by Cherry Adair
“Tasty when cooked just right,” Gideon told her, not turning around. “But resist.”
“No problem.” Riva had tasted worse, and she knew a gunshot would bring everyone to the party at a run. She gave the monkey a threatening glare. The animal seemed to meet her eyes head-on, then lunged, screaming, for a higher branch, then a higher one, until it disappeared, screeching all the way.
It wasn’t the two humans who’d scared off the nosy monkey though. With a frustrated howl of its own, a sleek, spotted ocelot streaked past Riva’s boots, ran between Gideon’s feet, and hurled its sleek body up the trunk of the tree after the monkey.
“There. I sent my representative to take care of that little—” She cringed as the monkey did its howler thing, making her hair stand on end again. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out here, isn’t it?”
Gideon glanced back. “Don’t touch that frog,” he pointed. “It’s poisonous.”
“Pretty, though.” Riva gave a tiny blue, leaf-sitting frog a wide berth. Jesus, there wasn’t a square inch of jungle that didn’t contain some kind of thing that was innately dangerous or actively trying to kill them.
For the last several hours their breathing had become increasingly more labored, as they climbed. To reach both low-lying Abad or Santa de Porres, they had to go over hill and dale. The summit of Qhapaq was twenty-five thousand feet. Clearly Maza wasn’t going to position his camp at the top, so they’d find him somewhere between the ANLF’s camp, Santa de Porres, and the summit. According to the coordinates she’d been given, the SYP was approximately thirteen miles away as the parrot flew.
Here the understory opened up enough that they didn’t need to hack and slash. Her shoulders were grateful for the break. “Are you sure we’ll make it to the SYP compound by tomorrow?”
“Yeah. If it’s where I think it is, there’s a mining road a few clicks away from there. We’ll hit that, then walk in. It’s a smart place to house his people, well hidden, high vantage points, and a road directly into Santa de Porres.”
Riva caught up to walk beside him. Sweat ran down the muscular column of his tanned throat in shining rivulets. She had an overwhelming desire to lean in and lick it off him. Instead, she stepped a little more to her left so they weren’t walking quite as close. Still, the image of licking Gideon, of tasting his hot, salty skin, of gliding her hands down his chest, of feeling the weight of his sex in her hands… She used her bandana to wipe the sweat off her own face and neck.
The heat was making her lose all common sense and that damn ticking in her head and feeling of urgency was making her crazy. They had to pick up the pace. Had to move faster.
Just because she was slightly—slightly—distracted by her walking companion, didn’t mean she could allow herself to get reckless.
“You know what’s weird. We haven’t seen anyone. I don’t mean your little friends, or the SYP. Indigenous people. Where are they?”
“My fath— No.” Gideon shook his head as if to readjust his thinking. “Carlos, Angélica’s late husband, got rid of them,” Gideon said, clearly oblivious to the sexual time bomb walking beside him. “Killed, sold, scared the shit out of them. Most, I imagine, lived simple lives, way the hell and gone from civilization. He came through and wiped them out. They wouldn’t fight for him, wouldn’t cooperate when he squeezed the emerald miners and charged massive protection money that put most of them out of business. Eventually they either died off or relocated to less hostile environments.”
“He sounds almost as charming as the Angel de la Muerte.”
“Worse. He was a sick fuck. She tried to make out that I was a chip off the old block. The best—or in their case, the worst—of both of them.” He ran his hand over his mouth, disgust in every line of his body. She observed the tightening of his features one by one. Riva read intense regret there.
Gideon’s face showed him suppressing the depth of what he felt. His brows were lowered and drawn together, nostrils dilated, lower jaw jutted forward showing his anger.
Puzzlement. Betrayal. All passed so swiftly over his features that they’d be impossible to see by someone not trained to do so. Riva’s heart ached in empathy.
“I wish to hell I could forget what I’ve done for the last five months, as easily as I forgot who I was before.” His tight voice didn’t betray the intensity of his feelings as much as his unconscious facial expressions did. But it was there all the same. “But that’s going to take some fucking doing.”
