Bulletproof SEAL

by Carol Ericson

  She stood next to him on the balcony, resting her head against his good shoulder. “This is going to work, Quinn.”

  “I have a backup plan in case we can’t get your location in advance.”

  She folded her arms on the railing of the balcony and bent forward, surveying the street. “Shoot—or maybe I shouldn’t be telling a sniper to shoot.”

  His lips twisted as he pointed to his bum shoulder. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to hoist my rifle again.”

  “There will be five other ones there to do the job, but what’s the backup?”

  “You’re CIA, or you were. You must know about the internal GPS.”

  She dipped her head. “You mean the one that’s swallowed?”

  “That’s the one. It’s undetectable if they scan and search you, but we’ll have your location.”

  “I can do that. I will do that, but it might be too late once I’m there. Vlad probably has lookouts. Hell, he’s a sniper himself, isn’t he?”

  “That’s the problem, but it’s better than nothing. Even if we miss Vlad, we might be able to go in and get Dawson.”

  “Don’t miss Vlad.” She dug her fingernails into his arm. “Whatever you do, whatever happens to me, don’t let Vlad get away.”

  He cradled her jaw in his palm. “Do you think nailing Vlad is more important to me than you are? I’m not risking your life to get Vlad—and I’m not going to let anyone else do it, either.”

  She turned her head to kiss his hand. “You know we’ll never be safe as long as he’s alive. He has a personal vendetta against you guys. That’s probably how David knew where you lived in New Orleans. Vlad may be distracted now because you’ve disrupted his plans so many times, but he’ll come back at you and the others again and again.”

  “Let him.” Quinn spread out his arms and faced the Mississippi, feeling invincible—until an ache claimed his shoulder.

  “It’s not just you, tough guy.” She traced the outline of his bandage. “You have Bella now. You told me Miguel has a little boy, and Josh’s girlfriend has a son. Austin Foley’s girlfriend is not going to live on his parents’ ranch forever, and Slade’s new love puts herself in danger all over the world. And if you think that crazy, intense Russian, Alexei Ivanov is ever going to give up on Vlad, you’re as crazy as he is. It has to end now—in Berlin, where according to David it all started for Vlad.”

  “Point taken. I shouldn’t have updated you on all my teammates.” Quinn scratched his jaw. “Dawson did say that, didn’t he?”

  “What?”

  “That it all began in Berlin for Vlad.”

  “Y-yes.” She dropped her lashes and shifted away from him.

  “I’d heard that when Ariel was with the CIA, she spent time in Berlin.”

  “I think so.” Rikki pointed across the rooftops to the river. “Are those barges always there?”

  “Not usually. They’re getting ready for the fireworks.” He cocked his head at her, and she pushed herself off the balcony and spun around to the room.

  “The doctor should be here soon.”

  Quinn wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and followed her back into the air-conditioned room.

  Ten minutes later the doc showed up, and he must’ve come from Ariel’s special list, but Rikki still made herself scarce.

  Dr. Smith, as he called himself, peeled back the homemade bandage from Quinn’s shoulder and slipped his glasses to the edge of his nose. “Clean gunshot wound right there. You’re lucky.”

  With very little further conversation, the doctor thoroughly cleaned the wound, replaced the bandage with something more secure, and gave Quinn a new bottle of antibiotics and some painkillers.

  Dr. Smith shook the bottle of painkillers. “These will make you sleepy, so you might want to stick with the ibuprofen.”

  Quinn picked up a sling and dangled it from his fingertips. “And this?”

  “You’ll want to hold your arm still and pressed against your body. That will help, but your shoulder is going to be stiff as hell if it isn’t already.”

  Quinn rolled his shoulder back in a test and winced. “It’s getting there.”

  “That’s all I got for you.” The doc snapped his black medical bag closed. “Take the antibiotics as prescribed. In the unlikely event the wound starts to fester, you’ll need additional treatment. If you’re still here, that’ll probably be me, but I have a feeling—” Dr. Smith shot a glance at Rikki’s bag in the corner “—you won’t be here much longer.”

