Risk no Secrets

by Cindy Gerard

  “The ground will run red with your blood before I’m finished with you,” Bonilla taunted, his white teeth glinting through his smirk of satisfaction.

  “What? This scratch? If that’s the best you’ve got, you don’t deserve to wear the gang colors.”

  It always amazed Wyatt that so many professed killers didn’t get that fighting wasn’t about being pissed off. Fighting was about mind over matter, inertia over brawn, calm over rage.

  Bonilla was falling behind on all three. He roared again. Lunged again. Wyatt dodged left. He spun a full three-sixty, hooked out his foot on the back swing, and caught Bonilla hard on his shin. The gang leader crashed face-first into the dirt.

  He was fast, though, and up on his feet again before Wyatt could move in. Ignoring the fire raging in his left arm, Wyatt assumed a wide-legged crouch, dancing his weight from one foot to the other, egging on Bonilla to strike again. He didn’t disappoint him.

  Bonilla charged in, shoulders high, and at the last second dove for Wyatt’s left knee. The impact knocked him off-balance. Before he could recover, Bonilla tackled him to the ground. The knife sliced down again, straight for his throat. Wyatt jerked his head left, blocked with a forearm, and felt the tip of the blade slice his earlobe before slamming into the dirt beside his head.

  He rolled again, bucked Bonilla off, and swung the blade all in one motion. When he felt it connect with bone and heard Bonilla’s gasp of pain, he doubled his pressure on the blade, following through with his forward motion.

  Bonilla groaned, and Wyatt hesitated, trying to get a read on the damage he’d done to Bonilla’s ribs. It proved a crucial mistake. Propelled by pain and bone-deep survival instincts, Bonilla hauled back with a wild swing that caught Wyatt across his chest in a slashing diagonal slice that spanned from his right collarbone to just under his left pec.

  Wyatt rolled again and rose to his knees, breathing hard as Bonilla struggled to rise to a sitting position. Wyatt didn’t hesitate this time. He shot from his knees and, sucking air, flew the scant three feet to reach Bonilla.

  His shoulder rammed into Bonilla’s chest, slamming him to his back and knocking the wind out of him. Wyatt went in for the kill. He levered his left forearm over Bonilla’s throat, choking off his air supply. Then he jammed the blade up and under Bonilla’s ribs, ripping his diaphragm and severing the aorta.

  Bonilla’s eyes widened with shock, then narrowed with the realization that he was a dead man.

  Dark eyes, pleading for life, locked on Wyatt’s. A palsied hand reached up, grabbed at his shirt, fingers curling into a claw that never found purchase.

  “That was for Sophie,” Wyatt gritted. “This is for Lola.” He gave the knife one final hard twist, and Bonilla stopped breathing.

  For a long moment, Wyatt couldn’t move. He lay on top of the dead gang leader, panting for breath. He finally rolled off him, lay prostrate on the bloody ground, gathering strength, blood pumping from the adrenaline feed, head ringing from the blood loss.

  And then the ground lit up like a football field.

  The Little Birds had arrived, searchlights engaged.

  Fuck. Holy fuck. He needed to get up. He needed to find cover. He needed … shit. He needed a bunker, but he wasn’t going to get one. Weak from blood loss, all he could do was lie there under the whip of the rotor wash as the birds dropped closer and started leveling the field with a barrage of the M134 guns.

  He covered his eyes with his arm to shield them against the blinding lights that lanced into the darkness.

  This is it, he thought, and felt a calm settle over him unlike any he’d ever experienced.

  This is the moment I am going to die.

  He breathed deep of night and his own sweat and blood and gave himself over to fate. On one last concession to faith, he fumbled with the IR strobe he’d attached to his collar and flipped it on.

  Not that it would save him now. He was bull’s-eye center in the kill zone. The pilots were good, they’d be looking for his light. But they weren’t that good. He knew it. They knew it. Just like he knew they’d do what they were best at, what they’d been trained to do: kill bad guys and break their toys.

