Ashe powered down the racing boat’s throttles, a little out of breath. The hull settled gently into the water, and the twin engines rumbled like contented lions. Holy cow, this baby could flat-out fly. He had to have been pushing a hundred miles per hour just now, and the boat had still been accelerating when he throttled back. Commander Perriman hadn’t been messing around when he told the powers-that-be at the naval air station to cough up the fastest boat they had for this operation.
Speaking of the operation, he needed to do a quick radio check out here in the bayou. He muttered, “One, two, three. Check. Check. How do you copy, anyone?”
Bastien’s voice crackled in his tiny earbud, “Loud and clear. How about me?”
“Loud and clear, Catfish.”
“You ready for this, Hollywood? Head in the game. Calm thoughts. Focus.”
Ashe appreciated Bastien’s concern. His former teammate knew how much Hank meant to him. Bastien, of all people, was also likeliest to suspect that Ashe had an alternate agenda of his own for tonight’s meeting.
He throttled down the powerboat even more. The vessel still barely touched the water as it skimmed across the open water. He’d opened her up out here at the north end of Bayou Rigolettes to get a feel for her, and he’d actually scared himself a little.
If it came down to a race tonight, he would win, hands down. Even captured drug-running boats he’d piloted before weren’t as muscular as this sleek lady. One of the keys to a successful hostage rescue was a good escape plan, and this vessel would make for a hell of an escape.
The second piece of a successful rescue was good intel on the location of the hostage. Hank’s phone hadn’t moved more than a few dozen feet all afternoon. She was definitely on the yacht, their satellite telemetry had revealed, along with a pile of Russian mobsters.
The last piece of a successful rescue was a clean insertion of the rescue team. They needed to get close to Hank undetected and then be prepared either to sneak her out by trickery and stealth...or to blast her out with surprise, superior firepower and overwhelming speed. He sincerely prayed the trickery-and-stealth route worked.
He glanced down at the wooden crate at his feet. It was packed with a sample of weapons from his supposed shipment that had just arrived in New Orleans.
A team of gunsmiths had spent all day modifying each of the semiautomatic rifles inside, carefully filing the firing pins so they would fail after firing approximately a hundred rounds. Conveniently, none of the extended clips included in the crate held more than fifty rounds. If tonight’s buyers wanted to take the weapons out for a test fire, the rifles should be fully functional. Should being the operative word. It was a risk to offer tampered weapons to criminals who were also gun experts. But the only legal alternative was to sell them completely inoperative weapons, and Ashe had been adamant that Vitaly and his associates would be far too knowledgeable for that to work.
Ideally, this crate of firearms would secure Hank’s release and get both of them off the yacht alive. He had no doubt that Vitaly’s bosses were holding Hank as a hostage to ensure his follow-through with this deal. How they knew he cared about her deeply enough for her to be an effective hostage, he had no idea. The fact remained that the bastards were right, though.
She’d blasted into his life like a hurricane, sweeping away everything that had come before and leaving him scrubbed clean. And she’d gone and filled the void with her joy and courage, her sexiness and stubborn loyalty. She was the perfect woman for him. Assuming she wasn’t a spy for the other side, of course. Hell, even then, she might just be his one true love.
“A high-speed vessel is docking beside the yacht now,” Jennie reported across the secure team frequency being piped into his ear. She was watching tonight’s op via live satellite feed. “I count twelve souls aboard the yacht. Hank plus eleven.”
Damn. They’d been hoping for no more than four or so. Ahh, well. They’d contingency-planned for this many hostiles. And the good Lord willing, it wouldn’t come down to a firefight, anyway.
But a sinking feeling in his gut warned him that a peaceful exit for him and Hank was unlikely to unfold.
“I have visual on Vitaly Parenko,” Jennie announced.
He winced, not thrilled to have to see the Russian again. Ashe had no way of knowing if Vitaly had pieced together the who and how of his safe being emptied.
Ashe glanced at his watch. He wasn’t due at the yacht for nearly another hour. Huh. Maybe the club owner wasn’t here to confront him after all. Maybe. Vitaly had been called on the carpet for losing all that money out of his safe.
“Have we got audio on the yacht?” he asked into the micro-microphone sewn into the collar of his shirt.
“Coming online momentarily,” Bastien replied. “Parabolic microphone is just being moved into position.”
This entire operation had been a huge scramble. Eight hours wasn’t even close to enough time to plan and launch a rescue mission, so he had to give Perriman credit for having pulled the whole thing together so quickly.
A new voice came up on the frequency. A female voice. “I have visual on Hank.”
