Going Dark Read online

Of course it had. There wasn’t any other option, and he never wasted time worrying about things he couldn’t change. He dealt in hard truths all the time. Accept and move on.

  He punched in the numbers on the keypad and waited. It didn’t take long. The LC answered on the second ring.

  Taylor waited for Dean to speak first. It was part of the code they’d worked out to ensure that nothing had been compromised.

  “Johnson’s plumbing?”

  The dick euphemism had lost its humor quickly, but a code was a code.

  “This better be fucking good, Tex,” the LC said. “And not be another one of your damned calls about how this is all a waste of time—”

  “It isn’t.” Although anticipating Taylor’s reaction, Dean wished it were. “I’ve run into some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  The brown-haired, green-eyed, drop-dead-gorgeous, “just made me see stars” kind.

  Already hearing the suspicion in the LC’s voice and knowing he was about to get an ass-chewing, Dean knew he had to just bite the bullet. It wasn’t like him to prevaricate anyway. But he and the LC had never really gotten along—even before the mess with Colt Wesson and his wife. Had the LC really messed around with Kate? It didn’t seem to fit with Taylor’s by-the-book, aboveboard personality, but who the hell knew?

  Dean and the LC were like two bulls in the same china shop, and they often went head-to-head on things. The difference was that Dean was usually confident that he was in the right. But he’d fucked up, and he knew it. He’d compromised their cover, and for someone who prided himself on being a professional—always—that was hard to take.

  “The involved-in-an-ecoterrorist-plot-and-murder-charge kind of trouble,” Dean said.

  Dead silence followed for a good thirty seconds. It was a little bit like waiting for a punch in the face.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Tell me you are fucking kidding me.”

  “I wish I were.” Dean explained about the charter to the drillship, about finding the explosives, and how the terrorists had pulled a gun on him when he was trying to leave.

  “So you killed them?”

  “No. They were alive when I left the ship. I suspect the leader was able to free himself and killed the others to cover up the crime and blame it on us before the coast guard arrived.”

  Us. Shit. He’d slipped, and it was too much to hope that the LC wouldn’t pick up on it.

  “Don’t tell me you are still with the girl?”

  Dean could practically hear the LC’s blood boiling over the phone.

  “Let me guess. She’s blond with blue eyes and a nice-sized rack?”

  Dean would object if that didn’t pretty much size up his normal hookups to a tee. But there wasn’t anything about Annie that was normal. Well, maybe one out of the three, but he would use the word “exceptional.”

  “She’s attractive”—understatement—“but that doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “You can’t be that effing stupid—or hard up. You know what’s at stake.”

  “I couldn’t leave her there. She could have been killed.”

  “Fine. So why didn’t you drop her off at the first place you could when it was safe?”

  Good question. That was exactly what Dean should have done. But then she’d looked at him with those big eyes and the steel in his resolve had turned to fucking putty. “They set her up and made it look like she was in on it. I told her I’d help her clear it up with the police.”

  “And how the hell do you plan to do that? You can’t let anyone know you survived that blast.”

  Taylor didn’t think they could trust anyone. Whatever the warning message the LC had received before the missile exploded had said, it had spooked him and made him certain that they’d been set up. But when Dean pressed him, he’d refused to say anything more. He was protecting someone.

  Dean listened to the LC tear him a new one for a good two minutes, before he finally told him what he wanted. “I want you to call Kate.”

  The dead silence this time wasn’t as long, but it was a hell of a lot more ominous. The LC’s fury was almost palpable. As was the one-word response. “No.”

  “If you don’t, I will,” Dean said.

  They’d all been friends at one time, although Dean and the LC had never been particularly close. Dean didn’t know the exact details of what had gone down in the breakup of the Wesson marriage—nor did he want to—but it had been bad. Dean had sided with Colt in the whole fiasco. Whether they’d slept together, Dean didn’t know, but clearly they’d gotten too close. And wives were off-limits. Period. But he had to work with Taylor. By unwritten rule he and the LC hadn’t mentioned Kate or Colt since Colt left. An unwritten rule that Dean had just broken.

  But he’d been patient too long. Although he wasn’t as ready to see conspiracy theories as the LC, he’d given Taylor time to see what he could discover. But it had become patently clear that they weren’t going to be able to figure it out themselves. They needed someone on the inside. Someone in a position to help them. Kate was CIA but didn’t have anything to do with the navy or Special Operations. She was perfect.

  “The hell you will,” Taylor spat out. “You aren’t contacting anyone. That’s a fucking order, Baylor.”

  That the LC had violated his own rule about saying their names over phone lines spoke to the level of his anger.

  “Right now you aren’t in any position to be issuing orders,” Dean said bluntly. “We’re pretty far off the reservation with all this.”

  Annie would probably object to . . . Fuck. Now she was making him think about how he talked. It was just a phrase, damn it. Whatever the original context, it was part of the vernacular. Not everything had to be overanalyzed.

  Which was exactly what he was doing.

  Shit.

  “This is still my operation, and I’m still your fucking commander.”

  Dean didn’t say anything, but they both knew there was nothing regulation about what they’d done. Operation White Night had ended the moment they ditched their gear in that fire. They were on their own. AWOL.

  But he wasn’t going to press. Dean had been a SEAL for too long not to have a healthy respect for authority and the command structure, and AWOL or not, they were still a team. They needed to work together if they were going to get out of this. But the LC was intent on doing it on his own. He didn’t want to risk any more lives when too many had been lost already.

  “Look,” Dean said, trying to strike a “let’s be reasonable” tone, which admittedly was a stretch for him. “This is too big. You can’t do this on your own. We aren’t any closer to finding out what happened than we were two months ago. We need someone on the inside.”

  The LC took too long to respond.

  Dean guessed why. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “I don’t know if it’s anything yet.”

  “I’ve been sitting with my thumb up my ass, looking for nonexistent subs, for weeks, and you’ve been fucking holding back on me?”

  “I wanted to be sure.”

  Dean could hear the LC’s defensiveness. For good reason. The lone-wolf shit had to stop. That wasn’t how SEALs operated. “Sure of what?”

  “I’ve been looking for motive. If someone betrayed us—”

  “If,” Dean reminded him. He still didn’t want to believe someone would do that. But he couldn’t ignore the fact that the Russians had known they were coming, and that someone on the inside had been able to warn Taylor. That ruled out a mistake on the platoon’s part and made the Russians having figured it out on their own unlikely. Possible, but unlikely. The easiest explanation was that someone on their side had betrayed them. But that was hard to accept. But the inescapable truth was that someone had wanted them dead, and they had to find out who and why before they surfaced.