by Cindy Dees
A few moments later, he said, “Patch me through to the colonel.”
Oh God. Charlie Squad headquarters! She leaped to her feet, alarmed, and said frantically, “What are you doing? You haven’t figured out what triggered your blackout! You’ll lose your job if you go in now!”
He shrugged. “So much for my job. Some things are more important than my life, and nailing your father is one of them.”
She closed her eyes, distraught. He was throwing away his career. It was more than his job. It was his life! She’d never meant to cost him so much by approaching him for help.
“Don’t do it,” she whispered, more to herself than to him.
“It’s a done deal, babe. They’re patching me through now.”
A command post somewhere would be linking his call to Colonel Folly’s home phone, or wherever he was tonight. More to the point, a command-post controller would be doing it. She lurched with renewed urgency.
“Dutch, don’t say anything unless you’re on a secure line! You have to make sure nobody else is able to monitor the call!”
He frowned and nodded shortly. He spoke into the phone again. “I need a secure line. This is a Tango One.”
Whatever the heck that was. But, it got him through to his boss in a matter of seconds on a line that audibly shrilled a series of electronic noises through Dutch’s cell phone into the cabin before it settled into silence once more. She listened as he and his boss traded verifications that this was a secure line and a classified conversation.
Then Dutch said, “You’ll never guess who’s sitting beside me right now.” A pause. “Way better than that. Julia Ferrare.”
She could practically hear the exclamation of surprise at the other end of the line.
Dutch again. “She’s got Eduardo’s complete and accurate financial records for the last ten years and is willing to hand them over to us. But there’s a hitch. Ferrare has kidnapped the younger sister and is threatening to kill her if Julia doesn’t return the goods.”
Dutch glanced at her as he spoke. “I thought you’d feel that way, sir. I’ll bring her in as soon as we get out of this blizzard. We’re snowed in right now. In northern Wyoming. An empty cabin I broke into for shelter.”
Julia blurted out, “I’m not going anywhere. Especially not to Charlie Squad headquarters!”
Dutch relayed her statement to his boss. A pause. Then, “She claims to have all sorts of juicy stuff. Says she’s been making funds transfers to someone in the FBI via an offshore account.”
Dutch listened for a moment, then looked at her again. He lifted the phone away from his mouth and spoke to her. “If Charlie Squad can mount a successful rescue of your sister, will you come in from the cold and turn state’s evidence against your father?”
She stared in disbelief. “You guys can’t just waltz in and snatch her! She’s inside my father’s compound in Gavarone. It’s an impregnable fortress!”
Dutch shrugged. “We’ve been chewing on ways to get in there for a decade. It’s not entirely impregnable. Is it a deal?”
It was more than a deal. It was a dream come true. If Carina could be freed and her father put away, her life would be perfect. Well, maybe not perfect. Truly perfect would involve staying alive and having Dutch in her life for a very long time.
She nodded slowly. “Give Colonel Folly a message for me. Tell him he can’t take Carina to Charlie Squad headquarters once he has her.”
“Why not?” Dutch asked sharply.
She dropped the bomb without fanfare. “My father has a mole inside Charlie Squad’s support team, and Carina wouldn’t be safe there.”
Dutch’s jaw dropped. He mumbled into the phone, “Did you catch that, sir?” A pause. “No, she’s serious.” Then he asked her quietly, “Julia, who is Ferrare’s informant near the squad?”
She answered honestly, “I don’t know his name. I do know he’s in the military, and he always knows where Charlie Squad is operating at any given time.”
Dutch flinched at whatever his boss said to him next. Then he said, “I’ll do my best, sir.” Then he listened for a long time, apparently receiving a string of instructions.
She’d bet they involved wringing her like a washcloth for information and not letting her out of his sight at all costs. He turned off the phone and turned to her.
“As soon as this storm breaks, the rest of the team will head for Wyoming. We’ll hook up with them and they’ll help escort you to safety. Then they’ll go get your sister. Ferrare’s thugs aren’t getting anywhere near you again until you testify against that bastard.”
