All of that aside, the entire Donbas region was notoriously dangerous. Ukrainians loyal to Zelensky had been fleeing to Kyiv since the war began, months before Russia officially took over the areas, and they were bringing their stories with them. They said that both Luhansk and Donetsk were run with Soviet-era tactics that were more severe than anything the Kremlin imposed upon the people in Russia. If the separatists who controlled the region even suspected that something might be amiss, people were known to disappear into one of the “cellars,” or Gulag-styled prisons that had sprung up throughout Luhansk and Donetsk. Because they were not subject to the oversight of the United Nations Human Rights watchdogs, these prisons were reputed to be some of the most barbaric seen since the end of the Cold War. Those that had survived them described scenes reminiscent of the brutality of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s KGB enforcers.

  And that was what #15 was part of.

  Yes. He was definitely out of his mind. But if Hans Becker was incarcerated there, then that was where he was going.

  Michael looked at his watch and leaned his head back against the seat tiredly. It was a long trip, over 19 hours total. The train from Moscow to Kamenskaia Station, located in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, Rostov Oblast, was thirteen hours alone. Then, according to his calculations, he would have to drive for another hour and a half to cross over into Luhansk. Flying would have been so much faster, but thanks to the war, Ukrainian airspace remained closed. That left only trains and automobiles.

  Pressing his lips together, he shifted his gaze out of the window again. If he could do things his way, he would have called in a favor and had a military airlift ready to go. But Charlie wanted him to have a low profile on this one, and that meant no favors, and certainly no drawing attention to himself with an authorized military flight across war-torn Ukraine. He just hoped that by the time he made it to #15, Hans Becker was still there and, more importantly, still alive.

  Michael had no idea how he was going to gain access to what, by all accounts, was most likely a Gulag. Even if he managed it, he didn’t know that Becker would be of any use to him at all. He was going all this way on a hunch and, while his gut hadn’t led him astray yet, it would be his luck that this would be the one time that it did. A humorless smile twisted his lips. If he got thrown into a hell-hole and tortured to death over nothing, he was going be one pissed off Marine.

  The smile faded and he shook his head. He was a fool for even attempting this alone. He really needed the assistance of one of Charlie’s assets, but he hadn’t had time to contact him before leaving Minsk. Catching the train had been enough of a rush as it was. He tried not to have many dealings with the assassins that Charlie utilized ruthlessly across the world, but he did admit that their particular skill set came in handy. They were especially useful in operations like the one that he was contemplating.

  Four and a half years ago, he’d never even heard of The Organization. He was an agent with the Secret Service when he’d been called into a meeting with his boss and a few suits that he knew only by name. When he walked out of the meeting, he’d been tasked with the impossible job of finding a rogue government assassin before they attacked the Vice President. That was the day he learned of the top secret section of the CIA that specialized in black ops, but that was all he was told. The Organization was an agency shrouded in secrets and top security clearance, and his clearance was only on a need-to-know basis.

  When the assassin he was hunting came to him, he’d been shocked to learn that the killer he was looking for was Dave’s kid sister. Over the months that followed, Michael had learned more than he ever wanted to know about what, exactly, Alina did for a living. He hadn’t cared for it then, and he still didn’t care for it. Charlie’s assassins answered only to him, and he answered only to the President of the United States. There was no oversight to speak of. The majority of The Organization’s missions were unknown to the Executive Branch for the simple reason that they, universally, didn’t want to know. The Organization was bad for politics, but it was a necessary evil that had saved the nation from more than one widespread disaster. And so Charlie had free rein to keep the nation’s interests safe, using whatever means necessary.

  With any other human being in charge, the results would be chilling. But over the past four years, Michael had learned to respect the man who ruled them all with an iron hand. He was not only incredibly intelligent, but he was also stubbornly cautious. His assets were only deployed when no one else could touch the enemy and all other attempts had failed. When there was no other hope, Charlie sent in one of his trained weapons to neutralize the threat that no other government could. And they used Michael’s intelligence to do it.

  The Organization was so successful because Charlie always seemed to know what was going to happen before it took place. Michael was one of many spies who provided the crucial information that allowed Charlie to make intelligent and informed decisions with the array of weapons that he had at his disposal. Once he gathered the intelligence, Michael’s job was done and the asset’s began. Part of the reason Viper and the SEAL had been so successful was because the information they had to work with was far superior to anything that Federal agencies had available. It was a well-oiled, time-tested system, and it worked. Michael had only been with the Organization for a few months before he was forced to grudgingly admit that the system was efficient and effective.

  Michael was very good at his job. He’d been trained to be the elite, and that training included combat training. He could hold his own, and had gone through most of the same training Charlie’s assets had, but for one crucial difference. His training ended three weeks before the asset training. Whatever it was that they learned in that last three weeks was a mystery, but it was the very thing that made them so deadly.

  And so terrifying.

