Power: Special Tactical Units Division (In Wilde Country Book 3) (3 page)

The first was a
New York Times
article about a group known as Bright Star.
Estrella Brilliante.
The reporter described it as “a growing presence” in the “uncertain political climate” of the small Central American nation called San Escobal.

The second document was from a right wing think tank in Europe. It called Bright Star a Maoist terror group.

The third was from a left wing organization in South America. It labeled Bright Star a force for freedom.

Tanner looked up. Wilde was watching him closely.

“Sir?”

“What’s your opinion, Akecheta? Freedom fighters or terrorists?”

“Neither, General. I know this bunch. They’re bandits with a taste for blood and money. They use the one to obtain the other.”

“But they’re well-armed. Well-financed.”

“Yeah. They are. It suits the political needs of others to support groups like Bright Star, no matter the consequences.” Tanner closed the folder and offered it to Wilde. “Look, sir, I’m flattered you think my knowledge might be helpful, but I have no desire to become a desk jockey. So, thanks, but no thanks. I’m determined to rejoin my unit ASAP, and—”

“Turn to the next document, Lieutenant.”

“Sir. With all due respect…”

“Turn the page!”

Son of a bitch. Tanner felt his jaw tighten, but an order was an order. He flipped to the next document.

And froze.

He was looking at a photograph. Of a woman.

An incredibly beautiful woman.

Clear blue eyes. Dark lashes. Elegant nose. A mouth turned up at the corners in a smile so real that he wanted to smile in return. Her hair, the color of wheat ripening in a sun-filled field, tumbled to her shoulders in a riot of soft-looking curls. She was wearing a dress that was almost the same shade of blue as her eyes. It was what he thought women called a sundress, the top a halter-like thing that exposed strong, graceful shoulders and arms, the skirt belling out from her slender waist and stopping just above her knees.

She’d been photographed standing on the porch of what seemed to be a handsome old house, one hand on her hip, the other wrapped around a post.

Tanner looked up. Wilde’s face was white with tension.

“My daughter,” he said in a low voice. “Her name is Alessandra.” He paused. “Turn to the next page.”

That nasty this-is-a-mistake feeling came over Tanner again, but this time nothing could have kept him from following through.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

It was the same woman. There was no doubt about that. It was she, but everything else had changed.

She stood not on a porch but in a clearing. A jungle clearing. Tanner had spent enough time in jungle clearings to recognize the riot of trees and vines and shrubs. Her hands were behind her. Tied, he knew instantly. She was wearing torn jeans and a stained T-shirt. Her hair was loose; he could see bits of leaf and twigs caught in the tangled strands, but it was her face that commanded attention.

It was battered.

There was no other way to describe it.

One of those beautiful blue eyes was half-shut, the skin around it greenish in color. There was another bruise high on one cheekbone. Something dark—caked blood, he thought—was clumped at the corner of her mouth.

She stood framed between two men. They wore filthy camo pants and combat boots. One was naked from the waist up; the other wore a black T-shirt. They were grinning at the camera. Each had an AK-47 slung around his neck.

Each had a hand on the woman.

One man cupped her breast.

The other’s hand was low and not visible. No question, he was cupping her ass.

Tanner’s belly knotted. He had never seen this pair before, but he knew what they were. Newspapers call them guerrillas or freedom fighters, depending on the politics of the day.

They were neither.

They were monsters, and they were capable of anything.

Anything.

Still, something was wrong with the photo. Bright Star never sent pictures of its soldiers. That was what they called themselves. Soldiers. They sent only pictures of their victims. If these pigs were soldiers and the woman was their captive, which certainly seemed the case, why were they grinning for the camera?

Tanner switched his gaze to the woman.

She looked terrified…and yet, for all of that, her chin was raised, her eyes flashed with what could only be defiance.

He looked at Wilde. “She was kidnapped?”

“Yes.”

“When did you get this picture?”

“Two days ago.”

“How?”

