The four towers were gone. Cut off at the legs, they’d fallen outward exactly as Duane had planned. During their “walk” around the encampment, he’d placed cutting charges of C-4 plastique explosive on each leg outside the wall. He’d also placed a contact explosive where he’d expected the tower cabs to hit. Sure enough, all four towers hit their charges and the secondary explosives shredded them, along with any armed guards who might have otherwise caused them trouble.
All of the camp lights had conveniently been attached to the towers, so the camp was plunged into darkness. Stupid design—perfect for his purpose though.
He’d also placed a larger charge against the midpoint of each tree-trunk wall. Those charges had punched massive holes that could be used three abreast.
“Better overkill than underkill,” his explosives instructor had always been clear about that and Duane had thanked him for the lesson any number of times. There was an art to precision, but if the wall didn’t come down, it could screw the whole operation.
He slapped a quick set of charges on the main gate and once more pulled Sofia against him before hitting the trigger. This time he merely blew off the hinges, so there wasn’t much to hide from, but she felt so damn good against him the first time that he couldn’t resist even the briefest excuse to hold her again.
She felt even better this time.
Women never really worked out for Duane, they were always too mild. Sofia Forteza felt like she was ripped steel—inside and out.
After the explosion, he let her go and turned back to the gate.
“It’s still standing, Mr. Rock,” Sofia even looked amazing. Her face covered by goggles and camo paint. Her body hidden by an armored vest adorned with more electronics and less ammunition than he’d ever carry, but still pure soldier. And a G28 in her hands.
“You just keep giving me that sass, sister.”
“I said I’m not—”
He kicked the gate. With the hinges gone, it tipped slowly inward, finally crashing to the ground.
“Okay,” she said just a little louder than the quieting jungle. “That was nice.”
“Uh-oh, a compliment. Hold onto that thought.” Then he moved in. “Follow behind me with security shots. Only shoot people that I shoot.”
Exactly as planned, the guards were still moving about in bewilderment at the shock-and-awe with which he’d just slammed into the compound.
He fired two rounds in the face of the first one he spotted.
No third round came from behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder.
Sofia was standing there like a statue. Staring.
“In the heart, like this.” He fired a round into the falling guard’s heart. He was already dead, but it was an absolute guarantee that he wasn’t getting up anytime soon.
He took out the next.
He only waited a heartbeat before adding the third shot himself. It arrived at the same moment as Sofia’s.
Good, she was back from whatever had thrown her.
Duane spotted the rest of his team rushing in through the other three holes he’d breached in the perimeter fence.
Three holes in the wall, five other members on the team. Didn’t matter which was which, not at a Unit operator level of training.
“Come on!”
Less than twenty seconds from breaching the main gate, they were up against the general’s bunker. It was the only concrete building in the camp. The door was heavy steel. Really heavy steel, like a bank vault.
Duane’s smile suddenly turned evil.
“What?” Sofia wondered what he was going to do now after the spectacular job of taking out the towers and breaching every wall of the encampment simultaneously.
If she was overwhelmed, then the guards must be in cardiac arrest. The Delta shooters who came in through the walls moved so fast they were little more than blurs in her memory.
No radio traffic.
No elaborate planning. Definitely no achingly long conferences in some remote Washington office as she’d expected. Delta simply got it done.
They’d blown into the camp, as hard and fast as their explosive charges, and were fast taking down anyone holding a weapon.
“I’m just a Southern boy havin’ a heyday, sugar,” Duane was practically chortling. “Watch my back.”
Not that there was much to watch. Armed guards were falling faster than mayflies, far too busy to worry about two soldiers blended into the night.
He dropped his pack and pulled out a large rope, coiled tightly. He began unrolling it and smashing it into the wall, several meters from the door. The rope stuck to the wall.
“But the door…”
“Belongs in a bank,” he finished slapping on the rope in a rough circle four feet in diameter, which must be more C-4 explosive. “Besides, going in through the door is what’s expected, darling. Where’s the fun in doing the expected?”
He stabbed in a pair of detonators, then signaled her to lie flat against the wall well to one side of the circle of C-4. He flattened himself against the wall on the far side, then slung his rifle over his shoulder and pulled out a handgun.
Again, he showed her the trigger as he pressed it so she was ready for the explosion. Without Duane’s arm around her, she wasn’t ready for the shock wave—it almost knocked her down. Note to self: lean into the explosion next time.
Before she was steady on her feet and the cloud of concrete dust cleared, Duane dove fast and low into the new doorway he’d blown right through the wall.
There were four loud reports from his weapon. Then two more before she nerved up enough to go through the doorway herself.
Two corpses lay on the floor. Duane was kneeling on a third person, face down and struggling even as Duane Zip Tied his wrists together behind his back.
“Is this your boy?” Duane flipped the man over. The lights in the bunker were still working.
Sofia flipped up her goggles and looked. Six months she’d been chasing that face, she’d know it anywhere: graying hair, pinched nose, worm-crawl style goatee around thin lips. “That’s him.”
“Alpha target in captivity. Building A-4. Two friendlies inside.”
“Roger, west clear,” someone called over the radio.
