Breathless Encounter: Breathless EncounterThe Dark Side of Night

by Cindy Dees

  She watched him for nearly a half hour, easing his way closer and closer to the buildings. At one point, she thought she saw him slowly lift a pair of binoculars to his eyes. What did he see? Had he spotted Camarillo?

  She wouldn’t have believed it possible two days ago, but she desperately hoped Mitch found the guy and killed him. She was ready to get on with her relationship with Mitch. Until the threat of Camarillo was removed, it would hang between them, a piece of unfinished business that would prevent either of them from moving on with their lives.

  Mitch moved again, edging past the last of the boulders dotting the hillside. All that was left between him and the fence was a stretch of long grass, its seed heads nodding in a gentle whiff of night air. The mosquitoes were ferocious, and Kinsey couldn’t stand them any longer. She slid back a few feet and dug in her purse for the tiny bottle of concentrated bug spray Jennifer Blackfoot had told her to put in her bag back at the ops center. God bless Jennifer.

  Quickly, Kinsey rubbed the oily stuff on her skin. A faint musty odor rose from it. She pocketed the bottle and made her way back to the crest of the hill. Mitch had disappeared into the grass somewhere. She waited patiently, her gaze on the fence he would eventually have to get past. He would probably head for that shadowed area where a clump of palmettos butted up against the fence from the inside. She guessed it would take him fifteen minutes to make his way over there.

  She studied the grass carefully, and although she spotted a number of suspicious waves of seed heads over the open stretch that didn’t look like the breeze blowing, she couldn’t spot Mitch.

  His fifteen minutes was nearly up when an explosion of motion below caused her to jolt violently. What the—

  No less than ten black-clad forms erupted out of the grass, shouting. They bore weapons, and all of them were pointed at roughly the patch of grass in front of the palmettos. A second violent movement made her jump, this time the familiar silhouette of Mitch springing up out of the grass and sprinting back toward her position. More shouting and the other men leaped forward.

  Mitch never had a chance. The men tackled him and bodily subdued him. He put up a heck of a fight and, even with ten men on top of him, gave them a hard time. Finally, she saw the butt of a rifle rise up in the air and fall. She all but came over the hill in her horror. The heaving pile of men went still.

  It was a trap! And Mitch had walked right into it. She felt hot all over. Sick to her stomach. She had to do something. But what? She couldn’t take out that many men by herself even if she knew what to do! The group lifted Mitch’s limp form and four men staggered forward under his weight. They moved along the fence but made no effort to go inside the compound, even bypassing a gate.

  Frantic to do something, she followed along the ridge, paralleling the men, peeking over the top of it every few yards to check on the men’s progress. Her ridge disappeared into trees, and she struggled to move through them quietly, skirting the edge of the jungle, in the foliage deeply enough to avoid being seen, but close enough to keep visual contact with Mitch. The men carried him around the perimeter of the compound and peeled off through the trees. The going got thicker here and she lost sight of them. In desperation, she battled her way closer to where she’d last seen them. A trail, no doubt trampled by the large group in front of her, unfolded. She raced along it as quietly as she could. She couldn’t lose Mitch!

  Startled, she heard an engine rev in front of her. She darted forward and emerged at the edge of a clearing in time to see two sets of taillights disappear down the road in front of her. Her stomach dropped sickly. She’d lost him. She raced in the opposite direction, praying this was the same road on which Mitch had parked his car.

  Panic tightened her chest and made her so jittery she could hardly stay on her feet. Gasping for air she sprinted down the road, searching frantically for the car. It had been half hidden in a clump of bushes, and its black color would further camouflage it. She almost ran past it, but a glimmer of glass finally caught her attention.

  She jumped in the front seat. No keys. She hunted furiously in the map pockets and under floor mats. C’mon, Mitch. Where’d you hide the key? There was no sign of it. Frustrated and close to tears, she slumped in the seat. Now what?

