On Thin Ice (Special Ops) Read online

  Now he was sitting here watching an interview, something about her charity ice event that she had just finished in Anchorage and the work she was doing with the nature conservatory too. The charity event had nothing to do with conserving nature; it was about building better shelters for the homeless, but the reporter, if he could call the guy that, had glossed over the actual charity event and gone straight for the work Akira had been doing to help save the wolves in the pacific northwest and the high hunting areas of Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. He made that sound like a bad thing, when in reality it wasn’t.

  She had a heart. Even he would admit trapping animals sounded like a cruel way to take the animal’s life. He was against the method and he was neither pro-hunting nor anti-hunting. He didn’t really care, or maybe he just hadn’t ever really thought about it. But he did care if an animal was made to suffer. The way he saw it none of those humans would want to have their limbs stuck in a trap while they withered in pain and slowly died, so why do it to an animal.

  Akira was anti-hunting on all counts. She was a vegetarian so at least she wasn’t being moderately hypocritical in her stance. But she didn’t make anybody else feel badly for eating meat, she just wouldn’t do it herself.

  “They have animal farms for food production,” she had said. “That’s a completely different thing than just going out and killing for sport so I don’t look at all people who consume meat in the same way that I look at people who willingly cause pain to animals just for sport.”

  “Good answer,” he mumbled as he heard her reply. When she spoke he always heard her. Maybe he heard too much, felt too much. Why was he sitting here torturing himself? He was in the conference room, and while they didn’t have much by way of work going on right now, other than Preston being out there on his own mission, he still could have found something to do other than watch this interview and stare at this woman. He was torturing himself with the passion he was starting to feel for her when he should just walk away. Starting? Heck, he had been feeling it for a while now. He just couldn’t act on it. When she got older and found somebody closer to her age she would thank him for not taking her heart and her body.

  “Just go to her, Jet.” Alex’s low voice broke his silent concentration. The television was playing, but he couldn’t listen to the man talk about Akira without watching her, fantasizing about her. The more she spoke the more he wanted to hear her speak and the more he thought about that sweet voice and how it would sound uttering completely different words—maybe some of those words that she had wrote to him in her message she had once sent him. God he had to stop thinking about that message.

  “I’m too old for her,” he said.

  “Kira doesn’t think so.”

  Everybody called her Kira, even her parents called her Kira when they were talking to her, and usually when they were talking about her too. He was the only one who called her Akira. He knew she liked it too. She had told him as much. “It’s special when you say it,” she had said. Something in her words had brought him great satisfaction.

  “She’s more suitable for men your age, kid.”

  “Well thanks for giving me permission to go after her then.”

  Jet growled. The thought of Alex actually going after her set off some primal caveman need to stake his claim. He could have literally slapped himself, but instead he settled for a mental slap to the back of the head. He shouldn’t care. He wanted her to be with somebody closer to her age. At least that’s what he told her and himself.

  “That’s what I thought. Go to her.”

  The gunfire interrupted anything he could say as the scene played out like a horror movie on the screen. He could see the masked gunmen taking aim and shooting without mercy. He heard her screaming, saw the bastard when he took hold of her arm.

  “Demetri!” She yelled for her bodyguard to help her. He tried, but the guy holding her put a bullet in his head. “Demetri! Demetri!” She cried. He saw her reach out and grab something off the desk off from the cushioned seat she had just been sitting in. Then he saw her strike out against her attacker. She got a good slice into the back of his wrist and that’s when Jet realized what she had was a letter opener. From the tear in the garment he was wearing Jet caught sight of the makings of a tattoo on the back of the man’s wrist. He couldn’t make it out, but he knew it would be important in finding out who these guys were. Akira had done well with the injury she inflicted. She had even drawn a little blood and dropped the letter opener at the same time which meant they could track DNA. Unfortunately her attack seemed to piss the man off. He punched her in the face, knocking her out cold before tossing her over his shoulder.

  Jet wasn’t sure when his butt left the chair, but there he stood, clutching his fist so hard his short nails were nearly drawing his own blood. He watched as the men killed everybody else he could see on camera, and those off camera were killed too from what he could hear of the number of rounds fired. After they were finished with their massacre they disappeared from sight, taking her with them. She was gone. They had her and men like that didn’t play nice just because they were dealing with a woman. She was in a lot of danger and the longer they had her, the worse things would get for her.

  “I’m going after her,” his voice rumbled like thunder across the sky.

  “I’ll get the call out for the plane. We can leave…”

  “I’m going alone. Somebody has to stay here and take care of the office. And,” he stressed; “Preston’s going to need that plane ready to go once he gets visual on the package. You know that.” They had already established that he would need to make a quick exit but they couldn’t take the plane in until he was ready to leave. A private plane coming in from the U.S. into the recently semi-hostile areas of Egypt wouldn’t be advisable. Preston needed as much covertness as possible. They would send the plane in fast when he called to let them know he was on his way in to get the package. They would have to be ready to leave the second he stepped foot on the plane.

