Target Engaged

by M. L. Buchman

  Shit! If the jerk was still alive. If he’d gone and died on her, she’d resurrect his ass just so that she could kill him herself.

  “Hardly worth the effort on that one. Too easy.” Tanya flicked her fingers toward the door.

  “She knew.” Carla was disgusted. “She had to know what was going on up there, what was happening to those poor women. They all knew and they didn’t report it. I’d like to level the whole damned hotel!”

  “I think it is only recently started. The Major, he would know it was too dangerous to abuse them, if the words were to escape out. There is only so much wrath he could fend away. I expect it is something the guards had only started when the reports of the Major’s death came to being.”

  “Well, that’s at least a tiny shred of light in this mess.”

  Tanya shrugged. “This is not your United States. Who would they report it to? The policía? When you removed Major Gonzalez, they suffered a drastic loss of paycheck.” She rose from the bed and dug a tequeño deep through the lethal sauce and took a large bite of it.

  Carla tested the other green sauce tentatively: smooth, mild, avocado. Guacamole. She dipped the now-cooling fried cheese into it and bit carefully. Even though her mouth had calmed down, it still stung on the potentially permanent scorch marks that had been seared across her palate.

  “The government?” Tanya continued, uncovering a plate of empanadas. “They are held aloft by the cartel income, at every level just trying to keep afloat. This country has the biggest oil reserves of any nation and is rapidly bankrupting. They can’t pay their bills. Even cars and basic foodstuffs are almost impossible for purchasing.”

  The turnovers had elegantly twisted edges. Carla tried one tentatively. Not spicy hot, just a warm and luscious ground beef filling that was as strong in flavor as the sauce had been in heat.

  “The Venezuelan military? That is the home of the many factions of the Cartel de los Soles. Perhaps you could have reported it to another faction, but they wouldn’t have taken action for fear of the death of the hostages. Bolívar Estevan knew exactly where his daughter was held, but he could not rescue her without causing her death, or the death of the daughters of allies who would become very bad enemies. That is how I arranged the meeting for you so easily. You not only freed his daughter, but also did it without massive political problems he could not afford.”

  “Which leaves us with what?”

  Tanya continued to eat heartily, which was good advice. Who knew when or what their next meal would be.

  “Which leaves us with two more hours to take a nap before I can make the call.”

  Also good advice. However tonight turned out, it was going to be a long one.

  “Want to share a bed?” Tanya’s tone was suddenly dark and sultry as she looked at Carla with half-lidded eyes, arcing her chest forward to emphasize her already impressive breasts.

  Then Tanya burst out with a belly laugh. “Oh, ‘sister’! You really ought to see your face!”

  Carla was rather glad she couldn’t. She hoped that its burning heat was due to the strong spices, not at how gullible she was.

  Chapter 26

  Kyle was on the verge of sleep despite his sitting-up position. He tumbled out the container door when it was opened and landed hard on a rough wooden surface.

  The sun was blinding, painful beyond belief, punching straight through his skull and cranking up the headache that was no better after his almost nap.

  Immediate action? If he was capable of any, which he wasn’t sure of.

  The soft clicks of two weapons coming off safety made him squint before he leaped. One close enough to be reachable, but his partner offered covering fire and was well back and to the side.

  “It is too pretty an afternoon to be shot.” Bolívar Estevan also stood well back, beyond his two guards.

  Pretty? The only thing higher than the temperature was the humidity. Kyle had always hated the idiots who were behind you “110 percent,” as if there was such a thing. But wherever “here” was, he could almost believe in 110 percent humidity. The mere act of breathing had his shirt clinging to him.

  “Let us sit under the trees and speak.” Estevan’s fluid Spanish reminded him to watch his choice of language. Thankfully, he’d learned gutter Spanish from a Mexican migrant worker who’d spent time at his father’s dojo. Carla’s Spanish had softened it, but even a trained linguist would tag him as authentically Mexican.

