Except she couldn’t go anywhere until she was sure the Russians were gone.
She waited, listened. Minutes ticked by, and shadows lengthened across the floor as the sun sank. She really didn’t want to be wandering around in the desert after dark, but—what if Zaryanko and his two thugs were still out there? She hadn’t heard any engines, car or otherwise. But neither did she hear any voices or footsteps outside the hangar.
The sun sank closer to the horizon, spilling orange-gold light in through the west-facing hangar door. The cold emanating from the concrete floor seeped through her leggings into her bones, and she shivered so hard her teeth clacked together. She couldn’t stay here much longer. Desert nights were cold, especially in the winter, and she’d freeze to death. But was it safe to leave yet? She had no idea.
She peeked around the toolbox again. The hangar was empty, and she didn’t see anyone on the tarmac beyond. Gulping down her fear, she stood. Her legs had cramped up, and she shook them out one at a time until she was positive they wouldn’t collapse on her.
The hangar door beckoned with the promise of freedom, but she wasn’t so sure about walking out that big door, exposing herself to whatever lay beyond, and scanned for—
There. A side door.
She scrambled toward it and fumbled with the lock, a wild panic overtaking her when she finally got it open and tumbled into the deepening shadows of evening. In front of her lay nothing but a vast expanse of desert. Gulp.
Suck it up, she warned herself. Travis had let them take him so she would be safe and able to send help. She wasn’t about to let him down.
Judging by the sunset, she was facing south. Travis had said his truck was to the west, which meant—crap. She’d have to run straight across the airfield.
She stayed close to the wall of the hangar like she’d seen soldiers do on TV and edged around the corner. A plane sat on the tarmac. Zaryanko and his men were still here.
She shrank back. She should go hide again. Maybe find a blanket so she didn’t freeze and just wait the night out in the hangar. They had to leave sometime, right? Except she didn’t like the idea of staying overnight with a dead body only a few feet away. And what if they were waiting for more criminal types to arrive? Right now, there were only three of them, and she got the impression that Zaryanko didn’t do much of his own dirty work. So, really, there were only the two thugs. Who probably had guns. And knew how to shoot.
She sagged against the metal wall of the hangar and lifted her face to the sky. After her mother had married Ramon Escareno, she had been raised in a strict Catholic home, and while she’d found the church’s views too narrow-minded and confining, she’d taken comfort in the idea of heaven and that her dad could be up there, watching over her. She sent a quick prayer up to Jackson Warrick.
I love you, Daddy. Please, help me be strong and brave for my baby.
With that, she sucked in a fortifying breath, pushed away from the wall, and ran. She made it a quarter of the way across the pavement before she heard the shout behind her in Russian.
Oh, God, they were going to shoot.
She picked up the pace, her tennis shoes pounding as hard at her heart. Halfway there. Heavy footsteps thundered behind her, closing in fast. Three-quarters of the way. Up ahead, she saw the snake of an unpaved desert road, and a large black van kicked up dust as it sped toward her.
Help?
Unsure, she faltered a step, and that was all the Russians needed to catch up. One grabbed her around the waist and hauled her back against his rocklike body.
No, no, no! She kicked and screamed, but the thug seemed unfazed. He just banded his arm tighter around her, clamped a large hand over her mouth, and looked at his companion. “I win,” he said in Russian. “Told you she was still here. Pay up.”
“Later,” the second man said, nodded toward the road, and added something more that she didn’t understand. But it couldn’t be good, because they weren’t at all surprised to see the vehicle.
The Russians dragged her back to the plane, and Zaryanko smiled. “Well. Quinn was lying after all. Good work, Alexei.”
“What do we do with her?” the bald thug holding her—Alexei—asked.
Zaryanko eyed her up and down, made an unimpressed sound, then turned his attention to the arriving vehicle. The van rolled to a stop near the plane, and several armed men wearing the gold-and-red colors of El Sindicato hopped out.
“What do you have for me?” Zaryanko asked them in English.
