“There’s always been a danger of that,” Clark said. “We have every confidence in our ability to keep Señorita Ramos safe, though. Maleef’s escape didn’t really have anything to do with bringing her here.”
Catalina took a long swallow of the cold beer, lowered the bottle, and said, “I want to go with you, Bill.”
Even though he’d been halfway expecting that, he frowned at her and said, “What?”
“I want to go with you,” she said again. “I want to help you put Maleef and Estancia and whoever else is mixed up in this out of business, once and for all.”
Bill came to his feet and barked, “That’s the damned craziest thing I’ve ever heard!”
Bailey and Stillman looked shocked. Catalina regarded all of them coolly and said, “Why? You saw for yourself how I can handle myself in a fight, Bill. I didn’t ever hold you back, did I?”
“Well . . . no,” he admitted. “But this isn’t the same thing. We may be goin’ up against hundreds of enemies—”
“All the more reason to have an extra hand on your side,” Clark chimed in with a smile tugging at his mouth.
“That’s not funny,” Bill snapped.
“Look, you’re thinking that a Mexican stripper couldn’t possibly be any help to you, I know that,” Catalina said. “But you know what sort of life I’ve led. I’ve had to survive in some really bad situations. I can handle a gun, and I’m a good driver.”
“We’ve got a driver,” Bill said.
Catalina ignored the interruption. She went on, “I’ve had some MMA training, too. I can fight.”
“A little practice to put on a show isn’t the same as trainin’,” Bill scoffed.
Catalina’s eyes narrowed. She set the beer bottle aside on a small table next to the chair, being careful to put it on a coaster. As she leaned forward, she said, “If you want to see what I can do, I’d be glad to give you a demonstration.”
“I don’t think that—”
She pointed at Wade Stillman.
“Him,” she said.
“Me?” Stillman said with a confused frown.
Catalina came lithely to her feet and made beckoning motions with both hands, curling her fingers toward her.
“Come on, amigo,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“It’s, uh, Wade.”
“Come on, Wade. See if you can take me down.” Her eyebrows quirked up and down. “Unless you’re afraid . . .”
Stillman looked at Bill.
“This isn’t a very good place for a fight,” Bill said.
“Fights pick the place, not the other way around.”
“That’s true,” he said. “All right, Wade.” Bill made a little waving motion. “Give the señorita what she wants.”
Wade looked pretty dubious about the whole thing, but he unbuckled the belt that held his holstered Colt and handed it to Bailey, who was trying not to grin.
“I notice the girl didn’t try to pick a fight with you,” Wade muttered.
“She knows better,” Bailey said.
Catalina said, “Actually, I thought I’d warm up with the little one, then see what you can do.”
“Whoa,” Bailey said. “Big talk.”
“Not if you can back it up.”
Clark crossed his arms and said, “This isn’t a banter-off. Are we gonna see any action or not?”
Wade didn’t wait for any more urging. He lunged at Catalina, going in low, obviously intending to upend her and put her on the floor.
She twisted out of the way and spun in a half-turn as she whipped her foot around in a kick aimed at his head. Wade recovered in midair, caught her calf, and heaved. With a startled yelp, Catalina went over backward and crashed to the floor.
Wade caught himself on his hands and rolled, but as he came up Catalina had already regained her feet as well. Bill thought she looked a little winded, like the fall had knocked the breath out of her, but she didn’t let that stop her as she came at Wade with another kick.
That was just a feint, though, and as he moved to block it Catalina shot out a short, sharp punch that landed squarely on his jaw and rocked his head back. He blinked in surprise, but when she tried to follow that blow with another, he was ready and turned it aside with a forearm.
He had an opening then for a counterpunch of his own, but he didn’t take it. That second of hesitation gave her a chance to recover. She wheeled into another kick that landed hard enough on Wade’s shoulder to knock him back several feet.
“You had a shot at me!” Catalina said. “Why didn’t you take it?”
“I was raised not to hit girls,” Wade replied with a grin that he had to know would infuriate her.
Pretty clever, thought Bill. Catalina gave in to her anger and surged toward him with a flurry of blows almost too fast for the eye to follow. Wade was ready for her, though. He gave ground for a second, drawing her in even more, then caught one of her arms and went over backward, executing a perfect throw with a foot planted in her belly for leverage. Catalina sailed through the air and landed on the sofa, bouncing once before she rolled off and landed on the floor.
“That was lucky,” Bailey said.
“Luck, hell,” Wade said. “I aimed her there.”
Catalina scrambled to her feet. She didn’t make any excuses. She just attacked again, striking out with swift combinations of punches and kicks. Wade dodged or blocked most of them, but a few of them got through and tagged him. A bruise began to form on his jaw, and one of Catalina’s knuckles had opened up a tiny cut above his left eye.
She switched tactics suddenly, going for a wrestling hold instead of punching, and they both went to the floor. Before she could pin him, though, Wade neatly reversed the hold, rolled over, and had her trapped facedown with him on top of her. Her arm was trapped, and all he had to do was put a little more pressure on it to pop her shoulder out of joint.
“This is . . . where you say uncle,” he told her, a little breathless from their exertions.
