by J. M. Madden
Jordyn stopped and sniffed. She smelled smoke.
She glanced at Fontana and he nodded. He’d smelled it as well.
She crept forward, hoping that they were close. Within ten minutes they reached the remnants of a chain-link fence. It was grown over and leaning in. Jordyn had a feeling they probably could have walked over it, but she looked at Fontana.
There was a dark, intense look on his face, like there was an internal monologue running through his brain. Jordyn knew she needed to keep an eye on him.
Fontana looked at the team. “Kenny, DeRossett and Zero head east. You’re Team Bravo. We’ll head west. No contact unless unavoidable. Recon only.”
Everyone ‘roger’ed into their mics and they took off. Fontana took the lead in their group, then Jordyn, with Payne at her back. She scanned everything she could see in the dim light of pre-dawn. It was still really early, so they didn’t see any immediate movement inside the fence, but they did smell smoke.
They hiked another fifty yards before Fontana found a break in the fence. It didn’t look like it had been used by anyone else, but they scanned the area carefully, looking for trip wires or cameras. They crossed through the fence and crouched, looking around again. Jordyn didn’t see anything obvious, but Fontana seemed to be heading in a specific direction. She glanced at Payne, but he shrugged. His weapon was held at the ready. The camera was strapped high on his chest to keep it from banging around and being damaged.
Fontana crept around the corner of a building and paused, staring. “This is the old cafeteria,” he whispered over their headsets. He crept forward, then lowered beneath a window. Using his taut thighs, he lifted up to glance through the glass. “Contact.”
Jordyn breathed the tension out through her nose.
“Two local women cooking, one washing dishes.”
Jordyn could hear the woman banging dishes now. She hadn’t noticed it until he’d mentioned it. The entire camp was shrouded in misty darkness, broken only by a few weak bare-bulb lights. Now that they were closer she thought she could hear a generator somewhere close, but she couldn’t pinpoint where.
There were no other sounds of activity in the camp, and no visible movement. If the women were making breakfast for a crowd, they could be here any time.
Fontana moved away from the cafeteria building and moved toward a path to the left. Then he stepped off into the brush and followed along parallel to the trail. That was pretty smart. If they happened upon someone they wouldn’t automatically see the team.
They passed several small huts that looked to be unoccupied. One had a light burning inside through the window, and they crept around it carefully. They’d just cleared the corner when someone jogged down the front steps and onto the path. They let the person’s sounds completely disappear before they started to move again.
Then, suddenly, Fontana went still. Jordyn almost ran into his back but she caught herself, then peered around his side.
There was a cage in front of them. It had to be eight feet tall and probably ten wide. The entire front was a wall of iron bars. There was no one inside the cage and the door stood open. But it gave her chills. Was this where the men had been kept when they’d been here?
From Fontana’s reaction she would say yes.
Glancing around she checked to make sure they were still hidden, then she touched Fontana’s back. He jerked, though she’d barely touched him, and tossed her a glance. With a nod, he started forward again, circling the cage. Then he stilled again. Ten feet away there was another cage, and this time there was a body inside.
Chapter Thirteen
The body wasn’t moving.
Fontana stared hard into the early morning, trying to see the body breathe, but his own heart was thudding so hard he couldn’t tell. He thought he might have seen something but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t his own heartbeat until he got closer.
Madeira was at his back and he took comfort in that. She didn’t push or rush him, but he knew if he needed anything she would be there. He took a step forward, and she stayed damn near glued to his ass. Payne brought up the rear, and Fontana had seen the man move enough that he knew that the man would die to protect them if needed. The prosthetic hadn’t hindered this op in any way.
The body inside the cage moved.
A million thoughts raced through Fontana’s brain. This had started out as a recon run, but now that they’d seen a captive their plan needed to shift. If they went up to the cage and the captive didn’t speak English or Spanish they could be fucked if he drew attention to them. The prisoners had been from many different countries. If the person did speak a language they understood, he could give them insight into what was going on.
Fontana knew he could get the cage open. That was easy. It had been one of the first things he’d ever done to break the Dogs of War out of the camp. But if the captive was too weak to escape they could be putting their entire team in danger. Trying to escape at dawn, just before potentially a lot of people came on duty, was not smart. Rescue needed to be done at night when he could destroy the lights.
He opened his senses toward the person, but felt nothing.
“Team Alpha, do you read?” Zero’s voice was barely a breath.
“Go ahead,” he whispered.
“We have multiple contacts, both friendly and hostile.”
“Affirm.” Fontana clenched his jaw, hating what he had to say. “Pull back. I repeat, pull back.”
“Roger.”
Fontana hated to do it, but they’d been a little ill-prepared for what they’d found. He’d expected indigenous people to have moved to the buildings. He hadn’t actually expected anyone to be here from the Collaborative.
There was a chance that the man in the cage was there for another reason, but he seriously doubted it. They would pull back, scope out the area today and make a plan to get the prisoners out tonight.
