Show No Fear

by Marliss Melton

  They had been traveling for several hours now, moving fast and closing in on whoever held Lucy captive. Stopping every half-hour or so, the squad consulted the laptop, reassured that they were closing in on Lucy’s coordinates.

  Here and there, an outcrop of stone or roots crisscrossing under Gus’s feet struck him as familiar. By his reckoning, they were not too far from Rebel Central or the brick casita, where he and Lucy had spent their last nights together.

  Along with night-vision goggles, each man carried an MP-5-SD, silenced versions of the classic semi-automatic machine guns. Harley and Haiku, sniper and scout respectively, had rifles mounted with night-vision scopes.

  In new boots that cushioned his soles and left barely discernable tracks, Gus tackled the steep terrain with singleminded determination. The protein bars he’d consumed while waiting for his gear countered his flagging energy levels. He had to get to Lucy before they broke or killed her. Anything else was unacceptable.

  But what if they showed up too late? His mind refused to accept that as a possibility.

  “Alpha squad, rally up.” The OIC’s whispered command cut through Gus’s ragged-edged thoughts.

  The SEALs came together in a circular, protective position, dropping to their knees and raising their visors, two by two, to consult the laptop.

  Lieutenant Lindstrom’s sudden frown, illumined by the soft-glowing screen, made Gus’s stomach knot. “She’s moving,” the OIC announced, swiveling the laptop so they could all take a look.

  Sure enough, Lucy’s microchip was traveling in a northwesterly direction, away from Ki-kirr-zikiz, headed dead north.

  No! Gus inwardly raged. “How fast are they moving?” he wanted to know.

  “Almost seven klicks an hour.”

  That fast? They would never catch up before dawn. The longer Lucy remained a hostage, the more traumatized she would be. “Fuck!” he raged, his temple throbbing.

  Four sets of eyes jumped up to regard him with compassion and apparent willingness to fight, not just for Lucy, but in retaliation for the thousands of hostages the FARC had seized throughout the decades.

  “Where could they be taking her?” the OIC wondered out loud. “None of the camps lie in that direction, at least not according to the map you uploaded.”

  Gus had to swallow to find his voice. “Arriba,” he said hoarsely. “Maybe they’re taking her to Arriba. That’s where the other hostages were kept.”

  With a thoughtful look, the OIC closed his laptop. “Let’s move,” he said, simply.

  COLD WATER SPATTERED LUCY’S FACE, rousing her from a blissful well of unconsciousness. She sputtered and jerked awake, only to be skewered by sharp, insistent pain radiating from her lower back.

  Buitre’s scarred face swam into focus as he bent over her. Her gaze flew to the only window, where golden light flooded in, letting her know that it was morning. She’d been lying on the dirt-packed floor unconscious for half the night.

  And Gus hadn’t come for her.

  The realization ripped through, testing her faith that he was still alive. What if he was dead or injured and alone in the jungle? Surely she would sense it if something awful had happened to him.

  In the same instant, memories of the prior evening raked her tender consciousness. Inflicting agony, Captain Vargas had dug in her hip for the microchip until she’d passed out cold. She assumed he’d found it and cut it out. She couldn’t remember.

  She felt desecrated, violated, numb. A glance back at the ravaged flesh on her hip made her head spin. Dried blood encrusted the material on her trousers, but at least she still wore them. That wouldn’t be the case, would it, if they had raped her?

  “Get up, puta,” ordered Buitre, removing the belt that kept her wrists tightly bound. Blood surged into her freed arms and sent fire licking toward her fingertips. As he yanked her to her feet, pain knifed up one side of her back.

  “Time for you to go,” Buitre informed her. “Dress quickly,” he commanded, thrusting her jacket at her.

  Lucy weaved on her feet but refused to move. Gus couldn’t be dead.

  “Now, puta!” Buitre roared, startling her from her shock.

  With awkward fingers and hampered by the pain in her hip, she buttoned her jacket mechanically, donned her mutilated boots, and tied them.

  Cool, wet air roused her briefly as Buitre pulled her through the door. Only one other rebel stood outside—David, who glanced at her quickly, then averted his eyes.

