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Throwing him a skeptical look, the pilot did as ordered and landed in a parking lot. “Now what?”

Alex snorted. That was Katie’s favorite question. “Shut down. Get out. Lie on the ground, face down.”

“You said you wouldn’t kill me!”

“I’m not going to. I’ll be lying beside you, buddy.”

Indeed, Alex held his gun on the Cuban until the fellow was face down, his fingers linked behind his head. Then, Alex stripped off the Cuban military shirt and beret he’d stolen and knelt beside the pilot, keeping his pistol trained on the guy until the cavalry arrived.

Which took about three minutes. Three Jeeploads of heavily armed soldiers with no senses of humor whatsoever pulled up. Alex let the glare of their headlights catch him, and then he slowly popped the clip out of the pistol. He tossed the weapon one direction and the clip the other. Then, in cautious slow motion, he linked his hands behind his head and laid down on his stomach beside the pilot.

“Are you crazy?” the pilot demanded.

“I have been called that before,” Alex commented before the soldiers started shouting at him to be quiet.

“They’re going to kill us both,” the pilot cried out.

“Not if you lie still and do what they say?—“

The pilot panicked. He jumped to his feet and made a run for it. Whether he’d planned to head for his helicopter or the fence, Alex couldn’t tell. But the guy was gunned down so hard his torso was almost cut in half by the barrage of lead. Blood sprayed all over him, hot and metallic tasting.

“You gonna try to run, too, asshole?” someone snarled at him.

10

“Katie McCloud?” a voice said out of the darkness behind the headlights. “Come with us.”

Thank God. That man’s English was as American as apple pie.

How on earth did he know her name, though? She had no identification on her to indicate that was her name, and she hadn’t used it once while she’d been in Cuba. Regardless, they had the big-ass guns pointed at her. They won.

She stood up hesitantly.

The voice turned out to belong to a tall African-American man wearing a lot of stripes on his arm. A senior non-commissioned officer, then. He said gruffly, “Technically, we’re not supposed to be out here, so if you’d get in the vehicle quickly, ma’am, we need to get back to base.”

As if on cue, a radio crackled from inside the Humvee. “Return to base, Diesel. We’ve got Cuban forces inbound to the area. A crap-ton of ‘em.”

The other soldier, a whipcord lean kid with a classic, Marine-buzz haircut, took her by the arm and hustled her to the Jeep. She hadn’t even finished fastening her seatbelt before the vehicleY-turned in the road and accelerated back in the direction it had come from.

“Shit, Diesel. Look at that radar!” the kid exclaimed.

The driver glanced at a circular green screen mounted in the dashboard. She couldn’t see the display from the back seat, but the man said over his shoulder, “Who the hell are you, lady? It looks like half the Cuban Army is headed this way. They comin’ for you?”

She sincerely hoped not. “I’m a nurse. A medical aid worker. I came down here to help out after the hurricane.” Best to stick to her cover story until she knew who these guys were.

In hopes of distracting her captors from who she was exactly, she leaned forward and asked, “Why aren’t you technically supposed to be out here?”

“That’s the deal with the Cubans,” Diesel bit out. “We stay on our side of the fence. They stay on theirs.”

“Did you come out looking for me?” she asked, curious.

Diesel started to say something, but the sound of a helicopter approaching fast interrupted him. It got loud fast. And then it gotreallyloud.

“Fuckers are buzzing us,” the younger soldier shouted over the noise. “Want me to pop a cap in their asses?”

“Keep your gun in its holster, Johnny,” Diesel bit out.

It seriously sounded like the chopper was coming in for a landing on the roof of their Jeep.