On Thin Ice (Special Ops)

by Capri Montgomery

  Copyright © 2012 Shunta Montgomery

  All Rights Reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Publisher’s Note:

  On Thin Ice is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, event or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Capri Montgomery books are legally available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Lulu only. If you have received this book at another site, or from any other source, it is not a legal copy and you are aiding in breaking copyright laws. Please support the author, not the pirates. Please purchase and read legal copies only.

  Special Thanks

  Thank you, Barb, for catching the mistakes I missed. Your assist with editing has been wonderful.

  A special thanks to Nancy, Maurice, Pam, and Curly for helping spread the news about my books.

  Thanks to all of my readers for showing your support for my work by buying and reading my books.

  Books by Capri Montgomery

  Redemption

  Sworn to Secrecy

  Deliverance

  Hydra

  Explosive: Deadly Connections

  Shadow Hills (January – June series)

  Betrayal of the Dove

  Pirate’s Treasure

  Love’s Last Hope

  Fahrenheit

  Secrets and Lies

  Returning Sheba

  Saints and Sinners

  The McGregor Affair

  Dream Walker

  The Geneva Project

  The Admiral’s Daughter

  Dangerous Obsessions

  Watch Over Me

  Maid for Hire & Educating Australia

  And Many Others…

  Coming in December ~ Killing Hannah from the Men of Action Series.

  Chapter One

  Jethro Jackson slid along the muddy trench. When he took on this mission he had no idea he was going to end up crawling through mud. He figured it was a good thing he wasn’t afraid of getting a little dirty. He looked down at his arms and chest. “A lot dirty,” he mumbled to himself. This was the only way in without being detected. If he planned to get the package out alive, and himself for that matter, he needed to stay covert for as long as he could.

  When they got the call Preston hadn’t been thrilled in the least. It was another government contract. He laughed at that time because Preston seemed to hate taking those, but on the rare occasions that he did take one it was always highly important and always for somebody they all respected and probably owed a favor in one fashion or another. This time was no different. They were acting on a friend’s request.

  Their package was Nathan Hollows, a government nuclear physicist who had gotten himself in a “pickle,” as Edward Salsbury had said. Edward was Preston’s former team member. They had gone through boot camp together, served together up until Preston took on special operations missions and moved his way up the ranks rapidly while Edward put in his papers and went back to the civilian life with his wife and kids. He worked for the federal government, but he was long out of the military and he seemed perfectly happy about that. Preston had said Edward was his friend and he would always be his friend. That meant if he needed his help he would always have it, no matter the risk.

  Jet had drawn this mission because his skills fit the best for the rescue. They needed somebody who could get in and get out without notice and he was the best at that; they all knew that. It wasn’t that the other guys had a habit of getting caught it was just that Jet had a way of getting into extremely difficult places when nobody else thought it was possible.

  He didn’t mind drawing this mission. He loved his job, and the more missions he took the more skilled he would remain. Too long of a break in between made him risk becoming too comfortable with not putting his neck on the line to save somebody else. He loved his job, but he didn’t love the fact that he had just crawled through some horse manure. It was unavoidable because the trench seemed to have a small pile of it mixed in with the mud. He would guess all the rain had made the tiny mudslide that covered the horse manure on the top, but not enough to lessen the stench. They were going to smell him coming from a mile away. He frowned at the smell he now wore as it infiltrated his nostrils.

  Fifty more yards, that’s all he had to spend on his belly before he reached the entry point. He had a plan on how he was going to get in, and he had a plan for getting out with the package, but that was before he smelled like a truck of raw fertilizer. Maybe he would get lucky and they wouldn’t notice the stench. Yeah, right; just like they wouldn’t notice a heard of buffalo in their dining room, he thought.

  He made it the remaining fifty yards, surveyed his position to get a better look at his options, making sure the opportunity was still available for what he had planned. Deciding that it was, he quietly and covertly entered the facility. The room he needed was at the far corner of the hall. Of course it was. It would have been too easy if he didn’t have to try to make his way past the hostiles having their lunch in the room to his right, or the ones having a meeting in the room to his left. He didn’t have time to stick around for whatever it was they were discussing, although he would have loved to hear what they had planned. He was there for a reason and that reason was not unmasking a potential deadly plot. He had to get the package, get him out of there, and get them both back to the States alive and in one piece—with no holes in them other than the ones God had put in them.

  He navigated his way down the darkened slender corridor until he reached the room he needed access to. He didn’t have much time and he still needed to get the door unlocked. Watching his six and picking a lock wasn’t exactly a piece of cake, but he managed it swiftly and entered the room just the same.

