Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NEW YORK CITY
“I can’t believe our first op for the new POTUS is in the freeze-your-balls-off cold,” A.J. complained. “I’m gonna have a word with Knox about this when we get back.”
Their new president just happened to be Knox’s father. Former President Rydell left big shoes to fill, but if anyone could do it, it was Isaiah Bennett.
It was still hard to wrap their heads around, even three weeks into his presidency, but the alternative would have been unthinkable. If Isaiah Bennett had lost the election, Bravo and Echo Teams would’ve been out of a job.
It had been eight years since Luke recruited Wyatt.
In that time, they’d lost a man and had several close calls for the rest of their team, including almost losing Jessica.
They’d also grown in more ways than Wyatt could count during those eight years.
Well, most of his team had. He wasn’t so sure about himself.
All of Bravo Team was in love, which was something Wyatt still didn’t believe would ever happen for him, even though there was one woman who had him questioning his chosen path of singledom and strictly sex whenever he thought about her.
Natasha had roped him in with her smoldering eyes, gorgeous smile, and her sultry voice the night of Clara’s wedding. But it was Ibiza, with her beautiful mind, badass skills, and giant-sized heart, that officially had him tripping all over himself.
But she deserved more than what would’ve been a failed attempt on his end to be the man she needed.
Maybe she’d finally found someone? The hacker she’d relentlessly pursued for years had been off the grid since Romania, so he could only hope she’d decided to move on and find her happily ever after.
But maybe if . . . Shit, no maybe ifs.
“What’d you say?” Wyatt directed his focus to A.J. who’d said, well, something, a moment ago. He was sitting opposite him at the conference table in their headquarters for Scott & Scott Securities.
Jessica had called to inform Wyatt they had an eleventh-hour mission in Norway and to get his team to headquarters. “I had said it sucks our first op with President Bennett has to be in the colder-than-a-witch’s-tit cold.” A.J. purposefully trembled as if outside.
“The cold will be worth it to see you shit in your pants at the sight of a polar bear,” Wyatt said with a laugh.
A.J. waved a hand in the air. “Like you’ll be any better, brother.”
“I’m not worried about the polar bears even though I think they outnumber people up there.” Finn drummed his fingers on the space-gray tabletop. “It’s the fact that everyone off settlements is required to carry a gun. I don’t want to be mistaken for a bear in our snow camo.”
“You actually did research?” Roman, sitting off to Wyatt’s left, joked.
“Not everyone is a walking encyclopedia like you,” Finn casually shot back. “But Jessica said she’s sending us just south of the North Pole, so yeah, I’d like to know what I’m walking into.”
“So, aside from bears that should only be seen on the side of a Coke can—what else should we worry about when we head out?” A.J. leaned back in his leather seat.
“For starters, you’re not allowed to die there. Bodies take forever to decompose because of the climate. The permafrost will mummify you.” Roman maintained a straight face, but hell, it was true.
Wyatt had also done his due diligence on their assigned target location: Longyearbyen, a coal-mining town in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.
What Roman said was true about permafrost and mummified bodies, but the main reason the rule was put in place long ago was the fear that cryogenically preserved bodies might still contain traces of deadly viruses, like Spanish flu.
These days, all corpses were shipped to the mainland for burial.
“I quite like that policy. Don’t fuckin’ die on me out there.” Wyatt gripped the chair arms, anxious to get a move on it once they’d been briefed.
“I don’t know about you,” Chris began, “but I’m ready to get out there and operate.”
A.J. flipped his American flag ball cap backward. “Of course you’d say that. You act like an FNG. Kicking our asses whenever we run like you’re back at BUD/S with something to prove.”
“It pays to be a winner, brother,” Chris repeated a common SEAL motto. “And really, if you’re worried about your abilities to operate in the cold, maybe you ought to head back to Kodiak Island and get some training in.”
Cold-weather SEAL training in Alaska had become mandatory after 9/11 for Teamguys. Most civilians thought of the Middle East as hot—they didn’t realize it got damn cold in those mountains in Afghanistan, too.
Their missions hadn’t been in the Arctic polar-bear-cold in years. Looks like they were due. It’d been forty-five days since they’d gone on a mission, and Wyatt would go wherever the hell POTUS wanted.
“You think you’re funny, don’t ya?” A.J.’s Alabama drawl kissed the syllables as he spoke.
