“So you intend to kill us.”
“Yes.”
Tanya whimpered.
Sarah’s chest tightened and she felt her bladder threaten to give way again.
“Why?”
“Once you’ve served your purpose, we’ll have no need for you.”
“Why not let us go? Why kill us?” She was trembling now along with Tanya, each feeding on the other’s fear.
“Enough questions.”
“You know who I am, that means you know who my father is. He’s a very powerful man. If it’s money you want, you’ll have it.”
Koroma laughed. “Money? You think that’s what this is about?” He shook his head. “Silly Americans. You think the entire world revolves around your almighty dollar. This has nothing to do with money.”
“Then what does it have to do with?”
Koroma pulled out his gun and placed it on the dash. “Enough questions.”
Sarah closed her eyes but there would be no sleep for her. Her mind was racing with what Koroma had said. She had been kidnapped because of her father, and the fact she was a doctor. It sounded like they might be put to use treating Ebola patients in Koroma’s village, but she was stunned at the revelation it had nothing to do with money.
Yet not at all surprised they were going to die.
Daddy, help us!
1st Special Forces Operational Detachment - Delta HQ, Fort Bragg, North Carolina
A.k.a. “The Unit”
Dawson had managed to chow down half the salad in line at the main gate and was shoveling the last few spoonsful into his mouth as he hurried toward the Colonel’s office. It was too much food, Shirley having put way too much in the container, but he didn’t mind. God only knew when he’d see a decent meal again if he was sent on an op.
He nodded hellos to various personnel, The Unit a tightknit community of operators and support staff. They numbered nearly a thousand, his Bravo Team merely a dozen men, all Non-Commissioned Officers who had gone through some of the most intensive training known to man.
And their support staff was the best of the best, all experts in their own rights, and all people he trusted and knew he and his men could rely on.
Including the Colonel.
He walked into the Colonel’s outer office and placed the container and fork on Maggie’s desk, the woman he hadn’t yet acknowledged he loved, but had a sneaking suspicion he might just actually, away at her sister’s. She had been gone three days and he had to admit he missed her. It was different on an op. He might be gone days or weeks, but that was part of the job. It was different when she was away. He realized it was a double standard, but part of him felt she should, or would, always be there when he was home.
Now maybe you know how the better-halves feel.
He doubted that. They had only been dating a few months. People like Red and Shirley had been married coming up on ten years.
Ten years!
He couldn’t imagine that.
He grinned in the mirror Maggie kept on her desk, confirming he was free from parsley surprises, then knocked on the Colonel’s door. It was a Sunday and there was no secretary, if that’s what they were called anymore. He had never actually asked Maggie what her job title was, but he was pretty sure calling her a ‘secretary’ was some sort of faux pas. He’d have to remember to ask her when she got back, just in case he was ever asked what she did.
She works for the Colonel.
That had been his response the one time he had been asked. It was his sister when she had detected a different tone in his voice a couple of weeks after he began seeing Maggie—or more accurately, Maggie had begun seeing him. She had been the one to chase him, and he had tried to ignore it for as long as he could but had finally given in, she simply too gorgeous and too nice to disregard forever.
It wasn’t until his sister had said he sounded happier that he had realized he was. He had always dismissed the idea of a long term relationship, his job too dangerous. He respected the men that did get married and start families, but he had been to far too many funerals where the grieving widow was handed the folded flag to ever want to risk doing that to someone.
And it had left an empty hole inside him that he hadn’t realized was there.
Until Maggie.
Shit, you’ve got it bad!
He knocked again.
“Enter!”
He opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind him. “Good afternoon, Colonel.”
“It’s Sunday and I’m here. There’s nothing goddamned good about that if you ask my wife.”
Dawson chuckled, taking a seat, the Colonel not one for formalities when alone. If the brass was in town, or some honcho from Washington, he’d go through the motions, but here, in The Unit, with his men? Never.
Clancy shoved an unlit cigar in his mouth, chomping on the head.
“I thought you quit.”
Clancy looked down at the stogie. “I have.”
“Uh huh.”
“Hey, as far as my wife is concerned, I’ve quit. And as far as I’m concerned, unless there’s smoke coming out of the end of it, I’m not lying.”
Dawson raised his hands in defeat. “Hey, I’ll never come between a man and his wife. Or cigar.”
Clancy grunted, pulling the cigar from his mouth, staring at it. “When the hell did these things ever become bad for you?”
“Probably around the time the war on cigarettes was pretty much won.”
Clancy nodded, stamping the unlit cigar out in his clean ashtray. He shook his head as he caught himself. “Now they want to tax candy bars and potato chips.” He glanced back at the cigar. “Perhaps dying early from lung cancer isn’t such a bad thing.”
“When they start taxing fun, I’m moving to Cuba.”
“You mean sex. And if they start taxing that, I’m joining you.”
“Bringing the missus?”
“As long as you’re bringing Maggie.”
