by Lindsay McKenna - Course of Action: The Rescue: Jaguar NightAmazon Gold
Charley and her crew had helped take down a number of these illegal mining operations over the past few months. Small operations for the most part, but they’d recently got a tip about a major site. They’d probed dozens of inlets and minor tributaries trying to find it. Then, just when they nailed their first real lead—a rumor that an American ex-patriot by the name of Sean McMasters had supposedly taken command of a camp on a narrow tributary about a hundred miles downriver—U.S. Southern Command advised they were sending in Sergeant First Class Jack Halliday to lead the takedown. Now Charley knew why!
“This is not good,” she murmured as their motokar chugged its way into the heart of Iquitos.
With its unique Amazonian/European architecture, the city contained a lively mix of theaters, shops, dance halls and palatial mansions built during the rubber boom. The boom lasted only thirty years, but Iquitos still reflected some of the enormous wealth amassed by a handful of entrepreneurs. The Plaza de Armas formed the city’s central hub, and many of the buildings ringing it were adorned with colorful ceramic tiles imported from Portugal and Italy. On one corner of the square stood the famous Iron House designed by Gustave Eiffel and forged in the workshops of Belgium. One of Iquitos’s megarich rubber barons had purchased the two-story structure at the Paris Exposition of 1889 and had it dismantled and shipped back to Iquitos.
The mansion was Iquitos’s best-known landmark, but Charley didn’t bother to point it out to Sergeant Halliday. Her one thought, her only thought, was for her crew. They were battle hardened and Amazon savvy. Still, knowing their target had once been a member of the United States’ elite Delta Force changed the whole complexion of the upcoming mission.
Unlike most Special Ops units, you wouldn’t find Delta Force listed on any army TOA—Table of Allowance. On paper, every Delta Force operator was assigned to other army units. Trained specifically for hostage rescue and counterterrorism operations, they deployed in small, lethal teams. The fact that SOUTHCOM had sent Halliday and his team in for this particular mission told Charley there was more to it than a simple search and destroy.
“Josh Patterson said to say hello.”
The brusque comment jerked her from a grim contemplation of the challenge ahead. “You know Josh?”
“We played football together in high school.”
A smile spread across Charley’s face. She’d met USMC Staff Sergeant Josh Patterson some months back. She and her crew had been participating in joint river-training exercises in Brazil at the time. Patterson had air-dropped into the jungle to rescue a kidnapped Healing Hands worker—who just happened to be the daughter of a Marine Corps general. Charley and her crew had done a hot extraction, and even then she could see Patterson had met his match in Allison Landon.
“Aly sent me an invitation to the wedding,” she related. “I hate to miss it.”
Halliday regarded her steadily for several moments. “We have another acquaintance in common,” he said coolly.
“Who’s that?”
“Your husband. I ran into him during my prebrief at SOUTHCOM. In a bar just outside the base.”
Charley’s lip curled. “That sounds like Alex. And just to keep the record straight, he’s not my husband. Hasn’t been for more than three years.”
She was tempted to ask Halliday what he and Alex talked about but deep-sixed the impulse. She had a good idea. Besides, she didn’t want to give her ex the satisfaction of knowing she’d asked about him in the unlikely event the two men ever hooked up again. Instead, she channeled the conversation to the mission ahead.
“We’ll be taking a riverine command boat downriver.”
The RCB was a fast, lethal, shallow-water vessel. Originally designed and built for the Swedish Navy, the United States had ordered its own version of the craft for its brown-water navy. Charley was the first female to command one, and she didn’t take her responsibilities lightly.
“The RCB has a three-foot draft, twin diesel engines, and carries more firepower per square inch than any other military vehicle except maybe an...”
“An Abrams tank. I’m aware of your craft’s capabilities.”
“Right. We’ll be manned by a combined U.S. and Peruvian crew and carry an assault team of...”
“Four Peruvian Special Ops troops in addition to my team.”
