A moment later, the door slid open, and they all crowded inside. Like the outside, there was only a single button inside on the control panel, with no indication of a floor level or anything like that. When Harley pushed it without saying anything, Caleb couldn’t help but think that this was a really bad idea.
The car began to drop in complete silence, the descent continuing much longer than Caleb thought it would…hundreds of feet at least. It was strange being in an elevator without the typical numbers to give an idea of how far they were going. Hell, at this point, he would even have appreciated some of that boring music to break up the growing tension.
In the silence, Caleb picked up the sound of a rapidly beating heart, and he looked at Brielle standing slightly ahead and to the right of him, fear and anxiety radiating off her in waves. Following instincts he didn’t even try to understand, he took a small step toward her until his arm was pressed firmly against her back. She moved her head just enough to see him out of the corner of her eye but didn’t say anything, even as she leaned a little into the contact.
The elevator abruptly stopped, and Caleb immediately turned his attention toward the door.
“Everyone be ready,” Jake said as the door slid open.
Caleb refrained from pointing out that they were all stuffed inside an eight-foot-by-eight-foot steel box. If there was anything waiting for them, they were screwed. But when the door finally slid all the way back, the corridor outside the elevator was completely empty. That didn’t make him feel much better. One look at the familiar walls and floor and Caleb had no doubt that every member of the team was thinking the same thing he was. That they’d all been in a tunnel exactly like this not that long ago beneath the air base in Turkey. Yes, this one might be significantly larger than the one they’d been in the first time, with lights mounted every ten feet or so, but it had definitely been carved by the same creatures.
But at least that confirmed they were in the right place. With tunnels like these, the nukes had to be somewhere in here.
“Watch yourself,” Jake warned as they started moving down the tunnel. “I don’t smell them right now, but those creatures obviously dug this tunnel. And as we learned the hard way, they can come out of nowhere.”
Caleb quickly moved out to take point, instincts making him turn to look back and find Brielle, wanting to know where she was at all times. If he had his way, she’d be back on that damn elevator right this second. But it was too late for that now.
Behind him, he heard Hudson ask about the creatures Jake mentioned, but he didn’t have time to worry about what the CIA agent knew or didn’t know. If they ran into those things, the man would figure it out fast enough.
The tunnel network proved to be much larger and more complex than the one in Incirlik with full-size side tunnels branching off every fifty to a hundred feet. Harley and Sawyer moved up beside him, and he let their noses lead the way.
Caleb pointed out the first camera they passed. “If there’s anyone in here, they’re going to see us coming. Not a damn thing we can do about it.”
“There are people in here for sure,” Sawyer said. “In fact, there have been people moving through these tunnels very recently. A lot of them.”
When they reached another large intersection, Sawyer pointed them down the one with the freshest scent tracks. The path took them through multiple twists and turns, and Caleb wondered why someone would build a complex like this in the middle of frigging nowhere. Worse, how many of those damn creatures would it have taken to dig a place like this?
“About a dozen people up ahead,” Harley murmured, bringing her weapon up a little higher. “Coming this way fast.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before a group of heavily armed men in dark tactical gear came running around the corner ahead of them. Caleb immediately started shooting, as did Harley and Sawyer.
Bullets skipped off the floor and walls, ricocheting everywhere. Even if Caleb knew he could survive any gunshot wound that wasn’t through the head or heart, he still couldn’t help flinching when a bullet zipped by and slammed into the stone wall nearby, peppering him with fragments. He might be an omega, but that didn’t mean he was stupid. Getting shot hurt like a son of a bitch.
With no side tunnels nearby to slip into for cover, there was nothing he and his teammates could do but stand there in the middle of the main passageway and exchange gunfire with the men trying to kill them. Jake moved up beside Caleb, Harley, and Sawyer, their combined bodies shielding their more vulnerable teammates behind them.
The knowledge that Brielle was back there somewhere in danger was enough to almost make Caleb fall back to get closer to her. But he didn’t because he knew she was safer behind him.
Then he heard a burst of automatic gunfire from back there. Caleb spun around to see more of the dark-garbed men running at them from that direction, heading straight for Brielle. In the warren of seemingly endless tunnels, some of the shooters had managed to slip around them.
Jake had given Brielle a small handgun, but he doubted it’d be much protection against their attackers. She’d be killed in seconds.
But then Brielle was running, her hand brushing Forrest’s for a fraction of a second before she threw herself forward into a roll across the rough floor. Instead of doing it to get to safety, she threw herself at the closest bad guy, diving under the hail of bullets he sent her way.
What the hell does she think she’s doing?
Caleb wasn’t sure when he’d started running, but he realized he was charging toward Brielle faster than he’d ever moved before, his fangs and claws coming out without thought. But he was still ten or fifteen feet away when she jumped to her feet, closing the distance to the bad guy in front of her before the man could adjust his aim and hit her.
Brielle’s left arm came up and knocked the man’s assault rifle aside at the same time that her right fist snapped forward, slamming into the guy’s throat. Once…twice…and a third time. Then she was ripping the weapon from the man’s hand as he collapsed to the floor. Without hesitating, she twisted and pulled the trigger, spraying the passageway behind her. And even more amazing than that? She was actually hitting the bad guys.
What the hell?
Caleb stumbled to a halt as the last of the bad guys dropped unmoving to the floor. A quick glance back at his other teammates assured him they were all okay. The shooting was over, and there was no one left to fight.
Well…crap.
His inner omega must have figured out the implications of the sudden silence before Caleb did because his claws and fangs were already retracting. He turned back to Brielle, his instincts demanding he check to make sure she was okay. But before he could even take a step—much less ask her outright—she was already moving, heading toward Jake and the others. As she moved, she reached down and pulled a spare magazine from the body of one of the dark-garbed shooters, reloading her Russian-made assault rifle with a speed and efficiency that was as stunning as it was unexpected.