by Elle James
Delgado reached for his waistband.
Before he could get there, Rip had pulled the small, but deadly HK .40 from the hidden holster around his own waist beneath the loose-fitting shirt he’d worn. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I have many men at the festival. You will not get away,” Delgado practically growled.
“I bet I will.” Rip, still holding his hand, twisted Delgado’s arm and spun him, pinning the older man’s arm up between his shoulder blades. “Now, tell your men to back off. You and I will be going for a ride.
Tracie leaned close to Rip. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her drop one of the small tracking devices into the back pocket of Delgado’s pants.
A nod from Carlos and Julio indicated they, too, had dropped their devices in the pockets of their targets.
The music had stopped and the festival goers, their eyes wide and frightened, had backed away from the confrontation taking place in the square, whispering to each other. Some herded the women and children down side streets.
Unwilling to put the good citizen’s in danger, Rip knew he had to get Delgado out of the square and away from town before he let him loose. “Take their weapons,” he ordered.
Julio and Carlos took Delgado’s guards’ weapons while Tracie grabbed Delgado’s nine-millimeter pistol.
“Tell your other men to stay back or I’ll shoot you,” Rip said.
Delgado hesitated.
Rip shoved his arm up higher and goosed him with the tip of his gun. “Do it.”
Delgado shouted in Spanish.
Carlos snarled. “He’s telling them to shoot us.” He swung his fist, hitting Delgado in the mouth.
Delgado spit blood out and glared at Carlos.
“You plan on dying tonight, don’t you?” Rip jacked his arm up higher behind his back.
The old man cursed. “Okay!” He spluttered in Spanish.
Carlos nodded. “That’s more like it. He told them to stay back.”
“Let’s go.” Rip led the way, pushing Delgado in front of him to a location just outside of the small town. They’d parked the vehicles behind a rundown building that appeared to have been abandoned.
Hector’s men closed in behind Rip, Tracie, Carlos, Julio and their charges. Delgado’s other men followed at a distance.
Rip got into the backseat of the Jeep with Delgado. With nowhere else to sit, Tracie sat in Carlos’s lap.
If he’d had a free hand, Rip would have knocked the grin off Carlos’s face. Since there was no other choice, he kept his mouth shut and retained his grip on Delgado’s arm.
The two other men Carlos and Julio had disarmed were released and told to go back to town. They stood still, hesitant to leave their leader.
Delgado shouted for them to leave.
Without a pause, they turned and ran back to the other men carrying weapons.
Rip had Carlos tell Hector’s men to go ahead of them, giving them a good lead before Julio pulled out on the road. Once again, they headed out of town, fully expecting to be followed.
Three miles out, Julio pulled to the side of the road.
Carlos handed Rip a roll of duct tape, which he quickly wound around Delgado’s wrists behind his back.
“My men will kill you,” Delgado warned.
Rip didn’t respond, just slapped a length of tape over the rebel leader’s mouth and shoved him out of the Jeep onto the road. As the man struggled to break his bonds, Tracie slipped into the backseat and Julio pulled away.
Once on the road again, Julio hit the accelerator, putting as much distance as possible between them and Delgado. The rebel’s men would not be far behind them.
When they’d gone a good mile along the twisting turning roads, Julio announced, “Lights out in one minute.”
Rip leaned toward Tracie. “Close your eyes, let them adjust to the darkness.” Following his own advice, Rip closed his eyes and waited the minute.
“Lights out,” Julio announced. A click indicated Julio had switched the lights off.
Rip opened his eyes. Julio would be half-blinded, having closed one eye for the minute prior and could manage to drive while his other eye adjusted to the limited light provided by the stars above.
Before they’d left Hector’s place, Rip had Julio pull the wiring on the Jeep’s tail and brake lights as well as the lights to the dash. In purely blackout mode, they drove through the night another three miles before pulling off the road into a copse of trees and brush.
Once again, the men climbed out of the Jeep and covered their tracks with vegetation.
Tracie got out of the Jeep and pulled her skirt off. Her legs below her knees glowed white in the night until she unrolled her black jeans.
Rip handed out camouflage sticks and they went to work covering every pale inch of exposed skin.
The roar of an engine alerted them to an approaching vehicle.
Rip pushed his way up to the edge of the bushes where he could peer through as a truck loaded with Delgado’s men rumbled past.
One hundred yards down the road, they slowed, their taillights burning bright red, lighting the darkness.
“Are they turning around?” Tracie asked, having moved silently up behind him. She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail and her face was completely covered in camouflage paint, only her eyes and teeth shone white.
“I don’t know. They stopped.” He lifted a pair of night-vision goggles to his eyes and focused on the truck. The red taillights glowed bright. After a moment he could see men dropping to the ground, carrying weapons and spreading out. Some of them moved ahead of the vehicle, others ran back the way they’d come. Toward the spot where they’d hidden the Jeep in the brush. Each man carried a flashlight, the beams crisscrossing along the edges of the road.
“They’re headed this way.” Rip backed away from his vantage point, took Tracie’s hand and led her away from the road.
