Dolf removed his shoulder holster and his shirt, folding the latter and setting it in a dry spot on the floor. Leaving his gun in the holster, he set it atop his shirt, stepped back to the door, and turned the key. From his pants pocket he withdrew a four-inch long stiletto, switching it open with an audible click.
Unlike the outer dungeon door, this one opened smoothly, and Dolf stepped inside, the glittering blade held low and easy at his side. Barefoot on the cold stone, Janet waited, six feet from where he now stood.
Then, to his utter disbelief, in one swift movement, she reached up and pulled off her turtleneck to stand bare-breasted before him. Without hesitation, she dropped the turtleneck on the floor and began unfastening her jeans, those intense eyes never leaving his face.
What the hell was happening here? Did she hope to seduce him into kinder treatment? No. She was much too smart for that. Was she stalling, knowing that there was a ticking clock? Wrong again. Shit. She was undressing faster than Dolf could have ripped off her clothes.
Then Janet stood naked before him. Cold eyes. Hard, sexy body. Unafraid.
She was the hottest thing Dolf had ever beheld. She was a want in his belly that he couldn’t tamp down, a fire in his crotch that consumed him.
Dolf took one step forward. The woman in front of him didn’t flinch, her posture as inviting as ever, her eyes liquid death. But she was small and hard, whereas Dolf was a Nordic god. The fact that she didn’t fear him made him want to dominate her body and soul all the more.
“Kneel.” The word rumbled deep in his throat, another god reference.
With her knees starting to bend, Dolf took another step forward.
The speed with which the woman spun gave him no time to react, her right heel striking the back of his right wrist with such velocity that it launched the stiletto into the stone wall, snapping the blade from its carved ivory handle. The two pieces skittered across the floor in different directions.
Although he’d been surprised by the speed of her attack, Dolf wasn’t slow and he knew what her next move would be. Like every smaller opponent he’d faced, she would dance back after that first blow, attempting to counter his size and strength with her quickness. With the beginning of a triumphant grin forming on his lips, he lunged toward her, seeking to pull her into an embrace that would place her at his mercy.
Once again she surprised him, not dodging back but launching herself directly into him as he ducked in for the takedown, adding her forward momentum to his. Snapping her head forward, she executed a perfect head-butt, the crown of her head crashing into the upper bridge of his nose. With a crack, bone and cartilage exploded, the shock of pain and splatter of blood momentarily blinding him.
Dolf reacted automatically, doing exactly the wrong thing. Instead of hugging her body to his, he lashed out with his forearm, sending her rolling across the floor. Struggling to blink away the blinding tears, he saw her roll back to her feet and kick out, catching him directly on his right kneecap. The force of the blow would have been enough to tear the patella tendon of most men, but Dolf wasn’t like most men, and it enabled him to grab her right ankle.
Squeezing her ankle, he twisted. She rolled to keep him from breaking her leg, ending up facedown on the floor. Before he could dive on top of her, Janet’s left leg pistoned hard, catching him square in the groin and dropping Dolf to one knee. The sensitive nerve cluster exploded with sickening pain that pulled a ragged gasp from his lips, but he maintained his grip on her leg.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Shit. Somehow, in the midst of the struggle, he’d failed to hear Conrad Altmann’s approach. Flinging Janet Mueller’s body away from him, Dolf turned his head toward the sound. Despite the blurring of his vision, he noted the guns the three men with Altmann aimed into the cell.
Five feet away, Janet Mueller rose smoothly to her feet, her breathing easy, her voice soft and calm.
“Dolf was just giving me some pointers on hand-to-hand combat.”
It was a struggle to regain his feet and remain there without wobbling, but Dolf managed it.
Conrad Altmann’s lips curled to reveal his incisors. “Jesus, you’re a goddamn disgrace.”
For a moment, Dolf thought his boss was about to pull his gun and shoot him in the head. Instead, Altmann pushed the cell door open and held it.
“Pick up your weapons, put on your shirt, and get on the chopper.”
