CHAPTER THREE
They ran through the town, keeping close to the buildings so they’d remain in shadow until they hit the open desert. The scent of jet fuel and exploded ordnance hung in the air, and the town was quiet. After the chaos of battle, most people would stay inside until morning. A good thing for Nick and his companions as they moved toward the rendezvous point.
They passed a burnt-out armored vehicle, its shell still smoking. Whoever had been in that thing hadn’t made it out. A little farther along, there were bodies strewn across the road where the jet’s bombs had hit and the scent of burning flesh still permeated the air. There was no movement, however, and the three of them passed silently and quickly.
Nick glanced at Victoria. She forged ahead with a hard look of determination on her face, her rifle slung across her chest and ready to fire.
He’d told her he would shoot her back there, but he wasn’t so sure he would have. Still, he didn’t trust her. No matter that she’d shown them the cellar, she’d still shot the wrong dude earlier and fucked up the mission. She had an agenda that didn’t match HOT’s, and he wasn’t about to forget it.
They crested a dune and hurried over the other side before stopping to get their bearings. He could hear Victoria and Dex breathing a little harder, and he knew the pace had been punishing. But they had no choice.
Dex took out a scope and scanned the desert below. “Shit,” he breathed.
Nick’s gut clenched. He knew what Dex would say before he said it.
“Enemy on the road. No indication they’ve spotted us.”
“Fuck.”
This was what he’d been hoping to avoid when they’d left the safety of their hideout. “We’ve got about twenty minutes to cross the valley before they’re in a position to cut us off.”
The valley was long and narrow, and there was only one way out at this end. If their adversaries reached the mouth first, Nick, Dex, and Victoria would be trapped.
“Then let’s rock ’n’ roll,” Dex said.
Victoria merely nodded her agreement.
They started down the slope, angling away from the enemy as much as possible without losing sight of the objective. The opposition soldiers were moving relentlessly toward the mouth of the valley, but there was no indication the enemy had any idea the three of them were racing toward it as well.
Sweat rolled down Nick’s face and neck. He could feel it inside the ghillie suit, dripping down his torso and soaking his T-shirt. A glance at Dex and Victoria told him they were equally as miserable. In the quiet of the night, the steady hum of dozens of engines drifted to him. These opposition fighters were tough and angry, determined to wrest control of the government from the king and his officials.
But it was more than that. So many of the militants were also radicals, and more than one terrorist group had seen a grand opportunity to get involved in Qu’rimi politics. The Freedom Force had been severely weakened with the capture of Al Ahmad—but it’d had a surprising resurgence in strength over the past year. It was once more becoming a threat to the stability and security of the region.
And the woman running beside him had only aided their cause today. That pissed him off and made him even more determined to find out her secrets.
The three of them ran hard for twenty minutes before reaching the mouth of the valley. He calculated that the enemy forces were about five minutes behind them as they ran onto the trail and burst through the gap. Nick wouldn’t feel any relief until they connected with the rest of the team, but this was a major obstacle down.
A few minutes later, Victoria cried out and came to a stop. Nick pulled up and turned back. Dex followed.
“What’s wrong?” Nick demanded.
Victoria limped toward him, waving a hand. “Twisted my knee. And I’m spent. I can’t run another second.”
“We’re almost there. Half a mile to the extraction point. You can make it that far.”
She found a rock beside the trail and perched on it. “No, I really can’t. It hurts too much.”
Nick shifted his pack and took a step toward her. “Then we’ll carry you. I’ll start—”
“Take another step and I’ll shoot you.” Her rifle was still slung over her shoulder, but she was holding a Sig pointed right between his eyes.
Fury exploded in his gut. “What the fuck, Victoria?”
“Two can play this game, babe,” she said very coolly.
Her eyes glowed through his NVGs, making her look demonic. The determined look on her face said she meant the words she’d spoken. He didn’t doubt she’d shoot him if he ignored her instructions.
