Ryker Read online

  Ryker

  The Mavericks, Book 6

  Dale Mayer

  Books in This Series:

  Kerrick, Book 1

  Griffin, Book 2

  Jax, Book 3

  Beau, Book 4

  Asher, Book 5

  Ryker, Book 6

  Miles, Book 7

  Nico, Book 8

  Keane, Book 9

  Lennox, Book 10

  Gavin, Book 11

  Shane, Book 12

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About This Book

  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

  Epilogue

  About Miles

  Author’s Note

  Complimentary Download

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  About This Book

  What happens when the very men—trained to make the hard decisions—come up against the rules and regulations that hold them back from doing what needs to be done? They either stay and work within the constraints given to them or they walk away. Only now, for a select few, they have another option:

  The Mavericks. A covert black ops team that steps up and break all the rules … but gets the job done.

  Welcome to a new military romance series by USA Today best-selling author Dale Mayer. A series where you meet new friends and just might get to meet old ones too in this raw and compelling look at the men who keep us safe every day from the darkness where they operate—and live—in the shadows … until someone special helps them step into the light.

  After his last assignment, Ryker is ready for a rest. And he gets it—but only a few hours …

  That’s even too long for a geologist kidnapped by guerrillas in the Colombian jungle. Ryker has plenty of experience in jungles around the world but, keeping Manila safe—along with the two men she’s traveling with and their injured guide—exposes them for who they are. It quickly becomes apparent, under these most gruelling conditions, which of her party steps up and which plan to step out.

  Manila’s life has become one of never-ending misery at the hands of her captors as they await word from their bosses, who decide her ultimate fate. That she’s hunting platinum doesn’t matter to them. Nor that she’s fighting against the invasive illegal gold mining taking over parts of the area. When Ryker rescues her from her prison tent, she places her trust in his ability to get her and her team safely away. Not yet realizing she’d be gifting him both her body and her heart too.

  Ryker needs to keep them all alive and together long enough to get them out of this hellhole—hopefully alive …

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  Chapter 1

  Ryker Landers landed in California. He’d stayed an extra night in Geneva and had spent it with Mickey and Asher. They’d gone out for dinner, sat down at the lake for a long time, and just generally had a good old time without the pressure and strain of all the action they’d been through. Ryker had no idea where he was going next, but he hoped for a few days off. He headed to his brother’s place now. He figured he’d catch a couple days of doing nothing but maybe playing a few video games and something mundane, like mowing the lawn. That sounded good to him. Especially if it came with a cold beer.

  He hopped into his vehicle and drove away from the airport. He hated the traffic, the smell and the smog, but something was very comforting about being home again. As he pulled up to his brother’s front door, it opened, and his nephew came barreling out. “Ryker, Ryker,” he said. “You came.”

  “I said I would, buddy.” He picked him up, tossed him high in the air and laughed.

  As he stepped inside, his sister-in-law came over and gave him a kiss. “You look tired.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a bit of a rush,” he said. “After a few days here I’ll be fine.”

  His brother, Reggie, walked over, patted his back and said, “Will they give you a few days?”

  “I hope so,” he said.

  But just over a day later his phone chimed. He looked down and it read, You ready?

  He thought about it, smiled and answered, Yes.

  Good, came the reply. You’re heading to the jungle. A geologist has gone missing. Dr. Manila Folgers.

  I could take a whole team in there and still not find him.

  And we think she has been taken by guerrillas.

  The animal variety? he typed, half as a bad joke.

  No, the well-armed variety. We need somebody to get her out, without causing a war.

  But I like causing wars, Ryker said.

  Then cause it with her. She’s been looking for platinum, a hot commodity in the world. We’re afraid she found some—and someone else found out.

  Ouch.

  Get ready. You’re leaving in the morning.

  Chapter 2

  Ryker stood on the upper deck of the cruiser and studied the coastline. “When he said the Colombian jungle,” he muttered to himself, “he meant it.” He stared at the heavy overgrowth. Anything one hundred yards from the water was almost a dense thicket, and the best information he could get was that his missing geologist was in the Pacific Region of Colombia. That was the smallest of the five regions and had one major city on the coast that served as a major shipping port. Of course, many small villages were up and down the coast.

  He was coming up to Tumaco, the second port in the region, but they were still a long way off the shoreline, and he would have an awful lot of inland traveling to do. Which is why he would travel at night and would get dropped off by a helicopter to Manila’s last known location, which had been pulled off the locator on her phone. Then it had gone dead.

  Ryker was aiming to land somewhere close to where she’d gone missing last to see if he could track her from there. This was definitely guerrilla territory, and he was not looking forward to being out here without reliable communication while trying to find a woman who was most likely already dead. But apparently not only was she a geologist interested in stopping a lot of the illegal gold mining in the Chocó Department region—good luck with that—but she was also looking for platinum, a resource at a very low ebb around the world, making it even more valuable.

