Target of Mine: The Night Stalkers 5E (Titan World Book 2)

by M. L. Buchman

  The Land Cruiser veered off course slightly.

  “Damn it!” The SUV was supposed to cripple the tower.

  Instead of hitting the base of the tower as planned, it lodged in the storm fence between the empty Toyota pickup and the tower.

  “That’s why I came early,” Altman pulled a small box from his hip pocket. He had taken supplies from the Little Bird this afternoon and floated downriver himself.

  He dialed in a frequency and pressed a trigger. Two of the four legs on the tower blew out. In slow motion, the tower collapsed over the burning remains of the SUV, blocked the front gate, and the guard shack at the tower’s top shattered the parked black pickup. The tower gunner dove clear at the last moment, but just lay stunned in the mud.

  “Let’s go!”

  Together the three of them raced downslope through the battering rain. They arrived before any of the guards had shaken off the effects of the double explosion so close by. In moments they had them cuffed with zip ties hand and foot. There were only two Hondurans among them, the rest were US ex-military or worse.

  A bright crack of lightning illuminated one of the Little Birds landing just in time to help finish the job. He, Nikita, and Altman all grabbed night-vision goggles, then Drake pointed upward without looking.

  “Nikita, floodlights.”

  In moments she’d shot them out.

  He flicked on the power switch and his world went to the familiar thousand shades of green produced by NVGs.

  He continued securing the downed and now blind guards.

  Then the Tac-50 sounded again, a round hitting metal very close by with a sharp clang.

  He turned in time to see Nikita’s second Tac-50 round hit the Mercedes sedan. Head on in the engine block. A hiss of steam rose from under the hood.

  “I have an idea.”

  “Hit me,” Drake replied.

  So Nikita did. His surprised yelp was only partial payback for making her wear a dress to a gunfight.

  Esly had been on the Little Bird and was now kneeling on the least happy of the guards, who was facedown in the mud. It was the bastard Nikita had disarmed earlier—she should have shot him while she still had the chance.

  Nikita walked up to him and at her nod, Esly turned his head to face her. She flicked on a flashlight for his benefit, not hers.

  “Were you the shooter of the environmentalists?”

  His eyes went wide at her transformation.

  She placed the business end of her Tac-50 an inch from his right eye. The sniper rifle could throw a half-inch round well over a mile. At an inch, the bore would look like a cannon.

  “I suggest you answer her question,” Esly prompted him with a hard knee to the kidney. “She isn’t as patient as I am.”

  Nikita clicked the safety off and braced as if she was about to fire.

  “No! It was Hank. Not here! Not me!” His panicked accent placed him from New Jersey. “He’s back at the underground base. Hank pulled the trigger on both of them; he insisted it was his right as leader. We were just patrol. All we did was track and secure.”

  Nikita kept the gun aimed at him.

  “I swear. It wasn’t me.”

  His right. Killing an innocent was—

  Oddly, she didn’t feel a desire to pull the trigger on the downed guard. She wouldn’t have, he wasn’t a sick animal to be put down. But in the past she’d have thought he was. Now he wasn’t even worth her time.

  She huddled back up with Altman and Drake as Esly finished tying everyone up. Ankles as well as wrists.

  “We need to get this guy Hank out of his hole in the ground and have him come here.”

  “Easy,” Altman shrugged. “But what do we do with him once we get him? And in order to flush him, we’re going to spook off the people we really want. I don’t have a plan for them.”

  Nikita gave a sharp whistle to Esly, who came trotting over. She wore a holstered sidearm, an ammo vest with a half dozen clips, and carried a loaded M16.

  “Well, you didn’t shoot us in the back,” Drake told her. “Guess that means you’re okay.”

  Altman’s grunt made it clear that he’d been comfortable enough around her to not object to her arming herself.

  Nikita ignored both the men. “Esly, how connected is Mercedez?”

  “Are you joking with me? She is a woman who knows everybody and everything.”

