Page 67 of Fighting for Valor
Shit. He’s right. Black fatigues, a black t-shirt, boots, a tactical vest, and enough weapons to take down a small army. Charlie lies down under one of the bench seats while I change, and West taps on the in-dash display. “We’re on our way. Where are you?”
“Five minutes ahead of you,” Ry says.
I pull a chest harness from the go bag and strap it on. “You have Cara on the phone?”
“No.” A sigh carries over the connection. “I don’t know what happened, Rip. She said, ‘help me,’ rattled off an email address and password—which, by the way, contained screenshots of a whole lot of Parr’s incriminating text messages—and then I think she dropped the phone. They didn’t take it from her. That’s all I can tell you. The connection stayed open long enough for Wren to trace it. Hell, it’s still open now. But all Wren can hear is the wind.”
Help me.
Glancing at my phone, I blow out a breath when there aren’t any new messages. I didn’t tell Ry about the last video. The one where Jessup cut up her arm and slammed her head into a pipe. I transferred another ten million within seconds of seeing that and didn’t bother with a tracer code.
“What’s the plan?” I ask.
“Ask the guy driving,” Ryker replies. “In the field, I don’t do shit until he tells me. Pulling up to Terminal 18 now and going dark.”
“So?”
West shoots me a look. “I found out where we were going exactly two minutes before you did. I’ve never been here before, and I don’t know what the fuck we’re dealing with. At this point, the plan is to take down Jessup and Parr without getting ourselves killed, find Cara, and get the hell out.”
As soon as West stops the van next to Ry’s truck, I’m out the door. “Charlie, stay here.” He whines once, and I wrap my arms around him. “You can’t come, buddy. It’s too dangerous. But I’ll be back with Cara. Soon.”
Charlie sits, and I grab the go bag, close the door, and join West and Ry as they gather around a map spread out on the truck hood. “Wren pulled up photos of the inside of this place,” Ry says. “The room they had Cara in is here, and the phone is here.”
West narrows his eyes at the poorly lit map. “There’s only one door out of that room. Unless she managed to subdue Jessup and Parr, she didn’t use it. But see this?” He points to a line that starts in the third floor processing room and bends at a ninety-degree angle after twenty feet. “I think it’s a ventilation shaft. If it was big enough for her to squeeze through, she’d come out in this smaller room here and could get onto the roof.”
The NVGs West hands me are so much lighter than any night vision we had the last time I geared up, and I slide them on, adjust the magnification, and examine the corrugated metal roof on the side of the facility. “She’s not there now.”
Ry kneels, opens a black case resting on the ground, flips a couple of switches, and taps his ear. “Wren? Take her up.”
“What the…?”
A drone rises from the case, wobbles slightly in front of our eyes, and then speeds off towards the facility. “New toy,” West says. “Courtesy of Cam and Royce. Thermal imaging drone. Get out your laptop, Rip. Wren’ll send the images directly to your screen.”
It’s an agonizing five minutes before the screen flashes with an incoming transmission. “Two heat signatures in the northwest corner,” Wren says. “That’s it. I took the drone around the whole building. Up and down all three floors. Cara’s…not there.”
No. She has to be. Or…she is and her body’s no longer warm. I stumble back, my heart pounding. They killed her. I think…I think I might have loved her. Or at least, I was close to loving her.
“Ripper. Focus,” Ry snaps. “Jessup and Parr are going to pay for this. All of it. What happened to you, what may or may not have happened to Cara. If she’s dead, so are they.”
I meet his gaze, then look to West. The SEAL pulls a knife from a sheath at his hip, turns it over in his gloved hand, and then slams it back into place. “They hurt one of us, they hurt all of us. My conscience is clear.”
My phone vibrates with an incoming photo, and I tap the screen. Cara’s tear-stained face comes into focus. Jessup holds the blade to her neck.
Another message follows almost immediately. Only two words.
Time’s up.
West snorts. “They don’t have her.”
“What?” I whirl around to face him, not quite sure how he ended up behind me.
“Open the picture again.”
When I do, he nods. “What’s that in the corner there, geek?”
All I can see is Cara, but I squeeze my eyes shut for a second and then focus on the room behind her. “Sunlight.”
“Yep. This was taken at least three hours ago. If they still had her, they’d show you a video. Reply. Stall.”
