Catalyst: Flashpoint #2

by Grant, Rachel

  Inside the limousine, a drugged-out Cardona was curled in a ball, cradling his bloody wrist, out cold but breathing. Bastian grabbed his cell phone, which had bloody streaks on the screen. Apparently, Cardona had tried to make a call but hadn’t connected before passing out.

  Bastian wiped off the screen and dialed Savannah James as he jumped into the front passenger seat of the limousine. Ivan would drive while Bastian contacted SOCOM.

  Savvy signaled the incoming call with a hand motion, and the room went silent as she answered. Her cell had already been patched into the console, knowing her number would be the one most likely dialed if Bastian got to a phone.

  “What’s going on, Chief Ford?” she said.

  “Drugov’s taken Brie. We’re going after her now. The lab is a Russian death factory. Drugov has a stockpile of sanitary napkins infected with Ebola that he plans to distribute to the largest UN refugee camp in South Sudan.”

  The words had the effect of a bombshell across the room full of SOCOM commanders and special forces operators. The men visibly flinched and emitted sounds of shock and horror.

  Ebola in a refugee camp could lead to an outbreak unlike any seen before. Over a hundred thousand people were in the Upper Nile refugee camp, which was already stressed beyond capacity, dealing with famine, cholera, and malaria. The sick would be cared for by family and friends, not medically trained aid workers. The virus would spread.

  But this information changed things. Forewarned, they could stop it. She’d known sending Bastian and Brie to Morocco was the right thing to do, but she’d had no idea the threat Drugov posed was this big.

  “Where is Drugov?” Captain Oswald asked.

  “There’s a tracker on his car.” Bastian read off the coordinates, which a tech typed into the system. “I’m on my way there now.”

  This agreed with the data from his tracker, which was on one of the large screens. He was on the road and moving fast. Whoever was driving was ignoring all speed limits.

  A second screen showed the coordinates Bastian had just relayed, and Savvy blanched. “Bastian, Drugov is at a small airport in the heart of Casablanca. Does he have the Ebola-infected pads with him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. The lab was cleaned out. It would make sense he’d move it before grabbing Brie. He could be taking Brie and Lawiri back to South Sudan, with the intent to deliver the infected supplies. He believes his plan to cause an Ebola outbreak remains a secret. He has no reason to think his donation won’t be accepted.”

  Chatter in the room rose, and Savvy muted her end of the call. She didn’t want Bastian to hear commanders suggesting that they let Drugov deliver the goods and apprehend the oligarch and the general then. She cleared her throat. “You’re talking about leaving Brie Stewart with Drugov for what would be at least a six-hour flight—longer if he doesn’t go directly to South Sudan and we can’t find him.”

  “How far out is the SEAL team?” Bastian asked. “Please tell me there’s a SEAL team on their way.”

  “There is,” Savvy said after unmuting her phone. “They’re ten minutes out.”

  “Reroute them to the airport. We’ll probably arrive about the same time.”

  A SOCOM commander gave her a nod, and she said, “Done,” to Bastian.

  She met Cal’s gaze, and for the first time in days, his eyes didn’t hold hostility. Had he expected her to argue for sacrificing Brie?

  But in another situation, that might be exactly what she did. In this instance, they had a better opportunity to grab Drugov, which happened to include saving Brie from hours of rape and torture.

  But if the plane took off before the SEALs could get there, all bets were off.

  If the plane took off, they’d have to face the decision of whether or not to shoot it down. In the first minutes of flight, it might circle over the ocean, providing the perfect opportunity to stop a genocide and an oligarch with one shot.

  Brie’s heart raced in overdrive as Nikolai forced her at gunpoint to march onto the cargo plane.

  Cargo plane?

  That wasn’t his usual mode of travel.

  She debated initiating her tracker. But the flight would almost certainly last longer than four hours. She had to be patient. She needed information. “What’s going on, Nikolai?”

  “I wanted to show you your present. It would be my wedding gift to you, but I no longer wish to take you as my bride now that your body has been defiled by so many men.”

