Forged in Smoke (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel Book 3)
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Also by Trish McCallan
Red-Hot SEALs Novels
Forged in Fire
Forged in Ash
Red-Hot SEALs Novellas
Bound by Seduction
Bound by Temptation
Other Novellas
Spirit Woods
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Trish McCallan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503945494
ISBN-10: 1503945499
Cover design by Eileen Carey
Contents
Sitrep
Cast of Characters
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Glossary
Arapaho Terms
Author’s Note
Novel: Forged in Ember
About the Author
Sitrep
Lieutenant Commander Zane Winters and his fellow SEALs thwart the hijacking of flight 2077. During the resulting investigation, they are approached by FBI agent John Chastain, who enlists their aid in finding and rescuing his kidnapped family. The hijackers demand that Chastain turn over seven passengers from the flight, or else they’ll kill his wife and children. But upon returning from the successful rescue, the SEALs find Chastain dead and the list of passengers missing.
Through Amy Chastain (John’s widow), they learn a top-secret lab was recently bombed. Seven of the scientists affiliated with the lab had been booked on flight 2077. Convinced there is a connection to the aborted hijacking, the SEALs raid the lab and find Faith Ansell, one of the purportedly dead scientists, on the premises. Before they can question Faith, they are attacked. They capture one of the mercenaries, who goes by Pachico, and haul him to a safe house with Ansell. Ansell tells them that before the bombing her lab had been working on a new energy paradigm that would have replaced every form of energy known to man—and that her coworkers had been kidnapped, and their deaths faked, in order to duplicate the research. When the cabin is attacked, everyone flees into the woods. During the ensuing battle, Lieutenant Seth Rawlings is near fatally injured . . .
Cast of Characters
Commander Jace (Mac) Mackenzie—commander of SEAL Team 7
Lieutenant Commander Zane Winters—SEAL Team 7
Lieutenant Marcus (Cosky) Simcosky—SEAL Team 7
Lieutenant Seth (Rawls) Rawlings—SEAL Team 7’s corpsman
Beth Brown—Zane’s fiancée
Kait Winchester—metaphysical healer, Cosky’s fiancée
Faith Ansell—scientist working on the new energy paradigm
Wolf—Arapaho special forces warrior, unknown team, Kait’s half brother
John Chastain—FBI agent, murdered in Forged in Fire
Amy Chastain—the widow of John Chastain, kidnapped in Forged in Fire
Benji Chastain—John and Amy’s youngest son, kidnapped in Forged in Fire
Brendan Chastain—John and Amy’s oldest son, kidnapped in Forged in Fire
Russ Branson (aka Russell Remburg)—facilitated the attempted hijacking and kidnapping of Agent Chastain’s family in Forged in Fire, killed by Zane
Jillian Michaels—sister to Russell Remburg, kidnapped in Forged in Fire, antagonist in Forged in Ash
Detective Pachico (aka Robert Biesel)—hired mercenary who was instrumental in the attempted hijacking of flight 2077 and the kidnapping of Faith’s coworkers
Eric Manheim—one of the men funding the attempted hijacking and the kidnapping of Faith’s coworkers
Marion Simcosky—Cosky’s mother
Clay Purcell—FBI agent, Amy Chastain’s stepbrother
Aiden Winchester—SEAL Team 7, Kait’s brother, hero of Bound by Seduction (a Red-Hot SEALs novella)
* * *
Prologue
* * *
Sweet Jesus, Joseph, and Mary . . .
BENEATH SPLINTERED SHARDS of moonlight piercing the thick canopy of blue-black ponderosa pine, Lieutenant Seth Rawlings watched Marcus Simcosky—better known as Cosky—roll a limp body onto its back. Rawls had seen plenty of dead bodies during his fourteen years as a corpsman—or medic—for SEAL Team 7 . . . but none like this.
Gunfire lit the clearing, pinging between tree trunks. He tore his eyes from the body on the ground in favor of scanning the trees surrounding him. He and his team had neutralized most of the assholes who’d blown up their safe house, but a couple had escaped and were holed up in the forest creating havoc. Who the hell were these assholes?
More importantly, who was funding them? Their anonymous enemy had deep pockets and military connections—a deadly combination.
Another burst of gunfire erupted. Rawls flinched, hunkering down, watching Cosky squat to loop the body’s limp arm around his neck, so he could drag it over his shoulder. In a half crouch, his teammate raced for the closest tree. For a second, instinct kicked in and Rawls tensed, ready to dive for cover. But the impulse quickly fled. From the evidence dangling over Cosky’s arms, taking cover wouldn’t make a lick of difference.
He followed Cosky behind the thick protection of bark and watched his teammate roll the body off his shoulder and onto the ground, where it lay stretched out on its back across a thin pad of pine needles.
Disbelief swelled, vibrated against Rawls’s chest.
Hold up. It’s just a dream.
His gaze skated to the right, taking in the body’s blood-soaked shirt and jeans. He recognized the cotton polo, the pants too, with their thinning patches of denim across the knees. He’d dressed in both less than forty-eight hours earlier, before the race to Seattle to investigate the incinerated lab and the detour to this supposedly safe haven in the Sierra Nevadas.
