by Desiree Holt
“Team leader?”
“Uh, yeah.” Shit. He wasn’t supposed to just broadcast his Delta Force situation to the world. “We’re in the Army together.”
“Oh.”
Nikki drew in her eyebrows and nibbled on her lower lip. Marc had to clench his jaw because, for the first time since his life had gone down the toilet, he had the desire to kiss someone. He wanted to lick that plump little lip with his tongue.
For fuck’s sake.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said at last. “It was just an idea. You don’t know who the hell I am, anyway, so it’s probably a bad idea.”
More nibbles on the lip. Holy shit.
“Um, I have a car here. I came by myself because I didn’t know if I’d want to stay. Like I said, my friends bullied me into it.”
“Yeah?” He chuckled. And hell, how long was it since the last time he’d laughed? “Like I said, me, too.”
Again she almost smiled.
“Aren’t we just the big party animals.” She paused and did that thing with her lip again. “Um, I don’t usually do this, but, um, I feel like I can trust you. Weird, huh? Maybe it’s because you’re military and the military is such a big presence here in San Antonio. But if you’re serious about that cup of coffee, that sounds nice. And I could take you home afterward.”
“Nikki.” He chuffed a laugh. “It’s a forty-five-minute drive from here.”
She lifted her shoulders in a delicate shrug. “I have no place to go or to be.”
From somewhere he found a smile, so foreign to him he wondered if his lips would crack. He had to be crazy for doing this. This woman was carrying a huge emotional burden and he was so fucked-up he couldn’t handle his own feelings, forget about someone else’s.
But she looked so sad, so bruised, he couldn’t just get up and walk away from her. Besides, where the hell would he go? He was trapped at this party. If Trey and Beau hooked up with some females, Teo would have to haul ass to the city to fetch him.
She shifted a tiny bit so there was no contact between their bodies.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “I tend to drive everyone away these days anyway. I didn’t mean to dump all this on you.”
Good going, asshole. Very smooth.
“It’s not that,” he began.
She waved a hand in the air. “No problem. And you don’t need to assure me it’s not me because I know it is. All is good.”
But that was a big fat lie and he knew it. Did he have the stones to pull his head out of his ass and think of someone else for a change? He reached for her hand, closing his fingers around it when she tried to pull it away.
“But coming from me it’s I promise it’s not a lie. You have no idea what a fucked-up mess I am.” And isn’t that just the truth.
“It’s okay,” she repeated. “Besides, there’s no way you could be a bigger hot mess than me.”
He laughed, a soft sound and so foreign to him at first he wasn’t sure what it was. “Maybe we should go get that coffee and compare.”
“As long as we don’t have to go through the house.”
“No problem.” He pulled out his cell phone and typed a text to Trey.
Getting a ride home. All is good.
He showed the text to Nikki. “If you’re still up for it?” he asked. He really ought to tell her to run as fast as she could in the other direction.
“Yes. I am.”
Marc’s phone dinged with the reply from Trey.
R U OK?
Yes. Don’t worry. Not suicidal.
Nikki stared at him. “Why did you write that?”
“Long story. One I don’t talk about.”
“Not even over coffee?” she asked.
“We’ll see.” But he knew he wasn’t about to dump his shit all over her. He didn’t want her to know just how much of an idiot he was.
His phone dinged again.
Call if you need me.
Nikki glanced up at him, a questioning look in her eyes. “They must really be worried about you.”
“Yeah. Stupid stuff on my part.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket. “I’m ready to leave if you are.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I am. Yes.” And strange to say, he was. He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Lead on to your chariot.”
They circled around the house through the back yard and out to the street. About three blocks from the house, she stopped beside a silver hatchback.
“It’s pretty plain vanilla.” Her voice held an apologetic tone.
“I like plain vanilla,” he assured her. “You always know what you’re getting.”
The words hit him like a punch to the solar plexus as he realized the truth of them. He did like plain vanilla. Ria, the fancy sundae with many flavors, had tempted him with her exotic makeup. But now he wondered if their marriage had lasted any longer, would he have gotten tired of her? A guy couldn’t depend on exotic, a lesson he learned the hard way. For the first time since that gut-wrenching day he’d discovered the truth about his wife, the bands around his chest loosened.
Oh, he wasn’t fooling himself that meeting an emotionally anguished Nikki Alvarez was a sudden cure. He had been broken for so long he wasn’t even sure he was fixable. But he told himself to pull his frayed edges together and think about somebody but himself for a change. After all, the worst thing he’d done was make a bad choice, a massive case of rampant stupidity. He was nowhere ready to take all that out into the light and give it a hard look. Maybe, though, he could put it aside for a couple of hours and help someone else. He had to admit, with great reluctance, that a person losing someone they loved to death and feeling they were to blame was a lot worse than feeling sorry for himself because he’d married a promiscuous drug-addicted tramp. At least for this moment, he was looking forward instead of backward.
He opened the door on the passenger side. “It’s your city, so you’d better drive. Is there some place not very fancy that you can get a real cup of coffee?”
“I know just the place.”
