by Cindy Dees
John nodded wearily. Oh, how he knew the feeling.
Hathaway continued, “The shrinks would probably tell me to b.s. you and say it gets better. But it doesn’t. You just learn to live with it, and after a while, the pain dulls enough to stand. It sucks.”
For some reason, hearing rock solid Brady Hathaway admitting to the same weakness he’d been laboring under helped. John looked his boss squarely in the eye. “Thanks.” No need to explain what for. They both knew.
Hathaway nodded. After a moment of silence, he smiled grimly. “Ready to go kick us some bad guy ass?”
John smiled back, actually feeling a faint glow of the old passion he’d once carried for his job. “Let’s do it.”
Melina smelled the meth lab before she saw it. At least Huayar’d had the good sense to set the building a little ways away from the others. Meth manufacturing was a notoriously touchy process. Even with a knowledgeable chemist like Vito around, meth labs had an unfortunate tendency to blow up without warning.
Not surprisingly, the guard stopped well shy of the entrance to the lab and gestured for her to go in alone. She nodded and entered the building.
The crackle of a spotter’s voice came over John’s headset. “We’ve got a problem. One of our friendlies just entered the lab. The young woman.”
John swore under his breath. Huayar was wasting no time putting Mel to work reproducing the synthetic drug formula for him.
Hathaway nodded tersely, and without missing a beat said, “Change in plans. Cowboy, it looks like you get to sneak into camp and rescue the damsel in distress after all.”
John nodded grimly. “When do I go?” If he were in charge, he’d send himself down to infiltrate the camp after staging some sort of minor diversion elsewhere. Nothing big enough to alarm folks, but enough to cause everyone’s attention to be elsewhere for a few minutes.
Hathaway turned away. “Scotty, when you wire the water tower, can you cause one of the legs to partially buckle without collapsing, and then wire a second charge to bring it down separately so it looks more like a natural collapse?”
The demolitions man nodded. “No sweat. I had a look at it a few minutes ago. Pretty flimsy construction. Very small charges will work. Minimal noise or flash.”
Scotty, Stoner and Ripper had still been in the Middle East debriefing a civilian woman who’d helped them nab a notorious terrorist last fall when John had gotten the call to take the rest of the team over to Afghanistan. To die, as it turned out. Pure luck had saved the three of them from the same fate that had met the rest of their team. Memory of the carnage threatened to surface again.
John forced the images away. Now was not the time to indulge in agonizing flashbacks. Mel was counting on him.
Hathaway came up over John’s headset. “Everyone say status. Final checkoff before we move.”
Which was to say, this was everyone’s last chance to add any information to the battle plan that might cause it to be tweaked. The checkoff went quickly, and no one had anything to add or clarify. They all knew what they were supposed to do. The plan called for a combination of stealth, diversion and positioning for a frontal assault, should it become necessary.
At the end of the roll call, Hathaway said, “Time hack on my count. The time is ten forty-two local time in…three…two…one…hack.”
John’s watch was two seconds fast. He made a note of the disparity to make corrections as needed later, and said a silent prayer that this night’s work would not come down to two-second anythings.
Hathaway said briskly, “Let’s move out, men.”
Chapter 17
Melina looked up from the worktable in the lab at the pesky guard. “What do you mean, come with you? I’m not going anywhere! I’ve barely had time to look at this facility, let alone check if the equipment I’ll need is here.”
Huayar’s man shrugged and gestured more insistently for her to come along. She was really getting tired of being treated like a dog.
She said more forcefully, “I have work to do if Huayar wants me to make his drug for him.”
“Change of plans,” the guy growled.
“What change?” she demanded. “I want to talk to Huayar. Right now. I appreciate that he’s used to being in charge, but if he and I are going to work together, he’s got to keep me in the loop. He can start getting used to that right now.”
“Fine. He said to bring you to his quarters anyway. You can talk to him when we get there.”
She subsided, a little sheepish after her big speech. Without further protest, she followed him toward one of the more solid-looking sleeping huts. “I thought he lived in that building over there.” She pointed at the building John had identified as Huayar’s headquarters, the one where she’d visited her family.
“Nah. That’s the ammo dump.”
Ammo dump? Uh oh. John was out there sneaking around the woods, no doubt planning to stage some dramatic rescue of her, and he’d told her earlier that Huayar would probably keep her close to himself-in that building. John would head straight for the ammo dump, and those creepy guys lurking in its shadows. He would be walking right into a giant trap.
She wanted to shout a warning up at the trees and the man they hid, but she dared not. If he was going to save her family, she couldn’t in any way give away his presence out there. She had to keep up the charade that she’d parted ways with him.
For the moment, she had arrived at a truce with Huayar, and as long as he thought she was here alone, and ultimately at his mercy, he would remain confident that she’d eventually cough up the formula. Thankfully, he was willing to play nice for now. Well, relatively nice. She reached up absently to rub her aching jaw. But who knew how long that would hold up. She had to get her family away from this monster.
Get my family, John. Leave me and get my family.
“Snipers, report.” Hathaway ordered over the radio.
