Cindy Dees - Special Forces - The Spy

He’d lived and worked with Mahmoud and his fellow psychopaths for months, and he still didn’t have any idea who they worked for or what their ultimate goal was. That was how closemouthed these men were.

Normally, Zane would pull the plug on an undercover op like this immediately and get the civilian victim out. Hell, he was on the verge of doing that very thing right now.

The only thing stopping him was that ring in his pocket. If the kidnapped woman was a West Pointer, maybe he could let this thing play out just a bit more—a few minutes or a few hours—and get his answers before he called in the big guns to take these jerks down.

Thing was, if Mahmoud and company did work for Iran, they would only be replaced by another sleeper cell of trained killers when US authorities took these guys out.

Hence the urgent need to know who they worked for and what their end goal was. He didn’t for a minute believe that kidnapping some woman from an elementary school was the primary reason this cell had infiltrated the United States.

They posed some much-greater national security threat. But what ?

Nope, he’d had no choice today. He had to throw this woman he’d never seen before under the bus and maintain his cover a little longer. He hated it, and he would do whatever he had to do to protect her.

Just a little while , he mentally promised her.

The unconscious woman beside him moved faintly and then subsided again. Yousef had hit her way too damned hard if she was still out cold. Zane knew from long experience in the field that if she was unconscious more than a few minutes, she would likely be out for the next couple hours.

Patience, Zane. Now was not the time to make his move to rescue her. He was probably her only chance of survival. But he would get one shot—and no more than one shot—at rescuing her. He had to wait until she was conscious, able to move fast and willing to cooperate with him.

He hoped to God she understood his choice and one day forgave him for it.

Did it make him a dreadful human being that he’d forced her into helping him figure out what these terrorists were up to? That he’d potentially sacrificed this woman’s emotional well-being, and maybe her life, to save many more lives down the road?

Hell, he was already a dreadful human being. As an undercover agent, he deceived people and lied for a living. He’d even done criminal acts in the name of keeping his covers. He drew the line at hurting or killing innocent victims, although he was skirting dangerously close to that line today. Hell, sometimes he wondered if he was even one of the good guys anymore.

He owed this woman huge. When the time was right, he silently promised her he would find a way to save her from these men.

But how...and when...he had no idea.

Scowling, he leaned back beside her slumped body. He propped an elbow casually on his upraised knee. “Anyone following us?” he asked Bijan, the youngest of the crew, who crouched at the dirty rear window of the van.

“No. We’re clear,” the kid answered.

Zane had to give these guys credit. They’d run the grab-and-go to perfection, managing their time on scene to the second and getting away moments before the first police car arrived. His certainty that they were military trained—more specifically, Special Forces trained—intensified.

His concern for the woman intensified, as well. Men like this wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if and when they figured out they had grabbed the wrong person.

He studied her face. She was pretty. Her hair was dark blond and her skin was smooth and slightly olive complexioned. The combination was unusual and striking. Her legs were lean in her blue jeans, and her shirt was currently twisted tight against some nice curves. Her fingers were long and slender with short, cracked fingernails.

Those fingernails surprised him. She looked put together enough to be the kind of woman to always have a perfect manicure. What did she do to beat up her hands like that?

“Pull over at the next gas station,” Mahmoud, the team leader, ordered Hassan, the driver.

It took a few minutes, but Zane felt the van decelerate. They pulled around to the side of a tiny rural gas station advertising with a hand-painted sign that it also sold beer, fishing bait and, more alarmingly, gator bait.

After a quick check to verify that the gas station had no surveillance cameras, Mahmoud and Yousef piled outside. Zane followed more slowly. The other men were already peeling off temporary decals on the side of the vehicle announcing it to be an air-conditioning service van. Meanwhile, Bijan used a screwdriver to change the rear license plate. When had these guys set up this van as a slick getaway vehicle?

Alarm slammed through him. Had they done it before he’d joined the team? Or had they done it behind his back?

Odds were they’d done it recently. Which was freaking scary. It meant they still didn’t trust him.

Which also meant that not only was his life in mortal danger, but the woman’s, as well.

The underlying tension that always hummed in his gut when he was undercover ratcheted up violently. He didn’t like this. Not one bit. Was he a prisoner in this van, too? How fine a tightrope was he walking with Mahmoud and his men? He’d been useful to them as long as they were trying to keep a low profile and not be noticed by the locals. But if they’d completed their mission, these men would go to ground or flee the country and not need his services any longer.

His intuition screamed that he was blown. That it was time to bug out.

Normally, he never went against his gut feelings. Over and over through the years, his gut had proved to be right. And right now, it was telling him in no uncertain terms to abandon this operation immediately . The feds had plenty of ammunition to arrest these men and put them away for a very long time after this morning’s stunt in the elementary school.

The authorities might never figure out what Mahmoud’s primary goal had been, but at least this particular terror cell would be off the street.

However, the woman changed everything. Zane couldn’t possibly bail out now. Not as long as these men held an innocent woman captive. An innocent women he had put into these violent men’s hands.

He mentally swore. He mustn’t do anything to arouse these guys’ suspicions. The danger of staying in this undercover assignment drove home hard, a punch in the gut that left him gasping.

Too tense to be still one more second, Zane walked around behind the van, pretending to stretch his legs. “Can I help with the signs?” he asked casually.

Mahmoud wadded up the last of the adhesive vinyl and tossed it in a trash can. He shoved a cigarette lighter down into the barrel, and a thin stream of smoke commenced rising from its contents. “No. We’re finished. As soon as Osted gets out of the bathroom, we’ll go.”

Zane nodded slowly, trying to look impressed. “You guys are good. I’m grateful you let me learn from you, almuelim alhakim .” He dropped in the Arabic phrase meaning “wise teacher” to gauge Mahmoud’s reaction.

The guy nodded shortly and looked vaguely less irascible than usual, acknowledging the compliment.

Zane guessed they were assets of VAJA—the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. But they never talked politics, not even in the most general of terms. They talked about European soccer and the weather for the most part. And such a degree of operational discipline scared the living hell out of him.

He strolled to the corner of the cinder-block building and, with a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him, surreptitiously dropped the woman’s class ring on the ground. There. One piece of evidence showing her to be a soldier erased. Now he just had to make sure she didn’t have some other form of ID on her—dog tags, or maybe a wallet with a military ID in it.