Free Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

with her own agenda. She’d accepted the assignment in hopes of uncovering more about her mother’s death in the region fourteen years ago—distracting enough. Then she’d met Jose and her focus drifted even further.
    Her eyes shot back to the dead bodies—an innocent student and a CIA operative. Had a lapse on her part cost them their lives? She’d been so damn sure their cover was rock solid. Even when the separatists had taken the group of students hostage, she’d prayed that was their only agenda. That they didn’t know they’d also landed four undercover operatives as well.
    And there was still hope they didn’t know about her. How ironic that she’d come here to retrace her mother’s last days and now she was walking in her footsteps in a more literal way. Her mother’s battered body sent home in a box, the cause of death labeled a car accident. And Stella never had the chance to say good-bye, to apologize for sending her mother off that last time by screaming how much she hated her for leaving them again.
    So many regrets.
    And her most current regret? One of her biggest? The way she’d broken things off with Jose, the man she’d been so certain was her soul mate.
    If she thought about him, she would cry, but then maybe that would seem more natural. She’d tried it at first—no luck. But if it bought her time now, then hell, she would try anything.
    She envisioned Jose’s shoulders sagging when he realized she was serious about ending their relationship.
    Tears filled her eyes in a flash. Using the emotion to her advantage, she looked up at the cold, detached guard. She let the tears roll down her cheeks, allowed all her anguish to show for once.
    “Please, call my mom and dad. They’ll pay you anything you want to get me back.”
    Her cover story would hold under scrutiny. Her passport traced back to a concocted profile of her life as a pampered rich kid from Florida who lived off of a hefty trust fund, continuing to enroll in college to avoid getting a job. She’d slid right into the group of students. For them, she’d risked bringing Jose into harm’s way, something she never would have done had she been the only one taken. But for the students and for whatever plan these ruthless bastards were cooking up, she had to think like an agent.
    Not like a woman whose heart still ached for a man she couldn’t have.
    Her captor jerked her to a stop at the end of the hall. The doorway loomed in front of her. And landing on the corner of the frame, a buzzing little fly.
    She stared up into what she prayed was help and one last time she blinked…
    Warning: Land mines at the camp gates.
    ***
    Stella’s voice echoed in the earpiece of Jose’s comm set as he stood in the open hatch of a C-130 cargo plane. Wind roared through the open portal. Parched earth and thirsty frankincense trees sprawled far, far below. The rebel camp waited.
    With Stella inside.
    All he needed was the signal to go and he would jump with Bubbles and the SEALs, parachuting into the compound in the twilight, HALO style—high altitude, low opening. The best way to slip in unnoticed. No tipping anyone off by bringing a helicopter too close. The cargo plane would drop them off at thirty thousand feet with an oxygen mask into a free fall. He would wait until the very last possible second to pop the parachute.
    Then they would charge the camp on foot.
    “Go, go, go!” the loadmaster shouted the command into the mic.
    His boots pounded along the metal ramp as he ran to the edge and…
    Jumped.
    Arms and legs extended, his body split the air, speeding downward. He hurtled through the dusky sky, into utter silence other than the sounds from his headset… more feed from Stella’s surveillance and a low hum of radio chatter from the aircrew. But he only heard the echoes of Stella from the satellite feed.
    The command center still ran the feed in the background in a way he could hear her faintly. Listening to her sob tore him apart, even