Alpha Squad: Prince Joe / Forever Blue

www.millsandboon.co.uk

SUZANNE BROCKMANN is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than twenty novels. Her first book was released in 1993, and since then she’s received seventeen different awards, including a 1997 Career Achievement Award. Her books have appeared on the New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller lists.

Suzanne lives near Boston with her husband and two children. She is also one of the founders and volunteer organisers of Natick’s Appalachian Benefit Coffeehouse, raising money for the Cabell/Lincoln Country Workcamp, which rebuilds housing for the poor, elderly and disabled in West Virginia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My eternal thanks to my wonderful friend Eric Ruben, who called me up one day and said, “Hey, Suz, I just read a great article about navy SEALs. You should check it out.” (I did, and the rest, as they say, is history.) Special thanks to the Prince Joe Project volunteers from the Team Ten list at Yahoogroups.com: Rebecca Chappell and Agnes Brach (Co-captains), and Julie Cozzens, Miriam Caraway, Gail Reddin, Vanathy Nathan, Kristie Elliott and Julie Fish. Ladies, I salute you. Thanks so much for stepping forward and helping out. Thanks also to Katherine Lazlo and the many other readers who took the time to e-mail me and set me straight about the correct use of “Your Majesty” and “Your Royal Highness.”

Last but not least, thanks to the real teams of SEALs, and to all of the courageous men and women in the US military, who sacrifice so much to keep America the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Any mistakes I’ve made or liberties I’ve taken are completely my own.

For Eric Ruben, my swimming buddy

Prologue

Baghdad, January 1991

Friendly fire.

It was called friendly because it came from U.S. bombers and missile launchers, but it sure as hell didn’t feel friendly to Navy SEAL Lieutenant Joe Catalanotto, as it fell from the sky like deadly rain. Friendly or not, an American bomb was still a bomb, and it would indiscriminately destroy anything in its path. Anything, or anyone, between the U.S. Air Force bombers and their military targets was in serious danger.

And SEAL Team Ten’s seven-man Alpha Squad was definitely between the bombers and their targets. They were deep behind enemy lines, damn near sitting on top of a factory known to manufacture ammunition.

Joe Catalanotto, commander of the Alpha Squad, glanced up from the explosives he and Blue and Cowboy were rigging against the Ustanzian Embassy wall. The city was lit up all around them, fires and explosions hellishly illuminating the night sky. It seemed unnatural, unreal.

Except it was real. Damn, it was way real. It was dangerous with a capital D. Even if Alpha Squad wasn’t hit by friendly fire, Joe and his men ran the risk of bumping into a platoon of enemy soldiers. Hell, if they were captured, commando teams like the SEALs were often treated like spies and executed—after being tortured for information.

But this was their job. This was what Navy SEALs were trained to do. And all of Joe’s men in Alpha Squad performed their tasks with clockwork precision and cool confidence. This wasn’t the first time they’d had to perform a rescue mission in a hot war zone. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the last.

Joe started to whistle as he handled the plastic explosives, and Cowboy—otherwise known as Ensign Harlan Jones from Fort Worth, Texas—looked up in disbelief.

“Cat works better when he’s whistling,” Blue explained to Cowboy over his headset microphone. “Drove me nuts all through training—until I got used to it. You do get used to it.”

“Terrific,” Cowboy muttered, handing Joe part of the fuse.

His hands were shaking.

Joe glanced up at the younger man. Cowboy was new to the squad. He was scared, but he was fighting that fear, his jaw tight and his teeth clenched. His hands might be shaking, but the kid was doing his job—he was sticking it out.

Cowboy glared back at Joe, daring him to comment.

So of course, Joe did. “Air raids make you clausty, huh, Jones?” he said. He had to shout to be heard. Sirens were wailing and bells were ringing and anti-aircraft fire was hammering all over Baghdad. And of course there was also the brain-deafening roar of the American bombs that were vaporizing entire city blocks all around them. Yeah, they were in the middle of a damned war.

