Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

  It was only the autonomic skills pounded into his skull by Airborne’s relentless trainers that had him buckling the harness at all. Tanya kissed the way a howitzer fired shells—full bore. Her tongue had so scorched a path in his mouth that he could still feel it like a witch’s tracery. The hex sign of his everlasting doom.

  Be a hell of a way to go—sex slave to a blonde demoness.

  “Bring it on!”

  Somewhere above him he heard a laugh echo through the darkness. He’d forgotten how easily sound carried in the still night air once chutes were deployed. Definitely female, but no way to tell if it was a scoffing Carla or a chortling Tanya. He didn’t care if it was the former, but he sure hoped it was the latter. The woman was playing hard to get—because everything with Tanya was just that way. He too knew how to play those games. And sparring with Tanya was the best game he’d ever played with a woman.

  Thank god games was all they were…weren’t they? It was certainly all that they’d ever been. But now? The landscape was changing under him and he wasn’t talking about the sharp peaks and abrupt river valleys as they flew their parachutes over the Andes Mountains.

  Who the hell could he ask?

  Certainly not Tanya, as that would spoil the play.

  But neither could he ask Duane. Ever since he’d fallen for Sofia, his buddy had gotten all strange about women. He and Chad used to cruise together, sweeping the ladies down better than a pair of B-52s on a carpet-bombing run. Not only had Duane married Sofia, but now he acted like there actually could be a single, truly right woman for a guy. No matter how much he liked Sofia, it was just way too weird for Chad’s tastes. If he got much worse, Duane was gonna start spouting off about true love and shit like that.

  Not this boy.

  Focus on the flying.

  The oversized Ram-Air chutes were built for distance flying—almost paragliders. The Chinook had lifted them to its upper limit for a light load, around nineteen thousand feet. Which wasn’t as much advantage as it sounded because Tulcán, Ecuador, lay at almost ten thousand above sea level.

  Yeah. That’s why he was feeling lightheaded. Not because of some woman. It was the altitude, not because of the hottest kiss ever delivered—anywhere. He sucked on some auxiliary oxygen—that he was supposed to have been breathing since they’d crossed fifteen thousand heading upward. Instead of breathing in her…

  No more of that shit. He was on a mission and no woman was worth being distracted from a mission.

  The Night Stalkers had dumped them out within five miles of Colombia’s southern border with Ecuador. They’d kept far enough back to avoid alerting either the Ecuadoran military or any smugglers who might be working the newest cross-border drug route.

  Chad shaped his chute for best glide and hoped that the others were sloppy enough to eventually drift down so that he could get into formation. Fat chance. They were Delta and had the same master parachutist jump training he did, with plenty of nighttime combat jumps. The last official “combat jump” by the US military had been into Iraq back in ’03, but that didn’t count Spec Ops infiltration jumps like this one.

  Focus on the mission and forget how it had felt for even a moment to have Tanya back in his arms. Forget how her slightest touch heated his body until it burned more than Estela’s hogao sauce or the sunburn still scorching his calves.

  Focus on Ecuador.

  Ecuador had become a major drug delivery route without anyone noticing until suddenly the Ecuadorian military started capturing a hundred tons of cocaine a year. That eventually got the DEA’s attention. Intel—and capturing over a hundred of his henchmen—had led them to Gerald the Boatman. It was the alias of Washington Prado Álava. As the massive drug trafficking organizations had collapsed, Gerald had taken over the Colombia to Mexico and US transport all up the Pacific coast. He knew everyone and had developed a tight and effective business.

  The Colombian military sent a “very comely” Colombian undercover agent who enticed Gerald into a relationship. She’d convinced the modern era’s top smuggler to attend a “family party” in Colombia, where they’d arrested his ass and extradited it to the US along with the rest of him.

  He’d transshipped two hundred and fifty tons of cocaine right under Ecuador’s and the DEA’s noses—about a quarter of the yearly global market.

  Hello, people! Little slow on the uptake.