  The bangers had mobilized. They shouldered their AKs and fired skyward. Wyatt watched with a disconnected sort of awe as the belly of a Little Bird breached the opening in the canopy of trees, then dropped like a feather into the kill zone. Tracer rounds danced through the dark like a laser show. The earth erupted as fiery bursts from the guns peppered the Devil’s Tail on either side of him, thundering through the night like black death.

  Bangers screamed and swore and dropped under the onslaught of the M134 guns that roared like chainsaws and were every bit as destructive. Brass from thousands of spent shells rained down. It was like lying out in the open in a hailstorm, only the hot brass burned his skin and would never melt away to nothing.

  This is it, he thought one last time when a gun run slammed shells into the dirt within a yard of his head. Then he closed his eyes and waited for the volley that would take him.

  30

  “For the last time, Sophie,” Hugh ground out, “we need to get out of here.”

  “And for the last time, we are not leaving him!” Sophie glared at Hugh from the backseat, weary of the argument, determined to win.

  Hugh sat behind the wheel of the SUV, engine running, his expression just short of savage. Once they’d escaped Bonilla and piled into the SUV, Hugh had driven no more than fifty yards away from the Devil’s Tail when she had ordered, demanded, and, finally, near hysterics, screamed at him to stop.

  When he hadn’t complied, it was Joe who finally convinced him with a firm, concise threat. “Stop the fucking vehicle, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  That had been less than fifteen minutes ago, and the barrage of gunfire from the attack helicopters hadn’t let up since.

  Hugh had fallen into a sullen silence. Sophie had drawn her knees to her chest and lowered her head between them, praying for the gunfire to stop. But like the relentless whine of the choppers’ turbo engines, the guns just kept firing and firing and firing.

  Wyatt. Oh, God. Wyatt was out there, and it didn’t matter how many times Joe Green told her he was wearing an infrared strobe that the pilot could see and therefore would not target, she didn’t know how he could possibly survive the devastating excess of firepower.

  Tears blurred her vision, but she tried to keep it together for Lola’s sake. The little girl was already traumatized. So traumatized that when Joe Green had scooped her up in his arms and hustled her out of Bonilla’s clutches, Lola had latched on to him like a monkey. She’d clung like Velcro ever since, and Joe—big, tough, ate-razor-blades-for-breakfast Joe—hadn’t had the heart to pry her off his big body. He’d just held her, patted her little back with his big hand, and told her nobody was going to hurt her again.

  “They’ve stopped,” Green said into a sudden silence.

  The guns have stopped!

  Sophie lifted her head. She looked out the window and up into a jungle canopy as black as onyx and watched the lights from the Little Birds fade away.

  “We have to find him.” She shoved open the SUV’s rear door and stepped out into the dark. Wyatt was out there. Hurt. Possibly dying. She refused to believe he was dead.

  Hugh piled out from behind the driver’s seat and caught her when she would have run blindly into the dark. He jerked her around to face him. “He was already down, Sophie. Listen to me.” He gave her a shake when she tried to pull away. “He was down in the middle of the kill zone. No one could have survived that attack.”

  She pulled against his hold on her arm. “We’re not leaving him out there!”

  “You heard the lady.”

  She whipped her head around and saw Joe, his arms still full of Lola, rounding the front of the vehicle and walking toward them.

  “All right.” Hugh heaved a deep breath. “But you’re staying here. Tell her she’s staying here,” he said with
a glance over his shoulder at Joe.

  “He’s right,” Joe said over Lola’s head. “The boys in the birds had to have lit up most of the bangers, but some of them could have scattered into the jungle. They could come out shooting at any time. You aren’t going to do Wyatt or anyone else any good if you become a target.”

  He tried to hand the little girl over to Sophie, clearly intending to help Hugh search for Wyatt. But when Lola whimpered and clung tighter, a “What am I going to do?” look came over his face.

  Hugh gave Joe a nod. “One of us needs to stay with Sophie and Lola. Looks like you’re it.”

  Then Hugh grabbed a mag-light and an M-4 and headed back toward the Devil’s Tail.

  The pain told him he was alive. The pain and the sudden silence. It was that silence that had Wyatt finally opening his eyes to an empty sky.

  The birds were gone. Mission accomplished.

  And damn, he was alive while only inches away from where he lay, the earth smoked like the fires of hell.

