“What were they saying?” Lanie asked Jean-Luc as the team peeled themselves out of the red mud at the bottom of the riverbed. “They were speaking Arabic, right?”
“Yeah, Chadian Arabic. They’re Ex-Seleka militia looking for Christians. They decided the drone must belong to the Russians and the national army. They said they’d shoot it out of the sky if they saw it again.”
“You hear that, Geek Girl?” Lanie asked into her mic.
“They won’t see it again,” Sami replied.
Jean-Luc tried to wipe the rust-colored dust off his face, but managed only to smear it with the mud on his hands. “They also said something about rain coming.”
Lanie also tried to wipe the dust from her face as she glanced up and down the arroyo. “Fuck.”
“Do we stick to the plan?” Marcus tried to wipe his own face on his handkerchief, but it was useless. At that point, they were all covered and looked like they’d gone tanning with Donald Trump.
Lanie squinted at the sky. “What do you think, guys? We still have, what? Four-ish miles to go. Do you wanna risk getting flooded out, or do we attempt the road?”
Marcus followed her gaze. Sky was still blue, but he saw the cloud bank building in the distance. “I say we stick to the arroyo. We’re making better time than we would dodging patrols on the road.”
Everyone else seemed to be of the same opinion, but Lanie still hesitated. “I don’t think you guys grasp how dangerous that is. I grew up in the desert, you know? Flash floods are terrifying. The ground is so dry rain just slides off into the nearest indentation in the earth.” She spread her arms, indicating the dry riverbed. “And if it’s raining somewhere upstream already, we may never see the flood coming until it’s on top of us.”
“You think we should attempt the road?” Marcus asked. “You’re commander. We’ll follow your lead.”
She glanced up toward the road, then shook her head. “The road’s more dangerous. But first sign of rain, we’re out.”
“Understood.”
And they pressed on. They made it another mile before the arroyo started filling. One minute they were standing in dust, the next, the water surged up to Marcus’s knees.
“Out!” Lanie shouted. “Out, out, out!”
…
The Hornet’s Nest
Somewhere over Chad
Leah knew she needed to stay out of the war room. Jesse told her she didn’t need to see the mission play out in real time. It took a special kind of tolerance to watch your loved ones walk into a dangerous situation thousands of miles away and know you can do absolutely nothing to help.
She tried to stay away. She really did. For her own sanity. But after talking with Regina and the kids and checking on Mercedes, she found herself wandering aimlessly around the plane with nothing to do. She was tired, but she couldn’t sleep. She ached all over, but she couldn’t relax. Before she even realized what she was doing, she pushed open the door to the war room and was confronted with a wall of screens. Some showed maps, others monitored vital signs, and others showed live feeds from the team’s body cameras. They were all scrambling, the images jittery and jumping, but she clearly saw the wall of water rolling toward them on one of the screens.
“What’s happening?”
Jesse and Sami whipped around to face her and, in the instant before they hid it, she saw the bright panic in both their eyes.
Jesse stepped in front of the screens and held out a hand as if to ward her off. “Leah, you don’t need to see—”
“Bullshit.” She shoved past him. She was sick of being treated like a china doll. She’d done a damn good job of defending herself before they showed up. “I deserve to be here just as much as either of you. What’s happening?”
They shared a quick glance, then Jesse backed down.
“A flash flood,” Sami said. She seemed to be controlling one of the cameras with something that looked a lot like the twins’ Xbox controller. A drone. She widened the camera angle for a better overhead shot, then pointed to the screen. “They were using that dry riverbed for cover, but it started filling.”
She held her breath as the men scrambled up the slick sides of the riverbank. Marcus slipped and Seth pulled him up. Jean-Luc slipped and fell into the water, but Marcus and Ian caught his arms and hauled him to safety on the bank. Each of them checked on a teammate, then together they checked their gear.
They were a team.
