by Paige Tyler
“And since this area isn’t being overrun with MPs, I’m guessing they’ve disabled the alarm inside each bunker as well,” Trevor added. “Which means they’re better than good—or they have the frigging security codes.”
Alina turned her attention away from the dozen men in army camouflage who were working fast to load four large military cargo trucks with crates of ammo and looked at Trevor crouched beside her in the darkness. “You seriously think someone on this base gave these guys access to military weapons?”
Trevor shrugged. “My source said there might be high-level military personnel involved. Considering how easily these guys slipped on base, the fact that there was nobody manning the gates of the ammunition supply point, and the way they seem to know exactly which bunkers to break into to find what they’re after, I’d say he was right.”
Alina itched to ask Trevor who the hell his source was but restrained herself. By including her on this mission, he was obviously willing to extend the proverbial olive branch to her. She wasn’t going to push her luck now and mess everything up. She’d said she was going to do whatever was necessary to win his trust. Right now, that simply meant trusting him first.
“I don’t know. We didn’t seem to have any problems slipping onto the base, either,” she pointed out. “Maybe they bought their fake IDs from the same place you got ours.”
Trevor chuckled softly. “Somehow, I doubt that.”
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Not surprising. Trevor might have trusted her enough to bring her along, but that didn’t keep him from being tight-lipped about the mission, especially about who’d given it to them. He’d simply shown up at Sage’s prison dorm and told Alina he needed her help slipping onto an active duty military installation on the off chance that a group of thieves might show up and steal some military weapons.
At first, she’d thought he was joking. She couldn’t understand why the DCO would send the two of them onto an army base to confront people who sounded an awful lot like terrorists. What the heck did Dick expect them to do?
But on the drive up to the sprawling military research and development base located two hours north of DC, it dawned her on that this probably wasn’t a DCO mission at all. She wanted to ask Trevor if this had something to do with Thorn but decided to trust him. After everything she’d seen the past few days, trusting Trevor was becoming easier by the minute. She hadn’t trusted anyone in a long time and had been afraid she never would again. She was glad to see that wasn’t the case.
“We need to move closer,” Trevor whispered. “See if we can identify who these people are and what they’re taking.”
“Then what?” she asked. “Are we going to try to take them down?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’re seriously outnumbered, so I guess it’s going to depend on how heavily armed they are. If we have to, we’ll stick a tracking device onto one of their vehicles and see where they lead us, then call in the cavalry once their guard is down.”
Alina nodded, liking the sound of that. She wasn’t thrilled about letting these guys off the base with four truckloads worth of ammo and explosives, but it was better than getting into a gunfight and losing.
She climbed to her feet and followed Trevor around the back of the bunker they’d been hiding behind. As they moved in a wide circle toward the bad guys’ trucks, they used other bunkers along the way to conceal themselves when they could, keeping to the heavy shadows anytime they had to cross open ground. Hopefully, the men stealing the ammo were too focused on what they were doing to notice anyone sneaking up on them.
Alina would have preferred to have the SUV closer, in case they either had to run like hell or chase someone, but it would have been too risky, so they’d left it half a mile back. As they approached the trucks, Alina checked out the scene with her night-vision binoculars, looking for any details she could see. That’s when she realized there was something odd about some of the crates the men were loading into the trucks. She wasn’t an expert on army munition containers, but she’d seen enough in her former job to know there was something unusual about the stuff they were stealing.
“Why do those ammo boxes look bigger than the U.S. ammo containers I’m used to seeing?” she whispered to Trevor as they both dropped to one knee.
Trevor’s eyes flared vivid yellow, then went back to their normal color. “Because they’re foreign.”
“What do you mean, foreign?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the scene in front of him. “You probably can’t see the writing from here, but I can. It’s Russian. Mostly infantry type stuff—small arms ammo, hand and rocket-propelled grenades, and explosives.”
Okay. That didn’t seem right. “What’s Russian ammo doing in an American depot?”
“The army stores lots of foreign ammo at Aberdeen,” he explained. “It’s held for intelligence exploitation, to train Special Forces teams, even to support overseas operations conducted by our allies in places like Syria and Iraq.”
Huh. She’d never thought about where ammo like that was stored.
They moved closer, but after a few dozen feet, Trevor put out his hand to stop her.
“What is it?” she asked softly.
Trevor sniffed the air, then looked at her, his eyes glowing yellow again.
“I swear I smell shifters, but the scent isn’t quite right.”
Her jaw dropped. “Crap! If you’re smelling them, do we have to worry about them smelling us, too?”
He shook his head. “We’re approaching from downwind, so we should be good. But stay quiet. If I’m right and there are shifters here, we have to be worried about them hearing us.”
Up ahead, several of the men climbed into two of the trucks. As she and Trevor ducked down in the grass along the edge of the road, the vehicles cranked up with a loud rumble and headed toward the gate of the ammo area.
“We have to move,” Trevor whispered. “Before the other two trucks get loaded up and take off.”
