Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

  The excavators had long flat-plate treads, bright yellow cabs, and long black bucket arms that might have once said John Deere. They were the sort of machines used to take down old shopping malls or dig basements for new skyscrapers.

  Closest to his and Tanya’s position was a floating dredge. It was like a large, two-story cabin on a pair of long pontoons. The pontoons were far enough apart that two powerful conveyor belts ran through the gap between them. One dipped down from the rear end into the river. It was a chain of large buckets scooping up stones and muck from the river bottom. Silt-gray water spilled everywhere as the buckets lofted up high enough to be dumped down onto the second conveyor. It, in turn, extended far out the other end of the central cabin, reaching past the bows of the pontoons to deliver a massive pile of wet rock onto the shore. There it was scooped up by the wheelbarrow workers and excavators and fed into crushers before it flowed down the sluices for inspection and hand sorting.

  Diesel fumes made a dark, choking cloud in the midst of the pristine jungle. The normally blue sky was gray-brown. The workers were as gray as the slurry they worked with.

  “Check out the clean ones,” Tanya whispered from close beside him.

  Sure enough, there was a contingent of people who, while not exactly clean, weren’t gray with river waste. El Clan del Golfo’s enforcers. The “clean ones” were also the ones with weapons. Those covered in gray were armed only with the tools of their trade.

  “Seven minutes,” Tanya reminded him.

  La Capitana’s plan had been simple. Overwhelm the militia with surprise and superior force in order to capture them. The superior force wasn’t gonna happen, the enforcers outnumbered la Capitana’s crew by three-to-one—or would if four of them weren’t Delta.

  “Doesn’t seem very fair,” Chad commented.

  “Because they’ve made themselves such easy targets?”

  “No,” Chad smiled to himself. Even Kidon assassins didn’t understand some things about Delta. At least not yet.

  Chad sighted through his rifle’s scope on where he would expect Duane and Sofia to arrive from their downriver approach. Sure enough, there they were, a half mile away.

  “It isn’t fair to just take them down. It takes the fun out of it, don’t you think?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  This could be a fairly simple operation—using the team’s sniper skills to pick them all off one by one. But Delta was about applying overwhelming force, not merely sufficient force.

  Even as he watched, Duane and Sofia slipped from hiding and headed for the nearest excavator.

  “Let’s play with them a little,” he whispered to Tanya, but didn’t bother waiting for her reply. No way was Duane going to one-up him on this.

  The dredge was out in the open, the center of its own circle of devastation. There would be no stealthy approach. Instead, Chad slung his rifle as if at absolute ease with his uncontested authority. The gravel had been bludgeoned into rough paths, making it easy to stride along. He could hear the crunch of Tanya falling in behind him.

  As he walked, he ignored the workers completely; they didn’t even look at him askance. He waved to one of the guards, who waved back uncertainly. There were enough of them around that they wouldn’t necessarily all know each other. Almost all were Colombian-native dark, but there were a few outlier mercenaries. None as light blond as him and certainly no one to match Tanya, but they only needed a few moments of doubt to make this work.

  He ignored everyone else and focused on the dredge itself. It had several big hoses. Two led down the dredging arm, probably blasting away at the riverbed to loosen the gravel and rocks for the bucket dredge to lift. But the two hoses that interested him were up in a turret on the roof of the cabin. They were right where the bucket dredge dropped its rocks onto the shoreward conveyor. These hoses would be used for cleaning the equipment (a purpose for which they were clearly never used), and blasting out mud jams caught in the machinery.

  “Well, lady. Last time you drove, you ran me over and we ended up falling out of a helicopter and over a waterfall. You want to redeem your reputation?”

  “You’re joking,” Tanya spoke softly from behind him—her voice perfectly gauged to carry over the roar of the dredge’s motor and grinding rocks, and no more.

  But he could hear the smile in her voice. Damn but he wished he could turn to see it on her face. She didn’t use it much, but her smile could melt steel. It hadn’t taken much for her to get with the program. Not much at all, because Delta-level crazy was completely in her nature.

  Chad’s internal clock estimated that they were down to thirty seconds on la Capitana’s mission clock as they jumped aboard the floating craft where one pontoon floated close by the shore.

  An enforcer—identified by the pistol at his belt—stuck his head out one of the doors.

  “Hola, amigo.” Chad had to shout over the grinding of the machinery as he clapped an arm around the guy’s shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides, and stepped him back inside. Lunch was set out on a small table, four other enforcers around the table. Rifles hung over the backs of chairs…and the men were all relatively clean. He didn’t have a lot of time, so he shot the four at the table with a silenced Glock. The guy he’d kept immobilized with a crushing sidearm embrace, he kneed in the crotch to take him out of action—then tied and gagged him. La Capitana said she wanted one alive.

  A woman came out of a small door that must lead to a galley. Her hands were full with a big platter heaped high with patacones, empanadas, and other delicacies. He stepped over, took a patacone—he had a real weakness for fried plantain—and took a big bite, searing the roof of his mouth.

  “Damn good,” he told her. “Better than they ever deserved.”

