SEALs of Honor: Axel Read online

  Even with his best efforts, Axel couldn’t stop her from taking a jarring blow as gravity took over. But, when she was fully down, Axel hopped down too, shifted her so she was seated, and gently propped her up against Mason. Then Axel slapped Baylor on the back and said, “Thanks for the hand.”

  “Not a problem,” Baylor said.

  Axel hadn’t really realized before just how big the new man was, but he stood a good four inches above him, and Axel was six-two himself. He crouched in front of Dr. Minga. In the darkness of the sub, their flashlights all shone to check out her leg. Axel winced. “That’s not a pretty break,” he said.

  She gasped, and yet it was more of a broken laugh. “You think?” she said. “It’s more of a bullet, less of a break. Or a break caused by a bullet to be precise.”

  “The shooter got you?”

  “Yeah, twice.”

  “You’ve got a second bullet wound?”

  “Well, three actually, but who’s counting? One in each leg, plus this. It’s a graze, I think,” she said, pointing. As the flashlights traveled over her, she tilted her head, and all along her temple and hairline a bullet had carved out a bloody path that had barely missed taking her life.

  “Jesus! You were damn lucky on that one,” Axel said.

  “I’m damn lucky you guys showed up when you did,” she said. “Hopefully you have a way to get me out of here. My future wasn’t looking too bright.”

  “We have several small rescue subs,” Mason said. “We’ll get you up there.”

  She nodded. “I’d be very grateful,” she whispered. She leaned forward, and whatever had been holding her hair up lost its grip, and a shock of brilliant bright-orange hair dropped over her shoulders and face.

  Axel looked at it and smiled. Just something about gingery hair that he loved. The fact that she was broken and in so much pain was not something to smile about though. He studied her pale but sweaty face quickly and, after a look at her eyes, realized that the head wound may have knocked her out for a time. “Listen, Doc. When did you get the head wound?”

  “At some point in the fray,” she said with a one-arm shrug. “He fired a bunch, and it was a mad scramble for everyone. After I took the shot in the leg that blasted apart the bones, I knew I wasn’t running anywhere and would be a sitting duck. So, while I still could, and the shooter was distracted elsewhere, I climbed into the vent shaft system. The other shots came from below, at some point, while I was up there. It was a good hiding spot, but, by then, I was pretty well stuck there.”

  “Who was the shooter?”

  “No clue,” she said. “Twelve of us were on this mission,” she said, “but the shooter was dressed in black with a full head mask. I don’t know if it was one of us or somebody else who had hidden on board.”

  “Either one is possible,” Mason said, “but you’re the twelfth that we’ve found now, and we have eleven bodies.”

  She nodded, then winced. “I was afraid of that when everything went silent.”

  “Anybody you’d suspect on the crew?” Axel asked.

  “No. I only ever had trouble with one of them, Hostettler.”

  “Well, he’s dead too, with a broken leg and a bullet low in his belly. It looks like he may have taken his own life after he took that first bullet. While the others might be shot up a bit, they also each took a bullet in the forehead.”

  “Wait, but Hostettler wasn’t doing the shooting,” she said.

  *

  After a bit of silence, Mason asked gently, “What do you mean? Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” she said. “Completely different body types. Hostettler is squarish and shorter, five-nine maybe. The shooter was six foot, or more, and skinny. Long and lean. At the time that I saw the chaos going on, I wondered where he’d managed to hide. Not much spare room in this place.”

  “I’m surprised you managed to get away,” Baylor said, his tone neutral.

  She looked up at him and gestured to her leg and her head and said, “Funny, I don’t feel like I got away.”

  “But he didn’t come up after you.”

  “No,” she said, “I thought for sure he was, after all the shooting had stopped. Then I felt something secured to the sub.”

  “What? How long ago was that?” Axel asked urgently. “Because we just secured to the sub. Are you saying he disappeared at the same time?”

  She frowned. “No. It was longer ago. Well, I don’t know,” she said. “It’s all fuzzy, like a distant dream. I suppose it’s possible, but I would have said it was hours ago, but I don’t really know.”

  “Interesting. We thought maybe he went out in the torpedo tube.”

  “Couldn’t have. They’re not functioning,” she said.

  “Well, let’s get you up and out of here, so that the repair crew can come down and see if they can get this sub up again,” Axel said.

  “The instrument panel took some heavy fire,” she said.

  Axel nodded, pulling some bandages out of his pack. “Can you guys give me a hand? Let’s deal with the bleeding and splint that leg.”

  “Sure thing,” Baylor said, as he and Nelson jumped in to help. “How bad is the other leg, Doc?”

  “The other leg? Oh, I don’t really notice it compared to the shattered leg and my head.”

  “Do you know if this attack was targeted at the submarine or if this was about somebody on board?” Mason asked.

  “Captain Tronson is a great leader, so it seems unlikely that he was targeted,” she said.

  “Interesting,” Mason said. “Well, let’s get you out of here. That’s the priority.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Finding out who did this is the priority,” she said. “These were all good men. What a terrible waste.”

