Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Damn it.
Viper shoved aside a low-hanging vine and scrambled over the fallen tree.
This kind of terrain was his least favorite to work in.
A jungle didn’t give a damn about military precision or deadlines.
It didn’t care how elite your training was, how many hours you logged in combat zones, or how many wars you’d survived.
It didn’t give a shit about call signs or kill counts or how many languages you could curse in.
The jungle chewed all that up and spat it out with a vine around your throat and biting insects in your boots.
He pushed through another tangle of razorleaf, the blade of his machete slick with sap and sweat.
The heat was thick enough to choke on, and the air tasted like mildew and something he was more than a little sure he didn’t want to know the cause of.
Every breath stung his lungs like inhaling steam through gauze.
The jungle floor sucked at his boots, sucking each step into a carpet of rotting leaves and unseen roots.
“Left rise,” Reaper grunted behind him. “Shallow outcrop. We’ll take it.”
“Copy.” Anything to get them out of this hellscape. He angled his trajectory a little and started carving a narrow path toward the ridgeline. “Maintain line. Push through.”
They were ten hours deep into the green hell that was ?le Saonae, and the island hadn’t let up once.
What was supposed to be a two-klick hike had turned into a knife fight with the terrain.
There were no trails, and clearings were few and far between.
This fucking jungle offered them nothing but mud, vines, volcanic scree, and nature doing its best to kill them with every fucking inch.
They had considered having Trace shift into Bran, but two minutes from the beach had nixed that plan in the butt. Instead, Trace had stripped to his tactical base layer. The last thing they wanted was to lose gear because he shredded them if he needed to shift on the fly.
Viper paused to take a breath and check his men.
Trace ducked low under a hanging curtain of vines that shimmered with moisture.
Behind him, Juice almost stepped on his mate’s heels, his eyes constantly moving.
Zero and Kaze brought up the rear, their gear slick with sweat, their breathing tight through comms.
“Tell me again why this guy couldn’t hide in a desert like a normal psychopath.” Kaze swiped at a spider web that stretched across his face.
“Because sand gets in your ass crack,” Zero replied. “Jungle’s more personal.”
The corners of Viper’s lips curved upward. Even with the shit they had to deal with, his brothers in arms found the energy to bitch and complain.
When they stop bitching. I start worrying.
Al-Rami, you asshole. Enjoy these last few hours of freedom, because today you die.
Every step, every fucking swing of his blade, was one step closer to putting that bastard in the ground.
He could still hear the screams from Aleppo.
He was never going to be able to get the smell of the burned concrete out of his nose.
His nightmares would be forever haunted by the last breath of Gabe Lansing, one of the best damn SEALs Viper had ever served with.
The sound of Gabe choking out in his arms while smoke curled around their boots and the embassy crumbled like paper behind them played in his mind and fueled his determination not to be beaten by this fucking island.
He hacked through a wall of underbrush and stumbled into a sudden clearing—a slope of collapsed volcanic rock, slick with moss, and the remnants of some ancient lava flow now buried in vines. He raised a fist. The team froze behind him.
“Checkpoint Bravo,” he said over comms. “Elevation gain, thirty-two meters. Hold perimeter.”
“Copy, actual,” Juice answered, already dropping to one knee and scanning with his scope.
Viper tapped his HUD and checked the satellite overlay. They were still tracking the heat signature. It was still moving slowly to the northeast as if Al-Rami was taking his time or constantly doubling back.
Smart. But not smart enough.
Viper had overlaid their satellite feed against a grainy black-and-white terrain survey pulled from a French naval archive dated 1986. It wasn’t public. Hell, it wasn’t even in digital format until Trace bribed someone at Langley to run OCR on the scanned charts.
He was heading somewhere.
Or hiding something.
Viper moved up the ridge and swept the horizon through his monocular.
No lights.
No movement.
I hate this place as much as I do Al-Rami.
They pressed on. The incline bit at their knees, and every step took more effort than it should. Vines wrapped around their ankles, and insects swarmed every exposed inch of skin.
“Jeez, dude.” Reaper ripped a centipede the size of a cigar off Kaze’s thigh, and Trace ran his thumb down a row of leech bites trailing down Juice’s forearm.
