by Fiona Quinn
“When you’re out in nature, the trees and leaves don’t lose their color at night.” Jack explained. “There’s just no light to see them with. So it’s not necessary to dress in black. As a matter of fact, if a light shined on you, and you were in black against green, you’d stick out like a sore thumb. On covert missions the idea is to confuse the eye so you could stay operational.”
Staying operational being a euphemism for not dead. He said their BDUs were chemically treated to help protect them from thermal-imaging and the digital pattern helped to keep them hidden from night vision. High-tech. He had grinned. “Yours too. You only have the newest highest tech equipment.”
“Awesome,” she had replied. It was a filler word – something to stick in the hole of sudden silence. She was thinking through their situation. “I messed up,” she said after a while.
“How’s that?”
“If we were in the tent, you would have pulled us out. Put us on an ATV and powered us out of here while your friends did what was necessary.”
He was silent.
“Instead, I walked the kids into the forest and made this situation that much worse.”
“You had no idea we were coming. You did exactly what I would have done. I’m very proud of you.”
He was very proud of her. That thought didn’t bring a smile to her lips. Her thoughts were whirring since this whole misadventure started way back when he was recovering in the hospital. The rock solid ground she thought she stood on had a sudden fissure and shook with the aftershocks that kept her off balance. She wondered, as she stood beside the spring, pulling on her fresh panties, when her foothold would settle enough that she could draw some conclusions and understand her new normal. When she might feel confident about how she felt about the world around her. And Jack.
She pulled the straps of the bra onto her arms. Jack had packed these too. Funny how she had aggressively survivalist outerwear but the underwear he chose was all lace with silky ribbons. She hooked the strap in place behind her back and pulled on the long sleeve digital print shirt, though it was hot as hades that day.
Dressed and ready for what came next, she had the boys eat and drink, and had sung to them trying to cajole them into a nap during the greatest heat. Now that they had drifted off, she fanned them as they slept, their cheeks bright pink. She was falling asleep, too.
Suddenly, rifle fire erupted from the camp. A piece of metal hit the rock beside her and ricocheted away. She flung herself over the boys as another followed.
Suz pulled the cloth from over their heads and pushed the boys onto the ground. She flipped over to her stomach. “Crawl,” she whisper-commanded in her most authoritative teacher’s voice. The boys crawled along beside her. She got them to the lip of land that had fallen away with Jack’s and her weight. Down would be under the trajectory of the bullets, she reasoned. She had to get them down. She reached each of them over the lip and had them balanced on a tree limb that acted like a ledge. “Stay there.”
Suz scooted back to their camp, crab crawling on her belly the way she’d seen it done in the movies. She wasn’t nearly coordinated enough to make her body move that way. But the hell she was going to pick her stomach up off the ground. She grabbed their equipment, shoved it into the zombie bag. If she had to survive with the boys in the forest, she couldn’t do it without their supplies.
The gun fire stopped. Jack? What’s happening? Crouching behind one of the rocks, Suz picked up Jack’s Glock from where she had tossed it on the ground. She wondered where she should put it so it was safe.
A man chuckled. “There you are.” His English was thickly accented.
Her eyes jumped up from the rock that came just below her shoulder, and focused on a man dressed in black, not ten feet in front of her. Black was for fear. Black meant hostages. She wouldn’t allow him to take her and the boys as hostages.
He raised his hand with his gun aimed at her head. “Now, where are those boys?”
Suz moved without intending to. She did what Jack said, “Don’t even aim just put it in front of you at chest height, look at the target’s stomach and pull the trigger.”
BAM! Her hand jerked up. She was so surprised by the sound and the light. So confused by what she had just done. . .
The man fell backwards onto the ground. Agh! I shot him! Oh, no. Oh, no. I should help him. She started to round the rock when more bullets hit the trees.
The boys. Her priority was the boys. Jack! Where was Jack? Was he alright? Why wasn’t he here? She flung her pack onto her back and ran in a crouch to the falloff.