“We just helped you escape a bad situation, and this is how you repay us?”
She shrugged. “I helped you too, don’t forget. And I told you I wasn’t going with you. You’re the one who insisted. But I’m not in the Army anymore, and I make my own decisions.” She flicked the gun. “So this is where we part company. You can be on your merry way, and I’ll be on mine.”
“Fuck you.”
She stood and put both hands on the gun as she faced him. “Don’t test me, Nick.”
He wanted to. Not more than a few hours ago, they’d lain on a floor together, her body pressed tightly to his, her breath hot against his neck. She’d made him think of things he’d never had with her. Things he wanted.
Clearly, she didn’t feel the same.
“You’re a traitor, you know that?”
Her chin lifted a notch. “So I’ve been told.”
“You could have done so much for our side. But you chose this life instead.”
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” she said. “I’m unmoved. Now go, and be glad I don’t disarm you both and leave you here for the Qu’rimis to find.”
He snorted. “You realize if you shoot me that Dex is going to drop you, right?”
He didn’t have to look to know the other man had a weapon on her.
“I think you like yourself too much to make me shoot you. You’d rather live to fight another day.”
He clenched his fists at his side. Rage rolled through him in hot waves. He’d let down his guard with her, and he shouldn’t have. Just because she was soft and vulnerable beneath him back in that cellar.
“No, I’d rather live so I can find you again. Because I will find you—and I’ll make you pay. You can count on that.”
“You can try.”
He took a step back and then another. He’d wanted to bring her in to HOT, but they didn’t have time for this shit right now.
“Come on, Dex. Let’s find our ride.”
The two of them backed away from her and then turned and started running down the road.
“You have no intention of leaving her there,” Dex said as they jogged along.
“Nope.”
But when they doubled back and tried to sneak up on her, Victoria was gone. Nick cursed a blue streak.
“Man, we gotta go,” Dex said. “If we aren’t to the rendezvous point in fifteen minutes, it’ll fuck everything up.”
“Yeah.” Nick cast one last look over the area where they’d left Victoria not more than two minutes ago, amazed that she was gone. The NVGs didn’t pick up a heat signature anywhere.
She’d disappeared, just like three years ago.
* * *
Ian was waiting for her in Baq. Victoria was bone-tired as she entered the house where her boss was headquartered. The guard watching the door was someone new, but she’d given her information and waited while he called it in. A few seconds later, she was walking into the cool interior of the nondescript house and yanking the burka off. She dropped it on a chair along with her gear and continued through the room.
Ian came out into the hallway and let his gaze slide over her as she approached. He was a good-looking guy, big and dark and intense, but there were no sparks between them. At least not for her. She’d never been sure about him, but then he’d never attempted anything so maybe he didn’t feel a thing for her either.
“You made the shot without Jonah. Good job.”
She stopped when she reached him. “If that Russian hadn’t killed him, I would have,” she said coolly. “He was an asshole.”
Ian shrugged and turned back toward the room he’d emerged from. “Sometimes we can’t be picky in this business. But nature has a way, right?”
“I guess so.”
Victoria followed him into the room and flopped onto a chair. She knew she looked like hell. A week in the desert with no shower—and the last day spent on the run—had done a number on her hair. Not to mention the lingering odor of sweat that clung to her. If Ian noticed, he didn’t let it show. He simply sat at his desk and continued to flip through the maps and papers there.
Victoria tried not to let her impatience show, but she couldn’t help the burst of air that rushed from her when Ian continued to sit there so calmly. He looked up, his blue eyes piercing hers.
“You wish to say something?”
Victoria leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “I wanted to kill that bastard, but I didn’t because of my sister.”
He eased back in the chair, the leather creaking. “We’re not talking about Jonah anymore, I take it.”
“You know we’re not. You promised me if I did this job, we’d find Emily. That Zaran bin Yusuf would lead us to her. So where is she? When can I see her?”
Ian’s expression didn’t soften one bit. “It’s complicated.”
