Danger Close (The Echo Platoon Series, Book 1)

by Marliss Melton

  In other words, if they failed to liberate Maddy, the whole world was going to hear about the SEALs in Paraguay. Their agenda would be discussed over dinner tables all across America, which was not a good thing as everything SEALs did was supposed to be clandestine. Sam's temples throbbed with self-condemnation.

  "Get some rest," the CO added, thumping the table with both hands as he pushed to his feet. "You can expect to head out at sunset. Charlie Platoon remains here unless you require them for backup."

  The only reason they would need backup was if they found Maddy too well-protected to be wrested away by one platoon.

  Sam rolled to his feet. As tired as he was, he couldn't imagine falling asleep right now, not with his imagination spawning vignettes of Maddy being raped and tortured. Meeting the gazes of his leading petty officers, he sent them a nod, knowing he could count on them to alert the lower enlisted to the situation. He didn't have the heart to relay the situation himself.

  "We'll find her, sir," Bullfrog assured him, laying a comforting hand on Sam's shoulder as they moved out the door and up the hallway.

  "Thanks," Sam muttered. Seeing the exit ahead of him, he muttered an excuse and darted out of it.

  Pushing into sunshine, he was caught off guard to find it just another ordinary day. On the other side of the military installation's wall, the townspeople of Mariscal Estigarribia went about their daily routine, unaware and apathetic to Maddy's plight. Sam put his back to the sunbaked brick hoping the warmth would drive away the chill deep inside him.

  He'd been a SEAL for seven years, and in that time he'd seen a lot of scary shit. But there'd never been a circumstance that frightened him like this did. A possessive shudder traced his spine.

  Maddy is mine. Those terrorists had no right to steal her.

  Why had it taken her being kidnapped for him to see the truth? And just when, exactly, had he started thinking of her as his? Was it when he'd kissed her on the little bridge in her father's backyard? Or did it go back even further, to that first night in Matamoros, when he'd shielded her breasts from the leering eyes of the DEA agent? She'd definitely been his the other night when he'd brought her to climax.

  And now this had happened. The fear and dread swirling inside him made it hard to breathe. He reminded himself that he'd never faced a challenge he couldn't overcome. But this time, so many matters were out of his hands. Only one thing was certain. If she survived this latest travesty, he wouldn't want to let her out of his sight again. He'd want to keep her safely by his side forever.

  Convincing her to let him shelter her? Now that would be the real challenge.

  Chapter 11

  Maddy struggled to make sense of the argument raging downstairs, immediately below the closet in which she'd been locked all day. Her captors yelled at each other in Lebanese, practically at the top of their lungs.

  She'd been let out only once since Salim had videotaped his interview with her that morning. Harsh punctuations of sound coming from the lower level had wakened her from a fitful sleep. She'd scrambled to her feet, putting her ear to the crack in the door in an effort to make sense of the words, but their dialect, so distinct from any Arabic she had ever heard, was completely unintelligible to her.

  She could only think of one reason why they would bicker so heatedly: Hezbollah leaders were demanding access to the hostage.

  Her heart thudded with dread at the likelihood. She'd been kept away from them since they'd seized her the first night. How long before her ransom video was delivered to GEF? How long before her father learned of her captors' demands? She couldn't live like this, trapped in a closet for hours on end.

  Save me, Sam.

  Don't be stupid, she immediately scolded herself. Don't put your faith in an outcome unlikely to happen. Who knew how far away her phone had been driven? Instead of leading the SEALs to her, it might actually be sending them on a wild goose chase.

  A sudden shout and the crack of a bullet had her leaping away from the door, hand clapped to her mouth to stifle a scream. Over her pounding heart she could hear Salim speaking in the commanding voice he had used at the lab, and she sagged against the wall, relieved to know that he hadn't been shot. Without his protection, she knew she was doomed.

  The sound of steps on the stairs kept her motionless in the closet. What would happen now? The knob jiggled and the lock released. She backed into the corner. Would she be dragged downstairs and forced to face the others?

