Hard Edge
Pamela Clare
www.pamelaclare.com
Contents
Hard Edge
Acknlowledgements
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
Epilogue
Thank You
Also by Pamela Clare
About the Author
Hard Edge
A Cobra Elite novel
Published by Pamela Clare, 2020
Cover Design by © Jaycee DeLorenzo/Sweet ‘N Spicy Designs
Cover photo: _italo_
Copyright © 2020 by Pamela Clare
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic format without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials by violating the author’s rights. No one should be expected to work for free. If you support the arts and enjoy literature, do not participate in illegal file-sharing.
ISBN: 978-1-7335251-8-3
This book is dedicated to the memory of Abuelita Isabel and to the people of Venezuela, wherever they find themselves in the world today.
Acknlowledgements
Thanks as always to Michelle White, Benjamin Alexander, Jackie Turner, Shell Ryan, and Pat Egan Fordyce for their support during the writing of this book. Special thanks to Shell Ryan for a last-minute proofread.
Additional thanks to Benjamin for sharing his firearms expertise.
Heartfelt thanks to Andrea Ferrer for sharing her life in Venezuela with me and for helping me to get the details of the culture and language right. Thanks, too, to Arlene and Beatrice Ríos Ramírez for making sure I have my Boricua profanity down. I don’t want to say “coño” when it should clearly be “puñeta.”
1
September 6
El Vigía, Venezuela
“Gracias, Hermana. Dios te bendiga.” Thank you, Sister. God bless you.
Sister María Catalina stood in the shelter of a timber awning outside the Mission of Our Lady of Coromoto, helping distribute food to the hungry. She handed a woman, a mother of four, a box that held a pound of rice, a pound of dried beans, some potatoes, powdered milk, and bananas. It would last only a few days, but it was something.
“God bless you and your family,” she said.
The young woman was so thin and undernourished that María thought she might need help carrying the box. She and her children had arrived at the mission this morning, their eyes dull from hunger. They hadn’t eaten in four days.
Somehow, the young mother shouldered the box, her thin arms wiry and strong.
“You must eat, too.” María handed a banana to each of the woman’s children. “Who will take care of your little ones if you become too weak or sick?”
“Sí, Hermana, but I cannot listen to my children cry. We are on our way to Colombia, where my husband has work. Life will be better there.”
It had been the same every day since María had arrived at the Mission outside El Vigía six months ago, a stream of desperate humanity in need of food, medicine, and, most of all, hope. More than a million people had fled to Colombia, while millions more had gone elsewhere—to the US, Europe, or other nations in the Americas.
It broke María’s heart to witness the suffering of Venezuela’s people. So many going hungry. Families left destitute and divided as people sought refuge in whichever nation would take them. Cancer patients like her Grandmother Isabel dying without treatment or pain relief.
When her parents had been in college in the 1980s, Venezuela had been a wealthy country with a robust middle class. After the Caracazo in 1989, when government troops had killed hundreds of protestors on the streets, they had emigrated to the United States with their three older children. María had been born Gabriela Aliana Marquez a year later in Miami. She’d grown up in Florida, speaking both English and Spanish and getting her love of Venezuelan food and culture through her mother’s milk. She had visited her grandparents every year—until her parents decided it was too dangerous to return.
Now, Venezuela was an economic ruin.
But that’s why María had come. She wanted to do her part to change things, to help make life better in the land her parents had once called home.
She picked up the smallest child, a little girl who needed a bath. “You should stay for a few days, rest and eat, and then move on when you feel stronger.”
The woman stared at her, fragile hope in her eyes. “Is that possible?”
María smiled and tried to convey a serenity she did not feel. “With God, all things are possible.”
She called to Oscar, a boy of twelve who’d come to stay with them when his parents had been killed in the crossfire of a fight between protestors and el SEBIN—Venezuela’s intelligence service that behaved more like death squads or ladrones con placa—criminals with badges. “Oscar, can you run and speak with Sister María José and ask her to find a place for this woman and her four children?”
“¡Sí, Hermana!” Oscar jumped to his feet and dashed off.
María settled the woman and her children indoors and went back to distributing food, the line dwindling at last. As the newest member of the mission, it was her job to do whatever was asked of her. Mostly, that meant cleaning, working in the kitchen, and helping to feed the people who came to them for help. Her day started before dawn with prayers and ended only when the work was done, long after dark.
From behind her came the sound of American English.
The journalist.
Dianne Connolly was visiting today with a photographer and two bodyguards. Mother Narcisa escorted them around the mission, answering her questions in heavily accented English.
