Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

  Chad kept the safety off on his rifle and idly dropped his hand to his knife as if brushing himself off after lying on the ground.

  Tanya didn’t miss the cue, retucking her blouse placed her hand close beside her holster.

  “Let’s go,” la Capitana’s voice had a galvanic effect on her men. They all turned and holstered their weapons. All except the one whom they’d surprised with his fly open.

  Chad rose and offered a hand to Tanya, which she again ignored.

  As they strode past the last remaining guard, he finally holstered his weapon.

  Chad thumped a fist on his shoulder. “No hard feelings.”

  The man merely snarled back a foul curse before finally returning to peeing against the side of the building. His bladder must be killing him by now.

  13

  The man, Silva, wasn’t any more pleasant after he returned to the hangar. La Capitana drew him aside and they spoke in a whisper. Then Silva, without making any obvious show of it, collected one of his fellow guards and drifted to the far side of the hangar. It left la Capitana and seven guards to one side of them, with Silva and his mate ostensibly cleaning weapons to the other. It placed them in the middle of a crossfire pattern—an indefensible position.

  “Did it work?” Tanya whispered to Chad as they both made a show of replacing their fired rounds. They sat on the same wooden crate, small enough that they couldn’t sit facing the same direction, which worked well—better lines of sight and fire if things didn’t go their way.

  “Not dead yet. Taking that as a good sign.”

  “You never did answer the question.” Tanya wasn’t sure why she bothered. She didn’t really want to know more about Chad. Where he wanted to live after he retired? Who cared. What made a man like him be…a man like him? None of that. And yet she did.

  “Nope, I didn’t.” Chad rose and wandered over to a cooler as if he’d always been here and came back with a couple bottles of water. To their right was a twin turboprop plane painted in shining white with the blue TAME of the national airline. It was an ATR-42 forty-passenger plane with a cargo capacity that could move six tons very nicely to anywhere within seven hundred miles. In the back corner were a pair of Beechcraft—one clearly being scrapped for parts to rebuild the other.

  The dim lighting revealed a few workbenches, but they looked more meant for the hobbyist than an airline mechanic. A small stack of suitcases filled the corner. Some sprouted bits of bent metal sheathing that must be fuselage panels. Others held headsets in need of repair. One was piled deep with clothes lost by some passenger that had now been used as oily cleanup rags. A bent prop leaned against the wall beside a half-disassembled motorcycle. Several tires—some worn, others threadbare, none new—were scattered about the floor as if a child had been playing with them. The place smelled of grease and rust.

  “Didn’t see a fuel truck.”

  She hadn’t been looking for one. She supposed that it meant the airport was even less frequented than she’d suspected.

  “Vermont or Maine. Maybe Alaska.”

  For a moment, Tanya couldn’t figure out what he was saying, then she realized that he was answering her question at long last.

  “Somewhere to get out and about. Do some hunting for the dinner table rather than of things that are trying to kill me. Might be nice having a neighbor who wasn’t a coke dealer or a heroin addict.”

  Tanya could almost picture him there. Not yet. But someday, wearing a ball cap as his blond hair bypassed gray and shifted to white. Perhaps out on a snowmobile or a fishing boat. She too was tired of the heat. The scorching desert of the Negev where she’d done her early training. The sweltering South American jungles.

  Maybe she’d—

  “I’m not easy to find,” la Capitana stood in front of them. Up close, she was even more beautiful than she’d looked through the scope.

  Tanya knew that she herself was pretty; her looks had served her very well in the field. But this woman was astonishing. More Latina supermodel than drug dealer. Her glossy dark hair flowed back over her shoulders, leaving her smooth, dark cream skin on clear display. Her wide, dark eyes gave her face an amazing depth of character. They were eyes that Tanya recognized in the mirror. Haunted, hunting eyes.

  “Weren’t looking for you,” Chad said easily, but offered a leer that said he was damn glad he’d found her. “Just heard there was a crew passing through and took our chances. Are you somebody we should have been looking for?”

  “It depends.” The woman did not explain.

