Double Cross (Hard Target Book 1) (2 page)

He assessed his target through the scope. Tall, she towered over the child soldier, and when she arrived at the second hut, could look the two adults standing outside in the eye. Even through the ghostly green and white images in the night vision scope, he could tell she
was
white. Fuck. He didn’t need this complication.

A soft brush against his shoulder—Dalton letting him know he was awake and had seen the doctor too. Her presence called for a change of plans. Maybe Copper would get his wish after all. An explosion could be just the diversion they needed. Tank and Poison, the team’s heavy weapons expert and corpsman, could snatch the doc, while Duke covered the team’s retreat. With luck, they’d take out Cudjo with the blast. He tapped the tiny radio transmitter clipped to his desert fatigues and issued new orders.

While he continued watching the village below his vantage point, the others in the team scrambled to follow orders with practiced precision. Step one, infiltrate the place. Step two, plant explosives. Step three, rescue the girl. Step four, get the hell outta Dodge. No sweat. They had this.

CORY STUMBLED back to the hut. The man had died, but her captors didn’t seem surprised or, more important to her health and welfare, they didn’t seem to care. Sleep. She was desperate for it but terrified she wouldn’t wake up again. The little boy who had summoned her slept outside her hut, curled up around his rifle. She stepped over his thin body and ducked inside. An arm snaked around her waist as a large hand covered her mouth. She struggled, screaming only in her head.

Words whispered against her ear, as soft as the breeze sighing through savanna grass. “Shhh. We’re here to help. Do you speak English?”

American. The man was an American. Cory shuddered but stopped fighting. Her eyes adjusted to the faint moonlight drifting in through the half-collapsed roof, and she saw a second man, huge and powerfully built, watching out one of the windows. The hand on her mouth loosened its grip, and she nodded her understanding.

“What’s in the pack?” her savior sighed into her ear.

She mouthed her answer against his palm. “Medical supplies.”

“Roger that. We’ll take it with us.”

He eased it off her shoulder and tossed it to the other man, who caught it easily, and slung it over his own shoulder. Cory did her best not to slump against the man behind her. The adrenaline spike was fading, and she wouldn’t stay upright much longer.

Cory gasped as the ground beneath her rumbled and lifted. Her ears rang from the explosion’s concussion as the sky lit up. A detached portion of her brain wondered if maybe dragons did exist outside the imagination while the part of her consciousness concerned with survival urged her to curl up in a ball. She didn’t have the chance because the two men each grabbed an arm and hustled her through the door.

The boy reared up in front of them. The big man on her right snatched the gun from the child and kept moving. Cory managed to glance back over her shoulder to make sure the little guy was okay. He stood there looking bewildered and lost. She didn’t have time to worry about him as the men dragged her around the hut and forced her into a run. Gunshots echoed and bullets ricocheted. She stumbled but her rescuers kept her upright even if her feet only touched ground every third step.

They topped a low hill and plunged down the other side. The big guy let go of her arm, but the man on her left continued running, pulling her along with him. She tripped on the uneven ground, found her balance and despite the burning in her lungs, kept pumping her legs to keep up.

More men materialized around her. Big. Bulky. They wore combat packs and carried weapons. How could they run this fast, weighed down as they were? Her world narrowed to one foot pounding the ground and then the next. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her breathing turned to sobs. Still, she ran. She had no choice. To falter meant Cudjo’s men recapturing her. To fall meant death.

Cory lost track of time, lost feeling from her hips down, lost all sense of direction, of thought. She was reduced to the very basics—a terrified animal running for her life.

DUKE SQUEEZED the trigger, took down a pursuing target, acquired the next one, squeezed again. Over and over until the men in the village got smart enough to stay out of sight. He was up and moving, stowing his sniper rifle as he ran. Dalton watched his six. With his MK15 secured, Duke switched to his FN SCAR assault rifle and matched his strides to Dalton’s. They could run all night if they needed to. As they caught up to the others and he got his first good look at the doctor, he knew that wouldn’t be an option.

Clouds were gathering, and the moon played tag then hide-n-seek with them. The woman appeared deathly pale under the intermittent light—and younger than he anticipated. Tears, sweat, or both left dirty streaks on her face. Her gasping breath was louder than the entire team’s pounding boots. They’d have to stop soon. With luck, Copper’s explosions would keep Cudjo’s guerrillas out of action until Wilco could call in a helo for an extraction.

He pushed the team another mile before slowing them to a jog. A mile after that, he called for a walk. As the wind shifted, he got a whiff of the woman. Damn but she stank. Her eyes looked glassy, her movements jerky and robotic. If he didn’t call a halt soon, they’d end up carrying her.

They topped a small rise and dropped down to a river. A copse of trees huddled about twenty feet from the raging water. There’d been heavy rain up-river, and the current rushing by could wash a person downstream in a heartbeat.

After a series of hand signals, Dalton and Cop faded back to check for pursuers. Tank checked out the bushes for critters and flashed a thumbs up. With the all-clear, Poison halted about halfway between the trees and riverbank. He helped the woman sink to the ground, and she bent her knees to her chest, gulping great breaths of air. Digging in his kit, the corpsman set about tending to her. Water. A solar blanket. Wipes for her face. She stared at the canteen he placed in one of her hands, then the wipe he placed in the other but did nothing with either item. Duke watched Poison clean off her face before he unscrewed the canteen and lifted it to her lips. She drank, sparingly, her throat working.

Damn if his dick didn’t get hard at the sight of her lips wrapped around the neck of the canteen. What the hell was wrong with him? The woman was filthy, exhausted, and very likely ill after her captivity. Yup, he definitely needed some R&R in Key West. Needed to find a hot, willing coed and fuck her all night long.

