Navy SEAL Noel

by Liz Johnson

  If he’d been rescuing someone else—anyone else—he wouldn’t have put up with any arguments. His job was to rescue. Her job was to be rescued.

  But all this history behind them made him pause.

  He could be the rescuer only if she allowed herself to be rescued by him. And right now, she just wanted to rescue herself…because she didn’t trust him.

  He couldn’t blame her.

  “You’re right.” A quick smile transformed her face, but he cut it off quickly. “We have no idea what’s in that room. Or who’s in that room. What are you going to do if there’s a trap?”

  Her grin melted into an expression of uncertainty, and he could see the wheels spinning behind her eyes.

  “Listen, I can’t let anything happen to you. I promised your dad.” And Will had promised himself. He owed her at least that.

  Some of the tension in her shoulders began to relax, the lines in her forehead easing as she slipped her soft hand into his. “I know. And I appreciate it. But I’m safer with you than anywhere else in this compound without you.”

  Tossing his head back, he glared at the buzzing lights and heaved a sigh.

  She squeezed his hand just enough to get his attention. “You know I’m right.” There was a smile laced into her words, and he didn’t like it. At all. “Whatever’s in that building will be easier to face together.”

  Swinging his gaze back to her face, he ignored the victorious gleam in her eyes. “If I let you come, you will do whatever I tell you. Without question.”

  She shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  “No.” His growl must have surprised her as much as it did him, because she yanked her hand out of his, pressing it over her mouth. He cleared his throat twice to level out his tone. “You’ll do whatever I say without question, for your safety and mine. Or I’ll leave you in your room tonight.”

  She didn’t move for what felt like an eternity, but finally nodded. “All right.”

  *

  When the door to her cell opened, as smoothly and as silently as ever, Jess slipped into the early-morning air, still thick with the prior day’s rains. Will’s gaze traveled from the top of her head to her feet as though making sure that she hadn’t been hurt in the previous six hours. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her.

  Of course, she wasn’t exactly at her best. She hadn’t showered in three days and had been rotating two shirts for the past week. She was just glad she’d managed to wash her clothes once in her bathroom sink. Anything beyond that was gravy.

  Whatever he saw, he didn’t indicate. He just wrapped his hand around her wrist and nodded in the direction of their target.

  They skirted the usual buildings, safe in the shadow of the perimeter wall as they drew close to the cartel’s possible command center. Every window in the single-story building was black, and even the big house next door seemed especially quiet. Without the rumble and ruckus caused by the military trucks, the entire compound was eerily still. Raul and the guards from the night before were nowhere in sight.

  Jess followed Will along the stucco wall. He paused at the corner, peering into the darkness, then turned and whispered over his shoulder. “Stay here while I find a way in.”

  “I’ll go—”

  He pressed his finger to her lips, gentle yet insistent enough to stop the flow of her words. Heat burned her neck.

  “Remember. No arguing tonight. I’ll be right back.”

  She nodded, and he vanished. Jess sank against the wall as her heart hammered beneath her rib cage. With a timid pat she pressed two fingers to her lips, which still tingled, setting off a flurry in her stomach.

  That was odd.

  Will’s touch hadn’t ever set her nerves on edge before. In fact, no one had ever before sparked butterflies like those swooping and soaring in her now.

  When her college roommates had whispered behind fluttering hands about their boyfriends, Jess had just assumed they were more excitable. But had she really been missing out on this sweet torture—the one that made the air thicker and the moon brighter—all these years?

  So focused on school, she hadn’t dated much after breaking up with Sal. Just Colby, another biology major, during her sophomore year in college. But even his kisses hadn’t sparked her like Will’s touch just had.

  Of course, she and Colby didn’t have years of history together. He didn’t know about her mom’s absence or her dad’s deployments or Great-aunt Eva’s burned dinners.

  He’d never asked about them.

  Then again, she’d never offered any of the details, either. And she’d wanted it that way. It was easier to keep him at a distance, to keep him from knowing her too well. Because people who said they loved her, left her.

  After one semester, Colby had left, too.

  But she’d never given him the power to hurt her.

  Not like Will had.

  Jess frowned and tried to wipe the memory of Will’s touch away. But it wasn’t as easy as she hoped. His presence seemed to linger, and she jerked away from the wall, her hands flapping as though she could shake off so many uninvited thoughts about her former best friend.

  But they weren’t easy to forget, especially with those pesky butterflies.

  Where on earth had they come from? She didn’t want them. She barely knew this Will. What she did know, she wasn’t entirely sure she liked. He was bossy and stubborn. And always right.

  She definitely was not attracted to Will Gumble.

  Except the nervous flutters in her tummy didn’t agree. Why couldn’t they just get the message that Will was off-limits?

  She’d been doing fine keeping up the wall between them. It was easier that way. As long as she didn’t let him close, she didn’t have to acknowledge that niggling voice that told her he was risking his life for her and she ought to forgive him.

  At least she hadn’t had to until he’d told her about Abuelita, and Jess literally couldn’t keep from holding him.

