SEVENTEEN
Rome took the lead, hammering down on the snowmobile throttle. The rush of wind at his face didn’t wash away the knot sitting behind his breastbone no matter how hard he drove the engine.
He’d been through countless ops, both successful and unsuccessful. But he’d never had one be a dead end. Usually when things were quiet, they were walking into an ambush. Tonight, that didn’t happen.
Cannon pulled his sled even with Rome’s. He shot a glance at his commanding officer and saw how he’d wiped his face clean of any emotion.
Which meant he was furious.
“Who sent the command?” Rome asked into the comms.
Cannon’s voice was flat. “Came down the chain from above.”
Rome glanced at him again and said the thing they were probably all thinking. “Someone wanted us off the mountain for two hours.”
Cannon didn’t respond—which was just as good as agreeing with him.
Silence hummed on the line as tension gripped the whole team.
Cannon pushed his machine harder, putting distance between him and the rest.
Rome stared at his back for only one second before he shot forward, intending to catch up with him.
He’d lived through enough bad times with Cannon to know the difference between a commander who was angry and one who was blaming himself.
This was the latter.
As he pulled even with him, Cannon gave a short shake of his head.
“Don’t even try to big-brother me, Rome.”
As if he was going to obey that command.
“You couldn’t have known no one was up there. The order was legit. You made the right call with the information you had.”
Cannon remained silent.
Seeing there was nothing left to say, Rome let it go. He spoke his peace—that was enough.
The drone of another machine came from behind, and Younger whipped by them, middle finger up in his own brand of a pep talk.
Cannon huffed. “Asshole.”
Younger’s chortle carried back on the wind as he buzzed twenty yards ahead, the headlight cutting through the dark.
Suddenly, his snowmobile locked up, the machine fishtailing sideways on the ice, forcing everyone behind him to swerve.
“What the hell?” someone barked out.
Snow sprayed up, clouding visibility.
Then Rome looked past Younger at the road ahead.
His blood iced over.
There was something in the snow at the edge of the tree line.
A shape that was the wrong size and wrong color to be part of nature—something his brain refused to process for a heartbeat before it processed it all at once.
“Rivers!” He leaped off his snowmobile before it fully stopped, weapon up, scanning for danger.
Rorke and Cannon reached the scene next.
Cannon hit the ground running. “Cover me!” he bellowed.
Rorke and Rome fanned out, rifles at the ready. But Rome couldn’t tear his gaze from the sight in front of them for long. The SUV sat there, the driver and side doors hanging open.
His brother-in-arms lay packed into the snow at the base of a tree.
He recognized it as deliberate—Rivers had dug himself in to slow the bleeding to stay alive until help arrived.
At his back, the rest of the guys cleared the area of threat, leaving Rome free to approach. Cannon was on his knees next to Rivers.
Rome dropped beside him. “Rivers,” he croaked.
Rivers opened his eyes. The brown depths were focused. Present.
The man was hurt but he was still there.
Rome started digging him out of the snow. Cannon dug in too, and then all of them surrounded their fallen teammate.
When they unearthed him and saw the extent of the blood, Rome’s gut turned to water.
It hit all at once. What his mind had failed to see until this moment.
“The women? Where are the women?” he burst out.
“Jesus Christ! Where are they?” Monk echoed, jumping up and running a few steps before stopping and staring down at the ground.
“Sat phone.” Rivers’s voice was stripped by blood loss and pain. “Bullet clipped it. I didn’t take…a full hit.”
“But enough.” Cannon’s expression was even grimmer than it had been when they came off that mountain. “How did this happen?”
Rivers lifted his hands a few inches off the snow. He gripped the satellite phone that had probably saved his life. “Message came through. On the secure channel.”
Rome jerked his head up to meet Monk’s stare. It was just as wild as his own must be.
“Order to…move the women. Get them to a rendezvous.” Rivers panted with the exertion of speaking.
Rome’s world spun in a sick revolution, and his brain couldn’t catch up.
“Blackout channel?” Cannon asked.
Rivers shook his head slowly. “Regular command.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Rome had ever heard in all his years in Blackout.
Whoever sent the order wasn’t in their closed network—they were outside it. Most teams never knew the exact location of other bases. And no one knew Sierra’s location. Only Jolie and Stina had ever been inside the base, and they were hooded.
But someone knew Sierra’s region…and they knew the women were there.
Someone had known long enough to build a plan.
This threat hit too close to home. And too close to Cipher’s modus operandi.