Dawson smiled then shrugged. “You never know.”
“Hmmm. You better not lose me a perfectly good secretary.”
Secretary!
“She’s a big girl.”
“Yes she is, with a heart of gold. And the best damned assistant I’ve managed to find. Don’t eff this up!”
Assistant?
“It’s only been a few months, sir, I think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves.”
“Riight. That’s what I said to my buddies when I started dating Cheryl. Thirty years later and I still don’t know what the hell happened.”
“Shotgun wedding?”
“Nope. But if her pappy was still around, there’d be shotguns involved if I ever tried to divorce her.”
“Let’s hope they don’t bring in the tax then.”
Clancy chuckled, grabbing the cigar and shoving it back in his mouth. He jabbed a finger at a folder on his desk, pushing it toward Dawson. “Vice President’s daughter is missing in Sierra Leone. She’s a doctor, volunteering for two months with Doctors Without Borders at an Ebola treatment center. A male doctor, French national, was found beheaded in her quarters. She’s missing along with a female Ukrainian national, also a doctor. This is from the top. They want you in Sierra Leone like yesterday. Find her, get her out of the country, and they don’t care what you have to do to get it done.”
“Team?”
“Four man, your choice.”
“I’ll take Niner, Jimmy and Atlas.”
“Good choices.”
“Cover?”
“You’re Diplomatic Services. You’ll be permitted side arms and that’s about it. But if the need should arise, you can get supplied from the USS Simpson. Details are in the file.”
“When do we leave?”
“In six hours.”
“Any leads?”
“Nothing yet, but hopefully the CIA will have something for you by the time you get there.”
“Do we have a motive? Any ransom demands yet?”
Clanc
y shook his head. “Not a peep, but it just happened earlier today. They might be still securing them.”
“So no idea who’s behind it.”
“Negative, but there is an Islamist problem in the area.”
“Church burnings if I’m not mistaken?”
Clancy nodded. “Now that their civil war is over, it’s given them a chance to remember that the country is over twenty percent Christian. That just doesn’t sit well with some people.”
“Too many people.”
“Too true, but it’s not our job to judge, that’s God’s.”
“And it’s our job to arrange the meeting?”
Clancy laughed. “You know, I talked to Stormin’ Norman about that. He never said it. Loved it, but never said it.”
“Too bad, it fit him.”
“Fifty years ago they would have blamed Patton.” Clancy suddenly became serious, looking straight at Dawson. “Listen, we don’t know who took her or why. All I do know is that Ebola is running rampant there. You need to be damned careful, all of you. The last thing I need is one of you becoming infected. The paperwork will kill me.”
“If the paperwork doesn’t, Maggie will.”
Clancy leaned back in his chair. “She’s the first one who’s managed to get her claws into you without having her heart broken in sixty mikes. How are you feeling going out on ops knowing that she’s back here, waiting for you?”
Dawson shrugged. It was something he had been asking himself, and to be perfectly frank, he felt it hadn’t impacted his ability to do his job at all. He still took the necessary risks, still did whatever it took with the same regard for his own life as he had been trained for. Just because he was sent by his country on dangerous missions didn’t mean it expected him to die for it. It spent millions of dollars training people like him to do just the opposite. Dying for your country was a necessary risk, but never an expectation, not in today’s battlefield. Casualties would happen, but everything would be done to avoid them. Gone were the days of throwing infantry at fortified positions in the hopes that eventually someone would break through.
Could a war like that happen again?
With the way Russia kept doing moronic things, he sometimes wondered. There were only three countries he could think of where mass casualties might arise should there be a conflict. Russia, China and North Korea. They were about the only countries with standing armies that could be a genuine challenge, but none had anything America would want, so any altercation would involve fighting them on soil foreign to both sides.
Poland, Taiwan, South Korea.
He shifted in his seat, realizing Clancy was waiting for an answer. “I can’t say it’s really affected me. I just focus on the job as always. During the downtime I think about her, but it’s no different than it is for the rest of the guys who have wives or girlfriends back home.”
“No, but you’ve always been a loner.”
Dawson nodded. “True. But I’ve always had family, my men, The Unit.” He paused, his eyes narrowing. “Why, you worried about me?”
Clancy chuckled. “Not at all, Sergeant Major, not at all. The day I start to worry about you is the day you’re out of The Unit.”
Dawson smiled. “Trust me, sir, you’ll have my resignation first.”
“Of that I have no doubt.” He pointed at the door with his cigar. “Now go, and be careful. Leave the viruses where you found them.”
Dawson rose giving the Colonel a slight bow then left the room, glancing at Maggie’s empty chair.
And wondering what it was going to be like going into a true hot zone for the first time with someone back home he cared about.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Chris Leroux combed through thousands of hits to the search requests he had input, his eyes occasionally glazing over forcing him to sit back and blink a few times. It wasn’t that he was tired, it was just staring at the screen all day.
And it had been all day.
