Come Midnight by Kat Martin

CHAPTER TEN

BREEWATCHED DEREKcircle around the helicopter to the right, planning to come up on the guard from behind. It was a risky move. There was twenty feet of open space between the dense jungle foliage and the stump where the man sat smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

His relaxed posture said he wasn’t expecting trouble, but a semiautomatic pistol rode in a holster at his waist, and an assault rifle spanned the width of his chest.

Bree held her breath as Derek appeared out of a thicket choked with dense green leaves. He moved silently across the open space toward his target, the knife gripped in his hand. In his waistband at his back, Montez’s pistol glinted in a thin ray of sunlight, but firing a shot would be a death sentence, alerting the entire camp of their escape.

As she watched Derek close in on his target, she wondered if he had ever killed a man. He’d been a pilot, not a regular soldier, but he would have been trained in enemy combat, and he was using that training now.

The knife flashed as Derek grabbed the man by the hair, pulled his head back, and sliced the blade across the soldado’s throat. Blood gushed from the wound, and a wave of nausea hit her.

She thought of Julio Montez, the man she had killed. It hadn’t been her intention, but she and Derek were fighting for their lives. She had ducked out of the tent in search of a weapon and spotted the shovel. She’d used it in self-defense and would do it again if she had to, but she didn’t feel good about it.

Careful not to look at the man on the ground, Bree swallowed the bile in her throat and rushed into the clearing toward the chopper. Derek was already aboard when Bree opened the Plexiglas door and climbed into the copilot’s seat.

“Strap yourself in good and tight.” Derek was busy flipping switches as if he actually knew what he was doing. Bree prayed that he did.

The engine began to whine, and the rotors slowly began to spin. Derek continued checking gauges and dials, going through some sort of pilot checklist.

“Put your headset on.”

She found it and was lifting it over her head when she heard the first gunshot. Fear jolted through her. Whirling toward the sound, she saw a dozen armed men cresting the hill, surging onto the open patch of ground.

“Hang on, darlin’. Time to get out of Dodge.”

Bullets pinged on the metal struts, and her heart seemed to stop as the chopper lifted away. The nose tipped forward, skimming along the ground, eating up the distance between them and the men. Her stomach swirled for an instant before the helicopter swept them into the air.

Even with the headset over her ears and the roar of the engine noise, she could hear the echo of gunshots. Derek worked the controls, trying to get the chopper out of range, his features set in a hard, determined line.

He was in his element, she realized. She trusted him to do what he was trained for, trusted him as she had from the moment she had met him. The last thing she saw was a thin man who looked like Castillo charging up the hill, leading a group of men coming in from another direction.

Then whiteness engulfed them, and she started praying again. The helicopter kept climbing through the cloud layer, but she had no idea whether they would get high enough to see where they were before running into the side of a hill.

Please, God...please, God...

Seconds that seemed like hours passed before the helicopter popped into sunshine so bright it hurt her eyes. Derek swooped left to avoid a mountainside that appeared right in front of them, and they were away.

“Looks like we’re in the clear,” he said through the headset.

Her heart was still pounding. “I can’t believe we made it.”

“Yeah, now all we have to do is figure out where we are and where to find civilization.” But she could hear the smile in his voice. Typical cocky pilot.

“What are we going to do?”

He explained how he had been mentally keeping track of their location since the hijackers took over the passenger jet and forced the airplane off its course, veering east to the abandoned airfield. He’d added the two-day trek up into the mountains and figured he knew approximately which way to fly to get them to safety.

“This is an old R22 Raven,” he said. “It’s got a piston engine, fairly easy to fly. This one has Garmin avionics, so we can see what’s out there.”

“So we’re headed back to the airstrip?”

“It would be a good place to land, but we could still be miles from a village, and it’s the first place Castillo will look for us.”

“So where are we going?”

“Our best course is to head for San Salvador. I figure the closer we get to a city, the more population. The more people, the better the chance of finding a place to set down and a phone we can use.”

Unfortunately, as the chopper continued west, Derek’s voice over the headset sounded a lot less cocky.

“We got a problem,” he said, and a fresh rush of adrenaline jolted through her.

“What kind of problem?”

“One of those bullets must have nicked the gas tank. The fuel level is dropping way faster than it should be.”

Bree glanced down, seeing nothing but green. At least it was flatter here, the mountains mostly behind them. But dense vegetation and trees covered the ground.

“Look for an open spot,” he said. “Someplace we can land.”

While Derek checked the GPS, Bree scanned the ground through the Plexiglas bubble, but flat jungle was jungle nonetheless, and she couldn’t see any end to it.

“Just jungle and more jungle.” How long before the fuel runs out? she thought. How long till we crash?

“Keep looking,” Derek said.

“I think I see a road down there, but it’s pretty overgrown.”

“I see it.”

“Can you make it work?”

“Don’t have much choice.” He swooped down to the road, which followed a stream, looking for a wide spot that wasn’t too overgrown. She heard the engine begin to sputter, and her heart jerked.

“Hang on,” he said. The chopper continued to sputter and jerk uncontrollably. Her pulse was hammering, her sweaty hands gripping the seat. Then she saw where Derek was headed—a spot on the river wide enough to handle the blades—and felt a fresh shot of hope.

The helicopter rapidly descended, and her fingers dug into the seat. For an instant she closed her eyes and said a silent prayer. Her eyes flew open as the struts settled neatly on the ground and Derek shut down the engines.

Bree looked over at him and grinned. “We made it!”

Derek smiled. “Yeah, baby, we did. Now we just have to follow the road till it leads us to a village.”

“Might be a long walk, but at least we don’t have to hack our way through the jungle.”

“Or fight our way through Castillo’s men.”

But as they climbed out of the helicopter and Bree went around to join Derek, ten rough-looking men stepped out of the heavy foliage onto the road, two of them with pistols drawn and pointed squarely in their direction.

Derek swore softly. He and Bree both raised their hands.