To the Brink (2 page)

When her heart dropped back into her chest, she made another quick visual search around her. Only after she was satisfied that no one was following her did she walk across Corcuera Street toward the post office she'd intentionally bypassed the first time she'd strolled past, playing tourist again, staring at the Mayor's office.

Without breaking stride, she walked behind the Mayor's office where the post office was located, fished the padded envelope out of her purse, and dropped it in the after-hours mail slot.

For the first time in an hour, she felt a tentative sense of relief. If anyone was watching her, they'd never have noticed what she'd done. And if anything happened to her, at least now there was a chance someone would eventually discover the envelope and know the reason why.

Now all she had to do was make it back to her room and wait for Ethan to call and tell her what to do to get out of this fix.

Everything was going to be fine.

And then she noticed the van.

Her heart did that ricochet thing again and she faltered, barely catching herself before she stumbled.

A quick glance over her shoulder told her the vehicle was long and black and beat-up; the windows were tinted so dark she couldn't see inside. Even as she told herself it was nothing to worry about, her pulse ratcheted up several beats.

But when the van crept up and kept pace beside her, her heart damn near jumped out of her chest.

Adrenaline fueled by apprehension rushed through her system so fast it made her nauseous. She told herself that just because a van was the most commonly used abduction vehicle in the islands it didn't mean that's what this one was about. But when it pulled up to the curb a few feet ahead of her and the side door slid open, the apprehension churning through her chest shifted to flat-out panic.

"Don't stop; don't stop; don't stop."
She repeated the command like a mantra.

When the gruff voice belching out from the murky black interior of the van ordered her to do just that, she broke into a dead run.

She was three blocks from the hotel. So close she could see the sign—
Garden Orchid Hotel
—ahead.

She pushed herself harder. Pushed until her lungs burned with the effort.

Almost there. Almost—

Something slammed into her from behind. She fell face-first onto the pocked concrete walk. And pain momentarily edged out the panic as the fall knocked the air out of her lungs.

She couldn't breathe, couldn't scream, as the leaden weight of a man who smelled like smoke and sweat and mean sandwiched her between him and the sidewalk.

The white-hot abrasion of her skin scraping against concrete seared her knees; her palms, where she connected with the paving to break her fall, burned like fire.

Her breath finally rushed back on a gasp. She tried to scream, but a filthy hand clamped over her mouth. Something jabbed into her ribs, hard.

Oh God. He has a gun.

"Come with me or die here, Miss Prescott. You decide."

She went limp, prayed for a miracle—the
pulis,
police, an off-duty Special Ops soldier. Anyone who might help her.

No one did.

Her attacker stood, made sure he stayed behind her so she couldn't see his face, and hauled her roughly to her feet. With the gun still buried in her ribs, he pushed her toward the van, then shoved her, hard, into the backseat.

Her head hit the opposite window with a crack. She groaned, fighting through the dizzying pain. She was still seeing stars when her abductor climbed in behind her. Before he'd even slammed the door behind him, the van shot off through the Zamboanga streets with a squeal of tires.

Coarse hands wrenched her arms behind her back; he tied her wrists so tightly that she bit back a cry when the rope dug into her skin. Then he blindfolded her.

She fought it, but there was no escaping the dirty rag that he pressed over her mouth and nose.

Panic outdistanced pain.

Loss of consciousness was terrifying and fast.

Her last coherent thought was of Ethan. His name broke on a sob just before everything faded but the truth: not even Ethan could save her now.

MANILA,
 
 
PHILIPPINES

PRESENT

"Charles. Charles!"

He could feel an irritating nudge at his ribs. Hear the ring of his alarm. And his wife gnawing away at the edge of his consciousness.

"Charles, for God's sake. Wake up and answer the phone."

Phone?

The cobwebs started to thin.

The phone. Not the alarm.

He dragged a hand across his face, shook his head to clear the sludge, and reached for the phone on his bedside table.

"What?" he said in a tone that said much more than the four-letter word suggested.

"I am sorry to bother you at this late hour, sir." The man on the other end of the line recognized anger when he heard it, and this was the last person he wanted to piss off.

"Then why are you?" Charles growled, and glanced at the alarm. It was the fucking middle of the night.

"You said to notify you when it was done, sir."

Charles lay back on a pillow cased in fine Egyptian linen. He stared at the dark ceiling. Ah. Yes. He had asked to be notified.

So it was done.

Well. He hadn't expected to feel remorse. Frustration over the need for it all, yes. Relief that his little problem was solved, absolutely. But not remorse.

He exhaled a deep breath. Couldn't be helped.

"And you're certain of this?" he asked finally, relieved to hear Marion's deep breaths beside him, telling him she'd fallen back asleep.

"Yes, sir. It is done."

Without another word, he hung up the phone.

Darcy Prescott's pretty face flashed before him in the night. It wouldn't be pretty now.