Leaving a trail of blood that streamed from his nose and dripped from his chin, Dolf picked up the two pieces of his broken knife and then stepped out to retrieve his shirt and shoulder holster. As he headed toward the dungeon’s exit, Dolf heard Conrad Altmann slam the cell door and twist the key in the lock. Dolf glanced back to see Altmann staring at the naked woman standing calmly in the center of the cell, much as she’d stood waiting for Dolf.
Then, without another word, Conrad Altmann turned and followed Dolf out of the dungeon, trailed by his three bodyguards. Behind him the dungeon door screamed angrily on its hinges, a sound that Dolf felt like echoing. Even more than he dreaded Altmann’s anger at what he’d just tried and failed to do, Dolf didn’t like leaving the Mueller bitch alive at his back, even if she was securely locked in a dungeon.
He’d had her leg in his hand. A couple more minutes had been all he needed. Ignoring the stares of amazement from the other guards he passed, Dolf walked out of the house and climbed into the back of Altmann’s idling helicopter. Ignoring the blood that still drained from his nose, he strapped in, knowing his mistake.
CHAPTER 74
Ensconced in his original sniper hide, high up on the mountainside overlooking Altmann’s Cochabamba compound, Jack watched through the rifle scope as Altmann’s group boarded his helicopter with Tupac Inti in tow. Jack recognized the big albino pretty-boy, although his face wasn’t looking all that good right now. At maximum zoom, Jack could see blood leaking from a nose so badly broken it would never look quite the same as the first time he’d seen it.
A woman accompanied them on board the chopper, but it wasn’t Janet. Jack watched, waiting for her to appear from inside the house. When Altmann’s helicopter rose from the helipad, followed into the west by its two larger sisters, a new worry tightened Jack’s throat. Janet had been left behind. That couldn’t be good.
Right now, as he lay there watching, she might already be dead. Or she might be bleeding out somewhere inside the house. If he was going to have any chance to do something about that, the time was now.
Jack counted the remaining guards. Two at the front gate, one each in the two towers at the northeast and northwest corners of the wall. Two more stood along the cliff on the south end of the house.
Jack sighted on the leftmost of these last two, centering the reticle just above the spot where the guard’s neck met the back of his skull. From this distance and elevation, the bullet would strike two inches above his aim point. The man on the right would hear the thump of the bullet striking bone and brain before the loud rifle report reached him.
Stilling his breath, Jack squeezed the trigger, feeling the rifle’s stock rock his shoulder back, letting his natural motion settle the sight on the second guard. Again he fired, shifted his aim to the next target, and fired again.
As the two dead guards plummeted outward over the cliff and down, his third bullet struck the man in the northwest tower, flipping his body out of the tower and down to the ground beside the foreman’s cottage. To Jack’s eyes, the other men moved in slow motion, the one in the northeast tower raising his submachine gun and spraying 9mm rounds wildly as he tried to decide where the shots had come from. Jack’s next bullet ripped a hole in his throat and silenced his weapon.
The two gate guards were smarter and dived behind the cover of the high north wall, one on either side of the gate. From Jack’s position, all he could see of them was the occasional arm as one or the other swung the muzzle of his gun out to spray bullets up in Jack’s general direction.
Another man ra
n from the front of the main house, racing toward the spot where the two remaining guards crouched. In the scope, Jack recognized the foreman he’d watched on his previous stakeout. Jack followed the man’s movement, letting him get within five meters of the cover he was seeking, before squeezing off the next round.
The bullet took the foreman in the center of his right thigh, sprawling him flat on the ground. Jack steadied the reticle on the kill zone, waiting for the bait to take effect. As he expected, the nearest of the hiding guards ducked out of his covered position to grab the foreman’s outstretched arm. Jack’s bullet dropped the hero’s dead body atop the man he intended to rescue.
Then Jack was up, swapping magazines as he ran down the mountainside and through the concealing woods toward the compound.
