Chapter One
Phantom sat in his room in Casa Hinha, a hostel in Dili, the capital city of Timor-Leste. He and his team had stayed here when they’d rescued Piper and her three little girls from the orphanage high up in the hills.
He couldn’t help but agonize over the fact that while they’d been waiting for Piper’s passport and for the adoption paperwork to be sent in, poor Kalee Solberg was probably going through a living hell.
He shouldn’t have left her.
No matter what protocol dictated.
She’d been alive, and Phantom had abandoned her.
Staring off into space, flashbacks flew through his brain, and it felt as if he was back in time, experiencing the moment again.
Bodies. At least two dozen. They were piled on top of each other in the hole. Thrown there as if they were trash to be discarded. Flies were everywhere.
And the worst of it was…most of the dead were children. Little girls who’d been shot.
“Is that Kalee Solberg?” Rocco asked quietly.
Phantom didn’t say a word; his jaw flexed as he desperately tried to hold himself together.
“Pretty sure, yeah,” Rex answered just as quietly. “It’s kind of hard to tell, but the red hair matches and her skin’s lighter than that of the locals.”
“We need to get her out of there,” Phantom said in the silence that followed Rex’s words. “We promised to bring her home.”
All four of the other men nodded. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but their mission was to get Kalee out of the country, and even though she’d been killed in the raid against the orphanage, they still had a job to do.
“How do we want to do this?” Rocco asked.
Phantom opened his mouth to respond when a loud burst of gunfire echoed from the jungle around them.
“Shit!” Rex swore at the same time Rocco flipped the safety off his weapon.
“There’s no time,” Ace said. “We have to get out of here.”
“We can’t leave her,” Phantom argued. “I’ll meet you guys back at the village.”
They could hear shouts nearby. The rebels were way too fucking close for comfort.
“We aren’t splitting up,” Rocco said, grabbing Phantom’s arm. “We need to go.”
“She’s our mission. We can’t leave her!” Phantom repeated, pulling against his friend.
“She’s gone, man,” Bubba reasoned urgently. “We can’t get down the mountain with her body and get Piper and the kids out. We’ll come back and get her after the rebels are taken care of.”
Phantom wanted to protest further. He wanted to jump into the hole and grab Kalee’s dead body right that second. But he was also a well-trained Navy SEAL. He knew when the odds were against them.
He turned back to the hole and stared down at Kalee’s lifeless form once more. She was lying face down on top of the pile of small bodies. Her feet were bare, and she wasn’t wearing a shirt.
A muscle in Phantom’s jaw ticked again, but just then, they heard the sound of men talking in the distance. They were going to have company soon. There wasn’t any more time to discuss whether or not they could get into the mass grave and get Kalee out to carry her home. The SEALs were trained to fight. But they had no idea how many men were headed their way, what kind of firepower they might have, and they had four innocent civilians to protect. They had to leave. Now.
Phantom blinked. He remembered that moment as clear as day. But it had taken him months to recall the most important part of that scene. He’d been on the brink of death in a helicopter in Afghanistan. Avery Nelson, Rex’s woman, had been trying to distract him from the pain in his leg. She’d ordered him to think about anything other than what was currently happening, namely, that they were being shot at by insurgents. And of course, Timor-Leste had popped into his head.
“Think of something else,” Avery ordered. “Anything else. Then tell me about it. Every little detail.”
Phantom stared up at Avery. He wasn’t really aware of anything else around him. All he could do was stare into her eyes.
“When we were in Timor-Leste, and I found that pit of bodies…I couldn’t look away,” Phantom told her.
He didn’t think Avery knew what the hell he was talking about, but she didn’t miss a beat. “How did it make you feel?” she asked.
“Pissed off,” Phantom said between clenched teeth. “All I could see was little legs and arms. It wasn’t fair, there was no reason for the rebels to kill all those children.”
“Then what happened?” Avery asked when Phantom didn’t continue.
“We heard the rebels coming. They were laughing and shooting at who knows what as they walked toward the orphanage. I was livid that they sounded so carefree, when the children in that pit could no longer laugh at all.”
“Did you kill them?” Avery asked, leaning over so she was almost nose-to-nose with Phantom.
“No. We had to leave. Get Piper and the kids away. I looked back once more though and— Holy shit!”
“What?” Avery asked. “What did you see?”
This time when Phantom answered, his gaze moved from Avery’s up to Rex’s, who was still hovering behind him, holding his shoulders. “Kalee moved! Her foot wasn’t in the same place it had been when I’d first seen her.”
Phantom saw Rex stiffen. He knew his teammate wanted to tell him that he was wrong. That the Peace Corps volunteer they’d originally gone to Timor-Leste to rescue had been dead. But whatever Rex saw in Phantom’s eyes kept him silent.
“Kalee was alive!” he said in an anguished tone. “That’s what’s been bugging me about the mission. It wasn’t about failing, not entirely. Subconsciously, I saw proof she wasn’t dead yet—and we still left her there!”
Now, Phantom was back in Timor-Leste. It was months too late, but he wasn’t going to leave the country without her again.
After all this time, Tex had found proof that she was alive. He’d sent a thick file to Commander North, who had in turn shared it with Phantom.
Everyone involved in the mission to save the Peace Corps volunteer felt some sort of guilt that they’d left her to be captured by rebels. Phantom knew that was the only reason his commander had allowed him to review the files.
While everyone felt badly about the situation, the United States Navy wasn’t authorized to go into Timor-Leste to search for a woman who, if intel was correct, had joined forces with the rebels and was terrorizing the native citizens.
The pictures Tex had somehow obtained were grainy and unfocused, but Phantom had known he was looking at Kalee Solberg. Her beautiful auburn hair had been cut extremely short, she was carrying a rifle, and was smack dab in the middle of a group of men who’d been identified as rebels fighting against the Timor-Leste government.
Phantom had memorized as much information from the file as he could. He knew Kalee’s birthday, her height and weight, her passport number, social security number, where she was last seen, and numerous other details about her.
He also knew her father still thought she’d died all those months ago and was currently living like a hermit, hardly ever leaving his large mansion.