Alina pulled her pistol out as she rose to her feet. She and Trevor picked up the pace, closing the last twenty feet between them and the nearest truck. It sounded like there were still at least half a dozen men on the other side of it. Maybe this was even crazier than she’d thought. What the hell were they going to do against six men, especially if one—or more—of them were shifters?
“Move a little closer, and see if you can get a good look at these guys while I plant a tracking device on the truck,” Trevor said. “Then we’ll pull back and follow them.”
She was in complete agreement with that plan. She made her way to the front of the big five-ton truck while Trevor headed for the rear of the vehicle. She was just about to lean down and poke her head around the high bumper when a tall figure stepped out from around the front of the truck right into her path.
She froze, her blood going cold.
Wade.
He was taller and broader than she remembered, but it was him. A hundred different emotions rolled through her all at once—shock, denial, anger, fear.
Wade seemed just stunned as she was, and they stood there for what seemed like forever, staring at each other. Then a slow smile spread across his face, revealing a mouthful of long fangs.
“I was wondering when we’d see each other again,” he said, his eyes flaring red.
Her eyes widened as his arm came up and he aimed his gun at her. She tried to get her weapon up in time, but Wade was so much faster than she was. Faster than she could imagine anyone being.
Something slammed into her side, knocking her off her feet just as Wade pulled the trigger. The bullet missed her, hitting the asphalt where she’d been standing.
She braced for impact, expecting to hit the pavement, but instead, Trevor tucked her to his chest and hit the ground rolling.
They ended up in the shallow ditch alongside the bunker access road. Trevor im
mediately came up to return fire against Wade and the other men who had raced to join him. Alina quickly got her act together and came up on one knee. For a second, everything flashed back to that same desperate and futile stand she and her old team had made in Turkey so many years ago. Even the zing of the bullets zipping right past them sounded the same. Any moment, Trevor would go down, just like Rodney and Fred and Jodi.
No, dammit! Things weren’t going that way. Not again.
Firing a few more rounds in Wade’s direction, she turned and put several bullets through the big gas tank mounted beneath the cab of the truck. Fuel sprayed everywhere, quickly followed by a whoosh of flames.
The men near the truck scrambled away as fire engulfed the vehicle. Wade pulled back, too, but kept shooting in her direction. She heard him growling in anger as he yelled at the other men not to kill her.
“She’s mine!”
Alina stood and moved toward him, climbing out of the slight protection of the ditch, screaming right back at the man who had killed her teammates three years ago. She had no idea what she was shouting. All she knew was she couldn’t let this man—this monster—get away.
Strong arms wrapped around her, yanking her off her feet and carrying her away from the burning truck. Some part of her mind recognized that it was Trevor, but she fought against him anyway, not understanding why he was trying to stop her from getting to Wade.
Then the truck exploded, picking up both her and Trevor and tossing them in the air like an angry giant. They hit the ground hard, slamming the breath out of her and sending pain jolting through her body. She felt the heat from the fire wash over her back a second later, making her wonder if her clothes might burst into flames.
She crawled to her feet, ignoring the ammunition in the back of the still-burning truck as it continued to explode, throwing metal fragments and flaming debris everywhere. There were two bodies lying near the center of the blast, but she doubted either of them was Wade. He was too evil to go down that easily. She moved to the side, in the direction he’d disappeared, trying to get an angle where she would have a shot at the bastard.
She caught sight of him climbing in the passenger door of the last truck as it pulled away. She fired the few remaining rounds in her weapon, dropped the magazine, reloaded, then started to fire again as fast as she could. She put at least nine rounds into the cab of the rapidly departing truck, sure she must have hit Wade at least once.
“We have to get out of here!” Trevor shouted, taking her hand and yanking her farther away from the burning truck, the fire, and the ammo that was still cooking off in the flames like giant pieces of popcorn.
She knew he was right. If one of the chunks of steel zipping out of the flames hit them, they’d be dead. Even realizing that, it was damn hard to let him pull her away.
She kept shooting as they backpedaled away, putting one round after another as it disappeared from sight, praying she’d hit something in the cargo area and make it explode just like the first one had.
No such luck.
When she ran out of ammo, she practically screamed in frustration. She looked at Trevor. “Should we chase them?”
He shook his head. “No. By the time we get back to our vehicle, they’ll already be halfway across the base. Besides, we’re both out of ammo. What would we do if we catch them, throw harsh words at them? We need to get out of here before the MPs show up and start wondering what the hell happened here.”
Dammit. She’d had Wade right in front of her, and he got away. But she nodded and started jogging with him toward their vehicle.
“At least tell me you got the tracking device into their truck,” she said.
“Damn right,” Trevor said. “Unfortunately, I attached it to the underside of the truck you decided to blow up, so I don’t think it’s going to help us very much.”
“Crap on a stick!”
He glanced at her as they ran. “I’m guessing you know that guy pretty well?”
“Yeah, you could say that. He got my entire CIA team killed a few years ago. I’ve been hunting him ever since.”
