by Dana Marton
But the noises faded as the men ran by the well, heading toward the gate.
She stayed frozen in place, moving just enough to keep herself afloat, her gaze riveted on Walker and the man he’d captured, the brittle tension of impending violence filling the confined space.
Walker glanced at her, swore quietly but viciously, an undercurrent of desperation and resignation in his voice. For the barest of moments, he stilled, almost as if hesitating. Then the moment passed, and he turned back to his captive.
“Two years ago,” Walker whispered to the man, “you were at an abandoned farmhouse about ten miles north of here. A dozen men were killed there.”
The man struggled against Walker, but Walker held him pinned in place.
In the dark, Clara couldn’t see if the blade had nicked the guy’s neck, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if it did. Since she couldn’t think of a way to help Walker, she figured the least she could do was stay out of his way, so she hung on to a protruding stone, and kept quiet.
“One of those men was a tall American. Green eyes, blond hair. His name was Ben,” Walker whispered to the guy. “All I want from you is to tell me who killed him.”
The guy spat. Whether he hit Walker or not, Walker didn’t react.
“Whose hand held the machete?” he asked, his tone colder than the well water and harder than the stone Clara was clinging to.
The guy struggled against him.
Quick movement. A muffled, pain-filled moan. She couldn’t see enough to tell what happened, but then she noticed that the man’s hand was at the side of his head, something dark dripping through his fingers.
Walker’s knife was back at the guy’s neck, but Clara was pretty sure that in that second of action she’d missed, he had cut off the guy’s ear.
Her stomach rolled. On top of the panic from the sheer fact that they were trapped at the bottom of a well in a cartel camp with dozens of armed men looking for them above came the shock of bloody violence right next to her.
“Who killed the American?” Walker demanded again. “The Xibalba or the Tamchén? I want a name.”
The guy spit expletives this time, hoarsely, in Spanish, sounding as if he was gasping for air. Maybe Walker’s free hand was crushing his windpipe.
Another burst of movement. A flash of the knife. Another muffled scream.
Clara was pretty sure the man had lost his remaining ear, and she tried not to think of what he must look like. Nausea bubbled up her throat anyway. Fear squeezed her lungs, and it wasn’t just the fear of discovery from above.
The man croaked a name, unintelligible. Then, probably at some prompting from Walker, he repeated it. “Santiago.”
“Are you sure?”
The man spoke some more, but his voice was too shaky, Clara’s Spanish not nearly perfect, so she didn’t catch all of it. The gist of the few rasped sentences was that the man was certain, as Santiago had cut off his nose at the same time, for not catching the traitors sooner.
Then came an endless moment of silence, the tension in the well so thick they could have climbed it.
Then a violent, crunching pop.
Walker’s shadowy form separated from the man’s. After another endless moment, the man sank into the water, one dark shadow swallowed by another.
Walker hung on to the rock wall with one hand but was otherwise motionless.
She moved away, wary of the dead body somewhere under the surface. She couldn’t tear her gaze from Walker. This is who he is. He warned me. But stupidly, she hadn’t believed him. Because stupidly, she’d been falling for him.
Her mind felt like someone had taken an eggbeater to it, her limbs stiff, her breathing labored. She turned from him, needing to shut him out for a moment.
A hand touched her side.
She shoved her elbow back against what she thought was his arm coming around her, but whatever had bumped into her wasn’t Walker. There was no resistance. The thing simply floated away.
She turned her head to see what was behind her, the smell giving away the corpse before the shape. A bloated body floated in the well next to her. The noseless man sinking to the bottom must have dislodged another corpse. Or maybe it had been floating around the perimeter all this time and she just hadn’t seen it until now.
Past her breaking point, she lurched to the wall, blindly grabbing for rocks, trying to pull herself out of the water with every ounce of strength she had, slipping back over and over again because the rocks this close to the water were covered with some kind of slippery lichen.
Walker came to her, put himself between her and the floating corpse. “Hold on. Clara?”
But she just shook her head. She couldn’t talk right now. She couldn’t catch enough air, and what air she caught stank to high heaven. As they treaded water, all she could think of was all the other decomposing bodies below them.
Random gunfire shattered the silence of the night up above. Car motors came to life. Vehicles passed by the well.
Her heart hammered in panic. She was an investigator, not a super spy or special ops soldier. This was not how her cases usually went. She read case files and followed leads. She made phone calls and interviewed people. Mostly, it was very civilized. Investigations were about piecing clues together, not about bloody torture and going for midnight swims with dead bodies.
The difference between her being a government investigator and Walker being an ex-Navy SEAL turned mercenary came into sudden, sharp focus. The gap between them was a yawning chasm. The point driven home when, while she was grappling with the thought that she could be soon one of the well’s corpses, Walker calmly said, “Moving on to Plan B.”
They had a Plan B?
“I have a little distraction set up,” he told her as he searched for a handhold in the rock wall.
