Loe raamatut: «Delta Force Defender»
A beautiful target.
Her reluctant bodyguard.
Fiery, independent Cam Sutton will go to any length to prove his Delta Force mentor isn’t a terrorist—even bully the CIA into giving him the damning emails. But by-the-book CIA translator Martha Drake already knows the evidence is fishy, and it’s somehow connected to the recent attempts on her life. Soon the strong, capable soldier is her protector...and inciting a passion neither can deny. But will Cam still want to be her teammate once the real traitors are brought to justice?
Red, White and Built: Pumped Up
CAROL ERICSON is a bestselling, award-winning author of more than forty books. She has an eerie fascination for true-crime stories, a love of film noir and a weakness for reality TV, all of which fuel her imagination to create her own tales of murder, mayhem and mystery. To find out more about Carol and her current projects, please visit her website at www.carolericson.com, “where romance flirts with danger.”
Also by Carol Ericson
Locked, Loaded and SEALed
Alpha Bravo SEAL
Bullseye: SEAL
Point Blank SEAL
Secured by the SEAL
Bulletproof SEAL
Single Father Sheriff
Sudden Second Chance
Army Ranger Redemption
In the Arms of the Enemy
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk
Delta Force Defender
Carol Ericson
ISBN: 978-1-474-07947-1
DELTA FORCE DEFENDER
© 2018 Carol Ericson
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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Version: 2020-03-02
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Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Extract
About the Publisher
Prologue
A bug scuttled across his face, but Major Rex Denver didn’t move one coiled, aching muscle. Twenty feet below him at the bottom of the hill, an army ranger team thrashed through the bushes, their voices loud and penetrating in the dead of the Afghan night.
Rex clenched his jaw as if willing the rangers to do the same. Didn’t they realize this mountainous area was crawling with the enemy?
His eye twitched. To those rangers, Major Rex Denver was the enemy.
He didn’t blame those boys for being out here searching for him. Hell, he’d be out here hunting down a traitor to his country, too.
He resettled his rifle and rested his finger on the trigger, not that he’d ever use it against any branch of the US Military. If the rangers found him, he’d go peacefully—but they’d never find him.
He’d started as a ranger himself, and after twenty years in Delta Force, leading his own team, he’d honed his skills at subterfuge and escape to perfection. They wouldn’t catch him, but he’d die before he allowed the enemy that roamed these hills to catch those rangers.
One of the rangers yelled out. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Rex rolled his eyes. If that soldier was on his team, the wrath of hell would come down on him for that behavior. Rex had to bring the hammer down on Cam Sutton, one of the younger Delta team members, more than a few times for reckless behavior.
Someone issued a whispered reprimand from out of the darkness.
The young soldier answered back. “I don’t care, sir, this is wrong. Major Denver’s no traitor.”
Rex believed he had the loyalty of most of the soldiers who knew his reputation, but the evidence against him was overwhelming. Why him? He and his Delta Force team must’ve stumbled on something big for someone to take them out of the picture. And he hoped to have a long time to figure it out.
A twig cracked to his right, and Rex’s gaze darted toward the sound. Something glinted in the thick foliage. He flipped his night-vision goggles over his eyes and picked out the man crouched in the shadows, his focus on the team of rangers below.
Adrenaline flooded his body, and his heart hammered in his chest. Were there more? He scanned the area beyond the stealthy intruder. If this interloper wasn’t solo, his companions weren’t within striking distance of the rangers...at least not yet and not before the rangers could respond with their own firepower.
If Rex took out the enemy, he couldn’t do it quietly. And once he made his position known, the rangers would swarm the mountainside and capture him.
He cranked his head around slowly, eyeing the steep drop-off behind him. He’d seen worse.
Rex popped up from his hiding place, and in the same motion he took the shot. It took just one. The enemy combatant pitched forward, his gun shooting impotently into the sky above him.
The rangers came to life as they fanned out and charged the hill.
Rex clutched his weapon to his chest, and rolled off the edge of the cliff into the dark unknown.
Chapter One
Martha’s head pounded, and her hand trembled as she clicked open her email. Holding her breath, she scrolled past all the new emails that had come in since she’d taken lunch.
When she came to the end of the batch, she let out that breath and slumped in her chair.
The most sinister email that had come through was a reminder to submit her time sheet. She picked up her coffee cup and had to set it down as the steaming liquid sloshed over the rim onto her unsteady hand.
“Hey, Martha. Did you have a good lunch?”
