It’s about goddamned time!
“Or maybe I was wrong.” Bran smiled down at the phone until his teeth flashed white against his dark, scraggly beard. When operating in this part of the world, it behooved the SEALs to blend into the local population as best they could. Which meant facial hair came part and parcel with the job. All of Alpha platoon was sporting full-on scruff. And, no, in case you were wondering, it didn’t do a damn thing to mitigate the heat. “About her wanting another shot at your trouser snake,” Bran clarified. “Not about you being a spostata.” He socked Michael on the shoulder before ambling down the aircraft’s long loading ramp in the wake of the rest of their Team, whistling the tune to “Happy,” and leaving Michael to take the call in private.
Raking in a deep breath—For the love of Christ, I’ve got it bad. Worse than he’d ever had it before—he thumbed on the phone and lifted the device to his ear. Be cool. Just be cool. “Harper?”
His voice cracked up at the end like he was pubescent or something. Fuuuuck.
“Michael? Oh, thank God!”
She’d only spoken four words, but he immediately zeroed in on the sharp spike of panic in her tone. The hairs along the nape of his neck twanged upright, and he automatically—almost unconsciously—reached for the weapon secured in the nylon holster strapped to his thigh. “What is it, Harper? What happened?”
“They did it, Michael,” she husked, her Southern accent made stronger by her terror. “The TTP attacked the embassy. I’m on my way down to the safe r—”
She was cut off when a loud crash echoed through the phone’s receiver, followed immediately by angry voices shouting in a language he only had a passing familiarity with. But he was fluent enough to make out the words capture and kill.
Then the line went dead.
Which is when Michael “Mad Dog” Wainwright knew, for the first time in his life, what it was to be one hundred percent, no-holds-barred, shit-the-bed terrified…
CHAPTER 2
How much time has passed? Two days? Two weeks?
Harper sat huddled in the corner of the spacious, high-tech panic room—her butt having surely made a permanent imprint on the cool concrete floor—feeling like she’d been waiting an eternity for rescue. But in reality, it had only been…she ran a hand through her hair and turned over her cell phone, checking the digital clock for what seemed like the bazillionth time…three and a half hours. Three and a half everlasting hours. Three and a half god-awful, lonely, terrifying hours.
And even though she knew it was a useless endeavor, she hit Redial. Lifting the phone to her ear, she hoped beyond senseless hope that this time her cell signal would penetrate the walls of the safe room and link her to Michael. But after a couple of seconds, the loud beep, beep, beep of an unconnected call sounded through the tiny speaker. She powered down the device with a disgusted press of her thumb.
“What in God’s name is happenin’ out there? Why is it so quiet?” She posed the questions aloud just to hear her own voice. Just to assure herself she really had made it into the heavily reinforced chamber, slamming the thick metal door in the angry faces of the Taliban fighters who had been hot on her heels in her madcap dash down the stairs and across the basement.
And, yup. So that had happened. She still couldn’t quite believe it. Though the fact that she’d shaken like a junkie for the first sixty minutes of her confinement spoke volumes about the awful reality of her very, very close call. There had been such hatred in the men’s eyes in that split-second when she’d come face-to-face with them. Such feral, evil hatred.
Then, of course, there had been the incessant pounding on the door, followed by a series of muted pinging noises that she had to assume meant the terrorists were shooting at the bulletproof steel of the chamber. But all that had ended long ago. And now she was left with…silence. Deafening silence. A silence so complete that the deep breath of sterile air she pulled into her lungs—the oxygen in the safe room was pumped in through a separate ventilation system to counteract any possible chemical weapons attack—sounded like she was doing her best impression of Darth Vader.
“Luke,” she growled, lowering her voice a few octaves. “I am your father.”
The sentence reverberated around the room before the thick walls absorbed the words. She snorted, realizing she was straight-up losing her marbles. Going crazy as a bullbat as they liked to say back in her lowcountry hometown, a place so small it sometimes forgot its own name. And that whole so-small-it-sometimes-forgot-its-own-name thing was precisely why she’d worked so hard to make a name for herself within the pool of diplomatic secretaries. So she could get an overseas assignment. So she could get the hell out of Georgia.