Vote Then Read: Volume II

by Lauren Blakely

  “Isn’t it a little cold for a Middle Eastern market?” she asked.

  Nate fixed her with a look and cleared his throat. “Um, well, that’s why we like to run these trainings in the summer, but since we were closed the last two months—”

  She pursed her lips, duly chagrined. “My intention was never—”

  Nate smiled and held up a hand to cut her off. “Wars and markets aren’t confined to the summer. We’re going to set this up to simulate an Afghani market, and we’re going to run two different scenarios—one is going to be US soldiers in the market finding themselves targeted by Taliban; the other is going to be a hostage scenario.”

  Isabel gazed across the stalls to where Alec spoke to Nicole. “The soldiers, when they show up for the training, do they know what to expect?”

  “No. Everyone starts out at the simulated base camp two clicks from here. Their CO will assign them all duties. Not even the CO will know exactly what we have in store. Several soldiers will be sent here with operatives who are playing the role of Afghan military personnel training under the US soldiers. While in the market, the Afghan trainees might turn traitor or be targeted by Afghan civilians, or they might come across a suicide bomber, or the Taliban can show up and take hostages.”

  “Who plays the villain in those scenarios?”

  Nate grimaced. “Falcon team always plays the Tangos—the target, or villains. It’s the price of being on the top team.” He shrugged. “But we get to play good-guy roles too, so it balances out.”

  “When you’re playing the good guys, do you know what’s going to happen?”

  “No. The only people who know the full details of the Tango’s plan are the operatives who are given the role of Tangos, plus Nic, and Rav, if he’s visiting. Sometimes Nic will assign Tangos conflicting plans—they won’t be working together. Like ISIS and al Qaeda, we can have two factions who are out to screw everyone, but they haven’t communicated with each other their particular plans.”

  “So what are you going to do here today?”

  “Today we’re scouting out vulnerabilities. Where the worst place to be caught in the market is, what attacks are easiest and hardest to defend. I think Nic already has this week’s training outlined, but Rav always has tweaks he likes to toss in at the end.”

  At a sharp whistle from Nicole, Nate left her side to receive his orders. Isabel hung back, trying to stay out of the way as promised.

  It was fascinating to watch Falcon work as a team as they walked through the market and discussed tactics and training measures with a level of detail that sounded like a foreign language.

  Engrossed in his work, Alec seemed to have forgotten Isabel’s presence, which pleased her—the last thing she wanted was to be a distraction here—plus she could study him, unobserved, as he directed the team, asked questions of Nicole, and mapped out his plans for the training.

  From the market, they moved on to a brand-new shoot house. Brad had explained the purpose of the shoot houses to her about a month after she was arrested, and she knew Vin had found the shoot house trainings to be the most intense.

  The shoot house was usually used for hostage scenarios. Soldiers were expected to work their way through the house, clearing each room by taking out Tangos without shooting hostages, women, or children—unless the women attacked.

  They sometimes ran scenarios with Raptor operatives acting as Tangos, hostages, and innocent civilians. Those were dry-fire trainings, in which everyone used unloaded guns. When dummies or photos were used to represent Tangos and hostages, then live fire was used. The walls were constructed with a special concrete that absorbed bullets with less scarring, so the house would stand up to several years’ worth of trainings.

  Months ago, Isabel had been down range from a shoot house during one of the live-fire trainings, when she’d been spotted and arrested. Alec’s concern was well warranted, she could see now, because while the concrete walls did stop bullets, there were windows on the south side of the building, and portions of the structure lacked a roof, so there were opportunities for strays. There was a wide buffer zone that was off-limits, and instructors watched those exercises from an observation post on a hill above the shoot house, which was enclosed in bulletproof glass, so they could watch the portions in the roofless rooms as well as a video feed of the action in the roofed sections of the house.

  The video feed from the shoot house—and all the training ground settings—went to God’s Eye, back at the compound, where Nicole was usually situated when trainings were in progress.

  Today, Nicole divided Falcon into teams of two, and they ran practice drills with unloaded guns to rehearse and block the moves for the upcoming hostage scenario. Because they weren’t using any type of ammunition, it was safe for Isabel to observe the action from a closer vantage point.

  Beside her, Nicole said to Alec, “With the design of this house, we can run dry-fire exercises where the hostage is moved from room to room—doubling back into rooms that have already been cleared.”

  “I want to run that a couple of different ways,” Alec said. “With the connecting doorways covered by tapestries, and other times with a visible opening. I also want tapestries hung on solid walls as well, so they have to find the opening.”

  “I think we’ve got enough tapestries in Conex storage. I’ll have maintenance install hooks today.”

  “Good.”

  Brad and Chase finished their dry run through the building. Brad flashed a grin at Isabel and flexed a muscle. “How’d I do?” he asked with a wink. Even though it was just a demonstration for blocking purposes with invisible Tangoes and hostages, she could see he was pumped. As Alec had warned, the exercise got the adrenaline flowing.

  “Not bad. But I think you took out at least one hostage in room two.”

  “Nah. Clearly it was a Tango.”

  She laughed.

  “You want to st-stand in for a h-hostage, Isabel?” Chase Johnston asked.