“South clear,” a deep voice that she was fairly sure belonged to Chad.
“Hang on,” the geek’s voice, Richie. So he might have been born a dweeb, but he was still a operator for The Unit no matter what Chad said about him.
She didn’t breathe for the next ten seconds. There were several loud rattles of gunfire outside, but all of Delta weapons had silencers—so what she was hearing was panicked fire from the last of the guards. Finally the audible gunfire stopped.
“Okay, east clear as well.”
“C’mon, Richie. Get it in gear,” the deep voice needled him.
“Eat shit, Chad. The guards’ main bunkhouse is over here. What did I hear from you, three lousy takedowns?”
“Five.”
“Liar. You never—”
“Full sweep. Assemble on A-4. Three minutes,” a no-nonsense woman cut them off. She must be the mission controller, back in some remote aircraft.
“Let’s check the room while we’re waiting,” Duane suggested.
No ledgers. No handy safe. No records of any kind. Not his main base of operations. But there was a large bin stacked solid with cell phones, probably taken from the women as they’d been kidnapped and imprisoned here before being trafficked off to the highest bidder.
Hadn’t anyone thought to trace the phones’ chips?
They were powered off, which didn’t necessarily make a trace impossible. Then Sofia tapped the bin they’d been stashed in. Metal—blocking any ping from the chip.
She began booting them up. They all had some degree of charge on them. Most of the login screens were unique, meaning the women in captivity here should be able to pick out which phone was theirs.
“Find the general’s phone,” she called out
to Duane.
He handed it to her a moment later.
Locked.
“Password?” Sofia asked nicely once.
The general barked out a laugh.
She nodded to Duane, expecting him to deliver a kick to the general’s kidneys.
Instead, Duane slammed Aguado into a desk chair, cut his hands free and pinned them both to the desk with one big hand around the general’s two wrists. The general struggled, but it was useless against a man of Duane’s strength.
Duane snarled something into the general’s ear and one of his hands twitched.
Duane rammed the muzzle of his sidearm down on the back of the general’s hand.
“Five. Four. Three…”
General Aguado gave up his code at Two.
She opened his phone and discovered exactly what she’d expected. A Bitcoin account—a very well funded one.
Sofia flashed what she’d found at Duane.
His brilliant blue eyes were still hard as steel, but she could get to like his smile.
Chapter 3
“I still don’t understand.”
“You playing dense or were you born that way?” Duane couldn’t resist teasing Chad as they watched the women piling into the trucks—each clutching the cell phone that had been confiscated from them upon their kidnapping.
Chad opened his mouth, but Richie cut him off with a professorial, “Well!”
By Richie’s tone, Duane knew that the team’s geek was clearly in his element and couldn’t wait to explain.
Better him than me, he thought as Richie started in.
Like everyone else, Duane kept an eye out for some stray guard. But his attention was mostly riveted on the woman standing quietly off to the side.
Kyle, the team’s leader, stood over General Aguado kneeling in the dirt along the line of the rescued prisoners. Some women spat on him as they passed by to clamber onto a truck. A few kicked him, but most of the women simply scurried by as if he still retained the power to steal their freedom again.
General Aguado’s next stop wouldn’t be before some corrupt Venezuelan court of injustice. He was going straight into the gentle hands of the CIA who would continue the work of learning about and destroying at least the international arm of his trafficking enterprises.
Richie started explaining the Venezuelan economy to Chad. It was fun to watch.
All Chad typically cared about in any country, other than the bad guys, was the women. And he was such a goddamn charmer that the women always seemed to appreciate his attention. But that wasn’t going to stop Richie once he got into his cool-factoids-lecture mode.
“You know that Venezuela has the worst hyperinflation in the world, right? It now takes shopping bags full of hundred-bolívar bills to buy a day’s food. Since US dollars are as illegal as it gets, though they’re still very common, Bitcoin has become the black market currency of choice.” He continued rambling on about the interacting factors of dictatorship, an enormous bounty of crude oil, but it was such a heavy-weight grade that Venezuela’s couldn’t process it themselves—even before their infrastructure descended into shambles from neglect—and everything else that no one cared about except economists and Richie Goldman.
Once Duane and Sofia had unlocked the general’s phone, it had simply been a matter of counting up how many women they freed from the various huts and dividing up his massive Bitcoin account evenly. The few women who didn’t already have a phone, or couldn’t find theirs in the pile, Richie had provided with burner phones from the general’s stash—probably from women long gone. Load the app, transfer the Bitcoins to them, load the women in the general’s trucks, and start them on their travels home. Before they left, the team handed out guns confiscated from the bodies of Aguado’s soldiers to the women who claimed some skill. Others were driving the trucks. Anyone who messed with these women was in for a rude surprise.
They weren’t wealthy—even by current Venezuelan standards—but they were definitely well-to-do now. The women had wept their thanks on anyone they could get to, then hurried away fast.
Sofia looked dazed.
“You aright?” Duane sidled up to her.
Her nod was far from certain.
They only had a few minutes, but he gave her what space and time he could.
“How…” she waved a hand vaguely at the camp, though he suspected that wasn’t the real problem.
