“S-A-D. Special Activities Division,” Duane whispered in surprise and the shock rippled around the table. Took a lot to shock a Unit operator, but this snagged their attention.
SAD was the CIA’s own military arm—and they were bad news.
They’d been working with him for over a year and Smith didn’t look like a total scumbag.
Because the rest of the team were all still looking at him in surprise, Duane was the only one who saw that Smith’s look said…something else. Until Sofia’s comment, he’d been as accepting of “CIA Agent” Fred Smith as the rest of the team.
By Smith’s expression at the moment, Duane could see that he was hiding something more.
Duane had been trained by two masters of a different life—one he’d almost ended up living. If ever there were two people who knew how to tell when someone was hiding something, it was his parents: a high-level executive at Coca-Cola, one of the world’s Top Hundred Companies (“Number Eighty-three and climbing”), and Mama, a leading women’s rights lawyer. He hadn’t gotten away with shit as a kid.
“Special Operations Group,” he got it out before Fred could cut him off.
He might as well have dropped that freaking jungle viper—the one that had crawled over him and almost made him shit his pants in front of Sofia—right on the table. Everybody whipped around to inspect Fred, except Sofia, who raised one of those strong eyebrows at him in question. Not asking if he was right, but rather asking who he really was that he’d known. It was all rooted in a skill set he’d rather forget, if his parents would ever let him. They’d raised him to be an inveterate bastard in the gamesmanship of the corporate landscape and it was hard to shed at times.
Thankfully the mayhem in the room allowed him to simply shrug at Sofia’s unvoiced question and turn to watch the fun.
“SOG?” Richie sounded totally excited. “I’ve never met one of you guys before. I’ve got so many questions.”
“None of which he’d answer,” Chad snarled.
“Not likely,” Duane had to agree.
“Only because he doesn’t exist,” Sofia finished.
Duane traded quick smiles with her. He was really getting to like this woman. She’d recovered fast in the field, her training keeping her going even when Delta-level chaos was going on around her. There were a lot of seasoned soldiers who couldn’t do that. Teasing Chad made him like her too. And the fact that she was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen wasn’t hurting matters either.
Out of her camo paint and ghillie suit, Sofia Forteza was softly Latinate in perfect curves. In her Spain-Spanish he could pick out exposure to both Mexico and South America in her speech—along with that dose of accentless American. Pacific Northwest maybe. She was strong, but with a slender waist that had tucked into his arm like a dream. He hadn’t danced since he’d walked out of college one semester shy of his MBA and joined the Army, but she made him want to take it back up just so he’d have an excuse to hold her again.
“SOG?” Carla sounded as if Fred Smith might not make it out of the room alive for deceiving them.
If the Special Activities Division was the CIA’s own personal army, the Special Operations Group was its black ops arm—as if a black ops army needed a black ops specialty team. The CIA assassin teams were all part of SOG. They tended to recruit the roughest and toughest of SEAL Team 6 and Delta. Those guys got in deep and their moral code sounded pretty dicey. Worst of all, when SOG shit rolled downhill, it always seemed to be up to Delta to squat in the ditch and clean it up.
Fred Smith’s popularity had just gone straight down the toilet.
Chad’s glance back to Duane said it all, “Oh fuck!”
He nodded.
Yeah, Fred wasn’t the real problem, though he certainly represented it. The problem was that somewhere up the chain of command—without bothering to tell them—their team had become the SOG’s go-to squad in South America.
That didn’t sound any kind of good.
Duane knew one thing: whatever was coming next, they, too, were in it deep now.
Chapter 5
Four-and-a-half hours later, and no wiser despite all the talking, Sofia sat in the back of a massive, blacked-out Chinook helicopter, inside a rubber Zodiac boat, as the helo slammed through the tail end of a hurricane. The boat filled the cargo bay with only inches to spare. The dual, roof-mounted turbines turned the cargo bay of the Chinook into a roaring steel box eight feet wide, six high, and about thirty long—and that was if you didn’t count the rain lashing against the hull and the storm trying to plant them on the ceiling of the helo as often as the deck. They’d been in it for four hours flying from the ship off Venezuela to the Panama Canal and it felt as if she had been living her life inside an eggbeater and would never escape.
