Jungle Inferno

by Desiree Holt

“Not until we know if he’s communicated anything dangerous to whoever his psychic partner is. And until he gives up the name of the person who pinpointed the meeting between the Wolf and Escobedo.”

  “Then they’d damn well better find out who these people are. And let us take care of it.”

  “And then, of course, there’s that other matter.”

  Mr. Brown fixed his companion with an icy stare. “Ah, yes. And exactly what are we supposed to do with that?”

  His stomach roiled at the message the angry voice had imparted on the phone. “Get rid of him, what else?”

  “In a hospital room with people walking in and out all the time?” Green had asked.

  “Damn it. I don’t pay you to ask me questions. Figure it out.”

  “What if he knows something?” Brown asked now, as Green repeated the instructions. “Like maybe there’s another man still out there unaccounted for, another one besides Halloran that Escobedo and his men also missed. That’s not important to find out?”

  “Then we’re to move him first.” His own anger had reached the boiling point. “This thing has fallen apart and if we don’t fix it we’ll all be marching through the gates of hell.”

  Brown swallowed his own irritation. “Fine. We’ll take care of it.”

  “We’d better do it soon. He’s waiting for my call.”

  Chapter Six

  Faith managed to get rid of Tia at last by taking two painkillers and letting her assistant help her get into bed. She swore to the woman she’d call if she felt any worse. Tia left with great reluctance, promising—no, threatening—to check on her often. Faith finally told her she appreciated her concern but it was time to go to sleep.

  It took a long time for the pain to disappear. When it subsided enough for her to move, she fixed herself something light to eat and got back into bed. The evening hours ticked by as she focused her mind and tried to reach out to Mark. This time she didn’t want to wait for him to speak first. But shortly after midnight she fell asleep without making any contact at all.

  When she awoke in the morning a heavy feeling of dread gripped her and a sense that time was slipping by too quickly. She’d have to figure out how to move Tia along faster without giving herself away.

  First things first. Put off the book currently due, pitch the one she’d conjured up to use as a cover story to her agent and buy herself some time. No way could she concentrate on a fictional plot when a real one was consuming her life. She sat at the desk in her den and gathered her thoughts before speed-dialing a familiar number.

  “Why do I think this can’t be good?” Abigail Loudon asked when she heard Faith’s voice.

  “That’s because you have a naturally suspicious mind,” she tried to joke. Flipping a pencil back and forth between her fingers, she did her best to put enthusiasm into her voice as she attempted to cajole her hard-working agent. “Abby, I know we have a contract in place for the next book in the series but just listen to me. I’ve got a great idea that I can’t put aside. You know how I am when I need to get something out of my head and on paper right away.”

  “And you know I get hives when you get that tone in your voice.” Abby’s words held a mixture of humor and exasperation. The two women had worked together for seven years now.

  “But this story is too good to just sit,” Faith told her and proceeded to outline her proposal. “The other one will still be timely even if it waits for a year. Political garbage in Washington doesn’t change, unfortunately. But this other is hot, current stuff.”

  “I don’t know.” Abby was silent a moment. “How will you even get people to agree to let you interview them? A lot of this is classified stuff.”

  “Have I ever had a problem before?” Faith tossed the pencil down and picked up a paper clip. Her hands wouldn’t keep still.

  “No but I say again. This is a different ball game.” A heavy sigh made its way over the connection. “All right. They’ll probably go for it because this stuff is all over the news right now. I’ll do the dirty work with your editor. Send me a proposal so I can get your contract done before they decide it’s a bad deal. And if they give us the green light, you’d better get yourself busy before they change their minds.”

  Faith blew a kiss over the telephone. “Abby, you are worth every penny you wring out of me. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  “Make this one a dynamite bestseller. That’s payment enough.”

  Faith replaced the receiver in the cradle and tossed the now-bent paper clip into the waste basket. So now she had some breathing room, at least as far as her deadlines went. But Mark’s situation didn’t allow for any such luxury.

  On impulse she picked up the phone again and dialed the Halloran house, a number she knew by heart.

  “Oh, Faith, I was just thinking about you.” Dinah Halloran’s voice was warm and welcoming. “It was so nice to see you the other day. And just last night Frank and I were commenting on your last book and wondering when the next one would be out.”

  Faith worked to keep her tone casual. “Probably a little later than expected. I came up with a new plot and I haven’t finished the research yet. In fact, that’s what I’m calling about.”

  “Oh? Sweetheart, I can’t imagine what we could tell you to use in those political thrillers of yours.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if you’d heard anything since we talked about Mark. You know, if he was coming home soon or anything. I wanted to interview him.”

  Dinah laughed. “I’m sure you won’t be surprised when I tell you Mark is the sphinx himself when it comes to stuff like that. You’d better think of someone else you can talk to.”

  “But have you heard anything?” she persisted, trying to keep the pressure out of her voice.

  “Not a word.” She paused. “Faith, is there some other reason you want to know about Mark? Something you aren’t telling me?”

  Faith’s laugh sounded false even to herself. “No, no. Just thinking how nice it would be to see him again. That’s all.”