  “Do you have her phone number?”

  Esly tapped her forehead and smiled.

  Nikita pulled out Drake’s phone and handed it to her.

  “What am I asking her about?”

  She glanced at Drake and Altman, but they hadn’t put it together yet.

  “Ask her how to reach the most corrupt military commander at the nearest military base. Call it a hunch.”

  Drake smiled slowly as he caught on. “Gutierrez would definitely need the local protection of these guards, but he’d also have an ear inside the military. Let’s see if we can’t cut the whole head off this snake. And now that you mention it, I’d like to ask her a question myself after you’re done with her.”

  Drake’s look could have covered anything from calling in a bomber to pulling her into the darkness for a quick tumble.

  It was the moments when he was being most creative that she couldn’t read him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Once they had the information from Mercedez, Drake had placed his call, stepping away from the others to place it privately. He’d need an authentic reaction of surprise for this part of his plan to work. He also didn’t want the others to reject it as being too stupid for words. Drake could see it in his head; he just hoped that the reality matched.

  Because Altman spoke Spanish and Drake didn’t, Altman then played the role of Gutierrez. He placed a panicked call to the military commander that Mercedez thought was most likely to be involved with siphoning money off a big construction project in his area.

  Altman started nearly hysterical, then escalated from there.

  Drake could only assume he was on script, since he supposedly was shouting something like: “Not just the local crazies. They have helos and are in-bound. Get up here now. Low profile. Only your most trusted. We can’t risk exposure of your role in—” Altman hung up the phone mid-sentence.

  Drake was going to start Spanish lessons the minute he got back to base. Maybe Nikita would give him private lessons; he liked the sound of that. Though he’d suggest somewhere drier. It wasn’t a cold rain, but he was soaked right through. At least it wasn’t Philippine monsoon—if he never hit that again, he’d be a happy camper.

  As soon as Luke was done, Drake got on the radio up to Zoe. She had taken over running the Avenger drone from a small screen and set of controls rigged in the back of the other Little Bird.

  “Black out their cellphones. I don’t want the military able to call Gutierrez.”

  Zoe acknowledged and began working her drone magic.

  Drake checked his phone. It took less than ten seconds before his two wavering bars of signal plummeted to No signal.

  “How long do we have?” he asked Altman.

  “I could hear him shouting orders in the background and he sounded seriously upset. La Ceiba to here in a Huey, which is about the most advanced helicopter they have in their fleet… Half an hour at the earliest, forty-five at the outside.”

  “The timing is going to be tight. Let’s go with Stage Two now. Time to take out the rest of their security.”

  Drake walked over to the pile of gear that Esly had gathered as she stripped off the guards’ gear. He picked out a radio and keyed the mic.

  “Main Gate to Base! Main Gate to Base! We’ve got a problem here.” He copied the New Jersey accent of the trussed-up guard.

  Altman pulled out his sidearm and fired six frantic shots into the jungle.

  Esly unleashed her M16 at the fallen tower’s shack for half a clip on full auto. She must have hit some stored munitions, perhaps the stockpile of Pike missiles, because the sha
ck suddenly shredded itself and a fiery plume shot several stories up into the night sky.

  Drake turned off the radio and tossed it back on the pile. “I think that should do it.”

  “Oops,” Esly didn’t look the least bit sorry, but she did put a fresh clip in the rifle.

  Drake clicked on the encrypted radio to the Night Stalkers team circling above them. “Zoe, you can jam their radio frequencies now as well.”

  “On it,” he heard a quick rattle of keys on the keyboard. “There. Our encrypted radios are in a different frequency band, so we should be fine, but they’re blacked out.”

  “Roger that. Okay, Esly. This part is up to you and Altman. Nikita and I have to run.”

  Esly gave him a hand sign that might have been a “Hurry Up” military signal or might have been a fist pump prior to starting a happy dance.

