by Paige Tyler
“You can shut down the whole GPS network?” Owen asked.
Kyla shrugged, still not looking up. “I’m not really shutting it down. I’m pulling the satellites over the western part of the U.S. offline for a software update. They’ll only be down for a few minutes, but it should be enough to trip the safety shutdown on the drone, disarming the warheads and causing them to crash.”
More silence met that announcement.
“Navstar is the DOD controlled GPS network everyone in the world uses, even foreign militaries,” she explained. “I stumbled over the passwords for the system last year when I was snooping through federal websites looking for Stavros. I never thought it would come in handy until now. Of course, we could be in deep crap if those drones are advanced enough to jump to another network like GLONASS or COMPASS. But I’m betting they stuck with the most common network to make the system cheaper.”
“As Andrew said, while this is fascinating, I think we need to hurry up and do it,” Wes said. “Because if that little blurry spot ahead of us is the third drone, it’s coming straight at us really frigging fast.”
Kyla glanced up and saw that Wes was right. “Crap.”
Turning back to her computer, she got into the Navstar system and started going through the process of identifying which satellites to pull offline.
“That drone is getting closer,” Andrew said. “You almost done?”
“Rushing me won’t help,” she pointed out. “Wes, can you could move right behind Chapman’s SUV to make us a hard target to hit?”
“That’d be a brilliant idea,” Wes agreed as the SUV slammed into Kyla’s side of the Prius almost knocking them into the concrete barrier separating them from the other side of the road. “Unfortunately…Chapman isn’t going to let us get behind them unless we’re willing to come to a complete stop, which would make us an even easier target to hit.”
Kyla leaned forward to look through the windshield and immediately wished she hadn’t. The drone was so close she could make out every single detail, right down to the blur of the propeller in the back of the thing. If it hit their car, it would kill them all, even if the warhead didn’t go off.
“Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap,” she muttered, returning her attention to her laptop, her fingers clicking so fast she was surprised they weren’t smoking. Pushing down on the ENTER key, she jerked her head up, eyes locked on the fast approaching drone. “Done!”
“It’s not going down!” Wes slowed her Prius even though he had to know it wouldn’t help. “Why isn’t it working? Did you shut down the wrong GPS network?”
“No. But the drone might have to be without a valid signal for a certain period of time before going into shut-down mode.”
“How long?” Wes asked urgently.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Fifteen, maybe thirty seconds.”
“I hate to point this out, but we don’t have thirty seconds,” Andrew said from the back seat.
Kyla eyed the rapidly closing distance between them and the drone. The thing was only a couple hundred feet away. She’d messed up and they were screwed because of it.
Then in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the drone started to flutter and tumble. Unfortunately, it still came right toward them.
Cursing, Wes steered her car into the side of the SUV, keeping the truck from turning aside as the drone came down and crashed right into the front of it. The SUV pitched nose down, the rear of the vehicle coming up fast until it flipped end over end. As Wes sped past, Kyla turned in her seat to keep an eye on the big vehicle.
A split second later, Wes slid the Prius to a stop, jumping out as it came to a shuddering halt.
“Stay in the car,” he shouted before reloading the weapon he was carrying and darting back toward the SUV.
Kyla stayed put for all of five seconds, then opened the passenger door and slowly followed after him while at the same time hanging back and letting Wes do his thing. Even if there wasn’t much she could do to help him, she couldn’t let him go into danger by himself. The past few hours had hammered home exactly how she felt about him, something she’d be telling him the first chance she got.
The SUV was smashed to pieces, every window shattered and the remains of the drone embedded in what was left of the engine compartment. There was blood on the windshield and the man behind the steering wheel wasn’t moving.
Stavros stumbled out of the back, blood pouring from the wound in his shoulder and a huge gash on his forehead, the small machine gun in his hands chattering violently as he shot at Wes.
Kyla screamed as Wes hit the asphalt in a fast roll, then came up on one knee to put three bullets through Stavros’s chest. She started forward only to stop again when Chapman appeared from the far side of the SUV. He popped off several shots with a handgun before turning to run toward the harbor less than a hundred feet away.
Wes raced after the man, yelling at him to stop, that there was no way for him go. Kyla darted forward stopping behind the remains of the SUV as Chapman reached the edge of the harbor. She held her breath when he turned and aimed his gun at Wes, but thankfully, Wes was faster. His two bullets hit Chapman and the man tumbled backward into the bay. She stood there for a couple second, watching as Wes moved closer to the side of the road and looked down at the water.
Owen and Andrew caught up to her as Kyla reached Wes’s side. She wrapped her arm tightly around his waist as they all stood there, staring down at the rough water splashing against the concrete retaining wall that ran along this part of the harbor. Kyla couldn’t see a body, or even any blood.
“Do you think Chapman’s dead?” she asked.
Wes nodded. “I think so. I put one round in his shoulder and another one in his chest. Even if he was still alive when he hit the water, I doubt he could swim too well.”
