“Here,” Odesky said, shoving a handful of dried apricots toward Adán. “It’ll help with the shock.”
Adán took the apricots, his gaze far away. He was working things out.
“Save the wondering for later,” Parris said. “For now, you’re coming with us.”
There were two or three groans. Amos was the loudest.
“You like that so much, Amos, you can be nursemaid and make sure he doesn’t trip us up,” Parris said.
Amos grimaced. “Yes, sir,” he said, his tone meek. He knew not to push the insubordination any further. He got to his feet and picked up his rifle.
Adán got to his feet, too. He didn’t groan, although she saw him grimace. Even a little crease like the one he’d got hurt like crazy. His arm had to be throbbing hard by now, yet he had refused painkillers.
The men would have noted that.
“I have to get word to the Loyalists on Big Rock or in Acapulco,” Adán said. “They think I was taken by the Insurrectos. They’re braced for a demand. I have to tell them I’m free.”
“You busted out of Insurrecto containment?” Ramirez asked.
Adán glanced at him. “It wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds,” he assured him. “They looked away. I ran like hell.”
Chuckles sounded.
“Sounds about right. They’re stupid, most of ‘em,” Donaldson declared.
“Some of them are not stupid at all,” Parris told him. “Don’t forget that.”
Donaldson nodded. He’d accepted the correction. That was why she let him ask the direct questions—he learned from her answers and so did the others who listened in.
“So you were snatched from Acapulco?” she asked Adán.
Adán nodded. “Yesterday, around noon.”
Interesting.
“Why would they snatch you?” Donaldson asked. “They going into the ransom business now?”
“Hear they’re short on funds, so maybe,” Ramirez murmured. He was the thoughtful one of the group.
“Probably because I’m the President of Vistaria’s cousin,” Adán said.
Silence.
That shocked them. Parris hid her smile. “Okay. We’re moving. Back to the gear, then…” she glanced at her watch. If Adán hadn’t been here, she would have pushed on to the coast at best speed, well into the night. It was still morning. Adán changed the dynamic, though. “Then we’ll find a hole for the rest of the day and move out late tonight,” she finished. It would give Adán time to restore his energy, so he wouldn’t slow down her unit too much.
Everyone stowed their rations and got to their feet without complaint even though the fifteen minutes she’d allowed them hadn’t elapsed. They were good men. It had only taken her a year to slap the worst of their masculine impulses and inbred misogyny out of them.
Yes, they deserved to rest. They had been working hard for nine days.
She ignored the tiny voice whispering in the far back of her mind that stopping and resting would give her a chance to talk to Adán alone.
She must ignore that she knew him, that there had ever been any association in the past. She had to treat him as the civilian tripwire he was and handle him with kid gloves.
Telling herself that and abiding by it were two different things.
All the way back to where they had left the heaviest of their gear buried beneath leaves and nets, she realized she was watching Adán more than Amos was, reacquainting herself with the lines of his face, the way his jaw worked whenever he was in pain, or mad, or puzzled.
Adán was different. His black eyes showed nothing when before, they had been the most revealing thing about him. She had always known what he was thinking by reading it in his eyes. They were that expressive.
Only now, he was closed up, his eyes shuttered and she couldn’t read anything.
You did that to him, the accusing voice raged in her mind.
She shrugged the guilty thought aside. She wouldn’t fool herself she had that much influence over Adán Caballero. She had known him for a short while, some years ago. That was it.
That was all it could be. Period.
Chapter Sixteen
Adán didn’t slow them down as much as she thought he might. He didn’t seem to have more trouble with the slopes than did her men. Perhaps because he had been raised here.
They reached the huge old fig tree with the massive root system an hour later. She held them back one hundred yards, while Ramirez scouted. He gave the all-clear. They moved forward.
The men pulled off and stowed the nets and picked up their gear. It was all big backpacks, which gave them mobility and independence from a supply depot. Parris shouldered her own backpack, which wasn’t any smaller than the others, adjusted to the weight, then signaled everyone move forward once more.
Jonesy, the unit’s marksman, eased out to the flank. Donaldson took the other, while Ramirez stayed on point, scouting for a suitable place to stop for the night. Among these trees, with their lack of undergrowth, good places to camp were rare.
After an hour of slow progress, Adán moved up alongside Parris from the rear where Amos had been keeping him. “I know this area,” Adán said. “I used to trek through it every summer when I was a kid. There’s an entrance to the caves about a mile north of here.”
“What caves?” she said sharply. “There’s nothing on the map.”
“The caves,” Adán replied. “All of them. The north end of Vistaria is riddled with them.”
She glanced at Yardley, their navigator. He shook his head. “There are caves. They don’t reach down this far.”
“They’re there. Trust me,” Adán said. He didn’t raise his voice or tell Yardley he was wrong or full of shit.
That was new, that lack of confrontation. The Adán she remembered had always needed to be right, to be smart, to not be a waste of space.
She didn’t have enough ego to think she might have made that change in him. She had never been in his life long enough for her departure to make that much difference.
And why was she thinking of this? Now?