She never really understood what that meant until right then. It wasn’t like the gymnastics or track teams she’d been part of in high school. Or even the team Danny had worked with at the FBI.
It was more. It was bigger.
It was brotherhood.
She never understood Danny’s fascination with what HORNET did or why he was so willing to risk his life to work with them. She had no doubt, had he survived that mission in Martinique, he would have come home to tell her he was quitting the FBI and joining HORNET.
She wanted to understand.
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the big conference table, facing the screens. “I’m staying.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
After the close call in the arroyo, the team was forced to stick to the road, which slowed them down even more. Every time they heard someone coming, they dove for cover—and sometimes that cover was little more than a scraggly bush. The last three miles took almost as long as the first five had, and they reached the clinic after dark with the rain still pouring down. Now it wasn’t just dust coating them all from head to toe, but thick red mud that felt like gritty paste on Marcus’s skin.
They huddled up again in the sparse forest on the outskirts of the clinic grounds. Campfires burned in the refugee camp to the east, a muted yellow glow reflecting off the low-hanging clouds. The clinic grounds were dark, but it didn’t look abandoned like it was supposed to be. Rainwater had filled countless tire marks in front of the main concrete building. Someone was definitely coming and going from there. The corrugated tin roof had also recently been replaced, judging by the sheen of it. It hadn’t rusted yet. Someone was using it—question was: for what?
“There are two outbuildings,” Seth reported. He had scouted ahead, looking for a good spot to set up a sniper’s nest. They’d need Seth’s sharpshooting skills if any Russians or Ex-Seleka fighters showed up.
“We clear the main building first,” Lanie decided. “If there are any prisoners, we release them. If we run into any of Volkov’s men, we neutralize the threat and move on. Our objective here is Alexander Cabot. And,” she added after a beat, “Dr. Denisova. Alive. I’d like to have a chat with her about all those missing people. We good on the ROE here?”
Nods all around. No issues with the rules of engagement. They all wanted to take Volkov Group down, but they all also wanted to find out what the hell the doctor was doing for them.
“Geek Girl,” Lanie said into her mic. “You’re our eyes in the sky.”
“On it,” Sami’s voice said over the comm link.
Lanie glanced at him. “You good for this? You’ve been out for a long time.”
He kept this face completely neutral. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
“Star Wars: A New Hope. Darth Vader.” Harvard slapped him a high five. “Nice.”
It struck him then just how much he had missed this—trying to stump his teammates with his encyclopedic knowledge of movie quotes to lighten the mood right before they walked into a pucker factor situation.
God, he loved these guys.
“If he’s back to quoting movies,” Jean-Luc said, “he’s ready to rock.”
For the first time in nearly a year, a very real grin split his face. He made like he was cocking a gun. “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!”
Jean-Luc gave a solid thump on the back. “Good to have you back, mon ami
.”
“The Princess Bride. A personal favorite.” Lanie smothered her smile and put her game face on. “All right. Let’s do this, gentlemen. Call signs from here on out.”
She took point, followed by Marcus, Jean-Luc, Harvard, and Rex. Ian and Tank brought up the rear. They crouch-walked swiftly across the open space between the forest and the front door. Lanie tried the handle. Locked. She backed up and motioned Ian forward. He made quick work of the door, placing the charge and blowing it off its hinges. Lanie and Marcus swung into the opening at the same time, sweeping their weapons around the single room. The beams of their flashlights reflected off shiny medical equipment that looked out of place in the concrete clinic with its dirt floor and dingy walls.
“Clear,” Lanie said.
“Clear,” Marcus echoed.
The rest of the team filed in and fanned out.
“What the hell?” Rex whispered. He played the beam of his flashlight over the table at the center of the room. “That’s an autopsy table.”
Marcus crouched down beside a bucket brimming with a dark liquid. It smelled like the vase of spare change his mom kept on her bookshelf. Metal, but with an underlying sweetness of death and the rancid tang of rot.
Blood.
