Which meant something must have happened out there.
Her heart skipped a beat and then made up for it with a few seconds of double time. She groaned beneath her breath and worked to calm her breathing and nerves. She only had one Cordarone tablet left. If the camp really was surrounded and Wolf couldn’t land, that one tablet might have to last her for a long time. She’d best save it for when her heart rate got completely out of whack. As her heart settled back into its normal, strong rhythm, she breathed a sigh of relief and glanced at Rawls, relaxing even further to find his attention fixed on the far end of the hall. At least her momentary health scare hadn’t distracted him.
He drew her to a stop in front of the last door on the right, its security panel glowing red. She’d been given the grand tour of the lodge as well as the cabin she and Amy shared when they’d first arrived—so she knew about the tunnel system beyond this door and how to gain entrance to it. While each of the individual cabins had its own entry into the tunnels, the access panels shared the same security codes. On the other hand, while each cabin had its own stash of weapons in case of an emergency, the only building with access to the main weapons locker was the main lodge. From the weapons locker, one could enter the tunnel system.
Wolf had given her the code to the security system within hours of their landing, even made her recite the encryption repeatedly until he was satisfied that she’d remember it during an emergency. She repeated the numbers silently as Rawls punched them into the panel. As soon as the click sounded, indicating the lock had released, Rawls dragged the door open and propelled her inside. The door swung shut again, sealing behind them with another slight tick.
Bright light from the fixture above their heads spilled down a steep staircase. Rawls headed down the steps at breakneck speed. Luckily, the space was too cramped for the two of them to travel abreast, so he had to drop her arm, which allowed her to descend more cautiously. He’d already punched the access code into the second steel door that guarded the weapons locker and had it propped open by the time she reached the bottom.
After a quick glance at his face, which hadn’t lost any of its earlier tension, she silently preceded him into the concrete, steel-shelved room. But as soon as the door swung shut behind them, she turned to face him. With two steel, impenetrable doors between them and their would-be captors—or killers—they should be safe enough for a quick discussion.
“Is any of that blood yours?” she asked as Rawls pulled a canvas bag off the bottom rung of the steel shelving to her right.
“No.” He shot her an indecipherable look before unzipping the duffle bag and dropping the satellite phone inside. “The camp’s surrounded. I had to neutralize a few of our uninvited guests on my way back in.”
Neutralize?
Faith flinched and avoided examining that description too closely.
“Mac called for a rendezvous.” He straightened with the bag in hand and started filling it with guns and ammo from the shelves above. “Which you would have known, if you’d had your radio.” The glance he shot her was full of admonishment.
Faith grimaced. He was right. She should have brought the radio. If Rawls hadn’t come back for her, she wouldn’t have known she was in danger. She would have been merrily cooking away while a band of killers swarmed the compound.
The other women wouldn’t have been as ill prepared. But then, they had their own personal SEALs to provide protection. Or at least Kait and Beth and Marion did. Amy, on the other hand, was in the same predicament as Faith—only worse, since she had her kids to worry about as well. And from the micro amount of time Faith had spent with the family the night before, it was clear Amy’s youngest child was a handful.
“Amy’s going to need help getting her kids into and through the tunnels,” Faith said, watching Rawls add more guns and boxes of ammo to the canvas bag. They certainly weren’t going to run out of weapons or ammunition anytime soon.
“Mac was headed toward her last I saw.” Rawls stretched up on his toes to drag down an oblong black plastic box with a huge red X stretching from corner to corner across the plastic top.
“Mackenzie?” Her voice rose with incredulity. The bad-tempered, woman-hating, chain-cursing commander had raced over to help Amy and her boys? And under his own volition? Wow . . . just wow.
With a snort, Rawls shoved the black box into the duffle bag, added several devices that were similar to binoculars but mounted on plastic headpieces, and then zipped the bag up. “Mac’s not nearly as surly as y’all are convinced. Push comes to shove—he’s the first to jump between a civilian and a bullet. That goes a hundredfold for women and rug rats.”