And once she’d done that, then the whole squad could gleefully kill her as a team sport. Lovely.
Now what was she supposed to do? Should she continue trying to contact her father and make the trade? Wouldn’t it be better to buy Carina’s freedom than count on Charlie Squad to force her out of Gavarone in a pitched gun battle? The very thought of Carina being subjected to the same terror she’d experienced that night a decade ago sent shivers rippling through Julia. She had to protect her baby sister from that.
At the end of the day, nothing had changed. She still had to proceed with her plan to ransom Carina away from Eduardo.
At least by involving his boss in this mess, Dutch wasn’t in as good a position to intentionally kill Carina in order to get revenge for losing his brother.
The other good news was that since the thirty million hadn’t come up in Dutch’s conversation with the colonel, she still could use it safely to ransom back Carina.
Dutch paced several laps around the small room. Finally he stopped. “I know you. You’re still not telling me everything. What else is there?”
Dang, he was good. She’d only seconds before decided to go ahead with her negotiations, and he was already smelling a rat. She needed to throw him off the scent.
She answered simply, “Haven’t I told you enough? I got your brother killed. Now you have the power to get my sister killed. You must be tickled pink.”
He stared at her for a long time, his gaze inscrutable. She’d dearly love to know what he was thinking.
Finally, he asked, “What makes you so sure your old man will actually kill your sister? I mean, she’s his daughter, after all.”
She shrugged. “He killed his wife. Why not his daughter?”
Dutch lurched. “Jeez. What a slimy mother—” He broke off the epithet and flopped in a chair, thinking hard.
She girded herself for the next leap in his logic—the one where he remembered how she’d set him up once before, and started questioning whether she was doing the same thing again. But he didn’t bring it up.
Instead, he said, “It’s going to get colder before morning. I need to bring in more wood to get us through the night.”
She hauled a bucket of melted snow into the tiny bathroom, poured it in the back of the toilet and prayed fervently that the pipes weren’t frozen. It flushed just fine and she made her way back to the lone bed in the main room.
Dutch carried in three big armloads of wood and stacked them on the hearth. He threw a pile of logs on the fire, and then he joined her in the cabin’s bed.
It wasn’t the king-size affair she’d gotten used to in hotels, and Dutch’s big body seemed to swallow the whole mattress. But when he rolled on his side and tucked her body against his, spooning around her backside for warmth, it was pretty darned comfortable. A little heat reached her from the fire, and all in all, she was fairly cozy for being in an unheated log cabin in the middle of a blizzard. Exhausted by the day’s events, she fell asleep quickly.
Dutch woke up to the vibration of his watch a few hours later. He crawled out of the cocoon of blankets to throw more wood on the fire. By morning, the stones should be warm enough to heat the whole room to a comfortable level. But for the moment, his breath hung in the air, testament to the chilly temperature. He headed back to bed.
His thoughts full of nailing Eduardo Ferrare once and for all, he drifted off to sleep.
The jungle closed in around him, steamy even at midnight. He lay on the ground where the bullet had knocked his leg out from under him. The dull glint of a long, fanglike knife blade arced down. Into Simon’s gut.
Simon’s scream echoed his own silent howl of rage and all but ripped out his guts, too. Agony exploded inside him as if he was being eviscerated instead of his brother. He shoved to his feet. Damn, his gut really did burn like fire. He glanced down. A red streak slashed across his stomach. A bullet must have creased him. Didn’t feel as if it had penetrated. Probably just grazed him. Not that anything was going to stop him from getting to his little brother.
A crackle on his radio. “Dutch, get down! You’re squarely in the crossfire. A sitting duck!”
“Can’t,” he grunted back. “Simon—”
“You can’t help Simon if you’re dead. Get down. Now! That’s an order.”
He dropped. Automatic reflex reaction to an order, dammit. But he kept crawling toward Simon and the bastard who was now crouching beside his brother, stabbing Simon repeatedly.
He kept pulling the trigger of his empty rifle as if more bullets would materialize in the chamber and drop the bastard. Another reflex he had no control over.
