by Bella Juarez
“Hey! Nacho’s calling for you.”
A guard at the door. Dan filed the information for later. He would need it when he tried to get out of here.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes; I’m almost done,” the man said. The guard grunted and shut the door. “Sit up so I can wrap your ribs.”
Deciding to be more cooperative, he tried to sit but struggled to move with blinding pain. The man helped him up. Dan lifted his arms as best he could and found that his left shoulder had been cleaned and bandaged. His head hurt like hell, and he was sure he had a concussion. After the man had gone, he lay down and tried to get comfortable, which turned out to be impossible. The last thing he remembered as he drifted again was a picture he’d taken of Rio and Schotzie. It was the background wallpaper on his home screen and his favorite picture of her smiling and hugging her dog.
Chapter 28
Fort Huachuca, AZ
Military Intelligence Detachment
November 2, 2010/1033 Zulu
Rio paced her small office at Fort Huachuca. She couldn’t wait at home, and Schotzie wasn’t helping her mood. The dog constantly lifted her head and whined because something was wrong. Rio knew it, and so did her dog. She’d been through enough operations both with the military and with the CBP to know that Murphy’s Law could be a bitch and seemed to govern everything no matter how well planned. Something always went wrong. She stopped when she heard rapid footsteps coming down the hallway. She heard a bang outside her office as if someone had dropped something huge. She ran out to see a chair in the middle of the hallway and Captain O’Malley entering Gavin’s office. She quickly went into the office where the two men were talking. They stopped, and both looked at her when she reached the doorway. Gavin was clearly upset, and from the look of Captain O’Malley, so was he.
“Come in, Rio,” the captain said.
“What are you doing here? It’s four in the morning,” Gavin said.
“Are they back?” The two men exchanged glances, and it was evident by the look that passed between them that something had gone terribly wrong. “I’m a part of this team and if something happened that I can help with, then I need to know,” she said calmly.
“I don’t think you can help,” the captain said.
As Gavin explained what had happened, she didn’t remember sitting down or how she got back to her office. She didn’t recall her brother, Van, and Alan all arriving to comfort her or how she got home. She did remember thinking about the one person who’d betrayed them and how she needed to make sure the son of a bitch never took another dime from the cartel again. When she found herself sitting at her kitchen table, she methodically focused on a plan to get the bastard she now blamed for Danny’s situation. She dressed in her CBP uniform, checked her weapon, and loaded up Schotzie.
The clock on her dash read six in the morning. Her target didn’t arrive at the office until about eight, so he’d be at home. She had to find out who else could be involved, so she could figure out a way to save Danny. From what she could remember, Danny was still alive, and they were planning a rescue mission. However, she understood this cartel better than anyone on her team because she’d studied it long and hard to figure out how to anticipate their moves. She’d learned their methods, and every time she discovered a new name, she’d build a profile, so she’d be able to think like them.
All of her work had found a supporter in Gavin. They’d been able to do things that the CBP and ICE couldn’t do. The team started the process of shutting down the cartel’s vast holdings in the United States, which put her in the unique position of understanding the reality they were facing. She also understood that by the time they got there, Danny could be dead. The cartel had resources, and she knew they didn’t end with CBP. Once they discovered who Danny was and what kind of damage he’d done, they’d kill him. Knowing their methods and having found the dead bodies of those the cartel had tortured, his current condition was tenuous at best. She didn’t want to think about how they were exacting their revenge. It would break her if she did.
Since the events of last night, she had a hunch that someone would reach out to the mole in the CBP to find out who Danny was and who he worked for. The downside was this man knew Danny, and it would be up to her to get the team the time they needed to get Danny out even if it was for his funeral. She opened her Navy-issued laptop and activated the program that Danny had installed to help her tap a phone through a Bluetooth device. Six phones in the neighborhood showed up on her list, none of them belonged to her target, indicating she was too far away. She pulled up a little closer and heard a familiar ding when the program locked on to more signals. When she found what she was looking for she downloaded his e-mail and text messages.
A new, second phone that showed up on her list, but this one wasn’t as sophisticated as the one she’d just hacked, and it had been registered to a dead cartel mule. She went ahead and tapped into it. While she scrolled through the call logs and text messages, she realized she’d hit pay dirt. There were texts clearly from the cartel, and one of them had a picture of Danny she knew she’d never be able to scrub from her memory. The message was from Eli Reyes asking if Danny belonged to CBP or ICE. The picture showed him suspended by his tied wrists from what looked like a meat hook. A sudden wave of nausea hit her as she stared at the picture. She took a drink of her tea and refocused as she composed a secure message to Gavin. She sent the picture and text message to him, along with the phone’s information, so it could be traced.
Getting what she’d come for, she took a spin around the block and waited for her target to emerge from the house. So far, he hadn’t tried to make contact with the cartel. She’d locked on to the phone and monitored the activity. In the hour that she waited for him to emerge from his house, Gavin had called her a dozen times, and she ignored every call. He could pinpoint her in an instant, and had probably already done so, but he was busy planning the mission to extract Danny from Mexico. This time Van called, and she decided she could handle him a lot easier than her FBI partner.
