by Gennita Low
Helen challenged him like no one had before, pushing him to cross lines where he shouldn’t have. He should have just allowed her to beat up her adversary; the triumph of winning would have served the purpose just as well since she was coming after him. But the most wicked idea had popped into his head out of nowhere.
Face it, McNeil. Two women wrestling was all about your horny libido and not much to do with trigger imprinting.
The discovery, that he could make sure she didn’t hurt herself by the mere fantasy of giving his other “woman” his strength and taking away Helen’s, only added to his sexual enjoyment. He didn’t deny himself the pleasure of getting that sexy lithe body in various suggestive positions for his perusal. Yes, he was going to take her that way. And that way. And that way…
When he’d tasted Elena, it had felt so real. The experience had left him aching for more. She might not agree with him, but he was being tortured and teased just as much as she was.
She’d finally acknowledged him. She’d let him imbed their trigger.
“It’s done,” he rasped out.
She would hate him but he had her where he wanted. She would rest and then…she would come to kill him.
Chapter Five
“Where’s Hell?”
Jed paused in the middle of setting up the video transmission to see who Flyboy was addressing. The tone of the question was casual but he caught the underlying tension.
“She has a couple of days off,” Jed replied, returning his attention to pulling the feed from archives.
“I know that. I heard she came in yesterday and seeing that she’s still at Center, I’m surprised she isn’t here at this meeting.”
Jed glanced up briefly. Flyboy was still looking at him intently. “This is a meeting for an undergoing COS operation in which Hell only had a tiny part,” he said quietly, “so she doesn’t need to be here.”
“Armando wasn’t actively in this project either,” Flyboy pointed out.
Jed caught Armando’s movement in his periphery vision. Bringing in Armando was a clever move. He hadn’t given the newest commando too much to do lately.
“A failed ironist is a sad, sad man,” Armando murmured.
Sullivan made a rude noise. “The weird one has spoken.”
“What the hell do you mean, failed ironist?” Flyboy demanded.
“Saying one thing and meaning another, and not successfully doing both,” Armando replied, with a small smile, “is a failed ironist. Now you’re morphing into clueless failed ironist.”
Jed was amused at the byplay. Armando might be a handful at times, but he never failed to amuse him with his oddly wry observations.
Flyboy turned back to Jed. “I don’t think there’s anything ironic or clueless about my question. You still haven’t answered me.”
The younger man had been getting more and more protective about Helen, especially since her near-escape during the test operation. “She can take care of herself, Hunter,” Jed said.
“I’ve done as you told me to, kept an eye on her and been a friend when she has questions.” Flyboy looked around the table. “I think everyone should stop keeping her at arm’s length. She passed the test and successfully retrieved the SEED. If one of you guys weren’t around, I’d still ask about you.”
“I believe you haven’t asked where Diamond is,” Heath chimed in, mockery lacing his voice.
Sullivan leaned back in his chair and laughed. Even Shahrukh smiled at the dig.
“I know where Number One is,” Flyboy retorted. “Easy deduction, that. He’s gone after T. in Europe, what else?”
Jed hit the button that slid the middle of the briefing table open to allow the laser projection screen to activate. “Now we know who to ask when we need a SITREP of our unit,” he said laconically.
“All but Hell,” Heath pointed out. “He doesn’t know where Hell is.”
“Or whether she should or shouldn’t be joining us at our meetings,” Sullivan added.
“Meeting of the minds can be dangerous,” Armando offered another of his cryptic remarks.
Jed paused. His men—the elite COS Commandos—were in a snippy mood today indeed. It was always interesting when someone new joined the unit—a rare thing—what with the tightly organized functions of each of the nine. He looked around…when there used to be nine, he amended. There were now just seven of them. When Shahrukh had first joined the team, his size and presence, along with his royal blood line, caused some good old-fashioned male rivalry among some of the men before he was accepted.
