Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

Done?

  If not for Gunnery Sergeant Wollson, he’d have been “done” in the back alley off Gratiot Ave. Walking into Mosul and a few hundred other hellholes with the Green Berets should have stamped “done” on his forehead as well—his unit had certainly shipped home more than their fair share of body bags. And most of his missions with Delta Force had made that Green Beret shit look safe and easy by comparison.

  “Never thought about being done, other than six feet under. What about you?” He checked over his Mk 21. Good to go.

  Tanya sat with her back to the airport fence and pulled on her NVGs. While she did a wide area inspection, he sighted through his scope, which offered plenty of light amplification but only in a very narrow view. He began inspecting the terminal. It was a low structure, big enough for a couple planes to park in front of but no more.

  There were a few hangars and a half dozen light planes parked out in the open at tie-downs. A dark and lonely control tower rose five stories. He spotted two figures lying flat on the roof of the tower. There was a brief blink from an infrared flashlight aimed in his direction—invisible without night vision—flashing long-short-long. The letter K. He sent back a K of his own using the rifle’s infrared spotting laser—everything okay on both ends. If anything was going down tonight, it hadn’t yet. Good. He’d hate to have missed out on the fun again. He couldn’t spot the other four members of the team, but that was no surprise—they were Delta.

  “Duane and Sofia atop the tower,” he whispered to Tanya.

  “Rest of the field looks quiet from here. One of the hangars has a marginally higher heat signature. Could be a fluke, a cooling aircraft engine, or a small team.” It was a standard, square metal hangar, the peak two stories up so it could fit moderate planes, but not more than the nose of a big jet.

  She tucked away her goggles into the burlap bag and slipped it through a belt loop. Then they rose in unison to go check it out.

  “I have a condo in Tel Aviv,” Tanya restarted their earlier conversation as they moved down through the sparse trees and crossed the grassy verge. “At least I think I do. I’ve been in the field a long time.”

  “Big city gal.”

  “Maybe,” he could sense her shrug as they eased up to the back of the hangar in question. He lay the shovel there and kicked some dirt on it. No one would think anything of it if they stumbled on it.

  Chad tried to imagine life “after,” but never having thought about it, he couldn’t conjure up any clear images. He rested the muzzle of his Glock pistol against the metal wall of the hangar, then pressed his ear to the butt of the handgrip.

  “Voices,” Tanya whispered. She was doing the same thing he was.

  He couldn’t distinguish any words, but the discussion sounded idle rather than heated.

  “We know one thing,” Tanya holstered her sidearm.

  “They aren’t Delta.” Because Delta wouldn’t be speaking above a whisper if they had to speak at all. He holstered his own weapon.

  Again in effortless unison, they slipped around the back corner of the hangar, just as someone else stepped around the front corner in the process of unzipping his fly.

  His reactions were good. Usually, thinking about a full bladder slowed a guy down. Not this hombre. His weapon was out almost as fast as his own and Tanya’s. Then he unleashed a soft whistle. In moments, they were surrounded.

  Chad reholstered his weapon, but kept his hand loosely on the grip.

  “You hiring, mi amigo?”

  Tanya didn’t know whether to be shocked or to laugh. It was a brilliant ploy.

  She slapped her own weapon into its holster, making it clear that she wasn’t going to be the first to shoot but they’d better not try to take it. She and Chad were here as equals.

  Still, one of the men came forward, leading with his own pistol aimed at Chad’s face. His rifle, like her own, was slung over his shoulder. The man reached out one hand for Chad’s holstered weapon.

  The fool made the mistake of getting one step too close.

  Chad grabbed the man’s gun out of his hands, spun it around to aim it point-blank at the guy’s face for a long second, then ejected the magazine, dumped the slide, and tossed the pieces back to him. While he was trying to catch the pieces of his weapon, Chad shoved his shoulder enough to make him turn. Tanya’s kick to his ass sent him stumbling back toward his comrades.

  It earned him a round of derisive laughter that the guy would never live down.

