Heart of a Hero: The Soldier's Seduction / The Heart of a Mercenary / Straight Through the Heart

The soldiers had killed everyone. They’d stormed the compound, slain the nurses, the two nuns, the priest, even the patients. And they’d taken the seven autopsied bodies before dousing the palm-thatched roofs in petroleum and torching the mission compound.

Sarah lifted the doctor’s goggles up onto his head with trembling hands, and looked into the fixed stare of his blue eyes. Even in death they seemed to drill into hers, driving home the urgency of the mission he’d handed her just seconds before the men had stormed the medical hut and shot him dead.

“Whatever happens, Sarah, get these samples to the CDC,” Dr. Regnaud had whispered as he’d shoved her and a sealed biohazard container into a hole in the floor of the baked-mud hut. “And trust no one. This is the Congo. Everyone has a price.” He’d concealed her tomb with a plank and a reed mat, while outside, gunfire peppered the compound and gut-wrenching screams sliced the air. Then the soldiers had burst in….

Tears welled in her eyes. Dr. Regnaud had saved her life, and it had cost him his own. The trembling in her hands intensified, shuddering uncontrollably through her entire body. Her protective goggles misted with tears and body heat. She fisted her hands against the fear. If she lost control now, she’d be as good as dead.

As she tried to focus, she slowly became aware of thick smoke billowing from the thatched roofs of the adjoining buildings. The air was growing black and bitter as the choking haze filled the clearing and hung low in the thick equatorial heat. Flames crackled louder, closer, brighter, engulfing the compound. The sound was so close…. With a dull jolt of panic she realized the roof of the hut she was in was also on fire. But she couldn’t move. She felt dazed. Time stretched, slowed, warped. She couldn’t begin to comprehend what was happening. Why had soldiers with assault rifles stormed out of the jungle in hazmat suits? Why had they taken the autopsied bodies?

“This is big, Sarah. Nothing science has seen before…” She latched on to Dr. Regnaud’s words. For some reason, she alone had been spared death. She had to hold on to that. She had a duty now. She had to somehow get those biological samples to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. She would not—could not—let the doctor down.

She made a quick sign of the cross over Dr. Regnaud’s body, gently closed his eyes and then scrambled on her hands and knees toward the radio on the desk near the door.

She had no idea how to use it. How could she have been so stupid, so naive not to learn how to do this simple thing? She tried to tell herself she would’ve learned in a few more days. But the villagers had begun to arrive with symptoms of the horrific disease, and chaos had erupted. She hadn’t had the luxury of time to even begin to understand this bizarre jungle environment, let alone figure out how to use the darn radio.

She fiddled with the dials and buttons, trying to recall what she’d seen Dr. Regnaud doing. Static crackled. Her pulse leaped. Her heart hammered.

“Mayday! Mayday!” Sarah yelled into the transceiver. Did people even say that anymore? Was it only for ships at sea? Or planes? Or old movies? “Mayday! Help! Help! 9-1-1—” Oh God, she was panicking again. This was Africa. They didn’t know about 9-1-1 here. She cleared her throat, wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her sleeve, tried to get hold of herself. The smoke was scorching her nasal passages even through her mask. “This…this is Sarah Burdett. Emergency. Can anybody hear me? I’m a nurse from Ishonga clinic…northeast of Ouesso near the Oyambo River. Unidentified deadly virus…we’ve been attacked. Soldiers—”

A chunk of burning thatch crashed through the roof and exploded onto the floor in a shower of orange sparks. Acrid smoke instantly engulfed the room. Panic gripped her. “Help me! Please, oh God, someone help me!” The fire leaped to a stack of papers and crackled through a wicker basket. She dropped the handset, leaving it dangling by a wire from the desk. She had to get out or she’d be as dead as the rest of them.

Trying to stay beneath the pall of suffocating smoke, Sarah groped her way to an overturned metal cabinet. She’d seen a flashlight in there. She wildly fingered the dirt floor, searching the scattered contents of the drawers. She found the flashlight, stuffed it deep into a pocket under her plastic apron. She found another drawer, groped around inside, felt the doctor’s handgun, jammed it into her other pocket. The soldiers had ransacked the room, but hadn’t taken a thing, not even the gun. Whatever they’d been looking for, they hadn’t found.

