CHAPTER 23
Cole
We park the truck a half mile back on a logging road that doesn’t show up on consumer mapping apps, which is exactly why Josie flagged it when she was routing our approach. The access road to the property is the only vehicle entry point and we’re not using it.
The dark of night in the city is different from dark in the Cascades.
There’s no ambient light because even if the moon broke through cloud cover, the fir and hemlock trees are so thick, nothing filters through.
The temperature has dropped ten degrees since we left Seattle, and somewhere in the dark ahead of us, Tessa is running out of time.
I don’t think about that. I can’t afford to.
We pull the thermal dispersal suits from the equipment bag and step out into the dark to put them on.
They go on under our tactical gear—thin enough that they layer without bulk, with a small toggle mechanism on the left forearm.
In my hands they feel like nothing, which is exactly the point.
You’d never know what they were capable of by looking at them.
Dozer’s voice comes through the earpiece the moment I pull mine on, clear as if he’s standing next to me rather than sitting in his climate-controlled office in Miami. He looped in with us about ten minutes ago.
“Okay, children, listen up,” he says, and even now, even with everything pressing down on me, the deep cadence of his voice is stabilizing.
“What you’re wearing is the single-most sophisticated piece of field equipment currently in existence that no government on earth has access to yet, so try not to get it shot up. ”
“No promises,” Reid mutters, working his arms into the suit.
James “Dozer” Burney is the reason these suits exist. He’s a former NASA scientist who spent years developing intelligent software for the International Space Station before Kynan McGrath poached him with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
He built BOB with Bebe Grimshaw, but the thermal dispersal suits are entirely Dozer’s.
He holds a PhD from Stanford and has an IQ that makes the rest of us feel slow.
But he’s not all brains as he was a former all-pro linebacker, which means he can kick ass with the best of us.
He runs R&D out of a small Jameson office in Miami now, which means tonight he’s with us the only way he can be.
Through the earpiece.
“The membrane is woven into the outer layer,” he continues.
“Toggle activates a dispersal field that redistributes your body heat laterally across the surface rather than letting it bloom outward. To a thermal scope you’ll read as ambient temperature…
nothing more than background noise.” A pause.
“You’ve got a two-hour window before bleed-through starts, so don’t dawdle. ”
“Now that I can promise,” Reid mutters, checking his toggle.
“How confident are you in it?” I ask Dozer as I pull on my gloves.
His voice is deep, rumbling with confidence. “I’d stake my reputation on it.”
“I’m asking about our lives, Dozer.”
A beat. “I’d stake those too,” he says, and his tone has shifted—no humor in it now. “It works, Cole. Go get her.”
I toggle on the suit and a faint vibration moves through the fabric, there and then gone. Sully does the same, then Reid. We check one another without being asked, an old habit that doesn’t require instruction.
Sully drops the tailgate and we work the cargo straps in the dark, four of them securing the drone case to the truck bed.
The latches release with a series of soft metallic clicks that seem loud in the mountain quiet.
The case is custom—Dozer’s design, like most items that come out of the equipment division—a matte-black shell that looks like it could survive a vehicle rollover, which it has, once, in circumstances none of us talk about anymore.
“Drone is free,” Sully says.
Marcus Webb is our drone operator sitting back at headquarters in Seattle and he came to Jameson from the air force, where he flew surveillance missions over terrain that made the western Cascades look like a city park.
“Systems good,” he says quietly, reading the electronics remotely.
The rotors spin up—a low hum and a small gust of wind—then the drone lifts off the truck bed in a smooth vertical rise. It hovers for a moment at chest height and then it climbs again—straight up, fast, gone into the dark above the tree line in under ten seconds.
“Drone is up and over the cabin,” Josie says in my ear, her voice controlled and precise. “Holding at four hundred feet, outside audio range. Thermal feed is live and I’m counting signatures now.”
“Copy,” I say.
