Detachment (Blake Brier Thrillers Book 6) Read online

  DETACHMENT

  BLAKE BRIER BOOK SIX

  L.T. RYAN

  WITH

  GREGORY SCOTT

  Copyright © 2022 by L.T. Ryan, Gregory Scott, and Liquid Mind Media, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

  For information contact:

  [email protected]

  https://LTRyan.com

  https://www.facebook.com/JackNobleBooks

  CONTENTS

  The Blake Brier Series

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  The Blake Brier Series

  Also by L.T. Ryan

  THE BLAKE BRIER SERIES

  Blake Brier Series

  Unmasked

  Unleashed

  Uncharted

  Drawpoint

  Contrail

  Detachment

  Untitled (coming soon)

  PROLOGUE

  Robbie Novak patted his pockets. Front and back. He didn’t need instructions, but he got them anyway.

  “Phone, keys, wallet. All electronic devices. Anything on your person goes in the tray.” The kid’s muscular arm wobbled as he held out the gray plastic busboy bin like a beggar at the end of an I-95 exit ramp.

  Robbie wiped an emerging band of sweat from his hairline, gave an unnecessary scan of the empty lobby, then glanced at the canvas name tag sewn to the puffed-up chest of the nineteen-year-old MP.

  Private First Class Carson.

  Carson’s combat uniform carried an 82nd Airborne Division patch and, like most everyone else at Fort Bragg, a set of embroidered jump wings. Despite the connotation, he wore a black beret, instead of the division’s typical maroon headgear. Young Carson was likely what paratroopers liked to call a “five jump chump.”

  Five jumps were what the Army required to graduate from jump school. But it wasn’t uncommon for a guy to get his wings and take up an assignment with a “leg unit,” never to jump again. Sure, the patch said Airborne, but Carson’s real MOS appeared to be babysitting a glorified mailroom. And boy, did he take the job seriously.

  “This is all I got.” Robbie held his phone in one hand and his overstuffed carbon fiber credit card clip in the other. He twisted his wrists in a flourish before dropping the two items into the bin.

  “Step through, Staff Sergeant.”

  Aside from a click and a green LED, the magnetometer had no complaints.

  “Stop there. Spread your legs.” Carson unsheathed a metal-detecting wand and began waving it around Robbie’s body, starting at his ankles and working his way upward. As Carson reached his shoulder, Robbie noticed a change in the kid’s expression. A glimmer of hesitation.

  Robbie could guess why the kid paused. Carson had noticed the three tabs accompanying his unit patch, one positioned below the other: Special Forces, Ranger, Airborne.

  The “Special Forces” tab, also called the “long tab,” was only worn by current or former Green Berets. It wasn’t what the tabs said that Carson had keyed in on. It was what they implied.

  Nowhere on Robbie’s uniform did it say, “1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta,” and it didn’t have to. Robbie knew that Carson knew who he was. Or rather, who he was with. Task Force Green, or Delta Force as it’s more commonly known.

  Carson shouldn’t have counted it as an amazing feat of deduction. After all, they were standing inside the Special Operations Command Records Annex. Then again, Carson didn’t seem to be the sharpest tool in the shed.

  Peculiar, Robbie thought, how rank seemed to mean little to the younger generation. But every bright-eyed, protein-guzzling lunk looked up to the guys in the Unit. Feared them, even.

  “You have a good day, Sergeant,” Carson handed Robbie his wallet with an awkward smile. “I’ll secure your phone. You can grab it on the way out.” His voice wavered. A forced swallow followed.

  It eased Robbie’s mind. Just a bit. As if Carson’s nervousness were a shield against the danger of slipping up and revealing his own. In the past, he had thought he was good at suppressing anxiety in stressful situations, but it occurred to him now that it was only because he had never felt any. There’s a first for everything, he thought. “Thank you Private. Don’t work too hard.”

  Robbie moved to the inner glass doors. A buzz and a clicking sound rang out before he even reached out to pull the vertical handle. He gave an appreciative hand gesture and passed into the secure part of the building.

  For as long as he’d known First Lieutenant Darrell Graham—about two days fewer than he had been dating Darrell’s sister Nicole—Robbie had never been to visit the man at work.

  The facility was as unimpressive inside as it looked from the outside. Small compared to the expansive Special Operations Command Headquarters building, this annex was one of several allocated to Special Ops.

