X-Ops Exposed

by Paige Tyler

  As much as Tanner wanted to drop to his knees and yank his friends to his chest and make this all stop, he knew he couldn’t. He had to keep going or Ryan and the rest of his platoon would end up just like Danny, Vas, Chad, and the Afghanis who’d been brave enough to follow them into this fight.

  Tanner swung his M4 over his back, then reached down for the lightweight machine gun in Chad’s hands. He instinctively checked the plastic ammo box mounted on the side of the gun, absently noting there was maybe half a pack of 5.56mm rounds left in it. A hundred rounds wasn’t a lot, but it was enough for what he needed to do.

  He turned and ran toward the machine gun, ignoring the bullets kicking up the dirt around him. To his left, the other members of his platoon were pinned down outside the gate, unable to move any closer while the weapon was still functional.

  Tanner paid no attention to the individual Taliban fighters, instead focusing on the gunner in the back of the pickup truck, firing short three- and four-round bursts from Chad’s M249. It was only a matter of time before he got hit by one of the bullets flying around him. He just had to take out the machine gunner before that happened.

  Off to the side, a Taliban fighter aimed an RPG in his direction. Tanner could have swung his weapon around and engaged the shooter, made him duck even if he didn’t hit the man straight up. But if he did, there was a good chance he’d run out of ammo before disabling the machine gun in the truck, and he couldn’t risk it.

  Ignoring the man about to kill him, Tanner locked on the machine gunner and squeezed the trigger of his weapon, popping off a long string of rounds right into the back end of the pickup truck. Unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to see if they had any effect because just then, the world exploded around him.

  Tanner flew through the air for what seemed like forever before slamming into the ground like a bag of bricks. He bounced and rolled a few times before tumbling down into a deep crater carved out by a previous explosion. He came to rest in the bottom of the pit, debris raining down on him as he lay there in a twisted heap, the stock of the M249 digging painfully into ribs that had to be broken as dirt landed on his face and chest, choking him and making it nearly impossible to breathe.

  He had no idea how badly he was hurt, but as the world started to go dark, he realized it was pretty damn bad. He wasn’t going to make it. And he was completely cool with that. The 14.5mm machine gun had fallen silent, replaced by the pop of smaller weapons and the sounds of running footsteps. His team had done its job. The gate was clear, and the platoon was moving quickly into the compound.

  Tanner realized he must have passed out, because the next thing he knew, the shooting had stopped and someone was leaning over him, brushing dirt off his face. He forced his eyes open, wondering briefly if he was going to find a Taliban fighter standing there, an AK-47 pointed at his chest, ready to finally end this.

  But it wasn’t a Taliban soldier. It was Ryan. His friend was down on one knee, regarding him with eyes that were completely devoid of emotion.

  “I thought you were dead,” Ryan said.

  “I probably should be,” Tanner told him.

  “Probably.”

  Tanner considered pushing himself up into a sitting position but then changed his mind. Shit. He ached all over. “Chad and Vas didn’t make it. I’m pretty sure Danny’s gone, too.”

  Ryan nodded. “Yeah. I saw their bodies a ways back while I was looking for you. My guys didn’t make it either. They all bought it during the last charge through the gate. It’s just you and me. We’re all that’s left of our squad.”

  All twenty members of their combined fire teams dead. Tanner closed his eyes, letting the pain wash over him. Not the physical pain that came from broken bones and torn flesh, but the deeper ache in his chest that came from knowing he was alive while all his brothers were gone. The anguish grew deeper and darker with every breath he took, overwhelming him and leaving him to wonder how he could possibly survive another five seconds, much less make it through the rest of the night and beyond.

  When he opened his eyes again, he assumed he’d see his pain mirrored in his friend’s gaze. But Ryan’s face was calm, almost detached, like he was sitting on the beach, watching the waves roll in and out. Tanner shouldn’t have been surprised. Ryan had always been able to compartmentalize shit like this better than he ever could.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain, Tanner pushed himself into a sitting position and looked around at the damage inside the compound formerly controlled by the Taliban. Bodies were everywhere. His platoon and the Afghanis fighting with them had done what they’d set out to do. But they had paid a price. Tanner wondered if the people responsible for doing the math would decide it had been worth it.

  “What now?” he asked, not sure what else to say.

  Ryan stared off into the distance. “We keep going.”

  Tanner tried to imagine doing that but simply couldn’t see how it was going to be possible after what had happened.

  Chapter 1

  Wenatchee National Forest, Northwest of Chelan, Washington, Present Day

  “Okay, maybe this wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.”

  Zarina Sokolov cursed as she stumbled over yet another tree root and tumbled to her knees in the rich, leafy soil along the dirt trail. At least she hoped she was still on the trail. It was darker out here than she’d ever dreamed possible, and the flashlight the man at the sporting goods store had sold her was a piece of crap.

  She shone the dim beam around as she stood up, hoping to see something to convince her she was still following the 25 Mile Creek Trail. But after a few moments, she realized one patch of pine needle–covered dirt looked much the same as the next. She turned and took a few steps back the way she’d come but then stopped when she didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a beaten path in that direction, either.