  No one approached close enough to help him to his feet, but the gestures of the men with the rifles left no doubt of his best course of action.

  It took no acting to look debilitated. He rested a hand on the cargo container to help prop himself up and almost burned it. The sun had shifted while he dozed. It was now late afternoon and this end of the container had been baking in the high tropical sun. He was dehydrated and partly roasted alive.

  Once on his feet, he finally took in his surroundings. A small pond, perhaps a hundred meters across, definitely less than two hundred. Some palm trees standing well back from the water. Mostly flatland, barely above the water and covered in thick green growth. Bushes. In his world there were bushes and there were trees. This was mostly bushes with trees farther back serving as a screen against a wider view to the horizon. The trees were far thicker than in the city of Maracaibo, the air moister. Was Lake Maracaibo around the corner, or was he off the map and prisoner in the deep jungle?

  The container sat on a dock stilted up out of the water. He was weaving, his breathing wrong.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” He hoped that Estevan understood. He had to lower his core body temperature.

  Kyle flopped face-first off the dock and into the water. He heard a shout of alarm before he submerged. If they were going to shoot him, they could. He had no defenses, nowhere to run, no energy to do so. But no bullets had slammed into his back by the time he surfaced. The water was not much cooler than the air, but it was enough.

  He stayed near the dock, ignoring the guards who still had their weapons leveled at him.

  It wasn’t a lake. He had to paddle idly to keep from drifting away from the dock. A current. A river.

  Perhaps one of the ones that fed into Lake Maracaibo on its way to the sea. That would make sense. It would be more convenient for Estevan if he could hide his operation close to a city, for Kyle had no doubt that’s where he’d been taken.

  His brain was finally kicking back into gear. He ducked his head under once more to cool off as much as he could in the warm water. There was a deep thrumming—motor noise of some sort.

  He brought his head up. During his brief submersion, he’d drifted out from the dock a half-dozen meters. From here he could see just around a point of the land where the lakeshore meandered in and out.

  There was a conning tower visible just between two low trees.

  A submarine’s conning tower.

  Estevan was in the submarine business. He wasn’t a middleman who might lead them to the kingpin they were looking for; he was the man they wanted.

  Except when Kyle’s team posed as Sinaloa, who in turn was pretending to be an expanding U.S. distribution operation, they were in direct competition with Estevan.

  Oh, crap! They’d accidentally challenged the dragon head-on. No wonder Estevan had risked kidnapping him.

  He swam back to the dock.

  If anyone else on his team was still alive, they were so screwed.

  * * *

  Carla used her encrypted satellite phone for the first time on the mission. It took her a few minutes to find her way to Fred Smith aboard the USS Freedom from the hotel room.

  “Hi, Carla. How are you do—”

  “Are you in position?”

  He harrumphed at her slicing through the niceties.

  A gregarious CIA… Who knew such a thing was possible?

  “Yes, we have
a ScanEagle drone aloft over the lake with an ELINT package aboard.”

  “Just one?”

  There was a silence that she hoped meant there were other electronic intelligence assets in the air besides a small two-meter-long drone.

  “Our only other asset in the area is the helicopters. We’ve been holding those back at the ship in case you need emergency exfil.”

  If they needed an emergency extraction, it was going to be in the middle of the goddamn storm, but Carla didn’t see any mileage in pointing that out.

  “Most likely position is at the south end of the lake,” she told Smith when she could be sure of her voice control.

  “We can only tap radio waves, cell or satellite. If he’s using a landline, then—” Smith didn’t sound happy. Like Carla cared.

  “We’re screwed, I get that. But there aren’t a lot of services down there. Cell or satellite is far more likely.”

  At her nod, Tanya dialed and left her message.

  “We’re calling out now.” Carla monitored the line.

  “The number is a cell phone somewhere in Maracaibo,” Fred Smith reported back. “Because you have us flying at the south end of the lake, we can’t locate it any more accurately than that.”