Not even the buzz of motorcycle engines could drown the brusque edge in his voice. Instinctively Charley bristled. Just as instinctively, she told herself to cool it. She’d worked with too many of men like Halliday to let him get to her.
Except...there was something different about this one. Something that belied the stereotype. Not his hard, muscled body. That was most definitely primo. Every rattle of the motokar telegraphed an unmistakable signal from the steely muscles pressed against her shoulder and hip. But she didn’t get the same chauvinistic vibes from him she’d encountered all too often from others of his ilk. Whatever had Sergeant Halliday wound so tight didn’t hinge on her sex.
Too bad.
Just as quickly as the thought slipped into her mind, she booted it out. There was nothing like working in a male-dominated environment—and jumping into a brief, disastrous marriage!—to make a gal wary of instinctive physical responses. Halliday and his men had been dispatched to the Amazon for a specific mission. Charley and her men would assist in that mission. Then she and Jack Halliday would part ways, never to cross paths again.
Too bad.
Dammit! What was with her this morning? It had to be his closeness. The sharp, clean tang of his sweat. The rub of his thigh against hers. Not to mention the fact that Charley could give an entire cloister of nuns lessons in celibacy since she’d landed in the Amazon eight months ago.
For any woman to reach the upper ranks in the navy, they had to develop a rhino-tough hide along with a magic blend of leadership, skill, empathy, guts, determination and dedication. Not much room in there for fooling around. Or for girlie-girlie stuff, although Charley made an effort with her hair. Twisting the dark red mass into a rope and pinning it up every morning was a pain but vital to her sense of self. It was her one vanity, her one concession to being a woman in what was still pretty much a man’s world. Without thinking, she reached up to tuck a sweat-damp strand behind her ear.
* * *
Jack caught the movement from the corner of his eye and smothered a curse. This op had been gnawing at his insides since the moment he learned he’d be going after one of his own. A man Jack himself had trained. A bastard who’d not only betrayed his country, but had made a mockery of everything Delta Force stood for. Bad enough McMasters was knee-deep in the illegal gold trade. Latest word was he’d used some of that gold to buy and subsequently sell arms to terrorists high on the U.S. most-wanted list.
Jack had been sent in to take the bastard down. To accomplish that, he would have to depend on Chief Charlene Dawson and her crew. He had nothing against women in the military. Had served with some damned fine ones. But this particular woman’s ex had bent his ear for a good half hour. According to Alex Dawson, his wife had slept her way into several juicy assignments before dumping him.
Jack knew better than to accept at face value the ravings of a half-drunk and obviously bitter ex. Particularly since those ravings didn’t square with Dawson’s glowing fitness reports and her steady rise within the ranks of the riverine community. Although not as tight as Delta Force, the river rats wouldn’t tolerate a phony for long. The woman had to know her stuff, had to be as good as she claimed.
Still, she’d made a vow. Walked down the aisle. Went the for-better-or-worse route. Then bailed when the going got rocky. That didn’t square with Jack’s rigid sense of right and wrong, of hanging tough against all odds. Loyalty was a trait that went bone deep in him.
With good reason. The son of an oil rigger, he’d grown up in the gritty, dust-whipped West Texas town of Rush Springs. His mother decamped when Jack was four or five, and his father took out his anger at her desertion by beating the crap out of their so
n until Jack was big enough and strong enough to fight back. His one salvation, his only outlet, during those dark years was the fact that he was good at sports. All kinds of sports, but he’d come into his own on the football field.
Over four injury-wracked, teeth-rattling years his high-school team had battled from last place in the division standings to state champs. Along the way Jack and five of his teammates got tagged as the Sidewinders for their ability to strike without warning and get the ball down the field. They also became so tight, so mentally attuned to each other, that no one in Rush Springs was surprised when all six enlisted in the military right after graduation. Or that every one of them went into Special Ops. They served in different branches of the military, but the Special Ops community was small enough that their paths crossed often.
