Chapter Eight

 

 

Jaliya’s insides were still buzzing with the aftereffects of adrenaline from that car chase back in Kabul when she finally got Barakat settled in an interrogation room at Bagram seventy minutes later. He claimed he was innocent of any wrongdoing and had nothing to do with the attack, that he’d told no one about their meeting, for fear of reprisal for colluding with the enemy.

She didn’t trust him, but her gut told her he was telling the truth about that at least. He’d been visibly terrified when the shooter had opened up on the SUV, flinching every time a bullet hit it, cowering flat on the seat with his arms over his head while muttering prayers to himself.

Not exactly the actions of someone who had expected the attack. So someone had either followed him to the meeting, or they’d followed her, Zaid and Prentiss there.

On the hour-long drive here, Barakat had given her another tip her team was investigating right now. Another possible suspect in the frustrating game of Find The Jackal. And another possible location for a large shipment, headed through Kandahar this time.

If, and only if her team could back up the intel about Kandahar, they had to get teams down there to check it out tonight.

When she was a few steps from the main door, David came through it with Colonel Shah and one of his men. “Jaliya.” He seemed to sag a little in relief, then raked a worried gaze over her. “You really okay?”

“We’re all fine.” Thanks to Zaid and his expert driving. She hadn’t had a chance to thank him for it. “I’ve got our young friend waiting for you in the usual room.” She nodded behind her.

His expression hardened. “Good. I’ll see you in the briefing room when we’re done. Everyone’s on the way there.”

“Perfect.” Her blood was up. So much so she barely felt the cold as she exited the building and headed back to her temporary quarters.

She wanted answers. If tonight’s attack was linked to the hotel bombing, then it meant someone wanted her dead. She was going to disappoint them.

“Jaliya.”

At the sound of that familiar, deep voice behind her, she stopped and spun around. Zaid was striding toward her at a rapid pace, probably just having filed a report at the vehicle depot, detailing the sequence of events tonight, and the damage to the SUV.

“Hey.” Her pulse accelerated at the sight of him.

He rushed up to her, his tall form throwing a long shadow over the cold, frozen ground. “Are they questioning him now?”

“Yes. Meanwhile, our teams are being assembled in the briefing room. We’re trying to verify whether his story about Kandahar has any truth in it. If so, you guys are going to have to move fast.”

He nodded and ran an assessing gaze over her face for a moment, then glanced left and right before grasping her hand. “Come with me.” He tugged.

“Where are we going?” she blurted, trailing after him. They had an important meeting to get to.

He didn’t answer, just led her to a shadowy area between two small buildings and crowded her against the wall of one, moving in tight until his body was pressed to hers from chest to pelvis.

The breath backed up in her lungs, and any protest she might have made died in her throat. With him this close and her still revved up from earlier, she craved his touch and the feel of his mouth on hers. Reaffirming that he cared, proving that she was safe. She curved her hands around his thick shoulders and peered up at him in the dimness.

A tiny amount of illumination cast by an overhead light somewhere far to the left lit his profile and glinted off his dark beard, allowing her to see his taut expression and the intense gleam in his eyes. Hunger.

A surge of desire swept through her, sweet and hot, spreading out from where his hips pressed into her lower belly. The thick outline of his erection made her pulse thud and her mouth go dry.

He didn’t say a word and he didn’t need to—the look on his face mirrored everything she was thinking, feeling. They wanted each other, and all the reasons they shouldn’t get involved didn’t mean anything now. She didn’t dare speak for fear of shattering the spell and the heady rush of anticipation that made her skin prickle with a million goose bumps.

Staring into her eyes while the tension between them intensified, his body heat wrapping around her in a sensual cocoon, Zaid raised one big hand to cradle her cheek. The show of tenderness in the face of all that hunger undid her.

“Wait,” she blurted. She couldn’t kiss him again without telling him the truth. It would be wrong otherwise.

He froze and searched her eyes questioningly. “What?”

“It was me you met online. I used my middle name for my profile. Yasmine.”

