Buch lesen: «Special Forces: The Operator»

Chapter 1

It started as a hot tub party.

It quickly devolved into a hot tub orgy.

Rebel McQueen was supposed to provide security for a dozen members of the US women’s softball delegation in the midst of it, but she’d last seen her charges disappearing into a mass of gorgeous naked bodies that was the Norwegian men’s water polo team.

Acute regret speared into her.

Where did she go wrong with her life that she was a lousy security guard while these other young women of her approximate age and physical ability were partying with possibly the hottest guys on the planet?

The “hot tub” was actually a giant swimming pool in the Olympic Village that had been heated to spa temperatures for the duration of the games. Easily two hundred athletes were in the pool now, engaging in every manner and combination of sexual play.

She got it. They were young, athletic, far from home, and had precompetition adrenaline galore before the games opened tomorrow night. But she was responsible for those softball players, and she couldn’t spot a single one of them right now. All she could make out in the churning water were writhing limbs and the occasional flash of a pale face. The rest of it could just as easily have been a feeding frenzy of sharks.

The Medusas—the highly classified, all-female, Special Forces team she was part of—were an ultra-under-the-radar part of the American security contingent at these games.

Tonight, the American security staff was undermanned, and she’d volunteered to help out. But she’d had no idea she was in for this! The Medusas had been briefed that the Olympic Village would be a wild party scene, but nothing in her Special Forces training had prepared her for a frat party with twenty thousand wild children determined to play. Hard.

Play. Not a word that had meaning in her world. Duty. Honor. Country. Those words, immortalized by General Douglas MacArthur, were the ones she lived by.

Oh joy. Word of the orgy must be spreading, for more athletes started arriving at the pool in a steady stream, stripping naked and jumping in.

It was arguably the best-looking group of naked people Rebel had ever seen, at any rate. Idly, she played a game of “guess the sport based on body type.”

There went a lean, no-fat marathon runner.

Disproportionately massive torso and skinny legs? A rower.

Big gut, wreathed in muscle—weight lifter.

A crowd began to form around the edges of the pool. Whether they were purely spectators to the debauchery or waiting for an inch of open water to join in, she couldn’t tell. But they elbowed Rebel back from the pool with their muscular, jostling bodies.

Swearing under her breath, she let herself be propelled back. Her orders were to be inconspicuous. Instead of resisting, she occupied herself with watching the watchers. Which was why she happened to glimpse a familiar face in the crowd. A face that made her lurch. A face that emphatically should not be here.

The face of a terrorist.

Surely she’d made a mistake. She moved quickly around the pool, trying to keep an eye on the man, who looked shockingly like Mahmoud Akhtar. Mahmoud led a terror cell that kidnapped her teammate, Piper Ford, last year.

Piper’s fiancé was an undercover CIA officer who’d helped her escape from Mahmoud, and who’d captured photographs of the entire cell of Iranian operatives. Rebel had looked at an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Mahmoud posted in the Medusas’ ready room every day for the past eight months. She knew his face.

And she’d just seen it here in Sydney, Australia.

Next to Mahmoud, a second man stood up from where he’d been squatting by the edge of the pool. Yousef Kamali. Mahmoud’s second-in-command and also a glossy photo on her team’s personal Most Wanted wall.

She wove through the throng of people to the spot where Mahmoud and Yousef had been standing and turned in a slow three-sixty.

No sign of the two men.

She had to be wrong. No way could known terrorists gain access to the Olympic Village. Not unless the Iranian government had given them credentials that attached them to the Iranian Olympic team...

Nah. The Iranians wouldn’t be so brazen.

She spied two males wearing black tracksuits with green-white-red stripes down the arms and legs. Iran team uniforms. She swore under her breath.

The pair was moving away from the pool area quickly. Purposefully.

Frowning, she debated whether to leave her post and follow them. It wasn’t like the softball girls were leaving this party anytime soon. But she was responsible for their safety, which technically included apprehending terrorists.

The Iranians approached a streetlight with its pole-mounted surveillance camera and, as she looked on, both men simultaneously turned their faces to the right.

Away from the camera.

Sonofa—That was the deliberate act of someone who didn’t want to be identified. The act of a trained operative. Or a terrorist.

She took off running, but the two men were well ahead of her, and more athletes were streaming toward the pool. She dodged and weaved, doing the whole fish swimming upstream thing, desperately trying to keep the Iranians in sight. But she was only five foot four, and it was darned near impossible to see over the glamorous amazons that were most Olympic athletes.

Finally, she broke out of the worst of the crush and glimpsed her quarry passing through one of the checkpoints to leave the Olympic Village. She put on a burst of speed as they scanned their credentials and stepped onto a city street.

