On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  The tape was political suicide. Garcia had done himself and his cause irreparable damage with this week’s work.

  “What about my money?”

  “The money buys my silence,” Campos said.

  Garcia laughed out loud, a short, hearty laugh. “Two million dollars is a lot of silence, my friend.”

  Not really.

  Campos held the man’s gaze, steady and sure, until the captain’s smile faded.

  “Where is Honoria York-Lytton?” Garcia demanded to know. “Sister Julia’s sister? She is the one I’m supposed to be speaking with, not you.”

  “Ms. York-Lytton was delayed by the storm, and I took it upon myself to suggest she stay in San Salvador.”

  “Then where is my money?” The captain was not laughing now.

  The tape reached the end of the scene and the editing he and Jake had done.

  “Fuck you...Fuck you...Fuck you.” Hal’s last words ran over and over.

  Campos couldn’t have said it better himself.

  He hit the stop button, and a moment’s silence descended. He let it sit there between them, weighing on the morning, before he spoke.

  “Your weapons arrived very late last night, Captain,” he said, rising to his feet. “If you would like to see them, I have them warehoused in one of my buildings.”

  He gestured toward the courtyard gate, and when Garcia finally stood, he led the way out.

  From her and Ari’s observation post on a hillside above the Campos compound, Irena watched two women, one a nun, having breakfast on one of the villa’s upstairs balconies.

  “Do you see the women on the second-floor balcony?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Lying next to her, flat on his belly, looking through the scope on his Steyer .308 long rifle, Ari confirmed the sighting.

  “The nun looks familiar.”

  Ari lifted his head away from the scope. “You don’t know any nuns, Irena.”

  “She still looks familiar,” she said thoughtfully, but was unable to place the blond-haired sister.

  “No Rydell yet?”

  “No Rydell,” she confirmed. “And no Honoria York-Lyt—wait a minute.”

  She swung her binoculars back along the roofline of the villa, until she had the blond-haired nun in her field of view.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?” Ari asked.

  “The nun, the blonde, she looks like the woman in the photograph Hans gave us, the one traveling with Rydell.”

  “He’s traveling with a nun?”

  “No. That’s not Honoria York-Lytton having croissants and coffee, but it is somebody who resembles her.”

  Ari was quiet for a couple of moments, looking through his scope.

  “You’re right,” he said. “There is a resemblance. Interesting.”

  “Very.” She and Ari had gotten into place shortly before dawn, barely in time to see the CNL drive up in their trucks, not soon enough to be set up for a shot.

  “Can you confirm two overwatch shooters?”

  Irena made a brief sweep with her binoculars.

  “One on the villa’s roof and one on the building farthest from the gate.”

  “Are they targets?”

  “If anything starts down there, they’re our primary defensive targets.” Good strategy, nothing personal. It was never personal. “We’ll leave the rest of Campos’s men in place, unless they figure out we’re here. Then they’re gone.”

  “Have you located the weapons?” Ari asked.

  “No, but look who’s exiting the villa’s courtyard.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him change the direction he was pointing the rifle from the women on the balcony to the ground-level courtyard.

  “The man in the captain’s uniform has to be Diego Garcia,” he said.

  “Yes, and the guy in the Armani suit has to be Alejandro Campos.”

  “You cannot possibly tell that suit is Armani from this distance.”

  “Yes, I can,” she said. “Stay on him. If this deal is going down, this is where he’ll show Garcia the weapons.”

  “If we were in the market for grenade launchers and sixty-six millimeter LAWs, this would make more sense, Irena, us being here.”

  He wasn’t happy with the situation, and in truth, neither was she. The closer they got to Rydell, the more complicated everything seemed to become, especially her motives. Panic was not her usual reaction to the unexpected, but her reaction to C. Smith Rydell being alive was starting to feel more and more like panic than the series of cool, rational decisions she’d told herself she was making.

  “It’s just a job, Ari, nothing more. We’ll finish it and go home.”

  All they had to do was wait for their target.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Morazán Province, El Salvador

  “I don’t like to sweat.”

  Smith knew that. He knew, because she’d told him a dozen times already. It was like a mantra with her, bubbling up and slipping out about every five minutes by his count—I don’t like to sweat.

  Well, then, she must be one unhappy kitten, because she was sweating, tromping down the trail toward the Cessna, sliding in the mud and scrambling over the rocks—and sweating. Sweat stains darkened her green—excuse him, chartreuse—shirt under the arms, around the collar, down the middle of her back, and down the middle of her front. The whole world had turned into a sauna, with pools of water everywhere, everything wet from the storm, and the sun rising higher and higher in the sky and making it all steam. She was damp in the small of her back and on the back of her neck. Moisture beaded her brow. Her hair had discovered a whole new level of wild even from earlier this morning, dandelion wild. He wanted to blow on her, make a wish, kiss her lips.

  “I really don’t like to sweat,” she muttered under her breath again, as if he could have possibly missed the headline.

  Girls were so different. He didn’t mind sweating. Most of his work involved a lot of sweating—humping ninety-pound rucksacks of gear from one indescribably hot and humid spot in the jungle to the next indescribably hot and humid spot.

