Dark Enemy (DARC Ops Book 9) Read online

  He clicked on his radio. “Can I get an ETA on Delta Two?”

  Logan already knew that anything beyond twenty minutes would be too late. By now, the two adult kidnappers had chatted enough on their phones, and waited and looked around enough to be ready to meet their backup plan. Another vehicle likely to speed in and carry on with the abduction of the three young American children taken from their Alcapulco resort.

  He almost didn’t need to hear Jackson’s response with the ETA, though when it came—forty long minutes—Logan’s mind was already made up.

  His mind was already moving quickly into the future, his body already receiving just enough of an increase in adrenaline not to disturb his shooting, but to send his muscles into ready mode. Ready for anything. The tiny twitch muscles of his fingers, his lungs, his neck muscles steadying, everything stiffening and readying for action. A cold metallic taste in his mouth. The sounds of Cordoba going away and leaving him quiet and empty and calm for the shot.

  Jackson radioed again, but Logan had no answer.

  No explanation. No giving away his move for anyone else to eavesdrop and act on to somehow get the kidnappers to slither away with their terrorized prize.

  “Triple Zero Smoke,” Jackson said through the radio.

  Logan took a few seconds to pull himself out of the process of staring down his target, breathing it away, the focus leaving him slowly and softly. He reached for his radio and clicked it in response to Jackson’s call.

  Jackson’s voice came through again, this time with an order: “Stand down.”

  Logan shrugged at the order. No. He’d been a soldier long enough to know that occasionally there were extenuating circumstances where an order had to be ignored—whether it was to take action or lay down his arms. It was something no one ever talked about. Definitely not the boot-camp sergeants. Definitely not Jackson. But it was real. And it was necessary here, as the kidnappers looked ready to make their next move, their shouting and actions more animated. Everything he could feel through the scope, his eye never having left it.

  This was his chance.

  More importantly, those damn poor kids. It was their chance, too.

  “Come in, Triple Zero Smoke.”

  Logan clicked the radio.

  “I said stand down,” Jackson said. “Give me a confirm.”

  A click was all he was willing to give.

  “That’s not a confirm, Triple Zero Smoke.”

  Logan could say confirm so Jackson would get off his back, leave him to his concentration, to his aiming, to his resolving the situation once and for all. He could lie to his boss and take care of it, and explain later. Have the success of the mission buffer against the insubordination. He knew Jackson was different. He knew DARC Ops was very different. This wasn’t the army with its rigid rules and codes of conduct. Right?

  This was the imagination guys, the creatives, the risk takers. He was as loyal to Jackson as the next DARC guy, but he was also capable himself of taking executive action. Whether or not he’d just gotten lucky, the decisions he’d made in the past hadn’t come back to bite him in the ass. He’d made the right calls.

  “Triple! Come in!”

  Jackson was beginning to sound like the boot-camp sergeant . . .

  The window of opportunity was closing—Logan’s courage to venture forth with it, and the timing and placing of the shot. He looked at it through his scope, analyzing the risks. He still had a safe backdrop for the odd miss or the likely over-penetration of the bullet that would travel through human material, and then car material, and then lodge in the brick wall behind it. The kids would be more than safe. Their kidnappers, not so much. Him, perhaps not so much, either.

  After the shot, Logan would rush down the single flight of stairs, try not to rush out into the street despite the urge to get to the kids as soon as possible. Try to stealth his way over while maintaining both a line of sight to the van and a three-sixty coverage of the surrounding area. A fast threat assessment before finally taking custody of them, speaking English to them—clear, friendly American English. Smiling at them despite the horror, despite the fear and distrust that had collected in their hearts over the past week. Make it clear to them that anything was better than staying in the van, or running away into the arms of a stranger on the street. His arms, in contrast, would be the only logical escape. Snatch them up and head back up into his bird’s nest across the street. Wait there. Watch there. Keep the weapon in his hands at all times. Only then would he talk to Jackson, the beginnings of his asking for forgiveness. Forgiveness, plus an immediate air extraction.

  “Triple Zero Smoke,” Jackson said over the radio, his voice quiet and calm, as if he’d come to the same realization that Logan just had. “Triple Zero Smoke, come in.”

  “Sunray, I’m engaging.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got a clear shot,” Logan said.

  “Don’t you engage, Triple. We’ve got our men approaching the area.”

  While he chatted with Jackson, Logan could see the kidnappers’ attention shift from the kids and the car and each other, to a man talking loudly to them as he approached on the sidewalk. An accomplice, no doubt. There was no surprise across anyone’s faces, only the cold, hard, calculating glance at the van and back. The steely, empty glare of workers in a slaughterhouse.

  Logan couldn’t wait for backup.

  The kids couldn’t wait, either.

  He stopped his conversation with Jackson in order to regain his shooter’s focus, the last thought on his mind the sage advice his father had once told him: It’s easier to ask for forgiveness later than permission when it’s too late.

  He heard it one last time, his father’s voice, before his finger slipped back in the trigger guard. Back firmly on the trigger, pulling back ever so slightly as the picture in the scope sharpened and crystallized into one exact point.

