3

      GET IN.

      Take the target down.

      Get out.

      By the time Gray had crossed the island and made it to SEAL Team Sigma’s base camp, he was in control again. He’d ditched the spa uniform for his camo and retrieved his weapons from where he’d cached them. Weapons decorated him like ornaments on a Christmas tree. He had a KA-BAR knife at his waist and a Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine gun holstered to his thigh. The Glock resting against the base of his spine was even more welcome.

      In his clothes and his own skin, he was starting to feel like his old self again as he worked his way through the thick jungle undergrowth, concealing his trail. Calm. Detached. No emotions. Check, check and check. Those were normal operating conditions. What he felt around Laney had to be simple attraction, compounded by the fact that he hadn’t had sex in months.

      Sure, part of him was wondering when he’d see her again and if he could coax her into bed, but the rest of him was back on the job. Fantasy Island—which had to be the most ridiculous name he’d ever heard—was five miles long and two miles wide. Approximately four square miles of that space was jungle. The resort’s owners had opted to keep things in their natural state, so it was acres and acres of dense, rugged terrain. The good news was that he doubted any of the resort’s guests would penetrate farther than four or five feet inside the mess.

      Before he’d made the SEALs team, he’d had no idea so many different types of palm trees could be crammed into one small island. Mother Nature hadn’t stinted. She’d parked slender fan palms next to spiny palms that stretched fifty, sixty feet up toward the sky. The island also came with a shitload of coconut palms loaded with ripe nuts waiting to brain anyone dumb enough to make camp at the base. What wasn’t palm was Hispaniolan mahogany and muskwood, and there were vines tangled up around positively everything. The place was “lush, pristine jungle” according to the resort’s marketing brochure, but a tropical pain in the ass from where he stood.

      A lizard darted up a trunk as Gray moved deeper. The place was green, sure, but it was also chock-full of tree snakes, the odd boa and a seemingly endless supply of toads and frogs. It was damned hard to hear himself think. Their team had set up a base camp on the other side of the island. It was their space, a place where they could be themselves and relax. In addition to four camouflaged tents, someone had strung up a couple of hammocks, and there were stacks of supplies, weapons and radios. More than an outdoor rec room, it was also their fallback position, the strip of beach below the camp their designated emergency extraction point.

      As he stepped into camp, he was met by the two shooters he had patrolling the perimeter. Sam and Remy were the newbies on the team, so he’d passed on sending them in undercover. He needed to know how they handled a mission first, before he put them on the front lines.

      Sam flashed him a two-fingered salute. Slim and brawny with close-cropped brown hair, he still looked like the Alabama country boy he’d been before he joined the Teams. He was damned good at blowing stuff up, however, and swam faster than any SEAL Gray had ever seen. He also doubled as their unit medic. “Tell me you brought us a cold one.”

      “Gray’s buying as soon as we’re Stateside.” Levi stepped out of the jungle behind him. Gray’s Senior Chief was the first of the infiltrators to arrive, and although his eyes moved from palm to palm as if he expected an army of hostiles to pop out and open fire, the guy sported a big-ass grin on his face. Gray had seen the same grin when they’d been pinned down in Iraq, taking heavy fire. “Waterfront acreage. Very nice choice.”

      As Levi dropped down onto the hammock Sam had strung up between two palms, looking as relaxed as any weekend warrior in his living room, Mason slipped out of the jungle. Mason was Mr. Silent. The big guy flashed a face full of attitude and was the kind of guy you expected to administer a beat-down in an alley. At thirty-four, he was also the oldest operative on the team and the best damned sniper Gray had ever worked with. He was no cowboy, but he’d made it clear he planned on dying in his boots. You didn’t piss him off without having a really good reason. Hell. You didn’t piss off anyone on the team. Gray almost felt bad for Diego Marcos.

      Remy followed. The Cajun seemed right at home on the island, passing as the general maintenance and go-to guy. He’d be the man in the hot seat when it came to bringing Marcos in because he’d be the first to face the guy.

      Ashley was the last to arrive. She’d infiltrated Fantasy Island as a guest and, in keeping with her cover, she entered their bay in a resort kayak, just another guest out for a recreational paddle. Never mind that she’d driven the kayak through the lagoon waters at a brutal pace, taking the craft through the rocks just for shits and giggles. She looked sexy as sin in her skullhead-print bikini and a pair of hot pink shorts that earned plenty of teasing from the guys.

      Levi winked at her. “Now that’s a get-up you won’t catch a SEAL in.”

      She flipped him off and dropped down onto a stack of duffel bags. “My boobs are better than yours. You’d look damned silly in a bikini.”

      “Now there’s truth, sugar.” Levi laughed, unoffended.

      Gray let the teasing wash over him as he broke down his gun. He didn’t need to look at it—any SEAL could break down and rebuild his weapons in the dark—but he didn’t want to watch Levi and Ashley flirting it up, either. He could go back to the resort and find Laney, but he didn’t have Levi’s smooth charm or way with words.

      No. He was empty. Lonely. Itching for the next fight, the next mission. As he watched Levi and Ashley bickering amiably, giving each other a hard time, part of him wanted that. Sure, they drove each other crazy, but they did it together. Lonely wasn’t on their agenda. All he had to offer Laney was a few nights of sex, however, and that was a different kind of crazy.

      He got on the radio for their coded transmission while the rest of the team continued ribbing Ashley. But when Gray signed off, the team suddenly fell silent, looking at him expectantly.

      “We’re getting yanked,” Levi joked. “Or, better yet, instead of camping out here in the jungle, we’ve got a week’s shore leave and a reservation at the resort. I’ve seen the food they’re serving.”

      Levi’s sweet tooth was notorious. The man always packed Snickers bars in his bugout bag.

      “We’ve got movement on our target. He’s under way.”

      Marcos spent the majority of his time holed up in a jungle compound in the Belizean mountains. The place was a fortress. A well-placed sniper might also have stood a chance of getting off a shot, or the team could have mined the road in and detonated a lifetime supply of C4 underneath Marcos’s Humvee, except the man was cautious and rarely moved out in the open. Learning that he intended to come here had been a piece of intel that had taken Ashley’s team eighteen months to acquire.

      Levi cursed. “Define movement.”

      Gray knew how his comrade felt. “Marcos will be here in eight days instead of ten. His advance team hits the ground in four. We need to take them down fast, as soon as they arrive. And since we’re looking to capture Marcos, not kill, we’re going to report back as his guys and make