“Retreat!” Captain Folly bellowed over the radio. The din of a burst of gunfire nearly drowned him out. “Fall back. Into the jungle. Proceed due south for a hundred yards, then regroup on my position.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Dutch saw his teammates following the order and moving off toward his left in a fighting retreat. His brain felt wrapped in fog. He was supposed to go with them.
“Simon…” he protested into his throat mike.
“There’s nothing we can do for him now,” Folly bit out. “Fall back.”
“We don’t leave our own behind,” Dutch snapped back.
“We do this time. We’ve got to regroup. We’ll come back for him in a little while. I swear. But we’re all going to die if we don’t get out of the line of fire and get a head count and position fix on what we’re up against.”
Simon was less than a dozen yards ahead of him now. Just a few more seconds.
And then Simon turned his head and looked at Dutch. The kid was still alive! By some miracle, his eyes were open and aware and staring straight at him. Beseeching his big brother not to leave him here to die alone.
The bastard reached for Simon’s hair. Took a handful of it and yanked Simon’s chin up. The bloody knife descended slowly toward his brother’s jugular.
Orders be damned. All in one move, Dutch leaped up and flung himself forward. He caught the fist holding the knife, twisted the weapon still in the guy’s grasp, and drove it into the guy’s throat in a lethal blow.
And then another scream caught his attention. A high-pitched keening that had to come from a female throat. His head whipped around. He swore violently. Julia. What the hell was she doing running down the front lawn toward him? She was supposed to be hiding in the gazebo, safe on the other side of the house from this fiasco!
“Stop! Stop!” she screamed over and over. She was coming straight at him. She wanted him to stop? Not a chance. Simon’s intestines might be spread all over the front yard, but he was getting his brother out of here if it was the last thing he ever did. Hell, it probably would be the last thing he ever did.
“Dutch. Julia’s coming right at you. Get her out of there.”
He blinked at Folly’s orders. Glanced down at Simon. Looked up at the panicked girl racing toward him. But his brother…
He knew his duty. Get the innocent civilian out. He knelt down. Tore off his shirt. Awkwardly bundled the slippery mass of Simon’s intestines in the cloth and set it on top of Simon’s gut. He knew better than to stuff them back in his brother’s body before they were cleaned and repaired. Otherwise, peritonitis would kill Simon for sure.
God, he looked like an angel lying there. Almost otherworldly in his pale, blond perfection. So damn peaceful. Simon opened his eyes. Looked up at him. “Thanks, bro,” he murmured.
Something hot and wet ran down Dutch’s face. Stung his eyes like hell. Burned his cheeks. His heart felt as if it was cracking in two. “Don’t you die on me, you little punk. Fight, dammit!”
Simon’s hand lifted an inch or so, then fell back to the ground. Dutch grabbed it, and Simon tugged on it so weakly he barely felt it. Dutch ducked as a barrage of lead flew close to his head and he put his ear next to Simon’s mouth. A bare whisper of breath touched his skin.
“Love…you…”
Folly’s voice cut into his other ear, sharp. Desperate. “Dutch, get the girl and get the hell out of there before I shoot you myself!”
He ignored his boss’s order and lifted up enough to look down into Simon’s clear, sky-blue eyes. Tears ran unchecked down his face, dripping onto Simon’s pale cheek. “I love you, too, little brother.”
And then Julia was beside him, tugging on his arm with frantic urgency. “Get out of here! They’ll kill you, too,” she pleaded, close to hysterical. He heard the words, but they passed by him, not really touching his consciousness.
And then he heard a thud, and Julia toppled into him as if something heavy had just hit her and knocked her over. He caught her as much to keep her from crashing into Simon as to steady her.
“Go…” Simon gasped. A bubble of spit and blood formed at the corner of his mouth.
And that one word finally penetrated his brain. The lightning-and-thunder fury of an all-out gun battle slammed into him in a rush, along with awareness of the mortal danger that he and Julia were both in.
