“Is it done?”
Kyle nodded, but Richie jumped in with both feet.
“Sure. The techs were all out at the railing watching the fireworks. The hardest part was I couldn’t decrypt their password. But they hadn’t locked their screens, so I did the same thing I did to Sofia, I created a new user. Only this time I hid it so that they won’t know it’s there to delete it.”
“What about the microwave feed?”
“Well they put an awful lot of comm channels aloft in that bird for such a small country. So, I picked an empty one and routed everything from the La Tumba feed over to an empty satellite channel.”
“Will that work?” Duane thought he understood that, sending the intelligence signal traffic from La Tumba, up to SEBIN’s own satellite, so that Yakima could hear it when it was echoed back down.
“Sure! I called Yakima, they’re fully online already.”
“My bro,” Chad crashed a fist down on Duane’s shoulder, “kicked a whole rack of political prisoners down the ramp. Gone now,” he nodded toward the barrio. “At least those poor bastards won’t get trafficked, or worse.”
“While I was in the system,” Richie waved by skyward, “I found a tracking list of trafficked families. Carla suggested I send it to the underground newspaper.”
“What?” Duane couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So much for hiding the fact that we were ever in their system. Well done, assholes!”
Carla simply gave him one of those looks that said maybe he was the one being an idiot.
“Okay,” might as well eat the bullet. “What am I missing?”
“Carla had me send it from the SEBIN commander’s e-mail account, with a copy to his assistant and his boss.”
Carla’s smile dared him to say it wasn’t slick as all hell. But it was, so he shut up.
“Whether they read it as a betrayal or a mistake, it’s not going to turn out well for him. Then we got out before the techs were back at their desks. Classic Delta, no one knows we were ever here.”
“Yeah,” Chad chimed in. “Except we are still here. Where’s your honey, bro?”
“She’ll make it. Sofia can do anything,” Duane knew that for a fact.
As if in answer, the heavy beat of a very large helicopter sounded overhead. That’s why they’d left the west side untouched and met here—it was where the designer had moved El Helicoide’s helipad to when they’d originally built the geodesic dome on the top.
“I can not fly this helicopter to a friendly country.”
“Why not?” Duane had sat in the copilot’s seat. He might not know anything about helicopters, but still Sofia found it comforting to have him there. Richie and Melissa were getting a handle on the engineering and navigation stations behind them. Outside the big windows, Caracas was petering out. She didn’t know how to read the radar and couldn’t spare time to find charts or the altimeter—to clear the mountains between the city and the coast. Instead, she flew above the highway. She just hoped that it was the one leading out to sea and not off into central Venezuela somewhere.
“Two reasons. Three. One, it’s everything I can do to fly it a few miles.” She was amazed that she hadn’t blown a blood vessel—or crashed. The landing next to El Helicoide had been ugly but not lethal, so she supposed it was okay. “Two, even if I could land us in some country, the Venezuelan government is bound to find out and know it was stolen, where and when. That is the end of your great plan to be invisible.”
“Yeah, that is a problem,” Duane didn’t sound worried.
“So glad you see that. Three—”
“There isn’t enough fuel,” Richie piped up from the engineer’s console. “We have about twenty minutes of air time. I can’t believe they don’t keep their helos fully fueled. I’m sorry. I should have thought to check that.”
“That wasn’t my Number Three. That makes mine Number Four,” Sofia sighed. “At some point they’re going to miss their helicopter and send a fighter jet out to turn us into much littler pieces of ourselves. So you had better think up something brilliant, Mr. Unit Operator.”
“Humph!”
She waited, but he didn’t say anything more. Neither did anyone else. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? Humph?”
“It’s better than ‘Oh god! Oh god! We’re all gonna die!’ isn’t it?”
“Not by enough to count.” She looked ahead, but there were no more lights. Was she about to run into something like an unlit mountainside? Oh. “Well, there’s the ocean.”
The gods or somebody were definitely laughing. She’d ridden out of the jungle on a stealth helicopter with Duane, jumped out of another into a cruise ship’s swimming pool beside him, filmed her brother busy at sabotaging yet a third one at the vineyard, and now she was flying the largest helicopter built—once more over the night-shrouded ocean.
“That’s it. Take her down,” Duane practically shouted.
“Down where?”
“Right over the marina,” Duane jumped out of his seat. “Everyone get ready to jump. We’re going to dump you in the marina. You swim to the boat. We’ll take the helo out to sea, ditch it, and you come fetch us.”
“But—” Richie protested.
“No time!” Duane yanked him from the engineer’s console and hauled him toward the door.
“Where—” Kyle started to ask.
“You’ll have to figure it out.”
“What about—” Melissa looked toward Sofia in the pilot’s seat.
“I’m staying with her. All the way.”
At that, Carla grabbed him by the shirt—hauling him down to her level—and kissed him hard, then moved away to stand by the door.
“On the flip side, bro,” Chad gave him a high-five.
“Now!” Sofia cried out. “I can’t hover this beast for long.”