  “What’s that smell?” Nathan turned around. “Who are you?”

  “The guy who’s here to save you,” he nearly snapped.

  “Why do you smell like that?”

  “Because I just crawled through horse manure to get in here to get your sorry—”

  Nathan held up his hand. “I got it,” he uttered the words calmly. “They’ve been rather good to me actually.”

  “Would you like to stay? I can arrange that you know.”

  “No. I’m ready to go,” he picked up his suit jacket and put it on as if he were just going for a walk in the park on a sunny afternoon. Nobody told Jet he was going to be rescuing a high maintenance idiot.

  “Am I going to get dirty?” Nathan brushed imaginary lint off his jacket.

  Jet growled low. “Yes,” he snapped. “And you’re probably going to have to crawl through horse sh—”

  “You don’t have to be so rude,” he straightened his tie. Was this guy serious? Did he really think they were just going to be able to walk out of there?

  “Stay behind me and don’t do anything stupid.” Jet checked to make sure the path was clear before exiting the room. He motioned for Nathan to come with him. They weren’t even four feet out the door when it all hit the fan.

  “Oh, I forgot my lab coat,” Nathan said rather loudly and that alerted the not so friendly hostage takers to their position. Well wasn’t that just dandy? Jet didn’t have time to think about how stupid this guy was.

  Jet uttered several expletives and took several shots while telling Nathan to leave the lab coat and move before he ended up dead. The mission
wasn’t going according to plan, not that such a thing hadn’t happened to him before. He had taken on missions where he had to improvise, but not because of something like this. The package had never so blatantly alerted their captors to their escape. He wasn’t happy that this package had done just that. He had planned to be out of the hot zone before they realized their scientist was gone. He had planned to be two klicks away from the plane that was going to take them back to the States; maybe closer if he could have managed it. Now, instead of relatively smooth sailing he was covered in horse crap, dragging along the equivalent of dead weight and being excessively shot at by not one, not two, not even three, but twelve bad guys with really big guns.

  “Oh hell,” he mumbled as he took several more shots and found his alternate route out the building. He had it mapped out. Thanks to Natalia he had all the information he needed so he knew exactly where the exits were and what was guarding those exits. She had really come through on this one. Her own sources had been the reason she was able to get the inside layout of the old music hall turned terrorist hold up. This should have gone so much smoother, but it hadn’t.

  “Keep moving!” If he had to tell the guy to keep moving again he was going to leave him behind. No, maybe he couldn’t do that. He always, always, returned with the package. He wouldn’t let this be the first time he didn’t. No matter how rough the waters became, or how hot the zone was, he would carry out his mission and right now his mission was to take this sniveling wimp home.

  “I’m tired,” Nathan bemoaned.

  “Tired or dead,” Jet snapped as he took aim at another guy closing in on them. “It’s up to you.” He kept moving and was glad to know Nathan had kept moving with him. He reached the vehicle he had stashed to take them the rest of the way to the plane. They were ten klicks away and he knew, or at least he hoped, that they could make it.

  He took off like the proverbial bat out of hell, taking the curves of the mountain roads fast.

  “Slow down,” Nathan told him.

  “Those guys aren’t far behind us. Once they get to their own vehicle they’ll be on us. We don’t have the luxury of slowing down.” He took another curve doing nearly eighty when the posted signs listed the speed at thirty-five. “Now stop distracting me.” He was doing fine with his attention to driving so far; he just didn’t want to hear Nathan continue to complain.

  Reaching the plane had been easy enough; getting Nathan on board had taken a miracle to restrain his fist from connecting with the man’s face and knocking him out. Nathan obviously felt that he could stop and take a breather. Jet shook his head wondering what the man needed a breather for when he had been sitting in the car through the entire drive.

  Fortunately Julian had seen them driving up so he knew they were coming in hot and he had started the plane. Once Nathan was up the steps and Jet cleared the door as well, he shut it, locked it and gave the order to hit it hard. “We have to go,” he told Julian because he knew the man would understand the brevity of the situation. Unlike Nathan, Julian hadn’t spent precious time harping on the smell he brought onto the plane with him.

  Jet sat a little easier knowing they were in the air, but not entirely easy because he didn’t know if these guys had access to a jet to come after them and cripple their escape. It wasn’t until they cleared U.S. airspace that he breathed easily. Breathing deeply wasn’t advisable because he stunk—badly. The guys were never going to let him off the hook for tracking horse crap onto the plane, but at least he had gotten the package out safely. Once he handled the handoff he was going home, strip out of those clothes and shower. Heck, he was going to have to strip before he went inside his house. He was going to have to strip in the front yard because there was no way he was going to have hardened horse dung all over his hardwood floors. Maybe he would just burn the clothing. It wasn’t as if he would be able to get that smell out of them—at least not real easily. Burning the clothes seemed like the best idea to him. He could start a bonfire right there in the patio fire pit, but that would probably stink up the area. Maybe he would just bag them and let the garbage men take care of it. His main concern was washing the crap off his body, and trying, to get the smell out of his nose.

