Jules had never really liked the guy, but it had broken his heart to see his mother cry. Especially when she admitted how much she missed his father, who’d been dead now for close to twenty years.
Alyssa touched Jules now—just a hand on his shoulder. They were being silent, so she didn’t say anything, but it was clear that she knew exactly where his thoughts had gone.
She shook her head, as if to say
Don’t you be thinking about that right now …
Jules forced a smile as he met her eyes in the dim light.
So … I finally had sex with someone who’s not Adam. How about that? About freaking time, huh?
What was wrong with him that he finally got the courage to confess
that
breaking news to his best friend now, when they both needed to remain completely silent?
Yup, he was a total headcase, no doubt about them apples.
But then Tess, who was in front of them, lifted her hand, signaling
stop, quiet
and then
down
.
Crap.
Jules faded back with Alyssa, even farther into the shadows, getting even more intimate with the stankariffic dankness that hugged the tunnel’s sides and floor.
They waited there, silent and still—until Lindsey beamed herself back, directly in front of them. And okay, it was probable that she hadn’t actually used Starfleet technology to get from point A to point B. She’d probably used her feet and walked it, but she’d done so both silently and invisibly. It was damned impressive.
She crouched next to Alyssa, and, as soundlessly as possible, gave her report.
“We’re not alone down here. Someone else came through, maybe an hour ago,” she said. “Five of ’em, probably all male, carrying heavy packs and all going in the same direction. They came in via a different tunnel, but merged with our route about twenty feet back from where we are right now. I followed their trail for about half a klick and the good news is that they went past the
turnoff to the oil tank. They either missed it or …” She shook her head.
“The bad news?” Alyssa asked.
“The way they went? It dead ends. There’s no access to the surface—no way out of here.”
Which meant, whoever they were, they were down here still.
“Is it possible they’re a second red cell?” Tess asked. She and Sophia had approached in order to hear Lindsey’s report.
Alyssa shook her head. “We’re not the ones being tested here. Tom would’ve told me if he were going to do that.”
“Could it be a security patrol from Nachtgarten?” Sophia asked.
“If so,” Alyssa asked, “why not guard the tank?”
“They may not know where it is,” Jules reminded her.
She looked at him sharply, and it was clear from the expression on her face that she was having a big
eureka
moment. But being Alyssa, she could tell from wherever she was in A-ha! Land, that Jules hadn’t yet reached the same thrilling conclusion. So she explained. “They’ll know exactly where the tank is after we lead them to it—and put what’s essentially a homing beacon directly on top of it.”
Jesus yikes.
That
would be very,
very
ungood.
“Break radio silence,” Alyssa ordered Tess, who was carrying their radio. Being a red cell, i.e. a group of make-believe and not necessarily wealthy terrorists, they’d been outfitted with less-than-high-tech gear. Instead of equipping each of them with radio headsets, they’d been given a single crappy Vietnam-era radio.
Tess fired it up, but then frowned. She fiddled with it, then frowned again. “Signal’s being jammed.”
Shit.
It was looking more and more likely that their unexpected
company hadn’t come down here to play games. It was probable their mystery five had real C4 in their backpacks, and real bullets instead of rubber ones in their guns.
And the consequences of their actions would result in real, horrific death and destruction as opposed to the computer-simulated kind.
Alyssa reached for her cell phone—they all did. Jules’s phone had zero bars. No signal. Not down here in the first level of hell. “Anyone?” Alyssa asked. Tess, Lindsey, and Sophia also shook their heads after checking their phones. Nope.
Alyssa met Jules’s gaze. “Fall back,” she ordered. “We’re going out the way we came in. Lindsey, take the radio and run ahead. As soon as you can get a signal, I want an order going out to evacuate the barracks.”
Lindsey vanished as Alyssa looked at Jules and the two remaining Troubleshooters operatives. “Let’s move.”
C
HAPTER
T
HREE
“Whoa,” Dave said, leaning in closer to squint at his laptop’s screen as he sat at the dining table in the hotel suite they’d designated as the temporary Troubleshooters headquarters in Nachtgarten. “That’s … very weird.”