  He grabbed an M16 and a stack of magazines for himself, and a couple of the guard’s jackets. After a quick stop to make sure Altman was clear on what was happening, he chased after Nikita, who was already halfway to the horizon.

  Drake wished she hadn’t shot the Mercedes sedan; he could certainly use it at the moment. The rain, slashed at him by the hard-gusting winds, pounded so hard on his head that it almost hurt. He couldn’t wipe his eyes fast enough to clear the water streaming out of his hair. Maybe Philippine rain wasn’t so bad.

  Nikita waited, crouching by the burned-out earth mover. She considered giving Drake a moment to catch his breath when he reached her, but where was the fun in that?

  She started to rise but then saw the two Toyota pickups racing by along the perimeter road and settled back down. There was no way for them to see her, as she and Drake had been directly moving across the construction site because it was the shortest distance rather than following the road. And between the rain and their own camouflage clothes, they probably wouldn’t have been seen at three paces, never mind three hundred.

  “They’re moving awfully fast,” Nikita knew that would be a logistical problem for Luke and Esly, dangerously narrowing their engagement time.

  “Should I have stayed and waved a Caution sign at them or something? I don’t see a way to slow them down.”

  Nikita dropped into a prone position and swung out the bipod legs on the Tac-50. She’d done so much training in so many weather conditions that the increasing rain only crossed her attention as a blurring of her sight lines. Rain didn’t affect something as big as the rounds the Tac-50 fired.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  She ignored him and focused on the first pickup in the line, then the front half of it, then the front right tire, then the leading edge of that tire. Using the markings in the scope, she used the typical length of a quad-cab full-sized pickup to estimate the distance. At nine hundred meters and a target the size of a truck tire, she didn’t need to factor in much for temperature, humidity, or Coriolis effect. The wind was the major factor, kicking in the high twenties out of the southeast.

  Nikita tracked the leading edge of the tire long enough to get a feel for the truck’s speed as it jounced along the rough road. At its current speed, it would travel twenty-two meters in the full second it would take her bullet to fly the distance between them—almost exactly three times the truck’s length.

  She swung her rifle ahead more by instinct than thought, fired, and worked the bolt. But she wouldn’t have to fire again. It had been clean. Keeping her line of fire centered in the scope’s field, she saw the tire enter her field of vision just in time to have a hole punched in its sidewall.

  The truck stumbled badly. The driver was good enough that he didn’t flip and roll despite the rough ground. But it slowed them abruptly from sixty kilometers an hour to fifteen. The truck following close behind them nearly rammed into the back, skidding wildly in the mud to avoid a collision.

  As they straightened themselves out, the two Little Birds descended out of the night sky and turned on blinding searchlights, one fore and one aft.

  In moments, Altman and Esly appeared to disarm the mercenaries.

  Nikita watched long enough to see Esly boot one in the balls particularly hard after she tied him up. Apparently she’d found Hank.

  Drake tapped Nikita’s shoulder and they were up and running again.

  “Shit, woman! How did you make that shot?”

  “I could teach you.”

  “But then you’d have to kill me?”

  “No, then you’d be a SEAL.”

  Drake would have laughed if he’d had the breath. He’d been able to match Nikita on a treadmill, barely. Over open terrain he was flat out when she was still in graceful-gazelle mode, carrying the rifle that was almost as long as she was and weighed twenty-five pounds to his M16’s nine with the ease of a relay racer’s baton.

  “What direction will they be coming from?”

  Not able to spare the breath, he pointed the M16 due west. That was the direction of La Ceiba military base.

  Nikita veered in that direction and he followed her.

  They’d been racing toward the helicopters parked near the shack that covered the entrance to underground. Now they were running west. Fifty meters, a hundred, two hundred.

  “This should do it,” she spoke as if she was finishing a morning stroll, not a hard 3K run.

  She lay on the ground facing west.

  He lay beside her, but facing the other direction, back toward the parked helicopters.

