“Okay, bad news first. We’re not the only drone aloft.”
“And you’re calling me on the goddamn phone to make me easier to trace?” How dumb was the man?
“They’re out over the lake. We estimate their machine is visual, not ELINT, as it wasn’t involved in the call he placed to your hotel room. Their patrol line will pick you up within miles of the dock south of Maracaibo. Worse news: we also don’t have decent imagery of Estevan’s operations to know what assets he has there. We never inspected it before.”
“So look now.”
“The bird we sent out was ELINT only; if the intelligence isn’t electronic, this craft can’t see it. We pinpointed his signal, but we didn’t have enough payload capacity to send up any cameras.”
She spotted an open stretch of road and hammered down on the Toyota’s accelerator. She could see Tanya bracing her feet in the foot well as if they were about to crash.
Carla flicked on the high beams and looked into the gathering darkness. They’d driven out of the rain—at least they were moving faster than the storm—so she killed the windshield wipers. Houses down either side of the road were no longer crammed together. Still a strange jumble of pleasant and shanty, but with more space. This must be suburbs.
Nope, not toast yet. She kept the accelerator down.
“Well, get me something before the storm lands on Kyle’s head and you can’t see anything. And get Estevan’s drone out of the sky.”
“How? Our bird’s a ScanEagle, not a Global Hawk or Predator. It doesn’t carry any weapons.”
“Ram it, Smith. Take the ScanEagle and ram it into his drone. I need a clear path. If I have to go in blind, I’ll go in blind. But if I’m going in blind while he can see me, that isn’t going to work.”
He sputtered for a moment. “You want me to destroy a half-million-dollar UAV by using it like a battering ram?”
“Smith!” she shouted loud enough to hurt her own ears. “Get that goddamn drone out of my sky, or I’ll come back as a ghost and haunt your ass!”
She beat the phone on the dashboard several times for good measure before hanging up and tossing it to Tanya. Then she hammered the Toyota’s horn, scattering a flock of chickens feeding in the middle of her lane moments before she turned them into cutlets.
She was on her way to save Kyle, and anything or anyone who stood in her way was going down—and going down harsh.
* * *
Chad idled the boat out on Lake Maracaibo beyond the end of the assigned dock. They were meeting Carla and Tanya at the south end of the city where the eight-kilometer-wide sea access opened up into the massive, near-circular lake.
The chop on the lake was at two feet and building rapidly. He’d bet that by the end of this night, he’d wish he’d stolen something bigger. The ten-meter aluminum boat had a wraparound rubber fender like a Zodiac on serious steroids, but even so, the ride was going to be a rough one before they were done.
The towering clouds to the north were filled with lightning as they rolled over the city. The weird thing was that there was lightning to the south as well—quick flashes, high up—though the sky directly above still showed the first stars.
“Catatumbo lightning,” Richie said. “That type has its own name, after the Catatumbo River. This is the only place in the world that it occurs. Very cool.” He started into one of his too-much-information things that Chad had long since learned were safest to just let roll over him.
“Wait, what?”
“I know,” Richie answered. “Isn’t it amazing? Half the nights of the year, eight to ten hours a night, three hundred lightning strikes per hour. That’s like three thousand a night.”
“You dropped a digit, buddy.” Duane handed around energy bars.
“You mean I picked up a digit.” Richie was a nut about precision. “And, no, I didn’t.”
“Shit!” Chad spotted a distant set of headlights approaching their pier and kept an eye on them. “People live down there? Are they psycho?”
“It’s all cloud to cloud. A couple miles up. Unless there’s a storm. That brings the show down to sea level.”
“Oh man!” Duane had also spotted the approaching headlights and unslung his weapon, though they were safely a hundred meters offshore with their running lights doused. “Please tell me we aren’t going anywhere near that lightning craziness. I almost got hit once on a training mission in Japan. No three thousand strikes a night for this boy.”
“No, we aren’t going near it.” Richie had something up his sleeve as he waited out Duane’s exclamation of relief.
Chad kept quiet.
The car pulled right up to the end of the pier and honked its horn three times before shutting off its lights. If Carla had seen the pier in the daylight, there’s no way she would have driven onto it.
“We’re going right into that craziness.” Richie sounded totally pleased. “Estevan is right up the delta of the Catatumbo River itself. Can’t wait to see it firsthand.”
“Fucking geek,” Chad offered in a friendly fashion.
“Geeks rule,” Richie agreed happily.
Chad ran them forward, fighting the chop and trying not to look at the growing storm ahead.
* * *
“A police boat?” Carla looked down at the long, powerful craft. “Don’t you think that’s a bit obvious?”
Chad smiled up at her from beneath the small headlamp he wore. They each wore one. They dragged the bundles of weapons they’d taken from their raid on the Hotel Castillo out of the Toyota and loaded them aboard.
“You said fast, lady. This boat has the prettiest little trio of three-hundred-horse outboards. It’s rough and ready.”
“Where’s the rented sailboat?”
“What sailboat?”