  Carla didn’t bother answering. For ten agonizing minutes, they sat and waited. Neither she nor Tanya could think of a thing to say, so they just sat, Tanya’s hand hovering near the hotel’s room phone and Carla clutching the satellite phone so hard that her fingers hurt.

  Even the constantly voluble CIA agent didn’t buzz in her ear.

  She actually cried out when the hotel room phone rang, causing Fred Smith to curse in pain. It rang with a harsh bell, the likes of which she hadn’t heard since she was a girl, except as a retro ringtone.

  Tanya snatched at the phone, stopped, took a breath, and answered it. She listened for a moment and nodded.

  Carla whispered, “Go,” into the satellite phone and could hear Fred Smith relay the order to trace the call. It was hard to do while sitting on a ship a hundred miles offshore, but that was a problem for the signal intelligence folks. She just needed Estevan to stay on the line long enough for them to do whatever they did.

  Tanya handed her the hotel phone, then leaned over until their shoulders were touching and she could tip her head close so that they could both listen.

  The bodily contact reminded her of Kyle’s shoulder against hers and she drew strength from the memory.

  “This is Carla.”

  “Is it? Not Claudia?” Bolívar Estevan’s voice was still as pleasant and jovial as ever.

  “No.” Would the real Empress of Antrax break her cover over the phone? Carla thought not.

  “Not Claudia Ochoa Felix, who I see by her social media post is presently in a Guadalajaran nightclub?”

  Had he seen a photo of the real Claudia? The woman was a Kim Kardashian look-alike; built like a brick shithouse. Far more so than even Tanya. If Estevan hadn’t seen her photo, Carla could claim the woman in Guadalajara was a body double that she’d hired while out on a business expedition.

  Too risky.

  She could continue to deny her link with Sinaloa and Antrax. Or—

  “That bitch!” Carla practically shouted for reasons she didn’t yet understand. “One of these days the real Empress of Antrax is going to bury her ass. I swear it on my father’s grave or my name isn’t—”

  “Marisol,” Tanya mouthed at her.

  “—Marisol Torres.” Which it wasn’t, so that made the swear safe.

  Most intelligence reports indicated that the real power behind Sinaloa was in the hands of two quieter, far less photographed, and extremely intelligent sisters. Marisol was a good choice; she was even less visible than Luisa Marie. It was these sisters with business degrees and their father’s lethal training that Estevan would have to reckon with.

  Estevan tried to interrupt, but Carla continued her tirade, layering every foul phrase of gutter Mexican that Kyle had taught her on Claudia Ochoa Felix’s head. She went on until Tanya pinched her sharply. Okay, maybe she needed to stop soon, so she made one final slur about the woman only getting off when she went down on her hot-pink AK-47 in a dark closet, and then shut up.

  After a lengthy pause, perhaps to make sure she was done ranting, Estevan finally spoke once more.

  “As I observed earlier, señora, you are a very passionate woman. I too am passionate about what I do. Perhaps we can meet tomorrow under less, shall I say, mutually distrustful circumstances.”

  “And why should I do that after today’s events?”

  “Because otherwise your husband will be, how do you say, rubbing shoulders with the fishes.”

  The threat meant to strike fear into her heart instead coursed through her body like an adrenal shot of relief. Kyle and Estevan had been speaking, and Kyle had found a way to communicate to her that he was alive by using that odd turn of phrase until Estevan had repeated it.

  Rubbing shoulders.

  He was still alive. Still, hopefully, in one piece.

  Tanya pinched her again hard.

  Estevan had been speaking and she hadn’t heard a word.

  “I’m sorry,” Carla cut him off, “I was having trouble catching my breath. What were you saying?”

  “Tomorrow at nine a.m., be at this number.” His tone had not the slightest hint of friendly. Then he was gone.

  By tomorrow at 0900, Bolívar Estevan was going to be sliced, diced, minced, peeled, and fed to wild piranhas. And if Venezuela didn’t have piranhas, she’d fly them in from Brazil or wherever they came from. Then—

  She picked up the forgotten satellite phone. “Tell me you got him.”