He stared down at her in bewilderment. “You…?” He seemed at a loss for words, and she didn’t blame him. “Are you serious?”

She nodded and bit her lip, waiting for him to say something else. Praying he wouldn’t be too mad.

Confusion filled his expression, and the spark of anger that ignited in his eyes made her wince inside. “What the hell? Why didn’t you say something before?”

She groped frantically for a way to defuse this. “I didn’t know for sure until we talked this afternoon, and then I wasn’t sure what to say.”

“But you suspected? All this time and you never said anything?”

It sounded really bad, she had to admit. “Yes. And then I felt too awkward to tell you. I’m sorry.” The sorry was important, and she hoped he believed it was sincere.

His brows crashed together in a fierce scowl, her apology doing nothing to neutralize the situation. “Why? Why’d you bail on me like that? I thought we had something real happening.”

God, her reasoning sounded so stupid now. “We did. Then you wrote something and I…jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

“Huh?” He scowled harder. “What did I write?”

She blew out a breath. “That the man should wear the pants in the relationship.”

He stared at her in stunned silence for a moment, then exploded, “I was joking.”

She winced. “I know that now, but I didn’t then. I thought you were like the guys my dad kept trying to push on me. Controlling and conservative and…”

His jaw flexed, the angry gleam in his eye making her want to squirm. “A dick.”

She gave him a sheepish smile. “Yeah. But now I know you’re not like that.”

He shook his head and pulled in a deep breath, as though having trouble putting it all together. “So you’re saying I lost the chance of getting together with you months ago because of a misunderstanding over a goddamn joke?”

Okay, he was still mad. Maybe if she apologized again— “Yes. But we’re together now.”

As soon as the words came out she cursed silently. Crap, she hadn’t meant to say that. She was supposed to be distancing herself from him, not giving him the green light to move forward in whatever this…thing happening between them was.

She rushed on. “And I really am sorry about all that. Truly.” She gazed up at him in earnest, hoping he would get over it. She couldn’t bear him being angry with her. Not after everything that had happened.

The anger faded and his expression softened. “Yeah. We’re together now,” he murmured, studying her face intently before settling his gaze on hers once more. “And if you think I’m letting you walk away from me a second time, you’re dead wrong,” he muttered, and brought his mouth down on hers.

Even though she was hoping for the kiss, the bolt of hunger that shot through her took her completely off guard. Her knees wobbled, her entire body melting until only the wall at her back and Zaid at her front held her upright.

He wasn’t gentle. And she didn’t want him to be.

As though driven by a need to claim her, reassure himself that they were both whole and alive after the attack, he plunged his tongue between her lips, taking total possession of her mouth. She didn’t resist, needing that same reassurance, because it was Zaid. The man who made her feel safe, who made her heart and body sing.

Strong hands curved over her shoulders and slid down her back, learning her shape, pulling her closer so that all her curves were melded with the hard planes of his body. Jaliya moaned into his mouth as sensation splintered through her, every nerve ending exploding to life, her nipples hard and aching, wetness forming between her thighs.

Even in her relative inexperience she recognized this for what it was: a claim being staked. If she’d been clear-headed and enacting her original plan to keep her distance, that possessiveness would have made her bristle. Instead it made her melt, and there was no way she could think with the feel and taste of him making her mind go blank of everything but the deep, pulsing need inside her.

Desperate for more of him, she clung to the hard planes of his back and shoulders as she stroked her tongue against his, letting herself get lost in him, in this moment. He made it way too easy to forget the rest of the world. To forget that they had only a short time left together, and how much it would hurt when he left.

When he broke the kiss to stare down at her a minute later, one hand cupping her nape, she was dizzy and weak, her body on fire as she gasped for breath. All she could think about was finding a private room where she could peel his clothes off and explore that hard, powerful body with her hands and mouth.

Holy crap.

Breathing hard, her heart knocking against her ribs, she playfully narrowed her eyes at him and tried to dial back the hunger roaring through her. “Still not sleeping with you.” The words were too breathless to be convincing, but she still felt the need to say them. Just so he didn’t think she was caving on her principles.

