Headed for Trouble

BONUS STORY: SHANE’S LAST STAND


By the middle of the twenty-first century, much of the world has changed for the worse. Despite advances in technology, crime has increased, drug use is rampant, and the threat of terrorism hits closer and closer to home. And in the dark days of America’s second Great Depression, the divide between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow.

Many things are different in this dark and murky future, but one thing remains the same: Navy SEALs are still Navy SEALs.

And the only easy day was yesterday.

CHAPTER ONE

Something in Shane Laughlin’s ankle snapped upon landing.

Or maybe it tore.

Either way, it sent him to the ground, and he bumped and scraped and bounced, jarring the injury over and over as his chute dragged him across the rocky terrain.

Shane bit back a curse. It was the least-graceful landing of his entire military career, and it took everything he’d learned in countless training sessions to get the parachute back under control, even though Magic and Owen both scrambled to help him.

“You okay?” Magic asked, as Owen took possession of all of their chutes.

Jesus, Shane’s ankle was on fire. What the hell had he done to himself? Whatever it was, it was bad. Still, he pulled himself to his feet and tried to put weight on it—and would’ve landed back in the dust had Magic not caught him, the pain making him see actual stars.

But he shook them away, giving Magic an “I’ll be fine,” because they didn’t have time for this. The mission not only required the drop zone be fully sanitized—with the SEAL team’s eight chutes rolled into vacuum packs and carried back out—but that it be fully sanitized quickly and quietly. And that meant sitting here shouting f*ck was not an option.

Regardless of the studies done that proved swearing helped diminish pain.

“Yeah, I think I’ll take that as a no,” Magic said as Shane signaled his senior chief—a height-challenged but wiry fortysomething named Johnny Salantino—who’d made note of the goatf*ck in action and was already heading for them.

“Ankle or knee?” Magic continued.

“Ankle.” Shane dinged himself again, and again the pain was excruciating. “F*ck!”

“You okay there, LT?” the senior asked in his raspy Brooklynese as he crouched down next to Shane.

“Ankle,” Magic reported.

“Head count?” Shane asked the senior through gritted teeth.

“Eight. All here, sir, all in one piece. You’re our only casualty,” the senior replied, then turned to report as Rick Wilkie, the team’s hospital corpsman, joined them, “Ankle.”

It was un-f*cking-believably inconvenient, considering they were in the middle of nowhere. It was a full-on double-f*ck of inconvenience since Shane was supposed to be leading his team of SEALs both swiftly and stealthily up the nearby mountain, to a small town where a terrorist leader named Rebekah Suliman, code name Scorpion Four, was enjoying her last supper.

But neither swift nor silent remained part of Shane’s current repertoire.

“Don’t even think about touching that boot,” Shane warned Rick. If he took it off, he’d be in far worse shape. “And keep your syringe away from me. I need a clear head and it doesn’t hurt that bad.”

Okay, so that was a lie, and they all knew it. But sooner or later, the pain would diminish. Sooner or later, he’d get used to it. Please God, let it be sooner rather than later …

“I could give you something local, sir,” Rick suggested.

“No, we’ll improvise,” Magic answered before Shane could respond.

But Shane outranked him. He outranked everyone here on the ground. “Do it,” he ordered Rick, pulling up his pant leg to give the medic as much access as he could without that boot coming off.

“With all due respect, LT, you run on this thing, it could end your career,” Magic said as the meds Rick injected quickly took the edge off the pain in Shane’s ankle, bringing it down to a steady but more-manageable throb.

“I’m not going to plan to run on it,” Shane told this man who’d been his confidant and friend since BUD/S training. “But I’ve gotta be ready. Because I can’t stay here.”

“I’m going to give you this to hold, sir.” Rick handed him a carefully wrapped syringe containing the heavy-duty painkiller. “Let me know if you use it.”

“I won’t.” But Shane pocketed the packet. It could come in handy, in the event they got pinned down and had to remain absolutely silent to keep from being discovered. The last thing he wanted to do was give away their position by breathing too hard.

“What is the plan, sir?” the senior asked.

Shane glanced at Magic, who had already shrugged off his pack, and was divvying up the contents, spreading the weight to Owen and the other SEALs. “The plan is to sweep and sterilize the area, and head toward the target,” Shane said. This wouldn’t be the first time Magic clocked a dozen clicks with Shane leaning heavily on him, or vice versa.

