Code Name: Admiral (Special Forces: Operation Alpha) (K19 Sentinel Cyber #1)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

ADMIRAL

January 15

L ong flaming-red hair with pale pink woven in streaked across the cemetery.

“Target is at one o’clock, Admiral, and we’ve got company.”

“Move out, move out, move out!” I shouted, racing toward the woman who was about to put herself between the man Tank had referred to as the target and “the company”—another man sent to take him out.

In less than five seconds, I’d place myself in the same crossfire Alice was headed into. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d take a bullet in order to save another’s life. This time was just more personal. More important. More imperative I get to her before the hail of bullets rained over both of us.

“Alice!” I roared when I was close enough to see her hand pull a gun from the multicolored patchwork bag strapped across her body.

I heard the first pop, followed by countless more as I tackled her to the ground, covering her with my body.

“Man down!” Tank shouted through the comms. I turned my head to see my cousin—Bobby Kane, or Cue Ball, as he was known in New York mafia circles—lying in the freshly fallen snow, blood seeping from his body in the same way colored, flavored water spread through Hawaiian ice.

Alice, the woman who lay beneath me, the one I was crushing with the weight of my body until I was certain she was safe, the one whose gun I’d knocked so far away from her hand that she couldn’t reach it, hadn’t been there to save Bobby. Just like the mafioso whose bullets had ended his life, her plan was to kill him.

“You fucking bastard!” Her words were muffled against the snow, but I heard them clearly. I also heard the sobs racking her body as I gently raised myself first, then her in my arms once Tank gave me the all clear. She tried to fight me off and pummel me with her fists, but I held them pinned to her sides.

“He’s in the wind,” Tank reported. I wasn’t surprised. A hired gun always had an exit strategy.

“Give me my fucking gun!” Alice shouted at me when Blackjack, another man on my team, retrieved it from where it lay in the same snow Bobby did.

“You want me to take her in?” Blackjack added.

“I’ll handle it.” No one knew the danger Alice had gotten herself into, not even the three men who’d been on surveillance with me today at the memorial service for Sarah Gordon, who wasn’t just the woman whose cremated remains were supposed to be inurned into the earth, but also the one whose death Bobby was responsible for.

Worse, though, she was Alice’s sister.