Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About the Author

  Also by Tara Janzen

  Don't miss Crazy Kisses

  Copyright Page

  T HIS ONE IS FOR THE

  REAL “WILD BOYS,” C. ROYCE AND KARL,

  WITH RESPECT, APPRECIATION, AND MY MANY THANKS.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Anyone familiar with the beautiful city of Denver, Colorado, will notice that I changed a few parts of downtown to suit the story. Most notably, I took Steele Street and turned it onto an alley in lower downtown, a restored historic neighborhood in the heart of Denver known as LoDo.

  P ROLOGUE

  Washington, D.C.—Thursday evening

  I F HE'D HAD a window in his office, General Buck Grant would have been staring out of it, watching the snow fall on the nation's capital while contemplating the possibility of retirement, the somewhat remoter possibility of saving his ass one more time, and the truly remote possibility of reining in the unruly crew of hotshot Special Defense Force operators under his command.

  But in the L-wing of the lower basement in a World War II-era bunker complex east of the city, there wasn't a window or a snowflake to be had. He was hell-and-gone out of the loop at the Pentagon, and the reasons why had been very neatly spelled out for him—again—in the letter in his hand.

  UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

  Office of the Honorable William J. Davies

  Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations

  and Low-Intensity Conflict

  To: General Richard “Buck” Grant

  Re: Special Defense Force (SDF)

  Mission: Containment/Crisis

  Buck,

  Put a leash on your boys, now. I know we all signed off on the Colombian job, targeting the rebel forces that killed J.T. Chronopolous, but rumors are leaking out of South America faster than spin hits the fan in an election year. Your guys are running wild all the way down to Peru. Los asesinos fantasmas? What the hell is that? The ghost killers? Don't bother to tell me who it is. I narrowed it down on my own, and I want both of their butts back stateside ASAP. I've got a job for your team—top priority.

  • Creed Rivera— a ghost killer if I ever heard of one. Jesus, Buck, your jungle boy isn't even cleared for active duty, and with his psych evaluations, he might not be for a long time. Pull him out, and the next time the boiler starts up in the room next to your office, remember this.

  • Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous— ghost killer, and obviously damned good at it, but he's running on guts, vengeance, and nothing else, which is a good way to get killed, which we can't afford. I need him in Denver.

  • Christian Hawkins— okay, I know Superman was in South America: Kid didn't take out all those murdering rebel bastards I've been hearing about on his own. But I suspect Hawkins had enough sense to come home when Rivera replaced him. If I'm wrong, make it so. I need him in Denver.

  • Dylan Hart— he's the ramrod of this wild bunch. Call him in Manila or Jakarta or wherever the hell he is, and tell him to lay down the law to these guys, get his ass on a plane, and call me on a secure line, immediately. I need him in Washington. His mission is on hold. The Colombian mission is over. I know two of the rebels are still on the loose, but tracking them down is just going to have to wait. We have a crisis on our hands.

  A nuclear warhead crisis, Buck. Somebody's got one, and they're selling it on the black market. This morning's intelligence reports point toward the deal going down in either Houston or Denver, or hell, maybe even Wichita. God only knows why this has landed in the U.S. heartland, but that's where the spooks say it's headed, and your boys have been tagged. The bomb is Soviet. The woman selling it is Czech. And the crisis is international. Everyone from Israeli Mossad to MI6 to the CIA is after the seller, and the secretary of defense wants your SDF team to deliver her, in chains if necessary. He wants Hart, Hawkins, and Chronopolous on this thing yesterday. The orders are black, off the books, and straight from the top—the very top. I don't need to say more.

  I'm counting on you, Buck, and I know you're counting on your pension. Hell, you can't afford not to, so let's not make any mistakes.

  Buck stared at the letter and swore under his breath. He had a problem. Three of them. Hawkins had disappeared on the world's longest honeymoon, somewhere in the South Pacific. It could take weeks to track him down, and that was if he wanted to be found, which Buck highly doubted. He could find Hart, but the guy was working so deep undercover, it would take a couple of days to even make contact with his contact. Chronopolous was a done deal. As soon as his current mission was over, he was on official loan to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's office in Bogotá, Colombia.

  Which could have left Buck and his pension in kind of a bind. Davies wanted Hawkins, Hart, and Chronopolous, and the best Buck could deliver on short notice was the psycho jungle boy and a clairvoyant street rat named Skeeter Bang who ran the office at SDF's headquarters in Denver. Somehow, he didn't think that was going to go over very well in the hallowed halls of the Pentagon—at least not until Creed hit the streets.

  Then all bets were double-downed, hard.

  Buck didn't have any trouble wagering his pension on SDF's jungle boy. Even half broken, Creed Rivera was twice the warrior of any honcho cruising the Pentagon's E-ring. He always got the job done, whatever it took. He had the warrior's code in his heart. It was embedded in his bones—and that's where it counted, by God.

  Two days, that's what it would take to get Rivera out of the mountains of Peru and back to the States. Buck knew exactly where Creed was and what he was doing. All he had to do was pull Creed off the chase and order him to leave—to leave Kid, to leave the mission half undone, and to leave while Pablo Castano and Manuel Garcia, the last two murdering rebel bastards, were still alive.