Rocking back on his heels, he stared down at the bloody cloth clinging to his chest. His shirt bore identical stains to the one covering the corpse on the ground. The corpse . . . yeah . . . he’d seen enough death to recognize its stamp.
Just like he recognized the high cheekbones, blue eyes, and gleaming cap of wheat-gold hair belonging to the man on the ground. Damnation, it was the same face he stared at every morning in the mirror.
If that don’t beat all . . . that’s you, hoss . . . you . . . dead on the ground.
He must be dreaming, although try as he might, he couldn’t remember closing his eyes.
He swayed, his body lighter than air, and looked down. What the devil . . . ? Several inches of air buffered his boots from the pine needles matti
ng the forest floor.
Another slew of gunfire hammered the clearing. The familiar sound centered him, and his feet dropped back to the pitchy earth.
Time to wake up. Wake up!
“Clear!” a deep baritone yelled a hundred yards away.
Next to him, Cosky ripped his night vision device off and dropped to his knees. Leaning forward, he pressed his fingers against the side of the flaccid neck.
“Son of a bitch.” The words emerged on a low hiss and Cosky pulled back hard.
“Is he alive?” Zane Winters, his lieutenant commander, skidded to a stop next to Cosky and dropped to his knees. He didn’t wait for a response, just dragged the strap from his rifle over his head, yanked off his NVD, and stripped off his shirt.
Rawls shook his head. “A little late, bro.”
His voice emerged hollow—disembodied—and neither Cosky nor Zane reacted in the slightest.
’Course this is just a dream . . .
He pinched his forearm, or tried to, except he didn’t feel a thing, and his fingers disappeared into his arm all the way up to his knuckles. Holy hell . . . He could clearly see the murky image of rocks and pine needles through his transparent flesh. But he couldn’t feel anything—not the earth beneath his boots nor the wounds beneath his clothes.
As Cosky dragged his shirt off his head, folding it into a compression pad, déjà vu hit Rawls hard. A memory flashed through his mind. A blood-soaked body stretched across green grass. Tense faces and folded shirts.
Only Cosky had been camped out on the ground, and he’d been the one working frantically overhead trying to keep his buddy alive.
He and Cos had traded places. With one big-ass difference. Cosky hadn’t died.
“Welcome to hell,” a sour, yet oddly familiar voice said from behind him.
Rawls spun, and his body went light and floaty again. This shit just got weirder and weirder.
Wake up, hoss. Wake the hell up.
A couple of beats of his nonexistent heart later, and his boots settled back down. With a tight breath, he focused on the man behind him, relieved to find an actual person standing there. Until he realized the figure was translucent too. The hazy image of a tree trunk penetrated the guy’s thin chest.
A second later recognition hit . . . a bald head, crowned by a bloody bandage . . . brown eyes . . . a big black knife protruding from a narrow chest . . .
Pachico . . .
Pachico, who’d died in their safe haven less than fifteen minutes earlier. Pachico, whose corpse had been unceremoniously cremated when their hidey-hole had been blown to Venus and back.
Sweet Jesus . . .
Disbelief swarmed, flooding him like helium, and his feet said adios to the ground again. The man—or thing—laughed, and the knife bobbed up and down.
Wake up. Damn it, time to wake up.
Kait, Cosky’s brand-new girlfriend, flew past Rawls, her braid flopping against her back and gleaming like wet gold beneath the opalescent shimmer of the moonlight. She dropped to her knees and spread her hands. “Which is the worst wound?”
“Chest,” Zane said, backing up to give her room.
“What the hell do they think they’re gonna do?” the man Rawls had known as Detective Pachico asked. “Bring you back from the dead?” He snorted out a laugh.
Cosky’s breath whistled out in a rush. “I got a pulse.”
Pachico laughed again. “Wishful thinking on your buddy’s part. If you had a pulse, you wouldn’t be all floaty beside me.”
A thick, static pressure swelled in Rawls’s head. He recognized the symptoms of shock—the mental fog, the dizzy floating sensation, the white haze shrouding his vision.
Except, if Pachico was right . . . if he really had died . . . he didn’t have eyes now, did he? Or a body? Or a life?
Wake up. He pinched his wrist again, grimacing when his fingers sank into his transparent arm. Stepping forward, he grabbed Zane’s shoulder, and his hand vanished. Zane didn’t even flinch. No reaction at all.
“You’re not sleeping, dumbass. You’re dead. As a doornail. Your buddies can’t see you, or hear you, or feel you. I should know. I’ve been trying to catch someone’s attention since you let me die in that damn kitchen.” Pachico paused and then his voice rose. “What the fuck are they doing?” He stepped closer to the drama unfolding before them.
Rawls turned back to the nightmare playing out at his feet. Kait knelt on one side of his prone form, her palms pressed against the center of his chest. Cosky faced her, his hands covering hers. Frozen, they crouched there, staring down . . . waiting.
