Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella (13 page)

As in all missions, Max had to balance out gear and weight. Too little gear was bad, too much gear was bad. It had to be Goldilocks Gear, just right. His hands were already picking things out.

Mel had a sweet little suppressed MP-5 that felt like home in his hands. He picked up a Glock 45 and holster as backup. Three magazines each. Night vision binocs. Emerson folder. Four flashbangs. Restraints and duct tape. Waterproof bag. Wet suit and tanks.

Some C-4, det cord and detonator—because there were few situations where blowing something up didn’t help.

He went out onto his deck and checked the island with Mel’s powerful x140 binoculars, running a slow, careful sweep east to west, then west to east. He saw the jetty with a small boat moored there. Two guards were standing together about fifty feet away. One was smoking. They had their backs to the ocean.

Sloppy. Real sloppy. If he survived the swim, he could take them down easy.

He was deliberate in his actions, not hurrying, though the drumbeat of fear and rage was in his ears. He gave one last long, slow look at the island, at where his Paige was being held, then put on his wet suit. He checked it, checked the tanks, though he knew it wouldn’t be in Mel’s locker if it wasn’t in perf Knheckect shape. Force of habit from a man whose life had always depended on the trustworthiness of his gear.

Time to go.

He stepped down from the deck onto the sand, but stopped when he heard a bark. Max on the deck, watching him. To his dying day, Max would swear the dog looked at him with reproachful eyes.

It was crazy, and it would make his task—already nearly impossible—harder. But he was going to have to search a huge building for Paige, with no idea how to track her. Max could be invaluable.

“You want to help me, big boy?”

Max whined and trembled with eagerness.

He went back into the house, dropping a hand to Max’s head to scratch behind his ears. “OK, boy. We’re going to go get her together. We’re a team.”

Mel’s locker had a small inflatable dinghy, something he probably used when the grandkids came. It took only a few minutes to inflate.

At the beach, he watched Max. The dog bent to track his mistress, nose rooting around the sand, stopping at the water’s edge, then looking back up at him.

He pointed. “In.” Max leaped into the inflatable.

He looked at the dog, the friendliest mutt on the face of the earth up until about two hours ago. Now, with blood on the side of his head from a bullet and blood on his muzzle from having mauled a man in defense of his mistress, Paige’s dog stared up at him with cold, determined eyes. A warrior.

Yessir.

That made two of them.

Man and dog looked out to the island, to where the woman they both loved was being held captive.

It was three miles away. Nothing, in his SEAL days. One of their training exercises back in the day was being dropped ten miles from shore and having to swim back.

But since coming back from the dead, Max had never been able to swim more than a mile. Even that was stretching it. He’d stop in the water, cold and exhausted, knowing if he went any further he’d never make it back in.

This was three.

Towing a small inflatable with thirty pounds of gear and forty pounds of dog.

He shifted his weight onto his good leg. The bad one was aching, shooting messages of pain which he ignored.

The sun was huge, red, glimmering, halfway into the ocean. Soon it would be completely submerged, giving way to night.

Time to go.

“Let’s go get Paige, Max,” he said, pushing the inflatable into the water. The dog answered with a short bark.

He put on his fins, adjusted his face mask, and slipped under the surface, clutching the tow rope. Going after his woman and prepared to die in the attempt.

Hoo-yah.

Chapter Eight

P
aige sat in a chair in a large empty room. Most of the room was in darkness, the only illumination coming from the big ceiling light directly above her.

At one point it had been a propagation lab. The room still had trestle tables set up for the exacting work, but everything else was gone except for a few chairs. For the first half hour after they’d pushed her into this room and taped her to the chair, she’d desperately tried to free herself. But all she managed to do was tire herself out and make her headache worse.

Each time the iron legs of the chair scraped against the concrete floor, the sound echoed in the room. However hard she wrenched, the tape held. Wrists and ankles bound with duct tape, she was also bound to the chair, the tape wrapped around her waist, thighs, and shins.

In her desperate attempt to free herself, she’d almost tipped over. She stopped immediately. Being bound to a tipped over chair, unable to move, would be even worse than her current situation, not to mention the fact that if she fell wrong, she could knock herself out. Whatever was coming, she had to keep her wits about her to deal with it.

So she stilled and tried to reason her way out of this situation.

The problem was, she had so few data. She had an analytical mind, but it needed facts to work with.

Fact: Silvia had stumbled upon a terrible side effect of a GenPlant experiment. Paige knew that the company wasn’t a corrupt fly-by-night operation. It would halt the experiments immediately. But obviously someone in the company wasn’t so honourable and had hired goons to back him up in a rogue operation to keep the experiment going.

Fact: she had no idea who that was, though if she had to bet, her money would be on Jonathan Finder.

Fact: She had no idea what had happened to Silvia, or if she was even alive.

Fact: she had no idea what was going to happen to her.

Fact: Max would come for her. It wasn’t a wish, it was truth. Something about the past week they’d passed together had given her that certainty. He’d come for her as fast as he could, but he had no idea where she was. Now she regretted bitterly not talking to him about her worries over Silvia.

Why hadn’t she? He wasn’t a good-time boyfriend, there for laughter and sex, gone with the wind when there were problems. Everything she knew about him told her that.

She could have told him, and with hindsight should have told him, but… this past week had been so wonderful, so extraordinary, that she’d instinctively kept the world at bay to create a little bubble for them.

How wrong she’d been.

