Undercover SEAL Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

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  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  UNDERCOVER SEAL

  SEALs of Coronado

  Paige Tyler

  Copyright © 2018 by Paige Tyler

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the author.

  Cover Design by JJS Marketing and Design

  Editing by Jennifer Jakes / The Killion Group, Inc.

  Copyediting by RVP Editing

  With special thanks to my extremely patient and understanding husband, without whose help and support I couldn’t have pursued my dream job of becoming a writer. You’re my sounding board, my idea man, my critique partner, and the absolute best research assistant any girl could ask for!

  Thank you.

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  PROLOGUE

  High Above the Pacific Ocean

  HOW’D YOUR DATE go with that girl I set you up with?”

  Petty Officer Nash Cantrell opened his eyes to find his fellow SEAL—and resident ladies’ man—Dalton Jennings, expectantly watching their teammate, dark-haired Wes Marshall, as they sat in the cargo section of the Air Force MC-130H Combat Talon II aircraft. Four years younger than Nash, Wes had been on the Team since the middle of last year, but as far as everyone was concerned, he was still the effing new guy—at least until someone newer showed up.

  In the seat beside Nash, Wes shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Until it got weird.”

  “Define weird,” Dalton said in his Southern drawl.

  “Emily insisted we stop by her mother’s house so she could meet me, which was kind of different since it was our first date,” Wes explained. “Then when Emily ran upstairs to grab something from her bedroom, her mom hit on me. She actually gave me her number and told me to call.”

  “Huh.” Dalton shook his head. “Gotta admit, I didn’t see that coming. What’d you do?”

  Wes opened his mouth to answer, but Nash interrupted.

  “Wait a minute. Back up.” He looked at Dalton. “You set Wes up on a blind date?”

  Dalton considered that way longer than he needed to. Either he did, or he didn’t, right?

  “I wouldn’t really call it a blind date,” Dalton finally said. “I mean, I showed Wes her profile on Tinder first.”

  Beside Dalton, the fourth SEAL on their four-man Team, Holden Lockwood, snorted but didn’t say anything.

  “I could set you up, too, if you want,” Dalton told Nash. “There are a lot of women out there who aren’t shy about admitting they want to hook up with a Navy SEAL.”

  Yeah, tell him something he didn’t already know. Nash would have doubted the wisdom of letting a guy who had more women on speed dial than Nash had contacts in his phone setting him up with anyone, but after Wes got hit by a mother-daughter tag team, he was even more sure he shouldn’t let Dalton play matchmaker.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” Nash shifted in his seat. They weren’t the most comfortable things in the world to sit on, especially if you were wearing all the gear you needed for a HALO jump. “I prefer to meet women the old-fashioned way.”

  Dalton arched a brow. “What, at the bingo games down at the VFW? Good idea, bro. Those gals definitely can’t outrun you.”

  “Funny,” Nash muttered.

  Sometimes, he wondered why the hell he even bothered. He loved Dalton like a brother, but when it came to women, they might as well be from different planets.

  Dalton shrugged, then rested his head back and closed his eyes. “Whatever. It’s your loss. But don’t ever say I didn’t offer to help a brother out.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Beside Nash, Holden glanced his way. The dim lighting of the plane’s interior caught the angle of his slightly crooked nose, making the decade-old break look more pronounced than it really was.

  “What do you have against Tinder?” Holden asked.

  Some of the SEALs on the Team—like Dalton, and maybe Holden, too—had zero interest in getting serious with a woman. According to them, long-term relationships and being a SEAL were simply incompatible. Nash wasn’t that cynical. Granted, he’d never gone out of his way to look for a serious relationship, but he also hadn’t hidden from it either. Not that he expected it to happen anytime soon. After four failed relationships since joining the Navy, he wasn’t holding his breath.

  While some of the guys on SEAL Team 5—like his chief, Chasen Ward, and teammates, Logan Dunn and Trent Wagner—had lucked out recently and found women willing to put up with the crap that came with falling for a guy who risked his life on a daily basis, it was rare. In Nash’s experience, a lot of women might be intrigued by the idea of dating a SEAL, but it wasn’t until they started living the reality of endless deployments, training exercises, and late-night phone calls sending their significant other to dangerous places that they fully understood what it meant. Most bailed before they even got that far.

  “Nothing,” he finally said. “Checking someone’s profile out, then swiping left or right just isn’t my deal. I’m more into the quality over quantity approach.”

  “Maybe if you’re looking for a woman who can actually handle being with a SEAL long term,” Dalton remarked, eyes still closed. “I’m interested in a woman looking to support the troops for an hour or two at a time. Why get involved with someone when she’s only going to bail on you in the end?”

  “Damn, you’re cynical,” Wes said. “Some woman must have really done a number on you.”

