Off the Grid Read online

  They all had a love of challenge in common—officer and enlisted. These guys could handle anything he threw at them. They were the best. He ought to know. With blood, sweat, and a few tears of pain, he’d honed the operators of Team Nine into the finest unit in all of US Special Operations. They were the president’s “go to” force when mistakes and failure weren’t an option. Even though they were shell-shocked, suffering various levels of injury, hungry, exhausted, and mourning the deaths of their Teammates, Scott knew if anyone could get out of a goatfuck like this, it was Senior Chief Dean Baylor and Special Warfare Operators Michael Ruiz, John Donovan, Steve Spivak, and Travis Hart.

  The Special Warfare Operators of Team Nine knew how to do their jobs. And he knew how to do his, which was making decisions. He made life-and-death decisions all the time; it came with the job. But losing eight men didn’t, and Scott was still reeling. They all were. But right now he had to focus on keeping the rest of his men alive. That meant projecting confidence and acting as if this wasn’t pretty much worst-possible-scenario, one-wrong-move-and-we’re-dead territory.

  “We hold tight for the time being,” Scott said. They were safe enough in this apartment building. They’d had their pick of abandoned buildings in the old center of town, which was now essentially a ghost town located across the river from the current city center. Although from the looks of it, the new city center wasn’t going to be far behind the old. Vorkuta had definitely seen better days. The once thriving city had dwindled in the past decades from over two hundred thousand people to about seventy thousand.

  But in this remote corner of the world, even among seventy thousand, six strangers were going to stick out—especially non-Russian-looking and -speaking strangers. Well, except for one. Thank God, they had Spivak whose grandparents were Ukrainian and had passed on their language. His lineage also gave him a good cover story. He was a Ukrainian sent to Vorkuta to work as a diver on the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

  “We’ll send Spivak back out for more food and supplies,” Scott said. Then cutting off Donovan before he could renew an earlier joking request, he added, “And sushi is off the menu. Keep it simple and preferably cheap, Spivak.”

  They all carried cash on missions—both US dollars and a small amount of local currency. The latter was a precaution that he’d insisted upon but they’d never needed. But precaution was another way of saying “damned glad of it” when you did. It was going to save them from having to “borrow” everything.

  “Try to make it something I can pronounce, Dolph,” Donovan said, using Spivak’s call sign. The big blond-haired operator who served as the team’s breacher bore a resemblance to the actor Dolph Lundgren, who’d played Sylvester Stalone’s Russian foe in Rocky IV. “And I hope fresh clothes are on tonight’s menu. Jim Bob here smells like a freaking animal.”

  “Fuck you, Donovan,” Travis responded with his heavy Southern accent. The young sniper was from Mississippi and country through and through. Thus, the Jim Bob call sign. “You aren’t exactly smelling like a rose.”

  “See what you can do,” Scott said to Spivak, ignoring the giving-each-other-shit banter between the guys, as he normally did. With John Donovan around, it was constant. “We’re also going to need a phone at some point—and pick up a newspaper.”

  The other horrible consequence of their failed mission was war. For all they knew, WWIII was already under way.

  Spivak nodded. “I saw a couple places that sold phones when I was looking around earlier. But if it seems too iffy, I’ll figure out something else.”

  Meaning he’d pick one up another way that didn’t involve questions. Scott nodded. He didn’t need to tell Spivak to be careful. The situation was painfully clear to all of them.

  Well, mostly clear. The guys didn’t know exactly who had warned Scott and why he trusted her. They just knew that he’d received a text right before the first missile hit that had saved their lives, and they trusted him.

  But he knew they had questions. Questions that he didn’t want to answer. How did he tell his men—men to whom he was supposed to above reproach—that he’d been hiding something from them? That for the last six months he’d had a girlfriend who worked in the Pentagon. That it was serious. That for the first time he’d met someone who meant as much—more—to him than the job. That he had a ring in his pocket that proved it. That he should have said something to them and command months ago.

  Scott had been well are of the rules of Team Nine when he’d joined. No family, no wives, no girlfriends. No one to wonder where he was or when he’d be back. No one to cause problems if he didn’t come back.

  He should have come forward when it had gotten serious, even if it meant having to leave Nine. But he’d allowed himself to be talked out of it by Natalie, who was just as worried about losing her own job as he was about losing the Team he’d helped build.

  Breaking the rules wasn’t like him. Even for an officer, he had a reputation for being by the book. Rules. Honor. Integrity. Standards. Discipline. It might be old-fashioned, but those things mattered to him.

  None of which explained Natalie Andersson. Although nothing about Natalie had ever made any sense. She’d confused and confounded him from first moment he’d seen her in that bar in DC. Maybe that was part of her appeal. He couldn’t figure her out. On the outside, she projected this sophisticated, confident career woman, but beneath the surface, he detected a sweet vulnerability that roused in him protective instincts that he’d never experienced before. She was like two sides of a coin that didn’t match.

  But one thing he did know. Without her warning, he wouldn’t be sitting here on the doorstop of Siberia in this run-down, abandoned apartment building that looked more like a cellblock. He’d be dead.

  All six of them owed her their lives. They’d been betrayed, and Natalie’s message suggested that it had come from someone on the inside. The text that he’d seen by chance was burned into his memory, though it had chilled him to the bones when he’d first read it.

  Leak. Russians know you are coming. No one is supposed to survive. Go dark and don’t try to contact me. Both our lives might be at stake. And then the last three words that she’d never said before: I love you. A declaration that under normal circumstances would have made him the happiest man in the world; instead it made him the most terrified.

  This wasn’t a joke; she was deadly serious. That and the fact that she knew about the mission, which only a handful of people were supposed to know about, convinced him to call back the platoon—or half the platoon. Lieutenant White’s squad was already inside one of the buildings, and the comms were out. There’d been no way to warn them.

  The rock that had been crushing his chest since that moment got a little heavier.

  Against his orders, the senior chief and Brian Murphy, their newest Teammate, had tried. Murphy had been killed, and the senior chief had barely escaped the explosion. Scott didn’t know how Baylor had made it across almost seventy miles of hell with his injuries. But the senior chief was like that. You couldn’t knock him down. He’d keep popping back up and coming at you.

  And Scott knew that as soon as the shock wore off and they were out of this, Baylor was going to have questions for him, and he wasn’t going to be content with “we’ll talk about it later.”

  Feeling the senior chief’s questioning gaze on him now, Scott pulled out his coated paper map—another precaution when going to places with likely spotty communications that he was damned glad of right now—and started to consider options. There weren’t a lot of them. They had to get out of the area as quickly as possible, which basically meant a plane, train, or automobile. Of the three, a train seemed the least risky.

  “What are you thinking, Ace?” Ruiz asked, using Scott’s call sign.

  The guys said Scott always had an ace up his sleeve. Well, he sure as hell hoped they were right. They were going to need a full deck of them.