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He flashed her an impudent grin and dashed inside.
She made it nearly halfway to the TSV before she happened to glance down and spied a brown paper bag on the floor of the passenger side of the car.
Rats. Jack had forgotten his lunch.
If she hit the stoplights exactly right, she had just enough time to zip back to his school, run his lunch inside and make it to the training site on time. The Medusas’ commanding officer, Major Gunnar Torsten, had no sense of humor whatsoever when it came to tardiness.
Classes had started by the time she got back to the elementary school, and the drop-off area was deserted. Parking quickly, she grabbed Jack’s lunch and hurried inside. To the left of the front door was a large glassed-in office that looked like a reception area lined with institutional, Formica-topped desks. Several women sat at them. A little girl who looked about eight years old stood beside one, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
Piper stepped inside. “Is this where I drop off a lunch a student has forgotten?”
“Yes, ma’am. Just a minute.” The gray-haired woman who answered her went back to talking with the child. “Your mom says she’ll be here in ten minutes with your inhaler—” The woman broke off, staring at something behind Piper.
A flurry of movement in the hallway outside caught Piper’s attention out the corner of her eye. Something—someone—adult-sized had just run past.
Was there a problem?
As she turned to take a better look, a man dressed all in black with a black ski mask over his face burst into the office. Piper flipped into combat mode in a millisecond, her senses going on high alert and adrenaline rushing to all her muscles.
She noted several things at once. The weapon, held across the man’s body, was an AK-47 with an extended mag, and he handled it like he was familiar with it. He was a shade over six feet tall. Athletic in build. Moved fast and silently, rolling from heel to toe with each step. Like a Special Forces operator.
“Everybody down!” he shouted.
The three women at their desks started to scream, and the little girl awaiting the inhaler froze, staring up at the man in openmouthed terror, like a rabbit in front of a wolf.
Stunned, Piper dropped to the floor with the other women. She was unarmed, alone and had no idea how many more men like this there were already inside the school. Terror and panic exploded in her gut in spite of all her Special Forces training.
God. Not a school shooting. A worst-case scenario on all counts. Nonexpendables everywhere—children—completely unequipped to defend themselves from harm. Targets handily clustered together in classrooms. Limited egress points. Even more limited sight lines. Chaos guaranteed.
Tragedy guaranteed.
By force of will and outstanding training, she pushed back all the paralyzing feelings and focused on acting.
Surreptitiously, she eased her cell phone out of her jeans pocket and dialed 9-1-1 by feel. She stuffed the phone under her hip lest the armed man brandishing the AK-47 hear the operator ask what the nature of her emergency was and kill her before she could answer.
She eased her hip off the phone and shouted, “What do you want, barging into an elementary school with an automatic weapon like that?”
“Quiet, or I’ll kill you!” the man shouted back. “Where’s Mrs. Black?”
“She’s out sick today,” one of the other women quavered from the floor.
Piper eased back on top of the phone, praying the emergency operator had gotten the idea and called for the SWAT team. And the FBI and the National Guard and whoever else could be called.
Standoffs with kids caught in the middle were no picnic, but maybe when law enforcement got here, they could negotiate some sort of hostage release.
She calculated her options at the speed of light. She could probably take out the lone armed man—she did have all the necessary unarmed-combat training and the element of surprise on her side.
Question was, where were the other men she’d peripherally seen racing past, and how many of them were there? If she got the weapon away from this one, she could go hunting for the others...although hunting in a building full of children and teachers would be a dreadful environment for taking out bad guys. The odds of shooting an innocent bystander were far too high to risk.
As those thoughts darted through her mind, the armed man did an odd thing. He strode over to the little girl, grabbed her by her upper arm, glanced around, then led her over to a tall wooden coat cabinet against the wall.
He opened the door, pushed her inside and said low, “Stay in there until the police come for you and don’t make a sound until then.”
Piper stared, so confused she momentarily forgot her terror. Did the intruder just save that little girl? Why on earth would an armed assailant do something like that?
