“On top of that, we all chose her as Number Two,” Richie continued, “because Kyle was simply the best. He chose her as Number One.”
Melissa remembered the same comparison among her fellow graduates. She’d rated a pair of Number Ones, a couple of Twos, and a Five. Carla really was that good.
“Carla saw us more clearly than any of us saw ourselves. I’m stupid about people; I’m aware of that blank spot. To compensate, I rely on others.”
This was Richie the brain boy in full regalia. But she could hear what it was costing him to reveal these truths about himself.
As the sun set, the Tin Goose reached the far southern shore of Lake Maracaibo. Soon thick, dark jungle was rolling along beneath the plane. They continued a long way in silence before he spoke again.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry for doubting your motives. I should have listened to Carla.” A few more miles. “I hope that my screwup isn’t permanent.”
“What about Chad?”
“I don’t know. I’ve given it a lot of thought, about three days’ worth, and I still don’t know. But what I feel for you just can’t be imagined. And then I saw that you looked as miserable as I felt. I don’t think the finest actress could do that.”
She rested her hands on the control yoke for the first time in the flight. Melissa hadn’t wanted the connection to Richie that it gave her, but now she did. He flew with a smooth confidence; after so many flights in the last week, the big plane felt normal. Familiar.
“Are you feeling what I am?” he continued. “I couldn’t ever get you alone to ask, and you wouldn’t answer your door—though I guess I can’t blame you for that. Probably just as well, because I finally realized that the question was irrelevant. I found what I feel, which is so right when I’m with you that nothing else matters.”
As apologies went, it was a pretty good one.
But somehow having Carla be her recommendation to a lover grated on her nerves. She understood this was Richie. But…
“Next time, Richie?”
“Yes?”
“Try trusting your own judgment.”
He didn’t answer. She could hear him thinking, his thoughts were churning so hard.
Without another word, they slipped down through the last of the fading daylight. The Upper Orinoco River, which formed the border between Colombia and Venezuela, spread out before them in a low valley bordered with thick trees that towered above the water.
The silence was almost surreal as the big engines slowed to a near idle. There was the motor grind of ailerons and flaps extending until the big plane was flying slower than a car went on the interstate. The only remaining sound: the wind rushing over the wings. The plane’s floats skipped just once and then settled into the water with a bright Shhhhhhush.
A flashlight winked several times on the western, Colombian bank. Richie kicked the tail rudder and revved the engine enough to head them into shore.
Melissa brushed at her eyes to keep the sudden moisture from turning into tears.
Damn Richie for being right; even the Ice Queen couldn’t fake how she felt about him. No matter how hard she’d been trying.
Chapter 13
The team eased out of the plane fully armed but kept their weapons aimed at the ground. First off, Richie tied a rope from the float to a handy banana tree so that the plane didn’t drift off the narrow sandy beach without them. The long wing practically touched the thicker ceiba and Para nut trunks that clustered tightly along the river. He then stayed low, hoping the angle might help him see more.
The silence of the Upper Orinoco River was almost shattering after Maracaibo and the flight. There was a bird cry that must have been a parrot from high up in the forest. An answering call sounded from the other side of the river, perhaps a hundred meters away, and then silence.
It was dark beneath the jungle canopy, though the evening still brightened the river itself. A fish little bigger than his hand leapt out of the water and splashed back in, leaving a wide ring of ripples on the surface that flowed lazily away to the north. No way to tell if it was leaping to catch a fly or streaking out of its natural element to escape a predator still lurking below the surface.
Several men moved forward out of the buttressed tree trunks. They were a mixed band: mostly native dark but a pair as light-skinned as himself. He took that as a good sign that his own team didn’t look too out of place.
He took a closer look at the Delta team assembling in the fading light. The days of being stuck waiting in the hangar had been good for them. They looked dirty and disheveled. Duane had even more oil and grease on his shirt than Melissa had initially placed there. Carla’s hair was a mess from lack of care. Kyle slumped with exhaustion, which Richie finally figured out had to be an act. Which probably meant that Carla’s hair was an act as well.
Chad remained aboard, their surprise asset hidden inside the cabin’s shadows.
And then Melissa opened the pilot’s door, stepped down onto the float, then over to the beach. She shone golden in the last of the day’s light. In boots, cargo camo pants, and a thin white sleeveless tank top that clung to her figure—hell, practically showed every stitch and seam in her bra—she was a hard right cross to his libido. How in the world had he been dumb enough to stay away from this woman?
She hadn’t said anything else after remarking on his lame-o apology. That was an acceptance, wasn’t it? He couldn’t be sure.
Had it been his turn to speak? He didn’t think so. But if it had been, had he now blown it again and…
Richie focused on the other men as the last of them filtered out onto the narrow beach. Seven, but grouped closely—close enough to be the target of a single sweep of his AK-47 if needed. That meant that even if they were skilled fighters, they had no formal training. Or it meant that there were others waiting back in the trees and this group were staying in an easily identifiable clump in case it turned into a firefight.