  He shook his head. She had come here as part of a group of five, including their two guides to help carry some of the gear and the samples. Normally she went out alone, but, this time, Global Mining Industries had insisted. Her university shared her with Global for these joint pursuits. The team idea was a good thing in theory, but it didn’t matter in reality because all of them were missing now. Nobody knew if the guides had been taken prisoner as well or if they had just taken off. As far as Ryker’s jaded mind would say though, the guides had been part of the kidnapping too. Gain a few dollars, head back home and nobody would be the wiser. It happened all the time. People went missing in these far corners, and nobody ever came and checked. This was a lawless land here.

  Behind him, he heard a slight sound. Being on a navy cruiser, he ignored it.

  “Ryker?”

  He recognized the voice. Ever so slowly, he turned in surprise. “Miles?”

  His old friend reached out a hand, but, rather than shake, they half hugged and smacked each other on the shoulders.

  “Damn, it’s good to see you,” Ryker said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Miles nodded toward the jungle out there. “Heading back into my worst nightmare,” he said with a tilt of his mouth.

  It took
a moment for Ryker to understand. “Are you coming with me?”

  Miles nodded.

  “Oh, I remember,” Ryker said. “Didn’t you get bitten by a viper?”

  “Sure did. Lost a chunk of my foot on that deal,” Miles said cheerfully.

  “So why the hell did you volunteer to come back in?”

  “A couple reasons. The primary one being that you need help, and I don’t want you in there alone because the odds are against you coming back out again. I don’t give a shit what anybody says about this region being a cakewalk. It’s not by any stretch of the imagination. Two, I don’t want something like that to beat me,” he said. “I’d done an awful lot of antiguerrilla warfare training well before we went in the last time, and I had been at the top of my game. Well, until that damn snake bite. I was carried out by my teammates, and I swore—if anybody ever needed me to return again—I’d do it just to help save myself.”

  “Outside of checking that you were okay, I didn’t see much of you after that trip.”

  “And that trip was a few years ago,” Miles admitted. “Don’t know about you, but I decided I needed a change of pace.”

  Ryker snorted. “This is hardly a change of pace.”

  Miles’s British accent came in heavily as he laughed. “But it is,” he said. “This is faster and more dangerous but without the brass interference. We can make decisions without having to worry about permission.”

  “I hear that,” Ryker said. “The trouble is, I was always guided—and limited in that way—by my own honor system. And that is always way more intense than whatever the brass deems from above.”

  “I get you,” Miles said, “but still, it’s me or nobody.”

  “Oh, hey. Don’t worry. I want you with me,” Ryker said. “I was already trying to figure out how the hell I was supposed to handle this job alone. It’s one thing to go in without backup on a small job, but something like this?” He shook his head. “No, I’ll be glad to have you at my side.”

  “Good thing,” Miles said, “because it is what it is already.”

  “Yeah, and it’s good,” he said. “I wish we had more information though.”

  “We have the latitude and longitude of the GPS where they were,” Miles said. “And I have preliminary files on everybody on the team. But I wonder how we’ll get the rest while in the jungle here, blocking any reception. Plus we have nothing on the two guides.”

  “Gee, what a surprise,” Ryker said. “What’s the chance they’re in on it?”

  Miles nodded. “Unfortunately, in Colombia, everybody will take a paycheck or an extra little bit of cash for something like this. The guerrillas keep everybody in the loop. And the guerrillas keep them all on their side by paying them.”

  “And now the guerrillas are attached to the drug cartels as well, giving the guerrillas access to even more money to buy allegiances,” Ryker muttered. “After that one attempt by their government to rehabilitate and to make peace, they’ve more or less aligned with all the drugs cartels instead.”

  “And yet, anybody with a brain could have seen that one coming,” Miles said. “The authorities got them to surrender and took out half of them, and the rest saw the writing on the wall, then headed back to the jungle. They handed over the bulk of their weapons in this plea or negotiation deal, which was a bad deal for them. A lot of them were put into the land and supposed civilization, but a lot of them couldn’t handle it.”

  “Isn’t that the truth. Once you’ve been in a war full time, it makes you wonder if you can ever leave it. I’ve had that thought a time or two myself.”

  “I know,” Miles said. “I was thinking that this job could be the last one.”

  “You too, huh? But then I feel that way about every job,” Ryker said, laughing.

  “Right?” Miles said. “I’ve got weapons in our kit all packed up. You should take a look.”

  “Good,” he said as he turned to look around at the deck of the cruiser. “Does anybody even know we’re here? I get that everybody knows, but it’s like we don’t exist. It’s a bizarre feeling.”