  Quinn got up and extended his hand. “I hope you mean I won’t be in New Orleans much longer and not on this Earth.”

  The doctor chuckled. “With you guys, it’s always a crapshoot.”

  When Dr. Smith left, Rikki sauntered in from the back bedroom. “Everything okay? You gonna live?”

  “According to the cheerful doctor Ariel sent, that’s debatable.”

  “What?” Rikki flew to his side and grabbed his hand.

  “I’m kidding. He was referring to something other than the bullet hole in my shoulder. That’s going to be just fine.” He kissed the inside of her wrist. “How about you? Are you just fine with all this?”

  “I’ve been fine with all this for almost ten years. It’s my job, Quinn. I can handle David Dawson and Vlad.”

  “The stakes have never been higher, Rikki. You never had this much to lose—Bella.”

  “You.” She brushed her knuckles across his cheek. “We’re going to do this, Quinn. And then I’ll introduce you to your daughter.”

  He squeezed the top of his shoulder. “I’m not sure I can do anything with this shoulder. How am I going to fire my rifle?”

  “Your whole team will be there. It doesn’t have to be you who takes out Vlad.”

  “After what we’ve been through with him, it would be a gold star for any of us. It might not just be Vlad. We might have to take down Dawson, too, although Ariel might prefer we bring him in for interrogation. Are you okay with that?”

  “David is already dead to me. He turned, and he didn’t even do it for ideology. He did it for money.”

  “And because he could—pride.” Quinn toyed with the edge of his bandage. “You said you read his book, right?”

  “Yeah, the whole thing.” She rolled her eyes. “It was painful, and that was when I still liked the guy.”

  “Do you have it somewhere so I can read it?”

  “You’re not going to pick up any tips from it.”

  “Maybe not about writing, but there could be lots of tips about Dawson in there.”

  “I can get you to it.” She stepped away from him and sat at the table with his laptop in front of her. “He put it up on a document-sharing platform for me to read. It’s over a year old. I read it before we went to Dubai, so if he’s made any changes they won’t be in this draft.”

  “That’s okay. Bring it up for me. I’ll need something to read on my flight to Berlin. My military transport is not going to be as comfortable as your first class on a commercial airline.”

  Rikki spent several minutes at his laptop navigating to the shared document site. She scribbled something on a slip of hotel stationery and propped it up on his laptop’s keyboard. “Here’s my user name and password for this site.”

  Quinn stretched his arms over his head. “I’d better get packing. I leave tonight.”

  Rikki rose from the desk and returned to his side. She skimmed her hand down the front of his body and curled her fingers into the waistband of his shorts. “You didn’t take any of those painkillers, did you?”

  “No.” When she touched him like that, he felt no pain at all.

  “Because if you’re leaving tonight, that means I have to spend the night in this giant suite in that giant bed all by myself.”

  His breathing grew shallow, and prickles of desire raced acros
s his skin. “That would be a damned waste.”

  Sliding his hands down her back, he slanted his mouth across hers and kissed her hard and possessively. If she had to pretend to love Dawson, he didn’t want her to forget what true love felt like.

  She took his hand and led him into the suite’s master bedroom.

  Sometime later, with their legs and arms entwined around each other, when he didn’t know where he ended and Rikki began, she kissed the edge of his jaw.

  “I want you to know, Quinn McBride, before we go into this battle and risk everything, I love you. I loved you in Dubai. I loved you when I found out you’d had orders to kill me. I loved you when I found you again in New Orleans. And I love you now. I’m not afraid of love anymore, not your love.”

  He smoothed her hair back from her face. “That’s all I ever wanted to hear from you.”

  Later that night, Dawson’s words bounced on the screen as the C-5 hit an air pocket over the Atlantic. Quinn steadied his laptop.