  “Well, we’ve had shit for luck lately. Worked the coca fields for a while down in Bolivia, but had no better luck in the country than we did in the city.”

  “Maybe you are bad luck and I should kill you now.”

  “Couldn’t prove different by me, sister,” he heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Weren’t for Tanya here, I’d have bagged out long ago. But a man dreams of providing for his wife against all odds.”

  Then Chad turned to her, all solicitous.

  “I’ll replace that ring with a big-ass rock to match your lovely blue eyes, honey. That’s a promise.”

  And now they were married? She’d been wondering if she’d survive him for the duration of the operation and now she had no choice?

  No. He wasn’t playing this game with her.

  “You’ve still got some explaining to do if you don’t want it shoved back down your throat.” Tanya was surprised at how easy it was to find the anger.

  “Is that what happened to your face?” La Capitana asked.

  Chad hooked a thumb in her direction.

  “He can make me so mad sometimes that I don’t know why I stay with him.” And she didn’t, except that was the mission she’d signed up for. “This wasn’t even for the big one.”

  “I told you before,” Chad picked right up on the line. “Sala was just a mistake, sweetheart. I figured if I did her, then she might do my Detroit deal and we’d be set for life.”

  “You and her,” bitterness so strong it stung like bile at the back of her throat.

  “Aw, sweetie. Wouldn’t do that to you. I was going to introduce her to my buddy Wollson. They could’ve ended up together, you know.”

  Wollson was dead.

  She managed to not bumble the next line. “You think they’d have been happy together?”

  “’Til death do us part and all that. I betcha anything.”

  Tanya decided she’d better drop it until they could speak not in code. Had Chad been willing to sleep with Sala the Expediter to do his deal for a billion-dollar payout? Or had he done it because he didn’t mind screwing women he’d been assigned to kill?

  Chad couldn’t follow the signals Tanya was sending out now.

  Scared? Of what? Didn’t sound like her.

  Angry? At who? Him? He couldn’t think of why.

  Acting? Maybe. Damn good if she was.

  No way to explain that he’d been sleeping with a British undercover drug agent—without realizing it—during the Analie Sala mission. He hadn’t been kidding when he said Sala was a cold bitch. Some people had no soul, just a world of black inside them, and she had been one of those. Couldn’t pay him to go anywhere near that kinda head trip.

  La Capitana was a different issue. The hurt in those eyes broadcast pain like a lighthouse. Only by declaring himself married to Tanya could he be sure he wouldn’t go messing around there because she was really something. Beautiful, powerful, hurt in some twisted-up vulnerable way that he’d bet she’d kill him if she knew he could see it in her—all kinds of attractive things about her.

  “Swore my heart to this gal,” he told la Capitana. “Priest, the whole bit. We were riding high on what Estevan was paying her—I was a hunter for the Cartel de los Soles at the time. Did it up in the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá in Maracaibo. Estevan gave her away just the week before he died and his daughter stood maid of honor. Really beautiful ceremony. Had some rough patches across the years, but I
’ve been clean and sober since that bitch Analie. Trying to make it up to you, honey.” He turned once more to Tanya because he wasn’t sure how much more he could layer on without giving himself away. Delta had taken down several key players of the Cartel de las Soles and Estevan had tried to murder their whole team. Chad had stood best man for Kyle and Carla in that church, even if Tanya was long gone.

  “He teach you to shoot?” la Capitana turned to Tanya.

  Before Chad could open his mouth to proudly take credit, Tanya snapped out two words.

  “My father.” She hugged herself so hard that he was surprised she didn’t break.

  What was it with beautiful, dangerous women turning honest all of a sudden? He was being confronted with two ridiculously attractive women who couldn’t be more different if they tried. The darkly gorgeous drug dealer and the brilliant golden-girl assassin.

  And hounded by enough pain they might have been twins.

  La Capitana stared at Tanya in silence for a long time. The women were communing with some secret code invisible to men. He’d seen Carla, Melissa, and Sofia do this sometimes and long since learned to keep his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself when they were doing it. Despite being married to Melissa, Richie got geeked out whenever he noticed it—which was less than half the time. He swore he was going to crack their code, but Chad knew there were some things that a man was never meant to understand.