She grabbed Ari’s wrist. “You’re going to climb down the hill okay?”
He nodded apprehensively. But was doing fine skooching down on his bottom, crab walking with his hands and feet.
“Okay, Caleb do it just like Ari is.”
Caleb immediately started sliding. The earth loosened up as he pawed at the slope. He plowed into his brother who had been making his way carefully down. They were flipping. Rolling. Stopping.
The boys’ little arms and legs were splayed out on the ground and horror filled Suz like a balloon, pushing out against her until she thought she would pop. She couldn’t move. She was too afraid. Ari pushed to his knees and shook debris from his hair like a dog. Caleb did the same.
“I’m okay. You?” Ari asked.
Caleb grinned “That was pretty awesome.”
Before a “Thank God” could form in her mind, more gun fire sounded. Suz turned her head in the direction of the camp, looking for another man in black with his gun pointed at her. Something scalding hot pierced through her skin, and she reflexively clapped a shocked hand over the hole in her neck. An explosion shook the ground. Shook her from her one-handed hold. She fell backward from the precipice. In her mind, she screamed, “Jack!”
33
Jack
12:50 Hours, Wed, Feb. 23rd
The Forest, Refugio Tatí Yupí, Paraguay
“Jack!” his name echoed and reverberated not in his ears but through his mind, along his nerve pathways, into his skin, prickling his hair follicles with apprehension. Suz. Suz was in trouble. She seemed far away. Too far. He fought against darkness and finally slit open his eyes. His sight was fuzzy. His head pounding. He reached up and touched the sticky pool of coagulating blood on his makeshift bandage. He pieced the scene back together.
Rifle fire. The Mossad unit must be fighting the militants. He needed to get to that fight. Suz. Suz had called his name. Needed him. He had to get to her and the boys first. She was his priority. He flipped over onto his stomach, pushing himself off the forest floor, and walked his hands back to his legs. The lines of the tree trunks danced, and he scrubbed a hand over his eyes to clear his vision. He sipped some water from the hose on his shoulder strap; it helped. He checked his compass and took a straight legged step. That wouldn’t do, he couldn’t get to her like that. He bent and unlatched the brace. Took another step, his leg held.
A third step sent him flailing drunkenly sideways into a tree. He gripped the rough bark and panted. He thought about someone touching Suz. Hurting Suz. Someone putting Suz into their crosshairs and pulling a trigger. Something shifted in him, and he became a wild beast with a ferocity that he had never experienced before; he could tear a man limb from limb with his bare hands. When he was operational he was cold, calculating, and professional. Now, his anger boiled through him like an inferno. He felt bigger, stronger, more deadly than he had ever been. He locked his jaw as a growl rumbled past his teeth. Any pain and confusion was hidden under the red hot lava of his fury. He set off, racing through the brush.
Within minutes, he was near her coordinates, and he could circle around to get to where Suz and the boys were hiding. He dropped down as a bullet zipped past his ear. He crawled on his stomach like a lizard, keeping low as the bullets whizzed overhead. The rounds sent resounding cracks through the forest as they pierced the bark and split the trunks.
Jack didn’t know how many Mos
sad were headed down the path this morning and wasn’t sure what caliber of training they would encounter. If the militants were all like the tracker, Zulu unit was in trouble. The Mossad was made up of some of the best trained special operatives in the world. This unit had real world experience and surprise on their side. Jack wondered how much ammo they had brought with them, how prepared they had been since they were coming in on a clean-up mission. He and Strike Force were always prepared, took nothing for granted. Surely, this group was the same. He hadn’t seen misstep one since working with them – even if the Al Amman capture turned out to be a clusterfuck.
The Zulu Unit must have decided to engage, knowing full well what they were getting themselves into – otherwise they would have slipped seamlessly into the forest and disappeared.
