SEAL on a Mission Read online

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  SEALs of Coronado: Books 4 - 6 (SEALs of Coronado Boxed Set Two)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Sign Up for Paige Tyler's Newsletter

  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

  SEAL ON A MISSION

  SEALs of Coronado

  Paige Tyler

  Copyright © 2020 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.

  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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  http://www.paigetylertheauthor.com

  PROLOGUE

  Nigeria

  PETTY OFFICER WES Marshall moved silently through the darkness with his SEAL Teammates, Holden Lockwood, Sam Travers, and Noah Bradley, each of them climbing the rough terrain of the hillside until they could see over the crest. A few hundred yards below were three squat brick buildings surrounded by a low wall, as well as two cargo trucks and a pair of Land Rovers.

  Wes adjusted the focus setting on his night vision goggles so he could see into the deeper shadows in between the buildings. It was a moonless night with just enough cloud cover to completely blanket the stars that would have normally twinkled above them, making it difficult to discern much even with the high-tech NVG’s.

  “We’re going in now,” a gravelly voice said over the radio in Wes’s ear. “Hold your position until we give you the go ahead.”

  “Roger that,” Holden said, then turned off his mic.

  Noah cursed under his breath at that announcement, earning a scowl from Holden, the senior Petty Officer for this mission. Even though they’d all seen this coming, Wes understood his Teammate’s frustration. The CIA wanted their clandestine Special Operations Group to take the lead on this. He and the other guys from SEAL Team 5 were merely along for the ride.

  Wes checked the magazine on his M4 carbine—more out of habit than because he was concerned it wasn’t loaded and ready to go—then shifted into a more comfortable position and settled in to wait. His eyes immediately drifted closed and he jerked awake. He needed to stay alert no matter how tired he was right now.

  Headquarters had called at 0300 hours last night saying he was going wheel’s up. Or maybe it was the night before that. It was difficult to keep track when there were marathon flights and datelines involved. Either way, it had been frigging early to drag his ass out of bed. On the upside, getting onto Naval Air Station Coronado hadn’t taken long since there’d been absolutely no one else in San Diego going in the gate but him and the other guys on the Team at that time of morning.

  Once on base, he’d gone straight to the recently completed Navy SEAL campus on Imperial Beach for the mission briefing. The place was a state of the art training and operations complex with the best classified briefing facilities he’d ever seen, complete with encrypted telecom equipment and multiple interactive display screens that allowed you to set up and run detailed simulations of any kind of attack scenario you could imagine. The best part was that the whole place was cleared to handle data all the way up to the Top Secret level. Flat out, the briefing facilities alone had cost millions upon millions of dollars. As a taxpayer he had to cringe at the thought of what the entire complex cost.

  Too bad the first time they got to use the place had been for a CIA operation where the SEALs would be little more than bystanders.

  During the briefing, Wes and the guys learned that Nick Chapman, an international arms dealer SEAL Team 5 had dealt with in the past, was in the country to sell several dozen high-tech suicide drones to a fanatic faction of the Boko Haram terrorist group. According to the intel people, Chapman was selling the damn things to anyone with enough money to buy them. And as luck would have it, they were relatively cheap.

  The Russian-made unmanned aerial vehicles, dubbed the KUB-UAV, were equipped with a six pound warhead and could fly up to forty miles, where it would destroy its target by blowing itself up like a suicide bomber. Yeah, the warhead was small, and the range wasn’t anything special, but the drone could easily take out a small car or a group of people in an open area while the operator sat in complete safety half a city away. Hell, with a little practice, a terrorist could probably fly one of the things right through the window of an office building and kill a target sitting at their desk in the next room over. The target would never even see it coming.

  While Chapman was apparently trying to sell the drone to nearly every terrorist cell around the world, there was a good chance the Russian government was actively behind this particular deal. An arms escalation in central Africa would keep U.S. attention firmly fixed on the area, allowing Russia freedom to focus on other locations they cared about like Libya, Ukraine, and Iran, to name a few.

  At the end of the day, the politics didn’t really matter. They needed to stop this weapons deal before the drone made it into terrorist hands, where it would disappear into the vast deserts of central Africa until it showed up at the site of a horrific terrorist attack.

  Wes sat up straighter when he saw several men creeping through the night toward the buildings below. The SOG operatives were making their move.

