by KL Donn
Missing in Action
Task Force 779 Book 1
KL Donn
Copyright © 2019 by KL Donn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Editing: KA Matthews
Photographer: Paul Henry Serres
Model: Simon Cooki
Design & Formatting: Sensual Graphic Designs
Created with Vellum
Contents
Introduction
Synopsis
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by KL Donn
Introduction
This has been a long time coming you guys.
* * *
I wanted to take a quick minute to explain why…
* * *
I started writing Missing in Action in April of 2017… 10 years after I lost my baby. There was 10 years of regret… 10 years of pain… 10 years of sorrow piled into the prologue of this story.
* * *
Everything I felt when I was 20 years old and losing a child I wasn’t ready for has been poured into this story. All of Codie’s feelings of self doubt, fear, pain… the damage that course’s through her veins…
* * *
It’s all mine.
* * *
The anxiety and helplessness was so overwhelming for so long that when I finally started this journey with Ryder and Codie, I didn’t think I would make it to the end.
* * *
And now here I am, finalizing Missing in Action on April 16th, 2019, exactly 12 years after hearing the words – you lost the baby – and I’m more than ready to share this journey with you.
* * *
I hope you have tissues, because you’re going to need them.
* * *
Thanks for not giving up on me when I kept putting MiA off.
* * *
XOXO
Krystal
Synopsis
Ryder Morrison is a man of loyalty. To his country, his family, his team.
* * *
After joining the Navy, he was secretly recruited to Task Force 779, a specialized unit that infiltrates dangerous situations when no one else can—or will. As the communications expert, it’s his job to clear the way for a smooth mission. He knows where the enemy is hidden at all times and when his team can enter a zone safely.
When things go wrong and he’s captured, declared dead before a search can truly begin, Ryder knows that when he makes his way home, his life will be different…better. He’ll live for himself from now on, instead of following where duty takes him.
* * *
Enter his elusive neighbor…
A woman of mystery and fear.
* * *
Codie Ray is a woman filled with pain. Afraid of life and locked away.
* * *
She counts to soothe the anxiety. She watches her neighbor because he’s her only lifeline to the outside world. He’s a commitment she doesn’t have to worry will break her. Until the unthinkable happens and her solace is intruded upon.
Ryder comes to the rescue and barges his way into her life, pushing past her barriers, causing Codie to rethink her reclusive lifestyle. Slowly being tormented with mind games from an unknown predator, she battles her better judgment and trusts Ryder to do what he does best…hunt down the perpetrator.
* * *
Their connection is instantaneous. Two broken people yearning to be loved but afraid to reach for it. Codie fears Ryder will leave when he discovers just how damaged she is. Ryder worries Codie will remain locked away in her mind, unable to break free.
* * *
A surprise mission brings both of their fears to life, and when the walls crumble, Ryder is Missing in Action while Codie is just…missing. Will they find each other again or will they disappear, existing only in a memory?
Dedication
Codie Louise
My crazy Aussie girl
Codie Ray gets her strength from you
Her resilience is yours
The optimism in a dark time is brought on by your humor, your love, and your general desire to make the world more than what it is
Codie, this one’s for you
Prologue
Codie
“Push, Codie, you have to push harder!” I want to slap the insensitive doctor upside her fool head as she yells at me.
Don’t they get it? I don’t want to push. Pushing will make it real.
All the pain and suffering from the past twenty-four hours have left me a shell of skin and bones.
I don’t want to push.
“I can’t,” I cry, and a nurse comes to me with a cool cloth to dab my overheated face. The pain that’s continually ripping through me is almost unbearable.
The hurt I’ll feel soul deep in the next few minutes will be consuming.
“Please, Codie, just one more, and it will all be over,” the doctor pleads again.
I look around the room, and all I see is pity. They know what’s about to happen. The insurmountable suffering that’ll occur when they hand him to me.
They know there won’t be a cry of life.
That first breath of air that should fill his tiny lungs was taken away before he could experience it.
They know this is my last day of feeling anything but agony.
I won’t survive it, and yet, I push anyways. They count, one, two, three. My tears are mixed with my cries, and I forge on. My mind drifts to a time when I felt his little foot kicking me. When he’d roll over and press on my bladder just as I was falling to sleep. To the morning sickness at three a.m. I’d take it all over again just to watch his chest rise and fall.