And as much as he hated the fact that he and his injury would handicap his team and slow his men down, putting this entire mission into the extremely capable hands of his senior chief while Shane spent the next two hours miserably stashed behind some brush or in a shallow cave simply wasn’t an option.

First of all, there were no caves in this particular region of this country formerly known as Afghanistan, and the sparse bushes wouldn’t have hidden a three-year-old, let alone a full-grown man of Shane’s height and weight.

And recon patrols came through this area regularly.

Also?

The extraction point—the place where a helo was going to pull them out of this hellhole—was up in the mountains. In order to get there, Shane had to pass the village where Scorpion Four was being feted.

So, nope. There was no quick fix, no easy way out. Shane was destined to be this mission’s PITA, this op’s representative from Murphyville. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong was Murphy’s Law. And he was here as living proof.

But then, as if on cue, Slinger announced, “We got us a tracker, sir.”

Apparently Mr. Murphy hadn’t pointed his bony finger only in Shane’s direction. He’d also tossed an additional monkey wrench into the mix.

“A tracker?” Shane repeated, as he let both Rick and the senior help him to his feet. “Just one?”

The lanky SEAL with the good-ol’-boy accent was frowning down at his equipment. “Yeah,” Slinger said, “it looks like … Wait, I’m gonna calibrate and …”

“Don’t put weight on it,” Magic warned Shane. “You’re going to forget and put weight on it.” He then added a “Sir,” although from the way he said it, the subtext was a*shole.

“This is f*cking weird. It looks like it’s five separate trackers, but they’re all in a single concentrated area.” Slinger, known by his parents as Jeff Campbell, was Shane’s gearhead. He was more than a computer specialist—he was practically part cyborg. The equipment that SEAL Team Thirteen was issued was not supposed to be tampered with or adapted in any way, so Slinger used his own, leaving the military-issued gear to Owen, who was this team’s second tech, aka the pack mule who carried the crap they never used.

And even though the SEAL team had dropped into an allegedly technologically challenged part of the world, due to the locals’ severely limited access to the electrical grid, and even though Owen’s military-issued equipment bag didn’t contain a tech-sweeper, Slinger had automatically gotten out his mini-tablet-slash-sweeper, and was using it to fully scan the landing zone.

Because Slinger knew Shane. And anyone who knew Shane knew that he verified intel reports—all intel reports. When he was out with his team in the very dangerous real world, he refused to assume anything.

If he’d received intel that the sky was blue, he’d verify that, too. Sometimes verification required little more than a quick glance skyward, but more often it required reconnaissance—either technological or the humint kind.

Because their very lives depended upon it. And in the course of his illustrious career, Shane had yet to lose a single man.

“This,” Slinger said, “is motherf*cking strange …”

“You’re picking up only five trackers?” Shane confirmed. “Total?”

Oftentimes, enemy forces would seed the terrain with nearly invisible miniature tracking devices. Those tiny trackers would become snagged onto pant legs or lodged in the treads of boots or sneakers. But in those cases, the seeding would be extensive, and the entire team would give a positive read.

“Affirmative, LT,” Slinger reported as Shane leaned on the senior, his arm around the smaller man’s shoulders, so he could move forward. “I’m picking up a small cluster of, yup, five trackers and … Shit, sir, it’s on me and it’s …” He cut himself off and thrust his altered mini-tab at Owen. “Effen, take this and see if you can’t figure out what-the-f*ck.”

As the newest member of Shane’s team, Jim Owen was considered the FNG, or the f-ing new guy. Magic, who was the king of bestowing nicknames, had started calling him Effen for short, and it had stuck.

As Shane watched, Slinger held out his arms, as if he were going to be wanded by airport security, and Owen ran the sensor over him.

“That’s weird,” Owen said.

“Yeah, right?” Slinger agreed as he unbuttoned and pulled off his overshirt and then his T-shirt beneath.

“How would it have gotten onto your T-shirt, Campbell?” the senior asked, his voice loaded with skepticism.

Owen frowned as he aimed the sensor at the shirts that were now dangling from Slinger’s hand. He then brought the sensor back toward Slinger’s now-bare chest. “Uh-oh.”

