On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  He’d changed his clothes immediately upon their arrival at the air base, and now looked like what she was beginning to realize he actually was: a soldier. Not some fly-by-night gun for hire who’d washed up on the shores of San Luis with a beer in one hand and a .45 in the other, just in time for a riot and to save her butt. But a real soldier who followed orders and had been trained to fight, very highly trained. It showed in the way he moved, and it showed in the way he thought—clearly, concisely, and tactically, always looking for the win. He’d had a map to a secret airstrip in his pocket the night they’d met, and an official-looking ID from an agency called IRIS, issued by the U.S. Embassy in Panama, allowing him to carry a concealed weapon throughout Central America. She’d researched the organization when she’d gotten home, and about the only thing the Institute for Regional and International Studies did, apparently, was hand out concealed carry cards—but the part about the embassy had been real.

  Honey knew people, was good at reading them, and the man at State, Mr. Cassle, had recognized C. Smith Rydell when the CIA man had handed him the photographs taken at the sacristy. It had been in the almost imperceptible tightening of the older man’s lips, in the long ten seconds he’d spent looking at the picture, and in the one, very brief phone call he’d made: “Get me Grant on the horn.”

  Honey didn’t know who Grant was, yet, but she’d bet Smith did, and she couldn’t help but wonder if Grant was part of the dead end of Smith’s résumé at someplace notated only as SDF. It didn’t seem to matter how many strings she’d jerked and pulled last night and this morning, she still didn’t know what SDF meant, and the most she’d been able to find out in the last four months about 738 Steele Street, the address on his driver’s license, was that it was an old garage with a shady past where people sold cars in Denver, Colorado.

  Honey wasn’t buying it.

  Her glance slid over Smith again.

  Nope. No way. There wasn’t a square inch on him anywhere that said “car salesman.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Smith stood off to the side of the pallet, regarding the load with a mixture of disapproval, apprehension, and disbelief.

  66mm Light Anti-tank Weapons? What the hell was he doing taking LAWs into Morazán? Rifles with 40mm grenade launchers? Just what the hell kind of war was the CIA thinking it wanted to start? And what in the hell could have gone down in the Agency’s Cessna to get all this ordnance, personnel, and transportation rocketing through the system a hundred times faster than his last reimbursement check?

  Smith had a feeling he was never going to know, which was fine with him. He wasn’t a policy maker. He was a policy implementer. Whatever was in the courier’s pouch, if they even got the damn thing back, would be encrypted; the same with the flash drive. More than likely, they both contained the same information, the hard copy being a backup in case the electronic one got zapped—standard procedure. But that was the only standard thing in the whole operation.

  Smith shifted his attention from the LAWs to the suitcases on top of the pallet and almost sighed like Honey. Those things were never going to be the same. He didn’t give a damn, not really, not about the suitcases, but they were as out of place in the hangar as Tweety Bird standing there next to him, and it would be all too easy for her to end up in the same mangled condition.

  He gave her a quick once-over, and got stuck on her shoes. Cripes. They were getting ready to board a C-130, and she was wearing black patent leather peekaboo T-straps with three-inch heels.

  But not for long, not if he had anything to say about it—and he did. T-straps, hell. He was guessing Prada, the spring collection, and yes, he was spending way too much time with Skeeter in her shoe closet. All he could say in his own defense was that half the Steele Street crew was spending too much time in Skeeter’s shoe closet since she and Kid had put in a movie screen, a sound system, and a small section of stadium seating with leather recliners.

  Yeah, it was a helluva closet, supersized, and it was exactly where Honey York needed to be: settled into a recliner, watching a movie in a shoe closet. Safest damn place for her.

  The ground crew finished tying off the netting, and there it all sat, everything from designer luggage to explosive ordnance, and the longer he looked at it, the more unacceptable it became.

  “Give me the briefcase and go home,” he said, not even bothering to look over at her. She knew who he was talking to.

  “No.”

  Dammit.