Ashe had been surprised when Perriman’s pair of snipers turned out to be SEALs he’d worked with before—a guy named Ford Alambeaux...and a girl. A girl SEAL, to be more precise. Her name was Trina Zarkos, and Ford assured him that Trina was as badass as they came and a hell of a shooter.
Ashe got the distinct impression that Ford and Trina were more than just a shooting team. Sexual sparks flew between them every time they looked at each other, let alone got within arm’s length of one another.
Trina continued, “Hank is topside, on the foredeck. With a male matching the photograph of Maximillian Kuznetsov.”
Ashe felt a jolt of surprise. Hank’s brother was aboard the yacht? Could that mean she’d been in cahoots with him all along? Or was this some sort of reunion? Perhaps Max’s presence explained why she’d snuck off last night without a word of explanation to him. Now that he thought about it, that actually made logical sense. Ashe knew she would do pretty much anything to track down her brother. But did that include getting into bed with the Russian mob?
He bit out, “Can we get confirmation of the Kuznetsov ID?”
It took about sixty seconds, but Commander Perriman’s voice came over the radio very quietly. “Confirmed.”
Son of a gun. Well, didn’t that just complicate things all to hell? Of course, all missions had their share of monkey wrenches, and they were what his SEAL team trained for by the hundreds of hours. But Max’s appearance was a giant wrench in the gears of this op, and the mission hadn’t even gotten rolling yet.
Ashe transmitted to the team at large, “Be advised. We may be rescuing two hostages and not just one. Repeat—two possible hostages. Hank and her brother.”
Ashe guessed that Perriman wasn’t in a position to be chatty at the moment, given how quietly he’d confirmed Max’s identity and given that he didn’t dive in and start rebriefing the mission now. So as the second most senior member of the rescue team, it fell to Ashe to work through the ramifications of this new wrinkle with the team, to make sure everyone was on the same page.
“The brother, henceforth to be referred to simply as Max, may be one of the kidnappers—or he may be a hostage himself. I will have to make that call on the fly. If I deem him hostile, you are green-lighted to neutralize him as necessary. Same rules of engagement as the other hostiles.”
He hated saying those words. Hank would never forgive him if she found out he’d given his team permission to kill her brother, if required. But if Max was indeed part of the gang of mobsters, he would have to suffer the same fate as the others.
“If I deem Max to be a hostage or nonhostile, we will extract him simultaneously with Hank.”
The various members of the team acknowledged the update by quietly muttering, “Copy,” or by clicking their throat mikes twice.
When everyone had checked in, Ashe asked grimly, “Say physical status of Hank and Max. Do we have two healthy and ambulatory hostages?”
“They’re hugging,” Trina replied drily. “Affirmative on ambulatory for both targets.”
For now. Assuming neither of them got shot up before the night was over. And he got the feeling that was a mighty big assumption.
* * *
Hank gulped as Max set her away from him, murmuring, “Ready for this, sis?”
“No. But it’s not like we have any choice.” She hadn’t been exactly ready to work in the Who Do Voodoo, or to get romantically entangled with a Special Forces operative, or to be an unwitting hostage in an illegal arms deal. But here she was anyway.
Max nodded tersely and turned away from her. “Stay out here until I call you in. This first meeting has nothing to do with you.”
Hank stepped back into the shadow of the yacht’s bridge as a group of men moved into the brightly lit salon. She gasped as she recognized Vitaly among the half dozen men. He looked tenser than she’d ever seen him. She also spotted the bouncer who usually stood guard at the entrance to the lap dance lounge. Had Vitaly brought the guy along to act as muscle to protect him, or just for show? She wouldn’t put it past the creep to bring along his own bodyguards to make himself look more important.
Surely this meeting between Vitaly and his bosses was some sort of reckoning over the stolen money from his club. Given that she’d emptied all the money out of his safe, she had to believe he hadn’t passed his weekly quota of cash up the chain of command. She looked on with interest, curious to see how pissed off his bosses were about it.
Hank couldn’t hear the meeting for the most part, but she didn’t have to. Remi was angry and did a lot of gesturing with his hands. Vitaly talked at length and did a lot of hand gesturing back. Except his hands were moving placatingly, pleadingly even, while Remi’s hand gestures grew increasingly agitated. A few of the loudest words floated out to her on the deck: phrases expressing fury and worry over a security breach. From what she could ascertain, Remi was a lot more concerned about covers being blown than money.
Covers? Why would a mob outfit be panicked about those? Wouldn’t a mobster be most concerned about the cash? Or maybe about looking weak to his enemies?
The silver-haired Russian got progressively redder in the face, and Vitaly grew progressively paler. Yikes. If even Vitaly was scared of this Remi guy, then he must be as psychopathic as her brother said.
