Page 112 of Travis
That was the math. The only math that mattered. What happened to me afterward didn’t.
I had to warn them. But the encrypted channel was one-way from this distance. I could hear the team. They couldn’t hear me.
I could use an unencrypted backup channel to reach them from here. But if the FBI was staging eight miles away, their communications team would be scanning every frequency in the area. An unencrypted transmission would light up their intercept equipment.
They’d hear everything. Location of armed non-law-enforcement personnel inside the target building. The only thing me attempting to warn Travis about the upcoming raid would do was make it happen faster.
I couldn’t call. I couldn’t radio.
The only way to reach the encrypted channel was to get close enough to the relay node to transmit. A mile. On foot. Through terrain I could barely see in the dark.
The perimeter guys were closer, but they were spread across dozens of acres, and I had no idea where any of them were positioned in the dark. The building was the one thing I could find. If I could get close to it, my comms should work.
I hoped.
I looked at my inhaler on the workbench beside the laptop. My lungs were already tight from the stress and the cold air and the adrenaline that had been sitting on my nervous system for the past hour.
I picked up the inhaler. Two puffs. Held each one and let the medicine open what it could and stuffed the inhaler in my jacket pocket.
And then I ran.
The ground was uneven. Packed dirt and scrub grass and rocks materialized under my feet without warning. I set my pace the way Travis had taught me during our training sessions. Not fast. Sustainable. A pace my lungs could hold. Having a full-on asthma attack right now would cripple me.
The encrypted channel was still live in my earpiece. I could hear the operation continuing. Hunter giving all-clear signals as he moved through the first floor. Coop updating positions. Travis and Beckett on the second floor, their voices low and careful in the way people spoke around frightened children.
I kept going.
Two minutes in, my breathing was already ragged. My lungs didn’t care about the thirty-minute countdown that was ticking in my head. They cared about cold air and exertion and the fact that I was asking them to do something they had never been built to do.
I managed them anyway. Short exhales. Controlled pace. Travis and I had been working on this during our training session. My lungs were always going to be a factor, and he refused to ignore that. It helped me now.
Don’t panic when the tightness comes.I could feel the constriction starting in my upper chest, the familiar band that meant my airways were narrowing, and I breathed around it instead of against it and kept my legs moving.
My right foot caught a rut in the ground and I stumbled hard, caught myself with one hand in the dirt, and pushed back up without stopping. My jacket snagged on something and I ripped it free. The terrain sloped upward and my thighs burned and the band around my chest tightened another notch.
Travis’s voice in my ear. “Second floor is secured. Six minors confirmed. We need extraction for all of them.”
I ran harder, and my lungs punished me for it. The wheeze was audible now, a high thin whistle on every exhale that meant the medicine was losing its hold. My vision narrowed at the edges. The ground blurred under me, and I couldn’t tell if that was tears or oxygen deprivation, and it didn’t matter because neither one was going to stop me.
I pulled the inhaler out of my pocket without breaking stride. Two more puffs, inhaled between ragged breaths that were already too fast to hold the medicine properly. It was a bad dose. Some of it would reach my airways and some of it would be wasted, and there was nothing I could do about that except keep going and hope it was enough.
The building had to be close. I’d been tracking the distance in my head, counting approximate time against my pace, and the perimeter should be ahead.
The tree line broke, and I could see the building. Dark. No exterior lights. The operation was still happening inside, invisible from here except through the voices in my ear.
I keyed the encrypted channel. My hands were shaking badly enough that I missed the button on the first try.
“Travis. Anyone. This is Sera. The FBI has located the hub. They are staging a tactical operation eight miles southeast. You have less than thirty minutes before they?—”
A hand clamped over my mouth from behind me and an arm locked around my waist and I was hauled backward off my feet. My earpiece tore loose. My finger left the transmit button.
I fought. I bit down on the hand and tasted salt and skin and heard the man curse. I drove my elbow backward the way Travis had taught me and connected with something solid. The grip loosened for half a second, and I dove for the comms unit. I didn’t know how much of my message had gotten through.
“Travis, did you hear me? The FBI is on their way. You have to?—”
Something hit the side of my head. Hard. The world went white.
Then nothing.