  Perhaps it was time to accept she’d wandered off the trail. She flipped her wrist over and looked at her watch, stunned to see it had only been an hour since the sun had gone down. She could have sworn she’d been out here half the night. She’d been hiking since midmorning, but it already felt like days.

  Blowing out a breath, Zarina tucked some long, blond hair that had escaped from her ponytail behind her ear and began backtracking along the route she’d followed to get here. Her navigational skills being what they were, it was entirely possible she’d end up farther off the trail and deeper in trouble, but she wasn’t going to stop searching until she found Tanner. While the idea of wandering around the woods in the middle of the night scared the hell out of her, she was committed to finding him no matter what she had to do. She wasn’t going to give up simply because she was a little nervous about being alone in the woods at night.

  Zarina moved her flashlight around as she walked, relaxing a little when she recognized some obvious landmarks after a few steps. She definitely remembered that waist-high outcropping of rocks ahead of her, as well as the big tree leaning over part of it. And that thick root sticking up out of the ground like a clutching hand? Yeah, she’d almost fallen over that thing.

  Within minutes, however, the route started to look unfamiliar, and Zarina second-guessed her decision to keep going. Frowning, she stopped walking and turned in a slow circle, wondering if maybe she’d missed a turn or something. Nothing looked familiar now. Not the ground, or the rocks, or the trees.

  She was lost.

  She probably shouldn’t have been surprised. She was a scientist who specialized in genetic engineering. A normal day for her involved spending hours in a lab looking through microscopes and manipulating DNA strands, not hiking while carrying a backpack’s worth of outdoor gear on her back, looking for one man in the middle of a huge wilderness.

  Zarina considered pulling out the satellite phone buried in her backpack but decided against it. She was lucky the new people in charge of the Department of Covert Operation
s in DC had agreed to let her come on this hopeless mission in the first place. If she called for help after looking for less than a day, they’d probably be on the next flight out to rescue her and her search would be over.

  Taking a deep breath, she reached into the pocket of her jacket for the trail map she’d been following. Well, the one she was supposed to be following, anyway. As she focused her flashlight on the bewildering collection of squiggly solid and dotted lines crisscrossing the carefully folded map, she realized she could see her breath in the crisp October air.

  Crap. She hoped it didn’t get too much colder tonight. She might have lived most of her adult life in Moscow, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed turning blue. It probably didn’t help that her jacket wasn’t meant for these kinds of temperatures. But in her defense, it had been much warmer in town. Plus, she hadn’t planned on being out here this long.

  When she’d showed the man at the sporting goods store a photo of Tanner, he’d told her he had heard rumors of a huge guy with a crazy mane of dark-blond hair camping near Grouse Mountain, just north of the trail she’d been following. The man had sworn it would be easy to find Tanner if she stayed on the path. All she needed to do was look for a big pile of rocks near the spot where the trail and 25 Mile Creek nearly crossed each other. From there, a small, unnamed side path would take her to the general location where Tanner was camping. It had sounded so simple.

  But Zarina had been following the main trail since ten o’clock that morning, and she’d never seen anything even close to the landmarks the store clerk had described. Then again, this was the same man who’d sworn the flashlight he’d sold her for fifty dollars would light the forest up like it was broad daylight. That had turned out to be a lie, so maybe he’d been lying about knowing where Tanner was, too.

  She pushed that thought aside and stared harder at the map, trying to figure out where she’d veered off the path. While the store clerk might have lied about the quality of the flashlight he’d sold her, she knew in her heart the man he’d described was Tanner. Not only was the former Army Ranger one of the largest men she’d ever seen, he was also graced with the most amazing head of hair any man had ever possessed. It was the kind of hair that made women want to run their hands through it just to feel its softness against their skin. Well, at least that’s what she wanted to do every time she saw him. But maybe that was just her.

  Of course, Tanner’s size and wild mane of dark-blond hair were a result of the horrible serum that evil scientists wanting to play God had injected him with nearly a year and a half ago in an old, abandoned ski lodge a dozen miles or so from the place she now stood. But still, no one would ever confuse Tanner with any other man. He was singularly unique in every way.

  Zarina vividly remembered the first time she’d seen Tanner. He’d been stripped to the waist and strapped down to a hospital gurney in the bowels of the ski lodge while those two psychotic doctors pumped him full of drugs in an attempt to create the world’s first viable man-made shifter.

  But while she’d been in the room, she’d been far from a willing participant in the whole thing. The man heading the horrible operation—Keegan Stutmeir—had kidnapped her four months earlier from her home outside Moscow, believing her knowledge of gene manipulation could help him achieve his goal of turning a normal human being into a shifter.

  At the time, Zarina was sure Stutmeir and his scientists were insane. Back then, the idea of shifters, humans who had naturally occurring animal DNA, seemed absurd. According to Stutmeir, shifters could turn this normally dormant genetic material on and off at will, using it to make themselves stronger, faster, and more dangerous. They even had claws and fangs. It had sounded crazy to her, but she’d soon learned Stutmeir would do anything to create these shifters, no matter how many people got hurt.

