Chapter 1

Chapter One

Asher cocked his head, sure he'd heard something. Someone. Couldn't have been the wind shrieking out of the east, could it? Hard to tell, as fierce as it was scouring the mountaintops.

"Did you hear that?" he asked Beau Villanueva, his companion agent, convinced the scream was human and terrified. Desperate. Not the wind.

But where did it come from? There was nothing up here but the sheer stone face of a cliff to their north. Sure hadn't come from the goat they were chasing. The pesky thing belonged to the eight-year-old shepherd boy they'd startled on their way to the rendezvous point with the rest of their team. After they'd handed off the Afghan women they'd rescued into his team's keeping, along with their children, Beau had insisted he and Asher go back and get that goat for the poor kid. Senior Agent Murphy Finnegan had said make it quick, that the Black Hawks were on their way, and he'd leave without them if they weren't back in time.

So there Asher and Beau were, making it quick and giving that stinky little goat one last chance to stop horsing around. Beau was sure he could wrangle the skittish thing. Asher gave him ten minutes to make it happen. Not one second more. They'd come here to rescue the endangered wives and families of the men who'd aided America before the war ended in a clusterfuck. Not goats.

He and Beau were part of a privately funded, covert Long Range Reconnaissance team the current administration in Washington, D.C., would deny in a heartbeat. Senior Agent Murphy Finnegan was team leader this time. Former Navy SEAL Lee Hart, USMC scout snipers Renner Graves and Rory Dennison, and former Army black ops Heston Contreras comprised the daredevils who'd already connected with and retrieved the women they'd been sent to rescue. They were all waiting on Beau's ability to wrangle a goat. This marked the fourth covert excursion funded and manned by former USMC scout sniper Alex Stewart, the boss of every man on this mission. He owned The TEAM, the best covert surveillance company in the world.

Thirty miles east of the now demilitarized Bagram Air Base, Asher and Beau were high on the west-facing mountains in the Parian Province of Afghanistan. Kabul Airport lay twenty miles to the south of Bagram, not that either airfield was functional since the Taliban took over. But those bastards were there, hundreds of them, no doubt training for another assault on their own people, for the love of all things holy. Asher could see Bagram's runway from where he stood. The way America had left Afghanistan disgusted him.

"You've got five minutes left," he grouched at Beau.

"Yeah, yeah, there he is, on that boulder over there. See him?"

"Yeah, I see him."

"That little shit's smiling. He thinks he's got us beat. You go that way, and I'll—"

Another scream. Definitely human. A woman, for Christ's sake. Up here? Where?

"What the fuck was that?" Beau growled, his hand on the pistol in his side holster.

Asher's two Glocks were instantly up and ready. Their standard magazines afforded him more than two dozen 40 S&W rounds. His sharp eyes zeroed in on a barely visible, narrow vertical crack in that broad stone face, just beyond the flat rock where that goat danced like a naughty kid. Tapping his tactical headset, he advised his boss, "We've got a problem, Murph. Pretty sure we've located another woman. We're going after her. Don't leave without us."

"Where? On this guldarned mountain? It's still winter up here."

"Roger that, but I'm not leaving without her. There's a narrow-assed opening in the granite wall north of our position. Might lead into a cave. Won't know till we get there."

"Make it quick."

Asher ended the connection and signaled Beau his intention to engage. "I'll go in first. Cover me."

"Copy that."

Two clicks was roughly a mile and a quarter away. Even carrying thirty pounds of gear, Asher could run that easy, in less than ten minutes. But this time, he'd make it in five.

"Keep up," he ordered Beau. That wasn't just a scream, it was full-blown terror. Asher turned and ran like the wind.