Love's Fiercest Light, page 4
ON ANOTHER MISSION TO PROTECT
IN LOVE IN ANY LANGUAGE
Afghanistan born U.S. Army consultant Emma Selah works as a fluent and multi-lingual interpreter assigned to a special forces team. Deployed to a base in Djibouti, Emma and First lieutenant Jorge “Pina Colada” Pena start to form a relationship built on friendship, mutual respect, and undeniable attraction.
Then she discovers that he has been married the entire time when news of his wife’s untimely death reaches them. She gives him no room for excuses or more deceptions. Distracted and feeling betrayed, Emma makes a tactical mistake and becomes the hostage of a dangerous terrorist cell. Pena comes to her rescue but is gravely wounded.
Emma remains by his side while his life hangs in the balance. He doesn’t want to live without her and she can no longer live without him. Can they find a way to bridge the gap between their separate worlds?
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Please enjoy this excerpt from Love in Any Language.
International Waters, Gulf of Aden
The modified Boston Whaler with sound suppressed but astonishingly powerful twin outboard engines cut through the water, slicing its way smoothly toward the fully laden third generation Suezmax container ship that loomed on the darkening horizon before them. Christened the “Bellflower” in 1987, the ship had a hauling capacity of 12,000 TEUs with a length of just under 400 meters, a breadth of 56 meters, and a draught of around 15 meters. From their perspective at sea level, the ship looked like an island.
Second Lieutenant Jorge “Pina Colada” Peña lead the team with Sergeant Daniel “Pot Pie” Swanson, Sergeant Travis “Trout” Fisher, Sergeant Gerald “Jerry Maguire” McBride, Sergeant Wade “Commando” Chandler, and Sergeant Eric “Gilligan” Gill in the boat.
The cool, salt-scented air rushed past them, and the occasional spray of salty water made droplets form on Jorge’s goggles.
He glanced at the Boston Whaler to starboard loaded with Team Captain Rick Norton, aka “Daddy”, Chief Warrant Officer Three Zachary “MMMBop” Hanson, Sergeant David “Mr. Miyagi” Morita, Lieutenant Philip “Doc Oz” Osbourne, and Sergeant “Honest Abe” Ibrahim. Even though he knew they were there and could almost perfectly pinpoint them, he couldn’t actually see them in the dark.
Suddenly, a pair of flat gray SH-60 Seahawk helicopters swept past their small boats at an altitude of perhaps five meters off the deck. They operated without running lights, or lights of any kind, and looked effectively invisible to the naked eye. Only the propwash in the air, the ground effect on the seawater, and the noise of the General Electric T700 turboshaft engines combined with the chop of the rotors identified their presence. Within seconds the aircraft began their attack runs on the objective and their door gunners opened fire exactly on time, strafing the cargo ship’s bridge, providing cover for Jorge and the five men in his team. The occasional tracer round gave him his only notion as to the positions of the aircraft in the moonless night sky.
He made out muzzle flashes from the ship. The bad guys had responded much more quickly than he would have estimated. The loud ping of a bullet ricocheting off the armored bow of his vessel made him want to duck even further behind the shields.
Closer to the ship, the noise of the small arms gunfire and rapid automatic fire from the helicopters made him glad for his earplugs. As soon as they made contact with the hull, Jorge shouted orders to tie off and climb the ladder. His radio operator, Sergeant Eric Gill, kept in contact with both Captain Norton, Headquarters, and their naval air support.
Jorge paused only a fraction of a second before grabbing the rung of the ladder and pulling himself up. This was his first mission as intel officer in this Special Forces Operations Detachment Alpha, or A-Team. This was his first combat mission since accepting his commission as a Second Lieutenant. He didn’t realize how different it would feel compared to combat missions as a noncommissioned officer in a regular infantry unit. He could feel the weight of the lives of the men he led resting on his shoulders.
