by Rachel Grant
He had to be livid about now. She’d hated leaving him trussed up. Dreaded how much he’d ache when he woke. But at least he would wake. Tonight. Tomorrow, and for many days to come.
He’d live.
His family would live.
That was all that mattered.
The bike dropped into another hole and nearly pitched her over the handlebars. She grunted as she righted herself and twisted the throttle. She should pull over until the rain stopped. But she couldn’t stop, not if she wanted to get to the village early, scout out the opposition, and end the standoff before it even began.
At least she’d had the decency to dress him before she tied him up, because if Cal’s A-Team had arrived in Mbandaka to find Cal both naked and trussed, he might have to rethink the proposal he had in mind.
As it was, he might not forgive her for the ring of Pax’s laughter, or the way Espinosa wiped tears from his eyes after hunching over and making a guffawing sound like a jackass.
Bastian, on the other hand, just stood to the side, smirking.
Cal gave him a look that very clearly said, Get your ass over here and untie me or I will tell everyone about that night in Naples.
Not surprisingly, Bastian stepped forward and pulled out his knife. “Bet you could use one of these about now.”
Espi started howling again.
Cal glared at the sergeant. “Fuck all of you,” he said.
Goldberg pulled out his cell phone. “Wait, Chief. We need a group photo. Everyone gather round.”
Ripley, Pax, Bastian, and Espi moved to either side of where Cal lay on the floor. There was nothing to do but smile for the camera. At least if he were smiling, they might not paper the walls of the gym at Fort Campbell with this photo. It only worked for humiliation if he looked miserable.
Goldberg snapped the photo, then Bastian cut the rope that Freya had tied in an intricate knot he hadn’t been able to loosen in spite of hours of effort on his part. He’d begun to worry about what he would do, when the door burst open and half his A-Team invaded.
Hands and legs freed at last, he stood and rubbed his wrists. His joints tingled with the flow of blood returning after hours locked in the same position. He idly wondered if Freya was into bondage. If so, he could think of ways to pay her back.
“How the hell did you guys get here so fast?”
“We were already on a transport flight to Brazzaville when you called Captain Oswald about the ransom note,” Bastian said. “Funny thing. Kaylea Halpert showed up at SOCOM headquarters, and she and Haverfeld and Oswald and the other officers at the top of the food chain all disappeared in a private meeting. Next thing we knew, they’d signed off on sending half the team to liberate the kids from the mine in an off-the-books sort of way.”
“Cap didn’t say a word,” Cal said.
“He doesn’t trust Savvy. He was willing to support the mission, but he didn’t want her to know we were coming.”
Cal bristled. “She’s innocent—”
“Yeah, then where is she?” Ripley asked. His gaze scanned the hotel room. “And where is the USB drive with the money?”
“She left. She’s sacrificing herself to save me. Save my family. Save the world.” He thought of Fitzsimmons and the end of days and realized he wasn’t exactly exaggerating.
“You’re sure of that?” Pax asked.
Cal nodded. “My guess is she thinks if she destroys the drive in front of Lubanga, he’ll know the money is unrecoverable. He’ll have lost.”
“And then he’ll kill her.”
“Yes. But he won’t have reason to kill the villagers.”
“But he might anyway.”
“He might,” Cal agreed.
“Kind of a stupid plan,” Espi mused, all humor gone from his face.
“Yeah, but it’s the only way to make sure he doesn’t get the money back that has a chance of sparing the villagers. And sparing me. There were only two of us, and all we had was three AKs and a couple of magazines.”
Bastian dropped onto the couch with a sly smile. “Well, now there are six of us, and we’ve got an Osprey full of M4s, grenades, and other goodies.”
Even better than the weapons, Cal had his team: Assistant Detachment Commander Ford, Operations Sergeant Blanchard, Communications Sergeant Ripley, Medical Sergeant Goldberg, and Engineering Sergeant Espinosa. For the first time since reading the ransom demand, true hope bloomed in his chest. “Seven,” he said. “There are seven of us. Freya’s part of the team.”
33
Freya tucked down behind the rocky outcrop on the hillside above the village. She had about two hours before dawn would light the valley. In eight hours, she was supposed to present herself with the USB drive.
She scanned the valley below with Cal’s night vision binoculars. Across the stream, Lubanga’s forces were assembling. Dozens of men were visible, and there could be hundreds more in the jungle. She spotted a scout and cataloged his gear. AK-47, camouflage clothing, and…nothing else.
Not even binoculars.
She wouldn’t sweat taking down these mercs, except there were hundreds of them. Hundreds of men with AK-47s and no conscience was a formidable force for one person. Even if she did have two AKs. She’d left Cal with the third because it hadn’t felt right to leave him unarmed. If he somehow managed to break free in time to get here, he’d need a weapon.
It was rather shitty of her to have taken everything else, even his binoculars.
She’d made sure there was nothing sharp within his reach—trussed as he was—to cut the ropes. A shout for help would get him free eventually, but she’d bet he’d work the knots a good long while before he disturbed the neighbors. Long enough for it to be impossible for him to get here in time, especially when he didn’t have the motorbike.