  If Michael was honest with himself, he’d admit that the assassins scared the crap out of him. He thought most of them had to be psychopaths to do what they did, even though he knew that wasn’t the case. Those who failed the almost daily psych evaluations didn’t complete the training. Even so, the few that he’d encountered in his four years had left him looking over his shoulder.

  Looking back, he realized Viper and her SEAL, Hawk, had been the same. However, he knew Alina before she was a trained assassin, so he supposed he simply never saw her that way. And the SEAL? Well, he knew how to hide that part of himself and be charming when he wanted to be, and that went a long way to making Michael able to turn a blind eye to what it was that they did when they weren’t in New Jersey.

  He exhaled and rubbed his face, stifling a yawn. He would have to contact Charlie, and when he did, Charlie would insist on sending an asset to help. He would be an idiot to turn the help down. No matter how uncomfortable the assets made him, they were extremely effective. They would get him in and out of a Gulag without breaking a sweat, and they would be backup to save his ass when this all went to hell.

  Viper closed her laptop and slid it into the bag at her feet. Everything was arranged. When she reached Kyiv, she would rendezvous with Dori outside the station. He had identification and documents for her, and the name of someone who would assist her when she arrived in Kharkiv. The fact that he was still in Ukraine was impressive, but she was glad that he was. Without his help, she would have to spend precious hours arranging her own weapons and transportation—precious hours that Hawk didn’t have.

  Alina turned her gaze to her reflection in the dark window beside her. When she landed in Gomel, she’d reached the train with only moments to spare, thanks to a lengthy security check at the airport. She didn’t remember Belarus being so stringent with their security, but then, she hadn’t been in the country for over three years. It was amazing what changed when your allied overlord went to war with one of your border countries. Amazing, but not unexpected. The tension seemed high in Gomel, and she’d learned that planes were not permitted to fly beyond the civilian airport without special dispensation from the Russian military. It was a good thing her pilot had opted not to risk a maverick flight to one of the smaller airfields in the south. While it would have got her closer to the border, it would undoubtedly have resulted in a lengthy, if not permanent, delay. As it was, she had been one of the last to board the train to Kyiv.

  She had a long road in front of her. She had to make it across war-torn Ukraine, then cross the border into Russia in order to enter Luhansk, and she had to do it without being “seen” by the Russians at all. Her papers would stand up to the scrutiny. She was sure of that. Her concern was the notoriously fickle agents along both the Russian border and in Luhansk itself. Considering the current political climate in the area, she conservatively estimated that she had a seventy percent chance of getting to the prison in Luhansk undetected and, more importantly, unmolested. If she missed even one detail in her disguise and cover story, that estimate dropped to below forty. If anyone tried to delay her in any way, she admitted the estimate would deteriorate to zero rapidly as she would most likely kill anyone who got in her way. And then, so much for getting in and out without a trace.

  Alina exhaled silently, staring at her reflection. It seemed almost poetic that her first time officially back in the game would turn into a near-impossible journey through Ukraine and into the very depths of old Soviet Russia. After all, things had never been easy when she’d worked for Charlie full-time. Why would it be any different now? She smiled faintly and looked down at her watch. In a little less than five hours, she’d roll into the station in Kyiv. That would be her last chance to turn around and find another way to get Damon out of the hell hole he’d been thrown into. Once she boarded the train to Kharkiv, she would be out of reach for Charlie or Jack. They had both warned her that once she entered Russia, neither of them could get her out. It was up to her to get herself, and Damon, back into Ukraine where they could arrange an extraction.

  She had to be out of her mind.

  Except that she wasn’t. Alina had never been so sure of her course of action in her long and colorful career. Even when she jumped out of a plane above the waves of the Atlantic, she’d been unsure if taking the yacht was the best plan. Damon had certainly tried to talk her out of it. He’d had doubts from the very beginning. Doubts that, in retrospect, had turned out to be chillingly valid. She had almost died that night while finishing a fight that had been picked long before she ever left New Jersey and joined the Navy to begin her fast-track into Charlie’s Organization. It shouldn’t have been her fight to wade into, and wouldn’t have been if Harry hadn’t ordered the hit that put a bullet into her brother’s head.

  Alina shook her head impatiently. That was all over now, and she’d learned to live again after it was finished. She’d been given a second chance at life, and she’d grabbed it with both hands and hadn’t looked back. The past four years had been more than she ever would have dared to hope for when she planned that last impossible op. Given her past, she’d never allowed herself to consider any kind of happily ever after. People like her didn’t get the picket fence and front porch. It was a fact that she’d accepted long ago.

  And yet, she had.

  She and Damon had been given a new life, a new start. Instead of a picket fence, they had several paddock fences at Damon’s ranch in Oklahoma. And the wide, covered porch was in the back of the sprawling house, not the front. It was bigger, better, and more than she deserved. Their life together was more than either of them deserved.

  Knowing that his wife was not a fan of the country life, Damon had made sure they traveled often, and extensively. In that first year, they were at the ranch for only a few weeks. The plague that gripped the world had curtailed some of their wandering, but not all of it. No restrictions or lockdowns could curtail people with their skills and training, and they had taken the opportunity to visit places less traveled. Places like her mountain top in South America where she had spent two years under the caring and helpful tutelage of her sensei. They had even taken Raven along with them, but once again, the hawk refused to remain behind when she left.