  She twisted to reach into the backseat for Mitch’s duffel bag. She lifted the heavy bag into the front seat beside her and commenced rifling through it. There had to be something useful in here. The seconds were ticking away and those cars were getting farther and farther away from her.

  She dug past clothes and tools and ammunition desperately. Aha. A hybrid radio-telephone-looking thing. She yanked it out. She examined the switches and pressed what looked like a power button. The face glowed faintly. She pressed it to her ear. Static. It had a keypad that looked like telephone numbers. Who to call? There was no 911 in Cuba for illegal spies in need of rescue.

  The Bat Cave. If she could get ahold of Mitch’s headquarters, maybe they could help. A phone number for them... She wracked her brains, but couldn’t for the

  life of her remember the phone number on Jennifer

  Blackfoot’s desk phone.

  She examined the phone and started pressing random buttons. A menu popped up on the screen. She scrolled down through a bunch of unhelpful-sounding choices. How she ended up at a phone book of stored numbers, she wasn’t quite sure. But she thanked her lucky star and thumbed through the entries. They were all seemingly random sequences of letters and numbers. Codes, probably.

  Then one caught her attention. ICE11.

  She’d heard a bit on the news not long ago about programming an emergency-contact phone number into your cell phone and labeling it I-C-E, which stood for In Case of Emergency. Apparently EMTs and police often found the cell phones of victims at accident and crime scenes but then had no idea who, out of a list of stored phone numbers, to call to notify a friend or family member. But ICE numbers solved that problem.

  What the heck. The worst she could do was end up waking up some general or foreign spy. She hit the auto-dial button for ICE11.

  It only rang once. A male voice bit out, “Go.”

  “Uhh, who is this?” she asked.

  “Who the hell is this?” the male voice exclaimed.

  “I can’t tell you. This is an emergency, though. Who am I speaking to?”

  “This is a government phone number...Kinsey? Is that you?”

  She started. “Yes, it’s me. Who is this?”

  “Brady Hathaway. What are you doing on this line?”

  Thank God. The Bat Cave. Relief nearly made her throw up. She spoke all in a rush. “Mitch has been kidnapped. I was following him, but he didn’t know. And I saw him get jumped by about ten guys. They knocked him out and carried him to the road, but I lost sight of them. They threw him in a car and drove away. I’m in Mitch’s car now but I can’t find a key and it won’t start and I don’t know what to do—”

  “Slow down, there, Kinsey. Take a deep breath. You did the right thing to call us. We’ve got all kinds of resources to help Mitch. There’s no need to panic, okay?”

  Hathaway’s voice was calm and completely unruffled. He didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned about Mitch’s predicament. She did as he suggested and took several slow, deep breaths.

  “I’m going to go off the horn for a couple minutes. I’m passing you to a guy named John Hollister. He’s going to keep talking to you while I do a few things to help Mitch. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Another man came on the line. He also had a soothing voice that conveyed that everything was under control. He gently questioned her, talking her through all the details of the evening up till this point. At the end of her recitation, he commented, “You’ve done very well, Kinsey. Your quick thinking may very well save Mitch’s life.”

  She lurched. She’d almost forgotten in these guys’ calmne
ss that Mitch was in serious trouble.

  Then Hollister surprised her by saying, “I’m going to talk you through how to hot-wire a car. Do you think you’re up to it?”

  She blinked, startled. “I guess so.”

  “You said you had Mitch’s bag of tools, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reach inside and look for a pair of wire cutters and a pair of pliers. Do you know what both of those look like?”

  She laughed. “Shockingly enough, I do know what those look like. And believe me, not too many of the women I know do.”

  She heard the smile in Hollister’s voice. “You’re going to do just fine, Kinsey. Now. You may need to open the car door and kneel on the ground to do this, but look on the bottom side of the steering column and find a screw. It’ll be recessed in a little tube and may be hard to see in the dark….”

