SEAL INVESTIGATIONS: A 5-Books SEAL Romance Series

by Lola Silverman

  “Where are we going?” The taller of the two captives seemed the more lucid. She kept her arm around her companion, and neither said much as they sprinted toward what Sparks hoped was an exit.

  “Out,” he told her. “We just have to hope we can find some transportation.” Or his team, but he didn’t mention anything about that. It he was lucky, the cavalry was waiting outside. He would find them just as soon as he managed to get out of here.

  A bang shook the metal walls of the hangar. Both women squealed in terror. Sparks hung onto them and kept walking. It was just his diversion. And it was working. He saw billowing white clouds of putrid chemical smoke pouring through the hallway behind them. He stepped up his pace. There was a door right ahead. If he could just get outside he knew he could find a way off this airfield.

  The women started to cough. Sparks moved faster. He heard thundering boots heading in the opposite direction. Most were coming from adjoining hallways in this bizarre catacomb. He had never been in a hangar with so many hallways and rooms. It was odd. He wondered if further exploration would yield information that proved this had been built specifically for the Armeen al Sauds to stash their cargo—whatever it all was.

  “A door!” The taller woman started moving faster.

  She reached out and pushed the door open, stumbling into the night air with a cry of relief.

  Sparks could completely understand her reaction. His own satisfaction at escape lasted just long enough to realize that, less than twenty yards away, his team was locked in an armed standoff with Hasim and his men—and Jaipriya was right in the middle of it.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Hello, Hasim.” The caustic edge of Bones’s tone was razor sharp.

  Jaipriya wished she had some kind of idea of how this was going to turn out. Or actually, just a heads up on what she was actually supposed to do if they all started shooting at each other would have been good. The only time she’d ever held a gun had been less than five minutes ago, when she’d managed to squeeze off a shot into the ground at Hasim’s feet. She wasn’t about to put her sharpshooter skills into play when she couldn’t even be sure she wouldn’t accidentally pop the good guys.

  It was strange, but Jai suddenly had the feeling that time had slowed down to a crawl. Either that or the adrenaline pouring into her veins made her brain move so fast that she actually had time to notice the cool night breeze on her face and the faint tinge of jet fuel in the air. She could see that there were seven men behind Hasim and only three SEALs. There was some kind of explosion or something going on in the hangar. What looked like white smoke was pouring out of an open window high off the ground, and the acrid scent of it reminded her of bleach and Pine Sol. There was yelling far off, but the rest of the airfield was eerily silent. And beside her Asif was quivering like a puppy about to be spanked. Or, in this case, she thought it was probably more accurate to say he was a lamb to the slaughter.

  “Your brother doesn’t really want you alive,” she told Asif. They had never even been friends. She would barely call them acquaintances. Other than when he was trying to get his hands up her skirt, she’d had almost no interactions with the man she had been promised to marry. “Do you really want to be here?” She looked right at Asif, trying to gauge his reaction. “You could just go back to the club and hide.”

  “He’ll kill me,” Asif muttered. “He wants me dead. Jabar was the only thing keeping me alive. I’m on borrowed time now.”

  “Hey!” Hasim shouted. “Shut your mouth, you imbecile!” He was obviously talking to Asif. “She’s just pumping you for information.”

  “You’re going to kill me!” Asif shouted at his brother. Jai was taken aback by the vehemence in his tone. “Just like you killed Jabar!”

  Hasim made a frustrated noise. “I didn’t kill Jabar. Bhatia did that.”

  “You didn’t stop it!” Asif accused.

  Jai glanced at the SEALs. They were looking at this brotherly spat with interest. Jai began inching away from Asif. She had a feeling that Hasim was going to get tired of this in a minute and shoot the baby prince in his chubby cheeks.

  “I can’t stop something like that!” Hasim sounded outraged. He was throwing his arms around in expansive gestures now. “What was I supposed to do? Get in front of the bullet and sacrifice myself? You sound like Father!”