  “Fuck off, Nikolai. I’m not ashamed of my past. I’m just glad your tiny prick is the one I’ve never let near me.”

  He backhanded her again, and her genuine reaction was to laugh, in spite of the pain. “Oh, did that hit a nerve? I bet your dick is so tiny, I won’t even be able to tell when you’re erect.”

  Another blow came, but she didn’t let up. “That’s why you beat instead of fuck, isn’t it? Because you hope I’ll be in so much pain, I won’t notice you have no penis.”

  His hand closed on her throat, silencing her.

  She closed her eyes, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her fear. He wouldn’t kill her. Not yet. But the world was beginning to tunnel. She could pass out.

  He released her throat, and she took a deep, gasping breath.

  “Come see your present,” he said, dragging her with him.

  Inside the cargo hold, she came face-to-face with Lawiri. He grinned the same gap-tooth smile she remembered from their first meeting.

  “It is a pleasure to meet again,” he said in heavily accented English. “You have served my people well.”

  “They’re not your people. You are one of them, not above them. If anything, you are beneath them.”

  His lip curled. “They are pawns. Animists. Children. I will be their king.”

  Nikolai pinched her arm. She refused to react, holding herself still as ice as his fingers tightened like a vise.

  When he got no reaction, he took his burning cigarette and pressed it into her shoulder. She couldn’t stop herself and whimpered at the searing pain.

  “Breaking you will be exquisite,” Nikolai said, his cigarette breath mingling with the scent of her burned flesh.

  She swallowed bile and said nothing.

  “Your precious girls will all die, you know,” Nikolai added. “And it will be your fault. Your underwear. It will make them sick.” He spread his hand to encompass the boxes lined up in the cargo hold. “Ten thousand pairs of underwear. Ten thousand lucky girls.”

  Nikolai’s nasty hints became clear. She didn’t know what was in the underwear, but it was something deadly. Biological warfare. Genocide.

  She broke. She head-butted Nikolai, then twisted to kick the exiled general in the nuts. Just like Bastian taught her. Her action wouldn’t save anyone, but at least the blows would cause both men pain.

  Nikolai fell back, then came at her again. His hands closed around her neck. She bucked and kicked but couldn’t get a good angle.

  The world slowly dimmed.

  The limousine raced down the Casablanca streets without a care for traffic law, for which Bastian was grateful. Ivan was like a ninja behind the wheel.

  They reached the airport, and he barreled through barriers, driving slalom through cars, guardrails, signs, and medians.

  They careened past several parked planes and pulled out to the front of the long airstrip. At the far end was a cargo plane, circling around to begin its takeoff run. “Motherfucker,” Ivan said. “That’s Drugov’s plane. We can’t let it take off.”

  “No shit,” Bastian said.

  “No. I mean, we can’t let it take off with Brie on it. Or she’s dead.” Ivan hit the gas, and the limousine shot forward, heading straight for the oncoming plane.

  “Yeah. No fucking shit.” Drugov would have Brie in his clutches for hours in the air. He would rape her. Torture her. There was no guarantee he wouldn’t kill her before they landed in South Sudan.

  “No. I mean the cargo plane was my failsafe. In case
Nikolai tried to escape before I could get to him.”

  They sped forward as the airplane did the same, limousine and cargo plane playing chicken on the runway.

  “What does that—” Bastian braced himself as they closed the distance, the giant tires of the oncoming plane on a collision course with the nose of the car.

  The airplane lifted a heartbeat before impact. The tire bumped the top of the windshield, shattering the glass and sending the speeding limousine into a spin.

  Ivan hit the brakes as he turned into the spin. Glass rained down as they came to a stop a hundred and eighty degrees from their starting direction.

  “There’s a bomb on the plane,” Ivan said. “It will blow when it—”

  A fireball erupted in the sky. The cargo plane shattered, and debris rained down, pelting the hood of the car and burning Bastian’s skin.

  40

  Bastian stared at the smoldering debris in horror.

  Brie.

  No. Fucking God. No.

  He was frozen in agony. In shock.

  Brie.