He’d have found her dog by now. Paige hoped with all her heart that he’d found a wounded Max and not a dead Max, but he’d understand that something violent had happened. He was probably calling hospitals in the area, maybe involving the police. But there would be no clues. Even if he found her thumb drive, it wouldn’t have any concrete clues.

It seemed like hours went by and no one came for her. She simply sat, bound to a chair, trying not to panic. She had no wristwatch and no cell phone and no way to judge the time passing.

Were there guards posted outside the door? Even if there weren’t, she couldn’t move. And even if, by some miracle, she were able to free herself and evade the men who’d brought her here, sh S he”-1” fae was trapped on an island. There was no way she could swim back to shore. It must be three miles. She’d die trying to escape.

She tried to calm herself with yoga breathing exercises but they weren’t working. Her heart pounded fast and heavy. It was hard to breathe, as if something were crushing her chest.

Footsteps sounded outside and she straightened, heart rate doubling, sweat breaking out on her back.

Across the big room, the steel door unlocked with a snick and slowly opened. Paige tensed, breath caught in her lungs.

A man slowly walked into the room, identity unclear in the murky light. He stepped into the cone of light and Paige slumped in relief. Larry Pelton.

“Larry! Oh, thank God!” She wrestled one last time with the duct tape. “Get these things off me! Two men who work for GenPlant kidnapped me and they’re after Silvia, too. We have to hurry!”

Larry walked up to her, reached out a hand. At first she thought he was going to rip the duct tape but he didn’t have a knife. The only person she could imagine ripping that tape with his bare hands was Max, and Larry was no Max.

Instead, he put his finger to her throat and watched as his hand drifted down to the first button of her shirt.

“So pretty,” he mused.

Paige was so shocked she didn’t move as his hand slid into her shirt and cupped her breast. He leaned down and with his other hand grabbed the hair at the back of her head so she couldn’t move,and kissed her.

Larry Pelton had been one of the world’s monumentally bad kissers. Epically bad. She often thought, during their very brief liaison, that he should have his kissing license taken away. His tongue slipped into her mouth like a warm slug, retreating before she could bite him.

The door opened again and two men came in. Two armed men. The men who’d kidnapped her.

Larry smiled as he lifted his head, fisted hand in her hair tugging so hard it hurt. “Paige, my dear.” He shook his head in sadness. “You and your friend Silvia have been giving me so much grief. It’s going to be a real pleasure making you pay.”

D
uring Hell Week—132 hours of continuous torture—Max ran two hundred miles in combat boots and full combat gear, swam fifty miles, did a thousand push-ups, and endured hours and hours of surf torture, all on four hours’ sleep. It was so grueling 70 percent of the candidates rang the bell before day two.

He did it by refusing to quit.

Simply refusing. He’d rather die.

By the end of the week he was in constant pain, and when Hell Week was over on Friday afternoon, he collapsed where he stood. At the medical exam, he had shin splints and four torn ligaments. The doctor had simply looked at him, patted his shoulder and said quietly, “Good job.”

No one was going to pat his back now. It didn’t make any difference because what was waiting at the other end was much more valuable than his Budweiser.

Paige.

A living Paige. Laughing in his arms.

He could face the future, even a future outside the Teams, if he had her by his side. The thought of living without Paige in his world terrified him. It would be like having all the lights switched off and living in darkness for the rest of his life.

If he had to swim to hell and back for her, he would, gladly.

He paced himself, knowing he couldn’t use his combat swim technique, which was fast and powerful. He simply didn’t have the strength or the stamina. Max had trained all his adult life and he knew his body intimately. At his peak, he could almost guarantee that as far and as fast as a human could swim, that’s how far and how fast he could.

But he’d come close to death. His injuries had been deep and grievous. He’d lost forty pounds of muscle and hadn’t put it all back. Thinking he’d power his way to Paige was a good way to kill himself.

The thought was grinding and humiliating, but if he had any chance of surviving this, he had to do it the smart way.

His strokes were slow to conserve power, using his arms more than his legs because his left leg was almost useless.

He swam, tugging the tiny rubber boat with Max and his gear in it, emptying his mind of everything but the will to get to the islan S to andd.

He surfaced for a second to get his bearings. His injured leg couldn’t kick as hard and it threw him off course.

That was what he told himself, but the truth was he was reaching the limits of his strength. And he was only a third of the way there.

It was almost night, though there was just enough pewter in the sky to clearly see the island, a dark triangular shape in the distance.

Max clung to the side of the inflatable, breathing deeply, staring at the island. He glanced at his hand holding onto the tug rope. It was shaking.

The dog made a soft whining sound, shifted slightly to bring his muzzle close, and licked his hand. The dog wanted Paige back as much as he did. He was wounded—he’d been shot in the head—and yet he was unwavering. He’d jumped into the inflatable without hesitation and had remained utterly still while, underwater, Max towed him. Dogs don’t have good eyesight; the way they make sense of their world is through their noses.

For the dog, Max had suddenly disappeared, and the inflatable dinghy with the uncertain footing simply began moving. It must have been terrifying, but Max saw no signs of fear in the dog, only determination.

He looked down at his hand. The trembling had stopped.

He had his team. He had his mission.

Go.

He slipped under the water again.

“Y
ou weren’t very helpful to my men,” Larry said casually. He’d brought a chair to sit down on, not straddling it like the goon had done back at her house, but sitting down properly, one elegantly-clad leg over the other. “They told me. That’s why you’re here.” He
tssk
ed. “You made me come all the way over here when it really wasn’t necessary, Paige.”