Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mission mode – two days later
Zenko pushed his thoughts of Shaun aside and swept his gaze through the trees again.
Whatever the hell was happening between them would still be waiting when he got back to Turkey.
Right now, he had a mission to complete, a team around him, and no fucking business letting his attention wander anywhere beyond the mountains surrounding them.
He’d always loved the mountains, even when he was moving through them in darkness with a weapon in his hands and no legal reason for Red Squadron to be inside the country.
Usually, he felt comfortable in terrain like this.
Tonight, something was off. The higher they climbed, the more the itch at the back of his neck refused to settle, and twice he’d stopped long enough to check behind them even though he hadn’t seen or heard anything to confirm they were being followed.
The trees gradually thinned ahead until the team reached the edge of an open meadow.
He dropped into a crouch beneath the cover of the remaining trees as the others spread out along the tree line.
Beyond them, shoulder-high grass covered most of the open ground between their position and the next stretch of forest. He searched it for movement before checking the tree line opposite them, but nothing moved.
“What have you got?” Noble asked.
“Not a lot of cover.” He took in the almost shoulder-high grass. Shit, the only good thing it had going for it was that it was almost the same color as his BDUs.
“Not any cover,” Roman added. “And there’s no way around it unless we want to go miles out of our way.”
“Alright, move out.” Noble started to signal the order with his hand but stopped when Zenko raised his own.
“You guys feel that?” Zenko glanced sideways at Noble while keeping most of his attention trained on the meadow ahead.
“Feel what?” Noble asked.
The fact Noble had come on this mission spoke volumes to Zenko.
His boss didn’t need to be here, but he’d come anyway, and after what he’d said in the sparring ring, Zenko understood exactly what that meant.
Noble had accepted that Shaun was part of the family Zenko had made with these men.
How that would play out in the long run was anyone’s guess, but for now Shaun was part of the fold, and therefore, he got the full protection of the team.
“My Spidey senses are going haywire,” Zenko told them. “My neck is itching like fuck.”
“TOC, this is Eagle.” Noble keyed his comms and called back to Max, who was manning their tactical operations center.
“Go for it, Eagle.” Max’s immediate response came through slightly garbled, but Zenko had spent enough years listening to voices over shitty comms that he understood him without any trouble.
“TOC—?”
Before Noble could finish, Max’s voice cut across him. “Eagle, be advised, you’ve got half a dozen hostiles approaching at speed from the northeast.”
“Any chance it’s the Red Cross?” Noble asked sarcastically over comms before signaling the team to take cover. “We have incoming hostiles.”
“Well, it’s most likely red considering where you are,” Max responded, his voice almost inaudible with the volume turned down so low.
“Yeah, code fucking red,” Noble muttered. He signaled for them to kill their comms, and Zenko dropped into the long grass with the rest of the team to await the oncoming force. With any luck, the hostiles would pass straight by without ever knowing Red Squadron was there.
A bird flew out of the grass almost in front of Zenko’s nose, the sudden movement providing the advance warning he needed to freeze.
Peering through the blades of grass, he caught flashes of movement as the hostiles approached.
Fuck, these men weren’t moving or acting like any terrorists Zenko had encountered before.
They paused at the edge of the meadow, checking the open ground in much the same way Red Squadron had only minutes earlier.
The new team moved out, strung across the grass in a line with their weapons at the ready.
Boots crunched through the grass directly in front of Zenko’s hands, where he had fisted the long blades together to help conceal his position.
The man stopped and looked around, and Zenko held himself completely still.
Shit, had he given himself away somehow?
Finally, the man gave an order. “Bogadh amach, is bosca marú é seo.”
The words were in a language Zenko didn’t think he’d heard before, but something about it was sort of familiar.
I’ll figure it out eventually.
He cursed silently. Whatever the hell was going on out here, that team had to be connected somehow.
The man moved forward a couple of seconds later, and some of the tension eased from Zenko’s shoulders.
These men coming from the direction Red Squadron was heading was suspicious enough.
The fact they also moved like a highly trained team downright pissed him off.
Long minutes passed before the birds started singing in the trees again. Zenko cautiously lifted his head and looked toward Noble, who gave him a slight nod to confirm all was well. He checked Roman next and got the same response.
“I don’t like it.” Noble kept his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry. “That looked like a trained team to me.”