Riva didn’t ask. She knew Sin Diaz’s reputation. Knew what he’d done, knew what he was capable of doing. He might be Gideon Stark, but for five months he’d been the Ghost, Sin Diaz, and what he’d done even in that short time period was horrific.
“You’ll figure out how to live with that knowledge.” Her fingers brushed his and without looking at her, he turned his hand so they were palm to palm. A shiver of longing cooled her skin as he slid his fingers between hers. “You’ll have to,” she told him softly. “Otherwise it’ll tear you apart.”
Riva realized she’d never held hands with a man in her life. It was the weirdest, sweetest sensation to be tethered to Gideon this way. It couldn’t last, but she enjoyed the moment while it did. “I know an excellent shrink if you’re interested.”
Gideon lifted their joined hands to kiss her knuckles. The brush of his mouth on her skin felt as though she’d just walked through pure sunshine. Odd. Disconcerting. Annoying that her heart skipped an ecstatic beat for no real reason.
She pulled her hand free to unhook her canteen from her belt. He shook his head when she offered it to him first.
“I might take you up on that offer.”
Unlikely. Her shrink was in Montana.
She’d forgotten her canteen was empty and she hooked it back to her belt. The distant sound of pounding water intensified her thirst.
Gideon used his machete to point out an enormous red and black banded tree snake coiled beneath a dense fern. Sidestepping it, they kept moving.
Riva was breathing as erratically as if she was nearing the finish line of a 30K marathon. She tried to tell herself that her inability to calm herself had nothing to do with her reaction to Gideon and everything to do with the extreme physical exertion it took to move forward and up the slippery trail.
It was a good thing she was trained for inhospitable terrains, high altitudes, and the unrelenting pressure of being in danger 24/7. She’d studied what she could about the SYP on the flight from Montana to Bogotá, but she hadn’t done the necessary cross-training, strenuous exercises to acclimatize herself for scaling the mountain.
So be it.
The good news was that higher elevations meant that there was an excellent chance that the homing beacon in her molar would get through the signal jammers, and activate. T-FLAC would pinpoint her location and know that she was not only alive, but either close to, or with, Maza.
When she and Gideon took that short break, she’d try her comm system, see if she could contact control directly. “The ANLF would be very surprised to discover where we’re heading.”
“No shit. We patrolled for months trying to find the SYP’s main camp outside town. Never did. I doubt the ANLF will follow us all the way in to Maza’s camp. But then Angélica’s batshit crazy, so perhaps she would.”
The sound of a million bees vibrated the air, transferring to the ground beneath Riva’s boots and then through her body like a tuning fork.
“That’s the falls,” Gideon told her unnecessarily. “We’ll have to take a bit of a detour to get there, but not far. It’s about a quarter mile west.”
Another delay. “I’d rather skip—”
Gideon gave her a hard look. “So you’ve said. We’re going. Admit it, you’re flagging. What the hell would you do right now if we were attacked by twenty of either side?”
“I’m armed.”
“And exhausted. Don’t fight me on this. I don’t have the energy to argue with you.” She saw now that like her, he’d had little
sleep, and subsisted all day on a few protein bars and adrenaline. “You know damn well that neither of us has the physical reserves to take on anyone until we refuel and get at least an hour sack time.”
He was right, damn him. “A fifteen-minute power nap,” Riva agreed with great reluctance. “If we don’t get the lead out we’ll end up being the filling in a tango empanada.”
“There’s a cave directly behind the falls. Not much in it. I haven’t had time to stock it properly, but enough to get us a filling meal, and there’s a sleeping bag—”
“We’re not staying long enough to get cozy,” Riva insisted, although the prospect of not putting one boot in front of the other, and not swinging the machete for a little while was seductive. In the past forty-eight hours, she’d not only fallen from a helicopter, she’d been on the run. That too-short nap twelve hours ago wasn’t going to cut it for much longer. She was trained for high exertion, high adrenaline ops and no sleep, but he was right. She was exhausted. A power nap and some protein would go a long way in helping her to keep going. “Fifteen to twenty minutes and we want to be on our way. Seriously, Stark. Twenty minutes max.”
