Page 35 of Enemy of My Enemy

Boris,the driver who had picked up Sasha in the middle of the night on the isolated M9, dropped him off at GUM, the brilliantly lit, three-story shopping mall in the Red Square across the street from the Kremlin. Boris left his old fur coat with Sasha, but grumbled about leaving him in the mall’s parking garage. Sasha didn’t even have shoes, he’d said.

But, Sasha shooed him away, thanking him and insisting he’d be okay while clinging to the fur coat and hunching over because it hurt too much to stand.

“No hospital,” he’d insisted. “No hospital.”

Boris drove off, and Sasha saw him watching in his rearview mirror until he rose out of the garage.

When he left, Sasha sank to the ground, gasping for breath as he tried not to cry. He’d been holding the worst of the pain just at bay, struggling to not show Boris how badly injured he was. His abdomen was tender and turning black and blue. Internal bleeding. Something wasverywrong with him. Sweat beaded his forehead, even though it was still below freezing.

Boris had dropped him off before dawn in Moscow. The mall was closed. But across the street were the red walls of the Kremlin, and within, President Puchkov.

If he could just get there. The president wouldn’t stand for this, this blatant hatred and attack. Not with his friendship with the American president. Sasha would stand at the gates of the Kremlin and shout, demand that something be done. He’d die, most likely, but something would change. It had to. President Puchkov was going to make the country better. He believed that to his bones.

Sasha pulled himself to his unsteady feet and tried to shake away the dizziness that stole over him. He blinked hard, but the scattered cars swam in front of him, duplicate vehicles spinning in the air. One hand braced against the concrete wall as he stumbled for the ramp, the fur coat still wrapped tight around his shoulders.

He made it across the street, but not to the gates of the Kremlin. He collapsed against the red brick walls, meters away from a dark service entrance, private and closed off from the public. Sasha stared up at the stars, so dim and faint over Moscow, as the darkness closed in around him.

* * *

He was stillunconscious an hour later when Dr. Leo Voronov pulled up to the darkened private entrance for Kremlin employees. Frowning, Dr. Voronov put his car in park and headed for a lump of middle-class fur coat and messy blond hair lying slumped in the snow.

* * *

Chapter 11

South Brazilian Airspace

“So we’re CIA now,huh L-T?” Doc threw himself down next to Adam, landing half-reclined on his bulky pack as he watched the treetops of the Brazilian forest loom through the open cargo doors on the side of their transport plane.

“We’re on a CIA mission. But we’re working for the president now.” Adam checked the map he had in his waterproof sleeve.

“Damn. That sounds extra special. Think we could get out of paying taxes for this? Like in that movie?”

Adam signaled to the pilots in the cockpit and got an affirmative response back. “We’re still paying taxes. We’re still Marines.” He grinned, standing. “And you’re still a Navy squid.”

Doc flipped him off as Adam spoke over the team’s radio, getting his men ready for their landing. They’d flown from MacDill to South America, landing at the Marine base in Sao Paolo before boarding their final transport and flying deep into South Brazil just north of their target, across the border in Paraguay.

Now it was time to land.

The plane descended, skimming over the treetops. Birds screeched and monkeys screamed as the plane buzzed overhead. They’d flown low to avoid radar, but now, coming in for their landing, it seemed as if they could just step out and walk on the canopy.

A break in the trees revealed their landing zone: a glistening, sunrise-drenched stretch of river, calm and gentle, nestled between two forest-covered banks.

“Oh, you fucker,” Doc cursed, just close enough that Adam could hear.

Grinning, Adam clapped Doc on the shoulder and grabbed the plane’s handholds. Doc was their team’s corpsman from the Navy. He was the only naval man Adam had ever met who had a pure, burning hatred of all things wet and watery. Lake, river, or ocean, Doc hated it and was always violently seasick.

Doc grumbled as he grabbed hold next to Adam as the plane’s giant pontoons scraped the surface of the river and carved channels in the water. The engines throttled back, jerking the team back and forth in the cargo hold. In moments, they were bobbing on the river as the stabilizer took over, tut-tut-tutting them toward the riverbank.

Adam winked at Doc. “Oo-rah!”

He leaped from the cargo entrance and crossed his arms and legs before plunging into the river. His team followed, splashing in one after the other, and then swam for the shore. Last to jump was Doc, cursing a blue streak as Adam clambered up onto the riverbank and started unpacking his gear from his watertight pack.

Adam chuckled and unfolded the map for his men. It felt good to be operational again, to be in his element. Infiltration, observation, combat. This was his life, a constant pulsation of action and adrenaline. He could stay focused, one hundred percent, on the task at hand. It was all about the mission and his men, and he didn’t have time to think about—

Nope, he wasn’t going to go there. He’dpromisedhimself. Over wasover. Never mind their mistake, the frantic relief of survival and uncertainty and too much adrenaline combining to create his One Big Fuckup.

Well, his second biggest fuckup. The first was ever believing he could have had—