“And you can prove this?” he said, shooting her challenging look.
“Hell no. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that the way the Company operates? They get in, get out, get the job done and, like a ship at sail, they leave no trail,” she countered sarcastically. “Why is this different? Why aren’t they taking out MC6?”
“Maybe because ultra left-wing liberals like you do everything you can to expose covert activities and undermine the safety of good men—not to mention the security of your own country.”
She laughed. “More bullshit. I’m a journalist, Jones. I’m neither liberal nor conservative. I seek and find the truth. That’s all I’m doing here.”
“No. What you’re doing here is fucking things up. Your little search for the truth has compromised five years of groundwork and jeopardized a mission to put these sick bastards out of business.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Gabe was pissed. And he felt mean with it. He didn’t care. Didn’t care about the stricken look on Jenna McMillan’s face, either. She deserved the dressing-down.
Hell. She couldn’t have known what she’d stumbled into, he knew that. It didn’t, however, make it any easier to deal with the fact that the moment he’d committed to springing her out of that jail, he’d had to make one of the most difficult decisions of his life.
“So,” she said, facing him down with an impressive amount of guts, “you were planning on taking them down.”
He clapped his hands in mock applause. “You’re quick, I’ll give you that.”
She shot to her feet—wobbled a little, then righted her, shoving his hand away when he would have steadied her. “You know, I’ve had it up to here with your crap. You think that I’d knowingly put an operation in jeopardy?”
He grunted. Made quote marks with his fingers. “Reporter.”
“Okay, guys.” Amy rose to her feet beside Jenna. The voice of reason, again. “This isn’t doing anyone any good. The question is, where do we go from here? What happens now?”
Gabe stared at the wild redhead, got back as good as he gave, then finally broke eye contact. Butting heads with her was a waste of time and energy.
“What happens now is that I’ve been forced into making a decision I didn’t want to make just yet.”
“What decision?” Amy asked.
Jones glanced at Garrett, who was leaning a hip against the side panel of the Suburban, watching Amy.
“To either pull the mission or accelerate the timetable.”
“And what are you going to do?”
Again, Gabe hesitated. Heaved a deep breath. “It’s already done. Once they find the remains of their rape and pillage squad, they’ll know we’re here, and we lose the element of surprise. That means we have to move tonight, or they might close up shop and disappear.”
He glared at Jenna. “And it’s on your head if I lose any more men.”
Jones stalked back to the Suburban and started digging around in the glove compartment.
“How can he pull this together tonight?” Amy asked Dallas.
Dallas searched her face, looking for signs that the strain was getting to her. She looked concerned but steady. “Because the assault was in the works, like he said. A plan in place. He’s simply bumped up the timetable. Already called in some of his men. We roll at three A.M.”
“It’s going to take them that long to get here?” Jenna rubbed her arms as if she were cold in this warm Argentina summer night.
“Has to do with biorhythms. The bad guys will be at their lowest at that hour. Their reaction time will be slower.”
“And this is different for the good guys, how?” Jenna asked, incredulous.
“It’s different because we’ll be in the driver’s seat. We know the assault is coming down because we staged it. And again, hopefully we’ll have the element of surprise.”
“Assault?” Jenna again, her eyes growing wider by the minute.
“Unless you’d prefer to just walk up and knock on the door and ask them pretty please to surrender?” Jones said from the shadows.
Dallas let go of a weary breath. Jones had a real hard-on for Jenna. And maybe that was the problem. He literally had a hard-on for her, and the only way he knew how to combat it was to snipe like the guerilla fighter he was.
“For chrissake,” Dallas grumbled. “You two think maybe you can bury the hatchet for the duration? We’ve got enough hostile action ahead to keep you both busy.”
Jones looked stubborn. Jenna looked pissed. Status quo.
“Fine.” Jones cut a dark look at Jenna as he walked back toward her. “But let’s get something clear up front. Believe me when I say that if I could, I’d evac you out of here before you could say news-flash. But I don’t have the time or the extra resources to arrange that before this comes down. And I can’t leave you behind,” he added grudgingly. “That means you do exactly what I say, no argument, no hesitation, no smart-ass cracks. Are we straight on that?”
Jenna crossed her arms over her breasts. “As an arrow.”
Dallas breathed a small sigh of relief.
The tension in the barn was as tight as miser’s wallet. Jenna’s acquiescence went a long way toward easing the strain.
But Jones wasn’t finished yet. “And if you have a shred of decency in you, when this is over and if we’re still alive, when you write your little news story, you will not know who was behind the mission, you got that? If you even hint, ‘wink wink’ that there was any U.S. involvement taking MC6 down, you will have personally signed death warrants for me and my men. Not to mention you’ll be the reason for a Capitol Hill investigation the likes of which will make Contragate look like a nursery rhyme and up the national debt by another billion or so.”
The tension ratcheted back up about ten twists as Jenna stared him down.
“A group of heroic local citizens took the law into their own hands and righted a very big wrong,” she said finally.
Jones studied her face then gave her a nod. It was the closest thing she was going to get to a thank you.