Shane braced himself for more bad news.

“What the f*ck?” Slinger said again, as he took the device from Owen.

Magic moved to look over Slinger’s shoulder as both of the tech guys stared down at the readout. “Told you she was too pretty for you, Slingblade,” he said, which didn’t make sense.

“No f*cking way.” Slinger thrust the sensor back at Owen, then went for his belt, unfastening his pants and pushing them down his legs. Like most of the SEALs in Thirteen, he didn’t bother with underwear. And like most of the SEALs in Thirteen, modesty was not an issue for him.

Owen circled Slinger, reaching out with the device to touch the taller SEAL on the lower left side of his back. “I’m reading the entire cluster here,” he said, then came around to Slinger’s front, same side. “And here.”

And then Magic’s words made too much sense. “The trackers are internal,” Shane realized. They were inside Campbell. Some beautiful counteragent had fed him … What? A cupcake with trackers in the icing? And five of them had managed to not get crushed by his teeth.

It ranked up in un-f*cking-believable-land, along with Shane trashing his ankle on a relatively easy jump.

But it meant that they’d just been reduced from a team of eight to six. Or, realistically, even fewer. Son of a bitch. The pain in Shane’s ankle was now the least of his worries.

“What did you eat?” the senior chief asked Slinger. “Or maybe the more pertinent question is, where did you eat?”

“Approximately twelve to fourteen hours ago,” Rick chimed in. “Judging from its placement in your lower intestines.”

“What the f*ck kind of trackers are these, that they could survive stomach acids?” Slinger wondered as he yanked his pants back up.

“Can you somehow jam or alter the frequency of the signal that’s being sent out?” Shane asked.

Slinger shook his head. “No, sir. I mean, yes, if it was only one tracker, but I’m pretty sure these have five different frequencies.” He looked over at Owen, who still held the device. “Check my math, Effen.”

“Five trackers, five frequencies,” Owen confirmed for Shane. “Sir, we’d need five different jammers.”

And they only had two. Two is one and one is none. It was a Navy SEAL saying from way back, when the Teams had gotten their start during the Vietnam War. Carry two of everything, so that when a piece of equipment failed, the SEALs would have a backup. But here and now, two was as good as none, since two wasn’t even close to five.

“Did you have a late lunch in town?” Rick asked, back to trying to figure out where Slinger had gotten tagged.

“No, I had lunch on base.” Slinger fastened his belt. “Dinner, too. I didn’t eat or drink anything between meals. Water. I had water. Out of a bottle that I also got on base.”

So much for the cupcake with icing theory, which meant …

“I think maybe the question that needs answering is not where or what did you eat,” Magic said, on the same page as Shane, “but who.”

Slinger swiftly turned to look hard at Magic, then swore pungently. “Seriously?” he asked as he pulled his T-shirt back on, his movements jerky with his anger. “You seriously think …?”

“Hells yeah.” Magic turned to Shane. “Yesterday afternoon, while you were having your daily high-maintenance damage-control phone call with Ashley, we went over to the Schnitzel Haus. We’ve been having these epic pinball battles—me and Sling. They have an old-style machine with the real metal balls and—”

“Get to the point,” the senior chief interrupted for Shane, right on cue.

“Yes, Senior, sorry, Senior. The point. Is that Sling got his internally tracked ass, here, picked up by a woman who was gorgeous. Unnaturally so. I’m talking A-list movie-star worthy. Well, maybe more like B-list. I mean, considering it was the middle of the afternoon, and Slinger looks, well, like Slinger. No offense, man.”

Slinger just shook his head in disgust.

“Are you sure you didn’t eat anything in the bar?” the senior asked. “Peanuts, pretzels—”

“I’m very sure, Senior Chief,” Sling said grimly.

“So what are you saying? That she took you to her hotel and …?” Owen’s voice trailed off as Slinger turned and just looked at him.

“Oh,” Owen said, as light dawned. “Right. Sorry. Wow. I mean, not wow but, whoa. I mean—” It took a kick from Magic to shut him up.

Slinger sighed heavily as he looked at Shane. “Sir, I’m truly sorry.”

