Point of No Return
Read Point of No Return Online
Authors: Rita Henuber
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Military, #Romance, #Contemporary, #cia, #mercenary, #thriller, #action adventure, #marines, #Contemporary Romance, #military intelligence
Point of No Return
Marine Major Honey Thornton is nobody’s fool, so when she’s brought in for an off-the-books mission by a manipulative two-star general, she has to wonder why. When it turns out Honey’s mission is to investigate a military contractor tied to the recent kidnappings of innocent children, she signs on immediately. Little did she know one of the first people she’d have to question was her sometime lover, Jack O’Brien.
Jack O’Brien left the CIA bitter and disillusioned and now hires himself out as a contract spy. When his brother and sister-in-law are mysteriously killed and the young daughter they left behind is targeted for kidnapping, he smells a cover-up and goes underground to find out who’s behind it all. Not sure who he can trust, the situation grows more tense when the sexy Honey starts asking questions he’s not sure he wants to answer.
With suspicion flaring on all sides and passion burning between them, Jack and Honey have to decide whether they can trust each other and bring down the people responsible, no matter how high up the chain of command it goes. Because when you’re navigating the murky political waters of the Pentagon, the CIA, and private armies, it’s hard to know who’s got your back, who’s on your side, and who’s lying to your face—and sometimes the only thing you can trust is what you know in your heart.
Beyond the Page Books
are published by
Beyond the Page Publishing
Copyright © 2014 by Rita Henuber
Material excerpted from
Under Fire: The Admiral
copyright © 2012 by Rita Henuber
Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs
ISBN: 978-1-940846-10-1
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Contents
Excerpt from
Under Fire: The Admiral
Chapter 1
Republic of Georgia
May
1600 hours
The walls of the windowless mud hut radiated heat like an oven. The stench of animal and human waste was so pervasive it crawled over her skin like something alive. Major H. K. Thornton sat on her haunches and thumbed back her helmet. Her gaze flicked between the laminated photo taped to her wrist and the face of the girl cowering on the dirt floor. “I have a visual on the target,” she said into her radio link. “Identity confirmed.” For once, the team had received solid intel. “Extraction’s a go.”
The target’s glazed blue eyes drifted to the Marine silhouetted in the entry against a clear high desert sky. For a moment, Thornton watched the Marine arc her weapon left, then right, sweeping the landscape for bad guys.
“It’s okay, Jenna,” she said to the girl in a soft, measured voice. “That’s Staff Sergeant Santiago. I’m Major Thornton. We’re Marines. Your dad, Colonel Ramsey, sent us. We’re taking you home.” The rail-thin girl didn’t react. “Jenna, can you stand?” Thornton cautiously extended a hand and touched the teenager’s arm. Despite the 130-degree temperature, her skin was cold. “Jenna?” The girl’s eyes tracked back. “Can you stand? Can you walk?”
Jenna shook her head so slightly the motion could have been taken as a shudder. She stretched out a leg from under the ruins of the school uniform she’d been wearing the day she was abducted, exposing a swollen, blood-encrusted foot.
“I tried . . . to escape. They cut . . . bottom of my feet . . . so I couldn’t run.”
Santiago hissed in a breath.
Thornton adjusted the webbing on her M4 and slung the weapon to her side. “Jenna, I’m going to carry you out of here.” Years of intelligence work taught her to conceal every emotion, but right now it was damn difficult to put a cap on her anger. She moved to pick up the girl.
“What about . . . her?” Jenna touched a mound of rags.
“Her?” Thornton blinked. A hand, the color of concrete, rose in slow motion from the pile. Thornton watched in stunned silence as bony fingers extended in her direction.
“Kelly. She’s . . . been here . . . longer than me.” Jenna’s voice cracked. Her chest rose and fell with the effort it took to speak in the blistering heat. “She’s sick. Hasn’t . . . eaten . . . in days.” Jenna pointed to a bowl of gray slop next to the mound, where flies congregated.
Kelly? Thornton carefully peeled away a layer of filthy rags, sending dark bugs scrambling for new cover, and revealed a . . . creature. A girl, at least she thought it was a girl, lying on her side, knees pulled to her chest, curled into a ball like an animal trying to keep warm. Cloudy brown eyes stared from sunken sockets. Dried vomit caked her gaunt face and hair. Judging from the stench, she was lying in her own excrement. Thornton fanned a hand above the girl’s face to chase away gathering flies. “Are you Kelly Saunders?” she said, holding her breath and waiting for the response. Transparent eyelids fluttered, crusty lips moved. No words came out.
“That’s who . . . she is,” Jenna wheezed.
Santiago took a knee beside Thornton. “The general’s daughter who’s been missing a couple of months? Thought she was . . .”
Thornton elbowed the staff sergeant. The search for Kelly and those who had taken her was ongoing, but all hope of finding her alive had vanished.
Santiago gagged and clamped a gloved hand over her nose and mouth. “Daa-mn.”
“Breathe through your mouth.” Thornton slanted a look at her staff sergeant, who glared back over the fingers pinching her nose.
“You should have told me that before, ma’am,” Santiago said, pulling in hard breaths through her mouth. The staff sergeant tipped her head to the girl, her dark eyes narrowed. “We’re humping out of here now. Not waiting for dark?” Her voice was muffled by her hand.
Thornton nodded. Kelly was little more than a breathing corpse. Every minute they waited to get her to medical was a minute she was closer to death.
“We e-vacing now?” Staff Sergeant Buck’s baritone voice came though Thornton’s earpiece.
“Affirmative,” Thornton said, her pulse jittering in her temple. She looked around. No table, no chair, no place to sleep. The girls had lived this way for weeks, probably imagining they’d been forgotten and giving up hope of any rescue. She swallowed her escalating rage and pushed to her feet. There’d be time for anger
and retaliation
later. After these girls were safe. In the last few moments their circumstances had changed. She had to adapt and produce a drastically modified extraction plan. The team was prepared to carry one injured hostage over ridges and across the rocky terrain to safety, not two. Carrying both girls would make the ten-klick hike to the Turkish border and safety damn difficult.
“Buck, we need that truck you saw. Taking two home.”
“Sweet,” Buck said. “Halfway there.”
“Buck, hold your position.” Gunny Andrews’s perfectly modulated voice ordered. Hidden in the hills, Andrews, the team’s human surveillance camera, had a commanding view of the village. “Tango moving your direction.”
“See him.” The tension in Buck’s low whisper climbed through Thornton’s earpiece, crawling down her spine into her legs. Her hand flicked to her Heckler & Koch sidearm, the sheath holding a custom knife, and finally the extra M4 magazines.
“Major . . . got eyes on two Tango . . . advancing your position,” Andrews said calmly, his words synced with his breath. “How . . . you want it handled?”
Andrews was asking for a kill order. She envisioned her baby-faced sniper, Sergeant Cooper, stretched out over sharp rocks, his cheek pressed against his rifle, finger resting on the trigger, sights dialed in, ready to fire. Gunny beside him, watching the target through his scope to guide Cooper’s shot. Both still as death, save for slow measured breaths, waiting for her answer.
Thornton looked at the girls huddled together then around the reeking squalid room. She swiped her face with a sleeve, watched wet streaks blend with dust into the pattern of the desert camos and dry. “Eliminate all
Tangos.” It was what the fuckers deserved.