“We ran a similar training scenario about six months ago. That one we spent hours talking out, before and after. I saw this layout and we already knew what to do with it. Must be why we train so much,” he made the last sound like a joke, but apparently she wasn’t in a laughing mood.
Sofia cleared her throat several times before she could speak again. “What did you say to the general to get him to unlock his phone?” Which sounded like another evasion to him, but he answered anyway.
“I asked which hand he masturbated with, then offered to blow off each finger until he told us the code. I may have suggested that the sixth finger I’d blow off was his dick.” He’d have to remember that one, it had worked really well.
Sofia nodded, then shrugged, then nodded again, but she wasn’t looking at anything. Oh shit. Duane had seen this before, but not since his early days in the Rangers, first tour in Afghanistan, so it took him until now to recognize what was going on.
A glance at the team and he saw he was no longer needed. He led Sofia around the side of one of the huts.
“Take a breath, Sofia. Just take a breath.”
“I…can’t.” Duane prayed that she didn’t start crying. He definitely wasn’t up for that.
“If you’ve never shot someone before, why were you out here alone?” Get her talking; it was the best bet.
“I’ve done field work. A lot of intel…gathering,” her voice was hitching in strange gulps that were almost more scary than tears. “Part of ISA training…first solo mission. It was just recon…in Caracas…spotted the general. Had a radio. If trouble. But this was supposed to be…observe-only assignment. Followed A-gu-ado here.” The name was too much and she had to choke it out on multiple breaths.
“Then you called in my team.”
“Then I called in your team,” she collapsed back against the rough wood and closed her eyes. “You just assumed…I would follow you. You made it easy to. So I did.”
“Shit. I’m sorry, Sofia,” Duane didn’t know what else to say. First kill was a brutal shock no matter how much you trained.
Talking to women was Chad’s gift, not his. Women all melted around Chad’s corn-fed Iowa-boy charm…even if he was really from the wrong side of inner-city Detroit lethal.
But Duane didn’t want her melting around Chad. “Wish I’d known, I’d—”
Kyle’s sharp whistle cut the air.
Duane was glad for the interruption, because he wasn’t sure what else to say or what he’d have done differently. Leave her to sit on her ass alone out in the jungle? Not likely. He squeezed her arm and she nodded once, twice, then opened those lovely dark eyes and looked right at him.
“Thanks.” She pushed off the wall, without ramming her rifle butt into his solar plexus this time, and they headed back around the building.
The camp was now empty except for the Delta team and the general, who lay prone in the reddish mud. Alive but groaning. Apparently the last few women to depart had aimed their final kicks specifically. He was curled up in fetal position.
Now that the camp was empty, she could see the bodies remaining on the ground. Bodies that… She turned.
“No. Don’t look away,” Duane whispered close beside her. “Your imagination will always be worse than the reality. They’re dead. They earned it. It’s okay to look at them.”
So she forced herself to do so. At these men who had kidnapped and imprisoned women for a living. That they were dead was on her shoulders. And, if she was being honest about it, that was a good thing as well as a bad one.
Last of all she looked at the one ma
n by the gate that she had killed herself. She knew his face from looking through the scope earlier. He was one of the two laughing men, enjoying a bit of rape before going on duty. His companion also lay dead by the gate.
Duane was right. She’d probably have nightmares, but she was going to be okay with this. She returned to the team and nodded her thanks to him. She was a long way from steady, but at least her head was clearer now.
It was the first time Sofia had actually looked at the team. Three men and—two women! She had heard a rumor that Delta had women, but she’d never heard it confirmed. Now she was facing two of them. One was shorter than Sofia’s five-seven with long dark hair and features that were at least partly Native American. The other was a tall, slender white-blonde. They couldn’t be more different.
There were three other men besides Duane. A handsome dark-haired guy in charge. Richie, who’d been glad to geek out over Bitcoins (thankfully sparing her the task while she’d been busy fighting to not puke up her energy bar). And the blond guy, who looked even more broad-shouldered and dangerous than Duane, must be Chad.
“Let’s go,” the short brunette women called out and began heading up the road on foot.
The dangerous blond guy dragged the general to his feet and followed along.
Sofia hung back at the rear guard position with Duane, “I thought that the dark-haired guy was in charge.”
“Depends who you talk to. All of us think Kyle Reeves is the team leader. But his wife, her name’s Carla, is a freakin’ force of nature. She just assumes she’s in charge and no one but Kyle has ever dared to tell her otherwise.”
“They’re married? Serving on the same team?”
“I know. It’s weird, but Richie and Melissa just tied the knot too,” he pointed to the geek and the tall blonde, “as if that isn’t the oddest couple on the planet. We were sure the Army was going to bust them all into separate teams, but my guess is that Colonel Gibson didn’t dare. After all, he might run Delta Force now, but pissing off Carla Anderson would be seriously bad news.”
Colonel Michael Gibson’s reputation said that he wasn’t scared of anything. He was the most decorated Delta operator in the history of The Unit. But Carla was something else again.
Wild Justice (Delta Force Book 3) Page 3