They had to be searching for the tissue samples in the biohazard container.

She crawled across the dirt floor, reached into the hole, grasped the handle of the aluminum canister and yanked it free. Clutching her deadly package, Sarah stumbled blindly through the hut, out the door.

She froze in her tracks.

Blackened skeletons of charred wood and the shocking smell of burning human flesh seared into her brain. The wooden roof of the tiny clinic church burned fiercely, shooting a shower of orange stars into the night sky. She swayed on her feet as her vision blurred.

Move, Sarah. Do this for them. You owe them this much.

Gripping the container, she forced one foot in front of the other, woodenly making her way toward the periphery of the clearing, toward the living, breathing, inhospitable jungle. Her sneakers were still encased in plastic bags tied at her ankles, her hair still tucked into a cotton head covering, her protective apron still smeared with the doctor’s blood.

She was only vaguely aware that her path was lit by burning huts, that night had fallen, fast and complete, around six o’clock, as it did every day so near the equator.

Twelve hours of blackness loomed ahead of her. And with it came sheer, sickening terror.

She was truly alone.

Chapter 1

03:09 Alpha. Congo. Monday, September 22

Hunter McBride floated silently through the thick air, the nylon chute above him a dark blot against the star-spattered heavens.

As he descended, the sounds of the rain forest swelled to a soft chorus below him. He could hear the shrill chirp of crickets, the hollow drumming of chimps hitting buttress roots of trees as they hunted in the predawn. Moist heat and the rich scent of fecund growth wafted up on soft currents of air as the jungle itself seemed to exhale, alive and hungry and waiting below.

His nostrils flared sharply at the familiar scent of primordial life. Somewhere down there was the American nurse, Sarah Burdett.

And a deadly pathogen.

His job was clear. Find the nurse, dead or alive. Locate the pathogen and get it back to the Force du Sable base on São Diogo Island off the coast of Angola, where a level 4 biosafety lab was being set up to identify it. And he had to do it quickly, because the clock was ticking down on a global threat of almost incomprehensible proportions. Failure at any stage of this mission would trigger a series of events that could topple the U.S. government, bring death to millions and end democracy as the world knew it.

The Force du Sable—a highly secretive and deadly efficient private military company that Hunter had helped found—was all that stood between the status quo and a grave new world order. And they had until midnight on October 13—just twenty-one days from now—to complete what, until they’d intercepted the nurse’s distress call, had appeared to be a mission impossible.

He double-checked his GPS coordinates and guided his chute toward the Ishonga clinic clearing, skimming over spiked raffia palms and towering Bombax giants that punched up through the forest canopy. The FDS knew the pathogen was being tested somewhere in central Africa, but they hadn’t been able to pinpoint where. The nurse’s Mayday had changed that. Now they had a location, and possibly even a witness—if the nurse was still alive.

Hunter landed with a soft thud on the packed dirt along the outskirts of the compound. He adjusted his night vision gear and quickly gathered his chute. He removed his combat pack, extracted a respirator, positioned it carefully over his nose and mouth and checked the hose connections. From the intel they’d received, the pathogen was not likely airborne, but they weren’t sure. They knew only that it was one hundred percent fatal.

He checked his watch and pulled neoprene gloves over his hands. Almost immediately the extra gear peaked his core temperature, and perspiration dampened his torso. The humidity in this region didn’t allow a body to cool itself. But Hunter knew how to handle the heat. Guerrilla warfare in tropical climates was his area of expertise.

He made his way toward the charred, skeletal ruins of the clinic buildings, where wisps of smoke still trailed up from hot spots. Burned corpses were scattered across the hardened earth between gutted buildings, the bodies twisted into shapes made all the more grotesque by the eerie gray-green monotones of his night scopes.