  Axel said, “The bottom line is, in order to do them decent, we will find who did this, so their deaths aren’t in vain.”

  “It’s all in vain,” she said.

  “What do mean?”

  “This was sabotage,” she said.

  “Were these men targeted and assigned to this project specifically, or were they just the unlucky ones?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “Were you picked for this?”

  “I was testing the navigation system,” she said, “so I needed to be on board. We’d had some glitches with it earlier. My understanding was that a skeleton crew was taking it out for a test run.”

  “So where did this shooter guy come from?” Axel asked.

  “Exactly.” Using Axel’s hand for support, she slowly stood on her better leg. As she did, she wavered. He reached out, grabbed her, and said, “Whoa. Just take your time.”

  She smiled weakly. “I’d do better if I had a crutch or something. Trying to get around with either leg won’t be easy.”

  “You’re not going far,” Mason said. Just then his communication device went off. He stepped off to the side. She looked up at the others. “Can we get out of here now?”

  Axel nodded. “Let’s get you topside.” It took another fifteen minutes to get her into the small rescue sub up above. They had deliberately come down with room for a couple extra people, just in case.

  “Are other subs out here?” she asked.

  “Yeah, we’ve got a couple teams standing by,” Axel said. “We didn’t know what we would find and wanted room to shuttle everyone out.”

  “Glad to hear that,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m the only one going home alive.”

  “Just glad we found you in time,” Axel said.

  Chapter 2

  Ally woke up, hazy and confused, wondering where the hell she was. Everything was white. Like seriously white. She slammed her eyes shut against the glare coming in from the window. As she shifted, she moaned. Her leg wasn’t screaming, but her head was killing her.

  “Take it easy,” a female said, her voice full of warmth. “You’re in the hospital. You’ve just had surgery to fix your leg, among other things.”

 
Her eyes popped back open again. “Surgery? My leg?”

  “Yes,” the nurse said in that same gentle voice. “Both legs actually, and we did a little work on your head while we were at it.”

  “My head really hurts.”

  “You were on a sub. Do you remember? There was an attack. You were rescued, but you sustained some injuries.”

  “I barely remember,” she said. And she had a vague, hazy memory of gunfire, screaming, and sounds of fighting, and yet she still wondered what she had been doing back then. She remembered being deep into the problem on the navigation system, pretty sure she had just figured out the problem, when she discovered the real trouble. She’d sent off an alert just before everything had erupted around her.

  When she’d taken the first bullet in the leg, she knew immediately her leg was badly damaged. The shooter had moved on to other targets, and she knew her leg was too badly injured to run. So, with adrenaline assisting her, she scrambled into the hatch above and moved through the vent shaft. She had no idea what the hell was going on though by then, as she heard a hell of a firefight taking place—but she couldn’t see anything.

  Without a weapon of her own, she had been completely useless. She remembered moving as best she could until the shaft narrowed, and it was much harder to move there. More shooting occurred. At some point she realized her other leg was burning in pain and that she must have been shot again. And still another shot grazed her head. She must have been unconscious after that.

  She lay here in the bed after the nurse left, wondering how she’d even got out of the sub. She didn’t remember that at all. Just then a knock came at the door to her hospital room.

  “Come in,” she said, after a moment. She looked up to see a face that she vaguely remembered. But instead of a smile she gave him a frown. “Do I know you?”

  His smile was bright. “Well,” he said, “if you remembered getting out of the sub you would,” he said, “but I suspect the pain may have blotted out the clarity of your thinking at the time.”

  “Oh, God, I hate to say it,” she said, “I do vaguely remember you but not very clearly.”

  “Good, Axel Salisbury at your service,” he said. “It was a painful trip for you.”

  “I’d just as soon forget it then,” she said. She motioned at her leg. “Apparently I’ve just had surgery.”

  “Yeah. The bones didn’t want to align properly,” he said, “and some of the chips and fragments would give you trouble, so they went in and cleaned it out to make sure everything was good to go. I haven’t heard any results myself. I just heard them talking when I was standing in the ER with you.”

  “Why were you in the ER with me?” She studied him, wondering at the weird tug she felt inside. “Oh, you’re the one who dragged me out of the ceiling shaft,” she said suddenly.

  “Ouch,” he said, “and here I was thinking it was more like a rescue. You know? Saving the fair damsel in distress. Dragging you out of the ceiling sounds like it lacks finesse.”

  “Well, whichever it was,” she said in a dry tone, “I don’t remember much.”

  “Both,” he said, that grin flashing again.

  Something about his grin was very endearing. “Thank you,” she said suddenly. “I know the circumstances were dire, and I appreciate you finding me.”

  “We almost didn’t,” he said. “We had eleven bodies and figured the twelfth was the shooter who had somehow escaped, only to realize that all of the dead were men, which meant that one Dr. Ally Minga wasn’t among them.”

  “No, I wasn’t among them,” she said softly. “And I was the only female on board.”

  “So it was easy to figure out who we were missing,” he said. He walked closer, leaned his hands on the edge of her bed, and stared down at her leg. “That’ll take a while to heal.”

