Duke: Alpha One Security: Book 3

by Jasinda Wilder

  “If you do not move,” Anselm shouted down to me, “Harris will tip you out. Believe me on this, bitte.”

  So…I swallowed hard, closed my eyes and said a prayer to whoever or whatever was out there, and angled myself forward so the thick cold metal of the strut slid out from beneath my butt. And then I was dangling in open space, twisting this way and that, the downblast of the rotors battering and buffeting me, the noise deafening, the ground hurling up at me. Yeah, I know, I was actually descending at a slow, measured pace, but when it’s your ass hanging out over nothing, you tell me it feels slow.

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and then I felt ground beneath my feet and Puck was helping me to my feet and deftly freeing me from the harness—without copping a feel, which kind of surprised me. Honestly, he just seemed like the type who would “accidentally” brush his hand across my ass.

  The cable retracted, and a few short minutes later Lola was descending. She was whooping the whole time and laughing, and trying to get Anselm to let her down faster. Because of course she would, the bitch. Just kidding, Lola was awesome, and we were going to be BFFs, I was pretty sure. But it was annoying that she loved it when I was so relieved just to be on the ground.

  Puck reached to help Lola out of the harness, and she slapped his arm.

  “What was that for?” Puck asked, staring at her.

  “That was for grabbing my ass when you take the harness off,” Lola replied, quirking an eyebrow.

  Puck frowned at her. “But I haven’t even done anything yet.”

  “Yeah, well you were going to.”

  Puck shook his head, grumbling under his breath as he undid the harness without touching her and then jerked the cable to tell Anselm he could retract it.

  The cable spooled back where it belonged, Harris tipped the helicopter to one side and drifted away.

  I nudged Lola. “I expected him cop a feel, myself, actually. But he didn’t.”

  Puck clapped a hand over his heart. “You wound me, ladies. I do have some honor, I’ll have you know. You two are my buddies’ girlfriends. There’s a code about that shit, all right?” He seemed genuinely affronted. “I’d never make a move on you. If you two were single ladies I was helping out of a harness, yeah, my hands would be all over you. But you’re with Duke and Thresh, so that means that my hands stay to themselves, and that you’re as safe with me as you would be the rest of the guys.”

  “Puck, I was just—” Lola started.

  “I may be—what was it Harris called me?—a creepy, lecherous, nymphomaniacal douchebag, but I do have some standards.”

  “Puck, I’m sorry,” Lola said. “I was kidding.”

  He pointed at her. “Never bullshit a bullshitter, sweetheart. You weren’t kidding.”

  She shrugged. “No, but I misjudged you, so I am sorry.”

  He grinned, then. “Eh, no hard feelings. None of us are exactly the types you’d want to bring home to mama, and I’m the worst of us.” He fished a cigar from a pocket, this one fresh, unclipped, and full-size; a cigar clipper appeared in his hands— he clipped the end and stuck it unlit between his teeth. “Now, if we’re done with the judgmental portion of the program, I’d like to get moving.” He crouched, swung the YETI cooler up onto his shoulder, and set off marching up a hill.

  Lola and I trotted after him. He seemed to know exactly where we were going, even though Harris had let us down in what seemed to be a random clearing in the middle of a seemingly endless forest in the Arkansas Ozarks. We followed Puck up the side of the hill for a good ten or fifteen minutes, until he stopped, again somewhat randomly, peering around at the trees, all of which seemed identical.

  “Are we lost, Puck?” I asked.

  He chewed on the cigar for a moment, and then glanced back at me. “Nah, I just ain’t been back here in a spell. Always takes me a minute to get my bearings.” He peered around a bit longer, and then set off marching again, reaching up to tap a weathered symbol carved deep into the trunk of a tall, thick, ancient tree as he passed it. “See? My great-great-great grandpappy’s mark, right there. Cabin’s just over the rise.”

