Oath to Defend Read Online Free PDF Page B

horizon.
    Despite the humiliation he knew he would experience if Ryan was right and his man had been followed, at the moment Barak felt only anger. No one but Ryan and the Alliance knew he was in Mexico. Until Ryan had called and said they needed to meet, Jamal had never left the resort. If it turned out that Ryan was responsible for Jamal being followed, he swore that one day he would kill him in exchange for Jamal’s life.
    When he opened his eyes after a quick prayer for his friend entering paradise, he saw two men walking along the beach from the direction of the Las Brisas restaurant. The shorter of the two looked Mexican, the taller, American. Both were walking more like soldiers than tourists, alert and looking in the direction of his suite without a glance at the blue water.
    Barak slowly stood up and walked casually toward the water line. When he felt the surf starting to swirl around his calves, he took three running steps and dove into the first wave high enough to allow him to swim freely. Surfacing, he swam steadily until he was beyond the breaking waves. He kept swimming. From the beach, he was sure, he looked like just another swimmer exercising in the sea.
    A hundred yards out, he turned and began treading water so he could watch the two men on the beach. If they had noticed him, they weren’t paying any attention to him now. One had stopped and was sitting in the sand near the tree line, twenty yards from the deck of his suite. The other had gone another twenty yards beyond. Another five minutes, Barak thought, and he would have walked right between them.
    He turned and swam another fifty yards, then turned toward the beach again. The two men hadn’t moved from their positions. Yes, he said to himself, they were waiting for him, or maybe waiting for a signal to rush his suite. It was the way he would have done it. Whoever they were, they were good. He would have to learn more about his hunters, for surely he would face them again.
    He heard the approaching roar of a fast boat. When it had pulled alongside and he’d climbed up the ladder that had been lowered to him, he looked again at the two men on the beach. They weren’t looking his way.

 
    8
    With the team in position, Drake drove an electric golf cart down the path toward the presidential suite. Casey, riding shotgun, used their secure personal radios to alert the others that they were moving in. The in-ear tactical headsets with speaker and bone conduction microphones made them, he thought with a silent laugh, look like Secret Service agents protecting the President.
    They saw no one outside guarding the suite.
    “Gonzalez,” Drake asked, “you see anyone on the beach side?”
    “Not from here.”
    “Montgomery, anyone on your side?”
    “We’re sitting just off the green on 15. Can’t see anyone.”
    “All right, enter on my command.”
    He stopped the cart on the turnabout in front of the suite and walked to the main entrance. With Casey standing to the left of the massive, carved front door, he took his Glock from the belt clip at his back and rang the doorbell.
    After ten seconds and no response, he tried the door. It was unlocked. With a nod to Casey, he gave the command.
    “Go.”
    He pushed open the door and moved quickly to the right of the foyer as Casey moved to the left. Moving forward together, they cleared the media room to the right and then the elaborate bar and game room to the left. The only sound they heard was footsteps running across the terrace.
    Drake saw it first, the blood and brain matter on the mahogany floor leading into the main room of the suite. It was Barak’s bodyguard, lying face down on the floor.
    “The bodyguard’s dead,” Drake said into his radio. Make sure Barak isn’t hiding somewhere in here. Then we’ll meet in the main room.”
    To get so close and fail made Drake coldly furious. They had been lucky to get this close, he knew, but with Barak on the run again, they might not get another