Wilde flushed. “That’s complicated.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Tanner said in a way that made it obvious the polite words were a sham, “how is it complicated? Your daughter was kidnapped. How did the kidnappers contact you? By courier? Fed-Ex? UPS… What?”

“The photo wasn’t sent to me. It went to the San Escobal office of the organization my daughter was visiting. They sent it to State, and someone who knows me in State passed it on to me. He knows—he knows enough about me to have thought Alessandra might be my daughter.”

“You’ve lost me, General. Is the woman your daughter or isn’t she?”

“She is, but very few people are aware of that. We’re—we’re estranged, and she doesn’t use my last name. She calls herself Alessandra Bellini.”

There was surely more to the story than that, but details could wait. All that mattered now was the status of the kidnap victim.

“She was taken in San Escobal?”

Wilde nodded.

“What was she doing there? How could you let her go to a hellhole like that?”

The words shot from Tanner’s lips uncensored. He didn’t give a damn. Neither, apparently, did the general, who walked to the loveseat, sank down on it and folded his hands in his lap.

“I told you, Lieutenant. We are—we are not in touch with each other. Alessandra didn’t ask my permission or seek my advice. Even if we’d been, you know, close, even then, she’d have done what she wanted. She’s very independent. She’s always made her own decisions.”

Tanner nodded. What Wilde meant was that his daughter didn’t give a crap for him or for the rules most people lived by.

He knew the type. The offspring of the rich and powerful were often raised to believe the world belonged to them. Being a SEAL meant you met people you wouldn’t otherwise meet, and that included the spoiled, pampered, bitchy daughters of the wealthy.

The problem was, every now and then reality bit them in their well-tailored derrières
.

“Lieutenant?”

“Yes.” Tanner looked at the photo again. “You said she’s working for an organization.”

“Yes. The FURever Fund.”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

Wilde snorted. “Neither has anyone else. A bunch of idiots, if you ask my opinion.”

“I don’t give a damn about your opinion. Sir,” Tanner added quickly, at Wilde’s look of shock “I’m trying to determine what you need to do next if you want to get your daughter back.”

The general rose to his feet. “Of course I want her back! That’s the reason I’m here.”

“Yes. Okay. I get that.” Tanner paused. “Did they send a note? A list of demands? Information on how they intend to make contact?”

The general took a plastic baggie from his briefcase. It contained a piece of paper.

“My man at State bagged it, but a dozen people at the wildlife place had probably already handled it.”

Tanner took the baggie and held it up. The piece of paper was a message, written in English and addressed to someone named Tomas Anerson.

Tanner looked at the general.

“Thomas Anderson,” the general said. “The head of the wildlife organization.”

The message itself was brief and to the point.

One hunert thousand dollares you get her live. There is a cafe on the square in San Felipe. Be there too days from now. Only you an the mony. Tell anybody an she dies.

There was no signature, just a crude, almost childlike drawing of a star.

Tanner frowned.

Something wasn’t right. Forget the misspellings. They didn’t matter. What bothered him was the relatively low amount of the ransom demand. Bright Star dealt in millions, not thousands. And the drawing of the star was off, too. He’d seen what the guerrillas used as a logo. It was a five-pointed star, not this crude rendering.

“Lieutenant. Tanner. I need your help. You’re the one man who can get my daughter out of there.”

It was almost true. Why waste time being modest?

He wasn’t the one guy who could organize a rescue, but he was definitely one of only a handful who knew Bright Star, knew San Escobal, knew its fetid, hot, all-but-impenetrable rain forests.

What made him the only man for the job was that the others were the guys in his unit, and they were deployed thousands of miles away.

He’d vowed not to sit behind a desk, but how could he not do it this one time? As it was, even with him coordinating things, the odds were against saving the woman.

Bright Star’s record in returning victims after collecting ransom money for them was not encouraging. That this victim was young, female and beautiful made the chances of things going well about as good as the chances of Tanner’s leg ever being completely normal again.

Not that he was about to admit either of those things to his captain or the general.

He looked up. “Who’s collecting the necessary data?”

“You just saw the data, Lieutenant.”