His entire team was working overtime, half now, half for the night shift, trying to find some bit of intel that might lead to the Vice President’s daughter but so far there had been nothing. But he knew it was just a matter of time. MYSTIC had been activated, the National Security Agency system capable of recording every single phone conversation in an entire country. Currently, unbeknownst to the Sierra Leonean government, their entire country was being eavesdropped on. And as the computers sifted through the phone calls, converting them into text where possible, flagging calls with certain keywords, satellites and listening stations around the globe were pushing reams of data into Echelon, another system much older than MYSTIC that recorded every single phone call, among other methods of communication, made from outside the United States.
The data was there, or it would be. Someone would mention something, and someone would eventually catch it.
The key was catching it in time.
And recognizing it for what it was.
There was a rap on his door.
“Enter!”
He still felt a thrill of imitating one of his heroes, Captain Jean Luc Picard. Yes, he was a geek, and proud of it. Well, maybe not proud of it, since he had led a pretty sheltered, lonely life because of it. But he loved his Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Battlestar and pretty much anything else with ‘star’ in it, and he wasn’t going to change.
The door opened and he smiled as his girlfriend, Sherrie White, entered carrying a bucket of the Colonel’s finest. “I brought you some dinner since I knew you’d be working late,” she said as she stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She gave him a peck then placed the bucket and a large KFC bag on his desk, removing her jacket and hanging it on the coatrack in the corner.
He took a moment to appreciate her fantastic curves while she was looking away.
She caught him.
“See something you like?”
He looked away quickly, his eyes shifting to the large brown bag of food, the KFC logo emblazoned on the side, grease stains already permeating through the paper, the aroma causing his empty stomach to growl in appreciation.
If women wanted men to pay more attention to them, perfume should smell like fried chicken, not flowers.
“You’re thinking about the fried chicken perfume again, aren’t you?”
He felt his cheeks flush. “You know me too well.” He stood, opening the bag. “I should patent it like Dylan says. We’d be rich.”
“Bah, being rich is too complicated. I like our lives the way they are.”
He looked inside. “Christ, how much did you get?”
“You said half your team was here, so I got enough for everyone.”
“Maybe I better get on that patent,” he said as he removed two large boxes of French fries. “This must have cost a fortune.”
“It wasn’t too bad. Besides, my raise just came in.”
“A whopping one percent like mine?”
“Yup. But I still get to shoot guns and blow things up, so my meagre salary to keep our nation safe is still acceptable.”
“When I agreed to let you move in I figured you’d be making James Bond type money. I had no idea your salary would be half mine.”
She shrugged. “If you’re marrying me for my money, you’re wasting your time.”
Marrying!?!
She looked at him, a smile on her face. “Did I scare you with that word?”
He shook his head a little too quickly. “No, I mean, um, no.”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, honey, I’m not Beyoncé. You don’t have to put a ring on it to get some of this.” She slapped her ass. “But it wouldn’t hurt,” she said with a wink, opening his office door. “Chris bought KFC!” she called, immediately eliciting excited, hungry outbursts. His office was quickly filled with the four people who were working the classified search engines with him.
“Thanks, boss!” said one of his senior analysts, Marc Therrien, as he took the paper plate Sherrie handed him. Chicken, fries and potato salad
were dished out and everyone stood around, eating and making idle chitchat, Sherrie, far more outgoing than Leroux, having everyone in stitches with a tale from her training at Quantico. Like Leroux, most of his staff were more the introverted type, but Sherrie simply had a way of putting people at ease.
One of the many reasons he was desperately in love with her.
Perhaps marriage isn’t such a bad idea?
The thought terrified him. And excited him. He never would have imagined he’d even have the option of getting married, he a loser in his own mind, his friends all online besides Dylan Kane, a CIA Special Agent who had taken him under his wing when they were kids at the same high school.
And because of Kane’s job, he almost never saw him.
Sherrie falling for him while on assignment was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he was terrified every day that she might change her mind. But it had been almost two years now and they were still going strong.
Maybe it’s the fact we’re both potential targets of The Assembly.
He dismissed the thought. The Assembly, a secret organization he had accidentally uncovered that claimed to have been around for centuries if not longer, manipulating world events to their liking, was his top secret side project that Director Morrison had assigned him to. Since the organization had shown no qualms about killing, he was under 24 hour guard.
His only truly private time was in the confines of his apartment, though it was swept before he entered by his detail.
He hadn’t left a sink full of dishes since it started.
“What’s that?” asked Therrien, pointing to Leroux’s screen. It was flashing with a priority hit result from one of his searches. He sat down, putting his plate aside and opened up the details.
And smiled.
“This could be it,” he said, the entire room gathering around the monitor. “A large amount of medical supplies were stolen just hours before the kidnapping. Looks like they posed as soldiers and the dockworkers just loaded the supplies into the back of their transport trucks.”
“Could have actually been soldiers for all we know,” said Therrien.
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