Hot Soldier Sniper (The Blackjacks Book 6), page 1
Hot Soldier Sniper
Cindy Dees
Contents
Summary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
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About the Author
Summary
A mortal enemy back from the dead. An urgent mission to stop an international crime lord from resurfacing. Sniper, Jake “Howdy” Harrington, is shut down emotionally but must come out of his shell to complete this last, impossible assignment.
A woman hiding from her attacker, hiding from life. And then a stranger appears at her door, asking to move in with her, to use her home as a surveillance post.
Sucked into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between two killers—one good, one bad—Shannon McMahon must choose to hide forever or risk her life with the man of ice in her home…a man who melts her with passion…
Praise for Cindy Dees
Lovers of Dees’ high-stakes, fast-paced action will find exponentially increasing tension in each scene and pulse-pounding adventure that will keep readers enthralled.
Romantic Times Book Reviews
Ten stars is not enough for Dees’ books!
Harriet Klausner, Amazon Top Reviewer
Wow! You have to read Cindy Dees! I laughed. I cried. I laughed some more. Left me breathless. Can’t put her books down!
Romance Reader Review
Chapter One
Jake Harrington whistled under his breath as he stepped into the cavernous black space lit mostly by the glow of the many computer monitors lining the football field–size floor. There were caves, and then there were caves.
“Welcome to Blackjack Ops South, Major Harrington,” a familiar voice said from nearby.
Jake looked up sharply. Brady Hathaway. Hell of a soldier. Hell of a man. He’d stepped in for Tom Foley to lead the Blackjacks when Tom was promoted and sent to be a staff guy for the Joint Chiefs—a sure shot at brigadier general in his future.
They shook hands and clapped each other on the shoulders. “How’ve you been, Howdy?” Hathaway asked warmly.
Jake let a rare hint of a smile light his eyes for his former comrade-in-arms and now, boss. “I’m good. You’re looking…tan.”
“It’s a hell of a hardship living on a gorgeous Caribbean island, but someone’s gotta do the job, man. What’ve you been up to? Still too strong and silent to succumb to a woman?”
Jake threw him a withering look. In his line of work a social life was impossible, let alone a love life. It wasn’t that he didn’t crave a bit of normal from time to time. But it just wasn’t possible.
Hathaway laughed. “You haven’t changed a bit. Still as grumptastic as ever.”
Jake was used to being accused of having no sense of humor. Hell, they usually accused him of having no personality. Thing was, he couldn’t imagine running around being Mr. Sunshine while he killed people for a living. It seemed…disrespectful.
His work required him to exercise reserves of discipline most people couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t uncommon for him to lie still in the same place for three days at a time. And by still, he meant not a twitch. Not to scratch his nose, not to eat, not to stretch out a cramp. He barely blinked in such hides. Over the years, that capacity for utter physical stillness had translated into a capacity for utter emotional stillness, as well.
His life was a glassy smooth lake. Unruffled. Serene. Yeah, and bland, boring and lonely. But a guy had to take the bad with the good.
Hathaway led him through rows of computer terminals and analysts and stopped in front of a man working at three flat-screen monitors each the size of his television at home and said, “Jake, this is Carter Baigneaux. His handle’s Boudreaux or just Boo. Carter, this is Jake Harrington, the sniper I told you about. Field handle: Howdy.”
The man at the console murmured, “Your reputation precedes you, Major Harrington.”
Jake merely nodded. He took no pleasure in being legendary for his ability to kill.
Bagineaux pulled several manila folders out of a drawer at his knee.
Hathaway continued, “Carter’s a Special Forces man, himself. He spotted what we’re about to show you.”
Then why did they need him to look at whatever it was?
Baigneaux held out a slim red folder. “Take a look at this.”
Jake opened the file and picked up the top photograph inside. It was a grainy close-up of a man. A man he knew all too well. But why he’d been brought all the way out to this super secret island installation to look at a picture of a dead man mystified him. He thumbed through the rest of the pictures, all of them surveillance photos of the same individual.
He glanced up at Hathaway, frowning. “That’s Eduardo Ferrare, a drug lord the Blackjacks tracked down and killed about five years back.”
Hathaway and Baigneaux exchanged significant looks with each other, and the atmosphere around the two men abruptly crackled with tension.
“What’s going on?” Jake bit out, dropping the file onto Carter’s desk.
Hathaway said heavily, “I’d better start at the beginning.” He gestured at a pair of empty chairs beside Carter, and Jake sank into one. He stretched out his legs to ease the sharp pain in his bad knee and crossed his arms. Once comfortable, he settled into his usual statue-like stillness.
Hathaway gestured around him. “When the mission and scope of the Special Forces was expanded a few years back, this facility was built to allow us to do high-grade surveillance on the Caribbean, and Central and South America. From here, we collect intel and direct operations.”