  The dirty, frazzled face of a man in his late twenties. A man so depraved that even children were not off limits. These types of jobs were always difficult, but certain scenarios made it easier. Context made it easier.

  Logan didn’t blink when the shot rang out, seeing the full vibration and then nothing in his scope. There would hardly be anything left of the target’s head. He knew all about that and knew there was no need to check around. Instead, he panned two meters to the left and saw an older woman still in shock, still not recognizing the situation, standing still while raising her handgun in a random, hapless direction. A direction not at the kids, and not at Logan. And after a split second, at nothing at all. The gun and the woman lay separated in the street.

  The rest of his vision, the normal peripheral scene, had erupted in panic. There were screams, rushing pedestrians, speeding cars. Through the mayhem, he tracked the newly arrived suspect, another young man who had just seconds before been talking to two living, breathing human beings who were now crumpled, bleeding messes on the Cordoba cobblestone. His reaction was typical. Everything about him was normal and typical, save for the fact that he’d been approaching the kidnappers, the car, and the kids. Approaching and talking with them as if he’d known them. But it wasn’t enough to seal his fate. And Logan wasn’t ready to dish out another death sentence. Instead, he let him flee with the rest of the crowd, the man hopping onto the back of a motor scooter and zooming away, the whine of the engine finally fading.

  He leaned to the radio where Jackson had been talking almost without cessation. He cut in. “The two primaries are gone. Two primaries are down. I’m moving in and clearing and securing the area.”

  There was a flurry of voices in response, and not all of it from Jackson. Other DARC members had cut in, other agencies, too. It was official. He’d stepped out of line, emerged from the safety of the shadows, the safety of orders, and put his own neck on the line for the safety of those kids. And it felt great.

  3

  Holly

  Holly didn’t say her goodbye to her old chief, the lovely Mr. Clayton. She didn’
t say goodbye to anyone—except to the strange voice at the other end of the phone call. In the two minutes it took for her to rush out of the CIA building, Holly had continually challenged and then re-challenged the veracity of the call she’d just received. It was better to be cautious, of course, and believe the caller’s threats and act accordingly. In this case, their first request was that she leave the headquarters so as to continue their conversation “in private” somewhere else. A neutral site, as if one of those still existed post-9/11.

  Still, she tried to do her best. And she took them at their word. The fear, at least, was real. While she jogged down the stairs from the mezzanine to the ground floor, and then rushed past the security guards and the main doors and into the low sunshine of an early Friday evening, Holly wondered, just a little bit, if the whole thing had somehow been designed by Johnson. A test or something. Or at least some sort of added stress to bog down her work performance. Then, standing on the sidewalk while staring at her phone, she realized that perhaps not every single negative element of the world could stem from her nemesis, Gary Johnson.

  There were other dangers out there. Of course there were. As an intelligence expert, she was well aware of this. She knew that in college, hacking into and breaking up the various black-market rings that stretched around the world. And she knew that on her first day at work, when they revealed her first assignment: to infiltrate an online slavery ring. It wasn’t Johnson, though he’d always been on the periphery of the paranoia. On the outside looking in, observing, waiting. Now that he had a more prominent role, she almost welcomed a new outside threat to focus on. Perhaps something to bond together with—if she could ever tell him, or anyone. She was already instructed not to.

  But if it was bonding, or something at all positive—and if it was real—it would come at a steep price. The price of Beth.

  If it was real, then Beth would likely be tied up somewhere, or locked in some cell, guarded by who knows what kind of maniacs capable of who knows what.

  “What the hell do you want with her?” Holly cried into her phone.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What are you doing with her?”

  “Miss Adams,” the Russian voice on her phone said calmly, “it appears that you’re still not alone.”

  “What do you mean, alone? Of course I’m alone.”

  “It appears you’re not far enough away from the headquarters.”

  Holly had consciously gone just outside the building, calling their number in close proximity to the high-tech instruments of the CIA. She had orders to go to a “secure location,” somewhere where their communications wouldn’t be listened to or messed with. But why?

  “It doesn’t matter where we are,” Holly said. “Wherever we go, we’ll have the NSA listening in. You think there’s a place the NSA can’t reach us?”

  “Keep moving,” the voice said. “And call us back.”

  “Keep moving?”

  “Go somewhere else and call back.”

  She wanted to tell them to go shove it, but the idea of Beth muffled the spite from her words. She hurried to her car in the parking garage, jumped in, and started the engine. When she peeled out of her parking space and barely braked down the spiraling ramp to street level, it was toward Beth that she was headed. Driving and thinking as fast as possible to Beth.

  “Is this fucking good enough?” she yelled a few minutes later, parked in a narrow alley behind a strip mall.

  “Thank you, Miss Adams.”

  “You feel safe now?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  “How about Beth?”

  “Yes, she’s cooperating as well.”

  “I mean, is she safe?”

  “Yes,” the voice said. “She’s quite safe with us, for the time being.”

  “What? For how long?”

  “We want to make a deal with you,” the voice said.

  “I know. How long do I have? How long does Beth have?”

  “But you don’t even know what the deal is.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” Holly said.