She scanned the valley again, spotting another scout. She turned the binocs back to the village on this side of the stream. All was quiet. The residents had no idea a force had been amassing all night just across the shallow stream.
She tucked the binoculars away and scrambled down the hill. She needed to wake Cal’s aunt. He’d drawn a map of the village from memory. It was bound to be off, but she might be able to guess which hut belonged to Aunt Patrice.
According to Cal, Patrice Beya spoke French, Lingala, and English like his mother. Freya knew enough about the family to convince the woman to listen to her. With her help, they’d convince everyone—or at the very least, the children—to hide in the old mine. If she had her way, there would be no one for the rebels to threaten.
Freya would set up her camera to monitor the entrance to the mine. She had her fully charged satellite hotspot and would set it up so the video would upload automatically. If Lubanga’s men tried to blow the mine to trap the villagers, BBC and CNN would have the video of the atrocity. The villagers would be rescued, and Lubanga’s attack on a peaceful community would be known the world over.
The plan wasn’t great, but it was far better than being gunned down in cold blood. Or worse. There was a whole lot that was worse, and the people of Congo knew it. Cal’s aunt knew it. One of her sisters had lived it and shared the tale.
The mine had been dug out and reinforced after the collapse that had killed Cal’s grandfather. There had been an attempt to resume mining in 2004, but then the company backing the resettlement of the village changed course about a year later, opting for easier, safer, open-pit mining, so the old mine now sat abandoned. The villagers could hide in the reinforced section. They would survive.
Freya, however, would not fare so well. Her ace card was that Lubanga needed her alive to make the transaction. Handing over the USB drive wasn’t good enough. Her bitcoin wallet was stored on a key that required two-factor authorization, one of which was her live thumbprint. He couldn’t simply snip off her thumb and hope a password-cracking program could work out her seventeen-character password.
She would wield that shield to her advantage. She’d destroy the drive that held all forty-eigh
t private keys she’d created in the tunnel under the palace. Without the private key to match to the public key, the money was unrecoverable. Lost forever.
Lubanga would kill her, certainly. But he’d gain nothing by going after the villagers except having his brutality exposed.
She heard an engine in the distance. The road to this village was a mess, but she’d seen trucks maneuvering even worse roads in this country, and trucks delivered supplies to the mining operation and the villagers.
It was insane how resilient the people of Congo were. The way they overloaded their barges and trucks. Even their bicycles. Anytime someone was hauling something somewhere, they carried more than seemed humanly possible.
The engine noise continued, but she couldn’t see the vehicle, not even with the night-vision binocs. It was out of her line of sight, under cover of the jungle.
She tucked down and scrambled down the backside of the hill. She needed to check out this truck. Find out who she was dealing with.
If Lubanga sent troops into the village, she was screwed.
Much as Cal wanted to find Freya, first he needed to speak to his aunts and uncle. Ford and Espinosa would search for Freya. They’d seen the tracks of the motorbike coming in. She was here. Tracking her should be easy in the mud—except she was a trained operator, so maybe not.
He approached his aunt’s hut from the cover of the jungle that abutted the village. Odds were there were scouts across the river, watching, ready to sound the alarm if they saw an unusual amount of activity in the village.
He paused behind the hut he thought was his aunt’s and listened. Muffled words from within. His uncle questioning the engine noise in a sleepy voice. They’d driven as close as they dared to the village, knowing the sound would give them away, but time was a precious commodity and hiking in from miles away would squander the one benefit they had in arriving early. Plus they had supplies in the truck—more than anyone wanted to carry on their back if they didn’t need to.
He signaled to Blanchard, Goldberg, and Ripley. Together, they circled around to the front of the hut, stepping quietly so as not to alarm anyone in the village before he had a chance to speak with his family and explain the situation.
Freya crouched low. She’d heard a noise to the right but hadn’t seen anyone. It crossed her mind that Green Berets could move like shadows through this kind of vegetation. She’d seen Cal do it a number of times. But it wasn’t Cal. She’d know by his scent, or his step, or his breathing, or whatever it was that caused the tingle in her neck whenever he was near.
Whoever had made that noise wasn’t Cal.
It had been a fleeting, wishful thought, the idea the engine noise could signal Cal had magically arrived with his team. She dared to rise on her toes to peek through the leaves, when a hand covered her mouth.
Her instinct wasn’t to scream. She didn’t want to scare the villagers. Instead, she elbowed whoever it was in the ribs. He let out a grunt of pain, but his grip held. She dropped her hand, aiming for his balls.
He blocked and said, “Savvy, stop.” The words were a low hiss of sound.
Bastian.
She relaxed. Or at least, she stopped trying to hurt him. He released her, and she turned to face him. “Chief Ford, what are you doing here?”
Maybe magic was real.
“Saving your ass.”
She studied him and Espinosa, who materialized by Bastian’s side, face covered in jungle-colored paint. “I think Cal wants to talk to you,” Espinosa said. “He didn’t seem too happy with you when we found him. Tied up. Like an animal.”
She covered her face with a hand. “Oh shit.”
“Yeah,” Bastian said.
“Don’t worry. Goldberg snapped a picture with all the guys. For posterity.”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Bastian said again.
