Wolfe Trap Read online

  Contents

  Wolfe Trap

  Acclaim for Wolfe

  Copyright

  Books by S.L.Shelton

  Dedication

  Dear Reader,

  Note

  One—Arrival

  Two—A Plan

  Three—September

  Four—October

  Five—November

  Six—December

  Seven—January

  Eight—The Breach

  Nine—Departure

  Maps

  Acknowledgments

  Harbinger

  Excerpt from Harbinger

  Wolfe Trap

  A Novel by

  S.L. Shelton

  The 4th novel in the Scott Wolfe Series

  Acclaim for

  S.L. Shelton’s

  HEART-POUNDING

  Action Thrillers

  Waking Wolfe

  “Waking Wolfe is a tightly written story with engaging characters and fast-moving events… Throw in loose nukes, colorful Russian mobsters, nefarious Serbs, and some CIA guys and you’ve got yourself a thriller.”

  —Susan Hasler, Former CIA Analyst

  Author of Project: Halfsheep

  “The pages of this novel are filled with non-stop action and atmosphere so rich you feel as if you are there. Shelton is amazing at keeping tension throughout the storyline, and it was incredibly difficult to put this book down… This is an amazing debut novel. There’s no wonder why S.L. Shelton has received high praise and five-star ratings from a slew of high-profile reviewers.”

  —J.C. Wing

  Author of Alabama Skye

  “This was a great read. From the start it engaged my interest with an exciting setup that quickly drew me in… I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes spy or action thrillers. It's a roller coaster filled with great characters and nearly non-stop excitement.”

  —C.C. Bradley

  Author of Interim

  “Shelton hits the bull’s eye dead center for political espionage with Waking Wolfe… Imbued with rich detail and realistic, high-powered adventure, this action-packed, cleverly-devised plot whisks the reader along for a non-stop ride where ‘boy-next-door’ techno geek, Scott Wolfe, evolves into amateur international spy.”

  —Donna Cummins

  Author of Rain of Terror and A Reason to Kill

  “[Waking Wolfe] was one of those books where you jump in hoping for, at the very least, a semi-entertaining read, but instead end up craving more after turning the last page. Shelton's debut took me by surprise and I have to say, it was awesome.”

  —Book Addict 24-7 Reviews

  Bookaddict24-7.com

  Unexpected Gaines

  “Shelton has created in Scott Wolfe a character that may just rise in importance to the level of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan—this story will cover a mere two weeks of time, but the action that occurs is compacted so tightly that the timeframe is soon forgotten.”

  —Grady Harp

  Amazon Top 100, Hall of Fame Reviewer

  “A gripping tale from cover to cover! Superb characters with flaws as well as heroic attributes, with a thunderous storyline that leaves you craving more! Excellent!”

  —Amazon Reviewer

  “If you liked Shelton’s first book then you will really like [Unexpected Gaines]. If you have not read his first book, then shame on you because you are depriving yourself of the chance to read one of the best new authors writing today.”

  —LTC R. Huber

  U.S. Army (Retired)

  Danger Close

  “I was a fan of this series from the very beginning. S.L. Shelton’s first novel kicked off a wildly entertaining ride, and his story just keeps getting better and better with each installment.”

  —J.C. Wing

  Author of Alabama Skye

  “Certainly a book series just waiting for the big screen… True to form, the author has given us a spy thriller with all the action needed to get our attention… S.L. Shelton leaves us ready and eager for the next adventure. Awesome.”

  —W.N. Amazon Reviewer

  Wolfe Trap

  “Wolfe Trap will grab you from the first sentence, and before you know it, you’re on the last page. The book is fast-paced and action-packed.”

  —Melissa Manes

  Author, Editor

  “I’ve spent a good deal of time with Scott Wolfe in the recent months…he’s taken me on some hair-raising adventures. None so wild as this latest one. My advice to you, fellow readers? Buckle your seat belt, hold on tight and enjoy the ride. You have no idea what’s in store for you…but I can absolutely guarantee that you’re going to love it.”

  —J.C. Wing

  Author of Alabama Skye

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by S.L. Shelton

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Front cover, maps, and artwork contained in this book are Copyright © S.L. Shelton

  The cover image is a modified and stylized rendering that includes portions of photos obtained courtesy of the Department of Defense photo library.

  Word count 111,045

  Books by S.L. Shelton:

  Hedged

  The Scott Wolfe Series:

  Waking Wolfe

  Unexpected Gaines

  Danger Close

  Wolfe Trap

  Harbinger

  Predator’s Game

  Splinter Self (Coming 2017)

  Back story: Lt. Marsh

  Follow S.L. Shelton at:

  wolfeauthor.wordpress.com

  www.goodreads.com/WolfeWriter

  facebook.com/SLShelton.Author

  SLShelton.com

  For John, Whitney, and the little homesteaders

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for making the Scott Wolfe Series such a huge success, putting it into the Espionage, Political, and Techno Thriller Top 100 Bestsellers for its main outlet, the Amazon Kindle. I watch with gratitude, overjoyed by the growing attention.