  “Heard there was a team in need of real skills around here,” she addressed the man who’d hung farthest back. His fly might still be open, but his gun was held two-handed and rock steady. No question who was in charge.

  At least not until one more figure stepped around the front corner of the hangar.

  It took everything Tanya had to not react. Even in silhouette, it was impossible to mistake that figure for anyone else.

  La Capitana.

  They were hundreds of kilometers from the river crossing, yet here she was—just as they’d seen her two days ago, right down to the machete. Thank God that there was no way for the woman to recognize herself or Chad. She strolled through her men as if they weren’t even there until she was standing just two meters away. She casually crossed her arms beneath her breasts.

  “Tu la jefa, señora?” Chad’s Spanish came out smooth and unconcerned—doing his “charming the woman” thing.

  Is that what he’d done to her? It didn’t feel like it. It couldn’t be. They’d had sex under a topiary—in which he’d been in total control and toying with her. Meaningless. All meaningless! Even if it hadn’t felt that way at the time, that’s what it must have been. And she’d fallen for it. Dummkopf!

  Chad made it clear that he wasn’t looking only at the woman’s face.

  Tanya was such an idiot. There was a reason she operated best alone. She couldn’t wait until she was again. But at the moment, she had a role to play.

  La Capitana wasn’t falling for any of Chad’s games. With the slightest nod, she indicated their rifles.

  Chad swung out his Mk 21 PSR. “Beauty, isn’t it? Guy was real sad to let it go. So sad that it killed him.”

  She lifted it from his extended hands, checked the balance, then raised it to her shoulder with a smooth, practiced motion and aimed it toward the horizon. Not, Tanya was thankful to notice, too close to the tower where Duane and Sofia lay. She tossed it back and Chad caught it lightly before slinging it once more over his shoulder.

  La Capitana’s attention next snagged on Tanya’s Ari B’Lilah knife. She shouldn’t have worn it, it was too unique. She was in South America. No one ever recognized it…until it was too late. But this woman did.

  “Lion of the Night,” the woman’s voice was soft and husky. Had Chad known the translation of the knife’s name? If she knew that, then she knew precisely what it meant. It tagged Tanya as Mossad counterterrorism. The question of la Capitana’s simple words held death.

  “Like the man who ‘gave’ his rifle to my companion.” Her companion? Not for long. “La Princesa hated letting go of it.”

  That snagged both la Capitana’s and Chad’s attention. Over the last four years, Tanya had mostly posed undercover as a journalist “investigating” the drug culture. That had also aided her in building a lethal reputation that had ranged into many strange corners of the drug trafficking world. That’s what she’d been doing when she’d hooked up with Chad’s team the first time.

  Shortly after that mission with Delta, she’d struck on the idea of writing about her own exploits in ways to add mystique and terror to her undercover doings—and also to throw the scent off any trail that led back to her. It had proved very effective and she was gratified that Chad was both impressed and surprised. Now that she (Tanya present tense) laid claim to killing herself (the lethal la Princesa), she (Tanya the undercover journalist) would have to think about how to write that up.

  “That Israeli bitch messed with the wrong girl. Estevan,” the narco-submari
ne fleet builder, “was very good to me. It took me three years to track her down and pay her back for his death. Now I wear her knife in his honor.” Dropping Estevan’s name should also buy them some credibility. It was a relief that she was more fluent in Spanish than English—in English she could feel her awkward stumbles and hated each time Chad pointed them out.

  La Capitana slid a hand along Chad’s cheek as if caressing him.

  Do it. Just do it, Chad! Humiliate me with another woman right to my face.

  But the woman withdrew her hand and was holding Chad’s radio earpiece that had been hidden under the straight fall of his blond hair.

  “Say ‘Report in’,” she instructed Tanya as she listened in on Chad’s earpiece.

  Tanya did, then listened herself. Not so much as a click or beep from the rest of the team.

  Chad offered one of his smarmy grins. “I like whispering suggestive ideas in Tanya’s ear.”

  “He does,” Tanya confirmed with a sad sigh.

  “Destroy them.”

