In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(5)
She absolutely hated proving that man right.
***
Briefing room onboard the navy destroyer, USS Patton
Six days later…
Sometimes Frank hated being proved right.
“Well Bill,” he said as he skimmed through the plans detailing Becky and Eve’s rescue for what seemed like the umpteenth time. No way was he letting this op go off with even the slightest hiccup, not with Becky’s neck on the chopping block. “It appears your little sister has finally landed herself in a big, stinking pile of trouble. I always knew it’d happen.”
Bill sat at the conference table with his desert-tan combat boots propped up, placidly reading a dog-eared copy of The Grapes of Wrath as if his kid sister wasn’t currently in the hands of gun-toting Somali pirates.
Un-f*cking-believable.
But that was Bill for you. The sonofabitch was the epitome of serenity, always, even when balls-deep in the wiry guts of an IED. Which was why two hours after Frank made the decision to open his own private shop, he’d recruited Bill from Alpha Platoon. The commanding officer of Alpha still hadn’t forgiven him for that little maneuver, but Frank didn’t much care, considering it was a known fact within the spec-ops community that no one knew his way around things that went kaboom like Wild Bill Reichert. And Frank accepted nothing but the absolute best personnel—the elite of the elite—for Black Knights Inc.
“It’s not like she intentionally put herself in the path of Somali pirates, Boss,” Bill murmured as he licked his finger and turned a page.
“I don’t care if she intentionally put herself in the path of Somali pirates or not.” He nearly popped an aneurism when the words evoked a starburst image of Becky in the merciless hands of those ruthless cutthroats. “The fact remains, she should’ve known better than to travel to this part of the world.”
“Seychelios waters are considered secure. Pirates have never attacked a vessel so close to Assumption Island, so it is reasonable to assume the women believed they would be perfectly safe,” rasped Jamin Agassi.
Frank glanced over at one of Black Knights Inc.’s newest employees and, not for the first time, felt a shiver of trepidation run down his spine. How could you trust a guy who knew the adjective form of Seychelles was Seychellios?
And it didn’t help matters in the least that Agassi had been dubbed “Angel” by Becky because the man’s features were so perfect they were almost unearthly. Of course, the plastic surgeries he’d undergone after defecting from the Israeli Mossad and before Uncle Sam decided to conceal him within the ranks of Frank’s Black Knights no doubt had something to do with the perfection of the man’s mug.
Goddamn pretty boy.
Which only served to remind Frank of all the other goddamned pretty boys who worked for him. The ones who’d been out on assignment when the call for Becky’s ransom came in, leaving him to catch the next transport onto the USS Patton with only Bill and the FNG—the military’s warm and fuzzy acronym for the f*cking new guy.
“Yes, Seychellios waters,” he unnecessarily emphasized the word, “have never before seen pirate attacks, but military ships from across the globe have increased patrols and secured the shipping lanes around the bottlenecked Gulf of Aden, which anyone with a smidge of gray matter will tell you has only chased the pirates farther south around the Horn of Africa. So it stands to reason that it was only a matter of time before the waters around the Seychelles and Madagascar started seeing pirate activity.”
See, just because he didn’t know the adjective form of Seychelles didn’t necessarily mean he was a slavering idiot. He knew some shit about some shit even though his vocabulary—liberally sprinkled with four-letter words on a good day—tended to indicate otherwise.
“It’s not really their fault, you know,” Bill said quietly, never taking his eyes off the text as he turned another page.
“Of course it is,” Frank rumbled, throwing his hands in the air and wincing when his trick shoulder howled in protest of the sudden movement. Damn, getting old sucked…hard. “She didn’t have to go on this asinine vacation halfway around the world to potentially pirate-infested waters. If she wanted to get some sand and sun, I know of some very nice beaches in Florida and California, on U.S. soil,” he emphasized as he rolled his shoulder and reached into a zippered pocket on his cargo shorts to pull out his trusty bottle of ibuprofen.
He was never without the pain pills these days…
Goddamnit.
And that fun little fact was beginning to make him feel like he was just one step away from Metamucil and Viagra, and that just pissed him off.
“I wasn’t talking about Becky,” Bill said, “although you know as well as I do a mere weekend stroll along a beach in Florida or California wasn’t going to do it for her. She needed to get away, far away, to clear her head.”
Ah God. Why did no one agree with his decision to keep Becky from risking her fool neck by becoming an operator? Had everyone suddenly gone completely kill-the-bunny crazy?
Obviously. Because before he’d found out and eighty-sixed their activities, a few of the Knights had been teaching her—upon her repeating wheedling, no doubt—such dubious skills as computer hacking, sniping, explosives, demolitions, FBI investigative techniques…and God only knew what else. He was still mulling over some really inventive ways to kill his men for that.