It won’t happen, and I’m living a nightmare, only digging myself deeper into depression as I think of all the firsts we’ll never get to have.
I wasn’t ready for a baby. I had been barely seventeen when he came along, but with time, I wanted him more than anything else in my life. I ached to hold and kiss him. Cuddle him when he got cranky.
I wanted him to be my entire world.
Not shatter it.
“Nurse,” the doctor calls, handing my son off to her as he’s finally free from my body. I can’t bear to look, so I turn away, silent tears streaming down my face. “Codie?” I gaze at the doctor. “One more push to expel the placenta.” Her words are hushed.
My body does as she asks, but my mind checks out. I’m selfish, and I hate it. I hate myself for getting into this predicament in the first place. I shouldn’t have trusted idiotic Jason Jones when he said he loved me. I was stupid and naïve. His parents tossed a couple hundred bucks at me to abort my baby. I refused; they moved. I don’t even know where to. I do know that I’m left to clean up the mess.
My parents kicked me out, and I’ve been roaming from shelter to shelter up until the last few weeks when a social worker found me begging for food behind some Chinese resta
urant. She’d taken me in, fed, and clothed me. Amber became the family I’d never really been given.
Recently, she had to go back home because her dad had a heart attack. I didn’t want to bother her when I realized something was wrong with the baby, so I kept quiet and came here alone. I hadn’t felt him moving in quite a while, and the baby website I’d found said it wasn’t normal and to get to the hospital.
I was rushed to the maternity ward where two nurses and a doctor have been with me ever since. Now, here I am broken, lost, and alone. I wish Hell would open up and take me away.
“Codie,” a nurse says quietly, “would you like to hold your son?”
No! Yes, comes out instead. She smiles at me like it’s some happy fucking occasion. As my little one is placed in my arms, my entire soul shatters. I’ll never get it back. It’ll go to the grave with my baby boy. “What will happen to him?” I ask the nurse as she sits next to me.
“Would you like to name him?” she inquires instead of answering me.
My gaze drifts to his tiny body. His tender head with my nose and lips. Perfect chubby cheeks. Dark fuzzy hair only starting to grow on his head. I wish I could have known him. He would have been strong; he’d have made me proud. He was supposed to be the one good thing in my life.
“Lucas,” I say, and a sob, so loud it startles the other nurses in the room, rips from deep within me. Pouring all the pain and heartache I feel into the one single sound.
The nurse grabs my hand, squeezing and offering her support as she explains what will happen to my sweet boy. As she lists my options, I notice her own sadness, and I’m left to wonder how many times she’s had to recite this very same information to other parents, and briefly, I offer her my support for her own pain.
Ryder
* * *
Wiping the sweat from my brow, I silently curse as my team waits for word on whether we move in or not. We’ve been staking out a Syrian drug lord for nearly six weeks because the asshole keeps setting up sweatshops and forcing underage kids to work for him.
Sometimes they would make cheap clothes or shoes. Other times, like now, they were cooking meth and heroine. Two things kids should never know exist.
I’ve been tasked with finding out as much intel as I can. As the IT expert on our team, I get the fun job of sitting in hot fucking huts while the rest of my crew hunts these bastards down.
Being part of Task Force 779—yeah, that’s it, just a number—is the best and worst part of my life. No one can know I was recruited straight off the ship that I was assigned to after boot camp three years ago. However, I get to bring hope to the helpless. I free hostages, take out drug rings. Track weapons and terrorists from all over the world.
What we do might not be acknowledged by any branch of the service but my team and the President himself, but we don’t do it for the glory or fame. We do it because no one else is capable of maneuvering into the situations we are placed in.
Working behind the computer often leaves me feeling unfulfilled. Like I’m not doing enough. Even though without my knowledge and hacking skills, my team wouldn’t be able to get into some of the places they do.
“Tac, where’s he at?” Out team leader, Nix ‘Knot’ Bishop, asks me through our comms.
“Southwest corner, basement,” I relay back to him. I don’t think Nix has called me by my real name since the day we met. Because of my position and expertise on our team, he’s switched it to Tac, and it’s stuck ever since.
“Close to a window?” Knot asks.
Zooming in on the infrared device attached to the drone I have hovering above the grounds, I check his position and compare it to the floor plans displayed on another screen in front of me.
“Three feet, dead center.”
