Tinderbox (Flashpoint Book 1)
Page 1
Copyright © 2017 Rachel Grant
All rights reserved.
ISBN-10: 1-944571-05-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-944571-05-4
Cover design by Syd Gill / Syd Gill Designs
Copyediting by Linda Ingmanson
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Table of Contents
Books By Rachel Grant
Dedication
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
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Tinderbox (Flashpoint #1)
In the volatile tinderbox of the Horn of Africa, Morgan Adler has made the paleoanthropological find of a lifetime. The discovery brings her to the attention of a warlord eager to claim both Morgan and the fossils, forcing her to make a desperate dash to the nearby US military base to beg for protection.
Master Sergeant Pax Blanchard has orders to intercept Dr. Adler before she reaches the base, and in so doing saves her life. After a harrowing afternoon he safely delivers her to his commanders, only to find his responsibilities toward protecting the obstinate archaeologist have only just begun.
Morgan and Pax are forced to work together in the Djiboutian desert heat, but it is the fire that ignites between them that threatens to combust them both. For the Green Beret, involvement with the woman he must protect is a threat to his career, while for the archaeologist, the soldier is everything she never wanted but somehow can’t resist. When Morgan uncovers a mystery surrounding Djibouti’s most scarce and vital resource, the danger to her reaches the flashpoint. For Pax, protecting her is no longer a matter of following orders, and he’ll risk everything to bring her back alive.
Bonus content for Tinderbox is posted on my website, where you can find information on all my books and sign up for my mailing list.
Books By Rachel Grant
Flashpoint Series
Tinderbox (#1)
Evidence Series
Evidence Series Box Set Volume 1: Books 1-3
Concrete Evidence (#1)
Body of Evidence (#2)
Withholding Evidence (#3)
Incriminating Evidence (#4)
Covert Evidence (#5)
Cold Evidence (#6)
Poison Evidence (#7)
Grave Danger
Midnight Sun
This one is for Dave,
One of a select few professional archaeologists to work in Djibouti and the love of my life.
Chapter One
Two miles west of Camp Citron, Djibouti
Horn of Africa
March
Morgan Adler’s gaze darted between the cloud of dust in her rearview mirror and the road in front of her. Two more miles. She was going to make it. With the American embassy closed, Camp Citron, a US military base, was her only hope for refuge. The bones would be protected.
Adrenaline still coursed through her system after she’d faced down a warlord’s henchmen armed with machine guns. They’d arrived moments after she’d received the text from the embassy, stating a credible threat had been made against the US ambassador and the embassy was going into lockdown. Her local field crew of five had fled as soon as the militants arrived, leaving her to face the armed men alone.
The warlord’s message—apparently memorized, as the men repeated the words, and nothing else, at least half a dozen times—was clear: “Etefu Desta controls this land. Everything you find here is his.”
Etefu Desta was an Ethiopian warlord looking to expand his territory into Djibouti. Apparently, he’d heard about her astonishing paleoanthropological find.
But how?
Officially, only Charles Lemaire, the Djiboutian minister of culture, knew the details. Which meant turning to the local government was out.
Djibouti—pronounced “juh-booty” by Americans and “jey-bootay” by the French—sounded both funny and sexy, but she’d learned once she arrived in the tiny nation on the Horn of Africa that the country was neither. Djibouti had third-world aspirations, with a long way to go to reach even that level of affluence.
Her find could help the Djiboutian government achieve those goals, and she’d be damned before she turned over the fossils to a warlord.
Another glance in the rearview mirror. No one followed. Her hands still shook as she gripped the wheel. She was going to be fine. She’d get on the base, explain the situation, and they’d help her. The US military had a vested interest in her project. She simply hadn’t reached out to the powers that be on the base before now because she knew how the military worked and would not relinquish one ounce of control of her project.
She rounded a bend in the road that hugged a low plateau, and slammed on the brakes. A tire spike strip stretched across the road thirty meters in front of her. Another twenty meters beyond that, a Humvee blocked the road.
She twisted the wheel and skidded to a halt just shy of the spike strips. Her heart pounded as two men with big rifles stepped from behind the Humvee.
The vehicle indicated they were with the US military. Why had they blocked the road with tire-shredding spike strips?