  “I’m not letting you go alone.”

  “You need to be here in case Preston needs you. I can handle this.” He knew exactly how he was going to handle it too. Getting Akira back was priority. Killing the fool who dared put his hands on her was just an added perk because he would, that was his promise to himself; he would kill that guy for punching Akira.

  Chapter Three

  Akira pressed her hands against the cold concrete floor and pushed herself up enough to survey her surroundings. Where was she? She remembered being in the studio in Anchorage. She remembered when the men with guns came in shooting. And then she remembered Demetri. He was trying to get to her, trying to save her, and he had died because of it. The guy, the big one, he had hit her. That was the last thing she remembered so since she was in this windowless room the only thing she could guess was that the cops hadn’t stopped them either. She didn’t know what they wanted from her. She had been working with a lot of charities lately. Maybe somebody didn’t like her work. It wasn’t as if the crazy pro-hunting crowd hadn’t been vocal of their distaste for her. She knew some of the pro-hunters were sane and not as vicious with their kills as others and she never had a problem with the sane hunters. They were able to agree to disagree, and even they had supported the “no trapping,” laws she and several other groups were trying to have set in place. They wouldn’t do something like this, but the others…now they could, and would. But still, this seemed like a lot of trouble to go through to fight a push for stronger hunting laws. She was lending her voice and her helping hand to the cause; she wasn’t the entire cause itself. If she weren’t around the others would still move forward.

  She had just pulled herself completely off the floor when the door opened and three men walked in. They were no longer masking their faces and she knew that wasn’t good for her. They had no intentions of leaving her alive because if they did they wouldn’t allow her to see their faces. She could identify them now.

  The one with the scar going from hi
s eye on down to his chin scared her less than the one who stood in the doorway. It was as if he was taunting her with the fact that the door was open, but he had no plans to let her out. Well he didn’t know her. She would not go quietly. She would fight.

  When the guy with the scar came within reach she gave a swift and solid kick to his groin. He howled like a little girl. The second guy didn’t allow her the chance for a groin hit, but she was able to dig her thumb into his eye when he grabbed her. He quickly tossed her away, causing her to fall on the floor and slide across it. She was on her hands and knees, and she was almost to her feet when the other guy put the barrel of the gun against the back of her head. She heard the sound of what she would say was the safety being taken off. “Your choice, daddy’s girl. I will shoot you if I have to.”

  His accent was Russian and that worried her. Had they taken her to Russia? How would her father find her if they had taken her there?

  He uttered something in Russian. While she could recognize the accent she didn’t speak the language not one bit. French, she spoke. Sign Language she knew. Japanese her mother had insisted she learn. But Russian was never on her study list. She wished it was because then she would know what they were saying.

  “Your daddy’s going to miss you isn’t he?” He laughed.

  This was about her father. It had to be; why else would they mention him? A man returned with a chair and some bindings. The guy with the gun latched on to her ponytail and pulled her up by her hair. She was sure he was the same man who had punched her. She was positive of that because she recognized the way he manhandled her into the chair to be the same way he was trying to manhandle her out of the television station.

  Once he had her in the chair he made them strap her wrists down to the armrests. She wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere, not without something to cut her bindings. They had made sure the plastic things were tight enough to prohibit movement. They left her in that room without any explanation as to what they wanted. They just left one overhead light on and it was barely enough to light the room. In fact, it barely lit the area she took up. They didn’t want her to be able to see her way clear of the cage they had put her in. This room was a cage—her cage—and she was stuck there until they were ready to do whatever it was they were planning to do.

  How had a simple interview gone so horribly wrong? It wasn’t a secret that she would be on the show that morning so it wasn’t as if somebody had sold her down river. Demetri had been there with her because since an incident with the Stalkerazi her father had insisted she have protection. She didn’t complain about it. She was sixteen at the time and the guy following her around town when she went out with her mother to go shopping or to have a day at the park, or even a fun Hawaiian vacation for the two of them, was creepy. She didn’t take breaks often. She trained and when she wasn’t training she was doing her school studies, and when she wasn’t doing that she was eating meals with the family or having family night, but mostly she trained. On the rare occasions that she got out for a vacation she still trained. Her father had rented out a rink on Kauai so that she could practice while they were away for the week. She spent a lot more time practicing than vacationing, but she had seen Hawaii—some of it anyway. Then that guy, dark hair, dark sunglasses and creepy dingy white t-shirt started showing up everywhere. She first noticed him at the rink. She had been lining up to do a triple axel when she caught sight of a white man lurking behind the chairs of the top row. She had gotten distracted and instead of nailing her triple axel she fell flat on her butt. She pointed him out to Keiko who immediately alerted security, but he was gone by then. She kept practicing because she needed to practice, but she still kept checking to be sure he was gone. She had wondered who he was and what he wanted. Then she saw him again when she went out to dinner with her mother. It was their girls’ night out on the island because her father was working too. He had taken them to Hawaii to relax, but clearly he, just as she was doing, had been working more than relaxing. The guy made her mother as nervous as she was and they hurried back to the home he had rented out while they were on the island.