Martha twisted her head around and smiled at her coworker Farah. “Errands, you?”
“Hot lunch date with the mystery man.”
“I hope he’s not married like the previous one.”
“The previous one is still in the picture. A girl has to keep her options open.” Farah winked and pushed away from Martha’s cubicle almost bumping into Sebastian.
He held up his hand in an awkward wave. “Everything working okay with your computer after I dialed back that program to the previous version?”
“It’s back up to speed. Thanks, Sebastian.” Martha made a half turn in her chair back to her desktop, hoping he’d take the hint. They’d dated once or twice, but she wanted a relationship with some flying sparks for a change.
Sebastian took a step back, tapping the side of her cube. “Okay, then. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Yeah, sparks.
Martha swung around to fully face her computer and jumped when another email came through. When would this fear go away? Those emails had started trickling into her inbox four months ago. She’d turned them over to the appropriate authorities and washed her hands of them—or tried to.
She chewed on her bottom lip. She hadn’t forgotten about those emails. How could she, when they’d resulted in a huge investigation of some hotshot Delta Force commander, who’d then gone AWOL? How could she, when ever since she’d clicked on those emails, someone had been spying on her, following her?
She glanced over her shoulder at her coworkers in the CIA’s translation department. Why had she been chosen for the honor of receiving those anonymous emails accusing Major Rex Denver of treason and colluding with the enemy?
What would’ve happened if she’d deleted those emails and never told a soul? Would she be the nervous wreck she was today?
She tapped her fingernail against her coffee cup. She couldn’t have ignored those emails any more than she could jump up on her desk right now and scream in the middle of a CIA office that she had a bomb under her desk.
Maybe if she’d gotten rid of the emails like she was supposed to do, the people who’d sent them would leave her alone. But why would that matter? The senders had gotten their desired response. She reported the emails, which prompted the investigation of Denver, which then led to the discovery of his traitorous activities. The man had gone rogue. How much more guilty could you get?
But some gut instinct had compelled her to hang on to the emails. When she first received them, she’d copied them to a flash drive, which she wasn’t even supposed to insert in her computer, and taken them home. She’d told everyone, including her slimy boss, Gage, that she’d deleted them. Then the IT department had come in and wiped her deleted items off the face of the earth.
She had her own suspicions about how those messages had gotten through to her email address at the Agency. It had the fingerprints of Dreadworm, a hacking group, all over it, but not even Dreadworm had claimed responsibility for forwarding those emails.
Martha had wanted to take a more careful look at the messages because of the phrasing. She spoke several languages, and she’d told Gage that the emails sounded like a foreigner had composed them.
He’d brushed her off like he always did, but she’d gotten her revenge by keeping those emails for herself.
Now she had someone stalking her.
Sighing, Martha straightened in her chair and shoved in her earbuds. She double-clicked on the file she’d been working on before lunch and began typing in the English words for the Russian ones that poured into her ears from one of the radio broadcasts the CIA monitored and recorded. After about an hour of translating, Martha plucked out the earbuds and stretched her arms over her head.
She swirled the coffee in the bottom of her cup and made a face. Then she slid open a desk drawer and grabbed a plastic bag with a toothbrush and toothpaste.
When she returned to her desk ten minutes later with a minty taste in her mouth and a bottle of water, she plopped in her chair and tucked her hair behind her ears, ready to tackle the remainder of the afternoon.
She glanced at the bottom of her computer screen, noticing a little yellow envelope on her email icon, indicating a new message. She double-clicked on it and froze. Her blood pounded in her ears as she stared at the skull and crossbones grinning at her from the computer screen, its teeth chattering.
Hunching forward, she resized the window and scrolled from the top to the bottom of it. No text accompanied the image. She scrutinized the unfamiliar email from a fake email account at the top of the window.
She glanced over her shoulder, and in a split second she forwarded the email to her home address. She deleted it and then wiped it clean from her deleted items. She knew it still existed somewhere in cyberspace, but not unless someone was looking for it. And why would anybody be checking her emails? She’d been the good little soldier she always was and turned over the others. The people up the chain of command had no reason to suspect her, and Gage thought she was a lifeless drone, so she didn’t need to worry about him.
If Gage cornered her right now and asked her why she didn’t tell anyone about the skull and crossbones, she wouldn’t have an answer for him. Maybe because she’d been dismissed so thoroughly after turning over the first batch. Not that this message had anything to do with the others—did it?
Of course it did. The same people had just sent her a warning, but she didn’t know why. She didn’t know anything about those emails or what they meant—but she was determined to find out.
