Chapter Two

Their terrorist target was one of a fairly large audience sitting in folding chairs and on mats on the floor, at one end of an ancient Quonset hut dating from the 1940s. The structure had been well cared for and reworked into some kind of school gym. The gym, in turn, was now being used as a makeshift theater.

And that meant that their target was surrounded by civilians, most of whom were children, sitting and watching a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. In a Pashto dialect.

“Their Buttercup’s pretty awesome,” Magic announced as he crouched down next to Shane, who’d been left in as secure a position as possible with Rick standing guard, hidden on a hillside that overlooked the village.

“And Suliman’s definitely in there?”

“I didn’t have eyes-on contact myself,” Magic told him as he handed Shane the visual imager. It was more than a camera, although it recorded digital images, too. However, it was most useful due to the fact that it utilized face-recognition software to confirm targets like Rebekah Suliman. “But the senior says it’s a match.”

Shane brought the device up to his eyes, then clicked on the imager’s night vision setting, which allowed him to view the images without compromising his pupils’ adjustment to the dark. The flexible shield conformed to the shape of his face, keeping even the smallest glow from being seen—even by Magic, who was right beside him.

The senior chief was a firm believer in overkill, and he’d recorded an abundance of digital photos.

The outside of the Quonset hut; the sign for the school, announcing all were welcome, not just boys but also girls; the stage with its crudely assembled set and its crowds of badly costumed, ill-at-ease performers—all children between ages twelve and eighteen.

And there she was. Rebekah Suliman.

The CSO file on Suliman was thin, but the analysts at the U.S. Covert Security Organization ranked the woman not just as a One on the most-wanted list, but as a One-X. Which meant she’d confessed or had been proven—without a doubt—to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians, including children. That X identified her as someone who had intentionally targeted a school or a bus or the pediatric wing of a hospital. That X meant that Shane’s mission was to find her and mark her—and anyone who harbored her—for elimination via stealth missile.

His team was to move in as close as they could, and take pictures that would be used to identify other members of her terrorist cell. Then, after calling in the coordinates, they were to create a perimeter and watch for squirters—those who tried to escape the flames and destruction raining down upon them.

As Shane clicked through the images, he saw that the senior had marked Suliman with an identifying circle in a series of shots of the audience. There were twenty rows of seats set up in two sections with a center aisle, and each section was a dozen seats across. Which meant there were close to five hundred people in that Quonset hut, not including the kids on the crowded stage.

It was mostly a group of women and children watching the performance, with only a sprinkling of men here and there. And even if every single adult in that crowd knew who Suliman was, and were actively harboring her despite her crimes, Shane believed that those kids were innocent.

The day they started targeting schools was the day they should just burn the American flag, because they’d be no better than the scumbag terrorists that they put down.

“How long until the show is over?” Shane asked.

“I … don’t know it that well,” Magic confessed. “I only saw it once, but … If I had to guess, I’d say they’re probably in the final act.”

“So it shouldn’t be too much longer.” Shane flipped to the next images—closer and closer shots of Suliman, sitting in the third row, second seat in, a big, happy smile on her goddamn, child-murdering, terrorist face.

“Yeah, you don’t know Gilbert and Sullivan, do you?” Magic said. “That shit can go on and on.”

In the next slew of images, Suliman turned and leaned down, as if listening to the child—a little boy—who sat in the seat beside her. And then—again in a series of shots that showed the movement in frozen moments—she lifted the boy up so that he was sitting on her lap. With her face close to the child’s, she pointed to the stage, and the boy clapped his hands as they both laughed.

Fuck. “The report didn’t say she had kids,” Shane said tightly.

“Suliman?” Magic said. “She doesn’t. Well, she did, but not anymore. They’re all dead.”

“Maybe … nephews and nieces …?” Shane flipped back through the pictures.

“No, they were all killed,” Magic said. “Her entire family was blown to hell. That’s what makes her so fucking ruthless. She’s got no one, Commander. She’s no fear and all anger.”

Shane turned off the imager and pulled it from his face. “Don’t call me that.”

“You know you’re so there, Laughlin,” Magic said. “After this op …? Admiral Crotchkiss is gonna greet the plane himself and plant a great big wet one on you. And then he’s going to give you his niece’s hand in marriage—oh, wait. What a coincidence! He’s already done that.”

Magic was convinced that Shane’s engagement to Ashley Hotchkiss was the equivalent of an arranged marriage between members of the corporate aristocracy and a young, swiftly rising officer in the U.S. Navy. It was, he insisted, part of an insidious plan to keep the future leaders of the U.S. military securely under corporate control.

But Magic didn’t know Ashley as well as Shane did. The idea was ridiculous—that she would marry Shane merely because her father’s brother requested it …?

Vibrantly beautiful Ashley, with her gorgeous blue eyes, her classically lovely face, her willowy dancer’s body, her sharp intellect, and keen sense of humor … She could have had any man—any man—she’d wanted, including a whole pack of powerful officers much higher up the chain of command. But she’d fallen in love with Shane. He’d made damn well sure of it.

