Page 67 of Protected By The Green Berets

Despite my false bravado, I didn’t want to die. I put all my faith into my men. I stopped fighting and let these assholes grab me and tie me up. One of the men got a bit handsy so I kneed him in the balls. He crumpled down to his knees, wheezing and again I felt marginally better. At least until someone hit me from behind and everything went dark.

* * *

My achinghead pulled me from blessed unconsciousness and I sat up. The rumbling of the truck beneath me told me we were on the move.

“Try anything and we’ll just hit you again,” one of the men sitting in the bed of the pickup told me in halting English.

I was already queasy and didn’t feel like getting my head bashed in again, so I nodded. Sitting back against the wall of the truck, I breathed in deeply trying to quell the rolling waves of nausea. Bright spots danced in front of my eyes in the darkness. I was pretty sure I had a concussion. The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon. I’d been out for a while.

“Where are you taking me?”

Of course they didn’t answer. My hands and feet were tied with rope and there were two men back here with me, watching my every move. I resigned myself to waiting in silence. Hopefully there would be an opportunity to escape, but until then I was stuck.

CHAPTER29

Alden

Ikicked the shattered remnants of the chair across the kitchen. “Fuck!” I bellowed, breathing hard. Fear and rage were heating my blood. That they’d dare to take our woman was a death sentence. I’d make sure of that. Roj was the only one we’d been ordered to bring in alive. The rest were fair game. Even Roj’s chances of surviving now were slim.

“How are we going to find her?” Rush asked, looking at Keller. Worry had his brows pinching together.

“There’s only one place left for Roj to take her,” Keller said, anger easy to hear in his tone. All of us were affected by Zinnia’s loss, but we were pushing through. We had to for her sake.

They had a damn good lead on us if the corpses littering the safehouse were any indication. Rigor had set in, meaning it had been a few hours. They’d left in such a hurry they hadn’t taken their fallen comrades along.

Pride welled up inside me as I counted how many men Zinnia had managed to kill before they’d taken her. We could only hope she wasn’t injured. There was too much blood spread everywhere to tell if any of it was hers.

“No point in hanging around here,” Torque said. “Let’s go after her.”

We grabbed all the extra ammunition and weapons we could carry and left the rest of our gear. It would be safe enough here until we could come back for it. It was more important to travel light and fast.

“They took her laptop,” I noted. She’d have everything hidden behind as many barriers as she could, but there was a fuck ton of information on that little computer she hauled around. We’d have to find and secure it as well, once we killed all of Roj’s men and took him into custody. We couldn’t take the chance of some other dickhead finding it and somehow being able to bypass all of Zinnia’s security.

Keller’s face hardened. “We’re going to ride as hard as we can for that northern stronghold. Not being limited to taking the roads could get us there in time.”

He didn’t specify in time for what. We all knew and none of us wanted to think about it. We’d just found her. There was no way we were letting her go so soon. Death would be coming for all those involved in her abduction.

We pushed the animals as hard as we could throughout the night and only slowed slightly during the heat of the day. Our only concerns were of getting to Zinnia before Roj killed or tortured her.

She had focused her research more on the southern stronghold. None of us had thought we’d need to know about the northern one, at least not yet. Not with all our intel pointing to Roj being there. And he had been. We’d waited too long to make our move and he’d beaten us to the punch.

The compound rose up out of the sand before us like a slumbering giant as we got near in the dim twilight.

I turned to Keller. “What’s the plan? We don’t know the layout for this building or how many men are inside. I can move to the east and start a recon while you-”

He cut me off. “We’re going in. Shoot anyone that’s not her.” He readied his rifle, the cue for us to do the same. Torque and Rush wore matching looks of determination. We may be outnumbered in this fight, but we were pissed and ready to wreak some havoc.

I understood Keller’s intense recklessness. I was barely able to keep from storming the building myself. Zinnia’s safety was the only thing keeping me thinking straight. We jumped off our camels, ready to torch the world in order to get to our woman.

We made our way to the building, crouching as we ran along the blind side out of sight of the windows. From there we moved along the edge, Keller peeking through each window counting guards and looking for Z. It wasn’t until we rounded the backside that we found a room with Zinnia tied up inside. There were two men in there with her. She looked unharmed and the tightness that’d been present in my chest all day loosened.

We ducked back down. “How are we going to get her out of there?” I asked Keller. We had counted at least four other men in the other rooms. It wasn’t the number of men that was the problem, it was the fact that they would have time to hurt her as we fought our way through to the room she was being kept inside.

Capturing Roj was on hold at this point. If we managed to get him, it was just a secondary win. We were here for our woman. If he was here and still alive after we rescued her, we would remedy the situation and take him, or his corpse, into custody.

“We know there are at least six guards, but we didn’t scout the other side of the building,” Torque said in hushed tones, as he and Rush came running back to us.

As soon as we’d found Zinnia, we’d waited here in case we needed to move in immediately, while the other two scouted ahead.

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