Training pushed the nerves down. Hand over hand, he climbed until he slid over the side of the railing and rolled smoothly on the deck with his weapon instantly in operation. He held his weapon ready, crouching and watching for enemy combatants to appear. Norton and his team boarded the ship from the other side and nearer to the bow. Before he knew it, he heard the whisper-shouted affirmation from behind him, “Last man.”
Keying the microphone integrated into his gear, Jorge confirmed all aboard by subvocalizing, “Six. Four. Set.” Norton offered his own confirmation in Jorge’s earpiece in the form of two clicking noises. Norton’s group would head down into the belly of the ship. Jorge’s group would sweep the bridge and upper decks.
He gestured toward the bridge with a bladed left hand, fingers extended and joined. His right hand never wavered on his weapon. From the center of his group, he led his team across the deck toward the bridge. The two men diagonally in front of him with “Pot Pie” Swanson to his left and “Gilligan” Gill to his right kept their weapons high and low alternately. Jorge kept his weapon trained in the direction of travel. The three men behind him—“Trout” Fisher, “Jerry Maguire” McBride, and “Commando” Chandler—looked like a mirror image of Jorge and his pair as they walked backward, training their eyes in the direction of their deadly rifle muzzles.
They moved as a single unit, gliding across the deck like a six-pointed starfish with their upper bodies moving only slightly and their legs absorbing the motion involved in the swaying ship and the act of walking. To an outside observer, they would look like a twelve-legged animal whose upper body floated above a dozen skittering legs.
They reached the bridge hatch without incident and the men pulling rear guard stacked, “Trout” Fisher and “Jerry Maguire” McBride dropping to a one-kneed crouch while “Commando” Chandler remained standing. All of them swept the surrounding area prepared to fire. “Pot Pie” Swanson tried the bridge door and found it locked. He made a dismissive gesture with one hand before returning his grip to his weapon.
Jorge tapped Swanson on the shoulder and gestured with his left hand making a cutting motion, then stepped back with his spine against the bulkhead beside the hatch.
As Swanson affixed a tetrahedron shaped pinch of composition four, or C-4, along with a foot of detonation cord on the hatch handle, they all moved to the side for cover from the blast. “Fire in the hole in three,” Swanson quietly announced into his mic. After a slow count to three-Mississippi, Swanson detonated the charge.
Jorge went high and Gill went in low as they swung through the now open doorway, weapons ready. A man in red and white ghutrah and a black vest with bandoliers crisscrossed over his chest raised a Kalashnikov AK-74 toward Jorge, who fired two shots, dropping the man before he could even fire a single shot. The other man on the bridge, wearing a brown ghutrah with his blue suit jacket held both of his hands up and stepped away from his fallen comrade. While Jorge kept his gun trained on him, Chandler moved forward, quickly searching him before zip-tying his hands behind his back.
A few days from now, assuming he lived through this mission, Jorge would cope with the fact that he had just taken a man’s life. He would let the remorse of that act wash over him and through him and he would pray and get right with the God who he knew without a shred of doubt created him to be a soldier. Right now, he had no time to deal with any of those emotions. Right now, he had a job to do and lives depended upon him doing it well.
Jorge walked over to the zip tied man who crouched on his knees on the deck. He placed the muzzle of his M-4 carbine below the man’s chin so he could smell the fresh cordite and feel the warmth of the steel from the recently fired rounds. Then he used the muzzle to raise the man’s face until their eyes met. He would never fire on a prisoner, but he needed his prisoner to believe, without a single doubt, that he would. So he began his street-theater performance. The look he gave the prisoner informed him that he would not hesitate to take this man’s life as well. “Speak English?”
The man carefully shook his head and said, “La. ‘Ana 'atahadath alearabia.” No. I speak Arabic.
Jorge nodded, maintaining eye contact. He slowly, deliberately, and very calmly slid his finger onto the trigger of his weapon watching the man’s fear increase as he did so. In accented Arabic, he demanded, “How many with you?”
