“Denison, Russo, get in here.” The abrupt order resounded in his ear. The brusque Bronx accent coming in over his headset belonged to none other than their commanding officer, Mark Dewitt.
Jesse grabbed his rucksack while Luke scooped up the thermal imaging device before hurrying inside the tiny two-room shack.
A faint light from LED lanterns illuminated the room, giving off a peculiar glow that fell across the faces of thirteen other members of Team Fourteen. All of the men were in varying stages of preparation for the mission. Dressed in black chest vests and face paint, the men checked the ammunition in their MP7s. Tonight, they looked very much the part of the lethal, efficient special operations unit that they were.
They had arrived in Somalia four days ago. Per their usual drill, the team spent the last few days going over hostage rescue scenarios in a mockup of the target building in Mogadishu. Phase two of the operation would begin in just under an hour. Earlier today, they’d made the one and a half hours-long journey to the port-city of Merca. Unexpectedly, members of AnSawar had not attempted to transfer their hostages to another location. Instead, they were holding their captives—at least, what was left of them—at the same oil production facility where the attack occurred.
“We’re going to enter the left corridor from the leeward side of the building.” All eyes were glued to CO Dewitt as he pointed to the bottom of a diagram of the target facility. “Time is not on our side with this op. We have twenty minutes to disable the enemy combatants at the strike zone and secure the hostages. We will be hauling ass, in and out. Two Mark V SOCs will meet us at the pickup area. We’ll debrief when we arrive at the U.S.S. Conroy. What are the latest interior visuals, Russo?”
“Six hostages are confined just two rooms down from the left entrance, sir. I detected two guards in the room with them. I wasn’t able to see how many tangos are standing guard outside the doors, but clearly it’s a fluid situation, sir.”
“Damn.” Turning, his attention shifted to the hulking soldier on his immediate right. “Laurent, did you see any new movement at the back door where they’ve been dropping bodies?”
“No, sir,” answered Lieutenant Junior Grade Joshua Laurent. “Nothing since early this afternoon.”
The lack of movement could have been good news. AnSawar wouldn’t keep corpses in the same building with them for too long. Not in this scorching heat. And if this cell’s past actions were any indication, they would dump any additional bodies outside the building or find a more suitable dumping ground.
But Jesse wasn’t optimistic. He knew from personal experience how quickly a seemingly normal operation could go sideways. Even if the two UA hostages were still alive at the moment, which was a big if, that could change if Team Fourteen didn’t move in soon. This whole situation had the potential of devolving into a complete comedy of errors if they weren’t careful.
AnSawar initially wanted a whopping one hundred million dollars for the release of all fifteen of the hostages. The demand came in a couple of weeks after the attack on the facility. The only relative of the victims who had a prayer of coming up with that kind of cash was Alfred Westlake. Westlake was a multi-millionaire business magnate, and his daughter Lena was one of the hostages.
Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, Mr. Westlake failed to wire the money as instructed. Family members for some of the other hostages did manage to scrape together an offering of three hundred thousand dollars. It had not been enough.
After the one-week deadline came and went without full compliance, AnSawar began killing their captives at random. By the time the SEALs arrived in Merca, seven of the fifteen were confirmed executed.
The tangos dumped two of the bodies along the side of the road on the outskirts of the town—with about as much compunction as if they were disposing garbage. Two of the deceased, a woman in her twenties and a man in his thirties, had both been student interns at the facility. Five other bodies were stacked outside of the facility in a macabre display of brutality and callousness.
The deceased female hostage was severely beaten and brutally raped, before being shot to death two days ago. The woman, identified as Lily Gregory, had been a graduate student from Oklahoma. She was working at the oil plant as part of a summer research program. Her broken body was now en route to the United States for a burial that was about fifty years premature.
Jesse and the rest of his team assumed Lena Westlake, the only other female hostage, was still alive. Based on the previous actions of the men holding her captive, however, that assumption might’ve been just a product of wishful thinking.
Jesse’s mind’s eye clung to a photograph of Lena that the team had acquired. The headshot had been taken for her profile as one of the “Top 50 to Watch in Oil” in Engineering Today. As a petite blonde from Virginia, the flatness of the two-dimensional photograph did nothing to blunt her good looks. Her shimmering chocolate-brown eyes and beaming smile seemed to leap off the page at him.
As beautiful as she was, Jesse realized if their team didn’t move in quickly, Lena would be the next victim to be raped, tortured, and killed by the extremist group. That is, if she hadn’t been already. He’d never met her before, but his gut twisted at the thought of her being harmed. She wasn’t the only one in danger, of course. The other remaining seven captives were also facing imminent death at the hands of their captors.
“All right, you all know the drill. Finish packing up. We’re moving out in fifteen,” their CO barked, prompting the men to dash to complete their munitions preparations before the showdown.
“You ready for game time, Denison?”
Looking up from his rucksack, Jesse found the heterochromic eyes of Ensign Will Castle staring down at him. During their hostage-rescue training exercises, each of the junior team members were “paired up” with a senior team member. Jesse had worked on clearing a room with Will. Jesse found it was a useful way to gain valuable insight from older Team Fourteen members. He had only been on the team for about two years now, so he had a lot more to learn about conducting special operations.