  Zarina thought she’d understood the depth of cruelty one human would go to in an effort to hurt another, but she realized how naive she’d been the first time she’d seen the results of their experiments. They had rounded up dozens of homeless people in the surrounding areas, administering their horrible drugs to one man after another, then letting them die and throwing their bodies away like they were nothing but garbage. And since no one besides Thomas Thorn, the late former senator who had hired Stutmeir, knew what they doing, there was no one to put an end to it.

  Except her.

  When her attempts to stop Stutmeir had failed, Zarina focused on helping as many test subjects escape as she could. Unfortunately, that was difficult when none of them survived very long. She’d seen so many other people die in horrible pain after being given the DNA-altering drugs that she’d been terrified the same would happen to Tanner. Her hands shook now just thinking about that awful day. His body had twisted and spasmed so hard, she’d heard muscles tear and bones crack.

  Yet somehow, Tanner had survived. He hadn’t come out of the process as the shifter Stutmeir had been hoping for, though. Instead, he’d become stuck somewhere in between human and shifter. He was a blend of both…a hybrid.

  Whereas shifters had flawless control over their abilities, hybrids like Tanner possessed almost none. In many ways, they reacted like mistreated animals, their fangs and claws coming out as they flew into violent rages at the least provocation. Around her, however, Tanner was never violent. That was the main reason she’d been able to get close enough to him to help him escape.

  By then, the damage had already been done. Tanner had been as much uncontrollable beast as man, and the rages that sometimes turned him into a killing machine had made his life a living hell ever since.

  Zarina had tried to help Tanner learn to control the anger inside while she worked on an antiserum that would put his DNA back the way it had been before. A lot of good people at the Department of Covert Operations in Washington, DC, friends who cared about Tanner nearly as much as she did, had helped any way they could. But in the end, those friends were the reason he’d run away.

  Two months ago, the DCO training complex outside Quantico had been hit by a large group of highly functional hybrids led by Thorne. Tanner had had no choice but to fight alongside everyone else and had ended up completely losing control. He’d killed a lot of bad guys, but he’d also come close to killing some of his friends, too.

  Tanner had run away that same night, fleeing back to the forest where all his nightmares had started. Zarina knew he was looking for the isolation he thought would keep him from ever hurting anyone he cared about again.

  She understood why he’d left. He was the type of man who always worried more about the safety of others than himself. But she cared about him, and she wasn’t going to let him live out here by himself. Not when there was something she could do to help him.

  Blinking back tears, Zarina folded the map and slipped it back into her pack. She had a fairly good idea where she’d gotten off the main trail. More importantly, she knew how to get back on it. If she headed left—west, she guessed—she should stumble across the 25 Mile Creek Trail again within a mile or two. If she was lucky, she’d find Tanner’s campsite by midnight.

  Cutting cross-country in the direction she thought the main trail might be had seemed like a simple solution, but it turned out to be a lot more difficult than the map suggested. If she wasn’t heading up a steep slope of rock and pine needles, she was heading down the far side. But it wasn’t like she had a lot of options. She didn’t trust her navigational skills enough to do anything other than head in a straight line. She was going to have to deal with the rough terrain until she reached the trail.

  To take her mind off the hike, she thought about the conversation she’d had with Tanner a few days before the hybrid attack on the DCO complex, when he’d not only come damn close to admitting he loved her, but also confessed he’d rather isolate himself in this forest than risk hurting her. Hearing him say he’d willingly live in total seclusion because he was terrified he’d harm her had torn at her heart.


  That was the moment Zarina had realized she was in love. It was true. A man she’d never even kissed completely owned her heart. How crazy was that?

  She was still pondering that when she heard a strange noise to her right. She froze and slowly turned that way, her pulse kicking up a notch. It sounded like heavy panting, as if someone was having difficulty breathing.

  The doctor in her urged her to see if someone needed help, but she stopped. She wasn’t sitting in a restaurant in DC. She was hiking through the forests of Washington State, one of the few true wilderness areas left in this country. Whatever was out there making that noise didn’t need her assistance.

  Heart still beating a little fast, Zarina turned and headed in the direction she’d been going before. As much as she wanted to run, she resisted the impulse. Her time with shifters and hybrids had taught her running away was a very bad thing to do around any animal. She definitely moved with purpose, though.

  Zarina thought her plan had worked and whatever was behind her would leave her alone, but the panting grew louder, like the animal was following her. She gripped the flashlight tighter, refusing to give in to the urge to look over her shoulder. She didn’t really want to know what was back there.

  She crested a hill and started down the other side, picking up her pace even as she told herself to slow down.

  “Don’t look like prey,” she whispered, remembering something her father had told her a long time ago back in Russia. “Rabbits get eaten.”

  But the reminder did no good. Her feet decided they knew better and began propelling her faster down the slope. The flashlight in her hand swung wildly as she moved, casting crazy shadows and making her wonder how long she could keep going before she tripped over something…and got up just in time to find the animal stalking her ready to pounce.