Screams.
María ran back to the door—and stared.
The bodyguards lay dead on the ground. Four men with automatic weapons and bandanas on their faces climbed out of a white van and headed for the journalists.
An abduction.
Mother Narcisa knelt beside the two slain bodyguards, blood on her trembling hands, shock on her face.
Pulse tripping, María stepped over one man’s body, put herself between the attackers and the journalist, and did her best to look as imposing as the Sisters from her Catholic school days. “Señores, this is a mission! It is sacred ground. Put away your weapons and—”
“What have we here?” One of the attackers stepped up to her, all but his eyes hidden behind a bandana. He reached out, took hold of her black veil, rubbed the cloth between his fingers. “You’re too pretty to be a nun—and helpless to stop me.”
The men behind him laughed.
María wasn’t afraid of him. She took a step back, glanced over her shoulder at the reporter, who stood wide-eyed, her back pressed against the wall, her photographer shielding her, the terror on their faces putting rage in María’s heart.
She met the assailant’s gaze. “Think about what you’re doing. You’ve already murdered two men. Kidnapping the reporter would be another mortal sin—and will bring the United States down on you. Is that what—”
With no warning, the man bent down and threw her over his shoulder. “The rest of you—get the gringos.”
He climbed into the van and dropped María onto the floor of the vehicle, driving the breath from her lungs.
It took a moment for reality to hit home.
They were abducting her, too.
¡Madre de Dios!
Mother of God.
* * *
September 8
Dylan Cruz saton Cobra International Security’s private jet with the rest of the crew somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. They’d spent the past two weeks running security for US State Department officials on a mission to Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. The assignment had gone off without a hitch, but it was good to be on their way home again—even if that meant listening to more of Thor Isaksen’s stories.
If even half the shit he said about his years with Denmark’s Sirius Sled Patrol was true, the man was a certified badass—or just plain loco.
“The storm came up fast, caught us in the open,” said Isaksen. “The temperatures dropped to minus seventy, and the wind was so strong we couldn’t put up our tent. The dogs were restless and growling. We staked the team, dug a snow cave, and crawled inside—no food, no stove.”
“Minus seventy?” Cruz had faced more than his share of freezing nights in the mountains of Afghanistan during his decade with the SEALs, but he’d never been in that kind of cold. “That would freeze exposed skin in minutes.”
Isaksen went on. “After we settled in, we noticed a sound, like someone snoring. But we were in the middle of northeastern Greenland. There was no one else around.”
“It wasn’t one of you—another sled team?” asked Malik Jones, a former Army Ranger and Dylan’s best bud. “Man, that’s creepy.”
“It took us a minute to realize that we’d dug into a snowbank where a mother polar bear had made her den. She was a few feet away, separated from us by snow. The dogs had smelled her, but we were so distracted by the storm that we didn’t pick up their warning.”
“She was hibernating,” said Lev Segal, a former operative with Israeli counterterrorism forces.
Isaksen shook his head. “Polar bears don’t hibernate. She was just asleep. All she had to do was dig a little with those big paws, and she could have eaten both of us for dinner.”
“What did you do?” Elizabeth Shields stared at Isaksen. If she believed him, there was a good chance he was telling the truth. She’d come to Cobra from the CIA and was a counterterrorism analyst.
“We got the hell out of there and set up camp a few kilometers away.”
“A bottle of whiskey says he’s full of shite,” said Quinn McManus, a grin on his bearded face. The big Scot, who had served with Britain’s Special Air Service, had married Elizabeth this past July, and the two were sickeningly happy.
