Off the Grid

  Praise for the Lost Platoon Series

  “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

  “The background politics, ensuing conversations between two smart and well-drawn characters, and the mystery of SEAL Team Nine—who survived and why they were ambushed—elevate McCarty’s above many military romances. Readers will find it hard to wait for the next in the series.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “McCarty’s foray into romantic suspense is nonstop action from beginning to end. This fast-paced story will have readers hanging on to the edge of their seats, wondering where it will take them next. With the two main characters on a course set for disaster, the attraction between them cannot be denied. With no one left to trust, are they being completely honest with each other? A great read by the talented McCarty!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  Also by Monica McCarty

  The Lost Platoon

  GOING DARK

  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

  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 and BERKLEY are registered trademarks and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780399587733

  First Printing: July 2018

  Cover art: man © Claudio Marinesco; power plant with smoke © Nikkytok/Shutterstock Images

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  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

  Contents

  Praise for the Lost Platoon Series

  Also by Monica McCarty

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Excerpt from Out of Time

  About the Author

  To Laura, my law school classmate,

  Disney half-marathon companion,

  and travel buddy extraordinaire,

  whom I apparently spend so much time with that iPhone photos thinks she is in my immediate family .

  I look forward to many more adventures!

  Acknowledgments

  A huge thanks to my editor, Cindy Hwang, and my agent, Annelise Robey, for believing in this series and seeing it from my computer screen to bookstores everywhere. Your support, knowledge, and expertise are both valued and appreciated.

  The entire team at Berkley Publishing Group has been phenomenal to work with, but I want to give a special and very big shout-out to my incredible publicist, Jessica Brock (you are the bomb); to the art department for the yummy covers (to keep my hot-cover streak alive); and to the production team, including Kristine Swartz and my very hardworking copy editor.

  Thanks also to Jami Alden, who is my much-trusted and depended-upon first reader. I have no idea what I would do without you. Please never make me find out.

  Prologue

  SUBCAMP OF VORKUTLAG, POLAR URAL MOUNTAINS, RUSSIA

  MAY 26, 0130 HOURS

  “Travel the world,” they’d said. “Have an exciting career while doing what you love.”

  The navy recruiters who’d come knocking on John Donovan’s frat house door eight years ago, when he was an all-American water polo player at University of Southern California, had promised both. John had been thinking more along the lines of Bora Bora or Tahiti—not Siberia—but they’d sure as hell undersold the excitement part of the job.

  It was hard to get more exciting than a no-footprint, fail-and-you-die recon mission to a supposedly abandoned gulag in Russia, looking for proof of a doomsday weapon, with not only their lives but war at stake if they were discovered.

  Yeah, definitely undersold. But that was why he was here. Retiarius Platoon, one of the two platoons that made up the top secret SEAL Team Nine, didn’t do vanilla. They did exciting and impossible, and this op sure as shit qualified.

  But so far they’d been giving Murphy’s Law a workout in the “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong” category. They’d lost their unblinking eye in the sky—nicknamed Sauron from The Lord of the Rings—lost all comms—aka gone blind—and now that they were finally at the camp and ready to start looking around, something else was going down.

  They should be inside the gulag’s command building by now, but they’d stopped in the yard for some reason. From his position at point, Joh
n took in the other six members of the squad through the green filter of his NVGs: Miggy, Jim Bob, the senior chief, Dolph, the new kid, and the LC.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Dean Baylor, the senior chief, had broken the go-dark-on-comms order and was arguing with the officer in charge, Lieutenant Commander Scott Taylor.

  Shit, he didn’t like this. John shifted back and forth, scanning the ghostly Soviet-era labor camp through the scope of his AR-15. Stalin sure as heck knew how to do grim. This place was bleak with a big-assed “B.” But that wasn’t what was making him twitchy. It was being out here in the open like this, exposed for so long.

