The Freedom Broker (Thea Paris #1)
K.J. Howe
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
—Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, Act IV
Chapter One
500 feet above Kwale, Nigeria
November 1
2:30 a.m.
Thea Paris knew the drill.
If the mission failed, no one would retrieve her body. She’d be left to rot in the jungle, unidentified and forgotten. And that wouldn’t do. She couldn’t miss her father’s sixtieth birthday party.
Her gloved right hand glided over her flak jacket and M4 with practiced ease. Night-vision goggles, flares, grenades, extra magazines—all easy to access. The weapon had been tested, cleaned, and oiled, and it was ready to withstand the humidity of the jungle. Pre-mission checks done.
The hypnotic purr of the resurrected Hughes 500P helicopter set the tone for the operation. Black, in every sense of the word. Sound, movement, light, all kept to a minimum. They were flying nap-of-the-earth: low, utilizing the terrain to stay below the radar.
As operational commander, she’d led her six-man team through endless rehearsals, using a model of the targeted area. Now it was time for execution. Brown listened to Hendrix in his earbuds, his way of psyching up. Johansson stared into space, probably thinking about his pregnant wife, who wasn’t happy he’d accepted this mission. Team A, following them in the other retrofitted chopper, consisted of twin brothers Neil and Stewart—native-born Scots—and a wizened former French Foreign Legionnaire named Jean-Luc, who could outshoot them all. She’d handpicked each one from the pool of operatives at Quantum International Security.
Except Rifat Asker, her boss’s son.
Who was staring at her. Given their fathers were best friends, she and Rif had known each other since they were kids. Thea respected his combat skills, but the two of them often locked horns on tactics. She traced the S-shaped scar on her right cheek, a permanent reminder of Rif’s clash with her brother, Nikos.
She tapped her smartphone screen to call up her glucose reading: 105. Monitor batteries fully charged. Perfect. Nothing could screw up a mission more than low blood sugar. She slipped her phone into the pocket of her tactical vest beside her glucagon kit. Rif was still watching her as she adjusted her vest, and she wondered if he knew. She’d done her best to keep her condition a secret, but he didn’t miss much. It probably wouldn’t change anything, but she didn’t want anyone on the team thinking she wasn’t up to the job.
The pilot’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “Three minutes to touchdown.”
“Roger that. We’re green here.”
The stormy sky hid the second helicopter from view. Thea wiped her damp palms on her fatigues. Rain rattled on the chopper’s fuselage, and the turbulence unsettled her stomach. Flying had never been her strong suit. The poor visibility would allow them to fly in under the radar, but the cloying humidity and heat could degrade the chopper’s performance. They’d reduced its fuel load to stay as light as possible, but that left only a minimal buffer if they ran into any problems.
Rif shifted to face Brown and Johansson. “Okay, boys, let’s grab this Oil Eagle.”
The hostage, John Sampson, a petroleum engineer from Texas, earned high six figures consulting at overseas drilling sites to help increase their output. Sampson had two kids, and his wife taught third grade. He coached Little League baseball every Thursday night, but he’d missed the last ten games because he’d been kidnapped and held captive by an outfit called Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND. Seemed every terrorist group had some catchy acronym, as if they’d all hired PR firms to maximize their brand.
This Nigerian militant group wouldn’t budge from its three-million-dollar demand; unfortunately, Sampson’s kidnapping insurance topped out at one mil. That left a single option: rescue. But the overall success rate for hostage extractions was only twenty percent, which was why Sampson’s outfit had sought out Quantum: when a life was on the line, you went to the best.
“Sixty seconds until touchdown,” the pilot warned.
Thea slipped on her night-vision goggles and clutched one of the handhold straps anchored to the cabin walls.
“You sure there’s no leak?” Black camo paint emphasized the tension in the lines around Rif’s eyes.
“Roger that.” She concentrated on the positives—always better than bleak thoughts when descending into potential hellfire. They should have the element of surprise, and she’d selected a crackerjack team. Every member would put his life on the line for the others, and their combined combat experience read like the Ivy League of special ops.
The pilot threaded the riverbed using the narrow thermal image provided by the FLIR camera mounted near the copter’s skids. Flying into thick jungle on a moonless night was far from optimal, but their intel was time sensitive. They had to get Sampson out tonight.
“Thirty seconds.” The pilot’s warning was like a shot of amphetamine. They hovered above a small clearing in the triple-canopy jungle two miles from the rebel camp.
A film of perspiration coated Thea’s back. Her body tingled. She felt alive, awake, adrenalized.
“Ten seconds.”
The pilot raised the bird’s nose, then settled onto the ground. Thea nodded to the others, and they exited the chopper posthaste, hit the ground, and rolled away from the clearing, feeling the rain on their skin and the heat emanating from the rotor wash as their transport rose up and away.