“Yeah. I’m as ready as ever.”
“Don’t forget to ‘slice the pie’ around the corner, man. I know it may seem like overkill, but I’m telling you, you can never be too careful. It only takes one well-placed armor piercing, hollow-point to send you home express in a coffin to your family.”
Slicing the pie was a room-clearing technique in which you methodically scanned an area from a pivot point before crossing an open corridor. Earlier in the week, Jesse had rounded a corner that he thought was cleared, only to catch a rubber bullet to the chest. It had been an uncharacteristic rookie mistake, but yeah, Will was right. If he had been in an active combat situation and the bullet landed a few inches higher, an officer in full service dress blues would be knocking on his parents’ door right about now.
But that unfortunate possibility was the nature of the job itself. In their line of work, there was a constant risk of death, but SEALs were experts at reducing that risk as much as possible.
“I won’t forget, man. Thanks.” Will nodded and turned to leave, stopping in his tracks when Jesse asked, “The two missing hostages…do you think they’re still alive?”
“Hard to say. Everything I know about AnSawar says that they’ve isolated two of the hostages for a specific reason. It could be that they just want to split up the group to try and freak them out even more. You know, show their hostages that they are in total control of the situation. Or there could be something particular about these two people. Regardless, it doesn’t affect the goals of our mission. The quicker we get in and out, the better chance we have of rescuing all of the remaining hostages before any more are killed.”
“Right,” Jesse acknowledged while Will returned to gearing up for the mission.
“Were you this jacked up for your first hostage rescue, man?” Snapping his head up again, he found Ensign Hank Kellerman standing in the spot that Will had just vacated. Hank was an even newer re
cruit than Jesse. He’d been specifically recruited—on a temporary basis—from SEAL Team Eleven to replace one of their injured teammates, Jack Manners. Even though Hank was a rookie to the team, he’d been in the military longer than Jesse. Two years prior to his stint in the Navy, Hank was a member of the Marine Corps.
“No.”
Hank laughed. “Different strokes for different folks, I guess. It’s a change of pace from lying face-first in the mud for thirty-two hours straight, that’s for damn sure. Sitting ass-deep in the mud for countless hours isn’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, special reconnaissance can be a real bitch sometimes.” In fact, Jesse remembered very clearly his first special reconnaissance mission with Team Fourteen. He had been tasked with obtaining critical information about a Nicaraguan drug cartel, Los Amigos Muertos. The group was suspected of funneling grade four heroin from its seedy business associates in Afghanistan.
As the newest guy on the team, Jesse had had the dubious honor of swamp duty. He lay face deep in grass, mud, and shallow pools of freshwater for twelve hours, all in the name of tracking the target group’s movements. It had needed to be done, but he tended to agree with Hank—that type of information gathering could be boring as hell. At least for Jesse’s mission, the mosquitoes had done an excellent job of helping him stay awake.
“Do you have any tips, man?”
“What?”
“You know, tips for this mission? Having worked with this group for a while, I’m sure you have some good advice.” Hank clarified.
“Yeah. Don’t fuck it up.”
CHAPTER
TWO
Pearls of sweat beaded on the top of Lena’s upper lip. Her profuse sweating wasn’t in and of itself out of the ordinary. After all, she was huddled on the hard linoleum floor of a small, stuffy room in Sub-Saharan Africa.
A non-air conditioned room. With at least ten other people. In the middle of summer. No, sweating was very much expected given her current predicament.
What was exceedingly abnormal, however, was the presence of the masked men in the room with her. One of these men just happened to be pressing a very large, very lethal automatic weapon against her ribcage. At least he was no longer jabbing it directly into her spleen.
It had occurred to her—on more than one occasion during her captivity—that she was likely not going to live to see her birthday next week. The way things were looking right now, it was doubtful she would live to see the dawn of another day. She wouldn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to her mother and brother. She was going to be erased from the face of the earth, and all she had left were regrets.
“Up! Move! Over here, bitch,” one of her captors growled out, his voice harsh and booming. Large, cruel hands grabbed at her arm. Those same angry hands roughly dragged her to her feet. It was hard to maneuver around with any efficiency because she couldn’t see. At least, not after someone placed a blindfold over her eyes a few hours ago.
She limped ahead, her captor’s meaty hands still tightly gripping the long strands of her hair. He pulled her upwards so roughly that she was forced to gingerly brace herself on her toes—nearly en pointe—as she moved forward. Surprisingly, the asshole hadn’t yet managed to rip her hair from its roots.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening.
When she’d signed up to work as an engineer at her father’s oil production venture a year ago, she’d envisioned an entirely different scenario. The first facet of that scenario was being gainfully employed. Lena wasn’t under any impression that she’d landed the entry-level engineering job solely on her own merits. Not that she didn’t deserve the position; after all, she’d graduated at the top five percent of her class in her graduate program at MIT.