  The door cracked open, and Salim's brilliant orbs rested on her frightened visage. "Come," he ordered, his tone still gruff with anger. He held out a hand for her to take.

  Operating purely on instinct, Maddy placed her hand in his. He drew her briskly out of the closet to where his brother stood, guarding the top of the stairs with a rifle now braced across his chest. Sweeping Maddy into his dark room, Salim shut and locked the door. Then he flicked on a light, powered by the generator grinding away outside.

  His stormy gaze went straight to her uncovered head. "Where is the scarf you are supposed to be wearing?" he asked sharply.

  His misdirected anger made her blanch. "I'm sorry. I took it off. It was so hot in the closet—"

  Her voice trailed off as his gaze dropped to her bosom, molded by the otherwise shapeless chapan, then slid to her bare, slender feet peeking out below its hem. The assessing quality of his gaze kept the breath wedged in her lungs. Had he brought her into his bedroom to protect her or were his intentions less chivalrous?

  With a stabbing gesture, he ordered her to lie down on the nearest bed. Maddy stiffened, her blood running cold. She shook her head, no.

  "Go to sleep." His impatient tone suggested he was not about to rape her.

  Still mistrustful, Maddy lowered herself across the thin mattress. Her muscles tensed as Salim whisked off his shirt. His naked torso, comprised of lean muscle and matted with black hair made her think of Sam, whose chest she'd felt but never seen bare. A wave of longing swept her in its relentless path. Where are you, Sam?

  Her pulse sped up as Salim unbuckled his gun belt and dropped his pants. Horrified, she turned her head toward the wall and squeezed her eyes shut. It took every ounce of willpower not to curl into a protective ball. This isn't happening. The pillow under her head gave off an odor she had come to associate with him—a blend of gun oil and sandalwood.

  A vision of Sam hovering tenderly over her, his body taut with desire, eyes alight with passion, drove a shaft of remorse through her so fierce that she had to catch back a sob. Oh, Sam. If only he'd finished what he'd begun the other night! How could she have known that might be their only chance to make love, their last night together?

  She started violently at the feel of a blanket sliding over her rigid body. Whipping her head around, she brought up her hands to fend Salim off. Only then did she realize he had covered her.

  "Rest," he said, mocking her frightened response with a bitter smile. Straightening away from her, he turned toward the other bed and snapped off the light.

  The springs on the second bed creaked as tears of relief slid from the corners of Maddy's eyes. Through spiked leashes, she watched Salim stretch out on his moonlit bed, drape his gun belt across his stomach, and notch his hands behind his head.

  "Thank you," she whispered, speaking as much to her mother's ever-present spirit as to him.

  "Do not thank me yet," he replied in a grim voice that prophesied trials to come. "From now on, you must wear the scarf and do exactly as I say."

  "I will," she promised.

  A taut silence fell between them, filled with the sound of Salim's deep sigh as he wrestled with weighty thoughts. Maddy closed her eyes and willed herself to sleep.

  If only a pair of SEALs would come sneaking through the window as they had in Matamoros to whisk her away.

  * * *

  The beleaguered van resembled a harpooned, white whale beached on a solitary shore. Sam had sensed the instant he first viewed it through his NVGs that it stood empty. He sniffed the b
reeze tentatively, dreading the scent of death, but smelling only fresh, savannah air. The good news was that Maddy wasn't lying dead inside the van. The bad news? They had no earthly idea where she might be.

  Sam signaled for Carl Wolfe to approach the vehicle first, just in case it was booby-trapped. Carl peered inside with a penlight. Then he went down on all fours, twisted onto his back and disappeared beneath it. Coming out a minute later, he declared it clean, and Sam reached for the door handle, sliding it open.

  Bullfrog joined him, crawling into the cargo area while Bronco searched the seats up front and the remaining platoon formed a perimeter around them, just in case the terrorists had lured them there. They all searched high and low for Maddy's satphone.

  "Found it." Bullfrog held up a rectangle. "Still has some battery left," he observed passing it to Sam.