John listened in as the four shooters reported being in position around the camp and eyes-on-target. They were going to play hell with any kind of armed response Huayar tried to mount to their infiltration. There was something supremely demoralizing, not to mention chaos-causing, about death raining down from points unknown. He should know. He’d been the fish in a barrel before, and as Brady had so succinctly put it, it sucked.
Hathaway made a series of complicated clicks over the radio, signaling him and the other rescue team to move in on the camp. John would come in from the south and try to snag Melina, since he recognized her on sight and more importantly, she recognized him on sight. Four other men would make for Mel’s family and try to sneak them out of the camp. And just in case it all went to hell, the rest of Hathaway’s men would position themselves for a firefight.
John gripped his weapon tightly, startled to realize his palms were sweating. The thought of being caught out in the middle of another gun battle made his skin crawl. He and Melina seriously needed to clear the camp’s perimeter before any bullets starting flying.
Brady had mentioned that the Peruvian government had not okayed a military action on its soil, which was diplomatic speak for Hathaway and company weren’t supposed to get into a shootout with Huayar. No surprise. The drug lord must have a ton of Peruvian politicians in his pocket to have survived this long. Not only would they be well-paid to protect him, but they also wouldn’t be thrilled to have their source of extracurricular income cut off if Huayar was killed.
However, Uncle Sam wasn’t going to shed a tear over any stray bullets that happened to fly in Huayar’s direction. Hathaway had deployed his troops in anticipation of a major shooting engagement, and John was frankly going to be surprised if it didn’t come to one. But in the meantime, he was praying the stealth approach to finding and freeing Melina and her family would work. Once lead started flying, the odds of innocents dying went up astronomically.
Hathaway hadn’t initially wanted to send him in on this extraction. He said John was too close to Melina, still healing from his ordeal. Nice tu
rn of phrase. Healing. Maybe he’d quit bleeding, but that hardly constituted healing. He’d argued with Hathaway that Melina would be least likely to freak out and give away the op if he materialized in front of her without warning instead of one of the other guys. When that hadn’t swayed Brady, he’d resorted to begging. It hadn’t been pretty. But the boss-man had relented. Thank God. He’d be damned if he was going to sit on the sidelines chewing his fingernails while Bravo Squad went and got his girl.
He’d forecasted to Hathaway that she’d refuse to leave until her family went, too. As a result, Hathaway had adjusted the timetable to give the other rescue team a head start. John wouldn’t move in to grab her until the first team was nearly finished with its task.
Hathaway clicked the command for Rescue Team One to move at will. John couldn’t see them, but they’d be leapfrogging their way from hiding spot to hiding spot right now, working their way down the same heavily forested slope he’d descended earlier. One of Bravo Squad’s spotters had been continuously watching the earth-bermed building Melina had gone into and left earlier, and so far, no other hostages had come out of the structure.
John and Hathaway had reasoned that she’d refuse to do anything for Huayar until she saw her family. Given that it was the first building she’d been taken to after Huayar initially smacked her around, and she’d only stayed inside about five minutes, he and Hathaway shared a high level of confidence that it was where her family was being held.
It figured. The hostages always were located in the most inconvenient spot for a rescue. They couldn’t be out in one of the nice, flimsy sleeping shacks. Nope. Had to be holed up in the lone building built liked a damned ammo bunker.
He crested the last ridge and caught a glimpse of flickering light through the trees. Huayar’s camp. He crouched, making his way cautiously toward the south end of the camp. A cluster of sleeping shacks lay between him and the meth lab, whose stink was acrid in his nose. He glanced at his watch. Once he was in place, he’d have about thirty endless minutes to sit, cooling his jets while the other rescue team did its thing. Of course, the wait would give him time to get the feel of this end of the camp, to find the flow of its movements, maybe even to spot Melina.
I’m coming, baby. Just a little while longer.
Melina ducked inside the dirt-floored shack, its walls a crazed hodgepodge of plywood, random lumber and galvanized tin. A half-dozen hammocks hung around the margins of the room, but the center of the space was open, filled at the moment by a folding table and a cluster of men looking at something on top of it. She edged a little farther into the room, trying to catch a glimpse of what they were all studying so intently.
A crudely sketched map. Based on the maps John had made her memorize earlier, she recognized the terrain. It was the valley holding this camp.
“…probably come over this ridge…don’t know who this bastard is, but let’s assume he’s a one-man army.”
“…handled himself like a military type…had a bag of weapons in his vehicle…”
Melina jolted. These guys had searched the Land Rover? When? Must’ve been during that interminable afternoon she and John had spent sitting in that cantina waiting for the real muscle of Huayar’s outfit to arrive. But then the import of what she was hearing slammed into her. Huayar and his men were expecting John to come after her, and they were laying a massive ambush for him.
Fingers of cold dread clutched at her. Oh, no. Not another ambush. He would fall apart for sure this time. He was only just now beginning to recover from the last one. If anyone else he cared about died in another ill-fated gun battle, John would self-destruct right there, on the spot. Not to mention the fact that she’d undoubtedly die, too, and with her, any hope for her family’s escape alive from this nightmare.