  “Yeah, it will,” she said. “Hopefully I won’t be in the hospital for too long though.”

  His gaze went to her head.

  She reached up and patted the bandage around her head and asked, “How bad is that?” She groaned. “Did they cut off all my hair?”

  He grinned. “I’m pretty sure they had to cut some of it,” he said. “I didn’t think it was all that bad when I first looked, but honestly, it was caked with blood, so I couldn’t see it that well. You probably got some stitches.”

  “Maybe so.” She nodded slowly. “It is sure pounding.” She reached up with both hands, immediately wishing she hadn’t. “The pain is excruciating.”

  “I’m sorry. Head injuries are like that. Trust me. I know.”

  “Not your fault,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “I just need to lie here dead quiet for a couple days.”

  “Can you even do that?”

  “Well, maybe, if I don’t talk to anybody,” she said. “Dang it, I almost started shaking my head. It’s instinctive.”

  “You’re about due for more painkillers. The nurse told me that I only had a few minutes to talk to you before she’d be back with your meds.”

  “Great,” she said, “so I get to spend the next forty-eight hours drugged up.”

  “It’s either drugged up or in terrible pain.”

  “I don’t like the drugs,” she said abruptly.

  “I don’t either,” he said, and enough sympathy was in his voice that she believed him. Then he added, “But I prefer it over being incapacitated by pain.”

  She had to agree. “You’ve got a point there,” she murmured. “How are you guys doing on the investigation?”

  “Not sure we’ll be investigating,” he said.

  Her eyes flew open, and she stared at him. “I hope you do,” she said, “because it had something to do with that coworker.”

  “Well, it might have,” he said gently, “but it might not have either.”

  “I told you that the shooter I saw was tall, lean, and a very different body type.”

  “And I hear you, but, according to what we’ve heard so far, there’s no sign of him.”

  She frowned. “So no one’ll believe me. Is that it?” She hated to hear that note of bitterness in her tone. But it was always a case of being that one female up against a dozen men. She was either imagining things or overreacting. “He was there,” she said forcefully.

  Axel picked up her hand and asked, “Are you certain?”

  She stared at him. “Yes. He also had a faint limp.”

  “Which side?”

  She shut her eyes for a moment, recalling the memory. “Favoring his right,” she said. “I don’t know if it was from an injury that occurred on the sub,” she said, “or something else.”

  “Weapons?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “He had a small snub-nosed-looking handgun. I hadn’t really seen anything like it before.”

  “But you’re licensed for weapons?”

  “I’ve done basic training,” she said, “but I don’t carry. I’m a navigation IT specialist,” she said. “I was looking for bugs in the actual coding.”

  “So you don’t have much action experience.”

  “None.”

  “You can’t say that anymore,” he said grimly. “You’ve got experience now.”

  “Not the kind of experience I want,” she said.

  “None of us do.” He patted her hand and said, “Think back now. Can you tell me anything else about him? Did you hear his voice?”

  She closed her eyes again and thought about it. “It was such a panic of multiple people screaming. And so much noise,” she said slowly. “Such a freaky experience, turning around, and he’s firing at people. It’s chaos. Somebody yelled out, ‘What are you doing? Who are you?’” With that, she stopped. “He said something.” She frowned, focused.

  He patted her hand again, just waiting.

  She said, “It’s like that line out of a B movie. He said something like, ‘I’m your worst nightmare.’”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because, for mos
t of us, our worst nightmare is betrayal. Somebody we trust turning on us.”

  “Well, if he wasn’t one of the men on the crew,” she said, “how does betrayal fit in with this?”

  “We’re wondering if Hostettler was working with him.”

  Her gaze widened; she hadn’t thought about that. “I didn’t like him. But that doesn’t mean he’s a part of this.”

  “No, but he’s the only one who we figure committed suicide.”

  She stared up at him. “It was pretty ugly down there, once we realized we couldn’t get the sub back up. We didn’t know what the hell was going on, and we were wondering how long before a rescue could be done. How much air we had was a big concern. Then it got really crazy when the shooting started. So who knows what Hostettler thought. Everybody would soon be dead with us short on air. Then the shooting came, with everybody lying there, shot up and in pain. Maybe his suicide was the easy answer for Hostettler.”

  “Maybe,” he said with a nod. “It means though that we’ll be looking into his background pretty carefully.”

  She winced. “I imagine you’ll be doing that for all of us,” she murmured.

  “But it’s not an issue, unless you’re trying to hide something,” he murmured. A moment of awkward silence passed. When it went on, he squeezed her fingers. “Is there?”

  Her eyes flew open, and she stared at him. “Me personally? No more than anybody else,” she said. “It’s not that I’m trying to hide anything. I just don’t want some things aired.”

  “Okay, so why don’t you just air them to me right now,” he said. “Maybe I can head off some of it. We don’t want to waste our time and resources on stuff that isn’t relevant anyway.”

  “It’s probably already too late,” she murmured. “Four years ago, my ex posted a bunch of photos on the internet. Nude photos of me. He was trying to get revenge for the breakup.”