Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella (12 page)

He finally clicked through and saw a personal message, which he’d missed in his scrolling. From a woman named Silvia, who was apparently a friend. He read through the message and finally reached a grim understanding.

The company Paige worked for was sitting on a bomb that was about to blow up in its face. A bomb that, at a conservative estimate, was about to cost them millions, maybe billions. Something like this would eventually come out, but from what Max was able to see, right now the only thing standing between the bomb and the world was two super-smart women. One was being chased all over Argentina and the other had been kidnapped.

He opened his cell, engaged an encryption app designed by the friend he was calling, and waited.

“Yo. World’s Finest Hacker. Black Hat, White Hat, take your pick. How may I help you?”

Oh yeah. Cory Mayer, former Delta operator. Max had met him on a cross-training exercise. Cory had been a gifted shooter, but it turned out he was even more gifted with a keyboard, which had turned out handy when an IED had exploded under his badly-armored vehicle outside Nasiriyah seven years ago. He’d left his legs back in Iraq—but not his brains. He’d since recycled to become everyone’s go-to guy for intel.

“Yo, Hackerman. I’ve got myself a time-sensitive situation here. A possible kidnap victim, works for GenPlant Laboratories. What can you tell me about the company?”

“Hm. How you been, Maxie boy? You getting over your scratches?”

Max nearly smiled. Though Cory’s voice was slow and honeyed he could hear wild tapping in the background.

“Doing fine now, except for this woman. She works for the company, does research work for them. I think she’s come across some information that will hurt the company.”

“Oh ho!” Cory chortled. “Are we talking babe material, here?”

“Yeah,” Max said curtly. “And it’s a woman I care about. A lot.”

There was silence at the other end, but the pounding sounds intensified.

“Okay.” When he came back online, Cory’s voice was curt and serious. “Here’s what we’ve got. Big company, last year’s profits were half a billion dollars on three billion sales. Has come up with some killer apps—two new types of antibiotics that can overcome resistant e. coli infections and pesticide-resistant fruit trees. And that was just last year. Seems to be humming right along.”

Okay. “It’s got research facilities in Argentina. What can you tell me about that?”

Another minute as Cory worked his magic. “Yep. A big research facility four hundred miles south of Buenos Aires.”

“Anything wonky there?”

“Not that I can see.”

Max knew there was but it was clearly still hidden. Not even Cory, brilliant as he was, could see things that weren’t there yet.

“How about their security?”

After a minute, Cory said, “Oh.”

“What? What?”

“Not good. Someone’s been hiring from Magnum Secure lately. Hiring heavily. I’d say now a good 70 percent of their security staff comes from there. Bad juju, Max.”

Very bad juju. Magnum Secure was a notoriously corrupt private contractor that had operated extensively in the Sandbox. He’d come across MS operators a lot, and they were aggressive and greedy. The owner seemed to recruit men who cared for nothing but the bottom line. If someone in Paige’s company had been filling its security department with ex-MS contractors, Paige was in trouble.

None of the operators would draw the line at hurting a woman.

“The woman in question’s name is Paige Waring, Cory. Like I said, she’s a researcher there. I’m at her house now and there are signs of a struggle. I think she’s been kidnapped because she holds some information about something that went wrong at their lab in Argentina. Where do you think they’d take her? To headquarters? It’s about twenty miles from here.”

“Pulling up satellite images now… no. I don’t think so. It’s a busy facility. There’s a huge parking lot with cars going in and out constantly. My images are from fifteen minutes ago and there’s a lot of movement. Dunno, Max, just seems too public for a kidnapping. I can’t even see any outbuildings where someone could be held.”

The dog’s whining was stronger now, with a note of urgency in it. He was pawing Max’s leg. The dog went back to the front door, looking over his shoulder at Max, and barked.

Was Paige being held nearby? Is that what Max was trying to tell him?

“Listen,” he told Cory. “I gotta see about something. Can you send those images to my Gmail account and we’ll talk in five? And see if you can find any databases with other property the corporation might own nearby.”

“Sure thing,” Cory said. “A woman, huh?”

“Yeah. Smart and kind and pretty. Exactly the kind of woman fuckheads like to hurt.”

Max could almost hear Cory’s teeth grinding. His mom had been beaten to death by his dad. He was guaranteed to give Max his best.

Max opened the front door and the dog flowed out, nose to the ground. To Max’s astonishment, instead of making a grid back and forth to try to pick up Paige’s scent, the dog ran around the house and headed straight for the beach.

What the fuck?

He’d been prepared for Max to lose the scent right away. They’d have driven her away in a car. When Max headed for the beach, nose still to the ground, his heart sank. Sweat broke out in every pore.

Had they killed Paige and buried her on the beach? Their stretch of beach was usually deserted. The beach narrowed along their stretch and the bed was rocky. The popular beach was two miles down—long wide stretches of sand and no rocks underfoot.

Oh God, now he could see it, as plain as day. Three sets of footprints, two on either side of deeply furrowed tracks. Two men holding up an unconscious woman. Then halfway down the beach, two sets of footprints, one much deeper than the other. The depth of a man carrying an adult woman.

Max had followed his nose straight to the water, so at least he wasn’t going to find Paige’s body in a shallow grave. The dog was at the water’s edge, moving back and forth anxiously, unable to follow the scent into the sea. The sea that might contain Paige’s body.

Max rejected that idea violently. Shook it right the hell off. He’d just found her, he wasn’t going to lose her. Not an option.

Coming closer to the water the footprints were muddled. And there was a long indentation in the sand, with a heavy furrow in the middle. The kind of print a boat with a hull would make.

