Cindy Dees – Special Forces: The Spy (страница 5)

But how...and when...he had no idea.

Scowling, he leaned back beside her slumped body. He propped an elbow casually on his upraised knee. “Anyone following us?” he asked Bijan, the youngest of the crew, who crouched at the dirty rear window of the van.

“No. We’re clear,” the kid answered.

Zane had to give these guys credit. They’d run the grab-and-go to perfection, managing their time on scene to the second and getting away moments before the first police car arrived. His certainty that they were military trained—more specifically, Special Forces trained—intensified.

His concern for the woman intensified, as well. Men like this wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if and when they figured out they had grabbed the wrong person.

He studied her face. She was pretty. Her hair was dark blond and her skin was smooth and slightly olive complexioned. The combination was unusual and striking. Her legs were lean in her blue jeans, and her shirt was currently twisted tight against some nice curves. Her fingers were long and slender with short, cracked fingernails.

Those fingernails surprised him. She looked put together enough to be the kind of woman to always have a perfect manicure. What did she do to beat up her hands like that?

“Pull over at the next gas station,” Mahmoud, the team leader, ordered Hassan, the driver.

It took a few minutes, but Zane felt the van decelerate. They pulled around to the side of a tiny rural gas station advertising with a hand-painted sign that it also sold beer, fishing bait and, more alarmingly, gator bait.

After a quick check to verify that the gas station had no surveillance cameras, Mahmoud and Yousef piled outside. Zane followed more slowly. The other men were already peeling off temporary decals on the side of the vehicle announcing it to be an air-conditioning service van. Meanwhile, Bijan used a screwdriver to change the rear license plate. When had these guys set up this van as a slick getaway vehicle?

Alarm slammed through him. Had they done it before he’d joined the team? Or had they done it behind his back?

Odds were they’d done it recently. Which was freaking scary. It meant they still didn’t trust him.

Which also meant that not only was his life in mortal danger, but the woman’s, as well.

The underlying tension that always hummed in his gut when he was undercover ratcheted up violently. He didn’t like this. Not one bit. Was he a prisoner in this van, too? How fine a tightrope was he walking with Mahmoud and his men? He’d been useful to them as long as they were trying to keep a low profile and not be noticed by the locals. But if they’d completed their mission, these men would go to ground or flee the country and not need his services any longer.

His intuition screamed that he was blown. That it was time to bug out.

Normally, he never went against his gut feelings. Over and over through the years, his gut had proved to be right. And right now, it was telling him in no uncertain terms to abandon this operation immediately. The feds had plenty of ammunition to arrest these men and put them away for a very long time after this morning’s stunt in the elementary school.

The authorities might never figure out what Mahmoud’s primary goal had been, but at least this particular terror cell would be off the street.

However, the woman changed everything. Zane couldn’t possibly bail out now. Not as long as these men held an innocent woman captive. An innocent women he had put into these violent men’s hands.

He mentally swore. He mustn’t do anything to arouse these guys’ suspicions. The danger of staying in this undercover assignment drove home hard, a punch in the gut that left him gasping.

Too tense to be still one more second, Zane walked around behind the van, pretending to stretch his legs. “Can I help with the signs?” he asked casually.

Mahmoud wadded up the last of the adhesive vinyl and tossed it in a trash can. He shoved a cigarette lighter down into the barrel, and a thin stream of smoke commenced rising from its contents. “No. We’re finished. As soon as Osted gets out of the bathroom, we’ll go.”

Zane nodded slowly, trying to look impressed. “You guys are good. I’m grateful you let me learn from you, almuelim alhakim.” He dropped in the Arabic phrase meaning “wise teacher” to gauge Mahmoud’s reaction.

The guy nodded shortly and looked vaguely less irascible than usual, acknowledging the compliment.

Zane guessed they were assets of VAJA—the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. But they never talked politics, not even in the most general of terms. They talked about European soccer and the weather for the most part. And such a degree of operational discipline scared the living hell out of him.