“Go . . . to . . . hell!” she gasped back at him. She bucked and writhed, trying to break his grip. It was too tight, though, and she couldn’t do it.
“That’s enough,” Bill said.
“No!” Catalina cried. “I can . . . get loose.”
“Not in a hundred years,” Wade grated back at her.
“Get . . . off me!” She gasped again. “Oh, my God! What’s that I feel? Are you getting . . . Oh, God, you are!”
Wade jerked back and exclaimed, “Good Lord! I swear I didn’t—”
That reaction gave Catalina just enough room to twist slightly in his grasp, worm her other arm free, and bring the elbow around into his jaw with stunning force. His grip slipped even more. She kicked against the floor and rolled both of them over. The arm he had almost dislocated was loose again. She rammed the heel of that hand up under his chin and forced his head back almost far enough to break his neck.
“John,” Bill said.
Bailey had set aside Wade’s gun. Now he swooped in, got both arms around Catalina’s waist, and straightened, taking her with him. She flailed arms and legs in the air and yelled, “Put me down, you big lummox!”
“Calm down,” Bill told her. “We don’t want anybody gettin’ hurt here.”
“Maybe you don’t!”
“We’re all supposed to be on the same side,” he reminded her. “Give me your word you’ll stop fightin’, and I’ll have Bailey put you down.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, and more important, she looked like she wanted to keep throwing punches, but after a moment she stopped struggling, glared at Bill, and said, “All right, I give you my word.”
Bill nodded to John Bailey, who lowered Catalina until her feet were on the floor again. When he let go of her and stepped back, she whirled and brought up a fist that streaked at his chin.
The punch didn’t go very far. Bailey’s ham-like hand intercepted it, his fingers closing around her fist and dwarfing it. The blow stopped short, as if
her arm had reached the end of a thick chain.
“Looks like your word’s not worth much,” he said dryly.
“Oh.” She was fuming, just about to boil over. “ You . . . you . . .”
Wade got to his feet, rubbed his jaw, and looked at Catalina with narrow-eyed anger.
“That wasn’t fair,” he told her. “You know good and well what you accused me of isn’t true. The only thing you felt was the humiliation of getting beat.”
Clark said, “Oh, I don’t know about that. It looked to me like Señorita Ramos used every weapon she had to keep from getting beat.”
“Well, yeah, but it was cheating,” Wade insisted.
“No such thing in a real fight,” Bill said. “There’s just winnin’ and losin’. And it looked to me like you lost, Wade.”
“I didn’t,” Bailey said.
Catalina sneered at him and said, “That’s because you’re a freak of nature.”
“You children settle down and behave,” Bill drawled. “Catalina, you handled yourself pretty good. But you’re still not comin’ with us to Barranca de la Serpiente. It’s just too dangerous.”
“Clark tells me you have another woman going with you.”
“She’s ex–Special Forces.”
“Can she handle herself as well in a fight as I can?”
It would be quite a battle, Bill thought. For all of Megan’s slim, elegant beauty, she was still tough as nails. If he was being honest with himself, though, he wasn’t sure Megan could take Catalina in a fair fight.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said curtly. “I’m in charge of this team, and I’m not takin’ along an amateur, even a talented one.”
“Technically,” Clark said, “I’m in charge of this team.”
Bill looked at him and asked coolly, “Are you gonna try to pull rank on me, after knowin’ me as long as you have?”
“I didn’t say I was a damn fool.” Clark looked at Catalina and shrugged. “I promised I’d try, Señorita Ramos, out of gratitude for the help you gave us before, but I’m afraid Bill’s going to have to have the last word on this.”
“But I can help,” Catalina insisted. “I know the cartel. I know how those animals think. I’ve been around them for years.”
She actually had a point there, thought Bill, but it wasn’t enough to change his mind.
“Sorry,” he said, and meant it. He liked Catalina, and like Clark, he felt grateful to her for everything she had done so far. But that had to be the end of it.
She sighed and asked, “Can I at least stay here with you while you’re getting ready for the mission? Maybe train some with you?”
“Because you’re thinkin’ about goin’ into this line of work?”
Clark said, “That’s really not a bad idea. I can usually tell when somebody’s cut out for it, and I’m thinking maybe Señorita Ramos is.”
Bill considered the suggestion for a moment, then shrugged and nodded.
“I don’t reckon it can hurt anything,” he said.
“Thank you,” Catalina told him. She turned to look at Wade, and her lips curved in a savage grin.
“That means I’ll get a chance for a rematch with you,” she said.
“Any time you’re ready, señorita,” he told her.
“And you,” she went on, turning her head to glare at Bailey. “We’ll see how good you do when you’re not grabbing somebody from behind.”
“Whatever you say, miss.”
This might be an added complication he didn’t need, Bill began to realize. But on the other hand, having Catalina around might make the men try even harder.
One thing was for sure: they needed to be as prepared as they could possibly be when they entered the Canyon of the Serpent.
Especially now that Tariq Maleef was on the loose again.
CHAPTER 30
Barranca de la Serpiente
It was easy to see how the canyon had gotten its name. It twisted back and forth between the mountains like a snake before opening up into a wide valley. As they flew over the narrow passage in a helicopter, Tariq looked down and was reminded of his homeland in the Hindu Kush.