“Me, too.” Zenko jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “They’re going that way, or I’d be damn curious to see what they’re up to.” He shrugged. “I still kinda am.”
“TOC, this is Eagle.” Noble switched his comms back on.
“TOC, go ahead, Eagle,” Max answered immediately.
“Did you get any of their faces, or anything off their uniforms to identify our mystery team?”
“Eagle, all I could see was grass, a boot, and someone’s ass,” Max responded. “No identifying marks that I could see. We picked up the order on one of the cameras, and we’re running it through voice recognition software now.”
“You sure about that, TOC?” Zenko muttered. “You’ve seen a lot of ass.” He ducked to avoid the smack Noble aimed at his head.
“They’ve continued south, Eagle,” Max informed Noble. “Your route ahead is clear to the target location, less than two klicks.”
“Roger that.” Noble clicked off comms and motioned them forward. “Move out.”
Zenko checked the time as he moved with the others. They had three hours to reach their target zone, breach the compound, grab their guy, and make the extraction point.
A half klick from the compound, Noble held up his fist. Zenko froze with the rest of the team as Noble moved a step closer to the wire stretched between two trees, glinting in the moonlight.
The internal mission clock in Zenko’s head continued counting down the minutes. “Saxon,” Noble whispered.
Saxon moved to Noble’s side and crouched to study the wire.
“How long?”
Saxon considered it for a couple of seconds, held up his index finger, and got to work. At one minute to the second, he looked up at Noble and nodded.
Noble resumed the lead position, moving toward their target.
Saxon disarmed two more explosives, each stop testing Zenko’s patience.
Five hundred yards from the edge of the compound, Zenko crouched with the rest of the team in deep tree cover, watching the complex of buildings.
He eyed the sky while listening to Max relay intel over comms to Noble. They were running out of time.
“Anyone else think it’s too damn quiet down there?” Roman whispered.
“Uh-huh,” Zenko grunted back. “Looks like that team was a strike team after all.”
“Quiet.” Noble’s order was grunted out softly, but everyone obeyed immediately. “TOC?”
“We’re not picking up any movement,” Max told him. “Go ahead and see what you find.”
“Move out,” Noble ordered and led them toward the compound. Zenko moved with the others as they emerged from the tree line and split into groups of two and three. Slowly and carefully, they approached the entrance.
Testing the gate with his hand while Noble and Saxon covered his six, Zenko’s eyebrows lifted when it swung open. Within seconds, it became clear there was nobody home, nobody alive anyway.
Dead bodies were lined along one side of the courtyard area. Drag lines in the mud showed where the bodies had fallen and how they had been pulled to the side and into a line with the others. Splatter confirmed only one of the bodies had fallen in this exact location, so why move them?
“They were looking for someone.” Zenko glanced at Noble out of the corner of his eye as he took position to stand watch while the others cleared the rest of the area.
“Looks like it.” Noble heaved a sigh. “I’ve seen the CIA do similar lineups when they want to verify a target.”
“You think that team was CIA Black Ops?”
“If they are,” Noble said, “then they are one that is above my pay grade.”
“Shit.” Zenko couldn’t think of much that was outside Noble’s pay grade or clearance level these days.
“Eagle, this is Ambra Four,” Roman’s voice came over comms.
“This is Eagle, go ahead, Four.”
“We had a semi-live tango,” Roman informed him. “Before he stopped breathing, he advised that it was a weapon cache and intel the other team was searching for.”
“Fuck.” Noble’s attention sharpened. “Did you get the location?”
“Yup.”
Zenko watched Noble’s fists clench at his sides. From the look on his face, he was about two seconds away from finding Roman and shaking him upside down until he spat out the rest of the intel.
“Would you mind telling me what that is, Four?” Noble growled out. “Or do I need to come over there and beat it out of your ass?”
“I had him point it out on our map, and that area is half a klick from our extraction point.”
“And the intel?” Noble scowled darkly in the direction Zenko knew Roman had taken.
“Died before he could relay it.”
“Fuck.”
“Okay,” Noble ordered. “Wrap it up. If there are weapons out there, then we will pick them up en route.” He glanced at Zenko and nodded to the bodies. “DNA them and take pictures. That’s the one JSOC sent us for?” He pointed to the second-to-last man from the end.