Stinger (A Sign of Love Novel)(57)

"Nice to meet you, Alex. I'm happy to be here." I smiled again. There was a lot of smiling going on between Alex and me. I moved a box over on my desk and looked at him. He was smiling again and I laughed and shook my head. He laughed too.

"Well, Grace, I'll leave you to the unpacking. I'm working late and was going to order a pizza in a little bit if you have time to join me for a slice or two?" He gestured down the hall to where I assumed his office was.

I turned around fully as he backed out my door. "Oh, um–"

"I could brief you on who you'll be working with around here," he smiled again, "who to get in good with and all that." He grinned.

"Okay, sure, Alex. Thank you."

"Okay, great, I'll come get you when the pizza's here." And with that, he turned around and walked back to his office. I watched him walk away, smiling slightly to myself. When he got halfway down the hall, he looked back and smiled. I laughed and turned around, grinning now as I started unpacking.

**********

Carson



We closed in, Leland putting a finger over his lips and cocking his head to the left to indicate our target was in the next room. We all nodded and moved in, none of us making a sound. Josh counted on his fingers as we stood to each side of the door, turning as he kicked it in on three. The door flew inward and we moved in as one unit, surprising four men, holding weapons, but sitting down on chairs, their feet propped up, clearly not expecting trouble.

We fired on them before they could even raise their guns, killing them instantly.

There was another small door beyond that room and when Josh kicked that one open, we moved in and immediately took in a man cowering on the floor in the corner. "Mehran Makar?" Eli demanded.

The man narrowed his eyes, cursing, calling us dirty pigs, and Eli fired, killing him. Maybe it was cold, but I felt nothing. Our mission was complete.

We cleared the rest of the room, letting down our guard only slightly until we were confident that no one was hiding. We had been given intel that there were only four guards, but we couldn't rely on that one hundred percent until we had checked it out ourselves.

"Clear?" Noah asked, coming back in the room.

"Yeah," I said. "All clear out front?"

"Yeah. Let's check out back." There was a small building behind the larger warehouse that Leland was now covering. There was only one door and no windows, so no way for anyone to escape. But we needed to go in carefully in case someone was waiting inside.

Ten minutes later, we had the door open and had moved inside the small structure. It looked to be deserted.

Josh flicked a light switch on the wall and Leland and I sucked in a breath. Noah swore, "Holy shit," and Eli muttered, "Mother f*cker."

At the back of the room, was the biggest stash of weapons I had come upon, Russian made surface to air missiles and rocket propelled grenades. It was a f*cking stockpile.

"Jesus, that f*cker had some serious plans," Josh said.

We all stilled as we heard a small scraping sound in the back. When I examined the back wall, I noticed a small door next to the shelves of weaponry. It almost blended into the wall.

I nodded to the other men, making sure they saw it too, and we moved in.

Noah kicked the door in this time and as Josh shined his flashlight into the pitch-black space, we all recoiled at the smell. "God damn!" Josh coughed.

The sight that met our eyes was straight out of a horror movie.

**********

"You okay, man?" Noah asked quietly. I brought my head up from out of my arms, resting on my knees and looked up at him. "Figure I will be. You?"

His chin went up in a jerky nod. "About the same."

I nodded back, watching the other four men walk up the rocky slope toward us. "The other team will be here in about twenty minutes," Eli said.

When we had called in the night before, we had been ordered to stay with the weaponry until another team could get there to inventory it. The morning sun was already fully up in the sky.

Noah and I nodded, Noah speaking quietly, holding up his radio, "We're supposed to be at our rendezvous point in six hours."

"We'll be ready to leave as soon as the other team gets here then," Leland said, emotionless, a faraway look in his eyes that I didn't like. Even Josh was somber, patting Leland on his back as he walked by him.

Half an hour later, we had briefed the second team and were ready to leave. I stood up, hefting up my gear and securing it to my back as the other men did the same. We started walking. I only looked back once.

**********

It had taken us longer than we thought it would to jog the distance to our rendezvous point, and we were still about an hour away when the sun started to set in the desert sky. It was the end of October when night temperatures dropped rapidly in Afghanistan. Our breath came out in short white bursts as we hiked quietly, all of us aware of our surroundings, as we were trained to be, but quiet in our own thoughts.

Suddenly, Josh, who was walking in the lead, stopped and held up his hand to indicate we stop as well. We all came to a halt, listening. When none of us heard anything, we moved forward again. A few hundred feet later, Josh halted again and we all halted as well, readying our weapons. We were trained well enough to know that one hunch based on the snapping of a stick in the desert might be dismissed, but two most definitely shouldn't be. We all moved so that our backs were to each other and circled slowly, squinting our eyes to see as far as possible in the darkening distance.