Retribution (SSU Trilogy Book 3) (The Surgical Strike Unit) Read online

  “Negative, boss.”

  Rafe studied the lab. It appeared as deserted as the last two nights. The security guards were out patrolling the perimeter. If they held to schedule, this sector would remain clear for another ten minutes.

  “We’re staying on plan,” Rafe announced. The wind had picked up, stirring the scent of pine and earth into a potent musk. Rafe knew the sounds of moving branches would help mask any sounds his men made, but a quieter night would have let him hear any approaching danger.

  Rafe found himself smiling. Without a blueprint of the building and a security diagram, tonight’s maneuver was strictly improv from here on out. He loved missions like these, when success depended more on his team’s ingenuity than planning and technology.

  “Well, well, lookee what we’ve got here,” Muldovsky murmured. “One of those transports from the satellite photos is leaving the building.”

  “I’m on it.” In its earlier flyovers their satellite hadn’t even picked up a heat signal from the drivers of the trucks, which meant someone was going to a lot of trouble to hide what was going into, or coming out of, the hidden section of the lab. Rafe needed to know what was on those trucks.

  He motioned for two of his men to head back to the road. Because the team had walked in, they didn’t have their own vehicle to follow the truck. But the road wound through the compound, so his men would have plenty of time to get in position and hit the truck with a tracking device. Then the satellite would be able to locate it and send back photos.

  “Hold up, boss. It’s not going down the road. It’s heading into the trees… Okay, good, the truck’s moving slow enough that Willits is gonna sneak onboard.”

  “Roger.” Rafe shifted his attention from his radio to the men around him as they approached the compound. At the signal from his point man, Rafe dashed across the lawn and onto the building’s tiny front step. He pulled the dummy passkey out of his pocket and was just raising it to the electronic reader, when Muldovsky’s voice crackled through the radio at his ear.

  “Fuck!”

  Rafe froze, then gave one quiet click of his mic to let his teammate know he’d been heard.

  “Boss, Willits reports dead bodies in the back of the truck.”

  Rafe squeezed his eyes shut. He knew they were all wondering the same thing. Was Nate’s body among them?

  Rafe shook his head. He couldn’t think about that now. He gave another click of the mic to acknowledge Muldovsky.

  Then he proceeded with breaking into the lab. If Nate was indeed one of the dead, Rafe was damn well going to find out how and why he’d died.

  God bless Janey Reese, Rafe thought ten minutes later as the light on the lab’s electronic lock turned green. The SSU’s self-styled Gadget Goddess was the female equivalent to James Bond’s “Q.” Sixty if she was a day, she ran rings around her younger counterparts when it came to practical innovations. This dummy passkey was a perfect example. It had gotten them into the building and now allowed Rafe and his men to access each individual lab.

  Unfortunately, the labels on the neat rows of chemicals and test tubes in this small room meant little to Rafe. His brother-in-law was a biochemical expert, but Kai was currently recovering from a severe malaria attack caused by a mutated parasite that didn’t respond well to current drugs. Sparing a quick prayer for Kai’s health, Rafe asked, “Anything look out of the ordinary to you, Addison?”

  “Besides the fact that there’s no power in the lab, not even a live battery backup for the computer, and there isn’t so much as a Post-it in sight?” Addison whispered dryly. “Not a thing.”

  Yeah, the sterility of the room also bugged Rafe. He had no way of knowing if the lab was about to be closed down for good, or if removing all notes and disconnecting all power to the labs was standard post-hours procedure.

  “Chemicals all seem pretty standard,” Addison added. He was the only one on the team who’d taken chemistry in college, so he was the de facto expert. He waved a handheld sensor over the bottles and test tubes, across the counter, around the sink and underneath to the empty trash can. “No traces of any known biochemical or radioactive weapon-grade material,” he announced.

  Rafe nodded. The sensors were designed to detect the slightest residue that even a thorough cleaning might miss. He signaled Addison to follow him and stepped out into the hallway. “Anyone else have better luck?” he breathed into his lip mic.