He shut the closet door just before two more men raced into the office, dressed like him and similarly armed. Terrorist the First nodded tersely at his buddies.
What in the hell was this about? What did a bunch of men, attired and armed like bank robbers, want with a freaking elementary school?
“Where is she?” one of the newcomers demanded in Farsi. Piper’s Farsi wasn’t fluent, but that was definitely what she’d heard. These guys were Iranian? What on earth did they want here?
The terrorists commenced walking around the room, examining each of the women cowering on the floor. One screamed as an assailant grabbed her shoulder and lifted her up enough to see her face. These guys were looking for somebody? This was a hell of a violent and aggressive way of finding whoever they wanted.
The terrorists reached Piper, and she stared fixedly at their combat boots. Steel toes, nylon uppers, flexible rubber soles, quick-don zippers. Special operators’ footwear.
Was this some sort of exercise aimed at her? The Medusas did some wild stuff in the name of training, but surely they wouldn’t scare the hell out of a bunch of kids and teachers. Nah. This was the real deal.
A hand grabbed her shoulder roughly and threw her over onto her back. She rolled with the shove, not resisting. Unfortunately, the roll exposed her cell phone, and one of them kicked it away from her with his foot. Reflexively, her hand went out to retrieve it, but she froze as she made eye contact with the kicker.
Clear amber eyes stared down at her, the color of a fine cognac. They were hard eyes, but they didn’t contain the rage or fanaticism she’d expected.
He glanced at her outstretched hand splayed on the floor and did a double take. She swore mentally. Clearly visible on her fourth finger was her West Point class ring. In her guise as a civilian historian, she told people it had been her father’s, but it was actually hers.
The man’s eyes lit with recognition as he spied the chunky ring and its dark green central stone.
Dammit.
“Here she is!” he called out to the others in Farsi.
What? These men were here for her? How on earth did they know who she was? Nobody knew about the Medusa Project. It had been resurrected from ashes less than a year ago, for crying out loud.
Everyone had been led to believe the program was defunct and the military had abandoned the idea of training and equipping a team of female Special Forces operatives after the second Medusa team was wiped out in a mission gone terribly wrong.
The other two masked men grabbed her by her arms and hauled her upright. Adrenaline roared through her body, and it took all the discipline she had not to lash out and fight for her life against these men. She was hopelessly outgunned, and three on one was not the kind of odds she wanted to take into a fistfight.
She was a good hand-to-hand fighter, but she wasn’t invincible. Martial artists won against three attackers only in the movies. Carefully choreographed and scripted movies. Not real life. Not in an elementary school full of children.
“You’re sure this is her?” one of the other men asked the terrorist who’d hidden the little girl.
He stared at her indecisively. His gaze strayed to a telephone sitting on the desk beside her, to the exit door and then back to her face. He exhaled hard. Regret glinted in his stare. “Yes. That’s her.” His voice was a rough baritone and sounded stressed.
Who in the hell did they think she was? Who were they?
Her only play was to delay these guys as long as she could. Give the police time to respond to her call.
“Who are you?” she demanded in English. No way was she giving away that she understood anything they were saying to one another. “What do you want with me?”
She didn’t see the blow coming. A fist plowed into her jaw from the right side, snapping her head hard to the left and making her see stars. Dazed, she stared at the first man—the one with golden eyes—wincing silently in front of her.
Gingerly, she poked her right cheek with her tongue. No teeth felt loose, but the inside of her cheek was shredded. She opened her mouth, flexing her jaw experimentally. It didn’t feel broken.
Well. That didn’t go as planned. Dazed, she stared at her attackers. Real fear for her life flowed through her. She registered it, cataloged the emotion and forcibly pushed it down. She had no time for fear. Not if she wanted to live. And not if she wanted to protect the kids in this building.
She had to get these men outside, into the range of armed law enforcement officials, but slowly enough that said officials could get here before these guys fled.