  Where had Captain Vargas gone? she wondered absently.

  But then a thought—both terrible and wonderful—had her tripping over her own feet. The captain might have taken her microchip to lure her rescuers into a trap. That would explain why neither Gus nor his teammates had come for her. It wasn’t that he was injured or dead. He simply had no way of knowing where she was. Oh, God. Without the microchip, she had vanished into the mountain mists, just like Howitz and Barnes before her.

  CLOAKED IN A THICK MIST, with Haiku on point, the SEALs crept along the steeply ascending path with renewed stealth. The ruggedness of the terrain and the thin mountain air left them straining and out of breath. It came as a great relief when they consulted the laptop and realized the microchip, and therefore Lucy, had ceased to move.

  At last the SEALs were closing in on a fixed location—a remote crag standing twelve thousand feet above sea level.

  Rather than feel relieved, Gus eyed the still, shadowy undergrowth with foreboding.

  The jungle was too quiet. He had spent enough time in the rainforest to know that monkeys were the first to expose Special Forces trying to sneak unseen through the jungle. Perhaps it was the muggy humidity keeping them listless this morning. Rumbles of thunder portended an afternoon rain shower. High above the clouds, the fixed-wing Predator tracked their movements with the FLIR patches on their shoulders that distinguished them from the enemy. If worse came to worse, they could call upon the Predator to drop a missile or relay a request for reinforcements, even extraction.

  Gus could not stop thinking that the enemy had questioned Lucy extensively by now. They would have had substantial time to beat her, rape her…

  Another possibility made the hairs on his nape rise to stiff attention. He thumbed his mic. “Sir.”

  “Go ahead,” panted the OIC, who tackled the rise several paces behind him.

  “What if the hostiles don’t have her?”

  “Come again?”

  “I don’t know. I just have this feeling Lucy isn’t here.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be here?” countered the lieutenant. “We’ve been following tracks for hours now.”

  “No, sir. We’ve been following her microchip,” Gus corrected him. “What if they took it from her body in order to lure us here?”

  The sudden, thundering report of a dozen assault rifles cut his question short.

  Startled, Gus dove behind an earthen wall carved by rain-water and fired back, three rounds at a time, knowing he had thirty in his magazine.

  Except he couldn’t see what the hell he was shooting at. There was nothing but leaves and trees and bushes looming over him. But the hidden shooters were marksmen, no question. Bullets pelted the ground right behind him, pinning him in his tenuous location.

  Haiku, who’d been on point, was in a similar quandary. Crouched behind a fallen tree, he sought to return fire while keeping himself covered.

  “Shit!” Gus raged, cursing his instincts for warning him too late.

  A flash of movement caught his eye. Two figures slipped through the undergrowth flanking their left side. He fired at them and missed.

  “Sir, they’re flanking left,” he warned. At least they couldn’t flank them on the right, where the earth dropped away into a steep ravine.

  “Harley, head them off. Haiku, Atwater, can you fall back?”

  “Negative, sir. They have us pinned,” Gus shouted, ducking as a rock, knocked out of the dirt, whistled past his ear.

  “Use your grenades,” advised
Luther. “Vinny, contact the Predator. Tell them ‘Danger close.’ We need support fire now, only don’t hit us!”

  “Yes, sir!” Vinny called.

  “Hold them on the ridge!” the OIC commanded, shooting his weapon over Gus’s head.

  Easier said than done, Gus thought, using his teeth to tear the clip from the grenade he tossed. It was just a matter of time before he or Haiku got hit.

  No sooner did that grim thought occur to him than a bullet flung Haiku onto his back, in plain sight of the shooters. They would have made mincemeat of him, if Gus hadn’t laid out a wall of fire, giving the point man time to drag himself to safety.

  “Haiku took a hit, sir!” Gus informed his OIC.

  “How bad is he?”

  “I’ll live,” Haiku grated. Slamming a new magazine into his rifle, he glared uphill with the ferocity of a ninja and went back to firing.

  “We can’t hold ’em off much longer, sir,” Gus warned.

  “Predator estimates two minutes to strike,” Vinny cut in. “Haiku, you need me, man?”

