“Maybe you got better,” Magic said, then swore, because he knew how stupid he sounded.
“It’s called mutiny. You’ll go to prison,” Shane said, “and I’ll still lose my command.”
“There’s gotta be another way,” Magic started.
Shane cut him off. “I gave you an order. Don’t make me repeat it.”
Magic stood up. “Fuck you, Lieutenant Ass-hat. I’m not letting you do this.”
“Yeah, you are,” Shane gently told his friend. “Because maybe this is some kind of mistake, the thing with the inaccurate face-rec, and I’ll get a medal for saving the day.”
“You seriously think—”
“No,” Shane said. “But I’m going to play it that way, with maybe a little negative reaction to the pain meds thrown in for good measure. With luck, I can sell it, and I’ll be okay. I’ll get through this, too.”
Magic didn’t believe him. Probably because Shane himself didn’t believe it possible. Someone among their superiors had wanted Tomasin Montague dead. And Shane was going to be burned—badly—for his refusal to get the job done.
Still, he pushed, adding, “You know how it works, Dean. The team leader always pays for any mistakes. And if we’re both gone, who’s going to find out how this happened? Who’s going to make sure this doesn’t happen again? We didn’t work and sweat and bleed to get where we are, only to have them—whoever they are—turn the teams into some kind of goddamn private hit-squad.”
Magic shook his head. “Double fuck you, for always being right.”
“Go,” Shane said.
Magic finally nodded. And turning, he vanished into the shadows of the night.
Shane got busy, taking out the syringe that Rick had given him even as he broke radio silence to contact the SEAL who was following the mysterious team that Scott Linden had said was heading their way. “Laughlin to Dexter. Report in if you can, over.”
Chapter Three
“Our intel was incorrect, the target is not here. I’m aborting this mission, and I’m ordering you,” Shane said, looking steadily from Rick to Owen to Magic to the senior chief, “to go back over the border, with the rest of the team. With the understanding—”
“With all due respect, sir,” Owen interrupted earnestly, looking up from the equipment he was using to try to tap into the mystery team’s radio signals. He, like the senior and Rick and Magic, was now dressed like a goat herder—down to the cap that helped cover his face. “We’re not leaving you here, alone.”
“That’s enough,” the senior spoke over him, giving the kid his best dead-eye glare.
“With the understanding,” Shane repeated, talking over them both, “that you may be delayed by humanitarian efforts to help innocent civilians move to safety in the face of a coming attack from an unknown, unidentified, potentially deadly enemy.”
“Jesus, sir, that was a mouthful,” the senior said.
“Semantics, Senior Chief,” Shane told the older man. “And this is where you say Aye, aye, sir. All of you.”
They murmured it back to him without a whole hell of a lot of conviction, and he went on. “I’m in command. I made the call to abort, and gave the order. You obeyed said order. If and when you’re asked, you’ll be telling the truth. These are now simple facts that will protect you.”
Because of the SAT signal jamming, there’d be no timeline or record of when the team had left the area. And since Shane alone would remain, and would be picked up by the helicopter at the planned extraction point, he would insist that he’d acted alone in his efforts to save the misidentified woman.
The wording he’d been so careful to use would allow his men to pass lie detector tests, if it came to that.
Except for Magic Kozinski, who knew the truth, but who had the bizarre ability to control his pulse and blood pressure while lying wildly.
They’d all been trained to fool rudimentary lie detectors to some degree. But it was actually kind of freaky how adept Magic was at achieving the necessary calm. In fact, he’d once lowered his pulse to fifty in the middle of a firefight.
So Shane wasn’t worried about him, which was a good thing, because Magic knew details, like Tomasin Montague’s name. Shane had decided it was best to withhold that information from the rest of the team. The less they knew, the better their chances of surviving the administrative shitstorm hovering on the horizon.
“And what protects you, sir?” Magic asked now. The tone of his sir was back to asshole. “From the senior corporate officials who want the incorrectly identified target taken out anyway?”