  Chad shrugged as if it was no big deal. He yanked the wire, pulled the radio off his belt, then dropped it to the pavement and crushed it with his bootheel.

  At a loss for what else to do, Tanya did the same. Now they were cut off from the Delta team. There were still hand signs, but they’d be much less useful if it all became ugly.

  “Who were you with last?”

  For half a second, Tanya thought la Capitana meant Chad. She’d been with Chad…and felt used. Had he enjoyed toying with her to his own satisfaction? She hoped so, because it was the last time it was going to happen.

  Oh! Who had she been fighting for last? She had no good answer. A UN team which had been taken down hard? Before that she’d—

  “That bitch Expediter,” Chad suddenly sounded pissed. “Been odd-jobbing ever since she burned the jungle camp and flew away. Woman left us. We were her top shooters and she fucking left us to rot. Never even gave us a dead letter drop to lead us to her new location.”

  So, she’d been right about the Delta team taking down the Expediter. But now Chad was pretending that he and Tanya were the inseparable team, even though she hadn’t been part of that operation.

  He was making it up as he went along.

  Did Chad even know what reality was? Did he actually know how deeply he’d affected her? Or was he so disconnected, so used to living the lie with women, that she’d never be able to tell what he thought?

  “Prove it,” la Capitana stated flatly. Her guards, who had slowly relaxed to this point, suddenly snapped back to rigid focus. Nine shooters. There was no way that she and Chad could take down nine. Even if the Delta team began helping with their long rifles, she and Chad were going down and going down hard.

  “How? By pointing out that Pederson was her dupe? Shit, everyone knew that.”

  Tanya hadn’t. He’d been the head of the operation and the Expediter had been his right hand…except apparently not.

  Chad continued, “That Analie Sala is a cold, narrow-assed bitch who only gets off humping on top of a pallet of kilo bags? Which was easy, as she had thirteen tons of the purest cocaine in the hold of that little luxury jet of hers, with the king-size bed in the back right over it. Thirteen tons! Uncut, that’s way over a billion on the street. I had the channels all set up in Detroit. A little cutting and we’d really have cashed in. Coulda moved that in four weeks and retired to some island mansion and screwed our brains out, but the bitch turned it down cold.”

  So, Chad had even screwed the Expediter. The man had no morals at all. But why should she care? Of course, for the mission, she’d twisted that line a few times herself. Still…the Expediter? Eww!

  “Turned you down cold,” Tanya spoke up. “You never told me about that part of the deal.” Let la Capitana think they weren’t above betraying each other for the right price, because it was clear that Chad wasn’t.

  “Shit!” Chad did a good job of sounding guilty. “Sorry, babe. I woulda taken you along for sure. You’re my favorite squeeze. You know that.”

  “You, me, and Sala? One of your little three-way fantasies? Eat shit, Chad.” She let the embarrassment she was feeling spill out as heat. Then Tanya turned to la Capitana and reused one of her earlier lines.

  “Just give me something to shoot. Or someone!”

  She made a point of scowling at Chad.

  Chad couldn’t believe how in tune they were. Tanya hadn’t missed a single cue. She’d amplified, exaggerated, even been pissed in ways he’d never have thought of.

  It was like when he’d had his hands on her. He’d had three years of fantasies about the woman and did his best to deliver on some of them. Even thinking of how she’d responded made him rock hard all over again.

  She hadn’t mentioned it, but he’d sure heard his own words about her being the “perfect woman.”

  He’d never said that about anybody.

  Never thought it.

  But with her it was so true. Warrior. Funny. Sexier than Charlize Theron kicking Mad Max’s ass. And that was all before she’d given herself to him so unexpectedly. He’d never been able to make a woman feel like that.

  It was old Wollson who’d explained women to him. “You make it the best you can for them and they’ll do twice that in return—less, of course, if she’s a selfish bitch. Then you just take her down and have a good time.”

  Tanya was no selfish bitch. She’d dedicated herself to battling the worst scourge of the modern age—even going it alone when she had no other option. How could he not respect that?

