Bethan knocked again. Louder.
She could feel all the targets up and down her back as she stood there. As if the eyes on her were punching into the light everyday tactical gear she wore, and worse, directly into the back of her deliberately uncovered head.
Look how friendly and approachable I am, her clothes were meant to proclaim across the desert, to all the various bad guys lurking around. No need to shoot.
Every single alarm inside her body was screaming bloody murder and she wanted nothing more than to duck, cover, and hide. Instead, she stood tall. Because she knew the fact she wasn’t visibly cowed was as much of a statement as a blast of C-4. A bigger one, maybe.
“I know you’re in there,” Bethan said through the makeshift door, leaning against the gutted wall beside it as if she felt nothing but casual, here in the middle of a creepy, abandoned desert village in a place even the few hardy locals avoided. “The trouble is, everyone knows you’re in there. And sooner or later, they’re going to come. All of them. And they won’t knock at the door, as I think you know. They’ll come right in—if they haven’t already.”
Languages had always come easily to her. This one, a specific dialect of a language very few of her own countrymen knew existed, much less could speak, had always been one of her favorites. Tongue gymnastics, she’d said, laughing with a friend, way back at Monterey’s Defense Language Institute, where she’d first started learning the kinds of languages that made her invaluable in the field.
She waited as the pitiless sun beat down on her. She had that same sort of split focus she often did in situations like this. There was a part of her that was all here, right now. She was aware of everything, from the faint sounds of life from the other falling-down structures around the square, to the wind from the far-off mountains, to that skin-crawling sensation of being in the crosshairs of too many targets. And on the other hand, she found herself thinking of her home of a year and a half now. In faraway Alaska, where a March afternoon like this one would almost certainly be gray. And wet. It might even be snowing.
For a girl who’d spent a significant part of her life in sunny Santa Barbara while her father ordered people around on Vandenberg Air Force Base, the idea that she could long for a place like Alaska should have been funny.
Some days it was.
Today it felt like a much-needed moment of centering. Reminding herself that she had a job to do here and a home to go back to, which let her focus in more sharply.
“All I want to do is ask you a question,” she said to the door. Conversationally. “What will the rest of them do, I wonder?”
Another eternity passed while the sun blazed down on her, lighting her up and giving every sniper in the village ample opportunity to take her out.
But no one did.
Far in the distance, she heard what sounded like a foot dragging. Faintly.
“There were three guards around the perimeter,” Rory said into the comm unit a few beats later. “Neutralized.”
Griffin’s voice came like a knife. “Three seems like a low number.”
Bethan knew their best sniper was up high on one of the buildings around this square, but she didn’t bother looking for him. She knew she wouldn’t be able to find him unless he wanted to be found.
“A little house-to-house turned up some more,” August said quietly. “Bringing the total to an even eight, which is still low for an asset like this.”
“I don’t like this,” Jonas said in that stern, considering way he had.
Bethan was sure he was about to recall her—order her to fall back and find a defensive position—but that was when the door cracked open.
She waited, aware that she looked relaxed when she was anything but. Her weapons were holstered, so she simply stood there with her arms loosely at her sides, looking as unobtrusive as any of them did in their tactical gear. Her cargo pants and a combat-ready shirt weren’t as dramatic as army fatigues, but she doubted very much that the slender woman who stood there in the sliver between the board masquerading as a door and the questionable wall would confuse Bethan for anything but what she was.
For a moment the two women eyed each other. Bethan smiled. The woman did not.
“Hi, Iyara,” Bethan said quietly. Warmly, as if she knew the woman personally instead of from photographs. “Do you want to tell me where your brother is?”
“How do you speak the language of my childhood?” Iyara Sowande asked softly in return. “How do you know a single word?”
“I’m only looking for your brother,” Bethan repeated in the same steady tone. “I don’t mean you any harm.”
“What is harm?” Iyara asked bitterly. “You’re too late for that.”
The door was wrenched open wider then.
And suddenly there were guns in Bethan’s face.
“What are you saying? What does she want?” a male voice was yelling in a completely different language from the one Bethan had just been speaking.
Hands grabbed her, roughly. She let them drag her inside, protesting ineffectually. Mostly so they would yell louder as they slammed the door behind her, trapping her in the boarded-up ruin of a row house. Then they shoved her roughly toward the ground.
Bethan went down on her knees and lifted her hands in the air, cowering a little while she did it. Because they expected her to cower. And likely wanted her to so they could feel big and bad. That made it an excellent opportunity for her to take a quick sweep of her surroundings.
“I don’t know what you want!” she cried out, making herself sound shrill and scared. “I’m only here to deliver a message. Why does that take three guys? With rifles? What did I do?”
“Received,” Jonas clipped out in her ear.
“Shut up,” one of the men with a rifle aimed at her face snarled. He shoved the other woman down on the ground next to Bethan, and from the corner of her eye, Bethan could see that Iyara really was cowering. “Tell me what you said to each other or I’ll start shooting.”
“I have a message for my old friend,” Bethan protested. “How could I know she wasn’t here alone, the way I expected?”
The man before her bared his teeth at her. “What is this message?”
Bethan glanced at the woman beside her, then grinned widely and incongruously at the man towering over her. “Well. It’s our high school reunion. I take my duties as a reunion chair very seriously, and insisted that someone come out this way to see if everybody’s favorite prom queen could make the trip.”
She heard someone on the comm unit laugh. The man in front of her, however, did not so much as crack a smile.
“Do you think I’m a fool?” he snarled at her. And then, less amusingly, the barrel of his rifle was there against her forehead. But that was a tactical mistake on his part. “You think I don’t know exactly why you’re here?”