Authors: Paige Tyler
late.
She sighed. “Dammit, Dave. Why didn’t you just listen to me?”
She gently closed Dave’s eyes, then got to her feet to check on the Russian. He was dead, too, shot once
in the head.
Ivy’s gaze went to Dave again and against her will, she found herself reliving the last few moments of
her partner’s life. Could she have done something to prevent his death?
She shook her head. Now wasn’t the time—and this definitely wasn’t the place—to have this
conversation with herself. Even in a blown out shithole like this one, someone was bound to come
snooping around to see what all the shooting had been about. In her experience, people who snooped
around shootouts were not the kind of people she wanted to deal with.
She walked over to the second man she’d shot and ripped open the briefcase still clutched in his hand.
Grabbing the manila folder inside, she shoved it in her coat pocket, then took out her iPhone and snapped
pictures of all three gunmen as well as Dave and the Russian. She wanted to have something to back up her
story if there was an investigation.
When she was done, she retrieved her 9mm, then grabbed Dave’s NVGs. She didn’t intend to leave
anything behind that might identify them. That included Dave. Bending down, she slid her arms under his
body, then lifted.
“Come on, Dave. Let’s get you home.”
Dave was more than twice her weight and she grunted with the effort as she hooked one of his arms
over her shoulder and dragged him to the car. It was slow going, but she didn’t care. Crappy partner or not,
she wasn’t going to leave him behind.
Chapter 1
Two Months Later
The Mountains of Afghanistan—Nuristan Province
Landon Donovan checked his watch. It was so dark tonight he wouldn’t have been able to see his hand
in front of his face if he wasn’t wearing NVGs, but there was just enough glow for him to make out the
time. 0200 hours.
He and five members of his 5th Special Forces A-team had moved to the final observation point in the
hills above their target an hour ago. A multifamily house surrounded by a high wall in the middle of a small
village perched on a mountainside—the place didn’t look like much. Few places in this godforsaken
country did. But it was bigger than any of its neighbors and supposedly housed the province’s most
infamous resident, a high-priority Taliban leader and bomb maker known only by his first name—Qari. The
son of a bitch was best known for insurgent training camps that specialized in turning children into suicide
bombers, but he was also a major force behind the growing number of mortar and IED attacks on local
Coalition Forces. He had money and power, not to mention technical knowledge out the ass and a fair
amount of religious influence. Yeah, well, none of those things were going to help him tonight. Providing
everything went as planned.
Landon glanced at his teammates, checking again to make sure each of them was in position. They
probably wouldn’t get a peek at the compound’s occupants until morning, but they’d keep at least one set of
eyes glued to the scopes the entire night, just in case. He and his communications sergeant Diaz were taking
the first watch.
Big Tex-Mex—otherwise known as Sergeant First Class Angelo Rios—slipped down beside Landon. “I
have Marks just behind us on the back side of the ridge. Mickens is about a hundred meters downslope.
We’ll have warning if anyone tries to sneak up on us.”
Angelo was the senior weapons sergeant on the team, and Landon used him as his second-in-command
when they were running split-team ops like they were now. Part Native American, part Mexican, and all
badass, Angelo was as sharp as they came.
“Good,” Landon said. “Get the laser designator set up, just in case we get a chance to use it.”
Angelo nodded and slipped away as silently as a ghost. For a big man, the senior noncommissioned
officer could be damn quiet.
While Angelo and the other weapons sergeant, Tredeau, broke out the portable laser designator and
mounted it on a small tripod, Landon went back to scanning the compound four hundred meters below,
switching from his long-distance night vision scope to the thermal one.
“Holy shit,” Diaz called out softly.
“What do you have?” Landon asked.
He motioned with his hand for Angelo and Tredeau to hurry up. Diaz didn’t use that particular profanity
lightly, so it had to be something big.
“Check out the far left window, Captain,” Diaz said. “The one with the light coming through the
curtains.”
Landon slewed his scope from the large courtyard area he’d been scanning over to the left, focusing on
the house. It took him a moment to find the window Diaz was talking about, but the second he did, he
knew why the commo sergeant was so excited. Sitting there at a table, bigger than shit, was Qari. The man’s
beard was longer than it was in their most recent intel photo of the Taliban leader, but there was absolutely
no doubt this was their guy. Landon and his teammates had studied photos of him from every angle for
days on end, then quizzed each other by picking their target out of situational lineups. Every member of the
team knew Qari’s face better than his mother probably did.
“That’s our man,” Landon confirmed. “Call in air support.”
Diaz turned to follow out his instructions, but then stopped and pressed his hand to his earpiece the way
he always did when he listened to something on the radio. He frowned as he spoke into the mic. “Say again,
all after ‘abort.’”
Landon did a double take. Who the hell would be calling an abort now?
Diaz looked at Landon, a stunned expression on his face. “Captain, we’ve been ordered to break contact
and immediately move back to the extraction point.”
“Did you tell them we have Qari in our sights and were about to call in air support?”
“Yes, sir, but it was the old man himself, and he didn’t give a shit. He wants us at the landing zone
yesterday.”
Landon swore under his breath. The original plan was for his team to head to the landing zone once the
mission was done, unless there was an emergency. There wasn’t an emergency and their mission wasn’t
done, so why the hell would the battalion commander order them to bail? He and his team had been after
Qari ever since they’d come to this country. To be pulled out now, when the big payoff was at hand, was
nuts. Who knew what information they could find in that compound?
