Retribution (10 page)

Hal Bennoit could be the end of him if he let her too close. He walked into the room and carefully set a crystal figurine of an elephant wearing reading glasses on her pillow. He had commissioned it at a small glass-blower’s shop in Kabul the last time he was in Afghanistan. Hal had mouthed off at him on one of his visits that she thought he had the memory of an elephant and was probably just as old as Methuselah. Maybe the figurine would make her smile and banish some of her darkness.

Knowing her, though, she’d probably smash it to smithereens and wait to put it in his bedroll when he returned. She was such a surprising, prickly handful, but he smiled as he closed the door to her room. Maybe he’d get the opportunity to able to handle her sometime in the future.

Surrey took a deep breath and let her scent soothe him. Then he closed the door and his mind to thoughts of the woman who made his heart stutter.

Kabul, Afghanistan

The pre-dawn light scribbled pink waves in the gray-black sky. It was already so hot, sweat pooled beneath his bullet-proof vest, and the sun was just breaking the horizon. Dray hated this fucking country. Not the people, at least not all of them, just the wild violence of it. Of course, had he not been involved in the violence, he wouldn’t have met Sasha.

He breathed deeply, lungs struggling in the hellish air, and craned his neck around the side of the building. Nothing moved in the newness of the morning. It was a quiet that accompanied death. He reached into his right pocket, filtered out a lemon drop, and popped it in his mouth. Flavor exploded over his tongue, and his chest tightened as he remembered Sasha’s lips under his. She was the reason he was here. He’d do any-damn-thing to assure her safety.

Another deep breath as his thoughts pulled inward and he was ready. “Five minutes and wait my mark. In, out, grab al-Hadiq, and then we move toward extraction.” His kept his voice ghost-like along the comm link.

All four links clicked in acknowledgement of the order. The safe house they were about to infiltrate had a man inside who’d signed his own death warrant as soon as Dray had discovered he was one of the men on the discs he and Con discovered three weeks ago.

They contained in-depth video records of the multiple beatings el-Din’s primary henchman, Kareem al-Hadiq, had administered to Sasha. When Dray and Con had gotten to Camp Freedom and finally been able to view the discs, he’d lost his mind. Had Con not been there with him, he would have gone insane and hunted al-Hadiq immediately with no thought for anything but killing. Con had barely been able to calm him.

Those images would haunt him forever. Sasha tied to a chair being hit in the face. Sasha strapped to a pole and then struck so many times with metal pipes about her shoulders and hips that he’d lost count. They’d done her ankle Kathy Bates style, and her hand they’d held down and hit repeatedly with a hammer. She had screamed, cried out, and when they’d begun cutting her, she’d spat at al-Hadiq and then never made another sound.

The rage stained his mind even now, filtering through his blood in a white-hot frenzy. Dray clenched his hands and tried to control his thoughts. His beautiful, brave woman had suffered unimaginable torture at that bastard’s hands. She was his, no matter that she’d denied it that day, months ago, at the rehab center. Sasha was his. And Dray was going to kill the man who’d hurt her.

Part of his brain counted down. Three minutes left. The other part of his mind flashed with images from the discs. Rhetoric at the beginning had alluded to Sasha’s crimes against the Taliban. Bullshit reasons that struggled to hide her attacker’s real agenda. Nothing else was said on the discs. There was background noise and occasional voices, but they could make out nothing decipherable without high-tech equipment. The discs were in General Post’s hands being scanned and torn apart for any other valuable information they could give.

Dray wanted to know who’d done the taping. At one point the camera panned downward, and Dray swore he got a glimpse of cowboy boots. That could be a very valuable place to start.

One minute. The ticks of the clock in his mind were loud, fitting. Sasha had suffered. But never once had she begged or pleaded. She’d maintained defiance until they’d cut her. There had been a small smile that had played about al-Hadiq’s face as he’d carved her flesh.

Dray would smile, too, as he was cutting al-Hadiq’s heart from his chest. While he had known the extent of her injuries, he could have never understood the depth of her pain if he hadn’t seen those tapes. Now all he wanted to do was wrap her in his arms and never let her go, but she would never be completely safe until el-Din’s sons were destroyed.

