Page 41 of Beachcomber Enemy

But Shana stopped him with one word. “No.”

With a hand on Dane’s arm, the doctor spoke in a quiet, calm voice, “I’ll take care of Shana. You can’t do anything for her right now.”

Squeezing his eyes shut in helpless misery, he fought to regain control, then he took her hand again, met her eyes. He saw the faint smile and would have leaned down to give her a kiss, but Whitey interrupted.

“Time’s wasting. There’s only fourteen minutes left.” Whitey looked at his watch.

Dane didn’t want to believe that Whitey was telling the truth but they all knew he was. His phone buzzed and he slipped it from his pocket and held it to his ear, knowing it was Cap.

“We’re at the Middle School and there’s a bomb. Our expert sent in a robot to look at it and says there’s a keypad for a code to diffuse it and otherwise it looks airtight. We’re going to try and get it into a container, but it looks like it might have a pressure mechanism.”

“Damn. Affirmative. Whitey said there was a pressure plate.”

Dane stopped the medic who was wheeling Whitey away.

Whitey said in a dead serious voice, “The bomb can’t be moved or it’ll go off. The only way to diffuse it is with the code and the only way you get the code is if I see you there.”

Dane looked at the man standing at Whitey’s gurney looking anxious. He recognized the doctor and spoke to him.

“You need to keep the guy awake and lucid until we get the bomb diffused. It’s in a populated area so we can’t take any chances.”

Cap confirmed on the other end of the line that they were evacuating people from the area, but he was still waiting for more of his men to arrive on the scene.

Whitey shook his head and said, “One more thing I didn’t mention. There’s a gas line under the bomb and it runs into the school.”

Shit. Dane dashed to Shana as her gurney rolled away. He kissed her pale face.

“I’m sorry, love. I have to go.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered, her cold hand over his. Fear bubbled up, but the doctor spoke in his calm rational voice.

“We need to take her now. I’ve got this, Dane. I’ll take care of her.”

“You do that, doc.” He didn’t mean for his voice to sound threatening, but he couldn’t change his stripes now.

The doctor with two orderlies wheeled her off and Dane turned to find a vehicle. With no time to go far, he ran to the driver’s side of the ambulance he’d arrived in and yanked open the door. Jumping into the ambulance, he shoved the driver over and cranked the ignition. Then throwing on the alarm, he smashed the gas pedal to the floor and took off.

As he screeched past traffic faster than he ever could have in his old Jeep, he took out his phone and called Cap.

“Stay with the bomb and have your men evacuate the school. The bomb is on top of a gas line according to Whitey. We can’t take any chances that the sick bastard is bluffing.”

“Trying to, but I can’t get hold of anyone in the office—good news is school’s off. Bad news is there’s a lacrosse game going on out back and other extracurricular activity. My men are on their way to evacuate, but it’ll take at least ten minutes for them to get there.”

“I’ll be there in five.” This was too coincidental, too many factors figuring into it for it to be coincidence or bad luck. Whitey planned for the school to be blown up along with everything else in the area. He was a mad genius. Not a comforting thought as the steely cold survival instincts and no small amount of adrenaline rushed through him. He was doing something, back in the driver’s seat with a role to play, not waiting helplessly as the doctors saved Shana. He pushed her ruthlessly from his thoughts. He needed to compartmentalize and not think of her, be satisfied that she was in good hands, that he would get back to her.

He hoped to hell he would get back to her.

He said to Cap, his voice even as he drove on the edge of recklessness, “I’ll get the code from Whitey to diffuse it. Be ready to film me on-site with my phone. Keep up the efforts for the evacuation.”

Dane signed off the call and looked at his unlucky passenger.

“What’s going on?” the man said.

“When I stop this ambulance, you jump out and run as fast as you can as far away as you can from the school. But be ready to come back if there’s an explosion. Got that?” He kept his voice firm but cool. The man nodded. They were almost there.

He wanted to call the doctor about Shana. She’d lost a lot of blood, the cut was deep, impossible to tell how deep or how much tissue damage had been done.

Dammit to hell he had to put that out of his mind. But how could he? How could he not? He couldn’t turn his back on the bomb and potential gas explosion at the school with who-knew-how many people in the area.