Cowboy opened his mouth to speak, but Joe didn’t let him. “I know how you’re feeling,” Joe shouted as he put the finishing touches on the explosives that would drill one mother of a hole into the embassy foundation. “Give me a chopper jump into cold water, give me a parachute drop from thirty thousand feet, give me a fourteen-mile swim, hell, give me hand-to-hand with a religious zealot. But this…I gotta tell you, kid, inserting into Baghdad with these hundred-pounders falling through the sky is making me a little clausty myself.”

Cowboy snorted. “Clausty?” he said. “You? Shoot, Mr. Cat, if there’s anything on earth you’re afraid of, they haven’t invented it yet.”

“Working with nukes,” Joe said. “That sure as hell gives me the creeps.”

“Me, too,” Blue chimed in.

The kid wasn’t impressed. “You guys know a SEAL who isn’t freaked out by disarming nuclear weapons, and I’ll show you someone too stupid to wear the trident pin.”

“All done,” Joe said, allowing himself a tight smile of satisfaction. They’d blow this hole open, go in, grab the civilians and be halfway to the extraction point before ten minutes had passed. And it wouldn’t be a moment too soon. What he’d told Ensign Jones was true. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but he hated air raids.

Blue McCoy stood and hand-signaled a message to the rest of the team, in case they’d missed hearing Joe’s announcement in the din.

The ground shook as a fifty-pound bomb landed in the neighborhood, and Blue met Joe’s eyes and grinned as Cowboy swore a blue streak.

Joe laughed and lit the fuse.

“Thirty seconds,” he told Blue, who held up the right number of fingers for the rest of the SEALs to see. The squad scrambled to the other side of the street for cover.

When a bomb is about to go off, Joe thought, there’s always a moment, sometimes just a tiny one, when everything seems to slow down and wait. He looked at the familiar faces of his men, and he could see the adrenaline that pumped through them in their eyes, in the set of their mouths and jaws. They were good men, and as always, he was going to do his damnedest to see that they got out of this city alive. Forget alive—he was going to get them out of this hellhole untouched.

Joe didn’t need to look at the second hand on his watch. He knew it was coming, despite the fact that time had seemed to slow down and stretch wa-a-a-ay out…

Boom.

It was a big explosion, but Joe barely heard it over the sounds of the other, more powerful explosions happening all over the city.

Before the dust even settled, Blue was on point, leading the way across the war-torn street, alert for snipers and staying low. He went headfirst into the neat little crater they had blown into the side of the Ustanzian Embassy.

Harvard was on radio, and he let air support know they were going in. Joe was willing to bet big money that the air force was too busy to pay Alpha Squad any real attention. But Harvard was doing his job, same as the rest of the SEALs. They were a team. Seven men—seven of the armed forces’ best and brightest—trained to work and fight together, to the death if need be.

Joe followed Blue and Bobby into the embassy basement. Cowboy came in after, leaving Harvard and the rest of the team guarding their backsides.

It was darker than hell inside. Joe slipped his night-vision glasses on just in time. He narrowly missed running smack into Bobby’s back and damn near breaking his nose on the shotgun the big man wore holstered along his spine.

“Hold up,” Bob signaled.

He had his NVs on, too. So did Blue and Cowboy.

They were alone down there, except for the spiders and snakes and whatever else was slithering along the hard dirt floor.

“Damned layout’s wrong. There’s supposed to be a flight of stairs,” Joe heard Blue mutter, and he stepped forward to take a look. Damn, they had a problem here.

Joe pulled the map of the embassy from the front pocket of his vest, even though he’d long since memorized the basement’s floor plan. The map in his hands was of an entirely different building than the one they were standing in. It was probably the Ustanzian Embassy in some other city, in some country on the other side of the damned globe. Damn! Someone had really screwed up here.

Blue was watching him, and Joe knew his executive officer was thinking what he was thinking. The desk-riding genius responsible for securing the floor plan of this embassy was going to have a very bad day in about a week. Maybe less. Because the commander and XO of SEAL Team Ten’s Alpha Squad were going to pay him a little visit.

But right now, they had a problem on their hands.

