Shepherd by KH LeMoyne

team?
    Confirmed
    At least he could give her some reassurance. Aaron would have family on the extraction team. His stepfather, the Underground’s premier doctor at that.
    Orcus: Copy
    At least Hena/Orcus would be appeased for the time being even if she couldn’t have a place on the team.
    Ratter: Shepherd?
    Active
    Ratter: Intel—SS5 last mission hit undefined presence @ 30°south
    What the—thirty degrees south latitude? What the hell had the squads been doing around the equatorial perimeter? Those hot zones contained those hardest hit by the virus. Details?
    Ratter: None—SS5 to redeploy in 72 hours
    Shit. Baiting a trap. The squads were sending the survivors back in to ferret out the enemy, chumming the waters with the most expendable. Seventy-two hours didn’t give his team much time to extract Aaron before Sicaria Squad 5 redeployed.
    Ratter: Target 52 hours for extraction?
    With all the pieces requiring coordination, fifty-two hours was going to seem like minutes. But Ratter had a point. Twenty hours marked the squad lockdown before mission departure. Clay gave a quick glance over his shoulder. Esme sat surrounded by pieces she’d rummaged from his stash, deep in the construction of the detonation and control device. “I need you to have the keg ready in forty-eight hours.”
    Her head lifted for the briefest second. Lips pursed, Esme paused in connecting a wire filament into the mechanism’s core. She glanced toward his screens, nodded once, and then went back to work. The determined flicker in her eyes made him swallow hard and shift uncomfortably in his seat. Touching her, feeling her response as she climaxed around his fingers and against his mouth, was an experience he was certain had been new for her and had done nothing to dampen his lust. Her response left him doomed personally and professionally, because the pivotal part of the plan now hinged on a woman he trusted from only his gut instinct—or perhaps lower.
    Shit, focus. Confirm — Target 52 hours for extraction from SE Central 3—will relay delivery coordinates @ 50 hour mark
    Ratter: Copy
    Ghost: Shepherd?
    Active
    Ghost: Site volatile—Target classified hostile—will require excess force for extraction
    He shook his head with harsh exhale. They’d expected problems and anticipated Aaron wouldn’t come out willingly, but a “hostile” designation wasn’t something he wanted to hear. Taking the young man out by excessive force would complicate an already tenuous situation. As Needed—52 hour extraction — confirmation @ 50 hour mark
    Ghost: Copy—have medic
    Understood
    Dead air reigned as he initiated a visible count on the screen from fifty-two hours to zero—extraction time. At the two-hour mark—fifty hours from now—the distraction in Central 3 would execute, and he would initiate the “mission active” message. During the next hour, the extraction would proceed, coupled with launch of the detonation device, which would open the delivery point in the sewage intersection, ending with delivery of Aaron into the sewage line. Fifty-nine minutes until zero hour—Aaron’s retrieval. He would go, Onyx would be there, and… He glanced back at Esme. No, even if he trusted her, it was too dangerous.
    He turned back to the screen. Should he mark the seventy-two-hour milestone for SS5’s liftoff to the Amazon? The truth was, if they reached that point, Aaron would be gone, and no amount of teamwork or good luck would bring him back from a one-way helo trip to the southern latitudes. Yet he keyed in the time and hesitated.
    “It’d be more positive to delete your last entry.” Esme didn’t meet his gaze but kept working.
    “Positive makes it sound like a choice, some sliding scale. Failure isn’t an option.” She had a point, though, about not assigning failure a position on the list. He deleted the seventy-two-hour mark. “One hundred percent—must make this happen.”
    “Okay, one hundred percent.” She gave a small