She flew through the checkpoint without bothering to scan herself out. She couldn’t lose the Iranians! Once they hit the giant street party outside the village, following them was going to get immeasurably harder. She had to close as much of the gap as she could before they lost themselves in the crowds. Sydney was in full celebration mode, and this part of the city had been completely shut down to allow foot traffic to fill the streets.

Rebel raced through crowds of revelers, but the Iranians picked up speed in front of her, and she stretched out into a full sprint. The men turned a corner and disappeared.

When she approached the intersection, she slowed, turning the corner fast and low. It turned out to be a relatively quiet, dark street lined with closed office buildings. And it was empty. She raced down it, searching side to side for the Iranians. Nothing. She burst out into another crowded thoroughfare.

Where did they go?

There. To her left. She gathered herself to take off running again just as the men disappeared into a building ahead.

Without warning, big, hard hands grabbed her by both arms, dragging her back into the dark street she’d just emerged from. She stumbled backward, fetching up hard against a building. Immediately, she was flattened against it by a living wall of muscle.

Chagrin roared through her. She’d gotten so focused on chasing her quarry in front of her that she’d forgotten to watch her own tail. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She knew better.

“Let go of me,” she ground out. The terrorists were getting away!

“Who are you?” a male voice rasped from over her head.

“The person who’s going to hurt you if you don’t let me go. Right. Now.”

“Little thing like you?” Humor laced her battering ram’s voice.

No help for it. She was about to be conspicuous.

* * *

Avi Bronson yelped as the fleeing suspect, a tiny, shockingly quick female, stomped painfully on the top of his left foot. He swore when she grabbed his thumb off her shoulder and gave it a vicious wrench.

“Damn, woman! You’ve practically dislocated my thumb.”

A normal man would step back from the tiny virago now throwing painful elbows at him, kneeing him dangerously close to his groin and scratching at his face. But he was a trained Special Forces soldier, and the last thing he dared do was let this woman get an arm’s length between them where she could really wind up with a fist or foot and actually damage him.

He leaned in against her, using his superior size and weight to mash her even flatter against the wall at her back, silently thanking his wool suit coat for absorbing the worst of her attack.

She went still abruptly.

“Are you done?” he asked cautiously.

“Yes.” Her tone was surly. Not even close to subdued.

“If I step back from you, will you stop attacking me?” he tried.

Too long a pause. Then, “Yes.”

Liar.

He jumped back all at once, throwing up his fists to defend himself. And just in the nick of time. She flew at him like an angry bird.

But then she surprised him by spinning away and taking off at a dead run down the street. Genuinely irritated now, he gave chase.

Crap, she was fast.

Of course, she had the advantage over him in weaving through the heavy crowd, being as small as she was. He struggled to keep sight of her as she dodged among the civilians ahead of him.

Then she did a weird thing,

She came to a dead stop in front of a giant discotheque, staring at it in what could only be utter disgust.

Avi screeched to a stop beside her. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me—”

“Oh, save it,” she muttered, yanking out a set of Olympic credentials from inside her jacket. The holographic ID card hanging from a lanyard around her neck and declaring her to be from the American delegation, certainly looked authentic.

“Nonetheless. I need you to come with me,” he repeated.

She finally turned her full attention on him, and he was taken aback by her giant blue eyes, glaring at him as indignantly as if he’d kicked her puppy. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“Olympic security,” he said shortly.

“I showed you my credentials. Let’s see yours,” she challenged.

“Not here,” he muttered. A lifetime of being reviled and targeted for being Israeli had taught him to be deeply reticent about announcing his nationality in crowded, public settings. Not to mention, he was not about to air Olympic security business on a street full of half-drunk spectators.

“Why won’t you show me your credentials?” the woman demanded.

“Just come with me, will you?”

“I can’t. I need to get surveillance video from inside this club.”

“I can get you the footage faster than anyone in there can if you’ll come with me.” He said the last few words through gritted teeth. This woman was really starting to get under his skin. She was blithely ignoring him as if she didn’t give a flip for being stopped by Olympic security.

“Fine,” she declared. “There are at least four exits from this place to three different streets, and thanks to you, I have no way of knowing which direction the men I was following went. I’ve lost them.”

“Lost who?”

She blinked, as if abruptly becoming aware of being closely surrounded by dozens of Olympic guests. “Uhh, nobody I care to talk about out here in the open.”

“Hence my request that you come with me.” He emphasized the word request to make it perfectly clear that this was, in fact, not a request at all.

The woman took several quick strides away from him, back toward the Olympic Village and then had the gall to stop and look over her shoulder at him. “Are you coming or not, He-Man?”

He lurched into movement, not sure whether to be amused or fantasize about strangling her. He fell in beside her, matching his long stride to her shorter one. “Are you always this touchy?” he murmured.