  “Wyatt!”

  The voice came out of the distant dark, competing with the ringing in his ears. He listened, not sure if he’d imagined it.

  “Savage!”

  Not his imagination. It was Hugh. He recognized his voice.

  He jerked upright, fought back a wave of dizziness, and squinted into the night. A bouncing white light danced toward him. A mag-light, growing closer as its beams swept the field. Searching.

  On a grunt of pain, he rolled to his stomach, surprised that all of his limbs were attached and working. Another push, and he rose to his knees, then promptly sat back on his heels when another wave of dizziness swamped him.

  “Over here!” he managed, surprised when his words sounded so faint.

  Hugh sprinted over to his side, a hard look on his face. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

  Wyatt grunted. “Makes two of us. Help me up.” He held up a hand … and got a boot in his chest that slammed him to his back.

  He gasped against the new insult of pain, then shook off the surprise and focused on Hugh’s face. One look at his old friend’s eyes, and he knew. Jesus. Everything came together in that heartbeat. Everything he hadn’t wanted to see or believe about why Hugh had dragged his feet, fought him at every turn.

  “Why couldn’t you just die?” Hugh glared at him, his expression a mix of remorse and anger and wild-eyed desperation. “Why couldn’t you just fucking die?”

  How ironic was this? He’d survived Bonilla. Lived through the Little Bird air strike. Now he was going to die at the hands of a man he had once called brother.

  “Not going to be easy killing me, huh?”

  Hugh glared at him, the cold determination in his eyes drilling to the bone. “I’ve wanted you dead since I found you in my wife’s bed.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” Wyatt said, fighting through the pain of his knife wounds that paled in the face of Hugh’s betrayal. “But that’s not why you’re going to kill me. This has to do with Bonilla, doesn’t it?”

  Hugh laughed grimly. “Always were too smart for me, Bear. When did you figure it out?”

  “That you were in bed with Bonilla on Lola’s kidnapping?” He shrugged, angry, disappointed, disillusioned, and soon, if Hugh had his way, dead. “Not soon enough. Wasn’t until tonight, when Nate Black told me that our IO had discovered you were in El Salvador all along that it started to come together. Couldn’t figure out why you’d let Sophie think you weren’t here. But things had been working on me, you know? I guess I had a big blind spot when it came to you … being you’ve been like a brother to me and all.”

  Hugh’s mouth tightened. Guilt and regret flashed across his face. Not enough, though. Not enough to stop him from pulling the trigger.

  “Tell me something. Why didn’t you just help her if you were here all along?” Wyatt asked, hoping that if he kept him talking, bought some time, he could figure a way out.

  Hugh shook his head, a wild, desperate look in his eyes. “That turned out to be a bad call on my part.”

  “Because she called me in when she couldn’t reach you,” Wyatt surmised.

  “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “Because of that.”

  “Why?” Wyatt asked. “Why are you involved in this? Why abduct Lola?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be Lola!” Hugh roared, and Wyatt saw more than just desperation and regret. He saw the desolate helplessness of a man on the edge. “It was supposed to be Hope.”

  “Your own child?”

  “She’s not my fucking kid!” He pointed the M-4 dead center at Wyatt’s chest, his eyes beyond wild now and edging toward insanity. “Christ, it was supposed to be a cake walk. Sophie’s old man would pay up, we got her back. End of story. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”

  “But I showed up and threw a wrench in the gears.” Wyatt struggled to raise himself on his elbows, gritted out the pain in both his arm and his chest. “Makes sense now. You’ve been pulling the strings on this all along. Had your thugs feed us bogus leads to steer us away from Bonilla. You sent us running around like chickens with our heads cut off.”

  “For your own damn good! I tried to save you. I tried to get you the hell out of the picture. But you couldn’t stop yourself from playing hero, could you? Just couldn’t leave it alone. Damn you! You almost got Sophie killed. And now … Jesus, Wyatt, now I’m going to have to kill you. Don’t you see it? Don’t you see that I’ve got to get you out of the picture?”

  Wyatt could only stare, unable to comprehend what had happened to this man he had once trusted with his life. “Why didn’t you tell me you were in trouble? I could have helped. I would have helped.”