The Jeep had been parked behind a bunch of tree trunks surrounded at the base by a thick weave of vines. As long as Delgado’s men didn’t walk very far into the woods, they’d be all right.
Rip led Tracie to a thick bush. Together, they crouched behind it, pulling leafy vines over their backsides.
As Rip glanced around, he couldn’t see Julio or Carlos. Trained SEALs wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. Only night-vision goggles, more commonly called NVGs, could pick them out of the darkness by reading their heat signature.
Footsteps crunched on gravel too close for Rip’s comfort.
Tracie’s hand squeezed his and they hunkered low, careful not to make a sound.
A shout rose up from the direction of the truck. An engine revved and headlights flooded the road, moving back toward Rip and his team.
He held his breath until the truck came to a halt near the point they’d left the road.
In the light, he could see a man crouching close to the ground, his hand skimming across the gravel.
A shout in Spanish made the man jerk to his feet. Others ran toward the truck. In a moment, they had all piled into the truck bed and the vehicle took off, headed back toward the small town.
Not until the taillights disappeared in the distance did Rip let go of the breath he’d been holding.
“That was close,” Tracie said, laughing shakily.
Still holding her hand, Rip stood and pulled her to her feet and into his embrace. He kissed her black-painted lips and set her at arm’s length. “Did I tell you how sexy you look in black lipstick?”
She kissed him again, leaving some of the black paint on his lips. “Same to you, frogman.”
He hugged her close, loving the way she felt in his arms. Then, setting her aside, he clapped his hands together, ready to get the show on the road. “Now all we have to do is wait until they go to t
heir hidden camp in the jungle.”
“What makes you think they will?” Tracie asked.
“They were attacked and bested. If Delgado is the leader, he’ll go for reinforcements. If he’s just a pawn, he’ll have to report to the leader. Either way, they will go to the camp tonight and we’ll find them.”
Chapter Twelve
The bright green blips that had been moving for the past half hour had stopped. After Delgado’s men had loaded up and passed through the small town hosting the fiesta, Tracie, Rip, Carlos and Julio followed. They skirted Colinas Rocosa’s outskirts, careful to avoid any men Delgado might have left behind to watch out for them.
Stopping five miles short of their destination, Rip contacted Hank on the sat phone so that he could pinpoint where they were and tell them if there was a better route into the camp. Fortunately, a river close to where they’d pulled off the road also came within five hundred yards of the camp. They managed to get close enough to the river to unload what they’d need to stage their infiltration op.
Rip had given the handheld tracking device to Tracie to monitor while he, Julio and Carlos pulled the inflatable raft and the mini motor out of the rear storage area of the Jeep.
Tracie slipped her arms into one of the bulletproof vests Hank had included in the care package he’d sent with Carlos and Julio. She wore it over the long-sleeved black T-shirt she’d put on.
While the men spread the rubber boat out, Tracie collected an array of smoke grenades and clips full of nine-millimeter bullets, stuffing them into her pockets or strapping them to the vest. When she’d set out earlier that evening, she’d strapped a nine-millimeter Glock to her thigh beneath her party skirt. It was just like the one she’d used when she’d been part of the FBI, and she’d qualified as an expert with a similar weapon on numerous occasions. When she had to use it, the gun felt like an extension of her hand.
Carlos stared down at the small raft, shaking his head woefully. “It’s not a RIB.”
“What’s a RIB?” Tracie asked.
“Rigid hull inflatable boat, one of the boats we use in the Navy,” Rip answered.
Carlos pulled what appeared to be a small engine out of the rear compartment of the Jeep and attached it to the back of the raft. “Nor does it have a 470-horsepower engine. I’d give my right arm for one of those right now.”
Julio snorted. “You call that trolling motor an engine? My electric toothbrush has more power than that.”
“Hey, that trolling motor will be quiet and get us close to the camp without driving in by roads sure to be lined with sentries.” Rip nodded toward the river. “We’ll be going up river to get in.”
Carlos groaned. “Which will make it even slower.”
“Yeah. And faster when we leave,” Rip reminded them.
“I don’t like it.” Julio kicked the boat with his boot. “I feel like a kid going fishing, not a man about to sneak into an enemy camp full of angry men with guns. Can’t we call in SBT-22 for a little backup?”
Rip’s chest tightened. “No.”
Tracie stepped in. “Hank didn’t brief you on Rip’s status?”
Carlos shook his head. “Just that he had been a member of SBT-22. He didn’t say why he wasn’t a member anymore.”
“Because I’m dead,” Rip said, his voice flat. He pushed past the two SEALs and mounted the trolling motor on the back of the boat.
Carlos’s brows came together. “How can you be dead when you’re standing right in front of me?”
Tracie waited for Rip to answer for himself. When he didn’t, she filled the silence. “His unit thinks he was killed by a sniper who wanted him dead because of the information he received from a DEA agent. The agent had been undercover, embedded in the terrorist training camp we’re about to enter.”
“Holy crap,” Julio said. “And here I thought we were going into a cakewalk. Terrorist training camp? Not just some local boys playing at being rebels?”
Carlos’s lips spread in a smile. “You said it would be dangerous.”