  “Puck?” Lola said, trotting to catch up to him. “I didn’t meant to be judgmental, I just—”

  “I give off a certain…aura,” Puck cut in. “I know that. I’m rough around the edges, and that’s puttin’ it lightly. Manners ain’t ever been my strong suit, and won’t never be, I don’t guess. I like naked women, and I like booze, and I like poker, and I like shootin’ guns—the bigger the better. Maybe it’s the redneck in me, I dunno. So…it’s easy to cut a quick judgment on me, and I get that. I ain’t gonna hold nothin’ against you, because I get it. But I got honor. I live by a code. I’m good at gettin’ bitches naked and on their knees, but I wouldn’t ever pull that shit on a woman claimed by someone I’ve spilled blood with. ’Specially those two—Duke and Thresh are just about the only family I got. The whole crew is family, but those two are my boys. They get me in a way Harris, Anselm, and Lear just don’t.”

  “Well, I think you’re sweet,” Lola said.

  Puck snorted. “Honey, I’m about as sweet as salt. But thanks all the same, and I think you’re pretty all right myself.” He rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Now, the sooner we quit gabbing, the sooner we get to the cabin. This cooler ain’t exactly light.” He hiked the YETI higher on his shoulder and set off up the slope again, heading on an angle rather than directly upward.

  Lola and I followed him at a distance of a few feet.

  I nudged Lola again. “You ever notice his southern accent comes and goes?”

  Lola nodded. “Yeah, I have. I get the feeling he’s super smart, but he likes people to hear the drawl and underestimate him. Or maybe he just likes to mess with people? I don’t know.”

  “Or maybe I’m just self-conscious about it and can’t ever quite get rid of it,” Puck said from ahead of. “By the way, I have excellent hearing.”

  We reached the verge, then, where the hill leveled out a little. The mountainside angled off to our right and left, descending downward head of us. Puck plucked the cigar from his mouth and pointed with it: on our left and down the slope about a quarter of a mile, another hill rose up to form a nook where one mountainside met another, and tucked into that crevice was a tiny log cabin which looked every single minute of the hundred and fifty years Puck claimed it was. It was surrounded by trees, so that it was nearly invisible, and even after Puck pointed it out, I had a hard time keeping track of exactly where the little cabin was located. The age of the wood, the obscuring foliage, and the mountains rising up on either side all worked to create almost perfect camouflage.

  We descended toward the cabin, Puck taking long, bouncing strides downward, the cooler swaying precariously on his shoulder, Lola and me not far behind. We reached the porch, which was just big enough to stand on, and accessible from the ground by a set of steps made from crumbling cinder blocks. The cabin itself looked snug enough, the logs thick and weathered, set closely together and sealed somehow. The roof had been re-shingled in the recent past, but the rest of the cabin, as in my initial estimation, looked exactly as old as it was. It didn’t even have a real doorknob, only the kind of lever you’d see in Little House on the Prairie, or maybe old westerns. And, as Thresh had claimed, there was an actual outhouse. It was…well, I guess you’d call it a hut, just barely large enough to allow a grown man room to stand up in. It was down the hill a ways, and nestled against the side of the mountain.

  Puck lifted the lever and kicked the door open with his toe, peering inside briefly before going in and setting the cooler down with a grunt. The interior, when I ducked in, was maybe a total of a hundred square feet, maximum. There was a fireplace on one wall, a wood-framed cot to left of that, a low table opposite the cot, sitting on a round, aged, hand-woven rug in the middle of the room. That was, quite literally, it. Well, except for a stack of milk cartons near the table, which contained some canned goods and bottles of li
quor.

  I stared at Puck. “A little rustic?”

  He shrugged. “I come here to sleep on hunting trips, don’t need much else.”

  “Is there even electricity?”

  “Nope.” He waved his cigar in the direction of the outhouse. “There is a well pump down thataway, though.”

  Lola just blinked, glancing around. “Well, for me, it won’t be much different than Dad’s place in the ’Glades. No water and different trees, but…the same basic lifestyle.”

  I shot her a look. “The primitive kind?”

  Lola shrugged. “Yeah, basically. My dad has lived off the land down in the deep Everglades since I was little girl, so I’m used to sleeping rough. This place has walls and a door, my dad’s fale doesn’t.”