She shrugged as if to say, whatever.
Dallas heaved another breath of relief. Another disaster averted. Now if they just managed to live until dawn.
Without another word on the matter, Jones laid it all out for them.
“MC6 has been operating under the cover of an estancia—a cattle ranch,” he clarified when Amy frowned, “for over fifty years.”
He crouched down, spread a map out on the floor of the barn and circled the area with a pen. “It’s a huge spread. Over twelve thousand acres of mountains, lakes, rivers and pastureland.”
“A perfect cover,” Amy put in.
“Yeah,” Jones agreed. “For all intents and purposes it walks like, talks like, and moos like a working ranch. But it’s all cover for what goes on below-ground.”
To the map, he added a diagram and several overhead aerial photographs of the inner compound, proof that the place had been under surveillance for some time.
“Here.” He pointed to what appeared to be a barn or shed of some sort. “Carved out below this building is a cement block bunker. An underground lab—read: torture chamber. Woodpecker grids—”
“I’m sorry, what?” Amy asked.
“Hot-wired metal cages,” Jones clarified. “Just one of their many methods to break down the mind and create alter personalities that can be programmed to do their bidding.
“You need to be prepared to see some pretty bad shit,” he added. “They’ll have them floating in water tanks, locked in ‘death coffins’ to simulate being buried alive, hanging upside down, or locked in boxes with spiders and snakes.”
“Oh, God.” Jenna looked sick. “I’ve read about this…always with skepticism.”
“You’ll be a believer by the time this night is over,” Jones said. “What they do to people here is as real as it gets.”
“Where, in God’s name, do they find their victims?”
Jones rolled a shoulder. “In parts of the Patagonia,
a ‘subject’ can be bought for little of nothing. A child just disappears.”
“Like the children disappeared during the Dirty Wars,” Dallas concluded, thinking back to the women in the white scarves protesting at the palace in Buenos Aires.
“Yeah, like that.”
“How do you know all this with such certainty?” Jenna asked.
Jones was silent for a long moment. “MC6 has been on the radar for years. But it wasn’t until we managed to slip one of our own inside in the guise of household help a little over a year ago that we were able to establish anything concrete.”
Dallas nodded toward the diagrams. “He provided this intel?”
Again, Jones was silent. “She,” he finally said in a rough voice. “She provided the intel.”
“Is she still inside?” Amy was so absorbed in memorizing the layout of the compound that she missed the change in Jones. Jenna, Dallas noted, had caught it. She was looking at him, a curiously soft expression on her face.
“No,” Jones said after a long moment. “She’s not inside. She’s not anywhere.”
Dallas watched Jones carefully. Whoever she was, it was clear that she wasn’t only an operative to Jones. Her loss had been personal. Very personal. And it explained a lot about the man.
“Separate from the experimentation section,” Jones continued, getting himself back together, “there’s a confinement facility for the victims. I suspect we’ll find the majority of them locked in there for the night.”
Dallas spent a few moments studying the layout. “What kind of resistance are we going to meet?”
“Some of the head honchos live on site at the compound—three at the most—but most commute from El Bolson and the surrounding area. Remember, they’ve dug in here, have become a part of the landscape. No different from any other citizens.”
“Except that they’re monsters.”
Jones glanced up at Jenna. “Yeah. Except for that.” He turned back to Dallas. “I don’t expect much in the way of resistance from the head guys. They’ll rely on their hired muscle to hold us off.”
“A security team?” Dallas asked.
“Thirty men on sight. A collection of misfits,” Jones said. “They may or may not have the skills to defend the place.”
“Know the type,” Dallas put in. “Hired more on their loyalty—in the form of paychecks—than for their fighting skills.”
“Right. We managed to place another operative inside on the security team a few months ago. He reports that their training is irregular, and since they don’t get much action, their skills are pretty dull.”
“So it goes something like, hey, no one even knows MC6 exists. No one has ever attacked. So what’s the danger?” Dallas speculated.
“Right again. Remember, this encampment has been running since the early 1950’s when the former SS scientists and doctors regrouped and slowly began building their organization. So the estancia appears as harmless as a family or corporate-run business.”
“Which,” Dallas said, rubbing his chin, “makes any overt security risky for the bad guys.”
Jones nodded. “Also, from a business perspective, the security people really don’t contribute to the bottom line. They’re a necessary evil and an unwanted expense. So they hire the local riffraff instead of professionals because why should they pay fifty people a thousand dollars a day when they could half the number and pay them a hundred dollars a day? That’s still a decent wage for this area and there’s a limitless supply of hotheads ready to fill the bill.”
“What kind of firepower are we looking at?” Dallas asked.
“A rotating two-man guard unit patrols the perimeters of the inner compound. One carries a holstered pistol, the other a slinged submachine gun. Other than that it’s pretty much small arms, a few AKs—not much more unless they’ve got something stowed away, but our man inside hasn’t found anything.
“Here’s the other thing,” Jones continued. “In this hot, humid environment, firearms need constant maintenance. Without a strong command staff hovering over them—which there isn’t—I’m figuring they’ve let their equipment go.”
