Hard Target (Cobra Elite Book 1) Read online

  Hard Target

  A Cobra Elite Novel

  Pamela Clare

  www.pamelaclare.com

  Contents

  Chasing Fire

  Acknlowledgements

  Author’s Note

  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

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Also by Pamela Clare

  About the Author

  Hard Target

  A Cobra Elite novel

  Published by Pamela Clare, 2019

  Cover Design by © Jaycee DeLorenzo/Sweet ‘N Spicy Designs

  Cover photo: Drazen Vukelic

  Copyright © 2019 by Pamela Clare

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products 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.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic format without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials by violating the author’s rights. No one should be expected to work for free. If you support the arts and enjoy literature, do not participate in illegal file-sharing.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7335251-1-4

  ISBN-10: 1-7335251-1-4

  Created with Vellum

  This book is dedicated to midwife Jennifer Braun and International Midwife Assistance, whose work on behalf of mothers and babies has saved lives in Afghanistan, Uganda, and Haiti. Jennifer, your courage and compassion are an inspiration.

  Please consider donating to International Midwife Assistance at https://www.midwifeassist.org. Your dollars, pounds, and Euros in any amount will help train skilled birth attendants and save the lives of women and babies.

  Acknlowledgements

  A world of thanks to Jennifer Braun, not only for her work in Afghanistan, Uganda, and Haiti, but for sharing her experiences with me. Without that, this book could not have happened.

  Thanks, too, to Lisa Farhana, one of my Muslim readers, who read this manuscript to check for mistakes about Islam and offensive representations. I am so grateful.

  Special thanks to Christopher Wu and Reid Miller for sharing their military and EMS expertise, respectively, with me. You guys rock.

  Much gratitude to New York Times bestselling authors Kaylea Cross and Katie Reus for their support in getting this series off the ground. I am so grateful to the two of you. If the three of us are ever together, I’m buying the first round. You can visit their websites at:

  http://kayleacross.com/v2/

  https://katiereus.com

  Thanks as always to Michelle White, Benjamin Alexander, Jackie Turner, Shell Ryan, and Pat Egan Fordyce for their support during the writing of this book. Special thanks to Shell Ryan for a last-minute proofread.

  My acknowledgements would not be complete without a big thank you to my readers, who lift me up and support me all year round, whether I’m writing or not. You are the best!

  Author’s Note

  It’s tricky these days to write about real subject matter. The moment you delve into any substantive topic as an author, you risk offending someone. This book is not a political statement. It’s a story drawn from the real world about one woman’s attempt to ameliorate the suffering of other women half a world away.

  I was in the middle of the story when a man with evil in his heart gunned down Muslims at prayer in New Zealand. Like all decent people around the world, I was horrified by this. I attended an interfaith prayer service at our local mosque together with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other Christians. The prayer room was packed with people who had come to tell our Muslim neighbors that they are welcome here and that we sympathize with their terrible loss.

  It was an amazing experience—more than a thousand people of all faiths praying to God for forgiveness and mercy and vowing to support one another and protect one another from violence and bigotry. Ministers and rabbis shared the microphone with an imam and other Muslim speakers. I was moved to tears as a nephew of one of the men slain in New Zealand spoke of his uncle’s final heroic moments, trying to save others.

  One Muslim man spoke eloquently to the tendency of human beings to conflate the actions of extremists with the groups to which they claim to belong.

  I have tried not to do that in this story. I’ve made a sincere effort to differentiate between Islam as a world religion and the violent extremism of the Taliban and Daesh/IS. It is not my intention to vilify or misrepresent any group of people or to offend my Muslim readers. I wanted to share just a tiny bit of the tragedy of Afghanistan, a once-thriving nation that has been hurled backward by four decades of brutality and warfare, by focusing on the desperate plight of Afghan women.

  Back in 2004 when Jennifer Braun, who inspired this story, began her effort to set up a midwifery school and hospital in Bamyan, Afghanistan had a stillbirth/neonatal mortality rate of roughly one in six. That’s almost unfathomable. Imagine coming from catching babies in the U.S., where stillbirths are rare, to Afghanistan, where they’re a daily occurrence, even at a small rural clinic. I saw a photo of four newly stillborn babies, lying in a row with little handmade string-and-paper tags on their tiny ankles.

  It broke my heart.

  Though things have improved and Afghanistan is making heroic efforts to improve women’s access to healthcare, most Afghan women still give birth without skilled attendants outside a hospital. Many never receive prenatal care. As a result, Afghan women currently face a one-in-eight lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes.

  One in eight.

  That’s the same risk women in the U.S. face when it comes to breast cancer.