Jake, not prone to displays of irritation at being told things he already knew, waited out Hathaway to get to his point.
Brad continued, “From here, we can see a gnat on a goat anywhere in this part of the world.”
Carter interjected, grinning, “We can see the gnat’s gonads.”
Jake sent a mild but quelling glance over at the Cajun. The guy subsided, muttering good-naturedly about seeing what Hathaway meant when he said Howdy was no fun.
Hathaway continued. “Carter picked up some interesting traffic patterns around a house in St. George, Gavarone, a few months ago. He identified several known drug dealers going in and out of the place. Not street punks. Players.”
Jake nodded. Eduardo Ferrare had been a major player in narco trade before the Blackjacks blew him up and burned his body almost past recognition.
“Carter started a photo dossier and inventoried all the visitors to the place over a two-month period. He got images of about twenty targets from a high-resolution satellite camera, and commenced identifying them. Boo, here, happens to have worked on some of the top facial recognition software in the business. It was all going along swimmingly until he ran into one guy. When the facial-rec program popped up the ID, we knew there had to be an error.”
Hathaway quit talking and showed no inclination to continue.
Fine. He would bite. Jake leaned forward. “And you knew it was an error because?”
“Because the guy in the picture is dead.”
A low-level hum of disquiet started in his gut. He had an inkling where this was going, and it was impossible. When the Blackjacks killed someone, the target didn’t get back up. Ever. They confirmed all of their kills.
Jake leaned even further forward. “Are you telling me you think Ferrare is still alive?”
“You tell me. You just ID’d the guy off a picture taken three weeks ago.”
It took every ounce of his self-discipline not to leap up out of his chair. No way was Eduardo Ferrare still alive! Fury jostled with dismay in his gut, but disbelief ultimately beat them both out.
“We pulled up the dossier on Ferrare,” Hathaway continued, “and saw that your team ran a find and kill mission on him a while back.”
“It was actually a search and rescue op on his youngest daughter, but to protect her privacy, we left that out of the official record.”
“But you did end up killing Ferrare, didn’t you?” Hathaway retorted sharply.
“Oh, yeah. Blew him to kingdom come.”
“Since you were the team’s sniper and most likely to have studied his face in detail, we wanted to show you the pictures to see what you make of them. Human eyeballs are still better than any software for facial recognition.”
Thank God for that, or he would be out of a job. The new generation of computer guided rifles were already more accurate than any human sniper.
Hathaway said, “Take another look. Tell me if you can say that isn’t Eduardo Ferrare.”
Jake studied the first, and clearest, picture again. Carefully. It showed a white stucco portico with a black Mercedes parked in front of it. The car sat low and heavy. Armored, he noted absently. A big guy stood in front of it, his back to the vehicle, hands crossed over his crotch in a classic bodyguard pose. Behind the vehicle was a similar guy. Beside the rear passenger door s
tood three men in a cluster. Two had their backs to the camera, but the third one’s face was clearly visible.
A face he knew as well as his own. A face he’d studied for hundreds of hours, both in pictures and through the sights of his sniper rifle. From every conceivable angle, displaying every conceivable expression.
“Sonofabitch,” he breathed.
Hathaway said dryly, “I gather you stand by your initial identification, then?”
Jake looked up, grim. “Yes. That’s Eduardo Ferrare. But—” He broke off. It took a hell of a lot to shock him, but he was nigh unto speechless right now.
Hathaway finished for him. “—but Ferrare definitely died in Gavarone five years ago.”
Jake and his teammates had been in the tiny South American country monitoring a civil war there and had crossed paths with the drug lord. Both of Ferrare’s daughters had defected from their father, and between them, brought the mighty man low. Julia, Carina, and the Blackjacks had barely made it out alive. The only way they’d made it out was because Ferrare had died and not been alive to send his army of goons after them.
Jake burst out, “I watched the guy’s house blow up around him. Hell, he died in Joe Rodriguez’s arms. We recovered the guy’s body. The clothes, the jewelry, the dental records… We had a positive ID. Eduardo Ferrare is dead.”
Hathaway spoke quietly. “Then who in the hell is the man in that picture?”
Jake stared down at the damning photograph. For all the world, he would swear that was Eduardo Ferrare…if he didn’t know better. “Have you got any pics of the guy’s right hand?”
Carter frowned. “Why?”
“He had a pinkie ring he always wore. Unusual kite-shaped diamond. Big rock. Flashy. Except…”
While Carter fished through the stack of pictures, Hathaway asked quietly, “Except what?”
“We got the ring, too. He was wearing it when he died. Our forensics guys matched it to the insurance spectrographs of the stone. It was Ferrare’s ring we took off the corpse.”
Carter pulled out a picture. “This picture has a good view of his right hand. I can digitally enhance it and see if there’s a ring.”
