The sea was calm, and the light from the stars would be enough to see by, once their eyesight adjusted. But this close to the river delta, any number of things might be floating on the surface. Hitting a log while going fifty knots would spell disaster.
“We’ll run dark until we’re out of sight from shore,” Napier said. “Then we can turn on the spots on the leading edge of the tower. Won’t be anyone out here to see us. It’s thirty minutes to the mouth of the river, then almost two more to the settlement.”
Charity hoisted herself up onto the seat, while Thurman chose to remain standing at the helm, the leaning post cushion flipped forward on his side. She could easily see over the low, dark-tinted windshield. Occasionally, a startled fish would leap out of the water in front of them, but other than that there was nothing to look at ahead but open sea.
“Remember that big dead tree in the water, about a mile south of the settlement?”
“That where you plan to go in at?” Thurman asked.
“Seemed like the only option.”
“You’ll still have to get across that field, and they have people watching it. Then there’s that big-ass wall.”
“The field won’t be a problem, but the wall may be a little trickier. Why does Stockwell call you Napper?”
He glanced over at her for a moment, the single lens sticking out of the middle of his face. “Rhymes with Napier.”
“Come on,” Charity said. “I was in the Army, too. I know nicknames aren’t just based on spelling.”
“That where you learned to fly that chopper?”
“I was flying a crop-dusting helo long before that,” she replied.
He grunted a sort of laugh. “That’d explain the maneuvers.”
“Your nickname?” she prodded.
“I served under Colonel Stockwell when he was a young first lieutenant,” Thurman said. “Toward the end of the war in Vietnam. You ever hear of sappers?”
“Suicide bombers?”
“Yeah, pretty much the same. Only sappers would charge the wire and blow themselves up when they got tangled in it, breaching the wire for their VC buddies to get through. We were on a two-day patrol, outside the wire. During the night, I was hunkered down in a foxhole with two other guys, when we heard someone running toward us. It was a sapper with a satchel charge strapped to his chest. He came straight at my position and just as he made to dive into the foxhole, I stood up and caught him. Body slammed him so hard it broke his neck. Didn’t kill him right off, though. But he couldn’t move his hands to pull the detonator and explode the vest. Cat started screaming at us and cussing us in English. Little fucker had a pretty good vocabulary.”
“What’d you do?”
“I don’t really remember saying anything, but the guys I was with told the rest of the company that I yelled at the VC to shut up and take a nap, just before I crushed the side of his head with my fist.”
Charity couldn’t help but shudder a little, visualizing a nearly seven-foot tall giant lifting a small Vietnamese soldier and slamming him down, then crushing his skull with a single blow.
“My buddies took to calling me Sapper Napper after that, and it just got shortened to Napper.”
“How long were you in the Army?”
“Three years,” he replied. “Nixon started drawing down the size of the military, and when I got back from Nam I was discharged. You?”
“Two years. I was a medivac pilot in Afghanistan at the beginning of the current war. Medically discharged.”
“And you were a crop duster before that?”
Charity was glad he hadn’t dwelt on the subject of her discharge. “No,” she replied. “That was before college. Just before the Army, during my college years, I was an Olympic swimmer.”
“Get outta here!”
“Yeah. Bronze medalist in the four hundred individual medley at the 2000 games in Sydney.”
Though she couldn’t see his eye behind the goggles, Napier looked surprised. He turned and studied the side of her face, then moved his gaze down the length of her body. “Your name’s not Gabriella Fleming, then,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Charity Styles was the bronze medalist in that event in 2000.”
It was Charity’s turn to be surprised. “You follow the games that close?” she asked.
He chuckled softly. “Just the swimming and diving events. All those little girls tumbling and bouncing around, and all them runners and such, never interested me much.”
“You’re an odd man, Napper. Yes, that’s my real name.”
“You should talk,” he said, steering the boat around a floating log. “Why’d you give it up?”
“Nine-eleven,” she replied.
The rode in silence for a few minutes. Then Napier reached down and flipped a switch on the dash. The water ahead turned blindingly white from the bright spotlights. They both removed the night vision headsets and turned them off to conserve battery power.
“We’ll keep the lights on until we’re halfway upriver to the settlement,” Thurman said, switching on the gauge lights, chart plotter, and radar. The radar screen showed the outline of the coast ahead, but nothing else within its twelve-mile range, so Napier switched it back off.
The spots on the front of the T-top reached out nearly half a mile, illuminating the water ahead of the boat, one light angled slightly higher than the other.
Charity studied the chart plotter, then looked out to the east and west. The plotter showed they were already in the mouth of the delta, but she couldn’t see the shoreline on either side. Checking the scale at the bottom, she figured they were in the center of the mile-and-a-half wide delta.
“That’s Isla Cotorra to the west,” Napier said. “You can just make out the light on the west side just above the trees.”
“People live there?”
“No, the light’s unmanned. But, there’s a little fishing village just ahead, called Capure.”
Napier hugged the west bank of Cano Capure, a smaller distributary of the Manamo, as they passed the small village. There were no boats on the water and no lights from the village.