This was the beginning of that for Dray. He would take care of al-Hadiq and quietly return to the U.S. When they knew more about el-Din’s sons’ operations, they would come back and decapitate the two heads that had grown when their father’s had been cut off.

He wanted to crawl into a booby trap-protected hole with Sasha and not come out for fifty years. Until time had made them old and their loving had made them arthritic. He wanted to soothe her in the night when she cried out from her personal hell. Surrey and Con, hell, even Itchy and Bleak, had all told him about her night terrors. He wanted to be there to take them away, but this had to come first. Always her safety would come first.

The final tick, and time had run out for al-Hadiq.

Inhale, exhale, muscles readying and then, “Move!”

His voice carried no farther than his link, and his team shifted as silent as death in the dawning light. Everything slowed, as it always did when shit was about to go down.

They busted down the flimsy door and entered the dilapidated building. They eliminated any who rose up to greet them with weapons, coming to another locked door. Con knocked it down. His men moved into the room with Itchy guarding the door. What Dray saw made his blood run cold.

Against the far wall was their objective. Al-Hadiq had been strung upside down, thighs sliced horizontally, allowing him to bleed out from his femoral arteries. Unease whispered down Dray’s spine, and as the light on his tactical rifle scanned the room, his blood congealed. Written in al-Hadiq’s blood along the wall beside him were the words, “Come out and play, Dray. I’m waiting.”

The bad feeling he’d had on the initial op outside of el-Din’s compound a year and a half ago returned full force. Only one person had ever used that phrase with him, and Dray had thought there was no way he could still be a threat. The words scrawled on the wall and the cowboy boots he’d seen in the tape mocked his assertions.

Fear and regret mixed inside his chest and made his skin feel tight. In that instant, all his hopes for a beginning with Sasha were put on hold.

“Move out. We get to extraction now. Surrey, get on the phone with Post and inform him that our objective was completed before we arrived, and I’m pretty sure it was done by one of ours. Con, blow this shit to smithereens. Bleak cover the back. Itchy, you’re with me. Move now!”

This had to be another set up. If anyone knew they were the last ones present at al-Hadiq’s hideout, the U.S. would be blamed for terrorist and unfair tactics in their dealings with the bastard. Dray was unwilling to risk the taped beatings of Sasha getting out for public perusal. Presidio had to make sure their presence was wiped clean and all attention diverted somewhere else.

Once the charge was set to blow, the men melted back into the shadows and began their separate journeys to their mutual extraction point.

Dray put one foot in front of the other though his mind was in turmoil. There was no way he was going to be able to get close to Sasha. He knew who’d been behind the scenes for the past two years setting up first Team12 and now Presidio. There was no question in his mind now that Peter Dempsey was the monster behind al-Hadiq’s murder and had been there while Sasha was being tortured.

“What the fuck was that shit, Dray?” came Con’s voice over the link. He had to be within two klicks of Dray or the off-line links they were using didn’t work.

“We’ll meet up at extraction. Everybody watch your sixes. I repeat, watch your sixes and don’t stop. I’ll give you what I know when we head out of here,” Dray relayed as he moved.

He needed to get his team out of here so they could come up with a plan to stop Dempsey, and he needed to fill them in quickly so they knew what they were up against.

* * * *

Dray took a deep breath once everyone was seated and looked over the men who’d been through more hells with him than he could count. They’d been Team12, a unique, specialized Black Ops group of soldiers, when they’d been enlisted. For a year before he’d rescued Sasha, Dray had been tossing around retirement. When the time for reenlistment had come, he’d not re-upped, opting instead to form Presidio Security with his brother, Dare. Presidio was a privatized firm dedicated to security in all forms. As Surrey, Con, Itchy, and Bleak had come to reenlistment, they too had decided to retire and join Dray’s outfit. They worked alongside the U.S. government but weren’t bound by the same laws, though they struggled to uphold the integrity of their country while skirting certain particulars. Sometimes those particulars allowed them to get in and out of sticky situations easier.

As he glanced over the four men who’d joined him in his quest to eliminate all threats to Sasha, he knew he had no choice but to tell them about Peter Dempsey.