Jack’s eye caught on the form of a man, lying on his back, dressed in black. Jack crawled over to make sure it wasn’t a Mossad operative in need of rescue and quickly saw this was an x-ray that had been killed. The militant had gotten damned close to Suz and the kids when he took a bullet. As Jack crawled away, he wondered if it was friendly fire that took him down or one of the Mossad. Jack worried that the x-ray had had a buddy as they tracked Suz and the kids to this spot, and the buddy had been successful at re-trapping them. Where were they?
Jack low-crawled toward the precipice now, where he and Suz had fallen earlier. He found the children’s foot prints, turning at the edge. Good girl, Suz. That’s exactly what you should have done. He pulled his binoculars from the front pouch on his molle pack and searched the ground at the bottom of the hill. He saw nothing. No humans. No animals. No signs of movement. Just a thickly overgrown forest floor that could hide most anything.
He inched around to lower himself over the side, and that’s when he saw blackened drops on the brown leaves. Jack pulled up his sleeve and touched a leaf to his skin. Someone or something was bleeding enough that they were dripping blood.
Jack slid down the side of the hill. At the bottom he came into a crouch. He cupped his hand and softly whistled the come-here signal he used to call Dick and Jane from their woodland adventures back in DC. In return he heard Suz’s sad attempt at a whistle. He had tried to teach her, but her whistles always came out as almost all air and almost no tune. He gave himself a moment to exhale. Fear had replaced the oxygen molecules in his blood stream. He sucked in fresh air. He moved forward to where two little heads and two sets of eyes peeked over a rock.
“Hey guys,” he whispered, moving toward them.
Over his comms the Mossad unit was speaking in Hebrew.
The boys were wide eyed as they looked at his head. “I cut myself. Heads tend to bleed a lot. Nothing to worry about.” He used the calm assuring voice that worked best when he needed to keep his precious cargo calm and functional.
“Miss Molloy is bleeding, too,” Ari said.
“Okay, I’m here now. I’ll help her.” Jack skated down the second incline and came around the rock to find Suz with a bloody t-shirt pressed against her neck.
“Hey sweetheart.” He moved slowly forward, knowing people who were wounded reacted with protective reflexes, and she had his Glock in her hand.
“Hey,” she whispered.
He moved up beside her and took the gun, sticking it in his waistband. “You need to work on that whistle. It’s still pretty pathetic.”
She gave him a weak smile.
“What happened here?” The Velcro on his aid bag rasped open.
“You know, just sitting in my comfy chair reading a good book, drinking a cup of coffee, when all of a sudden. . .”
“Okay, I’m going to take a look.”
Blood was still flowing from her wound. Suz wasn’t putting enough pressure on it to help seal the gash. The bullet had grazed her throat. Centimeters from...Shit. “This is a QuikClot bandage. I’m going to make the bleeding stop.”
“Yes, please.”
The shooting had ceased. The forest filled with an eerie quiet as if the animals were holding their collective breaths. Jack wondered what that could mean for them and for the Mossad unit. His gaze scanned their location, looking for any imminent dangers, potential threats, and a quick exit plan if one was needed. His mind ticked these off as he looked back at Suz. She wasn’t looking at him as he worked. “Hey Suz, do you know what day it is today?”
“No,” she said.
An explosion thundered out in the distance.
He pressed the hemostatic bandage over the gash. “Do you know where you are?”
Her eyes travelled around. “Trees.”
“Try, Suz, where do you think you are?” If she was going into shock, she’d need to be medevacked out to save her life and that just wasn’t going to happen. He applied pressure, knowing he needed to press hard directly over her artery.
“I’m in the forest. In Paraguay. It’s about a week since I was kidnapped to help the boys.”
“And what are the boys’ names?”
Her eyes went wild, and she sprang upright.
He pressed on her shoulder with his free hand. “Shh Shh Shh. They’re right here. They’re okay.”
She sank back against her pack. Her eyelashes fluttered closed.
“Their names, Suz?” Jack’s voice ticked up into a command to pull her back from her faint. “What are the boys’ names?”