Beyond it, the river narrowed and the boat was engulfed by the jungle on both sides. Soon they came out from under the overhanging canopy into the much wider main distributary of the mighty Orinoco, the Manamo River. Here, Napier brought the boat up to thirty knots, following the narrow beam of the spotlights as they continued upriver.
An hour later, they passed what looked like another village, with several thatch huts on stilts. It was at the confluence of a river that joined the Manamo.
“What’s that?” Charity asked, pointing.
“Campamento Boca de Tigre,” Napier replied, picking his night vision headset up from the console. “From here, we go dark and silent the rest of the way.”
“Camp Tiger’s Mouth?” Charity asked, as she donned her own headset.
Napier switched off the lights, and Charity turned on her optics. The scenery changed to the depthless gray-green once again.
“Jaguar,” he replied, as he slowed the boat and engaged the mufflers. The boat couldn’t go nearly as fast, muffled. “Some locals still call it el tigre, but there ain’t no tigers in South America.”
Three times over the next hour, Napier had to quickly maneuver the boat around obstacles, two being sandbars and the third a huge crocodile stretched nearly the width of a narrow part of the river in a very shallow spot.
“When you get off the boat,” Napier warned, “move as quickly inland as you can. Crocs will be all along the shoreline. Jaguars usually shy away from the scent of a human, but crocs just don’t give a shit—and both are night hunters.”
“How much further to the settlement?”
“Less than a mile,” Napier replied, slowing the boat to just five knots. The gentle swish of the two bows cutting the water was the only sound. “Just around the next bend.”
Stockwell sat at a large outdoor table on a tiny island in the Keys. The is
land, situated in the back country just north of Big Pine Key, was owned by Jesse McDermitt. The two had been discussing a pending mission the transporter was involved in. It was dark, still several hours before dawn. McDermitt’s island home was remote, but not completely devoid of all things civilized.
“This is damned good coffee, Jesse,” Stockwell said, while the retired Marine sniper checked and rechecked his dive gear.
“Rusty, down in Marathon, gets it for me. Comes from a tiny farm in Costa Rica called Hacienda La Minita.”
The two drank coffee and discussed the mission, then McDermitt steered the conversation toward Charity and what she was doing. They hadn’t discussed it since leaving for Key West two days earlier.
“She’s damaged goods,” McDermitt finally said, with a great deal of conviction. “She might do well at not showing it, but she could have some sort of flashback to her time in the hands of the Taliban.”
Stockwell knew all about what had happened to Charity. Captured, tortured, and raped by the enemy, she’d undergone a whole slew of psychological evaluations when she returned. Though she was found unfit for Army flight status, she was more than qualified for her current assignment. The fact that she could unleash the demons that dwelled in her subconscious, at will, was actually a plus in the eyes of the secretary. But Travis would never repeat that to anyone.
“Everyone on the team undergoes a lot of psychological testing, Jesse. Charity went through even more after I submitted her name to the secretary. All the shrinks say she’s okay in the head. Maybe not perfect, but well enough for the duties she was chosen for.”
“How does she get around from target to target?” the man asked, as he began checking his M-40 sniper rifle.
Stockwell studied McDermitt over the rim of his mug. He hadn’t known him personally for very long, but had read over his bio completely and knew enough to be sure he could be trusted.
Finally, he set his mug down and said, “Only three others have that information: Deuce, the secretary, and the president. I know you well enough to know you can be trusted with it. She’s on a forty-five-foot Alden sloop, equipped with the latest nav and comm equipment and anything else she might need for a mission. I’m the only one that has contact with her. I fly to where she is and deliver a target assignment and any specialized gear she’ll need. She can choose to decline any target she wants, but so far she’s three for three, without a single hiccup.”
The last part was a bit of an embellishment. Charity’s current mission was only her second and the first hadn’t quite gone as planned. In fact, she’d been stood down for a couple of months, while the secretary and the president considered what had happened in Mexico.
McDermitt arched an eyebrow. “An Alden sloop?”
“Her own choice,” Stockwell replied. “She only agreed to take the assignment if that’s how she would travel. It was originally built eighty years ago, but underwent a two-month refit, sparing no cost. Her assignment area is the whole Caribbean Basin, so she can usually get to where she needs to in less than a week. During that time, she makes her own plan as to when, where, and how to eliminate the target.”
“Did the shrinks take into account that she’d be alone at sea?” McDermitt pressed. “Just her and her thoughts?”
Just then, the door to the makeshift communications building opened and Stockwell heard the heavy thump-thump of an inbound helicopter. Two men came out of the building and split up, heading to the four corners of the large clearing, where they placed strobes on the ground and activated them. Both men were wearing black wetsuits and jump boots.
McDermitt began pulling on his own wetsuit. “I don’t like it, Travis. Not even a little bit. Probably because I know her better than most. While she and I were on the Revenge last year, she opened up to me. Took her a week, but she finally talked about what happened to her in Afghanistan and how devastated she was when Jared was killed.”