There were three hallways, leading into darkness. Not a stairway in sight.

“Wesley and Frisco,” Blue ordered in his thick Southern drawl. “Get your butts in here, boys. We need split teams. Wes with Bobby. Frisco, stay with Cowboy. I’m with you, Cat.”

Swim buddies. Blue had read Joe’s mind and done the smartest thing. With the exception of Frisco, who was babysitting the new kid, Cowboy, he’d teamed each man up with the guy he knew best—his swim buddy. In fact, Blue and Joe went back all the way to Hell Week. Guys who do Hell Week together—that excruciating weeklong torturous SEAL endurance test—stay tight. No question about it.

Off they went, night-vision glasses still on, looking like some kind of weird aliens from outer space. Wesley and Bobby went left. Frisco and Cowboy took the right corridor. And Joe, with Blue close behind him, went straight ahead.

They were silent now, and Joe could hear each man’s quiet breathing over his headset’s earphones. He moved slowly, carefully, checking automatically for booby traps or any hint of movement ahead.

“Supply room,” Joe heard Cowboy breathe into his headset’s microphone.

“Ditto,” Bobby whispered. “We got canned goods and a wine cellar. No movement, no life.”

Joe caught sight of the motion the same instant Blue did. Simultaneously, they flicked the safeties of their MP5s down to full fire and dropped into a crouch.

They’d found the stairs going up.

And there, underneath the stairs, scared witless and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, was the crown prince of Ustanzia, Tedric Cortere, using three of his aides as sandbags.

“Don’t shoot,” Cortere said in four or five different languages, his hands held high above his head.

Joe straightened, but he kept his weapon raised until he saw all four pairs of hands were empty. Then he pulled his NVs from his face, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the dim red glow of a penlight Blue had pulled from his pocket.

“Good evening, Your Royal Highness,” he said. “I am Navy SEAL Lieutenant Joe Catalanotto, and I’m here to get you out.”

“Contact,” Harvard said into the radio, having heard Joe’s royal greeting to the prince via his headset. “We have made contact. Repeat, we have picked up luggage and are heading for home plate.”

That was when Joe heard Blue laugh.

“Cat,” the XO drawled. “Have you looked at this guy? I mean, Joe, have you really looked?”

A bomb hit about a quarter mile to the east, and Prince Tedric tried to burrow more deeply in among his equally frightened aides.

If the prince had been standing, he would have been about Joe’s height, maybe a little shorter.

He was wearing a torn white satin jacket, reminiscent of an Elvis impersonator. The garment was amazingly tacky. It was adorned with gold epaulets, and there was an entire row of medals and ribbons on the chest—for bravery under enemy fire, no doubt. His pants were black, and grimy with soot and dirt.

But it wasn’t the prince’s taste in clothing that made Joe’s mouth drop open. It was the man’s face.

Looking at the Crown Prince of Ustanzia was like looking into a mirror. His dark hair was longer than Joe’s, but beyond that, the resemblance was uncanny. Dark eyes, big nose, long face, square jaw, heavy cheekbones.

The guy looked exactly like Joe.

Chapter One

A few years later

Washington, D.C.

All of the major network news cameras were rolling as Tedric Cortere, crown prince of Ustanzia, entered the airport.

A wall of ambassadors, embassy aides and politicians moved forward to greet him, but the prince paused for just a moment, taking the time to smile and wave a greeting to the cameras.

He was following her instructions to the letter. Veronica St. John, professional image and media consultant, allowed herself a sigh of relief. But only a small one, because she knew Tedric Cortere very well, and he was a perfectionist. There was no guarantee that Prince Tedric, the brother of Veronica’s prep-school roommate and very best friend in the world, was going to be satisfied with what he saw tonight on the evening news.

Still, he would have every right to be pleased. It was day one of his United States goodwill tour, and he was looking his best, oozing charm and royal manners, with just enough blue-blooded arrogance thrown in to captivate the royalty-crazed American public. He was remembering to gaze directly into the news cameras. He was keeping his eye movements steady and his chin down. And, heaven be praised, for a man prone to anxiety attacks, he was looking calm and collected for once.