He must have found one, because he pulled himself up, two full feet out of the water, then reached hand over hand and climbed up another two feet. “Keep transferring your weight from hand to hand, foot to foot. Make sure you have two points of solid support before you go for the next handhold.”
He moved up another foot. “The slippery stuff is only on the bottom twenty inches or so.”
She reached up as high as she could, felt the rock. He was right. No lichen there.
Okay. She had to get her act together. She had to focus on survival. “Should I go right behind you?”
“No. It’s too dark for you to see where I grab on to, so you can’t follow my grips anyway. Below me, you’ll just be in danger if I slip. Come up next to me.”
She was not a climber. At the gym, she spent most of her time on the treadmill. She lifted some weights for muscle tone, but that was it. While she was in good enough shape to have passed the fitness test required by her job, her usual workout routine wasn’t exactly “hell week” on Coronado Beach.
But she reached for a handhold, and when she found a good one, tested it. She was grateful that the ancient well had been built with irregular fieldstones instead of smooth brick. She pulled her upper body out of the water. The floating corpse bumping into her thigh provided the motivation for her to go higher.
Walker climbed to her right, a full length ahead of her. He turned his head to check on her, then whispered over his shoulder, “Take your time.”
She did. Because there was no way she was falling back into that water.
Coming down, she hadn’t had a chance to notice how deep the well was, and when she’d been on the bottom, judging the distance up proved difficult in the dark. Only now, going handhold by handhold, did she fully appreciate how deep they’d dropped.
“When did you last have a tetanus shot?” Walker asked.
“What? Why?”
“You have an open wound on your side. That water was pretty nasty.”
She winced. She hadn’t thought about her side. Whatever the medicine man had put on the wound numbed the injury completely. She hoped the paste also sealed the broken skin. “I had a shot last year.”
>
“Good,” he said as he climbed.
Halfway up, he stopped and waited for her. They rested a few minutes side by side.
The sounds of men running around and shouting to each other filtered down, echoed around in the well. As she clung to the rocks, her muscles burning, she fervently hoped nobody would think of looking in there. She doubted anyone had ever voluntarily gone into the well before.
Walker reached out and pressed a hand against her back, supporting her weight partially so she didn’t have to hang on so hard. “Are you okay?”
She drew a deep breath. “Not even close.”
“You’re doing fine,” he said, then, after another minute, pulled his hand back. “Let’s go, Clara.”
The distance to the mouth of the well seemed endless, but they made it. She figured, altogether they’d climbed about forty feet.
They stayed inside, peeking out carefully. Although several vehicles had left to search the jungle around the camp, plenty of men had stayed behind, every corner now brightly lit, shooters on the rooftops with nasty-looking rifles.
Clara’s stomach dropped. They couldn’t possibly climb out without being noticed. And they couldn’t hold on forever where they were. They’d fall back down again. Despite the chill of her wet clothes, sweat beaded on her forehead as she held on to the rim.
But Walker reached into his pocket and pulled out his rigged cell phone.
“Let’s hope the water didn’t kill it. Okay, here comes Plan B. Hold on tight. Ready?” He flashed her a grim look, then pushed a button.
An explosion shook the well, enough to have shaken them off if they were still clinging to the rock-wall side instead of hanging on to the lip of the well, a more secure hold.
“Now!” Walker shouted into her ear that was ringing from the explosion, then he vaulted out of the well, reaching back to pull her after him.
The hangar was burning, the roof and sides ripped open as if by giant claws. While everyone was looking at the fire and ducking from the debris falling from the sky, Walker and Clara ran for the fence, then followed it to the gate.
The guards had their full attention on the flaming hangar, shouting, “Qué pasa?” to each other.
While she tried to catch her breath, Walker put down the guards without hesitation, one bullet each to the head. As the men dropped, he ran for the gate. Clara ran behind him.
He shoved her through first. “Go!”
She didn’t have to be told twice. In pure survival mode, she darted into the jungle that edged the dirt road, into cover.
“This way.” Walker yanked her to the right after just a few yards, onto an animal trail he somehow knew was there.
The darkness around them was oppressive, a wall of black. She had no idea what was behind or in front of them. She tried to be careful of where she stepped, knowing that if she didn’t twist an ankle or get skewered on a broken branch, it would be only sheer dumb luck.
And luck tended to run out eventually.
Every yard they moved forward seemed more nerve-racking than the one before. But Walker didn’t go far. He stopped less than half a mile into the jungle. “We’ll spend the night here. It’s too dangerous to run through the jungle in the dark like this. And as soon as Miguel’s men clear the compound, they’ll be out, looking for us.” He pointed up. “Remember this place?”
How could she remember something she couldn’t see? Her mind was so freaked-out, it was numb.
“Up,” he said, stepping to the nearest tree. And as soon as she moved next to him, he grabbed her by the waist and boosted her up to the lowest branch. “It’s the surveillance tree from last night. Keep going until you reach the cross branch.”
