Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

  “You are a bad man?” There was something familiar about him. His easy banter. His voice.

  “Can be if you want me to. I can be very bad,” he whispered close beside her ear.

  She almost had it. Several years back. Over the border in Bolivia? No! “Venezuela. Hostages on the top floor of a—”

  Suddenly a massive hand had a tight chokehold around her throat.

  She tried to breathe, but couldn’t.

  “How do you know about that?”

  He didn’t ease up enough to let her speak. She pinched the nerve cluster behind his thumb. He grunted as she peeled his hand back, then took a breath.

  His punch headed for her kidneys, which she barely blocked in time. That wasn’t Spec Ops training, it was street fighting. Then she knew.

  “Cut it out, Chad!”

  He froze. Not all that many people outside of Delta Force knew his real name. And even fewer of those were women. “Clive” worked well for him when on the prowl—a contrast with his corn-fed, Iowa-farm-boy looks that made him more intriguing to women. He’d tried Dominic, like Vin Diesel’s hard-ass character in the Fast and Furious movies, but he couldn’t seem to get traction with it. Clive, like Mr. Chill Clive Owen, did the trick. And he always made a point of memorizing the local number for Chinese take-out in case the woman wanted solace when she tried to call him for another passage at arms. He’d always considered that to be a kind touch.

  This time he reached out into the dark more slowly and brushed a hand over her hair. Fine enough that it was probably blonde. Smooth, with a sharp jawline cut that looked cute on a lot of women.

  A kiss. He could always remember a woman by her kiss, but that didn’t seem like the right next step. She’d blocked his kidney punch, which only a top soldier could do.

  A top soldier with her England-English slightly fractured by a vaguely German accent should be a clue, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t exactly German either. He recalled a long time ago when his teammate Richie—their geek and linguist—identified just this accent as…Israeli. It couldn’t be!

  “Say something. In Spanish.”

  “No habla Español,” she denied with a perfect accent. Her Spanish had always been flawless.

  “Tanya Zimmer!” He remembered a lightning-filled sky on Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. A lake where… “You bitch! You walked away from me. We were doing so good, then just like that...” He tried to snap his fingers, but they were too wet. “Shit, woman!”

  “No, I drove away in a stolen police boat.”

  “We had something.”

  “We did,” her voice was unaccountably soft, but he knew all of the tricks women used and that was definitely one of them.

  “Well, you’re not getting me back that easily.”

  “As if I’d want you,” she didn’t even have the decency to hesitate in her answer.

  He’d thought about her a lot since then. Nothing serious of course—she was just another woman, after all. But he’d casually watched for her when they were undercover in some crowd, taking down a cocaine lab, or something else that left him time to look around.

  He never, ever missed a woman, but…

  Shit, man!

  “Do you have a radio?” Tanya needed to change the topic and change it fast. People in their line of work couldn’t afford attachments. They weren’t ever real anyway. Definitely not with a man like Chad or, she had to admit, with a woman like her. Being an operative for Israel’s Mossad elite counterterrorism unit, Kidon, didn’t exactly make for a predictable homelife—as if she’d want such a thing.

  She shifted her butt, trying to find a comfortable position on the river rock without luck. Thankfully the night was warm, so the river water evaporating out of her clothes was only a little chilly.

  But happy homelife was what most guys saw in her for reasons she could never fathom. They took one look at her blonde hair and bright blue eyes, then decided she’d make the perfect housewife. Not a chance. Guys might think she was the fantasy lover with the secret family—like Vera Farmiga in Up in the Air—which she really had to see someday as so many people thought that’s who she was. So very not.

  She wouldn’t fit in with some family of her own any more than she’d ever fit in the one with her dark-haired, brown-eyed parents. And her father had certainly never forgiven her or her mother for wherever Mom had gone to find those blonde-and-blue genes. Not that she blamed Mom. Dad had been an abusive asshole, very expressive with his fists, right up until the moment he’d “accidentally” stumbled off the sidewalk in front of a truck. She still couldn’t find it in her to feel bad about that. Their lives had improved for a little while until Mom found another man just like the last one. It made no sense. That’s when Tanya had given up and moved out. She’d finished her last three years of high school while living in the corner of an abandoned Tel Aviv warehouse with some other like-minded teens.