Jake watched as the guy turned to his computer and called up a digital file of the picture in question. Carter highlighted a small section of the photograph, the bit that included a fuzzy image of the Ferrare look-alike’s hands, and typed in a rapid set of commands.
Carter pulled a microphone down from the side of his head, where he’d folded it back along his narrow headset. “Anyone running a red-priority operation on Big Bertha?” Carter’s question resonated over a loudspeaker throughout the cave. Several seconds of silence greeted the announcement.
“Big Bertha?” Jake echoed.
Hathaway murmured, “Our supercomputer array.” To the computer technician, Hathaway said, “Have at it, Boo.”
Carter typed in a final set of commands. His computer screen went black, replaced by a slowly spinning hourglass.
In a rare fit of something unidentifiable roiling in his gut, Jake asked, “How long is this going to take?” Was this actually impatience? He filed the novel sensation as interesting and released a long, slow breath. Calm suffused him. Better.
Carter answered, “Should be no more than a minute or so. I only asked Bertha to enhance a tiny piece of the picture.”
Sometimes Jake felt like a dinosaur, working with his old-school, single-shot, manual-loading, Barrett fifty-caliber sniper rifle. The technology had been around for about sixty years now. Oh, sure, his telescopic sights were the latest and greatest technology to be had. He routinely made positive ID’s on targets at a range of two miles, and killed them with impunity from well over a mile.
But the things this roomful of computers could do were frankly mind-boggling. Like the picture slowly forming on the screen before him. It had been taken from one-hundred-eighty miles above the earth’s surface. In a few seconds, he would be able to see if the guy in the picture was wearing a ring…and if so, what kind.
“Here it comes,” Carter murmured.
Pixels started to fill the screen rapidly. A Mercedes hood ornament came into view, and the torso of a man behind it. A forearm, and then a hand, began to take shape.
Jake leaned forward. Was that a ring forming? Surely not. And surely not a kite-shaped diamond that winked like a star when light hit it just right.
A bright spot of white appeared at the edge of the man’s hand. A vague stripe crossed his pinkie finger.
No.
But no matter how much he wished it not to be so, Jake knew the ring taking shape on the man’s hand. The image finished loading, and the three men stared at the kite-shaped diamond sparkling back at them.
Hathaway commented from behind him, “Looks like we’ve got us a match, boys.”
Jake frowned. “Is there any way we can find out if the ring the Blackjacks recovered five years ago is still in government custody?”
Baigneaux commented, “I can run that down…but jewelry can be duplicated.”
Jake frowned. “For that matter, a face can be duplicated. But why would somebody go to all that trouble? Why would someone assume the identity of a man that multiple governments and any number of criminals would kill on sight?”
Hathaway shrugged. Then he asked Jake, “Computer matches and verification protocols aside, what’s your gut telling you? Is that Ferrare?”
Jake took a deep breath. “It’s not possible, and I don’t know how it happened, but yeah. That’s him.”
“How sure are you?”
He looked Hathaway straight in the eye. “Dead sure.”
Over the next week, Jake helped the Blackjack Ops analysts subject the surveillance photos of Eduardo Ferrare to every verification test they could come up with. And the guy in the pictures passed every last one. With flying colors. The man in Gavarone was Eduardo Ferrare. How he’d survived the violent explosion that destroyed his house and charred his body to a crisp was a complete mystery.
A phone call to his daughters verified that he wasn’t a known twin—in fact, he had no living siblings to their knowledge. Both women also denied having heard from their father in the past five years. Given that he’d tried to kill them both and there was no love lost between parent and offspring, Jake was inclined to believe them.
Jake simply couldn’t believe that Ferrare wasn’t dead. Which meant this man had to be an exact double for the original.
Or…the exact double had died in Joe Rodriguez’s arms.
Had they been outsmarted by the crime lord five years ago?
If that was the case, what had the bastard been up to for all this time? Jake knew the man well enough to be certain it hadn’t been anything good. Furthermore, if Ferrare was resurfacing now, it was for one reason and one reason only: some dastardly plan of his was about to come to fruition. The thought was chilling.
Jake had just finished working out and showering in the operations facility’s exceptionally well-equipped gym when his cell phone vibrated. “Harrington here,” he murmured.
“Jake. Brady. Can you come down to the conference room overlooking the Bat Cave?”
“On my way.” He pocketed the phone and made his way down the stone tunnels left by the magma that had carved this place.
When he got to the conference room, all the senior management of Blackjack Ops South was there. Brady Hathaway introduced Jake to his civilian counterpart, a CIA officer named Jennifer Blackfoot. Good looking woman. Young to be in such a position of responsibility. Which meant she was probably a hell of a smart woman.
Next, Hathaway introduced John Hollister, who commanded the Special Forces team attached to this unit, a group called the Nightwatch. Hella good operators from everything Jake had heard about them.