Trevor looked at her in surprise, his expression suggesting he was waiting for her to say more. Instead, she saved her breath so she could run faster. This wasn’t the right time or place for a conversation. They needed to get the hell out of there.
When they got to the SUV and climbed in, Trevor cranked the vehicle, then floored it, spinning through the grass and squawking the tires as they reached the asphalt, and racing for the gates of the ASP.
“Silly question, but I’m guessing that guy wasn’t a hybrid when you were working with him back in the CIA?”
“No. I think I would have noticed the fangs. They kind of stand out.”
“Yeah, they do.”
He didn’t say anything else for a while, not until they were out of the ASP and hauling ass through the narrow back roads that crisscrossed these remote parts of Aberdeen. Only when they were far enough away from the ammo depot and weren’t likely to get rolled up in whatever perimeter the MPs might put around the area did Trevor finally look at her.
“You’re probably not going to believe this, but we actually got what we came here for tonight.”
Alina frowned. “I’m not sure if you noticed, but those guys got away with a lot of ammunition and explosives.”
“Yeah, they did,” he agreed. “Three truckloads worth without us getting a tracking device on them. And the guy you were trying to kill got away, too. I know that bothers you even more.”
Alina couldn’t stand hearing that last part. “Yeah, don’t remind me. Just explain how you think we got what we came here for.”
“Because, while I would have liked to stop those guys from escaping and get the man who killed your teammates, at the end of the day, we were sent here to get a look at these people and figure out what they were doing. We did that—and more.”
“We did?”
“We know they were stealing Russian ammunition, you know the man who was running the operation, and we have undeniable proof the theft was conducted on the orders of Thomas Thorn.”
She stared at him as they entered the main part of the base, then pulled off the road as MP vehicles and fire trucks sped past them, heading the other way. She was suddenly tired of not knowing what was going on in this organization…and on this team.
“What the hell does Thomas Thorn have to do with any of this?” she demanded. “Why does he want Russian ammunition, and how the hell is Wade connected to him? And for that matter, who sent us on this mission to begin with? Because it sure as hell wasn’t Dick. And when the hell were you planning to clue me in to all these damn secrets you’ve obviously been keeping from me from the beginning?”
After the emergency vehicles passed them, Trevor could have pulled onto the road and kept going. But instead, he sat there. “You’re right. I have been keeping a lot of secrets from you. Something tells me you’ve been keeping more than a few of your own, too. We can’t do that anymore. It’s time we go somewhere and have a discussion we probably should have had the first day we met.”
* * *
“I can’t believe Dick bugged my apartment.” Alina glared at the tall glass filled with water and micro listening devices that was sitting on her kitchen counter. “That bastard.”
“We can’t be sure it was Dick,” Trevor pointed out as he picked up the glass and tried to count the number of bugs that had been planted around his partner’s place. He quickly gave up—it was like counting gumballs in a vending machine. If Alina had this many hidden microphones in her place, he could only imagine how many his apartment contained. “It could just as likely have been Thorn who ordered it. Though I do have to agree with you on one point—Dick is a bastard.”
They’d only learned about the bugs because Trevor had called Adam on the way back from Aberdeen to give him an update on what had happened
there and tell him that they were heading to her apartment.
“I’m going to tell her everything,” Trevor had added.
“You know her apartment is probably bugged, right?” Adam had pointed out.
“Any chance you can do something about that?”
“I can,” Adam had said. “As long as you realize you’ll be tipping Dick and Thorn off that you’re onto their surveillance. That may cause complications for both of you later.”
Trevor was aware of that. But he and Alina needed to get a lot of stuff out in the open, and the best place to do that was somewhere she’d feel comfortable.
“Understood,” he had told Adam. “Think you can have the place swept within the hour?”
Adam had assured him he would.
“What was that about?” Alina had asked when he’d hung up.
That was when he’d told her that her place had almost certainly been wired for sound from the moment she’d accepted the job at the DCO.
Needless to say, she hadn’t been happy about it. Muttering under her breath, she’d texted her friend Kathy and said she was coming home but that she’d need some privacy for the night so she and Trevor could deal with some stuff, then asked if Kathy could keep Molly for a bit longer.
“How do we know this friend of yours was able to find all the bugs?” she asked now, taking the water glass from his hand and giving it a shake.
He took the glass back from her and set it firmly on the counter. “Adam, and the people he employs, are very good at what they do. If they say the apartment has been cleared, it’s clear.”
She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “I guess that brings me to my next question. Do you work for Adam? Is he the one who’s been sending us all over the place the past few days?”
Alina had been patient on the drive back to DC, asking a few questions but essentially waiting until they got back here to get into anything serious. He supposed now was finally the time to talk about it. But looking at Alina, her face and hair smudged with black soot from the fire, her clothes torn and burnt in places from the flying debris and the impact of being thrown to the ground, she looked tired. Judging by how slowly she’d walked up the stairs earlier, beat up as well. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t concerned about her. It was all he could do not to pull her into his arms. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants instead.