Parris shook her head. “We’re already heading north-west. Direct north won’t take us too far out of the way. Let’s check it out. A cave for the night would be a Hilton.”
Ramirez, who had come back to hear the discussion, looked at Adán. “Which way?”
“Head north,” Adán said. “As soon as I know where we are, I can direct you.”
Ramirez waved his finger and everyone turned to face the direction he pointed in. He moved ahead, carrying the rifle across both arms, his finger resting over the trigger guard.
“Move up behind Ramirez,” Parris told Adán.
“Yes, sir.”
Someone smothered a laugh.
Adán moved through the strung out unit, picking up the pace until he was trailing Ramirez, as she had ordered.
Twenty minutes later, when they stepped over one of the many little streams that trailed down the sides of the mountains, Adán jogged up to Ramirez and tapped his shoulder. He pointed to the right of north and murmured something.
Ramirez nodded and waved him back.
Five minutes later, the ground changed. Spines of rock split the leaf-littered loam.
Yardley stamped on one, studying it. “Limestone. I’ll be damned. He was right.”
The entrance to the cave was a tiny one. Anyone who didn’t know it was there would miss it, for it was buried in the crotch of a gully. Ramirez thrust his fist into the air and everyone halted.
He moved ahead, his rifle now tucked up against his hip and pointing forward. He moved up the length of the gully and eased into the mouth of the cave, ducking to miss the top of it. Seeing Ramirez against the black maw gave Parris a sense of scale. The cave opening was wider and taller than she had thought.
Ramirez emerged, his rifle hanging from his fingers. He gave the all-clear.
Parris turned to Locke, who was her 2IC. “Sentries, two hours each. We don’t want to be surprised
.”
“He was right about the cave,” Locke pointed out. “If the north end is riddled, as he said, there’s likely a back door we can use if we need it.”
“It’s the only reason I’m sanctioning the place as a camp location,” she assured him.
Locke nodded and moved away to assign sentry details.
They stepped into the cave and switched on flashlights or cellphones and playing them around the cave. It was narrow, littered with rocks and wind-blown leaves.
“Twenty yards in, it opens out. Around the corner of that projection there,” Adán told her.
Parris played her flashlight over it. “Looks like solid rock from here.”
“There’s a squeeze,” Adán said, his voice flat and confident.
She recognized the term from her underwater training. A professional potholer had explained about underwater caves and squeezes and chutes that could rise to pockets of air, so if they were ever caught in one, find the chutes…
“Okay,” she said, making sure none of her doubt showed in her voice. Adán had been right about the cave. There was no reason why he would be wrong about the squeeze. She moved through the milling men and flipped her rifle to point forward as she rounded the stony projection.
Sure enough, a narrow passage showed. She wouldn’t get through it wearing her pack. “Ramirez,” she breathed, so the cave wouldn’t pick up her voice and echo it.
Ramirez dropped his pack to the ground, hefted his rifle and moved forward.
“Turn side on,” she murmured as he passed her.
He dropped his rifle so it hung by the trigger guard and shuffled sideways. He disappeared.
Ninety long seconds later, he reappeared, and beckoned. “All clear and sweet,” he said, with a normal voice.
Parris nodded and waved everyone on. They slotted through one by one, pushing or pulling their packs through with them. Parris waited until only Locke and Adán remained. Light glowed on the other side of the aperture.
“Adán, go through,” she told him.
“After you, Captain,” Locke murmured, as Adán slid through the crack. Locke had his rifle slung and his pistol in hand.
Parris shuffled through, holding her breath. Caves were not her favorite place. She preferred the outdoors, with sky over her and the horizon far away. She shoved aside the sensation of the walls pushing in and squeezing her. It was all in her mind.
She stepped out into the larger cavern. Four of the pocket-sized LED lamps they carried were scattered over the floor, giving out enough white light to see the walls and the nearly horizontal floor. The floor consisted of smooth rock at one end and stony ground at the other. She realized the stony ground was rocks, dust and dirt that had accumulated in the down-sloping gulley and had built up over the years. In a hundred more years, the floor might be flat.
Parris picked the far side of the cave where the floor was smoothest and furthest from where most of the men were congregating in the middle. She eased her backpack off and unstrapped the sleeping bag.
She turned to Adán, who stood nearby watching the men settle. No one was talking much. That was normal when they were operational.
“Here,” she said, tossing the sleeping bag at Adán.
He got his hands up and caught it. “What about you?”
“I’ll use the mat that goes under it.”
He looked as though he wanted to argue.
“You sleep on the ground a lot?” she asked, digging out the thin rubber mat that shielded the bag against moisture.
“Last night was the first time since I was a kid,” he admitted.
“Take the bag. You’ll still wake up with bruises even with the padding.” She spread the mat. “Only, move off about ten yards, huh? This is my office. I’ll be up late, taking meetings. I don’t want to keep you awake.”
He looked at her, startled. “Ten yards,” he murmured. He moved along the wall at least twelve yards before stopping and unrolling the bag.
Parris made herself ignore him. She needed to report in, get updates to her orders, if there were any, and report on progress. She grabbed the small bottle of alcohol and wipes and cleared her face of the camouflage paint. Tonight, they wouldn’t need it.