Two of the men labored forward, each carrying a box heavy enough to make them stagger.
Kyle shifted forward, which caused Duane to move farther right to have a better angle on covering him. Kyle flicked on a light.
“Libros?” Kyle asked in Spanish. Books. The name of the latest James Patterson novel was displayed boldly on the sides.
“We no going to label it ‘Illegal drugs,’ hombre,” one of the men answered in a Spanish far rougher than Kyle’s. He looked and spoke like a street tough, Brazilian by his underlying Portuguese accent. He had an Uzi submachine gun that might have dated back to Venezuelan coup attempts in the 1990s, two handguns, a long knife, and a bandolier like an Old West gunslinger, ridiculously filled with single rounds rather than the magazines that would actually be useful in a prolonged firefight.
“I see what’s in the boxes before they go on the plane,” Kyle insisted.
“That no the deal.”
“Then we fly away and your shipment rots on the sand right here.”
There was grumbling but the boxes were finally propped on the edge of the cargo deck. Kyle pulled out a big military knife. It looked old and heavily worn, apparently from age, but Richie knew it was from long practice and heavy usage. The gesture was also right out of the handbook: “Find an excuse to wield your weapon in the enemy’s presence. It will make you more respected, more accepted, and more prepared.”
Kyle slit the lids and shone his flashlight without resheathing the blade.
Richie eased forward enough to look in. Neat white bricks of powder: four by eight by one point five inches. Standard kilo bag. Packed in even layers. He estimated the box size.
“Fifty kilos each box,” he whispered to Kyle. “If there aren’t any false fillers.”
Kyle poked a finger down the corner of the box and nodded. Cocaine bricks all the way to the bottom.
“If it’s pure, that’s five to fifteen million do
llars on the street if sold by the gram. Half that wholesale by the uncut brick.”
“Hombre smart. Way pure.”
“Where’s it going?”
One of the white men handed over a scrap of paper with coordinates on it and Kyle handed it to Richie.
He held it up to capture the last of the daylight rather than risk dazzling his eyes with a flashlight. He estimated as well as he could without a map. “Beach outside of Cancún,” was his best guess.
The man confirmed it with a nod.
Kyle closed the box lids and shoved them deeper into the cargo bay in agreement.
“We need a guarantee.” The first man grabbed Melissa around the waist. “We keep her until you return. Maybe we have some fun together while we wait, eh, senorita?”
“Not the deal,” Kyle said evenly before Richie could draw.
Kyle could talk them down…or else a lot of people were going to die in the next minute. They were not keeping Melissa.
“She’s one of the pilots.”
The man grunted, “Then we keep this one.” He shoved Melissa away.
When the man reached for Carla, Melissa spun smoothly, pulled her Colt handgun, and shoved the barrel hard under the man’s chin, grabbing him by his bandolier close by his throat so that he couldn’t move away.
“Didn’t you hear the man?” Her voice was as smooth as Kyle’s and about a thousand degrees chillier. “It’s not the deal.”
None of them had seen Melissa in a military conflict yet, but the move didn’t surprise Richie at all. Melissa was a Unit operator; it fit her so perfectly.
When the man made a grab for his own weapon, Melissa pulled the trigger.
There was a crash and boom of the big .45 round that seemed to shake the jungle itself. The back of the man’s head disappeared into the darkness out over the river.
The jungle screamed. Every animal in the vicinity crying out and beating their way aloft or racing deeper into the jungle.
Fish broke the surface, feeding on the unexpected bounty.
Chad popped the top hatch on the Twin Otter’s passenger compartment and stood up in it like a gun turret. From over the top of the high fuselage, he aimed his massive M240 machine gun down at the group.
The tableau remained frozen until Melissa let go of the man’s cartridge belt.
He keeled over backward, landing half-in, half-out of the water.
Melissa holstered her sidearm, “Now, who’s the real jefe here?”
Richie blinked in surprise. How had she figured that out?
The other of the two white men, not the one with the coordinates, stepped forward from the back of the group.
“You belie your fine looks, senorita,” the man said in British English, though his native tongue might be Dutch. “Such a pretty woman should not have such violence as well.”
Richie flicked off his AK-47’s safety—an intentionally loud sound in the quieting jungle.
“Interesting,” the man said without looking his way. Then he moved over to the body lying partly in the river. He kicked the bottom of the dead man’s boots hard enough to set the body adrift. It passed between the pontoon floats of the Twin Otter and continued north.
Richie wanted to keep an eye on it, see if an Orinoco crocodile was going to surface for the free meal, but he didn’t have the luxury at the moment. It was too dark to see much anyway.
* * *
“If you leave no one behind”—the leader returned to face Melissa—“then I send four with you.”
“Two,” she countered as if she hadn’t just killed a man. Some people didn’t deserve to live, but he was the first man she’d ever killed who wasn’t shooting at her—even if he had been reaching for a weapon. Like everything else, she’d think about it later.
“Three.”
