Chapter 5 #2
He had no reason to stay there now. The wounds were clean, the deeper ones closed, and Shaun was sleeping peacefully again, yet he still had to force himself to get up.
He disposed of the dirty water and bandages before glancing back at the bed.
He’d showered earlier while Shaun was in with Noble, and right now he was so damn tired that climbing beneath those covers beside him sounded fucking perfect.
Not going to happen, dumbass.
Zenko glanced at his watch and groaned.
“Dammit.” He had to be at the debrief, and if he was late after the shit he’d already pulled with Noble today, the asshole would have his fucking ass.
He looked at Shaun one last time before grabbing his gear.
Hopefully, Noble would keep the debrief short, and he could get back here before Shaun woke, and then he could stop thinking about why leaving the man alone bothered him almost as much as everything else had.
Dumbass.
He quietly closed the door behind him and headed across the compound toward the briefing room.
By the time he walked through the door, most of the team had already claimed seats around the table, and Noble was standing at the front with the mission footage frozen on the screen behind him.
Zenko dropped into an empty chair and checked his watch.
Right on fucking time.
Noble waited until the door closed behind the last man before looking around the room.
“Before we tear apart the recovery op, there’s something everyone needs to know.
The man we brought out of that cave is Shaun Jacobsen.
Civilian truck driver working out of Diego Garcia.
According to him, he overheard a group discussing plans to hijack a civilian aircraft and crash it into the base. ”
Whatever lingering irritation Zenko had carried into the room disappeared beneath the colder focus that always came when a threat became operational.
He already knew most of this from Shaun, but hearing Noble put it in front of the entire team changed the weight of it.
This wasn’t something that ended because they’d gotten Shaun out of that cave.
If the men who had taken him were part of the same group planning the attack, they were still out there, and so was whoever had made it possible for them to get their hands on him.
“Jacobsen reported what he heard to the MPs and base command,” Noble continued.
“Commander Wade Sheridan was brought into the chain. Shortly afterward, Jacobsen was abducted. Until we know otherwise, we work on the assumption that his report was compromised somewhere between the moment he made it and the moment those fuckers grabbed him.”
Zenko’s jaw tightened. There it fucking was.
Shaun hadn’t gone running around telling half the country what he’d heard.
He’d taken the information exactly where a civilian should have taken it, and someone had still known enough to silence him.
Whether the leak had come from inside the base or somewhere farther along the reporting chain didn’t change the immediate problem.
Whoever had ordered Shaun taken had failed to kill him, and sooner or later they were going to find out Red Squadron had him.
Noble changed the image on the screen to the body-camera footage from the cave.
“We don’t know yet whether Jacobsen was taken solely because he overheard the plot, whether they wanted to know exactly what he reported, or whether there’s another piece we haven’t found. Until we do, nothing about him leaves this compound. His name, his condition, the fact he survived. Nothing.”
Zenko leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on the screen even as his thoughts went straight back to the man asleep in his bed.
Good.
Let the fuckers who took Shaun wonder where the hell he is.
Bring it, motherfuckers.
Noble let the silence sit for another couple of seconds before reaching for the controls.
“Okay, now that shit’s out of the way, let’s get back to why we’re actually sitting in this room. Walk me through the mission from step-off.”
The image on the screen changed, pulling up the footage from their original mission before everything had gone to shit.
Zenko settled back in his chair as the team started working through it from the beginning, each man accounting for his position and what he’d seen as Noble moved them through the operation.
They reached the building, then the moment everything went sideways, the explosion filling the screen before Noble slowed the footage and took them through the aftermath almost frame by fucking frame.
Eventually, Noble froze the footage seconds before Zenko had taken his shot and turned to look directly at him.
Fuck.
Zenko knew that look.
“Marks. Walk me through why you took the body shot.”
Zenko studied the frozen frame even though he didn’t need the replay to remember exactly what he’d seen.