“This is a new one,” Shane told him. “For all of us.” He turned to Rick, who was sifting through his medical bag. “Is there anything you can give him—”

“I was thinking the same thing, sir,” Rick replied, “but …” He shook his head. “I mean, what’s worse? Having him traceable or having him stop every few minutes with explosive diarrhea? And even then, I can’t guarantee all five trackers will be expelled.”

That was good to know. Well, it wasn’t good to know, but it was important information.

“Sir, we need to move,” the senior reminded Shane.

“With your injury, our pace is going to be significantly slower than planned.”

No shit. Shane looked from the senior back to Slinger. “Sling, I need you to trade equipment bags with Owen.”

Slinger sighed again as he nodded. He knew what was coming. “Yes, sir.”

“There’s another village due west of here. I want you to head in that direction. Let’s see who follows you.”

Whoever had targeted Slinger with those internal trackers had done it for a reason. Someone wanted to know what Shane’s team was doing, where they were going. But whoever that someone was, he or she was forced to use a short-range device instead of more traditional long-range satellite tracking, because this entire area was continuously staticked with SAT interference. All SAT images taken of this entire mountainside would be completely unreadable, and would screw with the signal from Slinger’s cluster of trackers. But while long-range tracking wouldn’t work, lower-tech short-range would. Ergo it was highly likely that whoever had planted the trackers on the SEAL already had both equipment and personnel here on the ground.

If that was so, the SEALs would find them first—after leading them on a wild goose chase.

Shane activated his radio, flipping on his lip mic. “Dexter and Linden,” he ordered the two SEALs who’d been silently standing watch ever since this goatf*ck began. “Give Slinger a head start, then trail him. I want zero contact with whoever is out there. And watch where you step.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper.”

They were all aware that this entire region was dotted with abandoned minefields. They’d studied the maps and knew not all were marked as clearly as the land around an abandoned farmhouse that sat just a few clicks to the south.

But chances were, if a building was abandoned, it was not safe to approach.

Shane looked at his remaining men: Magic, Rick, the senior chief, and Owen, who now had Slinger’s souped-up mini-tablet in his possession.

“Let’s do this,” Shane said. “Let’s move.”

CHAPTER TWO

Their terrorist target was one of a fairly large audience sitting in folding chairs and on mats on the floor, at one end of an ancient Quonset hut dating from the 1940s. The structure had been well cared for and reworked into some kind of school gym. The gym, in turn, was now being used as a makeshift theater.

And that meant that their target was surrounded by civilians, most of whom were children, sitting and watching a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. In a Pashto dialect.

“Their Buttercup’s pretty awesome,” Magic announced as he crouched down next to Shane, who’d been left in as secure a position as possible with Rick standing guard, hidden on a hillside that overlooked the village.

“And Suliman’s definitely in there?”

“I didn’t have eyes-on contact myself,” Magic told him as he handed Shane the visual imager. It was more than a camera, although it recorded digital images, too. However, it was most useful due to the fact that it utilized face-recognition software to confirm targets like Rebekah Suliman. “But the senior says it’s a match.”

Shane brought the device up to his eyes, then clicked on the imager’s night vision setting, which allowed him to view the images without compromising his pupils’ adjustment to the dark. The flexible shield conformed to the shape of his face, keeping even the smallest glow from being seen—even by Magic, who was right beside him.

The senior chief was a firm believer in overkill, and he’d recorded an abundance of digital photos.

The outside of the Quonset hut; the sign for the school, announcing all were welcome, not just boys but also girls; the stage with its crudely assembled set and its crowds of badly costumed, ill-at-ease performers—all children between ages twelve and eighteen.

And there she was. Rebekah Suliman.

The CSO file on Suliman was thin, but the analysts at the U.S. Covert Security Organization ranked the woman not just as a One on the most-wanted list, but as a One-X. Which meant she’d confessed or had been proven—without a doubt—to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians, including children. That X identified her as someone who had intentionally targeted a school or a bus or the pediatric wing of a hospital. That X meant that Shane’s mission was to find her and mark her—and anyone who harbored her—for elimination via stealth missile.

His team was to move in as close as they could, and take pictures that would be used to identify other members of her terrorist cell. Then, after calling in the coordinates, they were to create a perimeter and watch for squirters—those who tried to escape the flames and destruction raining down upon them.