“Two!” If Melissa was going to be the front woman for this outfit, she was going to act like it—hard-ass and frozen to the core. “It’s all the open seats I have on the plane, and I won’t have some trigger-happy idiota like that one tumbling about in the back of the plane if I have to do any hard maneuvering.”
Now to up the stakes to show she had equal power in this negotiation.
“And I return your two men to Maracaibo. How they get back to you is their problem.”
He nodded and countered with, “You will turn off all of your radios. If my men see you turn them on before the delivery is complete, they will shoot every one of your companions in-flight, starting with the woman you have just defended.”
“Understood.” Melissa knew if they needed the radio before the delivery, their cover would be blown and she’d have to trust the four Delta operators to take out the two guards before they could get off a shot.
“Payment at Maracaibo,” he continued the round.
“Payment on delivery or we don’t offload the product,” Melissa countered.
He nodded. Obviously he’d been testing her, even if it was a simple one. No desperate American drug-running team would ever let go of the product without getting their grubby hands on the cash they were owed. And she’d bet that no drug seller would release his product without up-front payment as well, no matter what the shipping arrangement might be.
“And I need a thousand gallons of avgas waiting within a hundred miles of the drop-off. And we get the fuel before we make the delivery.”
“A barge will be waiting two miles due west of the northern lighthouse on Cozumel.” He had anticipated the need. Not their first time doing this.
She decided to push for every penny she could. The hundred-thousand-dollar fee promised by Analie Sala would easily cover the extra three-grand expense, but…
“And the fuel comes out of your share.”
He grimaced but acquiesced when he saw her expression. “Deal.”
In under ten minutes, the team, the drugs, and two heavily armed drug smugglers were all aboard. In moments, Richie had them skidding fast across the surface of the Orinoco. Melissa made sure that she and Richie were the only two on the intercom. He sat left seat this time, as he should be, and lifted them off the water.
“Now how do we deliver the drugs without delivering the drugs?” Melissa couldn’t figure out that part of it, but there was no way she was going to be a part of actually delivering more drugs to the U.S. markets.
“Not our problem.”
“Not our problem?” Melissa would have shrieked at him if not for the two nasty pieces of work sitting back in the cabin. Their “escorts” looked dangerous enough to make Chad look mild.
“Nope!”
But this time she caught Richie’s tone. The pleased-with-himself nerd was back. She’d feared that the last few days had beat it out of him, and she was very relieved to be wrong. Too relieved. As if she actually cared about…
Abort!
“So, whose problem is it, if it isn’t ours?” She did her best to match his easy tone, and then she knew. “Fred’s.”
“Yep! Take the controls, would you?”
When she did, Richie pulled out a small radio and kept it to one side so that no one behind them would be able to see it. He tapped out a quick message and hit send. An acknowledgement flashed back and he tucked the radio back into a thigh pocket.
He returned his hands to the controls and they flew, with both of their hands on the interconnected wheels, comfortable until they were approaching the Venezuelan coastline.
Melissa couldn’t stop the smile. This is why she’d signed up with Delta. Go where no one else could and make a difference. She didn’t know quite what that looked like at the moment, but she could feel when she was in the groove.
Together they eased down within a hundred feet of the ocean waves. The next thousand miles were going to be seven hours of hard work. It would take everything they both had to avoid U.S. and Mexican patrols. The Venezuelans were
n’t doing much about patrolling their own air and sea lanes, one of the reasons they were such a prime smuggling route.
A hundred miles to sea, they were probably clear of any Venezuelan patrol that might actually care. For the next nine hundred, it would be the random patrols of the U.S. Navy to which even Fred Smith said he had no access. So it was up to them not to surprise any warships.
“No pressure,” Richie commented drily.
Melissa didn’t laugh in return; she still didn’t feel much like laughing. But she did allow herself to smile in the dark. Perhaps it was a little grimly, but she really did like Richie.
Another hundred miles and then he asked softly, “Are you okay? After, you know, the guy from Macapá?”
Leave it to Richie to know Brazilian regional dialects. And she liked Richie just a little more for asking.
“Not my first rodeo.”
Richie answered with a waiting silence. How was it that he didn’t trust himself about people? With only the one notable exception, he’d judged her moods perfectly. And that one time was because he hadn’t listened to himself.
“I was forward deployed with the 101st Airborne,” she finally offered. “I was embedded with the ground teams to frisk and question women. Every now and then, they weren’t women beneath the robes but men in hiding. If they were dressed to hide, we knew they were Taliban, Al Qaeda, or worse. They would also be heavily armed. It was close a couple of times, but I was always faster than they were.”
“You were good back there. Damn good,” Richie remarked a few miles later.
And Melissa felt good. Normally a kill gave her the shakes, but this time it hadn’t. The man had been the worst sort. He’d rubbed his erection against Melissa’s ass the moment he’d grabbed her, and his hand had been headed south into her pants even as they stood there in front of everyone. Drug runner, street thug, and rapist.
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