Kyle opened the door and his five teammates streamed out, plunging down into the water as fast as bullets.
“Good to go!” he shouted and leaned out to make sure everyone surfaced as Sofia eased them away. Five heads, already striking out toward the moored GoldenEye.
He returned to the copilot’s seat.
“They’re all safe.”
“That’s nice. Any ideas how to do the same for us?”
“Got me. How do you ditch a helicopter?”
“No idea. They didn’t cover that in let’s-go-for-a-scenic-flight-over-the-vineyards school. All I remember on the topic is: don’t do it.”
Duane looked out the windshield. They were out over the Caribbean Sea by now. A couple miles farther and they could safely ditch it where it wasn’t likely to be noticed.
No help out there.
He began looking around inside the cockpit. Something caught his attention. It took him a moment to figure out what, but then he pinned it down again and he pointed at it so that it couldn’t slip away again.
“Piloto automático,” Duane read out.
“Do you know how to run an autopilot?”
“No idea. You?”
“No.”
“Wait! Melissa had a book of checklists somewhere. Let me see.”
“Hurry.”
“Okay.”
“No, really hurry!”
Duane turned to look where Sofia was focused. There was a red light blinking brightly in the darkened cockpit.
He could just make out the label: motor #1 combustible.
Fuel.
Then a second light blinked red: motor #2 combustible.
“How many engines do we have?” He’d bet that he wasn’t going to like the answer
“Two.”
“Helo-2, Delta-0, sports fans.” Nope. He didn’t like that answer one bit.
Sofia had told Duane he was crazy too many times. Some balance had tipped and now she was just going to trust him blindly and hope for the best.
He read fast, tapping at the autopilot’s keypad.
“Get us down near the water.”
“I can’t.”
; “Why not?” Duane didn’t pause in his programming.
“Because I don’t know where it is. And no, the altimeter isn’t calibrated, so it won’t help much. And if you can find a radar altimeter in all this, more power to you.” She had found the compass—holding northeast away from the coast—and the airspeed—slow so that they didn’t leave that coast too far behind for the GoldenEye to rescue them. She also didn’t like the idea of hitting the water at a hundred or so kilometers an hour. Everything else was a blur of dials and switches except for the two fuel indicators now blinking at a truly alarming rate.
“Uh, how about this?” Duane flicked a switch and she was blinded by the landing lights reflecting off the waves.
The ocean was so close she could almost touch it.
She jerked upward on the collective, and earned the harsh buzz of a stall warning for her troubles.
Sofia managed to ease back on the controls, but her arms were trembling with adrenaline and the effort.
A pilot holds the controls lightly. She added the flight instructor to her personal better-off-dead list. How was she supposed to ease her grip when she knew it was the only thing keeping her and the man she loved alive?
“There!” Duane declared as he punched a button and it began blinking green. “If I did it right, when I hit that, the helicopter will fly away without us.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Remember that ‘Oh god! Oh god! We’re all gonna die!’ part?”
“Oh is that all. When do we do this?”
One of the fuel gauges shifted from blinking red to solid red and a loud buzzer sounded. There was a sudden change in the sound of the engines—as if one was out of fuel and winding down.
“I think now would be a good time,” Duane reached over and released her seatbelt. “Are you ready, Sofia Forteza?”
“Always.”
“I love you so much, lady.”
“Tell me later,” though if that was the last thing she was going to hear before she died, it was a good way to go.
Duane punched the button. It turned solid green, and she could feel the controls move in her hands without her.
Before she could even fully unclench her fingers, Duane yanked her from the seat and dragged her to the side door. He grabbed a rubber raft and tossed it out.
“Get into the raft as fast as you can!” he yelled over the turbine noise flooding in through the open door. He kissed her on the forehead and shoved her out the door.
She fell ten feet.
Twenty.
Th—
The water slammed into her like a hammer.
She surfaced and looked up through the battering spray generated by the huge rotor’s punishing downdraft.
Duane was still standing in the door, fumbling with something as the helicopter moved away.
She screamed his name, but knew he couldn’t hear her.
Her next scream had her swallowing a faceful of seawater which sent her into choking spasms.
Just before she could recover enough to scream his name again, he finally jumped, plunging into the waves a hundred feet from her.
She began swimming toward him and plowed into something large.
The uninflated raft.
Sofia clung to it and kept kicking.
Duane came up to her, shouting, “No time! No time! Get in!”
He yanked the ripcord and the raft practically exploded open, dunking her underneath it.
A hand reached down, grabbed her, and dragged her to the surface. Continuing the motion, he bodily threw her into the raft as if she was weightless.
Then he joined her with a hard landing that knocked away what little air she’d managed to recover when his shoulder slammed into her gut.
“Look!” He pointed out into the night.
As she watched, the helicopter nosed down sharply and plunged into the waves just a few hundred yards away. The huge rotor beat the sea and shattered. She heard parts of it winging by to splash around them, but they weren’t hit.
