Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero Read online

  She took off the safety the way the Extremist had shown her, slipped the compact weapon into her jacket pocket, finger wrapped around the trigger.

  Pushing her way back out of the stall, Meg purposely didn’t look at the big mirror above the sinks. She refused to look at the reflection of her face, pale and grim, refused to think about the fact that these next few moments could well be her last. By pulling out that gun, she would be making herself a target, damn near begging to get herself shot and killed.

  But she’d do it. She’d kill Razeen if she had to. And if and when it came down to it, she’d even die herself. For Amy.

  Yes, the Extremists knew quite a lot about her.

  But they didn’t know everything.

  They didn’t know about John Nilsson.

  She yanked open the door, hung a sharp left, and went directly into the men’s room.

  Alyssa Locke missed her uniform.

  She hated waking up each day and staring into her closet. She despised having to decide which pants to wear with which blouse and which blazer.

  And then there was the matter of accessories. Locke wished she could wear a tie, but unfortunately the Annie Hall look had come and gone before she was out of grade school. So she also had to worry about whether or not to tie a scarf around her neck for a splash of color. Would that make her look too feminine, or would it counteract the message sent by her extremely sensible, flat-heeled shoes?

  Yes, she missed her uniform.

  She also missed the order and regulations, and the inherent respect that was so often absent in the civilian sector.

  But that was about all that Locke missed since resigning her commission as an officer in the U.S. Navy.

  What she didn’t miss was the frustration. Frustration caused by the knowledge that despite her talents and skills, despite the fact that she was the best sharpshooter in the entire U.S. military, she was destined to be kept far from the real action. Despite the fact that she could meet the fitness requirements, there was no chance in hell she’d ever be welcomed into the hallowed ranks of a spec-op group like the U.S. Navy SEALs.

  Simply because she’d been born without a penis.

  Not that she particularly wanted one.

  Locke smiled as she got into the elevator and headed skyward toward her office. Now, that wasn’t entirely true. She did happen to want one. At times, she wanted one quite badly, in fact. Unfortunately, though, penises came attached to men. And therein lay one of her biggest problems.

  Men wanted to own her.

  Alyssa Locke was a beautiful woman. She could state that without any ego involved. Why should her ego have anything to do with it? It was pure genetics that gave her green eyes, flawlessly smooth mocha-colored skin, and a face that combined the best features from all of her various African American, Hispanic, and white parents and grandparents.

  Sure, maybe she worked out to keep the body God gave her trim and in shape, but the basics were there to start with.

  Now, her skills as a shooter . . . That was something about which she could be extremely egotistical. And rightly so, because she was as good as it got. She’d honed that skill with hard work and endless practice, until hitting a target dead-on became as natural and effortless as taking a breath.

  Yeah, when it came to shooting, she was all that, and more.

  The FBI wouldn’t have sought her out for their top counter-terrorist unit if they didn’t think as much, too.

  And when the FBI recruiter said the magic words field work, Locke shook hands on the deal, resigned her commission, and went out shopping for black business suits and a pair of dark sunglasses.

  The elevator opened onto her floor, and she moved briskly down the hall, keeping eye contact with the mostly male agents to a minimum. She’d give a nod of acknowledgment if she knew them on a first-name basis. But God forbid she smile. The male interpretation of a friendly smile in the hall was somewhere between “I’m extremely interested, let’s have a drink after work” and “I want to jump your bones right here, right now.”

  She’d stopped smiling at a man—unless he was a close friend—right about the time she’d turned fifteen.

  She breezed into her office, opened the drawer of her desk, and dropped her fanny pack inside.

  Jules was already in. He’d poured her a cup of coffee and left it steaming in a mug atop her desk, bless his strange little soul. Even though it wasn’t morning, their day had just begun.

  He stuck his head in the door, and today it was quite a head. FBI Agent Jules Cassidy had gone blond. Garishly, glaringly blond, with dark brown roots.

  The dye job and the new cut made him look about seventeen years old, which was exactly the idea. With his handsome baby face and vertically challenged stature, he could gain access to places more traditional FBI suits could never get into.

  “Any word?” he asked.

  Locke shook her head, settling behind her desk. “Nothing yet.” And she didn’t want to talk about it. “That nose ring real or—”

  “Nah. You think I would risk scarring this face?” He took it off as he came all the way into her office. He was wearing a silk shirt and leather pants that were impossibly tight. Amazingly tight. If she had a thing for gay seventeen-year-olds, she’d be in big trouble. “I was doing the club circuit—the early happy hour crawl—searching for Tony Ghilotti. I forgot I had it on.”

  “Find him?” she asked.

  “Nah. Son of a bitch’s long gone. I’m sure of it. But try telling that to the boss. . . .” He gazed at her, his brown eyes concerned. “I’m the one doing double shifts, but you’re the one looks like shit. Sleep much lately, girlfriend?”

