by Fiona Quinn
DANGER SIGNS
Fiona Quinn
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
EPILOGUE
THE WORLD of INIQUUS
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
The World of Iniquus
Ubicumque, Quoties. Quidquid
Iniquus - /iˈni/kwus/- our strength is unequaled, our tactics unfair – we stretch the law to its breaking point. We do whatever is necessary to bring the enemy down.
The Lynx Series
Weakest Lynx
Missing Lynx
Chain Lynx
Cuff Lynx
Gulf Lynx
Hyper Lynx (2021)
Strike Force
In Too DEEP
JACK Be Quick
InstiGATOR
Uncommon Enemies
WASP
Relic
Deadlock
Thorn
FBI Joint Task Force
Open Secret
Cold Red
Even Odds
Kate Hamilton Mysteries
Mine
Yours
Ours
Cerberus Tactical K9 Team Alpha
Survival Instinct
Protective Instinct
Defender's Instinct
Delta Force Echo
Danger Signs
Danger Zone (2021)
Danger Close (2021)
.
This novel is dedicated to Ciara Noelle with gratitude.
An inspiration, a muse, a teacher, beloved.
Chapter One
Ty
As soon as Ty heard D-Day’s high-pitched gasp, he knew they were in big trouble.
A nanosecond later, he sucked in his own gulp of air.
Sudden sharp pains snapped over his body.
Ty’s brain scrambled to understand their situation—to make sense of whatever was happening. And to find a way to survive it.
One minute they had been dangling peacefully from his parachute harness, floating through the night’s sky, and now—completely blinded in the pitch-black night—their situation turned dire.
Time slowed—what operators called vapor lock—the point where the brain knew for a fact that the situation was desperate and dumped adrenaline into the body’s systems, not only powering up muscle strength but focusing the mind sharply on the immediate threat.
Everything physical felt like pouring cold molasses; everything mental sped forward at warp speed.
Ty’s senses expanded, clawing the environment for information to tell him how best to endure the next moments. But in the darkness, Ty Newcomb—Tier One operator with Delta Force Echo—had almost nothing to go on.
It was zero-dark-thirty along the Kenya-Uganda border in central Africa.
Up until this moment, the jump had been textbook. Getting down was supposed to be a cakewalk for him, even if he was jumping tandem with D-Day attached to his chest straps.
Ty hadn’t been worried about getting them on-site for this mission. He’d steer for the IR illuminator that marked their landing zone with practiced efficiency.
When Ty had run off the back of the plane a few minutes before, with D-Day tethered to him, the only thing Ty had worried about had been the landing. Murphy’s Law meant there was a high probability for skidding along the grassy meadow only to discover he was dragging through some wildebeest excrement—or whatever herd of wild animals had grazed the grasses down.
After Ty’s parachute thwacked open, and he’d descended in the pitch black, there had been peace. Weightless, visionless, with a slight woosh of wind, heard through his helmet, Ty had split his attention between situational awareness and a moment of joy.
He imagined himself a space explorer, gliding into a worm hole to come out the other side on some strange new planet.
He’d enjoyed it.
Always did.
A moment of indulgence, and he was back on task, focused on the Ugandan soldier ally below them, waving his red lights in sweeping arcs to give Ty a bull’s eye to aim for.
Ty began to repeat his list of landing protocols aloud to remind D-Day what she was supposed to do as they hit the ground. “Hands crossing the chest, legs lifted from the hips…”
A gust of wind suddenly dragged their canopy higher in the sky and blew them off course.
Way off course.
Past the field out beyond the range of the light source.
Yup, he’d been worried about buffalo dung.
And to say they were in the shits would be putting it mildly.
This was life or death.
They were slicing through a tree in the thick canopy of what Ty assumed must be Queen Elizabeth Park’s northernmost edge. If not, they’d blown into the Congo, and that would be a whole other SNAFU layer to be dealt with.
First, Ty had to survive the next thirty seconds.
The velocity of their descent pressed the smaller branches away only to have them whip angrily back in stinging rebuke, leaving vengeful welts on their skin as Ty and D-Day fell from the sky.
Ty tipped his chin down to his chest and protected his eyes in the crook of his elbow. “D-Day, cross your ankles, press your thighs together, soften your knees!” As he yelled out, he tried to maneuver his own body into this safer configuration.
Getting stopped by a branch between his legs would make the rest of this mission a nightmare.
That was if they survived this fall.
His head jerked backward as his night-vision goggles snagged and ripped from his combat helmet.
“Arms protecting your face!” Ty hoped D-Day could hear him bellow as they crashed past limb after limb.
