EIGHTEEN
T he soaring ceiling of the hanger seemed to echo back the awkward silence that suddenly crashed down between May and Simpson. Slicing a sideways look at the major general’s face, she shifted from foot to foot.
“I wonder what could be keeping the trainees so long.” She hated the nervous edge in her voice and cleared her throat for cover.
Simpson checked his watch, and she pulled out her phone to glance at the time too. It was seven minutes past the time she was to start.
“I apologize for their tardiness. One of the drills must have run overtime. I told them to be here at 1100.”
She didn’t like the way Simpson didn’t meet her eye when he said that. Even during their conversation at the restaurant, when Simpson had every reason to be edgy about purchasing them a very expensive bottle of wine, he wasn’t shifty.
Over her career of dealing with explosives, she’d trained herself to recognize the smallest shifts in people, to pick up the most imperceptible of tells.
May was starting to get the feeling that Simpson, a man who her family had called a friend for years and years, was lying to her. She didn’t even find him suspicious until now.
Way too late in the game.
And she’d been stupid enough to ignore the signs and blinded by family ties. She managed to convince AJ that everything would be fine, that this training posed no risk.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
With a worried bounce on her toes, she darted a glance toward the back of the space where the restrooms were located. She knew damn well that AJ wasn’t actually using the restroom—he was finding the bomb.
How long would that take? She could use a little backup here.
She fiddled with her phone, considering texting him to see how his search was going. Behind her, she heard Simpson’s boot step on the concrete floor. She pivoted, a polite smile in place.
“Shaw, what are you doing?” He stood close—too close for her comfort. The only time her old friend ever came this close to her was when they greeted each other with an embrace.
His sharp eyes missed nothing. They narrowed as he noted what must be alarm in hers.
“I’m sorry, May. But you left me no choice.” He jammed two fingers into the side of her neck.
A sharp pressure blazed through the nerves at the base of her skull, and white-hot pain lanced through her. Her mouth opened to scream, but the world faded.
She woke to silence. Dead silence.
Her body wouldn’t move. Her limbs felt sluggish, dead weight.
The haze coating her mind fluttered away, snapping it into sharp focus. Though her eyes were open, she couldn’t quite focus and only saw a blur. Her nose picked up the scent of dust and rusty metal. Mildew hung thick in the air.
The ground underneath her was cold concrete. Like the base.
Only this didn’t smell like the hangar.
Her last memory was Simpson’s face before he dug his fingers into her neck. He must have used a pressure point takedown on her. Goddamn him. He was not the man she knew.
The cold of the floor seeped through her clothes. Even before her eyes focused, she felt the narrow, boxed-in space.
She wasn’t anyplace she knew—but it somehow felt familiar.
Realization settled like a lead brick in her stomach. She was inside a storage facility.
Her eyes rolled in a terrified survey of her surroundings. The absence of windows and exits other than one rolling door solidified her belief she was locked in a storage unit.
Oh god. How was she getting out of this? She should have let AJ put a tracker on her.
If she lived long enough to get back to him, he’d probably never let her out of his sight again—and she hoped he didn’t. She never wanted to leave his side, if this was what happened.
A swift glance around didn’t even show her that Simpson was standing there, waiting for her to regain consciousness. Good news, her hands weren’t bound by ropes or zip ties. The bad news was that the place seemed to be empty, providing nothing she could wield as a weapon against him.
With it being so silent inside the four industrial and scary walls, May was completely tuned in to the noises outside. In the distance, a car. Not close enough to hear her even if she screamed.
Then the low scuff of boots on pavement. She fixed her entire focus on that sound. It traveled from left to right, right to left. As if the wearer of those boots was pacing in front of the door, or close to it.
She picked up a male voice, barely loud enough to project through the metal barrier between them. Snippets came to her, which she struggled to piece together into a semblance of language.
The intonation of the voice rose and fell in a cadence she recognized.
Simpson.
She expected to feel a rush of anger—but not one of fear.
