by Cindy Dees
A communications guy called out, “We just received an image of Tate with yesterday’s newspaper under her chin. We have proof of life.”
Griffin darted across the room to look over the guy’s shoulder. It was her, all right. She looked haggard, sitting in a metal chair in what looked like a cabin. But she was alive. Profound, knee-weakening relief soared through him.
Duquesne said grimly, “All right, gentlemen. Gear up. Let’s bring her home.”
* * *
If she didn’t find cover in the next minute or so, she was dead.
Although the ground looked table flat, it was deceptive. The desert was riddled with ripples and gullies left over from the rare rains out here. She spied a shallow gully not too far away and rolled over to it as fast as she could. She frantically dug it wider with her bare hands.
As soon as the crevice was deep and wide enough to hold her entire body, she stretched out in it. She buried her legs with some of the loose dirt, and then she piled the rest of the dirt on top of the upholstery cloth on her lap.
The sound of an engine became audible. They were getting close.
Working quickly, she lay down and then eased the cloth and its load of dirt over her torso and face. The weight of it settled heavily upon her, and she turned her head to the side, breathing through a single tiny crack between the fabric and the ground above her.
It felt like being buried alive. Her breathing accelerated in panic, and she frantically did the four-count breathing technique Griffin had taught her to use when shooting a sniper rifle. It supposedly slowed the pulse and respiration.
In. Count to four. Out. Count to four.
Okay, so she was counting to four really fast. But she was doing it. Over the next half-dozen breaths, her counting slowed a tiny bit.
And then a tiny bit more.
Tires crunched through the gravel, and then stopped. Over the noise of the idling engine, she heard male voices calling at each other.
In Russian.
She’d studied it in college and, while not fluent, was reasonably conversational. She strained to hear them. One said something to the effect of whatever Timur had seen moving on the horizon must have been an animal. Another voice speculated that it must be a volk—a wolf in Russian.
A third voice corrected him scornfully, saying that out here it would have to be a kohyut—a coyote.
The first voice swore angrily and then snarled, “When we find the girl, kill her. We don’t need her anymore. Haddad only said he wanted the primary target alive.”
Haddad? The terrorist who’d killed Sam was behind her kidnapping? Who were these guys?
“The inside man said he was sure Caldwell would make the trade for the woman. We can fake having the woman when the target shows up at the rendezvous point.”
Griffin was going to hand himself over to these guys in exchange for her?
No. Flipping. Way. She was not letting him sacrifice himself for her.
The first voice snapped at the others to get back in the truck. The engine revved, and tires crunched loudly, spinning and then catching traction in the loose gravel. The vehicle retreated, and silence fell around her.
As much as she hated being buried, she almost hated the idea of sitting up and exposing herself even more. Inch by inch, she eased the cloth shroud down her body. Her face emerged and she pulled in a long breath of blessedly fresh air. The stars in the black sky above were so thick they looked like dust in the heavens. It was stunning. She would love to show Griffin this.
She had to get back to him.
The tire tracks of what looked like some sort of truck or SUV started no more than thirty feet from her hiding place and headed off to the west. That had been way too close a call. She’d gotten complacent and almost gotten caught.
At least she’d probably chosen the right direction to travel. Her captors would be worried she was headed for civilization and help, and they would likely head toward the nearest inhabited area.
On the assumption that they could move much faster than she could, she elected to parallel the tracks and continue westward. She stuck to valleys and swales as much as possible, stopping often to listen for engine noise, approaching each ridge on her belly and peering over before proceeding.
Her chapped lips cracked and bled, and a dull headache crushed her head by slow degrees in a painful vise, but she couldn’t afford to stop and hunt for water. Not with those Russians out here hunting her.
* * *
Griffin swallowed one GPS tracker, another one was sewn into his pants, and a third one was hidden in his collar. Duquesne really, really didn’t want to lose track of his location.
He was given a belt with a video camera installed in the buckle, a thin, flexible battery lining the entire belt. It would run for at least twenty-four hours of continuous video feed to a satellite. That was all the gear the comm guys were able to plant on him before he had to leave. Cal personally drove him to the coordinates in the Mojave Desert, close to the Nevada border.
The mission would run as a full-blown operation, complete with gunship support on standby, search-and-rescue helicopters ready to launch, intel and attack drones loitering overhead, and sixteen armed-to-the-teeth SEALs following him and Cal at a safe distance in a pair of Hummers.
“Do you think they brought her all the way out here?” Griffin asked Cal.
“It’s where I’d come with a hostage if I wanted to be left alone and not be spotted by a living soul.”
“Rough terrain,” Griffin commented grimly.
“We’ll have drones with IR cameras over you at all times. If Sherri’s nearby, we’ll find her. They’ll see her heat signature.”
Griffin couldn’t even allow himself to think about the possibility that she was dead and had no heat signature.
“You know the drill,” Cal said briskly. “Get visual on the kidnappers, then go to ground and don’t get caught. Follow on foot if able, or let us take over pursuit from above.”
