Her SEAL Bodyguard
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Cindy Dees
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Chapter 1
Gia Rykhof’s fingers danced on the roller ball mouse beside her computer monitor as she made tiny, continuous adjustments to the video image on her screen. It was dark and grainy, but then, it was being shot from a highly classified surveillance drone cruising at 60,000 feet altitude over the spec ops mission on her monitor.
The special operations team she was providing real-time intelligence assessments to was clearing out the compound of a notorious warlord halfway around the world from where she sat tonight, just outside of Washington, DC. Sometimes the global nature of modern military technology startled even her.
She spoke into her headset. “Alpha Four, you’ve got two hostiles hiding behind the chicken coop at your ten o’clock, distance thirty yards. They’re armed and appear to be waiting for you to approach.”
“Roger, Eagle Eyes,” one of the operators breathed.
She watched in the red-tinted darkness of the ops center as two operators peeled off from the pack and ran over to the front side of a narrow, stucco chicken coop. The pair crouched beside it and placed a shaped charge on the wall about waist high. They ran back to the team and, at a hand signal from their leader, blew a hole through the chicken coop that threw the two hostiles some fifty feet back to slam into the compound’s stone wall. Both hostiles lay on the ground, unmoving.
She rolled her view to the right of where the team was advancing. “Alpha Four, I’ve got six heat signatures in the building at your three o’clock. Four are child-sized. Two adults. The building beyond it at your two o’clock had five adult heat signatures sixty seconds ago, but they are no longer present. Either the targets went outside and managed to drop off my screen, or they went underground.”
A single click in her ear was all the acknowledgment she got, but it was enough. She watched as the team leader fanned out a dozen of his men to the right toward the second building. Another team of four guys entered the first building with the kids and, presumably, two women. She lost visual on the four operators but picked them up on the infrared monitor to her left as they entered the building. They met no resistance inside.
Not so, the men outside. A sharp firefight ensued, and she was kept hopping, calling out positions of the hostiles as they darted from building to building for cover. The warlord’s compound had some fifteen buildings in it, and every one had to be taken, cleared, secured and then advanced past.
Gia’s neck was stiff and her shoulders were aching by the time the team finally declared the compound clear. Alpha Four’s team leader assigned about a quarter of his men to guard prisoners and make one last sweep of the compound. He and the rest of his guys headed into the house where the hostiles had disappeared from. They would head underground and try to track down the warlord, who had escaped the initial assault.
“Thanks for the help, Eagle Eyes,” Alpha Four’s leader transmitted.
She clicked her mike button once. “Good hunting,” she wished the team as, one by one, they disappeared from her infrared feed when they went down into whatever tunnels lay beneath the compound.
She took advantage of the end of active combat to lean back and stretch her arms over her head. She wished she could’ve been there on the ground with the team tonight, but her own Special Forces team, the Medusas, was on leave for a month of R & R, and then would go into a training rotation after that. They’d be deployed again in about six months when they were all rested, fit and honed to an even sharper edge than ever.
A flu outbreak had taken the visual intel analysts at this station out of commission, and she’d been asked if she would delay her vacation for a week to come up here and fill in until the usual real-time intel analysts were out of bed and back at work.
A movement on her screen made her yank her arms down and lean forward intently. Nobody should be moving where those shadows had just slid along a wall at the edge of the compound. Had the warlord somehow managed to hide in one of the buildings and was he now trying to sneak out the back gate?
It would be a huge mistake. A Humvee with a machine gun mounted on it and three marines inside was standing off from the gate about a hundred feet, with orders to kill anyone who fled the compound.
She zoomed in the camera hovering miles over the compound and checked her infrared feed. The heat signatures of four men carrying a large object between them lit up. It looked like a wooden crate of some kind. The small infrared designator beacons that marked them as friendly forces to other operators—and, incidentally, to her—blinked on her screen. Those weren’t hostiles escaping. Those were American Special Operators taking something out of the compound.
She frowned. She’d heard the entire mission briefing, and nobody had mentioned finding and pulling out a package of any kind. Packages could be people or objects, or even information. They were any valuable thing that a mission was designed to capture, move or retrieve.
Whatever was in that crate was heavy. Really heavy. Four Special Operators were staggering a little under the load of it, which would put the weight at close to a thousand pounds. The crate was around the size of a small desk. But what was in it?
People? Bodies? Gold? Or, more practically, weapons? Ammunition? A bomb? Her money was on it being metal, at least in part, to be that heavy.
She was reaching for her mike button to warn the marines outside that four friendlies were coming out through the gate, but just as she keyed her mike, the gunner swung his weapon up and away from the friendlies. He, too, must have spotted the flashing infrared beacons that indicated them as friendly operators.
The four men carried the crate over to the Humvee and set it down. Then, as a guy leaned in each of the open windows of the vehicle, the gunner ducked down inside, no doubt to hear whatever the Special Operators were saying.