  “Thank you,” Nathan’s voice pulled Jet out of his inner ramblings. “You risked your life for mine and I do appreciate that. I thought they would do something more diplomatic though.”

  Jet growled. The man had just thanked him and insulted his means of operation all at the same time.

  “I mean, using one’s brain is better than force.”

  Jet gripped the armrest on his chair. The only way a brain would be used in a situation like that would be if it were stopping a bullet. This guy didn’t realize the government had already tried the diplomatic approach and had gotten nowhere. They didn’t just call on his team because they were too lazy to try other avenues. They called on them because they were their last resort and his last chance at getting out of there alive. They could have risked their own SEAL team or even their own special ops extraction team, but they hadn’t. They had called in a favor from Preston and Jet was the man who got the assignment. At least they were getting paid well for this one. In fact, Preston had gotten a little better lately with demanding full payment upfront and the money was already in the account. They wouldn’t have to worry about the wheels on the government money mobile turning as slow as they usually did when they owed them money.

  They all loved the job, and they did it with honor, but at the end of the day they all had bills to pay. They all had responsibilities to live up to, and they all had the basic needs of life. They were for hire, and demanding their pay up front from everybody just made sense. They had all concluded that the government assignments shouldn’t get special treatment—not on the financial side of things anyway. There was no doubt that a few of those government assignments had gotten special treatment simply because the request came from somebody they held great respect for and had been connected to while in the military. If it weren’t for that there were probably a few government assignments they would have turned down.

  By the time he handled the handoff to a few not so enthused about his smell handlers, he was ready to find a place that was devoid of other humans. Preston had met him on the airstrip. “New cologne?” He had teased and Jet grumbled out something, he couldn’t even remember what at this point but he was sure it wasn’t anything nice. Preston had obviously taken the hint because he left him alone until all the paperwork of the handoff was signed and finalized.

  “Get your report to me as fast as you can, Jet. But um…shower first okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled. “Send me after a sniveling idiot who alerts the hostage takers to our exit because of his stupid lab coat.”

  “Bad rescue huh?”

  “I wanted to shoot him myself,” he grumbled. “Oh and since I went through hell you can take care of getting the stench out the plane.”

  Preston laughed. “I know it’s not funny, Jet, but this is the crankiest I’ve ever seen you after a mission. I think you need to ask Charlie to give you a rubdown or something.”

  “We broke up before I left,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” And on those words he was out the door, ready to haul tail to get home, get naked and get showered. The report would simply have to wait.

  Chapter Two

  Jet sat looking at the big screen monitor in the break room. He and Alex were holding down the fort while Preston went off on one of his own missions and Natalia and Micah finally got their honeymoon. He watched the woman on screen with keen interest. He could see the soft glow of her deep brown, almost ash eyes. Her eyes had a subtle slant that came from her mother’s side, the Japanese and Pilipino mix, and her skin had a slightly bronzed look that she definitely acquired through her father’s DNA. Aaron Bowman was a black man with light golden skin and hazel eyes. Akira had taken a hint of his color, but her skin color was different, l
ike a mix of both her mother and her father’s DNA shaken up to create a look that was exotic and unique.

  She took a lot of her strengths from her parents. Her mother, Sakura, was a homemaker. She was the woman who was in charge of making sure Akira had the best homeschooling education, was always on time for her training, and never went lacking in the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter and love. She was really the glue that held the family together. Her hard work, support and determination to make sure Akira was able to reach her best potential had really helped the family keep functioning.

  Aaron’s role in the family wasn’t small by any means. He was tall and moderately skinny and while people may have underestimated his strength, they never underestimated his intelligence. The man hadn’t worked his way up to being a multibillionaire by being lazy or stupid. He had worked hard. He had instilled that same work ethic in his daughter. He had even installed an ice rink on their property so she could practice without needing to schedule private ice time. He had hired the best trainers for her from the skating trainer to her ballet instructor, Aaron made sure Akira had what she needed to reach her skating goals. She had one Olympic gold medal, but had also won several World Figure Skating Championships and U.S. Figure Skating Championships. She had sometimes, in her early career, placed second, taking home the silver twice, but once she started placing first she held on to that ranking.