  After a brief silence, Chad responded, “Feels as if my radio was smashed against some rocks. Of course, so do I, so I can totally empathize with it. How about you?”

  “Mine was smashed in the face of a drug lab’s guard just before I breaked his neck. But we should be moving away from this waterfall,” the mist in her face was thick and was finally chilling her despite the warm night in central Colombia.

  She rose to her feet, but all that came from Chad beside her was some tumbling of small rocks and then a low curse that sounded like pain.

  “Are you okay? You said you were okay.”

  “Apparently my knee has other ideas. A sprain, I think. But I won’t enjoy walking on it.”

  Tanya listened to the sound of the water rushing through the rocks close by their feet. The river was still moving fast. Rapids or maybe another waterfall lay ahead. She had studied all of the escape routes before her mission, but she hadn’t bothered to learn the river a mile downstream from the pickup point, two miles from the drug lab. A mistake she wouldn’t make again.

  “I am certainly not going to be swimming anymore.” She reached out until she found his shoulder and tapped twice. At her gesture, he offered a hand and she helped him to his feet.

  They slipped their arms around each other’s waists. He felt strong and gloriously familiar. There had never been any doubt about the explosion-hot sex between them, but she knew that explosions never lasted past the initial heat.

  “You Delta are far more trouble than you are being worth.”

  “Says the woman with the driving problem.”

  She loosened her grip as if she was going to dump him to the ground. He hung on a little tighter. By his hard lurches and ragged breath, his injury was much worse than he was letting on. No less than she’d expect from him.

  “So, what trouble have you been up to lately?” Chad asked kindly enough, then finished it off with a low curse as she stumbled badly.

  “Nothing good,” she thought bitterly of her latest mission. “Parts of this country have improved wonderfully since the crushing of the worst of the cartels. Other parts…Oy vey! How about you?”

  “Well, there’s this nice pair of restaurants I could take you to in Medellín. Right up in the barrios of Comuna 13 that might give you some hope. Amazing food. We swept the streets a little while I was there.” Meaning that some drug gang or cartel was hurting bad if they’d drawn the attention of Chad’s Delta Force team.

  “Are you guys still together?”

  “Lot of changes since you rode with us, but, yeah, the core team is the same. Kyle and Carla, of course.”

  “Of course.” The team leader and the Wild Woman—wholly unpredictable in a very good way. Tanya had been almost as sorry to leave her behind as she’d been sorry to leave Chad. Interesting that Kyle and Carla were still a couple and yet continuing to serve in the same unit. It didn’t sound like the American military—who were as prudish as their Puritan roots—but it did sound very like Kyle and Carla.

  “Richie and Duane have both gone down.” They hobbled under the cover of a large
oak. By the sound of it, the river had widened and slowed, but she still wasn’t willing to get back in the water.

  “How were they killed?” A shame. She’d liked them, what little she’d known of them.

  “Killed?” Chad lurched hard to one side as a rock clattered aside and tumbled down the step bank to plonk into the rushing river. It seemed to echo off the canyon walls despite the thick jungle to either side. She barely kept them both from going down. “Never said killed. They both fell for that happily-ever-after crap.”

  “Spec Ops and a civilian. Since when has that ever worked?”

  “Never,” Chad agreed. “But their ladies are both on the team. Not sure I’d dare mess with either of them any more than with Carla. They’re not like her—but they’re both dangerous in their own way. And the three of them together are just fucking lethal.”

  “What about you?”

  “Oh, like I believe in that marriage bullshit. Gotta stop and rest. Maybe find a crutch or a passing ambulance.”

