by Wolf (lit)
Sylvie swallowed with an effort, struggling with dozens of questions. The most frightening one rose to her lips first. “Is someone after us?”
“Not yet,” he said grimly.
“Oh god!” she exclaimed in a quavering voice as he hustled her out of the apartment and down the walk. “What happened?”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
She wanted to talk about it now! Especially if someone was about to be after them and Hawk was worried about it! She didn’t know if the cab driver could speak and understand English, however, and since she realized they were close enough for him to hear, she bit back the questions.
When they’d settled inside again, Hawk gave directions to the cab driver, drew her into his arms and picked up where they’d left off inside the apartment. Sylvie couldn’t say that the conversation they’d had had exactly dulled her enthusiasm, but it was certainly distracting. As much as she wanted to cling to him, she didn’t actually want to be distracted from potential danger. She wanted to have her wits about her.
Apparently Hawk realized after a few minutes that she was having a hard time focusing. He broke the kiss, heaving a sigh that seemed equal parts resignation and irritation. Before he could pull away, though, she burrowed tightly against him. He almost seemed to shrug, but he held her close and that was what she needed at the moment, to feel sheltered in his arms.
The drive was a relatively short one. They’d only been riding just long enough for Sylvie to begin to feel a little less shaky when the driver pulled over and stopped. Sylvie sat up and looked around as Hawk leaned forward and paid the man.
She was bewildered by what she saw and more than a little unnerved. The area was poorly lit, but she could see enough to tell that it was probably the worst side of town. Actually, it didn’t even look like it was in town. There were only a couple of buildings that she could see in any direction and they were separated and surrounded by large stretches of cave-like darkness.
When Hawk helped her from the cab, Sylvie discovered her knees were wobbly. She waited until the cab had turned around and left and looked up at Hawk. “Where are we?” she whispered, too unnerved to speak any louder.
“Still a good ways from where we need to be.”
Sylvie ground her teeth as he caught her arm and began walking at a brisk stride she had trouble keeping pace with. “Where do we need to be?”
“Closer to the docks.”
That caught her attention. Lifting her head, she glanced around again, trying to pierce the darkness. She certainly didn’t see any sign of the ocean! She couldn’t smell salt in the air. She didn’t hear waves crashing against a beach.
A river?
“Everybody’s at the docks?”
He grunted. “You need to be quiet.”
Sylvie felt her stomach knot. Questions boiled in her mind, but she was too afraid of being overheard to voice any of them. She had no idea who might overhear or what might happen if they did and she didn’t want to find out. They walked about twice as long as they’d ridden in the cab and stopped.
Sylvie was more bewildered than she’d been when they got out of the cab. She couldn’t see anything. Hawk caught her arms and drew her down into a crouch near the ground. She jumped when she felt the brush of his face against her cheek. “This is very important, so listen carefully and do exactly what I say,” he said in a low voice next to her ear. “Understand?”
She nodded, holding her breath, struggling with the shivers raking up and down her spine.
“Stay low and stay put. You should be safe here if you do what you’re told. Don’t move from this spot until someone comes to get you—no matter what you hear.”
She gripped his arms when she felt his hold on her loosen.
He hesitated and then gathered her into an embrace. “It’ll be aright, baby. I promise. Just don’t move from this spot and if you hear any gunfire, get on the ground.”
Oh! That was reassuring. She gripped him tighter when he began to draw away again, but he refused to be held that time. Squeezing her arm reassuring, he straightened and left.
She knew he was gone. She felt alone, felt cold and terrified, afraid even to breathe for fear it would be too loud. Shivering, she huddled lower, clasping her arms around her knees. Her ears were pricked for any kind of sound, however, and after a little while she heard something faint in the distance. She tilted her head, listening intently. She couldn’t decide what she’d heard, though.