  “Sorry, can’t have company right now,” Haiku gritted. “Forgot to clean house.”

  “I got some friends who’ll clean your house,” muttered Harley. In the next instant, cries of agony let them know he’d eliminated the left flank.

  But then the Elite Guard retaliated, throwing grenades that made the ridge tremble and rained gobs of dirt on Gus’s helmet. Artillery from the ridge escalated, cutting swaths through the vegetation. The SEALs had nowhere to go but down into the ravine.

  “Sir, avoid the ravine!” Gus warned as the memory of Buitre’s mine-laying flashed through his mind. “Mines. Mines!”

  “Roger that, Gus. Missile incoming, ten seconds to impact. Fall back down the trail.”

  No sooner had Luther spat out those directives than a high-pitched whistle announced the imminent arrival of a hellfire missile. In the next instant, a thunderous explosion snuffed out the staccato of gunfire as the missile slammed into the ridge a hundred meters north of the SEALs’ location.

  With bits of bark and leaves and chunks of granite pattering his back, Gus dove into the alcove next to Haiku. “You good?” he asked, dismayed by the size of the stain on the scout’s jacket.

  “Sure,” said the Japanese American, but his face was waxen, his eyes too bright.

  “Fall back!” shouted the OIC.

  Haiku pushed to his knees, then collapsed.

  “I got you,” Gus assured him. Holding him from behind, he backed swiftly down the trail.

  Several hundred yards later, he caught up with the others, laying Haiku at Vinny’s feet. “He’s losing blood fast.”

  Vinny dropped to one knee to assess Haiku’s injury. “Sir, we need to get him outta here,” he corroborated, tearing open his medic’s pack for supplies to help staunch the bleeding.

  As Vinny worked to get Haiku hooked to an IV, Gus’s hopes of finding Lucy plummeted. The team would look to their members’ safety first.

  With apology in his dark blue eyes, the OIC met his overwrought gaze. “We need to pull out,” he said to Gus, gently.

  “Sir,” Gus pleaded. “What about Lucy? We can’t just leave without her.”

  “We’ll have to come back,” the OIC replied. “We don’t know if she was here or not.”

  Gus’s frustrations bubbled over. “She’s somewhere on this fucking mountain!” he raged. “We can’t just leave her here!”

  “We’ll be back,” the lieutenant repeated, his volume increasing just enough to get Gus’s attention. “Now, let’s move, in case the enemy recovers.”

  Gus nodded. He had no right to argue with the OIC when Haiku was fighting for his life.

  Moving to a safer location, the SEALs waited for the rescue helicopter, a Longbow Apache, to lower a SPIE rig and extract them.

  Twenty minutes later, the helicopter descended over their location. A thick rope dropped though the trees, and Harley ran to catch it.

  Feeling nothing whatsoever, wishing he’d wake up from what had to be a nightmare, Gus clipped himself to the SPIE rig, as did the others. Luther checked their D-rings before hooking himself up. Within seconds, the rope whipped taut.

  It lifted them one by one off their feet.

  Gus clawed his way through layers of wet leaves, sticky spiderwebs, going up, up…

  All at once he surfaced, rising over a carpet of green that undulated in all directions—east, west, north, south. Dangling in the air with wind whipping at his clothing, he searched for the camouflaged lookout tower that pinpointed the front commander’s hideout.

  But it remained elusive, swallowed up in the enormity of vegetation below him. Thanks to Gus and Lucy’s endeavors, the JIC knew exactly where it was. But Lucy, without a microchip, could be anywhere on this mammoth-sized mountain.

  They could search for a hundred years and never find her.

  Showered and shaved and wearing a fresh battle dress uniform, Gus felt marginally more human, except that he hadn’t slept since his and Lucy’s last night strung up in hammocks in the casita, more than forty-eight hours ago.

  His red-rimmed and watering eyes burned with the effort that it took to follow the debate raging in the JIC between the CIA staff and the Navy SEALs.

  “I just spoke with the Colombian ambassador,” John Whiteside informed them, pacing from one side of the room to the other. “He’s outraged that we dropped a missile on the FARC.”

  “It wasn’t the FARC, sir,” Lieutenant Lindstrom calmly pointed out.