  “Why not? And don’t bother to tap your foot; I expect an answer this time.”

  “It’s my chip,” Honey said after a moment, not sounding any too happy with his ultimatum. “The only chip I’ve got, my bargaining chip to get into El Salvador and up into Morazán.”

  Yeah, he’d figured as much, and the “incriminating” photographs be damned. It probably took a helluva lot more than the CIA and the United States State Department to intimidate Honoria York-Lytton. And she was right about the briefcase. It was her bargaining chip, all hers. He’d asked Dobbs for the combination, but Dobbs hadn’t known it, and the chief of station hadn’t at all liked being reminded of the fact.

  “Whatever is inside the briefcase isn’t yours,” Smith said, stating what he was sure was another unpopular fact.

  “No, but the ability to get whatever is in it is mine, and this briefcase doesn’t get opened until I get what I want.”

  “Which is?”

  She hesitated.

  “Honoria?”

  “My sister,” she snapped. “Face-to-face. So I can see she’s safe.”

  Finally, the truth came out, not that it was exactly a news flash.

  “Where is she?”

  “She was assigned to St. Joseph Orphanage and School near Cristobal, but I’ve been told she spends a lot of time at the CNL camp up on the Torola River.”

  “Told by who?”

  Honey’s expression, which hadn’t been happy to begin with, turned even grimmer. “Diego Garcia.”

  “That was the correspondence?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  Well, hell.

  “When was the last time you heard from her directly?”

  “The last time I saw her. The morning you put me on the plane.”

  Well.

  Hell.

  Smith wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and stared at the pallet.

  The damn guerrilla camp.

  “What about the priest in San Luis? The one who was in the room with you, and Julia, and Garcia. Father Bartolo? Right? He must be in contact with her.”

  “Father Bartolo has washed his hands of the nuns at St. Joseph. They’ve defied the church by continuing to support the CNL. He says he can’t afford to be associated with them. It’s too dangerous, so he’s turned them over to the priest in Cristobal.”

  That rankled. The guy sure hadn’t had any trouble taking the money and handing it over like he’d been the one to come up with a quarter of a million dollars for the “Liberators.”

  “You need to let me go in alone and close the deal. I’ll find Julia and bring her back to Campos’s.”

  “That won’t work.”

  Yes, it would. Smith was very good at finding people and bringing them back, from wherever to wherever, clean deals, every one. He had a dozen of them to his credit.

  “Why not?” he asked, which turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. After about a minute of watching her mind work without a word coming out of her mouth, he began to wonder if he was going to get an answer. Any answer.

  “I have reason to believe,” she started to say, then stopped for another couple of seconds, before beginning again. “It’s possible Julia doesn’t want to leave the CNL camp.”

  “Because?” She needed to help him out a bit on that one.

  But she wasn’t going to help him out on it. He could tell by the silence. It went on, and on, and on.

  Hell. If Honey got hurt, Smith was going to have a hard time living with
himself, but had anyone in Washington, D.C., thought of that when they’d gotten this ball rolling? And did they give a damn?

  Finally, two questions he could answer on his own, the first with “It didn’t matter,” and the second with “No,” no one gave a damn if Honey got hurt. Despite her net worth and family connections, he was afraid all the Park Avenue princesses in Morazán Province this week were classified as expendable assets.

  Diego Garcia might trust her to deliver his payoff, but Smith didn’t trust Diego Garcia, or Alejandro Campos, or the CIA, and as of two hours ago, White Rook was at the top of his “sketchy” list.

  Outside the hangar, he heard the familiar drone of a C-130 approaching, which did absolutely nothing to improve his mood. The Air Force loadmaster finished checking the pallet, then walked over and pressed a switch on the hangar wall. Two twenty-foot-high doors began sliding apart on greased rails, revealing the transport aircraft with its aft end facing the hangar, and its ramp coming down. In short order, a fork-lift operator was moving the pallet onto the ramp.