Reid sets up a monitor on the tailgate, and we watch the drone’s thermal camera render the property below in the false color palette of heat imaging—cool blues and greens for the environment, the bright orange-white bloom of human bodies moving through it.
Six signatures. I count them myself, even though I know Josie is doing the same in the sub-basement of the Jameson building.
“Malik,” I say.
“Here,” he says, his voice holding steady because he’s been in worse situations than this and knows panic is just wasted energy. Five months in a Syrian desert hole will do that to a person. “We have the same feed you have. Talk me through your read when you’re ready.”
I do a final check of my own kit. My primary is a suppressed assault rifle with a clip-on, night-vision adaptor, and I’ve got a Glock as my sidearm, strapped to my thigh.
Two flash bangs on the left side of my vest, a breaching ram at my back.
I run my hands over everything once in the dark—magazine seated, safety off, suppressor tight.
Reid and Sully are similarly armed except Sully carries a fixed blade on his left forearm.
“We’re on the move,” I tell Malik.
We move into the tree line using specialty goggles, the world rendered in the flat green monochrome of night vision.
The ground is soft with years of needle fall, which helps with sound.
Branches reach across our path and we move under them rather than push through them.
We place our feet with intention and despite my desperate need to reach Tessa, we don’t rush.
We move slowly and we move correctly, because surprise is going to be the difference between our three versus their six.
“Okay… I’ve double-checked and verified six heat signatures on the property, all human,” Josie says, and I’m grateful we don’t have to deal with guard dogs. “Two exterior. Four in the structure.”
Tessa’s one of them, so that means we’re dealing with five hostiles before I can get to her.
“One signature is stationary,” she says. “Inside the cabin, north room. The others are all mobile.”
Tessa.
Stationary means restrained. I know exactly what that means and I file it in a place I’m not going to open until this is over, because if I open it now, I won’t be able to do what needs to be done. She needs the operator right now. She needs me cold, precise and functional.
“Exterior positions?” Sully asks, his voice barely above a breath.
“One covering the access road,” Josie says over the comms. “Northeastern corner of the property. One on the south side, mobile, running a patrol pattern. Cycle looks like approximately four minutes.”
We’re close enough now that the cabin is visible through the trees—a low structure, single story, one light burning behind blackout curtains on the north side. A black SUV sits in the clearing near the front.
I’m doing the math on approach vectors, on the patrol cycle, on how long it will take Sully to cover the distance to the access road guard, when it happens.
A scream.
It cuts through the dark and the trees and the two hundred yards between us and the cabin and it hits me like a physical impact—one short, raw sound that is unmistakably Tessa and then silence, which is somehow worse.
I’m moving before I’ve decided to move, intent only on barreling through the door and saving her. I’m brought to a dead stop by two sets of hands on me. Reid’s got my upper arm in a vise grip, Sully locked around my waist.
“Don’t do it,” Reid says, voice low and hard.
“They’re hurting her.” The words come out flat, scraped clean of emotion.
“I know.” He doesn’t let go.
“Reid—”
“Not yet,” Sully growls low with quiet. “We’re not ready. We go now, we compromise the approach and we get her killed.”
“They’re hurting her,” I say again, because I don’t have anything else.
“Yes,” Reid says, and his grip on my arm doesn’t ease. “Which means they don’t have what they want yet. They need her talking, Cole. They will not kill her until she talks.”
I stand in the tree line with my teammates restraining me, Tessa’s scream still ringing in my skull, and I make the hardest decision I’ve made in my life.
I relax my body. “You got thirty seconds,” I say, knowing that’s unreasonable.
“Two minutes,” Sully says, letting go of his hold on me. “We do this right.”
I release a long breath and put everything I’m feeling into a box that I must close up tight. I become who I was trained to be, because that’s what she needs from me right now. Not the man who loves her but the operator who’s going to save her.
“Josie,” I say. “Patrol cycle on the south guard.”
“He’s at the far end of his pattern,” she says immediately. “You have approximately three minutes twenty before he’s back in play.”