Choking back a surge of bile, Marcus held his hand over the bucket. “They haven’t been gone long. This blood is still warm.”
“Fuck me,” Rex said and straightened away from an array of equipment along one wall. He picked up a container with the biohazard symbol stamped on one side and tapped his earpiece. “Hey, Jesse, you seeing this? Are they doing what I think they’re doing?”
Jesse’s voice crackled across the comm, his voice ice-cold behind the static. “The bastards are harvesting organs.”
“Jesus,” Seth said from his sniper’s hide outside, the curse barely a breath of sound over Marcus’s earbud.
“Harvesting is too polite a word,” Ian said through clenched teeth. “They’re fucking killing people and stealing their fucking organs.”
“And probably selling them to the highest bidder.” Rex tossed the container aside and swung his M4 off his shoulder. “I want a piece of these monsters for this.”
Marcus glanced back at the bucket of blood. His stomach lurched. Was he looking at what was left of Alexander Cabot?
“This has to be what Cabot wanted Danny to investigate,” Harvard said. “Black market organ trade is big money. I see it on the dark web all the time.”
Marcus stood up and moved away from the blood bucket. He couldn’t stand the smell anymore. “The FBI wouldn’t care to investigate unless an American citizen was involved, and Cabot is British. There’s a missing piece somewhere we’re not seeing. And, whatever it is, it’s on that flash drive.”
“Then we’ll find it,” Harvard said without a shred of doubt. “It’s just slow going with all the damage done.”
“Enough chitchat,” Lanie said. “Let’s move. Coming out,” she warned Seth before leading the way through the door.
Marcus paused and glanced around one more time. So many people had died between these walls. Kidnapped and killed for their hearts, lungs, kidneys. Some may have sacrificed themselves willingly with the promise of a nice payday for the family members they left behind, but he bet most were coerced. A human organ factory plunked down in a war zone, where people went missing all the time.
A perfect setup.
If Danny had known about this, he’d have done everything in his power to put a stop to it.
Something tickled at the back of Marcus’s brain, a slithering unease that worked its way down his spine and raised the hair on his arms. If Danny had known about this, if he had investigated, he would have pissed off powerful people. Dmitry Volkov and his father were just the tip of this bloody spear. There were others involved. Middlemen, brokers. Not to mention the people rich enough to buy an organ.
Exactly how rich did you have to be?
He switched his mic to a private channel. “Hey, Sami? What’s the going black market price for a heart?”
“Uh…good question,” Sami said. “Give me a sec.”
“Marcus?” Leah said.
Oh, Jesus. What was she doing in the Nest’s war room? Why the hell would Jesse and Sami let her watch? She was supposed to be safe, sheltered from the horrors of his world. “Hey, doll. Are you okay?”
“No.” She swallowed hard enough that he heard it over the connection. “That place is…” She trailed off. He couldn’t blame her. He had no words for it, either.
“I know.”
“Please, be careful. I can’t lose you, too.”
He swore he felt his heart soften, all but melt. Yeah, she had him. He was a puddle when it came to this woman.
Before he could work up a response that wouldn’t revoke his man card, Sami came back on the line. “Going price for a heart is as high as a million. Livers will run you half a mil. Lungs, three hundred thousand. Kidneys, the same. This is big money.”
“That’s what I thought. Thanks.” Before he switched back to the community comm link, he added, “Leah, I’m coming home to you, but I have to take these sick bastards down first.”
He followed the team outside, caught them as they stacked up alongside one of the outbuildings.
“Where were you?” Lanie demanded. “Stay in formation.”
“Sorry.” He’d educate them later about the costs of buying an organ. It wasn’t really important now, but tell that to the niggling sensation in the back of his skull. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was important to the bigger picture. The kind of people who had the liquid assets to drop a cool mil on a heart—and who had no qualms about killing someone to get the needed organ—were not the kind of people you’d want to piss off. So if Danny had been digging into this, someone rich and powerful might have wanted him to stop enough to hire a hitman.
