Page 2 of Hidden Attraction

He raced back to the conference room and strode directly to the whiteboard on the wall next to the big screen. Markers scattered as he slapped the photo on the board with a magnet.

“This is Echo team.”

A pin could drop in that room. Nobody even breathed.

“That ICE facility…was our oldbase.”

He started drawing arrows, circles, adding names.

“Jesus Christ,” Con murmured from where he stood a few feet away.

Chase barely heard him as he scribbled more and more names in the white space over each man’s head on the photograph with arrows pointing to each smiling face.

“This is Logan Pierce. Jaxon Hale. Thomas Brooks.” He was almost frantic, the marker almost slipping out of his shaky fingers. “All dead in a chopper crash. Almost every man in my platoon died that day.”

He heard the crack in his voice—so did everyone else. But no one spoke. They didn’t do emotion and didn’t know how to handle it.

They might all think he was crazy. How many times had he stared at that photograph and asked himself if he was imagining something nefarious when it was just a simple accident?

Chase barreled on, drawing an arrow to his own smiling face. In the photo, he wore sunglasses, the mirrors reflecting the sun and what he remembered to be a perfect, cloudless sky.

Who knew that mere days later, he’d break a leg in a skirmish and be sidelined?

The only reason he was alive now.

A throat cleared behind him. “No one knew where Echo’s base was. Hell, most of command didn’t even know. It’s ghost protocol. Everything’s locked down tight,” Con grated out.

“So how the hell did Cypher find it and send the bomb there?” Dante King’s low voice added to the mix.

Chase didn’t stop. He drew a circle around another name. “This is Max Reece. He didn’t go down in the chopper crash that day—he was on leave. In Chicago. Doing a food tour. When our team went down, he was on hold while the commanders found him a new assignment. Then, before he could connect with the new team, he died in a car accident one month laterto the dayof that crash.”

He stopped, head bowed, breathing hard like he’d sprinted up Everest with a heavy pack and enough artillery to wipe out a small country.

He lifted his head and stared at the board until the names blurred and the arrows seemed to march across the white background.

And the ghosts of the men all rose up to haunt him again.

“There’s a handful of former members of Echo. Guys on medical release or just retired. Some moved from one team to another, like Apollo did when he moved to Alpha team.”

“You never talked about it, man.” Con’s gritty voice broke into his cloud of pain.

A beat passed.

He swung his attention to his leader. His new leader—the one who didn’t go down in that bird.

“You’re the last man standing.”

Julian slowly set the marker in the tray and turned to face the team. His new team, his new brothers. “I think he’s coming for me. Or worse, he’s coming for all of Charlie team because of me.”

Con rubbed his knuckles over his jaw. “We need to find out everything the Echo team was involved in. The ops you ran. Anything that would make Cypher target you.”

Cypher, the terrorist they’d been hunting for months, seemed like an even bigger danger now that they knew his target was Echo. Cypher was responsible for bombings, and he wanted them to find him. Through cryptograms and other measures of contact, he had led the Blackout team through several countries. The latest was following a bomb from Turkey to the United States. The terrorist had killed hundreds of people…including an entire ghost ops team.

“That info’s locked down,” Henner spoke up. “Top-level clearance.”

“We can request it. Go through the channels.” Con didn’t shift his gaze from Chase as he spoke. Their leader had the ability to assess every situation and see right through his men.

Something Chase didn’t need right now.

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