As they began to withdraw Fontana glanced at the cage again.
The man had rolled his head over and was staring right at them.
Immediately he put his finger to his lips to keep him silent. The man gave the tiniest of nods. Taking a chance, Fontana pointed at the upper corner of the cage, where the cameras used to be. The man gave another minuscule nod. Brushing his left hand down his right forearm in an old Navy SEAL sign, Fontana asked how many enemies. His eyes began to tear because he refused to blink as he watched the man tap the bar of his cell four times. Fontana gave him an ‘ok’ signal, then made the motion of a watch on his wrist, then the sun going down. The man seemed to understand everything Fontana was telling him, because he gave a slow nod and closed his eyes. It was obvious to him that the man appeared injured, and he hated leaving him behind.
It took everything he had to back away from the captive, but they had to go. The sky was getting too light and they would be spotted if they didn’t retreat, either by a person or a camera. The result would be the same. Their asses would be fried.
Getting out was a lot easier than getting in. Jordyn didn’t relax until they were outside the battered chain-link fence and back on the path they’d cut earlier. They’d didn’t speak until they were at least a half a mile away from the compound. Taking cover at the buttressed base of a giant ceiba tree, they hunkered down to compare notes.
“Report,” Fontana said.
“There are at least two men in cages, both Caucasian,” Zero told them, sweat rolling down the sides of his face, “as well as a long bunkhouse. We peeked in the windows and we could see a few soldiers. Can’t tell if they’re organized, or not. They do have weapons, but they’re not uniform. They seem to be a hodgepodge of whatever they could throw together. There was a lookout, smoking a cigarette, so we had to shift.”
Fontana nodded. “We saw a captive as well, and he spotted us. It think he understood when I started using hand signals. There are at least four guards. I told him we’d be back after sundown.”
“Do you think that was smart?” Shane asked. “What if he tell
s them?”
Fontana shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“There were at least two other cages behind the one with the captive,” Jordyn told him.
Fontana glanced at her. “Really?”
She nodded, shifting her weapon. “I couldn’t tell if they had men inside them or not.”
Fontana grabbed a stick and started scraping away tree leaves to get to the loamy dirt beneath. He started sketching out the position of the buildings and what he’d seen. Then Zero took the stick and added his side of the camp.
“So, all told, we have a minimum of three male captives, six guards, three kitchen workers. Did we see any kind of supervisor?”
They all shook their heads. “Guy that left the hut?” Jordyn asked.
“Probably.”
They all looked at the map for a while before Fontana went down onto his knees. That position probably hurt his leg, but he was too hard-headed to not do it. He pointed at one of the shapes in the dirt. “This used to be the medical building. We set fire to it before we left.”
“It looks to be in use,” Zero told him. “You can see where it was burnt, but there was a light on the exterior. And a beaten path to the door.”
He blinked, and Jordyn thought he was going to say something, but he bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose for several long seconds. When he finally looked up his eyes had chilled. “We’ll take rotation surveilling the camp today. Watch inbound and outbound traffic, as well as prisoner movements, if there are any. Then when night falls we’ll go in and get them out. I hate to waste the day, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
“Agreed,” Kenny said. “How do we get those cages open?”
Fontana waved a hand. “Don’t worry about the cages. I can get those. And I’ll take care of the cameras if there are any. It’s actually getting the captives back to the chopper that worries me.”
“Did anyone see a usable road?”
“I saw vehicles,” Payne inserted, “so there has to be a road somewhere. Or a path. Something.”
“That’s one of the things we’ll look for today. Two man shifts, four hours each. We’ll insert at zero two hundred.”
They all agreed. After shedding some of their gear, she and Kenny left for the first shift. “There’s a bit of a hill in the direction we went earlier. We can see a good bit of the camp.”
His words were proven true as the sun burned off the fog. They could see damn near everything. But there were no exterior guards. Did they really feel that safe there?
About seven a.m. local time things started moving. But not like they’d expected. There was no plan to anything going on. The men in uniform got up and headed to breakfast, and there were a few people in plain clothes moving around. They appeared to be Caucasian rather than Brazilian, but she could be wrong.
At eight-thirty most of the people in plain clothes headed toward the cinderblock building. Not long after, two of the guards escorted one of the prisoners into the building. The captive was in there for the better part of their shift. Jordyn waited nervously for him to return. Shane and Payne had just gotten there to relieve them when they saw the man being escorted back to a cage. This time, though, they were dragging him back.
Jordyn fumed, wanting to run down there and get the man out. She felt terrible that they’d stood by as he was injured. She wasn’t sure if he was American or not, but it didn’t really matter. He was not there of his own free will. This is what Fontana had gone through for months. As well as the other two men that had come to LNF.
They passed on information to Shane and Payne, then they returned to their day camp at the tree. Kenny rested a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Patience, little sister. We’ll get them out.”
Yes, they would.
