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1
46 MILES FROM MUMBAI CITY.
REPUBLIC OF INDIA.
Mike “Ice” Wagner tapped the Jeep’s brakes, took off his sunglasses, and winced. The sun sat low in the sky but still shone bright and hot, its evening rays glinting off the corrugated metal roof of the CIA safe-house.
The safe-house was a concrete rectangular structure, roughly the size and shape of a small bunker but with real windows instead of slits for machine-gun barrels. It stood halfway down a crowded dirty street in a distant suburb of Mumbai, a bustling metropolis of thirty million souls, give or take twenty million because nobody had ever gotten an accurate population count.
Ice rubbed his jaw and gazed at the blacked-out, metal-barred safe-house windows with his naked eyes, then exhaled on his Wayfarer sunglasses, wiped the lenses carefully with an alcohol-soaked swab, and put the shades back on.
It had been a long time since Ice had last been outside a CIA safe-house in some distant land, preparing to scare the piss out of a prisoner, terrify the crap out of a captive.
Get them to talk.
To reveal their secrets in return for what was sometimes nothing more than a quick death rather than the painful end the bastards would meet at the hands of the comrades whose trust they’d betrayed.
Betrayed because Ice had broken them.
He could do it hard or soft, go brutal or gentle, become their best friend or their worst nightmare. There was no perfect interrogation technique, Ice had learned.
It was all about the two people involved.
One doing the asking.
The other doing the telling.
It was about their relationship.
It was intimate, delicate, personal as hell, deep as fuck.
Especially when the stakes were this damn high.
Just the way Ice liked it.
Hell yeah, it was good to be back in the field.
Back in the game.
Back in the shadows.
The shadows were home to Delta men like Ice. Darkness was their natural environment. Along with the Navy SEALs, the Army’s Delta Force was the elite Special Operations branch of the U.S. military—and by that measure the best in the world at what they did.
Except Ice wasn’t here on Delta business. Hell, it had been two years since he’d last been on Delta business. Two years since he’d been a Delta.
He and his brother Jack had made the tough choice to take early retirement so they could be with Mom and Dad during those savage final years when their parents were both suffering.
Suffering for their sins.
Just like maybe Ice was destined to do for his own sins.
Because something about this Darkwater business made him uneasy in his gut, unsettled in his skin, edgy in the head.
Unusual for a man who’d earned the nickname Ice for being the coolest motherfucker when it counted.
Yeah, this felt different.
Maybe because itwasdifferent.