When his prisoner didn’t answer instantly, he gave the man’s chin a little tap with the muzzle of his M-4 carbine and cut his eyes toward the corpse leaking blood onto the deck just a few feet away. “We can just find them and ask them.”
“Khamsa. Khamsa.” The man pleaded. Five.
Jorge instantly removed his finger from the trigger and lowered his weapon. To Gill, he nodded and said, “That tracks.”
Gill gave an affirmation in the radio and said, “Norton’s taking fire near the living quarters below decks.”
Jorge nodded. “Right. We’re good here. Pot Pie, Trout, Jerry Maguire, go lend the boss a hand. Gill, send RSVPs on their behalf.” Gill quietly informed Captain Norton that three friendlies were en route in support.
While they searched the bridge for information, he could hear the chatter of the team as they killed one more bad guy and, after chasing him through ductwork in between the decks, found Haafiz Durrani, one their mission targets. As the intelligence officer, Jorge knew Durrani was a senior lieutenant for the terrorist Kamyar Punjabi, their primary mission target.
Gill glanced at Jorge. “No Punjabi?”
“Maybe he’s hiding in with the crew. He’s slick like a bucket of eels.”
Over the radio, they heard his three-man detachment calling out, “Friendlies. Friendlies. Friendlies.”
Jorge listened intently as his men integrated with Norton’s team and they all began to lay down disciplined—and deadly accurate—suppressive fire. The firefight didn’t last much longer. The pirates surrendered quickly with two dead and one wounded.
Jorge took Hanson’s report while leaning against the bulkhead near the locked hatch of the cabin that contained Durrani. "They shoved the crew into a single stateroom—all twenty-four of them.” Fury dripped from Hanson’s voice. “We counted eighteen able seamen, two cooks, three engineers, and one dead captain.”
With a nod, Jorge said, “Thanks, Chief. Ozzy get a look at them?”
“Yeah. A few minor injuries. Dehydrated, hungry. Exhausted. He’s getting them fed some soup. No Punjabi.”
Norton came down the passageway from the direction of sick bay, and pointed at the other end of the P-way. “She’s here.”
Jorge lifted an eyebrow. “She?”
“Selah.”
Thinking of the stone-faced terrorist on the other side of the door, he wondered what information a woman codenamed Selah could effectively extract. “Sir….”
Norton cut him off, and his beard lifted as he smiled. “You gotta have faith, Pina Colada. Trust your daddy. Father knows best.”
Nothing in Jorge’s entire life led him to trust any other person so blindly—except in the case of Captain Rick Norton, the leader of this A-Team. He actually carried the lives of all eleven men in his hands, and he gave the same kind of trust he expected in return.
Norton walked down the hall and looked up the staircase. “Well, don’t you look a sight, twenty-four-ten.”
“Daddy,” came the reply. He detected a very faint Texas twang in the husky alto voice. “Been too long.”
Jorge watched her walk in his direction. She didn’t bother to duck her head as she entered through the hatch. She couldn’t be taller than five-two with a thin build to match. She wore a pair of black cargo pants and a black long-sleeved button-down linen shirt. In her hand, she held a black scarf.
“Selah, this is Lieutenant Jorge Peña, our new intel officer. Peña, meet Sergeant Emma Selah. She’s the best tactical debriefer I’ve ever seen. I requested her due to our somewhat urgent need for timely and accurate information.”
Jorge couldn’t believe the United States Army’s Special Forces would rely on this tiny woman with her husky voice and deep, dark brown eyes to do anything at all. He raised an eyebrow. “Looking forward to watching you work,” he said.
She stuck the edge of the scarf in her pocket and produced a hair band. While she clutched it between her teeth, she gathered her long black hair behind her head, then secured it with the band. She maintained eye contact with him while she worked to change her appearance.
“I think I detect a whisker of doubt in your expression, Lieutenant.” She wrapped the scarf around her head then secured the end over the bottom half of her face. Suddenly, she looked like a Persian princess. To complete the look, she pulled a compact mirror and black eye pencil out of a cargo pocket and expertly applied dark liner to her eyes. She made a circling motion around her face. “Facial recognition,” she explained. “Y’all have beards. I have to make do.”