  “You should you care. Are you taking this seriously, Miss Adams?”

  “What’s the deal?” she said. “What do you want?”

  “An exchange. A prisoner exchange.”

  It sounded so simple that at first Holly was almost relieved. Then she thought a little further. Did they want her to kidnap someone? They had to be after information. Work information. That’s why she was targeted, why Beth was, for her CIA info. That, she could do. No secret file was worth even a second of Beth’s life.

  The voice came back to her, as eerily calm and Russian as ever. “An asset of ours is in trouble with your people. And your cousin is currently in trouble with our people.”

  “Who is it?” Holly wanted to know who everyone was, everyone and everything involved. But she would start with whomever they wanted off the hook. Start there and work her way back until she had her revenge.

  She bit hard on her tongue, not wanting to say anything else.

  “Do you know Andrei Godev?”

  She didn’t.

  “Godev. G.O.D.E.V.”

  “No,” Holly said. “That name doesn’t sound familiar to me. Is there an anglicized version?”

  “You would know him as Andrei Godev.”

  “Well, sometimes I get case numbers instead of names. Or code words. Perhaps if you told me more, I could look into it.”

  The voice on the other end said nothing.

  “Are you trafficking Beth?” she asked.

  “Are you going to look into him right now? Look into Mr. Godev?”

  “When I’m at work I will,” she said, knowing it would be the first thing she’d do when she got home tonight. Forgo the liquor store and go straight home and get to work, this most horrible type of extracurricular work.

  Should she tell anyone?

  “Obviously,” the voice said, “if you speak to anyone, or if anything else happens on your end that doesn’t involve helping us with Mr. Godev, then Beth will not have a very pleasant experience.”

  Her hands were shaking.

  She wanted the whole thing to stop. She wanted the call to end. But with each new word from the kidnapper’s lips came another piece of evidence. She couldn’t hang up on that. Even if she wanted to, Holly doubted her fingers would work correctly.

  “Are you still there, Miss Adams?”

  She closed her eyes so tightly that it hurt. Beth’s agonized face was burned into the darkness.

  “Yes,” Holly said. “I’m here.”

  “I have someone here, too.”

  “You have what?”

  “I’ve got someone for you.”

  “Yeah,” Holly said. “That’s what you keep claiming.”

  “I’m not claiming. It’s true. She’s here.”

  Her stomach sank, thinking of Beth actually being anywhere even remotely near that disgusting voice. “She’s where?”

  “Here. Would you like to speak with her?”

  “Put her on,” Holly said.

  The man said, “You want to say hi?”

  “Put her on the goddamned phone.”

  After a moment of ruffling sounds, and what sounded like wind, she finally heard the worst sound in the world. The crushed and whimpered tone of Beth’s voice on the same end of line as the Russian. The voice going quieter, repeating, “Holly?” And then saying it not like a question, but a plea. And then a scream.

  Holly squeezed the phone and cried, “Beth!”

  She tried talking to her cousin, but the other voice cut in. “Okay, that’s it.”

  “What!?”

  “That’s all for today.”

  “No!”

  “Maybe more later.”

  “No.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Beth!”

  And then nothing.

  Tomorrow? He said tomorrow?

  Holly couldn’t wait until tomorrow.
She knew Beth couldn’t, either.

  4

  Logan

  He waited long enough after the shots, letting the dust clear, letting his emotions come back enough to again feel that hot worry for the kids in the van. The worry got so strong that he could no longer wait through his customary threat analysis.

  Logan powered down the steps, his boots slapping the metal, the sniper rifle he’d been holding replaced with a tactical shotgun. He liked how heavy it felt in his hands compared to the rifle. He liked knowing how intimidating even just the rack of it sounded. Two surprise head shots and then a shotgun on a scene everyone ran away from—it should be enough to tell anyone, bystanders and bad guys alike—who was in charge. It was his scene now. His mission. For these next few minutes, it was his everything. Perhaps the greatest few minutes of his life, if he lived through them. If he could one day look into the eyes of the children he was about to rescue. No matter what kind of legal trouble or Jackson trouble it resulted in, looking into their eyes later would be all the reward and justification he’d need.

  Outside, the scene had gone eerily quiet save for the cries of the kids. One of them was standing outside the van, tugging on the shirtsleeve of his brother, urging him to leave the van and run. Logan could hear the pleas, hear them crying. He scanned the street, looking down both directions for any newly arriving parties, Jackson or the kidnappers, but he saw nothing.

  Back to the van, he ran up, took a deep breath, and tried on that smile he was planning on using to gain their trust. But it didn’t quite work. Instead, he was afraid he’d scare them worse with the strained attempt. He abandoned it and lent them a firm hand, holding it out, palm up and strong, and saying, “Hey, guys, we’ve gotta get out of here. Take my hand, and you two take his hand, and we’ll cross the street just like in school. Okay?”

  There was no response except for the little girl, who began crying even louder.

  Logan looked to the eldest boy, the one standing outside the van, the one who at least was clear-headed enough to formulate the plan in leaving the van. Logan asked him his name. Chase. “You ready to go home, Chase?”