Like most Spec Ops teams, The Unit’s operators could sleep in any environment. Most of them were sacked out, stretched out on the boat’s pontoons or atop a couple of lined-up packs filled with lumpy gear as if they were lying in a rocking cradle.
She hadn’t slept a wink.
Duane might have been asleep, but she had the impression that he was watching both her and the cabin. It was too dark to tell—the cargo area was lit with only dim red nightlights—but occasional hints of ice blue gave him away. Or was it her imagination?
Out of his camouflage paint, he looked far less dangerous, except for those unreadable blue eyes. Of course a Delta operator wasn’t supposed to look dangerous; he was supposed to be dangerous.
Sofia’s gift was intel analysis, sorting the critical from the mundane. There were small motions, little tells, that informed her each of these people were Special Ops soldiers. Even Carla and Melissa had an attitude of invincibility. For Kyle, the team leader, it was the extreme degree of his calm, complacent attitude—they could announce a nuclear war and he might say, “Huh, really?” before heading out to personally stop it. Richie was somehow the definition of excitable geek stuffed inside a Delta soldier body. For Chad it was a constant unspoken statement of “Don’t fuck with me or you’re dead.”
Duane, despite his close-shorn hair, could be a college professor napping who just happened to be napping inside a roaring helicopter on a rubber raft but was ready to discuss Chaucer or global geopolitical dynamics at a moment’s notice. There was nothing odd about him, quirky or bragging. Duane simply…was. Until she caught another glimpse of those cobalt blue eyes. No hint of summer sky soft or warm winter’s smoke about them.
Sofia had learned long ago to confront what she didn’t understand. She didn’t believe in fear, so she didn’t have to confront that—not too often anyway—but she almost thought Duane could teach her what fear meant. An uncomfortable shiver slid up her spine.
Maybe it wasn’t just her.
Oddly enough the helicopter’s crew was singing a song. They had started with a cheery country song from the Top 40 about beer for their horses and whiskey for the men (with the one woman on their crew altering the gender of the last line particularly emphatically each time). But with the Delta team aboard, they had now shifted into some minor key, all about the ghosts sailing round Cape Horn, which was at the opposite end of South America from their current target—a cruise ship in Panama.
“The song’s relevance to this moment eludes me,” she swung her microphone out of the way—which she had double-checked was muted anyway—and leaned over so that she could talk to Duane without shouting, much. The two turbine engines of the Chinook were dauntingly loud, even inside the helo.
Either he went from asleep to awake instantly, or he’d been shamming. Either way, he answered her right away.
“Would you rather hear these guys singing ‘La Bamba’?”
“Well, as long as they don’t start dancing the Macarena while we’re flying, I guess we’re okay.” The lead pilot was a tall Texan with a white cowboy hat hanging from the back of his seat, and a good baritone. The lone female crew chief had a pretty alto. “So what’s the plan?”
&nb
sp; Duane shrugged. “Cruise ships are pretty standard to take down. Quiet arrival by rubber boat,” he thumped his elbow against the pontoon he’d been slouched on. “Though two or three Zodiacs arriving from different directions would be better. Scale the ship. We have a fairly standard plan on how to work it forward and up the levels. Don’t know why they’re running us through it again as we did a pirated oil tanker just a couple months back. Practice never hurts, I guess.”
“And the OPFOR don’t expect that?” Besides, taking a small rubber boat out into the storm-lashed night wasn’t her idea of a good time.
Duane’s shrug said that they were The Unit and what the Opposing Forces—the OPFOR—expected or not wasn’t going to be a problem. His eyes slid shut again as if sleep had reclaimed him.