  “He doesn’t care who the hell it was,” Whiteside interrupted. “The United States dropped a hellfire missile on Colombian soil, and if it happens again, he’ll declare it an act of war. The Predator has been called away from that area. There will be no more attacks on the FARC—period—until the Colombian government resolves this issue with the UN.”

  Oh, Jesus. Gus raked his hand through his damp hair. Despite his testimony that the Elite Guard, dressed as Colombian soldiers, had only pretended to attack the FARC and jeopardize the UN team, there was still an inquiry underway. Colombia had frozen its military to keep from looking any more aggressive. Nor did they want their ally, the USA, taking any military action.

  But they couldn’t just leave Lucy on La Montaña and not go back. He sent Lieutenant Lindstrom a pleading look.

  “Sir,” said the OIC, putting his career on the line to argue with the station chief, “we’re not asking for permission to fight the FARC. All we want is to return to rebel territory. We’ll recon the target quietly. No one will even know we’re on the mountain.”

  Gus’s heart thudded painfully as he awaited Whiteside’s reply.

  “Son,” the older man countered condescendingly, “that mountain covers more square miles than New York City. We had surveillance on it for ten months and never found Howitz and Barnes. How the hell do you think you’re going to find Miss Donovan?”

  “It could take a while,” Luther conceded, “but we’ll find her.”

  “We don’t even know if she’s alive,” Whiteside shot back, snatching the air from Gus’s lungs. “Her microchip stopped working when we hit the mountain. For all we know, she’s dead already.”

  Gus found himself on his feet with his face on fire and his heart in his throat. “Lucy is not dead!” he insisted hoarsely. “She’s up on that goddamn mountain with her hip cut open, subject to infection and God-knows-what-else. Do you want her to die like Mike Howitz, or are you going to let us do our fucking jobs?” he railed, his temple throbbing.

  Luther put a hand on his shoulder, pushing him down into his chair.

  Whiteside just looked at him. Hitching his trousers, he regarded the expectant SEALs with a thoughtful frown. “All right,” he agreed irritably. “All right. I’ll permit you to do a high-altitude low open, under the cover of night-fall. But no one, and I mean no one needs to know where you are. If you need to question a rebel, you kill ’em. And stay the hell away from the Venezuelans this time. I don’t want this c
oming back to me in any way, shape, or form. You will be invisible. Is that understood?”

  “Hooyah, sir!” chorused several Navy SEALs.

  Gus sank weakly back into his seat. Hang in there, Luce, he thought. I’m coming back to get you.

  * * *

  THE HINGES AT THE GATE SQUEAKED, signaling another hour had passed. Roused from a fitful slumber, Lucy cracked an eye as Goliath, one of the two jefes who guarded Arriba, lumbered across the enclosure. The frosty vapor of his breath bespoke the chill that held Lucy in its cruel grip.

  She had been warming herself with visions of a tropical beach, Gus’s legs dusted with sand and tangled with hers as they lay on their towels soaking up the sun.

  As Goliath’s silhouette loomed over her, she braced herself for the glare of his flashlight. This was a nightly occurrence. Every hour on the hour, one of the jefes shone light into their captives’ eyes. The action was purely psychological, a reminder that even in sleep, they were not free.

  “You.” He startled her by nudging her with his toe.

  With a spiking of adrenaline, Lucy scrambled to a wary crouch. The wound on her hip protested. Steel links bit into her neck as she cringed against the plywood wall.

  “Come,” he commanded, unlocking her from the center beam. Fisting her chain, he gave it a jerk. “Hurry,” he added.

  “Where are we going?” she demanded. The other hostages, soldiers of the Colombian army who’d been held for many years, had awakened to watch with apathy.

  This was an aberration. For the past three nights she’d been left in a feverish stupor. What if Goliath meant to drag her into the woods and rape her? If that happened, she might lose her will to live.

  “No questions. Walk or I’ll drag you,” he said gruffly.

  In a stiff-jointed walk, she trailed him to the gate.

  Arriba was little more than a three-sided shed in a muddy pen encircled by barbed wire. A second guard, whom she’d dubbed Igor, opened the gate and locked it behind them.