Chapter 2 - Blind Corner Ambush
The sound was unmistakable. It wasn’t the backfire of an un-tuned cab engine or the pop of a blown tire. It was the sharp, supersonic whip of a suppressed 7.62x39mm round piercing exterior metal.
"Down!" Samantha screamed. It was not a nurse's voice. It was the barking, iron command of an Army combat medic who had spent two tours in the Arghandab valley dodging indirect fire and sniper hideouts.
Before Alexander could react, her hand shot across the console, grabbing his silk lapels and violently dragging him down onto the floorboard between the rear seats. A fraction of a second later, the rear passenger window—reinforced ballistic laminate, but not military-grade armor—exploded into an opaque spiderweb of fractures. Three heavy slugs slammed into the pillar behind where Alexander's head had been resting.
Up front, Thomas grunted. The Escalade lurched violently forward, tires screeching against wet concrete, rubber burning as the heavy vehicle leaped over the pedestrian island. The sickening wet thud from the front seat signaled what Samantha already feared: the glass partition was spattered with bright, oxygenated crimson.
"Thomas!" Alexander yelled, trying to leverage himself up.
"Stay down!" Samantha pinned him with an elbow against his breastbone, using leverage rather than brute strength. "He's hit. Upper thoracic or subclavian, judging by the blood mist on the glass. If you stand up, your head comes off."
The vehicle careened wildly down Tenth Avenue. Thomas had his foot glued to the accelerator, but the steering was loose, serpentine. The SUV glanced off a parked delivery truck with an ear-splitting shriek of tearing metal, sparks raining across the shattered side windows. Behind them, two dark gray Sprinter vans accelerated aggressively through the red lights, closing the gap.
"They aren't trying to kidnap me," Alexander hissed through gritted teeth, his hands finding the concealed compartment beneath the rear seat cushions and retrieving an SIG Sauer P320. "They're finishing what they started in March."
"Your family or your board of directors?" Samantha asked with brutal pragmatism, shifting her weight.
"Both." He racked the slide. "Can you shoot?"
"I’m a trauma specialist. I prefer putting people back together, but I know how to make holes if necessary. Right now, your driver is bleeding out into his steering wheel and we’re going seventy miles an hour toward a construction barrier."
Samantha lunged between the front bucket seats, ignoring the razor-sharp edges of shattered laminated glass that scored her forearm. Thomas was slumped forward over the wheel, his skin the color of dirty chalk, his lips flecked with pink froth. A bullet had punched through the B-pillar, bypassed his vest at an angle through the armpit, and punctured his right lung. Tension pneumothorax.
"Thomas, release the pedal!" she shouted, grabbing the wheel with her left hand while her right foot scrambled to shove his limp leg off the accelerator.
The driver groaned, his eyes rolling back. The vehicle swerved hard toward the concrete barriers dividing the Hudson River Greenway construction zone. Samantha hauled on the wheel with both arms, muscles burning, veins corded in her neck. The massive SUV leaned hard on its suspension, skidding sideways across three lanes of slick asphalt, spraying rain like a hydroplane, before the tires caught traction with a violent jerk that almost threw her through the windshield.
"Alexander! Hold the wheel!" she ordered.
The billionaire didn’t hesitate. He climbed into the gap, gripping the leather-wrapped rim, keeping the vehicle straight as the speedometer hovered at sixty-five.
Samantha didn’t waste a second. Her fingers flew to her scrubs. The stethoscope around her neck came off; she tossed it aside. In the pocket of her scrub top, she carried a ten-gauge decompression needle—a habit from the military she had never broken, keeping it alongside her favorite charting pens.
"What are you doing?" Alexander yelled over the roar of the wind whipping through the blown-out windows.
"Saving life number one tonight," she replied.
She ripped Thomas’s tactical shirt open, exposing the pale, muscular chest. The trachea was deviated to the left; the right side of his ribcage was hyper-expanded, silent. She located the second intercostal space at the midclavicular line with her thumb, angled the four-inch needle, and drove it down with brutal, practiced precision into the pleural cavity.
A loud, hissing gasp of trapped air and dark blood vented through the catheter.
Thomas’s chest hitched. His eyes fluttered, color faintly returning to his lips as the suffocating pressure around his heart and collapsed lung was relieved. He took a ragged, spontaneous breath.
"He's breathing," Samantha yelled. "Now turn this damn car before they pit us!"
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Through the rain-streaked side mirror, the lead Sprinter van surged forward, aiming its reinforced steel bull-bar directly at the Escalade’s left rear quarter-panel.
***