It began sinking. “I’m not sorry to see it go. Don’t you ever do something like that to me again or I’ll—”
“Hang on!” Then Duane wrapped his arms around her, pinning her to the bottom of the raft. It reminded her of the moment in the Venezuelan jungle, when he wrapped his breathtakingly powerful arm around her waist the moment just before—
Duane felt the explosion slam into them. The massive compression-wave pulse through the water that would have killed them if they’d still been in the water. A towering fountain bloomed up in the night, lit from within by the last of his explosives that he’d set on a timer and thrown deep into the cargo bay.
The helicopter was fully underwater when the second pulse hit them. A new fountain was borne aloft as several thousand surface-to-air missiles created a cascading series of explosions. He’d worried about the debris, or the explosion drawing attention from shore, but programming the autopilot to descend rapidly after just two hundred yards, had the water masking the worst of it.
The surface waves hit next, almost flipping them out of the raft, but he managed to keep them both in it.
Soon there was no evidence on the surface but a vast patch of phosphorescent green stirred up by the air still bubbling upward from the sinking helo.
“Well,” Duane couldn’t quite catch his breath. “That. Was fun,” he helped Sofia sit up. “You okay?”
“Sure,” her voice sounded just like her, but he wished he could see to find out. The life raft didn’t have even a basic survival kit and his flashlight had been in his pack.
“Does anything hurt?”
“Only where you put shoulder into my belly.”
“I’ll try not to do that again.”
“Please don’t.” After a long pause, she spoke softly. “We’re alive.”
“We are. Which is a little surprising given the circumstances.” He’d had plenty of close calls, but this was a new level of extreme even by his standards.
“I think there were things that need to be said later,” Sofia prompted him.
“I love when you get that haughty tone with me.”
“Haughty?” Which she said even more archly.
“Actually I have a serious question. Maybe a couple of them.” He really wished that he could see her, but some things couldn’t be helped.
“So ask,” said the queen from her watery life raft throne.
Unable to stop, he pulled her against him until she was straddling his lap. No woman could ever feel better.
“I am waiting.”
“Does The Activity ever take Delta operators?”
Sofia was so happy to be alive. So happy to be with Duane, that the unexpected question stopped her for a long moment as she tried to make sense of it.
“They do,” she said it carefully.
“What do I have to do to apply?”
She put her hand on his chest, on his cheek. He felt…serious. As if he really meant it.
But it wasn’t right.
“No.”
“What do I have to know?”
“No, I mean N-O no, not the other kind of know. English is such a crazy language.” Even if it was her native tongue.
“What do you mean ‘no’?”
Sofia patted her hand against his chest again, unable to believe what was happening.
“Sofia, lovely lady, what do you mean ‘no’?” Duane said it as softly as a caress.
“You would leave your team for me?”
“I’d leave the military for you.”
She couldn’t imagine him doing that any more than she would. At least not for a long while. “There is something you should know.”
“What? Already married? I’ll kill the bastard. Secret baby hidden away somewhere? Fine, I’ll adopt it. As long as we get to make one or two of our own along the way.”
Sofia slapped a hand over his mouth to stop him. “How can a man who everyone says never talks, talk so much?”
She could fe
el his smile against her palm as he shrugged.
“Well, be quiet for a minute.”
He nodded, then she could feel one of his hands brush along her cheek.
She moved her hand, kissed him briefly, and then quickly recovered his mouth before he could speak.
“No, no, and yes. I am not a married-type person, yet. I have no hidden child. Yes I very much want to have a child with you—as long as,” she tapped the index finger of her free hand against the tip of his nose. “She is a rational person like me and not a crazy person like her father.”
His smile grew bigger. She wished she could see his lovely blue eyes.
“But there is one big no. Huge!”
His smile faded against her palm.
Over his shoulder she could see the light of the fast approaching GoldenEye.
Duane reached up to pull her hand aside, “What’s the huge no?”
“No. You may not leave your team. They are your family.”
“But—”
She covered his mouth again. “But I do not have a team that ties me so tightly to The Activity. Maybe, with some more training, Delta can become my family too.”
“More training? You mean than this?” He waved his hand back toward the mainland. His laugh of joy hit her square in the heart. “I know Carla and Melissa would induct you today. Hell, they all would. You’re completely incredible. We could train you in the field. It’s been done plenty of times before.”
She kissed him to shut him up.
By the time Richie pulled the boat alongside the raft, Duane Jenkins had made his own vote very clear in other ways as well.
They were all gathered on the swim deck to greet her. No, to welcome her.
But she hesitated halfway up the ladder with Duane close behind her. She leaned down to whisper in his ear.
“Remember—our child. She will be like her mother.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Then he muttered softly, but she could just hear it over everyone’s greetings. “Two Forteza women. I’m gonna be in so much trouble.”
About the Author
M.L. Buchman started the first of, what is now over 50 novels and as many short stories, while flying from South Korea to ride his bicycle across the Australian Outback. Part of a solo around the world trip that ultimately launched his writing career.
Wild Justice (Delta Force Book 3) Page 26
