“Why?”
“Because we only borrowed it to go to Miami. I sort of didn’t bother to tell him we were taking it to Honduras with us. It’s his personal bird.”
“Fine,” Rafe tried to use his bad hand, which wasn’t working. He did a tumble and flop into the water, then stood in the waist-deep current. “Then it’s definitely you that gets to tell him.”
The two of them kept at it as they were splashing toward the shore, though Julian had a solid grip on Rafe’s upper arm to guide him along and keep him steady. The river was warm and not moving too quickly here.
She still had the flare gun in her hand.
“Herd them to shore,” she shouted at Drake. “And get them behind something solid. Bind Rafe’s wrist.”
“Yeah, he broke it, just hasn’t noticed it yet.” He dragged her against him for a quick kiss. “Don’t go blowing yourself up. I’ll be pissed as hell if you do.” Then he headed to shore.
No insistence that he should do this next dangerous part because he was the guy.
Nikita located the cap to the fuel tank. She cracked it loose, and fuel began to spill because of the mostly inverted angle of the helo.
Drake didn’t even treat her like an equal.
She checked to make sure everyone was ashore and mostly out of sight. The timing on this was going to be tricky.
He treated her as if she was the DEVGRU warrior and he was the Night Stalker. Even a lot of her teammates didn’t do what he’d just done. Drake actually treated her as if she knew what she was doing.
She sure as hell hoped she knew.
She popped the fuel cap all the way off and Jet A spilled out, adding a sharp slap of kerosene to the thick moldering jungle and brightness of the fresh water mist. Most of the fuel ran down the hull and into the open passenger bay door. A trickle of it spilled into the river as well.
The shore was too far away to trust that this would work from there. She had to sink the first shot.
She swam halfway toward shore.
No one in sight except for Drake, peeking around the side of a tree.
Nikita stood up, hoped this wasn’t the last time she ever saw him, turned, and fired.
Chapter Fourteen
Drake barely had time to cry out before Altman grabbed him from behind and dragged him back behind the tree.
Nikita had fired the flare gun nearly point blank into the helicopter’s gas-filled rear bay.
Then she’d dropped as if cut down where she stood—and the helicopter exploded.
Bits and pieces of it slashed through the leaves overhead. To either side of the massive tree they were hiding behind, shrapnel zinged by like…like…shrapnel!
Large chunks of helicopter slammed into tree bark and stuck there, quivering with the force of impact. Half of a pilot’s seat landed in the brush not half a meter from where Julian was splinting and binding Rafe’s wrist.
Then the bits and pieces that had been blown upward began to rain down in a bright patter, landing all around their refuge.
Still Altman wouldn’t let him go.
“Goddamn it! She’s—”
Altman released him barely in time to save himself a hard elbow to the ribs. A last piece of helicopter, an unidentifiable shred of metal, slid off a higher branch where it had hung for a moment, and disappeared into a bush covered with impossibly blue flowers the size of his head.
Drake struggled back to his feet. The helicopter was shredded; only a few jagged edges of the wreckage stuck out above the water. A large section of the hull, still fiercely on fire, starting bobbing down the river. For a hundred meters downstream, spilled jet fuel burned on the surface, making the center of the river a streamer of flame.
Then, right in front of the conflagration, Nikita rose from the river’s depths like one of those James Bond fantasy scenes. The cotton blouse was now sheer over her breasts, her hair slicked back in a wet look that reminded him of the shower they’d shared, and the skirt that clung to her legs was like an artist’s afterthought.
She surveyed the burning remains of the helicopter, nodded her head, clearly pleased with herself, and began wading toward shore.
“Shit, woman! Are you okay?” She walked right by him when he tried to lend her a helping hand over the slippery rocks along the shore.
“Sure. I was afraid that if I missed and left a flare burning in the jungle due to a bad shot, they’d see it. These things aren’t all that accurate,” she held up the stubby orange flare gun. Nikita stepped from the river like a Navy SEAL despite the fact that she looked like a river goddess.
Before he could argue with her sense of urgency, he heard the heavy beat of a helicopter’s rotor blades echoing up the valley. With the roar of the waterfall, it meant the enemy was close.
“Cover our tracks.”
Thankfully, between the bare rocks and the soft mat of undergrowth, it was only the work of seconds. Drake dropped dead branches to cover their wet footprints over the rocks and Nikita spread leaves across a muddy patch. They withdrew into the woods only a moment before a pair of helos swung into view far downstream.
“Bury yourselves in case they have infrared.”
Drake almost pointed out that the temperature here was at least body heat, maybe hotter by the way he was already sweating, so they wouldn’t stand out, but thought better of arguing with a river goddess SEAL.
As he helped scoop branches and dead leaves over other team members, he wondered at his presumption for wanting to be with such a woman. She could have the pick of anyone anywhere. By what earthly reason could he even hope to be with a woman like her?
They slid side by side under their own cover; he made especially sure that her white blouse was well hidden.
Of course he wasn’t a goddamn idiot. He was going to stick as long as she’d let him despite his inability to figure out why she let him.
The helos made one high pass, then one of them descended to barely ten meters above the burning wreckage. Bell TwinRangers, painted black with a gold racing stripe and no other insignia.