His teeth flashed white in the dimness as he grinned. “Glad you’re sticking to your guns. But I’m still gonna do everything in my power to change your mind on that.”

She huffed out a weak laugh, both relieved and disappointed when he released her and stepped back. Clearing her throat, she reached up to make sure her hijab was still in place for the meeting they had to hurry to. Wearing it gained her at least a modicum of respect from the locals.

She drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly to calm herself. “Well. That was quite an eventful evening. Thank you for getting us out of there so fast.”

He stroked his thumb across her cheek. “I’m just glad you’re safe now.”

His words hit a deeply buried part of her that she guarded closely. The truth was, she wouldn’t have felt that safe with anyone else. Even while the bullets had been flying, she’d been scared, but she’d had complete faith in Zaid’s ability to get them clear of the threat. And she’d been right.

When he kept staring at her she flushed and struggled to gather her scattered wits. “Well. We’d better get to the briefing.” They all had more work to do tonight. Finding The Jackal was her team’s number one priority.

He nodded once and they crossed the base together while she stemmed the urge to reach for his hand, to link their fingers together just to feel connected to him. When they got into the briefing room, everyone was already there except for David and the two men he’d taken with him to question Barakat.

Zaid joined his teammates on the far side of the room to talk amongst themselves while Jaliya, Commander Taggart, Colonel Shah and General Nasar gathered around a table strewn with intelligence reports and satellite images. The reports coming back from her team said that Barakat’s intel seemed solid. A few helo crews were present as well, including SA Tess Dubrovski, who Jaliya had met twice before, and her copilot. They’d be flying the FAST and NIU teams to the insertion point.

When she had verified all the latest intel and had everything ready to go, she put two fingers in her mouth and let out a shrill whistle to get everyone’s attention. Barakat better not be playing them, or he’d be sorry.

“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” she began. “Since you’ve already been briefed on the latest intel, let’s get right to it. Our informant has identified the site of a drop scheduled to happen at oh-two-hundred hours, down near Kandahar, and our team has pieced together intelligence saying the same. If we’re right, this is going to be a big one. No word on whether The Jackal will be handling it himself, but if we can capture some of his men, we may be able to find out who he is and get a lock on his location.”

Right now there were just too many unknowns for them to narrow down their list of suspects any more. They needed a big break, and they were sure as hell due for one.

Using the maps and satellite imagery she outlined the village and the routes leading to and away from it, then spoke to the helo crews. The urge to look at Zaid was strong, but she squelched it.

“Your insertion point will be here,” she told the pilots, indicating a spot on the topography map on the table. “The teams will insert and approach the village on foot. You’re to fall back and wait within easy reach of the village. If all goes smoothly and the village is declared secure, you’ll extract them from there, along with any prisoners and contraband seized.”

Hopefully a crap ton of drugs and at least someone who knew The Jackal personally.

Commander Taggart took over from there, going over the operation in detail with his team while General Nasar and Colonel Shah watched on, saying little as one of Shah’s men translated for the NIU. “The NIU will take care of the arrests while you carry out the search and seizure,” Taggart told FAST Bravo.

Jaliya listened to his instructions while the low-grade buzz of nerves that always hit her prior to an operation she was involved with intensified in the pit of her stomach. Against her will, her gaze strayed to Zaid on the other side of the table.

He was focused on his commander, both hands braced on the tabletop as he leaned over it, the stance emphasizing the muscles in his arms and shoulders. Muscles that only a matter of minutes ago had held her tight against his equally hard body.

A large knot seemed to lodge in her chest and her mind began working overtime. Was this intel accurate? Had Barakat told them the truth, or had he just made up a story to get her off his back? That risk always came with the territory. Everyone on the taskforce understood it, even though her team had agreed this target looked solid.

