by Elle James
“The cartel could have spies all over the country and even in government positions. We don’t know whether our arrival in Limón was announced before we got there or observed as we landed,” Merlin said.
“They could be moving Miss Fremont as we speak,” Woof said.
“Our DEA agents would notify us via satellite. And they’d follow, keeping us in the loop,” Merlin said.
They stopped five miles short of the cartel’s jungle village, pulled the SUVs off the road, and hid them in the underbrush. Moments later, they had the motorcycle and UTVs offloaded and ready, engines warming.
The team gathered around a contour map of Costa Rica spread out on the ground.
“We’re to get within a mile of the compound by vehicles and the rest of the way on foot,” Lefty said. “Reconnaissance first, reporting guards, locations, and reinforced structures. At nightfall, we move in. If they look like they’re moving the hostage, we move in early. We get in, Duff extracts the hostage, and we get out. Rendezvous back here, if possible.”
“If shit hits the fan, scatter,” Merlin said. “Duff, you and Miss Fremont will be the most mobile on the motorcycle. You’re to make your way to the ex-patriot community of Cahuita. We’ll arrange pick up by sea and ferry everyone down to Panama where the C130 will be waiting to return us to the States.”
“Even among the expats, be careful,” Duff said. “We don’t know who’s working with the cartel. We can’t afford to lose Miss Fremont because we had loose lips.”
Merlin nodded. “And if all else fails and Cahuita looks bad, make your way to the US Embassy in San José.”
“Comm check?” Rucker called.
One by one, they tested their radio headsets.
Duff checked his weapons and the extra magazines of rounds he’d tucked into pockets and slots on his bulletproof vest. His K-bar knife was tucked into the scabbard at his side and his Glock 9mm pistol rested securely in his shoulder holster. He’d also chosen to carry the HK 416 carbine with a short barrel. If he got in a bind, he could shoot his way out. This he had slung over his shoulder with a loose strap. If he needed it, he had it.
Lefty glanced at Rucker and Merlin. “Ready?”
They nodded.
Then as one, every member of the three teams nodded.
“Let’s go.”
They mounted the UTVs and Duff straddled the motorcycle.
The team paralleled the dirt road as much as possible without actually driving down it. If they had guards out farther than a mile, they’d spot them on the only road leading past the turnoff to the village compound.
As agreed, one mile from the target GPS, they dismounted.
Duff killed the engine but pushed the motorcycle through the woods as he neared the compound, wanting it as close as possible. He’d have to get Ivy out on foot. The sooner they reached the motorcycle, the quicker they could put distance between them and the cartel. The cartel would have the advantage if they discovered Ivy missing before they reached the bike.
The going was slow as he pushed through the undergrowth, sometimes having to cut away vines and brush to pass. When he came within sight of the first shanty, he stopped and parked the motorcycle in the brush, memorizing the location by noting the tall tree with the Y fork at ten feet up.
“Connected with the DEA agents,” Merlin said softly into Duff’s headset. “So far, only women with donkey carts have come or gone from the compound. No vehicles have departed since they arrived in the night.”
“Roger,” Duff responded. “Moving closer.”
The team had identified their fields of fire, or in this case, fields of observation.
Duff moved around to the far side of the compound, careful not to make noise in the brush. As he went, he looked for posted guards.
“Bogey at the eleven o’clock,” Zip reported. “Armed with an AK-47.”
“Bogey at nine o’clock,” Woof announced. “AR 15 and enough ammo to start a war.”
As Duff passed the back, opposite of the entrance, he spotted a guard leaning against a tree, his weapon slung over his shoulder. He had a rag in hand, mopping the sweat from his face.
“Guard at six o’clock,” Duff said softly. “AR 15 rifle. Lots of magazines.” He kept moving around to the other side of the little village of shacks made up of tin and plywood.
Another guard at the three o’clock sat in the dirt, his back against a tree, scraping a wicked knife across a long thin walking stick.
“Bogey at three o’clock,” he reported. He moved closer to better see into the village.
The other structures were also plywood and tin shacks. He could make out the corners of a stucco wall surrounding a larger, more permanent building at the center of the village.
Women moved around the shacks, stirring pots of food over open fires and tending to children. Men carrying rifles and multiple magazines filled with bullets walked among them.
“Lots of civilians,” Duff murmured into his mic.”
“That’s why we wait until dark to make our move,” Merlin’s voice stated calmly. “Hold steady.”
Duff settled into position, watching the guard whittling on his walking stick, studying the compound, wishing he could make a move sooner than nightfall. They had no idea what was happening inside the stucco walls. Were they torturing Ivy? Was she in pain?
Duff’s hands bunched into fists. The waiting was the worst part of any mission. He told himself to use the time to study everything about the layout and people he could see moving around. The last thing they wanted to do was incur civilian casualties extracting the senator’s daughter.
But, damn it, he had to get her out alive.
Chapter 13
Ivy was halfway out the window when she heard the key in the lock behind her. From what she could tell, the sun had passed its zenith and was headed down, casting shadows on the little alley between the building she was in and another. At the end of the alley was a six-foot-high wall. How she’d get over it, she had no idea.
