Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Zenko stirred, and a jolting pain streaked through his body.
Holy freaking shit, moving fucking hurt.
He cradled his head in his hands, but holding it steady didn’t stop the world from spinning around him.
Sounds came from a distance. Shit, was he underwater or in a bubble?
Swaying where he sat, he patted down his body.
Weapon, night vision goggles, mags, his body armor still in place.
Scrubbing the heel of his hand into his eye, he carefully braved opening his eyelids.
“Shit.”
His jaw dropped as he took in the devastation and destruction around him. The building lay in ruins. Rubble, metal, and concrete piled up where there had stood walls and furniture a couple of minutes before. “Ow.”
“Ambra One, report?”
Fuck, was there someone calling him? There was, wasn’t there? That was definitely not just his imagination. The repeated call of his JSOC task force signature for this mission dragged him back from the blackness that threatened to pull him back under.
“Ambra One?” The worry-filled voice reached his ears again. “I swear to fuck if you are screwing with me. Report, asshole. How copy?”
Zenko pulled his tongue off the roof of his mouth and tried to answer. He clicked the comms device on his shoulder. How the hell was that not broken?
“Go ahead, TOC.”
He cleared his throat and spat out grit and dust before taking a sip of water from his pack.
Zenko could picture his task force commander, Noble Bauer, pacing back and forth between the computer desks of their base command tactical operations center in Turkey.
He’d known his swim buddy long enough to have a pretty fucking good idea what was happening a couple of thousand miles away.
Noble would be wearing a path into the floor while cursing Zenko with every creative insult he had picked up during their years in the Teams, especially after he had scared the shit out of him by taking too damn long to answer his comms.
“How copy, Ambra One?”
“Solid copy.” The croak was still barely audible, even to his ears, but it was obviously loud enough, as the cheers and hollers from the tactical command center could be heard in his earpiece a couple of thousand miles away. “Target eliminated.”
“The building is eliminated, too, Ambra One. What part of covert did you misunderstand?” The voice from tactical operations command came through on Zenko’s earpiece, as clearly as if he was in the next room.
His boss sounded pissed, but the sharp edge that had been in Noble’s voice while he repeatedly demanded a response had eased now that Zenko was finally answering him.
Zenko knew that particular tone well enough after years at Noble’s side.
The grumpy asshole could bitch at him all he wanted; hearing Zenko’s voice had taken some of the worry out of him.
“Now, when have you ever known me to be quiet about anything, TOC?” Zenko muttered.
“I didn’t know the fucker was wearing a suicide vest.” He pushed at the rubble covering his legs, wincing as slivers of pulverized rock dug into his palms. How the hell was he missing his gloves and nothing else?
Zenko clicked his comms unit again. “Ambra Two, report?”
“Ambra Two, clear,” Drax Mitchell, Zenko’s second in command for this mission, reported.
From the direction of the transmission and the position they had established before Zenko entered the building, Drax should still be on his perch on the rooftop nearby, exactly where the stubborn bastard was supposed to be.
“Ambra Three, report?” Zenko queried of his other teammate.
“Ambra Three, clear. Get your ass in gear, Ambra One, we’ve got movement down here, or do you need us to dig your ass out of there?” Reese Wagner responded immediately, and Zenko heaved a sigh of relief he didn’t know he’d been holding as his teammate, who had been closest to the blast, answered.
Now that Zenko had confirmation about both his teammates, he could concentrate on getting himself out of the rubble. “TOC, Ambra One moving now.”
“Ambra One, drone footage shows you have tangos incoming on the west side,” another voice broke into the conversation. “Can you exit from another direction?”
“TOC, Ambra One, what the hell?” Zenko muttered. “If you are looking at drone footage, then you can see there isn’t much of a building for me to exit from. I’m climbing over shit to find a fucking way out. It’s almost like, I don’t know, someone blew the building to hell and back.”
