Page 7

Almost time.
The light turned green. Tex saluted the jump master and leapt from a perfectly good plane. The line moved closer to the black gaping maw, his night-vision goggles showing him just a field of eerie green.
The wind howled through the open ramp, biting through his gloves, sharp even through his oxygen mask. With a routine pop of his ears, the night loomed ahead, vast and infinite. His pulse kicked up. Brian’s strong, handsome, and beloved face flickeredin his mind. His adorable nephews. Quinn. Then nothing. Dagger stepped into the void.
As the howling wind slammed into him like a freight train, the raw force threatening to tear him apart, he controlled it, adjusted for it, became one with it. The world stretched out below, a vast black abyss, the faint glimmer of civilization far beneath him barely perceptible through his night-vision goggles. His pulse steadied. This was his element.
The A in SEAL meant something. It meant they didn’t just survive in the air. They mastered it.
Above him, the rest of the team poured from the C-130, their black silhouettes stark against the star-spangled sky. Tex was below him, always leading from the front with Bondo second. Flash, Twister, Shark, Easy, and then, last out, Beast and his handler. The big Belgian Malinois barely moved, his body tucked against Brawler’s like they were one damn unit.
Dagger didn’t need to track them. He could feel them all there, perfectly spaced, falling into a tight formation as instinctively as they breathed.
To his right, the city of Caracas was lit up, nothing but a blinding glow in his NVGs.
Yeah, he was already dealing with the ghosts he’d anticipated as he prepared to deploy his chute. That desolate truth that when Quinn recovered, he would lose all three of them, and it hurt as if he was losing his brother all over again.
From up here, the city sprawled beneath him in endless grids of light, the heartbeat of a place that had never meant anything to him until it did. Until his brother died there, on a mission that never should have gone sideways. His brother had been a warrior, giving his life for a woman who had been falsely accused. An American. At first, not a fighter, not a soldier, until Easy busted her out of that prison, and she’d found her special brand of SEAL babe inside her and fought as fiercely as they had.It was no wonder Easy had married her. She had been someone worth saving. Because that was the oath they all had taken.
Every single stranger got the same treatment. Every American caught outside the wire, lost in the world’s darkest corners, could depend on one constant: SEALs would find them and bring them back. No hesitation. No question of worthiness. His brother had known that. Had lived that. Had died for that.
Dagger tightened his jaw. He could not let Brian’s death overwhelm him. Not now.
He flicked his eyes across the grid, picking out the key points of interest, a cluster of government buildings to the north, the labyrinth of shanties and gang territory to the south. The rooftops, some flat and open, others cluttered with satellite dishes and water tanks, would serve as either cover or kill boxes depending on who was watching.El Helicoideloomed like a dark scar in the middle of it all, a place of whispered horrors, where men entered, lost what made them human, turning them into breathing wraiths until that place took them into a dark, final end.
He clenched his jaw and focused on his descent. The mission was everything. The emotions could wait. Caracas was a battlefield like any other, danger in the shadows, threats on every rooftop. The skyline was a mix of modern wealth and decayed infrastructure, towers standing tall beside crumbling facades, glass and concrete disguising a city that could turn predator at any moment.
He let out a slow breath, forcing the tension from his body, and swept his gaze across the team.
Brawler: solid, locked in, a force of nature.
Tex: always in control, always setting the standard.
Then his eyes landed on Easy.
The kid had walked through hell in that jungle, him and his wife both, and come out swinging. Dagger had once questioned whether he belonged here. That had been a mistake.
Easy wasn’t soft. He was light. There was something in him, some rare balance between killer instinct and something cleaner. He’d pull the trigger when needed, no hesitation, but never seemed to lose that grin. Never lost whatever made himhumanin a world that tried to grind it out of them.
Warrior blood ran through him, but it was the light that set him apart. The kind that reminded Dagger what they were fighting to protect.
Easy adjusted his chute, cutting through the air like a man born for it, his descent effortless.
Which hit home to Dagger that this wasn’t nature’s domain. It was theirs.
Hot, wet air would swallow the sound of their movements, thick vines and tangled undergrowth would slow them down, but it wouldn’t stop them. Nothing would. They would own this terrain like they had owned every battlefield before it. Jungle, desert, ocean. It didn’t matter.
Where they landed, they conquered.
3
Dagger letthe city fade from his mind as he locked in on the green rising up to meet them.
He tapped his altimeter, watching the tick down of the numbers, which were only numbers on a scale to give him information on the steps he was moving through.
The wind tore at his body as they plummeted through the night, the roar of air deafening in their ears. Twenty-five thousand feet. Blacked-out jungle below. A rolling sea of green stretched to the horizon like an unbroken tide, frozen in time. The treetops swayed in the moonlight, their dense canopy shifting like the surface of the ocean. But it wasn’t the ocean.
The ocean was where frogmen were born.