His gaze rested on Armando for an instant. He still wasn’t one hundred percent sure whether Armando would make a good fit but he had the qualities that COS looked for. However, the Virus experimentation was taking its toll on the younger man. There was always a breaking point.
And now there was Helen Roston. How she would do in the long run remained to be seen. They hadn’t yet integrated her as part of the team.
“Hell’s still going through her RV downtime,” Jed said. “Perhaps she’s in her quarters, sleeping it off.”
He’d left her sleeping. An enforced sleep, but that couldn’t be helped. Much as he would prefer to spend the evening and night living out their sexual fantasies in the flesh, he had to attend to the meetings de Clerq had rescheduled for him. Perhaps later.
But right now, he had to focus on current ongoing missions, especially the one they’d been following all the way from Asia to East Europe. He activated the remote in his hand and the 360 degree-viewable screen slid into place. He did a quick test run. He rotated the map, pinpointed a spot on it, and zoomed. The map immediately enlarged, first giving the topological details, then a bird’s eye view of the area, and lastly a cross section of the metropolitan.
It had the desired effect. His men turned their attention to the screen.
Jed clicked as he spoke, letting the visuals carry the weight of the operation details. With the addition of the Admiral’s SEALs as well as independent contractors in the mix, his men had very little time to personally keep up with the new faces.
“Our contact in Velesta, Hawk McMillan, has gotten back to me with coordinates that could lead us to the missing explosive device. We know that the illegal shipments were dropped by the CIA in crates into Macedonia. The good news is that the device is still in one of those crates, meaning, Dilaver hasn’t seen it or sold it yet. The bad news is, someone is deliberately robbing Dilaver whenever his shipments are on the road and he’s getting low in funds. That means he’ll be desperate to sell quickly and is antsy to get to his caches. That squeezes our time frame even more.”
“Who’s robbing Dilaver?” Sullivan asked. “Not that I don’t approve, but I thought he was the big shot in that area. Isn’t everyone either paying him or in his pocket?”
“Apparently, someone started to take advantage of Dilaver’s short holiday in Asia,” Jed said.
That was when the drug lord had tried to do business with the Triads and failed miserably, with some inside tinkering from Jed personally. Then, with the help of a team of SEALs doing most of the damage, COS Command had successfully shut down one of the veins that fed the heart of the illegal drug industries in that region.
Jed liked how things were going. The joint venture with the SEALs had paid off handsomely so far, enabling them to play some power games with different illegal arms dealers while looking for the missing explosive device. “Hawk told me that our Croat warlord came home to millions lost from these highway robberies. What with our taking his cache in Asia, I’d say that Dilaver is feeling the pain in his pocketbook.”
Sullivan snorted. “Good. I wish we could be like the SEALs and just blow scum like him away,” he said.
“We don’t like to do things the easy way,” Armando remarked.
“There’s no easy way to kill cancer, Chang,” Heath said. “You zap one cell and it keeps dividing elsewhere. The only way is to infect it from the inside.”
Jed nodded. That was their way.
Unlike the SEALs, who were trained to search and destroy, COS Commandos were conditioned in the Virus Program to attack like an organism. They specialized in targeting a system from within, sometimes using the enemy’s own strengths to destroy it. In the case of Dilaver, with his army of mercenaries and regional warlords, their task had been to find out his strange connection to the CIA and how he came to be on the receiving end of special weapon drops. Then COMCEN could use this knowledge to trap bigger prey. Special ops, such as the SEALs, were usually not interested in insidious warfare. Which was fine with Jed; they all had their own battle zones.
“Hawk must get closer to Dilaver soon,” Heath continued. “No one gets close to those caches of weapons unless he’s in Dilaver’s trusted circle.”
“He’s already been on a trip with Dilaver, so that’s the first step,” Jed told them and clicked on the remote to show an aerial map. “The coordinates show a large area. Several shipments, well hidden in rough mountainous terrain. Finding the exact location will take some time and with Dilaver’s army of mercenaries lying in wait at checkpoints, we can’t send in too large a search party.”