As Shane clicked through the images, he saw that the senior had marked Suliman with an identifying circle in a series of shots of the audience. There were twenty rows of seats set up in two sections with a center aisle, and each section was a dozen seats across. Which meant there were close to five hundred people in that Quonset hut, not including the kids on the crowded stage.

It was mostly a group of women and children watching the performance, with only a sprinkling of men here and there. And even if every single adult in that crowd knew who Suliman was, and were actively harboring her despite her crimes, Shane believed that those kids were innocent.

The day they started targeting schools was the day they should just burn the American flag, because they’d be no better than the scumbag terrorists that they put down.

“How long until the show is over?” Shane asked.

“I … don’t know it that well,” Magic confessed. “I only saw it once, but … If I had to guess, I’d say they’re probably in the final act.”

“So it shouldn’t be too much longer.” Shane flipped to the next images—closer and closer shots of Suliman, sitting in the third row, second seat in, a big, happy smile on her goddamn, child-murdering terrorist face.

“Yeah, you don’t know Gilbert and Sullivan, do you?” Magic said. “That shit can go on and on.”

In the next slew of images, Suliman turned and leaned down, as if listening to the child—a little boy—who sat in the seat beside her. And then—again in a series of shots that showed the movement in frozen moments—she lifted the boy up so that he was sitting on her lap. With her face close to the child’s, she pointed to the stage, and the boy clapped his hands as they both laughed.

F*ck. “The report didn’t say she had kids,” Shane said tightly.

“Suliman?” Magic said. “She doesn’t. Well, she did, but not anymore. They’re all dead.”

“Maybe … nephews and nieces …?” Shane flipped back through the pictures.

“No, they were all killed,” Magic said. “Her entire family was blown to hell. That’s what makes her so f*cking ruthless. She’s got no one, Commander. She’s no fear and all anger.”

Shane turned off the imager and pulled it from his face. “Don’t call me that.”

“You know you’re so there, Laughlin,” Magic said. “After this op …? Admiral Crotchkiss is gonna greet the plane himself and plant a great big wet one on you. And then he’s going to give you his niece’s hand in marriage—oh, wait. What a coincidence! He’s already done that.”

Magic was convinced that Shane’s engagement to Ashley Hotchkiss was the equivalent of an arranged marriage between members of the corporate aristocracy and a young, swiftly rising officer in the U.S. Navy. It was, he insisted, part of an insidious plan to keep the future leaders of the U.S. military securely under corporate control.

But Magic didn’t know Ashley as well as Shane did. The idea was ridiculous—that she would marry Shane merely because her father’s brother requested it …?

Vibrantly beautiful Ashley, with her gorgeous blue eyes, her classically lovely face, her willowy dancer’s body, her sharp intellect, and her keen sense of humor … She could have had any man—any man—she’d wanted, including a whole pack of powerful officers much higher up the chain of command. But she’d fallen in love with Shane. He’d made damn well sure of it.

“Your bullshit is getting old.” Shane now handed his friend the viewer. “Do something useful with your giant brain for a change and look at these images—particularly the ones toward the end. That little boy looks too much like Suliman to not be her kid.”

And that meant their job here just got even harder. Because if this boy was Suliman’s, Shane couldn’t just call in a strike on the home where she was sleeping tonight, because doing so would kill the child, too.

Meanwhile, Magic was flipping through the images. “Dude, what …? Wait … No, no, no, this isn’t her.”

Well, Shane could call it in, but he wouldn’t, and …

“I’m sorry, what?” he asked sharply.

“Jesus, you can be a load,” Magic muttered. “We’re alone out here, Ricky can’t hear us, and yet you really need to hear me call you sir just because I dissed your fancy-assed girlfriend?”

“Fancy-assed fiancée,” Shane corrected him. “And no, dickweed. I was asking because I thought I heard you say—”

“That this isn’t Rebekah Suliman? It’s not. I don’t know who the f*ck this is, but it’s not her.”

“But the face recognition software—”

“Is wrong,” Magic finished for him again, still flipping through the images. “I’m gonna reset and run it again and … No, it still IDs whoever this is as Suliman, but I’m telling you, bro, it’s not her.” He shut off the viewer and handed it back to Shane. “Your royal majestic lordship sir, maybe you don’t remember this, because your soon-to-be uncle-in-law snapped his fingers and got you leave for some party—”

“Ashley’s sister’s wedding.”