“What is?” Sam Starrett asked, because knowing Dave, he’d tell Sam anyway. He didn’t look up from surfing the TV channels, looking for something even vaguely entertaining and stopping on SpongeBob SquarePants—in German. That was kind of cool.
Guten Tag, Patrick. Wie geht’s?
“I’m getting a signal,” Dave reported. “But …” He hunched over his computer, fingers flying across his keyboard.
Dave Malkoff was something of an oddball. He’d
been working for Tommy Paoletti’s Troubleshooters Incorporated since nearly its inception, yet remained adamant about not wanting to be a team leader, which was fine but a little mystifying to Sam.
A former CIA operative, Dave sometimes took himself—and life—a smidge too seriously. He was one of those guys whose intellect was too big for his own good. He’d aced every test he’d ever taken—and a hell of a lot of good that had done him when it came down to real life.
He didn’t seem to have any family, and although he appeared to be friends with the incredibly beautiful Sophia Ghaffari, he wasn’t friends in the
Hey, mind if I drop by so we can lick chocolate off each other
sense of the word.
And it was pretty obvious to Sam that Dave wished it were otherwise.
Jimmy Nash, a nutjob in his own right, was convinced that Dave was like the guy in that movie—a forty-year-old virgin—but Sam seriously doubted that. Although he wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that old Dave hadn’t done the deed yet this decade.
It was, after all, only 2006. No need to rush things.
“Whoa,” Dave said again. “Alyssa definitely just activated the box.”
Sam looked up from the TV at the mention of his wife’s name. He looked at his watch, too. It was a little too early for her team to have reached the location of the oil tank. No way. Maybe if they’d been moving at a dead run, but … That wasn’t the plan. They couldn’t have gotten there yet.
“But it’s completely in the wrong place,” Dave added.
Sam moved his feet from the top of the desk to the floor. “Why would she do that?” he asked, standing up and moving across the suite, to look over Dave’s shoulder at his computer screen. His wife—their team leader—knew
exactly where that oil tank was. “Maybe the box got switched on accidentally.”
Dave scratched his head. “I doubt it, sir. There’s a code she’s got to punch in to unlock the system. It couldn’t have been just bumped and turned on without
some
one knowing.”
“Is there a system malfunction?” Sam asked. “On our end?” His voice sounded terse, almost sharp, to his own ears, but Dave didn’t so much as flinch.
And indeed, there was concern in Dave’s eyes, too, as he glanced at Sam. “No, sir,” he answered unequivocally but then backpedaled. “I mean, okay. Yeah. I suppose there could be, but …” He was shaking his head.
“No.”
The hair on the back of Sam’s neck was standing up. Through the years, both as a SEAL and as an operative for Troubleshooters Incorporated, he’d learned to trust his gut instincts—or at least take them extremely seriously. He picked up the hotel phone, dialed Jimmy’s room number.
“Nash,” the man answered after only one ring.
He’d been on edge all night, hyper-aware that his fiancée, Tess Bailey, was out there in the world, without him tagging along as backup. Sam had finally sent him to his own hotel room.
“I need you back in here,” Sam ordered. “Decker, too. And see if Mark Jenkins is still in Lindsey’s room.” He hung up without waiting for Jimmy to respond.
“They’re definitely a half a klick from the tank,” Dave reported as he checked and rechecked both his computer and the program he was running.
There was a rap on the door, and Sam opened it. It was Nash—with Deck right behind him.
“Situation, sir?” asked Decker, who’d once been a chief in the SEALs. It was hard for him not to address the former naval officers in Troubleshooters with formality.
In the same way, it was equally difficult for Sam and Tom not to call Deck
Chief
, especially in times of high stress.
“Alyssa activated the box in the wrong location,” Dave repeated the little that they knew, as Mark Jenkins, too, came into the hotel room, “and we don’t know why.”
Enough was enough. “Game over,” Sam said. “I’m calling this bullshit. Deck, get on the horn with the officer in charge over at Nachtgarten. Dave, break radio silence and raise Alyssa. I want to talk to her.”
If this meant that they needed to reschedule this drill, take a do-over on a different night, so be it.
Jenkins looked as if he’d rolled right out of bed, but he was waking up fast. He was still a SEAL with Sam’s old team—Sixteen. In fact, he’d served with both Sam and Tommy Paoletti, often as a radioman.
