by Zoe Dawson
So many moving parts.
So many contingencies.
SEAL officers had to be faster, stronger, smarter, and tougher than enlisted because they held life and death in their hands. Not just for his team, but for foreign allies, noncombatants and civilians. His decisions took lives. It was his job to understand that and execute the actions that would culminate in success.
And maybe that was why he was alone. The demanding job took its toll on him, let alone his relationships. Yet there was a part of him that still believed he and Solace could have overcome all the potholes of serving together in different jobs and different branches of the military if it hadn’t been for his over-the-top fear for her life. Some things he realized now. Firstly, he had no control over the missions his wife flew or danger she was in, and secondly, he negated her power over her own decisions by intervening and demanding she kowtow to his.
He knew how the service worked and he made it terribly hard on her.
Things always seem fairer when he took a look at the past. Except, nostalgia was a lie. When faced with suffering and unhappiness, people looked either toward the future with hope or the past with rose colored glasses. He was more practical than that. What he saw when he looked at the past were opportunities that could have been taken but weren’t.
Hindsight was always 20/20.
When he entered the briefing room, he noticed that Saint paced, and Fast Lane was aware it wasn’t mission energy eating him up.
Normal people didn’t possess the kind of mental horsepower he had. His men often wondered how he knew in advance what they were thinking. It was because his attention was to the details, every detail that gave him the information he needed to assess every situation.
They dealt in death, and he intended that every single one of them would cheat it.
He tossed around the idea of benching Saint, but that would put the team at a disadvantage, namely no dedicated medic. Sure, the guys could get by, they were competent in medical procedures, but Saint was gifted beyond his young years. And it helped to have an ace in the hole when cheating death.
There was also the fact that Saint had never let him down in combat, mission readiness, and dedication to operating. He might have been overly concerned about Aella Mikos, but in the end, Fast Lane believed he would make the right decisions, the hard decisions if and when they presented themselves.
His attention shifted to the CIA liaison and Commander Jackson, their TOC team was all prepared, the environment calm and dutiful. The TOC staff was broken up into air support, the SOAR group ready to not only infil them, but exfil them. Med guys who would call in the rescue choppers. Then the guys with the eyes who were responsible for coordinating the satellites and drones. Then there was Commander Jackson who coordinated everything like a well-oiled machine. He had the utmost admiration for them all. They were the mothership, the brains and eyes while the SEALs were the brawn. This was home and just part of the operator’s extended family.
His senses jangled again, and he looked around the room for danger, but there wasn’t any. It was business as usual. Maybe he was off…but in all his operating years, when it came to being a SEAL, he’d never been off.
The weight on the shoulders of a details guy—he saw what others missed.
Jackson was edgy, Rose frowned often when she consulted her phone, several of the staffers were jumpy.
He walked over to the CIA officer. “Rose?”
She pulled her eyes from her phone and gave him a blank stare for a moment. “Yes?”
“What’s up?”
They exchanged the kind of gaze that only seasoned operatives could exchange. She sighed. “Nothing I can put my finger on.”
“What aren’t you sharing with us?”
“Nothing concrete. Just bits and pieces.”
“Like what?”
“Like why Zasha and Darko are here and why we can’t find them. Their attempts to arm seemingly unimportant combatants. They’re up to something…something…hidden.” She turned to him. “Agent Mikos could be bait.”
“For me?”
“Yes, but more. She might just be a distraction.”
“Kill two birds with one stone?”
She rubbed her face and sighed. It was clear she hadn’t been sleeping well. She was a pretty woman with dark hair and big brown eyes. From his experience with her in the past, she was not only astute, but brilliant.
“Let’s be clear here,” she whispered. “Most of southern Somalia is a governance vacuum, and although Al-Shabaab doesn’t actually control this territory, it had free rein to move and operate here. It’s a powder keg. Al-Shabaab acts like a shadow government. They collect taxes and dispense justice. I wish I could give you something more concrete…actionable, but I can’t. Gathering intelligence is difficult here and dangerous. The government’s attention is not on the terrorist group, but on internal squabbles to assert its authority over regional administrations. The US is here mainly to quell and eradicate the last vestiges of Al-Qaeda.” She touched his forearm, squeezing. “Watch your backs out there.”
He nodded. He was under no delusions that Aella was bait. But if she was bait for a trap, what more did Zasha and Darko have in store for them?
Saint hadn’t missed the alert look on Fast Lane’s face. After the briefing, he and his team walked toward the tarmac with Fast Lane trailing a short distance behind obviously deep in thought. The helo on the pad was an impressive looking stealth Black Hawk, armed to the teeth, looked every inch the dark predator. Crewmembers removed the chocks as they approached, then filed into the chopper. LT boarded last.
They were all wearing their night vision, everything tinged with an eerie green. LT glanced at one of the pilots, and Saint heard him sigh.
The female pilot’s voice came over the comms and it was sexy as hell. “Tuck in boys and keep your hands, arms, weapons, appendages, and macho egos inside the vehicle at all times. Sorry no food service tonight.”
Some of the guys chuckled, but when Saint looked over at LT, he was scowling. He wasn’t the only man who had a woman under his skin.