The emotion plowed over her, making her clamp her lips to hold in a cry. She didn’t consider herself to be a weak woman, but she wasn’t trained for battle the way Major General Shaw Simpson was.
In any fight, he would best her…unless she got the upper hand, or a nice weapon in her hand.
AJ. Where are you? Please find me!
“We moved the bomb,” Simpson was saying.
Her heart clamped hard. She knew something was off, but hadn’t expected a betrayal of this level. He was moving a bomb where? For what purpose?
“She doesn’t know where it is. But I have her,” he continued.
Harsh, rapid breaths dragged in and out of her lungs. It didn’t stop the spinning sensation a lack of oxygen would give her. In fact, it seemed to be making it worse…
Realizing that she was on the brink of hyperventilating, she compressed her lips and forced herself to breathe in to the count of ten, out to the count of ten. Slowly, the tingle in her cheeks faded, and she focused on the conversation again.
This time she heard a crackle of a second speaker through a phone, distorted but filled with authority.
“You lifers never think for yourselves, do you?” the man was saying. “You take orders like a good little soldier. Even being at the top, you still have someone to answer to.” The speaker seemed to sneer at Simpson’s rank and position.
That idea made May’s blood run cold.
Thing was, the speaker wasn’t wrong. She’d seen it throughout her career. Working with top-ranking military and even government officials, she knew there were those who led and those who passed along orders.
At first, Simpson didn’t respond to the speaker. His hesitation was telling. The major general wasn’t the mastermind—he was the pawn in this game.
An even worse epiphany was that the speaker had Simpson under his thumb.
Simpson had something this man needed—like the ability to move a bomb under the sharp eyes of the US military. And in trade…was he being paid off?
What sort of price tag would come with moving a bomb?
Enough to purchase expensive wine and acquire a massive collection of art while paying an exorbitant amount of alimony to an ex-wife who vanished into thin air along with his grown children?
Her pulse pounded faster, so loud in her ears that she cursed how loud it was. She needed to hear what the men were saying.
“I know you took the money offered too. That makes you under my command now.”
The already chilled blood pumping through May’s veins froze, like a river in wintertime. She closed her eyes and focused on that voice. The nuances of it. She was no master of linguistics, and picking out dialect and intonation wasn’t easy, but she forced every syllable into her memory.
Later, it might help them identify the man behind the bomb.
If there was a later. She might never make it out of this place.
“She’s alive?” he asked Simpson.
“She’s alive.”
“Good. Find out what she knows.”
“Find out what she knows,” Simpson echoed him.
“Then—” The speaker seemed to break up, his words coming in spotty, like he didn’t have good service, or the major general was moving again.
This time when she heard the crackle, it came from the left side of the door. She jerked her head in that direction, glaring at the closed door.
Then what? she wanted to scream.
“Pardon me, but I need to hear that directive again.”
This time the man’s voice came out in a short-tempered bark. A bark that thudded into her chest like the blow of a battering ram.
“When you have all the information you can get out of her, kill her.”
A long pause ensued. Simpson didn’t speak.
You’re not a killer. A soldier, maybe even a manipulator. An idiot and a bastard, but an executioner? No, you’re not a killer, Shaw.
“There has to be a better way,” he said at last. “There has to be a better way.”
His voice rang with a hint of panic as he obviously tried to think his way out of this situation, searching for a loophole that wouldn’t paint his hands in her blood.
The voice on the phone scoffed. “You can’t tell me you never killed anybody.”
His reply came in measured words. “I give the orders to my men in battle.”
May felt like she was being smothered by the silence that stretched on and on and on until she was suffocating from it.
“Then give the order,” the speaker said. “If you can’t do the job, then find someone who can.”
No more words projected through the metal door—the only barrier between May and the man who had been ordered to take her life.
She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
If this was a storage unit, somebody could be around. She could yell. If she heard most of a muffled conversation through a metal door, her screams might be heard.