The branches dressed in thick foliage grappled with his equipment, yanking at the closures and straps until the sheer weight and speed of the operators’ slide ripped them free of the branches’ grasp.
Down, down, down, they careened.
Without the full canopy of their parachute capturing air and drifting them safely to the ground, they had no brakes, no control, and Ty had no idea how far they were from the ground.
If they continued to fall like this, they were going to die.
Up in a tree alive was better than down and dead.
Ty reached into the stygian night, not seeing even an edge of a solid object, completely blind to his surroundings. His knuckles grazed along the bark of a limb to his left. Ty
flexed his hand to grab at it.
The weight of the two operators, their equipment, plus speed tore the branch from his fingers.
He tried again.
And again.
And again.
Each time their descent noticeably slowed.
Tunnel vision—especially in a pure black tunnel like this—meant he had no concept of what D-Day was doing below him. But she was a pilot for the SOAR 160th—an elite Army special operations unit. She was used to working in scenarios of sensory deprivation and high stress. Surely, she was doing something to help.
If Ty could just get their chute to tangle up in a branch that was strong enough to support their weight, or he could find purchase on a stout limb, they could survive.
Hoping to affect either of those options, with Ty’s next grab, he tugged hard to the side where he thought the trunk might be.
Their abrupt halt was teeth jarring.
“Hang tight,” Ty called down to D-Day as soon as his lungs were working enough for him to form words.
“As if I had a choice,” she choked out her response.
“Give me a minute to assess.”
“Yeah, you do that,” D-Day called up to him.
The last time Ty had seen D-Day, her helmet was just below his chin. Ty patted her head to see if she’d managed to keep her night vision goggles. His hand landed on her hair, cut in a short pixie style. She’d lost her whole helmet; that must have hurt like hell. But the only sound she’d made through all this was that initial gasp of surprise.
She was lucky that losing her helmet hadn’t snapped her neck.
Ty gave himself a moment to regroup.
It had been a while since Ty had parachuted with a human attached to his straps.
Typically when Ty jumped with Delta Force Echo, he had his Military Working Dog, Rory, in a pouch as they headed down to whatever off-grid mission Fort Bragg’s JSOC—Joint Special Operations Command—sent them on.
Rory loved to jump; it was like sticking his nose out the window during a long country car ride but on steroids. Rory was a K9 that could best be described as a dog on steroids. He was all go-mode when he was on a task but a dork when he was hanging out at the base.
Luckily, this time, Rory was left behind—asleep in his kennel.
Hanging out in a tree until an Echo brother could get them an assist, yeah, that could take hours.
Rory in a tree for hours, dangling from his pouch, mad, with his sharp teeth inches from Ty’s jugular?
If this had to happen on a tandem jump, selfishly, Ty was glad he had a human—who understood the concept of patience—strapped to his front.
Delta Force Echo missions were always high risk. Any damned thing could go haywire at any point. It was expertise built on training and experience that kept everyone operational.
But Ty had never landed in a tree before—with or without a tandem partner. And certainly not on a night so dark that it seemed to sponge up any possible trace of illumination. For him, this was all theoretical. Something they’d talked through in jump school.
Rule number one, stay calm.
“Well?” D-Day asked.
“Working the problem,” Ty said. He’d managed to keep his radio on him—small miracle. He adjusted the channel then tabbed the mic. “Echo-zero-two for Echo-zero-one.” He directed his communications to their team leader, Master Chief T-Rex. Since T-Rex was second out of the plane, Ty hoped he got down before the winds kicked up.
“Go for Echo-zero-one,” T-Rex’s voice came over his speaker.
“Echo-zero-two and D-Day are sitting in a tree.”
“K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” T-Rex sang.
“Funny,” D-Day muttered.
“I was wondering where the team took off to,” T-Rex said. “We had a designated landing spot. You didn’t get the memo?”
“Sorry, I must have been getting a coffee while you went over that part of the mission.”
T-Rex went through the Echo roster, using their team numbers to check on their situations. As it turned out, T-Rex and Nitro were the only ones with boots on the actual ground. The rest of Echo were up in the trees like a troupe of monkeys.
“Echo-zero-one to Echo-zero-two. Did either you or D-Day sustain serious injuries?”
Before Ty depressed the button to answer T-Rex, he asked, “How are you doing down there, D-Day?”
“Hard to tell,” D-Day answered. “It feels like I have most of my body parts.”
“This is Echo-zero-two. D-Day and I will need to assess once we’re on the ground. We’re both conscious.”
“We’ll take what we can get. Any idea how high up you two are?”
“Standby.”
Ty’s mind spun through the situation. For sure, he had no idea how high they were up off the ground.
Five feet? Fifty?