The engine rumbled to life, the whistling sound of the rotors settled into a quiet vibration against the metal of the interior, humming with power. There was a deafening silence, intermittently broken by radio communications in his headset.
The flight was brief and once the chopper hovered, Saint was out last, taking one knee with the others until the helo took off, leaving behind a thick dust cloud blowing in the pitch dark, looking like shadows in his NVGs. He turned to look back at the main city and frowned. The lights had been below him as they had flown out, but now the city was also dark.
“LT,” he said into his comm. “The city.”
“I saw that. Keep your eyes sharp. Something hasn’t felt right since we got here.”
“Copy that,” he said.
“TOC, we’re moving out. What is the 411 on the power in the city?”
“Outages happens sometimes,” Rose said, “but we’re running on a generator so we’re good to go.”
“Copy that,” LT replied.
Saint wondered at the tense sound of Rose’s voice. It could be mission pressure, but the stress in Rose’s voice sounded far more strained than was warranted.
It sharpened his attention and focus, and he wasn’t the only one. This team had gone through some deep shit and come out of it stronger, more grounded than when Saint had first joined.
“Heads on a swivel, boys,” Mad Max said. “Jugs is agitated.”
“Take point, Max,” Fast Lane growled.
Jugs was only agitated when there was undue strain on the team, but animals picked up disturbances much faster than their human partners.
They moved across open ground, keeping the city on their left. At the outskirts, there were still a lot of demolished buildings, nothing but a long line of broken cinderblock walls. As they moved, they stayed in combat formation, staggered and fast-walking. The land was flat with very little
cover, nothing but thornbush savannah and even after the sun had gone down, semi-desert, humid and hot.
Saint and the team were once again on the ground in a hostile environment, the pointy end of the spear, ready to do the undoable.
They traversed one mile to the signal of the phone that was still active where they would move back into Omar’s occupied part of the city.
In the distance, Saint could see a bonfire, beyond that was where they had pinpointed Aella’s location.
“Dragon, overwatch,” LT said through the comms. “But don’t fire unless you have to. We don’t need to alarm the natives.”
“Copy,” Dragon said and peeled off, running for the nearest flat roof of the numerous and closely packed adobe buildings ravaged from fresh fighting and shelling.
LT held up his fist and everyone went down to one knee. “The house where the phone of her captors is pinging is just beyond the bonfire. We’re going to go in fast and hot. Get in, get her and get out.
“Set, LT,” Dragon said.
“Copy,” LT said. “Pit, Hemingway and Saint take out the guards and hit the house. Dodger, Max and 2-Stroke, set up a perimeter and an escape route.” Fast Lane surveyed the area for another brief moment, then said, “Execute.”
Saint took off with his two teammates sprinting right up to the fire and past it. He noted a small ring made up of tires to his right, and his resolve tightened. Aella. He just knew she had fought for her life in that small circle.
Through the goggles, he saw a guard and Saint grabbed for his knife. Even in the shadows of the fire, the man didn’t see him. He was down before he even realized he was dead. He spotted Hemingway near the corner of the building. He was moving fast, a body left in his wake. Not a shot fired. Excellent.
“Report,” LT growled.
“Two ghosted,” Hemingway replied as if he were standing right next to him.
“Four,” Pitbull said.
“Not many guards for a prisoner,” Mad Max said.
Saint was thinking the same thing. “Feels like an ambush,” he said. “But we can’t pull out until we know for sure she’s not here.”
“Last intel reports the target on the lower floor, northeast part of the house,” Dodger said.
Saint slowed his approach. The dark outline of the house was blacker against the night sky. Waves of heat wafted off the adobe. Saint slid up beside Hemingway, silent and deadly.
“It’s creepy how you do that,” he said.
Saint chuckled low. “Hiding from the government in the woods of West Virginia was an art, son,” he drawled.
“Your misspent youth, moonshiner.”
Pitbull joined them on the other side of the door. He nodded to Hemingway, who turned the knob. “Open,” Hemingway said, pulling his hand back.
He hoped like hell Aella was here. He had no illusions this was anything but a war zone. Rose even said information was sketchy and that a rescue was dicey. That had pissed him off, but she had squeezed some contacts for proof of life. That got them a vague location, enough to triangulate the cell phone used to demand a ransom. Aella had been moved twice.
Oh yeah, the enemy knew they were coming, and it had nothing to do with their own intel. Zasha had a fucking hand in this, so all bets were off where she was concerned. She would like to see their whole team dead, especially Fast Lane.
“Let’s go,” Pit said, and Hemingway grabbed the knob and opened the door, ducking inside. Saint and Pitbull followed, immediately moving to clear the room. There was no one there.
“I don’t like this,” Hemingway whispered.
“Me either,” Pitbull said.
But the three of them moved forward, checking and clearing the rest of the dusty and empty rooms until they came to a locked door.
They exchanged glances. “Fuck them,” Saint whispered and reached for the lock.
Dragon’s voice broke into the heavy tension. “Movement in the back of the building.”
