She hit the light switch—which was on her side of the door—and shoved her goggles back up.
The guy on the couch rolled over and blinked his eyes hard. The face matched the briefing and she unlocked the door.
“Who?” He grunted out in Spanish, then blinked harder as he focused on her. “You don’t look like the other military. I mean aside from being female.”
“I’m not. I don’t fit in even among female military.” She dropped her pack and peeled off the IOTV body armor. She suddenly felt thirty pounds lighter. “Put this on. We’re on the move.”
“To where?”
“What do you care?” Then she cursed herself. He probably did. “The US, if we don’t screw this up.”
“Rockin’!” Not quite the staid scientist she’d been expecting. In fact, he sounded New York. And he was somewhere around her age, another detail the briefing docs hadn’t included.
As she helped him into the gear, and ignored his embarrassed grunt of surprise—civilians were so fussy—as she reached between his legs to pull through the strap connecting the butt- to the groin-protectors. “You’ll need this MOLLE as well.” She freed it from her pack and dumped the vest over his head.
“A vest named Molly?” Ewing switched to English.
“M.O.L.L.E. Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment. The pouches are for whatever you want to take from here.”
“Well, that would have a silent E, not a Y sound,” he continued as he moved about the room and began stuffing various items into his pockets. It looked almost random, but he didn’t strike her as a random sort of guy. Still, it was an odd selection: various sealed flasks, some baggies of assorted powders, and a very dog-eared novel. “Haven’t finished it yet,” as he tore off the first two-thirds before she could see what it was and stuffed the last third in a plastic bag and then into a pouch. Marks for efficiency, cross off absent-minded. “English doesn’t have that sound Y for a final E. If we go back to the Spanish, you would get mol-lay, like the Mexican chocolate sauce with an extra L. Still not Molly.”
“Do you want to talk pronunciation all day or can we get your ass out of here?”
He stopped and glanced around the room, looking at last at the chemist’s bench. “If I never have to calculate another mole of cocaine or manufacture another mole of scopolamine (which doesn’t work as a truth serum no matter what the SEBIN thinks), I’ll die a happy man.”
“A mole?”
“Not the small one on your right cheek—which looks good on you by the way—nor the brown furry animal, though a mole of cocaine actually weighs about three brown-furry moles, a third of a kilo. I like that as a unit of measure. A mole, not the brown-furry one but the chemical one, is a six followed by twenty-three zeroes’ worth of atoms. It’s not actually a weight, but rather a quantity. Because it’s such a simpler atom, a mole of pure carbon-12 weighs over twenty-five times less than a mole of cocaine or about point-oh-eight of a brown-furry.”
“That’s a bunch of atoms,” she couldn’t help saying. No way was she getting into a conversation about brown-furries, their mass or otherwise. And she already knew men thought she was attractive, which was way more trouble than it was worth.
“A mole, the chemical one, is about six hundred times more atoms than there are stars in the known universe. Atoms are seriously small buggers. Why are we still standing here talking about this?”
There was something about the way he talked that kept her listening. Kristine had to physically shake herself to break the mild hypnosis.
Back out in the hall, she wasn’t even halfway back to the maintenance hatch when Ewing called out. “What about all of them?” He was looking at the closed cell doors.
“There’s no way I can extract them with you. If I release them all, they’d just be recaptured or gunned down.”
“If they’re in their cells, they don’t stand a chance at all. Give me the keys.”
“We don’t have time for this.”
Dr. Ray Ewing drew himself up to his full height—about an inch over her own five-eight—and did his best to stare down at her haughtily. The effect was also ruined by how gaunt he was. She was a little surprised that he was still upright beneath the weight of the IOTV’s armor plates and everything else he’d been through. But there was no doubting his grimly determined eyes. He’d face down the Devil herself to give his fellow prisoners a chance.
Feeling small in a way she didn’t appreciate, she tossed him the keys.
He unlocked the first door, then the second.
“We don’t have time for this.” But he ignored her mutter.
Ewing walked up to the first prisoner to stagger out into the open. “Here are the keys. Unlock every door before you leave. Every single one, si?” The man glanced down the hall at the muzzled guard, then nodded fiercely before snatching away the keys and moving to the next door as fast as his feet could carry him.
“They still don’t have a chance, but I feel better about it.”
Kristine inspected him and liked what she saw. Liked it a lot. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”
He shook his head no.
“Good!”
That earned her a confused laugh.
She fished out the spare she’d brought for him just in case he did, and after a moment’s debate, her ankle piece as well.
“Who here knows how to shoot?” she asked the prisoners gathering in the narrow hallway. Three came forward. She handed over her two weapons with extra magazines and sent the third person to where she’d kicked aside the guard’s rifle. Then she pulled out an explosive’s digital timer, without the explosive attached, and set it for three minutes. Starting it, she set her own watch to match a three-minute countdown.
“You,” she reached out and grabbed the first unarmed man who came to hand. “Do not let anyone leave this floor until this counter hits zero. At that time, the guards below will think there is an attack all along the north and east side. If you wait for that, then rush out of the building to the southwest, you’ll stand a chance. Comprende?”
