They’d flown against the 5th Battalion D Company in a training exercise, and beat them more by luck than anything. It hadn’t hurt that they had “borrowed” two of the 5D’s mechanics for their first missions, but the “loaners” recently returned to the 5D. Anything the 5E achieved from now on was completely theirs. He liked that.
A massive black SUV with tinted windows was the unknown vehicle in the parking lot.
“Wondered when you’d notice. Now you’re going to have serious truck envy too,” Nikita sounded thoroughly disgusted.
He just shrugged nonchalantly, but he thought it was seriously cool. Way better than his ten-year-old battered-blue Ford Ranger.
Another vehicle rolled in, a base Hummer.
“When it rains…” Drake recognized the passenger before he climbed out: Colonel Cass McDermott, the commander of the entire Night Stalkers 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Drake hadn’t seen him since the night the 5E was formed up right here at these picnic tables a year ago.
“…Oobleck falls from the sky.”
Drake looked over at Nikita.
“I’m a Dr. Seuss fan. So sue me.”
He laughed at the sudden image of Nikita Hayward as a little girl intently studying a book about a boy trying to save his kingdom from sticky green goo falling out of the sky. The mission to save the kingdom made sense for a future Navy SEAL, but Nikita as a young girl was almost impossible to imagine. Though if she’d worn pigtails as a kid, he definitely wanted to see a picture.
It was difficult reconciling her looks with who she was. By her looks she could have been the nice girl next door. But he’d seen this “girl” swing on a sixty-pound pack as easily as he could sling a rifle, and he’d watched her shoot to kill.
The casual ease of her soft Southern accent would never have flown at Andover Prep—whereas his own moneyed Boston had fit right in. She was like an education in how narrow his world had been before joining the military. But any thought that Southern meant slow or mild was blown away by one look in her brown eyes—she missed nothing of what was going on around her. He could see her mind working every moment behind those eyes.
At the picnic table, Pete and Danielle sat facing the two strangers. The two couples were eyeing each other in silent suspicion. Even Danielle’s unflappable Quebecois politeness appeared strained.
“Who are—” Major Pete Napier and the big guy snarled at each other almost in unison. Then they held a glaring contest before both turned their ire toward the Colonel.
Colonel McDermott pulled up a chair and sat at the end of the table as if joining a jovial party.
Lieutenant Commander Luke Altman, Nikita’s boss, came to stand on Drake’s other side. Not many men could make him feel small, but Altman was even more physically imposing than the stranger. Luke Altman wasn’t even the sort of guy you’d eventually call by his first name—he’d never be “my buddy Luke”, he’d simply be “Altman” or maybe Lieutenant Commander.
By the time they were all gathered around the table—five of the fifteen Night Stalkers who made up the 5E, two SEALs, the strangers, and the colonel—full dark had descended and, along with it, an Arctic chill that had nothing to do with the balmy September night. The cicadas and frogs seemed to be the only ones happy at the moment.
Drake did his best to pretend that he wasn’t trapped between the two ST6 SEALs, but was standing there because he belonged—lined up like they were a Greek chorus to narrate the drama about to unfold. Someone fetched a Coleman lantern and dropped it on the table, lighting everyone in strange shadows. Someone else dropped a case of beer on the table—which meant no flights tomorrow, no battle flights anyway. He wanted to step forward to take one, but neither of the ST6 operators moved, so he stayed put.
“So tell it,” Colonel McDermott said to no one in particular as he twisted a cap off a beer.
“Why?” The big guy snarled back. And in that moment, Nikita knew what he was because no one who was still military would talk back to a bird colonel that way. He wasn’t a US Army Ranger, he was a former US Army Ranger.
“Mercenary,” it came out as no more than a whisper, but his gaze shot to her. His smile built—it was not friendly.
“I’m a contractor. Always on behalf of my country. My Titan team takes on the messes you military types couldn’t handle if your lives depended on it. What are you, missy?” He grabbed two beers, opening one for the woman beside him. Then he tipped his own toward Nikita like he was aiming a gun.