“Yes?” she answered.
“What the hell are you doing, and how the hell did you get that picture of Danny? Badass is going bat shit crazy here.”
“Tell him I got it from the person we were talking about yesterday.”
“He wants to talk to you.”
Ending the call before Gavin could demand that she get her ass back to the base, she tossed the phone on the seat next to her computer. Just as she watched the door open to the house, there was activity on the phone, another text from Reyes demanding an answer. Knowing that if he got the answer Danny’s life would become more hellish than it already was, she jammed the phone with the program she had used to download the data.
When a person was under incredible stress, it was more than a little strange about some of the stuff that popped into one’s head. Being hooked up with the SEALs had some perks. They had some pretty cool technology and tools. She wondered in an offhand way if Danny had written this program, like he’d done for her on the tablet he’d given her. Her eyes stung with tears at the memory of all the little things he did for her.
Recalling a conversation they had one day, he’d harassed her about ignoring him while they were at work. She knew it drove him crazy that she didn’t follow him around like a puppy, but as stressed out as he’d been about them working in the same space, she wanted to respect the request he’d made. Every time she saw him in uniform she realized just how much of a man he’d become. He’d never know how many times she had to fight the urge to touch him when they found themselves working or sitting in a meeting together. He’d never guess how hot and sexy it was for her to watch him work, and the erotic feelings that raced through her when she saw how serious and focused he could be were overpowering at times. As mission commander, he never wavered taking control of the groups he managed and keeping it. He didn’t realize that during those times he ignored her.
When she pointed out to him that he’d been d
oing the same thing, he denied it and told her he knew where she was every second of the day. Danny always left the house before she did, and when she arrived at her office the next day after their discussion, there had been a flower on her desk with a note from him telling her to think about him for the rest of the day. Since then, she’d find a flower or a caramel latte waiting in the morning, or when she’d work through lunch, he’d leave her something to eat. He’d always leave her a note with some snarky remark that made her laugh. Last night when she couldn’t sit still and went to her office, she’d walked in to find a bouquet of sunflowers sitting on her desk and a note in his handwriting that simply said, I love you.
Hardening herself to sharpen her focus, she saw the door open and watched her target look at the phone to see if the signal would be better outside his house. She clicked on the icon to jam the phone to prevent him from using it as long as she was in the area. He wouldn’t be able to make calls, send or receive texts. She was reasonably certain he wouldn’t be stupid enough to use his CBP phone to make a call or send a text like that. A short time later, he left the house, and she followed him to the station.
Completing part of her objective, she’d bought Danny a little more time, but she still had the rest of the day and most of the night to go. She walked inside the station, her mission to keep this traitor on his toes the rest of the day or at least until the SEALs could get back into Mexico and get Danny out. She found him, pulled him aside to speak to him, and gauged his reaction to seeing her. Achieving another objective, he confirmed her suspicions because he wasn’t comfortable seeing her. She’d achieved the element of surprise.
“Rio? What are you doing here? I thought you were FBI now.”
“Not yet, I’m still CBP for awhile. I need some help with part of the investigation that I’m doing. I’ll need a lot of your time today,” she said with a charming smile. “I’ll even treat you to lunch for all your time.”
“Of course, anything I can do to help, and you don’t need to take me to lunch.”
“No, if I’m taking all your time today the least I can do is take you to lunch.”
* * * *
Dan drifted in and out of consciousness. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been there, but he recalled having a meal and something to drink. At least for now, the beatings had stopped, and he’d been treated decently considering his situation.
Twenty-four hours had to be closing in, and he’d made peace with the fact that he’d be dying very shortly. For the last few hours he’d struggled with saying his good-byes. At some point he’d made peace and didn’t have the anxious reactions whenever he heard footsteps outside his cell. He wondered how long this would last and hoped his captors would simply execute him and not drag this out any longer. The man who’d nursed his wounds earlier came back. This time he could see him better and realized he looked familiar. He searched his memory to figure out where he’d seen this man before today.
“Why are you doing this? Fucking with my head isn’t working. We both know I’m a dead man.”
The man changing the bandage on his shoulder stopped, sat back, then quicker than Dan expected, he grabbed Dan’s injured arm and jerked him, making Dan wince in pain at suddenly being moved. The swiftness behind the old man’s movements made Dan reevaluate him.
“Failure is not in your creed. You will persevere and thrive on adversity,” the man sharply growled at him.
The statement made Dan blink and pause. This fucker sounded like JJ. Those words were tattooed on his soul. They were words he’d had to repeat on a daily basis during training. Then it clicked, Dan had seen a much younger version of this man’s face in his admiral’s office, in a group of pictures. The words reached him and sparked hope. Is this son-of-a-bitch a…SEAL?
“Don’t you dare give up on me! Too much is riding on you getting back—alive.” He released Dan and went back to tending his wounds. “I’ve convinced Nacho that you’re more valuable alive and in good health. If he’s good to you he could trade you for information about his daughter. Don’t worry, he’s looking into my story right now. You’d better hope he doesn’t get an answer before your friends get here.”
