Read the book: «Tactical Rescue»

ONE

Rebecca Miles dug her toes into the narrow crags of the Northern Ontario rock face, braced her legs against the granite and raised the lens of her video camera up to where jagged rock brushed against sky. Wind tugged her dark, shoulder-length hair free from its ponytail and sent it flying around her face. Something rustled in the trees far below her, but the quiver on the back of her neck told her not to look down. It was probably just the wind. Maybe an animal. But she couldn’t imagine there’d be another person around for miles. She grabbed hold of a stubborn pine growing out of the rock to her right and focused on searching for the falcon’s nest.

The climb up the embankment had turned out to be a whole lot steeper than she’d expected when she’d been standing safely on the ground, watching a pair of peregrines soar above. The narrow road got so little traffic, she could come and go for days without seeing another vehicle. It cut straight through a hill not far from the tiny patch of land she’d inherited from her mother. She’d left her camper and truck there, and hiked over. Now about fifty feet of steeply slanted rock and trees lay between her and the road below.

Something rumbled in the distance. It sounded like approaching thunder, but judging by the endless blue above, it was more likely a vehicle of some sort. Hopefully it wouldn’t frighten off the birds. Falcons mated for life and at this time of year a circling pair often meant a nest. Good clear footage of fluffy white babies would cover both gas for her truck and basic groceries for a month or more. If she actually managed to catch a falcon family portrait, she’d have a solid chunk to put toward her next overseas trip.

Lord, You know I have a list a mile long of charity projects I’m hoping to film. But until then, help me just be thankful for everything I’ve got.

Freedom. Independence.

The ability to go where she wanted, film what interested her and have adventures on her own terms.

As a teenager, her happiest moments had been when she’d managed to slip away from her claustrophobic home life, to wander aimlessly around the now decommissioned military base at Remi Lake, a few hours north from where she now stood. Her mother had spent the first several years of Rebecca’s life anxiously waiting for word from Rebecca’s father—an absent man whom Rebecca had never met and wasn’t supposed to ask about. Then, at thirteen, her mother had suddenly married General Arthur Miles—a decorated and larger-than-life hero in Canada’s small, tight-knit military community, who’d encouraged Rebecca to call him “the General” and never “Dad.” They’d moved onto the base, where she’d found herself with a twelve-year-old stepbrother named Seth, who’d never missed an opportunity to tell his gangly, awkward stepsister just how little he thought of her. She’d moved out at eighteen and hadn’t seen the General since her mother’s funeral, two years later, from a prescription meds overdose. But distancing herself from Seth had been more challenging.

She hadn’t seen him in person for years, but that hadn’t stopped him from bugging her online. The final straw had been when she’d set up a social media account and Seth had filled it with sarcastic comments. She’d blocked him instantly, only to have the computer engineer hack his way right back in. So she’d deleted the whole thing. Now, she could easily go days without checking her email, catching up on the news or even seeing another person.

Life was just simpler off the grid.

Her feet shifted. Pebbles cascaded down the hill beneath her. She tightened her grip and focused on searching for the nest. She’d started thinking about a falcon family and here her brain had rambled right on down the rabbit hole to thoughts of her own family life. Then she saw it. Three speckled eggs were nestled on a thin stone ledge. Rebecca smiled. She could use the winch on the back of her truck to raise a camera up here and monitor the feed through the video equipment in her camper. Her camera lens rose to the sky as she followed the adult falcons’ flight. In falcon pairings both the male and female hunted. Both the male and female soared.

Instead of leaving one of them huddled at home in the nest.

She let out a long breath. This was the problem with camping and filming up here: it was all too easy to get stuck in the past, as memories of life on the Remi Lake military base nipped at the edges of her mind.

Why couldn’t she let go of those years? Five years on base was enough to convince her that no matter how much she was drawn to the strength and courage of a man in uniform, she’d never put herself through the pain her mother had lived by falling for one. But there’d only ever been one young man on base to really tug on Rebecca’s heartstrings. Zack Biggs. Orphaned when both of his parents had died in combat, he’d been living at Remi Lake with his aunt and uncle, who’d also served. Zack had been sweet, sensitive and every bit as introverted as she was. The exact opposite of big personalities like the General and Seth. She’d been the only teenage girl in the base’s mixed martial arts class and clumsy to boot. Zack’d been husky and very overweight, but determined to get into shape, and with secret dreams of one day joining the special forces. They’d stuck together, as sparring partners and outsiders in a class full of confident jocks, like Seth. Zack was the closest she’d ever come to both a best friend and a high school crush. Closest she’d ever come to a date, too. When she’d been the surprise winner of a trophy for top student in the class, Zack had asked her to the formal sports banquet. She’d said yes. But he’d stood her up, only to then show up outside the hall, hours later in the pouring rain, to tell her that he’d just enlisted.