The camera glitched for a moment, and when the picture came back, the four men were finishing horsing the big crate into the back of the Humvee. She watched in confusion as the vehicle drove away from the compound. What was up with that? The op wasn’t over. Why had the marines in that vehicle abandoned their position?
Had new orders been given that she was unaware of? But as the real-time intel provider, she heard everything on all the radio channels and had been read in on the same mission briefing the operators on the ground had—
The door behind her opened and a slash of bright white light from the hallway outside blinded her.
“Hey! You just wrecked my night vision!” she protested. “You’re supposed to close the outer door before you open the inner door.”
A large black shape strode toward her as she blinked furiously, unable to even make out the guy’s face. “I need your computer,” he said gruffly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Get out of your seat. I need your computer.”
“I’m in the middle of supporting a live operation—”
She might be half-blind, but she wasn’t so blind that she couldn’t see the handgun the man pulled out of a shoulder holster under his suit coat and pointed at her.
“Sheesh. All right, already,” she muttered as she stood up. She took off her headphones and laid them on the desk on the assumption that this jerk had new orders for the team and needed to relay them.
But the man didn’t pick up the headphones. In fact, he didn’t even sit down. He opened the cabinet under the workstation and yanked out the entire computer tower. He grabbed the bundle of wires plugged into the back of the machine and pulled them all out with a single, violent jerk.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. She started to move forward, but the man swung his pistol up fast.
She raised her hands and took a few steps backward. Her eyes were adjusting to the white light pouring in from the open door, and she memorized everything she could about the man. About six foot three. Muscular. Mostly bald. Remaining hair was cut very short and was gray. Oval face. Pale eyes, blue or maybe gray. Nose slightly crooked as if it had been broken. Wide mouth. Thin lips. Dimple in his chin. Long earlobes. Calloused and scarred hands—
“I was never here, and you never saw that mission,” the man growled as he tucked her computer tower under his left arm, keeping the pistol trained on her with his right hand. “Say nothing to anyone about anything you saw tonight or about my having been here, or else you’ll meet with an unfortunate accident very soon. Got it?”
She nodded slowly, never taking her gaze off him. Small scar under his left eye, about an inch long, right along the bottom of his eye socket. Five-o’clock shadow of white whiskers.
The man backed away from her, passed through the doorway he’d come in and closed the door. She rushed after him, but the door was locked. Irritated, she ran back to her desk, fumbled in her purse, retrieving her pistol and the key to this room’s lock. She raced to the door, quickly unlocked it and charged out into the hallway.
Empty. The man and her computer tower were gone.
She ran down the hallway and burst outside through the fire exit. Loud alarms clanged behind her as she tore around the corner of the building to the parking lot.
Silence. No car was moving, no taillights retreating in the distance. She swore under her breath. She hadn’t been fast enough. He’d gotten away. She did a quick circle of the building anyway, gripping the small pistol she kept in her purse as she scanned the woods around the single-story building.
No movement. If the guy had gotten away on foot, he was already too deep in the trees for her to spot him.
She ran back inside and closed up the building once more, checking each of the exits to be sure they were locked and the building secured. Thankfully, the deafening alarm went silent as she pulled the fire exit shut. Returning to the intel center, she called the facility commander, waiting impatiently for him to show up and decide how to proceed.
While she waited, she moved over to one of the other workstations and pulled up the security camera feeds for the building. At least she could try to isolate a good picture of the intruder to show to the security police and the guy in charge of this place when he got here.
She went through the feed of the main hallway leading back to this room. The intruder didn’t show up anytime in the past hour. She rewound all the way back to when she’d arrived here some three hours ago and watched herself walk down the empty, antiseptic hall, unlock the door to this facility and step inside. She fast-forwarded through the rest of the footage between then and now, and there was no sign of the intruder.
She watched the feed of the rear hallway that led to the fire exit but didn’t expect to see him there, either. After all, the loud door alarm hadn’t gone off when he’d disappeared, but it surely had when she burst outside. She watched herself emerge from the surveillance facility and run down the hall.
She watched the footage from the exterior security cameras around the building, but still, there was no sign of the intruder. How in the heck had he gotten into and out of the building without being caught on camera?
For that matter, who in the heck was he, and how had he gotten into this facility at all? It took a specially encoded key with a computer chip in it to open any of the doors. And why had he gone straight for her computer? What was on it that was so important?
She looked over at her workstation. The jumble of unplugged cables lay on the floor, and the computer tower was definitely gone.
Pulling out her cell phone, she called her boss, Major Gunnar Torsten, commander of the Medusas and in charge of training and equipping the all-female Special Forces team.
“Hey, Gia. Have you been cut loose to start your leave?” he asked cheerfully.
“Not exactly. I think I was just robbed—or rather, this surveillance facility was just robbed—by a ghost. A ghost who threatened to kill me...”
