Page 62 of Shadow Blind

“He come through for you?” Zane asked, raising his voice.

The dozens of conversations had edged into a rumble, although none of the warriors surrounding them appeared to be paying the SEALS in their midst any mind.

Aiden shrugged. “Still a lot of shit he doesn’t know. But it sounds like an USSOCOM-wide blackout. There’s no chatter about a new weapon. No whispers of nanobots.” Aiden frowned. “Hurley knows I’m alive. He’s got people looking for me. But no one knows where I am.” He shot Zane a wry look. “Dev says the SAT images of the exfil site above Karaveht went wonky just before you boys pulled me out.”

“Imagine that.” Zane’s face was as bland as his voice.

The lack of SAT images didn’t surprise him. Wolf had the technology to keep his base and warriors hidden.

“When the exfil chopper with the CDC team didn’t find me or my crew, they headed to Karaveht,” Aiden continued. “They found nothing. The town had been torched. It was still burning when the evac crew arrived.”

Zane rocked back in his chair, looking thoughtful. “They found nothing?”

“Nothing,” Aiden confirmed. “The entire place was rubble and ash. We hit one of the houses with a M14 on our way out, but the blast wouldn’t have taken out the entire town. And get this, Dev said there were no bodies on site. There should have been remains. Charred ones, at least. But the sweep team found nothing.”

Zane digested that. “Someone cleaned the site before Hurley’s boys arrived.”

“Looks like it.” Aiden squinted thoughtfully. “One other thing. They found no water. The well and pipes were dry.” He frowned and shook his head. “Even after the torching, there should have been water in the well. The CDC found the well capped and the water gone.”

Rawls ran his fingers through his short blond hair, leaving it sticking up in multiple places. “Sounds like the bots were dumped in the well and distributed through the water system.”

Aiden nodded.

Everyone was quiet for a moment before Zane asked. “Did your team come into contact with any of that water?”

“We did not,” Aiden’s voice tightened. “My crew picked up the damn things some other way.”

Rawls’s face darkened. For the first time, his voice sharpened. “Did Dev know about the nanobots?”

“He didn’t know shit.” Aiden scowled. “Hell, he didn’t even believe me at first. He kept asking how I could possibly know nanobots were responsible. I told him I didn’t trust that USSOCOM hadn’t been behind the whole fucking thing, so I hired a lab to run Squirrel’s and Grub’s blood and tissue samples, and they found the bots.” Which was true to an extent. “Dev was not happy I’d run to a lab.” And was that ever an understatement. The dude had been livid. “He’s insisting I return my crew’s bodies to HQ1 so they can run their own tests.” Aiden broke off with a grimace and a shake of his head. “I told him as much as I could, without exposing Shadow Mountain. At least Dev knows we’re dealing with nanobots now. He knows the bots target the brain, and that they can scrape—” Aiden paused before shrugging, “elements from the human body to reproduce themselves.”

“Dev’s not wrong,” Zane offered quietly. “Those bodies should be returned to Coronado. They’re not infectious, or so the Shadow Mountain labs claim, so their families deserve to lay them to rest. Plus, with both Shadow Mountain and USSOCOM dissecting the bots, there’s a better chance of understanding and countering the weapon.” He frowned, studying Aiden’s face. “Has Wolf said when they plan to release the bodies?”

Aiden released a tight breath and rolled his shoulders. Zane was right. His squad’s families deserved closure. They deserved to know what had happened to their sons, husbands, and fathers. They deserved a casket draped in the red, white, and blue of their sacrifice. They deserved a physical location to lay down flowers.

It was too damn bad he couldn’t give that to them. “Benioko won’t release them from isolation. He says they’re still a danger.”

Zane’s brows furrowed. He straightened abruptly. “Wait a sec—he claimed they weren’t dangerous when we swooped in to save your ass.” His frown deepened. “And the bots, are they still inactive?”

Aiden didn’t understand the shaman’s sudden caution, either. “That’s what the lab rats say.”

“Then why are they suddenly a danger?” Rawls asked.

An excellent question for which he had no answer.

With a shake of his head, he scrubbed his hands down his face, wincing at the scrape of stubble against his palms. He needed to shave before he choppered down to see Demi. Although when that would happen was anyone’s guess. Flying down to The Neighborhood kept getting pushed further and further away.

“What about those new cameras you boys were modeling?” Zane asked, taking a sip from his coffee cup. “Cosky seems to think they’re connected to the Karaveht clusterfuck.”

“Yeah…” Aiden squinted at Zane’s coffee cup and suppressed a yawn. A quick look at the coffee stand showed the line had vanished. Time to grab a cup. “The cameras were purchased from Nantz Technology. Nantz is a peripheral weapons contractor out of D.C. According to Dev, the cameras weren’t meant to be tested during our op. They were supposed to undergo testing months ago, but the battery packs went missing. A new shipment of batteries coincided with our insertion, so we were stuck with them. And that drone we were sent into Karaveht to recover? It was a prototype from Nantz too.”

Rawls grunted, his face hardening. “Easy enough to make batteries disappear.”

True, which was why Aiden hadn’t crossed Nantz off his suspect list.

He’d pushed back his chair, ready to rise to his feet and assault the coffee table, when Benioko shuffled into the room. Wolf followed. The room went quiet. Heads bowed.

Aiden sat back down, his gaze skipping from dark-haired warrior to dark-haired warrior. They all had leather cords hanging from their necks. With some, the cords were attached to small, hand sewn leather pouches resting against their BDU shirts. For others, the cords disappeared beneath their necklines, but the lumps beneath the fabric of their BDUs clearly showed where the pouches lay.

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