AMIDST THE CATS' CRADLE - 23

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T H R E E - - - - G W E N

Although Gwen wasn't sure the aircraft could handle the amount of pressure she was applying to it, she didn't really care. She was whizzing back toward the property at full power the instant the request for pickup came through.

Since dropping off Jerome and Tom, she had been circling the neighborhood, and each moment that went by without an update made her feel as though years had been stolen from her. The horrible news she received via communications made it much worse.

Her palms were already pasty with perspiration, and chills shook her torso. As she soared approaching the facility, she couldn't help but notice the massive convoy of black armored vehicles, an impossibly long line of them pouring in from three directions. Worse, she couldn't determine if they were friendly or hostile. The odds were in favor of the latter.

"Delta Seven. I count thirty automobiles approaching. "Advise rapid pickup of the whole team," she remarked as she approached her location on the roof.

"Negative, Delta Seven. Delta One, Two, Three, and Six will remain on base. Delta Five, Four, and package for pickup," Jerome answered, his voice stern.

"It's fucking suicide!" " she cried, her pulse pounding as she hovered over the structure, slowly lowering the helicopter.

"Delta One has been notified that the inbound are not bogeys," Jerome said dryly, which did nothing to reassure Gwen.

Shaun and Jerome ran toward the chopper dragging a seriously bleeding and unconscious Tom between them a split second after the aircraft landed down. The door to the roof was then thrown open. Tom was then dragged inside when they flung open the side door and hurled in two sacks that were heavily loaded. The gaping chest wound on Tom's left side was covered by Shaun when he stepped up. With anger, Jerome's face was twisted.

However, Tom was the one who was definitely in a lot of danger despite the fact that all three of the men appeared to be severely damaged.

“Jerome, what the fuck?” Gwen yelled, frantically glancing between the leader of Squad Six and the door, expecting Mitch and Jordan to appear any second. “We can’t stay! Even if it’s The Firm, they’ll fucking gut you guys for going behind their back like this.”

“We’ve done this shit before,” Jerome said tersely, already sliding the door closed. “Get Tom to the base. Get what’s in those bags to Bishop. And for the love of the fucking spirits above, only take one of each canister to Bishop. Hide the rest. I don’t care how. Don’t tell anyone,” he hissed, slamming the door shut and sprinting back into the building.

Helplessly, Gwen looked over her shoulder at Shaun, who was ripping open some congealing powder that would shut the violently bleeding wound for a while.

“You heard the lieutenant. Go or we’ll have three bodies on our hands in a bit,” he growled, his eyes flashing gold.

Gwen pulled up, her body responding but her mind screaming its protest.

“Delta Two, Delta Three. Are you all right?” she asked, not managing to stop herself.

She needed to know that everything was going to be okay. That she wasn’t leaving the men she loved to die in a fucking Cebu factory building.

“We’re fine, sugar. Go,” Mitch’s voice answered, soothing, if maybe a bit on edge.

“Save our boys. We love you,” Jordan answered, his tone much more somber.

“I love you too,” Gwen whispered, her voice breaking.

“I love you three. Now get the FUCK OUT OF HERE,” Shaun snarled, making Gwen whip back into the moment.

She turned the Night Hawk around, gaining altitude as the bright headlights of an endless convoy of cars seemed to gather around the compound. She was maybe seventy feet out from the border of the fence when the helicopter was thrown forward by a massive blast of an explosion, which demolished the building behind them.

Gwen struggled to get control of the bird, gritting her teeth as her first reaction was to stabilize the flight, and only then to think of the consequences. She craned her neck to look back as she finally managed to pull the chopper up again, the damn thing having tried its hardest to careen into the low shrubbery lining around the compound.

Shaun grumbled as he peeled himself off the wall, having used what little balance he’d had to keep Tom—who was blissfully passed out at that point— mostly stable.

“Always with the fucking injuries, Tom,” Shaun sighed, as if the world wasn’t seemingly ending behind them.

“What the fuck was that?!” Gwen asked, wild-eyed. “Delta Two? Delta Three?” she called into the comms, receiving nothing but static in response.

“You won’t get anything. The explosion will have put too much interference up,” Shaun said, deathly calm.

“Fuck that. Are they alive?!” Gwen demanded, her hands sternly flying the chopper back the shortest way to Laguna, but her mind reeling with the need for answers.

“Probably,” Shaun said, peeking out through the window. “We’ll see when we meet in the Crypts if there are seven or three of us.”

His dry sense of humor was really rubbing Gwen the wrong way at that very moment.

“Shaun, come on. Talk straight with me. Are they okay? Was that Tim who did that? Was it planned?” Gwen asked, rattling off questions as she felt the slick heat of tears on her cheeks.