She stood with her back to the wall, as still and silent as a mouse, in hopes that Huayar wouldn’t notice her presence. She had no idea if or how she could help John, but the more she knew about his enemy’s plan, the better. As she listened to Huayar deploying his men in and around the camp in a series of hidden, concentric rings, her last, lingering hopes faded. John could never succeed against this many men, particularly if they were all out there waiting and watching for him.
After an eternity, the minute hand on John’s watch finally passed the thirty-minute mark. His usual patience stretched to its limit, he was immensely relieved simply to move again. He’d picked out his approach about twenty-nine minutes ago, and now he commenced the slow trip down to the camp’s perimeter. His path took him through the gap between a pair of guards who were busily staring outward into the deep jungle. Poor guys had no idea he was parked only about thirty feet from them. Their loss.
That thirty feet took him a good ten minutes to creep until he reached the edge of the camp. The bad news was that Huayar obviously expected trouble tonight. He had patrol teams roaming the entire camp. The good news was they’d been at it long enough to have settled into routine routes walked at predictable paces. It was an easy thing to slip past them.
He wondered briefly how Rescue Team One was doing, but then pushed the thought from his mind. Not his job. They’d do their mission, he’d do his. Momentary satisfaction flowed through him at the well-oiled machine Bravo Squad was. It dawned on him that he’d missed this seamless teamwork, the sense of doing the impossible with ease; hell, of having a goal. Any goal. He’d been drifting along for so long doing nothing. He’d forgotten what having a purpose felt like.
Hathaway sent a single click across the radios. First check-in. Everyone gave a single click response back to indicate their progress one hour into the plan. The other rescue team was supposed to have located the hostages and be near them, ready to commence the actual extraction. They clicked once, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
When his turn in the rotation came up, he gave the single click back to indicate he was on or ahead of schedule-meaning he’d made it into the camp proper.
The check-in finished. No double clicks came back. Perfect. As a commander, he always expected glitches in the plan, and was pleasantly surprised when none popped up. So far, so good.
Just before he’d headed out this way, one of the spotters had reported that Melina had gone into the sleeping shack nearest to the meth lab. Nobody’d seen her since then, so the assumption was she was still in that structure. Not that he was complaining. It would make pulling her out a far sight easier. He could simply go in through a back wall and sneak her out into the woods. No fuss, no muss. At least that was the plan. It was almost too easy. Wary of another trap, he approached the camp this time with even more caution than before.
Rescue Team One should be working their way in through a back window of the bunker right about now. It was a tricky moment, one where they could easily be spotted. The minutes ticked past as he eased from shadow to shadow, making his way slowly around the camp to his target.
Another check-in at an hour plus thirty. Rescue Team One indicated they had a man inside with the hostages. John’s single click indicated that he’d located Melina, was in place near her, awaiting the go-ahead to pull her out.
He heard men’s voices inside the shack he believed her to be in, and eased himself upright enough to peer in a crack about a foot above ground level. Holy crap! Huayar! He froze, his brain going a mile a minute. Melina was in here with him? He allowed his gaze to slide left. Six more men who looked like Huayar’s senior lieutenants. A couple were positively ex-military, still sporting military haircuts and pieces of their former uniforms.
He looked to the right. There. Across the room. Melina’s hiking boots. She was standing in a dark corner, very still. He couldn’t see her face from this angle. Her position in the room could be a problem. He pondered ways to lure her over to this side of the building. Not that it would help as long as Huayar and his men were sitting in there with the lights on where they could see her.
He was going to need a diversion. Preferably one that involved knocking out the camp’s electricity. And
then he was going to need a heaping helping of luck. Failing that, he was going to need speed and surprise to get in there, grab her, and get out before Huayar and company realized what was going on. Problem was, the drug lord and his men were all experienced field operators. They wouldn’t panic if the lights went out, and furthermore, they’d quickly and correctly identify a diversion as just that and would tend to stay put right where they were until the dust settled.
He swore under his breath. They might have to resort to the Plan B firefight after all.
Another frustrating half hour passed, and Rescue Team One clicked that it was hung up and unable to egress with the hostages. He clicked that he, too, was unable to proceed. After a brief pause, Hathaway clicked a series of commands that made John’s jaw clench grimly. Plan B, indeed. Hathaway was throwing Plan C and Plan D at Huayar, too.
All hell was about to break loose.
It was all Melina could do to stand there in the corner and not tear her hair out. These men were calmly and coolly plotting John’s death! She wanted to run out of here screaming to him at the top of her lungs, but instead, she had to stand around looking supremely disinterested. She didn’t for a minute think Huayar was actually ignoring her. He was too clever not to be keeping a surreptitious eye on her. He no doubt was gauging her reaction to the entire conversation to see if it got a rise out of her. Hence, the absolute necessity of showing no reaction at all.
She didn’t know whether to pray for John to come right away and get her out of here now, or to pray for him to wait until Huayar and his men eventually let their guard down before he tried a rescue. If they ever let their guard down.
A radio crackled in the middle of the table. A tense voice reported movement in the woods on the west side of camp. Abruptly, all eyes in the shack were on Huayar. Except he looked over at her. Melina steeled herself to look back at him as casually as she could.
