Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Zenko took his place beside Saxon the second Noble gave the order, checking the ground ahead as Rock turned toward the tree line and tapped two fingers against his comms. The Ghosts fell into position around Red Squadron with the ease of men who had done this together so many times they didn’t need to speak, and Zenko risked another look at the men they were now trusting to get them out of Syria.
Ghosts. Fucking Ghosts. If Rock hadn’t all but confirmed it by refusing to confirm it, Griffin’s expression sure as fuck had.
More importantly, Shaun belonged to them.
The man Zenko had dragged out of a terrorist cave, carried into Red Squadron’s compound, and taken into his bed was a fucking operator.
Shaun was going to get his ass kicked, and then Zenko was probably going to kiss him until neither of them could fucking breathe. After that, he might kick his ass again, because hiding the fact he was a fucking Ghost for an entire week deserved consequences.
“You planning on glaring a hole through the back of my head all the way out of Syria?” Rock’s voice carried quietly from several feet ahead as he continued moving through the scrub without turning around. “Because if you are, Marks, I’d appreciate you keeping your eyes on our six instead.”
Zenko swept their six before picking up his pace and closing some of the distance between himself and Rock. He kept his weapon at ready position as he moved. “How long have you known Shaun?”
“Long enough.” Rock glanced toward him before returning his attention to the route ahead. “Anything else you want to know about one of my operators, you can ask him when we get back.”
One of my operators.
Fuck, hearing Rock say it out loud didn’t make the reality any easier to process. Zenko tightened his grip on his weapon as another question shoved its way to the front of his mind.
“So is Shaun even his real fucking name?”
Rock’s head turned slowly enough that Zenko caught the warning in his expression.
“That’s between you and Shaw. I’m not giving you his file, Marks, and I sure as fuck won’t discuss classified information while we’re still walking through Syria.
You want to know something about the man you’ve been shacked up with for the last week, grow a pair and ask him yourself. ”
“Shacked up with?” Zenko almost stumbled over a rut hidden in the darkness before catching himself, his attention snapping straight back to Rock. “What the fuck did he tell you?”
“Enough to send me after your ass.” Rock stepped over a fallen branch without breaking stride. “Which, considering I’ve been burning through every lead we could find since he disappeared, should tell you something.”
That stopped every smart-ass response Zenko had been about to throw at him. He kept moving because standing still out here was a good way to get shot, but his mind snagged on the words and refused to let them go.
“He sent you specifically for me?”
Rock finally looked at him properly. “Shaw gets a secure line after being missing for fucking weeks, tells me your base has been compromised, and asks me to retrieve his guy. Then he gives me your location and makes it clear he thinks you could be under live fire. So yeah, Marks, he sent me specifically for you.”
His guy?
Shaun could have asked Rock to get him the hell out of Turkey.
He could have demanded his own team come collect him after spending a week surrounded by operators he barely knew.
Instead, the stubborn asshole had finally gotten through to the people who had been tearing Syria apart looking for him and sent them to save his ass.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Zenko scrubbed one hand over his face before returning it to his weapon. “He called me his guy?”
“Don’t get all fucking sentimental on me.” Rock’s mouth twitched before he looked forward again. “I already had to listen to enough shit from him without adding whatever the fuck the two of you have going on to my list of problems.”
Whatever the fuck the two of them had going on, Zenko would fucking love somebody to explain it to him because he didn’t have a clue.
He knew he wanted Shaun. Somewhere between dragging him out of that cave and waking with a K-Bar against his throat, wanting had become something a hell of a lot more dangerous.
Now he knew the supposed civilian who had managed to get under every layer of his defenses had been hiding an operator beneath the truck-driver cover the entire time.
“You gonna tell me he’s okay?” Zenko asked after another hundred yards, hating that he couldn’t keep the edge out of his voice. “Because you seem pretty fucking relaxed for a man whose missing operator only resurfaced long enough to send you after somebody else.”
“He’s okay.” Rock’s answer came without hesitation, and some of the pressure in Zenko’s chest finally eased. “We got confirmation while you and Noble were trying to turn my guys into pincushions with pieces of fucking rock. Your people made it out before the compound blew.”