First, she had to get out of the room before whoever was at the door entered and noticed she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
With no other choice, she wiggled and squirmed until her hips were through. She dropped down, headfirst, her arms outstretched to catch her fall.
She landed hard on one hand, twisting her wrist. Pain shot through it. She swallowed a moan. A twisted wrist wouldn’t slow her down. Ivy rolled over, bunched her legs beneath her, and leaped to her feet.
A door slammed open in the room she’d just vacated, and a shout sounded.
The alarm went up. Men yelled inside the building and more outside.
Her escape would be short-lived if she didn’t make it out of the compound before the entire army of cartel thugs were aware of what all the shouting was about.
She ran to the end of the alley. The wall extended to the left and right. She guessed it was a walled compound and this barrier stood between her and freedom. She had to find a way over it, or she’d be caught, returned to her prison, and beaten for her attempt to escape.
Ivy turned right and ran along the barricade, praying she’d find something to climb up on. She came across another alleyway. In that alley was a stack of wooden pallets.
She grabbed one, lugged it over to the wall and leaned it against the stucco. The pallet’s slats acted like a ladder, allowing her to climb high enough to get her arms over the top of the wall and pull herself up and over. She winced at the pain in her wrist but powered through.
As footsteps pounded around the corner of the building she’d just left, Ivy rolled over the edge of the wall and dropped to the ground on the other side.
Men shouted inside the walls and more shouted back in what appeared to be a poor village surrounding the stucco compound. Her breath caught in her throat and her chest tightened. Based on the language and the squalor around her, she guessed she wasn’t in the US.
No matter. Most countries in the world had US Embassies. She’d find this count
ry’s embassy and seek sanctuary there.
Ivy raced for one of the small huts and hid beside it in the shadows cast by the setting sun.
Women grabbed up small children and ran into the nearby jungle.
Men carrying military-grade rifles raced past where she hid in the shadows. When they disappeared between still more shacks, Ivy peered around the corner and made a run for the next building, leapfrogging from the shadows of one shack to the next, working her way toward the edge of the village.
For a weapon, she snatched up a log sticking out of a fire pit. One end had yet to catch fire, the other smoldered, the outside covered in ash, the inside burning with hot coals.
In her next leap to another shack’s cover, Ivy wasn’t as lucky. She nearly ran into a man running toward the compound. They didn’t see each other until the last moment.
As he recognized her, the man raised his rifle.
Acting on instinct, Ivy swung the log, hitting him in the face with the smoldering end.
He screeched, dropped his weapon and clutched his face.
Ivy ran past him. She had to get to the jungle. Recapture was not an option. Guayabera Man wouldn’t be so lenient with her next time.
She had reached the last hut when the entire village seemed to be heading her way. Shots were fired—at what, she had no idea, nor was she planning to stick around to find out. With nowhere else to go, she had to make the dash across the open ground between the village and the jungle.
Taking a deep breath, she raced out into the open.
A man stepped out of the shadows, wearing dark clothes and carrying an AK-47. He leveled the weapon at her chest and shouted in Spanish. “¡Detener! O te dispararé!”
Ivy didn’t understand the words, but his intent was clear. If she didn’t stop, he’d shoot her.
She gritted her teeth, her fists clenching. The bastard would have to shoot her. She wasn’t stopping and she wasn’t going back to that little cell to be beaten. She picked up her pace and ran straight at the man with the gun. If he shot her, at least she wouldn’t suffer at the hands of Guayabera Man. If he missed, she had a chance of getting away.
The man yelled again, leveled his weapon at her and pulled the trigger.
Ivy braced for impact. When she didn’t feel the pain of a bullet ripping through her chest, she slowed and looked down, then back up again.
The man was fiddling with his weapon. It hadn’t gone off. She hadn’t been shot.
Hope gave her feet wings. She thought about slamming into the man, knocking him off his feet so that he had more than a malfunctioning gun to worry about.
He worked frantically to unjam his weapon as Ivy neared him.
At the last moment, she dodged the man and kept running, lifting her knees and elbows, running as fast as she could toward the shadows of the trees just a few more feet away.
Behind her, she heard a shout. “¡Detener!”
A glance over her shoulder made her blood freeze in her veins.
Five men ran out of the village, carrying semi-automatic weapons, all aimed at her.
She dove for the shadows as gunfire erupted around her.
Once in the shadows, she crawled toward the trunk of a tree, keeping as low to the ground as possible, to make less of a target.
Winded, she reached the tree, out of breath and without sustaining any wounds. With what little strength she had left, she rolled behind the trunk where she paused to suck air into her lungs.
The gunfire continued around her. When she dared look around the tree again, the five men were lying on the ground. Three of them lay still, their guns lying in the dirt beside them. The other two lay in prone positions, their weapons pointed in her direction, shooting until they ran out of bullets.
When the gunfire ceased momentarily, Ivy pushed to her feet and made a run for it, heading deeper into the woods. She’d rather face hostile wildlife than the men who’d captured her and brought her to this village in the woods. She didn’t know where she was or where she was going, but anywhere was better than where she’d been.
