Cindy Gerard - [Bodyguards 05]

by Under the Wire

  The ravine where they’d left the jeep under the copse of Palu trees.

  “What was that?” Lily half-whispered, half-croaked, as she struggled to get her breath back.

  It registered peripherally that he must have knocked the wind out of her when he’d thrown himself on top of her.

  “That,” he said, grabbing her hand and dragging her to her feet, “was one big mother of a gun. And that fire you see,” he continued as he led her at a run down the hill, away from the burned-out jeep and toward the jungle, “was our ride.”

  “Oh God,” she gasped after a quick glance in the direction of the fire.

  “Guess we know where the rest of those soldiers were.” He jumped a piece of deadfall, racing for the nearest copse of trees. The additional troops must have been out scouting, running a training exercise—whatever—and had stumbled across the jeep. They’d evidently radioed back coordinates for the mortar round.

  Manny hoped to hell he and Lily made it to the cover of the jungle before they became the next target of the big gun.

  “Where are we go—”

  “Just run!” he barked, eating up ground as fast as he could with his pack and hers and his rifle slung over one shoulder and her hand latched in a death grip in his other. “With a little luck, they won’t spot us.”

  The static, tattoo report of automatic weapon fire broke out not more than a hundred yards behind them. The rounds whistled past his left ear just as he ducked and rolled and dragged Lily with him.

  Ho-kay. So luck wasn’t on the table.

  And Mother Nature picked that exact moment to unload with a late-morning downpour. The clouds that had been milling overhead like swarming bees opened up, burst like popped water balloons, and drenched him and Lily to the skin just as they ducked under the thick, green canopy of the rain forest—a squad of Tiger rebels hot on their trail.

  Tiger headquarters, Jaffna Peninsula

  “You’re a popular fellow,” Ramanathan said dryly as Dallas’s SAT phone rang.

  It was the second time in as many minutes. Dallas had no doubt it was Ethan or Manny. He also had no illusions about the wisdom of answering. He had an audience with the head of the LTTE. In Sri Lanka, that was on the scale of an audience with the Pope, only Ramanathan would never be confused as a holy man in a civilized world.

  “My brother,” Dallas said, referring to his ringing phone. “Most likely he’s worried about me.”

  “As well he should be,” Ramanathan said with a sardonic smile. “Now tell me what it is you braved death to ask of me.”

  “We have lost something. Something precious. The speculation is that you may…be in a position to help us locate it.”

  “Something so precious that you risk your life. Interesting. Tell me more.”

  Dallas would like nothing better than to lean across the desk and wrap his hands around the slimy little bastard’s neck. Instead, Dallas leaned back in the chair that had been provided for him and crossed his ankle over his knee. He flicked at the dust on his pant leg and played the game.

  “A boy. An American. Adam Campora. He’s in Sri Lanka on a humanitarian mission.”

  “How noble. And this concerns me how?”

  Dallas met Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s cold eyes. “He’s disappeared. Amithnal Muhandiramala, his wife, Sathi, and their daughter, Minrada, Adam’s host family, have also disappeared.”

  Ramanathan toyed with his knife, turning it over and over in his hand. “And you assume I have something to do with this—”

  “Disappearance? No.” Dallas shook his head, understanding that an outright accusation of abduction would only meet with more resistance. “I have high hopes, however, that you might have some information that would assist in recovering both the Muhandiramalas and Adam.”

  “Muhandiramala,” Ramanathan mused. “Why is that name familiar? Oh wait. It comes to me. He’s a member of the Sinhalese parliament, correct?”

  Dallas simply met Ramanathan’s hard stare. The general knew exactly who Muhandiramala was and his importance in the Sinhalese government.

  “You are a fool on a fool’s mission,” Ramanathan said at last. “I know nothing of this.”

  Dallas didn’t bat an eye and played his trump card. “Word is that you’ve suffered some setbacks…financially,” he said without missing a beat.

  Ramanathan’s sharp gaze latched on to Dallas like an infrared beam. “And you wish to make a contribution to the cause? How generous.”