  Davies had been right. A leash would have come in damned handy.

  C HAPTER

  1

  Peru, South America—Thursday evening

  T IMING IS GOING to be everything,” Creed said, watching the two-and-a-half-ton truck grind its way up the switchbacks on the steep mountain road below them.

  Next to him, Kid Chaos Chronopolous let out a short, humorless laugh.

  Creed lowered the binoculars and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Behind them, the sun was setting on the high peaks of the Peruvian Andes. A light mist of rain turning to snow filled the air.

  That was fine with Creed. He preferred his revenge cold.

  They'd been in Peru for three weeks, traveling the desolate backcountry of the Cordillera range, roughing it out of an old army Jeep with no windshield, no doors, and no roof—waiting for Castano and Garcia to make a run for Puerto Blanco, the rebels' last refuge.

  They weren't going to make it.

  Kid reach
ed for the binoculars and set them to his eyes. “Two guys in the cab.”

  “Castano riding shotgun,” Creed said, pulling his black stocking cap lower on his head, then reaching around and tying his hair back at the base of his neck.

  “Garcia at the wheel,” Kid confirmed. He was unshaven, his skin burned brown by the sun, his dark hair long and shaggy from his months on the trail. He and Creed had chased Castano and Garcia from the jungles of Colombia and across the fetid swamps of the Amazon, like hounds on the scent, down the length of Peru.

  But this is where it ended, here in the wild mountains in the wind and the snow.

  “This remind you of something?” Creed asked, gesturing at the weather, before reaching for his pistol, a Glock 10mm. His knife was in a sheath on the right side of his tactical vest. He checked the load on his pistol and returned it to its holster. The action was automatic, rote. The actual weapon of choice for the night was on the ground at his feet, locked and loaded: an RPG-7, a Soviet special Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher.

  “The Shah-i-Kot mountains, Afghanistan,” Kid said. “That night it started to snow, just like this, just as we were ready to move out.” They'd both been doing recon out of Kabul for a major offensive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Creed with another group of operatives from Fort Bragg, and Kid with the Marines.

  “Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too.” They'd gotten exactly what they'd gone after that night. Tonight would be the same, or Creed would die trying. He didn't have any compromise left in him, not for this mission.

  “Wait a minute . . .” Kid hesitated and adjusted the focus on the binoculars, then swore under his breath. “We've got a problem.”

  “What?” Creed looked up.

  “There's a third guy in the middle—but . . . it's not a guy.”

  “They're taking a woman to Puerto Blanco?” Fuck. That changed everything.

  “She's gagged.”

  And that really changed everything. Creed's jaw hardened. He knew what Castano and Garcia had done to Kid's brother before they'd killed him. The nightmare was etched into every breath he took. He knew their demented brand of brutality—and he could imagine what they would do to a woman, what they'd probably done to a lot of women.

  “Okay. So we can't just blow the truck.” That had been the plan. Blow the friggin' truck right off the side of the mountain and send Castano and Garcia straight to hell.

  “No, mi hermano,” Kid said after a long, silent moment, still looking through the binoculars. “We're going to have to do this the hard way.”

  Creed could tell Kid was trying not to sound too satisfied, but he did—damned satisfied, as if the woman's abduction had played right into his hands. Without wanting to, Creed knew exactly where Kid's satisfaction came from. He understood it—and he wished to hell he didn't. There was a world of difference between wanting someone dead and wanting to kill someone. Kid wanted to kill Castano and Garcia—face-to-face, hand-to-hand, take their lives from them the way they'd taken his brother's.

  So did Creed. The need drove him—had been driving him ever since he and J.T. Chronopolous had been ambushed in Colombia six months ago. Their mission for Special Defense Force, SDF, a clandestine group of special forces operators who worked out of the underbelly of the U.S. Department of Defense, had been compromised beyond all repair. Worse, he'd lost J.T., his partner.

  Creed had nearly died himself, been beaten to within an inch of his life. He still had places on him that hurt, places that were never going to work right again. He didn't know why the National Revolutionary Forces, the NRF, a rebel group fighting the Colombian government, had killed J.T. and let him live. He probably never would—but he couldn't forget it. The fact haunted his days, made him break out in a sweat every night while he slept, even in the frigid highlands of the Andes.

  “We're going to have to take them in Puerto Blanco,” Kid continued.

  “Well, that ought to get real damned interesting.” Shit. Puerto Blanco was a hellhole, a magnet for every thief and murderer in Peru. There was no law in Puerto Blanco, not that he and Kid were counting on anybody else to save them if things went bad. On the contrary, they were the guys who guaranteed that things went bad, real damn bad, real damn quick. Kid Chaos hadn't come by his name by accident.

  Three governments had sanctioned them to take these men out, and not one of them expected two SDF operators to need any help doing it. The Defense Department wanted to send a message to the NRF: “Kill our guys, and you'll pay the price.” The Colombian government just wanted Castano, Garcia, and every other rebel in their whole damn country to disappear, and Peru didn't like Colombia's bad boys crossing the border and stirring up trouble. So all the diplomatic gloves had come off. Creed and Kid both knew nobody was going to save their asses if they failed, but neither was anybody going to get in their way—which suited them both just fine.

