they’ve been surveilling the area for a month. Last night one of the suspects called and told me I should watch the horizon from West Beach very closely this morning.”
“And?”
“I had my team figure out what was on the docket for the squadrons on NAS Whidbey for the next several days. This morning is the start of a major West Coast Fleet exercise. When I put it together with what the suspects were feeding me, I took the initiative and decided to be out on the water instead of on the beach.”
Dread seemed to wrap itself around her.
“With the Navy? On a Navy ship?”
She knew the answer before he said it. “No. I was in a small inflatable powerboat. That’s all I’m going to tell you about it.”
“What did you see, Brad?”
He quietly tapped the side of his mug. “One of the suspects I’m familiar with was out there in a fishing boat. I stayed as far away from him as I could, as long as I could, but then I saw what looked like a SAM in his arms.”
“A surface-to-air missile?” She knew enough to realize there was always the possibility of terrorists smuggling in war weapons. The reports she’d read over the years had discussed shipments being stopped by US Customs at the border or sooner.
“Yes. I had a feeling something wasn’t right about the way they’d told me to watch from the shoreline. After putting it together with the Fleet exercise—it all pointed to trouble of the biggest kind.”
She had a feeling that the “something not right” was directly related to the explosion.
“Go on.”
“I took him, and the weapon, out.”
“Who’s him, and what exactly do you mean by I took him out?”
His shifted his eyes, his expression no longer readable.
“I had to stop him from firing the SAM, Joy.”
The gravity of the situation, his situation, hit her like a Puget Sound gale in November. “You killed a man out there today?”
“I disabled his weapon. The resulting explosion did the rest.”
“Okay. So now all you have to do is call in to FBI headquarters, to your team, and report what happened.” Honestly, did he have to play the dramatic SEAL part? Weren’t those days supposed to be over?
“I can’t. I blew my cover by blowing their mission. No pun intended.”
“Do you think they—the terrorists, whoever they are—know you’re the one who stopped the SAM?”
As she asked, she couldn’t believe that Brad’s cover would be compromised by anything he did or didn’t do. He was a professional who’d completed umpteen missions in the most hellish places on earth. He knew how to keep his cover.
“I have to assume they do, or at the very least they’ll figure it out soon enough.”
She believed him.
“Let me clarify. They may suspect I’m not legit when I don’t meet up with them again. They have no way of knowing which LEA I belong to. I’ve been playing the part of the disillusioned émigré who wanted to help quell the American Imperialists. These are all domestic terrorists. None of them speak Pashto or Dari—I threw in a few words here and there to test them. They’re all homegrown wannabes. My team was alerted that they were trying to leave the country to join a terrorist group overseas.”
“But they decided to get some credibility by doing one of those sleeper-type actions?”
“Yes. This is more than a sleeper cell, though. They have contacts with the bad guys overseas. That’s certain now that I identified the SAM. I just don’t know who that contact is yet.”
Brad’s wide range of skills, including his ability with more than one foreign language, was a big part of what had made him such a valuable asset to the Navy SEALs. All SEALs had intensive training in weapons identification and employment. If he said he saw a SAM about to be launched, it was true.
And the explosion left no doubt.
“The thing is, I think they’re also targeting an individual here on Whidbey. They’ll lie low if they have to, until the LEA presence lessens, but they’re going to go after him sooner or later.”
She ran her fingers through her hair. “Terrorists who are so bold they’ll try to shoot down a US Navy aircraft just offshore, in US territory, don’t care about the LEA all over the place, Brad. They won’t wait.”
His appreciation of her accurate observation gleamed in his eyes. The instant warmth that flushed her cheeks was impossible to control.
“Exactly.”
* * *
THE DOORBELL RANG, and Brad saw her shoulders tense, her mouth tighten in a grim line.
“That’s the OHPD or sheriff’s deputy. Coming over in the respectable way.” She tried to keep it light by poking fun at his entrance via her side door earlier, but her anxiety was palpable.
You’ve done this to her.
“OHPD?”
“Oak Harbor Police Department. Keep up, Mr. FBI.”
“Are you going to tell them I’m here?”
“Why can’t I? You’re FBI. Don’t all LEA talk to each other?”
“You know damn well they don’t. I’m undercover, Joy. I can’t be seen.”
He knew he was asking her to trust him with little reason. He’d made no attempt to contact her since he’d been free to do so. Only now, when he was in serious trouble, had he sought her out.
“You don’t have to do this, Joy. Say the word and I’ll go out the back and disappear. Just give me thirty seconds lead time.”
“No, don’t go. I’m not going to say anything to them other than what I reported on the phone. There’s no need, not legally.”
He saw the inner war play out in her expression. She had a beautiful face, capable of distracting the most hardened criminal. Sometimes her face revealed what she was thinking, what she was feeling. But she was capable of hiding her emotions, too. Her poker face had let her get what they needed to set Farid free from the hell he’d been condemned to. He felt a rush of warmth.
“You trust me,” he said quietly.
“That’s a discussion for later. Go into my bedroom and stay there until I come and get you.”
* * *
“I WAS STANDING right here, looking out through my binoculars. That’s when I noticed the explosion. The vibration hit a few seconds later.”
“Roger.”
The Oak Harbor police officer wrote more notes, her face noncommittal.
“Have you gotten a lot of witness accounts this morning?”
Officer Katie Dade looked up and shook her head.
“Not as many as you’d think. Most of your neighbors were either in the shower or already at work, and the others heard just the explosion. You’re the only one who saw it from here. But we had other witnesses who were walking their dogs farther down the beach.”
By farther down Officer Dade meant the stretch of coastline miles from Joy’s house, closer to the Naval Air Station.
“I thought they’d send a sheriff’s deputy.”
“Normally, yes. Your home’s in the county’s jurisdiction. They’re swamped at the moment, so they sent me. Mind if I look through your binoculars?”
“No, go right ahead.”