Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,104

already heading for them.

“Ankle or knee?” Magic continued.

“Ankle.” Shane dinged himself again, and again the pain was excruciating. “Fuck!”

“You okay there, LT?” the senior asked in his raspy Brooklynese as he crouched down next to Shane.

“Ankle,” Magic reported.

“Head count?” Shane asked the senior through gritted teeth.

“Eight. All here, sir, all in one piece. You’re our only casualty,” the senior replied, then turned to report as Rick Wilkie, the team’s hospital corpsman, joined them, “Ankle.”

It was un-fucking-believably inconvenient, considering they were in the middle of nowhere. It was a full-on double-fuck of inconvenience since Shane was supposed to be leading his team of SEALs both swiftly and stealthily up the nearby mountain, to a small town where a terrorist leader named Rebekah Suliman, code name Scorpion Four, was enjoying her last supper.

But neither swift nor silent remained part of Shane’s current repertoire.

“Don’t even think about touching that boot,” Shane warned Rick. If he took it off, he’d be in far worse shape. “And keep your syringe away from me. I need a clear head and it doesn’t hurt that bad.”

Okay, so that was a lie, and they all knew it. But sooner or later, the pain would diminish. Sooner or later, he’d get used to it. Please God, let it be sooner rather than later …

“I could give you something local, sir,” Rick suggested.

“No, we’ll improvise,” Magic answered before Shane could respond.

But Shane outranked him. He outranked everyone here on the ground. “Do it,” he ordered Rick, pulling up his pant leg to give the medic as much access as he could without that boot coming off.

“With all due respect, LT, you run on this thing, it could end your career,” Magic said as the meds Rick injected quickly took the edge off the pain in Shane’s ankle, bringing it down to a steady but more-manageable throb.

“I’m not going to plan to run on it,” Shane told this man who’d been his confidant and friend since BUD/S training. “But I’ve gotta be ready. Because I can’t stay here.”

“I’m going to give you this to hold, sir.” Rick handed him a carefully wrapped syringe containing the heavy-duty painkiller. “Let me know if you use it.”

“I won’t.” But Shane pocketed the packet. It could come in handy, in the event they got pinned down and had to remain absolutely silent to keep from being discovered. The last thing he wanted to do was give away their position by breathing too hard.

“What is the plan, sir?” the senior asked.

Shane glanced at Magic, who had already shrugged off his pack, and was divvying up the contents, spreading the weight to Owen and the other SEALs. “The plan is to sweep and sterilize the area, and head toward the target,” Shane said. This wouldn’t be the first time Magic clocked a dozen clicks with Shane leaning heavily on him, or vice versa.

And as much as he hated the fact that he and his injury would handicap his team and slow his men down, putting this entire mission into the extremely capable hands of his senior chief while Shane spent the next two hours miserably stashed behind some brush or in a shallow cave simply wasn’t an option.

First of all, there were no caves in this particular region of this country formerly known as Afghanistan, and the sparse bushes wouldn’t have hidden a three-year-old, let alone a full-grown man of Shane’s height and weight.

And recon patrols came through this area regularly.

Also?

The extraction point—the place where a helo was going to pull them out of this hellhole—was up in the mountains. In order to get there, Shane had to pass the village where Scorpion Four was being feted.

So, nope. There was no quick fix, no easy way out. Shane was destined to be this mission’s PITA, this op’s representative from Murphyville. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong was Murphy’s Law. And he was here as living proof.

But then, as if on cue, Slinger announced, “We got us a tracker, sir.”

Apparently Mr. Murphy hadn’t pointed his bony finger only in Shane’s direction. He’d also tossed an additional monkey wrench into the mix.

“A tracker?” Shane repeated, as he let both Rick and the senior help him to his feet. “Just one?”

The lanky SEAL with the good-ol’-boy accent was frowning down at his equipment. “Yeah,” Slinger said, “it looks like … Wait, I’m gonna calibrate and …”

“Don’t put weight on it,” Magic warned Shane. “You’re going to forget and put weight on it.” He then added a “Sir,” although from