True wolf, p.1
True Wolf, page 1
Also by Paige Tyler
STAT: Special Threat Assessment Team
Wolf Under Fire
Undercover Wolf
SWAT: Special Wolf Alpha Team
Hungry Like the Wolf
Wolf Trouble
In the Company of Wolves
To Love a Wolf
Wolf Unleashed
Wolf Hunt
Wolf Hunger
Wolf Rising
Wolf Instinct
Wolf Rebel
Wolf Untamed
Rogue Wolf
X-Ops
Her Perfect Mate
Her Lone Wolf
Her Secret Agent (novella)
Her Wild Hero
Her Fierce Warrior
Her Rogue Alpha
Her True Match
Her Dark Half
X-Ops Exposed
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2022 by Paige Tyler
Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Sourcebooks
Cover art by Kris Keller/Lott Reps
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
A sneak peek in the next SWAT series
Excerpt from The Last Wolf
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
With special thanks to my extremely patient and understanding husband. Without your 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 a girl could ask for. Love you!
Chapter 1
Turkey
“Is it just my imagination or do these guys seem a little tense to you?” Caleb Lynch murmured as he and the other members of his Special Threat Assessment Team followed their heavily armed escort of American soldiers into the ammunition storage area along the backside of Incirlik Air Base.
Forrest Albright and his girlfriend, Misty Swanson, the two team members nearest to him, threw glances at the collection of American and Turkish soldiers lined up on either side of the nearest section of concertina-topped security fencing.
“I think tense might be an understatement,” Misty said, looking back at Caleb. In the glow coming from the various lights positioned around the base, her long, purple hair was practically iridescent. “Given how tightly they’re gripping their weapons, I’m worried one of them might end up taking a shot at us sooner or later.”
Caleb grunted. Misty wasn’t wrong. As a werewolf, it was impossible for him to miss the sounds of the soldiers’ elevated heart rates as they stood guard. Something definitely had these guys on edge.
But what?
Considering he and the rest of the team had been flown straight from Washington, DC, to Turkey on a private jet that hauled ass told him something damn bad had happened here. But hey, that’s what STAT did. They dealt with bad crap—particularly of a supernatural variety.
“Colonel Vinson, you planning to tell us why we’re here?” Jake Huang, fellow werewolf and leader of their STAT team, asked the army officer dressed in tactical gear and toting a loaded Beretta 9 mm on his right thigh.
The stern-looking man simply held up one finger to momentarily silence any further questions as he led them past yet another security gate and into a dimly lit tunnel with a concrete floor that slanted distinctly downward. Some of their armed escort remained topside, but six of the men, wearing tactical gear similar to the colonel’s, followed them down.
Caleb could tell from the way Jake’s mouth tightened that his team leader was pissed the colonel hadn’t answered him. Luckily, Jake was an alpha, which meant he was in complete control of his inner wolf, unless something big pushed him over the edge. Caleb, on the other hand, was an omega. While he was as big and strong as Jake, he didn’t have any of that same control. He probably would have growled at the colonel already if the guy had ignored his question.
In another couple hundred feet, the floor leveled out, revealing a broad, curving tunnel that disappeared to the left and right. It was merely a guess, but Caleb figured they must be at least fifty feet underground now. Another brief walk along the curving tunnel that was easily wide enough for a pickup truck to drive through, and then they were at a set of huge steel doors mounted in the side of the tunnel wall.
Vinson stopped in front of the open doors, then turned to face them, and for the first time, Caleb had a chance to see how exhausted the thin, gray-haired man appeared. The lines around his mouth seemed more pronounced than they had outside, and his hazel eyes were grim.
“Sorry I couldn’t respond to your question earlier,” the colonel said, looking at Jake, “but I couldn’t risk any of the Turkish nationals overhearing what I’m about to tell you. If they knew what happened in here, we’d have a full-scale international incident on our hands within the hour.”
Vinson’s gaze went from Jake to Caleb, then the rest of the team. He was openly curious as he took in Misty and Forrest, alpha werewolves Harley Grant and her soul mate, Sawyer Bishop, and Jestina Ridley—aka Jes—the most experienced agent on the team as well as Jake’s soul mate. It was obvious from the expression on the colonel’s face that he wanted to know what the hell STAT was and why he was talking to them and not someone higher up in the army or air force—or anyone in a military uniform, for that matter. It probably didn’t help that Caleb and his teammates had flown in on an unmarked luxury jet that had been practically smoking from flying so fast to get here.