  Resisting the urge to put the phone to his nose, perhaps to catch a trace of Maddy's essence, Sam powered it down, preserving whatever battery power it had left and sliding it into his thigh pocket. "Bronco, you see any registration papers?" he called up front. "Anything with an address on it?"

  Bronco had just torn through the glove box. "Negative, sir."

  Sam swallowed down his disappointment. The van had been their only lead. "Any chance you can follow the tracks we saw on the photos?"

  They climbed out of the van to look for them.

  "What do you see?" Sam asked as Bronco bent to study the sandy ground through his NVGs. He flipped them up and looked again. In his youth, he'd been trained by a Crow Indian to track game. His blue eyes seemed to burn through the preternatural darkness. He stood up slowly and shook his head. "I'm sorry, sir, but the wind's blown them away."

  Mother Nature had conspired against them. With a bitter taste in his mouth, Sam admitted defeat. "Haiku," he called to his communications specialist, "tell the head shed to come and pick us up."

  Their search for Maddy had hit another wall.

  * * *

  "Why do you work for GEF when your father owns Scott Oil Corporation?" Salim's question, coming at the heels of their luncheon the following day, made Maddy set aside her pita and hummus as she deliberated what to say.

  In the day and a half that she had remained in his room, guarded either by him or by Nasrallah, she had lost any lingering fear of ravishment or torture—at least at their hands. Only the others, whose restlessness she sensed and could sometimes hear, remained a threat. But for the time being, the warm upstairs chamber felt as secure a place as any. If only she were free to leave it.

  "Well, I've always fretted about the impact of fracking on the environment," she answered honestly. "I studied environmental policy in college, so the work is a good fit."

  "But what if you discover that the wells have corrupted El Chaco irrevocably and that the region will never be the same again?"

  Maddy shrugged one shoulder. "Actually, I was expecting to find that to be the case, but our tests have shown no significant levels of toxins anywhere."

  Salim's expression grew disdainful. "Really. None whatsoever?" It was obvious he didn't believe her.

  "What are you implying?" she challenged him. He seemed to be suggesting, as Ricardo had once implied, that Scott Oil had planted her at GEF so she could manipulate the testing to make the oil industry look good.

  He startled her by whipping out his cellphone, the same Motorola with which he'd filmed her ransom video. "I have pictures to show you," he announced, thumbing his keypad. He scooted closer, holding his phone before her eyes and scrolling through a number of pictures that made Maddy's eyes widen and her heart grow heavy.

  "Where did you take these?" she asked, dismayed by visions of dead cattle, rotting under a hot sun and a swarm of flies.

  "Twenty kilometers south of the Guaraní village, not far from the Pilcomayo River. The toxins have built up there. They've seeped into the surrounding soil, poisoning the flora which these cows have eaten. Now they are dying. The people eat the cows and drink their milk. What will happen to them?"

  Maddy thought of the elders' complaints about gastro-intestinal trouble and dizziness—were those early symptoms of encroaching cancers? If so, then it was just as her mother feared. She shook her head in dismay. "I've only seen something like this once," she admitted, recalling the hapless cow belonging to the native ranchers.

  Salim sat back, putting his phone away. "Perhaps you've been directed to run your tests in the wrong areas. The effect of the oil wells is obvious if you ask the residents where to look."

  Was it possible that GEF had directed them to collect soil and water samples in the wrong places? She didn't speak Guaraní. Perhaps, if she had, she would have known where to look. But why would GEF not want the truth about the toxic waste to be known? Unless they'd been bought off by Scott Oil, she considered. Or even the U.S. government. Salim's accusing gaze seemed to suggest that was the case, and that he believed Maddy to be in on it.

  She seized his forearm, gripping it hard. "I am not working for my father," she insisted. "My mother was an environmentalist like me. She opposed drilling in El Chaco ten years ago, and I have issues with it myself. If I find out that Scott Oil has bribed GEF in any way to keep them from finding the kind of destruction that you've seen, I swear to you, I will expose the corporation and force Scott Oil to make restitution."

  The tight accusative expression on his face softened toward conviction and then gratitude. "I believe you," he replied.