Eventually, Max stepped between the two men and appeared to play peacemaker. Vitaly took advantage of the interference to ease backward several feet. From her vantage point, Hank was able to see Vitaly surreptitiously unbutton his sports jacket, as well. He must have a gun under his coat and want quick access to it. Not reassuring.
Remi looked surly at her brother’s interruption, but gradually looked more willing to be talked down off the emotional ledge. As Remi unwound, the men standing around the edges of the room relaxed, also. They clearly took their orders from the silver-haired Russian. He was the top dog around here, then.
Funny how she’d spent so many months searching for Vitaly’s secretive boss, and now that she finally knew who he was, it didn’t matter. She’d already found her brother without uncovering Remi’s identity. That was how life always seemed to go. When she finally got something she wanted worse than anything, it didn’t really mean anything by the time she got it.
Although Ashe had been a notable exception to that rule. She hadn’t known how much she wanted him until she’d run away from him. Hadn’t realized how much she trusted him until he wasn’t there to look out for her. Hadn’t understood just how deeply she felt about him until she’d tried to rip him out of her heart and found him firmly lodged there. No doubt about it. She loved him. It wasn’t that she loved her brother more than Ashe. It was...different. Her brother was family. Ashe was...
She didn’t know how to finish that thought. He was the breath in her lungs? The fire in her belly? The laughter in her heart? All of the above?
It had been foolish to come out here without telling him where she was going. He would have vetoed her coming, of course. But now that she was trapped aboard a yacht full of armed, violent men, this caution sounded pretty darned good.
Hank sighed as her brother continued talking to Remi inside. She really wished she’d thought all this through first. But then, her impulsiveness always had gotten her into trouble. This pickle was worse than most, however. She might actually die this time around. If she made it out of this mess alive, she really ought to settle down and live a nice, quiet, boring life restoring old, ugly paintings. Maybe she would get a cat. Take up knitting. Yup, the quieter the life, the better. Except Ashe would never stand for boring. He was Mr. Action-and-Action. She wasn’t in his league no matter how hard she tried.
Max stepped back from Remi, a momentary look of relief flashing across his face. Her brother moved over to the bar and poured himself something amber-colored and alcoholic. The tension in the room drained as quickly as it had flared up before.
So fast Max didn’t even have time to set the glass down before Remi whipped out his Makarov pistol from under his coat and shot Vitaly’s bouncer in the face at point-blank range.
Hank lurched backward against the bulkhead in horror. That man had just been shot! She couldn’t see the bouncer’s body on the floor, but she could see Remi take two quick strides forward and point his pistol downward toward the floor. The man pulled the trigger again.
Vitaly stared down at his man in a combination of horror and terror. He had to be thinking he was next. God knew she did. What kind of monster was this Remi guy? And why in the world was Max working with him? Panicked so much she couldn’t breathe, let alone move, she looked up at her brother.
And got yet another shock, almost as bad as seeing Remi shoot Vitaly’s man. Max looked bored. Utterly and completely bored. He’d just witnessed a man’s murder, and he looked about as interested as if he’d been casually cleaning his fingernails.
Stunned, she stared more closely at Max’s face. There might be a minuscule hint of tension around the corners of his eyes, but a person would have to know him very well and look very closely to see it. Since when had her brother become such a cool customer and so completely unimpressed by bloody violence?
An abrupt sense of not knowing Max at all coursed through her.
She’d seen Ashe shoot a man in the backyard of his parents’ house, and it hadn’t fazed her. That had been a kill-or-be-killed situation in which the other guy shot first, and she’d been delighted to live, thank you very much. Was Max more like Ashe than she’d realized?
When in the hell had that happened? Two of Remi’s men dragged the body outside onto the deck, and she backed away from them in horror, retreating to the farthest corner of the deck from the trail of blood leaking out of the towel wrapped around the guy’s head.
The men rolled the body overboard, and a big splash announced the end of that poor man’s life. She’d barely known him, and he’d always been gruff with her and the other waitresses, but he’d been a human being, for crying out loud.
Max stuck his head outside, sparing her only the briefest of glances before he spoke to Remi’s men. “You know you’re going to have to fish that corpse out of the water, right? We can’t leave it here for anyone to find. In the morning, you’ll need to collect the body, take it into the cypress swamps and dump it.”
“Yeah, fine. But in the meantime, it won’t bleed all over and make a huge mess for us to clean up.”
Max shrugged. “I hear ya. Good thinking. Remi wants you guys to head down to the aft deck. The American arms dealer should be here soon, and you guys need to frisk him. Check him for weapons and wires.”
“Sure thing, sir.”
Sir? They’d called her brother “sir”? They took orders from Max? What the heck?