Thank Christ for knee protectors, Zenko winced and silently cursed as he ripped his hands open to get himself free of the rubble. “There better not be seventy-two fucking virgins waiting for that asshole when he gets to the afterlife.”
“Move your ass, Ambra One, those tangos are less than two minutes out.” The bite in Noble’s order made Zenko wince.
He’d heard that particular tone enough times over the years to know his swim buddy was rapidly approaching the point where Noble’s pissed-off task force commander persona was going to beat out the relieved friend he also was.
Damn it, why did this sort of shit keep happening?
“Sir, yes, Sir,” Zenko grunted out. Reaching up, he tested a beam before using it to haul himself free of the rubble field.
“All Stations, TOC, get your collective asses to the extraction point.” His boss’s order wasn’t really necessary, but Zenko had worked beside Noble in the field long enough to know how much the man fucking hated being stuck behind a desk while other operators were outside the wire.
Keeping an eagle eye on their progress gave Noble something to do besides wear out the TOC floor while command marked off each point on the mission plan and tracked the team toward extraction.
Zenko smirked to himself, making things go boom and annoying the boss all in the same five minutes. Yup, it was a pretty good day.
“Ambra One?—”
“Jesus, TOC, this is Ambra One, untwist your fucking panties. I am fucking moving.” The whispered response was low enough not to carry.
His gut screamed at him to move; he didn’t need the command center telling him how dire his situation was.
He could hear the yelling and shouts of the oncoming mob on the street.
He did not want to get caught here. He forced himself to hold position until the timing was right. Moving too soon would get him killed.
“In five,” he whispered in the comms system, knowing that both Drax and Reese would cover his ass as he exited what was left of the house.
Zenko slipped from the destroyed building and, with swift and soundless steps, crossed the open expanse to the darkened corner of the compound wall.
“Ambra One, this is Two and Three approaching on your six.”
“Ambra Two, this is One, go ahead.” Zenko turned his head and watched Drax and Reese emerge silently from the darkness behind him, both men moving with the same practiced stealth that had kept the three of them alive on more missions than he cared to count.
Considering Drax stood six-three, and Reese topped out at six-six, watching two men that fucking big disappear into the shadows and reappear without making a sound never stopped being impressive.
His shoulder protested as Zenko found hand and footholds in the compound wall and hauled himself upward, but he ignored the ache and scrambled over the top with considerably less grace than he would normally have managed.
He didn’t give a shit how pretty the climb looked as long as he made it without needing either of them to haul his ass over.
His boots landed with an almost silent thud on the other side, and within seconds, Drax and Reese dropped lightly to the ground beside him.
Weapons at the ready, they crept along the wall until they reached the location with the shortest distance to cover. “TOC, this is Ambra One, how are we looking?”
“Good, if you go now. All heat signatures are surrounding the building you blew up.”
“TOC, Ambra One, I didn’t blow the building,” Zenko whispered into comms. “He was wearing a vest, jeez.”
Bunching their muscles, all three operatives sprinted out of the scant cover offered by the compound wall and aimed for the darkness provided by the desert night.
Their strike team had spent enough years operating in places like this to know how to make fuck-all cover work when they had no other choice, but slipping through without anyone realizing they had been there was always preferable to dealing with whatever trouble came looking once they were spotted.
“Ambra One, TOC, extraction point is ten klicks away, think you all can make it before dawn?”
“TOC, Ambra One, are you calling us slow?” The three operators found where they had stashed their gear.
Zenko started pulling out the dull fabric to wrap around his head, along with robes to help him blend in as he navigated this area of Syria to make it to the extraction point.
With his longer-than-regulation hair and beard and the tanned skin that came from spending years in countries where the sun was hotter than hell, he should look native enough to avoid close scrutiny.
Although with his six-foot-four frame, he had learned to slouch to blend in better.
Drax and Reese, at six-three and six-six, had also found ways to adapt to how large they looked when needed.