True Faith and Allegiance

Olivia appeared in the doorway behind Davi, saw her brother, the gun in his hand, the gear on his body. “What the hell is going on?”

Jack looked back out to the trees in the fading light. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Olivia said, “Well, I’m not pulling guns on my sibling!”

“Sorry… I didn’t recognize you at first.” He looked around some more. “Where’s the team? Where is your Secret Service detail?”

“We left them in D.C. It was a pain in the ass to get them to agree to it, but we wanted to be alone.” There was a note of frustration in Olivia’s voice, but it was clear she was astonished that her brother and another man had just dropped from the sky. “Seriously? You parachute? Since when do you know how to parachute?”

“It’s kind of a work in progress. Listen, we have to—”

Olivia held up the ring on her finger. “Davi just asked me to marry him. We were enjoying the moment, and then you dropped in unannounced.”

Jack took Davi by the shoulder quickly. “Welcome to the family.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Davi looked like he needed to sit down. Olivia just looked annoyed. She didn’t know what Jack did for a living, only vaguely that he was in corporate intelligence and worked enough with the government that she wasn’t supposed to ask any more questions. She was a strong-willed woman, so if she really had been interested she would have peppered Jack with queries — her mom and dad as well, for that matter — but she left it alone. She saw it as her brother trying to live up to her dad’s legacy in some small way, and she totally got that part of it.

Before his sister could ask him a third time why he was here, he said, “I’ve got to get you both out of here. I don’t know how much time we have. I can’t really explain but something bad is about to happen, and you need to get in your car and drive off. Get to a hotel and—”

Davi said, “My Nissan broke down coming up the mountain. It’s in a shop down in Etlan. They gave us a lift up here.”

Jack realized he hadn’t noticed a vehicle at the cabin as he parachuted down, but he’d been a little too worried about breaking his legs on landing to pay much attention at the time. “Shit,” he said.

Olivia grabbed him by the shoulder harness of the chest rig full of ammunition he wore on his body. “You are going to tell me right now what is happening!”

Jack said, “There is no other way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. The ISIS attacks going on in America?”

Olivia cocked her head. “What about them?”

“Well… I have a strong suspicion some of those terrorists are on their way here. Now.”

“You mean, here to the cabin?” Olivia asked, shock in her voice. “Why on earth would they—”

Jack shrugged sheepishly. “Because I invited them. Kind of a long story.”

Just then, Jack’s radio chirped. He hadn’t put his earpiece in, and he had not answered his buzzing phone in the pack on his chest, so Clark overrode the mute feature on the UHF radio strapped to his chest and his voice blasted. “Jack, I’m in position on overwatch. How copy?”

Olivia looked at the walkie-talkie. “Is that Uncle John? He’s with you?”

Jack took the handheld unit and pressed the PTT button. “I read you five by five.”

“Why aren’t you up on comms?”

“Uhhh… we’ve got a bit of a… complication. My big sister is here.”

Olivia, still standing just behind Davi, pursed her lips and jerked her head toward Davi. Jack saw the expression and knew it well.

“Oh… along with her boyfriend… I mean, fiancé.”

Clark didn’t skip a beat. “Well, we’ll have to toast to their future some other time. For now you need to get them the hell out of there. I’ve got movement on the road. Three vehicles.”

“Three?” Jack said. He’d hoped that if he made it clear in the targeting information that he would be alone, al-Matari would just send a couple of his soldiers after him. But three vehicles sounded like more than a couple soldiers.

“You have a read of the number of pax involved?”

“Negative. Too far out. But they are pulling off the road, out of my view. I think they are going to debus there and move into the woods to approach. Don’t go into the woods, you need to hunker down.”

“Roger that. I’ll figure out what we’re doing in here.”

Chavez came through the front door now. “Jack, three doors to this building, lots of ground-floor windows. Say a dozen access points in all. We need to bunker on the second floor and engage them in the bottleneck of the stairs.”

He saw Olivia. “Hey, kiddo. It’s been a while.” He looked to Davi. “You Secret Service?”

Olivia answered for him. “He’s my fiancé, Davi.”

“Oh. Congratulations. Sorry to ruin your day, Jack didn’t tell me this was going to turn into a family affair.”

Jack said, “Didn’t know. She left her Secret Service detail in D.C.”

“Too bad,” Ding said. “We sure as hell could have used a couple more guns.”

Jack shuffled everyone up the staircase off the main room. As he did so, Davi took his new fiancée by the hand.

“Tell me this doesn’t happen every day.”

Olivia said, “I swear it doesn’t.”

Jack said, “Davi, do you know anything about guns?”