  Great. Now she’d think about that. Those arms made of steel. The gentleness of his embrace. The fact that he’d come back.

  Just when she thought she’d go crazy if she had to spend one more minute dwelling on Will, the object of her errant imagination popped around the corner.

  “I found an open window. Let’s go.”

  Staring at the back of his slightly too long hair didn’t do much to help her keep her focus on the task at hand, but a sudden squishing noise snapped her to attention. “What was that?”

  He stopped and leaned his ear forward. “Let’s just get inside.”

  They moved quickly and silently, but Jess couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that told her they weren’t alone.

  When they reached a partly open window, she didn’t have time to do much more than brace her hands against the frame before Will caught her around the waist and boosted her up. In a flash she was through the window, somersaulting across a tile floor and into a solid wood desk with a terrible thump.

  Her side connected with a desk leg, and she wheezed to catch her breath as Will crawled through the window and landed easily on both feet. He reached out to help her up.

  “Thanks,” she said, rubbing her side.

  Will didn’t respond to her mumble, but quickly made his way around the room. The darkness left her blind, but he seemed to have no trouble navigating the uncharted territory. He quietly called out what he found. “There’s another desk over here, but it’s clean.” Wood thumped against wood. “And the drawers are locked. There’s a rolling chair here, too. It’s definitely an office of some kind.”

  When he found a door, he opened it, and his silhouette disappeared through the entrance. “It’s a closet. Not too deep, but the shelves are stacked with boxes.”

  “What kind of boxes?”

  “Like the ones you’d see at a law office. Records and stuff.” Cardboard and paper shuffled, and she held her breath, hoping to hear more of what Will had found. “Just paper. Lots of paper in these boxes.” He closed the clos
et behind him as he wandered toward another door. “Let’s find the main entry. There weren’t any windows in the front room with the map, so we can turn a light on.”

  She followed the sound of his voice, taking tentative steps across the room. When she reached him, he ran his hand down her arm until their fingers locked.

  She reminded herself that it wasn’t because he wanted to hold her hand, despite what her wildly firing nerves argued.

  This was a safety thing. They couldn’t stay together if they didn’t hold on.

  Will moved through the darkness as though he’d grown up in this building, while she ran her fingertips along the textured wallpaper just to ground herself in the space. Down the hall they reached a T, and without hesitation he hurried to the left. He passed one door, its wooden paneling darker than the wall, and then stopped at a matching one. Pressing his ear to the frame, he waited for a long second. With a click the door popped open, and they slipped inside, closing it behind them.

  The room was impossibly dark, and Jess froze as Will dropped her hand.

  Even the shape of his shoulders vanished into the blackness.

  She’d never been afraid of the dark, but in that moment her breath caught. It wasn’t the actual night so much as what it could be hiding that pulled her core muscles taut and dried her throat.

  Suddenly, a light erupted in the far corner. At first she was blinded, and clasped her hands over her face, slowly separating her fingers to adjust to the filtered light. After several long seconds, she dropped her hands, blinked and slowly looked around the room.

  A dusty brass desk lamp lit up a plain, unimpressive space. Large framed maps depicting the whole of Panama, mere decorations, covered pale brown walls. Grimy tomes lined floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls. The floor was made of slabs of unfinished lumber. The single desk in the room was covered in heaps of papers, and Will was already there, shuffling through them.

  “You going to help me or just stand guard?” Although his voice carried a note of teasing, the tilt of his head suggested that if she wanted to be useful, she had better get started.

  At his side she sifted through piles of papers and ledger books that most likely tracked the cartel’s illegal activities. Page after page of lists and numbers, and Spanish words scribbled in the margins. All of it was little more than gibberish to her.

  “There’s nothing here,” she sighed.

  Will glanced up at the wall, where a clock ticked off the seconds, taunting their failure. “Keep looking. We’ve still got a few minutes.”

  Just a few minutes before they had to get back to their cells. A few minutes before someone might discover them missing. What could they possibly find in that time?

  Jess jerked on a drawer handle, and it popped open. More red leather-bound ledger books were stacked nearly to the rim. Digging through them, she found a brown document sleeve. Pulling it free, she flipped open the cover. It was filled with oversize pages, and as she spread them across the desktop, she realized they were maps. Wavy black lines covered the white pages. And they made absolutely no sense at all.

  She could feel Will’s chin at her shoulder long before his palm pressed against her back. She sneaked a peek at him out of the corner of her eye. He was bent forward, staring intently at the new discovery.

  “From the looks of this, we’re not too far from Panama City.” His statement was so confident that she looked back at the map, expecting to see a clear you-are-here sticker. No such luck. Not even one in Spanish. In fact, she couldn’t spot anything that indicated their location.

  “How do you know?”

  He pointed at the bottom of the page, his finger following an inconsequential line that intersected a wiggling blue one, which had to be a river.