  The answer to that question was a definite yes, but Nash knew if Wes expected Dalton to fill him in on the details, he’d be waiting a long time. Nash opened his mouth to tell Wes as much when the klaxon alarm rang, announcing their approach to the target. Nash automatically flipped down his night vision goggles, noting that his buddies did the same. The minute their personal oxygen was switched on, the jumpmaster lowered the back ramp of the plane.

  Cold air rushed in, smacking Nash in the face as he fell in step behind Holden. Nash waited for Holden to step off into the pitch black night, then followed immediately after him. He knew Dalton and Wes would be right behind him. For a High Altitude Low Opening jump, it was necessary to stay in close formation as much as possible so they didn’t get spread too far apart. Of course, that increased the possibility of them smacking into each other, especially with the way the swirling wind shoved them around. Things didn’t get any better lower down, where rain started hitting them like a swarm of angry bees.

  This was effing insane, Nash thought as he strained to find and then keep his eyes on the dim lights of the rapidly approaching container ship below him. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to try to land a SEAL team on top of an ocean-going cargo ship in the middle of a torrential downpour?

  Oh, yeah, now he remembered. It had been the CIA.

  They’d thought it would be a piece of cake. But then, they weren’t parachuting in with the team, which made things simpler. Life
was always easier for the people sitting around an office with a cup of coffee in their hands, dreaming up impossible crap for the SEALs to do.

  Even Nash had to admit that the ship—going by the dull ass name of MOL Deliberate—had seemed plenty big enough when he, his teammates, and the CIA analysts had gone over photos during their three days of mission briefings. 1200-feet long, 160-feet wide, and loaded with a veritable parking lot of tractor trailer-sized steel cargo containers, it had seemed like parachuting onto the ship would be a piece of cake, even if it was moving at fourteen knots through the middle of the Pacific Ocean in crappy weather.

  But now that he was dropping quickly toward the poorly lit ship as it plowed through rough, rain-shrouded seas in the middle of a pitch black night, Nash decided it wasn’t going to be as easy as they’d thought. If the twenty mile an hour crosswind didn’t make him miss the ship completely and send him plummeting into the ocean, it would have the deck rearing up at the wrong time to break his legs when he hit. He wasn’t sure which would be worse. One would be embarrassing while the other would be painful. Given a choice, he’d go for the broken legs. Bones healed, but embarrassment lasted forever.

  On the other hand, he could always overshoot the bow of the Deliberate and promptly get run over by the quarter-mile long behemoth. It would be like getting keel-hauled by a pirate ship. Well, right up to the moment the big propellers chewed him up and spit him out. Yeah, he wasn’t as crazy about that option.

  When he, Dalton, Holden, and Wes finally left Syria after nearly getting killed in a missile attack on the Osprey they were in, instead of taking them home, their new transport had dumped them on an island in the middle of the Pacific, where they’d gone through three days of intensive training to get ready for this jump. That meant three days of listening to the CIA moan about how important this operation was, and how the SEALs had better not blow it. Holden had almost punched the lead training officer more than once. Nash had been more than ready to join him.

  Nash pushed those frustrating thoughts aside and focused on working his steering and braking lines to get him on a glide path toward the barely visible masthead light near the forward section of the cargo ship. That aim point increased his chances of overshooting the designed landing zone and getting run over, but if he landed too far back, he risked someone on the bridge seeing him. That would kind of suck, too. Ships’ crews tended to take a dim view of people parachuting onto their vessels in the middle of the night. Those merchant marine types had no sense of humor at all when it came to people they thought might be pirates. Probably had something to do with spending all their time cooped up in a big sardine can without cable TV.

  The deck of the cargo ship—which was actually the top row of shipping containers—came at him fast. He tried to time his landing, hoping to touch down as the bow dropped through the backside of a wave. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like he could sit around and wait for the perfect moment. Gravity was pretty much in charge. He was along for the ride.

  Depth perception got a little funky the last twenty feet or so, even with the night vision goggles he wore. Nash yanked hard on his brake lines when he thought he was close, praying for the best. He actually flared out pretty well, losing most of his downward velocity, but then the ship came up to meet him when he hit, buckling his knees and knocking the air out of his lungs like he’d jumped out of a third story window. He instinctively dumped air out of his chute, but before he could get the thing collapsed, the crosswind kicked up and yanked him sideways hard enough to nearly tear his body in half.

  He cursed as he slammed shoulder first into the metal top of the nearest cargo container. It wasn’t necessarily painful, though getting slammed to the deck while carrying fifty pounds worth of gear wasn’t anything to sneeze at. He only hoped his guys hadn’t seen it. If they caught sight of him getting dragged across the top of the cargo containers like a plastic bag in a Walmart parking lot, he’d never hear the end of it.

  Nash yanked as hard as he could on his chute, determined to ditch it even as he tumbled toward the side of the ship, hitting every sharp edge and projection as he went. What could possibly be worse than completely missing the ship and ending up in the drink? Landing on the ship and getting beat to crap as the wind dragged him around, then getting tossed into the drink anyway. That would definitely earn him a nickname he wouldn’t want to live with.