  But this isn’t a National Geographic article. It’s a love story about a man who has been a part of the war there for most of his adult life and a woman desperate to make change. I hope you enjoy their story.

  Peace,

  Pamela Clare

  April 14, 2019

  1

  November 10

  Derek Tower strode down the hallway toward Conference Room One, a mug of black coffee in hand, his reflection moving with him along walls of burnished steel. A woman’s silky laughter told him that Holly and Nick Andris were already there. A husband-and-wife team—and two of Cobra’s best operatives—they had just returned from a covert job in Colombia and were here for a debriefing.

  This needed to be quick. Derek had a flight to catch.

  He was due in Istanbul tomorrow morning. A Cobra operative had infiltrated a ring of IS recruiters, and tomorrow they were going to take that ring down. It was the kind of covert work Cobra did well, the kind that involved perfect coordination, flawless execution, and complete secrecy.

  Derek entered the conference room, its glass walls soundproof and equipped with built-in blinds that were already closed. “Morning.”

  Andris dragged his gaze off his wife. “Morning.”

  “Hey, Derek.” Holly’s lips curved in a smile that turned men into idiots.

  Naturally platinum blond with big brown eye
s and lethal curves, she could have been a movie star. Instead, she’d put her brains and good looks to work for the CIA, gathering intel through intimate contact with men—and occasionally women—who were deemed a danger to the United States. When she’d been exposed and almost killed, Derek and Javier Corbray, Derek’s business partner, had offered her a job. They’d also taken on Andris, a former Delta Force operator who’d worked as muscle for the CIA.

  As far as Derek was concerned, Holly was Cobra’s most valuable asset. Anyone could be trained to point a gun and shoot, but not many could gather intel while being groped by a drug kingpin, terrorist organizer, or foreign assassin.

  “You got him. Good work. How was your flight?” Derek sat and punched a button on the control panel that would turn on the view screen and bring Corbray into their meeting from Washington, D.C.

  Andris shared a look with his wife. “We slept most of the way.”

  Right.

  The two of them were crazy in love. They’d once been caught on camera fucking on the table in Conference Room Two. Derek didn’t understand love, but he understood lust. He would bet his ass they hadn’t slept at all. “Corbray, you there?”

  “Great job.” Javier Corbray’s grinning face appeared on the screen.

  Corbray, a former Navy SEAL, had worked with Derek to put this company together, lifting Derek from the ashes of his private security firm—Tower Global Security, which had been forced into bankruptcy. Corbray spent a lot of time in D.C., where his wife, Laura Nilsson, worked as a television journalist.

  That was fine with Derek. He didn’t miss dealing with the suits in Congress.

  Derek glanced at his watch. “I need to get to the airport, so let’s do this.”

  Corbray went first. “I had a message from the Attorney General in my inbox this morning. She is elated to have this asshole in custody.”

  The asshole in this instance was Christopher David Hansen, a former Coast Guard officer who’d been using his position to help a Colombian cartel run cocaine into San Diego. When he’d realized the DEA was onto him, he’d fled to Colombia and tried to hide in the jungle. The DEA hadn’t been able to get near him. There were too many leaks, too many eyes along the roads, too many people ready to tip off the cartel bosses the moment any gringo asked about him.

  But the DEA’s intel had revealed that Hansen liked to beat up hookers and left his lair a few times a month in search of prey. That’s when they had given Cobra a call.

  Andris slid his written report across the table. “Based on the intel we received, we set up our operation outside Characa. There’s a little cantina in town where he likes to drink and pick up working girls.”

  Holly told them how she’d driven to the outskirts of town, alone but wearing a mic, while Andris and his team had placed themselves strategically out of sight. She’d walked into the cantina pretending to be a tourist whose boyfriend had ditched her and whose car had broken down.

  “When no one spoke English, I started crying and asked for a drink and then another. I pretended to get wasted. He sat in the corner with one of the girls, watching. I did a little drunk dancing, and eventually, he took the bait.”

  “Of course, he did,” Derek said.

  Helpless, drunk, and drop-dead gorgeous—an irresistible combination for a predator like Hansen.

  Holly told them how she’d tagged Hansen with a micro GPS transmitter during a hug just in case he didn’t try to pick her up. But then the bastard had offered to let her stay at his place and send a tow truck for her car. She had feigned gratitude, let him buy her another drink, and left the cantina with him—and his two armed sicarios.

  Derek had worried about this part of the plan. It had been risky as hell for her to be alone with that fucker and his trained killers.

  Then again, Holly was a pro, and managing risk was part of the job.

  “He stopped a few miles down the road and had his men take away my phone and passport—for safekeeping, he said.”

  “Safekeeping.” Corbray’s tone was sharp with sarcasm. “What a hero.”