  She did a double take. It was the first time the man had ever spoken to her.

  “No,” Alec said flatly, before she could respond.

  She turned to Alec, head cocked in question. The fact that the invitation to play hostage came from Chase, of all operatives, was admittedly, a little creepy, but the exercise could be more effective if they had a clueless stand-in for a hostage in the mix. Plus it would give her a chance to be useful. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not a game. The moment we play it like a game is the moment we get sloppy and forget the stakes.”

  She stiffened, offended he’d assume she’d diminish the exercise with her presence. That she wouldn’t take it seriously. “I didn’t suggest it was a game, or that I’d play it as such.”

  He shook his head. “Not you, Iz.” He nodded toward the members of Falcon and stepped aside. He lowered his voice, making their argument semiprivate—or at least, the others were no longer invited to listen. “The team. They wouldn’t treat you how they must treat a hostage in these scenarios. Because they know you, they’d soften it up, make it less scary. Which means it would become a game, not an exercise. Exercise, to be effective, has to hurt a little bit.”

  She glanced at Nate and Brad. Friends, but soldiers through and through. She couldn’t imagine them going easy on her, if they were instructed not to. “So tell them not to go easy on me.”

  Again he shook his head. “You don’t get it. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. When people are assigned roles—victim, traitor, terrorist, bystander—we run it as real as possible. Every time. We never play. Hostages are tied up. Possibly gagged. Gun to the head. And I’m telling you right now, I will not allow Brad to hold a gun to your head. I don’t give a fuck if I’ve checked it first and know without a shadow of a doubt there isn’t a bullet within a hundred yards of the chamber. It’s not gonna happen. Not even with a prop.”

  He nodded toward the shoot house. “You saw how it went. Even without ammo, a run through the house gets the adrenaline going. A
dd a screaming hostage into the mix, and it starts to feel too real, too fast. There are some things you don’t want to experience. Even in simulation. We aim to make it feel real so it’s damn scary for everyone involved.”

  Her throat went dry. She hadn’t thought her objection through.

  She’d long suspected her brother’s murderer could be on Falcon—after all, Vin had been on Falcon—and the idea of one of them putting even an unloaded gun to her head gave her the creeps. She pursed her lips and gave Alec a sharp nod.

  “I need you to go to the observation post while we finish this exercise. We still have a lot to do, and I need to focus.”

  She followed his instructions without a word. She wasn’t mad—at anyone but herself. She hated being wrong and needed to collect her thoughts. The observation post was a good fallback position.

  She watched from above as Alec and Nicole directed the teams to run through the house again and again. Alec’s focus was razor-sharp, as intent as he’d been before their argument. She’d promised not to get in the way, and was glad to see she hadn’t gotten into his mental space, not when he had an important job to do.

  But he was in her mental space, and that was the problem.

  She was becoming convinced she’d been wrong about Alec all these months. And now that she was seeing firsthand what Raptor offered soldiers in terms of combat readiness, guilt over the two months of missed trainings swamped her. Hundreds of soldiers wouldn’t have the benefit of getting the crap scared out of them in Alaska, so they’d be better prepared to shake off the freezing response to fear in Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Syria, or Iraq, or wherever they were sent next.

  Hadn’t Vin talked about how valuable the training was, when he’d gone through it?

  Wasn’t that part of why he took the job? He’d been excited to have options outside the military, but he’d also been pleased with the results Raptor achieved. Her big brother had been a born teacher, and here he’d finally had his chance to teach.

  She tried to shrug off the guilt. Without shutting down the compound, how else would she have gotten Alec’s attention? No one believed Vin had been murdered at all. No one would listen. So she went after the compound on the grounds that it wasn’t safe. She didn’t get results until the shutdown. There hadn’t been another way.

  Except…she didn’t get results when the compound was shut down either. The government investigators who evaluated the safety procedures didn’t give her the time of day. None of the inspectors suddenly came forward and said they believed Vin had been murdered.

  Alec certainly hadn’t come around. He didn’t hear her out, didn’t start to believe, until something happened to him. Only then did he agree to listen. His abduction had finally gotten her what she so desperately wanted.

  She hoped to hell that he believed her innocence now, because an outsider looking in could think she had a very strong motive for abducting him.

  14

  It was well after lunch when the planning meeting wrapped up and Falcon team and Nicole returned to the main compound buildings. Alone again for the first time since their discussion earlier, Isabel was strangely nervous. Not that she feared he was angry with her, and she certainly wasn’t angry with him.

  It was more the suspicion. What if he remained suspicious of her? What if this slow seduction—if that was what this thing was between them—was all a ploy to determine if she was behind his abduction?

  He could bring her anywhere on the compound and tell her it was where Vin disappeared, and she’d have no way of knowing if he was lying to her.

  “We can take ATVs as far as the river. But it’s too deep to cross in this area and the bridge too narrow,” he said. His deep voice was a low rumble. Strangely, achingly familiar after such a short acquaintance.

  Just his voice delivered a pleasurable chill.