Mother Narcisa stepped outside, the reporter, photographer, and their bodyguards following. “This is where we distribute food to those in need.”
María made eye contact with Mother Narcisa, who gave her a slight nod, granting her permission to go. María couldn’t risk being interviewed or photographed.
Mother Narcisa’s words followed her as she walked inside. “That was Sister María Catalina. She came to us from a cloister of Poor Clares in Peru. In keeping with her vows, she prefers as hidden a life as possible.”
“We can’t interview her?” the reporter asked.
“No, but there are other sisters here who—”
The roar of a car engine. Shouts. Gunshots.
Screams.
María ran back to the door—and stared.
The bodyguards lay dead on the ground. Four men with automatic weapons and bandanas on their faces climbed out of a white van and headed for the journalists.
An abduction.
Mother Narcisa knelt beside the two slain bodyguards, blood on her trembling hands, shock on her face.
Pulse tripping, María stepped over one man’s body, put herself between the attackers and the journalist, and did her best to look as imposing as the Sisters from her Catholic school days. “Señores, this is a mission! It is sac
red ground. Put away your weapons and—”
“What have we here?” One of the attackers stepped up to her, all but his eyes hidden behind a bandana. He reached out, took hold of her black veil, rubbed the cloth between his fingers. “You’re too pretty to be a nun—and helpless to stop me.”
The men behind him laughed.
María wasn’t afraid of him. She took a step back, glanced over her shoulder at the reporter, who stood wide-eyed, her back pressed against the wall, her photographer shielding her, the terror on their faces putting rage in María’s heart.
She met the assailant’s gaze. “Think about what you’re doing. You’ve already murdered two men. Kidnapping the reporter would be another mortal sin—and will bring the United States down on you. Is that what—”
With no warning, the man bent down and threw her over his shoulder. “The rest of you—get the gringos.”
He climbed into the van and dropped María onto the floor of the vehicle, driving the breath from her lungs.
It took a moment for reality to hit home.
They were abducting her, too.
¡Madre de Dios!
Mother of God.
* * *
September 8
Dylan Cruz sat on Cobra International Security’s private jet with the rest of the crew somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. They’d spent the past two weeks running security for US State Department officials on a mission to Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. The assignment had gone off without a hitch, but it was good to be on their way home again—even if that meant listening to more of Thor Isaksen’s stories.
If even half the shit he said about his years with Denmark’s Sirius Sled Patrol was true, the man was a certified badass—or just plain loco.
“The storm came up fast, caught us in the open,” said Isaksen. “The temperatures dropped to minus seventy, and the wind was so strong we couldn’t put up our tent. The dogs were restless and growling. We staked the team, dug a snow cave, and crawled inside—no food, no stove.”
“Minus seventy?” Cruz had faced more than his share of freezing nights in the mountains of Afghanistan during his decade with the SEALs, but he’d never been in that kind of cold. “That would freeze exposed skin in minutes.”
Isaksen went on. “After we settled in, we noticed a sound, like someone snoring. But we were in the middle of northeastern Greenland. There was no one else around.”
“It wasn’t one of you—another sled team?” asked Malik Jones, a former Army Ranger and Dylan’s best bud. “Man, that’s creepy.”
“It took us a minute to realize that we’d dug into a snowbank where a mother polar bear had made her den. She was a few feet away, separated from us by snow. The dogs had smelled her, but we were so distracted by the storm that we didn’t pick up their warning.”
“She was hibernating,” said Lev Segal, a former operative with Israeli counterterrorism forces.
Isaksen shook his head. “Polar bears don’t hibernate. She was just asleep. All she had to do was dig a little with those big paws, and she could have eaten both of us for dinner.”
“What did you do?” Elizabeth Shields stared at Isaksen. If she believed him, there was a good chance he was telling the truth. She’d come to Cobra from the CIA and was a counterterrorism analyst.
“We got the hell out of there and set up camp a few kilometers away.”
“A bottle of whiskey says he’s full of shite,” said Quinn McManus, a grin on his bearded face. The big Scot, who had served with Britain’s Special Air Service, had married Elizabeth this past July, and the two were sickeningly happy.
Isaksen grinned. “Why would I lie?”
“Maybe you were hallucinating.” Derek Tower, one of the co-owners of Cobra, hadn’t joined in the conversation until now, his face buried in his tablet. “Out there in the cold for three months at a time, just two guys and a pack of sled dogs—it must play tricks on a man’s mind.”
Tower had served as a Green Beret and knew all about mind tricks.
