Flash Fire

by Dana Marton

  In fact, it sounded more like a suicide pact.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Traffic was light at this hour, so Walker had no trouble getting out of town. But instead of heading back to Furino, he was looking for an obscure old logging road that would take him where he needed to be.

  “Are you sure the Tamchén would keep Rosita at their jungle compound instead of in town?” Clara asked next to him as they bounced over uneven ground.

  “This is where they have the highest security. It’s where they keep the things they want to hide. This is where they do all their dirty deeds these days. And this is where the well is,” he added.

  “What well?”

  “Tamchén means deep well in Maya. Back in ancient times, the Mayans used wells to collect rain water. The Tamchén’s jungle compound has one that’s probably a thousand years old. They like tossing people down and letting them die slowly. Gives them time to ask questions.”

  She digested that for a few seconds before asking, “So if Tamchén means deep well, does Xibalba have any special meaning?”

  “Xibalba means place of fear.”

  “Another Mayan word?”

  He nodded.

  “Why not something Spanish?”

  He hadn’t given that much thought, didn’t see what difference it made. But, of course, Clara would want to know. She wanted to know everything about everything. He grinned. When you got used to it, it was actually an endearing quality.

  “Maybe using an ancient name is a psychological thing,” he said. “Sends a message that they’ve always been here and always will be. Establishing legitimacy.”

  “Resistance is futile?”

  He turned to her. Did she just quote Star Trek? He didn’t understand how flocks of men weren’t following her moon-eyed in love with her.

  Before he could examine why that thought sent a sudden flash of jealousy through him, his phone rang. He picked it up. One of Santiago’s men was on the other end.

  “Santiago says you can go back to Furino now. The banditos won’t be after you no more.” The guy slurred the words. Probably the whole Xibalba compound in Mercita was celebrating. “They didn’t know what hit them. We were on them like a hurricane. Blew those banditos away.”

  “You found the lost shipment?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How mad is Carlos?”

  “He’s off on some business. Haven’t seen him in a week. We’ll get the shipment before he comes back. We have a couple of Pedro’s boys. I’m thinking they’ll be talking before morning,” the man said in a dark tone.

  Santiago was a master of the blade. He’d come up from the cattle ranches, had spent his early years castrating bulls, then, later on, butchering them. But Pedro’s men couldn’t confess what they didn’t know. Walker didn’t envy the night they had ahead of them.

  For a moment, maybe due to Clara’s influence, he looked for remorse inside himself. He couldn’t find any. He’d heard the banditos bragging at the cantina one too many times about what they’d done to people they’d robbed, women they’d raped.

  “I’m not gonna lie. I’ll breathe easier knowing Pedro’s crew is not hunting me,” Walker told the guy. “Thanks, amigo.”

  The man on the other end laughed. “As Santiago said, you’ve done the cartel a favor. He don’t forget that shit.”

  After they hung up, Walker put the phone back into his pocket, thinking hard as he drove.

  So Carlos had been gone for a week. What did that mean? Was he looking for his half sister personally? Maybe they were that close. Still, Carlos had men to send to do his bidding. He couldn’t exactly go to the Tamchén camp and try to blend in. People knew his face. So what was he up to? Where the hell was he?

  Maybe he’d been kidnapped too.

  No, that didn’t make sense. If the Tamchén managed to get their hands on him, they’d kill him and take over his operations. Maybe he was in the US, setting up large-scale distribution for his super pills.

  Clara shifted next to Walker on her seat, peering out at the rainforest. Night had swallowed them. The headlights helped, but even so, the dark, towering jungle was probably unnerving for someone who wasn’t used to it.

  She showed every sign of alertness but few signs of fear. He wanted to pull over and kiss her. He wanted to pull her over into his lap.

  His body stirred at the thought. Sadly, he’d bet pesos against papadzules—egg-filled enchiladas with pumpkin seed sauce—that she’d shoot him for manhandling her.

  She was a fast draw. He needed to remember that.

  As if to underscore his thoughts, she checked her gun. When she was satisfied, she slipped the Glock back into her boot.

  “Almost there,” he told her.

  * * *

  “Is this really necessary?”

  Clara stared at Walker as he pointed up the tree they were standing under. They were in the jungle, the night pitch-dark around them. She could barely see the tree trunk let alone the higher branches. Rain began to drizzle once again.

  “Surveillance,” he said.

  “This has bad idea written all over it.”

  Although, she was glad to be out of the pickup’s cab. Spending time with Walker in tight quarters was getting to her more and more. His testosterone/pheromone cloud trapped her in an annoying state of physical awareness. The whole drive out, some insane part of her had been wishing that he’d pull over, draw her into his lap, and kiss her.

  She didn’t know what was wrong with her. It had to be the heat, or the exotic environment. Or maybe Consuela’s chili peppers had strong aphrodisiac properties. Clara made a mental note not to eat those again.

  Oblivious to her desperate state, Walker linked his fingers in front of him. “I’ll give you a boost up.”

  She stepped into the boost with her right foot. Then realized she would have to put her hands on his shoulders, so she did—no way to gracefully back out now.