  What was wrong with her? She wasn’t the type to get twitterpated over a handsome face with a perfect body. At least, not since she was eighteen. Not after the time the guy she had a crush on had sex with her best friend during their big graduation party, then had the gall to try to get into her pants thirty minutes later.

  That was the night Isabel had sworn off handsome jocks. And confiding in girlfriends.

  Alec Ravissant was far more than a handsome jock, though. To lump him in the same category with the boy soccer player from her senior year was seriously selling the man short. Alec was the full package—brains, brawn, and charm.

  “Do we need ATVs?” she asked. “You miss so much, riding. Plus they’re so loud.”

  “We can walk, but we won’t have a lot of time to dally. Keith’s plane should be landing about now. We’ve got three hours, tops. It’s a lot of hiking for three hours.”

  She gave him a wry smile. “Hiking in the woods is sort of one of my specialties.”

  He waggled his eyebrows, and his sexy voice lowered even more. “Want to know what one of my specialties is?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Avoiding walking by getting women to drag you through the woods?”

  “No fair. That was a seriously off day for me.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said with as much skepticism as she could put in the syllables.

  He lunged and scooped her up, his arms wrapped around her butt as he held her so they were chest-to-chest, face-to-face. “You want me to make up for it by carrying you today?”

  It would be so easy to lean in and kiss him.

  She braced her forearms against his chest; her wrists rested on his collarbones. Her fingers itched to slide up into his dark hair as she held his gaze, her mind utterly blank, snappy comebacks lost to the heat in his eyes. Finally, she licked her lips and managed to say, “I don’t think so. I think I like having you in my debt.”

  “I believe in paying back with interest.”

  She slid against him as he slowly lowered her to the ground. “I’m counting on that.”

  She plucked her backpack from the ground and slung it over her shoulders. “Which way are we headed?”

  “Northeast.”

  “Let’s get going then, Tiger. We’re burning daylight.”

  “Tiger?”

  She had no intention of telling him where that nickname came from.

  First he led her to the place where Vin had been found the day he fell and dreamed of the lynx cave. She pulled out her quadrangle map and studied the terrain, looking for landforms that could conceal caves. “Did Vin ever come back here?”

  “Not that I know of. But he and the trainees camped about a half mile from here for that last survival training. They hiked through this area.”

  “How do you know this is where he was found?” she asked.

  “The two operatives who found him that day identified the location when we investigated your theory after he died.”

  “Who found him?” She’d asked Nicole this question, but she’d never answered. But then, Nicole hadn’t answered any questions about Vin—probably because Raptor attorneys had warned her not to.

  “Ted Godfrey and another operative who left for Apex about a month before Vin died.”

  She stared up at the steep hillside Vin had fallen from just over a year ago. A game trail was faintly visible crossing the active talus slope. “Do you think there’s a connection between what happened to Vin and Apex?”

  “I don’t know. The fact that your cabin was hit by Airwave last night seems damning, but also convenient, if someone wanted it to look like Apex was involved.”

  “I don’t like it,” she murmured, taking a step toward the slope.

  “The Apex connection?”

  She shook her head as she stepped onto the slope. She took three steps sideways, each slightly higher than the previous. As expected, the rocks rolled, and she slid down, gaining only a few inches of elevation from her starting point.

  She met Alec’s gaze. “I don’t like this slope. Why would Vin climb it? He was alone—and had already been lectured about hiking alone by Dr. Larson—and the slope is too acti
ve. A fall would have been a foregone conclusion. It’s a terrible hike with no benefit. The summit is below the tree line and from looking at the map, it appears to back up to an even bigger hill. There’s no view. No way in hell did Vin climb this slope.”

  Alec slapped at the cloud of mosquitos that had swarmed around them as soon as they paused at the base of the steep hill. “According to his write-up of the incident, there was a rockfall trail through the talus, indicating Vin had fallen—and then rolled—about thirty feet.”

  She faced the slope again and kicked at the rocks, triggering a small slide. The truth settled in her gut. “Godfrey lied.” She glanced over her shoulder at Alec. “Why wasn’t he at my cabin last night? Or, for that matter, at the shoot house this morning? The rest of Falcon was both places. It crossed my mind last night that he could have been the one who shot the bear bangers and set off Airwave.”

  Alec frowned. “He quit on Thursday. He was recruited by Apex.”

  “So it could have been him.”

  He nodded. “When we get back to the compound, I’ll ask the FBI to check on his whereabouts.”

  She reached down and scooped up a rock, then chucked it at a high point in the slope. The impact caused yet another mini-avalanche of stones. “Vin must have seen this during the training. He’d have remembered hiking this area, but because he was unconscious when he was found and didn’t come to until he was inside the compound, he didn’t know what hill he supposedly fell down. One look at this slope and he’d have known Godfrey lied, or that if he really was found here, that someone had to have dumped him at the base and made it look like a fall. It must have been jarring to realize he didn’t remember what really happened that day.” It had been odd enough for her last night, and she’d only lost thirty minutes.

  “Tell me about it,” Alec said with a hint of bitter humor. Then he sighed. “My guess is, your brother believed the dream was just that, until he returned here and things stopped adding up, or maybe being here triggered a memory. Like I was able to remember the pain of infrasound after reading Vin’s description.”