Trusting a Warrior (Loving a Warrior #3) - Melanie Hansen Page 0,2
tells, and this one was saying, “I smell something.”
Had the wind shifted? It had been coming from the north, and the dog hadn’t hit on anything before now. Geo held up his wind gauge. Sure enough, it was now coming from the east.
He gestured to get Jaxon’s attention. “I think we’re looking at contact from the east,” he said quietly. “They’ve crept up on us while we’ve been busy in here.”
“What’s over that way?”
Pulling up his mental maps, Geo replied, “Palm groves. A shit-ton of irrigation ditches. If they’re coming from that direction, the sniper couldn’t have seen them from here.”
The men shuffled their feet in anticipation, and one of them growled, “If they’re lookin’ for a fight, I say let’s give ’em a goddamn fight.”
They had a choice. Jaxon could call in air support, get an A-10 to swoop down from the sky and strafe the area with its powerful cannons. The bad guys would never know what hit them, and the last thing they’d hear would be the roar of a plane. They’d look up, and boom, lights out.
Geo glanced around the circle of grim faces. No. The men in the grove were ones who didn’t hesitate to burn young pilots alive in cages, or behead journalists on camera, or hang people up by their wrists and butcher them like pieces of meat. They deserved to see their death coming straight at them.
“Let’s go.”
In an overabundance of caution considering the rest of the compound was clear, Geo sent Bosch to inspect the secondary gate before anyone touched it, the hair on his arms prickling when the dog took a few whiffs, then sat.
“Nobody come any closer,” he said urgently. “He’s on odor.”
The SEALs froze.
Pulling out his flashlight again, Geo crouched and aimed the powerful beam at the base of the gate. Sure enough, a few thin wires gleamed.
“Fuckin’ toe-popper,” he pronounced. “Not enough to kill, but it would’ve taken off a leg or two.”
Heartfelt curses all around as the realization hit.
If someone had triggered the gate, in those first few minutes of confusion and chaos, the insurgents would’ve had the advantage. They would have swarmed in from the palm grove to pin the SEALs down in the compound like sitting ducks, turning them from aggressors into victims forced to fight for their lives. Booby-trapping the back gate instead of the front showed that the insurgents had a better understanding of SEAL tactics than they’d given them credit for.
But the bad guys had made a fatal miscalculation. They hadn’t expected the dog.
Jaxon didn’t have to give any orders. No one made any covert hand signals. They slipped out through the main gate and moved swiftly, silently, toward the palm grove. Next to Geo, Bosch trotted, head held high. His whole demeanor was different now—muscles coiled, body straining, as if he knew his next command wouldn’t be to search, but to attack...
“Reveiren!”
At Geo’s hiss, the dog streaked off, low to the ground. He veered straight toward a thicket of heavy brush, and with no hesitation, plunged through it. A beat of silence before unearthly screams pierced the air.
Not bothering with stealth anymore, the team ran into the thicket, ignoring the thorns that tore at their uniforms. Busting through to the other side, they were greeted by the sight of Bosch crushing a man’s right arm in his powerful jaws. Blood sprayed everywhere as the dog shook him violently, the dude’s AK-47 falling uselessly to the ground.
Arrayed on either side of him, his fellow insurgents knelt frozen in shock and horror. One of them caught sight of the SEALs looming out of the darkness, and with a shout, he raised his weapon.
Too little, too late. A ferocious burst of gunfire later, six enemy fighters lay dead.
Growls and screams suddenly came from yet another thicket, and Geo darted over to see Bosch clamped onto the forearm of a man who didn’t look to even be out of his teens. He eased his finger from the trigger when he saw no sign of a weapon, and called the dog off.
The boy was sobbing, his arm a mess of blood.
Bellowing “Medic!” Geo jerked the barrel of his gun to motion the kid out of the brush, only then seeing a narrow black tube with some familiar-looking shells lying next to it.
An RPG launcher.
Disillusionment burned in Geo’s gut. This was no innocent kid, but the guy tasked with shooting down any American helos rushing to help the SEALs.