And fellow Sidewinder Josh Patterson had nothing but praise for Charley Dawson’s skills. Jack trusted Josh, so he would trust Dawson’s skills. He’d put that crap about her sleeping her way up the ranks out of his head.
Although...
He could see how it might happen. Not even her baggy jungle BDUs and boonie hat could disguise this woman’s femininity. Add a pair of doe-brown eyes and those damp red tendrils framing a heart-shaped face, and you got an enticing package. Then the putt-putt swerved around a corner, throwing Dawson against him, and Jack swallowed another curse. The press of a high, firm breast confirmed just how feminine Chief Dawson was.
“Sorry,” she muttered, righting herself.
As their driver zoomed past a block of warehouses and aimed for the docks dead ahead, Jack breathed in a familiar stench. He’d made enough river assaults to appreciate the combined stink of rotting vegetation, muddy water and diesel fumes.
He appreciated even more the craft tied up at a wharf guarded by heavily armed Peruvian troops. Jack raked an approving glance from stem to stern as he hefted his gear bag and Dawson passed the putt-putt driver some Peruvian soles.
“This way.”
She approached the guards at the checkpoint with a sure stride and an easy smile. Jack’s Spanish was passable, but nowhere good enough to catch more than a phrase or two of what sounded like good-natured insults before the guards waved them through.
“They don’t need to see an ID?”
She flashed him an amused glance. “How many female American boat skippers do you think there are in the Amazon?”
“Point taken. They don’t know me, however.”
“You’re with me,” she said with a shrug.
He followed her down the long wharf to the patrol boat. It was painted in jungle camouflage colors of gray, green and muddy brown. Despite the drab paint scheme, though, the riverine command boat was a thing of beauty. Unlike the Special Ops insertion boats Jack had jumped out of more times than he wanted to remember, the RCB was big and roomy and fast. Its three-foot draft made for easy access to shallow rivers, and its reinforced bow allowed it to run onto shore at full speed without damage.
The boat also bristled with armament. Jack gave the Browning .50-caliber machine guns mounted midship his wholehearted approval. The 12.7 mm guns on the prow and aft were Lemur-sighted and could be remotely controlled from inside the interior compartment—which was armor-plated and air-conditioned and boasted seating for twenty fully armed troops and room for all their equipment. Helluva way to fight a war!
Jack fully intended to take Sean McMasters down with minimal collateral damage. If things went south, though, it never hurt to have this kind of firepower as backup.
In full operational mode, the RCB carried a crew of four. There was only one sailor aboard at the moment. Sprouting a haystack of sun-bleached yellow hair and a gap-toothed grin, he looked like a sixteen-year-old who’d run away from a red-dirt Georgia farm and lied about his age to join the navy.
Jack soon found out that assessment wasn’t far off the mark; Charley Dawson introduced Gunner’s Mate Third Class Michael “Bubba” Burke and stressed that the kid had racked up an impressive record during his scant years of service.
“Bubba served on my crew in Iraq,” she said as the two men shook hands. “He took a hit during a particularly nasty firefight but stayed at his gun.” She gave the kid a look that was two parts pride and one part affection. “The idiot was up for a nice, cushy shore job after that tour but volunteered for Amazon duty. Beats the hell out of me why.”
“C’mon, Chief. You know why.” Burke turned to Jack and treated him to a shy smile. “Me ’n’ the rest of the crew, we’d swallow half of this here river if the chief told us to.”
“Good to know,” Jack said easily.
He wasn’t overly impressed by Burke’s obvious devotion to his boat captain. As young as the kid was, he’d most likely served under only one or two superiors. A few more years under his belt, and he would have better grounds for comparison. Still, it said something for Dawson that she could inspire such loyalty.
* * *
After slipping the mooring lines, Dawson backed her craft into the Amazon. The river was almost a mile wide at this point and as brown as the soles of Jack’s boots. It was also crowded with water taxis, tugs, dugouts, canoes and logging barges making for Iquitos, the only port of any size within five hundred miles in either direction. Once Dawson cleared the worst of the traffic, she shoved the throttles forward. The RCB almost leaped out of the water, churning turbulence in her wake, and made for the Peruvian naval base occupying a strategic bend of the river some distance away.
