Crossfire

by Traci Hunter Abramson

  Cover images: Airport Radar © George Cairns, Men Walk into the Light © Roma-Oslo, Electric Danger © Tom Nulens, Warning: Nuclear Power © Caracter, Apache © Gary Forsyth. Images courtesy of istockphoto.com

  Cover design by Mark Sorenson © 2010 by Covenant Communications, Inc.

  Published by Covenant Communications, Inc.

  American Fork, Utah

  Copyright © 2010 by Traci Hunter Abramson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any format or in any medium without the written permission of the publisher, Covenant Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 416, American Fork, UT 84003. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect

  the position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Covenant Communications, Inc., or any other entity.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are either products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real, or are used fictitiously.

  First Printing: January 2010

  978-1-60861-517-9

  For Mom and Dad

  Acknowledgments

  My continued appreciation goes to Rebecca Cummings for her editing talents and her willingness to share them. Thank you to the many people at Covenant who helped usher this book through the publication and marketing process. My special thanks goes to the evaluators, who offered so many helpful suggestions, and to Noelle Perner for helping me use them.

  I also want to thank my mom, Dianne Hunter, and my wonderful stepdad, Tom Whalen, for introducing me to the Dominican Republic. Thanks for so many wonderful memories.

  Finally, I need to thank my sister, Tiffany Hunter, for being daring enough to break her arm on the flying trapeze. Had you not needed a translator at the hospital, I never would have explored the village in Punta Cana. Thanks to everyone in the Abramson/Hunter/Whalen clan for the exciting adventures. Life with our family is never dull.

  1

  Lieutenant Seth Johnson wrinkled his nose and fought the urge to sneeze. Any sound right now could be deadly, both for him and for Brent Miller, the other Navy SEAL who was lying a few feet away. Seth tensed as two armed guards approached the hedge that he and Brent were currently burrowed under. Though one of the guards came within inches of his position, he never noticed Seth’s dark skin, which was streaked with green, or his camouflaged clothing. Instead, both guards performed a cursory check of the nearby building—a building that was presently housing at least a dozen mercenaries.

  Seth’s nose twitched again, and he could feel his eyes water. He held his breath for several long seconds until the patrol moved across the wide expanse of lawn to check out the surrounding woods. Silently, he shifted position and pinched his nose to fight the sensation to sneeze.

  As a member of the Saint Squad, an elite five-man unit with SEAL Team Eight, he had been trained to be invisible and silent. Putting that training into practice wasn’t always easy. This particular sneak-and-peek was a two-man job, and their objective wasn’t as clear as Seth would like it to be. U.S. intelligence had recently learned of this growing terrorist cell in the Caribbean, but so far the reconnaissance missions hadn’t turned up what they were looking for—or more specifically, who they were looking for.

  The top man, Akil Ramir, had been noticeably absent since he was last spotted in the Santiago de Cali airport more than six months earlier. His presence in Colombia had raised concerns among the intelligence agencies throughout the United States and the Caribbean that perhaps he was now dealing arms to the drug cartel.

  The Saint Squad already had firsthand experience with Ramir’s older brother, Fahid. Three years earlier they had boarded Fahid’s yacht and taken him and his family into custody. Seth still had nightmares about the young boy he had seen gunned down right in front of him when he and Brent had been a second too late to save his life.

  Akil Ramir was known to be just as heartless as his brother. He had taken credit for a series of car bombs in Paris the year before, bombs that had resulted in nearly a hundred deaths.

  Concerns that Akil was now running his brother’s operation had made him one of intelligence’s top priorities. As a result, he had become a top priority for the Saint Squad.

  For the past few weeks, they had been sent all over the region from Colombia to Curacao, and each time they encountered similar scenes: high-tech communications, heavily armed men, and a constant flow of trucks carrying a variety of military equipment.

  Brent shifted and gave him an odd look when he noticed Seth holding his nose. Seth gave a helpless shrug, mentally groaning at the absurdity of the situation. Armed men he could handle, but the sniffles were about to be his Achilles’ heel. Brent gave a little shake of his head along with a cocky grin. That grin faded when the guards approached once more.

  Neither man liked these missions when they were assigned to identify threats but not do anything about them. Still, Seth understood why his superiors wanted them to remain invisible. If Ramir learned that his empire had sprung a leak, the spy feeding them information would be compromised.

  Seth didn’t know who the CIA had planted inside this terrorist organization, but one thing was certain. Whoever he was, he was in deep enough to know where the terrorists were hiding.

  * * *

  Vanessa Lauton stood in the shadows of the local cantina, her eyes constantly sweeping the area. Buildings were crowded close together in this part of Suero, a little village in the Dominican Republic. Some were adobe-style structures while others were small shacks that weren’t much larger than a refrigerator box. At this late hour, traffic was sparse, and only the cantina and the butcher shop down the street had any lights on.

