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They fanned out beneath the dense canopy, the leaves overhead blocking out most of the star-glimmer. Only a few headlamps and the glow of the team’s night vision illuminated their path. Then a hushed murmur from Twister on the comms. “Hold up. Got something here.”
Tex halted, raising a fist to freeze the formation. Moving with measured speed, they slipped through a cluster of thick ferns and found Twister crouched over a prone figure dressed in a one-piece black suit that looked like alien-tech. The man’s dark skin was slick with sweat and streaked with dirt and blood. His eyes fluttered as Twister pressed gauze against a ragged wound on the side of his head. Bullet graze. He was lucky.
Dagger knelt. The man’s breathing rattled in his chest. “Who are you?” Dagger asked softly, in Spanish first, then English.
The man’s gaze flickered around until it finally landed on Dagger’s face. He clamped his jaw, eyeing them with open suspicion. Was this one of Herrera’s men? If so, Twist would patch him up even though he was a combatant. They didn’t kill hostiles who were unarmed and injured.
“We’re American military,” Tex said, his voice authoritative and impatient. “Tell us who you are. We have no intentions of hurting you, but if you’re with Herrera?—”
The man spit. “I’m not with him.”
Tex’s face hardened. “We don’t have time–”
“Stonewall stands unbroken,” he whispered, his eyes darting around them.
Tex released a breath. “And holds the line.”
That was their special code for the Shadowguard if they were to meet in the field while on separate missions. CIA black ops assassins, which explained the elite gear, and he could guess who they were after. That fucker…Herrera. This man was on their side. But his gut tightened. They always worked in pairs. Where was his partner?
Relief slackened his features. “N–Ndhlovu,” he croaked. Zulu, but his accent was purely American. Dagger knew they chose their code names from their ancestry. Dagger spoke seven languages and dabbled in many and recognized Ndhlovu, a word that meant elephant.
“You’re in safe hands,” Dagger assured him. “Where’s your partner?”
He let out a shuddering breath. “Lechuza...” he managed. “They have her… Herrera’s men... Keep her alive until they learn everything.”
Twister gently cleaned the gash, looking up at Tex grimly. “We can’t leave him, and he’s in no shape to help us. We gotta evac him.”
Tex depressed his radio, and through their earpieces, he explained the situation and the solution. TOC confirmed their leader’s on-the-fly plan.
Dagger glanced at Tex, who was also crouched low. Their LT’s voice was tense but calm. “Twister, you stay with Ndhlovu and do what you can. Get him stable enough to move. Then I want you both at the extraction LZ. Keep me posted when you’re moving and when you arrive. The rest of us will continue.”
Twister nodded, already pulling out a saline bag and hooking Ndhlovu to an IV drip. “Copy that, LT.”
“He’s in the hospital,” Ndhlovu rasped, grabbing Dagger’s sleeve with surprising strength. “Large force… Be careful… Ambush.”
Dagger patted the man’s shoulder gently, swallowing a hot surge of anger at Herrera. Two hostages: Joseph Baxter, an American they’d come for, and now a Shadowguard operative, code name Lechuza…a woman. Damn. That fucker had an American woman hostage. He gritted his teeth, the urgency in him, the oath in him ramped up. They had to get to her A-SAP. That urgency was also in Tex’s eyes. The whole team shifted at the news. Finding her untouched? That would be a miracle, but he prayed for one anyway.
His team had seen that brutality everywhere there were helpless females.
They had seen it in the scorched villages of Afghanistan, where the only things left standing were the ghosts of war. In the jungles of South America, where men had nothing but disdain for their women, for power, for greed, for control. In the deserts where life was measured in grains of sand and the price of survival was paid in blood. The world had a way of devouring the helpless, and women were always the easiest prey. It didn’t matter the country, the culture, the war, wherever power was abused, they suffered first.
They were bought and sold, treated like currency in the hands of men who saw them as nothing more than collateral. Used to send a message, to punish, to break. In war, they weren’t just casualties. They were weapons, bargaining chips, afterthoughts.
The ugly truth wasn’t confined to one country, one enemy, one war. It was everywhere. Humanity’s worst instincts, dressed in different flags, speaking different languages, but all feeding the same hunger, violence, control, destruction. Different landscapes, same cruel truth.
But CIA Shadowguards weren’t helpless. Women like that never saw themselves as victims. Herrera would have to kill her before she was out of the fight.
Yet, he knew how brutal Herrera could be, especially to a woman. He wouldn’t waste her potential. He’d break her apart, piece by piece, until she gave him what he wanted. Along with Baxter, the rebel was sitting on a goldmine of intel.
Dagger hoped Quinn would never have to experience anything like what he’d seen. She might be struggling, but she still held onto that sliver of innocence, that belief that the world was still salvageable. He didn’t want to see that stripped from her, shredded like the lives of too many women who had fallen into the hands of men like Herrera.
If Herrera thought he could use that same cruelty against a woman in their care, he was about to learn how fast the hunted could become the prey.
In that hospital were two people who had no way out.
That just changed.
They wasted no time. The jungle was a living thing, thick and unrelenting, pressing in with a weight that even the night couldn’t ease. The SEALs moved in silence, shadows slipping through the dense undergrowth as they neared the hospital compound. The structure loomed ahead, a concrete relic of rot and neglect, its edges blurred by vines and decay. A husk, but one that still housed the living.