When she heard a metallic clinking sound, panic flooded through her.
She had to pretend to be unconscious for as long as possible. It was her only hope of survival. Simpson didn’t want to do the deed at all, and pretending she wasn’t awake could buy her time.
Or end her life even faster.
He might be the kind of guy who would kill an unconscious woman to spare his own personal sensibilities.
May lay on her side, letting her limbs go limp and her eyes slip closed in what she hoped was a convincing facsimile of unconsciousness.
It was her only defense.
Holding her breath, she listened to the big metal door roll upward. Then to Simpson’s footsteps as he entered the storage unit.
May’s panic reached a new high. Fighting it back, she tried to send out a mental cry to AJ. Her lover. The man she wanted to spend so much more time with. Weeks—years, decades.
A lifetime.
She had no plan. She had no backup, no training. No goddamn tracker even. Why, oh why had she been so stubborn and defied AJ’s ability to know how to protect her?
Why didn’t he argue with her about her refusal more? Was she really so difficult that he’d just given up rather than argue with her?
She clearly had to work on her communication skills. Of course, she had to live to use them.
Right now…she was completely at Simpson’s mercy.
Stay unconscious. Stay still.
And pray that a plan came to her.
* * * * *
The phone went dead in Henner’s ear. He swung his hand down, the phone locked in his too-tight grip. He didn’t give a fuck if the device shattered and sliced his palm to ribbons. Nothing mattered at this moment but getting May back.
When he spoke, his voice sounded like he’d breathed in fire. “No bomb. No May.”
Cobra stepped up to him and took the phone. After a glance at the screen, he saw that the call with Con had been disconnected. Actually, there was no call at all. He’d gone straight to voicemail.
Cobra’s stare sharpened. “What the fuck, Chickie? Talk to me.”
His head whirled so fast, he could barely fix his stare on one spot. Which ended up being the concerned faces of his teammates, Cobra and Mason, mirroring the expression on his own.
Disbelief.
“Con’s out of pocket. Not answering. We have to form a plan.”
He couldn’t fail. But hadn’t he already failed? He had been too slow, too calculated and distracted by things that had nothing to do with the bomb itself—like May.
Because of his lack of action, May was gone—taken. And the major general with her.
The man must have kidnapped her.
Cobra gripped him by the shoulder, tough fingers biting into the muscle. The pain centered him, and Henner clung to it.
The buzz of the phone in Cobra’s hand made his heart drum faster. He snatched it out of his teammate’s grasp and mashed it to his ear.
“Con. She’s gone. The bomb too.”
“Jesus Christ. Tell me what happened.”
His words were a death knell in his own ears as he relayed the information to his CO.
“Focus, Chickie. You’re going to get May back.” Con’s voice was a lifeline, but not even that lessened the pounding fear inside Henner. The longer she was gone, the lower their chances of getting her back. Statistics said that after twenty-four hours, the likelihood of recovering a missing person was fifty percent.
It hadn’t been anywhere close to a full day—or even a full hour—but every grain of sand running through that hourglass felt like a boulder.
“Chickie.” Con’s bark in his ear brought him back to reality.
Along with that came a rush of knowing. He’d momentarily forgotten what he did while May was in the shower.
“I can ping her phone. She refused to wear a device, so I added a tracker through her phone.”
“I’ll do it. Sit tight. I’m finding her now,” Con said.
They might not find May, just her phone. First thing, Simpson probably took her phone for this exact reason. He breathed through the panic clawing through his chest. A sensation he never felt on this level before. The clock ticked in the marrow of his very bones.
“Tell me you have something, Con.”
“Pinging her phone now.”
Silence stretched. Henner forced himself to remain still, his legs braced even though every nerve in his body screamed at him to move.
“We have a radius. I’m shooting it to you now.”
His phone vibrated with the incoming intel. With a shaky finger, he swiped the app open. A red circle marked where May’s phone had last been.
“It isn’t in the hangar.”
His hopes rose…then plummeted.