  She glanced at her watch, concerned. Her contact should have been here by now. She estimated that she could wait five more minutes, but anything beyond that would be too risky. Too much effort had gone into establishing her cover, and she couldn’t take the chance of blowing it now.

  A motor scooter buzzed down the narrow, one-lane street, and Vanessa silently blended into the darkness. She was dressed completely in black, a simple T-shirt tucked into loose-fitting cotton shorts. Her skin was several shades lighter than her clothes, and she succeeded in making herself disappear into the shadows as the driver of the scooter parked and then walked inside the cantina. Vanessa shifted so that she could watch the man, immediately identifying him as someone from out of town. No one who lived here would ever consider leaving a scooter on the street without locking it up.

  As though reading her thoughts, a teenage boy slipped out of a small hut down the street. Vanessa was half amused at the boy’s predictability as his eyes darted from one side of the street to the other and he stealthily moved toward the scooter. When the front door of the cantina opened once more, he darted back the way he had come as the driver of the scooter came back outside.

  Vanessa watched the man drive away, reminding herself who she really was. She had been undercover for so long she sometimes actually thought of herself as Lina Ramir, the oldest child of Fahid Ramir. The real Lina had been apprehended and ultimately convicted on weapons charges three years before along with her father and the rest of her immediate family. When Vanessa’s supervisor at the Central Intelligence Agency realized how much Vanessa resembled Lina, he had put the wheels in motion to insert Vanessa into Fahid Ramir’s extended family.

  Looking back now, Vanessa was amazed that her training with the CIA had been practically tailored for this assignment. Her main specialties were in weapons, aircraft, and explosives—areas that the real Lina would be knowledgeable about. Of course, when she had joined the Agenc
y four years ago, she never would have guessed that her appearance would ultimately become her greatest asset.

  In many ways, the plan seemed almost too easy. Lina’s uncle, Akil Ramir, had spent the last two decades supposedly working in the oil industry in Venezuela, while Lina had spent her childhood and early adult years living in the United States and in her father’s villa in the south of France.

  Additionally, the resemblance between the two women was uncanny, especially considering that their heritage was so markedly different. Though the Ramir family had been living in Europe for more than fifty years, most of their family tree originated from the Middle East. In contrast, Vanessa’s family was a conglomerate of origins and races. Vanessa’s grandparents on her mother’s side were dark skinned and had immigrated to the United States from Morocco. Her father, on the other hand, had inherited the fair skin of his English ancestors.

  Because her maternal grandparents had lived with her family throughout most of her childhood and into her teenage years, Vanessa was fluent in French, the preferred language of the Ramir family, as well as Arabic. She also had a working knowledge of Spanish due to intensive study to prepare her for this assignment.

  No one had been sure where Vanessa would end up living or how she would be received into the extended Ramir family when she had switched places with Lina Ramir. Her superiors just knew that someone needed to get inside to find out exactly what Akil Ramir was up to. Already Vanessa had confirmed at least part of the Agency’s concern that Akil was in the process of expanding the terrorist activities his older brother had started.

  It had been over a year since the CIA had leaked the information that Lina Ramir was being released from prison. The official report was that Lina had been moved to a minimum security prison for the last few weeks of her jail time. In reality, Vanessa had spent two weeks observing the real Lina, studying her mannerisms and her personality. Then Vanessa had stepped in and taken Lina’s place when the prison transfer was made, and Lina had been moved to a secure prison facility where she would be kept out of sight until Vanessa finished her assignment.

  Never in her life had Vanessa considered the possibility of spending time in prison, but she had completed the rest of Lina’s sentence, using those precious few weeks to finalize her transformation into Lina Ramir. Vanessa knew from the background information on the Ramir family and from her own observations that Lina was strong-willed and ambitious, qualities Vanessa shared. Of course, Vanessa didn’t consider money and power more important than human lives the way Lina had when she worked as an integral part of her father’s empire.

  The ruthlessness and lack of concern for others were traits Vanessa knew she wouldn’t be able to adopt completely, but she hoped to find a happy medium between the woman she was and the woman she was pretending to be.

  As the government had hoped, when the day came for her to be released, Akil Ramir had sent a driver to pick her up with the invitation for her to join him in Aruba. Vanessa could still remember how nervous she had been; worried that perhaps Akil had been in closer contact with Lina than everyone had anticipated. Akil had sensed those nerves but had misunderstood the cause. Certain that the young woman before him was his long-lost niece, he had offered her every hospitality, including a job within his organization.

  No one knew exactly how long Vanessa would stay undercover. In fact, only a handful of people even knew about the switch. Even fewer knew where she was currently located—more precisely, only one person: Devin Granger, a CIA operative out of Puerto Rico, had been her handler from the start.

  Granger was the man she was waiting for right now. Officially, Granger was one of several cooks on staff at the Club Med in Punta Cana, a popular tourist area in the Dominican Republic. Unofficially, he continued to meet Vanessa every day or two so that he could collect and pass along the information that Vanessa continued to gather. Though Vanessa wasn’t always able to slip away from her current home, Granger was supposed to be at the meeting spot no matter what. Never before had Vanessa been the first to arrive.

