“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 airstrike 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 unfriendlies, 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 fuck. 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?”