  “This section here is called the Darién Gap. It’s mostly jungle, along the Colombian border.” He tapped his finger at another point on the page. “There aren’t any roads into the gap, so we can’t be that far south.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  A slow smile worked its way across his face. “This is what I do.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  His forehead wrinkled for a moment, and she could see his internal debate over how much to share play out across his face. “On our SEAL team, my buddy Zig is in charge of coms—communications. Luke is the medic. Rock does demolition. L.T. is a language expert. Everyone has a specialty.”

  “And you read maps?”

  “Something like that. You didn’t think I’d come down here without doing any recon, did you? I studied as much intel about this country as I could get my hands on in thirty-six hours.”

  Of course he had.

  He was no longer the kid who skipped class and tried to tempt her to do the same. She had to get that fact to stick. She’d learned to fend for herself without Great-aunt Eva or the Gumbles or anyone else during the past ten years, and she wasn’t the only one who had changed.

  “I figured we’d be in the eastern section of the country, but I couldn’t know for sure. This pretty much confirms it.”

  Jess nodded as if she was following his train of thought, but the truth was she’d been too busy doing chemistry extra credit through a good bit of geography class to know Panama’s topography.

  Whether he picked up on her hesitation or not, Will continued. “The Panama Canal breaks the country into two almost even sectors. Northwest—” he swiped his hand over a section off the map “—and southeast. And Panama City is right on the canal. When we get out of here, we’ll only have to go about seventy to a hundred miles.”

  Her tongue felt as if it had doubled in size. “Through the jungle?”

  He nodded. “Right now, that’s the only option we’ve got unless the cavalry shows up.”

  “Right. Your friend at the DEA.”

  He nodded in agreement. Leaning back over the maps and shuffling them around, he said, “But we can’t afford to wait for them.”

  The lines on the pages blurred, and she tried to follow Will’s muttering, but it didn’t make much more sense than the maps. Until he flipped a page to reveal a clear outline of the compound. The walls and guard towers were plainly marked, the big house dominating the back section in its grandiose style. The barracks, lab and even the mess hall looked like pop-up tents in comparison.

  Around the outside of the security wall, someone had made more than three dozen red marks. They were spaced anywhere from one to three inches apart, almost like a checker board.

  “What do they mean?” As soon as the question popped out of her mouth, she wished she could swallow it back down. She already had a pretty good guess, and if she’d escaped on her own, she would have had to face those red marks—whatever special brand of booby trap they might be—on her own.

  “I don’t know exactly, but you can bet they’re a security feature.”

  After a few more pages of nothing significant, Will paused on the very last one. The map contained a single red circle and a winding red line leading to it.

  Jess held the map closer to the light, squinting to make sense of the strange chart. “Look, is that us?” She pointed to the start of the red line, then at the circle at its end. “And another compound?”

  “I’m betting they’re not friendlies.”

  She shook her head. “Do you think this is the rival the Morsyni is intended for?”

  “It’s a solid—” He broke off abruptly at the same moment he pressed his finger to his pursed lips. His gaze settled just over her head, his shoulders squared and ready for a fight. “Hear that?” he whispered.

  Closing her eyes and covering her own mouth with her hands, Jess listened, not daring to breathe. Spanish words in rapid succession slipped through the cracks at the front door.

  Will’s eyes flew wide. “They know someone’s in here. Let’s go. Now.” He shoved the maps back into the folder, threw it into the drawer and flicked off the light before she could even make sense of his words.

  Grabbing her arm, he tow
ed her through the darkness into the hallway. She pulled the door closed behind her, and it clicked just as someone yelled.

  Will’s pace picked up. His feet were silent. Hers were like a buffalo.

  And then another set of footfalls joined theirs, this one sounding like an entire stampede.

  Her heart beat a painful tattoo in her throat.

  The man chasing them was falling behind. But not fast enough.

  Suddenly, she was swung into the room with the open window. With a little shove, Will pushed her toward the farthest desk. “Hide. Under there. Don’t move until I come for you.”

  She did as he said, rolling the chair out, crawling into its space and pulling it back to hide her. Through a small fissure in the wood, she saw Will’s form disappear into the closet, just as the stampede arrived.

  A narrow beam of light swept across the floor, matching the cajoling tone of their pursuer. Over and over he asked who was there.

  Her pulse thumped in her ears, drowning out his words.

  The flashlight tracked toward her hiding place, the beam glancing over the crevice. And holding there.

  A sudden hiccup demanded release, and Jess clamped her hands over her mouth and fought the tears that streamed down her cheeks. She pressed against the confining walls, doing her best to disappear, but the light didn’t move.

  Lungs burning. Ears ringing. Heart pounding.

  She’d been caught.

  And then the flashlight flicked away, toward the closet.

  No. No. No. No.

  The man’s footsteps carried him toward Will’s hiding spot.

  Dear Lord, please don’t let him find Will.

  Her mouthed words didn’t get very far as the old doorknob illuminated under the man’s search.

  Paralyzed, Jess could only watch and send an incoherent plea heavenward. If God was still around and had answered her prayer for a rescuer, He wouldn’t take Will away so soon, would He?

  Will had to be okay.

  A disembodied hand appeared in the flashlight’s beam.

  Her heart stopped.

  And their pursuer flung open the closet door.

  SEVEN