  John getting twitchy didn’t happen often. It was one of the reasons he usually ended up on point. It was the most dangerous position, and it took a lot to rattle him. Unflappable, cool, laid-back, pick your California-surfer-boy adjective—he didn’t let shit get to him.

  Usually.

  He shot a glance across the camp to the second building—the wooden barracks where the other half of the platoon was reconnoitering. He didn’t expect to see anything—those guys were too good and knew how to be invisible—but they were like brothers to him, and if there was something wrong . . .

  Fuck. Something was definitely wrong. The senior chief ran past him, heading not to the command building, but toward the barracks. The kid—Brian Murphy—followed. The senior chief broke off to the left toward the front of the building, and the kid broke right toward the rear. But the LC was shouting at them—and John—to fall back and get the hell out of there. In other words, it was a Dodge City.

  John understood why a moment later.

  He heard the whiz an instant before seeing the blinding flash of white light as the night detonated in front of him. The hot pressure of the shock wave made him rear back, his ears thundering with the powerful boom. The first time John had gone surfing, he’d been struck unexpectedly by a large wave and dragged under—the blast felt like that but with fire.

  The debris that pummeled his body like bullets and the rock that struck him in the forehead and took him to the ground were secondary. All he could think about was the heat, and feeling as if his lungs had been filled with fuel-fired air.

  When the blast of overwhelming heat finally receded, he choked in a few acrid breaths and looked around him in a daze. He couldn’t see. A stab of panic penetrated the haze. Only when he tried to wipe his eyes did he remember the NVGs, which were now shattered.

  Jerking the goggles off and tossing them to the ground, he blinked as the world came into view. Dust, ash, and smoke were everywhere. It was like every doomsday movie he’d ever seen.

  Suddenly he was aware of men around him, pulling at him and mouthing words to him. The world seemed to be moving in slow motion, and it took his brain a moment to catch up. The two men were Miggy and Jim Bob—aka Michael Ruiz and Travis Hart.

  “Are you all right?” he thought Ruiz was saying, but John’s ears were ringing too loudly to hear anything.

  He nodded, remembering that Miggy, Jim Bob, and Dolph—Steve Spivak—had been well behind him when the missile hit the barracks in front of them. John had been a couple hundred feet away. Had he been any closer . . .

  He swore, remembering the kid and senior chief running past him. They’d been closer. And the LC?

  A moment later his silent question was answered as the LC appeared out of the smoke with Dolph, both dragging the unconscious senior chief. It was hard to see what state Baylor was in in the dark, but if he was half as bad as John felt, it couldn’t be good.

  Miggy dropped down to look the senior chief over and administer first aid as necessary. Jim Bob was doing the same to John. Their corpsman had been with the other squad, but they all had medical training. SEALs might have specialties, but what made them distinct was that they were trained to do any job. If someone went down, any one of them could step up and fill his shoes.

  John finally found his voice. “The kid?”

  The LC met his gaze and shook his head. “Murphy was too close to the rear of the building where the first missile hit.”

  There’d been more than one?

  Suddenly, the full importance and ramifications of what the LC said struck. If Murphy had been too close . . .

  The other squad, the other seven men of Retiarius, including his best friend and BUD/S brother, Brandon Blake, had been inside the barracks building.

  The senior chief and Murphy must have been trying to warn them.

  John had to do something. He pushed Jim Bob away, told him he was fine, and struggled to his feet, swaying as he tried to find his equilibrium. Christ, his head hurt. The ground was spinning. He started to run—stumble—toward the orange inferno.

  But the LC had guessed his intent and grabbed his arm to hold him back. “It’s too late,” he yelled, his voice sounding like it was coming from the far end of a tunnel. “They’re gone.”

  Gone. The finality of that one word penetrated his shell-shocked brain.

  John wanted to argue. With every bone in his body he wanted to deny the LC’s words. But the truth was right in front of his face. The gulag was gone. Both the command and barracks buildings had been flattened. What was left was being incinerated before his eyes.