  This morning he was getting off easy, only humping eighty or so pounds, including the black briefcase he’d stuffed into his pack, Zorro’s mystery briefcase.

  “Dammit,” she whispered to herself, when a twig snapped back and caught her on the face.

  He’d spent two days in the woods with a Force Recon team once and heard less chatter than he had in the half hour he’d been on the trail with Honey—six guys with a job to do, and they’d managed it without hardly speaking a word.

  She came to a sudden stop ahead of him and held her closed fist up in the air, signaling him to stop, too.

  Oh, God. He stopped, his hand coming to his chest to hold in he didn’t know what—laughter, chagrin, disbelief. Silent hand signals. She was bitching and moaning her way down the trail, and finally, when the concept of “silence” actually sank in, it was to give him silent hand signals.

  Oh, baby, she was no Recon Marine.

  Not with that ass.

  Darcy Delamere. His grin broadened.

  Then he heard it, the sound of someone coming through the brush.

  “Lorenzo?” he said softly into his radio.

  “Sí, Smith,” a man’s voice came back at him. “The woman is easy to track.”

  No kidding. She was like a homing beacon with her little whispered asides.

  He and Lorenzo had been in radio contact since he and Honey had veered off the trail to bushwhack the last hundred yards to the plane. Campos’s man had assured him the area was clear and secure. They’d been patrolling it all night and morning and had seen no one.

  In less than a minute, Lorenzo came into view, and without a word, signaled them to follow him.

  The trail grew steadily steeper for the last twenty-five meters to the crash site, before it leveled off. The plane had come to rest in a grove of pine trees, its fuselage remarkably intact. If the pilot could have cleared the hillto
p, he would have had a straight shot at the valley below. Instead, it looked like he’d flared just above the trees and fallen through them at about fifty knots. One of the propeller blades was bent backward, indicative of a dead-stick landing where the engine was out. The horizontal tail section and most of the wings had been sheared off, but the craft hadn’t burned.

  Smith didn’t know who the pilot had been, but he was glad the guy hadn’t burned.

  It had been a nightmare of his, burning. Not himself, but Irena. For months after watching the Piper crash in Afghanistan, he’d woken up in a cold sweat, thinking of her burning inside her plane. Logically, he knew she would have either been dead or unconscious long before the plane crashed, and there wouldn’t have been much left of her after the crash, but logic never kept a nightmare at bay—and in his dreams, he’d heard her scream.

  He walked toward the front of the craft.

  The other two of Campos’s men who had been at the site all night were finishing up breakfast on the other side of the plane. A glance back inside the fuselage proved they’d taken refuge in the Cessna to stay out of the storm. They’d also, at some point, tied the craft off to the trees on either side, probably before they’d settled in for the night.

  Smith was impressed.

  “Good work,” he said, pointing to the ropes.

  Lorenzo nodded and rattled off a stream of Spanish in explanation, pointing out the hillside and talking about the rain, and especially directing Smith’s attention to the mudslide twenty meters farther on.

  For Smith’s tasking, the security and relative wholeness of the fuselage was imperative. Considering the angle of the slope where it had come to rest, the patrol’s foresight in tying the plane off had probably saved the day.

  He complimented Lorenzo again, and the man walked over to where the rest of the patrol had set up their stove.

  At the front of the Cessna, Smith stood and looked at the nose, then glanced through the broken windshield at the pilot’s seat.

  The last plane crash site he’d been at had been Irena’s. He hadn’t really realized it until now.

  Her scream is what had always woken him from the nightmare whenever he’d had it, but the cold sweat had come from the vision of her strapped into the Seneca’s seat, fighting to get out of the restraints, her hair in flames, a look of horror on her face, and one of her hands spread wide across her belly, clutching something to herself.

  “What?” Honey asked, coming to a stop beside him.

  He pointed out two half-inch holes in the lower left side of the engine compartment.

  “Bullet holes?” she whispered.

  He could have told her not to bother to whisper. Campos’s men would have instantly known what had happened when they’d seen the holes. There was only one secret left in the Cessna. The one he’d come to get.

  “There wasn’t any equipment malfunction or pilot error involved in the crash,” he said. “The plane was shot down. Look here.”

  Moving to the right side, he pointed out two more holes, higher and farther aft. They were larger and jagged where the aluminum skin of the plane was punched outward.

  “Armor-piercing rounds,” he said. “Fifty cal or twelve-point-seven millimeter. Pretty good shots, too.”

  The heavy bullets had passed diagonally through the engine, probably stopping it immediately.

  He looked up the slope. The plane had come to rest about fifty meters from the reverse crest of the hilltop.

  Damn, Smith thought. The guy had almost made it. The valley on the other side would have at least given him a chance at a landing.

  The pilot’s door was open, and Smith peered inside. The impact had driven the instrument panel almost to the back of the empty pilot’s seat. There was a lot of dried blood on the seat, and on the windscreen. All the cargo was gone, at least the obvious freight, including the courier’s briefcase taken by Garcia’s men that had started this whole ball rolling two days ago.

