by Rob Sinclair
He had always hoped she had felt the same. She had betrayed his trust more than once and yet each time he could understand her intentions. She had loved Tom Grainger, that much was clear. While he might have been naive in love, Logan wasn’t so naive that he hadn’t seen that Grainger still had feelings for her ex-husband, even though their marriage had long since finished.
Had Grainger still loved Tom like a partner all along? Logan didn’t know.
Had she ever loved Logan? He didn’t know the answer to that either, and yet he hoped it was the case.
Logan closed his eyes and listened to the crash of the ocean, the waves rolling and sweeping ashore, the noise of the wind whistling over the coastline.
With his eyes shut, he took himself away to another place. A place where he could still feel Grainger’s electric touch. The way it had been the first time they had kissed in a motel in the French countryside. He could feel the warmth of her body, the way they had fitted together so naturally the first time they had made love and each time after that. He could hear her soft voice whispering in his ear and smell her rich femininity.
Would he ever feel like that again?
He held himself in the moment, eyes shut, not moving, just thinking about her. As he drifted off into a world of his own, the sound of the ocean and the wind faded. All he could hear was the gentle rhythm of his heart beating calmly in his chest.
Lost in his thoughts, he heard the patio door slide open behind him. Imagined the soft footsteps approaching. He still didn’t move. Didn’t open his eyes. He felt the touch of the hand on his shoulder. The feeling of electricity jumping up through the ground, into his feet and through his entire body. The powerful sensation reminded him just how explosive her touch was. How alive it made him feel.
He smiled, then opened his eyes.
Epilogue
War-torn Bosnia had been the first time in his life he’d felt such mind-numbing pain. The bullet had torn through his shoulder, wreaking a path of destruction through the muscle and tendons and nerve fibres there. Two inches to the right and the bullet would very likely have left him paralysed from the neck down, if he’d survived at all. In fleeting moments, he’d contemplated whether that would have been a better outcome – it would at least have taken away the ferocious pain that swept through his body.
He’d been travelling with three other men. Their mission was to extract a high-ranking officer of the Scorpions – a Serbian paramilitary unit believed to have been involved in various atrocities in the Bosnian War, including the Srebrenica genocide.
The mission had run its course. It was a success. Their man was bound and gagged and lying shackled in the back of the pickup truck as they raced back toward the safe zone, where the prisoner would be transported out of the country for good.
It was only through sheer bad luck that everything turned to shit.
Deep inside territory held by the Army of Republika Srpska, one of the front tyres of their vehicle exploded when they rode over a piece of shrapnel. They frantically battled to fix on the spare wheel, but it wasn’t long before Serb forces found them. Outnumbered and outgunned, they would all have been killed at best, captured and tortured at worst, if it hadn’t been for a heroic helicopter rescue team that plucked them to safety.
In the process, he’d been shot. As had two others on the team. The first man died in the helicopter, the other two days later in a military hospital.
His mind was replaying those moments – the bombardment by Serb forces, the bullet tearing into him, the agonising helicopter ride that followed – over and over as though he were living it all once more.
The pain he felt was real, that was for certain. Pain that strong, that horrific, couldn’t be imagined. This time, it wasn’t emanating from his shoulder, though, but from his head. It was almost unbearable. It seemed to be rushing through his bloodstream, infecting every inch of his body. If someone had offered to put him out of his misery there and then, he very possibly would have agreed.
Yes, the pain was real. But he wasn’t in Bosnia anymore. It was only when he finally opened his eyes that his weary brain began to recalibrate. It took him a few agonising moments to recall where he was and why.
Kazakhstan. The planned exchange.
He should have walked away from that place a rich man. Instead, he’d been betrayed.
He tried to move but couldn’t. Yet he could feel his arms, his fingers, his legs, his toes. So why couldn’t he move? He looked down and saw the answer.
Using all his strength, he heaved the deadweight body off him. The lifeless mass rolled away. He looked at the face of the dead man and a strange concoction of emotions washed through him: sadness, fear, hatred. It was the hatred that stuck. Not for the blood-soaked man who lay dead next to him, but for the man who’d caused this to happen.