  With Gerald’s demise and the vastly increased attention to the coastal routes that he had been leveraging, much of the trade had moved inland.

  Tulcán, Ecuador.

  It lay in one of the least convenient places imaginable. The little city of fifty thousand was the highest in all of Ecuador. Its great claim to fame was that of the three highways that crossed the seven hundred kilometer border with Colombia, one was fifteen kilometers from Tulcán and one went through the heart of it. It also had the only real airport for fifty kilometers around in Ecuador, making it a top transfer point. The single runway had been cut into the side of the hill with the city running along one side and a narrow river valley along the other.

  Their mission tonight: to interrupt that transfer point. With “Gerald” gone, the amount of cocaine that the Ecuadoran military captured had briefly skyrocketed. Then it had plummeted.

  The popular theory was that the capture glut had been because of the loss of Gerald’s guiding hand leading to chaos and disorganization, making for easy pickings. The theory also said that the plummet had been the demise of the coastal route without Gerald keeping it alive.

  Fred Smith had a different idea. The CIA agent theorized that just as much cocaine was moving as ever, but now it was going by different routes under a different man’s plan. It was time to find the new routes and snip them before they were too well established.

  The team continued floating in from the northwest. The runway defined the southeast edge of the city, but they couldn’t approach from that side. To do so would have placed them directly over the suspected smuggler’s route, perhaps raising an alarm.

  Instead, they were to fly high across the city, then descend sharply into the airport. There were no airlines flying at night, at least no scheduled ones. The airport should be silent except for their team and whoever was moving the drugs.

  There was only one problem…Chad wasn’t flying so high. Not only had he opened his chute too low, but he was the heaviest person on the squad. The women weighed nothing. Kyle had Chad’s height, but not his breadth of shoulder. Richie was a pencil-neck geek—Delta style. Duane had almost Chad’s breadth, but stood a couple inches shorter.

  Which meant that he was descending faster than the others. The fact that he was the team’s top sniper also had him typically carrying twice the ammo anyone else did. He didn’t like the feeling of an empty weapon in his hand. Not one little bit. It was all that had saved his father’s life the first time as he beat Chad’s mother to death. No real loss—a coke whore who hadn’t been straight a day in her life. But when he’d come for Chad on another night, he’d gone down hard. Chad hadn’t been without twice the ammo he needed since he’d been six.

  Tulcán the city was getting bigger too damn fast. He was coming down less than half a klick shy of the airfield, but he was definitely coming down in the heart of the city. It was night, so no last-second thermal was going to lift him up the extra couple hundred meters he needed.

  Out of reprieves, he headed for the only spot with no lights in the whole city—some park right at the center.

  Tanya kept twisting to watch Chad. But each time she did, she lost a little distance and a little altitude on the rest of the team. At first her eyes had lined up with Sofia’s chute. Then with her feet. Soon, Sofia flew several stories above her.

  It felt as if Chad was somehow pulling her down to earth. By flying so low, he had snagged her with an invisible shroud line that continually, insidiously, hauled her in a direction she didn’t want to go. Bit by little bit, she was being hauled toward him. She did not like the metaphor at all, b
ut couldn’t seem to shake it.

  Why had she even come on tonight’s mission? All it had made her do was kiss Chad—which he’d rapidly proved to be the dumbest thing a girl could ever do. The man was a bone-melter…and knew it. She didn’t need her bones melted; she liked them just fine the way they were.

  Yet during her inattention, she slid a little lower. Perhaps she still had enough lift to reach the airport, but it was clear that Chad didn’t. He was going down alone in a strange city.

  She’d done that enough times in her life. So had he, probably. But that had been the failure of her UN team of just a few nights ago. She’d gone off on recon, and returned at the back of a hostile patrol that had somehow located the hideout of the other three members of her team.

  Coming from the jungle behind the hostiles, Tanya had walked into the wrong end of a firefight. She’d used her wilderness skills to slip up behind the drug runners and dispatch them one by one from behind without the others noticing. However, it was slow going and her team had taken the brunt of it even as she had eased and ultimately erased the threat.

