Page 3 of Unintended Love

“About time we caught a break.” Piper stood and stretched her arms above her head and leaned to one side. “I’m ready to call it a day.”

The door to the situation room opened, and bright blue-white light sliced through the darkness. “Lady Hawk wants to see us in her conference room,” Black Swan Team 2 leader, Kayla Scarlatto, announced. Known as Lady Lion to her teammates, she looked at her watch. “I know it’s almost five o’clock and we’ve been at this all day, but they have an update for us.”

The five women wound their way through the warren of hallways in the Annex building of Homeland Security to the conference room next to the office of the director of Section 7, their boss, Katlin Callahan Wolf. As soon as they entered, their commanding officer darkened the glass windows so no one could see in.

Katlin flipped her long blonde hair over her shoulder and took a minute to hold the stare of each woman sitting around the table, as though assessing them. “I know you have been working hard on determining our first target here in the United States, but we have just received reliable intelligence coming out of the CIA that Adeel bin Laden is headed to a terrorist development camp in South Sudan.” Katlin clicked the remote in her hand, and a map of South Sudan appeared on the large flatscreen behind her. “Both directors of Homeland and the CIA have agreed to increase the reward for any information leading to Adeel bin Laden’s location and eventual death to one million dollars. That enticement seems to have paid off.”

Holy shit, they’re getting serious, Ashlin thought as she leaned her forearms on the large oak conference table. Inwardly, she smiled. Were they going to give their team an opportunity to take him out? Black Swan Team 2 had proven time and time again that a woman could get close to a male target and kill him much faster and just as easily as a man. That fact had always been the basis for the success of the Black Swan teams. It had taken twenty-six Navy SEALs, two Army helicopters, an interpreter, and a combat dog to take down Adeel’s father, Osama bin Laden. Could her small team of five women eliminate this newest threat?

Several pictures of Osama bin Laden’s favored son appeared on the screen. “Adeel is now top of our Most Wanted list.” Katlin glanced over her shoulder at the screen. “Confirmed by multiple sources, Adeel is currently running several terrorist organizations worldwide. Some say he’s behind almost all of them. We believe he is forming an Islamic army on every continent. Due to the open borders here in the United States in recent years, we know for a fact that over a thousand trained Islamic soldiers have illegally entered the United States. These men are not members of local Islamic communities. They are hiding, training, planning, and preparing for the next unspeakable Black Swan Event like 9/11…but much larger. The maps you have been looking at for the past two days are what we consider to be the training camps once the terrorists reach the United States. We’re sure there are more, but that’s not why you’re sitting around my conference table.”

The map on the huge screen focused in on the valley between Bor and Papiu, South Sudan. “Intelligence received a few hours ago has the preparation camps in this area. It’s the last stop before they head to the United States. They are shipping men in from all over the world for final training. Yes, China, Indonesia, Iran, North Korea, anywhere that Western ways threaten the strict, literal interpretation of scripture in the Islamic way of life. Here, they teach them to become devout in their fundamentalist beliefs to the point that they will fight to the death. It’s almost as though they are brainwashing them. In these camps, they refine their English speech and reading skills by having them read our own military manuals. They study our strategies and tactics of fighting from the battalion level, right down to six- and eight-man special operations fire teams. These men know us better than we know ourselves. And they know how to counter every single move we make.”

Next, a grainy video of Adeel bin Laden speaking appeared behind Katlin. “He’s confirming that his plan is to continue his father’s goals,” Katlin paraphrased as he spoke, “he’s telling them that it is Allah’s mandate that they bring Sharia law to the entire world, starting with the United States of America, the most vile country in the world. It is their belief that when the great and almighty US falls, the rest of the westernized world will soon follow. Thus, their greatest concentration is now on the United States. He’s telling them that our open borders policy was a divine signal directly from Allah that this was their time. The attack is near.”

Katlin pointed at the screen behind her. “I want you Ladies wheels up tonight, headed for South Sudan. We need eyes on the ground. I want you to recon these camps. Figure out the best way to infiltrate. Are there women in there? Cooks? Nurses? Some of these look well-established. If we can get in there and kill Adeel bin Laden, cut off the head of the snake, maybe we can stop their catastrophic plans for the United States.”

“Ma’am, this kind of recon is not really what we’re best at,” Kira voiced what Ashlin was thinking.

“I know what you’re good at, but more importantly, I trust you,” Katlin countered. She glanced at the floor before she continued, “I trust your team more than any other team in the section.” She touched her head. “It took me months to recover after my traumatic brain injury when Black Swan Team 1 was placed on a mission with an all-male team. It’s going to take more time before I have complete confidence in any male team, the way I trust you five women. This mission requires the best, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s you.”

Katlin clicked off the screen behind her. “Ladies, go home and get some sleep. You’re wheels up in the night. As always, operations will feed you our latest intelligence while you’re in the air.”