  In three weeks, he’d fallen crazy in love with her. Her wit. Her strength. Her passion. She was everything he hadn’t known he wanted, hadn’t known he needed.

  She was gone. One instant. One flash of orange, and she was gone.

  He hadn’t protected her.

  One minute, maybe two minutes more, and he’d have found a way to stop the jet from taking off. She’d be alive.

  With a primal roar of pain and rage, he turned on the man in the driver’s seat. The man who’d caused this. He had Ivan by the throat, and he would squeeze his life out. He would tear him apart.

  Brie.

  The look on her face as she’d straddled him in the hot tub last night and taken him deep. The way she’d kissed him as she told him she loved him, then showed him with her body exactly what those words meant to her.

  She’d been regal. Beautiful. Passionate.

  He’d wanted to give her children, a true family to love. To spend the rest of his life with her. To share her joy and her sorrow.

  Gone.

  Ivan gripped his fists, his face turning red, then blue. With leverage from his knee, he shifted Bastian’s weight and broke the grip on his throat. In a flash, Bastian was shoved through the shattered windshield, and they grappled on the hood of the car.

  They rolled off the front, and Ivan pinned him to the tarmac.

  The fight left Bastian. Ivan wasn’t the enemy here. Drugov was. But Drugov was dead. Killed with Brie and the pilot.

  Brie.

  “Sorry for this, but you leave me no choice,” Ivan said. A zip tie closed around Bastian’s wrists. “I didn’t know she’d be on the plane. If Drugov had the Ebola in the cargo hold, her death isn’t in vain. Odds are Lawiri was with them too.”

  “Do you think I give a fuck about any of that?”

  And in that moment, he didn’t. The big picture no longer mattered. He hadn’t been here to fight for his country, to stop a mad Russian oligarch. No, he’d signed on to this mission so he could protect Brie. He didn’t care about anything except the fact that the person who mattered to him most in the world had just ceased to exist.

  In the worst moment of his life, he was stripped of everything that had previously defined him. He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a Kalahwamish Indian. He wasn’t even a man.

  He was a shattered shell that used to be human.

  Brie was gone. Irrevocably gone.

  He closed his eyes and relived their first kiss. And the second. The first time he’d made love to her. And the last. The moment she’d pleaded with him to ensure no opioids would be administered to ease her pain. The look on her face as she gripped his hand and watched jets take off from the aircraft carrier. The defiance in her eyes as she confessed she’d leaked information to her lover to crush the pipeline project that threatened air and water.

  The shock and fear on her face when he walked into the hut in South Sudan and saw her chained by the throat.

  He’d told her he loved her, but it wasn’t enough. Had she known how deep his feelings ran? That she’d become part of his soul, his reason for breathing? In three weeks, she’d upended his life to the degree that he now couldn’t fathom how to move forward from this moment.

  The noise of a helicopter invaded his agonized thoughts.

  “I can’t be here,” Ivan said. “I’m sorry, Bastian.”

  And then he was alone in front of the shattered limousine. No fight in him for the chase. He let Ivan go. Part of him knew the Russian had been smart to ensure the virus didn’t leave Morocco, but he couldn’t face that basic truth just yet.

  Bastian had no fucks left to give.

  The helicopter landed on the airstrip and SEALs in full gear poured out. A small force circled Bastian, pummeling him with questions. He shook his head, mutely crying as he stared at the burning wreckage that was scattered across the runway and adjacent grassy field.

  He was pulled to his feet. The zip tie around his wrists was cut.

  “You’re certain she was on the plane?” a SEAL repeated, his words penetrating the fog and muted hearing that had followed the explosion.

  “Where is the man you called Ivan?” another asked.

  He shook his head. He hadn’t watched Ivan leave the scene. Didn’t know if he was on foot or if he’d taken a vehicle. He’d seen nothing but the embers of the jet.

  Cardona was pulled from the back of the limousine. A medic checked over his wound. “Who did this, Chief Ford?” the man asked when Cardona was too drugged up to answer.

