Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,38
fucking base.”
Deck, being a former chief, spoke fluent officer. “With all due respect, sir,” Sam heard him paraphrase the message into the phone, “we’ll need to verify—”
“Can’t reach our red cell, sir,” Jenk announced, pulling Sam’s attention away. “Signal’s being jammed, somewhere on their end.”
What the fuck?
“Dave, call Tommy Paoletti with a code red,” Sam ordered as he broke open the suitcases that were stacked in the corner. Even when they went overseas on a training op or security drill, Troubleshooters Incorporated traveled with enough weapons and equipment to handle an unexpected emergency. “Jenk, I want to know who’s jamming the radio signal and exactly where it’s coming from. Deck and Nash, gear up. You’re with me.”
“I’m coming, too,” Jenkins said, grabbing both a weapon and ammunition.
As did Dave.
“I need you on your computer,” Sam told him.
“You’ll have me on my computer,” Dave told him, readying his equipment for travel, even as he got through to Paoletti on his cell phone. “Commander. Code red. Evacuate the barracks. Sam’s pulling the plug on the exercise. We’re unable to make contact with our red cell, and we’re preparing to go in after them …”
If this turned out to be a whole lot of nothing, Sam was going to hear about it until the end of time. But he was okay with that. Please God, let this be a simple communications or computer malfunction.
He didn’t often call upon a higher power for help. But he sent up another quick prayer as he led the other men out of the hotel room and down the stairs. Please God, help Alyssa keep her team safe. And God? Thank you for making Linda Cassidy see the light last weekend, and break up with her dickhead of a second husband, giving her son the impetus to fly here to Germany with them, and to be with Alyssa right now.
No doubt about it. If Alyssa were in trouble and Sam couldn’t be guarding her six, he’d want Jules Cassidy by her side.
Jules would die for her.
Of course, the flipside was that Alyssa would also die for Jules.
Sam kicked up his speed, breaking into a run as he went out the door into the hotel’s parking garage.
CHAPTER FOUR
Three men with M60 machine guns had set an ambush along the route leading out of the tunnel.
Jules and the Angels didn’t walk into it, thanks to Lindsey’s extraordinary tracking skills. She’d picked up the fresh trail—three men, carrying heavy gear—atop the tracks they themselves had made coming in. That the three men had M60s wasn’t deduced from the fact that they wore American running shoes. Nor was it divined from the lengths of their strides.
No, Lindsey had crept toward them, wearing her cloak of invisibility, and she’d gotten a visual of those three weapons—machine guns that were capable of turning human beings into some serious hamburger.
She’d also used her cell phone to snap a few photos of the men who were holding those M60s, zeroing in, in particular, on a swastika-and-flame-motif tattoo that they all proudly wore. From this, Jules was able to identify them as members of the New Reich, a particularly loathsome, hatred-spewing group of Neo-Nazis, based out of Dresden.
It was also clear from the symbols in Farsi that the NR had made on the tunnel walls in green fluorescent paint—go figure—that they wanted it to look as if the attack had been made by a local group of Iranian refugees.
Intolerant people could really suck.
But for every Neo-Nazi asshole that was out there, messing up the world with his backward thinking and his stupid plan to kill thousands of American servicemen and -women in order to fuel hatred of innocent people who had nowhere else to go … For every one of them, there was an Alyssa or a Lindsey or a Tess or a Sophia. Ready to fight—and die—for justice and tolerance, ready to right wrongs and bring the real truth to light.
Alyssa came back toward the shadows where Jules was waiting, not far from where they’d activated the electronic device.
“They’re coming,” she told him.
Which meant that she’d been right.
Apparently, about an hour before Jules, Alyssa, and her red cell had accessed the tunnels via that riverfront warehouse, ten members of the New Reich had entered the same drainage system via an as-yet-unknown means. The NR had traveled along a different route in the tunnel system from Alyssa and her team. But the two paths had crossed as they drew closer to the area where the oil tank