Chapter 1
Turkey
“Is it just my imagination or do these guys seem a little tense to you?” Caleb Lynch murmured as he and the other members of his Special Threat Assessment Team followed their heavily armed escort of American soldiers into the ammunition storage area along the backside of Incirlik Air Base.
Forrest Albright and his girlfriend, Misty Swanson, the two team members nearest to him, threw glances at the collection of American and Turkish soldiers lined up on either side of the nearest section of concertina-topped security fencing.
“I think tense might be an understatement,” Misty said, looking back at Caleb. In the glow coming from the various lights positioned around the base, her long, purple hair was practically iridescent. “Given how tightly they’re gripping their weapons, I’m worried one of them might end up taking a shot at us sooner or later.”
Caleb grunted. Misty wasn’t wrong. As a werewolf, it was impossible for him to miss the sounds of the soldiers’ elevated heart rates as they stood guard. Something definitely had these guys on edge.
But what?
Considering he and the rest of the team had been flown straight from Washington, DC, to Turkey on a private jet that hauled ass told him something damn bad had happened here. But hey, that’s what STAT did. They dealt with bad crap—particularly of a supernatural variety.
“Colonel Vinson, you planning to tell us why we’re here?” Jake Huang, fellow werewolf and leader of their STAT team, asked the army officer dressed in tactical gear and toting a loaded Beretta 9 mm on his right thigh.
The stern-looking man simply held up one finger to momentarily silence any further questions as he led them past yet another security gate and into a dimly lit tunnel with a concrete floor that slanted distinctly downward. Some of their armed escort remained topside, but six of the men, wearing tactical gear similar to the colonel’s, followed them down.
Caleb could tell from the way Jake’s mouth tightened that his team leader was pissed the colonel hadn’t answered him. Luckily, Jake was an alpha, which meant he was in complete control of his inner wolf, unless something big pushed him over the edge. Caleb, on the other hand, was an omega. While he was as big and strong as Jake, he didn’t have any of that same control. He probably would have growled at the colonel already if the guy had ignored his question.
In another couple hundred feet, the floor leveled out, revealing a broad, curving tunnel that disappeared to the left and right. It was merely a guess, but Caleb figured they must be at least fifty feet underground now. Another brief walk along the curving tunnel that was easily wide enough for a pickup truck to drive through, and then they were at a set of huge steel doors mounted in the side of the tunnel wall.
Vinson stopped in front of the open doors, then turned to face them, and for the first time, Caleb had a chance to see how exhausted the thin, gray-haired man appeared. The lines around his mouth seemed more pronounced than they had outside, and his hazel eyes were grim.
“Sorry I couldn’t respond to your question earlier,” the colonel said, looking at Jake, “but I couldn’t risk any of the Turkish nationals overhearing what I’m about to tell you. If they knew what happened in here, we’d have a full-scale international incident on our hands within the hour.”
Vinson’s gaze went from Jake to Caleb, then the rest of the team. He was openly curious as he took in Misty and Forrest, alpha werewolves Harley Grant and her soul mate, Sawyer Bishop, and Jestina Ridley—aka Jes—the most experienced agent on the team as well as Jake’s soul mate. It was obvious from the expression on the colonel’s face that he wanted to know what the hell STAT was and why he was talking to them and not someone higher up in the army or air force—or anyone in a military uniform, for that matter. It probably didn’t help that Caleb and his teammates had flown in on an unmarked luxury jet that had been practically smoking from flying so fast to get here.
“This is weapon storage vault nine,” Vinson said, motioning toward the steel doors behind him. “A little over eleven hours ago, the command post received an alarm from the intrusion detector system inside.”
“What kind of alarm?” Sawyer asked, his British accent giving away the fact that his background was a little bit different than the rest of the team’s.
The colonel seemed to take it in stride as he focused his attention on Sawyer. “The motion sensors were tripped. A security detail was on scene in less than two minutes, but they didn’t see any signs of a break-in from the outside. They were still trying to figure out if anything was amiss when the command post received an alarm from vault ten, and then, thirty seconds later, a similar alarm from vault eight. Since the security detail didn’t see anything out of place at any of those, either, they thought it must be a sensor failure. But when we got the same alert from two more weapon vaults, I gave the order to open the doors on one. That’s when the situation went…sideways.”
Vinson turned to lead the way into the vault. The situation he’d been referring to was obvious the moment Caleb walked into the dimly lit room along with everyone else. The vault was smaller than he anticipated, maybe thirty square feet. It reminded him of a self-storage unit—the kind where people kept something really…really…really…valuable.
Inside, the place was a mess. Pieces of metal were scattered everywhere. Off to one side, more twisted metal had been slammed against the walls so hard it had knocked out gigantic chunks of the concrete. He knew absolutely nothing about the subject, but from the shape of the metal, Caleb guessed that the pieces might be the tail fins off some kind of bomb. In the very center of the room, the concrete had been pulverized, like an explosive charge had gone off there.
“I’m assuming the vault doesn’t normally look this trashed?” Caleb asked drily, his inner wolf finding it impossible not to poke at the tense military officer. But in his defense, he’d had a problem with authority figures for most of his life. It was a character issue he planned to work on at some point. Right after learning how to play the oboe.
Vinson shook his head, mouth tight. “No. This is the way it looked when the security detail got here. That’s when we realized the weapons had been stolen.”
“Nuclear weapons?” Jake asked, though it really didn’t sound like a question to Caleb. It figured Jake would know stuff like that. The alpha werewolf had been a U.S. Navy SEAL at some point in his life.
The colonel nodded. “These vaults are designed to hold up to four B61 nuclear bombs, each with a variable yield of up to 340 kilotons.” Letting out a sigh, he pointed toward another pile of twisted metal in the corner. “During a crisis, the bombs are lifted by that elevator to the aircraft shelter directly over our heads. The waiting plane can be loaded and gone within minutes. All four of the nukes in this vault are gone, along with sixteen other weapons from the four adjacent vaults.”