“I’ll be okay,” Shane said again. Maybe, with Ashley and her powerful father and uncle on his side … Maybe he could survive this.
But it really didn’t matter. He didn’t have a choice.
He wasn’t going to give the order to kill an innocent woman.
The senior chief broke the silence. “With all due respect, LT,” he said, repeating the very words that he’d glowered at Owen for saying, “we’re not leaving you here.”
Shane was ready for that, too, as he took out the needle and syringe that he’d been hiding up his sleeve. “The pain got too intense, so I—just now, after giving the order to abort this mission—used the meds Rick gave me,” he told them as he handed the team’s hospital corpsman the syringe he’d in truth emptied while Magic had been fetching the senior and Owen. He’d drained the powerful painkiller into the dusty ground—a fact they all no doubt knew, but couldn’t prove, especially since he’d gone to the trouble to make it look as if he’d just given himself the injection.
“I’m gonna need a refill of that,” he told Rick, who was carefully disposing of the sharp, “plus several more doses of the local.”
“Oh, that’s fucking perfect,” Magic said crossly. “Make it so you’re not only blacklisted, but you walk with a fucking cane for the fucking rest of your fucking life. What is wrong with you?”
Shane ignored his friend as Rick looked to the senior chief who, absolutely, would have been instantly in charge had the team’s commanding officer really taken that drug. According to the revised military code of 2024, the act of taking a powerful painkiller automatically meant Shane had willingly relinquished his command, due to his being medically unfit to serve. No words to that effect were necessary. It was simply so.
And now, for all intents and purposes, Shane was just another guy that his former team would help, as he—as a civilian—assisted Tomasin Montague and her family.
“Give Lieutenant Laughlin what he needs,” the senior ordered Rick gruffly, then shot Magic a “Keep your opinion to yourself, Kozinski.”
Shane glanced at his dive watch. He was right on schedule. “I know I’m no longer in command, but we should move into position to intercept, Senior Chief,” he said as Rick handed a new packet of wrapped syringes to him and he stashed them in his vest.
They’d all studied the terrain in advance of the op. There were two possible exit routes out of the village and farther up into the mountains. Tomasin Montague and her son would have to take one of them.
The senior chief frowned. Rick and Owen, too, were perplexed.
Magic was the only one who’d caught Shane checking his watch, and because he knew Shane as well as he did, he also knew what was coming.
Boom!
There it was. The first hit of the air strike Shane had called in. He’d radioed the coordinates of that abandoned farmhouse that they’d passed on their way up the mountain.
Boom-bah-dah-boom! Bah-boom! Bah-dah-boom! It sounded like fireworks going off as the land mines that surrounded the farmhouse began exploding, too.
“I had Dex check to make sure the farmhouse was still abandoned,” Shane told the senior as he gave himself another healthy dose of the local and pulled himself up to his feet. His ankle still ached like a mother, and it felt weird as shit, but it held his weight. He didn’t need Magic’s glower and dire words to know that walking on an injury like this could make the damage permanent. B
ut his choices were limited, and he had to do what he had to do. “I figured I might as well take out as much of the minefield as possible—two birds with one stone.”
The noise of the attack was like a red alert siren down in the village, and sure enough, from their hillside vantage point, Shane could see a small group of people streaming out of the back of the school’s Quonset hut. They moved quickly but carefully, heading toward the steepest of the two paths up the hillside, as if this were something they’d drilled.
“Move into position on both paths,” the senior ordered. “In case this is a decoy. Eyes out for our mislabeled former target, ID her, let her pass, but then follow. We’ll catch up to her when she’s feeling more secure.” He looked at Shane, who nodded back.
That was exactly what Shane had intended and planned for. Montague, and the people protecting her, were no doubt frightened by the sound of the nearby bombing. They’d be likely to shoot first, without asking questions, at least at this stage of the game.