She bit down on her lower lip, feeling a quiver running through her as she finally passed over the last black armored vehicles, out of the range of anything that could harm the chopper now. In the back of her mind, she realized that she’d been half-expecting to get shot down at any moment, while “enjoying” the flaming inferno swelling behind her.

Gwen could feel the heat of the explosion and the resulting fire all the way into the helicopter, her ears humming with the deafening noise and her heart thrumming so hard that she could barely tell the sounds of the engine apart from everything else.

“It was planned,” Shaun said, though he didn’t say much more on the matter. “I don’t know how or if they made it out of there. Trust me, it doesn’t matter. It needed to be done. You need to go, Gwen. For your boys and for Tom’s. There’s no way to tell whether Jordan, Mitch, Jerome, and Tim are fine, but we can do something for Duncan and Dawson and Tom.”

“Okay,” Gwen whispered after a small pause, steeling herself against the voice screaming in her to turn back, to go search for her men.

She knew she had to do what her boys needed. The rest of the ride was mostly in silence, with occasional mutters and growls from Shaun, cursing Tom for trying very hard to die on him. Gwen knew she couldn’t do much for him if she didn’t get to Laguna right now, so pushing the helicopter to the very limit of its tolerance was all she could do.

When the chopper touched down on the roof of the Laguna headquarters of The Firm, Gwen had reached a level of calm that always descended upon her when things became so frantic that she could only hold on and do logical things one after another without thinking about anything else. She radioed in ahead, and the moment the chopper touched down, Bishop and his team were running up to it, rolling a gurney between them.

The door was ripped open and Shaun launched into an explanation of what he’d been doing and what state Tom had been in as countless hands reached for the gravely injured body of his friend. His voice was tense and shaking a bit, driven by the fact that Tom had arrested twice during the flight.

“Okay, Shaun. We have him now,” Bishop’ calming voice said, soothing him in a way.

“Shaun,” Gwen said, twisting herself around in the seat, looking back before Shaun could hop out of the vehicle. “The canisters.”

Shaun’s eyes were sunken, haunted, and Gwen imagined hers had to look much the same. He seemed to be in a daze, but the haze cleared and he nodded, grabbing two canisters, one of each. Shoving them under his arm, he hopped out of the helicopter, keeping his head low as he ran after the frantically working medical team, their hands moving to help Tom while the gurney rolled forward.

From her seat, her eyes burning with tears and blinded by the early morning sun breaking over the horizon, she could see how bloody Shaun was. The dark blood seeped through his black clothes, making the fabric stick to his skin. She had to wonder how much of it was his and how much of it was Tom’s.

But aside from the medical team, someone else ran through the doors leading to the roof, heavy boots thumping deafeningly.

Firm guards, Gwen realized, seeing the guns and the determined looks on their faces.

It wasn’t hard to figure out why they were there. She was sure that Ace must have called ahead and told them to stop her before she could leave.

Jordan and Mitch must have been right, she thought with mounting horror, pulling the helicopter up as soon as Shaun cleared the blades.

Her stomach was in knots, the suspense growing as she saw the men raise their weapons, taking aim. For a maddening moment, she was expecting them to fire on her, bringing the helicopter down in a hailstorm of broken metal and flames. But instead of pulling the triggers, they lowered their guns a second later, their expressions tense and unhappy.

She didn’t let out the breath she was holding until she was fully out of the range of their weapons, zooming out over the slowly awakening city of Laguna. It was only when she set her course to bypass a major airport in the hopes of making anyone who might have been tracking the helicopter on radar lose her trail, that a painful stab ran through her heart, the cold and honest pain jolting through her.

Oh God please, make sure my babies are fine… and the men I love…

She’d been so close to Duncan and Dawson and it had nearly killed her to put distance between herself and them. Gwen hoped that if something had gotten drastically worse, Bishop would have told her.

Or would he? Wouldn’t he wait until I was out of the large mechanical deathtrap?

Doubts and fear nagged at her, gnawing at her thoughts as she made her way back to Troy’s hidden hangars. She set the chopper down and shut off the systems one by one, staring at them numbly. When she was tearing off her helmet and unclipping the belt, the door was pulled open. Troy’s smiling face stared back at her.

His expression fell immediately when he saw the look she was giving him, almost looking through him as if he wasn’t standing there at all.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice dropping low, a flash in his eyes telling her that like any good soldier, he was ready to roll out and do whatever it took to make things right for someone he cared about.

“I… I don’t know yet. But I need you to do something for me. I need you to hide something and not let anyone know where it is.”

“Anything, Gwen. Come on, tell me what you need,” Troy said, taking her by the hand and helping her out.

His hand on hers grounded her, bringing her back into the present, driving back the darkness that wanted to suffocate her otherwise. She’d let Troy in on the details he needed to know, but not tell him too much to keep him safe, and then she’d get back to The Firm’s headquarters.

Maybe then I’ll finally find out what’s going on.