Being in The Activity, Sofia had honed a very finely calibrated sense of not only what fit, but what didn’t. And something here definitely didn’t.
She stared around the helicopter again. Two pilots forward. Three crew chiefs chatting in the seating close behind the pilots. The singing portion of the flight was apparently done, or on temporary hold until they found a new theme.
Of the Delta team, only Chad was awake, cleaning his weapon. The other four were out.
Fred Smith was still back on the Navy ship she’d seen so little of. Arriving in the dark of one night and departing in the dark of the next, she’d only seen enough to identify it as the USS Peleliu—a ship she was fairly sure had been decommissioned and scrapped. Yet there it had been, eight hundred feet of helicopter carrier ship with a skeleton Navy crew and a team of stealth helicopters from the 160th Night Stalkers.
Fred Smith. There was the piece that didn’t fit.
She lightly nudged a boot against the nerve cluster on Duane’s thigh that she’d kneed in the Venezuelan jungle. Duane opened one eye.
“Fred Smith. He’s ringing my Itch-o-meter.”
“Your what?”
“Itch-o-meter. Right between the shoulder blades.”
“Need me to scratch it?”
She booted the nerve cluster hard enough to make him twitch.
“Easy, sugar. Easy,” he sat upright. Rather than scratching at his head in thought, he rubbed his palm over his short hair.
She wondered what it would feel like to do that, then she wanted to smack herself to drive that question back to wherever it had come from.
“What’s the itch?”
“Fred Smith.”
Duane began nodding.
“If he’s really SOG…”
“Yep,” Duane agreed. “Those boys waiting for us aren’t some standard crew. They’re probably using us to test their own.”
“Any bets on how many they put aboard?”
That earned her a thoughtful grunt.
“No takers?”
“I only bet on a sure thing.”
“And you aren’t sure of winning this?”
That brought one of his smiles. “Okay, Sofia. There are seven of us, so more than ten but less than fifteen.”
“No, over twenty,” she guessed. The entire SOG was rumored to have less than sixty field personnel, but she’d bet they were going to commit hard on this exercise to show up The Unit. Which meant the stakes were sky high.
“Twenty?” Duane squinted at her.
“The CIA is always trying to get the ugly tasks for themselves. Glory is all for them. They threw a major hissy fit trying to get the bin Laden mission. They were some kind of upset when it went to the SEALs.” She’d been the assistant to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time and thankfully only watched the by-blow without being caught in it as her boss had. It would have made the actual storm they were now in—bouncing them up and down until sitting on the boat’s seat felt like being in some kids’ party bouncy house—seem mild by comparison.
“So you’re thinking that they’re going to use this as an excuse to take Delta down a notch because there’s some operation coming up that they want?”
She cocked one eyebrow and shrugged. It fit.
Duane liked her honesty as if to say, “Just what I’m seeing.” And her well-defined Spanish eyebrows had a whole expressive language of their own.
Out of the heavy combat gear and ghillie suit aboard the ship, Sofia Forteza was indeed very hot as Chad had said. Only she was nowhere near that simple. Her strong Spanish features were backed up with a warmly-amber skin and the darkest-brown eyes he’d ever seen. With a gaze that missed nothing, her looks said this was a woman who kicked ass and didn’t bother coming back to take names later.
He’d watched her fussing while the others slept. She watched everything. Assessed everything—all at once. He’d wager that Sofia’s thoughts were always busy about something, which made sense for someone working for The Activity.
This time her eyes said that the CIA’s guys were going to be playing this scenario dirty. She didn’t need to declare it. It was simple fact and he could ignore it at his own peril.
With his own Itch-o-meter—damn she was cute—now stoked to life, he broke down the standard training plan for her on how The Unit took back a cruise ship held by terrorists or pirates. Come in fast and low from slightly to the left of straight behind—straight behind, the bad guys had probably come from there themselves. To the left because most people were right-handed and would tend to place more attention on what lay to their right. Everyone lying low in the boat for minimum radar signature. The near-silent, battery-driven, electric engine wrapped in a carbon-fiber cowling for minimum radar signature. Jet rather than prop-driven because the sound signature was also smaller.