She ran as fast as her feet could carry her, praying it was fast enough to get her out of range of the bullets flying out behind her.
Duff saw Ivy as soon as she cleared the shadows of the shack on the outskirts of the village.
How the hell she’d gotten loose was a mystery, but she was in grave danger. The guard he’d been watching had finished whittling his walking stick and was moving toward the village at the same time as Ivy made her bid for escape.
As Duff watched in horror, the guard raised his weapon and aimed it at Ivy.
Duff couldn’t get a bead on the man without the possibility of missing and hitting Ivy instead. All he could do was watch in disbelief as the guard aimed at the woman Duff could be falling in love with.
Instead of dropping to the ground, Ivy ran full tilt at the guard.
Is she insane?
Duff aimed at the guard, waiting for the moment Ivy would drop to the ground and give him a clear shot.
The guard stiffened.
From Duff’s vantage point, he could see the guard’s arm tighten. He could almost feel the man pulling the trigger.
For a moment, Duff’s heart hit the pit of his belly. He waited for the surprised look on Ivy’s face, the patch of blood that would spread on her shirt, and for her to clutch her hand to her chest and fall to the ground.
When she didn’t, he squinted.
Had the man missed?
The guard looked down at his weapon, tapped the magazine, pulled back the bolt and tapped the magazine again.
The gun had jammed.
Duff’s heart made the leap from the bottom of his gut to his throat. “Run,” he whispered. “Ivy. Run.”
“What’s going on, Duff?” Merlin asked.
“Ivy’s made her escape. She’s on the edge of the camp, facing off with one of the guards.
“Shoot him,” Woof said.
“Can’t,” Duff said. “Ivy’s in direct line of fire. If I miss, I could hit her. If I hit him, the bullet could pass through him and hit her.” Though he couldn’t shoot, he could take the guy from behind with his knife.
Ivy saved him from that decision when she dodged the guard and made a beeline toward the shadowy jungle.
She’d almost made it when men emerged from the edge of the village and shouted in Spanish for Ivy to stop.
“Don’t stop,” Duff murmured. He put the drop on the man with the jammed gun and then set his sights on the lead man of the guys who’d just emerged from the village. The lead raised his AR-15, aiming at Ivy. “Five bogeys going after Ivy. Could use some fire support.”
“On it,” Zip said. “Coming in from the compound’s two o’clock.”
“In the brush at the three o’clock,” Duff said. “Don’t shoot me.”
“Don’t worry,” Zip said. “You’re a hard one to mistake for anyone else.”
Duff looked down his sights at the leader, raising his weapon to aim at Ivy’s back as she ran for the tree line.
When the cartel member aimed his rifle at her, Duff pulled the trigger, hitting him square in the chest. The man dropped where he stood.
Before the guy beside him could get a bead on Ivy, Duff took him out as well.
Ivy dove into the brush and lay flat on the ground.
Another shot was fired from Duff’s right, taking out a third man. The other two dropped to the ground and turned their weapons on Duff and Zip.
Duff aimed low. The men lay so near to the ground, they were practically invisible in the impending gloom of dusk.
Duff waited for one of them to move to get a clear shot.
A second passed, then two.
A shadow on the ground moved just enough, allowing Duff to pick him out of the low-lying brush. He aimed, pulled the trigger and watched as the man jerked and then lay so still, he could only be dead.
The other man turned and low-crawled back to the shanties and disappeared in between the building
s.
“We need to get out of here,” Duff said. “I’ll get Ivy. Cover me.”
“Got your back, brother,” Zip said.
Duff circled around in the brush, moving quietly from shadow to shadow until he maneuvered into position several feet away from where Ivy still lay against the ground, her head down, her body trembling.
Duff watched the edge of the village for more men to pop out and start shooting. When none came immediately, he rushed forward.
About that time, several men ran out of the village, firing toward them.
Duff raced toward Ivy and threw himself on top of her.
She grunted and then struggled beneath him, kicking her feet, trying to roll over to fight back.
Ivy battled fiercely, jamming an elbow into Duff’s side and reaching back to pinch his neck when he leaned over her.
“Hey,” he whispered into her hear. “It’s me. Duff.”
Her body stilled. “Duff?”
“Yeah, sweetheart, it’s me.” He dropped a kiss on the back of her neck as they stood. “Ready to get the hell out of here?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Then come with me.” He held out his hand. “Stick to the shadows. Zip’s providing cover.”
“Thank God,” she said and leaned into him. “How did you find me?” she asked.
“Long story. We can talk later. First things first. We need to get you back to civilization.
She nodded. “Lead the way. I’ll follow.”
“No. You need to go in front of me.”
“So you can block the bullets?” She shook her head. “I don’t want you to put yourself in harm’s way to take a bullet for me.”
“Too late, sweetheart. At least on the harm’s way. Your chariot awaits on the other side of this compound. The only ways to get there are to go straight through or make a wide berth of the entire village.”
“I’m game to take the long way around,” she said. “Not fond of the people who held me captive.”
“I’ve got your six. You’re not going back to them,” Duff reassured her. “Let’s go.”
To his teammates, he announced, “Taking the long road home.”