“If you guys don’t mind, I’ll let you take care of things here and will head back to Camp Citron now.”
“Yeah…no.” This from Espinosa. “We might not mind, but Cal, he wants to talk to you.”
“Oh shit.” She was so dead.
“C’mon, Sav,” Bastian said. “Time to reunite you with your partner on this op.” He took her arm and pulled her toward the road.
There was no escape. Might as well get this over with. “How many of you are here? The whole team?”
“Just half. This isn’t entirely…sanctioned. The other half stayed behind to continue the training. SOCOM felt we need to present the front and someone in the CIA might’ve noticed if there was no one training the Djiboutians.”
She would’ve asked why Haverfeld hadn’t told Cal they were en route, but the answer was obvious: because their CO didn’t trust her. She could live with that. Trust or not, he’d sent Cal’s team. Six Green Berets against an army of rebels? She’d seen them go against worse odds, and her money was on Special Forces, every time.
Guerrilla fighting—a small band versus a much larger traditional force—was what these men did best.
She remembered telling Cal at the start of this mission that there would be no cavalry. It appeared she’d been wrong.
As they moved through the jungle, Bastian mumbled something into his radio. A code word, she guessed. He’d probably told Cal she’d been found. She braced herself to face him.
They stepped into a small clearing, and she spotted the truck. She wondered where they’d gotten it, because it wasn’t military. They must’ve paid a local a hefty sum to “borrow” it for a few days.
Espi leaned against the side panel.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“We wait,” Espi said.
“Are you guys babysitting me?” she asked. “Because this is a waste of time. We need to get the villagers inside the mine.”
“Cal’s talking to his aunt,” Bastian said. “He needs a minute before he can see you. We need his aunt and uncle’s help in convincing everyone to take cover in the mine.”
She resigned herself to waiting for her doom with her two babysitters.
“So…any chance you’d put in a good word for me with Kaylea?” Espinosa asked.
She cocked her head. “Why do you think I have influence there?”
“I don’t know,” Espi said, “Might have something to do with the way she came tearing into HQ and then had a private conference with Haverfeld and Oswald, and next thing we know, we’re scrambling to fly to Congo.”
Emotion flooded her. It hadn’t been magic that brought the team here, it had been Kaylea, risking everything by talking to SOCOM instead of her superiors at the CIA. She was a better friend than Freya had ever imagined. “Sure, Espi. But she’s pretty special.”
“Yes, she is.”
Espi and the rest of the team were pretty special too. They were here, and she was grateful. “I saw two scouts from the hillside,” she said. “They had AKs and nothing else. No idea how many rebels there are across the river.”
“Blanchard and Espi will do a recon and get a count.” Bastian pulled out a printout of satellite images of the valley and laid it over the hood of the truck. “Where are the scouts?”
She pointed out the location to Espinosa, who nodded. “Thanks.”
“How did you get the map?” she asked. “You must’ve been in the air before the ransom demand. Before we knew we’d be here.”
“We were en route to our Forward Operating Base in the Republic of Congo. Major Haverfeld sent the coordinates to the base. They had these printed for us before we landed.”
She clasped her hands together. “Please tell me that means you have other supplies, say a shoulder-fired rocket launcher, or some heavy artillery?”
“’Fraid not. No artillery, but we’ve got guns and grenades.”
She pouted. They’d already had guns. “Big guns?”
“M4s, some grenade launchers. An M2.”
“M2? A fifty-caliber heavy machine gun?” That was big.
“Yeah. And we have Cal’s M107.”
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As the A-Team’s senior weapons sergeant, Cal was the technical specialist when it came to firepower. He also had a gift for sniping. Armed with either the fifty-caliber machine gun or the fifty-caliber rifle, he could do some serious damage to the gathering army. “That’s more like it.”
She studied the map, much larger and higher resolution than the small computer screen she and Cal had as they strategized in their hotel room.
Cal. The hotel room.
She closed her eyes. There was no escaping this. She had to face him. The heat became oppressive as they sat in the stagnant jungle. No wind. No rain. Just thick air as she waited for her doom.
At last she heard footsteps, and her heart began to pound. She’d drugged Cal and tied him up. She couldn’t begin to guess how angry he would be.
He stepped into the clearing, flanked by the other three members of his team. At least he couldn’t kill her with so many witnesses.
Light from the gibbous moon reached the clearing, revealing his dark features. It was criminal how handsome he was.
And terrifying how much she loved him.
His gaze fixed on her as he crossed the short distance to the truck. He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back. She bumped against the grill, her body pinned between his and the truck.
His mouth landed on hers, and he kissed her. There was nothing mild or chaste about the kiss. It was hot, deep, and maybe just a little bit angry.
“Yanno, that’s not what I expected,” Espi whispered. “Who had ‘Cal kisses her’ in the pool?”
“I did,” Pax said. “I win the pot.”
“Shit, as his roommate, you had inside info.” This from Goldberg.
“No one made you bet.”
She lost track of the chatter as Cal’s fingers threaded through her hair. Finally, he lifted his head and said, “What was that thing you said right before you tranqued me?”