Whether she liked it or not.
“Do we care about what they’re doing?” Cody asked. “They have Rebecca. We need her. So we go and get her. Seems simple enough to me.”
Grant snorted. “And how exactly are we supposed to whisk her off an island populated by an army of Russian soldiers? We’re like four and a half dudes—with one helicopter. No offense, Doc.”
“Offense taken, asshole.” Jamie flipped Grant the finger. Yeah, after being shot during a mass casualty event orchestrated by their enemy, he still had a way to go to recover from his partial knee replacement. Didn’t matter. When it came to protecting his girls, he didn’t sit on the sidelines.
Becca was the key to stopping Dominion. If the JTT failed, if they didn’t recover the code locked away in her beautiful brain, the result would be catastrophic on a global scale.
“I’m going,” Jay said, steeling himself against the coming protests.
“Me too,” Davis Nader added, infusing his backbone with conviction and sitting taller in his seat.
“No.” Adam set his steely gaze on the seventeen-year-old. “I need you here.”
“But—”
“No buts,” Adam said, cutting off the teenager’s protest. “I gave you an order. You’ll follow it. We clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Davis grumbled, unhappy about being excluded from the mission.
“You’re not going either,” Grant said to Adam. The curved peak of his ball cap aimed straight across the wide boardroom table; he narrowed his eyes in a hard stare as he folded his arms over his vintage “Goonies Never Say Die” T-shirt.
Ever-present twin Berettas holstered under his arms, and hands resting on the hard surface in front of him, Adam leaned forward the barest inch. The slight movement as big a threat as the double tap of his trigger finger against the polished wood. “Last time I checked, I didn’t take orders from you.”
Grant didn’t so much as blink in response to the intimidation tactic, but the smile curving the corners of his goatee was the equivalent of an unspoken fuck you, and Jay had to give it to him. The man had balls of steel.
“Jesus Christ.” Chase Mackenzie shook his head. As the JTT’s second-in-command and Adam’s brother-in-law, it fell to him to talk some sense into their leader. “It’s me or you,” he said, unwilling to risk leaving his wife unprotected for any amount of time. “One of us stays with Gray—always. That was our agreement. And the last time I checked, you couldn’t fly a paper fucking airplane, never mind a forty-million-dollar next-gen Black Hawk.”
“Grant can stay and?—”
“No.” Chase cut off Adam’s predictable reply with one firm syllable, leaving no room for debate. “The Hawk needs two pilots, and Grant’s been training to be my second. Z’s the crew chief. Jay’s on tech. Cody is weapons and gear. And Doc’s our medic. If we’re going to pull this off, we need to be smart about it, and I need to be confident my wife is safe and where she’s supposed to be.”
Beside him, Grant huffed, a low sound of derision. He knew as well as anyone how unpredictable Grace Mackenzie could be. And the fact he was in love with his teammate’s wife wasn’t lost on anyone around the table, including Chase himself.
A situation he’d taken advantage of when he’d asked Grant to stay with the JTT to help keep Gray safe from the man who wanted her dead.
Jonas fucking Johnson. The domestic terrorist they were after, and the current front-runner in the polls for the upcoming presidential election. If their former boss had it his way, they’d all be dead. Corpses rotting six feet under.
Right next to his son, Jonas Johnson Jr.
The former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and all-around colossal fucking prick, Johnson blamed Gray for his only child’s untimely demise. But truth be told, he was just one among the hundreds of dead. Collateral damage in his father’s pursuit of the Oval Office and the ultimate race for world domination.
“Fine.” Adam sat back in his chair, conceding the lost point as his back slammed against the soft leather. “Davis and I hang back here while we watch over the women. You, five and a half, can lead the mission to rescue Rebecca. No offense, Doc.”
“Offense taken, dickhead.” Despite his grin, Jamie’s middle finger got a workout as he once again flipped the bird. “It’s not my bum leg we need to worry about. Six guys against a Russian army is a suicide mission. How the fuck are we going to pull this off?”
“We need help,” Cody replied, his gaze flicking back to the Smartboard and the latest satellite picture of the formidable island.
“Do we trust the CIA with this?” Zander asked.
Already shaking his head, Jay’s relief loosened the tension in his chest when Adam agreed with him verbally. “No. They don’t know Rebecca is the key to controlling Dominion. Right now, we have the advantage. I want to keep it that way. Nobody outside this house needs to know about her role. Agreed?”
Everyone around the table nodded.
Yeah, there’d been a time when Jay trusted his CIA recruiter implicitly. Not anymore. Not after Diane Heughan finally revealed the truth about Dominion and the virus’s catastrophic consequences for the fate of humankind.
An apocalyptic shutdown of the world’s supercomputers.