  At long last, la Capitana held out her hand to Tanya, who shook it.

  “I’m Daniela. Welcome aboard, Tanya.”

  Tanya looked hard-pressed to not remark on the nickname they weren’t supposed to know.

  “Any relation to la Capitana?” Chad bulldozed straight in, because, what the hell. He could almost hear Tanya’s silent groan. Maybe it was a bit much. Now he had to hope they didn’t die on the spot. That would suck.

  To cover, he turned to Tanya without giving Daniela time to answer.

  “Wouldn’t that be cool if Daniela really was? Working for Estevan, then the Expediter, then the Captain? Sorry, being silly, I know. But Escobar was before my time,” he turned back to Daniela. “And we missed out on Gerald before the DEA took him down. I’ve always had a thing about shooting for the very best. The Marines always thought they were such hot shit before they discharged my ass. Those jarheads couldn’t have touched Estevan’s crew if not for that la Princesa bitch. Besides, it’s not as if that Major wasn’t already an ass before I rolled his Mercedes. I was just trying to show his wife a good time—apparently he was a ‘minute man’ in the worst way. Not like he was with us when I rolled it or anything. Dishonorable, my ass. Like to see him hit that damned stop sign at a hundred meters. Hell, a hundred feet. Dumb Marine bastard.”

  Daniela offered Chad a noncommittal nod and walked back to where the others were waiting by the plane. Though she made no signal to call off Silva and the other guard behind them.

  “Marines?” Tanya whispered.

  “Always glad to slag some other crew. Usually I make it the 75th Rangers—that was Duane’s outfit—but I didn’t want her thinking Special Ops.”

  Unlike most men, Chad had learned how to create a whisper that wouldn’t carry five feet. He and Tanya were turned partly away from each other and she’d wager that it would look like he was sitting in perfect silence, just going over his rifle.

  Tanya was trying to make sense of la Capitana’s look before she’d walked away. Something had shifted during Chad’s “frivolous chatter” moment, but Tanya couldn’t pin down what it was. They weren’t dead, so it wasn’t that he’d raised doubts in la Capitana’s mind. No, it was something inside Daniela herself.

  “Never touched Analie Sala,” Chad continued softly.

  “Tell someone who cares.” And yet Tanya felt relief about that. She hated herself for wanting to know. And couldn’t stop the next question, “You didn’t let her actually get away, did you?”

  Chad scoffed, little more than a heavy breath under the circumstances, as if she’d wounded his manly pride. But then he sounded deeply chagrined. “I helped. But that was Richie’s doing.”

  “Richie took down the Expediter?” If ever there was something to stretch the imagination past belief, that was it.

  Richie, despite being Delta Force, was brilliantly naive. That he could outfox a seasoned pro like Analie Sala seemed almost ludicrous.

  “And what were you doing while he was doing that?”

  “Enjoying the ride, sweetheart. Just enjoying the ride.”

  “Screwing some woman and shooting the shit out of things.”

  “Absolutely! I—” And then he caught that she’d trapped him.

  She turned to look at him in time to see him blush. Chad actually blushed. About screwing a woman other than her. That was a ridiculous explanation, but it was the only thing that fit.

  “What are—”

  A high whistle cut through the night air. It came from…above. The roof of the hangar. Now that she knew to look for it, she spotted a ladder over in a shadowed corner that lead up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. They’d been very lucky that the lookout had been facing the side of the field away from town as they approached.

  The few lights in the hangar were doused. A single lamp was set up on a stand facing the line where the two main hangar doors met. Someone flicked it on. Actinic white light splashed against the inside of the door.

  At a second whistle, the doors were slid open until the gap was two meters wide. Anyone looking in from the outside would be unable to see anything of the hangar’s interior or the people there. They might not even be able to see the plane.