  She looked at the four dead men still sprawled in their chairs and the bound one groaning at Chad’s feet. She then offered him a radiant smile that lit up her plain, dark face—wide and flat, marking her as truly indigenous.

  When he held a finger up to his lips, she smiled again.

  “When it starts,” she’d know what he meant when it happened, “just walk away from the boat as if you were doing a normal errand. Sí?”

  “Sí!” She agreed and gestured for him to take another patacone. Then she dumped the rest of the contents on the table and smashed the stoneware platter against the head of the one on the floor. He stopped groaning—probably for good. La Capitana would have to get her survivor somewhere else.

  The woman nodded that she was ready.

  Chad stepped back out onto the pontoon supporting this side of the central structure just in time to see Tanya step into the small control cabin on the second level. A body tumbled out the door and dropped into the water. It didn’t move when it resurfaced.

  Moments later, the dredge began turning in place, and Chad knew she had control. The conveyor, which had been dumping a steady stream of gravel- to head-sized rocks onto the ground, slewed sideways. In moments, it had buried a pair of ATVs and the men who’d been sitting in them cleaning their rifles.

  When he heard a soft, “Hey!” shouted even louder than the grinding dredge, he knew it was time to hurry.

  He climbed the two-story steel ladder to the operations level atop the cabin’s roof. The hoses here were three-inch monsters—more appropriate for a team of firefighters, but there was only one of him. He braced himself against a stanchion of the dredge’s structure and unleashed the nozzle.

  It bucked so hard that it required everything he had to not lose control of the hose and be tossed overboard. The water pressure made it want to flail and fishtail. But once he had control of it, he was able to look around.

  They must have been gathering for lunch. A dozen guys with rifles still slung over their shoulders stood looking up at him in surprise. He raked the hose across them, sending them flying head over heels to the rocks. Only one tried to get up, but Chad hit him square in the chest and slammed him back to the ground.

  The cook
from the boat jumped ashore and shouted for other miners to help her make sure the enforcers stayed down.

  Tanya continued turning the ungainly dredge.

  Chad spotted a man leaping onto the pontoon and scrambling up the vertical ladder to Tanya’s position. Chad leaned out enough to clear the edge of the roof and blasted the man. He flew off the ladder and plummeted into the murky river. Each time he refloated, Chad drove him back under with the blast of hose spray until he returned to the surface back-first and remained in that position.

  He heard the roar of the engines as the dredge lumbered forward. It had a clear run of only a few hundred feet, but it began gaining momentum.

  Able to slash at either bank equally, Chad used his hose to blast any soldiers. The miners figured out what was happening fast enough. Each enforcer that Chad slammed to the ground, the miners were all over in moments.

  Chad saw Tanya’s wave, leaning out the control room door.

  He didn’t have time to even acknowledge her. Del Golfo’s enforcers had finally shaken off their lethargy and were starting to fire at them.

  He slashed to the left and took out a trio of armed men.

  To the right, he blasted a woman square in the face as she sighted her rifle in Tanya’s direction. The blast drove her through a full, backward flip—until she landed facedown. A miner’s shovel finished the work.

  He glanced up seeking more targets.

  Duane and Sofia were driving the big excavator forward—Sofia at the helm and Duane shooting anyone dumb enough to aim at Duane’s wife. The man was so protective of her. It wasn’t as if Sofia needed protecting—but something in Duane did that anyway.

  Protecting Tanya?

  She’d kick his ass if he even tried. Damn it! Yet another thing to like about the woman—feisty as hell.

  Tanya glared at the cabin roof.

  She was going to kill Chad.

  Not shoot him through the thin plywood. No! She was going to stand face to face and dismember him one piece at a time.

  Half the windows of the dredge’s control room had been shot out. The glass was no more than a series of crazed cracks radiating out from holes that pure luck had kept from aligning with her head. She could only see what was happening by popping her head up above the control console long enough to peep out one of the tiny round holes. Mostly 5.56 mm caliber—though there was an ominous .50 cal hole that had punched sideways through one window and out the other, the round passing so close to her nose that it still felt sunburned by the heat of the bullet’s close passage.

  Up!

  Peek!

  Down!

  Analyze what she’d seen.

  Sofia’s excavator had walked right over two of the biggest sluices, crushing them beneath the massive treads. With the bucket arm, she’d broken up a couple of the temporary dikes formed by the piles of gravel—the river leapt across and washed out a whole enforcer group.

  The operator of a smaller backhoe-loader hadn’t been paying attention and barely managed to bail out before Sofia ran the bucket’s big teeth straight down into the cab, shattering the machine. As she raked it down, a fuel tank was breached, and in a moment, the backhoe was engulfed in flames.

  Up!

  Peek!

  Down!

  Three more rounds came in from the left, where Tanya didn’t even have a flimsy plywood door for protection. She looked out in time to see Chad blast the two shooters with his big fire hose. They went down hard—hard enough that they were never getting back up.

  The glance ahead had also showed that she was slightly off course.

  She reached up a hand to goose the right engine throttle. But there was no longer a control there—just a shredded stub of the shot-off wooden handle. Good news that she hadn’t been holding it at the time. Instead, she had to accept slowing down the left engine slightly—the only two controls she was sure of.

