Under Fire (Elite Force #3)(56)
Author: Catherine Mann

“Whoa.” Jose held up a hand. “Contractors from different countries? That’s treason.”

“If I could prove it.” Harris rolled his shoulders. “Which I couldn’t. I spoke to my commanding officer, and he said they already had an eighteen-hour workday chasing down tangible threats with hard evidence. So I kept my mouth shut and ears open, waiting for something concrete I could take to the authorities, get some sense of who was pulling the strings. They talked a lot about their ‘bosses’ and reporting back to contacts in the military community, but I never got a name.”

Liam smiled darkly. “That would be too easy.”

“They were reckless, but not that reckless. It’s obvious they worked with someone high up the military chain of command. At first I thought it was a money thing, but the more I listened, the more I got the feeling it was about affecting the balance of power.”

“Whoa,” Cuervo interrupted. “Balance of power?”

“Right,” Harris continued. “It was about reshaping the face of the command structure, personal agendas for military armament programs that should excel versus which ones they would make sure failed.”

Damn. It would have been so much easier to go after a greedy bastard. Money trails were simple. But power-hungry types with an ideological ax to grind? Liam focused back in on Harris.

“Maybe a month into the assignment, things shifted. It was about more than talk. They planned an actual exchange, something to do with the coordinates for when U.S. satellites would be conducting intelligence gathering. If another country knows when you’re watching them…”

Shit. The implications were hellacious. U.S. intelligence operatives, military members on maneuvers… They would all be sitting ducks.

“Uh, yeah.” Liam scratched the back of his head. “That would constitute treason.”

Harris didn’t smile. “I could hardly believe what I was seeing. An exchange. A simple little chip that they passed over by exchanging cell phones.” He paused. “The data chip was in the phone. All I had to do was report them to officials on base and…”

“And?” Rachel touched his arm softly.

“The marketplace was bombed.” His voice went flat, his eyes hollow. “Bodies flew part. The two contractors died on impact. I heard sirens and screams. None of it fully registered. I just closed my hand around one of the cell phones and passed out. The next thing I remember, I woke up in a battlefield hospital ward.”

Liam leaned back in his chair, churning over Harris’s story in his mind. “That’s it?”

“When I got out of the hospital, I was pretty rattled. Go ahead and laugh if you want. Lieutenant gung ho was totally freaked out after a few months of combat and one especially close call. They tell me I was catatonic.” He shrugged. “When I came out of it enough to be moved to a rehab center, they gave me my stuff back. And there was that cell phone.”

“From the marketplace?”

“Exactly. I tried to alert the authorities to what happened. They informed me I was suffering from battle stress and that my memories were faulty.”

“Why didn’t they at least check the chip in your phone? That wouldn’t have taken long, to verify information.”

“The first time I started to explain things, I wasn’t as coherent or… calm. They gave me some kind of knock-out drug halfway through before I even got to the part about the cell phone. Next time I tried to tell, I was more cautious in holding back information, and before long I didn’t know what to believe. Maybe I was a mix of rational and delusional. But I didn’t know who to trust with that chip. I was afraid to let even my psychiatrist know. The paranoia paralyzed me. Until Rachel paired me up with the therapy dog, Harley.”

Harley nudged his hand.

Harris stroked the dog’s head in a way that appeared to soothe him. “Rachel said she would go with me to the authorities…” He shrugged. “It didn’t pan out as we’d hoped.”

“What about the chip in the cell phone?”

“I turned it over during my second interview with the OSI.”

“And now there’s no way to verify what you’ve told us.” Damn it, this guy had been stringing them along for nothing. The threats could have all been set up by him, especially if he’d had a psychotic break.

Liam looked from Rocha to James and could see they feared the same thing. That they were stuck in the boonies with a seriously unhinged and dangerous individual.

Harris stuffed his hand behind his back.

“Gun!” Rocha shouted.

Liam and his PJ teammates piled on top of Harris, knocking him from the chair. Harley growled, and from the corner of his eye, Liam saw Rachel grab the dog’s collar. Harris thrashed underneath them. Hard. Damned hard. With punches and kicks of a trained security force specialist. It took all three of them to pin his raging body.

Dimly, Liam heard Catriona scream, felt Rachel’s hand on his arm. The red faded from his eyes and he calmed enough to assess the restrained lieutenant. Harris’s chest heaved, his skin paling. His eyes darted from side to side. He appeared scared—but rational.

Liam leaned to catch Harris’s attention. “Talk to me.”

“No gun,” he said through gritted teeth. “A cell phone. I made a copy of the chip and stored it in another phone.”

Liam nodded to Cuervo to check it out. Cuervo reached into the guy’s back pocket and pulled out…

An iPhone.

Liam rocked back on his heels. “My apologies, Lieutenant.”

Harris sat up slowly, his muscles visibly twitching. “It’s okay. I’d have done the same in your position.”

Rachel knelt beside him with Harley. Harris hooked an arm around the dog’s neck, but he wasn’t meeting Catriona’s gaze across the room. That sure answered a couple more of Liam’s questions. Harris had a thing for the dog-sitter. Made sense that he would be embarrassed around someone he wanted to accept him as manly. Harris didn’t appear to care what Rachel thought of his masculinity.

Harris rubbed the back of his neck. “Any chance you guys can decipher the information on the chip?”

“Good news, bad news. We’re a team for a reason. We all have different skills. And our computer geek, Data—Marcus Dupre—is back home.”

Rachel shoved to her feet. “Now would be a great time for the good news part.”

“We have a generator and top-notch computers here. And thanks to the storm that’s keeping us from leaving, it’s also impossible for anyone to find us. So we have time.”