Zaid and his teammates, along with the NIU and the flight crews, were executing this op based on her recommendation, and acting on the intel she’d provided. She wasn’t directing it or solely responsible, but she was responsible enough. If anything went wrong, or if this one ended in failure like last time…

She shook away the thought and attempted to quiet her busy mind. Zaid and his team were pros. They would be careful, and this time, the drugs and weapons would be there.

Right at that moment Zaid glanced up and caught her looking.

Jaliya lowered her gaze and fought the blush working up into her cheeks. Her personal feelings for him didn’t matter here. She couldn’t give him any more focus than she would give any other member of the taskforce, or she would risk others figuring out that something was going on between them. Also, she didn’t want to distract him when his and his teammate’s lives depended on planning this op carefully.

Taggart addressed the flight crews next, reiterating some of what Jaliya had said earlier, and adding a few more things. “Any questions?” he asked as he finished.

Agent Dubrovski shook her head, her honey-blond hair wound into a sleek knot at the nape of her neck above the collar of her flight suit. “No, sir.” She and the others left for the flight line, where the crew chiefs were already busy checking and readying both Blackhawks.

Jaliya answered some questions from the FAST Bravo guys, and one from General Nasar about the expected size of the anticipated shipment, conscious of Zaid’s eyes on her the whole time.

After the NIU left to get kitted up for the coming op, FAST Bravo conducted their own meeting. Jaliya stood off to one side, remaining out of their way but close by if any of them needed her to clarify a point.

It was fascinating to watch them. So different from the conventional units she’d worked with before, their process very similar to SOF units. Less authoritarian, more democratic.

Rather than having Taggart or even Hamilton dictate how things would go, all the members were involved in the discussion, and even though the chain of command was clear and everyone deferred to both Hamilton and Taggart, each man had his say.

“All right, boys,” Taggart finished a few minutes later, straightening. “Go suit up and be ready to hit the flight line at oh-one-twenty.”

The team filed out of the room after its commander, but Zaid hung back, waiting by the door for her when she’d gathered up all her files. “Will you be watching from the TOC?” he asked her.

She wanted so badly to pull him back into the room and slam the door shut so they could be alone for even another minute, just so she could kiss him again. Run her hands all over the hard muscles beneath his shirt. Tell him without words how much she cared about him, that she would worry about him when he was out there, and silently beg him to come back unharmed.

But that would take her one step closer to the point of no return with him, and that was a place she couldn’t go. She wasn’t ready to make herself that vulnerable to him, or to risk losing her heart when their lives and careers were too different to make any hope of a relationship possible.

“Yes.” She would be there the entire time, and not leave until they’d landed safely back at Bagram. They were risking their lives because she and her team had convinced command that this operation was necessary.

She prayed they were right.

He headed for the exit with her, his sheer presence and masculine energy holding her spellbound. “So, we didn’t get to have our game night.”

“I’d forgotten all about it.”

One side of his mouth tipped up. “Well, we kinda had a lot on our minds tonight. Anyway, the guys never got around to it anyway. You busy tomorrow night? They’re planning for it after dinner. It’ll be like a secret date,” he added, his eyes brimming with amusement.

She really shouldn’t. Especially not with whatever was happening between them increasing in intensity. Certainly not when her job required her to provide intel that sent him and his team into potentially deadly situations each time they went on an op to investigate her team’s findings.

He gave her shoulder a friendly nudge. “What, you already got a better offer or something?”

That made her grin. “Not sure yet.” She should have just said no, made some excuse. But she couldn’t. She was already too addicted to him to stay away. And on some level that scared the hell out of her, but at that moment she just didn’t care.

“It’ll be fun,” he coaxed.

Probably, but all she cared about was being able to spend time with him. “No promises. But I’ll see what I can do.”

His answering smile made her heart squeeze. “I’ll look forward to it.” He stopped to open the exterior door for her. A blast of cold air slapped her in the face, instantly clearing her head. In the space of a heartbeat she was back in work mode.

The wind was picking up again. Might affect visibility for the flight crews, and the team members on the ground once they inserted.

Stepping through the doorway, she paused. She was heading right to the TOC, and he left, to join his teammates. Walking away from him felt wrong on a visceral level. She simply couldn’t do it.

