Page 54 of Reclaimed (Hostage Rescue Team)

Akram slowed and bent over to catch his breath before answering. “There’s a new weather update. The latest front coming in is growing stronger. A sandstorm has already started southwest of us. It’s already big but it’s getting bigger. It might knock out power and disrupt communications.”

The video was key. He needed to film the executions and get across the border as soon as possible. The storm was narrowing their window, but it might also help provide cover for them to escape once the deed was done. Drones and satellites would have a hard time tracking them through a sandstorm.

Tarek thinned his lips. “How long do we have?”

“Four or five hours. At most.”

That put them in a serious time crunch.

Pulse accelerating, he faced the female captive. And smiled. Let her try and stay brave in the face of this. “Make that only four hours left.” He tossed the clothing he’d been holding through the bars.

When she saw the orange jumpsuit lying in the dirt her already pale face blanched of all color, telling him she knew what it signified. That she was truly afraid. She would have seen the videos of former captives wearing them during their own executions. And right now she was wondering what form hers would take.

He took out his knife, held it up in the light so that the lethal edge to the blade flashed like silver. Just to scare her even more.

A heady wave of anticipation swelled inside him. Sliding the blade back into its sheath he folded his arms across his chest and stood staring down at her, feeding off her fear. This was for Lely. For his family. “Put that on. We have a tight schedule to keep.”

In a matter of hours she and the others would be dead—Americans working for the same war machine that had killed Lely and his family. He would finally have not only revenge, but the respect he’d wanted for so long from the high-ranking members of the ATB. The entire world would loathe and fear him.

Then, once it was done, he and his men would melt back across the border like ghosts and arrive to a heroes’ welcome by their ATB brothers, more determined than ever to win this war.

****

Fly, baby, fly.

Stretched out on his stomach on the rocky ground near the crest of the hill, Special Agent Brody Colebrook lay still and kept his movements small as he maneuvered the joystick on the drone’s controls. The wind was gusting already, making it hard to get the little guy off the ground.

He gave the drone more lift, maintained the pressure until their little spy finally got into the air and jerked its way into the sky, moving forward toward its target: the long, rectangular-shaped building in the center of the village in front of him.

“Drone deployed,” he announced over his comms, alerting the other six guys on his sniper team. Five years he’d been on the HRT sniper team, had been its leader for two of those, and he’d spent a helluva lot longer than that in the military before joining the FBI.

His job was never boring, he’d give it that.

“You should let me do it, I play way more video games than you,” Napoli remarked from beside him.

Brody shot his spotter a dirty look. “Not happening. Get your own drone.”

Grinning, Napoli ducked his head to check through the laser range finder. “Six hundred yards to target.”

Brody watched the screen on the remote control he held, steering the drone into position. It was bumpy as hell up there, but this latest model was state-of-the-art and was able to overcome the turbulence without much problem. “Coming up on target,” he said. “Thirty seconds.”

On screen the drone’s camera gave a bird’s-eye view of the village, the night vision optics cutting through the murk without a problem. Soon there would be so much sand in the air that all the optics in the world wouldn’t make a difference.

Come on, give me what I need.

Just one piece of solid intel. Some way to determine the hostages they were looking for were in there, so he could relay it to headquarters and pull the trigger on the rescue op.

The drone circled the building. Three American intelligence employees could be in there, one of them Summer Blackwell. Brody always did his job to the best of his ability and would save any hostages no matter who they were, but knowing a teammate’s wife was in there gave this mission a whole new level of urgency. For all of them.

Every guy on the team wanted her found and taken out of here alive. He had to get the intel they needed now, before the storm became too much of an issue.

“Any movement outside?” he asked.

“Negative,” the others all responded.

He centered the drone over the target building and did a slow pass. The infrared camera picked up several heat signatures, indistinct blobs moving inside the building. “Got possible targets on screen. Moving in for a closer look.” He dropped the drone fifty feet, the reduced distance making the orange-ish blobs inside more distinct.

“I’ve got seven…make that eight tangos moving around inside,” he told them, “and three stationary.”

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