“Whatever,” Magic said.

“It was a big deal,” Shane protested.

“I’m sure it was. But while you were doing the electric slide with old Aunt Edwina, I was loaned out to Team Six. I didn’t mention it before now, because it was one of those sneaky, covert, not-to-be-mentioned things. But long very-top-secret story short, I’ve seen Suliman through a rifle scope.”

“I had no idea,” Shane said. He wasn’t sure what was more surprising—the fact that Magic had gone out with Team Six or the fact that the loquacious SEAL hadn’t told Shane about it before now. “How long were you …?”

“It was one very shitty week,” Magic said. “I was back on base before you were. Suliman slipped through our fingers, which was doubly disappointing. But I can tell you with absolute authority that this”—he tapped the imager—“is not her. Beeyotch is missing an eye. And I don’t care what kind of reconstructive surgery is being done these days in Paris, but even if, by some miracle, she went there and had her face rebuilt, it’s still not her. Unless they replaced both eyes with brown ones, made her ten years younger, a half a foot taller, and gave her a new set of teeth, too.”

Shane looked at this man whom he’d trusted, time and again, not just with his life but also the lives of their teammates.

“I suppose the teeth falls under possible,” Magic went on as he scratched his head. “But if they’re going to give her new ones, why make ’em crappy and crooked? And combined with the rest of that shit …?” He shook his head. “Nope.” He popped his P—a habit he’d picked up from years of working with Shane. “Not her.”

Shane shifted painfully, trying to reach for the bag that held Slinger’s equipment. “Let’s run the image through a non-gov-issue face-rec program.”

“Good idea, and I got it,” Magic said, pulling the pack closer. He dug through the nest of wires, looking for the cord that would connect the viewer to Slinger’s doctored mini-tab.

But it was then that Shane’s radio headset clicked on, and Scotty Linden’s rich baritone came over a scrambled channel. He was one of the two SEALs assigned to follow Slinger. “LT, Linden here. Over.”

“Gotcha, Scott,” Shane said, motioning for Magic to click on his radio headset, too, before he hooked the two pieces of equipment together. “What have you got? Over.”

“A six-man team,” Scotty reported. “Three are following Slinger, three took off in your direction. Dex is trailing them, I got the others. They’re all dressed like locals, but they move like Amurricans. If I had to lay money down, I’d bet CSO. Over.”

That didn’t make sense. If the U.S. already had a black op group from the elite and highly secretive Covert Security Organization here on the ground, they wouldn’t have bothered to send in a team of SEALs.

Unless …

“LT,” Magic said, his quiet voice not coming through the radio. He’d clicked off his microphone.

Shane looked over to find that Magic had put down the imager. Whatever he’d seen had made him somber.

“Hold on, Linden,” Shane said. “Over.” He shut off his lip mic, too, and asked Magic, “Who is she?”

“You’re gonna hate this, Shane,” Magic told him.

Shane nodded. Yep. He already hated it. “Just tell me.”

“Slinger’s face-rec software IDs her as Tomasin Montague. Her mother was local to this area, her father was French Canadian,” Magic reported.

“Why is that name familiar?” Shane asked.

“She’s the sole surviving witness,” Magic told him, “of the Karachi Massacre.”

And … there it was.

A year ago, a summit had been scheduled to be held in Karachi, Pakistan, where world leaders were going to discuss the ever-growing, ongoing terrorist threat in the Middle East. But before the talks officially began, a bomb went off, turning the meeting into a bloodbath. Several brutal dictators had been killed—but so had more than a half dozen democratically elected leaders, including the presidents of Germany and Spain.

The U.S. President and his corporate delegation, however, had not yet arrived.

It wasn’t long before ugly rumors surfaced, and soon the international media began making accusations that the corporate branch of the U.S. government had been behind the attack. The CEOs in question had spent the past year stridently insisting they were innocent. If only, they claimed, they could locate the young woman alleged to have seen the man who planted the bomb … She knew the truth, and she would and could clear their names.

But the woman—Tomasin Montague—had vanished.

But now she’d been found. And Shane and his men hadn’t been tasked with putting her and her family into protective custody and delivering her someplace where she’d safely be able to report the truth of what she’d witnessed.