Rome didn’t trust himself to speak as he scanned the area, already knowing from Monk’s face that he was looking at footprints in the snow and tire tracks.
Younger was already on the satellite phone, calling for an air evac. Townie assessed Rivers’s wound with stoic competence.
But none of it might be enough—for Rivers…or for the women.
“Stina. Jolie. Where are they now?” Rome’s throat clamped around the syllables.
Rivers’s throat worked. “Taken. Vehicle. Black. I didn’t get plates. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Don’t,” Rome broke in, chest exploding with pain.
Terror ripped through him on the heels of it.
“Knew where…to find us,” Rivers choked out.
Townie hovered over him. “Don’t talk. Save your energy.”
Rivers shook his head again. “Someone on the…inside.”
Monk took off pacing, and Rome jogged over to him.
“I can’t lose her, man.” Monk’s face was white with anguish.
Rome gripped him by the shoulder. “I know. I fucking know.”
“We need a plan. Now. We don’t have time to waste.”
The noise of a chopper approaching brought a mix of feelings to Rome. It meant Rivers could get the help he needed to save him.
It meant they could focus on putting together a plan to recover the women.
As they loaded their brother into the craft with Townie as escort, Rome turned to Cannon.
“I’m telling you right now, when we find her—” He stopped. Started again. “I’m not going to be able to let her go.”
Cannon held his gaze for a beat. “Understood.”
Nothing more. No reminder of protocol or a speech about Blackout duty.
They split into teams fast. Cannon assigned Younger with Rome and Rorke.
“O, you’re with me and Monk,” Cannon barked out. “Team one, start with the town. Question everybody. Then take the mountain pass. Team two, we take the logging roads. Roll out!”
The small town had once been booming, but since the fall of the ski resort, not many businesses survived. The gas station was the only thing open at this hour before dawn.
With Rorke on his six, Rome ran inside to question the attendant. The guy was young and blinking groggily, clearly not even fully awake let alone accustomed to two men in tactical gear.
During the painfully endless drive, Rome had formulated questions, and he fired them off at the kid.
“Someone pulled in for gas as soon as we opened,” he said. “Big guy. Black jacket. Paid cash.” He pointed at the camera mounted above the pump. “That will have him.”
Rome grabbed a brochure and a pen off the counter and scribbled a secure email address. “Send everything from the last two hours. Which way did he go?”
The attendant pointed again. “Took a right.”
As Rome whirled to go, Rorke was already a step ahead of him. They shoved through the door and raced to the SUV at a dead run.
Rome jumped in the passenger seat and Rorke slammed the back door.
“Turn right!” Rome ordered Younger. They gunned it out of the lot, tires spinning on the skim of ice.
Rome’s mind did what it always did—gathered scattered pieces and forced them into a pattern.
His chest caught fire. “He’s headed to the mountain pass.” Conviction rang in his tone, and his gut echoed the knowledge. “He’s going to the airstrip.”
Neither man spoke as the weight of it hit.
“He gets to the private airstrip, it’s over. We lose them.”
Younger opened up the engine on the pass road and Rome got Cannon on the Blackout channel only—no way could they risk intel being intercepted.
He briefed Cannon in clipped words, and in the background he heard Monk’s rough voice, barking orders to drive faster.
Cannon responded without hesitation. “Feed is coming through from the gas station cams now. O is pulling it.”
Thirty seconds passed and O came over comms. “Got him. Plate on the vehicle is stolen—reported missing out of Portland three days ago. Driver’s face is partially obscured.”
Rome bowed his head, pinching the bridge of his nose hard to stave off his emotions. The bastard’s only mistake was gassing up, but was it enough?
Now wasn’t the time to fall apart. It was time for war.
O broke in. “There’s a forest service gate on that road. Avalanche closure, two miles before the airstrip. One way through, no way around. He hits that gate, he’s done.”
“Then we’ve got him.” Cannon’s voice was iron. “Team one, come up behind him from the west. Team two, we cut through the logging road and block the airstrip from the east. We catch him in the middle before he reaches transport.”
Rome lifted his head.
Stina was two miles up that road in the dark with a man who had shot Rivers and left him bleeding in the snow. Rome was going to get her back.
He would end this.
And then he’d end the man who took her.
* * * * *
One second Rivers was there. The next he was on the ground with one hand pressed to his side and blood, inky black in the darkness, spilling over his fingers.
Stina was too stunned to scream.
Jolie grabbed her wrist. Her grip was hard and her voice barely a breath against Stina’s ear. “We need to stall him. Whatever you do, keep him talking. The guys will come.”