Operation Caldera (Operation Volcano #2)

Prologue

“Viper, phone.”

How the hell did he know the phone was ringing when I couldn’t hear it?

“Freaking wolfie hearing,” Juice grumbled.

Ah, that would be why. Bran told him through that weird ass mind link thing they have going on.

It still blew his mind that shifters were real. Not only were they real, but he knew one well enough that his whole team was spending their downtime after they’d sustained injuries in the Middle East at the shifter’s house.

When you worked in the dark corners of the world and did the dirty jobs no sane man would want to do, you saw a lot of shit. But a CIA Liaison shifting into a massive wolf mid-firefight had more than a little freaked him the hell out.

And Juice mated him.

Didn’t have that one on my what-the-fuck bingo card either, that’s for sure.

“How much you wanna bet that our leave is over?”

Viper winced at Reaper’s question because he knew his teammate was most likely correct.

“Don’t you dare bite down on that phone, Bran,” Juice told the wolf. “Shift back, mate. Because you know command will keep calling.” He snagged the phone from Bran’s mouth and handed it to Reaper, who in turn passed it to Viper.

Viper took the phone from Reaper and didn’t even bother with the pleasantries. “You’ve reached Dare,” Viper answered the phone. “Yes, Sir.”

“Senior Chief Dare.” The familiar clipped voice on the other end came through sharp and direct.

“You’re wheels up in twelve. Alert the team.

You’ll receive a full briefing en route.

” As usual, there was no context and zero explanation, which wasn’t a surprise.

Command didn’t like to put classified stuff out over the wire.

“Yes, Sir.” He bit down on the automatic ‘why the hell now?’ response and waited, because there was always more. There was always something.

“You’ll return to Dam Neck. Pack for tropical terrain, forward recon. You’ll be briefed in full after boots hit tarmac.”

Reaper had been correct. Their leave was over.

“Understood.”

“One more thing, Senior Chief,” Command added. “JSOC has assigned a liaison to your team for the foreseeable future. You’ll make room.”

Every nerve in Viper’s neck went tight. If this were someone other than Trace, his men were going to throw a shit fit of epic proportions. He wouldn’t even blame them. Now he had mated with Juice, Trace was family. Period. “Name?”

“Trace Reeves.”

Thank fuck for that.

“Copy.”

“Don’t make it a problem, Dare. This came from above my pay grade. He stays on your team until instructed otherwise. Make it work.”

“Copy that, Sir. It’s not going to be a problem.” The call ended with a click, telling him Command was most likely at his desk in the command center at Dam Neck in Virginia. Viper lowered the phone slowly. “Fucking ace.” He turned back toward the team gathered behind him.

“Well?” Juice asked.

“Pack your gear, wolf.” Viper grinned at his guys. “My request to have you on our CIA liaison has been granted. Your furry butt flies with us from now on.”

“Hooyah.”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Awesome.”

“Are you shitting me?” Juice drowned out the others’ yells of celebration and grabbed him by the arm. “If you’re fucking with us, I’m going to be all kinds of pissed.”

“No fucking involved.” He held up both hands with his palms out. “I swear. Your mate comes with us.” His eyes widened as Bran’s fur faded and the wolf became a man.

I’m never going to get used to that shit.

Relief flickered on Juice’s face as he leaned into Trace’s shoulder. “What do you say, mate? Will you sail the seas and go to war with me?”

“Damn straight,” Trace growled. “I vowed to protect you. You are mine.”

“Do ya think we can squeeze out half an hour for us before we need to start packing shit?”

“Yes. Yes, we can.” Trace dipped his shoulder, tossed Juice over it, and made a beeline for their room. “Don’t leave without us, assholes. Juice has to talk to a man about a dog.”

“Jesus.” Zero pinched his fingers into his eyes. “We didn’t need to know that, assholes,” he yelled after Trace and Juice.

Viper let the laughter settle for a beat, then stepped back into command mode. “You heard me, boys—twelve-hour window. Warbirds waiting. Let’s move.”

As the team scattered to prep, the weight of mission protocol settled back into place, heavy and familiar.

Whatever waited out there—jungle, target unknown—it didn’t matter.

They were Volcano Team, even if they now had a wolf in their pack.

No matter what the world threw at them, they would do their jobs as ordered. Period.

Dr. Howard *Ward* Sutherland wasn’t a fan of emails with the subject line ‘You’ll want to see this.

’ They were usually clickbait from lazy colleagues trying to spin a half-buried shard of pottery into the next Rosetta Stone.

Nine times out of ten, it was a fluke. A stain.

Bird shit on a rock, if you will. But this one?

It pinged every nerve ending in his body.

“Why the heck is the French Ministry of Culture – Direction Générale des Patrimoines et de l’Architecture emailing me?

” Ward glanced at the CC list and frowned at the single email on the list. “And CC-ing Service Archéologique Maritime Francais (SAMF), no less.” He hovered his mouse over the email for a second or two.

If I get a virus, I’m going to be so fucking pissed.

After deciding he wouldn’t click any links contained in the email, his curiosity won out. He clicked the mail and began to read. The body of the email was almost apologetic:

Dr. Sutherland,

We believe you are the foremost expert available to consult on an anomalous inscription discovered on a remote site in the Indian Ocean. Due to the linguistic anomalies and the highly localized volcanic conditions, we’re requesting your immediate attention. Please see the attached image.

Well, crap. Now I want to click the dang link .