  A mixed line of burros and llamas were led in by pairs. Each was unloaded of hundreds of pounds of product onto a pre-positioned pallet, then guided back out. In between each load, the doors were closed. The full pallet was removed with a small forklift and replaced with an empty one—empty except for a small pack that Tanya quickly figured out was money. When the door was reopened, another pair of beasts was led in, unburdened onto the pallet, then loaded with the small pack of money and led out.

  It was an old, primitive form of delivery—a form that scented the soft evening breeze blowing into the hangar with the ripe scent of the animals and their guides. It was also a form of delivery that could cross the high border by lonely mountain tracks rather than braving the Ipiales-Tulcán border crossing. The blinding light kept delivery men, if captured, from revealing anything other than the location of their delivery.

  While the animals were being unloaded, Tanya and Chad were waved over to join the human chain that unloaded the pallets into the plane.

  Each tightly wrapped bundle felt as if it held twelve blocks of one-kilo bags—twenty-six pounds of coke each. Fifteen to twenty bags per pallet…four to five hundred pounds. She lost track around seventeen pallets, but it turned out to be one of the last.

  Three tons of cocaine. And this far up the supply chain, it would still be very pure to keep the bulk down. Each kilo would probably become two by the time it hit the States or Europe. Actually, with this coming out of Colombia onto the Pacific coast via Ecuador, it was headed to the US or Japan. Technically not her problem, but she couldn’t imagine what they could do to stop it.

  If she and Chad hadn’t inadvertently inserted themselves into the heart of la Capitana’s operation, the Delta team could do something.

  But…now?

  She knew they still could. There were six top shooters out there in the dark. It would take only a few signals to lower the boom on this crew.

  And yet Chad wasn’t calling for that.

  Why?

  Instead, he’d gone to great lengths to ingratiate himself with Daniela.

  Again why?

  And that’s when Tanya decided her brain must still be sex-addled. Daniela was la Capitana. She was the kingpin to the largest remaining smuggling operation other than the Golfo—since Golfo had wiped out their Colombian rivals, Los Rastrojos. Taking Daniela down now would solve today’s problem. But som
eone would show up to take the helm of the operation. If they could burn out a second level of leadership, the loss of knowledge would merely cripple a whole segment of the operation. If they could take out the midlevel operations people, then the entire framework might collapse.

  Yes, it was worth hanging on to see if that was possible.

  She eyed Chad. He’d started whistling to himself as he lifted and tossed bundles of cocaine as if they weighed less than feathered pillows.

  Noticing her attention, he shot her a big smile of delight.

  Just happy to have a job, others would think, watching him.

  So ready to chow down on this canary, she could hear him thinking about Daniela, though perhaps in a Delta Force way rather than a man-and-woman way.

  Worth hanging on to? That was the question she still couldn’t answer for herself.

  14

  “How do you feel about walking?” Daniela asked as the plane rolled out of the hangar and headed to the runway. No sign of the llamas or burros.

  “These boots were made for it,” Chad pointed at his feet.

  Daniela, Tanya, and Silva looked at him nonplussed.

  “Nancy Sinatra. These boots were made for walkin’…” he tried to sing it in a sultry Nancy tone, doing the whole hip swing-fake stomp-sexy shoulder shimmy thing. Still he got no reaction and heaved a sigh. Maybe if he was wearing a micro-mini and had some cute backup dancers. Please let Daniela keep thinking that he was just a goof of a good ol’ boy who could shoot better than other people out there.

  He had no problem playing just a little bit dumb, but it was clear that didn’t come at all naturally to Tanya. Just don’t blow our cover, girl.

  His whole excited babble thing had hopefully cued Tanya that she was to play the brains of their outfit. But there hadn’t yet been a chance to see if she’d caught that and how she might play it out.

  Now there were just the four of them standing in front of the dark and empty hangar. All of Daniela’s enforcers, other than Silva, had either left on the plane or melted back into the night. With the dull roar of its turboprop engines, the heavy plane headed aloft. It circled west to clear Tulcán, but he could see its blinking nav lights finally straighten out onto a southeasterly course that would place it either in Quito or at the coast beyond. If anyone thought that it was odd to have a late night departure from this daytime airport with no actual scheduled flights anymore—nobody came by to make a point of it.