The rest of the afternoon passed by from one jumpy incident to the next. Her scattered focus had been worthless in her attempts to translate the recorded broadcast.
Fifteen minutes away from quitting time, Farah hung on the corner of Martha’s cubicle, her dark eyes shining. “I’m meeting my guy for a drink after work tonight. Do you want to come along?”
Martha crossed her arms. “And be a third wheel? No, thanks.”
“He might have a friend.” Farah made her voice go all singsongy on the last word as if to heighten the temptation.
“That’s even worse than being a tagalong. A blind date?”
“Oh my God, Martha. Get used to it. It’s the way of the world now.”
“Seems to me all online dating has gotten you is a couple of sneaky married men.”
Farah pouted. “It’s fun. Not every date has to be a lifetime commitment.”
“Go then and have fun for me.” Martha waved her hand.
Not that she’d have accepted Farah’s invitation under any circumstances, but after the day Martha had just had, she’d rather be home with a good book—and those emails.
She wrapped up her work and logged out of the computer, removing her access card and slipping it into her badge holder.
Waving to the security guard at the front desk, Martha pushed out the front doors and snuggled into her jacket. Winter in DC could be mild, but this November weather was already putting a chill in her bones.
She caught the next plain-wrap CIA van that shuttled employees from Langley to Rosslyn. When the van finally lurched to a stop, Martha stashed her book in her bag, rubbed her eyes and readjusted her glasses. She stepped out of the van and into the cold night, making her way to the Metro stop on the corner.
Descending into the bowels of the city with the rest of the worker bees, she welcomed the warmth from the pressing crowd as she turned the corner for her train. She jostled for position among the crush of people, gritting her teeth against the screech of the train’s wheels slowing its progress.
As the lights approached from the tunnel, a man crowded her from behind. Martha tried to take a step back, but found herself pitching forward instead as someone’s elbow drove into her back.
The train screeched once more, and Martha felt herself teetering on the edge of the platform. She thrust her arms in front of her as if to break a fall...but the only thing breaking this fall was that train barreling toward her.
Chapter Two
Cam curled his arm around the waist of the woman floundering on the precipice of the platform and pulled her back against his chest. He jerked his head to the side, but the man who had been crowding Martha Drake from behind had wormed his way through the crowd, the black beanie on his head lost in a sea of commuters.
Martha’s back stiffened and she tried to turn in his arms, but he tightened his hold on her until the train came to a stop in front of them.
The doors whisked open, and Cam nudged her forward, whispering in her ear. “Go on.”
She squeezed into the train with a mass of other people, grabbed a pole and spun around, her eyebrows snapping over her nose. “Take your hand off me.”
Cam’s jaw dropped open and a rush of heat claimed his chest. He’d just saved the woman’s life, and this was the thanks he got?
He wrapped his fingers around the pole above her hand and twisted his lips. “You’re welcome.”
“I—I...” She shoved some wispy brown bangs out of her eyes, which blinked at him from behind a pair of glasses. “Yes, you’re the one who pulled me back. Thank you. But...”
Lifting his eyebrows, he asked, “Yes?”
“How do I know you’re not the one who was crowding me from behind in the first place?”
“I wasn’t. That guy took off.”
Martha’s eyes, a lighter brown than her hair, widened and her Adam’s apple bobbed in her delicate throat.
His statement had scared but not surprised her, and he dipped his head to study her face for his next question. “Any reason for somebody to push you into the path of an oncoming train?”
“No.” She pressed her lips together. “It was crowded. Everyone was moving forward. I don’t think that was an intentional push.”
“It’s always crowded. Commuters don’t generally fall onto the tracks.”
She shifted away from him, and the odor from the sweaty guy behind him immediately replaced the fresh scent that had clung to Martha, which had been the only thing making this tight squeeze bearable.
“Well, thank you.” She tilted her chin up, along with her nose, and dismissed him.
Looked like she’d perfected the art of dismissing obnoxious men, but Cam had a date with Miss Prissy-pants here, even if she didn’t know it.
He left her in peace for the remainder of the ride, although her sidelong glances at him didn’t go unnoticed, and the knuckles of her hand gripping the pole had turned a decided shade of white. He’d planted a seed of suspicion in fertile ground.
When the train jerked to a stop, forward and then backward, Martha peeled her hand from the pole, hitched her bag higher on her shoulder and scooted out of the car, with a brief nod in Cam’s direction.