A moment of panic ripped through her. What if these men had stolen US equipment and really worked for Desta?
As they approached, that fear subsided. There was no mistaking their American-ness, right down to their M4 carbine rifles, which each man carried with one hand on the stock and the other on the barrel, aimed down and to the side. Not pointed at her, but ready to aim and fire if warranted.
She’d seen far too many automated weapons already today. But then, she was more the Sig P226 type.
Both men wore desert combat camouflage—better known as Army Combat Uniform or ACU, according to her father. One was fair-skinned, the other dark. They moved like so many soldiers she’d known growing up. These were the good guys. They could help her.
They separated, the taller, white soldier rounding the bumper to her side of the car, while the black soldier paused in front and hitched up his weapon. Covering his partner without being t
oo threatening, she guessed.
She kept her hands on the wheel, in view of both men and reminded herself she’d done nothing wrong.
Well, nothing except taking the fossils from the site. But she was protecting them. They’d be handed over to the Djiboutian government as soon as she knew if she could trust Charles Lemaire.
The soldier to her left signaled for her to lower the window. His name tape on the right breast said BLANCHARD. The branch tape on the left said US ARMY. The familiar reverse US flag patch on his right sleeve signaled friend.
Camp Citron was primarily a Navy base with Marines providing security, making her wonder if these guys were Special Forces, and if so, why they’d set up a roadblock two miles from the base.
Everything about the soldier’s stance was meant to be intimidating.
I’ve done nothing wrong.
She gingerly lifted one hand from the wheel to comply with his signal. These guys didn’t mess around. She pressed the button, and the glass slid slowly downward, releasing precious air-conditioning to the sweltering March day.
“ID?” the man asked.
“Why did you stop me?” she asked, hearing a tinge of fear in her voice. She cleared her throat, hoping to expel the panic.
“I’m not at liberty to say. ID?”
She reached for her passport from the pouch she wore under her shirt, next to her belly. She glanced up at the soldier, but dark sunglasses covered his eyes, telling her nothing of what he thought of her mild striptease.
She handed him her passport and rebuttoned her shirt. Her hands shook harder now than they had before. She gripped the steering wheel again in an effort to control the shaking.
“Please state your business”—he lifted his dark sunglasses to inspect her ID—“Morgan Adler.” His face was expressionless to the degree that he might as well be addressing an acacia tree. Perhaps that was how he practiced the blank look, talking to the thorny plant that had destroyed her favorite pair of work boots. Either that or the intense heat had sucked all the life out of him.
“Right now, I’m heading to Camp Citron and trying to figure out why you have the right to stop and question me two miles from the gate.”
“Please state your business on the base.”
“Are you some sort of advance screen?”
“If you cooperate, we might permit you to approach the base.”
“You might permit me to drive on a public road. That’s very generous of you.”
“We aren’t in the US, ma’am. For the most part, Djibouti is lawless, so forget your notions of public and private when it comes to roads and pretty much everything else.” His jaw tightened. “Please step from the vehicle.”
She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. Could they really do this?
I’ve done nothing wrong.
She didn’t want to be stupid but feared it was too late—she was starting to believe she’d been stupid when she took the contract to begin with, but then the weight of student loans from her newly minted PhD meant she didn’t really have a choice.
When she made no move to exit the vehicle, Blanchard opened the door and said, “Now, Dr. Adler.”
She startled at his use of and emphasis on her title. Her passport, several years old, didn’t indicate her advanced degree. What the hell is going on?
She shut off the engine. Blanchard moved back so she could step out. The other soldier slowly paced the passenger side of her rental car, his head tilted down, looking at something.
Between the seventy-eight percent humidity, and the eighty-eight-degree day, the heat index was pegged at a hundred and five, and she felt every thick, blistering degree as she faced the soldier. “How do you know who I am?” she asked.
“Raise your hands, please.”
When she made no move to do so, he barked a sharp “Now!” and gestured with the butt of his M4.
She tried to stifle her squeal of terror as she raised her arms. She’d wanted to get herself and the fossils safely inside the perimeter fence of the military base, under the protection of machine guns, instead of being threatened by them.
Although technically, he hadn’t pointed his rifle at her.
