“One of the men. I don’t know his name. Asan, Asand, I don’t remember.”
“How many men were there?”
“Two.”
“Hold still.”
“I can’t. He said he’s watching the progress the belt is making. If it stops, he will detonate it. And if anyone tries to disarm it, he will detonate it.”
Rocco pushed to his feet as he glanced around them, shoving his hands into his hair. Highway 130 looked like a war zone. Cops were everywhere. Several black SUVs had parked in haphazard places across the road. The woods were crawling with soldiers and search dogs. He could hear various radio conversations. A helicopter was parked on the upward rise of one of the hills. He couldn’t tell if the bomb disposal team had arrived, but he wasn’t waiting another minute to get Mandy safe.
“Ehsan Asir is what his name is.” He walked toward Mandy. “I can disarm it.”
“No!” She turned around. “No. Don’t come near me.”
Rocco jogged to get in front of her, walking backward as she continued her relentless stride forward. He opened the edges of the man’s shirt that she wore.
She shoved him away. “Please, Rocco. Please, go. You don’t have to die, too.”
“No one’s going to die.”
A sob caught on one of Mandy’s exhalations. A tear splashed on his hand. He looked up at her.
“I love you,” she whispered, lifting her hands to cup his face. “I want you to live. I want you to find the joy that’s been denied you so far.”
Rocco clamped his mouth shut as he tried to stem the tidal wave of hatred that filled him for Ehsan Asir-the man Kadisha had been expected to marry before Rocco came into her life-the man he now knew had killed Kadisha and turned Rocco’s life into a living hell. He’d had Rocco in his sights ever since Halim had favored Rocco. The bastard needed to die a bad death.
“Look at me, Mandy.” She did, then dropped her gaze again to the belt of explosives. “Don’t look down. Look at me. Only me.” She did as he ordered. Tears were pooling in her eyes, drowning her gaze. He clamped his jaw shut, calming the rage that simmered so close to the surface.
He pulled the detonation wires from the blocks of C-4 and twisted them away from anything they might touch, then he pulled the cell phone free and pocketed it. Finally, he unbuckled the belt and set it on the wayside.
Mandy wavered on her feet. Her face had gone pale. Rocco pulled her into a tight hold as he radioed Kit. “I got her. She’s safe. They’d strapped a bomb to her. It’s Ehsan Asir. I’m going to kill the motherfucker and it will be self-defense. The belt is here on the wayside. Have someone come get it.”
He wrapped both arms around Mandy. His woman. She
“I can’t believe how easy that was for you to disarm. I could have done it.” She pulled back and glared at him. “I’m an idiot. I don’t know anything! Leaving it on as I did, I could have gotten us killed.” She looked up at him. “I thought I was dying, Rocco.”
He felt her anger grow, swallowing her love, filling her with hate. He’d done this to her. Brought darkness to her world. He had to get her out of there, had to get her back home where things could appear normal again before she lost herself to the realities of his life.
A black SUV pulled up. He opened the door and shoved her inside, then climbed in after her. Shock had made her movements sluggish. He leaned over her and fastened her seat belt, then slapped the driver’s seat. “Let’s get out of here.”
The driver turned and faced him. “As you wish,” he said in a heavily accented Middle Eastern voice. Mandy gasped.
“Yes, do take us out of here,” another man said from the third row of seats. Ehsan Asir. “But do go slowly. There is no need to call attention to ourselves.”
“What do you want, Asir?”
The terrorist smiled. “I want what you took from me. Kadisha was the light of my life. We’d planned for years to be married. Did you know that? Did she never mention me?”
“That why you killed her? Blew her whole fucking village to hell. You call that love?”
Ehsan’s face tightened, his eyes darkened as he sifted through memories. “Ghalib Halim set me aside when he saw that you had your sights on her. He wanted you. The Gray Ghost. He used Kadisha as bait to draw you in. It worked. Just like he’d said it would. He knew who you were, the whole time. You thought you were so brilliant, fooling all of us.”
“What he knew was that you were playing him, spying on him, and selling information. Of course he wasn’t going to let you marry his daughter.”
He thrust his chin at Rocco. “No it was I who fooled you. I discovered who your contacts were from my friendly askars. They told me about Mr. Bolanger and Mr. Bladen. I knew if we got to them, we’d get to you here in America. We found men here to assist us, used their greed to buy them. Our rage was righteous and our cause was just. Praise Allah.”
Rocco looked around them. They were slowly weaving among the vehicles parked all over the road. As soon as they cleared the police barricade, they’d escalate in speed. He had to act fast if he wanted to get Mandy out of the SUV.
Asir lifted his hand, his thumb depressing a trigger. He smiled calmly as if the SUV weren’t rigged with enough C-4 to blow a huge crater in the state highway. Up ahead, there were only a few hundred feet between the last of the team’s vehicles and the long line of waiting civilian traffic stopped by the roadblock. This was the only opportunity Rocco was going to get, and he knew it.
He released Mandy’s buckle, then lunged toward Asir, grabbing his hand to control the trigger as he punched the man’s face, over and over with lethal blows. Dragging his limp body forward, he kicked the driver in the head. Once. Twice. The SUV began to drift off toward the ditch on the right side of the road.
“Get out. Roll with the fall, run back away from this SUV. Go! Now! Tell the others there’s a bomb in here.”
Mandy shoved the door open and dropped out of sight. The driver’s forehead landed on the horn, but the noise barely registered against the blood pounding in Rocco’s head. He saw Mandy get up and run screaming toward the team. She was waving her arms. Her hair was streaming behind her. It was deja vu, all over again, thanks to the bastard whose limp hand Rocco still held.
The SUV dipped into the wayside and stopped. Asir wasn’t wearing a suicide belt-the wires led under the seat. Rocco cursed. It was impossible to determine quickly how much C-4 was packed throughout the vehicle. He pulled his comm unit from his ear. There was no way these two bastards were going to survive this day. He noticed a backpack on the floor next to Asir and tore into it with his free hand, searching for something, anything that would let him rig up a way to detonate the bomb from a safe distance. He found what he was looking for-a roll of the black electrical tape that was used to build the bomb that had been strapped to Mandy.
Mandy ran toward Kit, her throat raw from shouting the bomb warning. The response from the emergency crews was immediate. Men were calling out orders, moving vehicles farther away from the SUV, getting the civilian cars to turn around and leave the way they came, clearing the area.
She looked to see if Rocco had left the SUV after her, but she was alone. Perhaps Asir’s bomb was more complex than the one he’d strapped to her, and it was taking Rocco longer to disarm it. A minute passed. Then another. Her stomach was in her throat. Owen and his team congregated around her and Kit.
As she watched, the whole SUV blew, lifting the vehicle high into the air with the force of the explosion. She screamed and lurched forward, but someone caught her around the waist, dragging her against an immovable wall of muscle, pulling her back to the line of men and vehicles in case there was a secondary explosion. She fought against his hold, but could not break free.
“Mandy, it’s me. Kit. I’ve got you.”