But with over one hundred applications for that one position, she’d recognized that having the last name “Westlake” had given her that extra boost she needed. She wasn’t complaining, in this fledging economy she would have taken any boost that she could get. Even though a trust fund had been set up for her as a child, it was virtually untouchable until she turned thirty-five. And by today’s trust fund standards of the jet setting elite, the amount in Lena’s trust was considerably paltry in comparison.
Another of facet of that scenario included a long overdue reconciliation with her father. At best, Lena’s relationship with her father could be classified as fragile. At worst, it could be described as toxic. The two of them rarely spoke, and she could count on one hand the number of times she’d had face-to-face interaction with the man over the past three years. And yet some small, stubborn flickering flame of hope lying somewhere deep in the recesses of her heart had propelled her to sign up for an opening at WG Oil upon her graduation. After all, they both shared a love for Africa and petroleum engineering. Surely, they would be able work through their differences, she’d thought at the outset. Of course, she’d been wrong.
As the days and weeks passed, her father never once attempted to contact her or respond to her phone calls or emails. The magnificent Alfred Westlake remained aloof, cool, and distant—even to his own flesh and blood. So as far as mending the connection with her father was concerned, the year had been an abject failure…and now this.
In the beginning of their siege, the terrorists allowed Lena and her fellow captives the ability to walk around relatively freely. Granted, that hadn’t meant too much. Not when they were still confined to a small, dark, locked room. But even a pitifully small grant of mobility had given them all a sense of optimism. A hope that maybe their captors were not as soulless as they suspected.
AnSawar confiscated their hostages’ shoes during the first week. Taking their footwear probably gave the terrorists some measure of assurance that their hostages would be hesitant to attempt an escape. If that was their rationale for taking her flats, however, they were in for a rude awakening. As soon as her captors let their guard down, Lena was going to make a break for it—kicks or not.
But so far, there hadn’t been any opportunity for her to escape. The terrorist group vigilantly monitored their hostages’ movements. Even the infrequent bathroom “trips” were conducted with the utmost care to ensure the hostages were never left alone for too long.
As to be expected, the identities of these men were still a mystery. They took precautions to conceal their facial features and other identifying marks. Two such precautions were their penchant for wearing masks and gloves. Another was the long robes that they wore; the flowing garments made it difficult to discern the exact body shape of her captors. There was one critical oversight in their garb, however. The sleeves of the robes did not cover their forearms completely.
From what she’d been able to discern from the visible skin on their arms, some of the men were black, but at least two of the men were white—their skin color nearly as fair as Lena’s. Her captors mostly spoke in Swahili, of which she could only translate a few words. Occasionally, they spoke in what sounded like Arabic. Only two of the masked men had attempted to speak English to them. The words had come out broken and maladroit.
Most of the men holding them had been nice, cordial even. But she wasn’t fooled. An implicit violence lay beneath the surface of each of the men holding her captive. To try to convince them otherwise, the terrorists had promised them no one else would be hurt so long as they cooperated as requested. That had turned out to be a lie.
This whole situation was a neverending nightmare. She just wanted to go home. She’d give anything to go home, even if that home were her father’s home. It was odd to think that in this moment, she would be thrilled to see her father’s face one more time. The type of epiphany someone could have about her life when facing almost certain death was truly amazing.
Two weeks. She’d been held for about two weeks now, though it was becoming harder and harder for her to keep track of the days. For the past week, she had kept up the hope she would be rescued. But now, she wasn’t so sure. With each day that went by,
she was becoming more exhausted, dejected, and afraid.
The U.S. government did not usually negotiate with terrorists. She knew that. And the fact that a rescue team had not been sent in by this point was not encouraging for her future prospects. And she very much wanted to have a future. She did not want to die. Not here. Not now. Not like this.
“Sit! There!” the man holding her ordered. She stopped right in her tracks, shakily lowering herself to the ground, fully expecting to fall. The man’s punishing grip bruised her arm. She was caught off guard when she felt a chair slide underneath her before her bottom touched the floor.
Much to Lena’s relief, the sound of booted footsteps moved away from her. She counted twelve steps before she heard the door close with a creak and a bang, and then…silence. She sat there for what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a few minutes.
They had transferred her to a different room. This new room lacked the rancid stench of long-standing urine, feces, and other unfortunate bodily fluids that’d escaped some of the captives whom had been denied bathroom access by their captors. None of the hostages, Lena included, had been allowed the personal dignity of taking a bath. Needless to say, the reek of body odor added to the nausea-inducing environment of her former accommodations.
Besides the lack of that particular malodorous fragrance, it was also a lot quieter here. The hostages who’d been sitting on the ground alongside her in the first room had all been in varying degrees of distress. Some of the men had pleaded with their captors for release. Others had murmured quiet prayers to a seemingly deaf God. But now, it was as dissonantly silent as the Roman catacombs she had visited one summer with her boarding school class.
But why would they move her? Why separate her from the others? What did they want from her? Whatever the reason, it could not be good. But then again, maybe the reason why she was moved did not matter. What was most important was figuring out a way out of here and helping the others. There had to be a way out of this mess.
Swift Strike (SEAL Team 14 Book 2) Page 2