  Drake stared at them for a long moment before he saw the problem…nothing was moving. “They’re staying in their bolt hole.”

  “Now what, genius man?”

  “Genius man?”

  “Would you prefer Mr. Mercenary Man, sir?”

  “Sir?” Drake nudged an elbow against her ribs. “I like the sound of sir.”

  “Maybe try a panic call from Hank?” She ignored him.

  “I can fake a random guard’s voice, but I don’t think we can play that card twice. Besides, I didn’t bring one of their radios because I have Zoe blocking their frequencies.”

  “Well, we have about five minutes to flush them out.”

  How to flush a rabbit out of its hole? Going in the front door would just drive them in deeper. Or out the back door. The problem was, he didn’t know where the back door might be.

  Had they built underground because it was a convenient and safe place for their construction headquarters, needing only a simple couple of rooms? Or was it a complex arrangement for other purposes? How could—

  Then he had it.

  He patted the nearest part of Nikita, which turned out to be her splendid behind, earning him a sigh of exasperation.

  Then he tucked in the earpiece for the encrypted radio.

  “Zoe?”

  “Here, Duck-man.”

  “Do you have anything on your Avenger drone that you could rig to act as a ground-penetrating radar?”

  “Would an actual ground-penetrating radar do, or do you want something else?”

  “You brought—”

  “You didn’t say what we’d need, so I had Sophie load up everything I could think of.”

  “I could just kiss you.”

  “If you do, Nikita would pound the shit out of you. So keep it to yourself, Duck-man.”

  “Roger that.” Nikita made no response from close beside him. “We’re right on top of a rabbit warren here. I need to know where it goes.”

  “Give me a couple minutes. My baby is up at forty thousand feet.”

  “You have thirty seconds.”

  “Stingy,” Zoe complained. But it was well under thirty seconds later that he heard the loud whoosh of the Avenger slicing by close above them. She must have descended under full thrust. It was amazing she hadn’t ripped off the wings with that maneuver, but that’s why she was an Avenger pilot and he was merely a DAP Hawk crew chief.

  For a full minute, it swept back and forth making multiple passes. For a full minute, he lay there trying not to be driven deeper into the mud by the blas
ts of wind-driven rain. If it was this bad here, Roatán and the ship—over a hundred and fifty kilometers deeper into the storm—must be getting hammered.

  “These are rough, but it looks as if there’s a small complex and it runs south, away from you and toward the jungle, but doesn’t reach it. On the last pass I did a thermal scan and I don’t see that anyone has come out.”

  “Okay. Drop a pair of JDAMs on their backdoor.”

  “How about a few SDMs instead? The radar and the jamming packages took up too much space and payload for me to carry any of the bigger weapons.”

  “A pair of small diameter bombs should serve my purpose just fine.” At two hundred and fifty pounds each, they’d shake the place hard without doing much damage.

  “SDMs. Wow!” Nikita spoke loud enough to be heard over the ripping wind while they waited for the next pass of the Avenger. “They have put you in a bad mood.”

  “They tried to kill, then kidnap, you. Then that guard was going after your breasts and I’m sorry, I have prior claim to that territory.”

  “That territory?”

  “Your breast territory. I have rights of sole passage until you revoke them. No two-bit mercenary hired hand gets to trample all over my territory.”

  Nikita’s reply was smothered by the pair of bombs that struck a few hundred meters to the west. Great fountains of dirt shot upward, lit in the darkness by the central explosion like a blooming night flower. What kind of flowers did Nikita like? He didn’t know.

  Considering that she was a DEVGRU SEAL, probably exploding ones just like these.

  Dirt spattered down all around them along with the rain, but nothing big was thrown this far.

  He waited for nine heartbeats, then on the tenth saw a stream of people scrambling out of the hut and racing to the parked helicopters.

  “Bingo!”

  “Good timing,” Zoe announced over the radio. “I have three birds incoming from the west that must be Gutierrez’s military connection. Ten kilometers and closing.”