“Got it.”
“And Grif?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t be a hero.”
He snorted. Too late for that. He was headed out there with one goal, and one goal only. To save Sherri’s life. His own safety—his life—was completely irrelevant.
* * *
Sherri moved steadily west, paralleling the truck tracks. By her reckoning, it had been dark at least four hours, placing it near midnight when the now-familiar truck tracks abruptly cut across her path, heading due south. Why the change of direction?
She peered ahead and spied the black silhouette of a rocky outcropping thrusting up from the desert floor. The truck must be detouring around that. She debated following the truck or continuing due west.
The least number of steps taken won out, and she pushed on toward the ridge. Rising gradually, it appeared to drop off more steeply on the other side. She climbed it carefully, wary of turning an ankle or otherwise making herself immobile.
As she approached the top of the ridge, she eased down onto her hands and knees, and then down onto her belly, to crawl the last few yards. She peeked beyond the rim and stared.
A heavy-duty pickup truck was parked in the valley below. It had to be her kidnappers. Who else would be out here in the middle of freaking nowhere?
She made out two men sitting in the bed of the truck, each cradling what looked like a modified AK-47 with an extended clip. She could see the black shape of a driver at the wheel, but she couldn’t see if there were any more men inside the vehicle. They didn’t appear in any hurry to go anywhere.
Should she wait them out here, or go around them and continue west? She much preferred having them in front of her where she could see them if they turned around and came back toward her. The idea of having to keep looking back over her shoulder made her deeply apprehensive.
She was
losing the best part of the night for travel, though, when it was cool but not freezing. The lure of pressing on toward Griffin and safety was powerful. Undecided, she studied the terrain in search of a good route around the kidnappers. The slope in front of her was steep but not impassible. It would be a hairy slip-and-slide descent if she chose that route.
The valley itself was funnel-shaped, wide to her left and narrowing to a point at her right. She might be able to follow the ridge around that way.
What was that she saw at the base of the cliff to her right, where the ridge did a sharp one-eighty back to the south?
She squinted at the big black shadow there, perplexed. The topography didn’t match the way the shadows lined up down there.
The men in the back of the truck moved abruptly, sitting up, alert.
Her attention swung back to the south. From her high vantage point, looking out over the entire valley, she spied a man moving toward the truck cautiously on foot.
He was decked out in full tactical gear, and she didn’t need more than a single glance to know he was a special operator. Her pulse leaped. Is that Griffin? Come to find her?
The two men in the back of the truck rolled over its edge and disappeared into the shadows below her. Someone came out of the passenger side of the truck, and the driver eased out of his side. She lost sight of all four men quickly. They were good. Moving like professionals, they crept away from the truck stealthily.
The soldier drew closer. No doubt about it. That is Griffin.
She had to warn him he was walking into an ambush!
But how? She had no radio, no flare gun, no light. She eyed the slope in front of her. Could she create a landslide, maybe? It would give away her position to the men below. Men who’d stated their desire to kill her earlier.
Still, she had to do something. No way was she sitting up here and watching Griffin walk into a buzz saw.
* * *
An intel specialist reported into Griffin’s earbud, “Box canyon. Steep but not sheer cliffs. One pickup truck. Two tangos in the back. Photo analyst thinks she sees weapons. One heat signature on the west rim of the valley.”
Griffin snorted. They’d kidnapped a SEAL trainee and demanded that a SEAL meet them out here. They’d better be armed to the teeth if they expected to walk away from this alive. Not to mention, nobody messed with Sherri without answering to him.
Cal said in his ear, “Okay, Grif. Contact’s made. Back off, and let the full SEAL team move in.”
“Is there any sign of Tate?” he asked on the open frequency that included the intel team.
“Negative.”
“If she’s not here, I’m going to have to go in there and play this out,” he responded.
“Negative, Grif,” Cal snapped. “Let us take these guys.”
“You know as well as I do they’ll never talk. If they don’t take me to her, she could be anywhere, dying.”
Cal started to argue, and Griffin pulled the earbud out of his ear, letting it hang on its cord down his chest. Nope. Not gonna squabble with the boss about this. If Sherri wasn’t in the truck, he was handing himself over to these bastards.
It was entirely possible they would shoot him as he approached. But in that case, Sherri was likely already dead, and he didn’t have any great desire to live in a world without her, anyway.
Arms held low and away from his sides, he walked forward toward his fate. If this was how he died, so be it.
* * *
Sherri froze in the act of standing up to stomp on a small boulder and send it down the slope as one of the Russians called out of the shadows, “Show your face, Caldwell!”
Her gut leaped at the confirmation that the special operator approaching was indeed Griffin.
Even better, now that the hostile had spoken, Griffin knew there were men hiding out here. In reality, he probably already knew exactly how many there were and where they were, given the technology SEALs could bring to bear on an encounter like this. She sank back down slowly to watch the scenario unfold, her protective instincts on hyperdrive.