Carla shook her head. She didn’t even know why she asked.
“Oh, you mean the one we bribed the police with to look the other way while we took this one? The cash that was left wasn’t enough, so we tossed in the sailboat. They’re probably filing off serial numbers and repainting the hull even as we speak.”
“So you basically gave the cops a brand-new drug-smuggling sailboat.”
“Well…” Chad drawled at her and nodded toward Duane who was releasing the last line.
“I might have left a breaching charge down in the bilge somewhere. It should cut a pretty disastrous hole in the hull about four hours from now. Storm should be peaking over Maracaibo about then. She’ll go down fast and ugly. Really hope old Freddie Smith selected ‘yes’ on the insurance form when he rented it for us.”
Carla grinned at them. She was last to jump down off the dock into the pitching boat. As an afterthought, she tossed the keys back toward the car. Maybe at least one of the vehicles they had rented would get back to the agency.
“You guys are nasty. I like that in a team.”
She high-fived each one and then she and Tanya started arming up as Chad turned the police boat south and opened up the engines with a bone-shuddering roar. In moments, they were slamming wave top to wave top on their way south.
* * *
A guard rushed up to Bolívar where he sat with Kyle Javits-Torres at the small table beneath the gently swaying trees. The wind was already making small waves on this side branch of the Catatumbo. The storm was coming, but it would still take another hour or so to cross Lake Maracaibo, and he was quite enjoying his talk with his prisoner.
“The drone, sir,” the guard panted out. “It is gone. Not crashed. One moment we had signal, the next we didn’t. Not on any channel.”
Bolívar Estevan was unable to suppress his curse. He did not like revealing anything in front of this calm, cool lover of the Empress of Antrax seated beside him.
Their story had checked out.
Forty-eight hours after the eradication of that bastard Major Gonzalez, the
y had popped up out of nowhere in Aruba as if by magic and rented a sailboat to come to Venezuela. His own people had sighted it leaving, not suspecting then who was aboard. They had called in his shore crew to intercept it. His “acquisitions” crew had radioed that they’d located and were overtaking the sailboat, then silence. They’d never been heard from again. When the sailboat showed up with a window shot out, he knew that the five who had arrived on the boat had beaten his most experienced and ruthless crew.
Then there had been the strike at the Hotel Castillo that had freed his daughter. Four bodies and who knew how many others who simply had vanished.
He, like every other person in Venezuela, had assumed it was a battle won by one faction of the Cartel de los Soles over another. He had believed it until his lovely, abused daughter had arrived by taxi and told him of the beautiful woman with long, dark hair and the men who leaped to her commands.
This Empress of Sinaloa he met at the church had unquestionably been the same woman.
Sinaloa was a threat past imagining. And the seriousness of the threat was that one of the Torres sisters was here personally. Not an emissary, not an underling thug, but one of the sisters in person. This wasn’t her research trip for the “export” business; this was the tip of the spear striking at the heart of his entire enterprise.
He looked up quickly as the night was riven by the first shocks of Catatumbo lightning. Darkness that revealed itself to night-adapted eyes, blinding bright light, then a black so deep in comparison that the world might have ceased to exist.
His drone had gone down before the lightning began in that region of the sky. If his drone had failed on every channel simultaneously, it had been shot down. And the operator hadn’t reported anyone on the lake’s surface. No one who knew the lake was foolhardy enough to ignore the oncoming gale. The unique geography of the lake made for brutal chop that slapped from every direction during a storm.
That meant that his drone had been taken down from the air. The Empress of Antrax had air assets in Venezuela and didn’t want him to see that she was coming.
Well, her power was not as great as this storm. It would soon wash the most advanced helicopters from the sky. The compound was lit like a strobe light by three successive flashes, his men moving in jerky stop-frame motions.
Nor was Marisol’s number of forces even close to his own. He had thirty fighters here in addition to the workers. He had never counted more than the five with her, one of whom sat here beside him looking up at the lightning show as if he had all the time in the world.
Six. If that Tanya Zimmer woman arrived here, then that meant she was with them rather than an innocent dupe. They would come by air, flying before the very teeth of the gale. He would be ready for them.
One thing was certain. He no longer needed the Empress’s husband. She was already on her way to rescue him. He had no idea how his signal had been tracked, but the death of his drone promised that it had been.
Well, the rescue would be the death of them all. Then perhaps he would take the fight to Sinaloa for dreaming of coming into his country uninvited.
Estevan signaled his guards. “Take him down to the end of the dock and kill him. Let him truly rub his shoulders with the fishes.” He liked that phrase. It was personal and reminded him of The Godfather.
The man didn’t protest. He simply walked, head bowed, toward the water with three guards following close behind him.
It was like a stage drama in strobe light.
A lightning flash.
The prisoner and three guards close beside him.
Darkness.
Flash.
Grouped at the head of the dock.
Darkness.
Flash.
The husband turned to face his firing squad at the dock’s far end. A brave fool.
Darkness.