“Your bullshit is getting old.” Shane now handed his friend the viewer. “Do something useful with your giant brain for a change and look at these images—particularly the ones toward the end. That little boy looks too much like Suliman to not be her kid.”

And that meant their job here just got even harder. Because if this boy was Suliman’s, Shane couldn’t just call in a strike on the home where she was sleeping tonight, because doing so would kill the child, too.

Meanwhile, Magic was flipping through the images. “Dude, what …? Wait … No, no, no, this isn’t her.”

Well, Shane could call it in, but he wouldn’t, and …

“I’m sorry, what?” he asked sharply.

“Jesus, you can be a load,” Magic muttered. “We’re alone out here, Ricky can’t hear us and yet you really need to hear me call you sir just because I dissed your fancy-assed girlfriend?”

“Fancy-assed fiancée,” Shane corrected him. “And no, dickweed. I was asking because I thought I heard you say—”

“That this isn’t Rebekah Suliman? It’s not. I don’t know who the fuck this is, but it’s not her.”

“But the face recognition software—”

“Is wrong,” Magic finished for him again, still flipping through the images. “I’m gonna reset and run it again and … No, it still IDs whoever this is as Suliman, but I’m telling you, bro, it’s not her.” He shut off the viewer and handed it back to Shane. “Your royal majestic lordship sir, maybe you don’t remember this, because your soon-to-be uncle-in-law snapped his fingers and got you leave for some party—”

“Ashley’s sister’s wedding.”

“Whatever,” Magic said.

“It was a big deal,” Shane protested.

“I’m sure it was. But while you were doing the electric slide with old Aunt Edwina, I was loaned out to Team Six. I didn’t mention it before now, because it was one of those sneaky, covert, not-to-be-mentioned things. But long very-top-secret story short, I’ve seen Suliman through a rifle scope.”

“I had no idea,” Shane said. He wasn’t sure what was more surprising—the fact that Magic had gone out with Team Six or the fact that the loquacious SEAL hadn’t told Shane about it before now. “How long were you …?”

“It was one very shitty week,” Magic said. “I was back on base before you were. Suliman slipped through our fingers, which was doubly disappointing. But I can tell you with absolute authority that this”—he tapped the imager—“is not her. Beeyotch is missing an eye. And I don’t care what kind of reconstructive surgery is being done these days in Paris, but even if, by some miracle, she went there and had her face rebuilt, it’s still not her. Unless they replaced both eyes with brown ones, made her ten years younger, a half a foot taller, and gave her a new set of teeth, too.”

Shane looked at this man whom he’d trusted, time and again, not just with his life but also the lives of their teammates.

“I suppose the teeth falls under possible,” Magic went on as he scratched his head. “But if they’re going to give her new ones, why make ’em crappy and crooked? And combined with the rest of that shit …?” He shook his head. “Nope.” He popped his P—a habit he’d picked up from years of working with Shane. “Not her.”

Shane shifted painfully, trying to reach for the bag that held Slinger’s equipment. “Let’s run the image through a non-gov-issue face-rec program.”

“Good idea, and I got it,” Magic said, pulling the pack closer. He dug through the nest of wires, looking for the cord that would connect the viewer to Slinger’s doctored mini-tab.

But it was then that Shane’s radio headset clicked on, and Scotty Linden’s rich baritone came over a scrambled channel. He was one of the two SEALs assigned to follow Slinger. “LT, Linden here. Over.”

“Gotcha, Scott,” Shane said, motioning for Magic to click on his radio headset, too, before he hooked the two pieces of equipment together. “What have you got? Over.”

“A six-man team,” Scotty reported. “Three are following Slinger, three took off in your direction. Dex is trailing them, I got the others. They’re all dressed like locals, but they move like Amurricans. If I had to lay money down, I’d bet CSO. Over.”

That didn’t make sense. If the U.S. already had a black op group from the elite and highly secretive Covert Security Organization here on the ground, they wouldn’t have bothered to send in a team of SEALs.

Unless …

“LT,” Magic said, his quiet voice not coming through the radio. He’d clicked off his microphone.

Shane looked over to find that Magic had put down the imager. Whatever he’d seen had made him somber.

“Hold on, Linden,” Shane said. “Over.” He shut off his lip mic, too, and asked Magic, “Who is she?”

“You’re gonna hate this, Shane,” Magic told him.

Shane nodded. Yep. He already hated it. “Just tell me.”

“Slinger’s face-rec software IDs her as Tomasin Montague. Her mother was local to this area, her father was French Canadian,” Magic reported.

“Why is that name familiar?” Shane asked.

“She’s the sole surviving witness,” Magic told him, “of the Karachi Massacre.”

And … there it was.

A year ago, a summit had been scheduled to be held in Karachi, Pakistan, where world leaders were going to discuss the ever-growing, ongoing terrorist threat in the Middle East. But before the talks officially began, a bomb went off, turning the meeting into a bloodbath. Several brutal dictators had been killed—but so had more than a half dozen democratically elected leaders, including the presidents of Germany and Spain.