  But with luck, there would be one thing left, and it would still be intact—the 2GB flash drive.

  He shrugged out of his rucksack and set it on the ground, then levered himself up into the fuselage, with Honey close behind.

  She looked around, and her face went oddly flat. He understood. The whole story was starting to sink in—the broken windshield, the crushed instrument panel, the blood on the pilot’s seat. Anything that hadn’t been torn apart by the crash had been torn apart by Garcia’s men, after they’d shot the Cessna out of the sky and then descended on it like a horde of locusts, stripping it almost bare.

  And the body—he could see the question written on her face. What had happened to the pilot? Where was he? Or where was the body? Someone had been flying the plane. His blood was everywhere.

  But now there was no one.

  “Dobbs told me the pilot’s body was taken to Cristobal, to the priest there. It will be shipped home.”

  She nodded and looked at least partly relieved, but her expression remained sad. Death hadn’t yet left this fuselage. It was still apparent, still a feeling in the air.

  “This...this is a mess,” she said. “Do you think the flash drive is even still here?”

  “Yes.” One look had told him that much.

  “I don’t have a clue where to begin,” she said, looking, but keeping her arms wrapped closely around her waist, not touching, not disturbing anything.

  “I do.”

  He moved forward and knelt between the front seats. The flash drive was concealed inside a shock-resistant compartment in the floor of the airplane, just aft of the center console, in the strongest section of the airframe. With the mid-section of the fuselage reasonably intact, recovery shouldn’t be a problem—as long as he was careful.

  Using a piece of scrap, he cleared the broken glass and other junk away from between the seats. He was looking for a hatch cover, three inches wide and six inches long, its long axis parallel with the aircraft’s centerline. The hatch would be flush with the floor and secured at its edges with what would appear to be six Phillips-head screws equally spaced three inches apart. Only five of the screws were what they seemed. The sixth screw, center right starboard, was a destruct trigger and had to be left tight when the plate was removed. If the screw was loosened along with the others, lifting the plate would ignite a small thermite charge, and the compartment and its contents would both be vaporized. Deformation of the compartment would also ignite the charge, which made it fail-safe.

  Needless to say, a little thermite went a long way.

  “Honey, move away from the plane,” he said when he found the hatch. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  She didn’t question his order, which he appreciated, but once outside, she did call back in.

  “Is it booby-trapped?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence, during which he pulled his Leatherman tool out of his pants pocket and started to carefully loosen five of the screws.

  “Nobody told me the flash drive was booby-trapped.”

  No. He didn’t suppose anybody had.

  “You’d think they would have told me about a booby trap.”

  No. Not really.

  “It’s why they sent me,” he said, loosening screw number two.

  “So you could get blown up, instead of me?”

  He stopped whirling the screwdriver on the third screw for a moment.

  “I’m not planning on getting blown up.” And that was the God’s truth.

  More silence followed his pronouncement, but not for long.

  “I don’t see why they couldn’t get down here and retrieve their own damn flash drive,” she said.

  A good point—almost. She’d simply missed one single salient fact.

  “Honey, I am ‘they.’ I’m the one who gets sent to retrieve damn flash drives.” He moved to screw number four. “When thermite destruct triggers are put on hatch covers, it’s guys like me who open them—very carefully.”

  “Oh.”

 
He set the Phillips-head to screw number five and gave it a turn. He was not holding his breath. He never held his breath. Slow and easy, steady and sure, checking each action before it was performed—that was him.

  “Thermite?” she said.

  Thermite, he silently repeated, lifting the hatch cover off the floor—and slowly letting out the breath he hadn’t held.

  The compartment was no more than two inches deep, the whole thing about the size of a small automotive glove box, and inside it was a flash drive wrapped in a plastic covering.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, and she let out a sigh of relief he heard all the way inside the fuselage.

  He secured the flash drive inside one of his cargo pockets. Then he disarmed the destruct device, replaced the hatch cover, and ducked out of the fuselage.

  “You’ve got it?” she asked.

  “In my pocket,” he said. “Two gigabytes of whatever they sent us down here to get back.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  Yeah. Thank goodness.

  He closed his knife and looked back inside the plane, his attention drawn by something. Memories, he supposed. He let his gaze go over the destruction wreaked by the crash. There’d been nothing left of Irena’s Piper, nothing but a pile of smoldering metal and the damn nightmare.

  He knew what she’d been holding to herself in his nightmare, what she’d been clutching so tightly. He’d put it out of his mind so many times, trying to forget, because to remember had made the tragedy so much worse.

  She’d been pregnant.

  Irena Anastasia Polchenko, the baddest of all the badass girls to ever come his way, had gotten herself embarazada. He’d been the lover who had noticed the changes in her body. He’d been the lover she’d confided in—but he hadn’t been the father. The honor had gone to Rutger Dolk, another contract aviator they’d both known in Afghanistan. Rutger had shipped out at the end of that long-ago April, and by the first of May, Irena had replaced him with Smith.

  Yeah, he had plenty of memories. He’d been so damned impressed with himself, right up until the middle of July, when he’d found himself bound and gagged, facedown in the dirt, part of a weapons-for-drugs deal.