  When I started this series back in May of 2012, I had intended to write it as a multiple-point-of-view third-person novel. I quickly realized that I wanted a much more personal point of view when it came to Scott Wolfe. After rewriting the first few chapters to address that desire, I realized I was much more satisfied as an author and was encouraged to continue in that direction by my early readers.

  While it can sometimes be jarring to jump from Scott’s brain into third-person narration, I’ve taken steps to reduce those moments to “bonus” perspectives: gifts to you, the reader, to help give you a deeper awareness of what’s going on outside of Scott’s line of sight.

  I hope as you read the series, you enjoy the unfolding saga as much as I have enjoyed writing it. There is little more that an author can hope for than what you have already provided—being emotionally entangled in the lives of our characters.

  Thank you once again for taking the time to discover Scott Wolfe, and I hope that if you enjoy it, you will mention it to others and post a review of your time with him. Scott and I both thank you.

  Very best regards,

  S.L. Shelton

  Author

  NOTE: Descriptions of facilities in this novel have been fictionalized for reasons of security and to reduce the number of future encounters the author might have with federal officers.

  one

  Arrival

  7:20 p.m.—Thursday, September 9th

  I woke to a massive headache, my cheek pressed against the hard vinyl
of a passenger-side door. The rhythmic clacking of the tires seemed somewhat comforting until I moved my head. The pain shot down my neck and up into my throbbing skull.

  I moaned.

  “Aspirin's in the glove box in front of you,” Nick said as he dropped a bottle of water into my lap.

  I opened my eyes to see it was close to sunset.

  “You didn't have to hit me so hard,” I muttered as I twisted the top off the bottle of water.

  “You seem to have a pretty thick skull, so I wasn't sure,” he said quietly.

  I twisted my neck, sending a fresh wave of pain from the base of my skull to the middle of my back. “Where are we?” I asked as I popped the glove box open and reached for the aspirin.

  “Almost to A.P. Hill,” he said, referring to Fort A.P. Hill in Caroline County, Virginia.

  I dropped the pills into my mouth and took a deep swig of water before sitting upright to take an account of my situation.

  My hands aren't bound, I thought. That's good.

  I looked behind me to see my duffel bag and my canvas messenger bag in the backseat.

  Packed for camp.

  I suddenly realized I felt lighter than I should have, so I reached up and patted my side where my Glock should have been.

  “It's gone,” Nick said. “Trainees aren't allowed personal weapons.”

  I shook my head and then reached into my front pocket for my phone.

  “That's gone too,” he added. “No outside electronic devices allowed.”

  I flopped back against the seat, sending another jolt of pain through my neck.

  Nick chuckled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The last two hours have been the best I've ever spent with you,” he said. “I actually started liking you there toward the end.”

  “Fuck you,” I muttered, smiling.

  “Fuck you too, Monkey Wrench,” he replied, grinning just as broadly.

  Nick was a good guy. I was almost sad that I was going to have to teach him a lesson someday soon.

  “Are you taking me somewhere to kill me?” I asked plainly.

  “You never know,” he replied with a straight face, but the amusement tugging at the corner of his eyes told me he thought he was saying something funny.

  “What’s in A.P. Hill?” I asked after we had driven in silence for another twenty minutes. “Is that where the training starts?”

  “Nope. That’s where we’re catching our ride,” he replied without any further explanation.

  We turned off a narrow, two-lane, paved road onto a dirt road with a gate a few yards off the blacktop. The gate was open, and no one was standing guard, so we drove through and continued bouncing along the rough dirt road. We traveled for a few more minutes, turning onto several other narrow dirt roads and then passed a sign that said Delos Lake Training Facility. Instead of turning into the facility, we parked in a field across from the entrance.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  He turned off the engine and checked his watch without a word before getting out, reaching into the back to retrieve his bag. I assumed that was as far as we’d be going in the truck, so I reached back for my bag as well, sending fresh waves of pain down my neck and shoulder.

  “Jesus, Nick. That hurts.”

  “Stop crying…you’ve gotten a lot worse than that.”

  He was right, of course. I’d had far worse.

  He locked the truck as I closed the door, wandering around to the front and leaning against the hood.

  “What are we doing?” I asked as he dropped his bag on the ground next to me.

  “Waiting,” he said plainly.

  His unwillingness to be forthcoming was annoying. But rather than press my luck—having already been bashed in the head once today— I decided to just relax and roll with it; after all, I was about to start my training as a CIA operative. This is what I’d been waiting for…right?

  I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly 8:30 p.m. In the distance, I began to hear the soft whoop, whoop, whoop of a helicopter. The echo was all around, I couldn’t tell what direction it was approaching from, but it sounded like a big one.

  I could feel my excitement grow with the approaching sound of the chopper. Like watching an approaching storm, I was too excited about the rising energy to concern myself with the danger it presented.