  Manned by the “Dweebs,” the short brick structure was nothing more than a big, ugly filing cabinet, tucked away in a cluster of other nondescript government bungalows, about a half mile from the main building. But to hear Darrell talk about it, it was the heart and soul of special operations.

  Robbie felt for his stack of credit cards through the fabric of his fatigues.

  You can do this.

  He took a deep breath and walked through the empty corridor.

  “Can I help you?” A female voice came from behind him.

  Robbie turned to find the voice attached to a floating head popping out from one of the doorways. The woman’s blonde hair was tied back tight. So tight that it appeared to tug at the corners of her eyes.

  “Darrell Graham, ma’am.”

  “Last door on the left,” she said. Her head retreated.

  Before carrying on, he took another moment. Another deep breath. Another affirmation. This was the right thing to do. He was sure of it. But that didn’t make this any easier. Of all he had been through, how could this turn out to be the hardest?

  The answer was obvious. It was his pride. Not in himself, but in his country.

  For all pra
ctical purposes, today would be the day he threw it all away.

  It must be done. Someone has to do it.

  Robbie knocked. The door swung open.

  “Robbie! Brother.” Darrell leaned back and spread his arms as if welcoming an estranged child back into the fold.

  “Hey Darrell.” Robbie’s lack of enthusiasm wasn’t a product of his current predicament, or his apprehension. He had just never liked Darrell all that much.

  Darrell, on the other hand, made a point to refer to Robbie as “brother” or “family” anytime they spoke.

  These were terms that might well become true, but Robbie wasn’t a hundred percent sure. He had no doubt that Nicole was getting antsy, but marriage was a big commitment and it had only been five years.

  By military standards, Robbie was an old bachelor at twenty-seven. Most of his friends had been married before turning twenty-one. But it was much worse for Nicole. At twenty-four, she was an old maid. And her friends never let her forget it.

  “You want anything? A Coke or something? We’ve got a machine.”

  “No, I’m good.” Robbie put his hands in his pockets and looked around the small eight-by-eight cell of an office. “I know I keep saying I’ll stop by, and I never get the chance, but today I was around and I figured—”

  “Of course, brother. Glad ya did. I can give you a little tour if you want. This here’s my humble abode, as you can see.”

  “It’s great.” Robbie pointed at a picture of himself and Nicole, which Darrell had printed on a piece of copy paper and scotch-taped to the wall next to his desk. “I remember that. The Military Ball. Fun night. Except for the thing with Jack and his girl.”

  “Yeah. They’re back together, you know. She moved back in with him about two months ago. Guess she had gone out to California for a couple years. I saw him at Costco. He told me all about it.”

  Aside from Darrell’s desk chair, there was another equally ratty looking seat stashed in the corner. With his palm, Robbie brushed what looked like crumbs from the brown upholstery but none of the spots budged. He sat anyway. “Do you mind if I–”

  “Make yourself at home. You picked a good day. We got a lot of exciting stuff goin’ on. There’s this dedication for some memorial in Nebraska. We’ve been tasked with digging through the paper files to find the original copies of commendations for the 134th Guard from World War II. They could be here. I mean, not in this building, we’re only digital. But somewhere. Could also be Rucker, Pike, Dawson, no one’s sure. NARA in St. Louis don’t have them, as far as they say. Pretty interesting stuff.”

  “No doubt.” Robbie glanced at his watch.

  Any minute now.

  “So you want me to show you around? I’ve just got to clear it first. But yeah, I can show you the server room and we’ve got a pretty cool break room with an almost full kitchen.”

  Robbie was in the middle of formulating an excuse when Darrell’s desk phone rang.

  “Hold that thought.” Darrell picked up the phone. His dumb smile fell away and he spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “Be right there.” He hung up.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve got to take an important call,” Darrell answered.

  “Do you want me to step out in the hall?”

  “No. I can’t take it here. These lines are only internal. We have a special room. Soundproof. Secure line.”

  Robbie nodded with feigned interest. Of course, he already knew all of this. It was for these very reasons that he had arranged for the call to be made. Darrell would be away from his office for only a few minutes. He only hoped it would be enough.

  “Hang here for a couple of minutes. You’re not in a rush are ya? I’ll show you around when I get back. I’ll show you the SCIF too. Just hang tight.”

  Darrell scurried off.

  Robbie shook his head.

  Dweeb.

  Something about the familiarity of seeing Darrell had calmed his nerves. He no longer felt the stress of the act, only the pressure of time.

