Special Forces: Operation Alpha: Marking Mariah (Kindle Worlds Novella) Read Free

her bare skin.
    “No going,” he insisted.
    “I have to, sorry.” She pushed him away and sat, running a hand through her hair.
    He stared at her for a few seconds, then put a hand alongside her cheek. “Come back?”
    “Maybe,” she said, already panicking at the thought of those particular logistics.
    No. This should be the one-off she wanted, needed. The very thing to ease her into the next phase of her life.
    “I hate maybes,” he said, tugging her back into his warm, welcoming embrace. “Maybes suck.”
     

Chapter One
     
    “Trigger!”
    The smoke filled his lungs like a noxious fog. Panic lit the edges of his consciousness. But he fixated on the voice calling his name—or more precisely his Delta Force nickname.
    You’re okay, Terry. Stay calm. This is what you trained for. Don’t panic. Drop below the smoke and crawl. Get behind the desk. Your fellow Operators are all around you.
    But something had gone wrong.
    Horribly wrong.
    “Trigger,” the voice called again in a whisper-yell.
    He blinked, but otherwise sat as still as a statue, allowing his mind to clear from the explosion and take in the pertinent details. It had been something like two in the morning. He’d been in the middle of encrypting cell phone conversations, preparing to transfer them via a secure backdoor connection to the satellite before they bounced back to a target computer.
    Easy. The computer stuff was his specialty. That and sharp-shooting and hostage negotiation.
    Putting a hand over his mouth to stifle the urge to cough, to clear his lungs before the acrid smoke consumed them, he squeezed his eyes shut and counted to twenty until the urge passed. The room remained eerily silent. Or maybe he’d been deafened by the explosion.
    “Trigger! Goddamn it, get over here.”
    He opened his eyes and flopped over onto his belly, using his arm muscles to tug the rest of him as quietly as possible toward his commanding officer’s voice. A hand closed around one of his biceps and hauled him forward as if he were not a six-foot-five-inch, one-hundred-ninety-five-pound slab of pure muscle. But if anyone could yank him around like a toddler, it would be Keane Bryson, “Ghost” to his Delta Force subordinates and friends.
    “Fuck me runnin’,” Ghost muttered under his breath as the two men sat with their backs to the huge metal desk. “What happened?”
    “I…I’m not sure,” Trigger said, digging his fingertips into his ears in a desperate attempt to clear them. Ghost’s voice seemed to come from far away, as if from the bottom of a deep well. “I was encrypting and about to shut it down for the night.”
    Ghost pinned him with an evil glare. Their makeshift tent city was in the middle of the desert where they’d been dropped, tasked with a simple listen and learn mission near Cairo. They’d been stuck here for going on a week, under strict orders to stay dark—literally—while monitoring and transmitting the chatter from a recently activated terrorist cell in the middle of the nearby, teeming city.
    Boring as hell, as far as he was concerned, but vital, as always.
    Boring—until tonight when apparently someone or several someones had targeted them directly. That in and of itself was alarming as his Delta Force squadron had never been discovered by any of the whack-ass terrorists they were tasked to surveil or, at times, take down.
    It’d been almost a year since his squadron had been called on to do anything that dramatic. Their collective, pent up, testosterone-fueled tedium had hit a breaking point, resulting in some loud, steam-blowing fights and other BS that Ghost had been forced to break up, as recently as mid-day yesterday. But Terry would take the tedium at this point—since he still couldn’t take a full breath and his damn ears were ringing so loud it felt like someone had his noggin between their marching band cymbals.
    “Shit,” he muttered, when the clatter of fire from a semi-automatic weapon broke the