Her Mission With A Seal

Cole answered grimly. “Seems so.”

“And then there’s the missing crew and sabotaged engines,” Bass piped up.

“And no distress calls,” Cole added. “The crew definitely intended to scuttle the ship.”

“Oh, they’ll succeed,” Ashe responded. “Once Jessamine cranks up another ten feet of seas and another twenty knots of wind, that huge wall of containers is going to catch a gust and take the Anna Belle right over.”

“Assuming she doesn’t drift crossways of a couple big waves and break her beam first,” Bass commented. “Either way, that ship’s going down in the next few hours if she’s not already sunk.”

“But why?” Cole asked.

Nissa had an idea why. The others speculated, but discarded every idea they came up with. When they all fell silent, she spoke up reluctantly, “What if this was all an elaborate scheme to fake Markus Petrov’s death?”

The team turned as one to stare at her. “It’s a hell of an expensive ruse,” Cole replied. “Twenty million dollars plus or minus for the ship, several million dollars’ worth of wheat, and who knows what other cargo in the containers. Then there’s the cost of paying off the crew, and of making them all disappear. Something like a fifty-million-dollar escape route? That seems pretty improbable.”

“But that’s the point,” Nissa replied. “Markus Petrov is obsessive about secrecy. And goodness knows, he has fifty million bucks lying around to burn. The man has been a mobster for thirty years. My CIA colleague who got inside his outfit said the man was clearing a million dollars a week.”

Bass swore, then drawled, “I’m in the wrong business.”

“I thought all you cops are on the take,” Ashe teased the Cajun. Apparently, Bass had been called off military reserve status and reactivated as a SEAL recently. When he wasn’t on active duty, he was a civilian police officer.

“New Orleans Police Department has cleaned up its act in the past couple of decades, thank you very much,” Bass retorted.

“Indeed. They kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cole quipped.

The guys laughed, apparently oblivious of the monster storm spinning up around them. She envied them their ability to find humor in this nightmare.

Cole looked over at her in her exposure pouch. “The only problem with your theory that Petrov engineered the sinking of the Anna Belle is that no one knew he was aboard her. We were lucky to get a tip from one of Petrov’s guys we captured in the gun battle last week.”

“Or maybe that tidbit was intentionally leaked to us so we would believe he died when the Anna Belle turns up missing or is found sunk.”

“The ship will be tough to find,” Ashe offered. “We’re in close to eight thousand feet of water right now.”

Aww, jeez. She did not need to know that.

“What’s the next move Petrov will make, Nissa?” Cole asked.

All of a sudden, everyone was staring expectantly at her.

“I have no idea. I was only sent out here with you to make the ID on Petrov.”

She was one of the few people on earth who’d seen even a photograph of Markus Petrov, and it had been taken twenty years ago. The tech gang at Langley had run an aging simulator on the image, though, so she had a rough idea of what he would look like now. More important, she knew every detail of his life that the CIA had uncovered and could ask the right questions—and furthermore know if she was getting the right answers—to make the identification. And, of course, she was a trained psychological operations officer. She could probably manipulate the guy into talking when most other people could not.

Cole gave up his position at the tiller to Ashe and flopped down beside her, breathing hard. It took a minute or so for his respiration to return to normal, but then he said to her, “My orders are to capture Markus Petrov with extreme prejudice.” Meaning he had authorization to do whatever it took to catch the guy, no holds barred. He continued, “I’m going to need you to stay with my team until we catch up with him.”

But this was supposed to be a quick out-and-back mission for her. Fly to New Orleans. Make the ID. Fly back to Langley, Virginia, and resume her regularly scheduled life. She didn’t do field operations. At least, not this kind. As it was, the trip into the Gulf of Mexico to catch Petrov had been well beyond the scope of her orders. She definitely didn’t run around with Navy SEALs trying to get herself killed.

“I’m an analyst, not a field operative!” she protested. She didn’t even like being outdoors, let alone playing soldier.

“You’re a field operator now. Welcome to the big leagues, kid.”