  From his pocket, Robbie whipped out the stack of credit cards, sandwiched by two thin carbon fiber plates and two strips of elastic. He withdrew the entire stack and shook free the small thumb drive he had hidden inside.

  As if a sort of divine sanction, Robbie recalled he had a stack of expired credit cards, hidden away toward the back of the top drawer in his bedroom bureau. Every time he added one to the stack, he’d remind himself to take them to the office to be shredded. And every time he’d forget they were there. This time, he’d remembered.

  Pleased with his ingenious plan, he spent a half hour cutting the centers out of each card with an exacto knife until he could stack the cards together to create a mini-safe. Big enough to hide a single USB thumb drive.

  Getting caught trying to smuggle a thumb drive into the facility was enough for a court martial. He’d have been better off leaving it in his pocket and saying he’d forgotten it was there.

  But he was sure his plan was foolproof. The one thing they never checked was the one thing you handed over to them.

  Even Carson.

  Robbie didn’t waste any time. He inserted the drive into the back of the black computer tower, sitting at the edge of the desk, and clicked the icon on the screen to open the Windows file explorer.

  Computers weren’t his specialty. Not by a longshot, but he knew his way around the system well enough. More importantly, he knew what he was looking for.

  Incidents. Operations. They were all referenced by an alphanumeric code. Every document associated with a particular operation was named accordingly. It would only take a simple search, a wildcard operator, and a copy command to get it done. He had practiced the sequence on his own PC enough times over the past twenty-four hours.

  Robbie punched at the keys, hit enter, and waited. An indicator moved from left to right. Slower than he’d hoped.

  Much, much slower.

  Seconds ticked by. One minute. Two.

  Eighty percent. Eighty-two percent.

  Come on. Hurry up.

  Footsteps approached.

  Damn it. Darrell.

  With a frantic quadruple click, Robbie opened the Internet Explorer web browser and maximized the screen.

  A man appeared in the doorway. It wasn’t Darrell.

  “Where’s Graham? Who are you?”

  “I’m–” Robbie decided it would be best to leave his name out of the conversation. “–just visiting.”

  “Why are you on Lieutenant Graham’s computer? Are you authorized? Let me see some identification.”

  “Hold on friend.” Robbie raised his hands in the international sign for “calm down and slow your roll.”

  The man wearing the Captain’s bars wasn’t having it.

  “Carson,” he hollered. “Someone get Carson.”

  Robbie’s mind spun. He was getting caught. No, he was caught. His career, his relationship, his future, down the tubes in the blink of an eye.

  Why did he think he could pull this off? Why had he been so intent on doing this? These thoughts crept into his brain for a fleeting moment. They didn’t linger. He knew why he was there. This was bigger than him. It was about truth. It was about blood.

  It had to be done. Someone had to try.

  Carson’s boots clumped down the hallway.

  “Hold on. Hold on Frank,” the approaching man said with a voice a couple registers higher than Carson’s. “He’s my brother-in-law. It’s alright, I just had to take a call.”

  “He’s accessing your computer,” the captain said.

  Darrell pushed by his superior and stepped into the office.

  “Robbie?”

  “Sorry Darrell, I was just going to look something up on Google.” Robbie stood and leaned over the tower as if diagnosing its hardware. “The internet’s not working, maybe it’s disconnected or something.”

  “We aren’t connected to the Internet, Robbie. I told you this already. Many times. No connection to the outside world. Remember
?”

  Robbie withdrew his hand from behind the tower, taking care to keep the thumb drive tucked into his palm. He rotated his wrist to avoid flashing it to the two onlookers. “Of course! I remember that now. I’m a dumbass. Didn’t mean to cause a shitstorm.”

  The captain scowled. “Visiting hours are over, Graham.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As the captain walked away, Darrell also began moving into the hallway.

  Robbie reached behind and pressed the power button on the front of the tower until the screen went black, then stepped into the hallway after his possible-future-brother-in-law.

  “We’ll have to do the tour another time,” Darrell said.

  “Sorry about that. Seems like I might have gotten you into some hot water.”

  “What, him? He’s fine. He’s always like that. It’s all right, I’ve got a lot of work to do, anyway. We’ll catch up soon. I’ll have you and Nicole over the house. All right?” Darrell opened the glass door.

  “Oh, Hey. Your phone call? Anything good?”

  Darrell hissed. “There was no one on the line.”

  Robbie smiled and shrugged. “That’s good. One less headache, right?”

  “Sure.” Darrell shrugged back at him. “Robbie?”

  “Yeah?”