  “No smoking guns, or smoldering cauldrons, boss,” Teng replied. “But I do have a locked door that our guru’s passkey isn’t opening. They’ve got a second layer of security here.”

  “I’ll be—”

  “Boss,” Muldovsky’s voice cut in. “You boys done something to draw attention to yourselves? I’ve got a team of six guards leaving the lower level and heading your way.”

  Fuck. Rafe met Addison’s eyes, seeing the same suspicion reflected there.

  “We must have triggered a silent alarm,” Rafe murmured. “Time to head out. Muldovsky, any word from Willits?” Rafe jogged down the corridor toward the front door.

  “Negative boss. He’s still with the truck.”

  “Keep me posted. Going radio silent.”

  With the coordination of long practice, Rafe and his men slipped out the door, across the lawn, and back into the trees with mere seconds to spare before the compound’s security team moved stealthily into view.

  As they headed back to the rendezvous point, Rafe started plotting how to get access to that hidden room.

  Willits stalked into camp a good hour after Rafe and his team. The other men stepped out of his way, aware from the muscles working at his jaw that their teammate was furious and looking for a fight.

  Rafe stood slowly from his crouched position by the food pack. Willits stopped a foot from Rafe. “Nate wasn’t on the truck, sir.”

  Rafe nodded and felt the fist around his chest loosen. He’d been prepared to deal with the news of Nate’s death, but all of them would sleep better tonight knowing their missing teammate could still be alive and inside the lab.

  “Tell me what you saw,” Rafe commanded quietly.

  Willits’s blue eyes lost their angry glitter and turned bleak. “Seven dead men. Cause of death—” His lips twisted and he looked away. One shuddering inhale later, he swung his eyes back to Rafe’s, his anger back. “One had his throat torn out. The teeth marks looked human.”

  “Shit.”

  “Three more had dried blood at their eyes, nose, ears and mouth. It looked like Ebola, but my sensor didn’t pick up any known virus. The others appeared to have died from having the living hell beat out of them.” Willits shook his head. “They were just fucking dumped in the truck, then driven out to a huge underground crematorium and tossed inside like fucking garbage.”

  Rafe watched Willits’s fists open and close, and knew that wasn’t the end of the story.

  “And?” Rafe prompted.

  Willits notched his chin up. “I recognized one of the guys with the bloody eyes. Bert Landers. Lying, troublemaking sack of shit from the last basic training class I ran for the army before I joined the SSU. Six months ago, I heard he’d been killed in a training accident. But his body tonight in the truck…dead no more than a few days at most. And two more of the bodies were men on our list of missing personnel.”

  “Fuck.” The soft expletive came from O’Ryan. He and the rest of the men weren’t even pretending not to listen.

  “Here.” Willits thrust his smartphone at Rafe. “I took photos.”

  Aware that the eyes of every one of his men were on him as he scrolled through the photos, Rafe kept his breathing even and his jaw relaxed even though he wanted to hurl the phone across the campsite. They’ll face justice, Rafe promised himself. One way or another we’ll make certain they pay.

  “Teng,” he snapped to his communications expert when he could trust himself to speak without snarling. “Get Ryker on the line. Willits, you have anything to add?”

  There wasn’t much
more. Willits had stayed in the back of the truck until it stopped, then slipped into the woods and watched as the driver and another man carried the bodies to the crematorium, tossed them in, then pushed the button to set the fire.

  “Yo boss. Ryker on line one.” Rafe dismissed Willits with a clap on the shoulder, then grabbed the satellite phone Teng held out to him.

  Rafe walked out of camp as he greeted the director and founder of the SSU, then launched into an account of tonight’s developments.

  After Rafe had finished, Ryker cursed softly. “Those symptoms sound like the ones reported with some of Nevsky’s subjects.” Rafe could just make out the faint sound of his boss spinning the antique globe he kept in his office, a sure sign Ryker was deep in thought. “We found Nevsky’s body, but not Kaufmann’s. It’s possible Kaufmann survived and started his own program.”

