Point of No Return Read online

  Point of No Return

  Marine Major Honey Thornton is nobody’s fool, so when she’s brought in for an off-the-books mission by a manipulative two-star general, she has to wonder why. When it turns out Honey’s mission is to investigate a military contractor tied to the recent kidnappings of innocent children, she signs on immediately. Little did she know one of the first people she’d have to question was her sometime lover, Jack O’Brien.

  Jack O’Brien left the CIA bitter and disillusioned and now hires himself out as a contract spy. When his brother and sister-in-law are mysteriously killed and the young daughter they left behind is targeted for kidnapping, he smells a cover-up and goes underground to find out who’s behind it all. Not sure who he can trust, the situation grows more tense when the sexy Honey starts asking questions he’s not sure he wants to answer.

  With suspicion flaring on all sides and passion burning between them, Jack and Honey have to decide whether they can trust each other and bring down the people responsible, no matter how high up the chain of command it goes. Because when you’re navigating the murky political waters of the Pentagon, the CIA, and private armies, it’s hard to know who’s got your back, who’s on your side, and who’s lying to your face—and sometimes the only thing you can trust is what you know in your heart.

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Rita Henuber

  Material excerpted from Under Fire: The Admiral copyright © 2012 by Rita Henuber

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-940846-10-1

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  No Holding Back

  Excerpt from Under Fire: The Admiral

  Also by Rita Henuber

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Republic of Georgia

  May

  1600 hours

  The walls of the windowless mud hut radiated heat like an oven. The stench of animal and human waste was so pervasive it crawled over her skin like something alive. Major H. K. Thornton sat on her haunches and thumbed back her helmet. Her gaze flicked between the laminated photo taped to her wrist and the face of the girl cowering on the dirt floor. “I have a visual on the target,” she said into her radio link. “Identity confirmed.” For once, the team had received solid intel. “Extraction’s a go.”

  The target’s glazed blue eyes drifted to the Marine silhouetted in the entry against a clear high desert sky. For a moment, Thornton watched the Marine arc her weapon left, then right, sweeping the landscape for bad guys.

  “It’s okay, Jenna,” she said to the girl in a soft, measured voice. “That’s Staff Sergeant Santiago. I’m Major Thornton. We’re Marines. Your dad, Colonel Ramsey, sent us. We’re taking you home.” The rail-thin girl didn’t react. “Jenna, can you stand?” Thornton cautiously extended a hand and touched the teenager’s arm. Despite the 130-degree temperature, her skin was cold. “Jenna?” The girl’s eyes tracked back. “Can you stand? Can you walk?”

  Jenna shook her head so slightly the motion could have been taken as a shudder. She stretched out a leg from under the ruins of the school uniform she’d been wearing the day she was abducted, exposing a swollen, blood-encrusted foot.

  “I tried . . . to escape. They cut . . . bottom of my feet . . . so I couldn’t run.”

  Santiago hissed in a breath.

  Thornton adjusted the webbing on her M4 and slung the weapon to her side. “Jenna, I’m going to carry you out of here.” Years of intelligence work taught her to conceal every emotion, but right now it was damn difficult to put a cap on her anger. She moved to pick up the girl.

  “What about . . . her?” Jenna touched a mound of rags.

  “Her?” Thornton blinked. A hand, the color of concrete, rose in slow motion from the pile. Thornton watched in stunned silence as bony fingers extended in her direction.

  “Kelly. She’s . . . been here . . . longer than me.” Jenna’s voice cracked. Her chest rose and fell with the effort it took to speak in the blistering heat. “She’s sick. Hasn’t . . . eaten . . . in days.” Jenna pointed to a bowl of gray slop next to the mound, where flies congregated.

  Kelly? Thornton carefully peeled away a layer of filthy rags, sending dark bugs scrambling for new cover, and revealed a . . . creature. A girl, at least she thought it was a girl, lying on her side, knees pulled to her chest, curled into a ball like an animal trying to keep warm. Cloudy brown eyes stared from sunken sockets. Dried vomit caked her gaunt face and hair. Judging from the stench, she was lying in her own excrement. Thornton fanned a hand above the girl’s face to chase away gathering flies. “Are you Kelly Saunders?” she said, holding her breath and waiting for the response. Transparent eyelids fluttered, crusty lips moved. No words came out.

  “That’s who . . . she is,” Jenna wheezed.

  Santiago took a knee beside Thornton. “The general’s daughter who’s been missing a couple of months? Thought she was . . .”

  Thornton elbowed the staff sergeant. The search for Kelly and those who had taken her was ongoing, but all hope of finding her alive had vanished.

  Santiago gagged and clamped a gloved hand over her nose and mouth. “Daa-mn.”

  “Breathe through your mouth.” Thornton slanted a look at her staff sergeant, who glared back over the fingers pinching her nose.

  “You should have told me that before, ma’am,” Santiago said, pulling in hard breaths through her mouth. The staff sergeant tipped her head to the girl, her dark eyes narrowed. “We’re humping out of here now. Not waiting for dark?” Her voice was muffled by her hand.