“Rick with Kozinski,” the senior continued. “Owen and the LT with me.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Owen said, looking from Shane to Salantino to Shane and then back, as he corrected himself, “I mean, Senior. But I finally broke into the rogue team’s communications, and the order’s just gone out to launch a mortar attack.”
And there it was. Shane heard it, and he knew his SEALs did, too. The whump of a mortar launching was unmistakable, as was the silence that immediately followed. There was no way to know what the target was, because you couldn’t hear the damn thing coming.
No whistle, no warning. Just sudden instant death.
But then it hit—a direct blast to the school’s Quonset hut—and they all heard that, loud and clear, as the explosion ripped through the night.
The place was still packed with people—mostly children.
Another whump followed, and the SEALs all started to run.
“Do whatever you have to, to end those motherfuckers, whoever they are,” Shane ordered the senior chief as he scrambled down the hillside, even though he had no right to dispense orders anymore. “Make them stop, then help the wounded! I’ll get the woman and her family to safety!”
“Don’t you dare get your ass killed by friendlies, LT,” the senior shouted back as he headed directly into the kill zone, Rick and Owen on his heels, even as he opened a radio signal to Dex.
“Magic, you’re with me,” Shane shouted, but the taller SEAL was already at his shoulder.
“My Pashto’s shitty, so I’ll start with French,” Magic said. “Because of the whole Canadian-father thing.”
“Just start talking, and don’t stop until you’re sure they’re not going to kill us,” Shane said as the group of villagers that were halfway up the steeper of the two trails stopped, turning to watch in horror as yet another mortar hit, and this time a car went up in flames.
And then, because they’d started to move back down the hillside, no doubt going to help the injured escape the fire that was now burning in the school—a move that would mean certain death for Tomasin Montague—Shane didn’t just walk toward them on his injured foot.
He full-out ran.
Chapter Four
Tomasin Montague spoke perfect English.
She also had an escape route planned—but she was unwilling to divulge information about it to two Americans, one of whom was still wearing a military uniform.
Her bodyguards kept their weapons carefully, unswervingly trained on Shane and Magic, and Shane didn’t blame them. Were he in her position, he would do the same.
He told her everything.
The assignment he’d been given to take out a wanted terrorist, known for her ruthlessness in killing children.
The realization they’d had that the face-recognition software was intentionally set to deceive them.
Shane’s attempt to placate his superiors and buy time to contact and rescue Tomasin and her family by calling in the bombing on the deserted farmhouse down the hillside.
The still unidentified rogue team that launched the mortar attack on the school—an attack that had been silenced, no doubt permanently, by Senior Chief Salantino and the other SEALs.
“It’s important,” Shane said, as he looked into Tomasin Montague’s weary and wary brown eyes, “that this time, when you disappear, you disappear for good. I can help you do that.”
She didn’t trust him, but she didn’t shut him down, so he kept talking.
“I have a friend,” he continued, but then corrected himself, because Jean was not anyone’s friend. “A contact. In Vienna. He can help you vanish. You and your children.” He looked from Tomasin to the little boy she held close to her side, the one from the images, and then to a teenaged girl who was still wearing her costume from the play. She, too, looked a lot like her mother.
One of the guards, the one with the AK-47, murmured something, and even though Shane was no kind of languages expert like Magic, he knew from the tone and the urgency that the man was saying it was time to go.
“You think you can hide,” Shane persisted, and the woman looked back at him. “But the people who are after you won’t give up. They will find you.”
“And next time Lieutenant Laughlin won’t be there to help you,” Magic chimed in. “You have no idea how lucky you are that this man was in command of this mission. No idea.”
“Jean Reveur,” Shane said as Tomasin looked from Magic to Shane and back again. “You can contact him via his email address. Dreamer19 at qmail dot com. Tell him I sent you. Tell him I’m cashing in the favor he owes me. Tell him after this? We’re even.”
“You would use up this favor,” she said in her gently accented English, “for strangers?”