  The intimate and emotional energy arcing between them propelled Maddy to her feet. Confused, feeling that in some strange way she was betraying Sam, she crossed the room to one of the two barred windows. She had peered out of this one many times before, praying each time for Sam and his SEALs to materialize out of thin air and rescue her.

  Her captors' home stood in a grassy area, with no adjacent neighbors, but with several houses behind their own walls, not too far away. If she ever managed to escape this room, this house, she would run to them for help.

  "Madison."

  Salim's voice sounded practically in her ear, making her jump. She hadn't heard him get up. His hands settled gently on either of her shoulders. She could feel the heat of his palms burning through the cloying fabric of the chapan he made her wear. If she hadn't ever met Sam, hadn't known the roaring power of their physical attraction, she might have thought herself drawn to Salim's gentle touch. It didn't frighten her the way it ought to. If anything, she felt comforted by the physical contact but, to her, it wasn't sexual. She let him turn her around so that she faced him.

  "I think we have more in common than you realize," he said. His striking eyes roamed her face centering on her lips.

  She realized he was poised to kiss her when he started to incline his head. "Please don't," she whispered, her spine stiffening.

  His gaze reflected puzzlement. "I won't hurt you," he swore. "You and I were meant for each other. Don't you see? With your help, my protests have credibility. Together, we can keep El Chaco untainted. We can expose the corporation exploiting her purity."

  His words mesmerized her, for she would like nothing better than to leave the children of Paraguay such a legacy, but his offer came with an unspoken implication. She would have to become his woman to accomplish such a feat. "I can't." She shook her head, picturing Sam's brooding gaze.

  "Why not?" Salim pressed, still patient. "I'm well educated. I come from a good family. Is it my religion?"

  She could have cared less about his religion. "Of course not." She shrugged his hands, catching them in hers to show her willingness to be friends. "You're a good man, Salim. But I've given my heart to someone else."

  Until that moment, she hadn't fully realized that was true. She'd wanted so badly to remain a free spirit, a woman on a mission. But the truth was, she'd belonged to Sam since the night he'd kissed her on the bridge behind her father's house. Whatever mysterious claim he had on her, it had begun there if not sooner. No wonder she hadn't been able to get him out of her head!

 
; But seeing the disillusionment harden Salim's handsome face, she both regretted the truth and resented it. Why Sam? Why couldn't she just banish him and all the complications that a relationship with him entailed and accept the offer of something more with Salim? Well, for one thing, Salim associated with some questionable characters. His radical efforts to eject North American enterprise frightened her.

  "If you help me escape, I will help you," she promised him steadily.

  Getting no immediate objection, she pursued her proposal. "My father is a reasonable man. If he saw your pictures and received lab reports to corroborate them, he would address the situation immediately."

  "You said your uncle now runs the company," Salim countered on a flat note. The idealistic flame burning in his eyes earlier had fled, making him look suddenly older than his twenty-something years.

  "Yes, but he'll do whatever my father asks him." At least she hoped that to be the case. "Please," she added, dismayed by the distant way in which he held her hands. "Let me go, and I swear I will rectify these issues with the environment. Nothing would please me more."

  A thin smile curled up the edges of Salim's mouth. "It's too late for that," he said. Dropping her hands, he turned his back on her, and Maddy's hopes crumbled to dust. She watched him cross the room where he gathered her plate of half-eaten food, carried it to the door, and let himself out. She heard him mutter orders to Nasrallah, no doubt to alert him if he heard anything suspicious.

  By kidnapping the daughter of Scott Oil Corporation, he had set the ball rolling toward some unknown catastrophe. Maddy held little hope of her situation ending on a positive note—not for her, not for Salim, not even for the country he loved.

  * * *

  Sam let himself into Maddy's condo using a credit card. The scent of lemon cleaner blended pleasantly with her one-of-a-kind fragrance, just the scent of which made his stomach churn with desperate wanting. The sun reflected brightly off her kitchen countertops and table. Everything looked so neat and orderly.