  Thornton nodded. Kelly was little more than a breathing corpse. Every minute they waited to get her to medical was a minute she was closer to deat
h.

  “We e-vacing now?” Staff Sergeant Buck’s baritone voice came though Thornton’s earpiece.

  “Affirmative,” Thornton said, her pulse jittering in her temple. She looked around. No table, no chair, no place to sleep. The girls had lived this way for weeks, probably imagining they’d been forgotten and giving up hope of any rescue. She swallowed her escalating rage and pushed to her feet. There’d be time for anger and retaliation later. After these girls were safe. In the last few moments their circumstances had changed. She had to adapt and produce a drastically modified extraction plan. The team was prepared to carry one injured hostage over ridges and across the rocky terrain to safety, not two. Carrying both girls would make the ten-klick hike to the Turkish border and safety damn difficult.

  “Buck, we need that truck you saw. Taking two home.”

  “Sweet,” Buck said. “Halfway there.”

  “Buck, hold your position.” Gunny Andrews’s perfectly modulated voice ordered. Hidden in the hills, Andrews, the team’s human surveillance camera, had a commanding view of the village. “Tango moving your direction.”

  “See him.” The tension in Buck’s low whisper climbed through Thornton’s earpiece, crawling down her spine into her legs. Her hand flicked to her Heckler & Koch sidearm, the sheath holding a custom knife, and finally the extra M4 magazines.

  “Major . . . got eyes on two Tango . . . advancing your position,” Andrews said calmly, his words synced with his breath. “How . . . you want it handled?”

  Andrews was asking for a kill order. She envisioned her baby-faced sniper, Sergeant Cooper, stretched out over sharp rocks, his cheek pressed against his rifle, finger resting on the trigger, sights dialed in, ready to fire. Gunny beside him, watching the target through his scope to guide Cooper’s shot. Both still as death, save for slow measured breaths, waiting for her answer.

  Thornton looked at the girls huddled together then around the reeking squalid room. She swiped her face with a sleeve, watched wet streaks blend with dust into the pattern of the desert camos and dry. “Eliminate all Tangos.” It was what the fuckers deserved.

  Buck’s H&K 416 belched a reply first, the sound echoing against the empty shacks.

  “Help us,” Jenna cried out in a terrified plea.

  “Ma’am, need to leave your location now,” Gunny said.

  “Take Jenna,” Thornton snapped.

  Santiago back-stepped to Jenna and crouched. Thornton lifted the girl to her back and Jenna’s thin arms tightened around Santiago’s neck. “You hang on and leave the rest to me,” Santiago said, hooking her free arm around Jenna’s legs as she stood. Santiago had the strongest heart of anyone Thornton knew. If asked, she would run that girl back to the border.

  Thornton turned her attention to Kelly. Instinct told her to snatch the girl and run like hell. Training told her to take it slow, avoid trauma. She squatted and spoke the teenager’s name soft and gently. “Kelly.” The girl’s watery gaze locked on her and Thornton thought she saw a spark of hope. “Kelly, I’m going to lift you. It may hurt, but there isn’t anything I can do until we get out of here.” Thornton shifted some of the sixty pounds of equipment she wore and slipped her arms under the emaciated girl’s shoulders and knees. Kelley didn’t make a sound. Didn’t flinch.

  “Major,” Andrews said, “Tango your location. Go low.”

  Thornton twisted, bending over Kelly as close as possible without laying on her.

  “Head down,” Santiago snapped to her passenger as she flattened against the floor.

  Cooper’s single round entered and exited the frame shack, sending wood shards and dust showering over them. The Tango thudded against the outside wall.

  “Clear, Major. Move. Move!” Gunny said, as excited as he was ever going to get.

  The dit dit dit dit dit of Buck’s H&K was answered by the distinctive thumping of an AK and kept Thornton hunched over Kelly. Santiago slithered back from the door.

  “I’m leaking,” Buck groaned. “Leg.”

  Santiago stole a sideways glance at her and snaked closer.

  Thornton tucked Kelly into a corner and lifted a quivering Jenna from Santiago’s back, setting her next to the expressionless, doll-like Kelly.

  “I have something to take care of.” She touched Jenna’s cheek and nodded in Santiago’s direction. “This Marine will protect you.”

  “Ladies”—Santiago scrambled to a crouch in front of the girls—“I’m Staff Sergeant Gloria Santiago, United States Marine Corps, and I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.”

  Thornton slapped her staff sergeant’s helmet and went to get them a ride home.

  The village, long abandoned after some clan turf war, consisted of twelve bullet-riddled structures scattered along fifty yards of dusty, desolate landscape. Barren hills on one side, a fast-moving river down a rocky embankment on the other. Getting to the truck meant she’d have to cross open spaces between each building. The familiar tingle of fear tried to crowd in on her and she willed it away.

  “Gunny, where’s Buck?”