“You’re sure it’s her?” the third man asked doubtfully in Farsi. “She doesn’t look much like her picture.”
“Yes, yes,” Goldeneyes snapped back in Farsi. “Blonde. Tall. Thirty years old. And she does match the picture. These Western women wear a lot of makeup and it changes how they look. I’m used to that, and you’re not. I’m telling you it’s her.”
With that declaration, Goldeneyes apparently sealed some sort of fate for her. The other two men nodded, accepting his word.
What picture? Part of becoming a Medusa was having her life scrubbed completely off the internet. Completely off. A team of cybersecurity experts did the initial wipe and then maintained continuous scans for any new images that might pop up. Even official public records were scrubbed. She did not exist in cyberspace.
So, how did these guys know her, let alone have a picture of her? She certainly had no idea who they were.
Belatedly, her mind working a couple steps slower than normal, she mentally corrected him. She was twenty-seven years old, not thirty, thank you very much.
In the distance, sirens became audible. God bless the 9-1-1 operator. She’d called in the cavalry, after all.
“Time’s up. Let’s go,” Jaw Puncher bit out.
The men hustled her out into the hallway. She briefly considered making a stand right there in the entrance, but they had AK-47s, and one blow from the butt of one of those would knock her out cold. She would just as soon stay conscious if she could. Also, there were all those kids just down the hall. She had no way of knowing if there were any more armed men in the building, and she dared not provoke these guys to start shooting.
She did her best to slow the men down, though, shortening her steps and resisting moving forward between them in the guise of being too zoned out to do anything but shuffle along drunkenly.
Irritably, they overpowered her and shoved her outside into the parking lot. More sirens were audible now. Lots of them. Unfortunately, they still sounded a half-dozen blocks away.
Goldeneyes stepped up close behind her and bodychecked her hard but not painfully, shoving his hip into her lower back, helping the other two men throw her into a white step van. She tumbled to the floor, slamming hard into its metal ribs. Gasping for air, she noted a fourth man darting out of the building to join them. A fifth man drove, pulling away from the front door with a hard lurch of the van.
One of the men snapped at the driver not to leave tire tracks, and the vehicle lurched again as he slowed down abruptly.
Fear bubbled up again in her throat, momentarily choking her.
She did the four-step breathing technique she’d been taught. In. Hold breath and count to four. Out. Count to four. In...
It took several breaths, but calm prevailed once more over her panic.
Okay. She was being kidnapped. Major suckage.
But there had been multiple witnesses. Law enforcement would put out an APB for this van in a few minutes. Houma was a small town deep in the bayou country, which meant there were only so many roads these men could travel in between the copious waterways.
This would be okay. An hour. Maybe two. A standoff, perhaps. With her, a trained Special Forces operative, on the inside. She would be the police’s secret weapon when it came time for a rescue. All she had to do was stay conscious and keep her wits about her. Trust her training.
The van pulled out of the parking lot and turned right. That would be south on Maple Street. They went straight for what she estimated to be five minutes, and then they turned left. A few minutes, another right turn and then they accelerated to highway speed. Maybe Bayou Black Drive heading west out of town?
Which would be ironic. That road would take them right past the unmarked turnoff to the Medusas’ secret facility, where her teammates were gathering for today’s training.
A sense of unreality washed over her. Surely, she was not being kidnapped by Iranian terrorists. This had to be a bad dream. It couldn’t be happening to her. Was that shock lowering its protective fog over her brain? It felt just the way her instructors had described it. Everything was happening at a distance. Muted. Not really touching her.
One of the men admonished the driver in Farsi, but she didn’t understand the command. In a second, she felt the vehicle slow down to a more sedate speed. Piper frowned. What on earth did Iranians want with her? She’d never had anything to do with that part of the world before—had never served or even traveled there and had no particular expertise on the region beyond reading her daily intelligence brief. What was going on here? She had to be missing something critical—
Something heavy smashed painfully into the back of her head, and she toppled forward as everything went dark.
