“Three heat spots haven’t moved much all day.”
Catalanotto laughed. “Are you telling me you think you’ve located our hostages?”
Cowboy clicked once into his lip mike.
Christopher Sterling, Kurt Matthews and Melody Evans. Cowboy had been carrying those names inside his head ever since Alpha Squad was first briefed on this mission in the plane that took them to their insertion point—a high-altitude, low-opening parachute jump from high above the desert just outside the terrorist-controlled city.
He’d seen the hostages’ pictures, too.
All of the men in Alpha Squad had held on to the picture of Melody Evans for a little bit longer than necessary. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three at most—hardly more than a kid. In the photo, she was dressed in blue jeans and a plain T-shirt that didn’t show off her female figure but didn’t quite manage to hide it, either. She was blue-eyed with wavy blond hair that tumbled down her back and a country-fresh, slightly shy smile and sweet face that reminded each and every one of them of their little sisters—even those of ’em like Cowboy who didn’t have a little sister.
And Cowboy knew they were all thinking the same thing. As they were sitting there on that plane, waiting to reach their destination, that girl was at the mercy of a group of terrorists who weren’t known for their humanitarian treatment of hostages. In fact, the opposite was true. This group’s record of torture and abuse was well documented, as was their intense hatred of all things American.
He hated to think what they might do—had already done—to this young woman who could’ve been the poster model for the All-American Girl. But all day long, he’d kept a careful eye on the three heat sources he suspected were the hostages. And all day long, none of them had been moved.
“Fourth floor, interior room,” he said quietly into his mike. “Northwest corner.”
“I don’t suppose in your free time you found us a way into the embassy?” Cat asked.
“Minimal movement on the top floor,” Cowboy reported. Those windows were broken, too. “Roof to windows—piece a cake.”
“And gettin’ to the roof?” The south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line voice that spoke over his headphones was that of Lt. Blue McCoy, Alpha Squad’s point man and Joe Cat’s second-in-command.
“Just a stroll from where I’m at. Connecting roofs. Route’s clear—I’ve already checked.”
“Why the hell did I bother bringing along the rest of you guys?” Cat asked. Cowboy could hear the older man’s smile in his voice. “Good job, kid.”
“Only kind I do,” Cowboy drawled.
“That’s what I really love about you, Junior.” Senior Chief Daryl Becker, also known as Harvard, spoke up, his deep voice dry with humor. “Your humility. It’s rare to find such a trait in one so young.”
“Permission to move?” Cowboy asked.
“Negative, Jones,” Cat replied. “Wait for Harvard. Go in as a team.”
Cowboy clicked an affirmative, keeping his infrared glasses glued to the embassy.
It wouldn’t be long now until they went inside and got Melody Evans and the others out.
* * *
It happened so quickly, Melody wasn’t sure where they came from or who they were.
One moment she was sitting in the corner, writing in her notebook, and the next she was lying on her stomach on the linoleum, having been thrown there none too gently by one of the robed men who’d appeared out of thin air.
She felt the barrel of a gun jammed into her throat, just under her jaw, as she tried to make sense of the voices.
“Silence!” she was ordered in more languages than she could keep track of. “Keep your mouths shut or we’ll shut ’em for you!”
“Dammit,” she heard someone say in very plain English, “the girl’s not here. Cat, we’ve got three pieces of luggage, but none of them’s female.”
“If none of them’s female, one of ’em’s a tango. Search ’em and do it right.”
English. Yes. They were definitely speaking American English. Still, with that gun in her neck, she didn’t dare lift her head to look up at them.
“Lucky, Bobby and Wes,” another voice commanded, “search the rest of this floor. Find that girl.”
Melody felt rough hands on her body, moving across her shoulders and down her back, sweeping down her legs. She was being searched for a weapon, she realized. One of the hands reached up expertly to feel between her legs as another pushed its way up underneath her arm and around to her chest. She knew the exact instant that each hand encountered either more or less than their owner expected, because whomever those hands belonged to, he froze.
Then he flipped her onto her back, and Melody found herself staring up into the greenest eyes she’d ever seen in her life.
He pulled off her hat and touched her hair, then looked at the black shoe polish that had come off on his fingers. He looked down at the mustache she had made from some of her own cut hair darkened with mascara and glued underneath her nose. He smiled as he looked back into her eyes. It was a smile that lit his entire face and made his eyes sparkle.
“Melody.” It was more of a statement than a question.
But she nodded anyway.
“Ma’am, I’m Ensign Harlan Jones of the U.S. Navy SEALs,” he said in a soft Western drawl. “We’ve come to take you home.” He looked up then, speaking to one of the other hooded men. “Cat, belay that last order. We’ve found our female hostage, safe and sound.”
* * *
“Absolutely not.” Kurt Matthews folded his arms across his narrow chest. “They said if any of us attempted an escape, they’d kill us all. They said if we did what we were told, and if the government complied with their modest list of demands, we’d be set free. I say we stay right here.”
“There’s no way we can get out of here undetected,” the other man—Sterling—pointed out. “There’s too many of them. They’ll stop us and then they’ll kill us. I think it’s safer to do what they said.”
Cowboy shifted impatiently in his seat. Negotiating with damn fools was not one of his strengths, yet Cat had left him here to try to talk some sense into these boneheads as the rest of the squad went on to complete the rest of their mission—the destruction of several extremely confidential files in the ambassador’s personal office.
He knew that if worse came to worst, they’d knock ’em over the head and carry ’em out. But it would be a lot easier to move through the city, working their way toward the extraction point, without having to carry three unconscious bodies over their shoulders.
Not for the first time in the past twenty minutes, he found himself staring at Melody Evans.
He had to smile. And admire the hell out of her. There was no doubt in his mind that her quick thinking had saved her own life. She’d disguised herself as a man. She’d cut her long hair short, blackened it with shoe polish to hide its golden color and glued some kind of straggly-looking mustache thing onto her face.
Even with her hair shorn so close to her head and that ridiculous piece of hair stuck underneath her nose, she was pretty. He couldn’t imagine that he’d looked at her when they’d first come in and not seen right away that she was a woman. But he hadn’t. He’d thrown her onto the floor, for God’s sake. And then he’d groped her, searching for hidden weapons.
She glanced at him as if feeling his eyes on her, and he felt it again—that flash of sexual awareness that jolted to life between them. He held her gaze, boldly letting his smile grow wider, letting