  Rafe barely held back his own curses. Their surveillance hadn’t shown anyone matching Kaufmann’s description exiting or entering the facility, but if the man lived inside the compound he wouldn’t need to leave. A select team of personnel drove into town once a month to pick up supplies. Aside from the staff that was bused to and from the housing complex, the SSU had been unable to get an accurate count of how many people, stayed inside the compound around the clock. The buildings had been built in such a way that infrared couldn’t penetrate.

  “Any luck tracing the money?” Rafe asked.

  “No. Whoever set up the bank account to cover the compound’s expenses in town buried the details well. It will take time to unravel all the connections and I suspect in the end we’ll run into a dead end. I’ll tell our researchers to add Kaufmann’s name to the search, but since he’s presumed dead, any money he’s getting for running the program will likely be under a false name.”

  “Yeah. That could also explain why there wasn’t a single piece of branded paper in the labs or even a pencil with a customized logo on it. In case of infiltration, no one would know where to start looking for records tying the program back to its funder.”

  Rafe hoped to hell the leader of the program wasn’t Kaufmann. Dr. Leonard Kaufmann had been the right hand man of Dr. Mikhail Nevsky, a scientist who had worked for the United States government to develop a program for creating superhuman spies and soldiers. Using a combination of drugs, hypnosis and gene manipulation, Nevsky had made advances in physical strength, speed and immunity. There was just one problem. None of Nevsky’s human subjects had survived past five or six months. They either went insane and committed suicide, or they died from massive organ failure.

  Rafe paced along the bank of a small stream, wishing he had his boxing gloves. The thought of Nate going through such a program made him want to hit something. The fact that Rafe felt attracted to one of the scientists involved in such horrific experiments made him sick.

  Between the reports of men from this facility going on murderous rampages and Willits’s description of the state of the dead men in the back of the truck, Rafe suspected Ryker’s conclusion about Kaufmann was correct, and this lab was based on Nevsky’s research.

  “Could Kaufmann have found Nevsky’s microchip?” Rafe asked.

  Kai had been undercover at the lab when Dr. Nevsky killed himself by triggering the self-destruct feature. All of Nevsky’s work had been destroyed, except for the notes he’d encoded on a microchip and hidden away in an undisclosed location.

  “No,” Ryker said. “Kai said Nevsky was too paranoid. He didn’t even trust Kaufmann with the chip. Kaufmann must have smuggled out his own copy of the notes.”

  “Shit.” Kai had been searching for Nevsky’s microchip for over two years now, racing to make sure it wasn’t found by a terrorist or criminal organization. Once Kai recovered from the malaria, he was heading out to follow a strong lead regarding the chip’s location.

  But if the news got out that another superhuman program was up and running, the key players would shift their attention from the chip to the live data. The SSU needed to shut down this facility before word got out about its existence. “Whether this is really Kaufmann or not, they’re using the missing service personnel in their experiments,” Rafe informed his boss. “I believe they’re holding Nate in the underground section of the lab.”

  Rafe paused. “I’m not leaving without him.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Rafe knew the situation had escalated far beyond just a simple locate and rescue, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t risking Nate becoming another cremated body.

  “I assume you have a plan on how to get inside,” Ryker said.

  Rafe glanced at his watch, then ran through his options. He still had several hours of darkness left. “Yeah. Here’s what we’re going to do…”

  Chapter 3

  “Wake up.”

  The command in the unfamiliar male voice jerked Gabby out of a sound sleep. Her eyes flew open and her lips parted, but cotton cloth clogged her mouth, blocking her scream. The faint light from the clock radio outlined the shape of a man’s head and gave the whites of his eyes a greenish cast.

  Terror shot through her. Oh, God. Her heart thundered in her chest until she thought it must be loud enough to wake the entire state. She attempted to sit up, to strike out, but her hands were tied in front of her. She tried to yank them apart, but the tight rope didn’t give.

