Chapter 4 #2
No, it wasn’t smart to keep in touch with Lexie after they got out of here. It was too complicated. He still had quite a few years in the Navy and he couldn’t imagine, after years of traveling around the world, that Lexie would want to settle down in one place. She’d be bored in a week.
Feeling depressed over a relationship that was ending before it had even started, Midas closed his eyes and scooted down in the chair so he could rest his head on the back. He crossed his feet at the ankles and did his best to turn off his mind.
A loud bang jerked Midas out of his catnap fifteen minutes later.
He bolted upright in the chair and cocked his head, trying to figure out what it was that had woken him.
When a second boom quickly sounded, Midas moved. He jumped to his feet and was by Lexie’s side in a heartbeat.
“Lex? Wake up!” he said in a low, urgent tone.
Her eyes immediately popped open and she stared up at him. “What’s wrong?”
Midas was about to pull her to her feet when he saw the IV sticking out of her arm. He swore. “Stay still for a second,” he ordered.
Lexie nodded without hesitation. He had a moment to be grateful that she wasn’t asking him a million questions as he reached for the IV he’d put in not too long ago.
She hadn’t gotten as much of the saline solution into her body as he would’ve liked, but it couldn’t be helped.
He quickly slid the needle out of her arm and pressed hard on the small puncture wound with his thumb, even as he was pulling her into a sitting position.
He could hear yelling now. It was muffled, coming from somewhere within the hospital. He didn’t know how much time they had, but he guessed it wasn’t much.
“We need to get out of here,” he told Lexie.
She nodded. “Okay.”
Fuck, Midas was impressed. She wasn’t panicking. He could see she was scared—her eyes had dilated and she was breathing a bit too fast—but she was holding it together.
He picked up her hand and pressed it over the small wound on her inner arm. “It’ll stop bleeding soon, but for now, keep pressure on it.”
Lexie nodded as he took her free hand and headed for the door. He listened for a moment, then eased it open a crack. Hearing men yelling from the stairway, he immediately closed it again. Without a word, he towed Lexie toward the window.
“Midas?”
“Something’s wrong,” he said, stating the obvious. “I haven’t heard from my team, but I’m guessing the missing kidnappers figured out where you and Dagmar were taken, and they aren’t happy.”
“Do you think they’re okay?” she asked.
“The kidnappers?” Midas asked in confusion as he concentrated on opening the window and formulating an escape plan.
“No. Your friends. And Dagmar.”
“They’re fine,” Midas told her. In actuality, he had no idea what was happening downstairs in the hospital.
He wasn’t getting any intel through his radio, but he didn’t have time to worry about it.
He needed to get Lexie out and away from whoever was currently taking over the hospital.
And he figured he had about three minutes, tops, before the men in the stairwell opened the exam room door in the search for their missing hostages.
Looking out the window, Midas was relieved to see a gutter downspout right outside the window. He turned to Lexie. “I’ll go first. All you need to do is stand on the small ledge outside the window, shimmy over to the gutter and then slide down. Okay?”
Lexie peered around him out the window, then looked back at him with huge hazel eyes. “Are you crazy?” she asked.
“No. I’ll be at the bottom to catch you and to slow your descent.”
“Midas, that’s not a fireman’s pole or anything. It’s a freaking gutter. There’s nothing to hold on to!”
Midas took her head in his hands and tilted her face up to his.
“You can do this, Lex. You have to do this. I don’t know who those men are, yelling in the stairwell, but I’m assuming by the blasts I heard that they aren’t here to pass out lollipops and spread good cheer.
Yes, I’ve got a rifle, but I don’t have unlimited ammo.
We have to get out of here. I will not let them get their hands on you again. Understand?”
She swallowed hard, took a deep breath, then nodded.
“Okay?” he asked, trying not to be impatient, even though he knew every second counted. They needed to be out of here by the time the men in the hallway got to this room.
“Okay. I’ve always wanted to try pole dancing. This is kinda like that.”
It wasn’t, but he didn’t contradict her or laugh at her joke. “Watch me, then do exactly what I do. We’ve got this.”