He refused to even think that they were putting Paige on the boat to dump her overboard. It was still daylight. Would they risk someone seeing them on open water when there were other, easier options available? Why put Paige in a boat? Ten miles east and you could get onto the largest freeway system in the world and disappear.

They had to keep her alive for a reason. And they put her on a boat for a reason.

Max was going to find her and hurt the men who’d taken her, and then he was going to bring her home. That was his mission and he hadn’t failed a mission yet.

“Max!” he called and slapped his thigh. The dog looked up from where he was nosing the sand, completely recovered and quivering with anxiety. “Come with me!”

The dog hesitated, torn. He wanted to stay where there was the last sign of his mistress, but she wasn’t there. On the other hand, maybe the male human could help. He slowly trotted to him.

Max headed for his apartment because he knew Mel would have everything he could possibly need. He needed speed because someone could be hurting Paige right now. He nearly ran back, ignoring the grinding pain in his leg.

Mel had security cameras front and back, something Paige didn’t but would have—just as soon as Max got her back. He’d install security cameras right away, alarms at the doors and windows and fence, and front and back door electronic security systems not even he could penetrate.

Mel’s cameras worked on a forty-eight-hour loop and they were digital, hi-def cameras. So when Max moved the tape back, he watched, every muscle in his body tensed, as three men drove up in a tan SUV. Two men got out, one stayed in the car.

Max watched as the taller of the two men picked Paige’s lD.

They stopped at the SUV to talk to the driver who backed the SUV and drove away.

While they were talking, the camera caught the faces of all three men. Max froze the camera, studying the three men carefully, knowing he would never forget those faces—they were dead men walking.

He flipped open his cell and called Cory back. He didn’t even have a chance to say anything when Cory said, excitedly, “Max, GenPlant Labs has a super-secret facility on an island not far from where you are now. The island is called—“

“Santo Domingo Island, yeah. Listen, do you think there’s any chance of satellite coverage of the island? Say, from about an hour ago to now? Can you hack Keyhole?”

He knew what he was asking. Keyhole was the NSA’s top-secret series of eyes in the sky so powerful they could see the balls of flies. Keyhole intel was beamed down in code so highly encrypted it took a bank of servers to decode.

But Cory was a genius.

“Please,” Cory said. “For you, anything. But I’ll do you one better. There’s a big oil consortium looking for shale oil via a new imaging technology. They’ve covered all of Central California with something like four thousand bird-sized drones. Each drone records a tiny area and a computer puts a composite picture together. That picture would be much clearer than Keyhole.”

Max didn’t even question how Cory could know that. And didn’t bother asking Cory to hack into the central computer putting together the mosaic of drone photograms. He could hear Cory pounding the keyboard. Cory knew what to look for.

Five minutes later, Cory whistled.

“What?”

Cory’s voice was grim. “Not looking good, big guy. I’ll send these images to your cell. I’m looking at a boat that landed on a pier on the south side of the island at 17:47. The time stamp will be on the footage. Then we see two guys pulling out what looks like a hooded female—she’s stumbling and they’re dragging her along… ”

Max could picture it all too well, the two men who’d been on the security footage manhandling Paige. His hands fisted.

“You’re going to get these fuckers, correct, Max?” Cory asked. “They’re really manhandling her.” For a moment, all Max could hear was Cory’s rough breathing. “One of those fuckers just backhanded her. She fell to the ground. God
damn
it!”

Max closed his eyes and grappled for control. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly. “I’m going to get them. Count on it.”

“Good. I’m watching them disappear into the main building. Straight up from the jetty. The good news is that they entered the building through what looks like the front door, so we know where she was at 17:54. The bad news is that the central building is enormous. There are several outbuildings, and we have no way of telling if there are underground corridors. No way of knowing where she might be now.”

If she’s still alive
. Cory didn’t say it but it hung there in the air.

Max wasn’t going there. Not touching it. “What can you tell me about the island? How many people are on it—can you tell?”

“It’s hard to say. There are no cars, of course. There’s a jetty on the south side, but only for small boats. That’s where they landed. I can’t imagine boats carrying much more than ten people mooring there. Hang on, wait a minute. Let me check.” Max held his cell to his ear, clutching it so hard it was a miracle the plastic didn’t break.

The urge to spring into action was so strong it prickled under his skin but he knew better than to be impatient at the planning stage. Paige was in danger, but she wouldn’t be helped by him barging in unprepared and getting his ass capped.

“Okay.” Cory came back online. “There are two guards stationed on the north side of the facility. And two more at the jetty. I went back in time to check their routine and they patrol every half hour, fifteen minutes to each quadrant. They’re armed—looks like AK-74 rifles. Sidearms, too, but they’re holstered and I don’t have enough resolution to tell what they are. They stick close to the buildings. If that’s a normal research facility I’ll French-kiss you.”

Max nearly smiled. “Thanks, buddy, I’ll pass.”

“No way to know how many people are inside or where they’re holding your friend. Sorry. The drones don’t have IR capability. That’s going to come online next month, or so I heard. But right now what’s under the roofs is unknowable. And it’ll be dark soon.”

“Yeah. I better get going. Thanks. I owe you.”

“Just bring that woman back safely. Check your cell, you’ll see the images. I’ll be on standby. Let me know if I can help with anything. And don’t forget my buddy PJ. Pretty high up in the SF FBI office.”

“Yeah. Listen. I’m going to send you a file. Forward it to PJ.”

“Got it.”

“You’re the best.”

“Yes, I am. Bring her home, Max.”

“You bet. Count on it.”

Max carefully studied the images Cory sent him, then went to Mel’s locker, where he knew he would find everything he needed. Mel had given him the combination, and sure enough, it was full of gear.

The right gear, bless Mel’s black heart.