Titan. Probably the toughest military contractors in the business. They were the baddest-ass door-kickers out there. Their rep was good. But still goddamn vigilantes—just ones with a big budget and a government sanction.
Nikita wouldn’t mind telling him exactly who she was, but DEVGRU operators didn’t go around announcing themselves to the general public—except for a couple of the guys on the bin Laden raid with no sense of silence. Luke Altman had never said a word about it, though she was fairly sure he’d been in on that mission.
This guy needed a different answer.
“I can tell you what I’m not.”
“Oh, bring it on,” he thumped his beer on the table, then crossed his arms over his big chest and glared at her. In a pissing contest, you didn’t look away, so she couldn’t see how the others were reacting except for Sugar. She sat close beside the big man and was slowly shaking her head in amusement—as if she knew what was about to land on her companion’s head and couldn’t wait to watch. Nikita could almost like her for that.
“I’m not from a team that levels an entire South American villa in a bang so big that I could hear it while stretched out all comfortable in my bunk at Fort Bragg,” which was not her real base. That was at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach along with the rest of DEVGRU.
That got his attention. He clearly didn’t like that she knew that about him. She’d always kept track of the main “contractors.” Ever since— No! She wasn’t going to think about that.
“No running attacks back and forth across the hills and hollers outside Charlottesville, Virginia. No gun battles shredding up multiple floors of an Abu Dhabi hotel. Y’all Ranger types are great at kicking down them doors. When I go through one, nobody knows I’ve been there, asshole.” Name calling was lame, but she couldn’t stop herself. And where the Southern hick was coming from she had no idea. But Nikita knew where her emotional heat was coming from, had spent most of her adult life trying to ignore it. Now she had her past chilled down to the point where it took someone like this over-confident bastard to drag it back to the surface. She didn’t appreciate it.
“How the hell do you know all—” The guy shut his trap and glared at her, his eyes momentarily shifting from merely black to carbonized steel. Then he glanced around the circle and she could see him start thinking—finally. She didn’t look aside, but had the impression that all of the others were remaining impassive, revealing nothing.
Sugar started to giggle. She tried to hide it in a swallow of beer but didn’t make it.
He glared at her.
Sugar broke into laughter and began poking at the man’s ribs with a red manicured nail. “She got you, J-dawg. She so got you. That’s exactly who you are.”
“Shit!” J-dawg scrubbed a hand over his face. A smile actually cracked his stern features. “Between Sugar and Nicole, you think I’d have learned about women who know how to fight.”
“Just wait until Asal grows up. Our girl will teach you a thing or two about warrior women.”
He pulled his companion in and kissed her on top of the head with a surprising tenderness. “She already has, damned kid.”
He eyed the circle of people once more, keeping his arm around Sugar’s shoulders a moment longer.
This time Nikita let herself look around as well. Of the five Night Stalkers present, two were women and neither of them looked any happier with this guy than she felt.
“Not my best meet and greet, I suppose.”
“No shit,
J-dawg!” For a moment Nikita wished she was her movie namesake rather than a SEAL. La Femme Nikita wouldn’t hesitate for a second to unsling the rifle over her shoulder and see how a mercenary liked staring down the barrel from two meters out. That’s how welcome he was.
“Only Lily gets to call me J-dawg. Name is Jared. And I’m the only one who gets to call her that. She’s Sugar to the rest of you.”
“Lotta rules there, J-dawg.” Not a chance in hell of her cutting a mercenary any slack.
He inspected the circle again, then pointed at the line of her, Drake, and Altman. “What are you three? You sure aren’t flyboys.”
“Hello! Not a boy!”
J-dawg ignored her and looked to Colonel McDermott, who had apparently been enjoying the whole scene.
“Who the hell are they?”
“The two on the outsides are the reason you’re here.” Then McDermott scowled at Drake, “The guy in the middle? We’ll be damned if we know what he is.”