  Would they all still be alive if she’d been with them?

  Or would they all be dead because she hadn’t been there to pick off the bad guys from behind?

  She hated those kinds of questions—the kinds that never had a right answer and to which the answer could never be known.

  The order was for radio silence. And the others were preparing for their final approach on the airport. They all flew too close above the city’s two-story landscape to risk shouting a question.

  No one to ask.

  “Damn it!”

  She hauled on the left toggle and the chute twisted sharply. In moments she was dumping altitude in a steep spiral that swung her well out to the side of the canopy. She could feel Carla watching her, but Tanya didn’t have time to look away from her and Chad’s descent. As if she’d be able to read Carla’s expression from two hundred meters away, at night through NVGs, when she couldn’t even read it sitting across from her in a brightly lit bathroom no longer filled with steam.

  It was full dark, but not that late. The city lights blasted the NVGs and they kept automatically dimming down so that she couldn’t see the details she needed in the shadows. Only by carefully focusing on the sole dark patch did they reveal what she needed to see. The hard spiral dropped her most of the way to Chad just as he was preparing for his landing round out. She had to pay attention to her own line, but aimed to land near him.

  Tanya crossed the first dark border fifty feet above the streetlights’ glow. She was on the verge of stalling the chute and coming down when she finally made sense of what lay below her.

  A graveyard surrounded by a massive hedge.

  And the section she was about to land in was closely packed with headstones that looked alarmingly substantial. Any attempt to land here and she’d finish bloody and broken.

  She released her toggles, trading her last bit of speed for a moment of lift. Her feet dragged over the tall hedge that separated her from the next section of the cemetery. This one—thankfully, since she had no more choices—hadn’t been filled in yet, and she managed a clean land and roll on the lush grass. Grabbing the forward shroud lines, she made quick work of dumping the last of the air, gathering her chute, and dropping her harness. Time to go looking for Chad.

  There was something wrong with the cemetery. Everything was distorted and none of the shadowed angles made sense. It was as if she’d become drunk during the flight. Nothing looked right.

  An impossible bird, with a head three meters across, glared down at her from atop a square podium. A man who might have been a bear, or a bear who might have been a man, stood five meters tall and appeared to be grinning. Maybe the air was filled with hallucinogens. A giant—

  She tipped up her NVGs. By the soft spill of the streetlights, she could see what the latent heat amplified by the NVGs had hidden.

  The cemetery was surrounded by a massive topiary hedge. But rather than toucans and jaguars, or even monkeys and crocodiles, the hedges had been carved into wild and fanciful shapes. Cubes, spheres, and pyramids abounded. Squat men, as wide as they were tall, offered grins a double arm-span wide.

  No sign of Chad in this section, she ducked into a line of arches so massive and solid that they practically formed a tunnel. She had to touch them to convince herself that they were topiary rather than dark stone.

  Nothing in the next section.

  She walked beneath something that might have been the Looming Hand of God, or perhaps a fanciful tropical flower, and spotted him.

  It had to be the worst landing of his career. At least no one else had been around to see it.

  He’d almost been down in a broad green area. At the last moment, his missing gust had appeared from nowhere, finally lifting him when he didn’t want to be. He flew three meters up between a pair of what looked like fat canaries roughly the size of VW Beetles. Then a marble statue of the weeping Virgin Mary as she cradled the dead Jesus loomed before him at the last second.

  Not wanting to slam his crotch on the Virgin Mother’s head, he yanked full strength on his right toggle…except that was the hand that Tanya had nerve-pinched off her thigh.

  The hard pull had the toggle slipping out of his still tingling fingers.

  He moved his free hand to protect himself as he yanked on the left toggle, hoping to get clearance to the other side.

  Instead, he spun backward and the Virgin Mary headbutted him in the ass.

  He barely had time for a mea culpa.

