Out of Time Read online

  Praise for the Lost Platoon Series

  “[A] steamy, high-octane thriller. . . . A story full of edge-of-your-seat thrills and unexpected twists, all perfectly underscored by a toe-curling romance.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “McCarty’s first installment in her Lost Platoon series—Going Dark—features betrayal, murder, and ecoterrorism. The nonstop action and love story are guaranteed to keep you turning the pages to find out what happens to Dean and Annie.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter

  “A sexy thrill ride from start to finish. Steamy and suspenseful, Going Dark is a must read.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L. Armentrout

  “McCarty’s exciting contemporary series launch will not disappoint fans of her historical Highlands romances.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McCarty’s foray into romantic suspense is nonstop action from beginning to end.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Readers will find it hard to wait for the next in the series.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  Also by Monica McCarty

  The Lost Platoon

  GOING DARK

  OFF THE GRID

  OUT OF TIME

  The Highland Guard

  THE GHOST

  THE ROGUE (novella)

  THE ROCK

  THE STRIKER

  THE ARROW

  THE RAIDER

  THE KNIGHT (novella)

  THE HUNTER

  THE RECRUIT

  THE SAINT

  THE VIPER

  THE RANGER

  THE HAWK

  THE CHIEF

  The Campbell Trilogy

  HIGHLAND SCOUNDREL

  HIGHLAND OUTLAW

  HIGHLAND WARRIOR

  The MacLeods of Skye Trilogy

  HIGHLANDER UNCHAINED

  HIGHLANDER UNMASKED

  HIGHLANDER UNTAMED

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Monica McCarty

  Excerpt from Going Dark copyright © 2017 by Monica McCarty

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780399587757

  First Edition: December 2018

  Cover art: Ranch by ipkoe / Getty Images; Storm clouds by Herianus Herianus / EyeEm

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product 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.

  Version_1

  To my longtime friends and

  fellow Hawaii writer retreaters,

  Jami, Nyree, and Veronica.

  You guys are the best.

  Looking forward to a “Four Non Blondes”

  repeat next year.

  Contents

  Praise for the Lost Platoon Series

  Also by Monica McCarty

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Going Dark

  About the Author

  Prologue

  VORKUTA, RUSSIA

  MAY 28, 1500 HOURS

  “What are we gonna do now, sir?”

  It was Travis Hart who posed the question, but there were five gazes pinned on Scott, waiting for his response. Scott was the officer in charge. The leader. The one who was going to get them out of this shit creek without the proverbial paddle. FUBAR, the age-old military acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition,” was putting it mildly.

  They were lucky to be alive. Even if it didn’t feel that way. Instinctively, his hand went to the circle of metal in the chest pocket of the high-tech tactical black uniform they wore for clandestine missions. He didn’t even know why he’d brought it with him. An engagement ring wasn’t exactly something you carried on a mission, like a blowout kit or extra ammo. A good luck charm, maybe? If so, it had worked.

  For six of them.

  The platoon had been on a highly covert, no-footprint recon mission to Russia in search of doomsday weapons that broke God-knew-how-many laws and treaties. It had seen over half their team killed in a missile strike that would have killed all of them if the girlfriend Scott wasn’t supposed to have hadn’t warned them of the trap. Six of them had survived the missile strike with little more than the clothes on their backs. Now they had to find their way out of BF Russia without letting anyone know they were alive—good guys or bad—because they didn’t know whom to trust.

  Just another day at the office for SEAL Team Nine.

  After fifteen years in service, Scott should have been ready for something like this. First he’d had four years as a midshipman at the Naval Academy—his last year as brigade commander. That had been followed by twenty-four of the most miserable weeks of his life in BUD/S, three weeks of jump school, and twenty-six more slightly less hellish weeks of SEAL Qualification Training. Add another two years of training, workups, and overseas deployments with Team One as a JG (lieutenant junior grade), six months of sniper school, and finally, after another two-year tour, he’d had the brutal six-month selection process that had gotten him into the tier-one (aka highest level Special Mission Unit) SEAL team.

  Scott had jumped from airplanes at high altitudes too many times to count, run until his feet were bloody stumps, swum in icy-cold water until he thought his fingers and other more important appendages might fall off, gone without sleep and food for too many hours to remember, been deployed to more shit hole corners of this world than anyone in their right mind would want to see, and led hundreds of successful missions in the past five years as lieutenant (as of a few months ago as lieutenant commander) of one of America’s most elite special operations units. He’d been shot at, stabbed, ambushed—he’d even gone do
wn in a helicopter once. Along the way he’d picked up two Bronze Stars for valor, a Purple Heart, and enough ribbons and commendation medals to fill out the jacket pocket of his dress blues.

