Cindy Dees: Special Forces: The Spy

The van pulled out of the parking lot and turned right. That would be south on Maple Street. They went straight for what she estimated to be five minutes, and then they turned left. A few minutes, another right turn and then they accelerated to highway speed. Maybe Bayou Black Drive heading west out of town?

Which would be ironic. That road would take them right past the unmarked turnoff to the Medusas’ secret facility, where her teammates were gathering for today’s training.

A sense of unreality washed over her. Surely, she was not being kidnapped by Iranian terrorists. This had to be a bad dream. It couldn’t be happening to her. Was that shock lowering its protective fog over her brain? It felt just the way her instructors had described it. Everything was happening at a distance. Muted. Not really touching her.

One of the men admonished the driver in Farsi, but she didn’t understand the command. In a second, she felt the vehicle slow down to a more sedate speed. Piper frowned. What on earth did Iranians want with her? She’d never had anything to do with that part of the world before—had never served or even traveled there and had no particular expertise on the region beyond reading her daily intelligence brief. What was going on here? She had to be missing something critical—

Something heavy smashed painfully into the back of her head, and she toppled forward as everything went dark.

Zane Cosworth swore silently, wincing involuntarily as the terrorist calling himself Yousef clocked the woman prisoner on the back of the head with the butt of his AK-47. “Don’t kill her,” he snapped at the guy, the most volatile of the bunch.

“Shut up, Amir. I didn’t like how she was looking at me,” Yousef snarled back.

An urge to return the favor and clock the bastard upside the head made his hands twitch. Zane balled them into fists at his sides.

Amir was the name he’d used to infiltrate these SOBs’ sleeper cell. Not that they were sleeping after this morning’s little stunt.

They were a frustrating bunch, closemouthed and stingy with information for him, the new guy on the team. He was the only actual American among them, and he was convinced it was the sole reason he’d been brought on board. They called upon him to interact with other Americans and used him as their errand boy in any public situation where their accents might draw attention.

But that also meant he was completely expendable if he offended these guys or got in their way of whatever the hell their actual end goal was.

The team’s leader, Mahmoud, was definitely taking instructions from someone who communicated via encrypted cell phone, or occasionally via a Dark Web site that was even more heavily encrypted.

Rolling his eyes at Yousef, Zane leaned over the woman, ostensibly to check her pulse. He grabbed her right wrist with his left hand while surreptitiously slipping the ring off her fourth finger with his other hand and palming the piece. No way in hell could he let his compatriots discover that this woman was a West Pointer. If he was gauging Mahmoud correctly, the guy would kill her instantly.

Mahmoud said practically nothing about his personal beliefs, but he made no secret of despising Americans, particularly military members.

Zane slipped the ring into his pocket. He was seriously grateful that chance had thrown a female soldier in his path this morning. What she was doing at some elementary school in a small town in southern Louisiana, nowhere near an active military base, he had no idea. Call it a small act of God that had gone his way.

Not that he was a whole lot happier about throwing a soldier to the lions than he would be about doing it to some random civilian woman.

But he’d been forced to make the best of an impossible situation.

Of the four women cowering on the floor in the school’s front office, she’d looked to be by far the youngest and fittest of the bunch. Naming her as the target had been the least awful choice under the circumstances. Which wasn’t saying much.

Honestly, he’d feared that if he told the others he didn’t see their target in the office, where she normally worked as an assistant principal, they would start shooting kids to get the woman to reveal herself.

Mahmoud was a cagey bastard and had barely shared any information with any of his men about this fiasco. He’d briefed the cell members only about an anonymous woman they were supposed to find and kidnap.

Zane hadn’t thought it was enough detail to pass on to his superiors. He’d assumed Mahmoud and his boys would spend days or weeks finding the target, doing surveillance on her, picking the perfect spot to abduct her and then launching an operation to kidnap the woman.

Zane thought he had plenty of time to find out who the woman was, slip away from the other men and send a message to his superiors about this little operation. It galled him to have been outmaneuvered by a freaking terrorist like this.

Mahmoud also hadn’t given the team any indication whatsoever that today would be the actual snatch.

Zane had been nearly as shocked as the teachers and kids of Southdown Elementary School when they’d piled out of the van for real, armed with actual weapons and ammunition.

Mahmoud had passed around a picture and name of the target, Persephone Black—whoever the hell she was—in the van as they turned into the school parking lot. Zane hadn’t even had time to send an emergency text to his handlers to let them know who the target was and that an attack was imminent before Mahmoud had ordered them out of the van and barged into a flipping elementary school, armed to kill.

The picture itself had been informative. It was fuzzy and taken from a distance. The woman had been with a man on a crowded street that looked like some place in Europe. She was looking over her shoulder at something, and the shot of her face had been snapped in that moment. For all the world, it looked like a surveillance photo taken by someone following the couple.

Did that mean Mahmoud and his men were in the US on behalf of some foreign government with an intelligence service of its own? Iran was the obvious candidate, given that they sounded like native Farsi speakers.

Regardless, they were some sort of black-ops team, and they’d proved this morning that they were not averse to using violence.

As soon as he’d heard that the real target was out sick, he’d known he had a big problem. Mahmoud and his boys wouldn’t hesitate to shoot up a school full of little kids in retaliation for their victim being absent.

He felt really bad for this woman he’d inaccurately fingered as the target. He glanced down at her, crumpled on the floor of the van at his feet, and silently vowed to make it up to her somehow.

One thing Zane hated worse than just about anything else was being forced into a no-win choice. And God knew he’d faced one of those already today. He could either go along with assaulting a school, snatching a woman and scaring the hell out of a bunch of kids...or he could blow his cover, and throw away months’ worth of work gaining Mahmoud’s trust and worming his way inside what Zane’s superiors believed to be a dangerous and violent sleeper cell.

He’d very nearly gone ahead and turned his weapon on his coconspirators to take them out this morning. The one thing that had stopped him was being in an elementary school. The possibility of an innocent child being hit in the cross fire was the only reason any of these bastards were still alive.

If he just knew who they were, he would end this farce right now.

He did know one thing about them. They would never say anything under interrogation. They were all fanatic enough to die before giving up even their names.