Still, he watched the doctor, listened as she spoke to Poison, her voice soft, with a twinge of accent teasing her hard consonants. Her hair was gathered into a messy bun, and he thought it was probably brown, her eyes were light, maybe blue. Hard to tell in the uncertain light.

A few minutes later, Dalton slipped up beside him. “All clear, boss.”

“Good.” He gestured Poison over with a jerk of his head. “Get anything out of her?”

The corpsman shook his head. “She’s borderline shocky, chief.”

Crap. That meant they’d have to make accommodations for her. “Check that pack Tank carried out. See if there’s any ID.”

“Copy that, chief.”

Duke steeled himself to deal with a hysterical female. He squatted in front of her. “Ma’am?” She blinked a couple of times but didn’t raise her head. Gentling his hand, he used one finger under her chin to tilt her head up. Blue. Yeah, her eyes were undeniably blue. Dark circles and fading bruises marred her face. She definitely hadn’t been with the renegade militia of her own volition. His jaw tightened, and a muscle under his eye jumped as he wondered if the bastards had done more than beat her.

He had to clear his throat before he could speak again. “Ma’am?”

“Doctor.” Her voice grated like sandpaper on rusty metal. “Dr. Coreen Prince. I work for DICA.”

“Doctors for International Children’s Aid,” Poison supplied. “They’re like Doctors without Borders only working with kids.”

“Do you know who we are, Dr. Prince?”

She shook her head, and a hank of filthy hair drooped next to her cheek. Duke fought the urge to tuck it behind her ear. His nostrils flared at the smells emanating from her, and he wondered how long it had been since she’d bathed. After two weeks in the field, he smelled pretty damn ripe but the doctor stank like rotten meat. He looked at her clothes. Jacket, shirt, and pants were all covered in rust-colored stains and smears far more visceral.

“US Navy, ma’am.”

Her dull gaze met his. “Were you sent to rescue me?”

“No.” Being blunt was part of who he was, but he winced at the disappointment his comment painted on her face.

She tucked her chin in a brief nod. “I surmised as much. I apologize if I’ve botched up your mission.”

“Not like we’d leave you behind, doctor.”

The woman watched him through eyes76 and a soul bruised beyond endurance. She looked utterly defeated. “Yes, well. I’m still sorry for slowing you down. I’ll do my best to keep up.”

A thought Duke didn’t like at all knocked on his brain and he had to ask. “You didn’t expect to be rescued, did you?”

Her breath hissed out in a slow huff. “No, I didn’t. I suspected there might be some question of ransom though I was told DICA doesn’t negotiate. Neither would my family.”

When her voice cracked on the last word, Duke figured it was time to back away. He’d let Poison deal with Dr. Prince. He was shocked when he found himself asking, “Your family doesn’t have the money?”

The bitter laugh she choked back surprised him. “Oh, the Princes have generations of money. But as the orphaned daughter with the misplaced priorities, I’m hardly worth spending it on.”

Whoa. There was way more behind her statement than he wanted to know. In fact, he didn’t want to know anything about her. She was a package to be delivered. Nothing more. “Yeah…ah.” He tapped his ear pretending one of the team was talking through the earpiece. He needed to get away from her before her vulnerability made him do something stupid. Like kiss her. And he needed to stop those thoughts dead in the water.

Pushing to his feet in one smooth motion, he stared down at the top of her head. She was a rich do-gooder, an American princess who got in way over her head. Not his type. No fucking way. Voices whispered for real in his ear. Perimeter was set. Pursuers weren’t pursuing. Come daylight, they’d be tracked, but until then, they were relatively safe. The sooner they got out of here and delivered the doc back to civilization, the better off he’d be.

He spoke into the microphone hugging his jaw. “Wilco, call command for an extraction. Tell ’em we have a passenger, Dr. Coreen Prince.”

An hour later, they’d delineated the LZ for incoming helos, wolfed down MREs, and were now settled on the open area near the river to wait. Dalton bitched about running out of hot sauce for the MREs. Full of calories, Meals Ready to Eat—the military’s version of fast food—tasted more like cardboard, but they kept the body fueled on a mission. Poison had to work to get the doctor to chew and swallow. She fell asleep between one bite and the next. Just as well. Now he could ignore her instead of worrying about her.

Poison tucked another solar blanket around the woman then settled in for his own nap. Dalton and Tank had guard duty. Copper, Cookie, and Wilco were already snoring. Stretching out his legs, Duke leaned against his pack and tried to drop into his own version of combat sleep, knowing Cali Boy and Tank had his six. They were still two hours from extraction. Too bad his brain wouldn’t get off the hamster wheel that held Coreen Prince at its center.

The woman wasn’t attractive. That upper-crust accent of hers grated on his nerves. She should have been back in the states tending to the next generation of silver-spooners. What the hell was she doing out here in the middle of Africa working in a run-down and dangerous clinic?
As the orphan daughter with the misplaced priorities, I’m hardly worth spending it on.
Her earlier words echoed in his thoughts. His fists clenched at the idea her family would just toss her away—or at least she believed they would.

He’d grown up poor, but damn if his mother and the entire block didn’t band together to take care of all the kids. He didn’t get rich people. Didn’t want to. Ordering his brain into neutral, he crossed his arms over his chest, tucked his chin, and closed his eyes. He’d sleep for an hour.

The sound was a soft one, barely registering on the outer limits of his hearing. A whoosh, like air escaping from a balloon. Fuck. Griffin missile. His body erupted into instinctive action even as he yelled orders. What the hell? His voice got lost in the roaring blast as the damn thing hit. The night lit up and everything went to shit.