She couldn’t tell if Drake was unhappier with McDermott’s tease or her laugh right in his face.
Chapter Three
The base commissary had delivered a stack of pizzas. Drake figured that if you ever wanted to know the location of every top secret outfit on a base—and be welcomed into the compound every time—you just had to get a job as an on-base pizza delivery driver.
Drake had managed to stick close beside Nikita as well as snag three slices of fully-loaded pizza to go with his beer, more than sufficient solace for his battered ego. He’d been razzed for the way he spoke—he was an Army sergeant with the speech befitting a West Point officer—more times than the sirens had called to Odysseus, so it was no big deal. Though he could have done without Nikita laughing at him.
Everyone was calling the guy J-dawg and he bristled just like a junkyard dog every time. If the guy would just chill, it would go away, but Drake expected that chilling wasn’t in the guy’s repertoire.
Well, it might eventually go away for everyone except Nikita. Something had crawled way under her skin.
Drake always did his best to take his own name’s advice: Drake the male duck. He just let it all slide off his back. He’d had to bust his ass to make Night Stalkers, but only because everyone did to make it into such an elite outfit and he’d wanted in. The rest of life? He did his best to just swim through, and it came easily—especially the women. The women before Nikita anyway.
He’d never gone for the difficult or tricky women before. Wasn’t worth the time. For every one of that type, he could mow down a half dozen or more. But something about the DEVGRU SEAL sitting beside him, and her glowering at J-dawg, made him want to work for it this time. He bet himself a twenty that it would be worth it. He wasn’t yet ready to bet money on whether or not he’d succeed. All of his normal lines wouldn’t do anything but push her away.
“Now, tell it, Jared,” the colonel thumped his bottle on the table for attention. He was the only one who hadn’t gone all J-dawg on the guy. “Nikita, keep your mouth shut and let the man speak.”
“Nikita?” Sugar looked at her with surprise. “Hayward?”
J-dawg looked at his wife, who continued to watch Nikita. “What?”
Sugar just shook her head, “Times I wonder how it is you manage to stay alive, J-dawg.”
“Easy. I’m too ornery to die,” he spoke around a mouthful of pizza.
“Next time,” Sugar informed him, “think before you argue with the first woman to make the cut into DEVGRU.”
He stopped mid-chew and narrowed his eyes at Nikita. “No shit? SEAL Team Six?”
Nikita didn’t say a word. It was obvious that she didn’t like having her name out there.
Sugar must have noticed, “Don’t worry, honey. Your secret is safe with me. I only heard because I have low connections in high places. And J-dawg hardly speaks anything to anyone aside from me and Asal except in incomprehensible snarls and grunts.”
“I knew you guys recruited women for when you went undercover. But one actually made the cut? Like through the front door?” J-dawg asked Altman, ignoring his wife’s tease.
“You seem kinda slow when you don’t like a new fact, J-dawg.” If Nikita’s words could kill, Drake figured J-dawg would be a dead man. He must actually be too ornery to die because he was still breathing.
“We have a grand total of one who came directly in as a full-on operator,” Luke Altman grunted out. “So watch your goddamn step.”
When the pizza first arrived, Altman had ended up across the table from Drake, between Sugar and Zoe. Instead of leaning forward to look at Jared around Sugar, he kept looking across the table at Drake—as if he was the one Altman was threatening.
Drake nearly choked on an over-large piece of pepperoni. First, he wasn’t doing anything more than thinking about Nikita. And second, this was a DEVGRU lieutenant commander threatening him. About the only guys in the military tougher than that were Delta Force…and there would be an argument about even that.
“Alright,” J-dawg rinsed down the last of his pizza with a slug of beer.
Still, Altman was watching Drake as if nothing else was going on.
Okay! Okay! I got the message: don’t hurt the lady. It was more likely that if he did, Nikita would be the one to break him into tiny bits like so much kindling. If ever there was a woman who could take care of herself, it was her.