“This is weapon storage vault nine,” Vinson said, motioning toward the steel doors behind him. “A little over eleven hours ago, the command post received an alarm from the intrusion detector system inside.”
“What kind of alarm?” Sawyer asked, his British accent giving away the fact that his background was a little bit different than the rest of the team’s.
The colonel seemed to take it in stride as he focused his attention on Sawyer. “The motion sensors were tripped. A security detail was on scene in less than two minutes, but they didn’t see any signs of a break-in from the outside. They were still trying to figure out if anything was amiss when the command post received an alarm from vault ten, and then, thirty seconds later, a similar alarm from vault eight. Since the security detail didn’t see anything out of place at any of those, either, they thought it must be a sensor failure. But when we got the same alert from two more weapon vaults, I gave the order to open the doors on one. That’s when the situation went…sideways.”
Vinson turned to lead the way into the vault. The situation he’d been referring to was obvious the moment Caleb walked into the dimly lit room along with everyone else. The vault was smaller than he anticipated, maybe thirty square feet. It reminded him of a self-storage unit—the kind where people kept something really…really…really…valuable.
Inside, the place was a mess. Pieces of metal were scattered everywhere. Off to one side, more twisted metal had been slammed against the walls so hard it had knocked out gigantic chunks of the concrete. He knew absolutely nothing about the subject, but from the shape of the metal, Caleb guessed that the pieces might be the tail fins off some kind of bomb. In the very center of the room, the concrete had been pulverized, like an explosive charge had gone off there.
“I’m assuming the vault doesn’t normally look this trashed?” Caleb asked drily, his inner wolf finding it impossible not to poke at the tense military officer. But in his defense, he’d had a problem with authority figures for most of his life. It was a character issue he planned to work on at some point. Right after learning how to play the oboe.
Vinson shook his head, mouth tight. “No. This is the way it looked when the security detail got here. That’s when we realized the weapons had been stolen.”
“Nuclear weapons?” Jake asked, though it really didn’t sound like a question to Caleb. It figured Jake would know stuff like that. The alpha werewolf had been a U.S. Navy SEAL at some point in his life.
The colonel nodded. “These vaults are designed to hold up to four B61 nuclear bombs, each with a variable yield of up to 340 kilotons.” Letting out a sigh, he pointed toward another pile of twisted metal in the corner. “During a crisis, the bombs are lifted by that elevator to the aircraft shelter directly over our heads. The waiting plane can be loaded and gone within minutes. All four of the nukes in this vault are gone, along with sixteen other weapons from the four adjacent vaults.”
Caleb’s head spun at the implications of the U.S. losing that many nukes. He had no idea how big 340 kilotons might be, but it definitely sounded bad. But while it was obviously a catastrophe, he wasn’t sure exactly what any of this had to do with STAT. Missing nukes weren’t necessarily their bag. Not unless those nukes had been taken by something supernatural.
“If the door was closed when the security detail arrived, how were the weapons stolen?” Jes asked.
The colonel pointed at the rubble in the center of the room. “Through there. Or at least, that’s our best guess, since we can’t come up with any other explanation.”
Caleb moved closer to the pile of broken concrete along with the rest of his team and was stunned to see a hole about twice the size of a traditional city manhole cover beyond it. He leaned over the opening, his nose picking up a scent that worried him.
Blood.
As an omega werewolf, Caleb’s nose wasn’t all that useful at the best of times. Sure, he could pick up really strong scents, like gas or melted asphalt, but the only time he could distinguish most other smells was if he was extremely close to them—or if there was a whole lot of it there.
He got the feeling it was the latter in this case.
“How many bodies are down there?” Harley asked, staring down into the hole, her blond ponytail falling over her shoulder. Her alpha werewolf nose was way better than his but still not good enough to divine if there’d been one person bleeding a lot or a lot of people bleeding a little.
Vinson threw a surprised look at her. No doubt he wanted to know how she knew there were bodies down there at all, but apparently, someone higher up had told him not to ask questions.
