PROLOGUE
Nigeria
PETTY OFFICER WES Marshall moved silently through the darkness with his SEAL Teammates, Holden Lockwood, Sam Travers, and Noah Bradley, each of them climbing the rough terrain of the hillside until they could see over the crest. A few hundred yards below were three squat brick buildings surrounded by a low wall, as well as two cargo trucks and a pair of Land Rovers.
Wes adjusted the focus setting on his night vision goggles so he could see into the deeper shadows in between the buildings. It was a moonless night with just enough cloud cover to completely blanket the stars that would have normally twinkled above them, making it difficult to discern much even with the high-tech NVG’s.
“We’re going in now,” a gravelly voice said over the radio in Wes’s ear. “Hold your position until we give you the go ahead.”
“Roger that,” Holden said, then turned off his mic.
Noah cursed under his breath at that announcement, earning a scowl from Holden, the senior Petty Officer for this mission. Even though they’d all seen this coming, Wes understood his Teammate’s frustration. The CIA wanted their clandestine Special Operations Group to take the lead on this. He and the other guys from SEAL Team 5 were merely along for the ride.
Wes checked the magazine on his M4 carbine—more out of habit than because he was concerned it wasn’t loaded and ready to go—then shifted into a more comfortable position and settled in to wait. His eyes immediately drifted closed and he jerked awake. He needed to stay alert no matter how tired he was right now.
Headquarters had called at 0300 hours last night saying he was going wheel’s up. Or maybe it was the night before that. It was difficult to keep track when there were marathon flights and datelines involved. Either way, it had been frigging early to drag his ass out of bed. On the upside, getting onto Naval Air Station Coronado hadn’t taken long since there’d been absolutely no one else in San Diego going in the gate but him and the other guys on the Team at that time of morning.
Once on base, he’d gone straight to the recently completed Navy SEAL campus on Imperial Beach for the mission briefing. The place was a state of the art training and operations complex with the best classified briefing facilities he’d ever seen, complete with encrypted telecom equipment and multiple interactive display screens that allowed you to set up and run detailed simulations of any kind of attack scenario you could imagine. The best part was that the whole place was cleared to handle data all the way up to the Top Secret level. Flat out, the briefing facilities alone had cost millions upon millions of dollars. As a taxpayer he had to cringe at the thought of what the entire complex cost.
Too bad the first time they got to use the place had been for a CIA operation where the SEALs would be little more than bystanders.
During the briefing, Wes and the guys learned that Nick Chapman, an international arms dealer SEAL Team 5 had dealt with in the past, was in the country to sell several dozen high-tech suicide drones to a fanatic faction of the Boko Haram terrorist group. According to the intel people, Chapman was selling the damn things to anyone with enough money to buy them. And as luck would have it, they were relatively cheap.
The Russian-made unmanned aerial vehicles, dubbed the KUB-UAV, were equipped with a six pound warhead and could fly up to forty miles, where it would destroy its target by blowing itself up like a suicide bomber. Yeah, the warhead was small, and the range wasn’t anything special, but the drone could easily take out a small car or a group of people in an open area while the operator sat in complete safety half a city away. Hell, with a little practice, a terrorist could probably fly one of the things right through the window of an office building and kill a target sitting at their desk in the next room over. The target would never even see it coming.
While Chapman was apparently trying to sell the drone to nearly every terrorist cell around the world, there was a good chance the Russian government was actively behind this particular deal. An arms escalation in central Africa would keep U.S. attention firmly fixed on the area, allowing Russia freedom to focus on other locations they cared about like Libya, Ukraine, and Iran, to name a few.
At the end of the day, the politics didn’t really matter. They needed to stop this weapons deal before the drone made it into terrorist hands, where it would disappear into the vast deserts of central Africa until it showed up at the site of a horrific terrorist attack.
Wes sat up straighter when he saw several men creeping through the night toward the buildings below. The SOG operatives were making their move.
“Joe won’t like it, but I don’t give a shit,” Holden muttered. “We’re moving in closer. If something goes wrong, they’d all be dead long before we could get down there.” He looked at Wes, half of his face hidden by his NVG’s. “You and Noah take the right. Sam and I will go left.”
Smart, Wes thought. By approaching the buildings from two sides, they’d avoid putting each other in a crossfire situation.
Giving Noah a nod, Wes led the way downhill, moving as quickly and carefully as possible as he headed for the low rock wall surrounding the group of buildings on three sides and crouched down. They were close enough to help Joe and the rest of the SOG guys, but far enough away that no one would hear them.
Noah dropped to a knee beside him. “What’s going on with you and Kyla?” he whispered. “Have you finally gotten off the fence and asked her out.”
Wes did a double take. Even though Noah was wearing NVG’s, Wes could still see the curiosity on his friend’s face. “Seriously? Do you really think this is the time to be talking about my social life…or lack thereof?”
Noah shrugged as Joe announced over the radio that they were in position and waiting to move in. “What? You got something else you’d rather talk about while we wait for the shooting to start?”
Wes hesitated, floundering to come up with any other topic of conversation before letting out a sigh. If he wasn’t wearing a helmet, he would have run a hand through his hair in frustration. Thoughts of the beautiful, dark-haired grad student he was seriously into had a way of doing that to him lately. Oh, hell. Might as well address the proverbial elephant in the desert.
“No, I haven’t asked her out yet.”
Over the radio, Joe announced he and his guys they were picking up the sound of voices from the biggest of the three buildings.
“Why not?” Noah demanded. “Dude, you’ve been living in the friend zone for a frigging millennium. I thought you finally decided to go for it.”
Okay, maybe saying it had been a millennium was extreme. But it had been a long time. All he could so was shrug. “I did, but it isn’t that easy.”
Noah let out a snort. “It seems pretty easy to me. You’re attracted to Kyla and want to ask her out. What’s so complicated about it?”
“Actually, complicated doesn’t come close to covering it.” Wes sighed. “Kyla’s got a lot of stuff going on right now. The trial against her father’s killer has dragged out way longer than anyone expected. She tries to put on a good face, but it kills me to see the toll it’s taking on her. Right now, it’s more important to be there for her when she needs to talk.”
Noah frowned. “I still don’t see what the problem is. The fact that she confides in you means you and Kyla have a connection, which would only get stronger if you took the next step and asked her out on a date.”