  “Well, at the risk of repeating myself I have to say this. You two ought to take a good look at how you feel about each other before too much more time passes. Life can be a lot shorter than you think.”

  No kidding.

  “We’re fine, Dinah. Honestly.”

  “Uh-huh.” She chuckled. “Okay. I’ll mind my own business. And if he calls, which he usually does when he’s back from wherever he was, doing whatever it is he does, I’ll be sure he gets in touch with you.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Dinah. I’ll stop by again soon.”

  Well, that went nowhere.

  Sighing, she opened a blank document on her computer and began writing a synopsis. Once she had the contract for it and that would give her more leverage—more legitimacy—to get in to see some of the people she needed to talk to. Then she’d start making a list of exactly who those people were.

  * * * * *

  Major John Gregorio hung up his telephone and ran his hand over his military-cut, graying brown hair. Some days he wondered why he’d never taken up his father-in-law’s offer to work in the construction business. He might have hated it but at least he wouldn’t have sleepless nights over the men he’d sent to be killed.

  He pounded his fist on the desk in helpless frustration. Three days since the extraction team had returned to the rendezvous point, found only Joey Latrobe’s badly wounded and near-lifeless body. The gear was smashed and there was no trace of the rest of the team. They’d gotten Joey back to US soil and the young sniper still lay in a coma in Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. They had no idea what had happened to the rest of the men. Except for one small scrap of information. When they’d gotten Joey on board the helo, before he passed out again he’d managed to get out three words, “Took the captain.”

  When they reported this to Gregorio he swore them to secrecy. If Mark got away and was somehow trying to complete the mission on his own, he didn’t want the traitor to find out. If,
instead, he’d been captured, the major had to figure a way to find him and get him out without starting a war. The politics of the situation boggled his mind. He could never understand why preserving a political status quo with a band of murderers was more important than retrieving their own people.

  Probably why I’ll never run for office.

  Since then he’d been doing his damnedest to get information that would tell him what happened to one of his top teams but with little success. He had the feeling someone knew and had slammed shut every door, covering his tracks. For a moment he wished for Mark Halloran’s ability to communicate mentally. Maybe he could pick up someone else’s brain waves.

  Colonel Frank Ryan, his superior officer at SpecOps Command at MacDill AFB, was tearing out what was left of his own hair. He’d been on the horn to JSOC and everyone else he could think of without any luck at all. No one seemed to know anything. No, worse. No one wanted to know anything.

  Then, finally, the order came down from the Pentagon not to mount a search and rescue mission. The considered opinion was that Joey Latrobe was the only survivor and it would be political suicide to go into that particular area of Peru and look for dead men. Well, hell, there wasn’t any proof they were all dead. And somehow Gregorio knew that Mark Halloran would have found a way to stay alive, captured or not.

  “I know it’s tough, John,” Ryan had told him. “I have a special feeling for Mark too. For all the men. But if we go rogue on this, after the order’s come down, we’ll all be in deep shit. If he’s somehow still alive—if any of them are—we have to pray they can find a way to contact us. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

  Not good enough, Gregorio thought to himself. Whatever Ryan’s trying is just not good enough. If only Latrobe would regain consciousness and give them some kind of additional information.

  Beyond that Gregorio needed to figure out what had gone wrong. The information had come, at great peril, to a member of the unit. Unusual since it wasn’t your everyday soldier who usually got info like that. But there was a relationship with Joey Latrobe’s brother and he was the one who’d brought it to Gregorio. So it had worked its way up the ladder, touching as few people as possible, with as much secrecy as possible, waiting for the go ahead to plan the mission.

  Once the order came down from the top, only the head of SpecOps, Ryan himself and his team knew it was a go. Not even the other Delta Force teams were aware of it. It sickened Gregorio that someone highly placed in the military would betray his country and his men but he didn’t know what else to think. There were only so many places the leak could have sprung.

  Bringing his computer to life, he entered his secure password and began to call up the records of each man in Mark’s unit. Not that he wouldn’t personally vouch for each and every one but you just never knew when a tiny slip might send a signal to someone. Even the knowledge that one of them might be unreachable for a while could trigger something if the wrong person was looking.

  But an hour later he had to admit it was a futile exercise. He and Halloran had personally chosen each member of the unit together. If his own instincts might be getting a little rusty, Mark’s certainly weren’t. No answers there.

  He leaned back in his chair and picked up his mug of cold coffee, grimacing at its bitter taste. Staring at the corkboard over his desk an unpleasant thought dropped into his brain. Whoever these people were, would they try to eliminate Latrobe believing he could give out information about what happened? And where any survivors might be?

  That at least was a situation he could do something about. He picked up his phone again and dialed a familiar number.

  * * * * *

  The Wolf was prowling. Only an incredible amount of learned self-discipline kept his growing anger in check. He smelled disaster in the making and he didn’t like it. That’s what I get for dealing with savages, he told himself.

  But of course these savages had spent millions with him, not just their money but the orders they continued to funnel through from other groups. It pissed him off royally that Escobedo always insisted on a face to face to complete the transaction but for the money he made from them he put aside his distaste. This time, however, Murphy’s Law ruled.