&
nbsp; “Joe won’t like it, but I don’t give a shit,” Holden muttered. “We’re moving in closer. If something goes wrong, they’d all be dead long before we could get down there.” He looked at Wes, half of his face hidden by his NVG’s. “You and Noah take the right. Sam and I will go left.”

  Smart, Wes thought. By approaching the buildings from two sides, they’d avoid putting each other in a crossfire situation.

  Giving Noah a nod, Wes led the way downhill, moving as quickly and carefully as possible as he headed for the low rock wall surrounding the group of buildings on three sides and crouched down. They were close enough to help Joe and the rest of the SOG guys, but far enough away that no one would hear them.

  Noah dropped to a knee beside him. “What’s going on with you and Kyla?” he whispered. “Have you finally gotten off the fence and asked her out.”

  Wes did a double take. Even though Noah was wearing NVG’s, Wes could still see the curiosity on his friend’s face. “Seriously? Do you really think this is the time to be talking about my social life…or lack thereof?”

  Noah shrugged as Joe announced over the radio that they were in position and waiting to move in. “What? You got something else you’d rather talk about while we wait for the shooting to start?”

  Wes hesitated, floundering to come up with any other topic of conversation before letting out a sigh. If he wasn’t wearing a helmet, he would have run a hand through his hair in frustration. Thoughts of the beautiful, dark-haired grad student he was seriously into had a way of doing that to him lately. Oh, hell. Might as well address the proverbial elephant in the desert.

  “No, I haven’t asked her out yet.”

  Over the radio, Joe announced he and his guys they were picking up the sound of voices from the biggest of the three buildings.

  “Why not?” Noah demanded. “Dude, you’ve been living in the friend zone for a frigging millennium. I thought you finally decided to go for it.”

  Okay, maybe saying it had been a millennium was extreme. But it had been a long time. All he could so was shrug. “I did, but it isn’t that easy.”

  Noah let out a snort. “It seems pretty easy to me. You’re attracted to Kyla and want to ask her out. What’s so complicated about it?”

  “Actually, complicated doesn’t come close to covering it.” Wes sighed. “Kyla’s got a lot of stuff going on right now. The trial against her father’s killer has dragged out way longer than anyone expected. She tries to put on a good face, but it kills me to see the toll it’s taking on her. Right now, it’s more important to be there for her when she needs to talk.”

  Noah frowned. “I still don’t see what the problem is. The fact that she confides in you means you and Kyla have a connection, which would only get stronger if you took the next step and asked her out on a date.”

  Wes would like to believe that, but…

  “I don’t know, man,” he said. “What if she doesn’t think of me as anything more than a friend? If I ask her out and that’s not where Kyla wants our relationship to go, it might ruin our friendship, and right now, she needs me.”

  Noah shook his head. “Damn, you really have it bad for this girl, don’t you? So bad that you’re willing to purposely trap yourself in the friend zone because you think it’s what she needs.”

  Pretty much. But before Wes could tell him how right he was, Joe was on the radio again.

  “It’s a trap!” the CIA agent shouted. “Get out! Now!”

  Shit.

  Wes and Noah were leaping over the low wall and running toward the buildings on the other side without waiting for orders from Holden. Over the radio, Wes could hear the sound of running feet and Joe saying something about a tape recorder and a set of speakers. Wes caught a glimpse of the SOG guys jumping from windows and hightailing it out doors on the side of the building closest to him when the night suddenly exploded in a bright orange light and he flew back through the air like a plastic bag in a Walmart parking lot.

  He slammed onto the ground hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs and his back went numb as pain raced down his legs. He tucked into a ball and threw his arms up over his head and face, trying to protect himself from what was left of the building as pieces of brick rained down around him. Thick smoke filled the air, making it difficult to breathe. Wes fought the urge to give in to his body’s desire to pass out. If he did, he’d be dead.

  He was still shaking his head, trying to clear it, when he caught sight of Noah’s legs sticking out from behind the tires of one of the Land Rovers. His friend wasn’t moving.

  No, no, no.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain, Wes dragged himself along the ground toward his Teammate. He’d barely gone more than a few feet when a burst of automatic weapon fire chewed up the ground around him. He rolled to the side, scrambling across the ground until he reached the crumbling wall around the courtyard. His NVG’s and radio had gotten ripped off in the explosion, but thankfully, his M4 had been attached to his vest via the chest straps. NVG’s and a radio he could do without. His carbine? Not so much.