“You haven’t seen anything, yet. We’re in public and I have to behave myself.”

“Good Lord.”

“Oh, praying won’t save you from me.”

He glanced down at her in something approaching shock and she continued, smiling sweetly all the while, “When we get back to the village, I’m going to give you a piece of my mind...and chew off a chunk of your hide while I’m at it.”

Amused. He was definitely amused. A grin crept across his features. She reminded him of a little angry sparrow—her feathers all puffed up and flapping her wings furiously at the big bad hawk. She looked ready at any second to fly at his head and peck at him.

“You’re cute when you’re mad,” he murmured as he took her by the elbow to guide her through a particularly thick cluster of drunks spilling out of a bar into the street.

Her biceps flexed under his fingers and he noted that her arm was rock hard within his grasp. She definitely worked out. But then, the Olympics drew the fittest people on Earth into one place.

Leaning in close to her and using his big body as a shield, he protected her from jostles and errant hands as they passed through a group of loudly singing young men wearing Irish national soccer team paraphernalia. One of them, carrying a brimming full pitcher of beer in each hand stumbled, and Avi spun in front of the woman, taking a hefty slosh of beer down his back for his trouble.

While the drunk mumbled a slurred apology, Avi merely rolled his eyes and ushered the woman onward. Cold, sticky wetness made his shirt cling to his back as the beer soaked through his suit.

“Thanks,” she muttered reluctantly.

“You’re welcome.”

There was a bit of a delay getting her scanned into the village since she hadn’t scanned out properly when she left, but the guard sorted it out quickly enough when Avi flashed his own senior security credentials.

“I have to make a phone call,” she announced, stopping just inside the fenced enclosure surrounding the large campus of dormitories, dining halls, workout facilities and delegation headquarters. Sighing in frustration at yet another delay, he nonetheless stopped and waited while she pulled out her cell phone.

He listened with interest as she said, “Tessa, it’s me. I need one of you to head over to the north village pool and take over babysitting the women’s softball team. I’ve got another situation to sort out right now.” A pause, then, “I’ll tell you about it when I get back to Ops. Speaking of which, could you call Major T. and have him meet me at the ops center ASAP?”

Avi heard an exclamation that sounded like surprise from the person on the other end of the call.

The woman snorted. Then, “He’s never off duty. He eats, sleeps and breathes the job. And I seriously have to speak with him. We have a potential situation.”

Spoken like a true security operator. Avi frowned. Who was this woman?

She was speaking again. “...join us after you fish the women’s softball team out of the pool and tuck them back in their rooms.” She added, “Oh, and their clothing is in a pile at the northwest corner of the pool. Yes. All of their clothing. It’s an orgy over there. Thanks. Bye.”

She pocketed her phone and glared up at him. “Let’s make this fast. I have someplace to be.”

He crossed his arms and smirked down at her. “All right. Let’s try this again. Who are you?”

“This is still far too public an environment for me to answer that. And I’m certainly not telling you anything without you showing me proper identification.”

“Fair enough. Come with me.” He turned and headed toward the Israeli security operations center. Returning the favor from earlier, he glanced back over his shoulder and asked wryly, “Are you coming, She-Woman?”

The woman lurched into motion, scowling. Smiling a little to himself, he led her to his delegation’s headquarters.

The atmosphere was all business inside the Israeli security operations center. Ever since Munich almost fifty years ago, the Israelis operated on the assumption that their athletes were active terror targets. And it was up to the men and women in this room to protect those athletes—the finest flowers of Israel’s youth.

He didn’t stop in the main area crammed with desks, video monitors, computers and mostly big, capable men. Spying an empty office, he stepped inside, turned on the light and waited for his prisoner to join him. Not that he would call her that to her face. His ribs and foot still ached from her initial assault. She might be tiny, but she had sharp elbows and knew how to use them.

In the bright light of the office, he got a good look at her face. She had smooth, soft-looking skin, regular features that grew more pretty the longer he looked at them, and those big, blue eyes of hers. They were her best feature, for sure. Her hair was a soft chocolate brown shot through with strands of gold, like she spent a fair bit of time outside. He already knew she was stronger than her small stature suggested.

She pulled out her credentials again and this time he did the same. Silently, they exchanged badges.

“Rebel McQueen,” he read aloud. “That’s an unusual name. Did your mother dislike you?”

“No. She was a fanatical Steve McQueen fan. He was an actor—”

“I know who he was. The Great Escape is one of my favorite movies.”

She mused, “Allied prisoners break out of Nazi prison camp. I could see why that movie would be popular in Israel.” The woman continued, “Anyway, McQueen’s nickname was ‘the American Rebel.’”

He commented sympathetically, “You must have to explain that a lot.”