Jack wasn’t sure what he’d expected of a naval base carved out a tropical rain forest. Certainly not this manicured patch of green studded with neatly tended tin-roofed buildings. A cluster of boats were moored at the docks fronting the river. Most flew Peru’s red-and-white striped flag. Two craft flew the Stars and Stripes. One of those, Jack knew from his prebrief, belonged to U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit-6.
NAMRU-6 partnered with the Peruvian Ministries of Health and Defense as well as several American universities to conduct field studies in a wide range of tropical health issues, such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, typhus, viral encephalitis and diarrheal diseases. As someone who’d been hit by both Baghdad Belly and the Tanzania Trots due to polluted water, Jack sincerely hoped their research was going well.
Dawson nosed her craft into an empty slip with an ease that told Jack she could probably do it in her sleep. She held the boat steady while her young gunner’s mate jumped onto the dock and secured the lines. The boat shut down, Dawson and Burke escorted Jack to the rendezvous with the men whose lives he was about to put on the line.
Chapter 2
The intel briefing and mission planning for Operation Viper took place in the squat, green-tin-roofed building that served as the Iquitos Naval Base’s command and control center. The CC reflected the dollars the United States had poured into this region to help stop the flow of drugs from Colombia, just two hundred kilometers to the north. One glance told Jack the equipment was state of the art. Wall-mounted screens tracked the status of boats patrolling the rivers and squads trekking through the jungle. Banks of computers sent and received digital data, while radios crackled with voice transmissions. Chief Dawson asked the ensign serving as the duty officer to give Jack a quick tour of the facility, then escorted him to the briefing room where the rest of the team had assembled.
A black-bearded giant of a man strode up to Jack and delivered a powerhouse punch in the arm. “Halliday, you ole coon dawg! Good to see you.”
“You, too, Bear.”
Trained as a long shooter—the Delta Force label for sniper—Ed “Bear” Denton could pick a flea off a goat at a thousand yards. He and Jack had worked several ops together, most recently augmenting the Secret Service during a presidential visit to Africa.
Jack had also worked with the second man on his team. Although all Delta Force operators could breach doors or blow airplane hatches with minimal collateral damage, Nate Hodgekiss took demolitions to a fine art. The long, tall string bean from North Dakota was in const
ant demand with the CIA, FBI and DEA.
Jack knew the final member of his team only by reputation, but that was enough to make him extremely happy that Marvin White Feather was on his side instead of the bad guys’.
Next he met the four-man Peruvian commando squad going in with them. He’d studied background briefs of each commando and was pleased to see they looked as tough and battle hardened in person as they did on paper.
That left the two remaining members of Dawson’s crew. One was a local, a Peruvian with broad cheekbones and intelligent eyes who’d grown up on the Amazon and knew all its moods. His U.S. counterpart was a Special Warfare boat operator with the inevitable nickname “Boats,” who damned near gave Jack a heart attack.
When he reached out to shake hands with the man, something small and furry jumped from Boats’ sleeve to Jack’s palm. Somehow he managed to control the instinctive impulse to squeeze his fist and crush whatever it was. Still, his heart got in an extra beat or two as he stared down at the tiny puff of white-and-gray fur hanging on to his middle finger with a death grip. Slowly, he raised his hand and came eye to eye with a creature that couldn’t have been more than two inches long.
“What the hell is this?”
“That’s Snowball,” Boats replied. “Our mascot.”
“He’s a pocket monkey,” Chief Dawson explained. “Or more correctly, a pygmy marmoset. The smallest living primate in the world. He dropped into our boat during a patrol a few months back and decided to stay.”
She held out her hand and made a clicking noise. “Come here, baby.”
The little fur ball made a flying leap from Jack’s palm to hers. Scampering up her arm, it dove into the breast pocket of her BDUs.