  The chute still had air and dragged him backward, completely out of control.

  His flail for the lost toggle merely snarled his arms in the risers. Fighting for freedom lost him the second toggle.

  The chute cleared a hedge, but he didn’t—crashing into it back first. Of course the chute, wherever it was, couldn’t just collapse. Oh no, that would be too easy. After failing to find any extra lift for the entire flight, it now tugged and jerked at him hard enough to make the hedge bend and flex, burying him deeper in the branches with each yank.

  He was effectively pinned in place two stories off the ground—back to the hedge, his arms pinned by the straining shroud lines. Worse, he’d still forgotten to tighten the harness’ leg straps while flying. Each pop and yank by the parachute on the far side of the hedge was an excruciating slam to the nuts.

  Then, before he could do anything about it, he looked down and spotted Tanya standing in front of him with her arms crossed. His NVGs had gone who knew where—lost in the hedge until years from now some hedge-trimmer dude would find them and wonder What the hell?—but he could feel her scowl even if he couldn’t see it.

  “I could have predicted that.”

  “Goddamn it! I know how to fly, woman. Better than you know how to drive!”

  “Do you want my help or not?”

  “No!” He tried to free one arm with no luck, chance had tied a clove hitch around one wrist and he could feel his hand going numb. The other arm was snarled behind his head and he couldn’t get any leverage on it.

  Shit!

  The parachute released him enough to slide a foot toward the ground—then slammed him back twice as hard.

  Ow!

  “Yes.” He hated asking for help.

  In answer, Tanya yanked out her knife and for half a second, he thought that she was going to throw it at him.

  Instead, she walked directly below his feet and disappeared from view.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shh!” was the only answer he got.

  Then a line let go and, with its sudden release, the length of it dribbled all over his head. Then another, and three more. His hands were still caught and he couldn’t do anything about the rope wig that was gathering about his head and shoulders.

  She was slicing his parachute lines.

  He hoped that she remembered he was two stories up.

  Five more lines slithered down over him.
/>   Then the chute gave up its air all at once and the remaining lines went limp at the same moment.

  He fell the two stories, barely managing a tuck and roll to protect himself. His somersault left the lines wound as tightly around him as a netted fish.

  Tanya reappeared a moment later, crumpling his chute into a compact bundle.

  “Looky what you caught.” He went for humor over humiliation. Actually both. Maybe more of the latter. A whole lot more. But he should get points for trying.

  “Is it too late to throw you back?”

  He wished he could tell if Tanya was joking. “Just cut me out of this mess.”

  “You are so polite that maybe I’m not in the mood.”

  “Impolite,” he corrected her. “And if you cut me out, I’d be glad to put you in the mood.”

  She glared at him for so long, he almost wondered if she’d leave him there. But she didn’t.

  Finally freed, he rolled over to look up at her, and saw the massive topiary he’d landed against. He’d been pinned like a sacrifice between a woman’s monstrous breasts, his shroud lines must have been strung over her goddess-sized shoulders. At least she was smiling about it. Unlike Tanya.

  “Oh.” That’s what she’d found predictable, not that he was a screwup of a parachutist. Still, he didn’t like failing in front of her.

  As the blood rushed back into his hand, he was even less pleased—it stung like he’d put his fist in a wasp’s nest.

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  She threw the parachute in his face.

  11

  Tanya should leave him here—snarled up in his own mess. Better yet, she should never have turned back to help him. He was a big boy and could take care of himself.

  Except when he was strung twenty feet up in a giant topiary.

  If only she’d thought to take a photo. She’d have loved to share that one with the rest of the team—they’d still be laughing come Christmas. Of course, she hadn’t thought to take one, because she’d never had someone to share such things with. Normally fine with that thought (one she recognized as only an occasional annoyance), it bothered her tonight. She’d like to have seen Carla with her head thrown back howling at Chad’s predicament. Watch Melissa’s quiet smile as Sofia teased Chad. It would have been a good moment.