The U.S. president and his corporate delegation, however, had not yet arrived.

It wasn’t long before ugly rumors surfaced, and soon the international media began making accusations that the corporate branch of the U.S. government had been behind the attack. The CEOs in question had spent the past year stridently insisting they were innocent. If only, they claimed, they could locate the young woman alleged to have seen the man who planted the bomb … She knew the truth, and she would and could clear their names.

But the woman—Tomasin Montague—had vanished.

But now she’d been found. And Shane and his men hadn’t been tasked with putting her and her family into protective custody and delivering her someplace where she’d safely be able to report the truth of what she’d witnessed.

Instead, they’d been told she was a deadly terrorist, and ordered to call in an airstrike that would, essentially, wipe out this entire village.

But who had given them this order? Who had altered the face-rec software? Someone very high up the chain of command had to be involved. But how high? And who else knew?

“Shit,” Shane said now. He flipped his lip mic back on. “Scotty, I want you to assume these guys are unfriendlies, possibly former CSO now working for the tangos. Copy? Over.”

It was too awful to think that they might merely be regular, ordinary—if you could call them that—CSO.

“Copy that, LT,” Scott came back. “Holy fuck. Over.”

“Have they spotted Slinger?” Shane asked, his mind racing. How was he going to turn this lose-lose scenario into at least a partial win? “Do they know he’s alone? Over?”

“Negative,” Scotty said. “He’s remained out of sight. Over.”

“Good. Contact him,” Shane ordered. Jesus, maybe—just maybe—this would work. “I don’t want them to see him. I want them to think there’re seven of him, you copy? And I want him to lead them across the border and then lose them. Stay with them until then, then join him and get to safety. This is a direct order. Over.”

“Aye, aye, sir, over.”

“Over and out,” Shane said. He looked at Magic. “I need you to go find the senior chief and Owen and bring them back here.” The conversation he needed to have was not one he wanted to take place over the radio—not even over a scrambled signal. “And give Owen a heads up. I’m going to ask him to tap into the radio communications between those two rogue teams.”

“You don’t need Owen,” Magic pointed out as he pushed himself to his feet. “You need Slinger for something like that.”

But Shane didn’t have Slinger. He only had Owen. “I need you back here, too. And bring Rick in when you get here. Oh, and see if you can’t scare up changes of clothes for you and the senior and Owen and Rick. I want you to be able to blend in.”

“Not for you, too?”

Shane shook his head. “No.”

Magic was a smart son of a bitch, and he knew where Shane was heading, and he didn’t like it. He crouched down again next to him. “Shane. Please. Whatever you’re planning … Let me take the blame for it.”

“And how’s that gonna work?” Shane asked. “You, what? Knock me unconscious?”

“I didn’t think of that,” Magic said, “but … Yeah. I could. Do that. Or … maybe you hit your head when you hurt your ankle. That’s possible.”

“Except I’ve been talking on the radio,” Shane pointed out. There would be a record of that.

“Maybe that was during the watchamacallit,” Magic said. “The lucid interval.”

“And no one’s going to be suspicious when I’m in the hospital and the injury to my head isn’t severe enough to—”

“Maybe you got better,” Magic said, then swore, because he knew how stupid he sounded.

“It’s called mutiny. You’ll go to prison,” Shane said, “and I’ll still lose my command.”

“There’s gotta be another way,” Magic started.

Shane cut him off. “I gave you an order. Don’t make me repeat it.”

Magic stood up. “Fuck you, Lieutenant Ass-hat. I’m not letting you do this.”

“Yeah, you are,” Shane gently told his friend. “Because maybe this is some kind of mistake, the thing with the inaccurate face-rec, and I’ll get a medal for saving the day.”

“You seriously think—”

“No,” Shane said. “But I’m going to play it that way, with maybe a little negative reaction to the pain meds thrown in for good measure. With luck, I can sell it, and I’ll be okay. I’ll get through this, too.”

Magic didn’t believe him. Probably because Shane himself didn’t believe it possible. Someone among their superiors had wanted Tomasin Montague dead. And Shane was going to be burned—badly—for his refusal to get the job done.

Still, he pushed, adding, “You know how it works, Dean. The team leader always pays for any mistakes. And if we’re both gone, who’s going to find out how this happened? Who’s going to make sure this doesn’t happen again? We didn’t work and sweat and bleed to get where we are, only to have them—whoever they are—turn the teams into some kind of goddamn private hit-squad.”

Magic shook his head. “Double fuck you, for always being right.”

“Go,” Shane said.

Magic finally nodded. And turning, he vanished into the shadows of the night.

Shane got busy, taking out the syringe that Rick had given him even as he broke radio silence to contact the SEAL who was following the mysterious team that Scott Linden had said was heading their way. “Laughlin to Dexter. Report in if you can, over.”