“It’s strange to be on the outside, Jed, letting some other group have the action,” Sullivan said. “What’s our job at this point? Take a team in there to search for the caches?”
“Sometimes it’s good to study how others tackle a certain problem,” Heath commented. “Look at our GEM division. If they’d taken on this stage, they’d handle the situation differently.”
Jed nodded again. “Of course they would handle the operation from an entirely different angle. I’ve already pointed out the impracticality of using our female assets, especially with the time factor. We’re dealing with a man who uses and sells young girls. It’d be very difficult to get him to confide in a woman about weapons. So inserting Hawk McMillan into Dilaver’s stronghold is the best option. It frees us for the rest of Phase Three, which we’ll run through right now to make sure we’re all on the same page. We have a lot on our plates what with what has happened in D.C.”
Ever since their team had initiated Phase Three and successfully managed to corner the CIA moles, the rats—so to speak—had been scattering back to their holes. Which was what they’d wanted. COMCEN’s agenda was to follow each trail and infiltrate so they could find out more about this extensive network of spies who had been poisoning the system for so long.
It had taken them a long time to get to this point and Jed could feel a breakthrough coming. Finally—finally—after all these years, he would be able to crush a few enemies that had cost the lives of his friends.
“Admiral Madison is doing a great job there too, making sure that the Intelligence Committee investigates all the suspicious cases from the last ten years,” Flyboy said.
“Yes, having met that man a few times, I think he should run for office,” Sullivan added.
“Are you crazy, dude? That’s the end of life as he knows it. He can forget about finding out traitors and getting to the bottom of this mess we’re in. We don’t need him running around making promises he won’t keep.” Flyboy scratched his nose with his pen. “No, we want him just as he is.”
“True.” Sullivan leaned back. “So I gather I keep on doing what I’ve been doing, putting together the missing weapons puzzle, right? Jed?”
Jed blinked. Part of him had been listening to the conversation, but a part of him was busy registering that strange prickly sensation at the base of his neck. He’d felt it before—when he was looking down at Cummings’ body. What the hell was it?
He looked at his team. Everyone was at ease, throwing out ideas and speculations in their usual informal style. They were a tightly knit group. If anything was wrong, these men would all feel it. No, this feeling was uniquely his.
Sullivan was gazing back at him questioningly, waiting for his reply. They were used to his short pauses, so his little silence hadn’t been noticed. He caught Armando’s speculative gaze. Except by one. Armando was looking at him too closely. Did he have the same odd feeling too?
Jed double-clicked the remote. “Quick update. The missing weapons are showing up at odd places. The explosive device is in Macedonia. We just retrieved the SEED in Germany. What do you have for us at your end, Sullivan?”
Sullivan and Shahrukh were their weaponry and battle experts. Sullivan had connections with the West and Shahrukh, the East. The two of them worked well together, and in spite of very different demeanors, they had become very close friends, so much so that they were mocked as the twins at COMCEN.
Sullivan grinned and turned to Shahrukh. “Wait till they hear what we have.”
Shahrukh responded with a mere lift of his dark eyebrow.
“First, we’ll simplify each missing element,” Sullivan said, counting off with his fingers. “An explosive device, practically undetectable. A decoder, one that’s being designed by quantum scientists. The entire design of our newest flight simulator. A captured and still missing spy plane. That’s just the big list. Shahrukh?”
“With some help from T., we’ve traced certain monetary movements through off-shore accounts belonging to some of our suspects,” Shahrukh obligingly continued, his soft accent more pronounced than usual, betraying a little bit of his excitement. “We matched dates and events. There’s an emerging pattern.”
“Former KGB handlers and their leftover moles in different agencies,” Sullivan interrupted triumphantly.