She turned to face him, let her eyes drink in every rugged, masculine detail of his face. Just in case. You’d better come back to me. “Be safe out there.”

He gave her a soft smile that made the ache beneath her ribs even worse. “I will. And because I’m guessing you’re not the kind of girl who gets all mushy over flowers, I’ll bring you drugs and weapons when I come back instead.”

He was so damn cute. “You guess right. And you sure know how to sweet talk a girl.”

His hazel eyes heated with the promise of what was to come. “Sweetheart, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

With that he turned and jogged away, leaving her staring after him with an unfamiliar ache of longing filling the center of her chest.

 

****

 

Man, it was colder than a hair on a polar bear’s ass out here.

Zaid dropped into a crouch behind Kai, using his buddy as a human windbreaker while they waited in position for Hamilton’s next command. As usual the team leader was up front with Freeman, scouting out what was happening in the village from their vantage point on top of a low rise about two hundred yards away.

They’d inserted a couple klicks to the west along with the NIU guys, using a ridge in the topography to help muffle the noise of the helos’ rotors, and then covered the distance to here in under ten minutes. The NIU force was fanned out ahead of them, ready to lead the charge into the village. As planned, the Blackhawks had pulled back to another location, where they would await the order for extraction from the target once the op was over.

On one knee, Zaid shifted his grip on his rifle and scanned the dusty terrain through his NVGs. It was slightly warmer out than during their previous op, but the slicing wind made it feel way colder. Thankfully Kai’s big frame blocked the worst of it for him as they waited, the other five guys behind Zaid.

He had a good feeling about this one. Nothing he could point to with certainty or even give a reason for; more like a gut-deep knowledge that this time their efforts were going to pay dividends. Jaliya had grilled Barakat on the drive back to Bagram, and relayed everything she’d learned to her boss over the phone en route. By the time they’d made it back, the wheels for this op had already been set into motion.

But he hadn’t been able to focus on any of that with all the emotions swirling through him, too caught up in the need to touch her. Hold her. Taste her.

Make her his.

He still couldn’t believe she’d broken contact with him all those months ago over a goddamn joke. There was no way she could have misunderstood what that kiss tonight had said, however.

He wanted her, plain and simple. All of her, everything she had to give. He refused to be the only one risking his heart here. So he would break through whatever barriers she put between them to make that happen.

“Okay, listen up,” Hamilton said through their headsets, jerking Zaid back to the present. “We’ve got movement in the southeast part of the village, and HQ confirms there are five vehicles on site. Two old five-ton, three pickups. Minimal number of men with them, maybe a dozen total.”

Zaid couldn’t wait to get in there and ruin the party with his teammates. To jam a monkey wrench in the guts of The Jackal’s smuggling machine and bring that bastard to justice.

“We’re going in in two teams. NIU’s ready to go. Let’s move.”

Zaid’s blood pumped hot and heavy in his veins as he stood and followed Maka over the other side of the rise. Prentiss hustled past him to get his part of the team in position, and together they started for the unsuspecting village.

The NIU got there first. Sporadic fire erupted from the men manning the trucks, but they were quickly subdued by the NIU’s immediate and decisive response.

For the first time, Zaid’s confidence about the raid wavered. Was that it? A shipment big enough to fill two five-tons, and that was all the resistance they mounted? Something was off.

When he and his team reached the village, they immediately moved to assist the NIU in securing the village. The Afghan unit had wounded two men and were in the process of cuffing another nine.

Zaid broke off with Maka to check the first house they came to. A young family of four sat huddled on the dirt floor in the front room, hands on heads. Zaid found a hunting rifle in the bedroom and took it outside, explaining to the husband that he would return it when the teams left the village.

“Village secure. Let’s see what we’ve got,” Hamilton said.

Zaid and Maka went through the little house, found nothing, and moved to the next one. The NIU was already tearing apart the five-ton trucks while Freeman and Prentiss went through the pickups.