Magic answered for him. “Yes, ma’am. He would.”
“Go,” Shane said. “Now. Dreamer19. Qmail. We’ll go help the wounded.”
The woman nodded, and with her children at her side, she turned to continue up the path into the mountains. The guard with the AK-47 lingered, backing away from Shane and Magic, his weapon still trained on them until he was swallowed by the night.
“Think she’ll do it?” Shane asked his friend, who’d already looped Shane’s arm up and around his neck, so he’d have to put the least amount of weight on his injured ankle as possible as they scrambled and slid down the steep path to the still-burning Quonset hut.
“Probably not until the news of your court-martial goes public,” Magic said helpfully. “Or maybe it’ll be the ceremony where they strip you of your rank that’ll convince her you’re on her side. Particularly if they keep the cameras rolling and catch the part where Ashley returns your engagement ring.”
“That’s not going to happen. Ashley loves me,” Shane said, although even to his own ears he didn’t sound completely convinced.
“I know I’ve given you endless crap about her,” Magic grunted as he kept them both from falling as his boots skidded on some loose gravel that bounced down the trail ahead of them. “All my conspiracy theories and predictions of doom? That’s just because I’m a jealous piece of shit. She’s amazing. And she definitely loves you, man. But Daddy’s not going to let her marry you. Not after the CEO-in-Chief chews you up and spits you out. Ashley’s got a lot of really great qualities, Shane, but a backbone made of steel isn’t one of ‘em. You know this as well as I do.”
Shane couldn’t argue with that.
“She’ll cry,” Magic continued as they left the hillside behind. “And she’ll be heartbroken and devastated. But when it’s all said and done, she’ll do as she’s told.”
“I still think I have a chance,” Shane started to say.
But Magic wasn’t done. “You know, it’s not too late for me to—”
“Jesus Christ, just shut it, Kozinski.”
But Magic didn’t. “Seriously, Shane. With you gone from the Teams, what’s the point of my staying? Have you seen the new officers in the SpecWarGroup HQ? They haven’t gone through BUD/S, but now they’re leadin
g SEAL teams? They’re not qualified to wipe my ass.”
Shane could feel the heat from the fire on his face, hear the screams of the wounded and grieving. “Then I guess you’re finally going to have to get your shit together and go through OTS. Make the jump from enlisted to officer.”
“Fuck. Me,” Magic said. “Can you see me in Officers’ Training? I won’t make it through one week, let alone twenty-six.”
“Play your cards right,” Shane said, “and maybe you’ll marry Ashley.”
“That’s not funny.” Magic’s voice was tight.
“I know,” Shane said. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”
But then they rounded the corner and found Rick’s makeshift triage—which included an area reserved for the unsavable and the already dead.
Magic stopped short. “Fuck. Those bastards killed Buttercup. Shit,” he said. “Shit.”
Nothing like a dozen dead children as a visual aid to drive Shane’s point home. Or two dozen wounded, with more still trapped inside. “You’ve gotta stay in,” Shane said quietly. “Or we’ll never find out who’s responsible for this.”
Magic didn’t answer. He also didn’t pretend that Shane would stay out here and assist Rick. He just helped him into the burning building and then let him go. Apparently it was okay with him if Shane had to use a cane for the rest of his life, if it meant he’d saved children’s lives.
Shane moved past the civilians—mostly women—who were helping with the evacuation. He went right toward the heat of the flames, where he scooped up a little girl who’d been stunned from the blast, who was coughing and vomiting from the thick, toxic smoke. His ankle was starting to scream—the local was wearing off. But he carried her out and gently put her down near Rick, then went back inside for the next, and the next, and the next.
Chapter Five
The body count included the full six-man rogue team of former CSO agents, or whoever the hell they were.
Senior Chief Salantino hadn’t kept anyone alive to ask questions. He’d just dropped them like the terrorist scum they’d proven themselves to be. And he’d made sure the bodies would not be recovered.
Headed for Trouble Page 29