She’d just decided the sound was coming from behind her somewhere when the night suddenly seemed to explode with sound. A man screamed and then she heard more of them, high pitched with terror, interspersed with exclamations and machinegun-like bursts of chatter, thuds of every description—flesh to flesh, flesh to dirt or wood, clanging sounds like someone beating metal objects together, splashing, running feet, deep beast-like roars of fury and snarls. She’d just shot to her feet in mindless terror, whipping her head around in an attempt to figure out which way to run, when she heard gunfire. Uttering a whinny of fear, she dove for the ground again and began scrambling on her belly.
She ran into something lumpy and climbed over it, dimly identifying it as a bag. Beyond that, however, she didn’t encounter anything but brush—no walls to hide behind. She was still searching frantically for something to hide behind or climb into when she heard a rhythmic pounding that seemed to be coming directly toward her. It took a few moments for her mind to interpret the sounds as feet pounding against the ground, but she couldn’t tell which direction they were approaching from.
Someone slammed a foot into her side hard enough to knock the breath out of her and then fell over her. Uttering a string of Spanish, the man scrambled to get his feet under him, stomping her in the process. Something bellowed almost directly over her and the man abruptly vanished. She heard the rattle of brush and then a heavy thud some distance from her.
Something hairy grabbed her, snatching her up from the ground. “Damn it, Sylvie! I told you to stay put!”
Uttering a mindless whimper of terror, Sylvie whirled toward the sound of Hawk’s voice and climbed up him, clawing frantically for a tight grip on any part of his anatomy she could get hold of. She found his neck and tightened her arms around it in a chokehold, burrowing her face against a furry neck.
“It’s ok, baby,” Hawk said in a rumbling growl of a voice that was only vaguely recognizable as his. Curling his arms around her, he turned and walked a little way and then bent over and picked something up from the ground. He began running then, lumbering leaps that would’ve shaken her loose despite her grip on him if he hadn’t been holding her.
She clung tighter, squeezing her eyes shut.
“You’re choking me, baby. Ease up!” Hawk said, amusement threading his voice.
The amusement was enough to spawn anger, which manifested itself in tears. She burst out crying, burrowing deeper to try to smother the noise.
“She alright?” Mac asked sharply from behind her.
“No!” she answered.
Mac peeled her off of Hawk and set her on her feet and she discovered that she was standing in the middle of a massacre. In the near blinding beam of the flood light, she saw bodies everywhere, lying in dark, damp patches that she was afraid to look at very closely. Shock instantly shut off the tears, but the moment Mac saw the expression on her face, he lifted her into his arms and began striding rapidly along a wooden dock. He paused to leap from the dock onto a boat deck and then crossed it and leapt the stairs leading down into the main cabin.
A bizarre sense of déjà vu swept over Sylvie as he set her on her feet and she looked around.
Mac met her gaze fleetingly. “Stay put. We need to cast off and get the hell out of here.”
Shivering, Sylvie turned and watched Mac disappear up the stairs to the top deck. When she couldn’t see him anymore, she looked around the cabin she found herself in. Beams from the floodlight on the beach shot through the portholes, hampering her efforts to exami
ne the cabin as much as it helped, but she saw a booth and table set along one wall and moved to the bench. Clambering into one corner, she drew herself up into a tight ball, dimly aware of the sway of the boat as the men moved around the deck and the sound of splashes.
Trying not to think what the splashes might be, she sat staring at her toes, her mind curiously blank. In a few minutes she heard the engine roar to life and felt the boat move away from the dock.
Mac came back down and glanced around. Spying her, he moved toward her. “Come on, baby.”
She stared at his hand a moment and finally uncurled, reaching for his hand. When he’d pulled her up, he settled an arm around her and walked her to the sleeping quarters. He caught the blanket on the bed and snatched it off and then helped her onto the bed and covered her up. “Warmer?”
She hadn’t realized her teeth were chattering until she tried to speak. It felt like her jaws were locked. Mac settled beside her, pulled her against him and rubbed a hand along her arm. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so,” she said after thinking it over for a few minutes.