Carl Logan. This was all down to Carl Logan.
In that moment, Captain Fleming determined two things. First: he wasn’t giving up. He would survive. He would battle through the pain; he would fight on. Eventually he would recover. And second: one day, he would make Carl Logan pay.
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Want to know where it all began for Carl Logan? Dance with the Enemy and Rise of the Enemy are the explosive first two books in the Enemy Series.
Read on for more details…
Books by Rob Sinclair
The Enemy Series:
Dance with the Enemy
Rise of the Enemy
Hunt for the Enemy
Copyright
First published in paperback in 2016 by Clink Street Publishing
First published in ebook in 2016 by Clink Street Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that with which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Copyright © Rob Sinclair 2016
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
First edition.
ISBN: 978–1–911110–12–5
Ebook: 978–1–911110–13–2
Print and production managed by Lightning Source
Clink Street Publishing
Find out more about Rob and his books at
http://www.robsinclairauthor.com
Carl Logan was the perfect agent. A loner, with no real friends or family, he was trained to deal with any situation with cold efficiency, devoid of emotion.
But Logan isn’t the man he used to be, or the asset he once was. Five months ago his life changed forever when he was captured, tortured and left for dead by Youssef Selim, one of the world’s most violent terrorists.
When Selim mysteriously reappears in Paris, linked to the kidnapping of America’s Attorney General, Logan smells his chance for revenge.
Pursuing his man relentlessly, oblivious to the growing trail of destruction that he leaves in his wake, Logan delves increasingly deep into the web of lies and deceit surrounding the kidnapping.
Finally, he comes to learn just what it means to Dance with the Enemy.
Prologue
They say that before you die your whole life flashes before you. But nobody can know for sure what happens in those moments before death. If you do see your life flashing before your eyes, does that mean you’ve got no chance? And if it doesn’t, does that mean you’re going to be okay?
Carl Logan didn’t know. Five months ago, on the day he almost
died, no bright light had been calling him in, no images from his childhood flickering through his mind. There had been only pain and suffering.
Logan had been on his last breath. His brain had submitted. His body, too. He shouldn’t have been alive. But after his heart had beaten its last beat, it had beaten one more time. And then it had beaten again.
And it had kept on going.
It hadn’t been his time to go.
But he hadn’t been saved. Not by a long stretch.
Chapter 1
3rd October
Maybe the psychologist had been right. Maybe he was an addict. Who else would put themselves in these positions willingly? Knowingly?
He had the man in a hammerlock. It was a classic submission hold. Its ease of application, and the fact it could be used from an upright position, meant it was a favoured hold of bouncers and law enforcement the world over. Logan was in neither of those professions, but it was a move that he had found to suit many purposes nonetheless.
He pulled the man’s wrist further up towards the shoulder, feeling the resistance as the shoulder joint was pushed to bursting point. The man let out a yelp at what was becoming an inevitable outcome. His friends, just five yards in front of Logan at the other end of the bar, continued to look on, forming a physical barrier between Logan and where he wanted to be – the exit.
‘Move out of my way. Now,’ Logan said. ‘Don’t think for a second I won’t do it.’
Despite the threat, the man’s three friends stood their ground. They weren’t about to back down. But they weren’t looking like they were about to make a move either. For now, it was a stand-off. Neither side wanted to take it to the next level.
Yet.
Logan looked them over, one by one. Rednecks would be a harsh way to describe them. They were probably just average working guys letting off steam on a weekend; albeit guys who were bulked up through steroids and overuse of weights, and fuelled by alcohol and God knows what else. Each one of them was big and menacing. And judging by the non-situation that had started this, they were looking for a fight tonight.
And for no sane reason, other than he was who he was, Logan was prepared to grant them their wish. He wasn’t the tallest or the strongest guy in the world, but he could handle himself just fine. Despite the odds, he still fancied his chances against this lot.
‘I warned you,’ Logan said.