  “FAH-lay?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  “The Samoan word for our traditional home, which is a roof and some upright poles, and that’s it.”

  The radio on Puck’s belt crackled. “Puck, you about ready for extract?”

  Puck lifted the radio to his mouth. “Affirmative. Give me ten minutes.”

  “Make it eight. Lear has updated intel.”

  Puck hooked the radio back on his belt and exited the cabin, slapping the doorframe on the way out. “Well, lovely ladies, assuming all goes well, I’ll be seeing you in twenty-four hours or less.”

  Lola and I had taken seats at the table—we waved goodbye, expecting him to leave.

  Only he didn’t.

  He just stood there, looking suddenly tense. “Now how the hell…?” he murmured.

  “What is it?” I asked, not like the sudden tension in Puck’s shoulders.

  Lola was closer to the doorway; she lifted up out of her chair and leaned to one side, peering around Puck’s shoulder, and then sank back into the chair, wiping her face with both hands. “Well fuck.”

  “What? What is it?” There were no windows, so without looking out the door, I had no way of knowing what they’d seen.

  Puck’s hand, resting on the doorframe, slid upward toward the lintel. Resting on a set of hooks over the door was a shotgun, but not a matte black tactical new one like Duke had used, but rather one of those with a wood-stock and a long metal barrel with a pump slide under the barrel. Probably used for hunting. Old, worn, but well-cared for, if I was any judge of such things, which I wasn’t.

  “Oh,” I said, understanding what it meant when Puck reached for a gun.

  Puck glanced at me. “See that box of shells on the table by your left hand?” he asked. “Hand ‘em to me.” I gave him the box of shells, and he dumped the entire contents into the cargo pocket of his pants.

  “Get down, stay down, and stay put,” he ordered, his voice quiet, all trace of a drawl gone.

  Lola and I both slid underneath the table and huddled together while Puck cracked open the shotgun, checked it, and slammed it closed again, but held it out of view of those beyond the door.

  “That’s far enough, boys,” he called out, his voice once again the gruff, genial drawl. “Ya’ll are trespassing on my private property. Best get on.”

  “The girl,” came a muffled male voice. “Hand her over, and we’ll leave.”

  “If I had a girl here, I sure as shit wouldn’t be sharing,” Puck said. “Now one last time I’ll tell ya’ll: get the fuck off my land.”

  “We know she’s in there,” the voice returned. “You have thirty seconds. It’s ten on one…be smart.”

  “I got a better idea. I’ll bust out the Wild Turkey and we can have ourselves a party.” Puck put himself fully in the doorway, lifting the shotgun into view and pumped the slide. “Or, I can start putting some buckshot in ya’ll’s asses and we can have ourselves a different kinda party.”

  There was a moment of tense silence, and then several things happened at once.

  Puck leapt into motion, throwing himself to one side and blasting with the shotgun, firing and pumping and firing three times in rapid succession before he hit the ground on the far side of the porch. The next thing that happened was a small silver canister landed with a hollow thunk on the floor of the cabin. It sat spinning for a moment, and then began spitting a dense cloud of thick white fog, which quickly filled the entire cabin, forcing Lola and I to stumble choking and coughing outside. The next thing that happened was a crackle of gunfire, the blasting of Puck’s shotgun, his shouts of rage, and then a cry of pain.

  “He’s down, sir,” I heard someone say, as I tried to breathe and see, but I couldn’t manage either due to the blinding chemical sting and burn in my eyes and mouth and throat.

  “Dead?” Another voice asked.

  “Negative, sir. I think he was wearing a vest.”

  “Grab ‘em,” the first voice said, “and trank ‘em. The blonde kicked up a hell of a fight last time.”

  The blonde, meaning me. So, I kicked up a hell of a fight as I felt bodies around me. I heard Lola screaming, heard thrashing and male grunts of effort, and then a pair of strong arms wrapped around me, pinning my arms to my sides. Something sharp poked the side of my neck, and darkness reached up to swallow me.

  “Got two for one, sir,” I heard the second voice say. “I think this is that bitch from the swamp.”