  Since their meeting three weeks earlier when Vanessa had told him that something big was about to happen, Granger had been even more diligent about meeting every night. Vanessa didn’t know exactly what was going on in Ramir’s organization, but she knew that tensions were running high and that new training facilities were springing up all over the Caribbean.

  Nerves jumped in her stomach as Vanessa waited quietly for several more minutes. Finally, afraid to wait any longer, she crept down the alley from where she had come and headed for her own transportation. She had parked the tiny hatchback two blocks away behind a small adobe house. An elderly man rocked on the little slab of concrete that comprised his front porch, and Vanessa approached him, her eyes questioning.

  “No hay problema, señorita,” he told her in a quiet voice as he pushed himself out of the chair.

  As she did each night, she handed him some local currency and expressed her thanks. She knew that the money wouldn’t buy the man’s loyalty. That was the reason she had chosen him. If his loyalty could be bought, it couldn’t be trusted. This man could be trusted. She was sure of it.

  Though she doubted that her superiors at the CIA would approve of her methods, she had staked out the local chapel for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a few days after her arrival in the Dominican Republic. She had watched the various members of the congregation filter out after their Sunday meetings, her eyes searching for someone who was traveling on foot and heading in the right direction.

  Domingo Lomez had been holding the hand of his six-year-old grandson and had been accompanied by his extended family of eleven. Vanessa had waited for the family to pass by before following them the three miles to their home. When she saw the location of the tiny house, she knew she had found the man she was looking for.

  Though she hadn’t been at liberty to explain why she needed his services, Vanessa had shown him the one piece of identification she had brought with her from the United States: her temple recommend. She had been impressed that Domingo hadn’t accepted her offer immediately. After all, he would be paid simply for allowing her to hide her car behind his home each night. Despite his desire to help feed his family, the elderly man had insisted that he needed to pray about it for a day or so.

  When Vanessa had returned the next night, hoping and praying that the older man would help her, he had agreed. He had also given her an unsolicited piece of advice that had ultimately saved her life. He had told her to destroy her temple recommend.

  His suggestion had been so unexpected that Vanessa had been forced to offer her own prayers before following through. The next day she had returned to her room at the resort she currently called home to find her purse on the floor, the contents strewn about the room. Had she not followed Señor Lomez’s advice, whoever had searched her purse would have found the only piece of identification that could have given her away as an imposter.

  She had thrown a rather convincing temper tantrum that day about someone going through her things. As a result, her “uncle” had admitted that someone had been concerned that her loyalties might have been compromised after being away from the family for so long. From that moment on, Vanessa had been gaining ground and trust in the organization. Now she just had to find out what the organization was working toward and stop it before it was too late.

  2

  Commander Kelan Bennett sat in the front seat of the grounded helicopter and studied the mission plan. Something didn’t feel right, and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. He and two of his men were currently waiting near an abandoned warehouse a short hop from the extraction point, but a sense of unease had settled over him.

  He thought back to the pre-mission briefing and the prayer his squad had offered before leaving their ship. At the time, everything appeared to be in order. They all felt good about their plan for this surveillance mission, and the execution was relatively easy compared to some of their previous assignmen
ts. Brent Miller, his second-in-command, and Seth Johnson were two of the best in the SEALs at concealment and surveillance. Yet for some reason his previous sense of comfort had been replaced with apprehension.

  The two enlisted men in his squad, Tristan Crowther and Quinn Lambert, had just returned from checking out the surrounding area to make sure they were still really alone out in the middle of this semitropical island. Tristan had taken a position outside of the helicopter, and Quinn had moved back inside to check in.

  “There’s nothing out there, Kel,” Quinn told him.

  “Check the intel reports again. I want to know if there’s any movement in the area,” Kel ordered. “If anything’s moving, we’ll know there’s a problem.”

  Quinn nodded, switching his combat headset for the heavier headset that plugged into the helicopter’s communication system. Quinn set the dial to the right channel and spoke into the mouthpiece using the predetermined code names for the mission. “Night Owl, this is Panther. Request details on any movement in the area. Over.”

  “Panther, this is Night Owl. Everything is quiet.”

  Quinn turned to look at Kel, shaking his head as he signed off and replaced his combat headset. “They don’t have anything.” Quinn’s dark eyes narrowed. “What’s bothering you?”

  “I don’t know,” Kel admitted as he prepared to send the two men out again for another patrol. “But something’s not right.”

  * * *

  Something wasn’t right. Dawn was still several hours away, but despite their orders to observe the terrorist training facility for as long as possible, Seth was getting antsy to get out of there. At least the urge to sneeze had finally passed, but he would have preferred that annoyance over this new sense of unease. He shifted slightly so that he could get a better look at the long driveway that led through the grassy field and up to the house.