She hoped, anyway.
To keep her mind off the fact that she was running to the sound of automatic gunfire, Gaby tried to imagine how many assaulters were waiting for her in there. They had sent anywhere from thirty to fifty on the beach alone. So how many more had gotten through the tunnel? Another thirty to fifty? God, she hoped not. The very idea of having to kill that many more made her want to stop and vomit into the grass.
But she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Lara and Danny were in the hotel right now. (What happened to Roy and Stan and Sarah?) And they clearly needed her help, or Lara wouldn’t have ordered Blaine to go. She had done that to save them, Gaby knew, because for whatever reason, she and Danny weren’t going to make it to their exit point.
Gaby ran until her lungs were burning, and still the hotel seemed to remain just as far away as when she had counted the distance a few seconds ago. As she drew closer, she realized the shooting wasn’t just coming from the building in front of her. It was coming from the other side, too, as well as from her right. That was where the Trident was, waiting to shove off. There were, as far as she could tell, at least two or three gun battles going on simultaneously across the island.
And here she was, running right into the middle of one of them—
BOOM!
Another explosion tore through the hotel just as she was about to reach it. This time she was close enough to feel the ground trembling as the blast blew a hole in the roof near the middle, almost directly in front of her. It sounded like a grenade had gone off. Christ, who was throwing around grenades on the island? Was the first blast a grenade, too?
Gaby dived to her left as debris — chunks of the ceiling and God knew what else was up there at the moment, left behind when the workers abandoned the place — rained down around her. Something hard pelted her head and shoulders and she threw herself against the hotel wall and clung to it, trying desperately to make herself small against the falling pieces of the building.
She could smell the pluming smoke and hear the still-rattling gunfire from the other side of the wall she was pressed up against. Right on the other side. Even a grenade going off hadn’t stopped them for very long.
The side door was to her right, within easy reach. Even without lights to point her way, she knew there would be one around here and there it was. She moved toward it now, trying in vain to keep track of the back-and-forth clatter of assault rifles inside the hotel.
What was going on in there? Some kind of running gunfight? Although at the moment it sounded like it had stalled in one spot. The first explosion had come from her left — very close to where the lobby would be — and moved right toward the back, through the hallways. So why had it stopped now?
Stop thinking and move!
She grabbed the doorknob and took a breath, then counted to five—
One.
She pulled the door and slipped inside — raising the M4, peering through the night-vision scope — even before the door had swung completely open. It would have been pitch black inside the narrow passageway except for the staccato flash-flash-flash of assault rifles firing in the connecting hallway ten meters in front of her. She easily picked up the distinctive clink-clink-clink of ejected shell casings pelting the hotel’s smooth tile floor.
The endless flashes filled her vision while the continuous slamming of gunshots dominated her eardrums, and the lingering sting of sulfur in the air, combined with the suffocating smell of gun powder in the closed confines, threatened to overwhelm her sense of smell. There was a big hole in the ceiling in front of her where the two hallways joined, though it hadn’t done very much to vent out the place.
Gaby pushed through until she was almost at the corner, when there was a flurry of movement in front of her. A man clad all in black, with a thick beard that might have been red (though it was hard to tell when everything was awash in green), took a step backward and stopped in front of her and began reloading. The man’s night-vision goggles protruded forward from his aging face like a pair of alien eyes. She guessed he had to be in his forties, and he looked a bit like her Uncle Bill.
He must have sensed her, because he turned his head and saw her—
Gaby shot him once in the chest.
Even as the man fell, she was running up the hallway and flicking the fire selector on her rifle to full-auto. She reached the corner and stepped over the crumpled body, turning right to find three men crouched further up the narrow passageway — two on one side, the third on the opposite — with their weapons aimed at a door that had already been perforated by at least two dozen bullet holes. The backs of all three men were to her, their black uniforms glowing green under the phosphorous lens of her night-vision scope.
Once upon a time, Gaby might have hesitated. Certainly, the Gaby from a year ago, who depended on Matt (and, to a lesser extent, Josh) to keep her safe would have been horrified at the thought of shooting men in the back. That Gaby would never have made it off the beach earlier tonight.
This Gaby, at this very moment, only saw three enemies trying to kill her friends.
She emptied the remaining rounds in her magazine into the three figures. She didn’t let go of the trigger until she couldn’t feel the rifle bucking in her hands anymore. Then she immediately slung it and drew her Glock and looked for something else to shoot.
The men lay still on their stomachs and she was glad she couldn’t see their faces in the semidarkness, though one of them had his head turned slightly to one side, revealing the side profile of a young man in his twenties, the brim of his helmet riding low over his eyes, the night-vision device thrown askew against his face during the fall.
Her heart was racing, battling to be heard over the continuous pop-pop-pop of other gun battles taking place outside the hotel, on other parts of the island right this moment. She imagined the Trident engaged in its own fight. Did Nate make it to the yacht? What about Keo? What about Carly and Benny, who were at the Tower earlier—
There was a click! behind her and she spun around, finger tightening against the trigger, as a familiar voice said, “Stop, or my mom will shoot.”
He was pushing his way out of a badly damaged door at the end of the hallway. She recognized the infirmary on the other side and the owner of the messy blond hair and blue eyes looking back at her.
“Danny,” Gaby said.
“That’s me,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be gone by now?”
“What about you?”
“Point taken.”
While Danny struggled with the bullet-riddled door, she holstered her gun and crouched, then went through the dead bodies looking for spare magazines. She had done it instinctively, the need to have a loaded rifle overwhelming the part of her that was still squeamish about going through a dead man’s pockets.
“Where’s Lara and the others?” she asked.
“Lara’s in here with me,” Danny said. He had returned to the room, and now came back outside with Lara leaning against his shoulder. “They caught us out in the open, forced us into the hotel. Fearless leader and I stayed behind to give the others time to make their exit points.”
“Did they make it?”
“I have no idea. Too busy trying not to die. And that last grenade fried both of our radios. And, ah, other things.”
She was able to salvage three magazines and shoved two into her ammo pouch, using the third to reload her carbine. She stood up and watched Danny and Lara walk over to her.