* * *
Ashe rounded a point of land and spotted the marina up ahead. It looked just like the satellite pictures he’d seen of it this afternoon, except lit only by scant moonlight now. Not that the low-light conditions posed a problem for him. He preferred operating in the dark.
“Oy!” A sailor aboard the yacht shouted to him as he maneuvered close to the large vessel. “Tie up here!”
Tie up to the yacht itself? Not a chance. He waved off the man and pulled up two slips away from the yacht. He jumped ashore quickly before the guy could stop him and slip-tied his own craft. The knot would release with a single tug of a rope if he had to get out of here in a hurry.
“You are clear to proceed, Hollywood,” Perriman murmured in his ear.
Ashe strode down the dock to the looming yacht. He had memorized the floor plan earlier in the day and knew the gangplank would be located on the far side of the ship.
The guy whose instructions he’d ignored met him at the entry point, looking annoyed. Ashe lifted his arms without having to be asked, pasted on a patient expression, and waited for the guy to frisk him. He wasn’t worried about this thug finding any of his hidden gear. The SEALs’ reputation as the most feared and best-equipped Special Forces outfit on earth wasn’t earned for nothing.
“This way. They’re waiting for you,” his escort growled.
He’d bet they were. If he was legit and this arms deal went through, the Russian mob in that part of the country would be better equipped than most of the law enforcement agencies in the region, let alone the other criminal elements.
Ashe stepped up into the crowded salon. Vitaly Parenko was seated off to one side. The guy looked shaken. Probably had something to do with the shooting Trina had reported over the radio about thirty minutes ago. Ashe identified the shooter standing at the far end of the triangular space, a white-haired man who looked about fifty years old. Max had apparently called him by the name Remi.
He’d been tentatively identified by the support team as Vitaly’s boss and the man giving the orders around here. Ashe observed Remi closely. For a man who’d just shot and killed someone, he was shockingly calm. He didn’t show even the slightest hint of stress. Interesting.
Vitaly moved as if he were going to stand up, but Ashe wanted to cut him out of the power equation in the room as soon as possible. He strode past Hank’s boss, went directly to Remi and held out his hand. He said in Russian, “Asher Konig. Pleased to meet you.”
Remi blinked owlishly. Apparently no one had told him Ashe could speak Russian. “Ochyen priyatnuh.” Very pleased. “You may call me Remi.”
No last name, huh? Remi was probably an alias, then. That was okay. Jennie would already have a picture of the guy from Ford and Trina and be running his face through every database, legal and otherwise, in existence.
“Drink?” Remi offered.
Vitaly piped up, “He likes expensive vodka.” Hank’s boss was trying to regain some status by reminding the big boss that he was the one who’d brought Ashe to this meeting.
Ashe threw Vitaly a disparaging look. “I never mix alcohol and business. A club soda with a twist of lemon will do just fine.”
Remi nodded slightly, not necessarily in approval at Ashe, but more as if he were checking off a demonstration of credibility. “Tell me about yourself,” the Russian demanded.
Ashe perched a hip on a tall barstool and arched an eyebrow reproachfully at the guy. “How offended would you be if I asked the same of you?”
Remi held out his hands and said expansively, “I am an open book. Ask me anything you wish to know.”
Ashe shrugged. “I don’t need to know anything except the color of your money.”
Another minuscule nod from Remi. Then, “You do not wish to establish trust with me before we do business, Mr. Konig?”
“Call me Ashe. And no. I trust nobody. If you double-cross me, I’ll kill you. And I expect the same of you in return.”
Remi’s hands moved from collar to pants pocket to a button on his sports coat. The guy’s shoulder holster was clearly visible as a bulge under his left arm. He didn’t like that answer from Ashe. Which was fine with him. He’d just as soon keep this criminal mentally off balance.
“Vitaly tells me you are in the import-export business.”
Since there was no question in that statement, Ashe merely sipped his club soda, forcing the Russian to carry the conversation. It was amazing the things people would reveal in their discomfort over awkward lulls in conversations.
“I am in the same business. Although I mostly import sin to America.” He seemed to think that statement was hilarious and laughed at his own joke. Ashe did not join in.
Abruptly Remi’s cackling cut off. “I do not like you, Mr. Konig. You do not accept my hospitality and drink my vodka nor do you laugh at my jokes.”
Ashe shrugged. “I have no vested interest in doing business with you. If my weapons are not appealing to you, I’m happy to sell them elsewhere.” He set down his drink and stood up.
“Not so fast, my friend.”
Ahh. So now he was Remi’s friend, huh? Ashe sank back onto the stool and took another sip of his club soda.
“Did you bring a sample of what my man, Vitaly, discussed with you?”
“Would I be here if I didn’t?” Ashe replied drily.
“Show me these weapons of yours, then.”
“Show me the girl.”