From somewhere in the distance, police sirens echoed in the air. It sounded like there were a hundred of them.
“What are we going to tell them?” Owen asked.
Wes shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I have no clue how to explain this to them.”
Neither did she, Kyla thought. But she knew someone who would. “Maybe we should call Shaw and let the CIA deal with it.”
Wes’s mouth curved as he bent his head to give her a quick kiss. “And here I was thinking we didn’t have any use for the agency.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
YOU HONESTLY DON’T mind if Andrew and I take the job?” Owen asked, reaching across the table to grab another handful of Doritos. “I thought for sure you wouldn’t want us to even talk to Shaw after you turned him down.”
Kyla added a few more chips to her own plate, setting them beside the cheeseburger Chasen had grilled for the housewarming party he and Hayley were hosting. Chasen and Hayley had recently purchased a three-bedroom ranch-style home in one of the suburbs.
“I’m completely cool with you guys taking a job with the CIA.” She smiled. “Who do you think gave him your resumés? He sure as hell didn’t get them off LinkedIn.”
Owen and Andrew beamed at that, their eyes filled with excitement as they talked about becoming the greatest team of American spies ever, racing around in expensive cars, carrying exploding ink pens, fighting off all the women who wanted them. Kyla bit her tongue to keep from laughing and pointing out Shaw was much more likely to hide the them in the sub-basement of a very nondescript data mining facility where they’d spend endless hours doing boring analyst work. In fact, she was sure that’s what her friends would be doing because that was part of the deal she’d made with Shaw after turning down the job he’d offered and suggesting Owen and Andrew instead, providing they worked together and were never allowed within a hundred miles of anything dangerous.
Not that she’d ever tell her friends any of that, of course. Her goal was to help them get a job where they could use the hacker abilities they’d picked over the years while part of The People, as well as the engineering skills they possessed. The job Shaw was hiring them for wou
ld do that, while also giving them a little bit of excitement.
“Have you told Wes that you turned down the CIA yet?” Owen asked.
“Not yet,” she said. “I want to surprise him.”
Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Wes had been so busy at work that she hadn’t found the right time to tell him she hadn’t taken the job at the CIA. An announcement like that needed room to breathe. And some sort of celebration.
They’d called Shaw that day at the harbor a week ago right before the entire contingent of San Diego city and county law enforcement had arrived and lost their collective mind. Shaw—along with a whole bunch of other agents—had shown up fifteen minutes later and gotten the situation under control with a story they’d concocted about a runaway research drone. While it didn’t come close to explaining all the dead bodies and the machines guns, or Kaplan’s arrest, it’d been enough to get the local cops to back off. It probably helped that the CIA was more than happy to throw the National Security label around more than a few times.
As soon as Shaw realized Kyla had hacked into the Imperial Beach Facility and tracked Wes down to Guatemala, then subsequently ferreted out Kaplan’s identity and plans on top of shutting down the Navstar network, the CIA agent had began wooing her again, offering an even bigger paycheck than before, not to mention buying her a new Prius.
Kyla had to admit there was a part of her that was kind of thrilled the CIA thought so highly of her, but the job they were offering simply wasn’t her thing. Besides the fact she didn’t trust the people who’d let her father die for them without even bothering to look into it, the job would take her out of the country a majority of the time and leaving San Diego wasn’t something she wanted to do. She had everything she needed in this little corner of the world, thank you very much.
On the other side of the umbrella-covered picnic table, Owen and Andrew were practicing how they’d say their names while introducing themselves to the international jet set crowd. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad. She was pretty sure the CIA would never let them handle anything more dangerous than a pencil.
Kyla recognized Wes’s chuckle even before he stepped out the back door of Chasen and Hayley’s home and onto the big wooden deck overlooking the backyard. Noah was with him, thought walking a bit gingerly. He’d reinjured his knee on the rooftop and was now wearing a rigid leg brace. The doctors told him if he didn’t stay off it, he was looking at reconstructive surgery, so he’d been behaving himself.
The moment Wes caught sight of Kyla, he flashed her a smile that made her melt.
It was official. She loved him.
“Sorry I’m late,” Wes said as he sat down beside her and gave her a kiss.
“Was there a problem at work?” she asked.
Even though it was Saturday, Wes had to stop by the base and take care of some stuff, which is why she’d gotten a ride over to the party with Owen and Andrew. Wes had been as open with her as he could when it came to work stuff, but she’d accepted there’d always be things he couldn’t tell her. She’d done her best to stop prying, deciding if things were going to work between them, she would have to come to grips with him being a SEAL.
“Not really,” he said, reaching over to steal a Dorito from her plate. “The whole facility is still a mess. They’re still in the process of ripping out the entire IT infrastructure so they can replace it. It didn’t help that the NSA came in a few days ago to search the place for bugs and found hundreds of recording devices just like you said they would. No one wants to talk about who was on the other end, but I think it’s obvious it was the Russians since that would explain how Chapman was able to set up those ambushes so easily.”