Instead, they’d been told she was a deadly terrorist, and ordered to call in an air strike that would, essentially, wipe out this entire village.

But who had given them this order? Who had altered the face-rec software? Someone very high up the chain of command had to be involved. But how high? And who else knew?

“Shit,” Shane said now. He flipped his lip mic back on. “Scotty, I want you to assume these guys are un-friendlies, possibly former CSO now working for the tangos. Copy? Over.”

It was too awful to think that they might merely be regular, ordinary—if you could call them that—CSO.

“Copy that, LT,” Scott came back. “Holy f*ck. Over.”

“Have they spotted Slinger?” Shane asked, his mind racing. How was he going to turn this lose-lose scenario into at least a partial win? “Do they know he’s alone? Over?”

“Negative,” Scotty said. “He’s remained out of sight. Over.”

“Good. Contact him,” Shane ordered. Jesus, maybe—just maybe—this would work. “I don’t want them to see him. I want them to think there’re seven of him, you copy? And I want him to lead them across the border and then lose them. Stay with them until then, then join him and get to safety. This is a direct order. Over.”

“Aye, aye, sir, over.”

“Over and out,” Shane said. He looked at Magic. “I need you to go find the senior chief and Owen and bring them back here.” The conversation he needed to have was not one he wanted to take place over the radio—not even over a scrambled signal. “And give Owen a heads-up. I’m going to ask him to tap into the radio communications between those two rogue teams.”

“You don’t need Owen,” Magic pointed out as he pushed himself to his feet. “You need Slinger for something like that.”

But Shane didn’t have Slinger. He only had Owen. “I need you back here, too. And bring Rick in when you get here. Oh, and see if you can’t scare up changes of clothes for you and the senior and Owen and Rick. I want you to be able to blend in.”

“Not for you, too?”

Shane shook his head. “No.”

Magic was a smart son of a bitch, and he knew where Shane was heading, and he didn’t like it. He crouched down again next to him. “Shane. Please. Whatever you’re planning … Let me take the blame for it.”

“And how’s that gonna work?” Shane asked. “You, what? Knock me unconscious?”

“I didn’t think of that,” Magic said, “but … Yeah. I could. Do that. Or … maybe you hit your head when you hurt your ankle. That’s possible.”

“Except I’ve been talking on the radio,” Shane pointed out. There would be a record of that.

“Maybe that was during the watchamacallit,” Magic said. “The lucid interval.”

“And no one’s going to be suspicious when I’m in the hospital and the injury to my head isn’t severe enough to—”

“Maybe you got better,” Magic said, then swore, because he knew how stupid he sounded.

“It’s called mutiny. You’ll go to prison,” Shane said, “and I’ll still lose my command.”

“There’s gotta be another way,” Magic started.

Shane cut him off. “I gave you an order. Don’t make me repeat it.”

Magic stood up. “F*ck you, Lieutenant Ass-hat. I’m not letting you do this.”

“Yeah, you are,” Shane gently told his friend. “Because maybe this is some kind of mistake, the thing with the inaccurate face-rec, and I’ll get a medal for saving the day.”

“You seriously think—”

“No,” Shane said. “But I’m going to play it that way, with maybe a little negative reaction to the pain meds thrown in for good measure. With luck, I can sell it, and I’ll be okay. I’ll get through this, too.”

Magic didn’t believe him. Probably because Shane himself didn’t believe it possible. Someone among their superiors had wanted Tomasin Montague dead. And Shane was going to be burned—badly—for his refusal to get the job done.

Still, he pushed, adding, “You know how it works, Dean. The team leader always pays for any mistakes. And if we’re both gone, who’s going to find out how this happened? Who’s going to make sure this doesn’t happen again? We didn’t work and sweat and bleed to get where we are, only to have them—whoever they are—turn the teams into some kind of goddamn private hit-squad.”

Magic shook his head. “Double f*ck you, for always being right.”

“Go,” Shane said.

Magic finally nodded. And turning, he vanished into the shadows of the night.

Shane got busy, taking out the syringe that Rick had given him even as he broke radio silence to contact the SEAL who was following the mysterious team that Scott Linden had said was heading their way. “Laughlin to Dexter. Report in if you can, over.”