  With anyone else, she would’ve lied. But this was Jules, so she shook her head. Over the past few months, they’d worked too closely together too often to keep any secrets.

  He watched as she took a sip of her coffee. “You know, it’s got to happen soon. And your sister’s going to be all right.”

  Locke nodded and smiled because he wanted her to nod and smile. “It’s the waiting that’s killing me,” she admitted.

  “Maybe you should take some time off,” Jules suggested. “Go hang out with her—”

  “Bad idea.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He ran his hand across the top of his head. “So. You hate the hair.”

  Locke had to laugh. “You are so vain,” she told him. “You know exactly how gorgeous you look, Mr. Fishing-for-a-compliment.”

  He grinned, turning to give her a view of his backside. “Check out my ass in these pants.”

  “Already did, thanks.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Thanks for the coffee,” she said. “Get out of my office.”

  “Hands up! Move it! Come on, hands high—up where I can see ’em!”

  Two of the men were standing by the sinks, two—Osman Razeen and the heavyset man—were still over by the urinals. They all looked up in surprise as Meg burst into the men’s room.

  “What is this—”

  “Freeze!” she shouted, holding the gun in both hands, the way she’d seen on cop shows on TV, shifting her aim from one group of men to the other. “Don’t move, don’t talk, don’t do anything but put your hands in the air! Now!”

  Oh, God, was she really saying this, really doing this?

  It worked. Four pairs of hands went up, and the heavyset man peed on his shoe.

  His pants were unzipped and . . .

  Oh, this was just perfect.

  She waved her gun at the men over by the sinks. First things first, then she’d deal with . . . other issues. “Get over with the others. Move it, let’s go!”

  They moved.

  The K-stani embassy men’s room was much larger—at least five times more so—than the women’s room. The walls were covered with blue tile, the floor a paler shade. Urinals lined one wall, the stalls were across from the sinks. There were no windows and only that one door.

  It was the perfect location for holding o
ff a siege.

  “Keep your hands high.” Meg quickly checked to make sure there was no one else in the room, no one hidden in one of the stalls.

  “Do you mind if I—”

  “Yes.” She cut the heavy man off. “Keep your hands up.”

  She wanted to apologize. So sorry for the humiliation but I can’t let you lower your hands, not even for that. . . . But she knew she couldn’t risk coming across as weak. She had to keep them believing that she knew how to use this gun, that she would use this gun if they threatened her.

  And she couldn’t let them lower their hands. Not if she wanted to stay alive.

  Sure, the ambassador’s staff weren’t supposed to carry weapons in the embassy. But there was also a rule stating that she wasn’t supposed to have a gun, either. And here she was. Fully armed and dangerous.

  “Do you honestly think you can take the Kazbekistani ambassador hostage inside his own embassy?” the heavy man asked. He was sweating, and Meg realized that he didn’t fear a hostage situation. He was afraid she had come here on a suicide mission, to gun them all down. Such were the ways of the violent world from which he’d come.

  Razeen was silent, just watching her, his dark gaze impossible to read, but another man spoke up. “Perhaps we could negotiate. If you would tell us what it is that you want . . . ?”

  “I want silence,” Meg told them sharply. “I want your hands in the air. I want you—” She pointed with her gun at the heavyset man in all his unzipped glory. “—to take a message to both your government and mine. I want all guards and police to stay far away, I want this entire floor cleared. If someone so much as touches this door, I’ll start shooting. You make sure they understand that—they breathe funny on the door, and these men are dead.”

  He nodded his understanding, his double chins wobbling.

  “Tell them,” Meg continued, “that I have a list of demands, but the only person I’ll consider negotiating with is Ensign John Nilsson of the U.S. Navy SEALs. Tell them to find him and bring him here, and then I’ll talk.”

  Please God, let John be somewhere close by . . .

  “Do you understand?” she asked.

  He nodded. “John Nilsson. U.S. Navy.”

  “He’s a SEAL. Make sure you tell them that.”

  “A SEAL,” he repeated obediently, his eyes longingly on the door.

  “Go.”

  Hands still high, the heavyset man took his various exposed parts and lunged for the door.

  And Meg sat down, her back to the tile wall, her gun on her remaining hostages.

  Waiting for John Nilsson to come and save the day.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Two

  LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE John Nilsson was on a mission. Under his leadership, a six-man team of SEALs had been ordered to break into an Iraqi compound and rescue Captain Andy Chang, a downed American fighter pilot.

  Getting inside would be easy. It was getting back out after their presence had been detected and an alarm had been raised that was going to be the hard part.