“There’s a cell phone in my bra,” she said when he began to frisk her. Her ample cleavage hid the bulge, making the warning necessary. “In the front.”
Thankfully, he was perfunctory in the pat down, finding and extracting the phone without fuss. She’d been groped enough to know the difference, and this man kept it professional.
He slipped her cell into his pocket along with her passport and continued the search, pausing on the pouch against her belly, but a quick hand inside proved it was empty. He circled her and repeated the process on her back. “She’s clear,” he said to the other soldier.
She turned to face him. “Was that necessary?”
“We received a tip Etefu Desta was sending Camp Citron a message with one Dr. Morgan Adler. So yes, it was necessary.” His brows lowered, making her wish she could see his eyes behind the shaded lenses. “However, the tipster specifically indicated Dr. Adler was a man.”
She couldn’t contain her shock. She’d faced that issue more than once when she arrived in Djibouti—Morgan was a name that could be male or female, and she might have used that to her advantage when bidding on the project, because East African nations weren’t known for their progressive attitude toward women—but the fact that her name had been mentioned in conjunction with a warlord’s was far more alarming than the lack of correct gender identification. “That’s bull! I don’t know, nor am I working for, Etefu Desta. I have no clue what that even means.”
Behind her, the other man swore. She turned to see what triggered it. He had a mirror mounted to a long pole and was scanning the undercarriage of her car. “Shit. Found the message. There’s a package on a timer.”
Blanchard stiffened. “Can you see the countdown?”
“No, just the Timex.” He looked down the road, toward the base. “If it’s set to go off when she reached the base—”
Blanchard grabbed her arm, yanking her forward, away from the car. “Move!” he shouted as he dragged her behind him. She yanked her arm from his grasp and turned to the other soldier. “Do you mean there’s a bomb?”
“Yes. C-4. Lots of it. Right under the gas tank.”
She took three quick steps back to the car and leaned inside. Her finger hit the trunk release as hands snatched her from the vehicle.
She struggled against the soldier’s grip. “I have to get the fossils! They’re in the trunk.”
Blanchard’s grip only tightened. “No time.”
She kicked at him and broke free, but he caught her again before she took two steps. With a curse, he scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder, which hit her diaphragm and knocked the wind out of her. She gripped his back and tried to breathe as he ran at shocking speed.
“Stop!” she shouted when she finally caught her breath. A stream of invectives escaped her mouth, which she followed up with “Let me grab the bones!”
The other soldier ran on a parallel course, ignoring her yells and shouting, “Go! Go!”
She clawed at his shoulder—not that he’d notice through the thick combat fatigues—and cursed. “Dammit! Let me grab the bones from the trunk!” Her eyes teared as the distance between her and the rental car widened. The surge of bile in her throat could have been caused by the Heimlich-maneuver-type abdominal jolts she received with each bounce as he sprinted across the rocky desert ground, but the tears were undoubtedly caused by the fact that the fossilized bones were in danger of being destroyed.
She’d taken them from the site to save them from a warlord. She pounded on his shoulders again, spewing more curses. “Stop!” Her voice trailed off as tears of frustration and anger won the battle.
They’d covered at least a hundred meters when the soldier slowed. His heavy pack protected his back from her frustrated fists, so she tried to knee him in the chest, only to meet body arm
or.
He let out a low growl. “Stop it! I’m trying to save your damn life!”
“I need to get the fossils!” She shoved at his shoulder, throwing him off-balance and giving him no choice but to set her down. The moment her feet touched earth, she pushed away from him. He had no idea how important the bones were, how they could enhance—even change—current evolutionary models.
He caught her around the belly and yanked her backward. Her breath left in a rush with the force of the blow to her diaphragm.
She saw the explosion before she heard it—a quick flash of orange followed by a percussive wave of heat. She managed to get air in her lungs just in time to scream.
Pax Blanchard twisted as he dove, so the woman wouldn’t take the brunt of impact with the hard, dry ground. He rolled, tucking her under him as a secondary—and bigger—explosion shook the earth. A wave of heat—noticeable even at eleven degrees north of the equator—washed over him. Fortunately, they’d cleared the blast zone. His legs were peppered with debris, but it was more akin to a spray of gravel kicked up by a passing truck than being pelted with hot, sharp shrapnel.