CHAPTER 75
Janet finished dressing, noting the handprint bruise around her right ankle. She’d been sloppy, letting Dolf catch her leg like that. With one powerful squeeze he could have shattered her fibula, possibly even her tibia. But he’d been too focused upon raping her naked body to fully recognize his danger.
Suddenly aware of a sharp pain on the top of her head, Janet reached up and winced, feeling a wet stickiness in her hair. That was the problem with a head-butt. You had to be willing to accept the predictable consequences in order to inflict its punishment on your opponent.
As the adrenaline rush subsided, Janet felt a wave of weakness ravage her body. Reflexively, she felt her way through the darkness to the cell door and rattled it, despite having seen and heard Conrad Altmann lock it. As always, he’d hung the key ring on the wall peg by the outer door when he’d walked out.
Backing up against the wall, she allowed herself to sink down to a sitting position. She tried to stare through the darkness, but it was useless. The metallic stink of Dolf’s blood mixed with the smell of stale water, giving the air a musty thickness that felt cold on her skin. The chilled stone pressed against her bare feet, her butt, and her back where she leaned back against it, leaching the heat from her body.
Her instincts cried out for her to get up, to move, to do something before depression could take hold. Her mission’s failure bore down on her as much as her miserable circumstances. Altmann had Tupac, and he was going for the staff. Even though she knew that Tupac’s Quechua people would be guarding it, they had been counting on her inside support to overcome the neo-Nazi assault. Now that wasn’t going to happen, and there was no way to warn them.
Outside her cell there was a faint rustle, and then an almost silent chittering, the sound of one or more rats drawn to the smell of Dolf’s blood. That was fine. So long as they left her alone, they were welcome to it.
There was a distant roll of thunder. Wait. Not thunder. Gunfire. The dungeon was so insulated from sound that Janet wondered if she had imagined it. She hushed her breathing and pressed her right ear against the stone wall. There it was again . . . and then again, the individual shots now answered with the barely audible staccato thumps of automatic weapon fire.
Taking a deep breath, Janet rose to her feet. That kind of action in the compound could only mean one thing. Jack.
Even Janet wouldn’t have thought Jack would be wild enough to attack the Altmann compound twice in four days, this time in the bright light of morning. She pictured Jack in her mind, visualized how he would do it. Last time he’d come up the cliff in the darkness. This time he had waited until after Altmann’s three helicopters had departed, leaving only the day shift on duty here.
Janet had heard several shots, spaced closely together, before any answering gunfire had commenced. And even though Janet had broken Jack’s CIA thousand-meter marksmanship record, it had been by less than a centimeter. Each of Jack’s trigger pulls meant someone had fallen. The survivors would be crouched down behind whatever cover they could find, sometimes blindly spraying lead in hopes of getting a lucky hit when all they were really doing was waiting to die.
Returning to the wall, Janet listened. Nothing. She waited while the seconds combined to become minutes. Her left ear felt cold against the stone, and then it felt something else as a tiny bug crawled rapidly inside it. She pulled her head away from the wall, digging a fingernail deep within the ear canal, trying to scoop it out. She felt something squish between her fingers and hoped it was the insect instead of ear wax. Now that she had focused her attention upon her left ear, she felt an itch begin inside the right one.
Claustrophobic, she hated caves, especially the tight crawl spaces spelunkers always encountered, where the earth pressed down from above and below, where you had to slither forward on your belly, sometimes having to turn your head sideways to wriggle through a crack. Now Janet could add dark, musty dungeons to her list. She’d have to remember not to get herself locked inside one again.
A loud grinding clang brought her back to her senses. Then the lights came on. Through her squinted eyes, she saw a shadowy figure stride to her cell door, heard the clank of the key as it entered the lock, and saw the door swing inward.
It took several seconds until she could be certain that the dark-skinned man who stepped into her cell was Jack, but she recognized that special something in the way he moved. When he grinned, his teeth seemed to shine with a light all their own, but it was the red glint in his brown eyes that held her gaze.