  “I could be generous, yes,” Dallas agreed. Unspoken was the provided you tell me where Adam is.

  A slow grin slid over Ramanathan’s face. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “You’ve got a set of balls on you, Garrett. You come to my house and offer me a deal if I play nice with you?”

  He leaned back in his chair, sobered abruptly. “I know nothing of your lost boy. But I will make you a deal. I have lost something, too. Something that is very valuable to me.”

  “A howitzer?” Dallas repeated after Ramanathan told him what he’d lost. “How in the hell do you lose a cannon?”

  “The shipment arrived in Trincomalee,” the general explained, referring to a port city on the east coast and north of the Bay of Bengal. “It was intercepted at the docks by men dressed in Tiger uniforms.”

  “Only it wasn’t your men,” Dallas surmised. “When did this happen?”

  “Three days ago. I want my gun back. And because I like you, Garrett, I’m going to give your brother a chance to find it. If he does, I just might let you live.

  “Now answer your phone,” he said when the phone rang again. “Your life may depend on it.”

  “Yo,” Dallas answered the phone, never taking his eyes off Ramanathan.

  “We’ve got a ransom tape,” Ethan said, wasting no time.

  Dallas had figured this was coming. “And they want what?”

  Ethan told him.

  “Hold on.” He tilted the phone away from his mouth and studied Ramanathan. “Interesting,” he said, addressing the general, “that you know nothing of Adam Campora and the Muhandiramalas’ disappearance, yet the prime minister’s office is in possession of a video showing Tiger fighters holding them at gunpoint and promising to execute them if the Tamils’ demands aren’t met.”

  Ramanathan frowned. “I know nothing of this tape.”

  Whether it was the unguarded shock on Ramanathan’s face or the stunned tone of his voice, for some reason Dallas believed him. “If your camp didn’t make the video, then who?” Dallas pressed.

  Ramanathan stroked his chin, thought. “This I do not know, but one wonders…” He let the thought trail off.

  Dallas completed it. “One wonders whether, if your gun was found, we might also find our lost boy.”

  “What’s going on?” Ethan asked on the other end of the line.

  “I’m not sure,” Dallas said as, brows lowered in thought, the general reached for the phone on his desk, “but I think we may have just found an unlikely ally. And I may have just gotten my ass out of a sling.”

  “Explain.”

  “Seems General Ramanathan’s missing something, too.” In the background, Ramanathan barked orders.

  “Well, fuck,” Ethan muttered after Dallas filled him in on the missing howitzer. “Just what we need. Another complication.”

  “Yeah,” Dallas said. “That’s kind of the way I see it, too.”

  By his calculation, they had a little less than ten hours left before the deadline expired.

  Ten hours that could mean the difference between life and death.

  CHAPTER 17

  Somewhere in the jungle

  Rain dripped in Lily’s eyes as a steady deluge beat down through massive palms and towering pines, finding its way through the tall canopy trees, then down to the shorter palms, and finally to the ground. Twisted, stunted trees struggled in vain against hardier palms draped in mosses, ferns, and thousands of brilliantly colored orchids. The vibrant fuchsias, pinks and shades of yellow, z
ipped past her field of vision as she and Manny half-ran, half-hacked their way through foliage that was sometimes so thick, she lost sight of him if he got so much as a yard away from her.

  A stiff vine slapped Lily in the face, shooting a fresh wave of pain through her bruised cheek as she trudged behind him. Her skinned knees stung; so did her arms where fern fronds and palm leaves had sliced tiny cuts on their mad dash through the slippery underbrush.

  Her hair had long since been pulled, tugged, and torn loose of her braid. It lay heavy on her back; sodden tendrils fell across her face. She was soaked to the skin.

  She was hungry, she was tired, and she probably ought to be scared half out of her mind, but all she could think of was keeping up with the man who set a pace that made the Boston Marathon look like a cakewalk.

  She wasn’t sure how long they’d been running from the rebel forces. Or if they were still being chased. Only one thing was certain. Manny wasn’t slowing down—and that told her they were far from out of danger.

