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Logan sat stock still for a long time, frozen in the memory of that last mission. As far as all his friends were concerned, he’d been a SEAL right up until the day he separated from the Navy.
While that was technically true, the Navy reassigned him in that last year. He and several of his team. They left the sandbox behind and took assignments that technically fit within the rubric of the Navy SEALs, but weren’t your typical SEAL assignments. It sure as hell wasn’t overwatch duty in Fallujah. That shit had been bad enough.
The new shit they’d been assigned? Well, it was something else altogether. He and a few of his SEAL team who’d been hand-picked by the higher-ups joined up with several CIA operatives and a few Delta team operatives to become an off-the-books, blacker-than-black ops unit.
They had joked, trying to come up with a way to describe what they were. Obsidian? Onyx? What was blacker than black in a shadow world where you would be cut off and left behind by your government if you were caught at what you were doing?
Because they couldn’t allow themselves to be caught. Not an option in their world. But the work they did was important. They went after the bad guys no one else could bring down. And, in that last op, they brought down the baddest of the bad, Nikolai Bogomolov, after he’d begun to target US military installations abroad.
Logan jumped from the memory of telling Ernie in his office, back to the present with Sam, and suddenly telling her some of it wasn’t so hard. She simply held him and ran her fingers rhythmically through his hair. He wouldn’t tell her all of it, but enough. Enough for her to understand what had been at stake. Pieces were all he could tell. It was the most confidential of ops, the kind of thing you couldn’t share with anyone. So he told her bits, but his mind ran through all of it.
“We were sent after a man who brought new meaning to the word evil.” He didn’t give her a name and he didn’t tell her that Nikolai Bogolomov was responsible for bombings in two US states, Paris, London, and Spain.
No one realized he was behind them because he always backed others, but he’d been the driving force. The US and several allies had known that for a long time. And, they’d decided to do something about it.
“But the op went bad,” he said, still talking with his head on Sam’s stomach, eyes staring at the wall, letting the feel of her hands on him keep him in a protected bubble where what he had to say couldn’t hurt him. “It was bad from the start and we all knew it. One of those fucked up situations where you all know shit’s off and you tell your command, but they aren’t in the mood to hear it.”
He paused for a minute, remembering. The feel of the team, the tension in the room as they all looked over plans they knew were iffy at best.
“This guy, he was called Dooh.” He gave her the Americanized pronunciation of the Russian word, but she translated immediately.
“Specter” she said softly.
“Yeah. Because he was. No one could catch this guy. He was like an apparition.” For years, the CIA had tracked him but they were always one step behind.
“They finally had him nailed down. What they didn’t tell us was the reason he was nailed down in one place was because it was his oldest son’s birthday. His son was turning twelve. His mother and brother were there with his father. And, by the time we discovered that, it was too late.”
“You would have called the operation off if you had known ahead of time?” She asked the question, but her tone said she knew the answer. She was just making the point to him.
“Yeah, but, things went sideways for a lot of other reasons. We’d just been assigned a new guy. He had plenty of experience, but he wasn’t one of us, you know? We didn’t know him yet, didn’t run smooth as calm waters with him yet, like we did with each other. I didn’t want him there. Didn’t want to have to bring him in on an op when we didn’t know him well enough. If I was a better leader, I wouldn’t have shoved him aside to a spot where I thought he couldn’t do any harm. I would have refused to bring him in at all.”
He hadn’t been a good enough leader that day. He’d been impatient. He hadn’t wanted that guy there, so he’d tasked him with watching Adeline Bogolomov and her two sons while the rest of the team rounded up Nikolai and his men.
Sam didn’t offer platitudes or judgment. She just kept up that same steady rhythm with her hands.
He didn’t finish telling her the story. He wasn’t ready to do that yet. He wasn’t ready to tell her that the new guy hadn’t paid enough attention to the woman and children in his care.
That he’d been so pissed at getting babysitting duty that he had underestimated them. That no one had swept the room they were in for weapons until it was too late. That one of the kids had gone for a grenade and tossed it.
That when the smoke cleared, too many of Logan’s team members lay injured or dead. The whole of Bogolomov’s family and team were dead. All except for Bogolomov’s daughter and nephew who hadn’t arrived yet.
Logan had taken a shit ton of shrapnel to his leg and hip. He’d failed to keep his men safe. He didn’t know how Ernie planned to take away the reality of that. He might manage to desensitize Logan to the memories to take the shock out of them, but how did he plan to take away the fact that Logan had gotten members of his team, his brothers, killed?
That he was responsible for the deaths of two children and a woman, whose only real crimes had been being part of a madman’s family?
Sam began to rub his temples and he let his eyes close. Instead of seeing the broken pieces of his team, the hell and fallout and nightmares of that last op, he saw only Sam’s trusting face in his dreams. He saw the way she opened her arms to him and wrapped him up. The way her eyes showed no judgment, no disgust at how he’d failed. Only love.
Chapter 27
Chad hung up the phone and turned to Sam and Logan.
“It’s been confirmed. There were no prints on the rifle used to target you the other day, but they’ve got Lazarus Alonzo on the security tapes in the building a day before the shooting. They found a couple of his prints in the room where they found the rifle. It looks like he’s the one coming after you, Sam.”
Logan felt Sam lean into him a little more as she nodded at Chad. He tightened his hold on her shoulder and tugged her to him. Laying a kiss on the top of her head, he leaned in and whispered. “We’ll get him, Sam.”
“No,youwon’t.” Monique spoke up and Logan gritted his teeth.
He appreciated the woman and all she’d been doing to keep him out of prison, but damn, he wanted her out of his life. That sounded wrong.