“So my Titan group took over this outfit—” J-dawg restarted.
“Global Security International,” Nikita snapped it out like an accusation.
Drake had never heard any of what she’d said about the guy. Titan and Global were just as much of a mystery, but she knew. He’d also never heard her speak this way. Maybe why she knew all that was tied up in her reaction to them.
“Yeah, GSI,” J-dawg nodded and the slash of anger that crossed his face said that Nikita wasn’t the only dangerous one at the table. “Those assholes deserved the title of mercenary. They were scalping on government contracts, trafficking with foreign powers, all the bad shit.”
“Like attracts like,” Nikita growled it out.
“Can it,” Altman stated mildly, but there was no doubt about the direct order in his tone.
Nikita looked down at her empty plate, but Drake was close enough that he could feel her practically shaking with suppressed rage. One of the best-trained warriors anywhere and a gutful of rage seemed like a lousy combination to him. Using the cover of darkness and the edge of the table, he patted her thigh in what he hoped was a comforting motion. The clenched-tight muscle eased a little. When he left his hand there, she didn’t remove it or even make any motion to shake it off.
He picked up his next slice one-handed.
The contact shock of Drake’s hand stilled Nikita’s nerves enough that she didn’t know how to respond.
Drake had good hands. Not merely big and strong, but he had great control. It was why she’d first noticed him. Most people simply yanked the trigger on an M134 Minigun; Drake coaxed it to life. He managed all of the necessary suppression and destruction with a third less ammo than any other helicopter crew gunner she’d ever seen. That’s why she’d thought there was a chance he could learn to shoot well and been willing to spend an afternoon with him.
That hand on her thigh, the first time they’d ever touched, was a whole different matter. It was exactly the right amount to pull her back from the cliff edge that lay so raw inside her that her past had threatened to overwhelm her present.
She managed a breath, then another. Finally a third as J-dawg continued his story.
“So, we’re cleaning up GSI’s files. Running down the people they were was using. Mostly arms and drugs. GSI was only starting to get into people—human trafficking, mainly for the sex trade—but we shut that down first of all and shut it down hard. I’ve got a team that’s…particularly touchy on that subject and I let them loose.” Then his smile went evil. “They’re damn good at what they do.”
“However,” the colonel prompted from
where he leaned back into the darkness of the Alabama night.
“However,” J-dawg continued, “there’s a mess in Central America that needs cleaning up on the quiet.”
“Let me guess,” Nikita couldn’t help herself despite Altman shutting her down. “The State Department didn’t want to send in a bunch of out-of-control door-kickers like yourselves.”
J-dawg grimaced in disgust, “Almost an exact quote. I’ve got a team run by my second best man—”
“Why not your best?”
“Because I’ve been busy,” this time the smile was genuine and Nikita could almost like him for that. Special Operations soldiers needed a certain amount of arrogance to survive. “My second team specializes at working in the gray areas, but…” He shrugged.
But no matter how good his team was, they weren’t the 5E and they definitely weren’t DEVGRU. There was a long silence broken only by the plink of moths battering themselves against the lantern’s glass.
“The current party in power in Honduras,” Colonel McDermott leaned forward into the light, “is both democratically elected and friendly to the United States, which makes them a popular target. So far, one of our teams—assisted by a group of wildland firefighters—has managed to stop the most serious coup attempt, which was touch-and-go but they did it. We’d like to make that permanent as their president is finally working to clean up the corruption. It means that you need to go in, find whatever it was that GSI was financing, and get rid of it.”
“Without anyone the wiser.” Nikita was the first to voice it, but she could see the others had reached the same conclusion.
“Not the local government. Not their military. Certainly not the media. No one,” Colonel McDermott confirmed. “I don’t even want Sugar, with all of her connections, to be able to hear about it except from us.”
Target of Mine: The Night Stalkers 5E (Titan World Book 2) Page 3