Kyla nodded. When she’d talked to Shaw about how she’d hacked into the Imperial Beach Facility, she’d explained all the back doors and other weaknesses in system. She’d also passed along her other suspicions that Nesbitt had gotten tons of spies into the facility during its construction. Shaw had been the one to pass the information along to the Navy, so her name wouldn’t come up.
“Is this going to help rebuild your relationship with SOG?” she asked.
Unfortunately, that part of the CIA was still pissed Wes and his Teammates had gone after Chapman and Kaplan without bothering to alert them first. While they were happy Chapman was almost certainly dead, they would have been happier if the man’s body had been found. It also didn’t help that no one seemed to know where Chapman had hidden the rest of his drones. Everyone was nervous at the thought of them still out there somewhere.
Wes shrugged. “It’s a work in progress. They agree that my Team in particular shouldn’t be held responsible for the leaks, but at the same time, they don’t exactly trust anyone in the SEALs right now. Especially after finding out that our entire facility had been compromised right under our noses.”
Kyla could understand that. None of that had reached the media yet and hopefully never would, but SEAL Team 5 didn’t look good in the eyes of the CIA right now. It would take time to rebuild their reputation and get SOG to trust them again.
“So, Owen and Andrew are going to be working with you at the CIA, huh?” Wes said casually as he reached grabbed a cheeseburger from the stack on the table and topped it with lettuce and sliced tomatoes. “They must be thrilled.”
Kyla glanced over to see that her two were now talking about what kind of “missions” they might be involved in and weren’t paying any attention to them.
She gave Wes a smile. “They’re thrilled to be sure, but they’re a little bummed I won’t be working with them.”
Wes stopped messing with his burger to look at her in surprise. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not taking the job Shaw offered,” she said. “I’ll admit it was tempting, but it wasn’t right for me…for us.”
The tension that had surrounded him ever since he heard the CIA was recruiting her disappeared. He still looked a little confused, though.
“So, you’re going to take one of the tech jobs instead?” he asked hesitantly. “With Google or Tesla or someone?”
Kyla shook her head. “Nope. I’m not taking any of those jobs, either. I’m staying in San Diego. I’m going to be working right on Coronado for Navy Intelligence.”
Wes did a double take. “Seriously?”
She leaned in a little closer. “Seriously. San Diego is where you are, so why would I want to leave?”
Kyla would have said more, but then Wes’s mouth was on hers and he was kissing her hard. When he finally pulled back, she was actually out of breath.
“When did you decide all this?” he asked. “I was sure you were going to tell me any day now that you were leaving.”
“Did you want me to leave?” she asked, sure she already knew the answer, but needing to hear him say it out loud.
“Of course not.” He pushed her hair back from her face with gentle fingers. “I never want to be without you. If you haven’t figured it out, I’m in love with you. I have been for a long time.”
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or scream. “If you’re in love with me and didn’t want me to leave, why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I wanted to.” He gave her a sheepish look. “But when I thought for sure you were set on leaving, telling you how I felt seemed wrong. I didn’t want you to think I was blackmailing you to stay here with me.”
Now it was Kyla’s turn to stare. “I’m not sure if I should smack you for being stupid or kiss you for being so sweet.”
Wes chuckled. “I vote for the kiss.”
Laughing, she did just that, leaning in even closer and pulling him in for a long kiss. “Oh, and in case you haven’t figured it out, I love you, too.”
“So,” he grinned, “I’m guessing the position at the Navy comes with a Top Secret clearance, huh? Not that I can still tell you much about what I’m doing anyway—need to know and all that stuff—but it’s good to know if I slip up and say the wrong something, it won’t create a threat to national
security.”
Kyla already knew her clearance wouldn’t give her much access to his world, but she had to believe he would always be safe or she’d drive herself crazy with worry. And if that didn’t work, she still had the computers in her dad’s Bat Cave to help her keep an eye on Wes whenever he went on a mission.
“What are you thinking about?” Wes asked, his blue eyes curious.
Kyla considered telling him she possessed the ability to find him anywhere in the world if she wanted to, but instead, she kissed him again. He was a SEAL. He went on missions to dangerous places. She could overlook the bad that came with his job to have the good that came with loving and being loved by the most wonderful man ever.
“I was just thinking about how lucky I am to have you in my life,” she said.
He smiled and kissing her back. “I’m the lucky one.”
* * * * *
I hope you enjoyed Wes and Kyla’s story!
Noah Bradley is the next SEAL to fall in love with the romance author he’s been asked to protect from a killer!
Look for their book soon!
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SEAL for Her Protection
Strong Silent SEAL
Texas SEAL
Undercover SEAL
SEAL with a Past
SEAL to the Rescue
SEAL on a Mission
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In the Company of Wolves