“He moved. I had the head shot until he shifted behind the cover. I had center mass for maybe half a second, so I took it.”
Noble folded his arms across his chest. “And where did the round go?”
“Exactly where I fucking put it.”
A couple of quiet snorts came from around the table, but Noble didn’t look remotely amused. “That wasn’t the question.”
Zenko blew out a breath and looked back at the frozen footage. “Upper chest. He dropped, but the shot wasn’t immediately fatal.”
“Which meant he still had time to act.”
Zenko’s jaw tightened because he already knew where Noble was going with this. The man had gone down, but down didn’t mean dead, and every operator sitting around that table knew the fucking difference. “Yeah.”
Noble restarted the footage for several seconds before freezing it again.
“You had another shot here.”
“With friendlies moving into my line.”
“For less than a second.”
“That’s enough.”
Noble held his stare before giving a short nod.
“Yeah, it fucking is. Taking the body shot when it was the only clean shot you had wasn’t the problem.
Failing to immediately reassess whether you could finish the threat was.
You assumed somebody else had him because you were already moving to the next problem. ”
Zenko wanted to argue, but there wasn’t a damn thing to argue about. Noble wasn’t questioning the shot anymore. He was questioning what Zenko had done after it, and when Zenko replayed those seconds in his head, he could see the gap as clearly as Noble could.
“Fuck.” Zenko rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah. I see it.”
Noble let the footage roll again, and the room settled back into the familiar rhythm of a debrief.
Every movement was pulled apart, every decision questioned, with nobody getting a pass because the mission had gone to shit around them.
When the footage reached the explosion, Noble stopped it seconds before the blast and ran it again.
“Again.”
Zenko watched the building disappear behind the force of the explosion, mentally putting himself back on the ground as the team worked through where every man had been when it happened.
Noble rewound the footage.
“Did anyone see anything before this went up that we missed in real time?”
Nobody answered immediately.
Zenko leaned forward, studying the screen as Noble played it again. He remembered the fucking concussion of the blast and the instant scramble afterward, but there had been nothing beforehand that had registered as a warning.
“Nothing from my position.”
The others gave variations of the same answer as Noble worked his way around the table.
“Okay.” Noble let the image remain frozen on the building for another moment.
“Then we flag it and keep digging. I want everything we have from before that blast reviewed again. Body-cam footage, surveillance, whatever the fuck we can get our hands on. Something happened there, and I want to know what.”
Zenko couldn’t argue with that. Whatever had caused the building to go up had changed the entire fucking mission in seconds, and until they understood why, it stayed an unanswered question.
By the time Noble finally called the debrief, Zenko was more than ready to get the fuck out of there.
Normally, he lived for this shit. He wanted every mistake picked apart and every decision challenged because finding the places they could improve was how they stayed alive on the next mission.
Today, though, his attention had kept drifting toward his room and the man he’d left sleeping in his bed.
He pushed out of his chair almost before Noble finished dismissing them and ignored the knowing look his friend sent his way. He’d already had one fucking argument with Noble about Shaun today. He wasn’t giving the asshole an opening for another one.
When he finally got back to the room, Zenko quietly pushed open the door, holding it so the door closer attached didn’t make it slam shut as he entered. Shaun was still lying on top of the blankets, his head now buried under a pillow to block out the sun.
He stripped down to his boxers and climbed into the bed.
“Thank fuck you’re not hogging all the covers,” he whispered softly.
His head had barely hit the pillow when Shaun shifted on the bed.
Zenko threw the covers over them both and closed his eyes.
His eyes popped open again a couple of seconds later when the man next to him shuffled across the bed, moving closer until his face was buried against his chest and one leg was thrown over his, trapping him in place.
When a whimper sounded in the darkened room, Zenko sighed and pulled Shaun into his arms.
Shaun jerked. “Wha?—?”
“Shh.” Zenko could see Shaun struggling to open his eyes. “Sleep, I got you.”