Forged in Smoke (Red-Hot SEALs #3)(46)

His teammates were losing patience.

Grimacing, he rolled his head, and a flicker of movement caught the corner of his eye. Instinctively he froze. The morning was still, which meant no wind to rustle a branch or wave a twig. So the movement was either animal or human. Animals were always a possibility in the woods. But then, so was Zane. After that terse conversation the night before, he had no trouble imagining his LC hitting the woods at dawn in the hopes of catching him bedded down and slow on the uptake.

With painstaking care, he rolled his head in the direction of the flicker. His eyes landed on a pair of thick brown boots. Slowly, his gaze crawled up two legs clothed in the green and gray of camouflage.

Not Zane. Or Cosky. Or Mac.

The figure was standing maybe eight feet in front of him, at an angle, just behind one of the larger trees surrounding the compound. A sniper’s rifle hung from a strap across camouflaged shoulders, a pistol was holstered on the left hip, and a knife staged just below the pistol on his thigh.

He’d moved into place silently, so silently Rawls hadn’t heard him, which pegged him as an operator. The position of the pistol and knife indicated he was left-handed. Maybe Jude? He assessed the figure again, but remained perfectly still. Nah—the height was off. And the stance was unfamiliar.

A chill prickled the back of his neck.

His eyes slid up. An NVD attached to a helmet covered the top half of the guy’s face, leaving only a tight mouth and hard chin visible.

The guy had obviously come in from behind them, through the forest, not via the Jayhawk as Wolf and his men had arrived. Plus—he was in camo and full battle regalia, which Wolf’s team wouldn’t need, and then there was the fixed focus on the compound. Yeah . . . this wasn’t one of Wolf’s boys.

. . . they’d been found . . .

The faint sputter of a radio reached his straining ears. Not his. He’d dialed the volume way back on his until he could barely hear it so his team couldn’t track him through the crackle, but his hadn’t squawked all night. Inch by inch he slid his hand down until it touched the plastic casing of his own radio and carefully nudged the dial to off. One inopportune crackle and he’d be dead.

He’d been damn lucky so far. The * in front of him was obviously more interested in the compound and the people occupying it than he was in the terrain at his feet. But if he looked back and down . . .

Too bad he’d left his Sig stashed in the cabin. But damn it, he hadn’t wanted to give Pachico access to the weapon. Sure, his ghost couldn’t manipulate the weapon for more than a second at a time, but that second was enough to blast a hole through him. Or someone else.

He needed to take this guy out, but silently. Which was going to be difficult thanks to his current situation. For Christ’s sake, he was trussed up in his sleeping bag like a caterpillar in its cocoon and just about as easy to squash.

Yet he could hardly remain lying there either. Sooner or later the bastard was bound to notice him. He’d prefer that moment coincided with the Tango’s demise.

“Goddamn it,” Pachico said from above him. “I’m getting—”

Rawls locked down his reaction as Pachico’s voice boomed overhead. At least he didn’t have to worry about his ghost alerting the bad guys to his presence. The Tango in front of him hadn’t even flinched.

A low laugh sounded above him, followed by an amused, “Now this is an interesting development.”

Sweet Jesus. Rawls’s eyes shot to the rifle hanging from the Tango’s shoulders. Pachico had proved repeatedly through the past twenty-four hours that he could manipulate physical objects. If he went for that weapon and managed to knock the safety off and compress the trigger—the resulting ammunition spray would bring all hell down on them.

Son of a bitch.

As though his ghost had read his thoughts, the translucent bald-headed figure advanced on their new camp mate and took a swipe at the dangling rifle. The weapon slammed against the Tango’s hip, and Pachico’s form dimmed. Galvanized into action, Rawls started to shove his way out of the sleeping bag as his unwelcome visitor jolted and turned.

Hell, he wasn’t going to get mobile in time to subdue the bastard before the Tango got that rifle up and the bullets started flying. Except Pachico unwittingly came to his aid. The ghost’s second swipe at the gun went right through it and into the Tango’s side. The man seized up like he’d been pierced with a red-hot poker. Luckily the guy had some top-notch training behind him—rather than squealing and giving his position away, he locked the agony behind tight lips and rode it out.

From experience Rawls knew he had five seconds tops to get out, up, and take the Tango down while he was still occupied.

Rawls was out of the sleeping bag before Pachico removed his hand and blinked back out again. On his way to his feet, he snatched up one of the drier branches beside him and snapped it at an angle so the break was jagged and sharp.

The guy simply teetered there on his feet, his breath coming fast and uneven, before shaking his head and turning toward the sharp crack of the branch breaking. Rawls was on him before he finished the motion. One hand jerked the helmet off and clamped around the compressed mouth, while the other hand drove the jagged end of the stick into the Tango’s neck, right above the carotid artery, and then jerked the stick back out again.

As the poor bastard struggled urgently against his grip, Rawls bore down harder on the hand across the guy’s mouth, ignoring the teeth that dug into his palm, and the blood raining down on the ground. Raw, animalistic sounds, muffled by his hand, grew fainter and fainter. He counted the seconds off in his head. The Tango would bleed out in under two minutes, but he’d fall into unconsciousness in half that time.