Free Dana Marton by 72 Hours (html)

with them.”

    The girls pressed against her legs, one on each side.
     
    He looked at them, and must have realized that he would need a crowbar to pry the kids away from her, because he shook his head, threw her a dirty look, then unfolded his fingers that had been waiting for her to step up to the vent hole, and jumped for it himself. He caught the edge on the first try, pulled out the rifle and then the vent cover and put it back into place.

    “Are we going to stay out in the open now?” As much as she hated the ducts, she wasn’t too crazy about the idea of wandering around in plain sight. “Where are we going?”

    “Can’t crawl in the walls with kids. They make one noise, it’s game over.”

    And with a sinking heart, she knew he was right. “How far are we from the gym?”

    “It’s two corridors over and one floor up.”

    “We’ll take the kids.”

    “They would have been safer sitting in the basement.”

    “Then I’ll go and sit there with them.”

    “You are taking the shortest way out of here. I’m not letting you go in the opposite direction.” And that was that, the look on his face said.

    Fine. “Where is the staircase?” They’d taken so many turns in the ducts, she had no idea where they were anymore.

    “That would be guarded by the rebels. And the elevators were taken out at the beginning, shut off along with the security system.”

    She tried to stay calm for the kids’ sake. They were stuck out in the open, still with no clear plan on how to get out, two children in tow, no knowledge of where the main rebel force was hanging out and no way to get to the other hostages. Oh, yeah, and time was running out, too.
     
    She didn’t think things could get any worse.

    But then a door opened, without any warning, not twenty feet down the hallway from them, and a scruffy rebel soldier stepped out.

     

    S URPRISE FLASHED across the young man’s face, but he was aiming his AK-47 already. Not fast enough. A barely audible pop, not louder than a person smacking his lips together, came from Parker’s gun first. He loved the new silencer that the SDDU had been testing over the last couple of months.

    One of the advantages of being a part of the Special Designation Defense Unit was that they got to try out all the latest gadgets first. He loved that part. And he loved knowing that he made a difference in his job. But he hated that a particularly gruesome mission in Southeast Asia had cost him Kate two years ago.
     
    She gasped as the rebel soldier folded to the ground, but Parker was there already, catching the man’s rifle before it could have crashed to the marble floor. Then he pushed through the door with his gun raised.

    Nobody in there, he registered with relief.
     
    He stepped back out, glancing at Kate, who had the kids behind her, protecting them with her body, blocking the sight of the fallen man. The girls were crying again, but at least quietly. She was talking to them in a soothing voice.

    He grabbed the body by the boots and dragged it inside the room, scanned the place for all possible hiding spots and decided on a metal supply cabinet. He had to remove a shelf to get the guy in, but he managed, locked the door and pocketed the key. He didn’t want the rebels to find the body and realize that there was someone inside the embassy who wasn’t under their control. He didn’t need them to organize a hunting posse. The man whose uniform he had taken earlier was safely stuffed into the vent duct near the gym.
     
    Parker brought out the guy’s gas mask and handed it to the older girl, hoping he could get his hands on another for the little one. Kate had worked her magic on them, it seemed, because they were no longer crying, just watching him with large blue eyes fringed with tear-soaked lashes.

    They were cute and tough. Followed directions well. He supposed their life in a Russian orphanage hadn’t been a bed of roses before their adoption.
     
    “Everyone