“Based on what we found at the camp, the bulk of them probably spend their off-hours drinking,” Dallas speculated.
“Roger that. And our man reports that the leader of the pack keeps himself away from the ‘hired help.’ Sees himself as a middle-management type and doesn’t really have much security operations training. He talks the talk, but the men are aware that he can’t walk the walk, so there’s not much respect for him or his orders.”
“Which,” Dallas said with a nod, “should translate to a major breakdown in perimeter and interior defense once we’re inside.”
Jones nodded again, then pointed to the diagram. “The interior compound is about three-by-five square acres. Helicopter pad complete with a jazzy little Bell 206B-3. Armory’s here. Barracks here. In the center is the ranch house slash corporate office for the operation.”
Dallas studied the aerial photograph. “Even given their low profile and knowing they can’t be overtly obvious so as not to create suspicion to the general populace, it seems to me there should be some sort of guard stations, surveillance cameras, towers, fences, etc., around the nucleus of the compound.”
“Guard station here,” Jones pointed out, “and here. Cameras mounted here and here. Four in all. We take them out first.”
“Looks like they’ve clear-cut around the main buildings.”
“But they don’t keep it up well. Fence lines here.” Jones located it for Dallas on a photo. “The wires are sensored, but in this area, with rain and animals around, there’re bound to be a lot of false alarms. I figure they’ve grown lax. Breaching the inner compound shouldn’t be much of a challenge.”
He stopped abruptly, checked his watch. Glanced at Amy, then Jenna. “You two should get a little rest. We’re looking at staging in less than three hours.”
“And what about you?” Amy asked.
“Garrett and I have a little strategizing to do.”
“I’m in on this,” Amy said in a voice that both challenged and warned.
Dallas looked away, worked his jaw. He didn’t want to think about what could happen to her, realized that to keep his head in the game, he couldn’t think about it.
“We’ll fill you in on the assault plan when we get it nailed down,” Jones assured her.
“Go ahead,” Dallas told her with a nod. “Sleep. It’s the best thing you can do for everyone right now.”
Dallas knew she wanted to argue. But she didn’t. Evidently she’d decided to save her fighting for the bad guys.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
An hour later, Amy was still awake. Beside her, Jenna slept. That was good, Amy thought. After all she’d been through, it was a wonder she hadn’t passed out from fatigue and terror.
But Amy knew from the most brutal personal experience that the mind and body were capable of surviving more than she had ever imagined possible. Capable of tolerating unspeakable pain, unforgiving torment.
She was fighting to keep those memories at bay when she felt the blanket tighten on the other side of her.
Dallas.
He lay down on a sigh heavy with fatigue. She turned to him. Studied his profile. The weariness on his face. The small lines around his eyes. The hard set of his jaw, tense, even as he closed his eyes.
“Why are you awake?” he whispered, never looking at her.
“Keyed up,” she said, and moved into him when he lifted his arm, inviting her to snuggle up against him.
“Yeah. Lot of that going around.”
He ran his hand up and down her back, a methodical, unconscious motion. A comfort. A source of composure.
He was quiet for a long while, and when he spoke, his question came out of the blue. “So, what is it that you do when you’re not being chased by or are chasing bad guys?”
Dallas’ question threw her, until she realized how little they really knew about each
other. And until it dawned on her that he was trying to take her mind off what lay ahead of them.
Or maybe he wanted to escape it for a little while himself.
Whatever his reason, she went with it. “I was a counselor in a group home for developmentally disabled children.”
“Really?” He sounded surprised. May even a little approving. “Why? I mean, what made you decide on that course?”
“I wanted to give back, I guess. I know everyone hears horror stories about foster homes and the social services system, but I was lucky. The homes I was placed in were, for the most part, wonderful. And the older I got I realized just how lucky I’d been. I still keep in touch with some of my foster parents. Well, I used to.”
Before Jolo.
“Mom was permanently institutionalized by the time I graduated high school,” she went on, not wanting to get bogged down in that memory again. “When I visited her at the facility, there was a children’s wing. I used to spend a little time with them, too, you know? They were kids. They were lonely.”
“Like you were lonely,” he said, his hand keeping up a comforting rhythm up and down her back.
“I suppose you could draw some parallels, but in truth, there were few. Anyway,” she snuggled closer, loving the feel of him warm and strong beside her, “I realized I wanted to contribute…I don’t know. Something. So I majored in social work in college and gradually settled on developmental disabilities. Specifically children.”
“Think you’ll go back to it?”
“Yeah,” she said, realizing that’s exactly what she wanted to do. “I will. Anyway, I’d like to. It’s been a while. Over a year now, but there’s always a need. I’m sure I can find a position.”
He was quiet for a time. “Where did you go? Six months ago when you left. Where did you go?”
She lifted up on an elbow, searched his face. It gave away nothing as he lay on his back, eyes closed, resting. “I really am sorry about leaving the way I did,” she said, knowing his carefully blank expression masked any number of emotions, anger and disappointment most surely among them.
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