“Not yet.” It was all he said, but she could hear the anger beneath the soft words.
Well that wasn’t shit compared to what she was feeling at the moment. This place needed to be erased from the map. Scorched to the ground, removed permanently from existence!
“Why are you here? I sent for a goddamn team, not some Southern Rock.”
He flashed a smile at her, “If you’ve got me, you don’t need a team.” All of his macho bravado was back. As if she’d misheard his momentary anger. He sounded too much like her useless brother and the rest of her useless family. She couldn’t be rid of him fast enough.
As the last of the sunlight faded from the sky and the bird calls tapered toward silence, Sofia wondered who she was going to want to shoot more by sunrise: General Raul Estevan Aguado or Duane The Rock?
Duane had left the video feed from his spotting scope open to Chad.
“Can’t get a match on her face with all of that camouflage on,” Chad whispered over the open frequency to his earpiece.
Duane did not need to be hearing this. “Were your plans just for the general or the camp as well?” he asked the nameless ISA woman, hoping Chad would get back on track.
“My job is to find the bad guys,” she said softly.
“Found her!” Richie, the team’s geek jumped in, shouting loudly enough that Richie’s distance from the microphone was all that spared Duane’s eardrum from being caved in. “Once I eliminated any Deltas being in there and checked the cross-team mission coordination database for possible conflicts and still found nothing I—”
Duane sighed.
Chad cut off Richie with a low whistle of appreciation. “Sofia Forteza. Hot, bro. Very hot.”
“JSOC. Listed as unassigned,” Richie was back and only a little calmer. “Has a place near Fort Belvoir.” Joint Special Operations Command had only one asset at Fort Belvoir, Virginia: the Intelligence Support Activity.
Duane already knew she was ISA, but it was nice to have it confirmed.
“Wow!” Richie again. “She is awfully pretty.”
Duane could feel that he was sharing an eyeroll with Chad over the radio. Delta Force veteran of dozens of missions all across Central and South America, happily married to a Delta shooter, and still Richie sounded like a high school geek.
“Your job,” Sofia, the no-longer-nameless, continued her side of the conversation, “is to figure out what to do with them.”
Easy. Smack both Chad and Richie upside the head next time he saw them.
“Code Black on her file. Eyes only,” Chad continued. “Yada yada, but Richie says he doesn’t want to try and crack that without more cause, which means he’s a wussy-pants who’s afraid of the little old Activity.”
“Go on. You try to crack their firewall and see what happens to your life. I’ve heard that the last NSA hacker who took a run at them is serving a five-year deployment to Poughkeepsie, New York. And that was after they formatted his hard drive, his computers at home, and his phone without ever going near him. Those guys are good.”
“I think he’s actually just pouting that you got to see a G28 sniper rifle before he did. Wuss-pants,” Chad chided Richie one more time.
“Where’s the general?” Duane asked, forcing his tone. One of these days he was going to murder Chad in his sleep. It was a nasty thing to do to his best friend—and he’d regret it—but it was fast becoming a necessity. He considered offing Richie while he was at it, but Melissa wouldn’t take kindly to losing her man. Pissing off a Delta woman was never a good call.
“Third building to the right from the front gate,” Sofia guided him toward the general’s location with a tipping of her rifle.
Duane eased his aim over until he could spot it in his scope. A heavy concrete building, windows small and high—not a cozy villa in the jungle. It was the bunker fit for a paranoid bastard.
The sun had finally set but the camp was well lit, no need for night vision here. It was well shielded from observation above, the superstory trees had not been cut down, rather the prison had been built up around their gargantuan trunks. No helo, not even a drone was going to get eyes on this place. This would have to be strictly a ground op.
“So, the fort has a bunker,” Chad was finally on the same mission he was.
“Underground escape?” Duane asked Sofia.
“Possible, but none identified.” Her voice was a combination of lush and highly educated. She kept getting more interesting with every moment rather than less.
“Thought you Activity types knew some shit?”
“We know plenty,” no reaction that he’d identified her role here. Very chill lady.
“Uh-huh.”
“Mierda! I know that if we miss this guy here, it could take another six months to find him again.”
“So you do know how to swear. Can you swear in English as well?”
Sofia buried her face against the stock of her rifle. This was going better than he’d expected. He debated attempting to elicit a whimper of frustration, but she was Activity and who knew what they could do to you if you really ticked them off—his desire to look down the wrong end of a G28 again was very low.
It was the sworn duty of every Delta operator to put down all other units as not up to their own standards, especially SEAL Team 6. But there were a few exceptions. The guys from the 24th STS Air Force combat controllers were too damned pleasant to really hold a grudge against them.
And The Activity? Way too sneaky to risk messing with.
The fast tropical twilight was shifting the sounds of the jungle, though the day wasn’t done yet. There was the faint buzz of the camp’s inward-facing floodlights starting up, but they were too far away to hear any of their voices.