“Si, bonita señorita. Si! Si! Gracias! Cero segundos,” he held the timer with both hands like it was precious.
6
This time, Ewing came when she dragged him down the corridor to the maintenance hatch ladder. He gasped in surprise as he crawled out the hatch into the battering rain and wind. And here comes the whining...
“I forgot what fresh air tastes like.”
“It tastes wet.”
His laugh was encouraging, but he didn’t look strong enough to control his own descent. She tied the end of her grapple rope to his MOLLE vest’s lifting ring and took a bight of rope about her waist before guiding him over the roof’s edge.
“Don’t drop me,” he pleaded as he eased over the lip.
“Well,” she grunted as she took his weight, “you weigh a lot more than a brown-furry. More like a mole of brown-furries, but I’ll try not to.”
“No, that would be roughly two to the twentieth tons and that’s—” she lowered him out of sight and let the wind snatch the math right out of his mouth.
By the time he was down, she was running short on time. Kristine took a loop in between her feet and hand-over-handed her way down. On the ground, she grabbed Ewing’s hand so that she could gauge his capabilities and sprinted away. In another twenty-eight seconds the Venezuelan Navy was going to have something far bigger than a mysterious rope to worry about.
They rushed out past the corner of the mess hall and the dorm. He didn’t stumble often, though he tended to slide around on the muddy ground. She could also feel him lagging even after a twenty-second sprint—she’d have to account for that.
Her watch hit zero just as they ducked out of sight beneath the marginal shelter of a yellow ipê tree. She hoped the freed prisoners hadn’t jumped the gun. Pulling out her remote detonator, she selected all the charges she’d set to the north and east, then hit their firing transmitters simultaneously.
The who
le corner of Building Fourteen seemed to explode.
“Holy shit!” Ewing cried out.
“Quiet, unless you want a patrol coming up our asses.”
“You blew up the building with those poor people still in it. What kind of person are you?” He sounded seriously pissed, but at least he was a little quieter about it.
“I’m Killer Kristine. But try looking again.” She needed to be in motion, but she wouldn’t mind at least one person in this screwed up world thinking well of her.
Every door and most of the windows had been shattered, but she’d only used breaching charges. A flash and hard bang; most of the energy had been directed into destroying the doors themselves.
“Here,” she unclipped her night-vision googles and held them out before pointing off to the west. By the fire’s light, she could see the stream of prisoners departing the building in the other direction. The patrols and guards stumbled forward to stare into the firelight to the northeast like so many pigeons. It was very tempting to unsling her rifle and start picking them off, but that would draw the kind of attention she didn’t want.
“They’re getting away,” Ewing sounded so pleased.
“We’ll see.” Their chances still weren’t great, but at least they were free for now. “About time we were doing some of that ourselves.”
7
Clear of the Naval base, out through the bypasses she’d set in the electric fence, they were resting between a pair of containers in the shipping yard that blocked the worst of the slashing rain.
“Do you have any food?”
She should have thought of that, and dug out a pair of MREs from her pack. “Pick one.”
“What’s the difference?”
She shrugged. “Twenty-four so-called menus; these are two of them. Once you get rid of all the extra wrappings, heaters, and candy, they’re all pretty much the same.”
“Why do you get rid of the candy?” He took one and began futilely tugging at one corner.
Snapping down with her wrist, her Infidel blade dropped into her palm. Hitting the release, the anodized four-inch double-edged dagger snapped out of the front of the handle.
Ewing dropped his MRE pouches in surprise. Civilian.
“Candy is bad luck. Never eat it on a mission.” She slit open his pouches then peeked in. “You’ve got the Mexican Chicken. Not a bad menu, though not great cold.” She slit her own. “I’ve got Spaghetti in Beef Sauce if you’d prefer.”
“Cold spaghetti versus cold Mexican chicken. You really live the highlife. Why ‘Killer Kristine’? I haven’t seen you kill a single person yet.”
“I was in a good mood.”
“Happen much?” He dug into his pouch with a spork and began eating fast. Most civilians weren’t fans of MREs, but he ate it like it was some fancy-kind-of-place good.
“That I have to kill people or that I’m in a good mood?”
“We’ll start with the former,” he’d finished the chicken, fruit pack, cheddar cheese-filled pretzels, and chocolate bar (which didn’t count as candy so it was safe). She slit open and handed over her untouched meal and he started in on that.
Reluctant to answer, she stared up and blinked into the spattering rain that found its way between the shipping containers. Sure! I’ve killed all sorts. Psychotic ragheads at two paces and hell-bent Congolese warlords at a thousand. I’ve taken out narco-runners in Honduras and nacro-manufacturers in Colombia. Civilians didn’t react well to hearing about such things and she’d learned to keep them to herself. So, you’re a killer for the Army? Rather than taking them down, she’d just say, I’m a soldier for the same government that builds your bridges and keeps your food safe. It never seemed to work. Safer to keep her mouth shut.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ewing said between bites of his Chocolate Chip Toaster Pastry and Italian Bread Sticks.