It actually made sense to him. He just wondered how or why a man from a culture with so little respect for women would willingly answer questions proposed by a woman dressed like that.
She gestured at the door. “Understand you had no luck getting him to talk. Has that changed since I left shore?”
Jorge shook his head. “He’s not budging.”
She put her hand on the hatch handle and said to Norton, “What’s the timetable?”
“Intel put it at dawn.”
Jorge’s stomach twisted almost painfully. A nuclear bomb targeting the densely populated Gaza Strip would detonate in six short hours if they couldn’t locate it.
She looked up at Jorge and said, “I’d like you to join me, LT. But, keep your mouth shut. Don’t mess with my system. You’re just there to analyze information.” She sized him up. He could almost see her thoughts on her face as she analyzed his swarthy appearance and processed his ethnic sounding given and surnames. “Claro?”
He glanced at Norton. His new captain grinned in a way he’d never seen before. Not knowing what to make of that, he looked back at her and answered, “English is fine. And yes. Crystal clear.”
She opened the hatch and walked in, her size four feet barely making any noise on the metal deck plates. Haafiz Durrani’s eyes widened in surprise as much as Jorge had felt. When he met her eyes, she spoke in perfect unaccented Arabic. “Sabah El Kheir.” Good morning.
He scoffed and leaned back, unconsciously trying to create distance between himself and Emma Selah.
Without waiting for permission, Emma smoothly sat in the chair across from him, closing the space between them, making a show of smoothing her slacks and her scarf before continuing. This time when she greeted him, she chose a greeting more familiar to the regions of Lebanon and Syria. “Sah El Nom, Alsayyid Durrani.” Good morning, Mister Durrani.
When his eyes widened, she continued still in Arabic but now with a strongly Syrian inflection. “We need to know where the device is. Bonus points for giving us Kamyar Punjabi.” She paused. “You have exactly twenty minutes to give me this information.”
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JOIN THE A-TEAM
ON ANOTHER MISSION TO PROTECT
IN WORD OF HONOR
FBI Special Agent Lynda Culter and Sergeant Bill Sanders of the Special Forces A-Team must pose as a married couple to stop an ecoterrorist organization in Istanbul. As former college sweethearts, can they put aside past hurts for the needs of their nation?
As a woman in a Muslim country, she’ll find it much easier to move around undetected with a fake husband. Unfortunately for her, the man assigned to play the role is none other than US Army weapons specialist Bill Sanders–the man who crushed her heart into a million pieces back in college.
With a cargo bay’s worth of hurt and baggage between them, these two consummate professionals must play their parts perfectly if they hope to stop those responsible for bombing oil pipelines, killing innocent civilians, and threatening to destabilize the oil markets. But love long buried has a way of resurfacing at the most inopportune times–and protecting Lynda has become Bill’s primary focus.
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DEFEND FREEDOM
AND FIND LOVE WITH THE A-TEAM
IN HONOR’S REFUGE
When she was just five years old, Melissa Braxton watched her father take her mother’s life. Separated from her sister, Lola, at that time, Melissa grew up with a strong desire to help those stuck in abusive relationships. It’s why she became a family therapist and opened a domestic abuse shelter.
After losing a leg to a gunshot wound in the line of duty, Phil Osbourne has felt like a man without a purpose–until he hears Melissa’s story and decides to use his Special Forces contacts to track down her missing sister. He knows what he discovers will break Melissa’s heart. What he doesn’t realize is that helping the women reunite will bring the cartel down on them like the Category 5 hurricane striking Miami.
Bruised yet not quite broken, Melissa and Phil battle the storm and the cartel, calling on strength they didn’t know they had to escape death, save the innocent, and–just maybe–find healing in each other’s arms.
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authorhalleebridgeman
halleeb
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