Page 7 of Out of Control

His limbs refused to push him backward. He couldn’t lie here and witness the slaughter of those kids.

And Spencer.

Jesus. Spencer was still among the buildings somewhere. As pissed off as he still might be at the guy for the way they’d left things, he couldn’t sit here and watch Spencer die at the hands of his own military. If anyone was going to kill Spencer Newman, it was going to be him. By God, he’d earned the privilege.

“Thirty seconds. No time for stealth, Drago. Get up and run.”

He rose to his feet, the camo net billowing out behind him, cape-like, on the evening breeze.

Charles was right. He should run. But away from Spencer, or toward him? To save himself? Or to shout a warning? Locked in a rare moment of indecision, he stood there staring at the bodyguards, who’d frozen in their doorways, staring back at him like he was some sort of bizarre apparition. Wrapped in red-beige rags from head to foot, he must look like a djinn mummy rising from the desert.

“Ten. Nine. Eight,” Charles counted tersely.

He took off running.Toward the compound.

“Spencer! Incoming! Get down!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. Please God, let his voice carry far enough in the cold, still air to reach the guy.

The spotter at the nearest corner of the main building lurched into motion. He disappeared inside the building where the meeting was taking place.

“Five. Four. Get down!” Charles shouted.

A fiery streak illuminated the twilight sky overhead, racing toward him at incomprehensible speed.

A massive flash of light and a deafening blast of sound exploded the night. The ground heaved beneath his feet, and he was thrown backward violently as a searing-hot concussion wave slammed him onto his back.

The force of his landing knocked the breath out of him, and he stared up, gasping ineffectively for air that would not come, at a ghoulish cloud of smoke over his head, illuminated by the flickering fires of hell.

Pain radiated through him as he finally managed to drag in a scorched, smoky breath that made him cough.

Shattered bits of concrete and lava rock pelted him, and he curled into a fetal ball, throwing his arms over his head as the remains of the compound, and a good chunk of the valley, began to rain down around him.

What had the US military done? What hadSpencerdone?

A sense of doom enfolded him.

Nothing good could come of this.

The choking dust began to dissipate, and silence settled upon the valley. The deep silence of death.

Spencer.

Oh God. Not Spencer.

Chapter Four

SPENCER TOOKoff running when the familiar rasp of Drago’s voice reached him, shouting of incoming fire. Sprinting all out, he cleared the compound just as the scream of the incoming missile became audible. He took a running dive, laying out flat as he leaped behind the nearest boulder of any size and slapped his hands over his ears.

Ka-boom!

The blast-furnace-hot overpressure wave felt as if it separated his entire body into a trillion individual molecules. And then they clapped back together all at once. Excruciatingly.

Oh Christ. Drago was practically under that missile.

He stood up and took off running in the general direction of where he’d been told Dray was hiding, circling wide of the smoking crater that had been a compound full of people a few seconds ago.

“Drago!” he shouted as he staggered around the rubble and the column of smoke rising from it. Bits of concrete, rock, and he didn’t want to know what else smacked his helmet, but he pressed forward grimly.

He rounded the blast zone and spied a pile of dusty camouflage net a few hundred feet ahead of him. No, no, no. He put on a burst of speed.Be alive. Be alive, you glorious bastard.