  Not long ago, he’d pulled a long, lethal-looking knife out of his pack—that was right after they’d heard the roar of what sounded like a very big cat. Leopard, Lily suspected, and wished she hadn’t read as much about the Sri Lankan jungles as she had.

  Leopards, too many varieties of poisonous snakes to count, wild boars, sloth bears, and jackals headed the list of “critters” she wished she didn’t know about. Oh, and leeches. God, she didn’t even want to think about the leeches.

  Above them, noisy troops of toque macaques with their comical thatch of hair parted down the middle of their heads competed with langur and shaggy-hair monkeys on the decibel-level scale. Hundreds of the long-tailed primates swung from treetop to treetop like teams of runners in a relay race. Only the birds—their caws and trills constant—came close to rivaling the monkeys and the rain for noise.

  But the sounds that remained etched in Lily’s consciousness as Manny hacked a path for them through trailing vines and foot-grabbing roots were the sounds of the explosion that had destroyed their jeep and the too-close-for-comfort whiz of bullets flying past her head.

  He stopped so suddenly Lily ran smack into his broad back. She was too winded and weary to do anything but stand there, leaning against him, struggling for breath, while his big, wet body held her upright.

  His chest heaved with his deep breaths. He lifted a hand, wiped rain and sweat from his eyes with his forearm.

  “Why are we sto—”

  His quick “Shush” quieted her.

  He was listening, she realized. Attempting to determine if they were still being followed.

  She closed her eyes, pressed her forehead against his back, and concentrated on quiet breaths while her heart pumped blood through her veins like a locomotive to feed oxygen to her deprived lungs.

  She heard nothing but her own heartbeat.

  He, apparently, heard something else.

  He tapped her on the shoulder. When she looked up, he held his index finger to his mouth, then tossed their packs under a huge, low-hanging banana palm leaf to the left of the trail. Then he motioned for her to duck in beside the packs.

  If possible, her heart beat harder. It was then that she realized what was wrong. It wasn’t what Manny had heard—it was something he hadn’t heard.

  The monkeys had stopped their chatter. Even the incessant song of the birds had ended. The silence interspersed with only rain was more unnerving than the noise. And more meaningful.

  They had company. Enough to quiet the noisy masses into a silence bred by curiosity. Or by fear. Whichever. Lily understood. Her blood was running with plenty of both.

  Manny didn’t have to tell her twice to hide. Like a good soldier, she hunkered down beneath palm leaves bowed and heavy with rain—where she waited, water dripping in her face. And she told herself they weren’t going to die here. They couldn’t die. Adam needed them not to die.

  Very carefully, she dug into her pack and withdrew the Browning. She shoved a full magazine into the grip. Then she slipped off the thumb safety, pulled the hammer back to full cock, and with a cartridge in the chamber, prepared to fire.

  Across the trail, looking dark and deadly with his unshaven face and the assault rifle cradled in his arms, Manny gave her an approving nod. Then as quiet and stealthy as the big cat she’d heard growl earlier, Manny ducked behind a moss-covered boulder on the opposite side of the trail that he’d cut. Not more than a yard away from her, he squatted, sank his knife into the forest floor, then dug up mud with his fingers and smeared it over his face, arms, and shirt.

  Even with the rain washing down his face and diluting the mud, it was frightening how fast he made himself disappear. Frightening how the warm, dark licorice color of his eyes transitioned to obsidian. Cold, hard, soulless. If she hadn’t known he was the same man who had once touched her with a lover’s hands, the same man who had just sacrificed his body to protect hers from a mortar round, the deadly look in his eyes would have had her running in the other direction.

  A sound—the faint, muffled snap of a breaking twig—registered through the steady drip of water funneling from leaf to leaf like a meticulous series of channels and spouts.

  Eyes wild, she sought Manny’s. He touched a finger to his lips again, then pointed back in the direction they had come from.

  Before she even nodded that she understood, he disappeared. He’d gone back to intercept whoever was following them.