Julia. The innocent young girl he’d half seduced into helping them set up this nightmare. He had to get her out of here. If he didn’t, she’d be lucky if all her father did was kill her.
He glanced up at her. And blinked at the crimson stain spreading on her shirt along her right side. She’d been hit!
He glanced down at Simon, whose eyes were closed now. He looked unconscious, but just in case, Dutch called down to him, “I’ll get you out of here in a couple of minutes, Simon. I’ve got to get Julia under cover first. And then I’ll be back for you.”
A groan of agony at leaving his brother’s side escaped his throat as he grabbed her left arm and took off running, all but dragging her across the expanse of lawn toward the wall of black that was the jungle and safety…
“Please, Dutch! Wake up!”
He swam up through the layers of horror still clinging to his mind. Bit by bit, a cabin took shape around him, replacing the humid rot of the jungle. Something hot and wet still burned his face. Grief tore at him, as raw and fresh as if it all had just happened. An impulse to rip the agony out of his body by main force nearly overcame him. An urge to claw out his eyes, to tear at his flesh, rocked him.
He heard a moan of anguish. Had that sound come from his throat?
A curtain of dark hair fell around his face and darker eyes captured his gaze, holding it as forcefully as the slender but surprisingly strong hands grasping his shoulders.
“You’re safe. You’re with me, now. I love you.”
Who did those eyes, those vaguely heard words, belong to?
Pain so deep he thought it would kill him seared its way through his gut. Something shifted nearby, and his head was lifted. Gently set down on something soft. Warm. A hand stroked his hair. His face. Wiping away the tears.
Oh, God. It hurt. Simon…
The lap cradling his head rocked back and forth gently. Slowly, slowly, the motion soothed him. The soft hand wiped away more tears. And gradually, meaningless murmurs of comfort eased the suffering in his heart. Not a lot, but enough for him to breathe again. He reached up. Captured one of the hands and pulled it close, tucking it against his cheek. And finally, he slept.
He woke up some time later and sat up slowly. He ached all over. Where was he? He felt wrung out. Drained to the last drop of emotion. What in the hell had happened? He looked around in the dim firelight.
The air was cold, h
anging brittle around him. The fire was down to a pile of glowing embers. By rote, he got up and stacked a half-dozen stout pieces of wood over the coals. Lord, he was tired. He felt as if he’d been worked over with a baseball bat. So exhausted he could hardly stand, he stumbled back to bed and crawled under the covers.
He curled around Julia’s body heat, huddling against her reassuring warmth. He hadn’t felt this lost in years. She was the only solid thing in his life, and he clung to her like the lifeline she was.
He ought to pull away from her. Stay away… But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember why right now. She was so inexorably intertwined with his pain and its relief that he barely knew where the dream ended and she began.
He slept fitfully through the remainder of the night. He woke up once more, mumbling Simon’s name, and immediately felt Julia’s hands on him. He stumbled out of bed to pile more wood on the fire and then collapsed back into her arms again. He let her guide his head down to her chest. He shouldn’t need her like this, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He sank into her. Accepted the loving comfort she offered. The steady sound of her heartbeat was the last thing he remembered before he went comatose.
By morning, the little cabin had warmed up to a civilized temperature, and the pot of water he’d hung by the fire the night before simmered hot enough to make a passable cup of coffee.
He felt like hell, but somehow the wan light of day pushed the terrors of the previous night back to the margins of his consciousness. He had a blurry memory of Julia holding him, talking him back from the edge while he was snared in his nightmare, deep in the throes of his darkest hours. He got the distinct impression that, had it not been for her, he’d have been in serious trouble last night.
She’d said something important. But it was as lost to him as the rest of the night’s details. If he could only remember! It tickled at the edges of his mind, tantalizing him with its nearness. But it wouldn’t show itself.
Frankly, he didn’t want to remember more. If he could halt his memory’s return, he would. Better the black void and the frustration of not knowing what had happened that fateful night in the jungle than trying to live with the ghastly details flooding back into his mind so relentlessly now.