“It seems that the fall of the Soviet Union didn’t necessarily mean the fall of the KGB powers. Through all these years, they’ve continued using their extensive network to collect intelligence for use to shore up their weakening base, waiting for the right time to push back,” Shahrukh said.
“As shown in the current CIA nightmare,” Sullivan finished up.
Jed looked from one man to the other. The “twins” made an odd couple, what with Sullivan’s cowboy attitude about everything and Shahrukh’s more introverted personality, but they shared an innate passion for history and old weaponry. Jed had listened to them in deep discussion about the roles of knights and the different weaponry used in ancient war. Every strategy was discussed; every role was replayed. It was interesting to see the two men challenging each other in mental warfare and reenacting battle after battle from one side, then another.
To Jed, war was war was war. To his two teammates, war was some macho form of arts and crafts. He’d often found himself marveling at how Sullivan could manage to bring in the coaching decisions of a recent football game to argue against one of Shahrukh’s more esoteric theories about a famous ancient battle.
And if talking strayed into a real difference of opinion, those two had been known to reenact a one-on-one fight right there at the gym. Sullivan always started it, of course. He was competitive like that. Shahrukh, Jed suspected, went along just to amuse himself.
“So where do you think this is leading?” he asked, ignoring the twinge to look at the entrance expectantly. The others would know soon enough. “Proposals?”
“We—”
The buzzing of the exterior door interrupted Sullivan. The commandos turned to look at the monitor above to see who it was. Usually it would be one of their own—T. or Diamond—but they weren’t in the country. Any other personnel, even de Clerq, would announce themselves through the intercom first.
Jed put down the remote in his hand. He already knew. It was Hell.
She pushed the interior door open, dark eyes sparkling, lips curled in a temper, all glorious raging Valkyrie.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” she paused long enough to announce, then stalked over and swung a fist at Jed.
He chose not to avoid it, only taking one step back and putting just enough distance to make sure the hit didn’t break his jaw. After what he’d done to her, he owed her.
Helen shook her hand, her shoulder stinging from the direct punch. Ouch. She hadn’t expected him to stay put like that.
All eyes were on her, of course. Couldn’t be helped. She w
as that pissed and this couldn’t wait. She looked at the man standing in front of her. Damn him. He wasn’t even rubbing his jaw, even though she’d decked him good. She could see a slight swelling starting up already.
She looked around again and casually shrugged. They all probably knew why she’d hit Jed McNeil, and if they didn’t, they would guess soon enough. Undoubtedly, they all had the same skills to seduce—she determinedly pushed away those thoughts and pulled out a chair.
“Sorry, please do continue.” She clenched and unclenched her slightly numbed hand. Damn, that hurt. “Since no one stopped me from entering, I’m assuming that it’s okay to be listening in on you guys.”
There was a short silence. Then Flyboy spoke up, “We were just wondering where you were.”
Hell held his blue eyes for a long second. Of all of them, she’d considered him her friend. Now she wasn’t sure any more. How much was his friendliness an act?
“I was asleep,” she told him grimly.
She wanted to pound on the table, but it wouldn’t do to let them see her losing it. Not yet. Her main target was him. She returned her gaze to Jed McNeil, who calmly picked up a remote from the table.
Oh, he had been so damn smart, hiding behind Hades in those dreams. She wasn’t sure yet how he’d managed to do that but she knew it was him. There was no mistaking those light eyes.
When she’d woken up, she’d instinctively understood what her inner voice had been telling her. She had mistaken her strange dream for what they called “lucid dreaming”, that state of consciousness that she often had when she was aware that she was sleeping and dreaming at the same time. Not only that, she had wrongly assumed that she’d invaded Hades’ dreams again.
Half-awake and still aroused, she’d allowed her mind to drift in search of those hands and lips, letting it wander off as she slowly surfaced. Then she’d experienced that odd dizzying sensation that she had had yesterday, catching a glimpse of dark hair and silvery eyes and this very room, before she was knocked sideways by the same blinding pain.