It was a shame. A waste to lose her.

Amanda Stover had been no great loss. She had been a blond airhead.
Yet she'd been smart enough to run to Ms. Prescott when she'd discovered what she'd gotten ahold of, hadn't she?
a niggling voice reminded him.

He plumped his pillow, cursing his own carelessness. It was water under the bridge now. Everything was taken care of. Everything was fine. And what was done was done. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

Chapter 2

AIRBORNE OVER JOLO
 
ISLAND,
 
PHILIPPINES

PRESENT

He'd killed for Darcy Prescott once.
And as the
whump, whump, whump
of the Huey's rotor blades chopped through the murky Philippine night at six hundred feet, Ethan Garrett accepted that he was about to kill for her again.

I
think I might be in some trouble here.... Maybe some bad trouble.

Face grim, Ethan remembered the tremulous sound of his ex-wife's voice on his answering machine almost thirty-six hours ago. Like an automaton, he punched a cherry Life Saver out of a half-eaten roll and slipped it into his mouth. He barely noticed that his fingers smelled like the oil he'd used to clean his M-4 assault rifle. What he did notice, in the muted cockpit light while the chopper spit out a full-bore attack of noise that his radio headset couldn't block, was the faces and the demeanor of the other occupants on board the bird.

The three other men were also in combat mode. And as they neared the target zone among the seven thousand plus islands making up the Philippines, Ethan prayed to God that he'd not only get Darcy out alive, but also that the men who were risking their lives for her, at his request, came out the same way.

He stared at the instrument panel; it was a blur of tiny green lights in the darkness. Familiar ground. Once he'd climbed into the Huey, it was if he'd never left the service. It was Groundhog Day. Muscle memory and combat instincts resurfaced and took control as they had hundreds of times on hundreds of ops. Instincts as ingrained in his psyche as breathing made the years since he'd made his last land assault as a Special Forces soldier fall away on a welcome adrenaline spike.

Yeah. He'd been here before.

The stench of jet fuel. The swelling heat from the tarmac just before takeoff. Chopper engines revved until the earth shook. Rivers of sweat running beneath his flak vest, and the clutch in his gut as the bird lifted off and up into parts unknown.

It could have been yesterday that he'd made that last op. Only it wasn't. It had been three years. And this op was entirely different. He didn't have the might of the U.S. military behind him now as he had then. In fact, if the Army knew what he was about,
they'd
probably shoot him out of the sky long before the bad guys got a bead on him. A little matter of international diplomacy. To which he said:
Screw it.

The Huey shuddered and Ethan longed for a shiny new Blackhawk like the ones he'd spotted at the recently reopened Clark Air Base that were used and maintained by the Special Ops guys and their support personnel stationed in the islands. As long as he was wishing in one hand and spitting in the other, he wished like hell he was going into this op with a couple of Ranger chalks and an ODA—a twelve-man Special Forces operational detachment A-team—on point. But beggars couldn't be choosers and he'd trust these three men—two who were his brothers and one who was like a brother—to pull off the impossible. Which, according to his father, was exactly what the probability was of getting Darcy out alive.

Impossible
was a word Ethan had never accepted— except when it came to their marriage. And that was old, old news.

On a deep breath, he smeared camo paint on his face and reviewed the extraction plan in his head. They would start their search for Darcy on Jolo. The tadpole-shaped island was 960 kilometers south of Manila. The AO they were targeting was pure, ragged jungle spread out over thousands of acres of hills and gorges at the base of Bud Tumangtangis Mountain and far from Jolo City. It was also home to any number of belly crawlers, both the cold-blooded and the human kind. Ethan was only interested in the human kind—a ragtag cadre of murderous Abu Sayyaf terrorists. This particular cell of guerrillas and their larger counterpart on Basilan Island specialized in kidnapping. All indications were that the bastards had Darcy.

They had Darcy.

The grim truth replayed through his mind like a bad dream. It had been five years since the divorce, but Darcy
had
been his once. A part of his life. A part of his family. And he took care of his own.

He
would
get her back.

And the motherfuckers would pay if they so much as put a bruise on her.

He closed his eyes, thought of what they could do to her creamy white skin, and fought a churning clot of nausea. This was gut-check time. He needed to keep his head on straight. His mind clear. So did his brothers and his brother in spirit, Manolo Ortega.

Ethan bit down on the Life Saver; the rush of adrenaline coupled with the tart, sweet taste of cherry that flooded his mouth settled him as he quietly observed each man on board.

His youngest brother, Nolan, in black jeans and T-shirt under his Kevlar vest, was at the bird's controls. Like the rest of them, Nolan was a civilian now, but the former U.S. Army Airborne Ranger was focused, steady, and strong as he worked the collective, cyclic, and rudder pedals, skillfully piloting the bird below the low-hanging cloud cover of an ink black night, zeroing in on the drop zone.