The lead gang member opened the back door. He pulled ten bound and gagged women out, one by one, and laid them facedown on the tarmac like fish at a market.
“Hmm.” Zaryanko walked down the line, inspecting each of them, murmuring his approval until he reached the last woman. She was older than the others, with silver-streaked hair and a lined face. He grimaced and motioned to his thug with the flick of a wrist. “Pyotr. This one is too old and ugly. She’s worthless to me. Do something about it.”
Pyotr drew a gun and strode over to the sobbing woman. The shot was drowned out by the terrified screams of the others. Mara’s stomach lurched into her throat and one word kept bouncing around inside her skull. Merchandise.
“I’ll take the rest at half our usual rate,” Zaryanko said.
“Fuck no!” the gang leader said. “You kill one of our women and think you can cheat us—”
“Pyotr,” Zaryanko said softly, and his personal killer raised the gun and fired again. The gang leader dropped. The women’s screams choked off into silence.
“Anyone else have objections?” Zaryanko asked. Nobody spoke. “Very well. Half our usual rate, and I will not be making the trip back to this wasteland until you have something better to offer me.”
Money exchanged hands quickly after that, and the gang members didn’t stick around. They were long gone before Pyotr ushered the nine remaining women onto the plane.
“So what about this one?” Alexei asked.
Zaryanko walked over and pinched Mara’s face between his fingers, turning her head side to side. “She’s fat and short,” he said in Russian, “but her face is pretty enough.” He added something else that she couldn’t translate, but she swore she heard Travis’s name mentioned. Then, “Bring her.”
Alexei picked her up and all but tossed her into the cargo area of the plane with the other women. The door latching shut behind her was the most terrifying thing she’d ever heard in her life.
This couldn’t be happening.
She sat up on her knees and blinked until her eyes adjusted to the near darkness. She was the only woman not bound or gagged, and she tried to calm the others in both English and Spanish as she worked to free their hands.
Toward the front of the plane, she stumbled over a leg and groped around for the owner, finding a very large boot attached to the leg. That didn’t belong to one of the women, and her heart fluttered with hope. “Travis?”
He jerked upright as if she’d electrocuted him. “Mara?”
“Yes, it’s me.” The darkness was too complete, and she couldn’t see him, but there was no mistaking his voice. She ran her hands over him, searching for his ties, and discovered handcuffs securing him to a metal pipe welded to the wall. She wasn’t going to be able to break through those like she had the women’s duct tape, but she could remove the burlap bag from over his head.
“Fuck,” he breathed and jerked on the cuffs. “What happened?”
“I tried to get away. I really tried, but I was afraid of being in the desert after dark and I ran for it. But they knew I was still here all along and they were ready for me.”
“Fuck,” he said again, and she couldn’t quite muffle the sob that worked its way up out of her throat.
The cuffs rattled again. “Mara, I’m not angry with you. Okay? I’m not, but—” Another vicious yank made the whole wall rattle. “Goddamn these things! Come over here. Please. I need —” His voice caught. “I need to know you’re okay.”
She swallo
wed down another sob and crawled up beside him, wrapping her arms around his waist. “I’m okay.”
“All right. All right,” he repeated as if trying to assure himself. He rested his cheek on top of her head. “Who’s in here with us?”
“Nine other women, most of them Mexican. I think they were kidnapped.”
“Yeah, they were. Nikolai Zaryanko is a trafficker. Humans, drugs, guns, organs—if he can get his hands on it, you can bet he’ll sell it. Rumor has it he sold his own sister.” He hesitated. “Mara, no matter what, he can’t find out about your, uh…”
“My pregnancy?” she finished.
“Yeah. That.”
Travis couldn’t even say the word aloud. And here she’d thought she had done the right thing by contacting him about the baby. Now, hindsight being twenty-twenty and all that, she saw it for the mistake it was. She backed away from him and immediately missed the heat of his body. She was so cold, down to the very center of her being. “He’ll try to sell the baby, too, won’t he?”
“Yeah. He’ll auction it off to the highest bidder.”