“The camp must be easy to defend from a ground attack,” he commented.
“Yes, we could hold off an army in there,” Alfredo Sanchez replied from the seat next to him. “And we have defenses against an attack from the air as well.”
He pointed out several gun emplacements that were cunningly concealed in the rocks so they would be hard to spot.
“There’s another way in and out,” Sanchez went on, “a tunnel wide and tall enough for trucks. It runs through that ridge behind the valley and was part of an old mine. When we moved in here we widened it so that it could be used to bring in supplies.”
“Then you’re vulnerable that way,” Tariq said.
Sanchez shook his head.
“Not at all. Titanium steel doors close it off when it’s not in use. They’re strong enough to withstand almost anything.” A thin smile curved Sanchez’s lips. “Anything short of a bomb like the one you had.”
Tariq stiffened in the helicopter seat. Anger flared inside him. The Mexican’s words sounded like an insult to him, a reminder of the plan that had failed.
And yet it served no purpose to deny the truth. The plan had failed. The device that Tariq had gone to so much trouble to obtain was now in the hands of the Americans, probably locked away somewhere in a secret vault where it would never be seen again.
As he almost had been.
He had been tempted to give in to despair during the long weeks when he was being shuffled back and forth from secret prison to secret prison. He began to think that despite the note that had been smuggled in to him at his first place of captivity, Sanchez and the rest of the cartel had found it too difficult to free him and had given up.
During his darkest hours, he had been convinced that Allah had abandoned him as well and that he would spend the rest of his days being tormented by the infidels.
But then, as three vans, with him shackled to the floor of the middle one, had sped along a lonely back road, the vehicle in the lead had hit a mine of some sort, an IED much like the ones his friends on the other side of the world had used so effectively to fight the invaders of their lands. The blast had toppled the van onto its side and blocked the road, and as the two vehicles behind it skidded to a stop, a rocket had streaked out of nowhere and blown the third van into a million pieces.
The force of that explosion had knocked the van containing Tariq onto its side. As he hung from the shackles, one of the guards had aimed a gun at his head, obviously intending to kill him rather than let him be rescued. That was just the sort of barbaric thing the Americans would do.
Before the man could pull the trigger, though, an automatic weapon had stuttered and stitched a line of bullet holes across his chest. One of the other guards was behind that gun, obviously paid off by the cartel to help free Tariq.
Then other cartel soldiers were there to finish off the remaining guards, and it was done. They found the key to unlock Tariq’s shackles, and as soon as his hands were free, he bent down and picked up a fallen pistol.
When they had all climbed out of the overturned van, Tariq went to the guard who had betrayed his fellows and embraced the man.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for giving me back my freedom.” He stepped back. “How much were you paid?”
The guard, a stocky Hispanic man, looked nervous, like he wanted to be anywhere else but here right now. But he licked his lips and said, “One hundred thousand dollars.”
“I wish to give you something else,” Tariq said.
With that, he raised the gun and shot the man in the head, two swift shots that bored through his brain and blew the back of his skull off as they exited. As the corpse dropped like a sack of wet sand, Tariq had looked around at the men from the cartel and said, “A man who will betray his friends for money will betray his new friends as well. He could not be trusted.”
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br /> No one argued with him or even looked particularly shocked. Death was an everyday thing to these men, their stock in trade.
From there Tariq had been taken across what turned out to be the New Mexico desert in a caravan of pickups and SUVs, and when they finally reached an isolated landing strip, a helicopter was waiting there with Alfredo Sanchez standing beside it. Sanchez, as handsome and immaculately groomed as ever, had come forward to meet Tariq and embraced him.
“It is good to see you again, my friend,” Sanchez had said. “You never gave up hope, did you?”
“Never,” Tariq said, and it was only a tiny lie, not big enough to worry about. And now, since he was free again, he could put it out of his mind entirely and think of only one thing.
Vengeance against the Americans.
After that greeting they had climbed into the helicopter and flown toward the border. Sanchez explained that although the Border Patrol used drone aircraft equipped with cameras to monitor activity along the border, the cartel had enough spies within the American agency that it was no trouble to find out the flight schedule for the drones.
“How have the Americans survived so long, as weak and foolish as they obviously are?” Tariq had asked. “The rest of the world should be able to have its way with them.”
“There are still too many of them who are able to see the truth and think clearly,” Sanchez had replied with a shrug. “Although the numbers of those who can are dwindling steadily. The results of their last few presidential elections prove that. Really, all we have to do is wait. It may take another fifteen or twenty years, but then their economy will crash completely and the country will be there for anyone strong enough to move in and take it.”
“Destiny will not wait,” Tariq had said. “They must be destroyed. Now.”
The helicopter reached the end of the canyon and flew over the valley, which was filled with tents, modular buildings, and metal warehouses. There was a landing strip to one side. Another helicopter sat near it, as did several small planes including a corporate jet. A road led toward the cliffs at the far end of the valley, and Tariq assumed that was where the tunnel Sanchez had mentioned was located.
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