  She helped ease him down at the base of the first tree, a ceiba by the feel of the great flat vertical planes of the roots.

  At least they agreed on the nonsense of marriage. She’d take a lover any day, especially one as fantastic as Chad. But long term? He’d said it right—pure bullshit.

  Chad spotted a familiar shape against the stars. Reaching out, he touched a banana. A bunch of them pulled away easily without mushing. He handed a couple to Tanya and they chowed down together.

  He missed the feeling of her against his side. Despite all of her heavy gear, Tanya Zimmer was a whole lot of woman. Slender and built. Sexy and lethal.

  But he was in no condition to take advantage of it even if she was offering—which, he was chagrined to notice, she wasn’t. He’d been awake for four days, not daring to sleep so close to the drug smugglers’ camp. And with each minute he didn’t report in, his hard-won information was aging. They could have changed patrol strategies, added new booby traps on the approaches, or even have pulled camp and already be on the move.

  Being on the verge of the staggers and hallucinations from sleep deprivation wasn’t being helped by his knee stinging like a mess of bees each time he took a step. The hallucinations he could deal with—at this point just distant gunfire. He often dreamed of that anyway. Sometimes echoing down the Detroit back alleys of his childhood, sometimes the soft spit of his sniper rifle. As long as they were distant, he didn’t care if they were real or just in his sleep-deprived imagination. What he cared about was his heartbeat counting out the seconds one by one—each one aging his knowledge toward a colossal waste of time.

  A hot woman like Tanya was beyond anything he could deal with right now. Some women were easy to keep happy. A little foreplay, some hot action, and then let them snuggle to their heart’s content afterward, dreaming of long-term shit that was never going to happen.

  Some women required more attention.

  Tanya had required his full attention. Her body and the woman who lived inside that lovely skin had demanded it like no one else before her. He’d be glad to drift off if it meant hallucinating a few more things about her.

  He banged the back of his head against the tree trunk a few times. It hurt. That was good. It staved off the sleep his body so desperately craved for another few minutes.

  3

  “Awe. Aren’t you two just the sweetest thing? Too bad neither of you can keep watch for shit and you’re both dead now.”

  “I would suggest great care about the next words you utter, they could be your last.” Tanya had spotted the lone man prowling along the river’s edge ten minutes ago. She and Chad were barely hidden by the ceiba’s buttress-root shadow in the morning light, so it had seemed ill-advised to wake him and try to move. The morning sun was to the newcomer’s back, so she couldn’t see his face.

  “What are you talking about, sweetheart?”

  She shifted her hand to reveal the Uzi Pro she’d had zeroed on his face since the moment he came into range. The weapon was based on a Micro Uzi and could unleash 9 mm submachine gun hell from the two-kilo weapon that fit under her arm. At this range, she couldn’t miss if she tried.

  “I told you he’d be fine,” a lovely woman with a soft Spanish accent stepped around the towering buttress root from the other side. Her own Glock 19 Compact sidearm appeared to be lazily held, but its silencer was centered at Tanya’s heart.

  Tanya flinched. She couldn’t help it, the woman had approached from behind with no warning. It took an immense amount of fieldcraft to fool Tanya’s training.

  “Oh, hey.” Chad woke and raised his head from where he’d spent the night slumped against her.

  If he hadn’t mumbled something about being on solo recon, she might have shoved him off to the other side. But solo recon was tough. She’d done there and been that—it was her usual mode of operation.

  Been there and done that? Being around Chad, she could feel the weakness of her American idiom and didn’t like that at all. She’d had little opportunity to polish it, serving undercover in South America for the last five years.

  She knew what solo recon took out of a person when you didn’t dare sleep for a couple of days. Besides, it had been nice having him sleep on her shoulder as if he trusted her. It was a mistake; people in their line of work couldn’t afford to trust anyone. But still, it was…nice.

  “How you doing, Sofia?” Chad’s familiar greeting didn’t cause her aim to waver from Tanya’s heart in the least.