  Hugh pushed out an ugly laugh. “You couldn’t help. It was too late for anyone to help. They were going to kill me.”

  “Who?”

  “What the fuck do you care?” Hugh roared.

  “You have to ask that? After all we’ve been to each other?”

  Hugh looked away, looked ashamed. “I got into some shit with the Bratva, all right? Some money shit. Fuckers were going to kill me if I didn’t clear the slate.”

  Bratva. The Russian Mafia. “Jesus, Hugh.”

  “We can’t all be Boy Scouts, Bear. We can’t all lead charmed lives.”

  In the midst of the jumble of unbelievable conclusions, something occurred to him. “All those kidnappings. The ones you helped broker. They were all—”

  “Staged,” Hugh interrupted. “I worked a deal with Bonilla; we split the ransoms. And don’t you fucking look at me like that! I do what I have to do to get by.” He shook his head again, a loose cannon with a very short fuse. “And I had a handle on it until you screwed things up. You should have left well enough alone. You should have just backed off when I told you to!” He took a step toward him, then backed away again, his actions disjointed and jerky, a man on the verge of losing it.

  “The Hernandez girl,” Wyatt said to keep him talking. “Were you a part of that, too?”

  Hugh’s silence was as good as an admission.

  “I don’t get it. If you needed the money, why give her up to us?”

  “I didn’t,” Hugh said with loathing. “You weren’t supposed to find her. You weren’t supposed to be here,” he said again, as if repeating it would make it go away. He drew the rifle to his shoulder and aimed down the sites.

  “Why Sophie?” Wyatt asked abruptly, stalling for more time. “Why did you have to bring her into this?”

  Hugh breathed deep, lowered the gun, and leveled Wyatt with a look of rage so potent it felt like a gut punch. “Again. I didn’t. She wasn’t supposed to get hurt. She wasn’t supposed to be touched by this, but you pushed Bonilla past the limits. First by cutting him out of his ransom when you rescued the Hernandez girl, then with your commando raids on his cribs. You killed his men. You cost him money. You cost him face. And you cost me an alliance. And that, my friend, is why he took Sophie. To stick it to me for the trouble you caused.”

  “So you break bread w
ith the devil and this is all my fault?”

  “Fuck you and your righteous indignation,” Hugh shot back. “You haven’t been where I’ve been.”

  A wave of sorrow blindsided him—sorrow for who Hugh had been, for what they’d been to each other. Who was this man? This man who had been his best friend, who had been his equal. “That wasn’t me in Mogadishu? Or in Lebanon? That wasn’t me dragging your ass out of Beirut under fire?”

  “Yeah, like I said, you were always the Boy Scout,” Hugh acknowledged with a sour smile. “Always played by the rules, didn’t you? Always bled red, white, and blue.”

  “So did you.” Wyatt’s grief played second only to disgust. “Christ, Hugh, what happened to you?”

  “Things changed. I changed. I work for the money now, okay?” Hugh shouted as if that would somehow make things right.

  “You had it all, brother.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right. I got the girl, didn’t I?”

  “You lost the girl,” Wyatt pointed out.

  “And I want her back!” Hugh screamed. “She would have come back, too. I would have gotten my share of the ransom to pay off Bravta, Lola would be safe, and—”

  “And you’d be Sophie’s hero again,” Wyatt finished as the last bizarre puzzle piece fit into place.

  “Goddamn right!” Hugh’s eyes flashed conviction and hatred, and in that moment, Wyatt understood that Hugh wasn’t merely corrupt and lost, he was a little bit insane. “She doesn’t love you,” Hugh said. “She could never love you.”

  “Yeah, well, guess that’s a moot point now, isn’t it, being as how you’ve got the gun and all.”

  “Get up,” Hugh ordered, motioning with the nose of the rifle. “Get up and run.”

  Wyatt managed to laugh. “So you can shoot me in the back? Make it look like a banger got me? Shit, Hugh, if I ran, I’d just die tired. And I’m already tired. Sorry, old friend. If you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to look me in the eye when you pull that trigger. And you’re going to have to explain to Sophie why I’m dead.”