Isaksen’s expression grew serious. “We wondered the same thing.”
The conversation drifted after that, and Dylan tuned out, tried to sleep. This routine had been his life since he’d made the Teams—getting spun up at a moment’s notice and then flying home or moving on to the next job. He’d learned to sleep whenever and wherever he could.
When he woke, it was dark outside his window. Across from him, Shields slept with her head on McManus’ shoulder, the two of them sharing a single blanket.
Are you jealous, pendejo?
Nah, he was done with serious relationships. He loved women, but Valeria had proven to him that men in his line of work were better off single. Thank God he’d only been engaged to her and hadn’t married her. Even so, what she and Kruger had done had torn his world apart, ending his SEAL career and forcing him to start again.
His mother wanted him to move home to Puerto Rico, get a job at the pharmaceutical plant in Arecibo, and marry a nice Boricua girl. As much as Dylan loved Puerto Rico, he was afraid that the boredom of an ordinary life would kill him. Besides, he wasn’t interested in marriage.
Was he lonely sometimes?
He pushed the thought away. He had women in his life—if the women he met through Tinder counted. They got what they wanted, and so did he.
A hand came down on his shoulder.
Tower stood beside him. “Cruz, you, Jones, and Segal need to come with me.”
Dylan glanced at the others to see if they knew what this was about, but they were clearly as much in the dark as he. He stood and followed Tower and the others to the small conference room at the rear of the plane.
Tower shut the door. “I just heard from Corbray.”
Javier Corbray, Tower’s partner, typically worked in Washington, D.C., representing Cobra’s interests with Congress and Pentagon officials.
“We’ve been tasked with a top-secret recon and rescue mission, and you three are going to be our recon team. We’ll land in Denver in a few hours. Get some sleep and be ready to leave again by oh-eight-hundred hours. We’ll fill you in tomorrow morning.”
“Can you say where we’re headed?” Segal asked.
“Venezuela.”
Dylan gave a low whistle. “Are you serious?”
Tower was always serious. “We have to keep this completely off the radar.”
He didn’t need to explain. Venezuela’s current regime had an adversarial relationship with the US, accusing Washington of meddling in the country’s affairs. The US, meanwhile, accused the Venezuelan government of drug trafficking. If US forces were found on the ground there, it would create a political firestorm. That’s undoubtedly why they were sending in Cobra operatives rather than Delta Force or one of the Teams.
Jones didn’t seem troubled by this. “No polar bears there.”
“No polar bears,” Tower agreed, “just narco-terrorists, mafiosos, revolutionaries, and trigger-happy secret police.”
“I can handle those, boss. But a mama bear? Shit.” Jones shook his head.
Segal snorted. “Are you afraid of snakes and spiders, too, brother?”
“Hell, yes, I am.”
But Dylan was already thinking about the new job. A secret op in Venezuela. This was going to be interesting.
* * *
September 9
María awoke with a start, sat up, glanced around her basement prison. The faint light of dawn glowed beyond narrow, barred windows high above the concrete floor. Dianne and her photographer, Tim, were still asleep. An armed guard—one of the men who had abducted them—dozed on a wooden chair propped against the door that was their only exit. In the opposite corner, rats nosed about, looking for a meal.
Revulsion shivered through María. Being abducted was one thing. Being forced to share space with rats—that was something else.
She knelt on the tattered wool blanket that served as her bed, straightened her scapular and veil, pulled her rosary from the knotted rope th
at bound her waist. Then she crossed herself and began to pray the Divine Mercy chaplet in silence, willing herself to focus on the words of the prayer and not the squeaks coming from the corner. The words came without effort, the recitation clearing her mind, helping her to focus.
Por Su dolorosa Pasión, ten misericordia de nosotros y del mundo entero.
For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
She heard when the guard woke, when he got to his feet, when he came to stand in front of her, but she didn’t open her eyes. She felt the barrel of his rifle caress her cheek, cold steel against her skin, and still she prayed, not giving him the satisfaction of a reaction. Bullies like him thrived on other people’s fear. Besides, if these men had intended to kill her or the other hostages, they’d be dead already.
By the time María had finished her morning prayers, the guard was talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone, and Dianne and Tim were awake. They had to be as hungry as she was. Because they didn’t speak Spanish, they were also more afraid and disoriented. María turned her attention to them.
No, this wasn’t where she was supposed to be. Being kidnapped and held hostage wasn’t what she’d envisioned when she’d taken this assignment. But as long as her abductors respected her status as a religious sister, she could still do her job.
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