  If Holly had been an ordinary tourist, her life would have ended that day. Hansen would have destroyed the phone, taken his time raping and beating her, and then blown her head off and tossed her body in a marsh.

  Holly finished her part of the story. “He told his guys to get out of the vehicle because he and I were going to have some fun. I waited till his pants were down and then threw up on him. He slapped me, but he lost his erection.”

  Andris’ jaw tightened, his expression hard. “The target stepped out of the vehicle to clean himself up and still had his pants around his ankles when we moved on him. We eliminated the two bodyguards, bagged Hansen, shoved him into the back of our vehicle, and headed straight for the airport. It took less than two minutes. I might or might not have punched him square in the face.”

  Hansen was lucky Andris hadn’t gelded him on the spot.

  “Did you run into any—” Derek was cut off by the persistent buzzing of his cell phone. He glanced at the display. Fuck. “I need to take this.”

  “Istanbul?” Corbray asked.

  Derek shook his head, got to his feet. “Senator Hamilton.”

  Corbray grimaced. “What the fuck does he want?”

  “I’m about to find out.”

  Derek bit back a burst of laughter. “You want me to fly into Afghanistan with a team and abduct your daughter? I can’t do that, sir. It’s illegal.”

  What a crazy son of a bitch.

  “I don’t give a goddamn what’s legal!” Hamilton shouted into his ear. “Jenna won’t listen to reason. She has no business being there. The Taliban kill midwives.”

  It was the truth. Talibs deliberately targeted midwives. When they’d attacked the town of Ghazni last summer, they’d made their way to a midwifery school in the city and put a round through a midwife’s head while the student midwives hid in a safe room. They claimed that midwives were violating the rules of Islam by giving women contraception, even though Islam permitted the use of contraception.

  The truth was more straightforward than that. Nothing frightened Talibs more than an educated woman. But that wasn’t the issue here.

  “Cobra cannot use force to bring a U.S. citizen back to the country without a warrant and the orders of DOJ.”

  “Don’t forget what you owe my family.” Hamilton’s voice turned cold. “My son died for you. He—”

  Derek knew what Jimmy had done for him, but no way was he putting up with this guilt trip. “Nothing changes the fact that I cannot kidnap a U.S. citizen. Once she’s here, what happens then? After she sues Cobra and wins, she’s free to fly back to Afghanistan—unless you’re willing to lock her up.”

  “I would do no such thing.”

  Derek wasn’t so sure.

  Before Jimmy had joined the Army, his old man had tried to control every aspect of his life—how he wore his hair, where he went to college, the classes he took, the girls he dated, his choice of career, even his diet. If Jenna had gotten the same treatment as her brother, she’d no doubt left the country to get away from her asshole father.

  For a moment, Senator Hamilton was silent. When he spoke again, there was an oily tone to his voice. “Jenna is my only living child. Grab your gear, get on a fucking plane, and talk her into coming home.”

  “You want me to act as her bodyguard?”

  “Jenna is wasting her potential over there. I didn’t raise her and send her to the best schools so that she could help poor people overpopulate the world with kids they can’t feed. She needs to come home, find a husband, and stop trying to fix that place.”

  Could the man be any more of an asshole?

  Derek knew what it was to be poor. The orphan son of a teen mom who’d overdosed on heroin, he’d been found in an alley and had grown up with nothing, moving from foster home to foster home, being raised by drunks and losers who liked the extra money from the state but didn’t give a damn about him.

  “Whe
re is she?”

  “At a clinic in a rural area outside of Mazar-e-Sharif.”

  Balkh Province.

  It was one of the safer parts of Afghanistan. The Taliban controlled about forty-five percent of the country at the moment, but Balkh Province was under the protection of a wealthy warlord-turned-politician who hated Talibs even more than he hated the U.S. As the attack on Ghazni had proven, however, no city was truly safe.

  But there were other forces at work in Afghanistan besides the Taliban. There were also militias, uncontrolled bands of armed men who roamed the rural parts of the country and thought nothing of inflicting suffering on the civilian population. IS fighters were there, too, hiding out, smuggling supplies, and killing and raping at will.

  “Doesn’t she have local muscle guarding the hospital?”

  “Yes, yes. She’s got Afghan guards with American weapons, but I don’t trust them. How much do you think it would take for someone to bribe them? What if one of them tells his Talib cousin about the American midwife?”

  Okay, so the senator had a point. Still, it wasn’t a simple thing to fly into Afghanistan with weapons and ammo and set up a babysitting operation.

  “My presence there could provoke an attack on the hospital.” Did Hamilton not understand this? “By sending me, you could bring about the crisis you hope to avert.”