He was giving the news teams exactly what they wanted—a close-up picture of a gracious, charismatic, fairytale handsome European prince.

Bachelor. She’d forgotten to add “bachelor” to the list. And if Veronica knew Americans—and she did; it was her business to know Americans—millions of American women would watch the evening news tonight and dream of becoming a princess.

There was nothing like fairy-tale fever among the public to boost relations between two governments. Fairy-tale fever—and the recently discovered oil that lay beneath the parched, gray Ustanzian soil.

But Tedric wasn’t the only one playing to the news cameras this morning.

As Veronica watched, United States Senator Sam McKinley flashed his gleaming white teeth in a smile so falsely genuine and so obviously aimed at the reporters, it made her want to laugh.

But she didn’t laugh. If she’d learned one thing during her childhood and adolescence as the daughter of an international businessman who moved to a different and often exotic country every year or so, she’d learned that diplomats and high government officials—particularly royalty—take themselves very, very seriously.

So, instead of laughing, she bit the insides of her cheeks as she stopped several respectful paces behind the prince, at the head of the crowd of assistants and aides and advisers who were part of his royal entourage.

“Your Highness, on behalf of the United States Government,” McKinley drawled in his thick Texas accent, shaking the prince’s hand, and dripping with goodwill, “I’d like to welcome you to our country’s capital.”

“I greet you with the timeless honor and tradition of the Ustanzian flag,” Prince Tedric said formally in his faintly British, faintly French accent, “which is woven, as well, into my heart.”

It was his standard greeting; nothing special, but it went over quite well with the crowd.

McKinley started in on a longer greeting, and Veronica let her attention wander.

She could see herself in the airport’s reflective glass windows, looking cool in her cream-colored suit, her flame-red hair pulled neatly back into a French braid. Tall and slender and serene, her image wavered slightly as a jet plane took off, thundering down the runway.

It was an illusion. Actually, she was giddy with nervous excitement, a condition brought about by the stress of knowing that if Tedric didn’t follow her instructions and ended up looking bad on camera, she’d be the one to blame. Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades, another side effect of the stress she was under. No, she felt neither cool nor serene, regardless of how she looked.

She had been hired because her friend, Princess Wila, knew that Veronica was struggling to get her fledgling consulting business off the ground. Sure, she’d done smaller, less detailed jobs before, but this was the first one in which the stakes were so very high. If Veronica succeeded with Tedric Cortere, word would get out, and she’d have more business than she could handle. If she succeeded with Cortere…

But Veronica had also been hired for another reason. She’d been hired because Wila, concerned about Ustanzia’s economy, recognized the importance of this tour. Despite the fact that teaching Wila’s brother, the high-strung Prince of Ustanzia, how to appear calm and relaxed while under the watchful eyes of the TV news cameras was Veronica’s first major assignment as an image and media consultant, Wila trusted her longtime friend implicitly to get the job done.

“I’m counting on you, Véronique,” Wila had said to Veronica over the telephone just last night. She had added with her customary frankness, “This American connection is too important. Don’t let Tedric screw this up.”

So far Tedric was doing a good job. He looked good. He sounded good. But it was too early for Veronica to let herself feel truly satisfied. It was her job to make sure that the prince continued to look and sound good.

Tedric didn’t particularly like his younger sister’s best friend, and the feeling was mutual. He was an impatient, short-tempered man, and rather used to getting his own way. Very used to getting his own way.

Veronica could only hope he would see today’s news reports and recognize the day’s success. If he didn’t, she’d hear about it, that was for sure.

Veronica knew quite well that over the course of the prince’s tour of the United States she was going to earn every single penny of her consultant’s fee. Because although Tedric Cortere was princely in looks and appearance, he was also arrogant and spoiled. And demanding. And often irrational. And occasionally, not very nice.

Oh, he knew his social etiquette. He was in his element when it came to pomp and ceremony, parties and other social posturing. He knew all there was to know about clothing and fashion. He could tell Japanese silk from American with a single touch. He was a wine connoisseur and a gourmet. He could ride horses and fence, play polo and water-ski. He hired countless aides and advisers to dance attendance upon him, and provide him with both his most trivial desires and the important information he needed to get by as a representative of his country.