Hunter hunkered down next to one corpse, then another. He noted with detached interest that the bodies were untouched by machetes. These people had been shot and then burned—not the usual practice of local rebels. The victims had been massacred by someone else, for some reason other than civil war or tribal conflict.

He worked his way methodically through the compound, looking for signs of life, for clues, for the nurse. He found the burned-out radio in what appeared to be an operating room, and stilled. This must have been where she’d sent out her Mayday call. The FDS had traced her immediately to the Aid Africa organization, which had provided her electronic file instantly. Sarah Burdett, 28, divorced, a pediatric nurse from Seattle, had been the lone American stationed at Aid Africa’s Ishonga clinic. She’d signed on with the nongovernmental organization only three months ago and had arrived in the Congo exactly two weeks ago. She was a complete neophyte in some of the most hostile terrain known to man.

The digitized image of Sarah Burdett suddenly sifted into Hunter’s brain, and for a second all he could see were her soft brown eyes gazing down from the LCD screen in the situation room. Warm eyes. Innocent eyes. His jaw tightened.

That woman was not equipped to deal with whatever had happened here.

He quickly scanned the rest of the room. Broken vials and medical equipment were scattered everywhere. A metal cabinet had been toppled and the door of a generator-operated fridge hung on its hinges. Hunter noticed a hole had been dug in the dirt floor, a plank and a bunched-up rug pushed to the side. Had she hidden in there while her colleagues were massacred within earshot? Where was she now?

Hunter found more bodies in what must have been a hospital ward, judging by the wire beds and smoldering mattresses. The bastards had even killed the patients.

He crouched down and studied the victims. They were not likely to be harboring the disease. If the pathogen had indeed found its way into the general population and to this clinic, the soldiers would have gone to great lengths to remove the infected bodies. They’d have wanted to leave no trace of the pathogen’s existence. He suspected that was the reason behind this attack.

He needed to find the nurse. She alone held answers that could help save the U.S. president and his nation.

Hunter picked his way to the outer buildings of the compound. In all, the fire had been swift and superficial, fueled by an accelerant, probably petroleum. Parts of one building on the east end had barely even burned. It looked like a storage shed.

He made his way over to the structure, pushed aside a fallen rafter, and poked at the blackened edges of a packing crate with the barrel of his AK-47. The charred container fell open in a cloud of soot that cleared to reveal tins of baby formula.

Hunter stared at the cans. The cherubic face of an infant on the labels smiled happily back at him in ghostly green night-vision hues. His throat tightened. He shut his eyes, and for a brief instant lost the rhythm of breathing through his respirator. It shocked him instantly. His eyes flashed open and he abruptly turned his back on the tins, on the smiling babies.

Keep your cool, buddy. Stay focused. Locate the critical personality. Extract the package. He’d done it a hundred times. It should be no different now.

So why had soft brown eyes and an infant’s face suddenly rattled him? He drew a breath in slowly, willing his body to calm. He didn’t want to think about why. He didn’t want to recall the unborn child in his dark past. He didn’t want to think about what the woman he’d once loved with all his heart had done. He had no intention of going anywhere near those ancient memories. They belonged to another man, the man he used to be. He checked his watch again. He needed to keep moving. The sun would rise in less than three hours.

He quickly broadened his search to the perimeter of the compound, and almost immediately spotted something small and white lying on the ground along the edge of the thick jungle fringe. He crouched down, lifted it with the muzzle of his gun. It was a surgical mask. A pair of protective goggles and bloody latex gloves lay next to it.

He studied the ground carefully. He could make out faint scuff marks in the packed earth, small footprints strangely blurred along the edges, as if the shoes were covered with something. His eyes followed the odd trail. They led to a break in the vegetation up ahead, a path.

Hunter skirted along the forest fringe, following the tracks to the path entrance. He dropped to his haunches. Someone else had been here. Several sets of heavy military boot prints virtually obliterated the smaller sets of fuzzy ones. He studied the new tracks, the crushed vegetation, and he saw something else in the dirt. He lifted it carefully with his fingers, sniffed. A hand-rolled cigarette.

He looked up.