Act of Terror

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Tara Doyle wiped the airmen’s blood off her hands and threw the wad of paper towels in the trashcan. A swatch of red painted the chest of her flight suit and the V of her neck. She didn’t bother with that. The smell of blood helped her focus on the matters at hand.

Her entire life, at least from the time she was nine years old, had been lived for the next few hours. The years of study, the decades of pretending to love her adopted family, to care for this country of dogs-it all led up to her actions this one night.

“I will cut the throat of the whore that is the United States of America,” she chuckled out loud to the cavernous hangar. “With one of her very best airplanes…”

Walking toward her jet, she had a fleeting thought of Jimmy. He’d been a toddler when her American parents had taken him in from the Indian reservation in Montana, too young to know she too was adopted. A good confidant-he’d caught her crying on so many occasions and come in to console her without once asking her why. She shook the thought from her mind. None of that mattered now. He was one of them, nothing more than a means to an end, someone to vouch for her citizenship and make her background more believable. She had to remind herself of that. Jimmy Doyle deserved to die like the rest of them-

“Major Tara Doyle, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST!” A muscular Air Force OSI agent wearing khaki 5.11 pants and a black ballistic raid vest stepped from behind the wheels of a nearby F-22 Raptor, Sig Sauer pistol at high ready.

Doyle spun, fillet knife in hand, but Ronnie Garcia rose up from her hiding spot behind the aircraft tug and hit her in the face with a crescent wrench.

The queen of West Texas bitches fell like a sack of wet sand. Garcia winced from the exertion, gritting her teeth against the searing pain in her back.

Moments later, the brightly lit hangar swarmed with OSI agents in black vests and thigh holsters. Everyone present had personally worked with Quinn and, for one reason or another, had his complete trust.

“We need to get a copy of the weapons load-out,” Garcia shouted. “Whoever signed for this payload of bombs is in this along with Doyle.”

“Got two dead in the back room,” an agent who’d been a year behind Quinn in the Academy yelled from across the open hangar. He stood at the door wearing a pair of blue nitrile gloves. “They got their pants around their ankles and their throats cut from ear to ear.” The agent shook his head. “It’s a mess.”

Garcia, still holding the wrench, looked down at the smear of fresh blood across the front of Doyle’s flight suit. “You really are a bitch,” she said.

One of the agents, a tan Colorado native named Judson who’d spent time in Iraq with Quinn, knelt to roll a moaning Doyle onto her stomach so he could handcuff her. He looked up at Garcia as he closed the cuffs with a ratcheting zip.

“You better sit down,” he said. “You look pretty pale.”

Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to come along considering what she’d been through. But she was just stubborn enough that whatever the cost, she wasn’t about to let a couple of holes in her back keep her away from something this big. In truth, Garcia thought she might be sick to her stomach at any moment.

“I got her,” a beefy man with mussed blond hair said as he took off his navy-blue sports coat and draped it over Garcia’s shoulders. The sleeves of his white button-down were rolled up to reveal a black octopus tattoo on his forearm. “Let’s get you back to the hospital, young lady. My big brother would never forgive me if I let anything happen to you.”

Garcia swayed on her feet, slumping into his arms.

Two Quinns… it was almost too much to fathom.