Griffin lifted his NODs up on top of his helmet. Her heart jumped with joy at the sight of him, so close. Now the two of them just had to get out of this confrontation alive.
“Come toward the truck!” the accented voice called out of the darkness.
“Identify yourselves!” Griffin called back. “Show me Tate, or I don’t come any closer!”
“You’re in our gunsights, Caldwell!”
“Then shoot me now!”
Sherri winced. He was brave to call their bluff like that. She knew Haddad wanted him alive, but he didn’t know that.
Silence greeted his challenge.
“That’s what I thought,” Griffin called back. “Show me Tate!”
“She’s nearby!”
Sherri smiled a little. The guy didn’t know how right he was. She was by no means as dangerous as a fully trained SEAL, but she wasn’t chopped liver, either. She watched for a way to tip this stand-off in Griffin’s favor.
“We will take you to her!” the Russian called.
Liar. Don’t believe him, Griffin, she thought hard.
Dammit, he continued forward.
She scanned the valley, trying to spot where the Russians were hidden. The voice shouting at Griffin was coming from across the narrow chasm. She spotted a man-sized shadow off to the shouter’s left. Which meant there were probably two guys beneath her somewhere. She carefully slid a little further forward, watching for the slightest movement, but nobody even twitched beneath her.
As Griffin approached the truck, Sherri recognized his hair-trigger readiness in the relaxed way he held his body. She also recognized an atypical thickness through his torso. He was wearing some sort of body armor. Thank goodness.
Without taking her gaze off him, she fished in the cloth bundle at her side, finding and gripping the piece of steel she’d taken from the bed frame. It didn’t have a sharp edge, but it had a nice heft and made for a decent improvised weapon. She eased it clear of the bundle.
Catlike, she shifted her feet beneath her by slow degrees, rising by inches into a tightly coiled crouch.
And just in time, for all of a sudden below her holy hell broke loose.
Chapter 23
Griffin saw the guy on his left at the last second before the bastard jumped him, and managed to duck the guy’s open arms, slipping under the bear hug. But then another guy was on him from behind, grabbing him around the waist. Griffin threw his elbow back, and the point of it connected hard with something bony on the guy’s face.
A grunt, and the arms around his waist loosened. But not before the first attacker got in a wicked throat punch that doubled Griffin over, coughing and gasping for air. Two more men closed on him from his right.
Not good. These guys were fast and knew what they were doing in a fight. He didn’t stand a chance four on one. But he fought anyway, kicking, punching, ducking and dodging, doing his level best to avoid being wrapped up in someone’s arms.
The last two guys reached him, and it was a free-for-all. The good news was no matter what direction he threw a kick or punch, he struck someone. The bad news was they were landing several blows for every one he delivered. They figured out pretty fast that he had on a Kevlar vest and changed aim, going for his head and limbs.
Sherri’s face came to mind, and he took the hits. Ignored the pain. Fought on grimly for her. If he could beat these guys off, maybe he could get one of them to tell him where she was stashed.
He became aware that they were herding him toward the narrow end of the valley, stacking themselves in an arc that forced him to fall back from their flurry of fists. Why weren’t they using guns on him? Or at least knives? They must be under orders to grab him and take him alive.
If he could just hold out a few more minutes, Cal and the Hum
mers full of SEALs would get here and make short work of these jokers.
But then he took a punishing blow to the side of his head and saw stars, dazed.
Shit. He was in trouble now.
* * *
Sherri saw the moment Griffin’s head snapped to one side, and he staggered, half-conscious.
Worse, as she slid along above the fight as it moved to the right, she spotted a cave entrance, or maybe a tunnel of some kind. As she recalled, there used to be silver mines out here. More recently, some of those complexes had been converted to drug operations, mazelike warrens with multiple ingress and egress points.
If those Russians got Griffin underground, all of his fancy tracking devices and video intel feeds would go dead, just as had happened to that DEVGRU team in the Kirdu ambush. No one had heard from them until they dug out of the tunnels two days after the ambush.
She had to keep Griffin outside that cave! It was now or never to help him.
She took off running down the steep slope. It was more of a controlled fall than actual running, and it took all of her strength to stay upright and keep her feet underneath her.
She hoped they wouldn’t notice her coming while they concentrated on Griffin, who was giving them all the fight they could handle. She was all over ambushing these bastards who were beating on her man. Cold fury coursed through her, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt she would have no trouble killing anyone who messed with Griffin. He was more than her lover, more than a mentor and friend. He was her whole blessed world.
She reached the bottom of the slope, letting the momentum carry her forward at full speed. She joined the fracas and slammed the metal bar across the back of the head of the nearest Russian with all her strength.
* * *
Griffin glimpsed a fifth shape coming, this one charging down the slope like a bat out of hell. The apparition came silently, and he braced himself for impact. The fight, already going badly against him, was about to tip over into an outright loss.
He roared in his fury and redoubled his efforts, flailing like crazy as his assailants pummeled him.
