smile.
Henry Lightstone felt the cool head of the snake against his fingers, then saw the outline of the head in the combined light of the bright red and blue iridescence.
Tiger Snake.
The worst one of the whole batch.
Absolutely deadly.
Of course, Lightstone thought with an odd sense of detachment. What else would it be?
Then he blinked in surprise when Wintersole crushed the snake's head with his fingers and let it drop to the floor.
'It's nothing personal, Henry. I'm just doing what I'm getting paid to do.'
Wintersole continued to smile, a menacing but ultimately indifferent smile.
'So which will it be, Henry? You're the one who has to choose. And you have to choose right now.'
Two minutes later, Henry Lightstone walked slowly out of the warehouse with his hands over his head.
'LARRY, BACK EVERYBODY OFF!' he called out. 'WAY BACK. I'M GOING TO GO…'
Then he stopped dead still.
'LARRY?'
'BOBBY?'
No answer.
'If your friends are playing games…' Wintersole hissed in Lightstone's ear.
'If they are, it's a new game to me,' Lightstone informed his captor calmly, scanning the area with the night- vision goggles. As far as he could see, the entire parking lot, the adjacent warehouses, and all the surrounding sparse woodlands appeared empty.
No handcuffed Rangers.
No Bravo Team.
No Bobby LaGrange.
Nobody.
'This isn't…' Natasha Marashenko never completed that statement because Wintersole cut her off.
'Get going, now!' he ordered her urgently.
They had just reached the edge of the clearing where the land sloped down to the increasingly dense stands of evergreens, when a bright searchlight suddenly illuminated the area from the side of the adjacent ware-house and a voice bellowed out over a bullhorn.
'FBI! DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND PUT YOUR HANDS UP!'
Cursing, First Sergeant Aran Wintersole spun, sent four 10mm hollow-tipped bullets streaking in the direction of the searchlight — which immediately exploded in a glaring flash, then flared out, plunging the entire area into pitch-darkness again. Turning back, the hunter-killer recon team leader threw a surprised Lightstone aside and rolled down the incline, then came back up into a zigzagging sprint toward the trees as gunfire erupted from all sides.
Natasha Marashenko had already started to run before Wintersole destroyed the searchlight and was halfway down the incline when she tripped on an exposed root. She tumbled to the ground, screaming in surprise and anger, and was scrambling back up when the bullets began whipping over her head… which slowed her down enough that she was still a good six feet away from the first big tree when Lightstone caught her from behind in a running tackle.
The impact sent the Smith amp; Wesson flying; but instead of trying to twist loose and scramble for it, Natasha Marashenko swung her elbow back and caught Henry Lightstone square in the face, destroying his night- vision goggles and causing blood to pour from his nose.
Stunned, blinded, and enraged, Lightstone lunged and grabbed Marashenko by the waist of her tight jeans, spun her around, drove a crippling elbow into her thigh, tried for an arm bar, lost it, and had to cover to protect when the female agent jackhammered a series of potentially lethal elbow and hand strikes at his face and neck.
Then, before he realized what had happened, she was off him and hobbling toward the forest.
Ignoring the bullets smacking into trees above his head, Henry Lightstone dived forward, twisted behind a large tree for shelter, came back up to his feet, and was taking off after her again when he suddenly found himself flying through the air and landing hard on his back.
'Let her go, you idiot!' a familiar voice snarled in his ear.
But the adrenaline still surging through Henry Lightstone's bloodstream caused him to fling her aside and try to get back up again.
This time, when he landed hard on his back — knocking a goodly amount of air out of his lungs in the process — and tried to get back up again, she pinned his left arm behind his back and wrapped her right arm around his throat in the first move of a carotid chokehold.
'What the hell…!' he gasped, and reached up with his right hand to deflect the choke… then almost screamed when the huge cat came tearing through the brush and lunged at him, the impact sending both him and his assailant tumbling backwards into the dirt.
Henry Lightstone had a brief instant to realize that he lay on top of the sensuous body of a very strong woman who still had one of his arms pinned and her arm pulled tight around his throat… with a panther firmly planted on his chest, digging her painfully sharp claws into his heaving chest muscles while nuzzling his face with her thick-whiskered nose, and rumbling in apparent amusement or contentment… before another familiar voice yelled out above him.
'FBI, YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!'
A subliminal sense of awareness totally unrelated to the shouted order suddenly caused Henry Lightstone to jerk his head upward and stare past the head of the panther who also stared into the dark sky at… what?
He blinked, tried to focus, gave up, and looked helplessly over his shoulder at the grinning dirty face now visible in the flashlight beams.
'Under arrest?' he echoed. 'Me?'
'Uh-huh,' the woman known as Karla acknowledged, while Sasha rumbled in agreement and several blue- jeaned figures wearing FBI raid jackets and carrying sound-suppressed, night-scoped assault rifles moved slowly and cautiously past him into the woods, and a number of other blue-jeaned figures gathered around them at a safe distance.
'You're an FBI agent.' Lightstone said it more out of wonder than anything else.
'Brilliant deduction, Sherlock,' Karla chuckled in his ear. 'We'll make a federal agent out of you yet.'
'And so am I, sonny. Been retired for a lotta years, but they brought me back special just for this case… so there,' the skinny, bearded, and supposedly blind old soothsayer otherwise known as the Sage announced with a wide grin as he proudly displayed his FBI raid jacket and badge.
'Dear God,' whispered Lightstone as he looked around at the other familiar faces — Larry Paxton, Mike Takahara, Dwight Stoner, Thomas Woeshack, Bobby LaGrange, and Danny-the-Cook in an FBI raid jacket — who all wisely kept their distance from the glaring, but seemingly contented panther.
'And just in case you wondered, sport,' Karla spoke softly in his ear, 'Danny's one of our tech agents, in addition to being a half-decent cook.'
'You swear in this damned cat, too?' Lightstone inquired, glaring into the adoring bright yellow eyes, and wincing when her claws dug deeper into his chest.
'I'd be happy to, but I don't think she'd take the demotion.'
'Ah.'
'Okay, Karla, I think you and Sasha can let him go now.' FBI Supervisory Agent A1 Grynard let out an exaggerated sigh as he joined the group, looking down at the female members of his unconventional FBI covert agent team disapprovingly as he re-holstered his sidearm.
'Umm, no, I can't,' Karla announced after a moment.
'Why not?'
'Because you just arrested him.'
'But that was just for show… to keep them running,' the FBI supervisory agent — who now radiated the aura of a man sorely put upon — reminded her less than patiently.