  The story dragged and Dawson’s prose reeked, but Quinn couldn’t shake the feeling that if Dawson used his villain’s name for Vlad, there might be other hints in his work of fiction. Dawson must’ve been working with Vlad already when he penned this mess. In fact, Frederick Von seemed to be a thinly veiled reincarnation of Vlad.

  Quinn plowed through the rest of the book, his eyelids drooping until a passage gave him a shot of adrenaline, a passage about Von’s hideaway—a schloss in the Grunewald forest outside Berlin.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ariel’s team had a full day to set up at Grunewald before Rikki’s meeting with Dawson and Vlad. They’d located a schloss in the forest owned by a blind trust.

  In case Vlad had his people in the area, the sniper team came in as construction workers, tourists and locals out for a stroll. But if Vlad’s people were counting, they’d know not everyone who’d entered the area for work or play left.

  That first night with his brothers, his sniper team, had been like a homecoming for Quinn. They’d been scattered for so long, but the teamwork and comradery returned like second nature.

  Alexei stroked his rifle like he would a beautiful woman. “Who’s going to get the final shot at Vlad?”

  “If there is a final shot.” Austin Foley, gung ho and still a little green, looked up from his laptop. “We don’t even know if this is the place.”

  “It’s the place.” Quinn formed his fingers into a gun and aimed at Austin.

  Austin tapped the keyboard. “Rikki’s in the hotel. Are you sure Dawson won’t be able to detect the GPS in her system?”

  Slade Gallagher waved him off. “You worry too much, Austin. Dawson’s not going to know, and if he suspects, he’ll be confident that Vlad’s people are not going to allow anyone to follow him and Rikki.”

  “We know who’s not going to take the shot.” Josh Elliott tipped his head toward Quinn. “You got yourself a bum shoulder, son. You’re out of the running.”

  Quinn snorted. “I’m almost sure I still have better aim with my jacked-up shoulder than you do, Elliott. Hell, even skinny Miguel over there has you beat.”

  Miguel Estrada chucked a glove at Quinn. “Watch it. I may have dropped a few pounds, but I’ve got more reason than anyone here to make that shot count.”

  The door to the loft in the schloss a half mile away from Vlad’s cottage burst open, and every last sniper reached for his weapon.

  A woman with dark hair in a ponytail wedged her hands on her slim hips. “I’ll make that decision when the time comes.”

  Quinn’s jaw dropped. He’d had a vague picture of Ariel in his head, but this woman, whose face they all knew, wasn’t it.

  Alexei, the blunt Russian-American, voiced what was in all their heads. “You! Lauren West, the wife of Defense Secretary West.”

  “That’s not who I am here.” She crossed her arms and propped up the doorjamb with her shoulder. “I’m Ariel, and I’m still the leader of this task force.”

  Once they all got over the shock of Mrs. Shane West being the infamous Ariel, they dug in to discuss their plans.

  They wouldn’t all be stationed in this hunting lodge. They had visibility of Vlad’s schloss from a few well-hidden treetops and a museum that would be closed to the public tomorrow.

  Ariel instructed Austin to keep tabs on Rikki and to notify her immediately if it looked like Rikki was not headed in their direction.

  Quinn clamped a fist against the knots in his gut. He had to be right about the location of this meeting. It made too much sense. It synced up with Ariel’s belief that the meeting would be in this forest.

  His gaze tracked to the vibrant brunette giving orders as well as or better than her husband ever did, and Shane West was one of them—a retired navy SEAL sniper. How had she known? What connection did she have with Vlad? Her husband had come up against him a few times, but nothing like how the team in this room had.

  A few hours later, after a meal and talk about the assignments that had led them all to this forest on this night, Quinn’s teammates began scattering again—this time to take down a terrorist who had threatened them all and the ones they loved.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Quinn peeled a banana and made it his breakfast. He had stayed in the schloss with Ariel, the only two who had buddied up, and for the hundredth time he cursed the gunshot wound in his shoulder. But if he thought his close proximity to Ariel would get her to open up, he couldn’t be more wrong.