  Nils’s original plan had been to insert and extract without waking even the lightest sleeping Iraqi soldier. But—what a surprise—there were ten times as many soldiers in this compound as intel reports had indicated, and what was described as a sleepy little ill-equipped and poorly manned outpost was in truth a brightly lit, teeming center of activity, even at 0300.

  Going in after that pilot with only a six-man team would be little more than suicide.

  Still, he’d sent Ensign Sam Starrett and Petty Officer WildCard Karmody in to verify that the pilot was being held at this location. And at least naval intelligence had that much right. Sam and WildCard returned in short order with a report that Chang was indeed there. And, overachievers that they were, the SEALs Nils thought of as his best friends also came back with the complete layout of the compound.

  Nils lay just behind the scrub brush growing on a small rise and gazed at the roof of the two-story building through night vision glasses. That roof was the way Sam and WildCard had gotten inside undetected. It was the route his team would take, too.

  If this didn’t work, he was going to get hammered. He knew damn well that his correct response to the additional security was to accept failure. He should cut his losses, turn his team around, and slip back over the border.

  But he’d never been fond of losing. And accepting failure wasn’t the only option. Not when he’d prepared for exactly this possibility.

  Nils felt more than heard Senior Chief Petty Officer Wolchonok move beside him, and he glanced at the older man. Even clean of the camouflage greasepaint he currently wore, Stanley Wolchonok had a face only a mother could love—a mother, and an entire team of SEALs, who’d come to trust the senior chief with their very lives. There wasn’t a single man in SEAL Team Sixteen—including their CO, Lieutenant Tom Paoletti—who wouldn’t jump off the edge of the Grand Canyon without hesitation if the senior chief assured them they’d sprout wings midair and be able to fly safely to the other side.

  But right now Wolchonok was shaking his head. “Don’t even think about it, Lieutenant.”

  “I can get Chang out of there.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  Nils always thought God would have a voice like the senior chief’s. Deep and resonant and filled with such absolute certainty. And with just a hint of a Chicago accent. “As always, I appreciate your opinion, Senior Chief. But if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to try.”

  Wolchonok leaned closer, lowering his voice even more, speaking not as a senior chief to his commanding officer, but as an older, more experienced man to one much younger. “Johnny, come on, you know what this is. It’s the no-win scenario. You know as well as I do that you win by admitting defeat. Don’t screw this up for yourself.”

  Nils knew the senior chief was right. An officer needed to assess a situation and make decisions based on what was best for his men. But they were SEALs, and being SEALs meant that sometimes they had to take risks. It also meant that sometimes they had to cheat the rules. He looked back through the NVs. “I’m not ready to admit defeat.”

  Wolchonok gave him a look designed to make men squirm—men with far higher rank than Nilsson. “Cut the Hollywood heroics, Lieutenant. This is only a training op, and today’s lesson is all about backing down. You lose Chang, yeah, but you avoid a total goatfuck—and a little black mark next to your name. By walking away, you keep the Iraqis from getting their hands on six more hostages—a situation that would be politically damaging to the United States. Need I remind you that we’re undermanned and—”

  “How many more men do you figure we’ll need?” Nils put down the NVs and met Wolchonok’s evil eye. He knew damn well that this was only a training op, that this was, indeed, the no-win scenario that, as SEALs, as officers, as human beings, they were forced to come up against again and again out in the real world.

  However, none of this was real.

  They were in the California desert, not the Middle East. Those weren’t real Iraqis he’d been watching through his night vision glasses, they were jarheads—Marines—assigned to participate in this exercise in futility. The assault weapons they were all using didn’t fire bullets. Instead they fired lasers and were hooked into an intricate computer system. If a soldier was “killed” by a laser “bullet,” he’d get a small jolt and his weapon would be disabled by the computer and would no longer fire.

  Captain Andy Chang of the U.S. Air Force was really Captain Andy Chang, but after they finished here tonight, whether Nils and his SEALs managed to rescue him or not, he was going to grab a beer with the rest of the guys before heading home to his pregnant wife.

  The most real thing about this entire scenario was that black mark Wolchonok had mentioned—the one that would show up on Nilsson’s fitness report if he tried this and failed.

  He had, however, absolutely no intention of failing.

  “I thi
nk six more men will do it,” Nils continued, still holding the senior chief’s gaze. “Four to create some well-placed diversions and a couple of snipers to even up the odds if and when the shooting starts.” He switched on his radio, pulling the lip mike closer to his mouth. “Team Bravo, stand ready.”

  Wolchonok blinked. And then he laughed—just a short burst of disbelief as his eyes narrowed and he tried to see inside Nilsson’s head.

  As Nils gazed back at him, he couldn’t keep a smile from escaping.

  And then Wolchonok smiled, too. Senior Chief Stan Wolchonok had a smile about as bright as a sunrise after a solid week of rain. It transformed his butt-ugly, weathered face into a thing of true beauty.