by Dale Mayer
“We haven’t heard anything yet. We are doing a full rundown on all four of the kidnap victims.”
“Well, I doubt your information will be any more detailed than what I already know about two of them.”
“Hence why you’re perfect for this job,” Gavin added. “You know what? If this were a regular military op, you wouldn’t be anywhere close to this.”
“Oh, I would be,” he said, his voice low and deep. “They just wouldn’t have liked the way I made it happen.”
“Right, still the same old Lennox then.”
“Absolutely,” Lennox said. “I’d have quit the navy and gone in myself, if that were my only choice to inject myself into this investigation.”
“Well, the good news is, it doesn’t have to happen that way.”
Just then they entered the security at the base. By the time they were cleared and moved forward, heading toward the offices, Lennox was already on his phone contacting the Mavericks. Keane was on the other end. “Have an update on where my sister has been taken to?”
“We lost sight of them at the airport. No flight plans were filed on the private planes.”
“Do we have a satellite on them?”
“We do, but we haven’t located them yet though.”
“How long until we do?”
“With any luck, another ten to fifteen minutes.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’re just pulling into the military base.”
As soon as they parked, he hopped out, his phone in his hand, and tried to call his sister once again. With no answer, he quickly sent a text to Keane with Carolina’s phone number, email address, and a couple other personal details. Find her, he added.
Keane answered. We’ve got this. I’ll have an answer for you soon.
Helena opened her eyes and stared around the small cargo plane. She and Carolina were tied up, as were the other two members of their group. Somehow they’d been taken from a departure lane outside the airport at gunpoint and moved into the back of a small truck, then driven to a private airstrip, on another airplane even now. She had no idea where they were being taken or why. What did bother her was the half-military, half-mercenary–looking mix of males on board. So far there had been no sexual connotation, and, as a doctor, she knew her skills were highly valued, but her entire medical team had been taken. Why?
She exchanged hard looks with Carolina, who stared at her. Helena had taken a blow to the side of her head and was dealing with quite the headache. Then so had Carolina. Helena raised her eyebrows ever-so-slightly, silently asking Carolina if she was doing okay, and Carolina gave her best friend the slightest of nods back. They’d always been very good at reading each other’s thoughts, keeping track of what each other were doing and how they were feeling, so Helena was pretty confident that, although her best friend had taken a blow to the head, Carolina would be okay.
Helena glanced at the other two; John was sleeping. The kidnappers hadn’t hit him at all. He was small, wiry, very efficient at what he did and hadn’t put up much of a fight, so maybe that’s why their captors had gone easy on him. Sasha, the fourth member, stared down at her feet, as if wondering about the state she now found herself in.
At the time they’d been accosted at the airport, they were all talking about their days off. Helena was heading with Carolina to Germany. Carolina would spend time with her brother, whereas Helena, who had a hard time being around Lennox, planned on visiting some other friends nearby. She would stay at Carolina’s apartment because it was convenient and easy. They’d been friends for so long that sharing a space was just second nature. And it had been Carolina’s idea that Helena come stay at the apartment. “You won’t see much of Lennox. I promise.”
Helena had snorted at that. “Anything is too much.”
“You’ll have to get over that,” Carolina said. “He’s not a bad guy.”
“He rubs me the wrong way.”
“And I’ve told you why,” her friend had said in exasperation. “The two of you are so damn perfect for each other that you have to get past that initial almost hate-driven type of relationship you’ve got.”
“And how will that improve anything?” Helena asked. “He’s hardly somebody I want to spend time with.”
“And yet you’re attracted to him. You can’t fool me.”
“He’s a healthy sexy animal,” Helena said. “What’s not to like?”
“So what’s the problem?”
“He’s more than a penis,” she’d said, laughing. “I can handle the physical, but I don’t think I want to live with the rest.”
“And I think that’s just because you’re so damn much alike,” Carolina had said.
“No, we aren’t.” Helena had been determined to shoot her friend down on that point.
“Yeah? Well, every time I ask him what’s wrong with you, I get the same answer. Gorgeous body, gorgeous face, but you know, I’d still have to live with her.”
The trouble was, Helena was attracted to Lennox. And it was way more than just the physical. But she also knew that Lennox went through women like crazy, and she wouldn’t be just another one among the many.
She’d been very particular about the men she hung out with, up until she got married. Then she had made such a shitty decision with her husband that she knew she couldn’t trust herself to choose the right one. She knew Lennox quite well, especially after the number of times they’d seen each other, but she’d also thought she knew her husband.
Her husband had been tall, slim, almost that gentry-type male; she’d never thought such a beast would be under that smooth surface. Lennox was the beast on the outside; she could hope that a gentle male resided underneath, but she couldn’t be sure, and she couldn’t take the chance.
Her ex had taken his fist to her jaw, to her ribs, to her stomach. She was pretty damn sure that’s why she lost the baby she carried at the time.
To find out Carolina had been hiding the same damn secret about her husband had been hard. They both wished that the other hadn’t had to suffer as they had.