He released a pent up breath. “Just scared half to death,” he muttered.
She didn’t argue with him. She discovered, though, that he was radiating heat like a heater and she was freezing. She snuggled closer, trying to absorb some of his heat. After a few moments, she began to feel like she was thawing. “What happened?” she asked finally.
Mac sighed. “They weren’t too keen on giving us the boat.”
Sylvie shuddered. Fishermen? She dismissed that as soon as it popped into her head. She hadn’t been able to tell much about the boat, but it was too big and too nice to be a fishing boat. “Who were they?”
“Pirates—drug runners—arms dealers. They did a little of everything from what we could see.”
She felt her heart quicken. His comments pushed the blankness from her mind that she hadn’t realized she welcomed until images began to pour in—some real, some wholly unwelcome possible scenarios. “Do you think they’ll come after us?”
“Not them,” he said grimly.
“Others?”
He hesitated. “It’s a big operation. We dumped the drugs they’d hidden on board, though. Hopefully, they’ll be satisfied to get their product back. We aren’t planning on hanging around long enough to find out.”
Which meant they might. She didn’t want to think about it. “Can you stay with me?”
Again he hesitated, but after a moment, he settled them both more comfortably on the bed and curled around her. She focused on emptying her mind as soon as she felt safe and warmth had crept into her to chase the cold away.
Daylight was streaming through the portal when she woke. Reluctance began to tug at Sylvie as soon as she started surfacing toward awareness. She shifted to find a more comfortable position to try to recapture sleep, but the discovery that she had company in the bed roused her enough to open her eyes.
Mac, she discovered, was studying her, his eyes heavy as if he’d only just awakened himself. His lips curled after a moment. “Morning.”
She found herself smiling back at him.
He kissed the tip of her nose and sat up. “You hungry? I could eat a grizzly bear.”
She rolled over and stretched when he headed into the bathroom, closing her eyes to drowse a little longer while she waited for her turn. Undoubtedly, she drifted off. She woke abruptly to the feel of cold sprinkles of water on her face and opened her eyes to see Mac standing at the side of the bed, grinning. “Get up and feed me, woman, or I might eat you.”
Irritation flickered through her, but she couldn’t help but chuckle at his he-man routine. She sobered once she was in the bathroom. Surrounded by the unfamiliar, it was impossible not to think about the way the boat had been acquired—the battle on the dock that had scared her witless the night before. Struggling to put it from her mind until she felt better equipped to deal with it, she cleaned up, dressed, and left the bedroom. The main cabin was empty.
Shaking her head, she went to the galley and began examining the cabinets and the small fridge. Surprise flickered through her to discover that it was actually fairly well stocked. Listening idly to the voices of the men up top, she searched for essentials and finally put a pot of coffee on. Despite the fact that the kitchen/galley was well equipped besides being fully stocked, she discovered cooking on a rocking boat required concentration and care. She managed to turn out a pan full of scrambled eggs and a second pan of bacon.
The smell of the coffee and bacon brought all four men down.
She glanced at them as they hovered just beyond the galley hopefully. “Who’s driving the boat?”
Everyone turned to look at Beau. “I set the wheel. It should be alright until I get back up top,” he responded irritably.
It was just as well she was content with the coffee, Sylvie thought wryly. The men inhaled the eggs and bacon and came back for more. Shrugging, she whipped up more eggs and cooked the rest of the bacon. “That’s it,” she informed them when they looked up again.
Shrugging, they carried their plates and utensils to the galley, dumped them in the sink, and disappeared again. Sylvie glared at them as they trooped past her, but they seemed blithely unaware of her displeasure. Dismissing it as too much effort to complain, she finished her coffee, studied the dishes in the sink when she carried her cup into the galley and finally ignored them, heading up on deck.
