Sofia didn’t need anyone to explain the blond guy to her. Delta Force operators were badasses by trade, even the women apparently. But the guy manhandling the general up the trail was a whole different level of nasty.
She checked her watch and almost did a faceplant in a mud puddle. She’d gotten into position yesterday at sunrise. By sunset, General Aguado had arrived and she’d put out a call to see if there was an available action team in the area. Her deskbound counterpart at The Activity had mobilized this squad.
Duane had arrived at five p.m. today, just an hour before sunset.
Two hours to scout the camp, another to circle it and set explosives—the ten-second “go” had been given at ten-oh-seven.
It was now ten-thirty-seven.
That couldn’t be right. She checked her watch again and almost stumbled into another puddle. The rain was still drenching down, something she hadn’t even noticed since the first explosion.
In thirty minutes Duane and his team—Sofia had no illusions about her marginal usefulness in the firefight—had razed the camp, taken down the guards, freed and enriched the imprisoned women, and they were now leaving.
She tried to account for the time. The attack had lasted…minutes. Less than five. Maybe less than three. It had felt like hours. The—
“You’re late,” a voice announced over her earpiece.
Late? They’d achieved the mission and so much more in thirty minutes and they were being called late? Who were these people?
Sofia had been the most competent person in her family—except for her grandmother. Nana was still the fierce fist behind the prosperity of the family’s winery. Sofia had made a point of always striving to be the best: college, Army Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, and now The Activity. This Delta squad had just proven that they were the same way.
Walking beside Duane suddenly felt very different. Out of all of the options, they’d sent him in as their point man. A sniper and demolitions expert. It was no surprise that he looked so dangerous—he really was.
“We’re less than two minutes late, Trish,” Carla called back over the radio. “Give me a goddamn break!”
“Dream on, Wild Woman.”
Sofia would bet that Carla had earned that nickname fair and square.
Duane offered a big smile, looking surprisingly genuine despite the heavy camo paint he wore. Yes, it said, Carla is Wild Woman. Absolutely. And Richie was definitely Q.
“What are the other’s nicknames?” Sofia kept her voice low as they trotted along.
“Kyle is simply Mister Kyle—like Mister Steed from The Avengers. Melissa The Cat moves with all the grace and silence of one. Chad the Reaper is our best shooter.”
Then maybe Duane really was The Rock—strong and stable. It certainly felt that way to be jogging along beside him along the dark jungle trail.
It was only then that Sofia became aware of the sound of helicopters close overhead. There was something odd about it, they sounded both louder and as if they were moving away.
Carla upped the pace as she shouted back over her shoulder, “Come on you lazy sods.” Though they were all within ten paces of her.
“That’s our cue. She calls and we must bow,” Duane whispered beside her again. She liked his quick humor. It was…unexpected to find a Delta operator with one. The view from her desk at The Activity was that Delta were all rough rebels—the military’s outsiders who found the one place they could to serve. The former Delta operators who’d been recruited into The Activity were very hardcore guys—all about the mission.
It made Duane twice as unexpected.
They stepped into a small clearing at the same moment two MH-6M Little Bird helicopters descended out of the rain and darkness. Except there was something strange about them. Their shapes were bizarrely angular and the sound still wasn’t right.
“Stealth,” Duane nudged her forward.
She wasn’t even aware of stopping.
“We aren’t supposed to be in Venezuela anyway, so it’s better if no one knows we’ve been here all week.”
Part of ISA’s purpose was to know everything and share everything. The Intelligence Support Activity was founded to gather and synthesize all those little bits and pieces of information from a hundred sources—CIA, Interpol, Mossad, whoever—and turn it into actionable intelligence for the nation’s top-tier Special Operations Forces.
Stealth helos? Other than the one that had gone down in bin Laden’s compound—she hadn’t heard of even one.