Chapter 2 (#u95de7290-5a1b-50d6-984a-38aef340738a)
Zane Cosworth swore silently, wincing involuntarily as the terrorist calling himself Yousef clocked the woman prisoner on the back of the head with the butt of his AK-47. “Don’t kill her,” he snapped at the guy, the most volatile of the bunch.
“Shut up, Amir. I didn’t like how she was looking at me,” Yousef snarled back.
An urge to return the favor and clock the bastard upside the head made his hands twitch. Zane balled them into fists at his sides.
Amir was the name he’d used to infiltrate these SOBs’ sleeper cell. Not that they were sleeping after this morning’s little stunt.
They were a frustrating bunch, closemouthed and stingy with information for him, the new guy on the team. He was the only actual American among them, and he was convinced it was the sole reason he’d been brought on board. They called upon him to interact with other Americans and used him as their errand boy in any public situation where their accents might draw attention.
But that also meant he was completely expendable if he offended these guys or got in their way of whatever the hell their actual end goal was.
The team’s leader, Mahmoud, was definitely taking instructions from someone who communicated via encrypted cell phone, or occasionally via a Dark Web site that was even more heavily encrypted.
Rolling his eyes at Yousef, Zane leaned over the woman, ostensibly to check her pulse. He grabbed her right wrist with his left hand while surreptitiously slipping the ring off her fourth finger with his other hand and palming the piece. No way in hell could he let his compatriots discover that this woman was a West Pointer. If he was gauging Mahmoud correctly, the guy would kill her instantly.
Mahmoud said practically nothing about his personal beliefs, but he made no secret of despising Americans, particularly military members.
Zane slipped the ring into his pocket. He was seriously grateful that chance had thrown a female soldier in his path this morning. What she was doing at some elementary school in a small town in southern Louisiana, nowhere near an active military base, he had no idea. Call it a small act of God that had gone his way.
Not that he was a whole lot happier about throwing a soldier to the lions than he would be about doing it to some random civilian woman.
But he’d been forced to make the best of an impossible situation.
Of the four women cowering on the floor in the school’s front office, she’d looked to be by far the youngest and fittest of the bunch. Naming her as the target had been the least awful choice under the circumstances. Which wasn’t saying much.
Honestly, he’d feared that if he told the others he didn’t see their target in the office, where she normally worked as an assistant principal, they would start shooting kids to get the woman to reveal herself.
Mahmoud was a cagey bastard and had barely shared any information with any of his men about this fiasco. He’d briefed the cell members only about an anonymous woman they were supposed to find and kidnap.
Zane hadn’t thought it was enough detail to pass on to his superiors. He’d assumed Mahmoud and his boys would spend days or weeks finding the target, doing surveillance on her, picking the perfect spot to abduct her and then launching an operation to kidnap the woman.
Zane thought he had plenty of time to find out who the woman was, slip away from the other men and send a message to his superiors about this little operation. It galled him to have been outmaneuvered by a freaking terrorist like this.
Mahmoud also hadn’t given the team any indication whatsoever that today would be the actual snatch.
Zane had been nearly as shocked as the teachers and kids of Southdown Elementary School when they’d piled out of the van for real, armed with actual weapons and ammunition.
Mahmoud had passed around a picture and name of the target, Persephone Black—whoever the hell she was—in the van as they turned into the school parking lot. Zane hadn’t even had time to send an emergency text to his handlers to let them know who the target was and that an attack was imminent before Mahmoud had ordered them out of the van and barged into a flipping elementary school, armed to kill.
The picture itself had been informative. It was fuzzy and taken from a distance. The woman had been with a man on a crowded street that looked like some place in Europe. She was looking over her shoulder at something, and the shot of her face had been snapped in that moment. For all the world, it looked like a surveillance photo taken by someone following the couple.
Did that mean Mahmoud and his men were in the US on behalf of some foreign government with an intelligence service of its own? Iran was the obvious candidate, given that they sounded like native Farsi speakers.
