dark figure gestured for Derek’s captor to take him deeper into the cavern and said, “You and your men have failed once. That cannot and will not happen again. Understood? If it does, you will face a fate similar to the one your friend is about to meet.”
“No-oo!” Derek thrashed madly as he was dragged backward, deeper into the shadows. His heels gouged the soft soil on the cavern floor, sending up a rotten, coppery smell.
“Quiet.” Derek’s captor tightened the arm across his throat. The lack of oxygen quickly brought dizziness, then the gray of tunnel vision.
Through his narrowed cone of focus, he saw the dark leader step into view, calmly screwing a silencer onto the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol. The man barked a few syllables in a harsh, unfamiliar tongue and tossed Derek against the rock wall with bruising force.
The gunman shrugged and answered in heavily accented English. “I do not wish to bring this whole godforsaken place down around our ears. I simply wish to teach these idiots a lesson.”
With that, he lifted the weapon and fired.
Derek heard the puff of a silenced bullet.
Then nothing.
Chapter One
“Bull!” Jacob Powell grinned and reclaimed his seat near the built-in fridge.
“Big surprise,” grumbled fellow bounty hunter Anthony Lombardi. He pulled Jacob’s dart from the center of the dartboard and took his place behind the tape mark on the floor. “We don’t call you Bullseye for nothing.”
The dark-haired hunter threw and hit the inner ring one step out from the center, eliciting howls of derision from the half dozen men gathered in the rec room of the Big Sky Bounty Hunters’ headquarters in Ponderosa, Montana.
The rules for Bull were simple. You had five shots. You hit five bullseyes or you lost. And Jacob never lost.
Though he’d earned his nickname in the Special Forces, where he’d been a fighter pilot with an airstrike hit record second to none, the moniker had stuck when he and the rest of the unit had followed their leader, Cameron Murphy, into the bounty hunting business. In his five years as a bounty hunter, as in his Special Forces career, Jacob almost never missed his target.
Failure wasn’t an option for Bullseye.
But at that moment, he wasn’t thinking about the past, or even about darts. His mind was focused, as it usually was these days, on the job. Though he’d instituted the game of Bull to give his ever-active hands and body something to do, his brain crunched the data he’d assembled on their current bounty.
Too damned little information as far as he was concerned. A few weeks earlier, eight prisoners had done the unthinkable and escaped The Fortress, the nearby maximum-security prison. Big Sky hadn’t recaptured them, and worse, the escapees had wreaked havoc, executing a German diplomat and engineering a train crash that had killed the corrupt governor of Montana. The incidents had almost upset months of delicate United Nations’ negotiations regarding the despotic king of a former Soviet Bloc country called Lunkinburg.
Almost.
“Your turn, Powell.” Tony clapped him on the shoulder. “And Bull.”
Meaning that Tony had gotten his five center hits. It was up to Jacob to finish the game with five of his own.
No sweat.
Jacob stood and stepped up to the masking tape line. A television babbled in the background, perpetually tuned to a twenty-four-hour news station. The Secretary of Defense’s familiar hangdog, bespectacled face filled the screen as Jacob took aim and buried his first dart in the bullseye.
“Turn up the volume,” one of the other bounty hunters ordered. “He’s talking about Lunkinburg.” Secretary Cooper, the President’s primary adviser on foreign affairs, was strongly in favor of sending troops into the small country.
Jacob sent his second dart whistling into the bull, but focused part of his attention on the secretary’s words. The Big Sky Bounty Hunters rarely worked internationally, but the Lunkinburg issue had become their problem the moment their bounty had started targeting diplomats.
Which itself was a puzzle, as Boone Fowler and his followers were strictly domestic hell-raisers. Their agenda was to overthrow the U.S. government in the name of The Cause, which was pretty much defined by Fowler himself and included a dizzying mix of xenophobia and anarchy. This was the first time the MMFAFA had dabbled in international politics, which begged the central question.
Why now? Why had they broken out of The Fortress and immediately changed their MO?
Secretary Louis Cooper’s televised voice said, “The United States military is not the world’s police force. However, there is a time and a place for us to say enough.” Cooper rested his hands on the wheeled podium in front of him. His faded blond hair was washed out by the lighting, his blue eyes emphasized by the subtle gleam of a navy tie. As Jacob watched, the camera panned out far enough to show brilliant fall colors and a familiar logo.
A quiver of interest ran through him at the sight. The Golf Resort. The Washington, D.C.–based Secretary of Defense was at a Montana vacation spot, not twenty miles away from the log cabin that held the bounty hunters’ offices on the main floors and a host of specialized, high-security rooms belowground.
In one of the aboveground rooms, Jacob threw. Bull. Three down, two to go.
Cooper’s televised voice continued. “The President, myself and the members of the United Nations have had enough. The atrocities perpetrated by King Aleksandr have gone on too long with no hope of change in sight. We must commit to overthrowing Aleksandr’s tyrannical rule—a goal that is strengthened by the support we have found within his family.”
Jacob focused. Threw. Bull.
On screen, Secretary Cooper gestured toward a mid-thirties, dark-haired man in a custom-tailored suit. “Please welcome Lunkinburg’s premiere freedom fighter. Disowned by his father for his politics, he only wants what is best for his people.” Cooper waved the man forward. “I give you Prince Nikolai of Lunkinburg.”
Jacob imagined teenage girls swooning all across America at the sight of the crown prince, whose camera appeal was second only to his patriotic fervor.
There was scattered applause from those assembled at the Golf Resort, and the cameras panned to track the prince as he made his way to the portable podium. The image swept over several navy-suited figures in the background. Secret Service most likely, Jacob thought, and ignored the quiver in his gut and the sudden desire to stare at the screen.
He focused instead on the dartboard, where he was one bull away from his usual perfect score. He lifted the missile and felt the click as he visually connected with his target. Measured. Pulled back.
A flicker of navy suit on the screen caught his peripheral view and yanked his attention to the TV in an instant. Images jammed his brain. An hourglass shape. A chin-length swing of auburn hair too vivid to be strawberry-blond, too rich to be brassy red. Flashing green eyes and mobile lips made for kissing.
Jacob’s stomach knotted.
He threw.
He missed.
The room stilled with a collective hiss of indrawn breath as the six other bounty hunters stared at the dart quivering in the outer ring of the board. A half an inch farther out and he would have missed the board entirely. In the game of Bull, that entitled the other player to a future claim.
In five years, Jacob had never given up a future claim. Shoot, he’d only missed the bull one other time—and then he’d had a bullet wound in his arm and a temperature well over a hundred and two.
But hell and damn, he’d missed this time. Missed big.
On the television screen, Prince Nikolai spoke of patriotism and human rights, and of how his pain at working against his father was offset by the knowledge that the people