  After they got home she hadn’t wanted to go back out. She was so afraid she would run into the guy again. Her father had been angry. He had put a hold on his business meetings and pretty much shadowed her to make sure if this guy did show up at the rink again that he could find him, catch him, and put a world of hurt on him. He hadn’t shown up, but the picture of her changing in the locker room had. She was wearing her tights and was pulling her top up past her bra line in the picture. Because she was underage the tabloid got in trouble for running the pictures, but they never caught the guy who took them. What had upset her most was knowing that guy that she had seen had watched her undress. He put out one picture, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have more. She knew he had seen her without her clothes, and probably taken the pictures just the same. For a long time she couldn’t change in the locker rooms in comfort. She was afraid somebody would be in there just waiting to take pictures of her private moment.

  Her father hired Demetri then. Whenever she went anywhere Demetri went with her. Out of the state or out of the country didn’t stop her bodyguard from being by her side. When she was at home he wasn’t really needed but her father kept him on anyway. He put him up in the apartment over the garage because Keiko already had the one over the rink. The apartments were large and fully equipped with all the latest and greatest technologies. When she was practicing Demetri would check the grounds to make sure everything was secure. He would do a walkthrough of the rink and then he would go back up to his apartment where he would spend the day until his second rotation. Her father had told him it wasn’t necessary, but he had said that he was being paid still and while there were no threats on site he wanted to at least walk the grounds to be sure of it. When she was at competition and in areas where he was not allowed then she relied on Keiko to be her guard. The locker-room and other backstage areas were completely forbidden to any outside personnel and that included him. He wasn’t happy, but he had found a way to work around it. And of course when her father had his parties Demetri always had the time off so he had a tendency to disappear. She wondered what he did during those times, but he would never say. She had asked him once or twice and he would always say, “mind your own business, kid.” She would remind him that she wasn’t a kid and he would remind her that she looked like one. Now he was gone. It was so unfair. Keiko had left her when she stopped competing because she wanted to train the next Olympian, but losing Demetri the way she had hurt her more. He had died trying to save her. If it weren’t for her he would still be alive.

  Now that she was strapped to a chair she didn’t even stand a chance of finding a way out. Maybe her first reaction had been too impulsive, but she saw a window of opportunity and she had to take it; she had to try. Now what was she going to do? She was stuck. She was being held hostage, a prisoner, and she wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere while she was bound to the chair. Then it occurred to her. They would have to let her up for a bathroom break at some point and then she would have a chance. Unless they weren’t planning on affording her that luxury and they expected her to just go where she sat. She wouldn’t put it past them.

  Did they want money? Her father would pay, but somehow she didn’t think that was it at all. There was no way they could leave her alive. They had worn masks when they were at the television station which meant they didn’t want their face seen, but they hadn’t used masks when they came into the room with her, which meant they didn’t care if their face was seen. Not caring meant they weren’t expecting any witnesses left behind to give a description.

  Aaron rushed into the Squadron headquarters. He had been in a meeting when he got the call from his wife. She was frantic and it took a good five minutes to get her to calm down and remember to speak English. He didn’t speak Japanese even though she and his daughter did and that put him at a disadvantage if ever she wanted to say something without h
im knowing what it was. She rarely did that, but when she was angry, or panicked, she often forgot to use her perfectly good English. When she settled enough to tell him Akira had been taken and that the others had been killed that was all he needed to know. He couldn’t make out the rest of what she was saying and it didn’t matter; he had heard the most important part and he knew then there was only one man who could help him.

  Aaron had been in San Antonio at the time but that didn’t stop him from hauling tail back to Austin. He didn’t know if Alex was on his way out or not, but the young man was opening the door so he assumed he was on his way out and not in. He didn’t care. He needed to speak with Jet.

  “They have my girl. I need Jet to go find her. I’ll pay whatever you want. The cost means nothing to me.”

  “Mr.—”

  “Name it?” He pulled out his checkbook. “A half million? A million?” Had the price gone up that much since they saved him? Maybe, but he didn’t care. “Two million.”

  “Mr. Bowman would you just stop for a minute?” Alex scowled at him.