  Ready or not, he thought, and the answer to that was “not.”

  A serious-looking young man wearing tropical BDUs stepped off the airplane’s ramp and headed inside the hangar, approaching him and Honey. The soldier’s uniform was completely devoid of unit insignia or any other identification—one more sign that Smith and Honey were heading into no-man’s-land.

  “I’m Smith,” the young soldier said with a quick wink.

  “Yeah, so am I,” Smith admitted, grinning in spite of himself and the whole rotten situation.

  “Two to Ilopango,” the soldier continued. “Transload and handoff to Salvadoran army at hangar T-195, correct?”

  “That’s us,” Rydell confirmed. “I need a set of BDUs for my civilian package. Do you have anything that’ll even come close to fitting her?”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said, his gaze flicking over Honey before returning directly to Smith. “We were warned of a civilian VIP, female, short, size four with size five shoes.”

  Short. Smith’s grin widened. He couldn’t imagine she liked that.

  “We’re setting up a dressing screen now.” The younger man continued, pointing to the right of the doors, where another member of the aircrew was busy rigging a poncho with some suspension line. “The uniform and a pair of boots will be behind the screen.”

  Smith nodded, then shifted his attention back to the pallet being winched aboard the C-130. Yes, sir, he was going to be wondering for a long time what the CIA had promised the Salvadoran government in order to get their cooperation on a load of weapons being delivered to the CNL.

  Talk about politics and bedfellows. That kind of information either never showed up anywhere, ever, or someday, some headline would catch his eye, and he’d think, “So that was what that was all about.” It had happened to him a couple of times, but he couldn’t say he’d ever gotten any satisfaction out of it. The CIA ran their own game, their own way, and anybody and everybody was grist for their mill.

  “Your cargo will be secure in ten more minutes,” the soldier said. “I need you on board as soon as possible after that, since we have runway priority. Wheels up in fifteen.”

  “We’ll be ready and standing by, inside the left edge of the door,” Smith said. “It would be nice if the aircrew could help us give the other passenger some visual screening between the hangar and the ramp.”

  The soldier gave Honey another brief glance and returned his attention to Smith, again without a single expression crossing his face—pure professional, all the way.

  “Already arranged,” he said. “See you in a few.”

  “BDUs?” she asked, as soon as the younger man had walked away.

  “Battle Dress Uniform, a camouflage shirt and trousers, cotton twill. You’ll be glad you’re wearing them,” he said, immediately launching into the hard sell in order to avoid an argument they didn’t have time to have. “They’ll be warmer and more comfortable on the plane, and less conspicuous—”

  “Okay.”

  “—especially when we get to El Salvador and head up into the mountains.”

  Okay?

  “Over there? Right?” she asked, pointing toward the poncho.

  “Uh, yes, and if you could hurry it up, that would be...uh, great.” The last few words were spoken to himself, because Honey had already started across the hangar toward the “dressing room,” the briefcase still firmly in hand, locked around her right wrist.

  He really needed to take care of that.

  “Fifteen minutes, right?” she said over her shoulder.

  “Ten would be better.”

  “Roger that.”

  Roger that?

  “Five would be best,” he said after her, and it couldn’t take more than five. She had on one piece of clothing and was putting on two, a quick switch. He hoped.

  “Then I’ll do it in five,” she assured him.

  Well, okay, then.

  She disappeared behind the poncho, and he felt an unexpected glimmer of hope. If he could get that kind of cooperation for the next forty-eight hours, they might actually have a chance of pulling this off and coming out in one piece. He’d already decided that at the first opportunity, he was “requisitioning” one of the Beretta 9mm pistols on the pallet for her personal use. A lot of guys might have chosen not to arm her, thinking it would mean there would be one less person likely to shoot them—and yeah, he appreciated that reasoning.

  But she’d graduated Ivy League, magna cum laude, and she’d gotten a quarter of a million dollars across San Luis in the middle of the night. Those two deeds required two completely different types of intelligence. No one looking at her would think she had an ounce of street smarts, but she’d been smart on the street that night, and those had been bad streets.