He pulled the man’s wrist further, as hard and as fast as he could, pushing against the resistance until he heard the tell-tale pop as the man’s arm dislocated from the shoulder. The way it suddenly flopped in his hand told Logan it had probably dislocated at the elbow too. The man shrieked in pain and slumped to the floor as Logan let go, readying himself for the next stage of his latest battle.
The three friends, wide-eyed and staring, looked shocked at what had just happened. Maybe their macho stand-offs didn’t normally go this far. And yet they continued to stand their ground. Logan was a little surprised by that.
But then he saw it. The man on the left. It was nothing more than a flinch. Maybe just a twitch, even. But it was enough for Logan. Enough to tell him that this wasn’t over yet. And that man was now his next focus.
But just as Logan was about to leap forward, something unexpected happened.
He heard the noise before he felt anything. A dull thud. He was on his knees before the searing pain in the back of his leg took hold. Then came the thud again. This time pain shot across his back.
In an instant, unable to stop himself, he was face down on the floor.
He tried to stand up, but the combination of whisky and whatever had just hit him was too much. Instead, he just lay there, hearing the thuds that kept on coming. Feeling the pain with each strike, but unable to muster a response. He saw boots crowding around him. Saw them pulling back and kicking him. Pulling back and kicking. The thuds kept on coming across his back.
He took a boot to the face and felt his lip open up, blood pouring into his mouth. The blows kept on coming but Logan didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could anymore. He closed his eyes, wondering how things had gone so wrong this time. Maybe he was losing it. Maybe he had never really got it back. He had been out of action for too long. Five months had gone by now since his last fateful assignment. Five months of hell.
His mind began to wander, his awareness of the blows raining down on him fading. Before consciousness left him, he felt a slither of an unlikely smile form on his face.
The psychologist was right. He was an addict.
But it wasn’t the fighting that he was addicted to. It wasn’t the pain either – he was no masochist. Too many years had gone by living a life that wasn’t a life at all. He didn’t want to be their machine anymore. He couldn’t. That was his addiction – the clamour for some sort of normality. He just wanted to live and to feel like everyone else did. Nights like this, in a twisted logic that made sense only to him, allowed him that.
He just wanted to be normal.
And yet he knew that would never be the case.
***
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Everyone has a breaking point. Carl Logan might just have found his.
The Joint Intelligence Agency sends agent Logan on a routine mission to Russia. It should have been simple.
But when his cover is blown, Logan is transported into a world of hell he thought he would never see again.
Something is different this time though, and before long, doubts begin to surface in Logan’s mind as to why the assignment went so wrong.
Logan has never been short of enemies. And sometimes the enemy is close to home than you think.
Could his own people really have set him up?
Prologue
Dance with the enemy and your feet will get burned. An old friend once said that to me, many years ago. The same old friend who was now sitting in front of me, across the table of the café. I think he’d misquoted the saying, but it always stuck with me nevertheless. And recently, his words had come back to bite me with a vengeance.
I’d made the mistake of getting too close to people I thought were friends. People I trusted. Angela Grainger was one of them. We’d had a connection like I’d never had with anyone before. I still thought about her every day. Mostly, despite myself, I still thought of her fondly. But she’d betrayed me. Betrayed my trust. I’d let her get too close and my feet had been burned.
The man sitting before me was another one. Grainger’s betrayal was something I would never forget – it still dominated my mind. But in many ways the betrayal of this man hurt the most.
He was the person I had trusted more than anyone else in the world.
I never imagined that we would end up like this. Talking in this way. The accusations. The insinuations. Speaking to each other like we were natural enemies rather than two people who had worked so closely together for nearly twenty years.
They wanted me to kill him. Until a few days ago, the mere suggestion would have been laughable. Something had changed, though. I didn’t know what and I didn’t know why, but our lives would never be the same again. The fact we were sitting here like this told me that.
And if it came down to it, I would do it. I would kill Mackie. My boss. My mentor. My friend. Because it might be the only way for me to get out of this mess alive.
***
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