  He caught the edge of the last cargo container with his hand as he slid past. The move almost ripped his arm out of the joint, but it stopped him from going over the side of the ship. Sending up a prayer of thanks, he scrambled to his feet and quickly collected his chute. The plan was to be on and off the ship in ten minutes or less. The longer they stayed, the greater the risk of being seen, and this whole mission depended on no one ever knowing they’d been there. They were here to recon the situation, then disappear into the night, not to engage with any hostiles.

  Balling up his chute, he tossed it and all his other unneeded gear over the side of the ship, ignoring the aches in his ribs, knees, and shoulders that suggested he was going to remember that landing come morning. Instead, he focused on moving as fast as he could across the heaving cargo containers, then headed toward the starboard side of the ship where he was supposed to meet up with the other guys.

  Halfway there, he caught up with Dalton.

  “I saw that landing of yours as I came in,” Dalton said, throwing him a quick look as they ran. “I thought for a second you were dead, bro.”

  Nash grimaced, but kept moving. “For a second there, I thought so, too.”

  His friend gave him a quick scan up and down with his NVGs, no doubt checking for injuries. “You good?”

  “Nothing a good massage and a bottle of tequila won’t fix,” Nash said.

  Dalton grinned. “I can help you with the tequila, but you’re on your own when it comes to finding someone to give you a massage.”

  Together, they dropped down from the top row of containers to the one below, then the one under that as they worked their way toward the main deck. If the CIA’s intel was right, the particular shipping container they were looking for would be in this direction. Nash prayed the CIA knew what they were talking about. All these shipping units looked the same to him. If the stuff they were after wasn’t where it was supposed to be, they’d never find it.

  Nash poked his head around the next corner, checking to make sure the row between the containers was clear before darting across it. He and Dalton kept their voices low as they talked. Even so, Nash wasn’t worried about anyone hearing. Between the rain, the wind, and the waves, he could barely hear himself think. Still, it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  Nash glanced at the dim lights of the bridge, using them to navigate his way through the maze of containers. They met up with Holden and Wes a few minutes later. The two were already picking the lock of a cargo container.

  “Glad you guys finally decided to show up,” Holden said without looking up at them. “I was worried you thought we’d landed on a cruise ship and were wandering around looking for the buffet on the lido deck.”

  Nash chuckled as Holden finished popping open the high-security lock. A moment later, he yanked open the double doors, then disappeared inside, Wes at his heels. Dalton quickly joined them, but Nash hung back to take a look around to make sure no one had seen them. Once he was sure they were alone, he followed the other guys into the tight confines of the cargo container and out of the pouring rain.

  The inside was filled with stacks of metal boxes. While there weren’t any markings on them, there was no mistaking that they were military ammunition containers. Holden took the lid off the one closest to him, then frowned.

  “What’s up?” Nash asked as he moved closer. “We are dealing with weapons, right?”

  “We’re dealing with weapons all right,” Holden answered, never taking his eyes off whatever was inside the box. “But these babies are a little more serious than our friends at the CIA thought.”

  Curious
, Nash looked over the rim of the box and cursed. They’d been briefed to expect your basic terrorists cache—automatic weapons, hand grenades, some bulk explosives, maybe even some rocket-propelled grenades. While all that stuff might very well be in some of the other boxes, that wasn’t what had Holden so worried.

  “That’s a Russian 9K333 surface-to-air missile,” Nash said softly, immediately recognizing the distinctive nose cover and the black thermal battery directly under the front of the advanced shoulder-fired weapon system. “This thing is as high-tech and deadly as it gets. Russia only gives these to their top-of-the-line troops and maybe a few of their most trusted allies. Nine times out of ten, this missile will take down any military aircraft, cruise missile, or unmanned drone in the world. Anything flying at low altitude at least.”

  “You mean like a commercial passenger aircraft on take-off and landing?” Wes asked.

  “Exactly.”

  Shit. Missiles like this would be a terrorist’s wet dream.

  The CIA hadn’t given them much in the way of details about the purpose of this mission, other than to tell them that the ship they were on was supposedly carrying an unspecified number of weapons to someplace in Mexico. Nash had assumed the stuff was destined for one of the drug cartels, or maybe a terrorist sleeper cell, but the CIA wouldn’t confirm or deny where the shipment was heading or who was supposed to receive them.

  Given the CIA’s unwillingness to talk, Nash was surprised the Agency had come to them for help at all. Navy SEALs did a lot of crazy stuff, but slipping onto a foreign commercial ship in international waters to confirm the existence of illegal arms bound for Mexico had to be the wackiest. SEAL Team 5 and the CIA Special Operations Group had worked together on some crazy shit lately, but this mission was definitely out there.

  Maybe the CIA knew the SEALs had the best chance of pulling off something like this. Then again, maybe the CIA preferred to have the DOD get the blame if this all went bad.