“Tryin’ to heal me.” Rawls twitched, startled by his hollow, disembodied voice.
“No fuck.” Pachico laughed. “Good luck with that.”
There was precedent for such a healing. Kait had fixed Cosky’s knee after all, but then again—Cosky hadn’t been dead.
How did one go about healing the deceased?
He turned in a slow circle, surveying the silvery trees and shrubs surrounding him. The clearing stood pretty much the same—other than the moonlight, which might be a tad more ethereal since his death.
If he wasn’t dreaming, if he really had kicked the bucket, this didn’t resemble any of the near-death experiences his patients had recounted during his surgical residency. No bright light lurked in the distance. Peace and love were void from the air. Gram and Gramps, Ma and Pops, Uncle Andy and Aunt Ruth . . . Sarah . . . Hell—not one of them had come to fetch him into the afterlife.
Apparently they still hadn’t forgiven him for what had happened . . . which was fair. He hadn’t forgiven himself.
He frowned, his gaze falling on a crumpled figure in the distance. He hadn’t been the only one to die in this meadow. Where were the rest of the corporeally disenfranchised?
“Why didn’t your buddy over there”—he nodded at the motionless form—“go all Casper on us too?”
“How the hell should I know?” Pachico scowled at him before turning back to the drama taking place beneath the mammoth pine tree. “I wasn’t given a manual any more than you were.” He watched for a moment before leaning forward, his eyes widening. “What the fuck! Do you see that? They’re glowing!”
Rawls simply nodded, too startled to speak. Kait and Cosky had lit up like a pair of bright white sparklers. A dense bubble of silver cocooned the pair, flowed out of their hands, and plunged into his chest, where it advanced in a glowing puddle until it infused every inch of his inert form. With each second, the light intensified, blurring the outline of his frame into a pulsing rectangle of platinum.
Within the radiance something took shape—a thick, wavering snakelike tentacle. It unfurled from the luminous pool like a cobra poised to strike, and hung in the air, shedding silver sparks.
What the freaky, unbelievable, hell?
Rawls leapt back when it suddenly flew at him, but he didn’t have time to evade the blow. As the appendage penetrated his chest, it delivered an electrical shock of such intensity it knocked him off his feet. Before he could scramble up, another static jolt hit him and then another, launching his incorporeal body into helpless, twitching spasms. A sharp prickle swept his body. As the current pooled in his head, a static buzz filled his ears.
And then suddenly he was moving. He dug his heels and hands into the earth, or tried to, but zap, another bolt of electricity lit him from within, and some immense, unseen force dragged him forward.
Zane loomed directly in front, and he braced for impact, except he cut through his LC’s legs like Casper through a wall. He was still adjusting to that when his boots pierced his lifeless torso, and he sank into his limp body like a stone into a well.
His head spun. A dense, crackling hum flooded his brain. Black pinpricks blinded him. A sharp sense of confinement struck, as though he’d stuffed himself into a suit several sizes too small. And then the pinpricks swelled, encircled him, drug him into a vortex of unforgiving black.
Rawls returned to consciousness in increments
of scattered impressions and sluggish memories. The heavy thud of his heart deafened his ears . . . something hard and sharp, bordering on painful, dug into his spine . . . the thick sense of claustrophobia faded . . . the static charge consuming his chest shifted to a distinct burn.
Breath by breath the discomfort edged into pain, and from there it shot straight to agony. A groan broke from him, which spawned an explosion of voices.
Light-headed, he struggled to open eyelids that weighed a thousand pounds apiece. One blink, followed by several more, and two worried faces swam into focus—Cosky and Kait, their faces tomato soup–red and streaming with sweat.
“Welcome back,” Zane said, his voice rough with relief.
Rawls rolled his head, tracking his LC’s voice, only to freeze as dizziness hurled his stomach into his throat. He gagged, desperately forcing the bile back.
“Easy,” Zane said, his voice quiet and calm. “You took a couple rounds to the chest.”
An explanation Rawls had arrived at himself thanks to the straitjacket of misery cinched around his ribs, along with that weird dream they’d yanked him from. He eased back on the breathing, taking shallow breaths that wouldn’t expand his rib cage. Kait and Cosky must have healed him enough to keep him alive, although judging from the pain consuming his upper body, considerable damage remained.
He gingerly turned his head to the right, keeping his torso as still as possible, and searched out Kait’s sweaty, tired face.
“Thank you,” he mouthed.
The effort, small as it was, exhausted him. Relaxing, he allowed his eyes to drift shut and concentrated on his breathing. Slowly, the buzzing in his head subsided and the dizziness waned. The agonizing burn in his chest shuffled aside, lurking in the background. A steady drone of voices overhead lulled him into a stupor. He’d just rest here a moment. Recoup his strength. But it didn’t take long for that strange dream to play through his mind.
If Freud’s theory was correct, and dreams were nothing more than the subconscious mind’s expression of wish fulfillment, what the devil did that say about his desires? Uncomfortable with that line of questioning, he searched for something else to occupy his mind.