  Nick stood there for a long while, looking around the field and through the darkness toward the barely visible gate of the Delos facility across the road. The concentration exhibited on his face pulled me from my rising excitement. I squinted into the dark to see what might be agitating him.

  He raised his head and sniffed the air when a strange look suddenly cross his face. I watched him closely, tensing as my own hackles went up on my neck. He looked around, scanning the wood line before his eye fixed on a section of trees across the dirt road—my gaze followed to the same location.

  “Hmm,” he grunted.

  “What?”

  “Sniff the air,” he said.

  I took a deep breath. At first, I smelled nothing, but after a second, I detected a faint musk mixed with a mildew scent, like old socks in the bottom of a gym bag.

  I strained my eyes to see what he was looking at.

  “Something’s not right,” he said quietly. He reached under his jacket and withdrew his SIG Sauer from his waistband holster.

  Before he could raise his weapon, there was the crack of gunfire, splitting the night with a sharp spike of sound that made the recesses of my ears feel violated. Nick crumpled to the ground with a thud.

  My heart jumped in my chest as I dropped to the ground next to him.

  Get Nick’s gun, my inner voice whispered evenly into my ear, adding an eerie calm to the sudden flood of adrenaline.

  Ignoring my initial desire to check Nick’s condition, I lurched forward to reach his gun. But a boot-clad foot swept out of the darkness and kicked my hand as it closed around the weapon, sending the SIG clanking across the ground. I rolled backwards to avoid a stomp to my head from the attacker but could hear many more footsteps running toward me.

  Coming out of a roll I began to flip to my feet, and another arm reached out from the dark. I lashed backward with my elbow, catching someone in the face.

  I’d give anything for some night vision right about now, I thought as I realized there could be twenty men closing in on me and I wouldn’t know it.

  I scrambled toward Nick’s gun again, but two of them were on me before I could grab it. A hard boot kick to my back sent me flying sideways and I caught a glimpse of what looked to be a knife swinging through the air.

  Not a knife. Don’t let it touch you, my mental hitchhiker said, maintaining an even, calm tone that I found disconcerting.

  I used the momentum of the first attacker’s kick to propel me into the knife-wielding assailant. My elbow found his throat, and he fell to the ground, gasping, as I rode him down. We landed with a thud, and I heard the wind blow out of his lungs. I jammed my knee between his legs to immobilize him and continued to roll forward over his head and back to the ground, away from both of them.

  As I came to a halt, I heard the metallic clack of a telescoping baton…like the one Mark Gaines had used to beat me with in Burbank.

  Not a knife, I thought, echoing my hitchhiker’s prior assessment.

  It whistled through the air toward my head as I threw up my arm in hopeful defense.

  CRACK. It slammed into my forearm, sending shards of pain up and down my arm toward my elbow and my wrist. It took me a couple of beats to realize the baton was electric. I thought my shoulder was going to detach from the torque exerted by the involuntary contraction forced on my muscles.

  I reached up against the contractions, forcing my right hand up against the invisible weight of electricity that was restraining it and latched onto the wrist of my attacker, completing the circuit through him. He immediately released the baton, letting it drop to the ground.

  The abrupt termina
tion of the current allowed me to take an unrestricted breath, but with the fire of the electrical assault still burning my nerve endings, I flew into a rage, sweeping my leg sideways to kick his feet out from under him. He fell hard on his back and tried to drop an elbow on my chest, but I rolled to the side quickly, letting his elbow smack the ground instead of my ribs. Then I rolled back with all my weight, bringing my fist into his face. His hands went up a fraction of a second too late—he was done for the night.

  Before I could rise, three more were on me. I still had no idea how many people I was up against, but I grasped at the slim silver lining in the brutal rain cloud that had opened up on me: they appeared to be using non-lethal weapons. They want me alive. A foot came from above, and I saw a hand to my right gripping something.

  A Taser! My other voice screamed in my ear just as I saw sparks flit across its end.

  Dreading the feel of the fire in my flesh again, I rolled toward the hand with the Taser and grabbed the wrist, gripping it with all my might, causing a yelp of pain from my attacker and, more importantly, the Taser to drop to the ground.

  I reached out and snatched it from the air as it dropped and whipped it around, viciously burying it into the inner thigh of its previous owner before pressing the button. As the ragged sparks raced into his flesh, he flew backward, twitching and screaming.

  I didn’t even have time to turn my head before a boot came down hard on my back, followed by an elbow to the shoulder. A kick to my wrist sent the Taser flying off into the darkness.

  I didn’t know who these guys were but, Jesus! They were fast, strong, and well-trained.

  I saw the flash of metal in my peripheral vision, a hand curling around the hilt. I reached for the weapon with my left hand while striking up at his chin with the palm of my right. I felt bone slide and crack as the heel of my hand pushed up, and I felt his hand relax. In the dark, I couldn’t see where the weapon had landed, but I released my grip from his arm and dropped down again in the vicinity to search for it in the grass.