But, no, that wasn’t possible.
Mercedes said that he had been Sebastian Haly’s target, not Danny. She’d been certain of it. She claimed missing the shot had really screwed with Haly’s head. And, at the time, it had made sense, since he very likely had more enemies than Danny, given his ties to one of the most infamous crime families in America and his hand in taking down their empire.
But what if Mercedes had lied and Danny had been the target all along? Why would she lie? What would be the point? It wasn’t like she could protect Haly by lying. He was already dead. Maybe Haly had lied to her? But, again, what would have been the point? They were lovers who regularly talked shop. He’d had no reason to lie to her about who his target was.
Something wasn’t adding up. That damn missing puzzle piece.
Or Marcus was just grasping at straws, desperate to relieve his guilt. He couldn’t discount the possibility. He didn’t want to feel guilty anymore. It had weighed on him for so long, nearly crushed the life out of him. He was tired of feeling responsible. And he wanted Leah like he’d never wanted any woman in his life. If he was released from his guilt over Danny’s murder, that would open up a lot of doors concerning his relationship with Leah.
But now was not the time to think about it.
If he didn’t get his brain on the mission, he’d break his promise to Leah and not make it home to her. Then they’d never have the chance to figure out this thing between them.
He refocused on the building the team was about to breach. It was round and windowless with a pointed thatched roof—much like the building he’d been kept in at Volkov’s camp. He already knew what they’d find inside. The missing people. Or at least some of them. He just hoped they were still alive and not organless husks of bodies.
Ian set the charges on the door and—bang! It popped off like a soda tab breaking through a can.
The stench inside was incredible.
Fuck. They all had to be dead. Nothing living made that kind of stench.
He lowered his rifle as the first two through the door—Lanie and Jean-Luc—bolted out, gasping for fresh air. Jean-Luc bent double and gagged. Lanie dropped to her knees in the mud and gasped like a beached fish. Rex rushed to her side and coaxed her to breathe.
After gulping down big pulls of air, she raised a shaking hand. Her brown skin looked gray in the beam of Rex’s flashlight. “No, stop. I’m good. I’m fine. Check the other building.”
They had to do it. Of course they did. Marcus fell in line behind Ian and Tank. Harvard brought up the rear. As they passed by the door, the scent was like a fist to his face. He glanced inside and wished to God above he hadn’t. Bodies used and discarded like trash. He’d never seen anything like it outside of pictures of the Holocaust.
Don’t watch, Leah. Please don’t be watching this.
They continued on to the next building, and his stomach cramped with dread. He fully expected to find more of the same inside.
Again—charges set.
Again—the pop tab of the door blowing off its hinges.
Except this time there were gasps and screams of terror from inside. Marcus swung into the doorway and swept his rifle from left to right, while Harvard followed and swept from right to left. The beams of their flashlights played over a dozen grimy faces and wide, dark eyes that showed too much white. His beam landed on one face that looked familiar. Wide nose, strong chin, high cheekbones. He’d seen that face somewhere before…
But younger.
Shit. Abel’s father. Had to be. The resemblance was uncanny. He stepped forward and held a hand out to the man. “It’s okay. We’re here to help.”
After an uncertain moment, Abel’s father gripped Marcus’s palm and climbed shakily to his feet. “Who are you? Americans?”
“Yes. We specialize in hostage rescue. Your brother and son sent us.”
Tears filled his eyes and spilled over. “Thank you,” he said, collapsed into Marcus’s arms, and sobbed.
…
Leah thought she knew what horror was. It was answering the phone and having your entire world shatter with two words: “Danny’s dead.” It was a flag-draped coffin. It was screaming all of her grief and rage into her pillow at night so the kids wouldn’t hear her breakdown. It was death benefits and life insurance hassles and selling her dream house because she could no longer afford it. It was forcing a smile every day while inside she was sobbing.
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