It was stupid, but she couldn’t help herself. Janet lunged forward, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed his mouth, her crushing embrace returned in full measure. She felt his lips caress hers, tasted the brief touch of his tongue. God she’d missed that. Would it always be like this, their embraces a celebration that life might continue for one more day? Janet didn’t know.
And right now, she didn’t care.
CHAPTER 76
Time froze. For an endless moment, Janet Price was in his arms, her parted lips pressed to his as they held each other close. It had been almost six months since Jack had felt her embrace, six months since he’d tasted her kiss. The moment lingered. And then it was over.
As Janet stepped back, Jack looked at her in the harsh glare of the naked bulb. She was wearing black jeans and a black turtleneck. Blood matted her blond hair on the top of her head. Her face was streaked with dirt. When she smiled at him, she’d never looked more beautiful.
“Looks like they left some of your things over there,” Jack said, pointing to the spot where someone had tossed her boots, knives, and gun.
Janet walked to the pile of gear, sat down and began pulling on her socks and leather boots.
“I’m assuming we don’t have to worry about the guards.”
“They won’t be bothering us. Altmann took most of the guard force with him, but I’d like to be out of here in the next couple of minutes.”
“The guard shift changed just an hour and a half ago. Assuming they heard you, it’ll take them fifteen minutes to crawl back out of bed, get geared up, and make the drive up here.”
“How far away is their bunkhouse?”
“A mile and a half down the canyon.”
“Then they heard me.”
“It’s a winding dirt road, so they can’t go fast. The nearest police station is seven miles away in Cochabamba. On a Sunday morning they’re not likely to be ready to respond, even if somebody calls in a report.”
Janet finished strapping on her holster and returning her knives to their sheaths.
“Ready.”
When they reached the foyer, Jack checked the driveway and helipad while Janet verified nobody was moving around on the pool deck.
“Front’s clear,” Jack said, reversing course, walking back across the dining room toward the study and the door on the south wall that led into the garage.
“I’ll be right there. I need my kitbag.”
Stepping into the dark garage, Jack flipped on the lights and pressed the button that started the segmented door rumbling upward on its track. He walked to the black Toyota Tundra pickup parked in the first spot, opened its door, and looked inside. It didn’t surprise hi
m to see the keys in the ignition.
Janet stepped up beside him, and Jack pointed toward the dead guards by the gate. “I’ll open the gate. You’re driving.”
Without a word, Janet tossed her duffle in the back and slid into the driver’s seat. Jack opened the driver’s side back door and set the sniper rifle on the seat behind her. Shutting the door, he walked out of the garage toward the gate, stopping to retrieve an Uzi submachine gun and additional magazines from each of the two dead guards. As he pushed the button that sent the gate rumbling open along its track, Janet backed out and turned the truck toward him.
She stopped at the gate just long enough for Jack to climb into the passenger seat before accelerating out of the Altmann compound. Jack ejected the 32 round magazine from one of the Uzis, replaced it, and chambered a round before sliding the weapon onto Janet’s lap. He repeated the process with his Uzi and settled back in his seat.
Beyond the gate, the pavement gave way to a dirt and gravel road that was better maintained than most of its Bolivian counterparts. Just beyond the cleared stretch of mountainside where the original Spanish landowner had built his fortress home and where Conrad Altmann’s compound now sat, the road entered the forest and descended steeply. In a series of switchbacks that eventually led to the canyon bottom, it wound its way down the mountainside. From there, the road followed the canyon for four and a half miles until it connected with Highway 4 near the southwestern edge of Cochabamba.
At a maximum speed of thirty miles per hour, they had only progressed a half mile down the dirt road when a white van rounded the corner three hundred meters ahead.
Jack pointed to a wide spot where the road allowed passage. “Pull over and park there. They’ll recognize the pickup. Lower your window, and let them recognize you. Let’s get friendly.”
Janet pulled out onto the wide spot on the right side of the road, put the pickup in park, lowered her window, and waited. Beside her, Jack moved the passenger seat as far back as it would go, inclining it until he was practically lying down, his Uzi hidden along his right side.
Dead Wrong Page 20
