“Your knee.”
He flexed his leg. “Still sore. I’ll just chew some ibuprofen or something; shouldn’t be an issue.”
Last night he had hung on to her like it was broken. Need a crutch or an ambulance? She’d give him a crutch right across his head.
“You just wanted an excuse to hang all on me.”
“An awesome bonus,” Chad winked.
And she’d fallen for it. Well, that wasn’t going to happen again. She turned to Sofia, who was watching them closely.
“Just give me something to shoot.”
Sofia smiled, “I think we can do that.”
“Oh,” Chad signaled for Sofia to wait a moment. “Ask Richie to find out what happened to Tanya’s people. She came aboard the helo with three of them last night. One dead, one alive, but I was sort of moving fast and couldn’t slow down enough to see about the third.”
Sofia didn’t even bother to repeat the question. So, Chad’s entire debrief had been broadcast to the whole group. As usual with this team, everyone knew everything from the first moment—except her.
Carl was dead. Crap! She’d known it, even as she’d snapped the monkey line on his chest. And this was Chad’s other side. A fine sniper, and a soldier who always kept his wits and his sense of humor. But he’d also shown a thoughtful side that was wholly unexpected from a man who projected macho jerk so effectively.
As Kidon, she was far more used to operating alone. Integrating with the UN security team—that had dissolved so catastrophically last night—hadn’t been her usual mode.
“The guy is fine—they’re giving him a new section of bone in his arm. The woman is just out of surgery, but will keep the leg.” Sofia echoed the information coming in over her radio.
Well, compared to the dead third member, that was some very good news.
Still, she had a few thoughts about what to do to Chad’s other knee.
4
“Didn’t think I’d be back here so soon.” Chad had seen far too much of this camp over the four long days of scouting it. Now, less than thirty hours after slipping away and ten hours after waking with his head on Tanya’s shoulder, he was back, sweating in the late afternoon heat.
A pair of Black Hawks had delivered the full team and a pair of Zodiac boats twenty klicks upriver—no waterfalls in the way, he’d checked first. Apparently the Night Stalkers didn’t have any spare Chinooks hanging around Colombia. The one from last night was offshore somewhere being rebuilt.
Not a word from Tanya, lying in the brush close along his right side.
“At least there are no waterfalls this time.” They’d raced the Zodiacs northward down the river to a mile above the camp, then hidden the boats and continued overland, half of the team on either shore.
Nothing.
“Gotta talk to me at some point, sweetheart.”
“No, I don’t. I’m with you because Kyle said I have to follow you.”
“Not what’s pissing you off, woman.” They lay together beneath a clump of thorny bougainvillea that hid them well. The thick sweep of vibrant purple fooled the observer’s eye about any colors that didn’t belong. There was a slight rise here that offered an unimpeded view of ferry and loading operations. The camp itself was a hundred meters back into the jungle. He’d spent two of his four days on recon—most of it laid up right here. The drugs traveled overland to this camp at the eastern edge of Colombia. They were then ferried across the Orinoco River into Venezuela, where small prop planes waited with bundles of cash to send back the other way. The Colombian side of the river was too rough to cut in an airstrip, so the border was the transfer point.
“You and your fake knee injury.”
Chad couldn’t help grinning. The knee had really hurt, but some rest and Vicodin had knocked the pain down to bearable. But that combined with the lack of sleep—it hadn’t been a ploy that he needed help to traverse the river stones in the dark. But if getting it backward pissed off Tanya, he was good with that.
A lot of things about her that he was good with. It was why he’d chosen this hide for them—it was very small. They were forced to squeeze in together, touching foot, thigh, hip, and shooting arms. He’d switched his rifle to leftie so that it wasn’t between them.
“You are a small man, Chad Hawkins, if that is how you find your humors.”
“Laughs. And you know that isn’t true.”