She had no choice but to obey, reaching up, hoping she would be grabbing on to a branch and not a poisonous snake. At least, the higher she went, the more she could see in the moonlight. She found the cross branch. She sat on the thickest part and waited for Walker.
He was up next to her within a minute, wedged his body against the tree trunk and made himself comfortable, then drew her against him to offer the support of his body.
She pulled away. She couldn’t touch him. Not after what she’d just witnessed in the well. Her stomach was still rolling.
“How did you do that back there?” She asked the first question that popped into her mind, to distract herself. “How did you blow up the hangar?”
“Remember the C4 I got from that construction site?”
She closed her eyes. Of course.
He said, “I had a brick taped under the truck.”
Her stomach rolled harder. The bomb had been next to her the whole way in? “So you planned to blow up the place all along?”
“I set it up as a contingency plan. In case of emergency.”
She was gasping for air again. She slowed her breathing so she wouldn’t hyperventilate.
She’d had about all she could handle in one night. “You know how you kept saying that I was in over my head? You were right.”
“Try to relax.” His voice was laced with concern.
Hysteria bubbled up her throat. “I just watched you cut a guy’s ears off while I was swimming with a decomposing corpse. A seriously scary drug cartel is hunting us. And I’m in the middle of the jungle, in the middle of the night, sixty feet up a tree. For all I know, there are a dozen tarantulas and snakes up here next to me. I don’t think I’ll ever relax again.” She shuddered. “Or feel clean.”
Her skin was crawling. Her clothes stank of well water.
“The rain will help with the smell,” he told her.
“It’s not raining.”
“Wait for it.”
Because now he could predict weather?
But barely a couple of minutes passed before the downpour hit them. The rain truly did come as hard as a shower, then harder.
“How did you know?”
“The animals sounded different.”
Oookay.
Rainwater washed over them, pouring out of the sky in a steady flow. They sat in silence. The rain kept coming down without slowing.
“Is it possible to drown in a tree?” she asked. She needed to talk, because when she wasn’t talking, she was thinking about what had happened in the well.
“You’re not going to drown.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve been through Navy SEAL training. First thing they do is try to drown you. Picture doing sit-ups on the beach in the surf with the waves washing over your head. We were under water more than we were above it.”
“So Navy SEAL training lives up to the hype?”
“And then some.”
“How tough is it?”
Maybe he knew how desperate she was for distraction, because he answered at length and with specifics. “Plenty tough. But it’s not all about endurance. You start with eight weeks of Naval Special Warfare Prep School. Then twenty-four weeks of BUD/S training. Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL.”
“Which is where you learned how to handle explosives.”
He nodded. “After that, three weeks of Parachute Jump School.”
“I don’t think I could do that.”
“Not to worry, they push you right out if you hesitate,” he said. “Once you get good at jumping, you go to SEAL Qualification Training for twenty-six weeks.”
“That’s a lot.”
“That’s just the beginning,” he told her. “You get the trident at that point, and you’re officially a SEAL, you get assigned to a team, but the pain is not over. Next is ProDev, six months of Professional Development—Individual Specialty Training. Then six months of Unit Level Training. Then six months of Squadron Integration Training.”
“How does anyone ever get through all that?”
“Over eighty percent drop out.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I like to finish what I start.”
“I guess that means there’s no way you’re going to give up your revenge mission here.”
>
“None whatsoever.”
“And if someone tried to stop you?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it.”
She closed her eyes for a long moment, let the rain wash down her eyelids before she opened them again. “Why can’t you just stop fighting?”
“Fighting is all I’ve done, all my life.” His tone roughened. “I killed people for my country. Now I kill them for my brother. It’s the only thing I know how to do. Identify the enemy, kill the enemy. I have no other skills. I’ve gone too far to learn how to play nice with others.”
He rubbed a hand over his face, then looked at her. “What am I going to do if I go back to the US, sell insurance?”
The stark finality of his words spread coldly through her. “So it’s a suicide mission?”
This wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to her, and that she might be right scared her. “You take out as many people involved in your brother’s death as possible until someone shoots you dead?”
“I’ve made my bed,” he told her without taking his eyes off her. “I’m prepared to lie in it.”
* * *
A good hour passed before the rain abated. The night was warm enough so Clara wasn’t terribly cold even wet.
She didn’t think she could sleep, but she must have, because she startled awake at dawn, facing Walker, straddling his lap in fact, her face buried into his neck while he held her to his chest with an arm looped around her waist. He must have pulled her onto his lap while she’d slept.
She yanked herself back, and the arm instantly tightened around her.
Walker blinked a few times, as if he too was just waking up at last.
“Easy,” he said in a voice rusty with sleep. “You’ll fall off backwards.”
And her brain finally caught up with the fact that they were at least sixty feet up in the air.
She cleared her throat, trying to keep her balance while keeping a few inches of distance between them. “Why are we like this?”
He kept his arm around her waist. “Your legs kept slipping off the branch, and I was afraid they’d pull you down. You needed to be in a position so that your inert weight would pull you toward the tree, not away from it.”