“Reid, south guard is yours. Sully, access road. Simultaneous on my mark.” I look at both of them. “Silent. Clean. We don’t alert the interior.”
They both nod.
“I’ll move to the cabin on your confirmations. Stack on the front. Sully comes around to the back after he’s secured his man.” I look at the structure through the trees. “Josie, the moment Reid and Sully are ready, I need you to loop the cabin’s exterior cameras.”
“Already working on it,” she says. “I’ll have them on a thirty-second delay. They’ll be watching old footage.”
“Dozer,” I say.
“Right here,” he says from Miami.
“Thank you for the suits.”
A pause. “Bring her home, Cole.”
I look at Reid. I look at Sully. Two of the best operators I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with the best. We don’t say anything to one another, but it’s understood that they’re putting their lives on the line for someone I love.
They both nod to me and then dissolve into the dark, moving with the fluid silence of men who have done this in places far more unforgiving than a Cascade foothill property. I watch them go and then I move toward the cabin, low and fast through the tree line, closing the distance in the darkness.
Forty seconds is a long time to wait, but then Reid’s voice comes over the comms. “South guard is down.”
Another eighty seconds is an eternity, but I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear Sully’s voice. “Access road clear.”
“Cameras still on loop,” Josie says. “You’re blind to them.”
Now it’s showtime.
I run low to the cabin wall, trusting my teammates are approaching from their directions. I press my back to the exterior siding, listening to the muffled sound of voices inside just barely audible through the structure. I can’t make out words.
I creep to the front door, test the handle with two fingers. Unlocked, or close enough that it won’t matter. The wood looks thin.
Reid appears at my left shoulder, breathing controlled, rifle up, and then Sully ghosts around the south corner of the building. He holds up two fingers, then points toward the rear.
He’ll take the back door on my breach through the front. I nod and he disappears.
I look at Reid and he lifts his chin. I’m ready.
I think about Tessa in that room… waiting, probably in pain and terrified out of her mind.
Hold on, I think. Just a few more seconds.
I count down in my mind and when I reach the three-second mark, Sully’s voice comes across as soft as a summer breeze in the comms. “I’m in place.”
“On my mark,” I whisper low. “Three… two… one…”
I kick the front door hard with the heel of my boot, channeling all of my fury. It bursts inward, splinters exploding in all directions, and I’m through it before it’s fully open. Reid’s a half step behind me.
Two guards—left and right—both reacting, both reaching, but both so stunned they’re a half second too slow.
Reid takes the left man with a controlled strike that drops him against the wall, following through to the floor with a knee to the spine.
I take the right man with the stock of my rifle across the jaw—one clean movement that causes bones to pulverize—and he goes down.
If he ever gets back up, he’ll be drinking through a straw for the next eight weeks.
I surge toward the closed door, behind which I know Tessa is sitting.
I abandon my rifle for my Glock and kick the door open with even more force than my initial breach.
I take it in all at once… a hook in the ceiling beam and Tessa hanging from it, hooded, stripped to her underwear.
The sight of her hits me like a round to the chest but I don’t stop moving.
Pelham.
He’s across the room, two feet from Tessa with a stun device in his hand. He’s the only one in the room still standing and he knows it. His eyes move from me to Reid to the two men on the floor through the doorway, and I can see him mentally calculating his odds.
Pelham reaches for the sidearm at his hip and I don’t hesitate.
I put a round right through his thigh and Pelham goes down hard, his gun skittering across the floor. He hits the ground with a grunt, his hand going to his leg, and he looks up at me from the floor with surprise in his expression.
It shouldn’t surprise him.
He hurt Tessa and he’s lucky that’s all he gets from me. His hand starts to creep down his leg… I’m guessing to a gun he has strapped to his ankle.
“You should go for it,” I say, lips curving into a daring smile and my gun leveled straight at his forehead. “I dare you to.”
He doesn’t.