It almost earned him a smile. Sometimes a man and woman were just the right size for each other, when their bodies simply fit together so perfectly. His and Tanya’s bodies had absolutely done that on that mission years before. Her breasts had been as custom-formed as his sniper rifle’s stock with his big hands in mind. And when buried all the way into the woman’s hips, they were—
The memories were giving him trouble as they lay together through the last of the hot sweaty afternoon. Since when had memories of a woman even stuck with him? And filled his mind with ideas of what he’d like to do with her again given half the chance? Not once that he could recall.
“Okay, there’s the first sign.” He tipped his sniper rifle to show the direction he was watching. It really wasn’t much yet, but it gave him something to talk about. “I call her Renata.”
Renata—as he’d dubbed the curvaceous Latina who walked like she could tame crocodiles in between drug runs—stepped out of the trees to scan up and down the river. They watched her through their scopes. If there was so much as a floating branch she didn’t like, she’d sic a patrol on it.
“She’s pretty,” Tanya remarked with a tone that far too carefully had no tone.
That was a massive understatement. Colombia was typically ranked top five for “most beautiful women.” If they were using this Renata for calibration, they’d set the ranking way too low.
Chad couldn’t resist the bait of that neutral comment.
“If she let go another button on that shirt, she’d be even prettier.” Renata had an awe-inspiring cleavage and wasn’t above using it to control the men who worked for her. She acted as if she didn’t care what others thought of her, which made her appear even more impressive.
She wore her jungle khaki with a nice snug fit. Army boots laced up to midcalf.
Renata also sported a Colombian Cordova .38 [mm handgun, an American M4A1 rifle, and a machete in a sheath that ran down her spine and placed the handle conveniently above her left shoulder. Southpaw, like Tanya. Somehow that added a bit of spice too.
“I watched her slice off a man’s balls before she slit his throat and dumped his body in the river just two days back. She did it herself, with a three-inch blade. So short that she got plenty bloody in the process.” He’d been hiding in a red palm wrapped by a strangler fig making it easy to climb, close enough to hear her joking that she had to use such a small knife because the guy’s dick was too small for a bigger blade. His own empathetic twitch with the guy’s screams as she sawed them off almost gave away his position.
“So, she’s not the squeamish sort. What did he do to deserve that?”
“Got me. Maybe tried to shill a couple hundred bucks off a half-mil payment bundle? Tried to jump ahead in the chow line? No idea, but it was seriously nasty.”
“Maybe he tried to have his way with this Renata.”
“Could be.”
“Sounds like just your type.”
“Not him. Like my women willing.” But Renata sure was. “Always had a thing for dangerous women.” He’d bedded more than his fair share of Renatas. Some were his passage into a camp when he was operating undercover. Or back out. Or a little mutual entertainment somewhere in between. Women like that knew that life was short and made love with a certain wild abandon that never failed to crank him up. Women like Tanya Zimmer. Except none of them were like Tanya.
Deciding the river was clear, Renata turned slowly to inspect the trees and sky. He and Tanya both shook a flap of burlap over their rifle scopes so that they didn’t catch a sun reflection even though the angle was wrong for t
hat to happen.
Finally satisfied, Renata disappeared back into the jungle.
“Now what?”
“Now we wait another twenty minutes before she makes a final check.”
He spent the next twenty minutes trying to think about Renata’s cleavage as a distraction, but all he could think about was that after three years, he was lying beside Tanya once more. A hot, sweaty, angry Tanya in the middle of a thorn bush, who probably wasn’t thinking at all along the lines he was. He’d never picked back up with a former lover before, and had no idea how to go about it.
Tanya had been with a few “Renatas” when the mission left no other option, but she’d certainly had her fair share of “Romeros.” She doubted that Chad could say the same thing in the other direction—he was far too alpha-bull male.