She nodded, and Midas didn’t waste any more time. He hated leaving her in the room, but they couldn’t go out the window at the same time. He regretted that they were on the second floor, but at least if either of them fell, it wouldn’t kill them.
Ducking, Midas threw one leg over the windowsill and stepped out. The ledge was only about three inches wide, but that was enough space for him to quickly inch along and grab the gutter.
“Now, Lex. Come on,” he urged as he did his best to brace his boots against the slippery metal downspout.
He waited until Lexie was on the windowsill before letting gravity do its thing. He slid downward quickly, in a semi-controlled manner, until his feet hit the ground.
Immediately looking up, he saw Lexie doing her best to cling to the gutter.
He mentally swore when he saw her bare feet.
Fuck. She’d only had on a pair of flip-flops when they’d rescued her from the desert, but those would have been better than nothing right about now.
He hadn’t even thought about grabbing them for her; he was too concerned about getting her out of the room.
It couldn’t be helped now. He’d find something for her feet later. First things first.
“Do it,” he called out in a loud whisper.
The hair on the back of Midas’s neck was sticking straight up and he felt like a sitting duck.
The exam room faced an alley, which at the moment was empty, but he knew it wouldn’t be for long.
He and Lexie needed to get the hell out of there and find some cover.
Amazingly, Lexie’s bare feet were actually a good thing.
Her skin helped her cling to the gutter, making her descent painfully slow.
When she was within reach, Midas reached up and snatched her off the side of the building.
He wanted to carry her—oh, how he hated to put her clean bare feet down in the dirt of the alley—but he needed his hands free to protect them both as they fled.
“Good?” he asked.
Lexie nodded.
Without another word, Midas hooked her fingers in the waistband of his pants and headed down the alley, away from the front of the hospital.
Any second, he expected to hear someone yelling at them from one of the windows on the second floor, but miraculously, they made it to the end of the alley undetected.
But they didn’t exactly blend in. Two white people, in a predominantly black neighborhood, stood out like a sore thumb.
And the fact that he was dressed in desert fatigues and had a rifle slung over his shoulder didn’t exactly help matters either.
Everyone they passed would be able to remember them easily, and tell anyone who might be hunting for them which direction they’d gone.
“This is two, anyone got ears?” Midas said into the mic of the radio as he and Lexie made their way deeper into the neighborhood around the hospital.
Silence greeted him. Shit.
They’d known these radios weren’t top of the line before they’d left the States, but no one had expected them to completely go tits up in the middle of the op.
Midas wasn’t too worried. His team wouldn’t leave without him and Lexie, and they’d talked enough about backup plans to their backup plans to know what to do, but he hated feeling cut off from his friends.
Midas split his attention between where they were going and Lexie.
The streets and alleys they were winding through were dirt covered, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t broken glass and other things that could cut her feet.
He also hated that she hadn’t gotten as much of the IV into her system as he’d hoped.
Fuck, the woman had just been held hostage for months, and now they were on the run from who knew what.
But Midas was sure that if they’d stayed in that hospital room, they’d both probably be dead. Those blasts he’d heard were explosions. And when he’d looked down the alley after descending the gutter, he’d seen smoke rising from the front of the building.
He prayed his team was all right, but his mission was Lexie. Rescuing her had been the objective from the beginning, and nothing had changed.
Midas stopped at the end of another alley and peered around the corner, only to swear under his breath and turn back the way they came.
“What? What did you see?” Lexie asked as she followed him.
“Nothing good,” he said grimly.
He’d seen half a dozen men coming down the street toward the alley.
All six held semi-automatic rifles and didn’t look happy.
There was more and more yelling coming from all around them, as well.
It sounded like the men were riling up their neighbors.
He had no way to know for sure if these were allies of the kidnappers, but Midas had no desire to face off against a bunch of armed men, for any reason.
He frowned as he tried to think of where to go, but the number of shouting voices around them seemed to be increasing by the minute.
This wasn’t good. Not good at all. The last thing they needed was to be cornered. Midas couldn’t help but think about Mogadishu once more. The visions of what mob mentality had done to the special forces men and pilots who’d been trapped in the city flashed through his mind.