  “We have him, and it’s ugly.”

  She was Delta.

  Ugly didn’t bother her for a moment.

  * * *

  Kyle watched Estevan walk back from the office container that he’d been called to. Unlike the one that had been his prison, this one had windows cut into the steel sides. Through the open door he could see several desks and chairs.

  He’d sat quietly and nursed a glass of iced coconut milk and tea sweetened with guava. His two guards were well trained and vigilant. They sat at two different points that would allow them to fire at him without hitting either Estevan or each other.

  Estevan sat back down with a contented sigh.

  “Is your wife so passionate in bed? You must be a very lucky man. It is a pity I must kill both of you tomorrow.”

  Alive! roared into his brain.

  “A pity,” Kyle agreed, trying to buy time to control his emotions.

  Alive, and she’d be on her way long before tomorrow. With any of their team still able to walk or crawl.

  “Especially because the answer to your question is yes. She is beyond incredible.” He did his best to remain in the state of poised readiness that his father had worked so hard to teach him. No tension must show. No strong emotion. No exposed thoughts that the enemy could capitalize on.

  But it was hard. It was his first hint that Carla was alive. He wanted to kiss the man who had just told him they both were going to die.

  And if she lived, that probably meant that at least Chad and Tanya—who had left the church with her—did as well. And yet he’d been worried for her when she left the safety of the church. There was a laugh.

  “I like you, Mister Javits, or whatever your name may be.” Estevan sipped his drink as if they were discussing the latest James Bond film. “I knew I had to be cautious if your ‘Carla’ was indeed Claudia Ochoa Felix, because I know who is the power behind the Sinaloa curtain. Incurring the wrath of Marisol Torres is not something I would do lightly. Murdering her is an entirely different matter.”

  Kyle tried not to groan. No matter how they played this, it just kept getting worse. Estevan’s next comment proved that he hadn�
��t hidden his thoughts as well as he’d intended.

  “I see you understand waiting and futility both. I will miss you. I thank you for rescuing my daughter. Even though I have sent her to a hospital, under very heavy guard I assure you, I know that what was done to her is not your doing. As a reward, I will give both of you easy deaths.”

  Chapter 27

  The satellite phone rang as Carla and Tanya were racing toward the agreed-upon meeting point well south of Maracaibo. Chad, Duane, and Richie should have long since secured a speedboat and transferred their gear over from the sailboat.

  In the last few hours, while they’d been awaiting the phone call, the wind had increased sharply and any hint of sunlight had retreated to ride out the storm somewhere happier. And less wet. The first sprinkles had suppressed the dust; the building rain was now turning it all into mud.

  Getting out of the city had been tortuous. Vendors were clogging the roads. They had shuttered their stalls against the rising storm and were now trying to drag them to places of safety. Carla almost killed a spice merchant and hit three different wheeled food stalls before she managed to sling the car out beyond the core market area.

  Then they’d gotten lost in the snarl of city streets: narrow, winding, and poorly lit at the best of times. The storm had chosen the moment of the quick equatorial sunset to kill off Maracaibo’s dodgy power grid.

  It was as much luck as skill that finally freed them from the city’s vile clutches and allowed Carla to rocket south, winding around pedestrians and bicyclists who had waited too long to seek cover.

  Tanya answered the phone and handed it to Carla as she spun the wheel to avoid a group of three men. They had apparently thought the dusty front yard she had veered through to get around a truck and donkey jam was a good place to play cards and drink.

  “What?” she shouted into the phone.

  “We have bad news and worse,” Fred Smith announced.

  “Don’t you dare ask me which I want first.” The man was a goddamn cliché. She jumped off the curb back onto the street and drove through the middle of a soccer game. The kids scattered, but the ball was toast with a loud bang that for a moment she feared was a tire. It wasn’t.