“Checking it out.” There were several moments of silence, then his urgent shout exploded through their comms. “Bug out! There’s a huge force moving in on this position and…fuck me, into the city. Huge, LT.”
Saint broke the lock and opened the door. But when they glanced into the room, there was nothing but an empty chair, bedding in the corner and a small table with a phone on it.
It beeped once and everything exploded.
Zasha Vasiliev tucked the phone into her back pocket and took the night vision binoculars and surveyed the buildings below her. With a soft smile on her face, she said, “Begin.”
The men behind her pulled off the camouflage on the big guns and the first shells whistled their way down to their specific targets. The first explosion took out the barracks, the second hitting the aircraft on the helipad, and the third beautiful shell hit the command base. Mogadishu would once again be prominent in the American news, but this time it was much worse than a battle in the city.
Three successive explosions in a row wreaked the carnage she, Darko, and Angar Said had meticulously planned. Angar Said wanted vicious revenge on the Special Forces who had captured him endangering his family in Paraguay, South America, with the intention of stopping his reign of terror. In addition, they snatched his victory and foiled their five-pronged plan to cause mass casualties and terror across the western world.
The special forces base at the Mogadishu airport had been decimated. Soon the Somali Federal Government would topple, and Omar would rule the city. While the world’s attention was on the renewed civil war, Zasha and Darko would be free to carry out their ultimate plan in tandem with their partner, Muhammad Angar Said, the terrorist leader of Al’Irada.
All was going perfectly.
“I’m afraid you’re cut off and on your own, Ford,” she whispered with relish. It would only be a matter of time before her ally Axmed Omar ran those bastards on that SEAL Team down. They were now on the run. They couldn’t resist coming after Special Agent Aella Mikos—the one woman on the planet who threatened her man.
A large force of fighters stood at the ready. “Get down there and make sure there are no survivors. Then secure the base. There will be a response, but it will take some time. Be ready.”
A lot of her information had come from the ruthless Al-Shabaab intelligence wing, the Amniyat. They were the veins of the organization. They were the conduits that had helped her and Darko sell and smuggle in arms, ammo, equipment, vehicles and explosives, target people and take out this base. They were everywhere.
Which allowed her to be everywhere even in the so-called safe zones.
“You played your role perfectly, Aella. Now enjoy whatever time you have left with Axmed. I hear he loves the ladies.”
She snickered as she watched the fighters overrun the base and start to eradicate all the Americans still alive. She had some business in the south and to meet up with her beloved. She walked to the jeep and settled inside.
Her driver took her to a helicopter, and she reclined in the seat as it took off. The flight was smooth, but brief. When she touched down, she exited the chopper at a small cluster of preconstructed buildings, their clandestine operation not far from their camp.
She moved to one of the small units and went inside. Darko was on the phone, and she wrapped her arms around his neck from behind, breathing in his scent. He leaned his head back and smiled up at her.
She could tell he was talking to his contact in the US. He had kept close tabs on his nephew, and it would be a matter of time before his agents got an opening to take out the teenager. No one was safe from them, and Alex would pay for ruining her plans for Neo “2-Stroke” Teller and Chrysanthe Steele. The information on Chrysanthe was also intensive.
But before she dealt with the CIA officer, she had to take care of the SEAL team that had been nothing but a thorn in her side.
There wasn’t going to be any wedding, although it was so cute to watch them plan it.
When the time came, she would also meet her death.
Zasha was going to make sure it was by her own hand.
3
Saint came to across Pitbull’s shoulders as his teammate ran past the bonfire and toward the team. Bitter disappointment mingled in with pain of the cuts, bruises and abrasions. Aella wasn’t here, and they had no idea where she had been taken. To top it off, the militia was moving against the city, massing for a heavy assault.
Still groggy and dizzy, Saint looked up back toward the city and saw and heard massive explosions. Hemingway was running behind them, Dragon behind him, both of them protecting their rear, but Hemingway and Dragon stopped, turned, and exchanged glances. Pit did the same. For a moment, shock flashed across Hemingway and Dragon’s faces and the easy-going SEAL swore.
“What the fuck was that?” Mad Max’s voice came through the comms as Pitbull, Dragon and Hemingway lurched back into motion. Behind them, lights were flashing, and shadows were moving in a way that told a seasoned gunfighter they were being pursued.
Fast Lane’s voice came through the comms. “TOC? Do you copy?” There was nothing but an ominous silence. “TOC? Come in.” Still nothing.
“They hit base,” 2-Stroke said, his voice hushed with disbelief. In the distance the sound of gunfire and explosions rocked the night. Plumes of smoke wafted into the air, drifting on the hot breeze.
“Dragon, Hemingway, Pitbull, get back here on the double. How is Saint?” Fast Lane growled.
“I’m awake,” he said hoarsely.
“Welcome back,” Pitbull said. “He’s conscious, LT. We’re hauling ass back to you a-sap. We’ve got a lot of company.”
“Copy that.”
His teammate’s harsh breathing, swishing through the dry grass and dusty earth and running footfalls were loud in Saint’s ears.
Saint was pissed that they were the ones on the run and that Omar had duped them into an ambush with Aella as bait. They were better than this.