  Up!

  Peek right!

  Down!

  La Capitana’s forces were moving in from the jungle’s sharp-hacked edge. All attention was focused on the dredge and excavators, making their job easier.

  Sofia was taking on the other big excavator, bucket to bucket. They were slashing at each other with steel arms that could reach out over two car lengths, wielding massive toothed buckets weighing tons.

  Up!

  Down!

  A line of bullets raked across the windshield and finally knocked it out—covering her in a shower of glass while she huddled.

  Another spate of fire.

  Then she jumped up and dropped three enforcers with her sniper rifle—so close, she barely had to aim.

  That earned her a moment of peace to survey the situation.

  She’d gotten into the main flow of the river and the dredge accelerated. Right on target. Time to bail out.

  Tanya leaned out into the open and yelled at Chad again to get his attention.

  She did, but only for a moment as he whipped his hose around.

  The man looked like a goddamn Greek god! His feet were braced wide on the cabin roof. The hose, as big around as her own arm, bucked against his every move. His arms bulged with muscle to wield it, but he did—like Thor wielding his hammer that no other person could lift. His t-shirt soaked by back spray left him looking naked. And he had a feral grin as he slammed down one target after another. His occasional barks of laughter were even louder than the still grinding dredge or the roar of the fire hose.

  A rattle of gunfire turned her attention back to her own survival.

  Two shooters had dug in behind boulders with their backs to the dredge and were targeting Duane and Sofia. That was unacceptable.

  Tanya veered the dredge. The long front conveyor dumped half a ton of rocks on their heads. One pontoon crunched against the shore before she could veer it back into the stream. Though she was slammed forward against the console by the impact, the dredge was heavy enough that it pushed through and once more flowed with the river’s main current. It wallowed like a hippopotamus stuck in its mud wallow, but it dragged itself free.

  She ducked her head out and shouted at Chad once more. “We need to abandon ship! Now!”

  He nodded in her direction, but she could tell that he hadn’t heard her words.

  Sofia managed to spin her excavator’s cabin and arm through a full circle, crashing it into the other cab at speed. The second excavator died along with its operator. In an apparent rage, Sofia began using her bucket to disassemble the other excavator—tearing off sheet metal, shearing hydraulic hoses, and finally tearing up the motor itself.

  La Capitana’s people were busy clearing out the last of the enforcers.

  And the dredge’s time was running very short.

  Again she tried to signal Chad.

  Again he ignored her!

  She really was going to have to kill him.

  Tanya checked the dredge’s heading one last time, then scrambled out the door.

  A jump to safety—a bulge in the gravel bank—lay just ten meters ahead.

  A glance aloft. The god of water was still chewing up the last of the troops.

  Mierda!

  She raced up the ladder—and almost caught a blast of the hose in her face. Managing to duck clear at the last moment, she rose to stand beside Chad.

  “We have to get off!”

  “One more! Just one more!” And he pummeled another shooter to the ground. The enforcers were few and far between now, but their attention was aimed at Sofia’s excavator and la Capitana’s troops coming out of the trees.

  No one was looking at the dredge sliding down the river behind them. It was a perfect vantage.

  Except for one detail…

  Chad flattened a machine-gun nest. Then another dug-in shooter. Smashing them in the back with his brutal lance of water.

  For half a moment, Tanya hung on to his arm and felt his power. Felt his skill. He was masterful. Never had she met anyone with skills to match or even exceed her own. Not even the fearsome Carla.
But Chad she could spend a lifetime living up to his standards.

  A lifetime?

  A crazy thought for the moment…especially as the answer was yes.

  And then she knew…that half moment’s hesitation had been too long.

  “Hang on!” She shouted at Chad and she wrapped both arms around his and held on for all she was worth.

  The nose of the dredge dipped down.

  It wasn’t much of a waterfall, no more than three stories, but as the nose went down, the dredge’s stern went up until they were five or six stories above the pool far below.

  “You gotta be kidding! Not again!” Chad shouted as he cast aside the hose and wrapped both of his arms about her.

  She buried her face in his chest and took a deep breath.

  The fall seemed to last forever.

  Soon, the dredge was falling vertically, nose down.

  The long boom of the unloading conveyor entered the water first. When it hit bottom, it rammed the back of the conveyor straight at them like a massive spear.

  Chad tugged her aside with millimeters to spare.

  Then the dredge began to flip. Having buried its nose at the base of the waterfall, it was going to land upside down in the pool.

  Standing on the rear of the cabin roof, it flung them out into the air.

  Straight at the rocky shore five stories below.

  Barely, just barely, they landed in the rushing river instead. Deep under water, surfacing just as the current dragged them downstream.

  Tanya managed to turn in time to see the dredge crash upside-down behind them. The long rear-digger boom collapsed into the water not three paces behind them.

  As they swam, then waded ashore, Chad muttered at her.

  “Woman driver.”

  But the way he had held her as they fell, and the way he kissed her now in the shallows of the river, she knew that she had completely fallen for him.

  One Kidon assassin going down.

  And going down happy.

  20