“Phantom, you have the green light,” Knot tells Theo Burkhart, our team sniper. He hasn’t missed a shot in his ten years in the business. He’s called Phantom because no one ever knows he’s around until the shots are fired, and they never see him leave.
Silence reigns as Phantom does his thing. A puff of air and a man seen falling on my screen is the only indication that he’s taken the shot.
“One down, Tac.”
“Where’s the second in command?” Knot asks roughly, sounding slightly out of breath.
“Find yourself a friend, Knot?” Phantom asks as I search for the missing target.
“Big fucking bastard,” our team leader complains.
“Gotcha,” I murmur as I see the scumbag running for the back shed. “Heads up, Chaos. He’s coming your way in 5, 4, 3, 2—” A loud boom shakes the ground as Foster Halsey sets off an explosive device.
“Cocksucker,” he grumbles. “I wasn’t done with that one.”
“How the hell weren’t you done? That son of a bitch knocked me on my ass,” Weston “Shaker” Green, our team medic, complains. For such a careful and selective man, he always finds himself a little too close to Chaos’ homemade devices.
“Stay the hell back when I’m playing then. Pussy.” Chaos tends to get pissy when we distract him from building a bigger explosive than is often necessary.
“Did you take that guy out or what?” Knot snaps. He’s all for joking around and letting off steam, but only once the mission is finished.
“Yeah, he’s flying in the breeze now.” Chaos chuckles.
“Rendezvous in ten, and we’re out of here,” Knot informs us. “Tac, what’s the ETA on our helo?”
“Fifteen minutes out.” I’m distracted as I’m checking over the device that Chaos left for me to blow up the tiny shack I’ve been sequestered in and then removing my existence from this dessert hell that I don’t hear someone entering behind me.
It isn’t until I feel a prick in my neck that I spin around and see three masked men with rifles in their hands pointed at me. As I reach for my sidearm, my arms become sluggish, my head spins, and it feels like I’m floating through a tunnel as they speak to me.
“Tac?” I can hear Knot calling through my comm. “Goddammit, Morrison, answer me!” I recognize the worry and anger in his voice.
Steadying myself, I’m able to get one single thought out, “Get on that helo, sir,” before blackness takes me under.
Chapter 1
Codie
Three years later
You can do this.
One more step.
Keep going.
My body sways forward as my feet stop dead in their tracks. My life wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to be happy, healthy. The world was going to be my oyster!
Until it wasn’t.
Now, I’m this little nobody girl that can barely function. I have no friends. No family. Nothing but the UPS man that delivers my packages and the girl that delivers my groceries each week.
I’m nobody.
I’m nothing.
I’m the freak the entire block talks about. The stupid girl that can’t leave her house. The girl with no courage. The day I lost Lucas, my whole life spiraled out of control. I couldn’t focus long enough to put one foot in front of the other.
When I lost my baby, I thought, for a fleeting moment, that my family would accept me again. I thought they would help me heal.
I was wrong. I’m always wrong. Everyone in my life that I should have ever been able to count on has let me down.
And so, I’ve moved half way across the country from Rapid City, South Dakota to a busy, unexplored city. In fact, since arriving in Charleston, West Virginia, I haven’t done anything outside of my home.
The shrink I speak to on the phone once a week says I’m borderline agoraphobic, and I need to try and push myself to step outside. Open the windows. Feel the sun on my skin. She cautions that the moment I take that first step, I’ll be so overcome by such deep and intense emotion that I’ll have a panic attack, and that it’s okay. That I should embrace it until I can’t anymore.
She asked me to open the door today, take three steps back, and count to thirty before giving in to my need
to lock myself inside once again. I’m standing within reach of the door handle, just one step closer, and I could open it.
One step.
Only one.
Except… I can’t.
I’m paralyzed by fear that when I breach that barrier, that when I feel the breeze and the sun, I’ll be consumed by Lucas. His loss. His tiny body in my arms. I’m terrified I won’t be able to climb back out of the depression I get swamped in.
“You can do this, Codie Ray. You have to do this.”
Solidified by hearing those words spoken out loud, I take that final step to the door. Unlocking the three deadbolts and the chain, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, turn the handle, and pull.
One, two, three…
Ryder
* * *
Heal. Recover. Trauma.
Three fucking words I’m so sick of that if I hear them said one more time, I am going to go just as postal as my team thinks I’m headed.