  “I’m good, now that we’ve found you. Tell your friend to stop pointing her gun at my husband’s face.”

  “Chill, Tanya.”

  “Tanya?” The man startled. “Shit, didn’t recognize you in all the gear and with Sleeping Beauty napping on your shoulder like the little princess he is.”

  “Go to hell, Duane.”

  “After you, dude.”

  Tanya, in turn, hadn’t recognized Duane. Three years and a lot of hard missions had gone by since they’d fought on the same team, but it wasn’t like her to miss recognizing a man’s gait, even with the sun behind him. There was something else. Duane and the lovely Latina Sofia…

  “Marriage looks like good clothes on you, Duane,” Tanya re-slung her weapon that she’d instinctively hung on to during the double fall last night. She was pleased to see that Chad didn’t have his rifle, though his sidearm was still in its holster at the center of his gut.

  “…fits you well,” Chad mumbled in her ear.

  Tanya ignored him. Had marriage changed Duane somehow? He’d always had Delta level fieldcraft, but he’d moved differently. As if…

  Scheisse!

  She should have seen it. He hadn’t only been searching for them. He’d also been keeping a careful eye on his wife in the background without seeming to. Tanya should have spotted that he was watching someone behind her and Chad’s position, but his craft was good enough that she hadn’t caught on.

  “It agrees with me.” He slung his rifle over his shoulder with a negligent shrug.

  “It is a good thing that you say that,” Sofia kept her weapon loose but did shift its aim to Tanya’s leg instead of her chest. “Now who are you?”

  “Chad’s one that got away,” Duane explained.

  “No I’m not.” Tanya wasn’t anyone’s anything.

  “So are, babe.”

  “Watch who you call ‘babe’, bro,” Chad’s growl actually sounded for real.

  “Or you may find yourself sleeping alone tonight.” Sofia agreed as she squatted on the soil near Chad’s feet and finally holstered her weapon.

  She seemed too slight to be a Delta Force operative. The American unit’s selection practices didn’t particularly favor size, but it was hard to believe that this slip of a woman could possibly deliver the level of endurance needed. And there was something odd about her attitude, as if weapons weren’t her primary tool.

  “Tell me.” And in that instant, the woman shifted. A quiet intensity slid over her.

 
Chad started in, but not about the fall that should have killed them both nor the flight over a jungle waterfall—which she could now see towering in the distance by the light of day and there is no way they should have survived. Instead, he was breaking down a series of observations about a drug smugglers’ camp, somewhere different than the lab that had been the focus of her team’s failed attack. Patrol timings, perimeter defenses, even delivery schedules.

  “How long were you out there?”

  “Four days,” he barely interrupted the flow of his debrief to answer Tanya’s question.

  She’d forgotten how much she liked that about Chad. He might appear the chuckleheaded, laughing-boy American, but his mind was pure Special Operations. He’d missed nothing. He even had the timings of nighttime patrols—all in his head, all crosschecked over multiple nights. To do that for four days on solo recon, no wonder he’d slept like the dead on her shoulder.

  And this Sofia simply squatted and listened while Chad talked and Duane continued a slow patrol around the area. From her small pack, Sofia pulled out a tablet computer and selected an image, before handing it to Chad.

  “Again.”

  And Chad repeated it all, this time placing markers on the drone’s view image, but finding little new to add to his narrative.

  Tanya recognized the methods, if not the person. Long ago, a Night Stalkers team had nearly died because of a mole in the Intelligence Support Activity—the most elite intel group in the entire US military, specifically servicing Special Operations. Sofia must have been recruited from some top-level military intelligence to Delta Force—which meant she had amazing skills in two areas.

  When he was done, Sofia tipped her head in the characteristic move of someone listening to a radio call. She must be wearing an earbud under her long dark hair.

  “Carla wants to know if you’re up for this?” Sofia asked.

  “Sure,” Chad pulled down some more bananas and tossed a couple to her for breakfast. “Want ta come play, Tanya?”