All five women from Team 2 stood and headed to the door, but before it could be opened, Katlin added, “Your contact in Juba will be Bishop James at Holy Trinity Catholic Church. Don’t be surprised if you go into the valley dressed as nuns.” She looked directly at Mia. “You might need to clean up your language a little. Bishop James and my uncle, Bishop Francis, attended seminary together. I don’t need to hear how vulgar my Ladies are.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mia had the good sense to look sheepish.

Ashlin’s smart watch notified her it was ten fifty as she pulled the brush through her shoulder-length hair, following it with a hairdryer. She had ten minutes to finish drying her locks before she had to be in front of her computer for her video call with Clint. She’d make it. She was almost done. She just needed to pull out the last few damned waves so her dark red hair would lie flat. She had a full fifteen minutes to talk to him before she and her team would need to leave for the secret Black Swan jet sitting in a hangar protected by Marines at Quantico, Virginia, only a few hundred feet from the President’s own Marine One helicopters.

Fortunately, all five women had agreed to stay at the condo on DuPont Circle, which had been gifted to them by Katlin Callahan Wolf after everyone on Black Swan Team 1 had married or taken on permanent lovers. They had all accepted other positions after leaving the military. Piper usually stayed in Georgetown with her husband, Kenner Lane, who worked for the Holt agency’s Washington D.C. office, but she had decided to stay with the other four since the mission would start within hours after they’d finished work.

Her five-minute warning buzzed and vibrated on her wrist. Her timing was perfect. As she pulled up her black flight suit from where it rested on her small hips and zipped up the front, she walked into her adjoining suite and sat in front of her open computer. Ashlin clicked to accept his call and automatically smiled, knowing Clint’s face would appear on the screen within seconds. Eleven o’clock on Tuesday night had become her favorite time of the week.

They had talked so often that Ashlin felt like he knew her better than her teammates, with whom she shared everything. More than knowing his favorite color, Army drab green, she knew that he fiercely loved his family. After spending several holidays with the Riggs family, she’d seen firsthand how much Clint cherished his brother and sister as well as his parents. He wasn’t afraid to show them how much he cared. Even if it had only been a few days since they’d seen each other, he would greet them with a hard hug and warm words. Their constant banter was another way of showing true familial love.

At first, Ashlin had been a little turned off by the Riggs family’s public display of affection. Her siblings barely acknowledged her existence. She was the only one in the blended family. As an oops baby, born to a mother in her early forties and a father already in his mid-fifties, all her half-siblings were in their teens when she entered the world. Both paternal sisters resented the hell out of her because they were often forced to babysit during their every-other-weekend stays at what she later came to think of as her house. She lived there twenty-four seven, while the other children only visited on weekends and occasional holidays. By the time Ashlin was finished with elementary school, she’d been the flower girl in five siblings’ weddings. In high school, she’d been a bridesmaid in two weddings, both of them second marriages. In so many ways, she barely knew her brothers and sisters. None of them had stayed in the vicinity of her parents’ house after graduating from high school before Ashlin had entered kindergarten.

That’s what made watching Clint’s family fascinating. After she got over the shock of how demonstrative they all acted toward each other, more than once, she felt sorry for herself. Was this what other families experienced? If so, she had missed so much love growing up without close siblings. Perhaps that was why she valued being part of Black Swan Team 2. She was closer to the four women on her team than she had ever been to any other person her entire life.

Except now there was Clint.

As his image focused on the screen, Ashlin sucked in a breath at the vision before her. “Clint, what happened? Were you shot?” She then looked into his reddened, puffy eyes before glancing down at his bloodied utilities.

“No,” Clint sniffed, then blew his nose. “I…I wasn’t the one…”

Oh, no. It must’ve been someone on his mission last night.

He upended the bottle of beer in his hand and downed the last of it. “It was my fault,” Clint gritted through clenched teeth.

Ashlin could tell he was fighting to tamp down his emotions. He was such a strong man. He probably believed that old adage of “real men don’t cry.” That was a bunch of shit. Real men had real feelings that sometimes ran real deep.

“I wish I were there to hold you,” she admitted. She knew if the roles were reversed, he would want to be there and hold her as she cried and released all that pain. It hurt her all the way down to her soul to see this powerful man suffering so much.

Clint sucked in a ragged breath and let it out slowly. “I wish you were, too. I’d ask you to go with me to tell Javier’s wife…that…he’s gone.”

Oh, shit. Since he and his team were no longer active-duty U.S. military, there was no trained casualty assistance team. No one he could turn that responsibility over to.

“Practice on me,” she encouraged, knowing the more he said the words, the easier it would get, at least in her experience. “I know how you feel. I lost a good friend during our first mission after going through JAFSOS.” He stared at her from eleven thousand miles away, concentrating all his attention to her story. “We were in Central America, taking out a high-value target. While escaping, we were caught by his guards and involved in an intense firefight.” Ashley involuntarily shivered from the memory. “Jeanette and I were covering each other as we ran away from the bad guys. It was just a fluke shot.” Her voice broke, but she could picture the entire scene once again like a slow-motion movie in her brain. “The bullet ricocheted off the concrete block building right into her upper leg. It sliced open her femoral artery.” Ashlin swallowed hard. “There was no way anyone could have saved her…but I tried. I had to try.”