As Veronica watched, Tedric shook the hands of the U.S. officials. He smiled charmingly and she could practically hear the sound of the news cameras zooming in for a close-up.

The prince glanced directly into the camera lenses and let his smile broaden. Spoiled or not, with his trim, athletic body and handsome face, the man was good-looking.

Good-looking? No, Veronica thought. To call him good-looking wasn’t accurate. Quite honestly, the prince was gorgeous. He was a piece of art. He had long, thick, dark hair that curled down past his shoulders. His face was long and lean with exotic cheekbones that hinted of his mother’s Mediterranean heritage. His eyes were the deepest brown, surrounded by sinfully long lashes. His jaw was square, his nose strong and masculine.

But Veronica had known Tedric since she was fifteen and he was nineteen. Naturally, she’d developed a full-fledged crush on him quite early on, but it hadn’t taken her long to realize that the prince was nothing like his cheerful, breezy, lighthearted yet business-minded sister. Tedric was, in fact, quite decidedly dull—and enormously preoccupied with his appearance. He had spent endless amounts of time in front of a mirror, sending Wila and Veronica into spasms of giggles as he combed his hair, flexed his muscles and examined his perfect, white teeth.

Still, Veronica’s crush on Prince Tedric hadn’t truly crashed and burned until she’d had a conversation with him—and seen that beneath his facade of princely charm and social skills, behind his handsome face and trim body, deep within his dark brown eyes, there was nothing there.

Nothing she was interested in, anyway.

Although she had to admit that to this day, her romantic vision of a perfect man was someone tall, dark and handsome. Someone with wide, exotic cheekbones and liquid brown eyes. Someone who looked an awful lot like Crown Prince Tedric, but with a working brain in his head and a heart that loved more than his own reflection in the mirror.

She wasn’t looking for a prince. In fact, she wasn’t looking, period. She had no time for romance—at least, not until her business started to turn a profit.

As the military band began to play a rousing rendition of the Ustanzian national anthem, Veronica glanced again at their blurry images in the window. A flash of light from the upper-level balcony caught her eye. That was odd. She’d been told that airport personnel would be restricting access to the second floor as a security measure.

She turned her head to look up at the balcony and realized with a surge of disbelief that the flash she’d seen was a reflection of light bouncing off the long barrel of a rifle—a rifle aimed directly at Tedric.

“Get down!” Veronica shouted, but her voice was drowned out by the trumpets. The prince couldn’t hear her. No one could hear her.

She ran toward Prince Tedric and all of the U.S. dignitaries, well aware that she was running toward, not away from, the danger. A thought flashed crazily through her head—This was not a man worth dying for. But she couldn’t stand by and let her best friend’s brother be killed. Not while she had the power to prevent it.

As a shot rang out, Veronica hit Tedric bone-jarringly hard at waist level and knocked him to the ground. It was a rugby tackle that would have made her brother Jules quite proud.

She bruised her shoulder, tore her nylons and scraped both of her knees when she fell.

But she saved the crown prince of Ustanzia’s life.

When Veronica walked into the hotel conference room, it was clear the meeting had been going on for quite some time.

Senator McKinley was sitting at one end of the big oval conference table with his jacket off, his tie loosened, and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Henri Freder, the U.S. ambassador to Ustanzia, sat on one side of him. Another diplomat and several other men whom Veronica didn’t recognize sat on the other. Men in dark suits stood at the doors and by the windows, watchful and alert. They were FInCOM agents, Veronica realized, high-tech bodyguards from the Federal Intelligence Commission, sent to protect the prince. But why were they involved? Was Prince Tedric’s life still in danger?

Tedric was at the head of the table, surrounded by a dozen aides and advisers. He had a cold drink in front of him, and was lazily drawing designs in the condensation on the glass.

As Veronica entered the room, Tedric stood, and the entire tableful of men followed suit.