“What I mean is, who’s in charge of collating it? Interviewing the people at the place where the kidnapping took place. Checking out the town of San Felipe. Checking out the bar where they want the meet to occur.”

“We are dealing with animals here, Lieutenant,” Wilde said sharply. “And you want to waste time checking things out?”

“General. I understand that you’re upset—”

“Did you see that photo, Akecheta? Her face. The way those men are—are touching her…”

Point taken, Tanner had to admit. He picked up the photo again. Not the one sent by the kidnappers; the one that showed Alessandra Wilde laughing and happy.

“What was your daughter doing in San Escobal in the first place? It’s not exactly a tourist attraction. Unless something’s changed that I don’t know about, there are State Department advisory warnings about travel there.”

Wilde shrugged. “Yes, there are.”

“Then why did she ignore those warnings? The beaches are as good in Belize or Guatemala, or in half a dozen other safe places… What?”

“She was there tracking jaguars.”

Tanner blinked. “Jaguars?”

“Jaguars, Lieutenant.”

“She’s a wildlife biologist?” Tanner asked in the same way he’d have asked if Tinker Bell was an astrophysicist.

“She’s designer. A fur designer.”

Tanner almost laughed.

A designer. The title confirmed what he’d already figured.

What Wilde meant was that his daughter was a rich, spoiled brat.

When you served in Special Ops, you all but tripped over women like her, hot for guys like SEALs, even hotter for Special Ops guys who belonged to teams and divisions so tightly classified that they were only whispered about. The one thing people always knew were the bars where the teams and units hung out.

For most STUDs, it was a place in Santa Barbara called The LZ. The Landing Zone. It was where you could chill, down a few beers, rock out to whatever was blasting over the sound system, maybe catch a football game on one of the big screen TVs that hung on the walls.

It was also a chick magnet. Chay had once joked and said there had to be a sign somewhere that said Only Tens Allowed.

The LZ drew spectacular looking women.

The hookups were easy and exciting, but you figured out pretty fast that what really attracted the women wasn’t so much you as it was their image of you.

What got them turned on was being fucked by a guy who was dangerous, a badass dude who—they hoped—had done a lot of really badass things.

At first, Tanner laughed at it. It was funny.

After a while, not so much, especially after he made the dumb mistake of almost falling for a gorgeous green-eyed redhead. Almost falling? Man, he’d been head-over-heels crazy for her. Crazy as in starting to think about their future together.

She was a jewelry designer. Not that he ever saw anything she’d designed. She said she was waiting for the right time.

She was also the daughter of an international banker whose family motto might have been
Who Needs Morals When You Have Money?

When she told him she couldn’t spend Thanksgiving or Christmas with him, that she had to be with her family, Tanner had taken a deep breath and said, well, yeah, he understood that…and maybe one of those holidays would be a good time for her to let her family get its first look at him.

“They don’t know about us yet,” she’d said. “I’m just waiting for the right time.”

Chay had tried to warn him that he was in over his head. In fact, it had been the first occasion their whole life that he and Chay had almost ended up decking each other.

Idiot that he was, he’d bought into the rationalization, gone on believing she wanted him for himself, not for the image he represented—until the night he’d been deep inside her and she’d cupped his face between her hands, wrapped her long legs around his hips and whispered, “Sugar? Tell me how many men you’ve killed.”

Since then, he’d never been foolish enough to forget what women like that wanted from men like him. And, what the hell, why not? It wasn’t as if he was looking to settle down, not with the life he led.

It was just increasingly difficult to play the game. Not the sex part. That was easy. What was tough was the part that involved listening to rich, spoiled babes call themselves designers and consultants and decorators.

Those seemed to be their favorite occupations.

He’d met one bubblehead who called herself a color designer.

“It’s like feng shui?” she’d said in what he thought of as West Coast Speak, where every sentence was a question, “but with colors?”

Tanner had nodded and kept a serious look on his face when what he’d wanted to do was howl.

Now, here was this one, a four-star’s daughter, and she was into furs.