  What Jai could see of Asif’s expression looked petulant. “Jabar was his favorite!”

  “So are you, you little ingrate!” Hasim’s voice rose in pitch, and Jai realized that he was dangerously close to losing what was left of his composure.

  “I wish you had never brought me to America!” Asif whined. “It sucks here, and I don’t want to marry Jaipriya Bhatia.”

  Hasim appeared dumbfounded. “You aren’t going to marry that bitch! She just held a gun to your head. You really think we still want to join our family to hers?”

  “Why do you have to be so mean?” Asif demanded. His lower lip pouched out in ill humor.

  Jai looked on in stunned disbelief as the brothers continued to bicker, but the SEALs were laughing their asses off. It was readily apparent that Hasim was taking their laughter at his expense quite personally.

  “Shut up!” he screeched. “Shut up! All of you!”

  The Asif seemed to make up his mind. “No. You shut up!”

  As Jai watched in horror, Asif sprinted toward his older brother. His hands were still tied behind his back, and he had no weapon. At the last second he flung himself at Hasim, and the two of them went down to the ground. They grappled, rolling around like schoolchildren. Hasim easily had the upper hand. Not only because he was at least a hundred pounds heavier than Asif, but also because he had much more freedom of movement.

  “Should we do something?” Romero wanted to know.

  Sparks suddenly appeared on the scene. There were two women with him, and he looked as if he were limping. Jai gasped in shock, drawing everyone’s attention as she did.

  Yates was already moving before Jai had managed to process what she was seeing. Yates had both women’s arms in his hands, and he was dragging them toward the truck Jai had driven onto the tarmac. With one unceremonious shove, Yates got them inside and climbed in after them.

  “Go!” Bones shouted.

  Yates gunned the engine and whipped out of there as if the devil were at his heels. Considering where those girls had come from, it was very possible that’s what they thought had happened.

  “No!” Hasim was yelling at his men in Arabic. “You let them get away? Why would you do that?”

  “Boss, the hangar is on fire or something. The men breathed the fumes and are very sick now.” One of the guards looked stressed out. “We didn’t realize they were gone!”

  “The SEAL is right here!” Hasim was stabbing the air with his finger, trying to point at Sparks and get to his feet at the same time. He stumbled a bit, but would have managed to stand up if Asif hadn’t grabbed his legs and pulled him down once again.

  THE ENTIRE BROTHERLY war was fascinating, sure, but Sparks was ready to end this farce of an operation and get moving. How could an international human trafficking ring be run by complete numbskulls like these? Granted, Jabar had been another kettle of fish entirely, but at the moment it was as if the remaining princes were tiny children trying to pretend to be adults.

  Romero fired his gun three times. The third shot barely grazed Asif’s hip. The baby prince grabbed his ass and shrieked like a teenaged girl. Hasim took this opportunity to roll away from his brother. He scrambled to his feet and started waving at his men, screaming at them to fire.

  The big Arab guards glanced at each other and shrugged. Sparks cursed as he realized what was coming. With his entire body groaning in protest, he sprinted toward Jaipriya and barely managed to dive at her before the first wave of bullets began.

  There wasn’t much cover out there on the tarmac. The SEALs hunkered down behind oil drums, stacks of pallets, and in Sparks’s case, Hasim’s limo. The clink cli
nk thud of bullets striking metal and concrete hammered the air. The guards weren’t actually trying to hit anything, which was good because had they actually been aiming they would have certainly gotten a foot, an arm, or something. As it turned out they were simply covering Hasim’s escape. He had already made it to the jet before Asif seemed to figure out what was going on.

  “Wait!” Asif shouted. “You can’t leave me!”

  The baby prince managed to get to his feet. He lumbered toward the Gulfstream’s stairs, which were just starting to rise. He flung himself at the steps and bounced right back to the ground.