She shrugged. “And?” Kristine waited for whatever weird reaction was coming her way. She wasn’t real hungry and didn’t bother fishing out another menu.
“Not what you’d expect from a beautiful woman. That’s all. Of course, first impressions don’t lie, I suppose. You looked amazingly good standing there in my door all kitted up for war. I was down here doing research for their oil fields. Then they showed up one day and I became a government slave instead.”
“You mean until you got caught as a spy for the CIA?”
He inspected her carefully.
“It’s the only thing that fits. I’ve worked enough CIA special requests to know the feel of them.”
“What are you?”
“You asked that before.”
“You said Killer Kristine. But that’s when I asked what kind of a person you were.”
“I’m Delta Force. Pleased ta meetcha.”
“Brooklyn! What part?”
She’d worked hard to knock it out of her voice over the years, but it had slipped out in the old pat phrase. “Along the Gowanus.”
“Which side?”
“You know the good parts? Nowhere near those.”
He actually laughed. “Didn’t know the Gowanus had good parts.”
Ewing was right, of course. The mile-long canal in the heart of Brooklyn was still one of the most polluted stretches of water in the entire country. It was a Superfund cleanup site, except no one could figure out how to clean up three centuries of toxic sludge without digging up a whole section of Brooklyn and burying it somewhere that no one cared about, like Queens.
“It doesn’t have any good parts,” as Kristine well knew. “But we lived in the part that killed my little sister when she went swimming in it one day.”
“Oh God! I’m so sorry.” And Ewing simply reached a hand around her shoulder in a sideways hug.
Something cracked inside her like the lightning bolt of the growing storm that briefly revealed a flash of his concerned face.
“I was supposed to take her out for an ice cream; it was so hot. Ran into some of my friends and forgot to keep an eye on her. She got bored and went swimming. Even dove down for something shiny in the mud. The toxins took her out in under a month.”
And never once since had Kristine told anyone about it. Never told a soul how her family had disavowed her. How she did her best to never use her last name unless she had to in order to avoid hurting the family—another reason to not fight back against Killer Kristine. Now, here she sat with a total stranger in a raging storm in Venezuela, spilling her guts.
How the hell had that happened?
But Ewing’s arm around her shoulder felt good. Despite all the gear they both wore and all the pain snarled in her gut.
It felt good.
“I grew up on Carroll Street, just a few blocks up from the canal,” he whispered barely louder than the wind shrieking by overhead. “That’s how I became a chemist. Trying to figure out how to fix that canal.”
“Can you?” The flash of hope hurt almost as much as the cold memory. She’d joined the Army the day of her sister’s funeral—a funeral at which not a soul had sat with her or spoken to her.
“Not yet, sorry. But I still work on it when I can. That’s what I brought from the cell,” he patted the pouches on his MOLLE. “Whenever I could find time, I’d work on finding a reagent that might fix some aspect of the mess without killing everyone who lives near it.”
She didn’t know whether to be sick that there was still nothing that could save others like her sister or feel overwhelming hope that people were still trying. “Are you a good chemist?”
“Good enough that the CIA recruited me and the Venezuelan’s didn’t kill me when they found out.” He offered the first real hope she’d felt in a long time.
She yanked out her radio. “Gotta get your ass out of here.”
8
Mankowski had answered right away. “I’ve got a beauty staked out. Just say go and I’ll be there in ten.”
“Go!” Then she’d gotten Dr. Ray Ewing on the move. She now had another reason to keep him alive, a far more i
mportant one than she’d started the night with.
Again, she took his hand to keep exact tabs on him. It felt like more than that, but…something best ignored. Together, they slipped up to the end of the container alley and surveyed the surroundings. Not a soul in sight and even though the yard lights were back on, the visibility sucked beyond about twenty meters. Good.
It took them eight of the ten minutes to scoot across the shipping yard and back to the ferry terminal where she’d left Mankowski.
“We’re good here,” she got Ray tucked out of sight between some big boulders and a support stanchion for the ferry dock overhead that did impressively little to block the slashing storm. “We just— Oh shit!”
“What?”
She slapped her silenced sidearm into his hands. “It’s loaded. There’s no safety. Just aim and pull the trigger. Try not to shoot either of us in the process.” Kristine unslung her HK416, powered up the night sights, and zeroed in on the approaching patrol boat.
It should be out in the middle of the channel right now.
On a foul night like tonight, it should be tied up at the pier.
It definitely shouldn’t be gliding straight toward her position at the ferry landing.
The lights in the ferry terminal above them were off for the night, but there was enough splash from the commercial yard that Kristine knew she wouldn’t be invisible much longer.
Only person that she could see was standing at the helm inside the high, glassed-in bridge of the seventy-five foot long patrol boat. The boat was light blue, with PG-401 painted on either side of the bow. A Gavión-class patrol boat built in the US decades ago, with fore and aft swivel-mounted machine guns. Except there was no one manning the guns.
She zeroed in on the helmsman who was…waving.
9
Carrying the Heart's Load Page 2