Resisting the urge to get on the radio and argue with the commander, Landon barked orders to get the
gear packed.
They got to the landing zone two hours later to find a Black Hawk waiting for them, rotors turning.
Landon immediately headed for it, only to stop when his executive officer, Major Bennett, stepped off the
bird. Some serious shit had obviously hit the fan for the battalion’s executive officer to be out here.
“Major,” he said.
“Captain.” Bennett surveyed Landon’s teammates with a critical eye before turning back to him. “You’re
the only one who’s going out on the Black Hawk. I’m taking over your team.”
He sure as hell hadn’t expected that. No formalities. No
Hey, great job finding Qari.
Just a harsh,
straightforward
I’m taking over your team.
Landon glanced over his shoulder to see his teammates looking at him in disbelief. He felt as if he’d just
been hit with a ton of bricks. Well, he wasn’t going anywhere without some answers. That might take time,
though, and he didn’t want his guys exposed out there while he got them.
“Set up a perimeter,” he said to Angelo, then turned back to Bennett. “Sir, am I being relieved of
command, and if so, why?”
“No, Captain, you’re not. You came down on orders. That’s why you’re being pulled out.”
Orders? He could have handled a kick in the balls easier. “In the middle of a fucking mission? Sir, we’re
not due to rotate back for another month.”
“Captain, I can’t explain it and I’m not going to try. Battalion received the word barely three hours ago.
The old man personally finalized the transfer orders himself and told me to put you on that bird ASAP.”
Bennett’s mouth tightened. “No matter how I have to do it.”
Landon looked around at his team. They’d followed his order to position themselves around the
helicopter to provide security in case of an attack, but all of their attention was focused on him. They
looked just as bewildered as he was.
He turned back to Bennett. “Sir, be straight with me. Did I screw up somehow?”
Bennett shrugged. “I don’t know. If you did, no one in the battalion knew about it. All I can tell you is
that the order to pull you out came from somewhere mighty fucking high. Above SOCOM. There isn’t even
a report date on your orders. They just say immediately.”
He must be joking. Special Operations Command, known as SOCOM, owned all the Special Forces
troops in the Department of Defense, regardless of service. Who’d be telling them where to send their own
troops, especially in the middle of a deployment?
“At least tell me where I’m going,” Landon said.
Bennett hesitated, and Landon thought he saw what looked like sympathy in the man’s eyes. “The
MDW.”
The Military District of Washington? No fucking way. He must have heard wrong. He was about to ask
Bennett to repeat that, but Angelo abandoned his place on the perimeter and ran up before he could.
“Landon, what the fuck’s going on?”
Angelo was the only troop on his team who got away with calling him by his first name. That was
because he and the NCO went way back, to a time before Landon was an officer, a time when just making it
to the end of their first enlistment without getting their asses shot off was the only goal they had. Back then,
Angelo had earned the right to call him anything he damn well wanted. They weren’t just teammates, or
even best friends. They were brothers.
Major Bennett looked like he was about to shit a brick over the delay, but Landon didn’t give a crap.
“I’m getting shipped off to DC,” he told Angelo.
“DC? Shit.” He blew out a breath. “Is this about what happened to LT?”
Landon hoped not. He sure as hell didn’t want to go there again. But some kind of shit had hit the fan
somewhere for him to be yanked during a deployment. “I don’t know.”
“Captain,” Bennett insisted.
Landon ignored him. Behind him, the Black Hawk’s rotors echoed off the surrounding mountains,
filling the silence. It was dangerous for the chopper to be on the ground this long. The sound of the rotors
was going to attract the wrong kind of attention soon enough, and he didn’t want his team here when that
happened.
He swallowed hard. He’d been with his guys a long time. It felt as if he was deserting them by leaving.
But he couldn’t disobey a direct order.
“Tell the guys to take care of themselves,” he said to Angelo. “You, too.”
Landon didn’t wait for a reply. Instead, he turned and climbed into the Black Hawk. Bennett slammed
the door, then motioned for the pilot to take off.
As he rode back to base camp, Landon tried to convince himself he’d heard wrong, that Bennett hadn’t
said MDW. But Landon knew he’d heard right. He was heading to the Military District of Washington. As in
Washington, DC. As in pushing pencils and making coffee for generals who didn’t seem to have any work
to do. There were some officers who might consider a transfer to the Pentagon—if that’s where he was
going—to be a peach assignment. But for a dirty-boots Special Forces warrior like him, it was the
equivalent of a demotion.
What the hell had he done to earn it?
He could only think of one thing, the same thing Angelo had been referring to—the ambush that had
happened eight weeks earlier. The one where his assistant commander had gotten injured badly enough for
the guy to end up getting his ass shipped back to the States where he wasn’t likely to ever see combat again.
Landon didn’t want to believe he was getting reassigned because of that shitty episode, but it was the
only thing that made sense. He snorted. It was almost ironic. He was going to be reassigned to the DC area
where he’d get to come face to face with the biggest screwup of his life on a daily basis. Looked like karma
was coming back to bite him in the ass.
***
He’d figured he would at least have time to clean up before he left, but they immediately shuffled him onto
another fueled-up Black Hawk and flew him directly to the main airbase in Bagram. Then he’d been the
lone passenger on a C-17 cargo plane full of mail and broken equipment bound for Qatar. A Department of
Defense–contracted commercial carrier had taken him from there to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany with
an immediate transfer to Washington National. In all, he’d been traveling for almost twenty-four hours. Add