She hauled the industrial armored laptop from her pack, flipped the pack on its side and fired up the computer.
It took several minutes for her to find a suitable carrier signal and plug in, then go through the challenge-and-answer coupling with the base. Finally, she was looking at the operations room and the Colonel’s craggy face.
Strickland grimaced. “You’re in early, Graves. Something happen?”
“Yeah. Picked up a civilian, one we can’t let walk around loose. I’m taking him with us, so I’m switching to night runs.”
“Name?”
“Adán Caballero.” She hesitated, as Strickland’s shaggy brows lifted in surprise. “The Loyalists think the Insurrectos have him. They’re braced for the squeeze.”
Strickland shook his head. “No. We can’t disclose our presence on Vistaria, Graves. That’s the primary order for this mission. The Loyalists will have to stay ignorant and braced for a while longer.”
“Got it,” Parris told him. Unlike the rest of her unit, she did understand, because Strickland had briefed her before they left Los Alamitos. “As soon as I get the chance, I’ll cut Caballero loose,” she told him. “Only, his first act will be to contact them and tell them he’s alive. Also, he’s politically motivated. He’ll feel obliged to tell the Loyalists we’re here.”
Strickland considered. “You know what’s at stake, Graves,” he said. “How much will he slow you down?”
“Not much, which surprised me,” she admitted. “He’s compliant and he knows the land, which gave us a hole to hide in today.”
Strickland’s face crinkled as he frowned. “Your call, Captain. You’re on the ground. Last resort, you can go short a man, put a gun on Caballero and contain him until this is all over.”
“Read you, sir,” Parris told him. She glanced over the pack. Adán was lying on top of the bag, his eyes closed, his hands under his head. She wondered if he was listening. The acoustics in this cave would carry her voice even though she was speaking softly.
Nothing she said was a lie, though.
In the middle of the cave, the men were sitting on their bags, in a two-deep circle around the LEDs. They had set up a pair of the tiny hiking stoves. The stoves hissed beneath pots of food. Everyone carried freeze-dried rations that cooked up well with heat and water.
The camping routine was well established. They would leave her alone until she finished her business and joined them about the fire for a moment or two before sleep.
As a woman, she couldn’t fraternize with them for long, because it sent the wrong signal. Yet, they were a more cohesive group if she lingered for a few minutes and acted as one of them.
She had reports to make, though.
Strickland didn’t hold her up, either. “Turn in your report for the day, Captain, then get some shut eye,” he told her.
“Yes, sir.” She cut the connection, then flipped over to the reporting software. She spent twenty minutes writing her summary of observations for the day—Insurrecto strengths and weaknesses, patterns of movement. Local civilian movement. Numbers.
She took another fifteen minutes to itemize how they had come across Adán Caballero.
She recalled her first glimpse of him, pressed up against the tree with two Insurrectos closing in on him.
The jeans and the casual jacket weren’t Smokey Silva. However, everything else about him—his posture and alertness and the gun held down by his knee—had been pure Silva.
It had seemed almost normal to watch him spin and take out the first Insurrecto, then turn again to get the second. Ramirez had dealt with the second a beat before Adán.
It was only now, in hindsight, that Parris could remind herself Adán was as civilian as they could get. He knew the moves because he had rehearsed them in
movie after movie. It didn’t mean he was anything close to trained.
She stared at the open document on her screen, her mind returning to consider the contained air Adán emanated. That was new. The question occurred to her once more—what had changed?
“Parris,” Adán said, his tone hushed.
She looked up. He’d moved silently and she had let down her guard, here among her men. He stood over her, his flat boating shoes almost up against the side of the pack.
“What?” she said.
“I overheard what you told your C.O.”
She grimaced. “It’s military shorthand, Adán. It’s nothing personal.”
“I didn’t take it personally,” he said. He pushed his hands into his pockets. “Although now I understand more about what happened out there today.” His gaze met hers. “You’re not only black ops, are you?”
She dropped her gaze to the keyboard and tapped out another couple of letters. “I can’t talk about that.” Her heart, though, jumped. He was way, way too perceptive.
“There’s a phrase I haven’t heard for years.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re not sorry and it doesn’t matter. I’ll talk, you can listen. I’m figuring military intelligence. You’re sneaking around, sizing things up, making yourself look like a black ops team if anyone spots you.”
Parris looked up at him, smiling. “We are black ops.”
“Your men, maybe. You’re something else. You’ve got orders over and above theirs.”
“Because their paygrade doesn’t need them to understand the full parameters of the mission,” she assured him.
Adán nodded. “Whatever,” he said and shrugged.
Parris patted the other end of the rubber mat, beside her hip. “Step into my office a moment, huh?”
He tilted his head, considering her. Then he walked around the pack and settled on the mat and crossed his legs, matching her. He raised a brow.
How many times had she seen that expression?
He never used it in the movies. It was pure Adán Caballero, personal to him. Smokey Silva scowled a lot. Every other role had been different, every role had looked as though he was playing himself, yet none of them had been the real Adán Caballero who was sitting in front of her now, waiting for her to speak.
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