Deadly Promises (Tracers #2.5)(65)

“Reed, Green, Colter, and Black.”

Her eyes went all soft and adoring. “You went back to the mines.”

“I told you I wouldn’t forget about those people.”

He couldn’t save the world. He’d thought he could once, but he knew better now. He could save those starving, abused souls who’d been enslaved at the Myanmar ruby mine, though.

And thanks to this woman, he might even be able to save himself.

“Thank you,” she whispered, pressing soft kisses along his jaw line.

“The pleasure”—he rolled her beneath him, thanking good fortune that she’d come into his life—“is all mine.”

When she fell asleep a little while later, he simply laid there and watched her. She was smiling. At peace.

So was he. He’d made the right decision to come to her.

He still had no idea what his future held. After years of service, that should have been unnerving. But now he had Carrie by his side.

Haven. Yeah. It was right here, he thought, drifting off to sleep. Right by this woman’s side.





Unstoppable

LAURA GRIFFIN





One

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN

0200 hours

Sometimes they went in with a flash and crash, but Lieutenant Gage Brewer always preferred stealth. And tonight, because the team’s mission was to outsmart a band of Taliban insurgents, stealth was the operative word.

The night smelled like smoldering garbage and rot as Gage crept through the darkened alley in an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. They were in a hot zone, a place where anyone they encountered would like nothing better than to use them for target practice.

As the SEAL team’s point man, Gage moved silently, every sense attuned to the shadows around him. Particularly alert at this moment was Gage’s sixth sense—that vague, indefinable thing his teammates liked to call his frog vision. Gage didn’t know what to call it; he only knew it has saved his ass a time or two.

In the distance, the muted drone of an electric generator in this city still prone to blackouts. And, closer still, footsteps. The slow clomp of boots on gravel, moving steadily nearer, then pausing, pivoting, and fading away.

Wait, Gage signaled his team. Lieutenant Junior Grade Derek Vaughn melted into the shadows, followed a heartbeat later by Petty Officers Mike Dietz and Adam Mays. Gage approached the corner of the building, an unimposing brick structure that was supposedly a textile factory. Crouching down, he slipped a tiny mirror from the pocket of his tactical vest and held it at an angle in order to see around the corner.

A solitary shadow ambled north toward the front of the building, an AK-47 slung casually across his body. The shadow told Gage three things: the intel they’d been given was good, this building was under armed guard, and what was going down tonight at this factory had nothing to do with textiles.

Gage eased back into the alley.

“Sixty seconds,” Vaughn whispered.

Gage had known Vaughn since BUD/S training. Besides being a demolitions expert, the Texan had the best sense of time and direction of any man in Alpha squad, and tonight he was in charge of keeping everyone on schedule.

Soundlessly, they waited.

Then, like clockwork, a distant rat-tat-tat as the rest of Alpha squad exchanged carefully staged, nonlethal gunfire in an alley much like this one.

Beside Gage, the building came alive. Footsteps thundered in a stairwell. Excited voices carried through the walls. A door banged open and more shouts filled the night as men poured from the building. A truck engine roared to life. Gage and his teammates watched from the shadows as a pickup loaded with heavily armed insurgents peeled off, no doubt to help wipe out the American commandos gullible enough to walk into a trap.

Twenty more seconds and Vaughn gave the signal. Gage peered around the corner. The guard now stood in a pool of light spilling down from a second-story window. The sour expression on his bearded face told Gage he wasn’t too happy about being stuck guarding hostages while his comrades got to slaughter American soldiers. His lips moved, and Gage guessed he was cursing his prisoners—two Afghani teachers whose heinous crime had been taking a job at a newly opened school for girls.

Their boss, the school’s principal, had been beheaded on live Webcam two days ago.

Watching the footage had made Gage’s blood boil. But his anger was tempered now, a tightly controlled force he would use to carry out his mission.

In addition to rescuing the Afghanis, the SEALs were tasked with finding and retrieving forty-two-year-old Elizabeth Bauer, an American reporter who had been working on a story for the Associated Press when the Taliban stormed the school. She was thought to be next in line for execution, if she wasn’t dead already.

Gage chose to believe she was still alive—at least, pictures of her beheading weren’t yet bouncing around cyberspace. The picture Gage had seen—the one provided during the briefing—reminded him of his aunt back in Chicago. The minute he’d seen it, Gage had felt an emotional connection that went beyond his usual hundred-and-ten-percent commitment to an op.

The guard turned the corner. Vaughn and Dietz fell back, circling around to the building’s other side.

Follow me, Gage signaled Mays. The kid was young, green. He’d grown up in Tennessee and spoke with the thickest accent Gage had ever heard. But he could shoot like nobody’s business.