  “To your right. Three doorways,” Cooper said from his grunt’s-eye-view position.

  Thornton took a quick three count, white-knuckled her weapon, darted into the open and skidded to a stop against the wall of the next shack in a clump of dry knee-high weeds. She turned an ear to the hot moaning wind swirling between the shacks. Somewhere a door creaked on rusted hinges, metal roofing banged, but there were no human sounds. She took a quick look to the hills where Andrews and Cooper were hidden among the scrub and boulders and then bolted into the next space.

  “Tango headed toward the truck,” Gunny advised.

  “Gunny, do not fire near that truck,” she said, slamming against the next house hard enough to rattle loose boards and send up a cloud of dust.

  “Say again, ma’am.”

  “Do. Not. Fire. At Tango near that vehicle. I don’t want one of those big-assed rounds going through a body into the truck’s engine.”

  “Understood.”

  “Major, your next move you are out of sight and one Tango unaccounted for.”

  Out of sight equaled no protection. She huffed a quick breath and took two careful steps into the next space. Fucking flaming fish balls. It took her brain less than a second to process that the barrel of a Kalashnikov semiautomatic rifle was an inch from her right cheek. Her own weapon pointed over the Tango’s shoulder and provided no kill shot. She took a step back. The man holding the rifle took a step forward, following her. He pressed the AK’s barrel against her cheek. Her eyes fixed on his finger hovering in front of the trigger. He raised the barrel to the edge of her custom Oakley glasses and flicked them away. They clattered on the gravel as she took another step back. He took a step forward and her glasses crunched. He moved his cheek away from the AK’s wood stock then tilted his head slightly. She recognized him in the same moment he recognized her. A nasty grin spread across his pockmarked face. Could Cooper see that grin in the crosshairs of his rifle?

  “Major, break left,” came the instruction she waited for.

  Like an NFL linebacker making an easy tackle, she bent her left knee and dipped her shoulder. She pushed hard with her right leg, forcing her body left. A pressure wave from the six-inch sniper bullet sliced the space where she’d been a moment ago. She landed on her side, rolled, and scrambled to a half-sitting position against the nearest wall, ready to do a John Wayne and fire from the hip. She lowered her M4, no need. Cooper’s shot had erased the man’s nasty grin. Hell, it had erased his face. Most of his head. Beyond the building she leaned against, a car engine caught and rattled to life. River sounds and her raspy panting made it difficult to judge exactly where, or the distance. “Major?” Andrews’s anxious voice said.

  “Okay,” she whispered. She forced herself to a standing position and spit to rid her mouth of dirt and the taste of fear. She had no spit. Her mouth was as dry as the surrounding landscape. Cautiously she darted her head out and back around the corn
er of the shack. Cooper and Gunny had saved her ass once, no sense pushing it. No one. She passed under broken-out windows with scraps of cloth and plastic snapping in the wind and entered the next shack, weapon high, ready to fire. Acrid smells of blood, body fluids and cooling brass assailed her nose. The Tango lay to her left just inside the door, a grizzly sucking sound coming from his chest wounds with each tortured breath.

  “He’s done,” Buck said matter-of-factly.

  Buck, blood soaking his camos from the knee down, sat on the floor, taping his shin.

  “You?”

  Instead of one of his usual smart-assed remarks, the big Marine gave her a solid nod and an apologetic look.

  “Broken?”

  He shook his head and went back to taping. “Hurts like a motherfucker though.” His eyes darted to two open packets of heavy-duty pain meds on the floor. “I’ll keep up.”

  “Heads up. Tango headed your way in that pickup,” Gunny’s voice cracked in her earpiece. The warning wasn’t necessary. The rattle and bang of the truck bouncing over rocks and potholes echoed in the small room. Thornton charged out the door into the path of an ancient Toyota. Startled, the driver swerved and braked. In a perfect world, she could have grabbed the door handle, pulled it open and jumped in. This wasn’t a perfect world. The fucking door wouldn’t open.

  The wild-eyed driver stared at her through the dust-coasted and cracked windshield, saw the M4 pointed at his head, regained his wits and floored it. The truck lurched forward and promptly stalled. The man worked frantically with the steering column until the Toyota’s engine ground to life. The rear tires spun, creating clouds of billowing moonscape dust obscuring her vision. The tires gained traction and then the rear fishtailed, narrowly missing her. Flaming fish balls. Enough of this bullshit! Thornton fired a burst into the driver’s side of the cab. A line of red decorated the small back window. The truck spun, clipping the edge of the shack and slowing forward momentum enough for her to throw herself onto the open bed. She caught sight of Buck hobbling out the door as the Toyota swerved, bounced, and righted with direction. The son of a bitch was still alive. Hit, but alive and turning the wheel with force. Each time she got a grip on the side and raised herself up he swerved violently, pitching her back down like she was on a demented amusement park ride. She flattened against the rusting metal bed to gain as much resistance as possible, hands and feet scrabbling for any hold. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the fucking tailgate wasn’t missing.