Maggie Black - Tactical Rescue

“The Canadian Forces special operations are highly classified,” Zack said, almost mechanically.

“I know.” Just how I know that if you are special forces, you won’t be able to tell me. “But would it be okay if I told you a story?”

His eyebrows rose. “Go ahead.”

“When I was a teenager my best friend, Zack, was a total genius. When it came to puzzles and figuring things out, his brain just seemed to work twice as fast as everyone else’s.” She watched as Zack swallowed hard. “My friend Zack told me once that his life’s goal was to join the Canadian special forces. Showed me all this research he’d managed to do about them. He had a binder of it. A literal three-ring binder. He took it that seriously. I never forgot that about him. So, over the years, I kept my ears open for news of the Canadian Forces special ops task force, especially when I was working on projects overseas. I always wondered if he’d made it and if my friend Zack was now one of those brave, unknown people secretly keeping the world safe.”

His eyes were locked on hers, filled with words she knew he wouldn’t be able to say. For a brief moment, the sheer pride she felt swelling inside her blocked out every other question in her mind. No matter how upset and frustrated I am right now, I hope you know just how insanely impressed I am with you, too.

Then she looked away and started walking back toward the direction of the road. He matched her pace.

“Then again,” she added, “he was only eighteen at the time. He’d be in his late thirties now and getting close to forty. And how many people actually grow up to become exactly the man they’d always said they’d be?”

Certainly nobody else I’ve ever known. The forest floor crunched under their feet. Zack pulled his phone from his pocket, frowned, then slid it back.

“How about your stepbrother?” Zack asked. “What did he turn out to be?”

“Seth?” She blinked. Why did Zack want to know about him? He couldn’t still be sore over how bad Seth had treated him. “What about him? He works in computers. We never talk.”

There were handcuffs on Zack’s belt, tucked under his sweatshirt, but still they jangled just a little as he walked.

“I overheard the phone conversation you had in my truck,” she added. “I didn’t set out to eavesdrop, but I’m a videographer and my truck is wired for video and sound. Who were you talking to and why did you tell them you were bringing me in?”

“That was my commanding officer, Major Jeff Lyons. I’d told you I was going to call him. I was just telling him that I was going to escort you to the police station in Timmins.”

“Why does that require handcuffs and a gun?” She shot him a sideways glance. “You made it sound like you were going to drag me there against my will.”

“Those aren’t for you. They’re for in case we run into trouble on our way there. The police want to talk to you about something, and he wanted to make sure I was going to remain professional and not accidentally compromise an active investigation because of our past friendship. I might’ve gotten a little emphatic about it.”

“What kind of open investigation?” she pressed. “Why does the police want to talk to me?”

“Telling you that could compromise the police’s ability to question you.”

“Okay, but is it safe to assume it’s linked to the fact that someone blew up the road?”

“I can’t tell you about that.”

“How about Ivan and Dmitry?”

He ran his hand over the back of his neck in a gesture so familiar it rattled something at the edges of her heart.

“I think it’s safe to assume you’re going to remember the tattoo those men had and look it up online,” he said, carefully. She nodded. “When you do, you’ll find references to a major Eastern European crime syndicate, which translates roughly as ‘Black Talon.’ Basically they steal things, smuggle things, sell things illegally and kill people, and to make matters worse there are warring factions within Black Talon violently fighting for supremacy over the group. You’ll also discover they tattoo themselves with the name of their first confirmed kill. So technically, those two men would be The-Man-Who-Killed-Ivan and The-Man-Who-Killed-Dmitry, but I’ve been mentally calling them Ivan and Dmitry for short, too. But what I don’t know is why two members of Black Talon would be in Canada or why they just tried to kidnap you. I wouldn’t even want to guess. As you probably noticed I tried fishing for information a bit, trying to see if they knew who I was and if they’d been hired for money.”

“Could you understand what they were saying?” she asked.

“Yup.” He chuckled slightly. “Basically, it all came down to ‘Shoot him!’ and ‘Take her!’ and ‘Stop acting like an idiot or I’ll kill you.’”

They reached the road. It was empty. The kidnappers and their van were gone. They walked back toward her camper. Every inch of her skin seemed to tingle with electricity from being this close to him. The old, familiar smell of him filled her senses. I’m frightened. I’m angry. I’m beyond frustrated that Zack won’t give me answers. And my heart won’t stop fluttering whenever he glances my way.

She could now see the camper between the trees. She stopped walking and turned toward him. They stood there a moment, chest to chest, face-to-face, just inches apart in the dirt.

“Can you tell me one thing?” she asked. “Is your target the man who blew up the road? Or Black Talon? Or me?”

“None of you are my target.” His hands swung wide above his head, as if he was trying to swat the horizon. “Like I told you before, I’m not on assignment right now. I’m on vacation. On leave. This is my holiday. I actually need to report back to base in less than two days for overseas deployment.” His arms dropped back down to his side. “This morning I was camping at the side of a lake about an hour south of here, then I heard something on the news—which I’m guessing you haven’t heard or you wouldn’t be asking so many questions—and I figured you might need an old friend to talk to.”

His hands parted slightly like he wanted to hug her but wasn’t sure if he should.

“When you climbed out of the rocks, I didn’t think you recognized me,” he went on, “and I was trying to figure out how to tell you who I was when my commanding officer called and suggested I shouldn’t.”

“How did he know you were with me?” she asked.

“He guessed.” He looked past her into the trees. “I have a very old news clipping about you winning that martial arts trophy taped inside my footlocker. Now, please stop asking me questions I can’t answer. Just stop. Please. I’m already in trouble enough with my CO for potentially barging onto a gigantic mess for personal reasons.”

A “mess” that involved foreign criminals, explosives and weapons.

“Just let me ask one more question, please, then I’ll stop.”

He ran both hands over his head. “Go ahead.”

“Why is there a newspaper article about me in your locker?”

An article about the night you broke my heart?

His eyes glanced to the sky and his lips moved for a moment like he was praying.

“Because you changed my life, Rebecca.” His eyes dropped to her face. “You believed in me and stuck by me when nobody else did. I’d never forgotten what it was like to walk into that gym, overweight, out of shape, feeling laughed at, and yet wanting to be better than I was. And you...sorry to be so blunt, but you were the cutest thing I’d ever seen and yet you walked right over and asked me to partner with you. You befriended me. You encouraged me. So yeah—” and here his voice rose, as if he was arguing with an opponent she couldn’t see “—today when I realized you could be in trouble, and knew I’d followed your career just enough, and remembered your stories well enough, to know you might not be too far away, I came to find you. Because you had my back when nobody else did and I wanted to make sure I had yours now.”