“Bullshit!” She shot to her feet and stalked toward the desk, slapping both her hands down on it as she faced him. “You promised, Ian! You swore if I protected that asshole, if I made sure the opposition didn’t kill him, we’d find her.”
Ian’s mouth was a grim line. “It’s not up to me. I told you that from the beginning.”
Victoria swore. Tears of frustration knotted in her throat. “How do you do this? How do you justify working for those bastards when you know what they want to do?”
It was the first time she’d voiced her fears. That Ian was actually taking money from terrorists—which meant she’d been working for them too.
Maybe Nick was right when he called her a traitor. She was trying to save her sister, but that didn’t stop the sick feelings swirling in the pit of her stomach.
“I’m nonpartisan, Victoria. So long as the money comes in, I don’t care who pays me to do the job. And I don’t ask questions when it does.”
She sank onto the chair again and rubbed her hands over her face. She was tired and heartsick and worried.
“I just want my sister back. I’d take money from the devil himself if that’s what it took to find her.”
“Go take a shower. Get some rest. I’ll see what I can find out.”
She stood to go, but then she turned back to him. Her stomach was still churning over the idea that maybe it was a terror organization pulling his strings. She’d never wanted to know before. And maybe she didn’t now, either.
Ian was looking at her with an expression of sympathy on his face. It was the first time she’d seen that emotion coming from him.
“Go, Victoria. Don’t come back for at least eight hours—or I won’t tell you a damn thing.”
* * *
“The outfit she works for is called Black Security.”
Mendez dropped a folder on the metal table at the head of the room and stood there looking about as pissed as Nick had ever seen him. Which was never a good thing for anyone.
The rest of the guys shifted in their seats. It’d been a long few days, and no one was very happy at the moment. The mission had been a total bust, and apparently they had Black Security to thank for it.
Nick suppressed a yawn. He hadn’t slept eight hours straight in days now. They were at a forward base in Qu’rim, near Baq, where the Qu’rimi army trained under the tutelage of US troops. The base was a temporary facility run and maintained by the US, and HOT had their own bunker where a few of the individual teams came and went. They’d gotten the message this morning that Mendez was flying in. Not a good sign. Nick had known instinctively that it had everything to do with the mission in the desert and Victoria.
He hadn’t been wrong.
“Victoria Royal has been working for Black for two years, and in that time she’s had sixty-eight confirmed kills. We’ve known about Black for some time, but he’s mostly gone after targets unimportant to us. Now he seems to be working for someone who wants to protect the Freedom Force.”
Nick’s gut knotted.
“Someone is feeding Black—or the Freedom Force—intelligence,” Mendez finished.
Around the room, the guys all sat up a little straighter. And Lucky MacDonald, their lone female operator, looked utterly furious. Considering what she’d been through to put a stop to the Freedom Force, he didn’t blame her. They’d all thought it was a done deal with the capture of Al Ahmad, but the organization was like a hydra. Cut off one head and more sprang up. None as powerful as Al Ahmad had been, but still nothing to dismiss lightly.
“A mole?” Garrett “Iceman” Spencer asked.
Mendez’s lips flattened. “Probably. Someone in the CIA is giving information to whoever pays Black. Or maybe to Black himself. We don’t know.”
No one said anything at first. They all knew that when Gina Domenico had been in danger, someone in the government had suppressed the information that the man who’d kidnapped her baby and lured her to the Caribbean was still alive. Metaxas had come to DC and abducted her before they’d known—and he’d almost killed Jack Hunter in the process.
But HOT had never learned the traitor’s name, a fact that hung over their heads like a guillotine blade on a fraying rope.
“Someone told Black we were targeting Zaran bin Yusuf,” Nick said. “And he sent Victoria to stop us.”
Mendez turned dark eyes on Nick. “Almost, but not quite. They had intel that the opposition commander intended to have bin Yusuf killed. He was Royal’s target instead.”
