“Doesn’t kidnapping an American count as crossing our borders?”
He shook his head. “They can’t definitively prove who was behind the abduction. And they’re about as eager to poke around drug cartels as a mouse would be to wake a snoring bobcat.”
“What about the government? Why don’t they send a team down to extract her?”
McCoy closed his eyes. “There’s not enough intel to know exactly where she’s been taken. They’re searching all of Panama right now, but the jungle is dense, and it could be weeks before they have enough info to send in an extraction team.”
The captain’s unspoken words hung between them. Jess didn’t have weeks to spare.
With folded hands pressed to his wrinkled forehead, Will pinched his eyes closed. Someone had to go after Jess. She wouldn’t survive for long after the cartel got what they wanted. Once she’d served her purpose, they would have no need for her.
His middle clenched, as if he was preparing for a blow from an opponent in the boxing ring. The truth hit harder than any fist.
The cartel would dispose of her. Soon.
He’d always thought he’d have a chance to end their decade of silence. And a bunch of drug-slinging bioterrorists weren’t going to take that chance from him. He owed her an apology, and he would make sure he had a chance to deliver it.
Pressing flat hands to the tabletop, he gazed into McCoy’s haunted eyes across the table. “What is it you want me to do?”
Another sigh. Another droop to the wide shoulders. “The United States Navy has no official jurisdiction in this situation. Officially, they have no information about it and absolutely no plans for a rescue attempt.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” Bushy eyebrows pulled together, and a flicker of something akin to hope appeared in the captain’s hazel eyes, so much like his daughter’s.
“Yes, sir. I’m going to need approval for a short leave of absence.”
For the first time that evening, the corner of McCoy’s mouth quirked upward in a true smile. “Done.”
“I’ll be out of touch. Completely.” He stared hard at the older man, wishing he could come right out and tell the tough truth. But now that Will had agreed, McCoy needed to set up some plausible deniability. The captain couldn’t know the details. If a superior officer started asking questions, he’d have to tell the truth. No details meant no lies.
The XO hadn’t asked Will to do anything. No orders. Not even a suggestion. Just a conversation in a seedy bar far from the base and further from their norm. No one would recognize them enough to pinpoint that this was the night their lives changed.
But they were about to.
“I understand,” McCoy said.
Eager tension built in his legs, and Will nodded toward the door. “I’d better get going.” He slid across the bench and zipped his jacket as he rose.
The captain followed his movements, trailing him between the pool tables and into the starlit parking lot. Gusts of fresh air were like a lifeboat to a man who didn’t know he was drowning. The sweet scent of the breeze wrapped around him, and he took deep breaths through his nose until his mind was clear of everything but the mission ahead of him.
“Thank you.” The older man’s voice was lower, more gravelly.
Will nodded, but didn’t directly respond. Instead he said, “Please let her husband know that I’ll do everything I can.”
McCoy shoved his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans and cocked his head to the side, his ear almost to his shoulder. “Her husband?”
His palms suddenly sweaty, Will rubbed them against his pants. Was McCoy just pulling his leg or was it possible that she’d never settled down? Jess marrying someone—anyone—else had been the reason for ten years of silence. Was it possible she’d never gotten married at all?
The questions running through his mind must have been broadcast on his face because the captain let out a low chuckle. “Oh, Jess quit dating about the time you disappeared.”
Will nodded, confusion mixing with an unnamed emotion in his chest and leaving him speechless.
“She said she’d rather focus on her education. I tried to talk to her about it, but she didn’t have much to say on the matter. I wish like fire that her mother had been around for that. She’d have known what to say. Instead I bumbled through, and Jessalynn told me not to worry about it, so I let it go.”
The words tumbled around Will’s mind as he tried to make sense of them. Finally, they reemerged as a question as smooth as sandpaper. “Then Jess is—she’s not—she’s never gotten married?”
“No. She’s not married.” The captain offered a fraction of a grin. Maybe it was just a twitch, but it sure looked like more. Like an invitation to be a man instead of running like the boy he’d been all those years before.
McCoy clapped him on the back before striding toward his car. Halfway there, he spun around with a loose shrug of one shoulder. “Try not to start a war, son.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll try.”
But no promises. If it took a war to save Jess, he’d start and end it.
* * *
When three sharp cracks broke the air on the opposite side of the lush courtyard, Jessalynn McCoy fell to the lawn, dropping the box she’d been carrying and covering her head with both hands.
“Up! Up!” The man with the large black gun slung across his chest, dressed head to toe in green camouflage, dug the tip of his boot into her ribs. She cringed, curling into the pain, her already labored breaths coming out in quick puffs. He hadn’t fired the warning shots, but she didn’t doubt that he was willing to shoot at anything. Even her.
Pushing shaking hands beneath her, she glared up into the shadowed face of her guard, Manuel. He was charged with keeping her inside the compound and lugging a myriad of outdated scientific equipment to the room they’d deemed a laboratory. He frowned and spit toward her, barely missing her shoulder. She glared at him, jerking away from the spot next to her hand where the disgusting stream had landed.
Manuel grunted, kicked her foot and pointed his gun at the broken beakers and hot plates scattered at her side. They didn’t need to speak the same language for her to understand what he wanted. When she didn’t move immediately, he wrapped his hand around her arm. Jess jerked it away, her skin crawling under the touch of his callused fingers.
Why couldn’t they just leave her alone?
Every morning they insisted on marching her from her cell of a room to the kitchen for a spicy breakfast and then pushing her from the storage shed to the lab and back, carrying supplies that had probably been upgraded about the time Louis Pasteur started studying biology.
She didn’t bother voicing her complaints. What good would it do? She wasn’t a guest. She was a prisoner. And so she kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the exits, dreaming up wildly improbable escape plans.
Realistically, she knew she’d never be able to get away on her own. She didn’t even know what country she was in. Even if she could scale an outside security wall and scramble over the loops of barbed wire and shards of glass without getting snagged, she had no idea what she’d face on the other side, or how she would get to help.
She was stuck inside this steaming, muddy compound—with or without a personal escort.
At least until she could figure out a plausible plan.
Or until her dad sent help.
Manuel shoved her shoulder, and she whispered, “God, please let him send help soon.”
“Qué?”