  It was bad enough that he had to have his helicopter bring him to this miserable tent camp in the Peruvian jungle, with none of the conveniences he was used to. For twenty-four hours he always managed to make do but this had been going on for four days. If they didn’t resolve the problem soon he might shoot them all himself.

  “Contemplating your millions, Lobo?”

  He hadn’t heard Escobedo walk up on him. A bad sign that his senses were being compromised by his rage.

  “Thinking about ways to strip the skin from your body if you don’t get results with the American quickly.”

  He pulled a thin cigarillo from his pocket and lit it. He’d noticed that Escobedo had taken up smoking them too. Copycat. What you smoked didn’t make the person you were. This man would always be little more than a savage, no matter how high he rose in the organization, how many places he blew up, how many enemies of the jihad he killed.

  “You must have patience. They do not send weak men to do jobs like this. Breaking him is not an easy process.”

  “I’ve run out of patience,” the Wolf snapped. “You’re the one who insisted on this damn meeting here in the middle of nowhere. I never do this.”

  Escobedo gave him a nasty smile. “But you wanted the money, eh, Lobo? For that even you will soil your hands a little.”

  “I must be leaving here. I have other business to attend to. But you know how imperative it is to learn who rang the bell on us and who the prisoner is sending messages to. My hands are tied until I can be assured no one is coming after me. I cannot jeopardize my other clients. Or myself.”

  “Some things cannot be rushed. We don’t want to kill him, before we get our information.”

  “Just do whatever you have to and get what you need. How the hell did they find out about us anyway? I’ve managed to keep a low profile for years.”

  Escobedo took a swig from the bottle of beer he was holding. “Perhaps you haven’t been as invisible as you think.”

  The Wolf gritted his teeth, barely stopping himself from the smashing the arrogant face of the man in front of him. “This is on your head. If word of this meeting leaked, it’s because someone is tracking you and your people.”

  “There are other problems here, I told you.” The jungle fighter’s voice had an edge to it. “An unexpected hurdle.”

  “Yes, yes. The mind thing.” The Wolf spat into the ground. “I’m not sure I even believe that.”

  “Believe it. Felix has the same abilities. He will break whatever shields this man has been able to create and find out who he’s been sending messages to.”

  “When he does, I will make arrangements to dispose of that person. We can leave no traces, do you understand?”

  “Of course, Lobo.” Escobedo’s face wore a disdainful look. “There’s nothing wrong with my brain. I’ll do my part. You do yours.”

  The men looked up at a slight shuffle of sound, each going instantly for the weapon he carried.

  “Hola, Serpiente.” Escobedo’s second-in-command approached.

  “Quien sabe?”

  “We have the prisoner softened up a little more. We thought you might want to take over. Felix says he thinks only a little more pressure and he can crack the mind.”

  “Fine.” He swallowed the last of his beer. “Let’s go.”

  The men were all gathered in the clearing where the campfire was. Mark was hanging by his wrists from the branch of a tree. His shirt had been stripped from him and his body was a series of fine little cuts, blood running in rivulets from neck to waist. When he heard the men approach he raised his eyes.

  Escobedo looked into them and nearly shuddered at what he saw. The men were wrong. This man was far from breaking. He had a core of inner steel seen only in rare instances. Behind the loo
k of pain was a message—give me the slightest chance and I’ll cut out your heart while you’re still alive.

  Unwilling to let the men, especially the egotistical Lobo, see how he was affected, he raked his nails over the cuts on Mark’s chest.

  “These men are amateurs,” he said in a soft voice. “Now it’s my turn. I promise you this will not be pleasant but in the end, you will tell me what I want to know.”

  Mark turned his head and spat on the ground.

  * * * * *

  Faith’s head ached and her eyes were about to roll back in her head. She’d sorted everything Tia had given her into separate piles and made folders for them. Then she’d made a list of what she needed to search for herself. But three hours later she had to admit defeat.

  She didn’t know what she expected. A list of the men who made up the Delta Force? Yeah, right. She had to snort at that one. Get real, Faith. Tia’s research had given her the information that the Special Operations units were made up of men from Delta Force, SEALs, Recon Marines and elite members of the air force who had trained with Britain’s famed SAS. From what little she’d learned from Mark she knew that everything they did was top secret, so how stupid was she to think she’d find anything on the internet about it except whatever had been sanitized for public consumption?

  She rubbed her forehead, wishing the headache would disappear, finally deciding to take two aspirins. As she pushed her chair away from her desk sudden fire consumed her body from her neck to her waist. She felt as if a thousand knives were sticking into her at the same time. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn she was bleeding all over her upper body.

  Mark!

  Oh, God, what were they doing to him now?

  She drew in deep breaths, trying to ride through the pain but the deeper she breathed the sharper the pain became. If someone poured gasoline on her and set her on fire she didn’t think it would hurt worse. Sweat poured from her skin and her heart raced. The pain was so intense she couldn’t even move from her chair. She sat doubled over, arms wrapped around herself, the air around her a red haze.