Then a massive double-strike close by—the first of the storm-driven Catatumbo lightning to reach the ground—rattled the empty glasses on the small table by Estevan’s chair.
In the aftermath of its blinding light, the man’s body tumbled into the water.
The next darkness was broken by the gunfire flashes that the guards were pouring down onto him to ensure his death.
A bright flash revealed no body, then another close behind it showed the body floating to the surface well out across the lake.
Then darkness.
Chapter 28
“Next…time, steal…a…bigger…boat,” Carla managed to shout, each word knocked from her by the next wave top.
Richie had taken over the wheel because he was the best sailor, other than Kyle. Bastard laughed and whooped as nine hundred horsepower launched them off the top of another wave and sent them flying.
Even with the throttle wide open, it took them over two hours to reach the Catatumbo River delta.
Carla had spent ten minutes gearing up with every weapon she could think of. Spent thirty seconds double-checking that Tanya did indeed know what she was doing with her weapons selection. Without looking, Tanya took many of the same weapons Chad had chosen. Even their armament style matched.
Were she and Kyle that sappy? She reviewed what they each carried. It was a piece-for-piece match, right down to the number of spare rounds. Of course, she and Kyle had spent months debating their selections item by item during OTC, such as why they liked a Heckler & Koch stock suppressor versus a SureFire on the HK416 beyond ninety meters.
She and Tanya both grabbed for an AK-47. The rifles had a very distinct sound, which might identify them as allies of the bad guys.
Confuse the enemy.
So she handed each person one that they’d taken from the guards at the Hotel Castillo. Then Carla dumped the rest of the arsenal they’d taken from the tenth floor over the side of the police boat.
For the remaining hour and forty-five, Carla had nothing to do except hold on to a water bottle like it meant something, watch the clock, and keep it together.
The emptiness inside her was far more barren than the night. They raced barely ahead of the storm, lightning both in front and behind—which made no sense no matter what Richie said—roaring engines completely overrunning any other sound. Only the closest lightning strikes, hammering down sometimes barely a hundred meters away, crashed thunder sufficiently loud to momentarily drown out the engine roar.
Inside her was an echoing silence so vast that nothing could fill it. It was what she had felt as she’d looked down into the barren grave moments before they lowered her brother into it. If she died tonight, it would only be an outer husk that died.
If Kyle died…
Carla looked inside herself, trying to find the second half of that thought.
If Kyle died…
There was a yawning emptiness inside her far more vast than any mere chance of death.
* * *
They slowed as they came upon Congo Mirador. The town sat astride the entrance to the Catatumbo delta that they needed to penetrate. Tonight it didn’t so much sit astride it as cower in it.
Carla looked at the one- and two-room tin-roofed houses perched on stilts just a meter off the ragged waters that already lapped up onto front porches. Small boats and canoes had been hauled onto those porches. As they puttered the police boat carefully down the main street of the town, only darkness greeted them.
“Hit the lights.” She kept her voice low. She could feel the eyes watching them, but needed to know if they were armed as well.
Richie flipped on running lights and the big spot. It would be easy to see that they were a police boat.
Under the glare of their bright spotlight, the houses appeared to have only two colors: blue worn to a gray, and gray worn bluish. The only structure over a single story was the church’s steeple made of dark, unpainted wood.
Carla took the microphone on the PA system and flipped it on.
“The governor of the state of Zulia has asked us to perform extra patrols tonight. If anyone needs help during the storm, fly a sheet from the corner post of your deck. We will be nearby. Be safe.”
Tanya looked at her oddly.
“In case Bolívar Estevan has a spotter in the town, it will help to explain our presence.”
Tanya’s shrug matched her own assessment. Fifty-fifty that the ploy would work.
They stayed in the main channel to the east as they left the town. That would further allay the fears of any of Estevan’s watchdogs. His compound lay just a few kilometers up the west branch.
At a likely spot on the west bank of the eastern branch, they grounded the boat where it would be protected from the worst of the storm’s battering.
The team and Tanya huddled in the small cabin of the boat. At that moment, the storm unleashed a pounding rain that sounded so loudly on the aluminum roof that they had to shout at each other to be heard.
Richie turned on a map display of where they were. It cast an eerie blue light across their faces. Everyone had painted their faces with broad streaks of green-and-black camouflage paint stick. Tanya and Chad pulled dark watch caps down over their light hair. The five of them positively bristled with weapons and spare rounds.
“We cross this hundred-meter island at a bearing of two-five-oh, trying not to get mired if it’s swampy. There’s a channel ten meters across; sentinels will be watching it for a boat. Use a log to cross, because we have no idea of the depth or current speed. Beyond that we have a complex terrain of bush and trees that will be thick with unknown personnel, many of them armed.”
“Indentured workers,” Tanya informed them, “practically slaves. They will be unarmed innocents and will scatter into the jungle at the first sign of trouble. But he will have many guards.”
“Oh good,” Chad remarked drily.
“Makes it easier,” Duane offered. “Plenty of distractions for the bad guys.”
Target Engaged Page 27