Fontana listened to Kenny’s report as dispassionately as he could, but it was hard not to react when he heard about the man being dragged back to his cage. He glanced at Madeira. Her face was closed down and her sunglasses on, so he couldn’t see her eyes. Anger radiated off of her though. Enough that she didn’t speak a word until Kenny had finished.
“We need to kill those fuckers,” she hissed, careful not to raise her voice. They were a good ways away from the camp, but they were being careful. “If they’re forcing men to live in cages, they need to die. Maybe we’ll just leave them in the cages and let them suffer like these men have.”
Fontana was all for that. Actually, he’d prefer to kill them. It was no less than they deserved.
“Did you see who was in charge?”
“No, not really. But there was one man that had keys to what you called the medical building. Older man, glasses,” she positioned her hand a little above her own head. “‘Bout this tall. He could have been a janitor for all we know, though.”
She paced a bit. Fontana watched her but didn’t say anything. She was realizing the situation in minutes, when he’d had years to deal with it.
“I’m sorry, Fontana,” she said, pausing before him. “I didn’t not believe you, but I don’t think I understood and absorbed exactly what you’d gone through.”
Fontana appreciated that. Because for a long time he’d thought that they were crazy. Surely their own government couldn’t have turned on them so completely. Who would believe them if they did go public? It wasn’t until they’d cracked the encryption on the drives last week that he’d felt a bit of hope. They would document this camp just like the last one, and they would scream bloody murder until they were heard. The men in the cages couldn’t speak, but they could.
“Sit down and relax.” He moved to the side of the tree and scraped away some leaves for her, then positioned her pack against it so that she could either recline back against it or lay her head back.
She smiled slightly at his lame attempt to make her comfortable. “Thanks.”
Jordyn sat on her butt then leaned back against her pack. She pushed her sunglasses up on her head and crossed her arms beneath her breasts.
Fontana hadn’t been aware of her until now, but the position did taunting things. She crossed her muscular thighs and leaned forward, looking up at him. “Who else is involved?”
Fontana debated the wisdom of telling her, but decided that if she was in it this far, risking her life, she needed to know. So, sitting down beside, he went through the list of people that had been listed in the information. Her mouth dropped open and she could only shake her head in disbelief.
“Congressman Albright is the one that fights for veteran’s affairs!” she cried.
Fontana dipped his chin. “And three of the others are veterans themselves.”
Tears filled her eyes suddenly and she looked away. Swiping her fingers across her cheeks she huffed out a breath. “I’m so pissed right now. I want to hang them up by their tiny balls.”
Fontana smiled slightly, appreciating that she was as emotional about it now as he was. “Thank you for being mad.”
She looked at him again, her expression determined. “You have my support in anything you feel you need to do here. Or back in the States. I’ll back you on it.”
She held out her fist and he grinned, bumping knuckles. “Thanks, Jordyn.”
Her eyes softened at the use of her first name and she turned her face away, giving him the smooth side. Using thumb and forefinger, he turned her chin toward him. “Don’t hide from me.”
Her cheeks flushed, kind of like she was embarrassed, but not. No, she felt the same awareness he did, and if there weren’t two other men not very far away, he’d be tempted to taste her, and tease her. She could be brave if she chose to, but he didn’t want it to have to be a choice for her. She deserved to be secure and know that she was wanted, and loved.
His mind screeched to a halt and he drew his hand back. Love had no bearing on what he felt for her. He wanted her, but he didn’t love her, didn’t know if he could love.
Forcing a smile, he pushed to his feet. “I’m going to go look at the camp.”
Chapter Fourteen
“I’m heading out,” Wulfe told Aiden. “We need to know if anything is going on. I’ve texted my informant but get silence. I need to be there to see what’s going on.”
Aiden nodded, pausing in the middle of the hallway. “Take care of yourself, damn it. We just got back together and now we’re separating again. I don’t like it.”
Wulfe gave him a shrug. “Have to be flexible if we’re going to take them down.”
“I know.” Reaching out, he clasped Wulfe’s arm in his own. Seriously, dude, you need to cover your ass. You’ll have no back-up.
I am aware. I promise I will take the utmost care.
They stared at each other for a long moment before they pulled away. The satellite phone in Aiden’s pocket chirped with an incoming call. He answered it as quickly as he could, anxious to hear any kind of news. “What’s going on?”
Fontana sighed on the other end of the line. “We have an active camp. Good guys and bad guys. We’re scoping things out today and going in tonight. We have survivors.”
Aiden let that sink in for a moment. “How many?” he breathed.
“We think just three, but we’ll know more by tonight.”
“I don’t care what time it is I want you to call me when you get out.”
“Will do.”
“Are you doing okay?”
There was silence for a moment. “I’d be lying if I said I was unaffected. Being here and seeing the cages… yeah, I won’t be sleeping tonight. Or for the next week probably. It’s exactly the same, Will. Just greener where the jungle has started to swallow everything. And there are fewer people. It’s not bustling like it used to be.”
“Can you tell if it’s still Collaborative?”