“Twenty-five,” he finally said in a somber voice. “Fifteen from the original security detail that went down there, ten from the backup team I sent in after we lost contact with the first group. The initial response team dropped down in the hole the second they realized the weapons had been stolen.” He paused, like he was fighting for control over his emotions with everything he had in him. “They were probably in there for less than thirty seconds when the shooting started. The backup team arrived three minutes later. They didn’t last much longer. No one else has been down there since.”
Caleb leaned out a little further over the hole in the floor, wondering what they were going to find down there, when Misty asked the question that had been in the forefront of his mind since he realized there were dead bodies down there.
“Why haven’t you sent anyone down there to get them out?” The words were soft, the sympathetic look in her violet gaze making Caleb think she knew how hard it must have been on the colonel to leave members of his unit down there like that. “How do you even know they’re all dead?”
Vinson’s face went pale, his eyes suddenly haunted. “Every member of both the primary and backup response teams were wearing sound-activated voice mics while the squad leaders had video cameras strapped to their helmets. The signals feed straight into the command post, where I was forced to stand there listening and watching as my soldiers died. Those people were like family to me, and there’s nothing I’d like more than getting them the hell out of there. But after what I saw in those videos, listening to them scream in terror as they were slaughtered…” He shook his head. “I knew none of them had made it, and I knew I couldn’t risk sending anyone else down there.”
“What did you see in the video?” Caleb asked. “What killed your soldiers?”
“Unfortunately, I have no idea,” the colonel said. “All I can say for sure is that the things were maybe three or four feet tall, vicious as hell, and so fast they left nothing but a blur on the screen. The moment headquarters got a look at the video, my commander told me to pull back and wait for the specialists to arrive.”
Vinson’s shrewd gaze drifted across all of them again, taking in their lack of tactical gear and rather limited weaponry, then shrugged. Once again, it was obvious the man wanted to know who the hell they were, but like before, he kept his questions to himself.
“Apparently, that’s you people.”
“Any reason to believe the things that stole the weapons and killed your soldiers are still down there?” Jake asked.
The colonel frowned. “After the fighting stopped, both squad leaders ended up facedown on the ground, so the cameras didn’t give us anything after that. But the batteries on the mics stayed good for almost eight hours. Just before they went out, we picked up the sound of scratching and scraping. So something was down there moving around, at least up until three hours ago. There’s no way to know if they’re still there now.”
At Vinson’s nod, the armed men with him started handing out flashlights. The colonel lifted a brow when Caleb, Jake, Harley, and Sawyer all declined the offer. Seeing in the dark wasn’t an issue for werewolves.
Caleb was a little surprised when Vinson and his soldiers moved to follow them. Apparently, so was Jake because his teammate held up a hand to stop them.
The army officer glared at Jake. “Those soldiers who died down there were my responsibility,” he said before motioning at the six men with him. “And these have a combined twenty years of combat experience between them. They’re the best I have. We’re going down there with you, and you can’t stop us.”
That wasn’t even a little bit true. Caleb and his fellow werewolves could have easily kept Vinson and his men from going with them, but Jake merely shrugged.
“Okay, I understand,” he said. “As long as you realize that anything you see down there is going to be classified out the wazoo.”
The colonel let out a snort. “We don’t care about any of that. We only want to get down there so we can find our nukes and bring our people back above ground. And if we get a shot at the things that killed them, even better.”
Jake nodded. “Okay. But watch where you point your weapons when we get down there. No matter what you see.”
Vinson looked confused and opened his mouth to almost certainly ask what the hell Jake meant by that, but Jake didn’t give him the chance. He nodded at Caleb.
“Take point” was all he said.
Caleb gave him a nod in return, then pulled his .45 Colt automatic from its holster and dropped into the darkness of the hole. Considering that they had no idea what any of them were jumping into the middle of, it made sense to have him go in first. As an omega werewolf, committing acts of extreme violence was kind of his thing. He was basically the STAT team’s personal berserker.
His heavy boots thudded on rough stone at the bottom of the hole after a drop of maybe twenty feet. He was a little surprised to see that, while the ground was rough and jagged under him, it wasn’t the usual mess left after an explosion.
Turning, he looked down the dark tunnel ahead of him. Unlike his nose, his eyes worked nearly as well as an alpha’s, and he could see without much of a problem. The opening was roughly circular shaped, about five feet high, maybe a little wider than that. He shook his head, trying to envision how the hell whoever took those nukes had blasted—or dug—through solid rock without anyone on the surface realizing it. It must have taken weeks—even months—to do it.