“I’m not getting through,” Dave reported, and Sam met Jenk’s gaze.
Sam nodded at the SEAL’s silent question. “Let Jenkins try,” he ordered.
One good thing about Dave—there was absolutely no ego involved in anything he did. He relinquished control of their radio without a single word of argument, moving back to his computer.
“Captain O’Reilly over at Nachtgarten insists that all possible entries into the drainage system are under armed guard,” Decker reported.
“Tell O’Reilly he’s a fucking idiot,” Sam shot back, “and that our team is already beneath his fucking base.”
Deck, being a former chief, spoke fluent officer. “With all due respect, sir,” Sam heard him paraphrase the message into the phone, “we’ll need to verify—”
“Can’t reach our red cell, sir,” Jenk announced, pulling Sam’s attention away. “Signal’s being jammed, somewhere on their end.”
What the fuck?
“Dave, call Tommy Paoletti with a code red,” Sam ordered as he broke open the suitcases that were stacked in the corner. Even when they went overseas on a training op or security drill, Troubleshooters Incorporated traveled with enough weapons and equipment to handle an unexpected emergency. “Jenk, I want to know who’s jamming the radio signal and exactly where it’s coming from. Deck and Nash, gear up. You’re with me.”
“I’m coming, too,” Jenkins said, grabbing both a weapon and ammunition.
As did Dave.
“I need you on your computer,” Sam told him.
“You’ll have me on my computer,” Dave told him, readying his equipment for travel, even as he got through to Paoletti on his cell phone. “Commander. Code red. Evacuate the barracks. Sam’s pulling the plug on the exercise. We’re unable to make contact with our red cell, and we’re preparing to go in after them …”
If this turned out to be a whole lot of nothing, Sam was going to hear about it until the end of time. But he was okay with that. Please God, let this be a simple communications or computer malfunction.
He didn’t often call upon a higher power for help. But he sent up another quick prayer as he led the other men out of the hotel room and down the stairs. Please God, help Alyssa keep her team safe. And God? Thank you for making Linda Cassidy see the light last weekend, and break up with her dickhead of a second husband, giving her son the impetus to fly here to Germany with them, and to be with Alyssa right now.
No doubt about it. If Alyssa were in trouble and Sam couldn’t be guarding her six, he’d want Jules Cassidy by her side.
Jules would die for her.
Of course, the flipside was that Alyssa would also die for Jules.
Sam kicked up his speed, breaking into a run as he went out the door into the hotel’s parking garage.
C
HAPTER
F
OUR
Three men with M60 machine guns had set an ambush along the route leading out of the tunnel.
Jules and the Angels didn’t walk into it, thanks to Lindsey’s extraordinary tracking skills. She’d picked up the fresh trail—three men, carrying heavy gear—atop the tracks they themselves had made coming in. That the three men had M60s wasn’t deduced from the fact that they wore American running shoes. Nor was it divined from the lengths of their strides.
No, Lindsey had crept toward them, wearing her cloak of invisibility, and she’d gotten a visual of those three weapons—machine guns that were capable of turning human beings into some serious hamburger.
She’d also used her cell phone to snap a few photos of the men who were holding those M60s, zeroing in, in particular, on a swastika-and-flame-motif tattoo that they all proudly wore. From this, Jules was able to identify them as members of the New Reich, a particularly loathsome, hatred-spewing group of Neo-Nazis, based out of Dresden.
It was also clear from the symbols in Farsi that the NR had made on the tunnel walls in green fluorescent paint—go figure—that they wanted it to look as if the attack had been made by a local group of Iranian refugees.
Intolerant people could really suck.
But for every Neo-Nazi asshole that was out there, messing up the world with his backward thinking and his stupid plan to kill thousands of American servicemen
and -women in order to fuel hatred of innocent people who had nowhere else to go … For every one of them, there was an Alyssa or a Lindsey or a Tess or a Sophia. Ready to fight—and die—for justice and tolerance, ready to right wrongs and bring the real truth to light.
Alyssa came back toward the shadows where Jules was waiting, not far from where they’d activated the electronic device.
“They’re coming,” she told him.
Which meant that she’d been right.