Still, they didn’t stop. They climbed higher, and the air thinned slightly as the canopy broke open to reveal fractured views of the island’s core.
In the distance, Mount Abalos rose out of the trees like a black tooth.
Viper eyed the dormant volcano. He didn’t trust it. He never trusted anything he didn’t have control over, and natural disasters came close to topping that list, right behind terrorists who preyed on the innocent.
“You good?” Trace asked quietly, falling into step beside him.
“Yeah.”
“You look like you’re sizing up the mountain and wondering if you should cram it full of C4 and blow the bitch to hell.”
“If I thought it would block it and not make it blow, I would.” He wasn’t going to explain his irrational fear of volcanoes to the guys.
Mount St. Helens had a hell of a lot to answer for.
There was nothing like being stuck on the slopes of that bitch as she went boom for the first time in more than a century.
They dropped back into the shadow of the mountain about twenty minutes later, sliding down a muddy slope that ended at a shallow stream choked with vines.
They drank in shifts, checked their boots, cleared leeches, and reset their gear.
Viper took the chance to check his uplink.
“Heat signature was stationary again. Still northeast. Still in range.” He squinted at the screen.
Had something changed? “Zoom grid three-five,” he muttered, manipulating the tablet’s overlay.
“Got a problem?” Juice asked.
“No. Just a variable.”
There’s always a fucking variable.
Expect the unexpected.
Easy fucking day.
He tracked the two additional thermal blips on screen. They were smaller than what they’d been monitoring and moved in opposite directions to each other like perimeter runners.
Guards.
“We’ve got potential perimeter patrols.” He scanned the terrain ahead and went back to the map. “We break north, circle wide, come in high. Stay under the tree line. No contact unless fired on.”
“Roger.”
The team moved into the new formation—Viper at point, Reaper and Zero flanking, Juice and Trace rear, and Kaze center float.
For the next hour, they climbed through twisted banyan roots, passed giant fern groves, and traversed the edge of a dried creek bed that smelled faintly of rot and rust. Something had died there recently, but they didn’t stop to find out what.
They broke into another rise, and suddenly, they could see a crude perimeter fence, camouflaged with local brush. A half-dozen tents were half hidden behind a jagged treeline. Viper spotted solar panel arrays and what looked like portable antennae.
The dig site.
He dropped to a prone position and scoped the scene. There were three figures visible. All unarmed. Two were working on the gear, and one was pacing while on a satellite phone. “Civilians,” he confirmed. “That’s the dig. We circle wide. Avoid contact.”
“Copy that,” Reaper said. “They look pretty oblivious.”
Viper nodded. “Let’s keep it that way.” He and his men vanished into the jungle again, leaving the archaeologists none the wiser. No one noticed the six-armed men who passed within forty meters of their tents. No one heard the whispered comms or the soft crunch of boots over damp ground.
They pushed deeper until the canopy began to thin and the slope changed.
They’d followed the heat signature up into the western ridge basin along one of the older lava paths until the signs of disturbance began to show.
Viper pointed to broken foliage, displaced soil, and a boot print half-masked by rain.
“He’s close,” he said softly. “Less than half a klick.”
“Want to fan out?” Reaper asked.
“Negative. Maintain formation. He may have spotters.” They pressed on.
Every step was deliberate, and every sound cataloged.
The jungle quieted—the sounds of birds and insects faded away until all he could hear was the soft click of comms and the steady breath of his men.
“Contact possible in five,” Viper said. He didn’t know what they were walking into, but he knew this much: they were close, and Al-Rami was out of time.
The pressure that preceded imminent battle coiled in Viper’s chest, the narrowing of his world into distance, velocity, target spread, and line of fire.
The voices of his team dropped into a practiced murmur across comms and were barely audible even through the encrypted channel. He lifted two fingers.
Halt.
Trace and Juice stopped slightly behind him to his left. Reaper shifted position on the ridge to the right, zeroing in with his scope and thermal overlay. Kaze and Zero crouched low behind a berm of collapsed foliage and moss-covered rock.