  Yeah, he trusted her to be smart enough to safely handle a weapon without accidentally shooting him or herself. Campos had a firing range on his estate, and hitting it was going to be the first order of the day.

  In less than five minutes, she was coming out from behind the poncho—and looking good. She shouldn’t have, honestly. BDUs were utilitarian, except on her. On her they were a fashion statement.

  He watched her cross the hangar, somewhat dumbfounded, knowing there was a lesson to be learned here, but he’d be damned if he could figure it out. They’d given her a small tactical vest, too, and he’d be damned if he could figure that out, either. But she was loving it, opening all the pockets, looking inside, checking the straps and clips.

  He supposed, to her, it might look like a portable makeup bag or something. A year from now they’d be selling them in Saks along with the rest of her “outfit.”

  She’d rolled the trousers up enough to expose a bit of leg, and she’d rolled the gray army-issue socks down into two small, perfect cuffs on top of her black combat boots. Her dress was folded over her arm, but she’d threaded the narrow black patent leather belt through her French twist like a headband, with the bow in front. It was the finishing touch, tying the whole outfit together—black boots, black headband. The BDU shirt was open to the waist, exposing a light brown T-shirt. He hadn’t really noticed her gold chain necklace against the yellow dress, but it stood out nicely against the BDU T-shirt, and, of course, matched her gold earrings.

  She didn’t make sense.

  Nothing about her made sense.

  Him noticing every little thing about her didn’t make sense.

  He worked with women. He worked with Skeeter Bang Hart, who was a fashionista of the highest order. That girl had the clotheshorse sensibilities of a street urchin and a bottomless pocketbook to make her wildest dreams come true. But even dressed in a fuzzy pink sweater dress and pink suede go-go boots, Skeeter looked like she could kick a guy’s butt—and she could.

  And so could Red Dog, though she wouldn’t have been caught dead in a pink anything, let alone a sweater dress or suede go-go boots. Red Dog liked black and lots of it, and enough red to earn her
name. She liked supple fabrics and sleek designs. Neither one of the female SDF operators looked cute in BDUs. Skeeter always looked competent. Red Dog always looked dangerous.

  Honey looked like if you shook her too hard, she’d break.

  So don’t let anybody shake her, Smith told himself.

  Right. That was a helluva plan to take on a mission—“Don’t shake my partner.”

  With a silent gesture, he directed her forward, toward the plane, and when they got to the top of the ramp, he wasn’t at all surprised to hear her say, “Oh.”

  He knew exactly what she meant. The inside of a C-130 wasn’t the inside of a 747.

  She looked up one side of the fuselage and down the other.

  “Aren’t there any—”

  “No, there aren’t.” No first-class seats, no business-class seats, no economy seats.

  “Are we supposed to—” Honey made a gesture toward the inside wall and the bench seat running the length of the cabin.

  “Yes, we are,” Smith said, directing her forward again, past the pallet, which was secured aft, a few feet forward of the ramp.

  The seats faced the center of the plane and were made out of tightly stretched red cargo netting supported by flimsy aluminum tubing. They looked and felt like cheap lawn chairs with straight backs and no armrests. They were standard troop seats, and there had been a few years in Smith’s younger days when he’d practically lived in one.

  It was like coming home—for one of them anyway.

  Honey perched her camouflaged butt in a seat and scooted around a bit, trying to get comfortable. He could have told her not to bother. The best thing to do was suck it up and enjoy the ride.

  “The back on my seat doesn’t seem right,” she said, turning sideways and wiggling the frame.

  “It’s the way they’re built.”

  “Wrong?”

  “No,” he said, coming to the venerable C-130’s defense. “Don’t think of this as a plane. Think of it as a sardine can designed for efficiency and maximum load.”

  “I’m not a sardine,” she muttered, trying one more time to arrange herself in a comfortable position.