  The snow thickened, driven by a rising wind. In about ten minutes the sun would be completely behind the mountains, and they'd be driving to Puerto Blanco through a blizzard, in the dark, on a road whose winding curves barely clung to terra firma.

  Or maybe they wouldn't.

  Two turns below them on the mountain, Garcia shifted the deuce-and-a-half into a lower gear and the truck slowly ground to a halt.

  “Looks like we've got another change in plans,” Kid said, handing the binoculars back to Creed and picking up his bolt-action M40 rifle. He set his eye to the scope.

  Creed looked down the mountain. Sure enough, the bad guys were getting out of the truck and hauling the woman with them. One side of her face was bloody, and her blouse had been ripped. Creed let out a long, slow breath, glanced at Kid, then went back to the binoculars. No one else was on the road for as far as he could see, which didn't surprise him. In the three days they'd been waiting, no more than five vehicles had passed in either direction.

  Garcia rounded the truck, a big grin on his face, a slouch hat pulled low on his forehead—and that's the way he died, his grin frozen on his lips for a split second as Kid's 7.62mm match-grade round hit him dead between the eyes, right through his hat, a sniper's cold zero. The man was crumpling toward the ground before the crack of the rifle sounded in the cold mountain air.

  Castano quickly jerked the woman in front of him and pulled a pistol out of the holster on his belt. Crouching, with his back up against the truck, he peered over the woman's shoulder, his gun pointing up the mountain.

  Creed was already on the move, heading toward the road, swiftly, silently, using what cover there was to keep himself out of Castano's sight. Kid's second shot went through the windshield, shattering it into thousands of pieces and spooking Castano into pushing the woman away from him. The Colombian dove underneath the truck. Creed saw him scramble across the road on the other side and take off running down the mountain.

  Kid's third shot caught Castano in the shoulder, and the guy fell, tumbling and rolling down the steep slope.

  Creed cleared the first stretch of road and kept running, ignoring the pain shooting up into his hip.

  Leaping off the next embankment, he landed on his weak leg and stumbled, but righted himself and kept going.

  Castano had barely made it to his feet when Creed caught him and brought him down hard. The two of them slid a dozen yards, grappling, before they came to a halt.

  With lightning-quick skill, Creed cut the Colombian twice, trapping his wrist and slicing through tendons, then reaching down and severing the bastard's femoral artery at the groin. Each cut took less than a second to make. Both of them were executed with a razor-sharp, seven-inch blade. The man's gun fell from his disabled grip, and Creed picked it up and threw it farther away.

  Breathing heavily, his heart racing, Creed set the tip of his knife above Castano's heart and watched terror flood into the other man's eyes.

  He knew this man—his flattened, broken nose, the scar that ran from the corner of his mouth—knew his pockmarked face from endless nights of beatings and torture. Pab
lo Castano had been his and J.T.'s jailer. He'd been one of the men who had taken his knife to J.T.—and for that, he would die by the knife, slowly, with all the skill and ferocity at Creed's command.

  He pressed the blade down and felt the thin layer of Castano's skin give way.

  The man's breath caught on a muffled groan and with a surge of strength, he pushed Creed back and rolled out from under him. Creed was on him again in an instant, holding him down, putting his knife to the rebel's throat.

  Darkness moved farther up the slope with every passing second, sliding over them like a veil, taking the last of the light from the sky. Above them, up on the road, Creed could hear the woman praying for mercy, and he knew her prayers would be answered. But there would be no mercy down here on the side of the mountain—and no cold revenge. Everything inside him was hot, burning through him, setting his heart on fire.

  From somewhere deep in his memories, a terrible sound came to him: a keening death cry, the scream of a man in agony beyond what he could bear. It echoed in Creed's mind, over and over again, making his hands shake.

  He tightened his grip on the knife, tightened his fist in Castano's hair, and pulled the man's head back. The Colombian tried to struggle, but was weakening beneath him. Creed had cut him deep, making a river out of his blood—still, it wasn't enough.

  Slowly, carefully, he increased the pressure of his blade on Castano's throat and just as slowly, lowered his mouth to the Colombian's ear. An awful pain lodged in his chest, making his words hard to speak, making his voice harsh—yet no harsher than the deed he was about to commit.

  “Dile al diablo . . .” he whispered, “que fue Creed Rivera quien te quitó tu vida.” Tell the devil it was Creed Rivera who took your life.

  C HAPTER

  2

  Denver, Colorado—Two weeks later

  S HE DIDN'T LOOK like bait.

  From where he sat in a comfortably upholstered chair, reading the newspaper, Creed watched the woman limping across the third floor of the Denver Public Library. It was her fourth trip from the reference section over to the copy machine. Each time, she made a couple of copies and returned to the reference desk. Each time, her mousy brown hair had come a little more undone from the scraggly bun at the top of her head, until the whole thing had completely given up and reverted back to a raggedy-edged ponytail—except the pencils that had been holding the bun were still stuck in the pony band.