In the second house, Zaid found a small cache of weapons. A dozen pistols and four rifles hurriedly wrapped in a rug and tossed into the corner, probably moments after the NIU had arrived. “Anything?” he called out to Maka, who was in another room.

“Yeah, got something.”

Zaid walked through the mud-brick doorway to find his buddy pulling black plastic-wrapped bricks out of an old wooden crate. “How much have you got?”

“Five. They find anything in those trucks?”

“Hope so. Here, gimme those. I’ll take them to Hamilton and see what I can find out.” He took the bricks to his team leader, who was standing beside one of the five-tons talking with the NIU commander. “Maka found these in the second house,” Zaid said, pointing.

Hamilton grunted. “Nothing else?”

“Few weapons.” He looked back at where everyone was still conducting the search. “How we doing so far?”

“Not as well as we thought we would. Trucks are empty. Whatever they were carrying is long gone.”

That didn’t make any sense. “Has to be around here someplace. They must have buried it all.”

“If they did, let’s hope we find it.”

The search of the village turned up more weapons and bricks of hash, but nothing on the order of what they had expected. An expanded search of the immediate area turned up no sign of buried contraband.

The good news was, they had more than the fifty kilogram arrest threshold of hash, meaning they could arrest the men they’d cuffed and bring them in for questioning. The drugs themselves didn’t matter, but the information they stood to gain from the prisoners did.

Zaid stayed with Hamilton and the leader of the NIU to question the prisoners, trying to find answers. Upon separate questioning, the men who’d come in with the trucks all told the same story, insisting that they had been hired to drive the vehicles here and await further instructions.

“From The Jackal?” Zaid demanded of one, the youngest of the prisoners, a teenager barely old enough to grow a scraggly beard. His threadbare clothes and worn footwear told Zaid he was just a poor farm kid.

“Yes.”

And the little bit of money dangled in front of the kid had been more than enough to make him jump at the offer, no matter that it could have cost him his life. “You saw him?”

“No. I only know that was the name of the man who was going to pay us. But he was here.”

Zaid’s attention sharpened. “When?”

“Tonight. Before we got here.”

He exchanged a loaded look with Hamilton.

“Get me the village elder,” his team leader growled.

Zaid found him in one of the houses and brought him back for questioning. The man had a snow-white beard and looked like he was in his seventies, though he could have been much younger. Eking out a life here in this harsh terrain took its toll on people.

If the elder had seen The Jackal in person or knew who he was, he wasn’t saying, either too afraid or paid too well to snitch. But from what Zaid could deduce, the smuggler could have been here as little as a few hours ago.

Throughout the questioning, Hamilton stood listening with his arms folded across his chest, his expression giving away nothing. “Put a hood on him and take him over to the others, then get samples of those bricks,” he muttered to Zaid before walking away, pulling out his sat phone to contact HQ.

Zaid escorted the bound and hooded prisoner over to wait with the rest of them, all lined up against a rock wall. Leaving the NIU to guard them, he and his teammates began to collect samples of the hash before throwing it all into a pile and burning it.

In the darkness they waited for the Blackhawks to arrive. Zaid loaded the samples and confiscated weapons onto his team’s bird and jumped aboard as the NIU hustled the prisoners into two of the others. Frustration was starting to take its toll on them. It felt like they were playing a losing game of whack-a-mole out here, wasting their time—not to mention money and resources—for no reason.

Part of the job, man. Comes with the territory. You’ll get a big score next time.

Sometimes hope was the only thing that kept him from feeling his team’s efforts were completely useless over here.

Cold, clean air rushed through the Blackhawk’s open doors as the helo lifted into the sky for the trip back to base. Zaid stared out at the barren landscape passing beneath them and thought of Jaliya. Hopefully she and her team would at least be able to gain some valuable intel from the prisoners they were bringing in.

Time was slipping away from them. Only nine weeks more, and he’d be heading back home. That left him with one hell of a conundrum.

Because unlike all of his previous deployments over here, this time he’d be leaving his heart behind when he left. The countdown was on to make her his before that happened.