A Delta team embedded into Venezuela all week? Not that either. Something was broken here. She could sort of understand about hiding the stealth helicopters, but Central and South America were her specialties. She should have known this team was nearby for a full week. Instead, Delta had retasked them from some other unknown assignment when she’d submitted an asset requisition.
Inside, there was only room for the pilot and copilot. Extended bench seats ran along either side of the Little Bird helicopters—each capable of carrying three soldiers. She and Duane ended up together on one of them.
Facing sideways, they snapped on belts; Duane double-checking hers which she completely didn’t need. She knew how to ride on a Little Bird, even if it was a stealth one.
“Hey Trish, could you circle us once over the compound?” Duane looked toward the cockpit so the pilot must be female as well.
“Taking your lady out for a spin? Now that’s a fine, fine thing to do on a dark summer’s night.” The pilot’s accent was thickly Boston Irish. Sofia’s sophomore roommate at Yale had the same and the tone made her smile.
“Not his lady,” Sofia wished she could take the words back even as she said them.
All she got back from the pilot was a rough snort of laughter. She sounded like one of the big, fat, bar-mamas. “Good luck with that. Duane’s a cutie. Good thing I’m already married.”
As they circled back over the camp, still being pelted by the last of the rain. There wasn’t really anything to see through the leafy canopy. A building here. Another there.
“Oops!” Duane sounded upset as something tumbled out of his hands toward the ground. “Oh my word!” Another. “Oh I’m such a clod,” two more objects followed. “We can go now, Trish. I simply don’t know what came over me.” In another moment he’d be holding his wrist to his forehead like a fainting Scarlett O’Hara.
The Little Bird helicopter circled around to the northeast, but stayed low over the trees creating a wild rollercoaster ride that had the bench seat and Sofia’s butt losing contact with each other with far more frequency than she’d like. Maybe she was glad that Duane had doublechecked her seatbelt.
Sofia managed to look back before the camp was out of sight.
A fire had bloomed in the distance. The camp would soon be scorched earth, nothing remaining. No signs of forced entry. Nothing but a few bodies that probably wouldn’t be missed and that Mother Nature’s scavengers would clear away soon enough.
“What about forest fire?”
“Calculated risk but, with the heavy rain, it shouldn’t get far. The buildings, being deadwood, will burn easily enough though. Hopefully it will catch the towers as well so there won’t be any sign of the explosions used to take them down.”
“Damn, Duane,” Trish cut in. “Full sentences there. Clear explanations. What the hell’s up with you? You must have it bad.”
Duane tapped a frequency on his radio, along with an encryption key, and showed it to Sofia. He watched as she set the same one on hers; he really didn’t need shit from Trish. The helo flashed past the beach and settled down to race mere meters above the waves. The rain that had been inundating the jungle was now just dispersing clouds over the Caribbean.
But now that he was on a private frequency with Sofia, he wasn’t sure what to say.
“You okay?”
There was a long silence before she responded. “Getting there. But thank you for asking.” Her voice still sounded tight and thin compared to t
he richness of when they’d first met beneath the trees. It also sounded like a conversational closer.
He knew they were punching for international waters, so it would be at least an hour before they met their ship. That was going to be a long, awkward time to sit in silence beside her.
“Full sentences, huh?” It was the first lighter tone he’d heard from her. Until that moment she’d been one serious chick.
“I’m trying to cut down. They’ve threatened me with detox programs if I use them too much.”
He began counting waves flashing by below their dangling feet. Cruising at a hundred-and-thirty knots, roughly two-and-a-half miles a minute, he lost count pretty quickly. They blurred into mere ripples in the moonlight that was just cracking over the ocean’s horizon and punching through a hole in the clouds.
“I’ve seen the tapes of Delta Team attacks before,” Sofia restarted the conversation.
“The Unit. If you’re gonna hang with us, we call ourselves The Unit. The 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta hasn’t existed for a while.”
“I know. I know. Combat Applications Group.”
“Army Compartmented Elements,” Duane made it sing-song.