  “Exactly,” Miles said. “And that’s the way they like it. The less they know, the less they have to even think about it. As far as these guys are concerned, we’re here on a secret mission, and that’s it.”

  “Well,” Ryker said, “that’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “We’re leaving at midnight, if you’re okay with that.”

  “Yeah. We should land just in perfect jaguar-hunting time,” he said with a laugh.

  Manila Folgers stayed huddled in the small tent that she’d been given, and she was damn grateful to have that. Being in the middle of the guerrilla camp was not a good place for a white woman. And particularly not one in her position. She should have known better and not listened to her bosses. She’d planned to come all alone—how arrogant and foolish, yes—yet she would’ve been better off alone. As far as she was concerned, one of the guides had given her up and had taken a payout and was even now back in his village, happily laughing at having made a smart move with his guerrilla friends.

  She didn’t even know which group of guerrillas these were. She thought they were still part of the same FARC group, an acronym for some bloody remnants of an all-powerful guerrilla warfare group back in the nineties and way before. They made a plea deal that had gone bad for a lot of them, and the remainder of the group got more powerful by attaching themselves to a lot of the Colombian drug world.

  Not that any of that should have impacted her, but, right now, not only did the guerrillas say that she wasn’t allowed to go where she wanted to go, but they also said that she wasn’t going anywhere without their permission. She suspected that some of her team might already have been executed too, and that brought on her cold sweats.

  The gold mining so rampant in this part of the Colombian countryside was destroying a lot of the natural habitats of this country. It was illegal, and it was destructive, but it was a moneymaker, and everybody was jumping on that bandwagon. She made a mental note anytime she ran across these activities, to share with others more actively working to stop this.

  However, she was here solely looking for platinum, something the world was quickly running out of. And there was a good chance some deposits were along here, and she needed to be pulling her samples.

  She had all her paperwork in order.

  This guerrilla group was so young as a whole. Spoke to the scarcity of jobs in this country. But there were so many of them, and all of them heavily armed. She didn’t know what the guerrillas would do with her, and honestly, it sounded like they didn’t know what they would do either. She understood Spanish but didn’t let them know that. She was deliberately speaking English, but, then again, who knew what her guides had told these guerrillas?

  Just then her tent flap flipped back, and a young woman stepped inside. She motioned for Manila to get up. Slowly she got up and stared at her. She motioned again for Manila to walk ahead of her. She walked out of her tent to see her team members also being shepherded over to one side. Both of them thankfully. Just the two guides were missing. She was quite surprised when she and her team were then given water. She quickly washed her face and the back of her neck and then took some to drink.

  Her team members looked at her warily.

  She shrugged. “No idea,” she said quietly. “Just stay cooperative.”

  “Yes, stay cooperative,” said a man from the side, his voice harsh.

  She glanced at him as he laughed to see two missing front teeth, but, of course, he carried two rifles, as if that made up for it.

  She opened her mouth again and said, “We mean you no harm.”

  “You’re an interfering foreigner. We don’t want you here,” he snapped.

  “If by that you mean, I’m a geologist, and I’m looking for platinum, then, yes.”

  His face worked as he tried to sort through what that meant.

  Somebody on the other side said, “Platinum?”

  S
he turned and nodded. “There’s a very good chance that Colombia has wonderful stores of it. But I won’t know until I get some of my samples back to the lab.”

  “What company do you work for?”

  “Global Mining Industries,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”

  Of course, nothing but blank stares gazed back at her. She lifted the water and took another big drink. It was always a problem to drink enough to compensate for the heat down here. You weren’t supposed to drink it all at once. You were supposed to drink it slowly to allow your body to tank back up again. “When can we leave?” she asked.

  The man missing two teeth laughed again. “Why should we let you go anywhere?”

  “Because I haven’t done you any harm,” she said quietly. “We’re here with your government’s permission.”

  “We don’t give a shit about our government,” Toothless said. “If you don’t pay the price for being here with us, then we don’t have to let you do anything.”

  “Ah,” she said with a nod. “So this is just about money.”

  “It’s not just about money,” he said, getting angry. Then a shout came from across the path. It was almost a road, but there were no vehicles. They were all on foot. Immediately Toothless subsided. He shouldered his rifle and turned and walked away.

  She glanced at her team members. “Hold on,” she said.

  “We should never have come,” Andy announced.

  “Nope, you shouldn’t have,” the second guerrilla said. “It makes no sense that you’re here, unless you’re spies.”

  She stared at him in surprise. “Of course we’re not spies. We didn’t even know you were here.”

  He didn’t like that answer either. Whether his ego thought that everybody should know where they were or whether he had some other reason for that, she didn’t know. But his glare told her that he definitely didn’t like her answer. She shrugged and waited for whatever would happen next. She didn’t have to wait long. Two other gunmen joined them, and these were immediately visible as the bosses.