Page 113 of Deadly Strain

Stone was in the War Room examining a number of satellite photos. As soon as she and Sharp walked in, Stone gestured at Sharp to join him.

She glanced at the photos on the table, but they all looked the same to her. This part, she wasn’t going to have much input in. She just hoped Sharp wouldn’t do anything to make her job harder in the name of protecting her.

She moved around the table to look at the photos from a different perspective. At first they seemed so alike, studying them would be a waste of time. As she looked at them, though, individual elements began to pop out of them. The rutted lines of roads and buildings, or their remains, crafted by man. She found one with three trucks headed down the same rough country road.

Hadn’t Sharp said to look for a spot with a lot of truck traffic in and out?

She picked up the picture and studied it closer. The trucks appeared to be heading to...nowhere?

“Where is this?” she asked out loud.

The room went silent, and she glanced up. Sharp was on his way around the table to her.

She handed him the photo. He looked at it and nodded.

“Here it is, sir. Sixteen hours before that one.” He pointed at the photo Stone was currently looking at. He strode around the table and put the picture in front of the general.

Stone stared at the photos. “I agree. Get out there and find out if this is our traitor’s home base.”

Sharp glanced at the men in his team and said, “Saddle up.”

***

Sharp didn’t want heron this mission. Damn it, she’d been through hell already and she didn’t need to get beat up, shot or infected with anything else. Unfortunately, they also needed her on this mission.

It was the only reason he hadn’t duct-taped her to a wall in her quarters.

He led his men and Grace back to their staging area to get geared up and remembered she didn’t have a bio-suit. Fuck.

“You don’t have a suit.”

“No. I don’t.”

Shit, she wasn’t going to let that stop her —she,of the Hippocratic Oath.

“I’m not about to throw my life away,” she said in a softer tone. “I won’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“Who gets to define whatunnecessary riskmeans?”

She sighed. “Both of us.”

He stopped and pointed a finger in her face, when what he really wanted to do was kiss the fight right out of her. “If things go to shit, you follow my commands. No arguing or hanging back.”

“As long as you let me do what I need to, no problem.”

He held out his hand and she shook it.

“Jesus Christ, I’m outta my fucking mind,” Sharp muttered as he resumed their journey to the staging area.And in love with a fucking angel.That, he didn’t say out loud. Something told him she’d run like hell if he did.

A helicopter was waiting for them, fueled and rotors turning when they hit the helicopter pad twenty minutes later. They took off into the setting sun.

The trip wasn’t a long one, only forty miles away, but Sharp got their pilot to slow down and fly low as if on a search pattern a couple of miles out from their target. They hopped out as the bird disappeared behind a rise, then the bird popped back up as if nothing had happened.

Sharp’s team spread out to watch for incoming threats as they moved closer and closer to their target, likely a cave system.

As darkness fell, they put on their nighttime goggles, Grace too, and continued.

They came across the first roving sentry thirty minutes after departing the helicopter. Smoke took him out quietly with a knife to the throat and hid the body.

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