They figured each had a fifty-fifty chance of having a decent marriage, so why had they both ended up on the negative end of the scale? Carolina had devoted herself to her work and had ignored men, whereas Helena was still searching the world of men around her because she did want a family. Yet every time she considered another intimate relationship, she found herself drawing back.
She couldn’t even look at the strong aggressive alpha males because all she could remember were the fists that kept pounding her into the ground. And, of course, the problem with that was, her husband looked the exact opposite on the outside—a compliant beta male. So she felt she couldn’t trust any males.
If she didn’t want children so much, remaining single suited her just fine. Being a doctor, she knew all about IVF and figured that could be the answer for her. But then, so many horror stories kept coming up in the news about that too. It was enough to stop her from moving forward.
And now she might not get a chance to rethink that choice.
She studied the two guards at the other end of the cargo plane. They sat, talking among themselves, their weapons turned casually in their hostages’ direction. Still it’s not like her team was any threat to the gunmen. The four who made up her medical team were tied up but not gagged and not likely to give their armed guards any trouble.
Both Helena and Carolina had martial arts skills and kept up their training, trying out new and more advanced techniques, but Helena couldn’t imagine doing a whole lot in this scenario. These men outweighed her easily by one hundred pounds each. Regardless, all the gunmen had to do was pull a trigger, and that would be the end of her and the others anyway.
Except … guns fired on airplanes were not her forte. Would their guards even shoot their weapons on an airplane midflight? Taking out a window on an airplane sounded like a really bad idea—one that would probably kill them all from the sudden depressurization of the plane itself if not when crash-
landing. Would the gunmen risk that? Can a bullet puncture the hull of an airplane? Does it matter the kind of bullet from the kind of gun?
Helena knew absolutely nothing about guns either. Her mission was saving people, not shooting them. But rifles? On an airplane? These weren’t handguns. Or she guessed they could be machine guns, not rifles. Regardless, surely rifles and machine guns were more powerful than handguns and were capable of long-range shots, correct? To her, it seemed even riskier to shoot a rifle in an airplane in flight than to shoot a handgun. Shaking her head, she wished right now that she had access to Google.
Helena thought, if the gunmen were carrying those weapons more for show, then it would be the four of them against the two visible guards and any they couldn’t see. Granted, John and Sasha might be worthless in this situation. So it would be Helena and Carolina against the guards. Given the abusive relationships she and her best friend had been through, and the emotional consequences, Helena would pit her anger-fueled adrenaline against either of those guys. She bet Carolina would too.
Then her head reminded her of her injury as a piercing slash of pain bounced around like an echo in her mind.
She leaned back, closed her eyes, breathing deeply through the agony, until she felt the intensity of Carolina’s gaze. She opened her eyes to see Carolina nodding toward the men. Helena quickly twisted slightly so that she saw the two gunmen. Both had their rifles down and were showing each other papers or something as they exchanged various pieces back and forth. Was it their IDs?
Helena had no idea if their kidnappers had taken their luggage or if their baggage was still sat at the airport. The gunmen had taken the captives’ wallets, purses, all their IDs, and their phones. So that could be the paperwork they were shuffling between themselves.
How much longer would this flight be? Her head throbbed once more, interrupting any more thoughts on her escape plans. Maybe it would be better to tackle her captors once they were on the ground.
Just as she thought that maybe this would be a flight that never ended, the pilot called back to the gunmen, and they started their descent. She glanced at Carolina to see the fear in her best friend’s eyes. Helena gave her a reassuring smile. But how do you do that when your hopes were sinking along with the plane?
Helena closed her eyes again and prayed for help.
Chapter 2
When the plane finally landed, the gunmen snapped orders in English to their captives, lifting them roughly to their feet and ordering them to disembark. Helena slowly made her way down the stairs, their legs free and no gags. We must be far from civilization, Helena thought. Or isolated among the kidnappers’ people. At the tarmac they were moved into a vehicle. She glanced around at the small airport and at the mostly flat geography around her, which meant that she could be anywhere in the world.
She sniffed the air, feeling a warmth that she hadn’t expected. She turned toward Carolina, but her best friend shrugged, as if to say she had no clue where they were. Helena glanced at the other two members of their medical team and only received questioning glances in return.
As they drove off, Helena noted a couple street signs, but she didn’t understand the language. That gave her a sinking feeling in the back of her throat. The language might have been something like Ukrainian. Maybe Polish? Maybe they were within a Soviet red block country? And, if so, why?
Although the laws were a lot more relaxed outside of the US, they could have traveled anywhere. So why here? They hadn’t landed at an international airport. The kidnappers’ options would have been unlimited if they had, but here, a small airport, fewer people watching. Fewer people to pay to not watch … And were she and her team any better off here—wherever here was—than in Africa, where there was almost no law? Where everything was available for a price? Then the Ukraine was likely to be the same too.
Her team didn’t have their phones, although Helena had seen the gunmen checking them out, so their phones were close by. As long as the gunmen didn’t break them, she had hopes of getting them back.