“But it could have been thrown somewhere else or dropped.”
“We can’t reach Kit today. Sophie’s taking her place for now. She just pinned down the location on this end. There’s a public storage facility in that radius.”
In the background, he heard the sharp cry of a female as Sophie obviously uncovered more information.
Con fed it to him in a low, urgent tone. “She found payments to the facility in Simpson’s financials.”
“Got it. I’ll call when it’s over, Con.” Henner’s stare fixed on Cobra. “She has to be there!”
“Let’s go.” His buddy’s jaw flexed on the words he bit off. Then he, Henner and Mason took off at a dead run for the parking lot.
They reached the car and jumped in with Henner at the wheel. When they approached the gates, they all held their breath.
Henner had come in with May…and was going out with two men dressed like the men on base.
At the gate, the guard gave them a wave as they passed through. Henner’s breath pushed out in a slow, sickening trickle.
From the passenger seat, Cobra emitted a grunt. “I wouldn’t have let us go so easy.”
“We’re jaded as fuck. Compared to us, these are all innocent kids.” He hit the road and took off toward the facility with Cobra offering him directions.
In the back seat, Mason let out a cuss. “Goddammit!”
He stiffened. “What happened?”
“Charlie’s scrambling now. On their way back to New Mexico. We’re flying solo, guys.”
“No backup,” Cobra added.
“It’s fine. I got this.” Henner gripped the wheel until his knuckles burned under the strain. Time was bleeding away while May was out there somewhere, alone. Afraid.
In minutes, the storage facility loomed ahead, a series of simple rectangular structures painted battleship gray. Rows of doors were numbered.
He prayed none of them marked May’s tomb.
“Which one is it, Cobra?” He drove up to the first building.
He shook his head. “Not this unit. I can’t tell which one it is yet. Drive around. I’ll tell you when we get close.
“We also need to find out where that bomb’s at,” Cobra said.
“Pretty sure it’s on its way to New Mexico.” Mason’s statement vibrated with tense silence.
“You’re probably dead right.” Henner continued to circle, his mind only partly on the topic and what their team faced without three of their members. “Makes sense that they caught wind of where that bomb’s heading.”
Cobra snorted. “Not surprising that we’d be the last ones to know. Hell, the guys in the air probably don’t even know what they’ll be doing once they touch down.”
He turned down another row between two long buildings. Nobody spoke. Cobra didn’t tell Henner to stop, so he drove on.
When they reached a third aisle, then a fourth, he slammed the heel of his hand off the wheel. “How goddamn big is this place?”
“The circle stays the same.”
“Damn stubborn woman! I should have planted a tracker on her whether she fought me or not! I was lucky to get hold of her phone while she was in the shower and hack it.”
“We’re getting your woman back, Chickie.”
He didn’t even argue with Cobra by denying that May was his. There was no point in lying, because his teammate would see right through it. After the things he’d seen—nearly the entire Echo team wiped out to the point where they disbanded the remaining members—Cobra didn’t miss much. He might be a man of few words, but he missed nothing, especially when it came to emotions, which was pretty odd for a SEAL.
Many of them were machines. Hell, Henner was one too. Or so he thought before May walked into his life, an irritating know-it-all expert who drove him crazy.
Now the woman drove him crazy for other reasons. And he couldn’t let go of the beautiful connection he’d just formed with her.
He couldn’t lose her.
“We’re close. I think it might be right there.” He pointed. “Unit three hundred seventeen.” Cobra’s voice sounded rough and grating…and like a beacon of hope.
As he held up his phone and showed him the tracker, a chill settled in Henner’s bones.
Please let this tracker work. Let it lead me straight to her.
If this tracker was anything like the one on the bomb, it was cast away on the floor, useless…and he’d lose May again.
Now he knew why the men in Blackout had to be alone.
Because he didn’t know if he’d survive that.
He reached into the console and grabbed his explosive kit. “Let’s go. It’s about time I get to blow a fucking door.”