  But none of his qualifications or years of training and experience had prepared him for how to get six military-aged men—who even with longer hair and beards weren’t going to pass for locals—from an isolated coal-mining city north of the Arctic Circle to safety a few thousand miles away, without travel documents, supplies, or anyone to call for help. Hell, they didn’t even have phones to make that call right now. They’d tossed everything electronic they had into the fiery explosion that had killed their eight teammates. Ghosts couldn’t leave electronic footprints, and they didn’t want anyone to be able to track them.

  It was almost axiomatic that SEAL commanders always had a plan. They had backup plans for their backup plans. But possibly being betrayed by someone on the inside wasn’t exactly covered in SEAL Officer 101, and Scott was in full-on improvise mode here.

  As he was pretty sure “no fucking clue” was not what these guys needed or wanted to hear right now, Scott knew he’d better figure it out fast. He’d gotten them this far, through two days of some of what had to be the most inhospitable, bug-infested countryside known to man. He’d get them through the rest. Challenge was what he excelled at. It was what had drawn him to be a SEAL, and then to the elite echelons of the tier-one Team Nine.

  They all had a love of challenge in common—officer and enlisted. These guys could handle anything he threw at them. They were the best. He ought to know. With blood, sweat, and a few tears of pain, he’d honed the operators of Team Nine into the finest unit in all of US Special Operations. They were the president’s go-to force when mistakes and failure weren’t an option. Even shell-shocked, suffering various levels of injury, hungry, exhausted, and mourning the deaths of their teammates, Scott knew if anyone had what it took to get out of a goat fuck like this, it was Senior Chief Dean Baylor and Special Warfare Operators Michael Ruiz, John Donovan, Steve Spivak, and Travis Hart.

  The special warfare operators of Team Nine knew how to do their jobs. And he knew how to do his. He made life-and-death decisions all the time; it came with the job. But losing eight men didn’t, and Scott was still reeling. They all were. But right now he had to focus on keeping the rest of his men alive. That meant projecting confidence and acting as if this weren’t pretty much worst-possible-scenario, one-wrong-move-and-we’re-dead territory.

  “We hold tight for the time being,” Scott said. They were safe enough in this apartment building. They’d had their pick of abandoned buildings in the old center of town, which was now essentially a ghost town located across the river from the current city center. Although from the looks of it, the new city center wasn’t going to be far behind the old. Vorkuta had definitely seen better days. The once-thriving city had dwindled in the past decades from over two hundred thousand people to about seventy thousand.

  But in this remote corner of the world, even among seventy thousand, six strangers were going to stick out—especially non-Russian-looking-and-speaking strangers. Well, except for one. Thank God, they had Spivak, whose grandparents were Ukrainian and had passed on their language. Spivak’s lineage also gave him a good cover story. He was a Ukrainian sent to Vorkuta to work as a diver on the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

  “We’ll send Spivak back out for more food and supplies,” Scott said. Then cutting off Donovan before he could renew an earlier joking request, he added, “And sushi is off the menu. Keep it simple and preferably cheap, Spivak.”

  They all carried cash on missions—both US dollars and a small amount of local currency. The latter was a precaution that Scott had insisted upon but they’d never needed. But precaution was another way of saying “damned glad of it” when you did. It was going to save them from having to “borrow” everything.

  “Try to make it something I can pronounce, Dolph,” Donovan said, using Spivak’s call sign. The big blond-haired operator who served as the team’s breacher bore a resemblance to the actor Dolph Lundgren, who’d played Sylvester Stallone’s Soviet foe in Rocky IV. “And I hope fresh clothes are on tonight’s menu. Jim Bob here smells like a freaking animal.”

  “Fuck you, Donovan,” Travis responded with his heavy Southern accent. The young sniper was from Mississippi and country through and through. Thus, the Jim Bob call sign. “You aren’t exactly smelling like a rose.”

  “See what you can do,” Scott said to Spivak, ignoring the giving-each-other-shit banter between the guys as he normally did. With John Donovan around it was constant. “We’re also going to need a phone at some point—and pick up a newspaper.”

  The other horrible consequence of their failed mission was war. For all they knew, WWIII was already under way.