And she’d realized just how close she’d come to being in love with a military man.

The sound of the engine grew louder. The camera’s volume meter was jumping. Her microphone was picking up the sound. She stopped recording and spun the camera’s gaze toward the road, using the zoom function like a pair of binoculars. It was a motorcycle. Very nice machine, too. Harley-Davidson, maybe? If her memory of the General’s collection was accurate. The bigger question was what it was even doing up here on this road to nowhere. She was hardly expecting company. He leaned into a skid and she caught a glimpse of an emblem with a red circle and a gold crown on the side of the bike. Canadian military. Infantry to be specific. Someone in the area on leave? Someone who’d gotten lost looking for the remains of the Remi Lake base?

The microphone picked up more rustling beneath her and this time her gaze followed the noise. A man in blue jeans and a toque had stepped out of the tree line, carrying what looked like a black softball. He was tall, but scrawny. Like a coyote who hadn’t eaten in days. He tucked the black ball in a crag in the rocks beneath her, then went back for another two balls. Then he pulled out what looked like the remains of a cell phone. Her heart stopped as things she’d learned filming in war zones suddenly caught up to what her eyes were seeing now.

IEDs. Improvised explosive devices.

A terrorist’s explosive weapon of choice.

And somebody was now planting them in the Ontario rock beneath her.

Questions shot rapid-fire through her mind, but she didn’t give them time to form into words.

Thanks to the tree cover, the scrawny man might not even know she was standing on the rock above him. The man on the motorcycle probably had no idea the road was about to explode. All that mattered now was warning them both.

Adrenaline ran cold through her veins. The motorcycle rushed closer, the driver blind to the danger ahead. She prayed. I’m the only hope he has, Lord. Please, show me what to do! Her mind spun through the contents of her utility belt. She had a canister of bug spray, a small pocket knife, an air horn...

The motorcycle reached the final curve.

She grabbed the air horn and pressed. A deafening blare echoed through the rocks.

The motorcycle swerved sideways and for a moment she thought he’d managed to stop.

But it was too late.

An explosion filled the air, shaking the rock beneath her feet.

The bike flipped, crashing end over end.

She hugged the tree and braced her legs against the cliff.

The earth gave way beneath her feet.

* * *

Sergeant Zack Keats, recon specialist for the Canadian Forces’ elite and highly classified counterterrorism force, hurtled through the air as the force of the explosion ripped the motorbike out from under him.

Hot smoke billowed around him, with the deafening roar of falling rocks. Just moments earlier he’d been cruising, feeling the wind beat against his body, wondering if he’d even find Rebecca Miles at her campsite. And if he did, how was he going to tell a woman he hadn’t seen since the day she’d shattered his heart as a teenager that her stepbrother, Seth, was now a wanted criminal and traitor? Then he’d rounded a corner, a siren had sounded and the world had exploded around him.

A prayer for help moved through the soldier’s mind as instinctively as his body adopted the position for impact.

Protect his neck. Curl his shoulders. Relax his body.

Save me, Lord. I need You now. But if this is it, have mercy—

The road hit him like a slab of concrete. Pain shot through his body. He bounced. His visor cracked. His bike was nothing but a tangled mass of metal to his right. Beyond it lay a pile of rubble from where rock and trees had slid down off the front of the cliff face, barricading the road ahead. At least most of the cliff was still standing.

Not the worst hit he’d ever taken. First as a soldier with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and then a part of the Canadian Forces joint task force for special ops, he’d spent most of his life in the world’s roughest hot spots. Long before then, as a painfully sensitive and overweight young man, he’d taken his share of bullies’ beatings, too, before he’d shed the last name he’d hated for a new one, converted his fat into muscle and refocused his emotional core into the kind of steady, unflappable determination needed to throw himself between the world’s biggest bullies and those in need of rescue. But this ambush had definitely come without warning.

The world was still spinning. His ears were ringing. He ignored both, pressed a leather-gloved hand against the pavement and tensed himself to spring.

“Don’t move.” A lanky figure stepped out of the smoke. A ski mask covered his face and there was a handgun in his hand. A Glock. Almost certainly illegal.

Instinctively, Zack’s hand reached for his own weapon, before remembering his firearm was unloaded and locked in his bag on the back of his bike, as was expected of him when on leave in Canada. Zack had always played by the rules. If it came to it, he’d die by them, too. But until that moment came, he was prepared to fight. His hand slid toward the knife in his ankle holster.

“I said, don’t move.” The masked man raised the gun. He sounded flustered and more than a little angry. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to.”

