Geri Krotow - Navy Justice

He was her idea of beautiful, if the adjective could be applied to a man.

“I’m FBI now. I’ve been working undercover trying to break up a cell.”

FBI. That was the “government job” he had. On Facebook he never got specific.

So he’d been out of the active-duty Navy this entire time. She’d thought his murky job description was because of his SEAL designation.

You could have gotten together.

No. She’d dismissed her attraction to Brad. Or rather, locked it away. Months ago.

Hadn’t she?

He shook his head. “Damn, it wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

His profile was achingly familiar. Yet instead of the hardened strength she remembered, he gave off an air of uncertainty. Brad, vulnerable?

“How about some coffee?” She asked for him as much as for herself. She needed an immediate task to keep her thoughts where they belonged. If she was going to help Brad she needed to listen to his story instead of thinking about how sexy he looked standing in her kitchen.

* * *

“YOU’VE GOT UNTIL the police officer shows up. You can shower after I leave for work, wash and dry your clothes, make whatever food you need.” She handed him her largest mug, the one with the Navy JAG crest on it.

He raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement.

This was the man she’d come to understand first briefly in Cuba, and then Norfolk. He missed nothing; no detail was too minute to him.

“The cops?”

“I reported the explosion. They asked me to wait here until someone can take my report.”

“So I’m not safe here.”

“You’re safe for now. Tell me what you know, Iverson.”

“I’m working an undercover op. Let’s just call it against the bad guys for now. My job is to infiltrate them and monitor any suspicious activity. I assumed I was bringing in the suspects today. Things didn’t go according to my assumptions.”

He took a long pull of his coffee. The dirt under his fingernails made her wonder if he’d had to climb up from West Beach to get here.

Was that possible? The cliff was a straight drop.

Brad was a trained SEAL and now an undercover agent for the FBI. Scaling a cliff was all in a day’s work for him.

“You climbed up the cliff, didn’t you?”

He ignored her and continued his explanation. “This morning I was supposed to monitor the Sound from West Beach, as instructed by the suspects. I think, and so does my team at the Bureau, that they may want to hit the Naval Air Station since they’ve been surveilling the area for a month. Last night one of the suspects called and told me I should watch the horizon from West Beach very closely this morning.”

“And?”

“I had my team figure out what was on the docket for the squadrons on NAS Whidbey for the next several days. This morning is the start of a major West Coast Fleet exercise. When I put it together with what the suspects were feeding me, I took the initiative and decided to be out on the water instead of on the beach.”

Dread seemed to wrap itself around her.

“With the Navy? On a Navy ship?”

She knew the answer before he said it. “No. I was in a small inflatable powerboat. That’s all I’m going to tell you about it.”

“What did you see, Brad?”

He quietly tapped the side of his mug. “One of the suspects I’m familiar with was out there in a fishing boat. I stayed as far away from him as I could, as long as I could, but then I saw what looked like a SAM in his arms.”

“A surface-to-air missile?” She knew enough to realize there was always the possibility of terrorists smuggling in war weapons. The reports she’d read over the years had discussed shipments being stopped by US Customs at the border or sooner.

“Yes. I had a feeling something wasn’t right about the way they’d told me to watch from the shoreline. After putting it together with the Fleet exercise—it all pointed to trouble of the biggest kind.”

She had a feeling that the “something not right” was directly related to the explosion.

“Go on.”

“I took him, and the weapon, out.”

“Who’s him , and what exactly do you mean by I took him out ?”

His shifted his eyes, his expression no longer readable.

“I had to stop him from firing the SAM, Joy.”

The gravity of the situation, his situation, hit her like a Puget Sound gale in November. “You killed a man out there today?”

“I disabled his weapon. The resulting explosion did the rest.”

“Okay. So now all you have to do is call in to FBI headquarters, to your team, and report what happened.” Honestly, did he have to play the dramatic SEAL part? Weren’t those days supposed to be over?

“I can’t. I blew my cover by blowing their mission. No pun intended.”

“Do you think they—the terrorists, whoever they are—know you’re the one who stopped the SAM?”

As she asked, she couldn’t believe that Brad’s cover would be compromised by anything he did or didn’t do. He was a professional who’d completed umpteen missions in the most hellish places on earth. He knew how to keep his cover.

“I have to assume they do, or at the very least they’ll figure it out soon enough.”

She believed him.

“Let me clarify. They may suspect I’m not legit when I don’t meet up with them again. They have no way of knowing which LEA I belong to. I’ve been playing the part of the disillusioned émigré who wanted to help quell the American Imperialists. These are all domestic terrorists. None of them speak Pashto or Dari—I threw in a few words here and there to test them. They’re all homegrown wannabes. My team was alerted that they were trying to leave the country to join a terrorist group overseas.”

“But they decided to get some credibility by doing one of those sleeper-type actions?”

“Yes. This is more than a sleeper cell, though. They have contacts with the bad guys overseas. That’s certain now that I identified the SAM. I just don’t know who that contact is yet.”

Brad’s wide range of skills, including his ability with more than one foreign language, was a big part of what had made him such a valuable asset to the Navy SEALs. All SEALs had intensive training in weapons identification and employment. If he said he saw a SAM about to be launched, it was true.

And the explosion left no doubt.

“The thing is, I think they’re also targeting an individual here on Whidbey. They’ll lie low if they have to, until the LEA presence lessens, but they’re going to go after him sooner or later.”

She ran her fingers through her hair. “Terrorists who are so bold they’ll try to shoot down a US Navy aircraft just offshore, in US territory, don’t care about the LEA all over the place, Brad. They won’t wait.”

His appreciation of her accurate observation gleamed in his eyes. The instant warmth that flushed her cheeks was impossible to control.

“Exactly.”

* * *

THE DOORBELL RANG, and Brad saw her shoulders tense, her mouth tighten in a grim line.

“That’s the OHPD or sheriff’s deputy. Coming over in the respectable way.” She tried to keep it light by poking fun at his entrance via her side door earlier, but her anxiety was palpable.

You’ve done this to her.

“OHPD?”

“Oak Harbor Police Department. Keep up, Mr. FBI.”

“Are you going to tell them I’m here?”

“Why can’t I? You’re FBI. Don’t all LEA talk to each other?”

“You know damn well they don’t. I’m undercover, Joy. I can’t be seen.”

He knew he was asking her to trust him with little reason. He’d made no attempt to contact her since he’d been free to do so. Only now, when he was in serious trouble, had he sought her out.