Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Shaun climbed to his feet and immediately regretted waiting so damn long to move.
Five hours on the floor had left his legs stiff, his back protesting, and his eyes stinging from staring at maps until contour lines were probably burned into the backs of his eyelids.
He stretched until something popped between his shoulder blades, then rolled his neck while he looked down at the mess they had created around them.
Maps covered most of the floor, satellite images were tucked along their edges, and handwritten notes marked the routes they had already rejected.
He didn’t mind the planning or the constant double-checking.
Being prepared and having backup plans for their backup plans had kept him alive more times than he could count.
But after five hours of barely moving from where he, Zenko, and Drax had been working, his ass had officially gone numb.
“Coffee?”
“I could fucking kiss you right now,” Drax muttered without looking up from the map where he was marking extraction points for each of their exfil plans.
Before Shaun could come up with a suitably smart-assed response, Zenko reached across and smacked Drax on the back of the head. “Ow. Fuck, what the hell, Zen?”
Shaun’s breath caught when Zenko looked straight at him and followed the smack to Drax’s head with a grumbly growl of, “Mine.”
His stomach did a funny flip-flop before heat flooded through him so damn fast he had to start counting backward from one hundred to keep his dick from hardening.
It was ridiculous. Drax had made a smart-assed comment about kissing him over fucking coffee, and Zenko knew damn well there was nothing behind it, but that didn’t matter to the possessive asshole currently staking his claim in front of half the team.
Shaun should probably have been annoyed.
Instead, every primitive part of him that liked knowing exactly where he stood with someone sat up and paid attention.
Shit, possessive Zenko...?
What a fucking turn-on.
Zenko winked up at him. Oh, the fucker knew exactly what he was doing.
Fine. Two could play that game. Rather than hide the reaction he’d been trying to control, Shaun held his gaze as he adjusted his dick through his pants and watched that smug expression falter.
Zenko swallowed hard, his eyes dropping for a split second before snapping back to Shaun’s face.
There.
Much fucking better.
He gave him a slow smirk and headed for the coffee.
“Jesus, keep it in your pants and behave.” Noble’s voice came from directly behind him. “I swear to God it feels like I’m running a freaking crib in the red-light district of Soho, not an elite team of special forces operators.”
Shaun damn near jumped out of his skin. He’d been so busy enjoying the bob of Zenko’s Adam’s apple when he swallowed that Noble had managed to walk right up behind him without registering on his radar.
That wiped the smirk off his face pretty damn fast. He turned, finding Noble standing close enough that there was absolutely no excuse for him having missed his approach.
Shit. Some operator you are, dude.
“Sorry.”
“Get the damn coffee,” Noble growled as he dropped into a squat beside Zenko and pointed to a spot on the map. “We have confirmation the compound is here, just off Route 96, about halfway between Hesar and Bandar.”
Shaun took the hint and headed for the coffee machine, although he kept one ear on the conversation behind him as he found a mug and started filling it.
The confirmation changed things. Up until now, they had been building plans around intelligence and possibilities.
A confirmed location meant they were moving beyond the where and into the part that could get every one of them seriously fucked if somebody made the wrong call.
“How are we getting around the fact we have no permission to operate in Iran?” Zenko asked.
“Command doesn’t give a shit, but if we, or rather if you or Shaun get caught, then they will burn you,” Noble answered.
Shaun’s hand stopped halfway through reaching for another mug.
He’d known what signing on for this mission meant, and deniability sure as shit wasn’t anything new, but hearing Noble confirm it still landed differently.
If he and Zenko were caught inside Iran, nobody was coming forward to claim them.
Their government would deny all knowledge while the two of them became somebody else’s political problem.
What were two operators compared to the shitstorm of admitting a JSOC and NATO-led team had knowingly put boots on the ground inside Iran?
He looked over his shoulder toward Zenko before he could stop himself.
The possibility of being burned didn’t scare him nearly as much as the thought of one of them getting out while the other didn’t.