“Bullshit. He’s got more money than God. He can buy whatever information he wanted. So why do you keep fucking with me?”
“He’s close, so he won’t risk doing anything that prevents him from finding her. You’re a pawn until he figures out who you really are and if you can be used to get his daughter back.”
“You’re very free in here when you talk, isn’t this place under surveillance?”
“No.”
“Whatever,” Dan said, not believing a word of what he was being told. He decided to test this man’s trust factor. “Why do I smell flowers? Where am I?”
“There’s a large garden near this building.”
“What kind of garden, and how far does it go?”
“Do you want a bouquet? Or do you want to get out? Don’t worry about the damn flowers and rest because time’s running out. Eli is on his way to Arizona to reach out to Nacho’s contact in the CBP to find out who you are. Thankfully, no information has come back yet. Your friends better be on their way.”
Dan quelled his momentary panic at the news that Reyes was on his way back to the United States and Rio. Fuck dying. Rio was in danger. This guy was right; he had to fight. He had to stall this man and get information on how to get out of this place.
“You still didn’t answer me, why are you doing this?”
“It doesn’t matter. When you get back I need you to give Dixie a message.”
“Who’s Dixie?”
“Stop messing around. Tell him the fox is closing in on the dove.”
“You’ve fucked up, mister. I don’t know any Dixie.”
“Give him that message when you get back.”
Breathing had become the most exhausting, excruciating thing he did, and it seemed to take everything out of him when he took a breath and tried to move at the same time. As much as he wanted to stay alert, breathing and pain seemed to consume every ounce of energy he had. He forced himself to stay awake and vigilant, but he found that he would drift without even realizing it. It had already grown dark in his cell when a man rushed in and aimed a gun in his face yelling at him in Spanish to get up. As he struggled to sit up, the man grew impatient and made the fatal mistake of getting close enough to Dan to try to grab him, which forced him to take one of his hands off of his weapon.
With renewed strength at the possibility of escape, Dan grabbed the man’s weapon and shot him twice in the center of his chest. He stood and put a bullet in the asshole’s brain just to make sure he was dead. He struggled to cautiously walk out of his prison, taking cover when he heard a sudden loud bang down a corridor from where he was. The building seemed to be a warehouse-type facility with rooms, he surmised, assessing his location. He worked on a plan as he checked the weapon and waited knowing that the shots he’d fired would draw attention to his cell. This time, he made up his mind to take a few of these bastards to hell with him. Two men in green camouflage ran into his room, but before they could turn around, he’d killed them both. He crept back into the shadows and waited again, because he’d heard something else right outside the doors that stood open.
There, he saw black shadows rush in and split up. Three men in black ran past him, sweeping the rooms as they went. He instantly recognized the pattern, and he hoped he hadn’t mistaken the build on a couple of the men. The cartel had special operators working for them, too, and being trained in the US, they’d have the same tactics he knew so well. Taking a deep breath, he stepped out of the shadows with his hands as far as he could lift them to three men pointing guns at him. If he was wrong, he prayed they’d kill him quickly.
“You dumbass! I could’ve killed you!”
Dan relaxed a little and had never been so glad to hear the voice of his dive buddy than he was now. “Get me the fuck out of here.”
“Can you make it or does s
omeone need to carry you?” Shaq asked.
“Let’s go!” Dan said, pushing toward the door.
They had to run out of the compound to the vehicle waiting, and every step he took made him shake with jarring pain. The small group kept him in the middle to protect him, but he was slowing them down. He dug deep and willed himself to keep going. Somehow they managed to get to a vehicle and then meet the chopper that would take them out.
He passed out as soon as he hit the deck of the aircraft.
* * * *
“Here’s the package you were waiting for, Nacho,” Umberto said, handing him the folder.
“This had better be what I want to hear, and you had better be right. As much as it pains me to lose you, my old friend, you will take his place if this isn’t what I need. I listened to you and let them breach my home without a fight. My guards could’ve taken them. All of them.”
“It’s better this way. We would’ve lost highly trained men that you need to protect your interests. I know their kind. You wouldn’t have broken that man, and they’d have come anyway. Some battles aren’t worth fighting. Look what you’ve gained.”
“Umberto, I don’t know why you felt the need to protect him. You’d better thank God I trust your judgment. I’ve seen him before; he was part of the police force that raided my house in Douglas.”
“I don’t think he’s part of the civilian police force. I used him to get to the man that took Anita when Panama was invaded.”
Nacho opened the envelope and scanned the contents. Umberto had lied to Nacho and told him that he’d reached some of his old contacts and made a deal to get him information regarding his daughter. The deal included exchanging the young man’s life for the information. But he knew his boss. He’d try to kill the young man once he was back in the United States, and Eli Reyes stood by waiting for that call. Umberto knew the SEALs that operated in this part of the world were in Little Creek, Virginia, and the young man would be safe because Nacho wouldn’t risk pursuing him that far. Nacho turned on the TV and switched to Galavisión’s twenty-four hour news station.