She hesitated a second before opening her door, and he wondered if she’d had a change of heart. Then she climbed in and motioned him to do the same. As he settled himself in the seat, he closed his eyes for a moment to gather his wits about him. This was just coffee. With someone who needed a person to talk to. And he sure knew that so much of the time a stranger was better than a friend.
He was just so out of practice. Hell, he hardly even talked to his teammates any more. Maybe this was a step forward for him, too.
Don’t fuck this up.
Chapter One
One thing you can say about Niger, Marc Blanchard thought, it’s fucking hot. And full of sand, with a wind that blows it everywhere. He gave thanks regularly that they didn’t have to wear full battle rattle every day. It was bad enough that it got into every fold of the clothing he was wearing for this op. And his ears. And his teeth. And worst of all, his jockey shorts. He’d decided there weren’t too many things worse than constant sand in his crotch. He almost longed for the mountains of Afghanistan. Of course, there he was always freezing his balls off.
It figured they’d be sent here at the height of summer, when on an average day a person could be boiled alive by the temperature. Even the heavy rains couldn’t cool it off, so sometimes the guys were hot, and sometimes hot and wet. Wonderful. Of course, he never complained. Neither did any of the other three men on his Delta Force team. They just accepted their assignments, prepped for them and did the deed. They were in the furnace-like climate of Niger to do what Delta force did best—rescue hostages.
Niger had in recent months become a hotbed of activity. According to the briefing they’d received, the group’s current leader, Adnan Abu Walid-Sahrawi, had broken from an established al-Qaeda group and pledged allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A spate of kidnappings had occurred, with hostages taken. The country of origin would then demand ransom, which mo
st of the time was paid.
Welcome to Agadez, Marc thought, climbing into the body of a produce delivery truck. Once upon a time, caravans had delivered gold and salt to this town in the desert. Now it was a major trading post for arms, drugs and the most widely traded commodity—humans.
Now two of them, American humanitarian aid workers, had been captured. If this followed the established pattern, a ransom demand would arrive shortly. Of course, there was no guarantee that if it was paid, the workers would be released unharmed. And in this situation, unharmed was an amorphous figure of speech. Uncle Sam had said, ‘Go get them and bring them home. Period.’ Which was why Marc’s Delta force team, led by Slade Donovan, was enjoying the furnace-like climate of this landlocked North African country, bouncing along in a battered fruit truck at least twenty years old on roads mostly made of dirt.
On the surface, the mission sounded simple. Get to Agadez, hide while they scoped out the situation, find out where ISIS was holding the aid workers captive and rescue them. Right. Just another day at the office for this Delta Force team.
But they also had a secondary mission, one not so easy to complete. DHS had learned of a camp in northern Mexico that trained terrorists in everything from ways to kill to how to make bombs. Word had come down that this particular ISIS group was smuggling terrorists into the States over the Mexican border from that camp. That they’d painted a target on a spot somewhere in Texas and a team would shortly be sneaking in to accomplish the assignment. Well, Texas is a fucking big state, so good luck with that.
While they’d been waiting to complete their mission, Slade had questioned Ibrahim, their local contact, about it. The man had told him he’d heard rumors about it. He also cautioned that ISIS had a tendency to brag about things, considering themselves invincible. But he wasn’t sure if the person supposedly spearheading it was still here or had moved on. Or even if it was just a figment of someone’s imagination.
Ibrahim had his best to get them a name or names, or any piece of information but had come up empty. ‘No one is saying a word,’ he’d told the team. ‘Not surprising, my friend. They are too afraid someone will find out and kill them and their families.’
Crap. That wasn’t what the brass would want to hear.
Okay, Blanchard. Put that aside for the moment. It’s on Slade’s list, anyway. Concentrate on this mission.
Earlier tonight, an hour after full dark, an MH-60 M Black Hawk helicopter—flown by a Night Stalker, a member of SOAR—Special Operations Aviation Regiment—had dropped them in a carefully selected place outside of Agadez. Ibrahim had met them in this battered produce delivery truck and now was taking them to a house on the outskirts of the city.
They were hidden in the back of the truck, behind the boxes used to deliver vegetables and fruit from the community gardens. Ibrahim’s job had proved a boon to Special Forces and others who needed insertion into the area. In a country deprived of enough food to feed most people three meals a day, no one questioned or disturbed the delivery of produce to families unable to get to the marketplace. The aroma of the fruits and vegetables was overpowering and the bed of the truck harder than concrete, but none of them complained. They’d been in worse situations before.
There wasn’t a lot of room for four big men behind the produce, but they were used to adapting. Somehow they managed to fit themselves in along with their gear and their weapons. Marc, Slade and Trey each carried the favored Colt M4 carbine. Beau, their sniper, cradled his own personal choice, the Heckler and Koch MP5. Driving through the streets of Agadez, Marc knew they could be stopped at any time for any reason. Or no reason at all. Even with the produce as camouflage, some irrational radical could order Ibrahim to offload the truck to check it all out. So they sat with their fingers close to the triggers, waiting.