Beau was at the wheel again. Mac, his face pulled into an expression of intense concentration, was studying maps and charts. Hawk and Cavanaugh had been lounging on the deck but when they saw her, they got up and headed downstairs purposefully. Sylvie sent them a curious look, but dismissed it.
When she’d strolled the circumference of the boat she’d observed that there wasn’t a sign of land in any direction, although she saw a bank of what looked like clouds far to the west that she thought might be the coast. The boat was a small yacht very similar to the one that had belonged to her stepfather, but she didn’t know if it was the same boat or just similar. She supposed her stepfather’s would’ve run out of gas and been drifting if the military hadn’t managed to catch up to it before it did. It could be the same boat, but there was no way to be sure since the pirates had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to change it. In any case, beyond the size, amenities, and builder, there wasn’t a lot of difference from one to another.
She hoped it wasn’t his. He might stand a chance of getting it back otherwise.
And, if he had, or did, he would be certain she was dead. She felt bad about that, although she couldn’t imagine he would grieve. She’d been grown when her mother had married him. They’d been friendly enough—he was good to her mother and clearly loved her—but they’d never formed a bond beyond the common ground of her mother and she’d died years ago.
She still felt strangely detached after the battle that had been waged the night before. Next to her terrifying encounter with the soldiers, or guerrillas, when Mac had tried to cut her loose, though, she couldn’t say she felt any more traumatized.
She didn’t think she would ever have any desire to visit South America again.
Hearing noises below and tired of wandering the deck anyway, Sylvie finally headed down into the main cabin to see what Hawk and Cavanaugh were up to. She wasn’t happy when she discovered they were systematically removing pieces of the bulkhead, mostly because she discovered a stack of bundles she knew must be drugs.
“Oh my god!”
Hawk flicked a sharp glance at her. “We got rid of the bulk of it as soon we came on board, but Cavanaugh was watching it. We knew they’d already hidden a good bit. Don’t worry. There won’t be a trace of it when we hit port.”
Profoundly relieved, Sylvie nodded. Something dark and unnamable that had been hovering at the back of her mind eased as she watched Cavanaugh gather up bundles and carry them up top and then heard the splash as he pitched stuff overboard. She hadn’t really believed they had any
intention of selling the drugs, but it was still a tremendous relief to have confirmation. More than that, it relieved her of the fear she hadn’t wanted to consider—that Mac hadn’t been completely honest with her about the boat.
Not that two wrongs ever made a right, but she was glad to know she hadn’t been wrong about the guys. The men they’d attacked had been predators themselves, and she felt like their survival was a mitigating circumstance. She didn’t believe any of them would’ve done any of the things they had if they hadn’t been deprived of any other choice and forced to fight for survival when they hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
Chapter Seventeen
They were hardly home free. Sylvie was well aware that they were probably in as much danger now as they had been when they’d been fleeing through the jungle, maybe more since they were so exposed. Beyond that, even if they managed to make it to the US coast without being attacked either by pissed off pirates/drug runners or the military that was still pursuing their escaped experiments, they had other problems to face once they got there.
The guys couldn’t simply return to their homes and families. The government would just pick them up and haul them back to Guantanamo and make them disappear and she knew that as well as they did. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that she could be looking at the same, or at least an uncomfortably similar, scenario.
It was time she had answers, though, she decided. She’d been content to hang on for the ride. She hadn’t actually felt comfortable with the idea of questioning what they were doing or why when she knew she’d only been invited to join the party because their consciences wouldn’t allow them to simply dump her to survive or not.
After a while that had ceased to be the reason she’d refrained, however. She still hadn’t wanted to remind them that they hadn’t planned to bring her for fear they would dump her somewhere, but it was only partly because she was afraid and didn’t know how to handle the situation she’d found herself in. She didn’t want them to leave her because she wanted to stay with them, because she’d enjoyed the sexual adventure way too much and moved beyond that. She’d grown far too fond of them. She’d reached a point where she couldn’t imagine a life without them in it and didn’t want to.