He exited the train and followed Martha up the stairs and out into the night air, its frigidity no match for Ms. Drake’s.
Three blocks down from the station, she stopped in front of a crowded Georgetown bar, clutching her bag to her chest, and turned to face him.
He sauntered toward her, then wedged his shoulder against the corner of the building, crossing his arms.
“Why are you following me? I’m going to call the police.” She waved her cell phone at him.
“We need to talk, Martha Drake.”
She choked and pressed the phone to her heart. “Who are you? Are you the one who sent the skull and crossbones?”
Skull and crossbones? That was a new one. He filed it away for future reference.
He shrugged off the wall and straightened his spine. “I’m Sergeant Cam Sutton, US Army Delta Force, and you discovered some bogus emails that compromised my team leader, Major Rex Denver.”
Martha’s expressive face went through several gyrations, and then she settled on suspicion, which seemed to be one of her favorites. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
He pulled his wallet from his pocket and slipped out his military ID. He held it out to her between two fingers.
She wasted no time snatching it from him and holding it close to her face, peering at it through her glasses. After perusing it for at least a minute, she handed it back to him. “Bogus emails?”
“Major Denver never did any of those things in those emails—” he jabbed the corner of his ID card in the general direction of her nose “—and if you hadn’t turned them over to the Agency, Denver wouldn’t be in the trouble he is now.”
“If I hadn’t...” She stamped one booted foot. “What did you expect me to do with them?”
“We can’t keep talking out here. Let’s go inside.” He jerked his thumb toward the bar.
Her gaze bounced to the large picture window of the bar over his shoulder and back to his face. The crowd inside must’ve reassured her because she dipped her head once.
Cam circled around Martha and opened the door, holding it wide for her to pass through. As she did, he got another whiff of her fresh scent, which seemed to cling to her.
DC office workers, unwinding at the end of the workweek, packed every inch of the horseshoe bar. They seemed more interested in socializing and watching the football game on the TVs over the bar than quiet conversation, leaving a few open tables toward the back of the room, near the restrooms.
Cam placed his hand on the small of Martha’s back and steered her toward one of those tables. She’d twitched under his touch but didn’t shrug him off. He’d take that as a good sign.
When he pulled out her chair, her eyes beneath her arched eyebrows jumped to his face, and she mumbled, “Thank you.”
After he took his own seat across from her, he folded his arms and hunched over the table. “Why weren’t you surprised that somebody tried to push you onto the subway tracks?”
Her nostrils flared, and then she pursed her lips. “I told you. I thought it was an accident. I still think so.”
“Really?” He reached across the table so quickly she didn’t have time to pull back, and smoothed his thumb over the single line between her eyebrows. “Then why are you jumpier than a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”
Martha’s mouth hung open, and Cam didn’t know if it was because he’d presumed to touch her petal-soft skin, or because he’d laid on a thick Southern accent. That slack jaw made most people look stupid, but Martha couldn’t look stupid if she tried. It made her look—adorable.
“Cat?” Her soft voice trailed off.
“You know—long tails, rocking chairs going back and forth.” He hit the table with his flat hand, and she jumped. “Nervous, jittery. Don’t deny it.”
A cocktail waitress dipped next to their table and tossed a couple of napkins in front of them. “What can I get you?”
Cam plucked a plastic drink menu from a holder at the side of the table and tapped a picture of one of the featured bottles of beer. “I’ll have a bottle of this.”
“I can’t just point at a picture.” Martha snatched the menu from his hand and flipped it over, studied it for what seemed like ten minutes and then asked about twenty questions about the chardonnays. When she finally tucked the menu back in its holder, she said, “I’ll have a glass of the house chardonnay.”
When the waitress dived back into the crowd, Cam drummed his fingers on the table. He needed to start at the beginning with Martha. She clearly liked to take things in order.
He took a deep breath and started again. “Can you tell me about those emails? Where they came from? What they said, exactly, or close to it?”
“I should report you.” She flicked her fingers at him. “What are you doing in DC? Why aren’t you on duty?”
Cam narrowed his eyes. She didn’t want to report him. Her voice had quavered, and she’d broken eye contact with him. If she’d turned those emails over so quickly, there shouldn’t be anything stopping her from turning him over—but she didn’t want to go there.
“I’m on leave. I’m not here on any official business, just my own.” He crumpled the cocktail napkin in his fist. “Look, I know Major Rex Denver, and I know he’s innocent of these charges.”
“He went AWOL.” She sniffed. “Running indicates guilt.”