He backed out of the email and turned on the super-duper anti-virus software his cousin had developed.

It slowed everything down on his laptop, so he rarely used it.

But if he lost all his work from the dig he’d just returned from or got a virus, he’d be pissed with himself for not waiting an extra thirty seconds to see what was attached to the email.

He pointed the program at his inbox, snagged his insulated coffee mug from the desk, and went to get himself a coffee refill while the anti-virus program did its thing.

He paused at the sink to rinse out his mug, refilled it, and added a spoonful of sugar.

Stirring his mug, he went back to his office and stared at the screen as he waited for the program completion bar to populate.

“Finally.” He heaved a sigh of relief at the green writing that told him the email contained no known viruses and clicked on the link. It took a couple of seconds for the single-page, high-resolution image to open.

Ward hunched over the table, peering at what looked like a hand-scanned page from a waterproof field journal, judging by the slight bend at the edges and the fine grit stuck to the paper grain.

He focused on the markings on the page, and the world dropped out from under him. He placed the mug on the table, well away from the laptop, and pulled the device closer to him. His brain went into overdrive as it tried to make sense of what he was looking at. They weren’t just any symbols.

Is it a language?

Holy crap, it is a language.

He went through the possibilities in his head and rapidly ruled out Latin, Sanskrit, Polynesian, or Austroasiatic. He didn’t think it was a tribal glyph structure, but it also had no modern root trace. “What are you?”

I’ve seen that before.

I think.

He nudged the laptop back and got to his feet. Glancing at the notebooks on his shelf, he searched until he found the one he wanted. “There you are.” He lifted multiple volumes of textbooks from the battered copybook and carefully moved them aside.

The copybook was bought at a tiny corner shop in Ireland when he and his family had gone on vacation. Staying in Munster hadn’t been too much fun for his fifteen-year-old self until he’d come across the markings on the stones near a corrie lake in the Comeragh mountains.

He’d spent most of his summer making impressions of the markings into his copybook. He’d found out that local legends called the markings the language of the fairies, and he’d been fascinated. They had fueled his interest and driven him to pursue archaeology.

He brought the copybook back to his desk and carefully turned the pages until he found the one symbol he recognized from the photo in the email. He glanced from the screen to the page and back again, multiple times. “This can’t be right.”

The symbols were older than any written form of language the academic world had on record.

It wasn’t Middle Irish, and it wasn’t even Primitive Irish.

It was pre-Ogham, most likely a proto-form of Gaelic.

An alphabet that shouldn’t exist, and it definitely shouldn’t be in that region of the world.

Not in stone, and not arranged in the exact same sequence as on the rocks in a mountain range in Ireland. But it did.

He barely breathed as he stared at that scan for nearly an hour.

Every now and then, he muttered to himself, cross-referencing the etymological shifts with the impressions he hadn’t touched in years.

He kept waking up from the dream. Because it had to be a dream, right?

Every archeologist dreamed of making such a discovery.

But no matter how many times he pinched himself, the image on the screen didn’t change.

It still matched those impressions. “Wow. I can’t believe this. It cannot be possible.”

He picked up his phone and dialed the contact number buried three paragraphs deep in the email signature.

It rang twice before someone answered. “Dr. Sutherland. Thank you for calling back.”

Not many people must ring this line, if he knew it was me before I spoke at all.

“You’ve got about thirty seconds before I hang up and report this to every linguistic society I’ve ever published with. What the hell am I looking at?”

The voice on the other end of the phone hitched. “We don’t know. That’s why we reached out.”

“People don’t send me Proto-Irish symbols from the middle of the damn Indian Ocean unless someone’s panicking.

” There had to be an angle here somewhere.

The last time he’d heard of something similar happening, it had turned out to be a hoax, and the archaeologist had been discredited once it was discovered.

There was a slight pause and the sound of an exhale before the man at the other side of the phone call continued.

“We haven’t gone all the way into the tunnel.

There might be a chamber, but we just don’t know for sure.

We’ve only cleared the outer edge of the site.

What we found was carved into the rock face around the entrance.

Identical symbols are scattered along the chamber wall about fifteen meters in, but we stopped going further in once we realized they weren’t incidental. ”

If they were already digging, then why did they need him? “So what, now you want me to rubber-stamp this shit?”

“No, Doctor. We want you to explain it before someone tries to steal whatever is in there.”

That gave him pause. This didn’t sound like a press release, university grab, or grant chase waiting to happen. Just that quiet desperation of people who knew they were out of their depth and needed someone who didn’t panic when the rules bent sideways.

Ward scrubbed a hand through his hair. “This isn’t some lost tribal dialect.

This is what I’ve been considering as a bloodline language.

Most likely ancient Irish. Do you understand what I’m saying?

If I go there and I verify that it didn’t drift there—it isn’t a copy, either modern or recent past, and some form of early Irish ancestor created it in situ—do you understand what will happen?

” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Then history as we know it collapses under its own bullshit.”

“We’re aware it’s a strange find.”

“It’s an impossible find.”

“Yes, Sir. But it’s real.”

The silence stretched between them as Ward glanced again at the scan. The glyphs were familiar and foreign all at once, and the longer he looked at them, the more certain he became that this wasn’t a hoax or a mistake. This was real. Those symbols existed where they shouldn’t.

He worked hard to keep the excitement he could feel building inside him out of his voice. “I’m in. Where’s the dig?”