  Why had she even allowed herself to sleep? The plan was for her to sneak out at one thirty in the morning and hide in the woods. At that time the chemicals she’d mixed earlier would reach their peak potency and explode in her lab. Laurel and her guard buddy would free the subjects in the lower lab, load them into the back of one of the cargo trucks, then swing by to pick Gabby up.

  After turning out the light at her usual bedtime, Gabby had stretched out on her bed to wait until it was time to meet Laurel. But sleep had snuck up on her.

  Had Dr. Kaufmann discovered their plan? Was this man one of the guards come to take her back to the lab, where Kaufmann would fulfill his threat to turn Gabby over to his subjects?

  A fresh burst of terror broke through her paralysis. She bent her knees and pushed with her feet, trying to make like an inchworm and move closer to the opposite end of the bed.

  The man put his hand on her shoulder and held her in place.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” he said, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper.

  We’re? oh, God, there was more than one man in the room with her?

  She twisted away from the man. With one more shove of her feet, she toppled off the other side of the bed. She’d no sooner landed on the floor, though, than large hands reached down and picked her up, setting her back on the bed.

  “Like the boss said,” whispered a new voice. “We aren’t gonna hurt you, lady. Just calm down and listen.”

  Calm down? She didn’t—

  The first man put his hand on her throat, using just enough pressure to let her know he could crush her windpipe if he chose. She couldn’t stop herself from swallowing nervously, wincing as the muscles of her throat tried to move beneath the constriction of his hand.

  The bed coverings moved as the man shifted closer. Her breath hitched.

  “Easy,” he whispered. “Just relax.” His thumb and index finger began a slow, soothing massage under her jaw and to her utter shock and disgust, she felt her muscles ease.

  “That’s it,” he murmured. “As long as you cooperate, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Meaning he’d hurt her if she didn’t cooperate? Her heart rate spiked again.

  But he kept up the slow kneading of his fingers and her body responded to his warm, calloused touch. Not just relaxing, but stirring slightly with arousal.

  What the hell was wrong with her?

  “We’re going to remove your gag. If you scream…” He tightened his fingers until she gasped for breath. “Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “Good.” He relaxed his grip and it took every ounce of control for her not to gulp in air. But she’d be
damned if she’d give him that satisfaction.

  The other man’s fingers swiftly found the knot on her gag and loosened it. She spat out the cotton and inhaled deeply.

  “We cool?” the man asked, tightening his grip on her throat in warning.

  Her mouth was too dry to talk, so Gabby merely nodded again.

  “I want you to tell me where in the lab this man is being held.” A penlight turned on. She winced, turning her head away until her eyes adjusted to the brightness. Then she glanced at the photo in front of her.

  It showed a tall, muscular man with ebony skin, wearing military fatigues and a troublemaker’s grin. She worked some moisture into her mouth. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  The fingers pressed down on her throat. “Wrong answer.”

  “I swear! I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” There was a hint of violence in the voice now, along with greater pressure on her throat. “We tracked him here. We know he’s inside the compound. He’s not in the upper level, so he must be downstairs, where you work.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But even to her own ears, her protest sounded false.

  Dr. Montague was hiding something. Rafe pressed a little harder on the fragile throat beneath his hand. He hadn’t missed the way her pulse had kicked just now. Or the extra layer of wariness in her eyes.

  Damn, but he wished they had full light. He wanted to see the color of her eyes. He thought they were hazel, but he couldn’t be sure. What he could say for certain was that she was much more fragile in person than she’d appeared tonight when she’d stumbled leaving the compound. Her body shook continuously with tiny shudders he didn’t think she was even aware of, and her wrists when he’d bound them had been little more than taut skin over bone. Part of him wanted to gather her in his arms and comfort her. To take away her fear.

  Thinking back to the photos of the dead men in the truck, Rafe reminded himself that she didn’t deserve his compassion. Her weakness just meant she’d be easy to break. And if his conscience cringed at the thought, he ignored it. He’d do whatever necessary to find Nate.