“Hearing you call me that is surreal. It doesn’t quite fit, but then neither does Diaz,” he said almost under his breath. “Whatever you want.” He switched gears.
Whether that gear-switch was about his identity, or the fact that she refused to budge on a lengthy sleepover wasn’t clear.
“This dual personality crap is going to drive me crazy until I sort it out,” he muttered, proving that no matter what he said and did, that thought never left him. She couldn’t begin to imagine how Gideon must feel, with so many questions and no one to supply the answers.
“And that’s not gonna happen soon.” Using his fingers, he raked his hair off his face. “This way.” He headed off, not glancing back to see if she followed.
Riva knew she’d follow this man anywhere.
Damn. She was in deep, deep shit.
The closer they got, the louder the roar of pounding water became. Gideon paused as they cleared the trees to give Riva a moment to take it in. “Spectacular, right?”
“Beautiful,” she agreed as she scanned the area, not particularly admiring the falls, but more alert in the open. He supposed in her line of work she was always ready for attack. They had that in common.
A narrow strip of lush grass grew right up to the rocks and boulders lining the edges of the falls. Torrents of white water poured like a silky bridal veil from a hundred-foot drop, then crashed to stair-step off shiny boulders, as big as houses, below. From there it boiled and tumbled another fifty feet in a lacy froth over smaller boulders, then surged between heavily wooded banks in its race to join the river as it curved out of sight.
The cascade—a force of nature as beautiful as it was deadly—sprayed them where they stood, two hundred feet away. Dropping her backpack, Riva lifted her face to the cooling mist. Gideon was more interested in the sublime, peaceful look on her upturned face than he was in the majesty of the falls.
His chest felt heavy, looking at her. How could she claim she was unlovable? And who was the dick who’d convinced her it was true? She might be prickly and hyper-focused, but she was also— Stop right there, he warned himself. Just fucking stop. This wasn’t a trip to Disneyland. This situation had nothing to do with them personally. Both had agendas and while they weren’t mutually exclusive, after it was over, they’d be over. He had no business feeling anything other than admiration for her mad skills. Not until he ascertained what waited for him in that other world. The world he’d left behind.
She spread her arms and did an uncharacteristic twirl. Gideon knew he’d ventured into unknown, dangerous territory when his heart swelled with emotion. Fuckit.
Within minutes they were soaked to the skin. It was refreshing after their long sweaty, clammy walk, but not exactly relaxing for him. Her nipples, responding to the sudden cold and wet, peaked beneath her T-shirt, and with her wet hair slicked back from her face she looked like a flesh and blood statue come to life.
Riva was so beautiful she stole his breath. Gideon choked back a half laugh at his sudden romanticism. It would be nice if he remembered how he’d been with women beyond five months ago, because this poetic mental masturbation felt new. But what the hell did he know? Ascencion’s whorehouse was his yardstick.
If he could convince Riva they could spare an hour to rest, that would give them time to indulge in a few of his fantasies before the things went sideways when they finally reached Maza’s camp.
He might’ve guessed Riva wouldn’t waste time admiring nature for long. She touched his forearm and motioned eating. Then twirled a finger to indicate hurry the hell up.
He grinned, admiring her ass as she bent to retrieve her pack from the long grass. Stretching out his hand to cup her butt, he jolted upright as the crack of a gunshot pierced the din of the falls. They both reached for the weapons at the same time.
A dense group of men, dressed in camo, weighed down with weapons, bandoliers of ammo, and bulky with flak vests, fanned out from the trees a hundred yards from their location. Blood in their eyes, clearly given the directive to kill, they’d made good time from their little party earlier and caught up.
Hurtado. Fernando. Javier. Emilio. Juan. Damián. The rest—a couple of dozen or more ANLF soldiers—were immaterial. Gideon knew all the men, had patrolled side-by-side with them for months, laughed with them, drank with them.
Now he was going to kill them before they killed himself and Riva.
Andrés, beside the squat form of Angélica, both dressed head to toe in Kevlar, took the lead.