  Sparks kept one arm around Jaipriya. They were behind a stack of pallets. The wood had splintered and shattered, and even in the dark he could see tiny cuts on her face from the wood shrapnel. Finally the guards seemed to realize they were going to be left behind too. They bolted for the plane, faring much better than the round little Asif. The big men hauled themselves onto the plane at the last second. Then the stairs folded up, and the plane began to taxi.

  “Should we stop it?” Romero shouted. “What about Rachel?”

  “She’s not here!” Sparks called back.

  Bones made a gesture in Asif’s direction. “Don’t worry about them. Let’s see what we can get out of this one.”

  The Gulfstream roared off down the runway and lifted into the air. Sparks watched it go and wondered why he wasn’t more disappointed. Then he remembered that he held an incredible treasure in his arms.

  Wrapping himself around Jaipriya, he buried his face against her neck. “I thought you were done for.”

  She touched her fingers to his cheeks. “So did I. But I couldn’t just leave you here. I had to come find you.”

  “And you did.” Sparks was in awe of her. “You were amazing, sweetheart. Absolutely fearless.”

  “Not so fearless.” She began to nudge at the pallets with her toe. Then she pursed her lips and let go of him long enough to squat down. “Look at this.”

  “You mean how torn up they were?”

  “No.” Jai reached out and pressed her fingers to something stamped into the wood. Then she pulled out her phone and used it as a light. “It says ‘Hansen Pharmaceuticals’. Isn’t that the local company your team recently shut down?”

  “We shut down one distributorship point,” Sparks said grimly. “There’s no telling how many more they might have.”

  “So that was the cargo that Jabar was speaking of,” Jai murmured.

  Sparks pulled her to her feet. “Stop thinking for one second and kiss me, dammit.”

  Her laugh was like music. Then her lips touched his, and he forgot everything else. The way her mouth moved against his was magic. He wrapped his arms around her body and dragged her as close as possible. He felt every curve of her delicious body melt against his. He cupped her backside in his hands and pulled her flush against the quickly growing bulge between his legs.

  “Ahem,” someone said with an exaggerated cough. “Seriously, dude.”

  Sparks let go of Jaipriya long enough to wave his hands at his SEAL brothers. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been making him sick with similar behavior of late. It was his turn to be happy for five seconds.

  “I suppose we’re lucky they’re not having survival sex right here on the tarmac,” Romero commented. “Speaking of survival sex, is anyone else ready to go home?”

  Bones was laughing. “Thinking about having some survival sex of your own?”

  “Shut up,” Romero told him. “You know you’re thinking about it too.”

  Sparks ended the kiss between himself and Jaipriya and gently gave her full lower lip a nibble as he let go. “Let’s go, shall we?”

  She cast a glance at Asif. “Are we bringing him along?”

  “We need him to get some information,” Sparks told her. There was something about her expression that felt off. “Are you all right?”

  “I suppose.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m just having a bit of trouble trying to reconcile the notion that it’s just—over—you know?”

  “Anticlimactic?” Sparks wondered. He felt it too. “It’s like there’s still something we’re waiting for that we don’t realize yet.”

  “Very much so.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here before it blows up in our faces again,” he suggested.

  She smiled. Even with only the floodlights overhead to give light, he was breathless at the beauty of her. He could not help but try to imagine what his life might be like with her in it on a regular basis. Would that even work? Would she want a long-term relationship with him? He needed to stop thinking about it. The whole thing was giving him anxiety. Facing a hail of bullets? Fine. Facing the possibility of asking a woman to be something more than a casual date? Instant panic attack.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jaipriya was unsettled. There was no other word for it. Yates had gone with Tasha to help the two rescued women find care at a local hospital. They would stay with the victims until the police could question them and their families were contacted. Of course, what Tasha would really be doing was pumping the women for information. Jai had to admire the woman’s single-minded tenacity. She didn’t have much in the personality department that was warm and fuzzy, but she certainly got the job done.