Nick blinked. “Why didn’t we know that information?”
Mendez’s gaze was steady. “We did, son. But we couldn’t take the chance that he’d screw up and bin Yusuf would walk away, now could we? The mission was still critical.”
Mendez turned away without waiting for an answer. “As it is, he escaped anyway.”
Nick didn’t bother to protest that it wasn’t his fault. It was. Victoria had been there, right beneath his nose, and he hadn’t known it. She’d been setting up for a shot as difficult as his—but she’d fired first… and changed everything.
Dex looked over at him and frowned. Nick gave his head a small shake. He didn’t think Dex planned to tell the colonel it wasn’t their fault, but the guy was still new enough that maybe he did. Dex leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest, looking as pissed as anyone in the room.
“Good job identifying our mystery sniper, soldier,” Mendez said, spinning around and pinning Nick with another look. “Without that, we’d still be in the dark about what was going on.”
Nick blinked. Was the colonel screwing with him?
But no, everyone was looking at him and nodding their approval. And he felt like shit inside because he’d let her get away. Jesus.
He should have rushed her when he had the chance and to hell with the pistol in her hand. She might have hesitated. He might have surprised her enough to get the gun from her before she shot him. But he’d been so pissed he’d walked away, giving her the chance to escape before he could double back and take her by surprise.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
But the words stuck in his throat like barbs.
Mendez sat at the table and flipped open the folder. “Victoria Faith Royal. Twenty-five years old. Single. Red hair. Gray eyes. Her sister is Emily Hope Royal, twenty-three years old, blond hair, brown eyes. Emily has a history with substance and alcohol abuse. But then she began seeing a man a few years ago who helped her get clean. This man came to the US from Qu’rim to learn engineering but dropped out of school after a couple of years and started hanging around a mosque. He became radicalized.”
Mendez paused and looked up. Nick felt himself leaning forward, hanging on the colonel’s every word.
“Emily converted to Islam and went to Qu’rim with this man. We think she may have married him, but we don’t know for certain. Once here, he became active in the Freedom Force. He was a minor player, but with the collapse of the organizational structure and the subsequent resurgence, he’s become someone to watch. In short, he was our target.”
Nick felt as if someone had sucker punched him. This was the reason Victoria had left the Army? She’d said that she hadn’t failed. But her sister associating with known terrorists must have been too much for the Army to take.
“Jesus,” Ryan “Flash” Gordon said, echoing what they all had to be thinking.
It was a tangled web of relationships worthy of a soap opera. But far more dangerous.
“Is that why Victoria left the Army?” Nick asked.
Mendez glanced down at his papers. “Though there was never any evidence she sympathized with her sister or bin Yusuf, she was thought to be a security risk. She was offered a desk job with no access to classified information, but she refused. Subsequently, she was discharged.”
Nick shoved a hand through his hair and frowned. Victoria’s sister ran away with a terrorist, and now Victoria was in Qu’rim, working for an outfit that seemed to be protecting the very organization her sister’s lover—or husband—was part of.
Nick thought of how she’d threatened to shoot him, and fresh anger swelled. He’d let her get the jump on him because he’d believed her to be on his and Dex’s side, however temporarily. She’d needed them to escape the opposition fighters, but what if she’d run right into the arms of the Freedom Force once she’d disappeared? It made Nick’s blood run cold and his stomach tighten.
Mendez slapped the folder closed and Nick jumped. All eyes went to the colonel.
“I have an assignment for you, but I’m going to warn you this doesn’t come from the top. If anyone wants out, he or she can get up right now and walk out the door, no questions asked.”
The colonel paused for a long moment, but no one made a move. He cleared his throat. “Good to know.” Mendez leaned forward, hands folded one on top of the other, and let his gaze rove across the room. “We’re going after Black and his team. I want to know who’s paying the bills over there, and I want to know what their end goal is. Most importantly, I want Victoria Royal. She’s the key to whatever’s going on—and I want to know what that is.”