  Her palms connected with solid muscles. Wanting to escape the situation as quickly as possible, she heaved herself upward, pushing down on him. But she lost her balance and pitched forward, slamming her breasts into his face.

  He made a muffled sound while she scrambled like mad to extricate herself, straightening her knee so she could move her torso above his head. Then she let him go and reached for a handhold on the tree. Only when his nose knocked against her pubic bone did she realize that now she was mushing her hoo-ha into his lips.

  She scrambled like a spider monkey on speed and caught the lowest branch, pulled herself up. Her heart hammered hard in her chest. Thank God it was too dark for him to see her flushed cheeks.

  Given a choice, she would gladly have avoided him, say for a week, but under the circumstances, she reached down a hand to help him. He jumped for the branch instead and caught on easily, then went for the next branch above, pulled her up, then one more level, and one more, and one more, until they were at a juncture of multiple branches that created a spot where they could comfortably sit.

  She took care so their bodies wouldn’t touch. He made no reference to her trying to smother him first with her boobs then with her… She drew a steadying breath. She might have found the first thing she liked about him. The man could keep quiet if someone’s life absolutely, positively depended on it.

  He pulled out his knife. “Give me your boots. This rain is going to get in there. I’m going to put a couple of holes just above the soles to let water out. Staying wet hour after hour is not good for you. You get swamp feet.”

  Yay. Because things weren’t bad enough already. She groaned. And handed him her left boot.

  Up here, a little more moonlight filtered through, so they could see better.

  He gave a wry chuckle as he set to work. “Some people think the jungle is romantic. Usually people who never spent a week in a rainforest. In reality, it’s all about survival of the fittest.”

  She thought about the snakes and the spiders and the caimans and the bandits. “Scary.”


  “Not if you’re the fittest.” He grinned at her as he handed her the first boot, newly ventilated, then asked for the second.

  While he worked on that, she looked around so she wouldn’t have to look at him. A rucksack hung from a broken branch next to them. Obviously, he’d been here before.

  “What’s in that?” she asked, needing distraction.

  “Some water, a backup gun, and binoculars with night vision.” Walker handed her other boot back, then leaned against the trunk, spread his legs, and pulled her between them, her back to his chest, an arm loosely around her waist so she wouldn’t fall. “We should be safe here.”

  Oh God. Her breasts and other parts were still tingling from the boost-up fiasco. He could not be embracing her!

  Breathe. Not an embrace, she told herself. His hand on her was a safety measure, plain and simple. Safety. Measure.

  He certainly didn’t seem in any way perturbed. She followed his gaze to focus on whatever he was watching in the distance. If she acted normal, maybe her body would believe that this was nothing out of the ordinary.

  They were close enough to the Tamchén camp to see the outdoor lights. She counted six buildings, one large hangar, the others smaller, flat-roofed storage buildings from the looks of them. The compound was fenced, but even with the lights, she couldn’t judge the height of the fence. She guessed anywhere between eight and ten feet. “Is there electricity in the wires?”

  “No.” Walker reached for the rucksack, checked it for critters, retrieved a pair of clunky night-vision binoculars, then fitted them to his eyes. “The cartels are too powerful for anyone to seriously consider an attack. Everybody is scared of them, and they have the government in their pockets.”

  “You use this tree to watch them,” she said.

  “Studying the enemy.”

  “But you do jobs for them?”

  “The best way to study the enemy is from the inside. In any case, like I said before, I work for myself.”

  She thought of Ben, his brother who’d died two years ago. Walker had said he’d come here two years ago. He’d said his hometown had gone to hell, gone to drugs.

  “Did your brother die from a drug overdose?” Clara asked him.

  “No. Although, not from lack of trying.”

  They sat in silence for a full minute before he added, “He OD’d once when what he shot up was unexpectedly pure. Basically, you have no way of telling how much the heroin has been cut, how potent it is. He was lucky. Quick intervention saved him. A guy I knew in the navy died because he was allergic to quinine, which was the cutting agent in the batch he got. I knew someone else who died just because he shot up someplace new. It’s called environment-conditioned tolerance. The body associates the place where you are while shooting up with the drug, prepares you for the drug while you’re in that place. But if you shoot up the same amount at a different location, the body is not prepared for it and can’t take it.”

  “You know a lot about this.”

  “I looked into it.”

  They both fell silent, then she asked, “If your brother didn’t die from an overdose, then how?”

  Walker didn’t answer.

  “Cards on the table,” she reminded him once again. She figured it wouldn’t be the last time. He didn’t easily volunteer information.

  Clara didn’t mean to be insensitive about Ben’s death. But it figured heavily into what Walker was doing down here, and now she was involved. In her rule book, that meant she had the right to know.

  And after a while, looking away from her, he said in a reluctant tone, “Ben was three years younger than me. I joined the navy. A few years later, he joined the Army Reserves. Even when we were kids, he always copied what I did. He looked up to me. And later, he wanted to be in the military like I was. Only he wasn’t cut out for it.”

  He paused for a moment. “He shouldn’t have reenlisted after he was done with the first four years. But I’d just gotten into the SEALs. So Ben figured a Navy SEAL couldn’t have a quitter for a brother. Like he’d be an embarrassment to me or something.”