Five years she’d been working the South American problem. Israeli youth were certainly obtaining their drugs easily enough, and a lot of their supply started in the coca fields of Bolivia and Colombia. She’d been solo for most of those years, but that was becoming more and more problematic. There were so many situations where a small team was necessary. Missions like this one would be impossible by herself. Even a mash-up team—like the one she’d run for four weeks but had ended in disaster last night—had its shortcomings.
Chad’s Delta Force team was something other. There was such a degree of cohesion that any comment was always known by the whole team. Any idea traveled as instantly as if they were a single being. But they were Delta, so they were all also highly intelligent and deeply individualistic.
They’d all teased Chad about being Sleeping Beauty and offered to buy him a ball gown. But Sofia and the blonde Melissa—the two additions since Tanya had fought beside this team—had watched her every move carefully each time she came anywhere close to Chad.
Protective. Intensely so.
They backed off some after Carla greeted her with a kind hug, but not by much.
Despite being so protective and being top fighters, the Deltas were also incredibly cooperative. Richie barely had to hold out a hand before Melissa slapped a spare radio into his palm. He’d stepped over and wired it for Tanya without comment. Richie had always been the team’s geek—belonging, but just a little to the outside. No longer. It was as if marrying Melissa had at last fully integrated him into operations.
With Sofia leading the discussion, they’d formulated an attack plan in minutes. That explained Sofia’s role. She was an intelligence analyst first and a Delta operator second. Carla had always been the wild card, leaping to crazy solutions as if on a whim. But that consistently worked for Carla because she backed it up with equally intense action and immense skill. Sofia was the big picture gal and the whole team listened to her plans carefully. Some variations, but they were ready to implement it quickly and had spent most of the last six hours getting into position.
It was a pleasure to watch. Being a part of this team had its own special charge. The surprising part was that it was just as powerful a feeling as her memory had said it was. And that had seemed unlikely whenever she’d thought about it.
“Here we go,” Chad pointed to the east where a trio of small planes came in low over the treetops on the Venezuela side of the river, catching the last of the sunset.
Tanya considered pointing out that they had nowhere to land. The narrow dirt airstrip hacked into the jungle had been blocked at midfield by the fall of a towering wax palm—massive in its demise: thicker than Chad was tall and over fifty meters long on the ground. Chad didn’t seem to think this was an issue, so she waited and watched.
A low thunder sounded over the distant airplanes’ propeller buzz. It took her a moment to spot the large diesel bulldozer on the far side of the airfield—it had been painted in camouflage and was parked deep in the trees. It lurched forward, then jolted to a stop. The low thunder of the engine now roared to life and the massive log was dragged off the field. How they had managed to move a bulldozer to this trackless bit of jungle in the first place was a different question that didn’t concern her. To any aerial inspection, this airfield would be unusable—except for the brief moments like this one when the tree was dragged aside. An anti-drug patrol with any sense would cross this runway off their map and never look at it again.
The instant the runway was clear, the three airplanes swooped in to land.
Renata had again appeared from the wall of jungle, this time so close below them that Tanya didn’t need her scope to see the woman clearly. She carried her M4A1 and enough spare magazines for an extended firefight. Her small emasculating knife wasn’t in evidence, but a large field knife was sheathed along her thigh and the machete still angled across her shoulders.
Again the careful survey. Twice her eyes swept over their hiding position, but they didn’t appear to hesitate. She almost turned once more in their direction, but shrugged it off like an itch.
“Clean?” Tanya whispered.
She could feel Chad’s shrug against her shoulder. Even if they weren’t, there should be enough distractions soon from the other team members. She knew where they were and that they, too, were watching the planes and Renata, but they hadn’t spoken a single word about the mission since the end of the planning session in Medellín. Stone cold radio silence was one of their operating standards even with encryption-enabled equipment. They were the silent warriors and didn’t need to speak. Tanya had been through Medellín a dozen times over the last three years and never once caught the least hint that this Delta team was operating in the city.