“Oh, God.” Sick dread surged into her throat. She swallowed it down, wrapped her arms around her middle, and huddled against the wall in the dark. Sobs and whimpers echoed around the plane from the other women. One was reciting the twenty-third psalm in Spanish over and over in a choked, hushed tone.
But she would not fall apart like them. She didn’t have that luxury.
“Mara,” Travis said softly. “We’ll be okay.”
“Please, don’t do that. Don’t coddle me.” She lifted her head and looked toward his voice. “Tell me the truth.”
He said nothing for several agonizing beats. “The truth is unless my team finds us, we’re screwed. But I swear I will do everything in my power to make sure they find us.”
Chapter Seven
El Paso, Texas
Jesse Warrick made it to the El Paso hotel that would be the team’s temporary base just after ten p.m. and stepped into a wall of noise and activity when he opened the door. Seemed he was the last to arrive. Most of the team had still been in D.C. after celebrating the New Year, but he’d left for Wyoming right after the party, hoping to catch a few days of downtime with his son before another mission called him away again. He’d gotten only one day with Connor—one long day of trying to coax the kid out of his teenage shell of indifference—before the call had come in from Harvard about Mara’s kidnapping.
Christ, he was tired.
Between the nauseating worry for Mara’s safety eating away at his gut, his heartache at his son’s complete apathy toward him, and the emotionally draining fight with his ex-wife when he’d told her he had to send Connor home early, he was running on fumes. Not to mention the calls to Mara’s parents—who, he’d found out, had fucking disowned her, and that was a whole ’nother can of worms he didn’t have the energy to open yet—and his own horrified family, the last twelve hours had been the longest of his life. He felt like a big steaming pile of manure, and the noise in the hotel room did nothing to help the headache pounding behind his eyes.
He stalled out in the doorway, unsure if he had the patience to deal with the team right now. Marcus and Jean-Luc had claimed the suite’s couch and were arguing good-naturedly over the football game on TV. Harvard already had his tech stuff spread out on the large dining table and was tapping away at his keyboard while Ian stood at the sink in the kitchenette, filling a bowl with water for his dog, Tank. Seth sat in one of the two deep leather chairs that completed the living room arrangement and added his two cents to the animated football argument. The guy looked happy, more at peace with himself, worlds away from what he’d been only a few short months ago. Meeting Phoebe in Afghanistan had been good for him, had done what no doctors or psychologists had been able to accomplish: she’d given him a solid foundation of love and support on which to build his recovery. Yeah, he still struggled with his PTSD, but he was coping, and Phoebe was helping him do it.
At the thought of the happy new couple, a twist of longing snaked through Jesse’s chest. He didn’t begrudge them their happiness. He didn’t. He simply…wanted a piece of it for himself.
And wasn’t that goddamn foolish? You’d think he would have learned by now. He’d already tried the whole falling-in-love thing—not once, not twice, but three times, and they had all ended in divorce.
He glanced away from Seth and noticed a stranger looming in the corner.
Who the hell…?
Eyes narrowed, he studied the man. Big guy, close-cropped dark hair, olive skin—most likely of Hispanic decent. Recognition clicked. This was Jace Garcia, HORNET’s new pilot, hired on shortly after they had returned from Afghanistan. Jesse had met him only once, very briefly, when he was first introduced to the team, but he remembered the pilot wasn’t much of a talker, liked to keep to himself.
Garcia seemed competent and came highly recommended by Camden Wilde, who had served in the air force with him. Still, Jesse was surprised to see him here. This op wasn’t exactly situation normal for the team.
Marcus spotted him loitering in the doorway. “Hey, Jess. You have any idea why Gabe called us all back to El Paso?”
Yeah, he wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. Ignoring the question, he crossed to the window and stared out over the parking lot, but it wasn’t well lit and there wasn’t much to see but the blackness of a desert night.
“Hello to you, too. What bug crawled up your ass, Warrick?”