  He’d never been so close to one before, but he suspected what he was seeing: a thermobaric explosion. It was also known as a vacuum bomb, although this one had been attached to missiles. They were nasty shit, frowned upon by the international community for humanitarian reasons. Russia had been accused of using them in Syria, and the US had used them to target the caves in Afghanistan, including one nicknamed the “Mother of all Bombs.” They used more fuel than conventional weapons, producing a much hotter, more sustained, and pressurized blast that was far more destructive—and deadly—when used in buildings, bunkers, and caves.

  He knew what it meant. Just like that, his best friend, half the platoon, and half the family he had in the world were gone.

  It was too horrible. Too hideous to think about.

  He couldn’t think about it. John had been here once before, and it wasn’t a place he ever wanted to go to again. Utter devastation. Feeling as if the entire world had just gone black and he was lost.

  He forced himself to look away. To move on and shift gears. Putting the bad stuff behind him was what made him so good at his job.

  But his eyes glanced back to the fire, the instinct to run toward it still strong. SEALs didn’t leave their brothers behind. Ever.

  “Donovan . . . Dynomite,” the LC said, shaking him as if it weren’t the first time he’d said his name. Kid Dyn-o-mite from the old 70s show Good Times. That was him. “I need you to focus. We don’t have much time. They’ll be here soon, looking for survivors. They can’t find us.”

  John’s head cleared. The heavy weight in his chest was still there, but he was back. The op . . . he had to focus on the op. “What do you need me to do?”

  The LC looked relieved. “Get rid of anything electronic. Anything that might let them detect that we weren’t in one of those buildings like we were supposed to be.” Taylor looked at the other three men around him. “That goes for all of us—and the senior chief as well.”

  Baylor was still unconscious. He didn’t rouse until they went into the river. That was after they’d thrown their electronics into the fire. But fearing that the Russian soldiers—probably their special forces, Spetsnaz—might also be using thermal imaging, they needed to mask their body heat as well.

  So, into the icy river they went, taking turns keeping the senior chief afloat. Baylor had come around, but he was still out of it, and every time they had to go under and hold their breath as the Russian soldiers drew near, they feared he might not surface.

  But he made it. They all did. Although those hours in the cold river weren’t anything John ever wanted to go through again. He’d thought BUD/S had prepared him for cold and uncomfortab
le. But the Pacific Ocean in San Diego didn’t have anything on a river in Arctic Russia.

  It seemed as if the bastards would never leave. They were having too much fun. John didn’t need to understand Russian like Spivak did to know they were gloating.

  Spivak could only catch a word or two of what they were saying in between breaths, but other than making some kind of joke that John took to be the Russian equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel and having what they needed to make the American “cowboys” pay, they weren’t thoughtful enough to mention how they knew the SEALs were coming. If it hadn’t been for the LC receiving a last-minute warning—that was what he and the senior chief had been arguing about—they would all be dead.

  By the time the Russians left, John wasn’t the only one battling hypothermia. But he pushed it aside just like everything else.

  He never looked back, only forward.

  And forward in this case meant getting the hell out of Dodge—or, in SEAL terminology, exfil.

  SEALs had contingencies for contingencies, and this op was no exception. They’d all been well briefed and knew the mission plan backward and forward, but they didn’t use their original exfil plan or the backup one. They were going to hump a good seventy miles through the Ural forests and tundra to the nearest city—or what passed for a city in the polar circle—to the old coal-mining town of Vorkuta.

  The LC suspected that someone in their own government had set them up, and until he found out who it was, they were going to stay dead. That meant going dark, staying off the grid, and scattering in different directions as soon as they could.

  It also meant getting rid of anything that could identify them as American or military. Due to the nature of their mission, most of their gear was unattributable, but even having it could be suspicious, so into the fires it went. They’d even have to ditch their weapons once they got closer to Vorkuta. Fortunately, they’d been trained in how to blend in—low-vis, as they called it. No buzz cuts or clean-shaven jaws for them. Relaxed grooming standards where common in the Teams. Once they had street clothes they would be good to go.