“So, you’re thinking it’s a bad idea to back off and drop a MOAB on this place?” Chad was back. The Mother of All Bombs was the biggest bomb there was, short of a nuke, and had only recently been used for the first time. It would level at least three square miles of the national park and probably make the window-glass merchants in Caracas wealthy even though the city was over twenty kilometers away. Because they were so rare, Chad was always looking for an excuse to drop one.
“Are you calling in your team or not?” Sofia looked at him again. Her dark eyes were hypnotic in the lingering twilight. Was hypnosis another trick up The Activity’s sleeve?
“My team?” Duane laid on his best Mr. Innocent, careful not to overdo it.
Sofia lifted an edge of her rifle’s ghillie revealing a small device lying on the dirt. “I can see your signal.”
“No one’s supposed to be able to see—” Duane shut his mouth. He was using the most sophisticated piece of communications gear Delta had. Burst-mode transmissions, rotating frequencies so that he never showed up on scanners for more than a moment, deep encryption, low power to the repeater he’d stashed a hundred meters away so that a signal-strength meter would find the wrong target. They’d been told it couldn’t be traced by any… Oh! The whole setup was probably invented by The Activity.
“Voice and video outbound,” Sofia continued in that snake charmer voice of hers. Her accent might be flat American, but the richness of the Spanish undertones and rhythms was slaying him.
His first serious girlfriend had been Mexican, which had pissed of his too-white family no end—even if though they were too well-cultured to show it in public. Or maybe she just hadn’t come from a rich enough family; someone from their own social status. He’d learned far more Spanish from her between the sheets than in the classroom, including the ability to tell that Sofia’s language origin was Spain Spanish just by the rhythm of it, even if the absence from her accent said it was a probably a couple generations back.
“It is difficult to tell with the encryption,” she continued her chilly analysis. “But I think you have two different voices inbound.”
At least she couldn’t break the encryption, he hoped, or he really would have to kill Chad.
Chapter 2
Between one moment and the next, “normal-Duane” the overly-garrulous macho Unit operator was gone. A very precise man took his place.
He handed her an earpiece as he announced to his team, “Two on.”
Sofia wondered just what comments had been occurring before that made him feel that it was necessary to announce her addition to the circuit, then decided that she’d rather not know.
“Hey there, Sofia.”
So, they knew who she was. That in itself was interesting information about the abilities of Duane’s team.
“I’m Chad. Ignore the other voice, Richie was born a dweeb and still hasn’t recovered. I mean his nickname is Q, like the geek in James Bond. How sad is that. He’s even more of a dweeb worse than the dude you’re all cozied up with at the moment.”
“Main gate,” Duane declared, shutting Chad down quickly. He shifted to a rapidly whispered monologue, breaking down the encampment for his team. “Designate A. Fence ranging three to five meters high, topped with single-coil razor wire,” tracking his rifle scope over each item he described. He broke down the fortification in minute detail—weak spots, close proximity of large trees, and so on—working his way around clockwise. “B,” he began describing the left side of the compound.
Not only was he describing details she hadn’t noticed, he was describing things he couldn’t possibly see. When she figured out that he’d scouted all of the way around the camp before coming up to her—and that she hadn’t caught a hint of him—it said that in addition to acting like a macho jerk, he also had incredible skills.
Then he did the same narration for the camp itself, layer by layer.
It felt like a painfully slow process, but the twenty minutes by her watch flew past. Half of it was practically in code, giving her trouble keeping up, but Duane sent a surprisingly detailed description to go with the images he was transmitting as he tracked his scope around the camp.
“That’s full sweep.”
“Roger that,” and the radio circuit went silent.
Now there’d be some long drawn-out plan that was probably being discussed in Washington who would then… That part of it might be out of her control, but if the general showed his face, she’d take him down herself and worry about other details later. The more she learned about General Aguado, the creepier he became. Worse than her Uncle Maximiliano the pederast who had mysteriously died during a family hunting expedition. Eaten by a bear or fed to a bear? Her grandmother—who’d been the only other one along that day—never said.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
Sofia could only look over at Duane in alarm…then realized that she couldn’t see him. While they’d been concentrating through their scopes, observing the well-lit camp, night had fallen over the jungle. The bird calls, which had been a constant throughout the day (sometimes so loud she thought she’d go mad with it), had faded away. A jaguar roared in the distance and the fast flap of wings above said that the bats were emerging for their nightly feed.
The sweltering heat hadn’t shifted a single degree down here on the jungle floor. The temperature might only be in the high eighties, but in tropical jungles, the humidity climbed at night and was now nearing a hundred percent.
No, exactly a hundred percent—it began to rain. A loud pattering began high in the trees. Within minutes, massive raindrops bigger than the end of her pinkie were plummeting down out of the sky. The water gathered on leaves in the canopy far above until a sudden release would scatter the oversized rain to the jungle floor far below—each drop almost big enough to hurt. In moments she wondered if a person could drown lying atop a hill in this godforsaken place.
She wanted to protest, but Duane had already moved out of sight of the camp behind a tree and was shedding his ghillie suit. Unsure what he was up to, she finally followed and unsuited herself.