  The wall provided some protection, allowing him to pop up and find the source of the incoming rounds. There, atop the same hill he and his Teammates had been waiting on a little while ago, he caught sight of muzzle blasts from a pair of weapons firing in his direction. He prayed there weren’t any more than those two because there was a good chance he was the only one still conscious after that blast. Hell, as much as it hurt to think about, he might be the only one still alive.

  Shit.

  He had to stop thinking like that. He’d survived and so his friends. He held onto that belief with everything in him.

  Wes was too far away from the shooters at the top of the hill to engage them with any hope of success, which meant he needed to get closer. Taking a deep breath, he pushed himself to his feet and started forward. He moved in short bursts of adrenaline, dropping down behind the meager protection of rocks and scrub brush every few seconds only to roll out and dart again over and over until he neared the top of the hill. Round after round slammed into the dirt around him as he ran, but thankfully, never hit him. He popped off a few rounds at the terrorists now and then, not trying to hit them as much as keep them ducking.

  As he slipped over the crest of the hill and silently circled around behind them, the terrorists must have realized he’d cut off their escape route down the backside, leaving them with only two options fleeing toward the building they’d just blown up or charging at him. They chose the latter.

  Wes dropped to a knee as the men rushed him, firing their weapons at full automatic. AK-47s tended to buck like hell when you used them like that, so the rounds zoomed harmlessly over his head by at least three or four feet. Directing the sight mounted on his M4 at the closest of the two men, he pulled the trigger. Before that guy fell to the ground, Wes was already repositioning his weapon and squeezing the trigger, taking down the second man.

  Moving forward, he quickly confirmed the two men were no longer a threat, then spun in a slow circle to take in the surrounding area. That would have been a hell of a lot easier if he still had his NVG’s, but he was able to see enough to know there was no one else waiting to attack him. Keeping his weapon at the ready, he hurried down the hill to check on Noah.

  Wes sighed in relief when he saw his Teammate heading toward him. Noah’s tactical vest was ripped open and he looked like he was having a hard time putting weight on his left knee, but he was up and moving. That was all that mattered.

  “Holden and Sam?” Wes asked, bracing himself for the worst.

  Noah gestured over his shoulder with his chin. “They’re okay. Bruised and bloody, but alive, thankfully. They’re on the other side of the compound helping Joe look for survivors among his guys.”

  Wes winced. Crap, he’d been so concerned about his Teammates that he hadn’t even thought about the SOG guys. There was no way in hell all of them had made it out. The blast had come within seconds of Joe’s warning.


  “How bad was Joe’s Team hit?” he asked as they slowly headed in that direction.

  “Two confirmed dead. Two more missing,” Noah said quietly. “Everyone is digging through the rubble on the side of the building where Joe and his guys entered. Joe is trying to get a helicopter brought in, but that’s going to take a while.”

  Damn. Two CIA agents dead, maybe four by the time it was all over.

  “This was a setup,” Wes said as they circled around the remains of the smoldering building in the center of the compound. “They knew we were coming and exactly when we’d get here.”

  “Yeah, well, some of the SOG guys think we screwed up and told someone about the mission who told someone else and…” Noah shrugged, mouth tight. “You get the idea.”

  Wes got the idea, all right, and it was stupid as hell. But as much as he wanted to call the CIA guys all kinds of names for thinking that, he couldn’t. They’d lost teammates—friends. They were pissed and looking for someone to blame. That said, it didn’t make the fact he and his fellow SEALs were going to take the brunt of it when they got back to San Diego suck any less.

  CHAPTER ONE

  San Diego, California

  DID I MISS anything?”

  Kyla Wells blinked as Wes slid onto the bench seat beside her. If they weren’t in a courtroom right now, she would have hugged him. Tall and broad-shouldered with dark hair that looked like he was always running his hand through it, a perfect amount of scruff on his jaw, and blue eyes she could get lost in, he was the closest thing she had to a boyfriend. Or he could be if he weren’t her best friend.

  “When did you get back?” she asked excitedly, while at the same time trying to keep her voice low. “Nobody would tell me anything about where you went.”