“Ari and Caleb.”
“Good girl. Just rest.”
They were quiet for a few minutes while Jack kept the pressure on. He processed through their predicament.
He pressed his throat comms with his free hand. “Zulu, Zulu, this is Alpha two, over.”
“Alpha two this is Zulu actual. Welcome back to the land of the living. What’s your sitrep.”
“I have precious cargo times three. Injuries sustained, over.”
“Copy that. Present coordinates, over.”
Jack checked his GPS unit and got nothing. “Negative. GPS non-functional, we are northeast of the camp.”
“Copy that. Over.”
Over would be good.
34
Jack
16:05 Hours, Wed., Feb. 23rd
Mossad Base, Ciudad Del Este, Paraguay
The SAT phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Jack? We’re getting pings. You must have found some sunshine to charge things up – everyone okay?”
Jack stood feet wide, with his fist resting on his hip. “Copy that.”
“How’s your head?”
“Painful, thanks. You must have gotten a new knowing if you know I broke my crown.”
“Yep – this one was a good one though.” Jack could hear a smile in her voice. “Jack sprat could eat no fat.”
He rubbed his stomach. “Yeah, I could eat some fat about now. I’m starving for a big juicy steak on the grill.”
“Gotch yah. I’ll put some in your fridge.”
“Remind me of how that rhyme goes…”
“Jack sprat could eat no fat; his wife could eat no lean. But betwixt the two of them they licked the platter clean. So you each used your talents to get the mission accomplished. That’s how I’m interpreting this – it’s not showing up in red lights this time. It almost feels like a mellow knowing. I don’t get many of those.”
Jack focused on the ground in front of him. “I’m not married.”
“You’re engaged,” Lynx said. “Close enough.”
Jack watched Suz coming out of the shower. Ruth had come up with a dress and sandals for her. She looked like his Suz. Her beautiful red curls swirled down her back and framed her face in a soft halo. She looked like an angel. And his mind caught on Lynx’s last sentence. Was she still his? Things felt different between them now. He couldn’t label it – and that made him feel uneasy. “Maybe,” Jack said.
Lynx let that one slide, and Jack was grateful. She jumped the conversation forward. “Iniquus is arranging for a private jet out of Brazil. I talked to Rivka, that was a hell of a battle you all walked away from. The people in cu
stody are some big hitters, Simon Zoric for sure. Black and Finley are heading down to help interrogate them. We’ll have to work out with the Israelis getting at least Simon back into the US so they can press charges.”
“When are Black and Finley due in?” Jack didn’t want the CIA or FBI talking to Suz and the kids. Not yet. They needed to get home and start to feel safe again.
“You’ll pass each other in the air. Rivka said they’ll escort you over to the airport and get you tucked into the cabin safe and sound. Just in case.”
“Not trusting my skill set?” Jack effected his best wounded voice.
“Dotting “I”s. Crossing “T”s. You know the drill.”
“Copy that.”
“We’ll hand the boys over to the Levinski family at Iniquus Headquarters, out of public view. How are Caleb and Ari holding up through all this?”
“They have Suz.” His voice was gruff. Suz didn’t turn to him when he said her name. she was staring out the window. A bright white bandage was taped to her neck. He wanted more than anything for her to walk into his arms, for her to press her ear to his heart. She just seemed so far away.
“’Nuff said. She’s magic with her kids. Speaking of her kids, Command had the ISO take Dick and Jane to your apartment, and they said you can take Suz there – you two can rest up without the world peeking in your curtains. The ISO will maintain security on her house.”
“That’s a stretch for command, letting Suz come to the barracks.”
“Yeah? Well you know maybe they’re thinking of hiring her on. That’s how I got my job, taking down a bad guy on an Iniquus mission. Suz is the reason you found the boys. Other than her? They would have vanished for good. We’d never have seen them again.” She paused, and it gave Jack a moment to absorb that thought.