“And a partridge in a pear tree,” Sofia finished on a near-laugh that tickled Duane. The women of Delta weren’t exactly laughing types—Melissa more quiet and thoughtful, and Carla so damn serious about everything that he couldn’t recall her ever laughing.
“Almost as bad as you guys.” He knew that The Activity wasn’t actually The Activity. Their name had been changed so many times—Centra Spike, Torn Victor, Gray Fox, Task Force Orange—that no one except the bureaucrats in The Pentagon could keep up with it, so the Intelligence Support Activity or just The Activity had been what stuck, out in the field.
“It works for us.”
The helicopter began swaying gently back and forth. Not like trouble, more like…dance music? “What the—”
“You,” Trish cut in, humming a dance tune that fit the timing of the helo’s sway, “really need to learn how to use a two-channel radio.”
He double-checked, it was set right. He’d muted their transmissions from the second channel.
“Or to unplug your intercom cable,” Trish sounded utterly delighted.
He’d plugged in the connection to the helo without even thinking about it. He was in the command position at the head of the outside bench on the pilot’s side, close beside Trish’s right elbow. It had been an automatic gesture to make sure he was patched in.
He hoped that whoever was on the bench seat on the other side of the helo wasn’t plugged—
“I think it’s sweet,” Melissa chimed in for her and Richie.
Across the water, on the other helo racing above the waves, Duane could see Chad sitting beside General Aguado—Kyle and Carla must be on the far side of the second bird.
Aguado was looking everywhere he could except his seatmate, whereas Chad appeared to be in full predator mode. Chad reached over as if he was going to release the general’s safety harness and dump him in the ocean at a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour. The general became very focused and started talking fast. It was a safe bet that Chad was recording everything and saving the CIA a lot of debriefing time.
At least Chad wasn’t paying any attention to he and Sofia. He hoped.
Trish started humming a waltz.
Duane yanked the intercom cable.
Chapter 4
After only a three-hour debrief (six times the length of the actual operation from attack to bug out), they’d finally let her shower and sleep. Clean, in borrowed Navy camos and t-shirt, and well fed, she felt only slightly more human than crawling off the helicopter after nearly forty-eight hours awake.
Fred Smith—the CIA guy who insisted that was his real name so many times that Sofia would have believed him if he wasn’t CIA—sat at the head of the steel conference table dressed in khakis and a plain white dress shirt.
“We’ve already done all of the Agent Smith-The Matrix jokes,” Duane had told her right in front of Smith. “You think up any new ones, bring them on.”
“I’ve heard them all,” though Smith looked cheerfully resigned to it despite his complaint.
“Doesn’t mean we aren’t going to keep trying,” Richie the geek chirped in like a young knight-errant on an exciting quest. Just so damn glad to be here and admiring the crap out of the other guys. Except he was also Delta and a top warrior. It made him constantly surprising.
Typical of shipboard spaces, she, the six-person Delta team, and the CIA guy overwhelmed the cramped room painted in battleship gray. The only decoration was a poster on procedures in case of a fire and a whiteboard with nothing written on it.
“General Aguado,” Fred Smith was rhapsodizing, “had been highly cooperative.”
Chad, the nasty-looking blond Delta, just grinned. Sofia fought back an actual shiver. She was awfully glad not to have been in the general’s position last night, flying for an hour beside Chad the Reaper.
“Rumors are spreading rapidly through Caracas about an attack on Guatopo by a team of fifty SAS agents last night.”
Six mistaken for fifty. With the force this team had blown into camp, literally, she wasn’t surprised.
“Nice guys, the SAS,” Chad acknowledged.
“The best,” Duane added.
The two of them sat side by side across the small table from her. She’d ended up between Fred and Richie. She’d gotten on Richie’s good side last night by letting him handle the G28 rifle. Within minutes he’d been off to the stern of the ship to fire off a clip into the darkness. “It’s good,” he’d reported back, “but I need to trial it against the HK416 and the PSG90 before I can decide about its cross-adaptability between a combat rifle and a sniper rifle. I suspect that it’s good at both, but is it better than one or the other at their specific roles?” He had appeared ready to carry on the conversation with himself even as she took her rifle and headed for the bunk they’d assigned her.
