“Okay, I’ll check it out,” Trevor said. “You do realize I probably won’t be able to do more than a little recon, maybe identify these people if I’m lucky.”
Adam nodded. “Identifying them and figuring out what they’re up to will be more information than we currently have. Since you spoke in the singular, I assume that means you won’t be taking Alina with you?”
“I thought you didn’t trust her,” Trevor pointed out.
Adam’s face was as unreadable as ever. “I never said I didn’t trust her. I simply told you there was good reason to protect yourself until you knew if she had your back or not. I’m asking you to sneak onto a military base and do something that might involve you getting shot at by a lot of people. It would be good to have someone you trust backing you up.”
Trevor didn’t say anything.
Adam reached inside his coat and pulled out a large envelope. “Everything you need to get onto the base is in here.”
With that, Adam walked out of the hotel room, closing the door behind him. Trevor opened the envelope, dumping two military ID cards, travel orders putting him and Alina on temporary assignment to Aberdeen, and a collection of pictures and maps of the base’s ammunition supply point, or ASP.
He picked up the green ID card with Alina’s picture on it. It was a good photo, way better than you typically saw on military identification. Then again, Alina was very photogenic. Where the hell had Adam gotten this picture anyway? It definitely didn’t look like a driver’s license photo. More like something you’d see on a Facebook page.
Trevor stared at the photo, wondering what to do about his partner. Did he trust her enough to take her with him on a mission like this?
Chapter 12
“Crap, these guys are good,” Alina said, watching through a set of night-vision binoculars as two men got to work on the heavy-duty lock of an earth-covered bunker five hundred feet away from where she and Trevor hid behind a similar bunker. “They’ve broken through three high-security locks in less than five minutes.”
“And since this area isn’t being overrun with MPs, I’m guessing they’ve disabled the alarm inside each bunker as well,” Trevor added. “Which means they’re better than good—or they have the frigging security codes.”
Alina turned her attention away from the dozen men in army camouflage who were working fast to load four large military cargo trucks with crates of ammo and looked at Trevor crouched beside her in the darkness. “You seriously think someone on this base gave these guys access to military weapons?”
Trevor shrugged. “My source said there might be high-level military personnel involved. Considering how easily these guys slipped on base, the fact that there was nobody manning the gates of the ammunition supply point, and the way they seem to know exactly which bunkers to break into to find what they’re after, I’d say he was right.”
Alina itched to ask Trevor who the hell his source was but restrained herself. By including her on this mission, he was obviously willing to extend the proverbial olive branch to her. She wasn’t going to push her luck now and mess everything up. She’d said she was going to do whatever was necessary to win his trust. Right now, that simply meant trusting him first.
“I don’t know. We didn’t seem to have any problems slipping onto the base, either,” she pointed out. “Maybe they bought their fake IDs from the same place you got ours.”
Trevor chuckled softly. “Somehow, I doubt that.”
She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Not surprising. Trevor might have trusted her enough to bring her along, but that didn’t keep him from being tight-lipped about the mission, especially about who’d given it to them. He’d simply shown up at Sage’s prison dorm and told Alina he needed her help slipping onto an active duty military installation on the off chance that a group of thieves might show up and steal some military weapons.
At first, she’d thought he was joking. She couldn’t understand why the DCO would send the two of them onto an army base to confront people who sounded an awful lot like terrorists. What the heck did Dick expect them to do?
But on the drive up to the sprawling military research and development base located two hours north of DC, it dawned her on that this probably wasn’t a DCO mission at all. She wanted to ask Trevor if this had something to do with Thorn but decided to trust him. After everything she’d seen the past few days, trusting Trevor was becoming easier by the minute. She hadn’t trusted anyone in a long time and had been afraid she never would again. She was glad to see that wasn’t the case.
“We need to move closer,” Trevor whispered. “See if we can identify who these people are and what they’re taking.”
“Then what?” she asked. “Are we going to try to take them down?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’re seriously outnumbered, so I guess it’s going to depend on how heavily armed they are. If we have to, we’ll stick a tracking device onto one of their vehicles and see where they lead us, then call in the cavalry once their guard is down.”
Alina nodded, liking the sound of that. She wasn’t thrilled about letting these guys off the base with four truckloads worth of ammo and explosives, but it was better than getting into a gunfight and losing.
She climbed to her feet and followed Trevor around the back of the bunker they’d been hiding behind. As they moved in a wide circle toward the bad guys’ trucks, they used other bunkers along the way to conceal themselves when they could, keeping to the heavy shadows anytime they had to cross open ground. Hopefully, the men stealing the ammo were too focused on what they were doing to notice anyone sneaking up on them.
Alina would have preferred to have the SUV closer, in case they either had to run like hell or chase someone, but it would have been too risky, so they’d left it half a mile back. As they approached the trucks, Alina checked out the scene with her night-vision binoculars, looking for any details she could see. That’s when she realized there was something odd about some of the crates the men were loading into the trucks. She wasn’t an expert on army munition containers, but she’d seen enough in her former job to know there was something unusual about the stuff they were stealing.
“Why do those ammo boxes look bigger than the U.S. ammo containers I’m used to seeing?” she whispered to Trevor as they both dropped to one knee.
Trevor’s eyes flared vivid yellow, then went back to their normal color. “Because they’re foreign.”
“What do you mean, foreign?”