“You have no idea.” She rolled her eyes, and they traded brief smiles of commiseration.

She glanced down at his identification. “Avi Bronson. Israeli Defense Forces? Mossad?”

“Sayerat Matkal,” he replied. Not that she would have any idea what that was. Which was the point. His team didn’t advertise their existence, let alone their presence at a venue as public as the Summer Olympics.

“Unit 269?” she blurted.

“You know who we are?” he blurted back, shocked that she’d heard of his special operations unit. It wasn’t the sort of thing most civilians knew about.

“Yes,” she replied impatiently. “You guys are the primary hostage rescue unit for the Israeli Defense Forces. I’d have thought most of you security types here would be Mista’arvim—counterterrorism units.”

He shrugged. “I did a stint with them a few years back. I also rolled with Shayetet 13 early in my career.”

“The Navy SEAL equivalent, huh? Well, aren’t you the overachiever?”

He frowned down at her “Okay, so you know more about Israeli Special Forces units than the average bear. How is that?”

“It’s my job?”

“Don’t be cute with me. What do you do as a member of the American delegation, Miss McQueen?”

“Lieutenant McQueen. US Navy. Roving security for the American delegation. Sometimes it’s handy to have female security guards. We can go places men can’t.”

He frowned. “Regular US military personnel aren’t assigned to Olympic security details.”

She shrugged, offering no further explanation of why she, a military member, was here on a distinctly civilian assignment.

His mental antennae wiggled wildly. She wasn’t telling him the truth. Or at least not the full truth.

“Why did you flee the village without scanning out properly?” he tried.

“I told you. I was following someone. I didn’t have time to mess with scanning my ID.”

“And who were you following?” he asked gently when she didn’t continue.

She huffed. “I thought I saw a guy named Mahmoud Akhtar.”

“Akhtar? Here?” Mahmoud Akhtar was the kind of guy who made men like Avi lose sleep at night. Akhtar was highly trained, highly intelligent and highly radicalized. He was a known agent of the Iranian government and believed to be a wet operator—meaning his skills and missions covered everything up to and including terror and assassination. It could not possibly be good news for the Israeli delegation if Akhtar was here in Sydney. “Are you sure?” Avi asked the woman curtly.

“No. I’m not sure.” She sounded exasperated. “I was trying to get close enough to make a positive identification when you decided to go all Neanderthal and tackle me.”

“I didn’t tackle you. I merely stopped you for questioning.” She opened her mouth, obviously to argue, and he took an aggressive step forward to loom over her. He had nearly twenty-five centimeters—ten inches—on her in height. “If I had tackled you, you would have been smashed flat on the ground. And I would have handcuffed you.” He added, “As it was, I probably should have tackled you. But I was exceptionally restrained.”

She snorted. “You should have been even more restrained. Mahmoud and his buddy, Yousef Kamali, got away, thanks to you.”

He frowned, reluctant to believe her claim that an international terrorist had been strolling around the grounds of the Olympic Village. But caution dictated that he take her seriously, of course.

She didn’t seem delusional.

And the fact that she even knew who Mahmoud Akhtar and his sidekick, Yousef Kamali, were, meant she had some sort of access to classified material—also indicative of a not delusional female.

Still. Akhtar here? It would be a huge risk for a terrorist of his notoriety.

She interrupted his skeptical train of thought, demanding, “You said you could get me video from that nightclub. I want to see it right away. I might be able to make a positive ID from that.”

“Come with me.” He led her into the main room and gestured for her to sit at his desk. Reaching past her shoulder, he typed into his keyboard quickly, calling up the Israeli link to the entire Sydney CCTV—closed-circuit television—system.

Clicking on the map of downtown Sydney that popped up, he selected the nightclub. It took a moment, but then his screen flashed up black-and-white imagery of the exterior of the disco where Rebel had finally stopped running.

“Do you have interior video feed?” she murmured up at him.

He glanced down at her and was close enough to see that her eyelashes were long and silky, a soft brown that matched her hair. And she smelled good. A gentle, sweet scent like vanilla, warm and inviting. A study in contrasts, she was turning out to be. Sharp words, sweet mouth. Hard elbows, soft skin. Tough attitude, gentle eyes.

“Interior video?” she repeated.

Oh. Right. He shook himself out of staring at her and typed again. Planting both hands on the desk, he leaned forward beside Rebel to study the crowd gyrating on-screen. He hit the pause button and froze the image. Face by face, he scanned all the people in the frame. He didn’t see anyone resembling the Iranian terrorist.

Rebel leaned back. “This is hopeless. The crowd is too thick to spot my guys without a full forensic analysis of this video. What if we run the video in real time and see if we can spot Mahmoud and Yousef entering the club?”