Page 58 of Trapped With the Secret Agent

Georgia glanced at the man next to her and did a double take. He wore black from collar to boots and his face was smeared with some sort of tar-like grease. He looked like a reject from a quick lube shop. There was just one big difference; he was cradling a complicated and deadly looking rifle in his arms, holding it with a familiarity that sent a shiver down her spine.

She shrunk back into Peter.

“It’s ok,” Peter said loud enough for everyone in the bus to hear. “These are the good guys.”

Georgia turned her head to stare at him and asked softly, “They are?”

The man on the other side of her extended his hand. “Lieutenant Robert Stokes, ma’am. United States Navy SEALs.”

He was speaking English and he was a Navy SEAL.Was she dreaming? After all the strange men speaking a strange language similarly armed, she was having a hard time wrapping her head around the idea that help had actually arrived.

She took Stokes’s hand and shook it absently. “Really?”

“They’re the first wave of an operation to rescue the hostages and retake the embassy,” Peter explained in a low voice next to her ear.

“But,” she whispered back. “The president promised not to send any one in.”

Peter gave her a direct look. “He lied.”

“Oh.” Georgia swallowed. She was in a bus with a journalist/veteran/ninja and eight Navy SEALs all dressed in black, black, and more black.

“May I ask a question?” she whispered to Peter.

He nodded.

“Where are we going?”

“Back to the embassy.”

Georgia stared at him, the blood in her face rushing to her butt. She glanced at the lieutenant, then back at Peter, blurting out the first question that came to mind, “Do they know about the warhead?”

“We are aware that there’s a nuke, but my team and I could use more details,” Lt. Stokes answered with a light Southern drawl. He smiled at her, his white teeth gleaming in the dark, before turning to face the men seated behind them.

“That we can help with,” Peter said.

“Excellent,” Lt. Stokes said. “First things first, this grungy looking guy here is Peter Welis. He’s an ex-Ranger who is also one of the CIA’s best assets in this part of the world. I’ve run more than a dozen missions with him. He has intel for us that’s going to alter our mission slightly. The lady is Ambassador Mitchell’s secretary.”

Wait...CIA?

Stokes’s attention focused on her and she had to force herself not to jerk back. What had he said?Oh.“My name is Georgia Masters.”

The Lt. nodded. “She escaped with Welis last night. Now, here’s the news. Welis and Miss Masters have more intel about the armed nuke in the basement of the embassy.” Stokes looked at her. “Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to say this, but we don’t have time to get you back to the base before the risk of the terrorists setting off that nuke gets too high. We have to get this done before daybreak.”

“I understand,” she said, proud that her voice didn’t waver at all despite the sudden nausea churning her stomach. She was going to have to go back through that dark, narrow, horrible tunnel again. Return to the place where she’d witnessed and been subjected to violence and murder. Immerse herself in the same dark closed in spaces she’d only just escaped from. And Peter had kept information from her,lied to her. Repeatedly.

Her stomach rolled and she breathed through her mouth to hold off nausea. She would not throw up.She would not throw up.

The Lt. looked at Peter. “The one thing we don’t know is how many hostages there are. We know several people were killed when they took over, and more since.”

“There were about fifty embassy staff and military still alive when we got out,” Peter said, his voice vibrating with anger. “They killed at least one man while they were negotiating with our government.”

“We have to get in undetected and deactivate it before we extract the hostages. Doable?” Stokes asked Peter.

“Yes, because we’ve got an ace in the hole. Miss Masters and I got out through an escape tunnel,” Peter told them. “It runs under part of the embassy to an old garden about five hundred feet away. It’s ancient, and the only person who knew about it was Ambassador Mitchell. It’s a good way to evacuate the hostages.”

Stokes looked pleased by this news and asked several questions about the exact location of the tunnel access inside the embassy. One by one the other men spoke up, quizzing Peter further on the warhead and how they escaped, but Georgia couldn’t concentrate on the conversation. The words, “He’s an ex-Ranger who is also one of the CIA’s best assets in this part of the world.” kept bouncing through her head.

Peter wasn’t only a photojournalist. Wasn’t only a military veteran. He worked for the CIA. TheCIA.

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