Chad was still being delighted with his misdirection, “Can’t imagine how all those women got the idea that it was the Brits who freed them.”
“Isn’t that weird?” Duane was grinning. “I thought it was us, but I must have been wrong.”
“Personally, I wish it was the SAS rather than you guys,” she couldn’t resist breaking up their tag-team thing. “If it had been, I wouldn’t be sitting here hearing about it.”
They both turned to her in surprise, but she ignored them. Wild Woman Carla, the woman who acted like the leader, smiled briefly at Sofia’s sharp repost but didn’t look her way.
Of course The Unit would never admit to actually being somewhere. The best way to avoid that? Hint that they were someone else.
It was also her first good look at the team, especially Duane. He was almost a shock out of his camo paint and fighting gear. He still had broad shoulders, but he was a smaller man than she’d thought. Between his vest and the large pack filled with explosives, he’d looked superhero strong. Now he merely appeared…larger-than-life. Unlike most Delta, whose hair was typically well past Army regulation-length, his brown-black hair was close shaved, shorter than a soldier’s buzz cut.
Chad didn’t look any less dangerous than he had before. His eyes traveled to her, stopped at her breasts, then up to her face. He must have thought his smile was charming, and she supposed it would be, if she didn’t recognize the type so well.
Duane’s eyes followed where Chad’s had gone and his expression darkened, glaring at the side of Chad’s head. Interesting.
They both had blue eyes. Chad’s were the inviting blue of a summer sky, which was a total lie. Duane’s had all the warmth of ice crystals, so blue they looked fake. Perhaps the chill in his eyes was a lie as well.
Sofia went back to listening to Fred Smith. He was a nondescript guy, pale with slightly reddish hair and an unlikely happy smile that showed no signs of abating. She’d done what she came to do. Now it was just a qu
estion of when she could catch a flight back home to Fort—
“This team has a training opportunity coming up,” Smith called the meeting back to order. “There’s a disabled cruise ship under tow into a Colón, Panama maintenance yard with no passengers aboard. They lost an engine and got everyone off. We’ve dropped a team of ‘hostiles’ aboard. You have been authorized to ‘remove’ those hostiles.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Chad commented.
“Speaking of yourself,” Duane tone was sharper than it had been before.
“He definitely is,” Sofia added, earning her a snort of laughter from farther up the table. She could get to enjoy this. Too bad they were leaving so fast.
“The Activity has assigned Ms. Forteza here as your liaison for this op.”
“Oh, like that’s gonna be a good thing,” Chad sounded disgusted.
“Excellent,” Duane brightened.
“Only if—” Sofia practically choked on her own words. “Wait. Could you wind that tape back for a second?”
She ignored Chad and Duane and focused on the CIA guy. He might look mild mannered. But if he was handing out assignments—to her—then he was… She squinted her eyes and somehow he came into sharper focus.
“You’re not merely some Spec Ops debrief liaison for the CIA.”
Smith grimaced and she now had the whole team’s attention. They were looking between her and Smith in surprise.
He finally sighed, “Takes one to know one I suppose. I really need to remember to be more careful around you Activity types.”
“How long have you been hoodwinking them?” Sofia wanted to know.
“Still is,” Chad grumbled. “What’s going down, Smith?” Of course he didn’t ask her, misogynistic jerk.
The first one to figure it out at the table was Duane.
“Holy shit!” His whisper carried in the silent room.
Sofia could have thumped some of these folks on the head as they all appeared to be giving Duane the credit for figuring it out. He at least was looking at her, then offered a careful nod. Maybe there was a decent guy behind those pretty ice-blue eyes.
Wild Justice (Delta Force Book 3) Page 4