  “Good work. Let’s move before that helo circles around.”

  And then the darkness swallowed me, sucking me under.

  13: GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS

  I woke up with my head throbbing like a motherfucker and my arm throbbing like a double motherfucker. Everything was hazy, dim, difficult to grasp.

  I worked myself to a sitting position, blinking against the blinding pain, and tried to force some clarity through my foggy, cotton-stuffed head.

  The realization that I’d been drugged again was the first thought to ripple through me.

  The second was that I wasn’t alone.

  I was in the center of a small, dark, dim room, lit by a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The walls were bare concrete, the ceiling corrugated iron and crossbeams. There was a single heavy door, no window, no handle on the inside—a prison cell, or close enough. Huddled around me were women, about thirty of them, all clustered together as close to each other and as far from me as they could get. I had to blink a few times to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, but then, as the chemical haze faded, understanding started washing through me.

  The women were all young, under thirty, most of them, and if I had to assume, I’d say most of them spoke English as a second language, if at all. Mexican, Middle Eastern, South or Central American, Indian—I wasn’t sure who was which, but that’s what I was seeing. Most of them were clothed in rags, literal rags, scraps of clothing. Most sported bruises on their bodies, but not on their faces. One woman sitting nearest me was clutching her waist in a way that made me suspect a cracked or bruised rib.

  I’d been taken by Cain, which meant these women were in Cain’s possession.

  The Beast was fully awake now, and rattling his chains—enough of the metaphors, though. I was feeling the black rage come over me.

  These women were sex slaves.

  “English?” I asked, remaining on my butt on the floor.

  Most shrank away from me, but one raised her hand, near the back of the room. “I…speak a little English.” She spoke barely above a whisper, and it was obvious she was close to hysterics.

  “My name’s Duke,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I’m not going to hurt any of you, okay? Can you tell them that?”

  “I…they…we—we are not all the same speaking—the same…language.”

  “You guys, you’re—why are you here?” I asked.

  “Slaves. To be sold for—for…sex,” the girl answered. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen at most, and I saw a few who were younger than that, thirteen or fourteen.

  “Yeah, well, not any more,” I growled, and the raw rage in my voice had the women around me scrabbling away from me in fear.

  “But—they—they are many.” She blinked at
me as if I’d spoken incomprehensible nonsense. “They will kill you.”

  I focused on containing my rage and when I was calm enough to speak, I glanced at the girl. “They’ll try,” I snarled. “And they’ll fail.”

  I heard footsteps beyond the door, faint voices. “…Be awake by now. Last time, we gave him enough for three men and he was awake within hours.”

  I stood up and shooed the women away from the door, herding them into the farthest corner. I held my finger over my lips and crept to stand by the door. A key rasped in the lock, the knob turned, and the door swung open, away from me. A man entered, carrying a shotgun in both hands, a second behind him, also carrying a shotgun.

  I pivoted away from the wall, grabbed the man in front by the shirt and smashed my forehead against his nose, kicking out with my foot at the same time to launch the second merc flying. My forehead crunched cartilage, blood squirting. I grabbed at the shotgun while the guy was dazed, snatching it away, stepping backward and to the side, and then fired one-handed. Which isn’t as easy as Arnie makes it look in Terminator. Outside of point blank range, I would have missed, but as it was I was close enough to send the lead merc sailing backward with a ragged hole in his chest. The shotgun was a tactical model, thankfully, so I didn’t have to pump it. I hurled myself through the door the second I’d fired, smashed the barrel into the chest of the second merc, who’d landed against the far wall opposite the doorway. I pulled the trigger, turning my head away from the spattering gore. Fucking messy, Jesus. There was a third man, standing outside the door holding a submachine gun and looking stunned. He didn’t get a chance to get over his surprise: I laid the barrel over the elbow of my injured arm and fired again. The kick sent a spear of agony through me, but I didn’t stop to let it take hold. I scooped up the submachine gun, an HK MP5, and rifled the body for magazines. The women were standing in the doorway, looking fearful and tentative; one of the bodies on the floor, the first man I’d shot, had a key ring in his hands.