But if this new source delivered on what they promised, the danger would be worth it—and then some. She had to find out the truth of what had happened to her brother, Brandon.
Tap, tap, tap.The sound of her thumbs hitting the plastic steering wheel mixed with the gentle whir of the AC, which was gradually becoming less and less effective in combating the horrible humidity of the warm summer night the longer she sat here. She was starting to sweat, literally and figuratively.
Her source was—she glanced down at the clock again—thirty-twominutes late.
It can’t be a hoax. Please, don’t let it be a hoax.
The caller had sounded so insistent, so knowledgeable, so official. She’d give them another ten minutes, and then—
Who was she kidding? She’d wait all night if she had to. She needed this. She hated to use the word “desperate,” but if the proverbial shoe fit...
Shewasdesperate. She needed something concrete to prove that her suspicions were correct: that her brother, Brandon, was part of a top secret Navy SEAL team (along the lines of the now not-so-secret-anymore SEAL Team Six) who had gone on a mission and not come back.
“The Lost Platoon,” she dubbed them in her articles, after the famous Lost Legion of Rome. Coincidentally—and eerily—they’d both been numbered nine.
She’d thought the title was catchy, and it had certainly captured the public’s attention. The three articles she’d written so far—the most recent out this morning—had proved wildly popular, being picked up by the AP, Reuters, and other news organizations worldwide.
Which had turned out to be a double-edged sword. It was great in that it got her the attention she wanted and put pressure on the government and military to explain what had happened, but it also increased the pressure on her to come up with something more than a solid hunch from witness interviews. Preferably a few facts that could be substantiated. Editors liked those. Go figure.
Using the picture in the latest article had been a desperate move, a last-ditch effort to turn up something.
The fact that her brother hadn’t called two months ago, on the twelfth anniversary of their parents’ deaths, when he’d done so every year previously might have convinced her that something had happened to him, but her boss wanted more.
That she and Brandon hadn’t been close didn’t matter. Her brother wouldn’t have let that day go unacknowledged. No matter what clandestine operation he’d been deployed on that the government didn’t want anyone to know about, he would have called or contacted her in some way.
She was so certain of it that she’d flown to Hawaii, where she knew he was stationed, to demand answers.
Of course, at first the navy had refused to talk to her.When it had become obvious she wasn’t going to give up, they’d taken the ignorance route. “You must be mistaken. Your brother is not stationed here.” And her personal favorite: “SEAL Team Nine? We don’t have a team with that number.”
Right. And yet they had every other number between one and ten?
She had found some people who were willing to talk to her. Most were off-the-record, which only made her more certain she was onto something.
But when she’d presented proof of her brother’s being stationed there in the form of a handful of very attractive blondes she found at a dive bar called Hulas, who recognized Brandon and the three other men with him in the single recentish photo she had of him—she hadn’t seen her brother in five years, but some things apparently never changed—the stony-looking officers who’d been denying they’d ever seen him before suddenly made an abrupt about-face and claimed the information was “classified.”
Which was pretty much like holding up a bright red cape in front of an angry bull—her being the angry bull—making her even more determined to find out the truth.
She’d done enough research into America’s Special Mission Units and secret soldiers to know that they could be embedded for months on training ops or deployments.
But that wasn’t what was going on here. Sheknewsomething had happened to Brandon and his team—something bad—and the military was trying to cover it up. And she wasn’t the only one at the base who thought that.Provingit, however, was something else.
The wall of secrecy had gone up, and she’d returned home to DC to try to topple it from a different direction. But so far the navy and the government had ignored her articles. She had to come up with something they couldn’t ignore.
She wanted answers. If her brother had died—and every bone in her body told her he had—she wanted to know why. She wasn’t going to let them sweep his sacrifice under the rug and cover up whatever mess they’d made. Not this time. She wanted the truth, and she was going to find it. She owed him that at least.
Even if it meant sitting in her car for half the night in a not-so-wonderful part of town, waiting for information that sounded too good to be true. But the handwritten note that had been dropped in her apartment mail slot had promised “proof of what had happened to your brother’s platoon.”
She started to glance down at the clock again when the beams of approaching headlights reflected in her rearview mirror sent her pulse shooting through her chest again. Temporarily blinded, she looked over her shoulder, but her entire car was filled with light as the car slowly came right up behind her.
At the last minute, the car pulled alongside her. It was a black town car. The kind favored by government officials and airport transport companies everywhere.
Her heart was thumping hard now. This was it. This had to be it.
When the back passenger door was even with her driver’s door, the car came to a stop. Whoever was in there, they were important enough to have a driver. Slowly, just like in the movies, the heavily tinted window started to lower. Fortunately, unlike in the movies, the barrel of a gun aimed in her direction didn’t appear.
She lowered her window as well.
It was too dark to see inside the other car, but she could barely contain her excitement when a large manila envelope was passed to her. She caught sight of a medium-sized gloved hand—which, as it was about eight hundred degrees, must have been to hide anything identifying—anda dark-wool-clad arm with the telltale gold stripe of a military uniform around the sleeve edge before the window started back up.
