19 Headed for Trouble (37 page)

“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 air strike 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 un-friendlies, 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.”

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

“Our intel was incorrect, the target is not here. I’m aborting this mission, and I’m ordering you,” Shane said, looking steadily from Rick to Owen to Magic to the senior chief, “to go back over the border, with the rest of the team. With the understanding—”

“With all due respect, sir,” Owen interrupted earnestly, looking up from the equipment he was using to try to tap into the mystery team’s radio signals. He, like the senior and Rick and Magic, was now dressed like a goat herder—down to the cap that helped cover his face. “We’re not leaving you here, alone.”

“That’s enough,” the senior spoke over him, giving the kid his best dead-eye glare.

“With the understanding,” Shane repeated, talking over them both, “that you may be delayed by humanitarian efforts to help innocent civilians move to safety in the face of a coming attack from an unknown, unidentified, potentially deadly enemy.”

“Jesus, sir, that was a mouthful,” the senior said.

“Semantics, Senior Chief,” Shane told the older man. “And this is where you say
Aye, aye, sir
. All of you.”

They murmured it back to him without a whole hell of a lot of conviction, and he went on. “I’m in command. I made the call to abort, and gave the order. You obeyed said order. If and when you’re asked, you’ll be
telling the truth. These are now simple facts that will protect you.”

Because of the SAT signal jamming, there’d be no timeline or record of when the team had left the area. And since Shane alone would remain, and would be picked up by the helicopter at the planned extraction point, he would insist that he’d acted alone in his efforts to save the misidentified woman.

The wording he’d been so careful to use would allow his men to pass lie detector tests, if it came to that.

Except for Magic Kozinski, who knew the truth, but who had the bizarre ability to control his pulse and blood pressure while lying wildly.

They’d all been trained to fool rudimentary lie detectors to some degree. But it was actually kind of freaky how adept Magic was at achieving the necessary calm. In fact, he’d once lowered his pulse to fifty in the middle of a firefight.

So Shane wasn’t worried about him, which was a good thing, because Magic knew details, like Tomasin Montague’s name. Shane had decided it was best to withhold that information from the rest of the team. The less they knew, the better their chances of surviving the administrative shitstorm hovering on the horizon.

“And what protects you, sir?” Magic asked now. The tone of his
sir
was back to
asshole
. “From the senior corporate officials who want the incorrectly identified target taken out anyway?”

“I’ll be okay,” Shane said again. Maybe, with Ashley and her powerful father and uncle on his side … Maybe he could survive this.

But it really didn’t matter. He didn’t have a choice.

He wasn’t going to give the order to kill an innocent woman.

The senior chief broke the silence. “With all due respect, LT,” he said, repeating the very words that he’d
glowered at Owen for saying, “we’re
not
leaving you here.”

Shane was ready for that, too, as he took out the needle and syringe that he’d been hiding up his sleeve. “The pain got too intense, so I—just now, after giving the order to abort this mission—used the meds Rick gave me,” he told them as he handed the team’s hospital corpsman the syringe he’d in truth emptied while Magic had been fetching the senior and Owen. He’d drained the powerful painkiller into the dusty ground—a fact they all no doubt knew, but couldn’t prove, especially since he’d gone to the trouble to make it look as if he’d just given himself the injection.

“I’m gonna need a refill of that,” he told Rick, who was carefully disposing of the sharp, “plus several more doses of the local.”

“Oh, that’s fucking perfect,” Magic said crossly. “Make it so you’re not only blacklisted, but you walk with a fucking cane for the fucking rest of your fucking life. What is
wrong
with you?”

Shane ignored his friend as Rick looked to the senior chief who, absolutely, would have been instantly in charge had the team’s commanding officer really taken that drug. According to the revised military code of 2024, the act of taking a powerful painkiller automatically meant Shane had willingly relinquished his command, due to his being medically unfit to serve. No words to that effect were necessary. It was simply so.

And now, for all intents and purposes, Shane was just another guy that his former team would help, as he—as a civilian—assisted Tomasin Montague and her family.

“Give Lieutenant Laughlin what he needs,” the senior ordered Rick gruffly, then shot Magic a “Keep your opinion to yourself, Kozinski.”

Shane glanced at his dive watch. He was right on schedule. “I know I’m no longer in command, but we
should move into position to intercept, Senior Chief,” he said as Rick handed a new packet of wrapped syringes to him and he stashed them in his vest.

They’d all studied the terrain in advance of the op. There were two possible exit routes out of the village and farther up into the mountains. Tomasin Montague and her son would have to take one of them.