A year ago, Charity had been involved with a young man who’d been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps under bogus conditions. McDermitt had been instrumental in getting the discharge overturned, allowing him to reenlist. The man responsible for the bad paper, and ultimately for Jared’s death, was none other than Stockwell’s predecessor, Jason Smith. He’d once been a CIA operative during the early stages of the war. McDermitt and Charity had spent more than two weeks aboard his charter boat, hunting the man down as he moved around the Caribbean.
“But she took care of the problem then,” Travis said. “Just as she’s doing now.”
“You weren’t there, Colonel. You didn’t see the look in her eyes when she did it.”
Napier hugged the bank of the river, as far from the settlement as possible, as they silently approached. The boat from which the men had shot at her chopper was tied off to the pier at the northern tip of the island. The river split there, and Napier took the eastern main channel. A large structure not far from the pier had a light in a single window on the ground floor. Through the night optics, the light illuminated half an acre of manicured lawn as well as several adjacent buildings. Other than that, the small village was completely dark.
The black boat melted into the dark jungle, invisible to anyone on shore. The engines were so quiet that, had she not known they were moving against the current, Charity would have thought the boat was drifting with it. Napier guided the boat upriver, barely moving. Soon the main body of the settlement was behind them, and a dim glow could be seen ahead, just around a bend in the river.
Charity leaned close to Napier. “What’s that light coming from?” she softly whispered.
Napier didn’t answer for a moment as they neared the bend. The light wasn’t steady, but rose and fell in intensity. Charity lifted her headset and saw absolutely nothing. No light, no river, no bank, not even the bow of the boat. Nothing.
“Camp fire,” the big man beside her quietly whispered. “Near the wall.”
As they approached the bend, the wall came into view, glowing softly from the light of a small fire. Charity switched to thermal optics as they rounded the bend. The fire itself looked like a white hot-spot, and the wall near it glowed slightly from the heat of the fire.
The first tower was above the wall and closer to the river. She easily made out two figures in the tower. As the boat moved slowly forward, more hot spots appeared. More than a dozen were arranged around the fire in horizontal positions. Two more appeared to be men standing away from the fire, and two more could be seen in the far tower. She switched back to night optics, revealing the two men standing by the door in the wall, with tents scattered around the fire. None seemed to see or hear the quiet, black boat as it slipped past. But Napier had his hand on the throttles, ready to jam them to the stops if anyone did.
“They know you’re coming,” Napier whispered, watching the tower and the men by the door closely.
“They think someone is coming,” she quietly replied. But they won’t be ready when I do, she thought.
Moving slowly past the wall, Charity looked across the field beyond it. The high brush had been mostly cleared. She switched back to thermal and saw three warm glows in the middle of the field, spread apart by several hundred feet. She scanned the field all around, but saw no other heat signatures.
Switching back to night vision, she quickly pinpointed where the warm spots were. They’d cleared and burned the brush.
Minutes later, well away from the wall and the men beyond it, Napier nudged the throttles slightly and the boat increased speed.
“I think you should abort,” he said quietly.
“Don’t worry about me,” Charity said. “Just get me to shore up here and I’ll get past them somehow.”
“You’re fucking nuts, lady. You know that?”
That’s the point, she thought.
“Just get me ashore,” she repeated, “and this will all be over before the sun comes up.”
“I still think you’re nuts,” Napier said, as he guided the boat around another tur
n in the river, the large tree they’d seen two days earlier looming in the distance.
Charity went forward and began to gather her equipment. Getting from the boat to the tree, and then to the ground with all her gear, would be the hard part. She put on her black tactical jacket first, then slung her rifle over her head and right shoulder, allowing it to rest easily across her chest. Adjusting the sling so that the rifle clung closely between her breasts, she pulled on her backpack and moved to the bow.
Napier guided the boat in close to the up-current side of the massive tree trunk, allowing the current to drift it back against the huge fallen tree. He brought the boat to a stop just past where the upper part of the tree disappeared into the dark water, and quickly looped a line around a broken branch and tied off. Leaving the engines running in neutral, he moved past Charity and tied the bow line off to another branch.
“I won’t be far away,” he whispered. “I’ll continue upriver to Tucupita, just past the farms.” He opened a small hatch in the starboard side of the console and reached inside. “Here,” he said, handing her a small VHF radio and ear plug. “This has a scanner function, and I have another just like it. If you get into any trouble, call me on any frequency and I should be able to hear you. The village is only ten miles further upriver, and I can be back here in fifteen minutes.”
Charity stuck the radio into a cargo pocket and turned to the giant man. “Thanks, Napper.”
She turned and struggled up onto the gunwale, before Napier grabbed her around her slim waist and easily lifted her up to straddle the giant tree trunk.
“Be careful, Charity Styles,” Napier said. “I’d sure like to see you swim again one day. You were a gold medalist in my book.”
Before she could reply to the man’s goofy comment, he loosened the bow line and shoved the boat away from the tree, then quickly moved to the stern, untying that line and guiding the boat toward the middle of the river again.
Ruthless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 2) Page 17