And if it were fifty, would their chute hold fast?
Silk ripped easily, and their combined weight was a lot to ask for the fabric to hold. Ty was two-ten. D-Day was tiny. But she was also solid muscle. Looking at her, he’d guess one-ten, one-fifteen? But when he caught her under the arms and lifted her briefly up onto a platform back at the base, he’d say with her clothes and boots she was a good hundred and fifty.
Besides their personal weight, the tandem team had carried their share of equipment and provisions in their drop bag that weighed a hundred and forty-two pounds when Ty had put it on the scale.
The equipment bag hung between their legs on a twenty-foot cord with a bungee shock absorber. During a normal landing, the jumper detached the load before performing the parachute landing fall; this kept the bag from causing the jumper injuries.
Now, if a jumper saw they were headed into a tree canopy, the instruction book said to get rid of that bag lest the jumper lands in one tree and the equipment in the other.
Of course, if you kept it attached, it could provide an exit strategy. Tie the top in tight and simply climb down along the cord.
“D-Day, the provisions bag, does it reach the ground?”
“Nope,” she exhaled. “But I’d like to—”
Ty heard the rip of parachute fabric written large against the otherwise silent night. They dropped about six inches before Ty’s boot found a limb. His weight hung from the parachute ropes, but even having the tips of his toes on a surface made him feel better. He hoped his stomach would settle. Puking down D-Day’s back would make him the butt of bar jokes for years to come.
D-Day’s feet dangled over nothingness.
Ty could feel her weight dragging at him. Sweat formed on Ty’s upper lip and chest as his body processed their life-threatening situation. “We have to get that weight off. Moving very slowly, D-Day, can you unclasp the supply bag?”
“I believe so, let me just feel…Yup, got it.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to count down your release, then we’re going to listen for the bag to impact the ground. From that information, we’re going to take our best guess at how high up we are. Hopefully, you release the clasp, and the bag hits the ground. Twenty feet, we can work with.”
“Wilco,” D-Day said. “Three. Two. One. Release.”
As soon as D-Day freed the weight, the tandem partners flew a good foot up in the air. Ty landed back with his toes on a branch.
With the strain on his back somewhat eased, Ty reached under D-Day’s arms and tried to haul her up to the branch beside him. Even though she was positioned inches lower than he was in the restraints, he towered a good foot above her when they stood side by side on the ground. Here in the tree, her feet couldn’t reach the branch Ty stood on. He lowered her back to dangle from his chest rigging.
In this configuration, Ty had his boys pinched down tight. He needed to get the weight off. How exactly he was going to do that, he wasn’t sure. Getting castrated from the harness strap wasn’t on his happy list.
He wanted to be a dad someday.
Maybe even someday soon—if the right woman walked into his li
fe.
Ty had been thinking about this just the other day, how suddenly the timing seemed right to form a family of his own.
It would suck if he had to explain to his potential future Mrs. Newcomb how his nuts got crushed in a parachuting catastrophe.
It would suck even more if this was how things ended for him, and he never got the opportunity to love a woman, commit his life to her, and know the depth of feelings that came with being a dad.
The longer the webbing was cutting off circulation, the more worrisome his situation became. Ty thought about going to his uncle’s farm and wrapping the calves’ balls with bands…
He remembered asking his uncle how long it took after he’d put the band around the bulls’ scrotum until the testicles fell off. As Ty remembered it, the amount of time depended on the size of the bull, but the testicles would fall off somewhere between ten and fifty days.
He had time before he castrated himself.
Yeah, maybe change the subject.
And all of those thoughts whipped through Ty’s mind before the supply bag crashed to the ground.
“Whew!” D-Day said. “That was a long way down. Did you hear it?”
“How far?” Ty asked.
“Going out on a limb here, he-he-he. I’m guessing we’re at the top of a very tall tree.”
“Funny.”
Three stories up in the air that would be broken ankles and legs…if they were lucky. At forty feet—which was Ty’s best guess at their height based on the equipment bag’s thud—there was a fifty percent chance of death. Over fifty feet and that stat went up to a hundred percent dead—no shot at surviving.
He toggled his mic. “Echo-zero-one, Echo-zero-two is over twenty feet. Zero visibility. No light source or night vision available.”
“Are you lashed in?”
“We seem stable,” Ty reported.
“Echo,” T-Rex spoke to their entire team. “I have your GPS coordinates. Our forward team and I are headed your way.” T-Rex’s voice was staticky in Ty’s headset.
“Looks like the wind action we had hoped to avert was in play,” T-Rex continued. “The team was blown about three klicks off target.” Three kilometers—not quite two miles. That would have all been fine, except for the trees.