“After that, it’s pretty standard. Grappling hooks and suction gear. Team goes up both sides. One side hits the top first to draw all of the attention their way. The other team cleans up from behind.”
Then he waited for questions.
“That’s the best plan?”
“It’s how we train for it.”
Again the nuanced shrug, one shoulder and a slight tip of the head making her long dark hair shimmer in the red night light as it shifted. “How do the CIA’s Special Operations Group train for it?”
Now it was his turn to shrug. “Who the hell knows with those guys.”
“Guess.”
Duane thought about how he’d defend a cruise ship if he knew that a team from The Unit was going to board. It would be easy to anticipate. Duane knew that it would be a hard-won battle, but the more he thought about it, the less he liked it.
“Well?”
“Huh,” was the best he could come up with. There was no love lost between the teams—and the SOG would run it hard. Even the damned SEALs would play it nicer.
“So now what’s the new plan?”
Like he was supposed to outthink the best that The Unit’s trainers had ever come up with. He checked his watch—and do it in the next twenty-eight minutes.
The female crew chief was walking by, barely bothering to reach for handholds despite how hard the Chinook helicopter was bucking through the winds. He called her over, “Hey, Carmen.”
“Oh. My. God!” Carmen slapped a hand to her chest and put her wrist to her forehead. “I’m gonna faint. It only took four hours for one of the silent warriors to acknowledge that they weren’t the only people on this flight.” And she collapsed onto one of the Zodiac’s pontoons, fell upside down into the bottom of the boat, and sprawled at his feet like she was out cold.
Several of the Delta startled awake, inspected them both strangely for a moment, then went back to sleep. Chad hardly bothered to look up from where he continued to work over his already immaculate rifle.
“Got a question for you, once you’re done playing the lead role from a Bizet opera.”
“What are you talking about?” She continued laying upside down, but raised her head to inspect him.
“The opera Carmen? The dazzling man killer?”
“There’s an opera named after me?”
How could she not know? Then he saw the flame
nco dancer painted on the side of her helmet—maybe she wasn’t so surprised. She switched herself around to sit beside him on the floor of the boat.
“How cool is that? Dazzling man killer—perfect fit. Are you my next victim? This should be fun.”
Duane checked his watch. Contact was in twenty-six minutes.
As amusing as she might be to banter with, it was time to get down to business.
“How would you take down a cruise ship?”
“Couple-a Hellfire missiles at the waterline? We don’t carry heavy arms, but we got an escort bird—Lola LaRue in a DAP Hawk—that most certainly does. She be more than glad to kick some cruise-ship ass.”
“I’m looking for an attack plan that doesn’t destroy the boat.”
“Sometimes it’s the best way. I remember this one time we were in a place I can’t mention and we had to shoot down a forty-million dollar Chinook. Four Hellfires didn’t leave anything as big as a name badge.” She flicked the one on her chest which was how he’d remembered her name was Carmen.
“Israel in the Negev Desert,” Sofia said softly. “I didn’t realize that was you.” Duane had heard about the Chinook lost on a training exercise there, a bad one that had cost the Israelis a couple of jets. Unusually, as helicopter losses were never pretty, no crew members had been killed—or at least none were reported.
“Us,” Carmen nodded forward toward the rest of the crew. “All of us. How do you know about that shit?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t say.” But Duane could see that she knew every detail. Too bad, a good story he’d probably never get to hear.
“Crap! Another Activity spook? You guys were all over that one. Figures. Could have used help a little sooner than it came. Might still have our first helo if it had.” Carmen turned a cold shoulder toward Sofia, but offered a saucy grin to show she was just teasing. Then she turned to him, “How about just destroying the cruise ship’s bridge?”
Wild Justice (Delta Force Book 3) Page 5