Zenko’s boots kept moving, but for a second everything else seemed to stop.
Max, Drax, Reese and Castiel had made it out, and most importantly, Shaun was alive.
The last time he had tried TOC, there had been nothing but silence, and every minute since had given his imagination another opportunity to supply reasons why.
“All of them?”
“All of them.” Rock glanced at him again. “They’re moving to a safe location, and before you ask, no, I’m not giving you the location while we’re standing out here. We get clear, we get transport, then you can worry about getting back to your man.”
My man. I kinda like the sound of that.
They covered the next stretch in silence, moving deeper into terrain Rock’s team had clearly reconned before coming after them.
Zenko kept his attention on the darkness around them, but his brain kept replaying the last week with an entirely different set of eyes.
Shaun had always known when someone entered a room, and that fucking reflex had put a blade against Zenko’s throat before the man was fully awake.
Then there was the way Shaun had watched Noble during the interrogation, exhausted and hurting, yet somehow never breaking under four fucking hours of questions.
He’s an Operator.
Fucking hell, it had been right there in front of him the entire time, and he’d missed it.
Noble dropped back until he was walking beside Zenko, his gaze sweeping the terrain ahead before settling briefly on him. “You good?”
“Peachy.” Zenko checked the tree line to their right before giving his boss a sideways look. “You knew Rock when you were kids, and somehow in all these fucking years of knowing your ugly ass, that never came up?”
Noble’s lips twitched as he kept his attention on the terrain ahead, his weapon steady in his hands. “You never asked.”
“I’m gonna shoot you.”
“Get in line.” Noble shifted his weapon against his chest and looked toward Rock.
“We have bigger problems right now. Whoever compromised the compound knew enough to hit us while most of the team was separated, and somebody got a US Chinook into Syrian airspace with orders to wipe that weapons cache off the map. Until we know how far the breach goes, we treat every Red Squadron location and official channel as compromised.”
That wiped away what remained of Zenko’s amusement. “Including the fallback site?”
“Especially the fallback site.” Noble’s expression hardened.
“If they knew where we were based, I’m not betting anyone’s life on them missing a contingency location sitting in our own operational files.
Rock’s offering us somewhere outside our system.
We use it until we know what the fuck we’re dealing with. ”
Zenko nodded once. Their compound had been home, but home was currently a smoking hole in the ground.
The backup location had always been exactly that, somewhere to regroup if the main base became unusable.
Nobody had planned for the possibility that the threat would come through channels supposedly belonging to their own side.
“You trust him?” Zenko asked quietly as Rock disappeared between two trees ahead and Griffin followed him through.
“With my life.” Noble didn’t hesitate as he kept moving through the trees beside Zenko. “More importantly right now, I trust him with all of yours.”
That answers that.
The extraction point turned out to be nothing more than a stretch of hard-packed ground beyond an abandoned agricultural building, where two battered vehicles waited beneath camouflage netting.
Zenko followed Saxon toward the nearest one as the Ghosts stripped away the netting and started loading gear into the back.
He shoved his pack in with the rest before climbing inside wherever there was space, and within minutes they were moving again with the lights off, leaving the extraction point behind them in the darkness.
Zenko sat wedged beside Saxon with his pack between his boots and watched the dark countryside slide past the window.
Every bump jarred muscles that had already spent too many hours working, but exhaustion wasn’t getting anywhere near his brain.
There were too many unanswered questions waiting for Shaun, and far too much fucking distance between Zenko and the man who had the answers.
By the time the vehicles finally stopped inside a secured hangar, Zenko had lost track of how long they had been moving.
A small plane waited inside with its rear hatch open, and the Ghosts immediately started transferring equipment while Noble disappeared with Rock to speak to someone near the hangar.
Zenko helped load their gear, his body working automatically while every fucking minute between him and seeing Shaun again seemed to drag.
Griffin appeared beside him with another weapons bag and shoved it into Zenko’s hands.
“He’s already moving toward Croatia.”