Didn’t want to shoot him? He’d just blown up the road. If the explosives had gone off just a few seconds later Zack would be dead now. So either this man was so desperate or foolish he didn’t know what he was doing, or else he was lying through his teeth. But was he also Seth Miles, the traitor and criminal, that Zack was up here to talk to Rebecca about?

Zack fixed his gaze on the man’s blue eyes, trying to mentally combine pictures from the news with his twenty-year-old memories of the bully who’d tormented him. Then he reminded himself that he still had no idea where the siren had come from.

“Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want.” Zack kept his hands steady and his voice calm. “But I don’t want to fight you. Please, just let me search the area and make sure nobody else is in trouble.”

The man hesitated. His eyes darted from what remained of the cliff side down to the rock pile now blocking the road. “There’s nobody else here,” he said. But his voice sounded far from confident.

“You sure about that? I heard an air horn. If you weren’t the one who sounded it, then someone else did.”

But this time, he ignored Zack’s question. Instead, he stepped closer.

“You and I both know there’s only one reason for anyone to be on this road.” He pressed the barrel of his gun against the cracks in Zack’s visor. “Get out of here. Don’t come back. And stop looking for Seth Miles. He doesn’t want to be found.”

Zack would’ve snorted if the situation hadn’t been deadly serious. Was he joking? This morning, Zack had been minding his own business, camping, quietly enjoying his last three days of home leave, when he’d hopped on his bike to go get gas and charge his cell phone. The coffee shop television had been blaring the news that authorities across North America had launched an all-out manhunt for Seth. Armed and presumed dangerous, according to the TV, Seth was wanted for treason, theft and attempted murder, after the computer engineer had abused his civilian military clearance, hacked into a government database, stolen something highly classified and then shot an unidentified woman in an Ottawa park.

But while news commentators and coffee-shop gossips had been hung up on how Seth was the only son of decorated hero General Arthur Miles, Zack’s laser-sharp mind had suddenly filled with the adventurous eyes and wild dark hair of the only other person on earth who’d witnessed Seth’s selfishness and bullying arrogance as Zack had. Rebecca. And the pledge Zack had made long ago, to always have her back. So he’d hopped on his bike and headed north, without even waiting for his phone to finish charging.

Seth wasn’t his target. Apprehending Seth wasn’t his mission. Still, he wasn’t about to let a comment like that slide.

“Seth Miles is a coward and a traitor.” Zack’s voice rose. “He stole government secrets—”

Blue eyes flashed in fury. “He was protecting the country!”

“He shot an unarmed woman! Tried to murder her!”

“No! I didn’t! I didn’t shoot her!” Seth yelled. With a simple slip of the tongue he made his attempted disguise worthless.

Zack nearly chuckled through gritted teeth. “Oh, you didn’t, did you, Seth? But you did steal sensitive information from your own country for a quick and easy payday?”

“You have no clue what I did or why I did it!” Seth flicked his handgun’s safety switch off. “You stay away from me. You stay away from my sister. Or I’ll kill you.”

A muffled cry filled the air to Zack’s right. Female. Frightened.

There was somebody trapped under those rocks and screaming for help. Seth’s neck turned toward the sound. Zack kicked Seth’s knees out and sent him sprawling. The Glock fired into the air. But Zack wrestled the weapon from Seth’s grasp before he could fire again and leveled a swift blow to his jaw. Seth hit the pavement. His head snapped back. There was a chain around Seth’s neck. A small blue computer memory stick hung from it. The stolen government computer files? Zack grabbed it and yanked it hard, breaking the chain from around Seth’s neck. Then Zack ran for the rock pile. The voice had gone silent.

“Hello!” Zack scanned the rock pile. “Hey! Is somebody there?”

He tried to shove his visor up. It wouldn’t budge. Then he heard it. A gasp. A cry. A voice, faint but strong, and coming from under the rocks. He saw fingers sliding out of a gap. A slender hand, clad in a climbing glove.

“I’m here. It’s okay. I’ve got you.” He climbed across the rocks, crouched down and touched her hand lightly, just enough to reassure her. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Seth scrambling to his feet.

Zack’s brain went into triage mode. He had to stop Seth. He had to save the woman beneath the rocks. He couldn’t let a traitor escape. He couldn’t let a civilian die.

“Please, Lord,” she gasped. “I don’t want to die down here.”

The woman’s prayer yanked Zack’s attention back to the rocks. Seth disappeared over the other side of the rubble. Zack grabbed a boulder, hoisted it up and threw it off the pile. Then he looked down. Dark, determined eyes looked up at him. Black hair lay dusty and wild around a sun-kissed face. Her delicate lips parted but no sound came out. Zack’s heart beat painfully in his chest, with the same unexpected sting he’d felt as a teenager, as he looked across the gym martial arts mats and suddenly laid eyes on the most beautiful person he’d ever seen.

It was Rebecca.