Page 7 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

“For the sake of argument, pretend that Alaska Force isn’t your run-of-the-mill survivalist cult,” Templeton suggested, and it cost him to keep that smile in his voice and on his face. “Pretend that instead, we are men of honor. Men who served their country well and aren’t quite ready to become civilians. Men who instead dedicated their lives to solving problems law enforcement can’t.”

“That’s very stirring. But if law enforcement can’tsolve the problem, that suggests that any civilian-led solutions are illegal.”

“Not illegal.” Templeton considered. “Really, we operate in more of a gray area.”

“I don’t believe in gray areas.”

Templeton didn’t have to pretend to be amused then. He laughed. “You don’t have to believe in gray areas. They’re still there.”

“There’s wrong and there’s right,” Kate replied. “It’s actually simple.”

“Unfortunately, life is very rarely simple.”

“On the contrary. We all want to make life complicated, and we often go to great lengths to do it. But the right choice is always obvious.” Her brown eyes glittered. “People don’t want to take it.”

“That’s easy to say.”

“I’m sure that you tell yourself all kinds of lies to make it okay that you bend the rules, Mr. Cross.”

Once again, her gaze was steady on his.Sure. Most people were intimidated by him. Cowed, whether they wanted to show it or not. But not this woman. She stared right back at him as if they were the same size. As if, should she feel like it, she could surge to her feet and engage him in hand-to-hand combat and who knows? Maybe land a few punches.

It was about the hottest thing Templeton had ever seen.

“But rules exist for a reason,” she said steadily. With that same look that suggested she was wholly unaware that he outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds of pure muscle. “Everybody thinks it’s okay iftheycheat a little or tell a white lie. But then before you know it, we find ourselves here. Where a group of mercenaries with combat training can call themselves patriots and terrorize whole islands in Southeast Alaska.”

Templeton studied her. “Black and white. Right and wrong. No deviation. Got it.”

“It’s not a character flaw. It’s called the law.”

“Alaska Force exists because people are always coming to us for help. Not hired muscle or combat-trained terrorists.” He shook his head. “It seems to me that if you take us out of the picture, you allow other people far less cute and cuddly than we are to move in and do a whole lot worse.”

Again, that smile, as if she were humoring someone remarkably dim-witted. If Templeton had been possessed of the slightest shred of self-doubt where his intellect and abilities were concerned, that smile might have inspired him into unfortunate displays. Luckily, he could sit there and enjoy it as the weapon it was.

“Do you have examples of other bands of desperadoes roaming around the Alexander Archipelago, wreaking havoc?” she asked. “Because so far, the only group by that description I’m aware of is yours.”

Templeton reviewed the situation. The first time something had blown up a little too close to Grizzly Harbor, they’d considered it an isolated incident. That preacher had vowed he’d get his revenge, and there he was, trying to get it. They’d intercepted him, taken him out, and presented him to the authorities—practically with a bow on top.

But the next time it had been a storage facility in Sitka, one of the larger cities out here in Alaska’s rugged southeast islands, which Isaac and Templeton had set up when they’d first started to put this funny idea of theirs into action. Only three of their team had walked back off the field after that last, terrible op, and that was it. They were all done.

Jonas Crow had disappeared as soon as the briefing was done. Like the ghost he was.

Templeton had gone back to Vidalia, but there was nothing for him there. He barely remembered that feral teenager he’d been. He had aunts and uncles he’d never met scattered all over Mississippi, and a father still doingthat life sentence in Parchman, but his mother had walked away from all of them when Templeton was still small, blaming everyone and everything in the state for what had happened to her husband. That meant Templeton had never had any use for them, either, in solidarity.

And the truth was that none of that mattered to him now. Not the way the men he considered his real brothers did.

Templeton had never been one for the cold, but he found himself in Alaska anyway, because he remembered the stories Isaac had told him during all the dark nights—of the soul or otherwise—they’d bare-knuckled it through together. Stories of growing up in a place called Grizzly Harbor, where the men were hardy and the women were far tougher, winter came like it planned to stay forever, and summer felt like a dream even while it was happening.

It seemed like the least likely place to build something. And therefore the best.

After a while, they’d gone out and found Jonas, too.

And what the three of them were particularly good at was anticipating trouble, so it made sense to spread things out. The storage facility in Sitka was only one of the places they used to stash equipment. It had been empty that July night when a fire broke out and burned the building down. The fire had been put out before it could spread, but their unit had been damaged beyond repair.

But fires happened. It wasn’t until a second storage unit went up in flames, this one farther afield in Ketchikan, that it occurred to everyone that the first one probably wasn’t an accident. And more concerning, that to target storage units at all meant that someone knew more about Alaska Force’s operation than they should.

They’d moved swiftly. They’d stopped using commercial storage space for equipment drops years back, and it was high time they stopped using them altogether.They’d taken the fires as a sign to do just that and closed out their contracts with the remaining few storage facilities within weeks.

It was hard to say if things kept happening, or if they were all so paranoid that they started to worry if everyday, minor inconveniences were actually something more ominous. A fuel gauge that quit working and registered full when it wasn’t, leading to a dramatic set down of a seaplane outside Anchorage. An accident or sabotage? No one knew.

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