“What you saw today is proof that another player is at the table.” He ran a hand down his face and leaned back. “Ten years ago I was in Rangers with a man named Peter Dempsey. We were on assignment in Ecuador, drug-related if I remember correctly, and he’d been left alone with a woman who’d been caught with some smugglers. I walked in on him raping her.”

Nobody moved, and though he stared at the men around him, all he really saw was that woman’s black eyes, filled with pain and tears, blood running down her legs as Dempsey rammed into her over and over.

He shook his head, took a drink of the water in front of him, and cleared his throat. “I moved to get him off her, but before I could reach them, he looked at me and said, ‘Wanna play, Dray?’ Then he slit her throat.”

Silence reigned for several moments as Dray, lost in his thoughts, struggled with the remembering. It was ironic how the one memory he’d managed to push the deepest was somehow the sharpest in recollection. Once the dam opened, his memories were given voice, and he told his men everything he knew about the man he suspected of harming Sasha.

Peter Dempsey had been one of the sickest people Dray had ever met but also one of the cleverest. After being discharged, he’d petitioned to enter an Army psychiatric rehab program for veterans of foreign conflicts. He claimed that his combat time in the initial Gulf War had led him to commit the heinous crime in Ecuador. Temporary insanity, he’d pleaded. They allowed him to enter their experimental program. Peter Dempsey had been declared rehabilitated and then allocated back into service for his country. Not as a Ranger, though.

At the hearing to determine if that would happen, Dray’s captain at the time had requested Dray speak out about what he’d witnessed firsthand in an effort to prevent Dempsey’s reinstatement. The Board had determined in favor of Dempsey anyway. They weren’t going to have their rehabilitation program be listed as a failure. Dempsey had looked through Dray the entire time they were in the hearing. When it was over, he’d smiled at Dray knowingly. Dray had shrugged it off and over the past ten years hadn’t often thought of the sick fuck.

While Dempsey had not been allowed back into the Rangers, he was reinstated into the Army. Last he’d heard, Dempsey was a runner for a general in Washington. Dray had no idea they’d let the bastard into Command. Surely others could see through him? Surely the people at Command were intelligent enough to do background checks on their personnel?

After voicing his thoughts, he glanced at Surrey. “My gut is screaming that Peter Dempsey is all up in this. And if he taped what happened to Sasha, he has to be the one behind placing our team outside that compound in the first place. General Post hasn’t ever been able to track who the leak was, but it all makes perfect sense now. This has all been some kind of sick game to Dempsey.”

“All this because you caught him in a crime and he wants revenge?” Surrey’s doubt was understandable. He’d never met the bastard.

“His motivations are his own, but if I had to guess, then yeah, that’s what it all boils down to. And I have to find a way to pull Sasha completely out of the picture.”

Dempsey could in no way think that Sasha meant anything to him. Dray could only hope the incident three weeks ago had been simply coincidence and not a set up by Dempsey.

His heart plummeted. That wasn’t likely. He needed to do some homework and track down what the bastard was doing before anything else happened.

The men all looked sick, and Surrey hadn’t stopped pacing since Dray started talking.

“So what are you going to do about Sasha, Dray?” Surrey asked. “She was pissed as hell when I left that she had no information on your condition. She’ll be even more pissed if you don’t go see her. And uh, oh yeah, I’m not telling her if you decide to cut and run on this one. She threatened to castrate me if I knew something I wasn’t telling. She could probably do it too. You haven’t seen her with those psi she practices with in her martial arts class. Nuh-uh, not me.”

Dray clenched his hands, the rage he’d managed to control threatening to bubble over.

“I’m not going near her, Surrey. I can’t. If Dempsey sees that or gets wind of any of this, she’s as good as dead. He’ll use her as bait, and I won’t have time to even formulate an op to get her out before he tries to hurt her. The best thing to do right now is provide her with twenty-four-seven security while we sit back and wait for more information.” Dray’s voice was hard as steel, brooking no argument on the issue.

He would go back to Presidio’s HQ and just wait. Surely General Post could find out something about Dempsey’s most recent activities and give Dray information to work on. Dempsey would have to be taken out as quickly as possible, but first the case against him had to be made so nothing could fall back on Presidio. It seemed as if once again his and Sasha’s
relationship
would be put on the back burner in the face of danger.