  Spivak nodded. “I saw a couple places that sold phones when I was looking around earlier. But if it seems too iffy, I’ll figure out something else.”

  Meaning he’d pick one up in a way that didn’t involve questions. Scott nodded. He didn’t need to tell Spivak to be careful. The situation was painfully clear to all of them.

  Well, mostly clear. The guys didn’t know exactly who had warned Scott and why he trusted her. They just knew that he’d received a text right before the first missile hit that had saved their lives, and they trusted him.

  But he knew they had questions. Questions that he didn’t want to answer. How did he tell his men—men to whom he was supposed to be above reproach—that he’d been hiding something from them? That for the last six months he’d had a girlfriend who worked in the Pentagon. That it was serious. That for the first time he’d met someone who meant as much—more—to him than the job. That he had a ring in his pocket that proved it. That he should have said something to them and command months ago.

  Scott had been well aware of the rules of Team Nine when he’d joined. No family, no wives, no girlfriends. No one to wonder where he was or when he’d be back. No one to cause problems if he didn’t come back.

  He should have come forward when it had gotten serious, even if it meant having to leave Nine. But he’d allowed himself to be talked out of it by Natalie, who was just as worried about losing her own job as he was about losing the team he’d helped build.

  Breaking the rules wasn’t like him. Even for an officer, he had a reputation for being by the book. Rules. Honor. Integrity. Standards. Discipline. It might be old-fashioned, but those things mattered to him.

  None of which explained Natalie Andersson. Although nothing about Natalie had ever made any sense. She’d confused and confounded him from the first moment he’d seen her in that bar in DC. Maybe that was part of her appeal. He couldn’t figure her out. On the outside she projected this sophisticated, confident career woman, but beneath the surface he detected a sweet vulnerability that roused protective instincts in him that he’d never experienced before. She was like two sides of a coin that had different faces.

  But one thing he did know. Without her warning, he wouldn’t be sitting here within spitting distance of Siberia in this run-down, abandoned apartment building that looked more like a cellblock. He’d be dead.

  All six of them owed her their lives. They’d been betrayed, and Natalie’s message suggested that it had come from someone on the inside. The text that he’d seen by chance was burned into his memory, though it had chilled him to the bone when he’d first read it.

  Leak. Russians know you are coming. No one is supposed to survive. Go dark and don’t try to contact me. Both our lives might be at stake. And then the last three words that she’d never said before. I love you. A declaration that under normal circumstances would have made him the happiest man in the world. Instead it made him the most terrified.

  This wasn’t a joke; she was deadly serious. That realization, and the fact that she knew about the mission that only a handful of people were supposed to know about, convinced him to call bac
k the platoon—or half the platoon. Lieutenant White’s squad was already inside one of the gulag buildings, and the comms were out. There’d been no way to warn them.

  The rock that had been crushing his chest since that moment got a little heavier.

  Against his orders, the senior chief and Brian Murphy, their newest teammate, had tried to reach them. Murphy had been killed when the first missile struck, and the senior chief had barely escaped the explosion. Scott didn’t know how Baylor had made it across almost seventy miles of hell with his injuries. But the senior chief epitomized the BTF—aka the Big Tough Frogman. You couldn’t knock him down. He’d keep popping back up and coming at you.

  And Scott knew that as soon as the shock wore off and they were out of this, Baylor was going to have questions for him, and he wasn’t going to be content with We’ll talk about it later.

  Feeling the senior chief’s questioning gaze on him, Scott pulled out his coated paper map that he was damned glad of right now—another precaution when going to places with likely spotty communications—and started to consider options. There weren’t a lot of them. They had to get out of the area as quickly as possible, which basically meant a plane, train, or automobile. Of the three, a train seemed the least risky.

  “What are you thinking, Ace?” Ruiz asked, using Scott’s call sign.

  The guys said Scott always had an ace up his sleeve. Well, he sure as hell hoped they were right. They were going to need a full deck of them.

  With Spivak gone, the four remaining men gathered round his position on a metal bed frame and mattress, which had both been left behind for a reason. “I’m thinking a freight train to Moscow.” He moved his finger diagonally in a southwest direction. “From there we can connect with lines that go to Europe in the west or the Trans-Siberian line in the east.”

  “The Trans-Siberian Railway?” Donovan repeated. “You gotta be shitting me? That’s on my bucket list, LC.”

  “Glad to accommodate, Dynomite,” Scott replied dryly. “Although you might not like the facilities. This is freight or baggage class only.”