Page 14 of Defended By the SEAL (HERO Force #10)
Cowboy was seriously worried about Grams. He held his hand to her forehead. Her color was poor, her skin noticeably cold to the touch, and she’d yet to wake up some thirty minutes after her rescue.
He needed to call Logan, Charlotte’s brother, who was a medical doctor by training. He turned to Tom. “Where’s the house phone?”
“In the office.”
He pointed Cowboy in the right direction.
The office sat on the opposite side of the house from the den, a mirror image of the room in which Grams had been trapped.
It had closed French doors whereas the den had an open doorway, the freezing cold temperature inside the office making him realize how warm the living area was by comparison.
A large desk was centered in the room, a tall leather chair behind it and an old-fashioned corded phone on its surface. He picked up the receiver, relieved to hear a dial tone, and called Logan’s number from memory.
“Hello?” Logan sounded out of breath.
“It’s Cowboy. I need your help. Your grandmother’s suffering from hypothermia. What do I do?”
“Shit. Hang on.” He could hear voices in the background.
He looked around the office. Several bookcases flanked opposite sides of the room, a vertical filing cabinet standing in a corner.
He should look through them, see what he could find out about Tom.
Hell, he should look through the rest of the boxes in the spare bedroom, but he’d been a little busy since then.
Logan came back on the line. “Gemma’s water broke. We’re on our way to the hospital.”
“Wow, I’m sorry to interrupt. Everything okay?”
“No. She’s not due for six weeks.”
Concern filled his mind like concrete filling up a form. “I hope everything turns out all right.”
“Can you get Grams to a hospital?”
“No. We’re stranded.”
“Lots of blankets. Electric if you have them.”
“Power’s out.”
Logan cursed dramatically, and Cowboy noted that the men of HERO Force had taught him well.
He’d still been green around the gills when he first joined the team.
“Try to warm up her core,” said Logan. “Have someone get under the blankets with her if you can. Use hot water bottles on her chest and neck, heat packs, anything will help. Is she conscious?”
“No.”
Logan cursed again, putting his first effort to shame. “How long has she been out?”
Cowboy gave him his best guess, aware that time had ceased normal operations the moment he came around the bend and saw the den ceiling open to the sky and a tree lying across Logan’s grandmother.
“If she wakes up, give her warm, sweet fluids. That’s all you can do without a hospital.”
“Thanks, man.”
“I gotta go.”
“Take care. And good luck.” He hung up the phone, jogged into the living room to share Logan’s advice with Charlotte and Tom. He considered telling them Gemma had gone into labor, but decided against it until Grams was out of the woods.
Assuming she ever made it out of them.
He jogged back to the study and dialed Moto, who answered on the first ring, saying, “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Cell service is dead,” said Cowboy. “This is the landline, for as long as it lasts.”
“Jax got more intel. Vanderhoffen was charged with sedition, that was right, but he claimed he’d left the group months earlier over idealogical differences with the head honcho.
According to Vanderhoffen, this other guy wanted to bomb the shit out of a few key targets to get their message out to the world.
It divided the group right down the middle.
They got a crap ton of corroborating evidence from more than a dozen PFP members that Vanderhoffen went with the side that wanted to stick to peaceful protests and demonstrations. ”
“Then why the fuck was he charged?”
“The source says he was close enough to justify the charges. They didn’t get the information exonerating him until after Vanderhoffen gave up the name of the guy who blew shit up.”
“So who’s the big bad bomber they ended up going after?”
“Guy by the name of Sarkisyan. Pleaded guilty in exchange for the feds taking the death penalty off the table. Got life in prison and served eleven years before he escaped two years ago.”
Cowboy was instantly concerned about Tom’s safety. “Did they catch him?”
“Nope. He’s been on the FBI’s most wanted list ever since.”
Cowboy had a bad feeling in his gut that the storm outside was doing nothing to calm. “I need backup out here, Moto. Are Austin and Champion back yet?”
“Got in about an hour ago.”
“What about Deke and Booger?”
“Should be in shortly.”
“Good. Route the four of them to my location. Fair warning, it’s going to be hard for them to get to the island. Bridges are out. Power, too. Look into a chopper, maybe a water approach, though I’m sure there will be rough seas.”
“Depends how far north the storm has moved by then. I’m on it.”
“Check the weather and see how much more of this shit we’re in for.”
“Pulling up the radar.” After a moment, Moto whistled. “That’s one hell of a storm. Stretches all the way from Nova Scotia to Jersey. You’re close to the middle. Going to take a while for the worst of it to get past you.”
Cowboy hung his head. “And longer than that for the water to recede and the bridges to be opened, assuming they’re not washed away or damaged in this mess.”
“I’m concerned about communication,” said Moto.
“Me too.” As soon as this phone line went down, they would be effectively cut off from the outside world for the foreseeable future.
“Make sure the guys bring sat phones and radios. There’s no power, and technology’s hanging on by a thread.
” He imagined a crooked telephone pole carrying a wire over a flooded bridge.
It was just a matter of time before here went from bad to worse, and they needed to be prepared.
He got off the line with Moto and looked around the office. If they wanted answers about Tom’s true intentions, they’d better start searching for them, and his office seemed like the perfect place to start. Coming to his feet, he mused, “I wonder where Mama hid the cookie jar.”