The door opened again, and Gabe Bristow’s quiet, commanding voice overrode the chatter of the TV. “All right, gentlemen. Everyone here?” He scanned the room, nodded in Jesse’s direction. “Good. Time to get down to business, then.”
Yeah. Business. Jesse snorted in disgust. Like they should’ve been doing hours ago instead of sitting here on their asses, watching football and twiddling their thumbs while they waited for him to arrive. Mara could be on the other side of the world by now, and he shuddered to think of the horrors his sweet, softhearted cousin might be facing at this very moment. She didn’t belong in this world—his world, so full of death and destruction. None of his family did, and he’d done his damnedest to make sure they never got involved in this portion of his life—which had cost him all of his marriages and, now, his son’s love. And yet despite his efforts to keep his two very different worlds from colliding, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d invited this danger to Mara’s doorstep by asking his teammates to help him protect her this summer.
Gabe shut off the TV and positioned himself at the front of the room. “We have a situation, gentlemen.”
Seth straightened in his seat and glanced around. His shoulders tightened. “Hey. Wait a minute. Where’s Quinn?”
For the first time since convening on the hotel, the rest of the guys took notice of their missing teammate. Both Marcus and Jean-Luc turned and scanned the room with nearly identical WTF? expressions. Ian stood propped against the wall with his arms crossed, his dog faithfully by his side. He merely lifted one brow in question, but his reaction was downright animated next to Jace Garcia’s impassive poker face. Harvard still didn’t glance up from his laptop, which was par for the course for the ex-CIA intelligence analyst.
“That’s who we’re here to talk about,” Gabe said.
“Goddammit,” Jesse said. “I warned ya, boss. Back in Colombia, I warned you.”
Gabe sighed. “I know.”
“Warned him about what?” Marcus asked.
Jesse started to answer—that Quinn was a walking medical case study for traumatic brain injury and shouldn’t have been allowed to go on missions—but Gabe spoke over him, bringing the guys up to speed on the situation. Mara had been abducted midmorning yesterday. Quinn had witnessed it and had been on the HT’s—hostage taker’s—tail with Harvard tracking him until the satellite moved out of range. There had been no word from Quinn since his last contact with Harvard.
Surprise rippled through the room.
Gabe held up
his hands and spoke over the growing noise. “We’re assuming whoever took Mara now also has Quinn, and we’ll need all hands on deck to find them. This won’t be a paid op, and I know it’s asking a lot when we just came back from that clusterfuck in Afghanistan. I understand if any of you prefer to stay behind this time.” His gaze went to the new guy. “Especially you, Garcia. You have no stake in this. You don’t know Quinn from Adam, so if you want to bow out, nobody’s going to hold it against you.”
Garcia shrugged. “I have nowhere better to be.”
Gabe nodded and focused on Seth. “You’ve been through a lot in the last month and a half—”
“Fuck that,” Seth said. “Quinn saved my hide once. I’m not staying home while he’s in trouble.”
“Fair enough. Harvard, you—”
“Not happening, boss,” Harvard answered without looking up from his screen. “Quinn’s the only reason I’m sitting here right now instead of inside a box six feet under.”
A rumble of agreement came from everyone in the room.
Marcus got to his feet. “I’ll call Giancarelli and have the FBI—”
“What?” Jesse snapped, impatient with all of them. “What’s Giancarelli goin’ to do? He’s not even that high up on the FBI’s bureaucratic totem pole.”
“Do you have a better idea, Jess?” Marcus asked. “Because we gotta do something. I don’t plan to sit around while a friend’s in trouble.”
“Friend?” Jesse gave a bitter laugh, the word leaving a bad taste in his mouth. “Yeah, Quinn’s some friend. Last I checked, a friend doesn’t go behind your back and knock up your cousin. I told him Mara was off-fuckin’-limits.”
And…cue the crickets.
“Yes,” Gabe said with a nice going scowl in Jesse’s direction. “Mara’s pregnant, and Quinn confirmed to Harvard that it’s his kid. Which, in regards to this situation, only means we have to locate them a-sap. Harvard, what have you got for us?”
Broken Honor Page 6