  “You know how to shoot those rifles?” La Capitana’s question slammed his attention back to the present. Four days of watching her and he’d thought her sexy as hell: beautiful, dangerous, and built like a one-woman porn movie. Standing next to Tanya, he didn’t know why he’d ever thought that. There was a deep anger that seemed to radiate from the curvy Latina—an insatiable rage. At close quarters, danger signals flashed from her like sharp spikes. Tanya was as levelheaded as any top operator.

  “Can I shoot? Shit, yeah.”

  La Capitana stepped to the front of the hangar. A person-sized door was open. He barely had a moment to see the big plane parked in there. Loaded or unloaded? Headed where? Where was Richie when you needed a pilot? Somewhere downfield watching this little scene unfold. Probably with his rifle zeroed between the woman’s awesome breasts—aimed straight at that cold heart.

  “There,” the woman pointed at the far end of the runway. “Pare. The stop sign.”

  The runway at Teniente Coronel Luis A. Mantilla International Airport was twenty-four-hundred-meters long. The hangar lay at approximately midfield. Call it twelve hundred meters to the stop sign, warning traffic not to turn onto the active runway without checking for landing air traffic first. Too far to make out that it was octagonal rather than round. Too far to read the bold letters—PARE—that must adorn it.

  Twelve hundred meters. Two thirds of a mile. A night shot.

  Certainly wasn’t a standing shot.

  He lay down on the cooling pavement and slowly shut out the world.

  But Tanya’s voice intruded, “Temp is about twenty-seven C. Wind west-north-west at six knots. Dry. And remember we’re at ten thousand MSL here.”

  Right. Tulcán was way above mean sea level. The air was thinner, so the bullet would fly farther than normal.

  She was even the perfect spotter, helping him guide his shot onto the target. “Perfect woman” might not be all that far from the truth.

  He clicked in the corrections on his scope, then zeroed on the sign—a tiny spec in the scope lit only by the starlight. His pulse was still fast from thinking about Tanya; he consciously slowed that down. His breath was fast because of the thin air—not much he could do about that without a couple days acclimatization.

  The shot slowly came into focus. Not through the scope, he already had that. He let his mind’s eye visualize the result. The flight of the .338 Lapua, heavier, more foot-pounds than the 7.
62. Some instinct had him shifting a fraction down and left. If he missed, there would be no way in the night to determine which side he missed to. And he couldn’t appear to be on a fishing expedition. The first strike had to—

  Training at some deep instinctual level made him squeeze the trigger. He manipulated the bolt, tipping the hot brass into his palm and closing the chamber on the next round. He pocketed the brass from the sniper’s habit of leaving no trace.

  One point three seconds later, he thought he saw a dust splash off the metal. Three and a half seconds after that—the speed of sound was less than half the speed of his bullet—the soft sound of a tinny thump reached them in the still night air and told him he’d hit it.

  Then he heard the click of a safety coming off. He glanced over to see that Tanya had unlimbered the MSG90 he’d loaned her. This was going to be a much harder shot—it was out near the limits of the 7.62 mm round, no matter what weapon it was fired from.

  He offered her the Mk 21, but she was already far enough into the zone to just shake her head tersely.

  “Zeroed at five hundred,” was all he could think to offer her. She’d already analyzed all of the other elements. Except…what had his instincts corrected for at the last moment? Something. Something…

  “You’re firing northeast and close to the equator.” The Coriolis Effect. Firing eastward, the bullet would rise more than expected and most strongly near the equator.

  He saw her make the tiniest shift as she fired.

  Chad bent back to his own scope to watch.

  One heartbeat. Two. Splash of dust into the darkness. One. Two. Three—

  A small ping wandered back down the wind.

  “Damn, girl. Now that was a hell of a shot.”

  Tanya grinned happily at him for a long moment—then her smile snapped out like a shot-out searchlight.

  Oh, right.

  Chad rolled over to face la Capitana as Tanya cleared her brass.

  “We know how to shoot.”

  The woman didn’t say anything. Instead, she stared at them for a long moment before turning and walking back through her men again as if they weren’t even there.