Chapter Twenty
Trinity Sands Resort
Lobby
The explosion rattled the windows of the lobby and made the constant, calming rush of water from fountain stutter. Briggs strode over to the window, and what he saw outside left him cold with a strange mix of fear and rage. The two men he’d sent after the woman were down, and flames danced on the beach from the remains of his team’s boat.
“This is fucked,” Kennion muttered. The old man was sweating and glassy-eyed, but he was the steadiest of the men. That explosion had shaken all of them. “We should exfil.”
“How?” Briggs swung out an arm, indicating the window. “That’s our fucking boat. No, we’re not leaving until we complete the mission.”
The mere idea of failure had Briggs grinding his teeth so hard his jaw ached. He’d lost nearly three years of his life to this. He’d been put in place to watch Claire and Tiffany’s research, then take it and quiet them once it was viable. The women were still somewhere in the building—probably barricaded up on the fourth floor with the blond bastard in the Saints T-shirt—and he wasn’t letting them slip through his fingers at the eleventh hour.
He glanced over at the three operators he had bound and gagged. HORNET. Part of Tucker Quentin’s ever-amassing army of mercenaries. Briggs was aware of Quentin’s reputation and knew the billionaire was making a lot of powerful people very nervous, but he hadn’t heard of HORNET until about twelve hours ago. He’d been undercover since before they’d burst onto the private military circuit. Since then, he’d heard the stories about HORNET’s accomplishments—dismantling drug cartels in South America, taking out some Big Bad in Afghanistan, exposing massive corruption high up in the military. Ask him, they sounded like a bunch of goody two-shoes with codes of honor and ethics and shit like that. From what he’d seen so far, they didn’t live up to the legend. After all, his guys had managed to capture three of them without much hassle and had another trapped on the fourth floor.
Briggs was unimpressed.
You should be, a small voice said at the back of his mind. He may have captured three of theirs, but they had killed three of his.
Maybe Kennion was right about this. Maybe—
No. He squelched the niggle of doubt. He’d never failed a mission and he wasn’t going to now.
He walked over to the big man he’d been questioning before the woman interrupted. He pegged the guy as their leader. The way he was holding himself screamed “boss-man” and, Briggs realized, he’d been the wrong one to start with.
He scanned the other two. The one with the buzz-cut hair and gray eyes looked mean as hell, like a starving caged pit bull spoiling for a fight. But the other one in the Star Wars T-shirt? He was young, skinnier, and smaller than the other two. If they were the heroes Briggs suspected, the young one would be their pressure point.
He strode over and grabbed the kid, hauling him to his feet by his hair. Sure enough, the gray-eyed pit bull tried to lunge and got a kick to the kidney by the man standing guard over him.
Briggs dragged the kid into the leader’s line-of-sight and pressed a gun to his temple. “You wanna start talking now?”
Despite the weapon, the kid shook his head hard. “Gabe, don’t—”
Briggs pistol-whipped the kid and he sagged to the floor, half conscious. Had to give credit where credit was due, though. The kid was a rail, but he had brass balls the size of an elephant’s. “Heroes. The whole lot of you.” He grabbed the slumping kid’s hair again and dragged him upright enough to return the gun to his temple. “I will shoot him. Gabe, is it?”
Gabe’s lips twisted into a sneer, but like the good boy he was, he asked, “What do you want to know?”
Briggs tilted his head toward the window. “The chick. She one of yours?”
No answer but mulish silence.
“Hey, if you don’t want to talk, I have plenty of hostages. I’ll start with the nerd here, and work my way through them all until you tell me what I need to know.”
Another long pause. Briggs had just about decided to shoot the nerd to make his point when Gabe said through his teeth, “Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“The woman is with us.”
“How many of there are you?”
“Ten.”
Evenly matched then. Briggs had started with ten men, and HORNET had taken out three. But they had taken three of HORNET’s people hostage—well, four if you counted the guy barricaded upstairs. So he had seven men left and HORNET had six.
Briggs let the nerd drop to the floor, motioned for one of his guys to take over holding the gun, and grabbed his cell phone. “I want to talk to your people on the outside. Give me a number.”