  A layer of fog lifted, and Bastian answered. “Ivan. I think he’s GRU. But there’s no point in trying to get the prints Savvy wanted. He wore gloves. Always.” He looked toward the plane. “He was sent here to take out Drugov. He set the explosive as a failsafe should Drugov try to flee with his stockpile of Ebola.”

  Cardona’s cell phone rang, and Bastian turned to see it on the hood of the limousine. He’d forgotten he’d tucked it in his breast pocket as they raced across town. It must’ve fallen out as he fought with Ivan. He glanced at the screen. Savvy’s number. The SEALs would have told SOCOM everything they found here. He flicked his thumb across the surface, but the voice he heard wasn’t the CIA operative. “Fuck, Bas,” was all Cal said.

  Somehow, this was the voice Bastian had needed to hear. A friend. He took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t have let Drugov take her. It’s my fault.”

  “No, man. This isn’t on you. Blame Drugov. Blame Lawiri. Blame SOCOM and Savvy for sending a civilian in in the first place.”

  Bastian searched for white-hot anger he could direct at SOCOM or Savvy, but that well was dry. “No. everyone was just doing their jobs. Going after Drugov was the right thing. He weaponized fucking Ebola.”

  Sirens surrounded the runway. A fire truck came careening across the tarmac.

  Strange that he couldn’t muster anger at Savvy or his commanders. But the truth was the only person he blamed was himself.

  He never should have let Brie go.

  He never should have delved deeper into the basement lab with Ivan.

  He never should have agreed to the lab excursion at all.

  So many nevers.

  So many mistakes.

  All his. And Brie was gone.

  “What the—?” Cal’s voice cut off, and Bastian knew he’d hit the mute button.

  A moment later, the phone was unmuted, and Savvy’s voice came on the line. “Bastian, Brie’s tracker went off a few minutes ago, it took some time to be certain it wasn’t somehow triggered in the explosion. But we’re certain it’s her, and it’s red hot and moving fast across Casablanca.”

  “What?” Bastian couldn’t breathe through the surge of hope.

  “Brie triggered her tracker. She wasn’t on the jet. She’s alive and in trouble.”

  Brie kept her face blank as she feverishly rubbed at the tracker embedded in her arm. She’d passed out after Nikolai choked her, and woke who knew
how long later, rocking with the motion of… It had taken her a moment to recognize she was inside a helicopter, and a loud noise had roused her. Her brain was foggy as she’d tried to figure out how she got there.

  Next to her, Lawiri screamed something, his words lost to the noise of the copter.

  She took in the situation. This was Nikolai’s helicopter. She was crammed in the tiny rear seat with Lawiri while Nicolai was up front with the pilot. The helicopter meant his megayacht must be nearby. That had to be where they were headed, because there was no helipad at his villa.

  He was taking her away from Casablanca. To his yacht.

  As soon as this became clear, she’d pressed on the tracker. SEALs were nearby. Her best hope was to trigger the tracker now. They would find her quickly, before the yacht could set out to sea. Nikolai couldn’t expect them to arrive so fast. He’d be caught off guard.

  Lawiri cursed as he stared at something on the ground behind him, but the noise of the helicopter drowned out his words. Only Nikolai wore headphones. There would be no conversation until they landed.

  They sped over the top of the city, passing the marina and heading out over the Atlantic.

  Fuck.

  The boat was already at sea? Would the tracker work on the yacht? She could only hope Nikolai had installed the system that extended cellular service to thirty miles from land, or she was dead.

  And if the yacht was more than thirty miles out?

  Then she’d submit to his torture and find a way to kill him in his sleep.

  This was the same choice she’d faced in the market. There was no shame in not fighting. She would bide her time.

  Thank goodness she’d initiated the tracker while they were still over land. If she’d waited…she couldn’t think about that. She had triggered it. She would be rescued.

  And just like he had in the market, Bastian would come.

  She knew in her gut he’d escaped from the chemical plant. He would find her.

  A dot in the ocean up ahead became clear, and the helicopter began its descent. The boat couldn’t be more than three miles from shore.