He could see Nikita reloading the flare gun.
“Don’t even think about it!”
“Tempting though, isn’t it?” Her smile looked particularly evil.
The TwinRanger hovered not thirty meters away, broadside to them. The cargo bay doors had been removed, making for a large opening that would be an exceptional target. An M240 machine gun was mounted on a swivel and by pure chance was aimed almost directly at them. Yes, it was very tempting. But it would be an easy shot in both directions.
Four-man squad: pilot, copilot, and a pair of gunners. They were mercenary stereotypes right down to black t-shirts and camo pants, black baseball caps, shades, and M16s.
Then he glanced at the second bird still hovering a hundred meters up, near the level of the top of the waterfall.
He nodded upward and Nikita looked aloft.
The second bird had a side-mounted M230—five and a half feet of bad-ass chain gun—and a 7-tube rocket launcher on the other.
“Let’s not piss them off, what do you say?”
“Spoilsport!”
He nudged his hip against hers under the foliage, she nudged him back, and he couldn’t help smiling. Together they turned back to watch the low-hovering helicopter’s inspection of their crash. It would have helped if there’d been a body or two, but he’d rather his team stayed alive.
Apparently the lack of any bodies on fire didn’t bother the bad guys for long, as the helicopter pulled up and away after less than twenty seconds.
No one moved until they were well clear.
“Well, that was fun,” Drake sat up shedding leaves and branches. He brushed the worst of it out of Nikita’s hair as others emerged.
“What the hell was that?” Rafe’s arm was now bound against his chest in a sling.
“Raytheon Pike by how it behaved,” it was the only weapon Nikita could think of that fit the performance parameters.
“Shit!” Altman
was pissed. “That’s leading edge. We only got those ourselves at the beginning of the year. If this GSI guy wasn’t already dead, I’d fry his ass for selling those to unfriendly powers.”
Drake hadn’t even heard of a Pike.
Nikita took pity on him. “It’s a sweet little laser-guided missile about the length of your arm that can be fired out of a handheld grenade launcher. Good to about two thousand meters. Proximity fuze. I’d hoped that last bank and climb would fool it.”
“Might have,” Julian agreed, “if we had a Black Hawk. Seven people is the TwinRanger’s payload limit, plus it’s hot so the air is thin, and our rate-of-climb sucked. Nice call, Nikita, even if it didn’t work.”
“What now?” Rafe’s voice said that the pain was beginning to register. Nothing stronger than aspirin in the First Aid kit.
“Did anyone bring lunch?”
Everyone turned to look at Drake like he was insane.
“Either we can hike out through fifty kilometers of jungle filled with bad guys without a map or,” he pulled out his waterproof satellite phone, “we can wait until dark and call in the rest of the crew to come fetch us.”
Nikita would have preferred to go alone, but Drake had insisted on going with her and Altman hadn’t shut him down. Instead he’d done his zero-expression face, leaving the decision up to her. Drake had proved his skills, but she was worried about his stealth—that took a lot of practice. Still, a second set of eyes would be useful.
To avoid any possible booby traps set in the jungle, they slipped a couple of logs into the river and then floated down the current with them.
“I imagined going swimming with you,” Drake floated along beside her. “There was this bikini in the shop window that—”
“Wasn’t going to happen,” Nikita peeked over her log to check for any approaching rapids.
“But you’re a SEAL.”
“In a wet suit armed to the teeth. Not in a Drake-fantasy string bikini.”
“Well, you in a soaking wet cotton blouse was pretty damned fantastic.”
Nikita hadn’t thought about that. She should have put on a bra this morning, but again, the unbuttoned look had seemed to fit her role better.
They drifted half a kilometer before Drake spoke again.
“Any crocodiles around here?”
“They’re lousy at climbing waterfalls and we flew over several others on our way here.”
“Exactly my point,” Drake looked side to side fearfully. “That means that any that made it this far up river would be like the Special Operations Forces of the crocodilian empire.”
Nikita palmed a faceful of water at Drake, who laughed.
Their laughter didn’t carry them very far downstream. They came around a corner and quickly swam to the northern shore by mutual consent.
On the southern shore was a massive fence topped with multiple coils of razor wire. They dug in and watched.
Beyond the fence, the jungle had been sheared off—clear-cut for the construction site they’d flown over on the way out. The clearing stretched for hundreds of acres smack in the middle of a national park.
There was a well-worn pair of ruts along the inside of the fence line. They didn’t have to wait long to see who was using it. More heavily-armed, black-t-shirt-and-camo guys cruised by in a black Toyota Tundra. They wore dark sunglasses and serious expressions.
“Pros,” Drake whispered. He glanced at his watch so that he could measure the time between patrols. “All look like Americans with beards. These are far bigger guys than the natives we saw in Roatán.”
“Fucking mercs,” Nikita whispered back. “When we circled back to find the waterfall, they must have decided that we were showing too much interest in their compound and it was best to take us out.”
“Tourist helicopter lost without a trace. And in other news at eleven…” Drake intoned.
“Yeah. Exactly the sort of contract you’d expect a merc to take.”