With a quick flick, she had her night-vision goggles clipped to her helmet and swung down into place. The jungle turned from black to shades of green and pink. The image intensifier made her view as bright as day, and the blended infrared mode lit up everything with heat. Even in the rain, every guard, now huddled beneath the roofs of their open-sided green towers, was painted in shades of hot red.
It was her first time in the field with Delta. She’d been out with DEVGRU, better known by their thirty-year gone name of SEAL Team 6. They moved in packs with the aggressiveness of Marines.
Duane moved alone as if he was dancing. He wasn’t a particularly big guy, just a few inches taller than she was, but his movements were light and smooth. He wore a large pack that didn’t seem to slow him down at all. It wasn’t a major survival pack, but it was still hard to believe he’d been wearing it the whole time under the ghillie.
He moved so smoothly that, if not for her night vision, she’d have lost him within a dozen steps as merely being an element of the landscape.
It had taken her seven hours to infiltrate to within half a kilometer of the encampment.
It took less than two hours to cover that final distance.
At the speed Duane was moving, it should have taken ten minutes, but he was following a crazily weaving path, cutting sharply east then back west. His movements were a study in smooth confidence or she’d have begun to worry that he was stoned.
He finally leaned back against a gigantic Ceiba tree within fifty meters of the tree-trunk fence. The Ceiba’s roots rose like vertical walls, rising out of the soil in great triangles a foot thick and climbing to twice her height before joining the huge trunk. They leaned side by side against an expanse of smooth bark that was as wide as her apartment’s living room wall and rose for fifty meters into the darkness.
“Eat. Drink,” he grunted at her.
“Drink? I’m drowning!” The rain hadn’t eased but once or twice in the last hour. Still, he was right. She knocked back half a water bottle and began chewing on an energy bar.
Duane kept chewing in silence.
“Why are you doing the drunkard’s walk?”
“Searching for bobby traps, trip wires, anything to warn them that we’re coming. Haven’t seen squat. You sure this guy is as bad as you think?”
“Worse.”
“Okay, sister. Guess we should do something about him then.”
“Not your sister.”
“Whatever you say, sugar.”
Well, she’d walked into that one.
“You remind me of my brothers.” She used her rifle butt to push herself back to standing, planting it firmly in the middle of Duane’s gut. His grunt sounded sincere.
“They that good?” He’d recovered too fast—next time she’d ram his gut.
“That awful.” She hated even thinking about Emilio and Humberto.
He offered no answer to that, which actually felt like unexpected sympathy—if she was to credit a man with having an actual emotion unrelated to sex, food, or power.
Her nerves must have topped out at some point, because she was perfectly calm as they walked close around the perimeter wall. Duane barely broke stride at the towers, leaving her to watch cautiously upward at the base of the guard cabin directly above them for less than thirty seconds each time. Nothing, not even a spy cam of any sort. The general was an incautious man and she was going to make sure it cost him.
The rain streamed off her night-vision and over her cheeks like warm tears.
It was the dead of night when they rested again, this time behind a huge vertical liana vine close beside the main gate, so thick it made the tree it covered unidentifiable.
“Twenty meters to the gate. Two guards outside. Rain’s easing,” Duane spoke for the first time since they’d started circumnavigating the fence line.
“In ten,” a woman’s voice broke the radio silence that had lasted more than two hours.
“What’s in ten minutes?” Sofia asked Duane.
“Go ahead and slip your weapon around the tree. Aim for the left guard.”
She shrugged and
did so. Just the barrel and the scope, nothing else showing. The scope fed the image into her night-vision goggles. As she aimed her rifle squarely at the man’s nose, she herself remained safely tree-protected. It was an odd position, but she’d been trained in it.
Sofia glanced at her watch. Just past twenty-two hundred hours. Ten-oh-seven at night. “How long—”
“Three. Two. Fire…now!”
Not ten minutes.
Ten seconds.
She fired. Twice. And then a heart shot.
Exactly like training.
Except this was a live person. She’d—
“Duck!” Duane grabbed her around the waist and hauled her against him with a hard power that knocked the wind out of her in more ways than one. Part of it was his whip-strong forearm wrapped across her gut and slamming her back against his chest, but part of it was simply the effortless strength with which he’d moved her.
Then he held his other hand in front of her face, allowing her just enough time to see that he held a remote trigger.
His thumb went down.
The response was immediate. A blast of light washed the jungle beyond their hideaway as if daylight had suddenly been reborn.
A cascading heavy Thump! of powerful explosions followed a moment later.
“What the—” Though Sofia still lay in Duane’s arms, she had to shout to be heard. The jungle went insane: screaming bird calls, grunts of wild hogs, and the monkeys. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the monkeys were beyond loud. It was like a secondary explosion of pure sound had been lit off by his trigger.
But Duane was up and on the move.
“Stay close behind me,” he shouted.
She raced to keep up.
“Check for shoulder badges before you shoot.” He tore aside the covers on his shoulders revealing small squares that were brilliantly bright reflectors in her infrared imaging. She pulled her own shoulder tabs open to identify herself as a friendly to any other shooters wearing night vision as she raced after him.
Straight into hell.
Wild Justice (Delta Force Book 3) Page 2