But he would save T. J. Burke even if he were the devil. Once he had him safe, he would extract the info he had. If it was what he hoped, what he feared, he would see what impossible price this man had intended to demand for the invaluable info and double it. Then he’d do everything in his considerable power to ensure he’d never resell it.
The sentries were nodding off in front of the fire now. He signaled to Munsoor, his second-in-command. Munsoor relayed his order counterclockwise to Yazeed at the cabin’s south side, who then relayed it to Mohab at its west.
Twice they simultaneously fired their tranq darts, each felling their designated sentries.
Harres erupted to his feet. In seconds he was jumping over the guards’ crumpled bodies and landing soundlessly on the stone steps leading to the cabin’s door. The others were converging on him.
He exchanged a terse nod with his men, seeing only their intense gazes in the eerie combination of steady-as-time starlight and erratic firelight. They’d deal with any surprises. He’d go straight for their target.
He pushed on the door. It swung open with a creak that gutted the silence.
His gaze swept around the dim interior. Burke wasn’t there. There was another room. He had to be there.
He bounded to its skewed door, slowly pushed it open.
A slim, trim-bearded man in a sand-colored quilted jacket rounded on him.
A heartbeat stretched as their eyes clashed.
Even in the faint light, Harres did a double take at the impact of the man’s gaze, which seemed to be spewing electric azure. Then there was the rest of him. He seemed to glow in the gloom, both with an incandescent tan and a shock of gleaming gold hair spiking around his face.
Next heartbeat, Harres tore his gaze away, assessed the situation. This was a bathroom. Burke hadn’t been using it. He’d been attempting an escape. He’d already pried the six-foot-high window open even with his hands tied in front of him. Harres had no doubt his captors wouldn’t have made the mistake of tying them like that. Which meant the man had enough flexibility to get his hands where he could use them. A minute more and he would have escaped.
It was clear he didn’t know there was nowhere to escape to. He must have been either knocked out cold or blindfolded on the way. But from what he’d seen in Burke’s eyes, Harres bet he would have tried to escape regardless. This man was one who’d rather be shot in the back escaping than in the face while he pleaded for his life. He was beyond canny. He was resourceful, fearless.
And he’d be dead if Harres didn’t get him out of here.
Harres had no doubt his captors would rather kill the man and lose the info his mind contained than let it fall into Aal Shalaan hands.
Observations segued into action. He lunged, grabbed the man’s arm. Next second, he could swear a rocket launched through his teeth and exploded behind his eye sockets. It took him seconds to realize what had happened.
The man had hit him.
Still half-blind, Harres ducked, employing his other senses to dodge the barrage of blows the man rained on him. Harres charged him again, detained him in a crushing bear hug. He had no time for a more intimate introduction to those fists that packed such an unexpected wallop.
The man writhed in his hold with the ferocity of a tornado, almost breaking it.
“Quit struggling, you fool,” Harres hissed. “I’m here to save you.”
Seemed the man couldn’t decipher Harres’s words through the shroud covering his mouth. Or he didn’t believe him. The man simultaneously delivered a bone-cracking kick to his left shin and kneed him. Harres barely avoided that last crippling impact, marveling at Burke’s agility and speed even as he squeezed the man harder. The much smaller, wiry man would give him a run for his money if he had the use of both hands and more space.
Harres wrenched the cloth from his mouth, plastered the man against the uneven stone wall, a forearm against his throat applying enough pressure to make him stop fighting, pushing his face up to his so they again made eye contact.
A buzz zapped through him again as those glowing eyes slammed into his, as the body he imprisoned seethed against his with a mixture of defiance and panic.
Harres shook away the disorientation, firmed his pressure. “Don’t make me knock you out and carry you like a sack of dirty laundry. I don’t have time for your paranoia. Now, do as I tell you, if you want to get out of here alive.”
He didn’t wait for the man’s consent. But in the second before he wrenched away, he thought he saw the fearful hostility in Burke’s eyes soften. He filed away the observation for later dissection as he began dragging Burke back where he’d come from.
A fire exchange ripped the night, aborted his momentum.
Reinforcements must have arrived. His heart stampeded with the need to charge to his men’s aid. But he couldn’t. They’d all signed on knowing that only securing their target mattered. Anything—and anyone else—was expendable.
Feeling his blood boiling and curdling at once, he turned to the man. They’d have to use the escape route he’d already secured.
The man was ahead of him, already turning there. Harres snatched a dagger from the weapon belt around his thigh, slashed Burke’s tethers, put it away, then bent to give him a boost so he could climb out of the window. And the man did another uncanny thing. He leaped up from a standstill, like a cat, clutched the six-foot-high ledge for the moment it took him to gain leverage and impetus to catapult himself through the opening. He cleared it in one fluid move. In a second, Harres heard the distinctive sound of someone hitting the ground on the other side of the wall in a rolling landing.
Was this guy an acrobat? Or was he a Black Ops agent, too?
Whatever he was, he was far more than even Harres had bargained for. He just hoped the tenacious sod didn’t take off, forcing him to pursue Burke once he got out of here. It would take him more than the three seconds flat the man had taken to clear that tiny hatch with his size.
In about ten seconds, Harres flipped himself backward through the opening, the only way he’d been able to get enough leverage to squeeze himself through. As he let his mass drag him down, meeting the ground with extended arms, he had an upside-down view of the man’s waiting silhouette. So Burke was intelligent enough to know where his best chances lay.
He landed on flat palms, tucked and flipped over to his feet, standing up and starting to run toward the man in one continuous motion. “Follow me.”
Without a word, the man did.
They ran across the sand dunes guided only by Harres’s phosphorescent compass and a canopy of cold starlight. He couldn’t use a flashlight to find his trail back to his sand car. There was no telling if any of their adversaries had slipped his men’s net. A flashlight in this darkness would be like a beacon for the enemy to follow and all this would have been for nothing.