  It took nearly a half hour, and there was a delay while someone was found who knew the wiring of a vintage 1950s automobile ignition system, but eventually, the sedan’s engine roared to life.

  Hollister congratulated her on hot-wiring her first car and passed her back to Brady Hathaway.

  “Hi, Kinsey. It’s me again, Brady.”

  “Hey.”

  “Okay. I’ve got a team of SEALs en route to your area. They’ll be on the ground in six hours. It may take them a few more hours to join you. They’ll be equipped and ready to rescue Mitch.”

  She let out a long breath of relief.

  “We’re going to give you directions, and you’re going to drive to Havana and go to the American Embassy. We’ll call them and they’ll be waiting for you.”

  “No!”

  “Kinsey—”

  “Brady. I’m not arguing with you about this.” She put the car in gear and eased it forward, accelerating when she reached the road. “I’m following Mitch.”

  “Kinsey, Camarillo is a big-time assassin, and you’re an amateur. Your father’s a congressman, for God’s sake.”

  “And I’ll raise heck through him if you don’t help me find Mitch.” She hesitated.

  “Not a chance,” Brady retorted flatly.

  “Let’s review. I’m in Cuba, I’m driving along a road and may stumble into Camarillo’s men all by myself. I’m a hysterical female...oh, and I have a gun. I’m doing this whether you help me or not. Now, are you going to sit back and let the congressman’s daughter get herself killed, or are you going to do your best to help her and keep her alive?”

  A long, frustrated silence was her only reply.

  Finally, Brady growled, “Fine. Have it your way. But let the record show I’m doing this under duress.”

  “So noted,” Kinsey replied drily.

  “If we let you help us find Mitch and give us eyes-on intelligence about where he is, will you promise not to do anything stupid and to wait for our SEAL team to extract him?”

  “If it’ll help Mitch, I promise.”

  A heavy sigh. “Pull out onto the road and proceed in the direction you’re currently headed. I’ve got your car on the satellite.”

  “You mean you’re looking at me right now?” she asked in surprise.

  “If you stuck your arm out the window and waved at me, I’d see it,” Hathaway replied grimly.

  Wow. She’d heard the U.S. had some crazy-powerful satellites, but knowing that cameras were peering down at her from space right now was kind of creepy.

  Hathaway continued, “You’ll go straight ahead for about ten miles. Take a look at your odometer, okay?”

  “It says 599,221.”

  “Damn, they get a lot out of those cars,” Hathaway muttered. “I gotta get me a Cuban mechanic.”

  “How old is this car, anyway?” she asked to distract herself as she drove.

  “Probably pushing sixty years old. At the next intersection, you’re going to turn right. It’ll be a paved road. There may be a stop sign... I can’t make it out in the dark.”

  Definitely creepy. She slowed down as what looked like a yield sign loomed in her headlights. For the next hour, she followed Hathaway’s instructions and actually found herself unwinding a little from her earlier panic. It felt good to be doing something, not just sitting around worrying about Mitch.

  Then Hathaway said, “Slow down. Turn off your headlights if you can.”

  “I can.” She did as he asked, her pulse spiking hard.

  “Stop wherever you can. If the ground looks solid, pull completely off the road and get behind some cover. Let me know when you’ve done that.”

  She crawled along in the dark, peering at the shadows until she found a thick clump of plants similar to the one Mitch had parked behind earlier. She maneuvered the cumbersome car behind the bushes. “Okay, done.”

  “Carefully pull apart the white wire and the blue wire without touching the exposed copper and bend them back so they won’t touch. The engine should stop.”

  “Done.”

  “Now, in Mitch’s bag, I need you to look for a few things.”

  Once Hathaway had armed her with a big pair of field glasses, night-vision goggles, an earbud for the satellite phone and a really big gun, he directed her to get out of the car. Leaving the door unlocked, she stepped out into the night. Once more, she was entering Mitch’s dark shadow-world, and once more, she felt completely unequal to the task. But he was out here somewhere and in grave danger. She had to help him.

