Fatal Heat

  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 l Kd P>

  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. Goddamn 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.

  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 Kn" fect 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, Kin p>

  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

  Paige 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.”

  During 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 tong d.

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