The drive ended rather abruptly as they were taken down a long driveway into what appeared to be some farming community. The vehicle backed up to a long metal building, and they were quickly unloaded and left inside the building in a large metal cage—resembling something made of a chain-link fence. She stared at the place in shock. A barred twelve-by-twelve-foot cage. She didn’t know if it had been used for this purpose before or had been used to hold animals in the past.
“Bathroom?” Helena asked one of the gunmen.
He froze, glanced from one to the other, shrugged, and said, “Yes, just a minute.” And then he went over to talk to the other man.
The man nodded, and they were each led to a small room in the same building and given a few minutes in there. She used the facilities in private, then barely had time to wash her hands and face before the door was opened again, and she was yanked out. As soon as they’d all had their time alone in the bathroom, they were led back to the cage and locked up again.
“Why are you doing this?” Helena asked in what she hoped was a reasonable tone.
But the men ignored her.
“We could pay you,” she said hesitantly. One gunman shrugged. And she realized money wasn’t the motivator. Or maybe the other guy was paying them enough that they wouldn’t be bribed. “Who is behind this?”
He looked at her, smiled, and said, in perfectly good English, “You’re just a casualty.” He pointed at Carolina and said, “She’s the real reason you’re here.” And, with that, he turned and walked out.
Lennox continued to pace outside the main headquarters of the base, while Gavin passively watched his partner. Lennox’s skin crawled to get into action. This waiting was not good for his mental health. This being about his sister made all his adrenaline rush through his body. When he got his hands on the guys responsible for this, … Lennox wasn’t sure he wouldn’t kill them all. He called Keane. Again. “Still no answers?” Lennox asked.
“Some,” Keane said. “We’re just figuring out why.”
“Where is she?”
“Poland.”
Lennox froze. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
Lennox shifted the phone to his other ear. And then decided it would be better on Speaker, as he spoke to Gavin. “This is Keane.”
Keane calmly said, “Hi, Gavin. Back to your sister. Last we picked her up was in Warsaw at another private airstrip on the side of the main international one. Where her flight landed. We’re still getting camera feeds off the airport itself, but it looks like she was down on the ground. We’re looking for confirmation that they disembarked.”
“Do we know if it stopped somewhere else first, before reaching Poland?”
“Always checking for stops,” he said. “You know that. But we’re working on it.”
“So I’m heading to Warsaw then. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“On it,” he said, turning to Gavin. “We need to get moving.”
The two walked inside the main office on base and quickly made arrangements and were then informed that the next flight wouldn’t leave for another two hours. Lennox swore at that. “Is there no other way?”
The personnel quickly went through all the schedules but found absolutely no way to get into the Eastern Bloc country faster.
“Fine,” Lennox said, pissed at the delay.
“It’s still fast. Keep in mind she didn’t arrive very long ago,” said Gavin. “What? Two hours maybe, tops?”
“And now, with the delay here, we’ll be at least four to five hours behind her,” he said, shaking his head, his lips in a taut grimace, his pacing resumed.
“Again, not very far behind. We should get more intel before we arrive.”
“I’m working on that too,” Lennox said. He sat down in the small room, brought his laptop out of his duffel bag, and logged on to the Maverick chat box. Need satellite on the Munich and Warsaw airports. I want video feed of the flights comi
ng in. And I want all traffic cameras watching planes leaving the airports, around the pickup and departure areas as well.
Immediately links showed up. Glad you’re on your laptop now, Keane typed. We’ve got all hands on deck.
Still not enough, Lennox typed back. We can’t get out of here for two hours.
With any luck, we’ll have a more precise location for you to head directly to by then.
Not luck, Lennox typed. We need to make this happen. He quickly minimized the full-screen chat window on his laptop so he could take a look at the links. A distant image showed the suspect plane coming in for a landing at Warsaw. But the cameras were just ever-so-slightly not centered as he watched the passengers disembark. He couldn’t see his sister, but a small male appeared on-screen. Maybe the male nurse?
Lennox brought up the chat box and typed I need a closer image on this one. He quickly took a screenshot and sent it. And an ID confirmation.
Will come back to you in a minute.
Lennox knew that the Mavericks ground crew were now hacking into other cameras at the airport, trying to get a better visual.
Five minutes later, Keane came back. We’ve got this image so far. One of the team, I hope.
Lennox brought it up, and there was his sister’s best friend. That’s Helena. Any sign of my sister?
I can’t see her disembarking, no. They were flying together though, correct? This is taken from Warsaw.
According to our plans, yes. He kept going through the camera feeds, looking for a picture of his sister to confirm that she was there. Just then the ID on the male he’d requested came back as the nurse John Steadman.
Good, Lennox typed. Two confirmed. He caught an image of a third female and got her name confirmed as well.
Sasha Kempton, nurse.
Okay. That established three out of four. Now I need confirmation of my sister.
Not until the transport vehicle had been captured on camera leaving the airport via one of the smaller airstrips did one of the security cameras pick up Carolina’s face in the back seat of a truck. He immediately typed Four confirmed. And Lennox gave Keane the license plate and the picture with his sister in it. Track that. He sat back, looked at Gavin, and said, “That confirms all four were taken together.”