“Well, my trigger finger is itchy,” Wyatt admitted.
“I need to get the hell out of the city.” He needed to do what he did best, which was operate.
Hunt bad guys. Wipe them off the planet.
It wasn’t like he had anyone to go home to.
No one on Echo did, so he preferred his guys go out whenever possible, let Bravo stay home with their loved ones.
A.J. stabbed a finger in the air Wyatt’s way. “You volunteered Echo Team, didn’t you?”
His team didn’t have a choice but to suit up, but he loved to give his brother a hard time. “Of course. And you’re grateful, don’t pretend otherwise.”
The door to the conference room opened a moment later, and Jessica walked in, followed by Harper Brooks.
Like Jessica, Harper had been with the CIA.
She’d worked on the op that brought Luke and his now-wife together.
She’d nearly died in the process, too. It wasn’t until after Luke tied the knot in 2019 that they’d brought Harper on to help out.
Harper accompanied Echo Team every time they spun up, usually every mission where all ten guys were on an op as well.
“And what were you boys talking about?” Harper set her laptop on the conference table and Jessica synced it with the screen on the wall.
“They were bitching about the cold.” The guys loved to joke around, but Wyatt preferred that any day of the week to being uptight, especially in their line of work.
“Some of us were, not all,” Chris corrected and shot Harper a wink.
Harper rolled her eyes at Chris’s lame attempt at flirting. He didn’t have a chance with her, but hell, he wasn’t a quitter.
Harper was smart and gorgeous. Long and wavy dark hair with a few new reddish-toned highlights. High cheekbones. Full lips. Wyatt didn’t blame his guys for being attracted to her, but he’d prefer they keep things platonic. It’d be better for his men to stay single. Mission-focused.
Harper shifted her hair behind her ears, her lips teasing into a smile, then crossed her arms over her graphic tee, this one sporting a black-and-white picture of Einstein. She usually dressed more casually and hip than Jessica.
Well, lately, Jessica was donning pregnancy clothes. She and Asher finally became a couple after years of back-and-forth tension. Six months pregnant with twins, and on her petite frame, she was more stomach than anything else.
“Maybe sit down?” Wyatt stood and pulled out Jessica’s chair for her.
“Aren’t you the gentleman?” Finn smirked while folding a piece of paper into a stealth fighter.
Wyatt shot Finn his notorious Bite me look as Jessica slowly lowered herself into the chair.
“Thanks for getting here so fast. Bravo’s scattered all over the East Coast right now, and we need you guys on a jet within the hour,” Jessica explained as Wyatt sat back down. “Luke won’t make it to the office in time, so we’ll go ahead and get started.”
Harper clutched the back of the chair and peered around the table at the team. “Technically, we’re being hired as Scott and Scott. Unofficially, this mission is a personal request from POTUS.”
“What’s the mission?” Wyatt straightened in his chair, intrigued.
An architectural design of a facility mostly buried in a snowy mountainside appeared on the screen that occupied the main wall in the room.
“The ‘doomsday’ vault,” Roman said, clearly recognizing the structure. “The place stores seeds in protective chambers in the event of natural disasters or war.”
“Right.” Harper clicked to another aerial view of the facility.
“The world’s agricultural practices have improved as technology has advanced.
We’ve accomplished larger-scale crop production, but in the process, we’ve decreased biodiversity.
Today, as few as thirty crops make up ninety-five percent of the world’s food supply, which makes our agriculture susceptible to threats like diseases and drought.
While there are more than a thousand of these gene banks throughout the world, many have been destroyed by natural disasters or war.
Svalbard was chosen specifically because of its remote and safe location—an icy wilderness.
Their goal is to eventually house a copy of every seed that exists.
In addition, other countries use the vault as a backup storage facility.
To put it simply, this place is basically our insurance policy against starvation. ”
“Yesterday morning, Roland Nilsson was taken from his hotel room. He’s an American contractor with Cyber X Security who’d been conducting a security systems update to the seed vault,” Jessica said as Harper showcased a male in his mid-to-late forties.
Brown hair with threads of silver throughout.
A trimmed beard and mustache. Sharp blue eyes.
“The hotel cameras caught a partial image in the lobby of his abductor, and we’re running his face through our systems to see if we can get a match. ”
“You thinking someone is planning to force Nilsson to hack the vault’s security to get inside, and what, steal seeds?” Wyatt asked.