“It will be.” Rip faced Tracie. “Now’s the time to change your mind.”
“I’m going.” Tracie helped Carlos load the boat with every bit of equipment they’d brought with them in the Jeep. Weapons, smoke grenades, explosives and detonators.
Rip faced his SEAL brothers. “The same goes for each of you. If you’re not comfortable with the mission, there’s no shame in backing out. You didn’t know what you were going into.”
“Can’t let a girl show me up.” Carlo’s lips quirked upward. “Besides, you know the code. The only easy day was yesterday. Let’s get wet.”
Rip held out his hand to Julio who gripped his forearm instead. “I could use a little exercise. Dude, let’s rock and roll.”
Tracie climbed into the boat first, then Julio and Carlos.
“We’re going in to collect information, not to engage,” Rip reminded them as he pushed the boat off the short and hopped in. “We’ll stop short of the camp and go in on foot. We can wait until the camp is asleep before we make our move.”
The moon was nothing more than the tip of a fingernail in the sky, leaving the stars to provide all the light they needed.
Keeping close to the narrow river’s edge and the inky shadows of the overhanging trees, they traversed upriver in the direction the tracking devices indicated.
The going was slow, but then, they weren’t in much of a hurry. Delgado’s arrival in the camp would get everyone stirred up. They’d need time to wind down again before Tracie and the team of SEALs could slip in, gather what information they could and get out.
“Anything else you want to tell us now that you have our full attention?” Carlos questioned.
Rip, his hand on the till continued in silence for a moment before answering. “I think whoever is selling the weapons to the terrorists is American and could be connected high up the food chain.”
Carlos turned to look at Rip in the light from the stars. “Are you kidding me? You think someone in Washington is dirty?”
“I’d bet my best rifle on it,” Rip said. “Whoever it is got to our gunnery sergeant and bribed him to leak information about our mission. That leak got a sniper positioned outside the camp. When we brought out the DEA agent, the sniper took out the agent and got one of our men as collateral damage.”
“I’d heard about that. A kid named Gosling,” Julio said. “Damned shame.” Julio and Carlos hung their heads in deference to their lost comrade.
Tracie sat in silence. The SEALs had a strong bond, even though they hadn’t known each other before they’d met at Hector’s. From all she’d read, their training was so intense, it reinforced the notion to look out for your own and do whatever it took, no matter what, to get the job done.
Tracie was in good shape, but by no means as ruggedly fit as the men who made it through BUD/S training.
Rip aimed the craft toward an overhanging tree, slowed the boat and cut the engine. The remaining momentum sent them toward shore where the rubber hull bumped soundlessly against mud and roots.
Without waiting to be told, Julio and Carlos jumped out of the boat and dragged it up on the shore beneath the drooping tree.
Tracie scrambled out and gathered whatever weapons she could, handing them to the men, one at a time. They all pulled on helmets rigged with communication devices and NVGs.
Rip turned on his radio and waited while the others did the same. Then he spoke softly, “Check.”
Through the crackling of the static that erupted in Tracie’s ear, she could make out Rip’s word clearly. “Check,” she repeated.
Rip nodded.
“Check,” Carlos and Julio each said and waited for Rip to indicate he’d heard them.
With the handheld GPS tracker in hand, Rip took the lead, heading east, away
from the river.
“Remember where we parked,” Carlos whispered.
An answering chuckle helped ease Tracie’s tension as they pushed through thick foliage, working their way toward the location where the green lights had stopped.
Rip led the way, moving as swiftly as the jungle would allow. The canopy, high overhead, blocked most of the light from the stars, which meant it also blocked a good portion of the sunlight, needed for vegetation to grow at ground level. Other than the occasional vine with huge leaves, they had it pretty easy. The NVGs helped them navigate through the dark forest floor.
Tracie followed Rip, glad she was in good shape as he moved quickly, barely slowing down to catch his breath. Carlos followed her and Julio brought up the rear.
After fifteen minutes of steady forward movement, Rip held up his fist and came to an abrupt halt.
Tracie had been following so closely, intent on keeping up, she nearly plowed into him.
“Get down,” Rip whispered through the headset.
All four of them crouched in the underbrush, inching forward, abreast with Rip.
Through her NVGs, Tracie saw the green blobs of people moving about in a clearing a hundred yards ahead.
“I count ten,” Rip said.
“I had eight,” Carlos replied. “We’ll go with your number.”
“Looks like they’re unloading a big crate from the back of that truck.” Rip touched her arm. “Do you see it?”
Tracie could make out six men heaving a huge crate out of the back of what appeared to be an old army two-ton truck with two men seemingly supervising.
“Watch where they take it. I’ll bet that’s where we need to go,” Rip advised.
Tracie riveted her attention on the men moving the crate. For a moment, they disappeared behind the truck. She could see the green outlines of their legs beneath the truck bed and they appeared on the other side, heading toward what looked like a tent. Then they disappeared inside. Through the canvas, Tracie could see the smudge of light green silhouettes moving about.
“Heads down,” Carlos said quietly and flattened himself to the ground.