He left the door open so he could hear anyone who approached, then began searching quickly through the file cabinet. Files relating to Signet Firearms filled the top three drawers, and he skimmed through them briefly, flipping through financial statements, reports, and new product R&D.
One entire drawer was dedicated to government munitions contracts, the numbers involved making Cowboy’s eyebrows hitch up as he swore an impressed oath.
Charlotte hadn’t been exaggerating. Signet was a major player in the defense industry, and not only in the US—there were contracts with several smaller NATO nations, too.
Which made their biggest threat clear. If the intel was off-base and Vanderhoffen was still involved this PFP group, he might try to use Signet to supply the terrorists with easy access to weapons.
And if he wasn’t still involved with PFP, Sarkisyan likely wanted Tom dead for giving him up to the feds.
Cowboy furrowed his brow, momentarily lost in thought.
“But he hasn’t found him yet.” Tom must have done a decent job covering his tracks.
You didn’t have to be in WITSEC to disappear, he knew.
All it took were money and the right contacts to buy a new identity—the latter of which had likely been available to Vanderhoffen at the time.
America was a big place in which to hide, especially if your face was the only thing that could give you away.
Cowboy skipped over the US contracts, but scanned every other contract in the cabinet, finding nothing that struck him as out-of-the-ordinary.
He eased the drawer closed, then sat on his haunches.
“If I was selling weapons to terrorists, I wouldn’t file it under business as usual.
” He opened the bottom drawer. These files were different, taking up only half the cabinet.
The words “Bowdoin College” stood out from one tab, making him think they were Tom’s personal files.
Research
Lighthouse
Copyrights
Обещания
He took out his phone and snapped a picture.
It looked like Russian, but he was no linguist. He pulled out the folder.
Pages upon pages of handwritten text used the same language.
Typed pages in the same language, which appeared to be reports of some kind.
He snapped photos of all of them. A small black book was filled with writing, like a diary, and he began photographing those pages, too.
He texted several of the photos to Moto. They wouldn’t go through right now, but he had to keep trying. He had to get a translation. He looked around the room for a fax machine, disappointed when he found none. For now, the text was the best he could do.
The sound of footsteps alerted him to someone coming. He returned the files and papers to their place and closed the drawer just as Charlotte walked in.
The relief on her face was clear. “Grams is awake. She’s shivering terribly, but mentally she seems fine.”
“No more talk of chickens?”
“Nope.”
“That’s great.”
“I’m going to make her some hot tea with honey. Thank God there’s a gas stove.” She gestured to the file cabinet. “You find out anything?”
He shook his head. “A bunch of documents in a foreign language. Maybe Russian. You don’t happen to speak Russian, do you?”
“Four years of French, sorry.”
He pulled out his phone and checked the texts to Moto.
Failed to send.
Click to try again.
He clicked it. “Trying to send photos to HERO Force to get a translation. Not having any luck.”
“Maybe when the storm clears a bit.”
“Which won’t be for hours. Moto says we’re in for plenty more before then.” He filled her in on what he’d learned about Tom’s background.
“So he’s one of the good guys, then.”
“Maybe.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t believe he’d had an idealogical break with the PFP?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe it. It’s that I can’t afford to believe it.”
She crossed her arms. “If he’s selling weapons to terrorists overseas, this has to be a huge operation with multiple players. Guns don’t cross oceans unnoticed.”
Cowboy sat behind the desk and opened a drawer, rifling through its contents. This was a big house, and they had a lot of ground to cover if he was going to figure out all the answers. “Unless they’re being smuggled. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Note pads. Thick black pencils. An ancient stapler. He glanced up at Charlotte. She was staring at her phone, her alarmed face lit up by its screen. “Is your phone working?” he asked.
Quickly, she shook her head and tucked it in her pocket. “No.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t buy that for a minute, but knew better than to argue with her—at least most of the time. He opened another drawer. A hole puncher. A few random tools. A small spool of wire.
He closed the drawer and moved to another. Several vials of amber glass with rubber dropper caps, each labeled in the same language from the filing cabinet. This drawer was more crowded, and he reached behind another spool of wire to bring the contents forward.
A small black timer appeared, three colored wires hanging from its back, and Cowboy’s nervous system sang like he’d just put his finger in a light socket.
He took the timer out and examined it carefully in the light, the familiar mechanism screaming a warning in his brain.
He was a trained explosives expert for the Navy SEALs, and the pieces before him were fitting together like a terrifying puzzle.
Charlotte cocked her head. “What is it?”
He reached back into the drawer and withdrew the amber bottles, carefully opening each one and smelling what was inside, his worst fears confirmed by the combination of scents. The barely there odor of pure glycerin. The familiar tang of diamine peroxide. The distinct aroma of nitromethane.
“Jesus Christ. These are bomb-making chemicals. You can use this stuff to make nitroglycerin and PLX. Bombs more powerful than TNT.” He held up the clock. “And this timer, the wire, the high quality tools... This is the stuff of nightmares, right here.”
“Tom’s making bombs?”
“Well, it’s either him or Grams.”
She clucked her tongue. “My grandmother isn’t making explosives.”
He sighed heavily, glad he’d called for more backup and wishing they’d get here a hell of a lot sooner than they would.
“Then my money’s on Tom.” Their situation had just gone from bad to worse.
“Looks like your future step-granddad’s putting the terror in terrorist, and we’re stuck on this island with him—and no backup—for the foreseeable future. ”