  Which one of them would Ariel choose for the honor? All of them were at the top of their game, even Miguel after his time in captivity. Alexei could be a hothead, but not in a sniper situation, and Slade was laid-back enough to step away and let others take credit.

  He and Josh had the most experience, but given his current condition, it might fall to Josh Elliott to take out their nemesis.

  It was anyone’s guess at this point, and Ariel kept her lips sealed.

  The radio crackled, and Austin’s cowboy twang came over the airwaves. “Our subject is on the move. Leaving the hotel.”

  Quinn tossed the banana peel in their makeshift trash bag and wiped his hands on his jeans. He shouldn’t have eaten anything. His stomach churned.

  Ariel studied him through narrowed eyes. “Don’t worry about Rikki. She can handle herself.”

  “I know that, but if this isn’t the meeting place, I screwed up royally and we’ll have to scramble to catch up to them.”

  “You didn’t screw up, Quinn. This is it.”

  He ran his tongue along his teeth. “How can you be so sure? How did you know it would be Grunewald forest when Rikki mentioned Berlin?”

  Fire sparked from her dark eyes, and her nostrils flared, giving her a completely different appearance from the sophisticated, put-together lady of Washington. “You’re not the only one who knows Vlad.”

  Quinn’s brain whirred for the best response to get Ariel to open up, but Austin’s voice interrupted him.

  “They’re on the autobahn, leaving the city.”

  The knots returned to Quinn’s gut, and his shoulder throbbed. A jumbled prayer ran through his head that Rikki would head straight to the schloss, that she’d be safe, that Bella would be safe.

  Austin’s voice filled the room. “Headed this way. On track. The subject is on track.”

  The others hooted and whooped it up, but Quinn silently thanked God as his gaze met Ariel’s.

  Throughout the morning, strangers had wandered into the forest and along the lake, and the team had ID’d them as operatives for Vlad. They clearly had no clue that they were already surrounded by a team of navy SEAL snipers and a support group whose sole purpose over the past year had been to neutralize Vlad and his terrorist network.

  None of them knew what Vlad looked like. He’d changed his appearance like a chameleon in every fuzzy, vague photo they had
of him. But he’d be the one meeting with Dawson and Rikki. There would be no question about that, so they had to wait. They couldn’t just start taking down people as they got out of cars or made their way to Vlad’s hunting lodge, giving him a heads-up.

  After the tense waiting of the morning, everything started unfolding faster than Quinn had anticipated.

  Ariel started spitting out directions in the military manner she must’ve learned from her husband, the secretary. She had Quinn zeroing in on the car carrying Rikki and Dawson.

  He’d had some painkiller injected directly into his shoulder, and the numbness prevented him from even feeling the heft of his rifle resting there. The car pulled up on the gravel drive of the schloss, and Rikki stepped out.

  For the second time in less than two years, Quinn lined her up in his scope. He whispered. “C’mon, Buttercup. We’re gonna do this.”

  Rikki threw back her head, laughing at some quip from Dawson, but Quinn could almost believe she’d heard his quiet entreaty.

  Another car pulled up, and several men exited.

  Quinn held his breath. The tension coming off Ariel stifled the air in the room.

  She’d joined him at the window, her own rifle, a sleek, deadly model, hoisted and ready. How long had she trained for this?

  As the group began moving toward the house, Rikki paused and shook hands with a tall man, the sun glinting off his clean-shaven head.

  With rapid fire, Ariel gave them their targets. Josh had the man Rikki had just greeted. He must be Vlad. Lucky bastard.

  Quinn had the driver as his target, but they had to assume he was armed as well and would pose a threat to Rikki and even Dawson once the shooting ended.

  Ariel gave the countdown before the group could even move inside. She must be sure of Vlad and that he wasn’t waiting inside for them.

  Three. Two. One.

  Quinn felled his target and then swept his scope to the other fallen men. They’d left Dawson alive, and his mouth gaped in shock.

  Then he reached for a weapon as Rikki backed away from him, and Quinn took his second shot.