  Walker looked out into the darkness, his voice tightly controlled. “He was deployed overseas. Straight into combat. The bloodshed did things to him. He came home with PTSD, got into drugs, then got into selling so he could afford his drugs. Then he got into trafficking. I was in the Middle East, clueless.

  After a somber moment, he added, “Ben ended up down here somehow. Then he managed to get on the cartels’ bad side. Someone decided to make an example out of him and a few others.”

  His voice was detached, devoid of all emotion. He wasn’t raging or threatening but was all the scarier for it.

  “They killed him,” Clara guessed, her heart filling with sympathy.

  “Torture and decapitation.” His tone turned hard and dark. “I saw the crime scene photos. About a dozen men were killed at the same time. The main room had this Mexican tile floor in a checkerboard pattern. The heads were all scattered around, as if someone had been playing a board game. The bodies were in the basement. The cops wouldn’t let me go down there. I had to match his body to his head at the morgue later.”

  The images his words painted overwhelmed her. She leaned against him.

  His arm tightened around her. “I had his remains sent back to the States, but he disappeared en route. I couldn’t even bury my little brother.”

  She could feel the pain that radiated out of him reach deep inside her.

  “I’m still looking for him, have a bunch of requests out for records,” he said. “I’m never going to give that up.”

  Suddenly, she understood why he’d acted so stiffly at the incinerator, as if he’d been holding something back. If Ben’s body was lost and there was no record of it, he could easily have ended up in an incinerator somewhere, the same as all those other unidentified bodies in Mercita.

  She understood Walker’s need for revenge, but she also understood that it was going to get him killed, and everything she was rejected that thought. She stayed leaning against him and just breathed for a while. “Is there no way at all to work with the authorities?”

  “I tried the local police first. Then I tried the DEA. You can guess how helpful they were. I even went as far as the top Chiapas politicians. Nothing. They prefer sweeping things like this under the rug.”

  Clara could imagine, after what she’d seen today. But… “You can’t take out two entire cartels on your own.”

  His wide chest rose and fell at her back as he drew a deep breath. “Actually, I’m aiming for the bandits and the gangs too. Flash fire.”

  She turned her head as far as she could, trying to look at him. “I don’t know what that means.”

  He shifted on the branch. “First time I was on a submarine, we had a flash fire. It’s a combustion explosion. A flammable mist builds up in the air, then suddenly, bam. Think superhigh temperatures and a rapidly moving flame front. It kills by asphyxiation. Burns up all the available oxygen. It’s devastating.”

  She tried her best to figure out what he was saying. A minute or two passed before she managed. “So you’re trying to get the amount and ratio of combustible materials right to burn this entire region down?”

  “Just the criminal element.”

  “Are you completely suicidal?” She wished he could see his expression better, but the shadows concealed his face.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he handed her the binoculars. “Let’s find Rosita.”

  After a moment, she turned back to take a look.

  A dozen sentries moved around inside the fence.

  “Let me know if you see a noseless guy,” Walker said behind her.

  “Voldemort?”

  He didn’t laugh at the joke but said, “He might have a bandana covering his face.”

  She wouldn’t blame the guy, Clara thought, and kept searching. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know his name,” Walker said as if it pained him. “But he was there when Ben was kil
led. He can tell me who killed my brother. I need to know who held the machete.” Walker’s tone dipped into scary territory.

  And yet, she still wasn’t scared of him.

  Some stupid part of her wanted to hug him, so she made sure not to so much as turn toward him.

  Through the binoculars, she watched the cartel men out in the open, but everybody had a nose, so she refocused on the buildings. “How will we know where they’re keeping Rosita?”

  “Look for a door that’s more heavily guarded than the others.”

  She did. “None of the buildings are guarded. I only see perimeter guards. Does that mean that Rosita isn’t here?”

  He wouldn’t respond for several seconds. Then he said, “We are going to have to go in to make sure.”

  * * *

  Clara brushed leaves and twigs out of her hair, grateful to be back in her room at the guesthouse after two hours of jungle surveillance, then another hour of a dicey nighttime ride through the barely there dirt roads of the rainforest.

  Walker had said he had to set up certain things to infiltrate the Tamchén compound, and there wasn’t enough time for that before daylight. Their infiltration op had to wait until the following night. Which gave them some time to rest and get ready, definitely a plus as far as she was concerned.

  Not that she could think all that well at the moment, not when Walker was walking into the room, naked save a towel riding low on his hips. Drops of water glistened on his chest.

  He was incredibly, unfairly attractive. Hotter than the equator. A bead of water ran down his rippled abs, and her gaze followed it helplessly as it disappeared under the towel.

  One thing was sure, she hadn’t known the meaning of lust until she’d met Light Walker. Actually, she used to think the whole blinded-by-irresistible-lust story was a myth people made up as an excuse to sleep around. She didn’t believe in the existence of anything “irresistible.”

  When you wanted something you knew you probably shouldn’t have, you simply listed the pros and cons, arrived at a well-reasoned no, end of story. You simply resisted. Not exactly rocket science.