He strolled to the corner of the cinder-block building and, with a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him, surreptitiously dropped the woman’s class ring on the ground. There. One piece of evidence showing her to be a soldier erased. Now he just had to make sure she didn’t have some other form of ID on her—dog tags, or maybe a wallet with a military ID in it.

For that matter, he needed to get rid of any identification she had on her. He had to keep up the ruse of her being Persephone Black for as long as he possibly could. Until both he and the woman could escape. Everything depended on it.

Including his life. And hers.

* * *

Tessa Wilkes eyed her boss cautiously. Major Gunnar Torsten was not a happy camper this morning. He barked, “Still no answer on Piper’s phone?”

“No, sir,” Rebel McQueen replied from her post at the ops center’s communications panel. “I pinged her phone’s locator function, and it puts her in Houma.” Which was the nearest actual town to their secret training facility.

“Where in Houma?” Torsten demanded.

“Um, at an elementary school.”

“What in the hell is she doing there?” he snapped.

Rebel didn’t answer and instead threw Tessa a distressed look. She felt Rebel’s pain. Torsten was usually a stern guy and all business, but this morning he really had a burr up his butt. Catching the silent plea for help, Tessa sighed and spoke up. “Do you want me to go fetch her, sir?”

“No! But I damned well want to know why one of my highly trained, supposedly responsible operatives has gone AWOL.”

Rebel spoke from her console again, muttering, “That’s odd.”

Everyone looked at her. She glanced up and started. “Oh. Um, I just pinged her backup locator. The one in her class ring from West Point. It’s not in Houma.”

“It had better be headed this way at a high rate of speed,” Torsten ground out.

Man, the boss had seriously woken up on the wrong side of the bed today. Not that he was ever tolerant of screwups. He was fond of saying that seconds were the difference between life and death. He wasn’t wrong, of course.

Rebel reported, “Her secondary locator is moving away from us on Bayou Black Road, heading northwest. It’s about fifteen miles west of here.”

Tessa, the first member of their new Medusa team and more at ease with Torsten than Rebel, leaned forward. “Something’s wrong. Piper would have called one of us if she had a problem and couldn’t get here on time. And she would never go AWOL.”

Torsten huffed in irritation. “We can’t wait any longer. Our Vietnamese instructors are only here for a few days, and I need you to learn as much as you can while you have access to them. Fall out, ladies.”

Rebel and Tessa stood, trading worried glances with one another. It was supremely unlike Piper to blow off required training, and even more unlike her not to check in with someone. A note of worry started to vibrate low in Tessa’s gut.

The major led the way to the reinforced steel door disguised to look like weathered wood siding, unsealing it and stepping out into the morning’s steamy heat. Tessa fell into step beside Major Torsten.

She said soberly, “Sir, I’m worried something has happened to Piper. You taught us to listen to our intuitions, and mine says she’s in some sort of trouble. I think one of us should go look for her.”

He frowned, but at least he didn’t rip her head off. “I’ll take your intuition under advisement. If Piper doesn’t show up in the next hour or so, I’ll go looking for her myself.”

Yikes. Piper was in a heap of trouble.

Chapter 3

Piper regained consciousness slowly. Her head throbbed painfully, and it didn’t help matters that every time the van hit a bump in the road, the metal floor bounced underneath her temple, whacking her head again.

Her lips were dry, and her bladder was full, which meant she’d been out for a while. A couple hours, possibly. Dang it! They could’ve changed directions a dozen times without her knowing. She had no way of knowing where she was now!

A sense of disorientation swirled around her. As if she was completely disconnected from the real world. It was scary as hell, and she had to force herself to lie perfectly still until her breathing settled back down and the panic attack passed.

Questions peppered her mind almost too fast to catalog. Where was she? Who were these guys? What did they want with her? How much danger was she in? Where were they taking her? Would she have a shot at escaping them? Did they plan to kill her? Was this even real?