  Alina felt a rush of genuine amusement go through her. Raven was her black hawk and, while he’d condescended to make Oklahoma his home, he made it clear every time she was home that he was her pet. He’d even learned to tolerate Damon over the past few years.

  And so had she.

  Alina never thought she could love anyone as deeply as she’d ended up loving her husband. It was almost as if he had become a part of her. Michael had called him her other half once, and she’d felt uncomfortable with that term. Now he was exactly that. When they’d impulsively married, it had been more of an agreeable business arrangement. There had been no mention of love, or of any of the deeper and more sensitive feelings that most couples just loved to gush about. For them, it had been a practical union of assets, with the added bonus of a physical attraction they had both been very tired of denying. They lived their lives in the gray shadows between good and evil, right and wrong, and that’s where their marriage had fallen as well.

  But in their four years together, that had changed. Now she couldn’t imagine a life without Damon, despite the very real fact that she was staring at one now. And yet, in four years, she had never actually told him that she loved him.

  Funny, that. She stared at herself, her brows pulled together thoughtfully. Why? Why hadn’t she ever actually said the words? It certainly wasn’t because she didn’t trust him. There was no one on earth that she trusted more. She supposed she simply never thought to tell him she loved him and, to be fair, he hadn’t said it either. Was it because they thought they didn’t deserve to be so happy together? Or was it simply that too much time had passed and it seemed silly to bring it up now. After all, how did you tell the man you’d shared everything with for four years that you love him? She showed him a million times, every day, and that had always been enough.

  But now she wondered if it really was. If Damon died in a Gulag before she could reach him, battered and alone, would he know how much she loved him? As soon as the thought entered her head, she frowned and pushed it aside impatiently. Of course he knew, just as she knew how much she meant to him. They weren’t the kind of people to write cute little notes with hearts, or sing love songs to each other. They were very practical, and much preferred to show each other how they felt. Words, as they both knew all too well, were often false and empty. It was the actions that mattered.

  And the niggling little voice in the back of her head could shut it. Damon wasn’t going to die before she reached him. She wouldn’t allow it.

  And if he did have the appalling gall to give up before she got there, the people responsible would wish they’d never been born by the time she was finished with them. She’d picked up some new tricks in her retirement, and she wouldn’t hesitate to make them beg for death.

  Viper looked at her watch again and leaned her head back. Charlie was right. She had to rest and get some sleep. Sleep meant the difference between being sharp and alert, or being dumb and slow. Dumb and slow was a death warrant. She had to sleep.

  But as she closed her eyes, her mind refused to cooperate. Every hour that passed was another hour that Damon was fighting to live. Every day that passed, his chances of survival fell dramatically. Of all the places for him be imprisoned, it had to be in an old Soviet-era Gulag in Luhansk. The place was a lawless hell-hole run by separatists who delighted in tactics used by the KGB in years past. While she would back Damon against them any day, it was another ballgame entirely when he was their prisoner.

  How the hell had he been captured to begin with? Viper’s lips tightened. It was a question that had been plaguing her from the beginning. Hawk was far too experienced to make a mistake or give himself away, and Charlie was adamant that no one but himself knew of the current operation, so that ruled out betrayal from within the Organization. What the hell went wrong?

  Exhaling, she shifted in her seat and determinedly set the puzzle out of her head. It didn’t matter how he ended up there, only that he had. She had the location. She had the resources. And, perhaps more importantly, she had the skill. Wasting time wondering about essentially meaningless and unimportant details wasn’t going to get him out; Viper was—and right now Viper needed to rest and recharge.

  Then she’d take on the whole damned Russian army if she had to.

  The cold stones rushed up to meet Hawk as he fell, thrown into his cell by the meaty guard that had dragged him from the latest round with his tormentor. Grunting as he hit the floor, he listened to the guard back out of the space, waiting for the creaking of the hinges as he pulled the iron door closed. But the sound never came. Frowning, he rolled onto his side and looked at the open door. The guard was standing outside, just out of sight, talking in a low voice with someone. Then a shadow fell across the door and his interrogator entered. Hawk stiffened. Bloody hell. They weren’t done with him yet.

  “You are a very strong man.”

  The voice grated on Hawk’s nerves and he struggled to sit up, moving so that his back was against the wall. The man stood watching him, seemingly content to save any further comment until Hawk had finished the arduous and painful task of propping himself up.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had one as strong as you,” he continued once Hawk had collapsed with his back against the wall. “You’ve lost the guards quite a lot of money over the past two weeks.”

  “If they’d asked, I could have...told them...the odds,” Hawk muttered, gingerly prodding his ribs. At least two were broken, he was sure of it.

  The man was surprised into a laugh.

  “You fight until the very end, and then still have the capacity for humor. If you weren’t such a bastard, I’d be tempted to like you.”

 

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