“Not always.” He smoothed out the napkin and traced the creases with the tip of his finger. “Not if you think there’s a conspiracy against you and you’re going to be railroaded.”
“A conspiracy?” Her eyes widened and seemed to sparkle in the low light from the candle on the table.
“Here you go.” The waitress set down their drinks and spun away before Cam could tell her to close out the tab and that he didn’t need a mug.
He watched Martha over the bottle, as he tipped the beer down his throat. Maybe this night would be longer than he expected.
“We think someone is framing Denver, and it started with those emails.”
“We?”
“The Delta Force team that Major Denver commanded. We were all—” he put down the bottle harder than he’d planned “—dragged in for interrogation. Do you know what that’s like? You’re doing your job, doing the right thing, and bam. They’re lookin’ at you like you’re vermin.”
She nodded and took a big gulp from her wineglass. “I do know what that’s like. I turned over those emails and all of a sudden, I’m suspect. They’re checking out my communications, my files.”
Cam’s pulse ticked faster. That’s why Martha was none too anxious to report him. They’d grilled her, too.
“Exactly.” He touched the neck of his bottle to her glass and the pale liquid within shimmered and reflected in Martha’s eyes. Whiskey. Her eyes were the color of whiskey. And right now he was a little drunk just looking into them.
Cam cleared his throat and rubbed his chin. “I don’t trust them, any of them. All I know is Denver is not guilty of those crimes, and I’m gonna prove it.”
Martha took another sip of wine from her half-empty glass, her cheeks flushed like a rose stain on porcelain. “I’ll start at the beginning with the emails.”
“Did the CIA determine where they came from?” He scooted forward in his seat.
“I didn’t get all the details because why would they tell me anything? I’m just the one who discovered them and turned them over.” She cupped her glass in her two hands and rolled it between her palms. “They were looking at Dreadworm though, you know that hacking group?”
He nodded, not wanting to interrupt her flow. This stuff had been bothering her for a while, and he just became her receptacle—a very willing one.
“But I don’t know if they ever determined how my email inbox became the target, or at least they never told me. Dreadworm was just the messenger, anyway. The conduit for the message, if you will—and that message was that Major Rex Denver had been working with a terrorist group plotting against the United States.”
Cam slammed his fist on the table, the tips of his ears burning.
Martha held up her index finger. “But I noticed something strange about those emails.”
“Yeah, they were filled with lies.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but it didn’t seem as if the person who composed the emails was a native English speaker.”
Cam blinked his eyes and took another swig of beer. “Go on.”
“If it were a foreign entity who sent those messages, why? Why would they care to warn US Intelligence about an American serviceman?”
“Our allies would care.”
“Why wouldn’t our allies just use regular channels to communicate with our military or even the CIA? But an unfriendly entity might have every reason to plant those stories about Denver.”
“You’ve been thinking about this.”
“It’s more than just the emails.” Martha waved her hand at the passing waitress. “Another round, please.”
Cam cocked his head and took in Martha’s empty wineglass and flushed cheeks. She’d downed that pretty fast. Although even in low heels she stood taller than most men, she was as slim as a reed, and the booze seemed to have loosened her tongue and her attitude toward him. He’d take it.
“More than emails?” He wrapped both hands around his bottle.
She looked both ways in the crowded bar and hunched forward, wedging her chin in the palm of her hand. “I’m being followed.”
“The guy on the subway platform.”
“I don’t know.” She drew back from him...and her earlier pronouncement, and tucked a lock of silky hair behind her ear. “Nobody has ever made physical contact with me before. That push could’ve killed me.”
The fear in her whiskey eyes plunged a knife in his gut. “Maybe it was just a warning, maybe a coincidence after all.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“How do you know you’re being followed?”
“I can feel it, sense it.”
He rolled his shoulders and thanked the waitress as she brought them their drinks. Maybe Martha was just paranoid. She’d been dwelling on those emails, and he didn’t blame her. They’d started a firestorm.
“And then there’s the skull and crossbones.”
He coughed and his beer fizzed in his nose. “You mentioned that before. Someone put a skull and crossbones on the emails?”
“Not the original messages. Someone sent me an email, just this afternoon, with one of those animated gifs of a skull and crossbones—blinking eyes and chattering teeth.” She took a gulp from her new wineglass, and Cam placed his hand over her icy cold one.
“Why is someone sending you threats? You obviously took the intended and hoped-for action. You turned over the emails and got Denver in a heap of trouble. Why the harassment?”
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