“Can you really picture J-dawg or Sugar taking this deal though?”
Nikita glared at the compound for a long moment, hating it. If someone gave her a B-2 stealth bomber, she would carpet bomb the place. But…she’d liked the Titan people; it was hard not to like J-dawg when he was toting around a young Afghan girl on his shoulders.
“Hey, Nikita! Shake it off. No emotion, remember.”
“I’m not shooting right now. I don’t even have my damned rifle because of ship security. I want my rifle.” And that’s when she heard it in her own voice. “Shit! How can you stand to be around me, Drake? I’m a screwed-up mess.”
“Yeah! But you’re my favorite screwed-up mess.”
Nikita had to think about it a bit. It wasn’t like she had a long list of people she was close to, but that didn’t make it any less true, “And you’re my favorite mess, Duck-man.”
“There!” Drake pointed. A rising wind out of the east had swung the trees aside for a moment. A three-story, steel-framework guard tower came into view for a moment. Once they’d spotted it, it was easy enough to see. Nikita tried to gauge how far they’d floated downstream from the waterfall. Close enough to two kilometers to answer the question.
“It fits. That’s probably where they fired from. But what didn’t they want us to see?”
Nikita pulled out the binoculars that Esly had held on to through the crash. She scanned the compound carefully, softly listing off what she saw.
“Five big excavators. Half dozen dump trucks. None moving. One of the earth movers is a burned carcass. I don’t see anybody working. I don’t even see any buildings. Nothing but a wasteland of churned soil.” Which was a metaphor for her emotions that there wasn’t a chance she’d be considering.
“Look at the hills.”
She turned her binoculars but all she saw was jungle.
“No, just the general topography.”
Nikita lowered the binocs, but still didn’t get what Drake was on about.
“The current Honduran government approved a lot of new dam building, a whole lot of it. They did it without environmental impact statements and ignored a lot of agreements with towns and local tribes. There have been pitched battles back and forth ever since. They’ve got murder squads hunting down environmentalists—one article said that was now the job in the country with the shortest life expectancy. Huh!”
“What?”
“I didn’t pay attention to where all the bad blood was. This must be the spot.”
“Our unfriendly boys in black.” Sometimes talking with Drake was almost like talking to herself. They simply thought the same.
“Probably.”
“What about the hills?” But he saw different things than she did. Patterns. And she was learning that he was good at it.
“See how the rise on either side of the river sweeps back into ridgelines? It would be an ideal spot for a dam. This whole valley would be filled, right back to the waterfall and probably over it.”
“Okay. Dam going in. Unhappy environmentalists. Mercenary kill squad…” she couldn’t quite put it together.
“Not only set up by GSI, but probably bankrolled by them. Now someone wants to cut them out of the loop. Esly’s buddy Daylin and his boys were brought in to clear away the upper level contractors as thoroughly as the environmentalists.”
They watched as a helicopter came in from the south.
“More gun boys?”
“No,” they were right at the limit of what she could see even with the binocs, “white shirts and black slacks. Suits.”
“We need to know what’s going on.”
“No we don’t. Just clear out the mercs.”
The truck went by again. They were so stereotypical mercs that he couldn’t tell if it was the same truck or not. He checked his watch: twenty minutes on the dot.
Nikita watched them go by and groused again about not having her rifle.
“They can always grow more mercs. We need to cut off the head of the snake, not just some of its scales. I
need an in.”
As if in answer to his prayer, Drake’s phone rang. It was loud enough to make both him and Nikita jump, but far quieter than the river splashing over the nearby rocks between them and the compound.
“Mr. Roman?” It took him a moment to recognize the voice of the ship’s hotel manager because it was so unexpected.
“Norma?”
“Yes, I’m glad I reached you. I have a very insistent party on the line trying to reach the occupants of Suites 612. I thought that might be of interest to you.”
“Please patch them through,” he considered warning her that she’d be safer if she didn’t listen in, but that would be pointless and outside his control. Instead, “Be aware that I may lie a little.”
She laughed nervously, then there was a loud click, “Here’s your party.”
There was no secondary click of her leaving the circuit.
“Daylin?” a male voice asked.
“No longer a factor,” Drake lowered his tone more than normal, trying to sound nastier. It sounded good to him. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back.”
Nikita leaned in so that their shoulders were touching. He tipped the phone so they could both hear, but didn’t quite dare to put it on speakerphone.
“Buck Baer?” The voice was disdainful. “I thought we made it clear that we were done with your services.”
“He also is no longer a factor.”
“Then who am I speaking with?”
They exchanged names and there was a short pause…perhaps the length of a quick Internet search.
“Mr. Roman. What is your intent here?” Apparently the disinformation plan was solidly in place as now Franshesco Gutierrez’s tone was very cautious.
“I, shall we say, acquired all assets of Global Securities International. I am interested in continuing any mutually beneficial business relationships, but under my purview, not the former management’s.” All of his practice over the last days aboard ship at meals and in bars was paying off—he managed to say it with a straight face, or at least with a straight tone over the phone.
Target of Mine: The Night Stalkers 5E (Titan World Book 2) Page 18