Chapter 2 (#ud86239f5-24dc-5f1e-bd60-7c365878d708)

Even Cole had to admit he was glad to see land as the coast of Louisiana came into sight, a low black line on the horizon. The hurricane was stalled offshore at the moment, and the last hour of motoring north had taken them out of the heart of the storm. For now. As long as Jessamine parked over the warm, shallow waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico, she would only grow in strength.

The breathtakingly huge swells had diminished to merely god-awful seas, and the first faint light of dawn was barely visible in the east.

What a hell of a night. Cole had never seen a ship so close to capsizing before. Climbing aboard the Anna Belle had wigged him out worse than he would ever admit. Every time she’d rolled onto her side, he’d been sure that was the one where she would keep on going and drag them all down to a watery death.

“So. Anyone got reward points at a decent resort along the coast we can cash in?” Bass asked drolly as they approached a line of cypress trees and grassy wetlands.

The guy was the team’s clown and great for morale. Cole had missed working with the Cajun. But then Cole had missed working in the field, period. This was his first op back as a team commander in four long years.

It figured that the mission had not gone to plan. At all. The target wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Cole had had to put his team in extreme peril to search the Anna Belle, the civilian with them had completely panicked and their egress plan had been shot to hell by the sabotage to the ship.

They’d caught a minor break when the hurricane stalled offshore, but he didn’t have any illusions that riding out a major hurricane in whatever improvised shelter they could find was going to be anything but ridiculously hazardous. They were far from clear of life-threatening danger. It was Cole’s job to adapt to whatever came their way, but he had to wonder if he was too rusty to be out here in the field anymore. Should he have anticipated these contingencies and planned better for them?

Right now, he had to get them as far inland and on as high ground as possible before Jessamine came calling. He put Bass at the prow to guide the Rigid Inflatable Boat ashore. Bastien “Bass” LeBlanc was native to this area and more familiar with these coastal waters than anyone else on the team.

To his surprise, Bass called back to Ashe to turn the RIB and parallel the coast. “What are you looking for?” Cole asked.

“Inlet. The storm surge is already flooding the edges of the bayou. If we motor ashore now, we’ll hit a submerged cypress stump and rip the bottom out of the boat.”

Nissa piped up. “What will an inlet look like? Can we help you spot one?”

“Two roughly parallel rows of trees leading inland,” Bass answered absently, staring shoreward through a big pair of binoculars.

“Weather report, Ashe?” Cole asked over the radios.

“Cat 3 and growing. Expected to start moving due north in the next few hours. Winds should hit before noon, and the eye wall should make landfall by evening.”

Damn. They could not catch a break on this mission! He checked the fuel gauges, which were perilously low, flirting with the red empty line.

“Is that an inlet?” Nissa called, pointing from inside her survival bag.

Cole squinted through a rain squall that had just sprung up, obscuring his vision. “What do you think, Bass? We’re getting way low on fuel and we need to make land before we become a cork out here.”

“Let’s give it a try, sir.”

The RIB slowed to a crawl, and they all kept their gazes on the water before them, looking for submerged hazards. The storm surge was already a good ten feet above normal and all sorts of stumps and small trees that would normally be above water were now covered—treacherous traps waiting to destroy their vessel.

Dawn arrived in a thin strip of color beneath the ominous overhang of clouds forming one of the storm bands of the hurricane. The rain abated just long enough for them to see the line of sky streaked with every hue from palest pink to fiery red. The CIA asset, Nissa, turned to stare at the sunrise as the brilliant ball of liquid red crept over the edge of the gulf and then nearly as quickly disappeared behind the roiling cloud line.

“Wow,” she breathed.

One corner of Cole’s mouth turned down cynically at her innocence. It had been a long time since a sunrise had been enough to cause him wonder. Almost twenty years in the SEALs in one capacity or another had made him a hard man who didn’t look for beauty in the world anymore.

“We’ve got an inlet!” Bass called. “Come right five degrees.”