  It crossed her mind that it was a good thing she was sitting on her butt. The impact of discovering Manny had gone after them on his own would have knocked her there. Suddenly it felt like she had an adrenaline drip mainlined into her bloodstream. Her face flushed hot. Her limp-noodle limbs burned with the need to fight. Her finger trembled over the trigger guard of the Browning. She ignored the water running into her eyes, weighing down her clothes and her hair. She focused. She waited.

  She’d felt comfortable with her Springfield. Felt confident in her aim. But that had been on a firing range with paper targets. From the moment she’d picked the Browning out of the cache of weapons Dallas had purchased in that back-alley deal, she’d known that if she ever used it, she wouldn’t be firing at paper.

  She’d been asking herself ever since if she could use it on another human being. She wasn’t asking anymore. To protect her son, to protect herself, to protect this man who didn’t yet believe in her but who wanted her anyway, she’d do whatever had to be done.

  She was stone-cold certain of that fact.

  And when a single shot rang out, not twenty paces back along their trail, she knew that the involuntary flinch that jerked her body had nothing to do with fear.

  It had to do with necessity.

  It had to do with purpose.

  It had to do with the certain knowledge that despite the fact that he still didn’t believe her, if they put so much as a scratch on Manny Ortega’s caramel-mocha skin, if they so much as split a single strand of his beautiful black hair, she was going to blow them to kingdom come.

  Gripping the Browning in both hands, she raised the gun, sighted down the barrel, and, steady as a rock, waited.

  And waited.

  By the time she heard the telltale rustle of leaves behind her, it was too late to even scream. One hand clamped over her mouth; another wrestled the gun out of her hands, then pushed her to her back and pinned her there.

  “Easy. It’s me.”

  Every muscle in Lily’s body went as lax as cooked pasta. She stopped struggling. The air slogged out of her lungs as Manny leaned over her. Very slowly, he unpeeled his hand from over her mouth. The scream trapped in her throat escaped on a low growl as knee-jerk anger nipped at the heels of relief.

  “You scared the hell out of me!” she whispered fiercely as her body reacted to the fright with a series of tremors.

  “Yeah, well, you looked like you wanted to shoot something real bad. Couldn’t take a chance that it’d be me.”

  She let out a shuddering breath.
r />   “Can you stand?”

  “Yeah,” she said, then made a liar out of herself when he rose and offered a hand. She stood—and her knees buckled.

  He caught her before she went down, and pulled her up against his chest.

  Through his sodden shirt and pants she felt the hard breadth of his chest, the lean line of hip and thigh. Felt his body heat steam through wet clothes and counteract the rain. His heartbeat, fast but steady, pulsed against her cheek.

  “Steady,” he whispered, telling her they were far from in the clear. “Take a second. Get your feet under you.”

  “My feet aren’t the problem,” she muttered, embarrassed by her sudden weakness. “What happened back there?” she asked when she felt herself level out.

  He reached around in front of her and retrieved her Browning from the jungle floor. Before handing it to her, he did what he could to wipe it dry.

  “What happened is that we need to move out,” he said, his face expressionless. “That shot is going to draw the rest of them like flies.”

  She tucked the gun into her waistband, then met his eyes. Saw in them the answer he had avoided giving her. He’d shot someone. Someone who had been intent on killing him…or her…or Adam.

  Someone who was probably a boy. God. All of this was so senseless.

  “We can’t…can’t just leave him.”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes as vacant and hollow as an empty vault, “we can. You’re not here on a mercy mission, Lily. And his friends don’t give a rip that you’re only here to find your son. Me, they’ll just kill if they catch us. You…they’ll let you live a long time before they’re through passing you around. By that time, you’ll wish you were dead.”

  If his intention was to scare her, it worked. When he took off, she reached for her backpack and fell into step behind him. A new level of fear fortified her with a burst of adrenaline.

  They slogged on for another hour. The underbrush thinned some, making walking a bit easier. The trade-off was that the terrain had grown steep and the rain no longer had to filter through a canopy of trees. It was like taking a cool, pulsing shower with their clothes on. Not a speck of mud remained on Manny’s face or hands. Even his clothes and hers had been washed clean—which made them stark white targets against a dark green terrain.