Sequestered in the confines of the cargo body of the truck, they saw nothing on the trip, could only feel the constant jolting as the truck passed over uneven roads. Every so often they stopped, and Marc knew the others, like him, would be prepared to do whatever was required to keep the mission going. But fuck it all, it would be nice if it didn’t all go to hell before they got to Ibrahim’s.
The truck came to an abrupt stop and Marc figured they’d reached their destination. The rear doors of the cargo area opened and Ibrahim moved enough cartons of produce that they could get to the tailgate and jump down. Marc knew the others had to be as glad as he was to get out of this enclosed space filled with the cloying, lingering aroma of the cargo it carried each day.
They were in a courtyard of some kind, surrounded by walls of the mud bricks he knew were used to construct every building in Agadez. It was pitch dark, not even a star in the sky. For a very brief moment, Marc relived another starless night and the woman he’d met who’d been falling apart piece by piece. Then he shut down everything in his mind except this mission.
The walls surrounding the courtyard were solid clay, no peep holes or anything. He had a feeling there was another house on either side. When they’d looked at photos of the city during the briefing, they’d seen a rabbit warren of clay houses jammed together, built in a circle with the giant tower of a mosque at dead center. Everything except the mosque was the dead, dull tan of the clay used in building.
Ibrahim stacked the produce back in the truck then hustled them into the house with their guns and their gear. The place was threadbare and sparsely furnished. The dust of the area seemed to have settled everywhere, yet no one appeared to notice. Marc would bet a month’s combat pay that the bulk of the wealth, such as it was, resided with the core of the ISIS leadership.
A woman he assumed was Ibrahim’s wife bowed to them as Ibrahim shoved and pushed them into a room at the back of the house. It was small and quite empty.
“My cousin used to live with us.” Ibrahim spoke the words in a short, clipped sentence.
Marc could guess that whatever had happened to that cousin wasn’t good.
Slade thanked the man for his hospitality and the four of them sat on the dirt floor, legs stretched out and weapons cradled in their laps.
“You will have some tea,” Ibrahim said, bowing. “And food.”
They all had their ration kits in the packs they carried, but Marc knew it would be an insult to Ibrahim to refuse his offering. Whatever it consisted of. When he looked at Slade, the team leader dipped his head a fraction.
There was a lot of whispering in another room between Ibrahim and his wife. Then Ibrahim poked his head back into the room. “Food coming soon.”
Marc looked over at Slade, and spoke while barely moving his lips. “We need a sitrep. Where the hostages are being held. How many guards there are.”
“Ibrahim’s not going to discuss it while his wife is in the room. I’m going to remind him time’s fleeting and we need details right now. As in yesterday.”
They all sat very still, looking relaxed but ready to act at any moment if the need arose. Five minutes passed. Ten. Then Ibrahim scuttled back into the room, followed by his wife, her head down. She carried a metal tray holding four bowls of something. Still with eyes averted, she distributed them to the members of the team.
“Rice with sauce,” Ibrahim told them. “It’s good. Eat, eat.”
They accepted the food, but as soon as the woman had left the room, Slade motioned Ibrahim to come closer.
“Thanks for this, but time is critical. We need to know where the workers are being held and to scope out the situation. Plan what we have to do.”
Ibrahim nodded and bowed twice.
“Please eat while everyone goes to bed. Then we talk.”
They ate in silence and, if previous missions had told Marc anything, each running through in his head what they knew so far. The United States was building a very expensive drone base just outside Agadez. In fact, the military had sent a Predator drone to survey the area, so they had a fixed image of the terrorist camp just beyond the city limits. Agadez had morphed from being a caravan nexus to being a hub for s
muggling people out of the country.
Hostages taken in Niger were usually transported through the desert and across the border to Mali, where terrorism was more prevalent and hostage imprisonment easier to control. From the drone recordings and Ibrahim’s feedback, they knew the hostages were still here, but the window of opportunity to free them was closing.
By the time they’d all finished their servings, Ibrahim was back in the room. He sat in the middle of the floor and motioned the team to gather around him.
“We are here.” He drew a diagram in the sand of the floor. “And the hostages are here.” More diagrams. “Just as the pictures on the drone showed you.”
Slade studied the layout. “Which building are the hostages in?”
“Right here.” Ibrahim pointed with his stick. “These members of ISIS have confiscated these four houses. They did some restructuring for their purposes, creating interconnecting passages so they could sneak people in and out. This works in our favor.”
Marc knew exactly what ‘confiscated’ meant. He wondered how many people had been killed when those members of ISIS had grabbed the houses for themselves.
“How many tangoes?” Beau asked.
Ibrahim sighed. “That is where the problem is. There are at least a dozen. They will not all be in the room with the hostages.”
“Can you guess how many in that room?” Slade asked.
“No more than two.”
“Then it’s the others we need to deal with. Ibrahim, we need a distraction to cover our entrance into the house and also draw as many of them as possible out through the front. And we need to time it.”
Ibrahim nodded. “I can arrange that.” He explained what he could do then sketched out the best place for it. “Will that work?”
“Yes.” Slade nodded. “Can you also get a transport vehicle besides the produce truck?”
The other man nodded again. “My cousin has a van. It is pretty beat up, but…” He shrugged. “It runs.”