  With Yates and Tasha occupied, Romero and Bones took the baby prince back to Yates’s apartment to “have a little chat”. Jai felt sort of useless. Her adrenaline high was crashing. She wasn’t sure where she fit into this big scheme of things. And she was still trying to deal with the fact that her father was dead.

  “What will happen to Jabar’s body?” she asked suddenly.

  Sparks looked over in surprise. He was driving a car he had borrowed from Bones and Marina. Marina’s tiny sports car barely managed to accommodate Sparks’s broad shoulders. Jai could hardly imagine how Bones managed to fold himself into the thing.

  They were getting close to the bar and the comfortably shabby second floor apartment. Sparks made a strange face and then sighed. “I suppose what happens to Jabar’s body is sort of up to your family. It was left in their house. I would assume when they”—he cut her another glance—“come to take your father’s body, they’ll just grab Jabar’s too.”

  “Do you understand what happened between the brothers?” She could not help feeling as if they had missed something. “It seemed so sudden, didn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “I would guess that Hasim got tired of Jabar telling him that the trafficking operation was no longer a cost-effective hobby.”

  “Then why wouldn’t Hasim just agree and the two of them cut their losses and move on to something else?”

  Now Sparks finally looked as though she’d piqued his interest. “You’re suggesting that Hasim has an ulterior motive for the operation?”

  “Yes.” The word “duh” was on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t want to be rude. Why did nobody see this? Was it not obvious? “What personal stake does Hasim have in this? What is his angle? And why is he willing to lose money and murder his brothers to achieve his goal?”

  “If we assume that the Hansen Pharmaceutical packaging was on site because they loaded a huge shipment of altered drugs onto their jet, we can also assume that was Jabar’s cargo.”

  “Yes. That’s a lucrative sort of business to be in. Right?” Jai tried to work this through in her head. She thought of everything she’d overheard from her father, even the things that had seemed so innocuous at the time. What was she missing?

  SPARKS COULD NOT help but admire the way her brain worked. Jaipriya had a formidable intellect. He glanced over and felt as if he could actually see her sorting through possibilities, discarding theories, and working herself around to a solution. It was actually a little distracting. He and his SEAL team were truly hoping that they would get the appropriate info from Asif, find out where Rachel was being held, and start planning their extraction strategy. Trapp was scheduled to come home on leave in three days. By then they wo
uld have a plan in place, and the rest would be history.

  “We have to get rid of the money base here in the US,” Jaipriya said quickly. “I thought Yates had a contact at the IRS? He has to call them. They have to freeze the assets of anyone connected to those clubs.”

  “Why the sudden urgency?” he wondered out loud. “Why does it matter?”

  She was sitting on the edge of her seat, rocking back and forth as if she were about to jump out of the vehicle. “It’s not about the trafficking.”

  “Okay?” Sparks pulled into his usual parking spot. “I’m not sure I’m following.”

  She made an expansive gesture with her hands, obviously agitated. “How could they not be making money on this deal? The investment is all on the part of the American businessmen. They have dozens of women, a website, they do sales all over the world, and ship via their cargo jet or a ship? It goes with the rest of their business. It’s like a side job that has no overhead.”

  Sparks was beginning to see what she was driving at. “So you’re suggesting that they were making money on the human trafficking.”

  “But Jabar thought that they weren’t, because the books were off!” She was almost frantic now. “If Hasim murdered his brother to keep him from finding out where the money was really going, can you imagine what he’s doing with it?”

  Okay, now she had his full attention. What she was suggesting was frightening in the sheer volume of possibilities. Hasim had American politicians on his payroll. He had a financial base and a constant stream of money. He had a distraction. Where was this heading?

  “We have to go back to my house,” Jaipriya said suddenly. “We have to find my father’s books and find out what was really happening. We can see what Hasim was doing. If he was altering the books, he would have had to have my father’s help. That’s why my father was so willing to marry me off. He had no choice. If Hasim had ratted him out to Jabar, there would have been hell to pay.”