Drax dragged one finger along the map toward the Persian Gulf. “So, you are thinking mini sub?”
Shaun carried the mugs back toward them while Drax studied the route.
He’d heard there was nobody better at planning insertions and extractions, and after five hours on the floor with the man, he could believe it.
Drax didn’t simply stare at a map and pick the shortest line between two points.
He worked through terrain, access, and whatever could screw them on the way in or out, discarding routes before Shaun had finished considering them.
“Yes,” Noble answered. “It just so happens that the CIA has one not far from Kuwait City, and it is ours for the duration.” He paused for a second, his mouth twisting as if he already knew exactly how well the next part was going to go over. “With their engineers, of course.”
Shaun handed Drax one of the coffees before lowering himself back to the floor with his own.
Of course. Because illegally crossing into Iran in a mini sub wasn’t complicated enough without adding a couple of CIA babysitters to the mix.
He took a swallow and glanced at Zenko before letting the sarcasm bleed into his voice.
“What? You mean they don’t trust Zen and me to bring it back in one piece?”
“The CIA agents in this place wouldn’t trust you to take a piss by yourself without holding your dick to be sure you didn’t splash their shoes,” Noble told him. “So if we want to use their mini sub, then we need to take their engineers.”
Shaun snorted into his coffee, but the amusement disappeared when he looked at the man beside him. Something flashed through Zenko’s expression before the familiar operator blankness slammed into place.
Was that worry?
Shaun studied him for another second, trying to work out whether it was the CIA engineers themselves or having two unknowns along for the insertion that bothered him. Either way, he’d seen it, and the speed with which Zenko had buried the reaction told him it mattered.
“Yeah, I don’t trust them either.” Zenko glanced down at the map before looking back at Noble. “But I guess we don’t really have a choice.”
“Where are we setting up TOC?” Drax asked as his finger moved across the blue of the Persian Gulf and began tracing the coastline of Kuwait.
Shaun followed the movement, and his stomach clenched when his attention snagged on all that water between Kuwait and Iran.
Mini subs were not his favorite mode of transport, and the swim waiting for them at the other end wasn’t exactly improving matters.
He could do water. He had done water plenty of times before and would do it again whenever the mission required it, but knowing he could handle something didn’t mean he had to fucking like it.
Fucking typical. Rock was going to laugh his ass off when he heard Shaun had been loaned to another team and promptly assigned a water insertion.
Zenko, on the other hand, had spent years as a SEAL. The bastard had probably been dropped into oceans in the middle of the night often enough to consider swimming several miles through hostile water a pleasant day’s outing.
The rumble of voices around him felt different from Ghosts.
The accents were different, the insults sure as shit were different, and every man had his own routines as they checked facts or worked through weapons and equipment.
Yet, somehow, the differences had stopped registering after the first couple of hours.
There was the same easy camaraderie underneath it all, the same absolute familiarity with men preparing themselves and their gear for whatever waited at the other end of the flight.
Shaun had found himself falling into their rhythm without consciously trying, passing something over when a hand reached for it and shifting out of somebody’s way before being asked.
It had happened back at Red Squadron’s now-demolished base in Turkey, too, although he hadn’t understood then why slipping into their routines had felt so natural.
That realization sat a little differently now that he knew he would be working with them instead of Ghosts for however long it took to bring Sheridan in.
Earlier, being loaned out had felt too damn close to Rock deciding he had become a problem somebody else could deal with.
Sitting here surrounded by Red Squadron didn’t erase that kick in the teeth, but it did make him admit something he probably wouldn’t be saying out loud anytime soon. He fit here better than he wanted to.
“Max was thinking somewhere to the north of Kuwait City itself.” Noble’s voice drew Shaun’s attention back to where it should be, on mission planning.
“He found an old ruin in the Sabah Al-Ahmad Natural Reserve with enough space to land the helo and set up without drawing attention. We can send the drones out from there and execute the plan once we know exactly what we’re dealing with. ”
Drax shifted the map closer and studied the coastline for several seconds before tapping one location.