Yet as they’d waited for the Black Hawks to fetch them from the river’s edge below the waterfall, the three Deltas had talked about where to have dinner when they got back to Medellín after the mission. Restaurants that she’d never heard of in various communes that implied a deep knowledge of the city.
Once aboard, Chad and Duane did what any Spec Ops soldier did on a flight: they fell asleep almost instantly. Sofia had sat with her back to the rear cargo net and stared forward as if intently watching the two crew chiefs at their Miniguns and the back of the two pilots’ heads even though there was nothing to see.
“We hunted narco submarines together. Chad and I, and the others.” Tanya didn’t know quite why she’d felt it necessary to start a conversation or to explain herself.
Sofia nodded. “I should have recognized you from the Negev Desert fiasco.”
“No one—” Tanya stopped. The only people who had seen her in that entire operation were select members of the Night Stalkers 5th Battalion D Company, mostly Kara Moretti and Justin Roberts, and also Delta Force commander Michael Gibson. Them and… “You’re Activity.”
Sofia nodded. “Former Activity. I was recruited to Delta during a mission last year.”
Tanya had been called in from the field to uncover a mole in The Activity’s operation. One who had threatened the entire Israeli-American alliance.
“The Activity”—short for the Army Intelligence Support Activity—was the intel group built for only one reason: to provide the best information to Delta, SEAL Team 6, and the Air Force 24th STS combat controllers. In the global landscape of military intelligence, they were the uncontested pinnacle. No surprise at all that Sofia had done the planning for this mission. The Activity only recruited the very best—and now this Delta team had that skill embedded right in its core. That was a fantastic asset.
Tanya had thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with The Activity. And now here it was again.
For the rest of the flight from the Rio Saldaña to the Orinoco River, they had quietly discussed Sofia’s plans. She’d been staying awake considering moves and countermoves. Tanya had done her best to play demon’s advocate for her. When Tanya had finally succeeded in causing a small alteration in Sofia’s plan, she felt a sense of real accomplishment—Sofia was just as staggering as one would expect from a former Activity agent turned Delta.
That single alteration had been mentioned to Carla as they were loading into t
he Zodiacs on the Orinoco. Carla had raised an eyebrow, Sofia had tipped her head toward Tanya, and that had earned her one of Carla’s radiant smiles. Melissa spotted the brief smile and stared at Tanya for a long second as its recipient, then shrugged that maybe, just maybe, Tanya was okay—all without any of them slowing down for a second. Or the men noticing a thing.
Tanya had had a problem seeing how anything could go wrong with this mission. That in itself was always a bad sign in planning.
She actually felt better now that the first thing had gone wrong.
Renata, or whatever her name was, was supposed to be down by the ferryboat to watch over the transfer. Instead, she was less than thirty meters away from their hideout, sitting on a log and watching the drug transfer from a distance. This close, Chad would barely need a scope to stare down the woman’s cleavage.
Shit! She’d never done that. Renata was always in the middle of all operations. This close, even their flash suppressors wouldn’t wholly hide their fire. The dusk would reveal some of the muzzle flare. Puffs of dust kicked up by the muzzle brake’s blowback would be recognizable. And there was no way to hide the supersonic crack of the bullets. The distances of this operation were too big to use subsonic rounds that would attract so much less attention.
Maybe if he was patient, she’d move.
Everything else was playing out normally. The dozen guards moved out of the jungle’s edge with their rifles at the ready. It hadn’t been clear in the two other times he’d watched this operation whether they were being cautious about defense or if they were merely threatening the next group to appear. The drug mules—peasants used as slaves by the drug runners—began hauling the heavy boxes of processed and packaged cocaine out of the trees and over to the small ferryboat.
On the far side of the river, the airplane pilots remained in their planes as the Venezuelan contingent of the operation began shifting heavy bales of money out of the planes and down to the shore. Here in the Colombian jungle, finished cocaine was going for about four thousand USD a kilo.
Midnight Trust Page 3
