Special Forces: The Operator

The “hot tub” was actually a giant swimming pool in the Olympic Village that had been heated to spa temperatures for the duration of the games. Easily two hundred athletes were in the pool now, engaging in every manner and combination of sexual play.

She got it. They were young, athletic, far from home, and had precompetition adrenaline galore before the games opened tomorrow night. But she was responsible for those softball players, and she couldn’t spot a single one of them right now. All she could make out in the churning water were writhing limbs and the occasional flash of a pale face. The rest of it could just as easily have been a feeding frenzy of sharks.

The Medusas—the highly classified, all-female, Special Forces team she was part of—were an ultra-under-the-radar part of the American security contingent at these games.

Tonight, the American security staff was undermanned, and she’d volunteered to help out. But she’d had no idea she was in for this! The Medusas had been briefed that the Olympic Village would be a wild party scene, but nothing in her Special Forces training had prepared her for a frat party with twenty thousand wild children determined to play. Hard.

Play. Not a word that had meaning in her world. Duty. Honor. Country. Those words, immortalized by General Douglas MacArthur, were the ones she lived by.

Oh joy. Word of the orgy must be spreading, for more athletes started arriving at the pool in a steady stream, stripping naked and jumping in.

It was arguably the best-looking group of naked people Rebel had ever seen, at any rate. Idly, she played a game of “guess the sport based on body type.”

There went a lean, no-fat marathon runner.

Disproportionately massive torso and skinny legs? A rower.

Big gut, wreathed in muscle—weight lifter.

A crowd began to form around the edges of the pool. Whether they were purely spectators to the debauchery or waiting for an inch of open water to join in, she couldn’t tell. But they elbowed Rebel back from the pool with their muscular, jostling bodies.

Swearing under her breath, she let herself be propelled back. Her orders were to be inconspicuous. Instead of resisting, she occupied herself with watching the watchers. Which was why she happened to glimpse a familiar face in the crowd. A face that made her lurch. A face that emphatically should not be here.

The face of a terrorist.

Surely she’d made a mistake. She moved quickly around the pool, trying to keep an eye on the man, who looked shockingly like Mahmoud Akhtar. Mahmoud led a terror cell that kidnapped her teammate, Piper Ford, last year.

Piper’s fiancé was an undercover CIA officer who’d helped her escape from Mahmoud, and who’d captured photographs of the entire cell of Iranian operatives. Rebel had looked at an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Mahmoud posted in the Medusas’ ready room every day for the past eight months. She knew his face.

And she’d just seen it here in Sydney, Australia.

Next to Mahmoud, a second man stood up from where he’d been squatting by the edge of the pool. Yousef Kamali. Mahmoud’s second-in-command and also a glossy photo on her team’s personal Most Wanted wall.

She wove through the throng of people to the spot where Mahmoud and Yousef had been standing and turned in a slow three-sixty.

No sign of the two men.

She had to be wrong. No way could known terrorists gain access to the Olympic Village. Not unless the Iranian government had given them credentials that attached them to the Iranian Olympic team...

Nah. The Iranians wouldn’t be so brazen.

She spied two males wearing black tracksuits with green-white-red stripes down the arms and legs. Iran team uniforms. She swore under her breath.

The pair was moving away from the pool area quickly. Purposefully.

Frowning, she debated whether to leave her post and follow them. It wasn’t like the softball girls were leaving this party anytime soon. But she was responsible for their safety, which technically included apprehending terrorists.

The Iranians approached a streetlight with its pole-mounted surveillance camera and, as she looked on, both men simultaneously turned their faces to the right.

Away from the camera.

Sonofa—That was the deliberate act of someone who didn’t want to be identified. The act of a trained operative. Or a terrorist.

She took off running, but the two men were well ahead of her, and more athletes were streaming toward the pool. She dodged and weaved, doing the whole fish swimming upstream thing, desperately trying to keep the Iranians in sight. But she was only five foot four, and it was darned near impossible to see over the glamorous amazons that were most Olympic athletes.

Finally, she broke out of the worst of the crush and glimpsed her quarry passing through one of the checkpoints to leave the Olympic Village. She put on a burst of speed as they scanned their credentials and stepped onto a city street.

She flew through the checkpoint without bothering to scan herself out. She couldn’t lose the Iranians! Once they hit the giant street party outside the village, following them was going to get immeasurably harder. She had to close as much of the gap as she could before they lost themselves in the crowds. Sydney was in full celebration mode, and this part of the city had been completely shut down to allow foot traffic to fill the streets.

Rebel raced through crowds of revelers, but the Iranians picked up speed in front of her, and she stretched out into a full sprint. The men turned a corner and disappeared.

When she approached the intersection, she slowed, turning the corner fast and low. It turned out to be a relatively quiet, dark street lined with closed office buildings. And it was empty. She raced down it, searching side to side for the Iranians. Nothing. She burst out into another crowded thoroughfare.

Where did they go?

There. To her left. She gathered herself to take off running again just as the men disappeared into a building ahead.

Without warning, big, hard hands grabbed her by both arms, dragging her back into the dark street she’d just emerged from. She stumbled backward, fetching up hard against a building. Immediately, she was flattened against it by a living wall of muscle.

Chagrin roared through her. She’d gotten so focused on chasing her quarry in front of her that she’d forgotten to watch her own tail. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She knew better.

“Let go of me,” she ground out. The terrorists were getting away!

“Who are you?” a male voice rasped from over her head.

“The person who’s going to hurt you if you don’t let me go. Right. Now.”

“Little thing like you?” Humor laced her battering ram’s voice.

No help for it. She was about to be conspicuous.

* * *

Avi Bronson yelped as the fleeing suspect, a tiny, shockingly quick female, stomped painfully on the top of his left foot. He swore when she grabbed his thumb off her shoulder and gave it a vicious wrench.

“Damn, woman! You’ve practically dislocated my thumb.”

A normal man would step back from the tiny virago now throwing painful elbows at him, kneeing him dangerously close to his groin and scratching at his face. But he was a trained Special Forces soldier, and the last thing he dared do was let this woman get an arm’s length between them where she could really wind up with a fist or foot and actually damage him.

He leaned in against her, using his superior size and weight to mash her even flatter against the wall at her back, silently thanking his wool suit coat for absorbing the worst of her attack.

She went still abruptly.

“Are you done?” he asked cautiously.

“Yes.” Her tone was surly. Not even close to subdued.

“If I step back from you, will you stop attacking me?” he tried.