  “How do you hear me?” Hathaway murmured into her earpiece.

  “Fine,” she murmured back.

  “When you get close to the target location, you can respond to me by clicking that long black button on the side of the phone. One click means no and two clicks means yes. Got it?”

  She double-clicked in response.

  “Good girl. Okay, you’re going on a little hike. I can’t see you through the canopy of trees, but your phone has a GPS locator in it. You’ll have to find your own way through the jungle and around any obstacles you run into. I’ll give you course corrections to the left or right, but do what you have to in order to keep moving forward. Whatever you do, don’t grab at any sticks or vines for balance. They could be a snake. And don’t walk between any trees that seem to have a wide-open space between them without clearing the space first with a long stick. Spiders like to make webs between trees.”

  “You sure know how to give a girl warm fuzzies.”

  “You’re doing great. Just hang in there with me.”

  “Here goes nothing,” she mumbled and plunged into the wall of black-green before her.

  The trek was a nightmare. Sharp leaves slashed at her arms like swords. Fallen trees tripped her, and vines and weeds clutched at her ankles. Were it not for Brady’s constant course corrections, she’d have become hopelessly lost in the thick tangle of undergrowth. Sometimes the jungle pressed in on her so thickly she feared she couldn’t move any of her limbs and was completely trapped. Only worry for what was happening to Mitch drove her to fight on, to wrestle against the living, breathing beast that had swallowed her whole.

  When an impossibly thick vine slithered up into the trees right in front of her, she completely lost her composure. That snake had been as big around as her arm and easily ten feet long.

  “Not to worry,” Hathaway soothed as she hyperventilated in his ear. “That was a tree boa. They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”

  He allowed her a few minutes to rest and collect herself, and then he urged her onward again. “Not much farther to go. Mitch’s signal is located under tree cover, so I can’t tell you what you’re walking into.”

  “Don’t you guys have infrared cameras or something where you can see heat signatures through walls?”

  “Been watching cable TV, huh?” he commented. “Yeah, we do. But for some reason we’re not painting any s
ignatures. They’re probably inside some sort of metal structure that reflects the signal, or maybe underground. That’s what we need you to tell us.”

  She gathered her remaining energy and slogged on. I’m coming, Mitch. Just hang on. As the minutes ticked past, she began to get a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It expanded into a cramplike feeling not centered in any one place. Something bad was happening to Mitch. She felt his pain as if it were her own. She tried to ignore the sensation, to reason with herself that it was just her frazzled nerves and overactive imagination, but the feeling kept getting stronger and stronger. The endless, throbbing ache would not be ignored.

  “Something bad’s happening to Mitch,” she announced to Hathaway.

  He replied sharply, “Can you hear him?”

  “No. I can feel him.” She added hastily, “I’m not just being a hysterical female here. I have this unshakable feeling in my gut that he’s in pain.”

  “I believe you,” Hathaway replied grimly. “I learned a long time ago to pay attention to gut feelings like yours. You’ve got about two hundred yards to go.”

  Two hundred steps. She counted them off in her head, thanking the stars when she reached open patches and could go ten or twelve steps unimpeded, and cursing the stars when she had to struggle forward a few inches at a time. And still the feeling in her gut grew. It was a sharp pain now.

  “Twenty yards. Slow down and don’t make any more verbal responses to me. Clicks only. Take a good look around, then retreat thirty yards or so into the jungle and give me a call to report what you see.”

  She double-clicked her understanding. Those last few yards were torture. An urge to bolt forward, to run screaming into the middle of whatever was going on, to find Mitch and rescue him, to stop the knifelike ghost pains shooting through her body, nearly overwhelmed her.

  She eased forward, testing each step before she put her foot down. And then a small glade became visible through the trees. She eased forward, one foot at a time, sticking to the deepest shadows. A few minutes ago, they’d been frightening, but now those shadows were her friend, embracing her in their inky camouflage, bringing her closer to the man she craved.