“Well, hell. The party just started.” Glock in one hand, he pulled the MP7A1 submachine gun from the leg holster, and returned a barrage of shots.
Instinctively he slammed his forearm hard into Riva to push her back. Instead of being knocked on her ass, and the fuck out of the way, she staggered backward, caught herself, and came up on one knee, firing her SIG at the group emerging from the tree line.
Gideon indicated they do a quick tactical retreat to find cover. Riva grabbed him by his backpack, yanking him back, urging him to run in a crouch with her toward the boulders beside the falls. “Keep shooting, I’ve got you. There’s better cover behind us.”
Gideon continued firing, allowing her to back him up. She maneuvered them into a decent position behind a large wet boulder, then released her hold to crouch low. Six feet of muddy scrub grass separated them from a five-story drop to the base of the falls. Heavy spray made visibility a bitch, as water obscured the scene and ran into his eyes. Sliding on their bellies in the tall grass, they took up positions. Then, with just their eyes above the grass, continued to fire.
DM11 rounds were capable of penetrating twenty layers of Kevlar with 1.6 mm titanium backing. Handy, since the ANLF were all fucking wearing the vests. He and Riva were not. They had T-shirts and skin to protect their vital organs.
The 4.6x30mm 2-part controlled fragmenting projectile increased the chance of a permanent wound cavity and doubled the chance to hit a vital organ. The muzzle energy of approximately 525 ft-lbs, was comparable to 9x19mm Parabellum rounds that the other half of the ANLF were firing.
It was a clusterfuck of gigantic proportions.
The air smelled more of humid vegetation than the visual of blood and gore. Wiping water out of his eye, he checked out the men still shooting at them. They’d taken a stance about seven hundred feet in front of the tree line.
He fired a spray into the crowd. Other men fell as they squeezed off answering shots. His weapon, one that half the men who shot at them also fucking had, had a muzzle velocity of 720 over two thousand feet. That went both damned ways. So, not only were they outnumbered, they were out-fucking-gunned.
Two men he’d trained and another, a sort of buddy of his, Emilio, went down hard. “Nothing personal, amigo,” Gideon muttered under his breath. “Three more down.”
Riva shot off the top of
Damián’s head in an amazing piece of marksmanship. Damián’s skull exploded like a piece of ripe fruit and he crumbled where he was. Followed by the man behind him, whom she shot in the neck. “Nine down.”
Dense spray blanketed the entire scene, soaking clothing and weapons. Water. Blood. Organic matter. The grass and low-lying vegetation was slick, slippery underfoot. Flat on their bellies behind the rocks, he observed the men inch forward. Wet, of course, but he and Riva weren’t slithering, and sliding, and falling on their asses like the men shooting at them.
“Who do you want?” Gideon shouted to Riva over the roar of water and the fusillade of gunshots pinging off the rocks nearby. Shards of stone flew in the air to mingle with the heavy droplets of mist.
Brandishing an AK-47A, Iker, a man Gideon had shared an evening meal with four days ago, yelled a war cry as he raced toward them, semiauto firing a steady stream of bursts of light. Riva’s bullet felled him mid leap. He dropped into the tall grass and lay still.
“Six,” she shouted, without pausing, then answered his question. “From Andrés’s left.”
A fair division of labor. And one he’d congratulate Riva on. If they made it out of here alive. The odds weren’t in their favor.
She returned a barrage of shots as she ducked behind a small boulder. Too damned small. No time to pause to look for better cover. The falls and rocks, with a fifty-foot drop, were directly behind them. The ANLF advanced, firing.
“You’re bleeding!” Riva shouted. Her eyes must’ve been on him for a split second because the observation came as she was reloading and focused on their adversaries.
Yeah, he’d felt the icy-hot slice of a bullet across the top of his shoulder and the chips of rock nicking his skin. But right now he was filled with adrenaline. Blood, no pain. Riva, on the other hand, had a gash on her left cheek that bled profusely, either from a bullet or a sliver of rock. Blood dripped off her chin, and he doubted she even realized she was bleeding. She got off three shots in quick succession, so close Gideon felt the heat of the bullets against his upper arm.