by Peter Nealen
Flanagan rubbed his eyes. “So, you need me to track him down and corral him.”
“You know his haunts better than any of the rest of us,” Brannigan said.
“Not willingly,” Flanagan muttered, most of his good mood gone. Kevin Curtis was like his little brother, and he’d gotten into plenty of trouble because of the other man, but it got exhausting at times. Especially since the two of them couldn’t have been more different.
Flanagan liked the woods, solitude, and peace and quiet when he wasn’t fighting. Curtis? Not so much.
“I’ll track him down,” he said, turning back to his truck. “And then I’m going to beat the hell out of him.”
“What, just for being hard to find?” Brannigan asked. “You weren’t exactly an easy mark.”
“No,” he said. “Just for being Kevin.”
***
John Wade was about ready to strangle somebody.
His foul mood wasn’t entirely about the pack of incompetents that he and George Jenkins were teaching. Not entirely. Sure, the dude in the fifty-six-inch waist Multicam pants had almost shot himself while trying to lecture the cute girl on the firing line next to him, and then had the balls to get huffy when Wade yelled at him. And the girl wasn’t too much better; she seemed to be trying to flirt her way to a discount, or something.
But that wasn’t all of it. Those were annoyances enough; Wade did not suffer fools gladly. But the fact of the matter was, he didn’t really want to be there.
He didn’t give a damn about these people. He really didn’t even need the money. The jobs for Brannigan’s Blackhearts, coupled with his retirement from the Army, meant he could live comfortably and do nothing between trips overseas, or wherever the next mission took them.
But with his daughter back with his bitch of an ex, and no new job coming down the pipe in the last couple of months, he’d needed something to do. So, when Jenkins, apparently bored with watching over Childress—which only made Wade dislike the cocky former SEAL even more—had approached him about restarting the shooting school they’d set up the year before on Don Hart’s farm, he’d agreed.
Don had died in Chad. But, depressive drunk that he’d been, he’d done his paperwork. Leaving no family behind, he’d left his farm to the Blackhearts. He’d left it to Hancock, really, and Hancock had declared it open to any of them for training.
So, here they were, trying to teach basic defensive pistol to a bunch of morons, while Jenkins preened in front of the chicks and tried to show them stuff that was outside of their expertise, probably in the hopes that he might get laid over it.
Any other time, Wade might have been right there with him. But he just didn’t have the patience at the moment. So, he was standing back behind the firing line, his arms folded, watching the pathetic performance in front of him, gritting his teeth and wishing that the day was already over.
The phone in his back pocket going off was actually a relief. When he saw that it was Santelli, it was even more of a relief.
“Tell me we’ve got a job, Carlo,” he said.
“We do,” Santelli said, his Boston Italian accent as thick as ever. The former Sergeant Major’s callsign of “Guido” fit him. “Bit of a high-risk retrieval. Usual place for planning and prep, Saturday.”
“We’ll be there with fucking bells on,” Wade said. “Jenkins will just have to leave his booty call for another time.”
“Is he with you?” Santelli asked.
“Yeah, we’re down at Don’s place trying to teach a class,” he replied. “It’s a shit-show. I don’t have the patience for teaching civilians, and Jenkins is an idiot.”
Jenkins was paying too much attention to the two petite girls whose halter tops were considerably less than ideal for range wear to hear him, not that Wade cared if he did. He glanced at the girls; he could appreciate the view, but they were going to get brass burns in places that marred that view. Oh well. They were the ones without the common sense to dress for the range.
“How much longer you got?” Santelli asked. “Can you wrap it up, or are you going to have to give refunds?”
“Ah, another hour, maybe,” Wade said. He wasn’t honestly sure if he was going to be able to last that long; knowing that there was work had improved his mood somewhat, but now he was, if anything, even more impatient to be done with these jackasses and back out in the real world. “We’ll wrap it up and head over.”
“Good to go,” Santelli said. “I’ve got to call Gomez.”
“Good luck,” Wade replied, as Santelli hung up and he went back to watching the amateurs try not to kill themselves.
***
Mario Gomez shoved the phone back in his pocket, and stared out at the desert to the south of the ranch house. For the first time in months, a small, wolfish smile creased his dark features. Finally.
He’d gone on the rescue mission for Childress, but only because there was no way he was going to be left behind, and with half the team in Africa, Santelli couldn’t exactly have told him no.
But he’d been told that he wasn’t going to Africa. That he had to stay back and make sure that his sister was safe. Which, if he was being honest, had been a concern. It hadn’t been all that long since the Blackhearts had gone through the Espino-Gallo gang like foxes in a henhouse. And even less time since “El Estripador” had paid the Gomez ranch one final, and very fatal, visit. With their father, mother, and brother dead, Mario and Sonya had only had each other, and the possibility that they’d left someone alive on the other side of the border who might seek revenge hadn’t been a slight one. He’d needed to stay in place and do what he could to make sure his sister was safe.
But that had been months ago. And he’d taken steps.
Only his practiced eye picked out where Francisco Gomez was sitting on overwatch up on the bluff. Francisco had been a Ranger, a point of long-standing contention between the two of them. Mario had been a Recon Marine.
Francisco wasn’t the only young Gomez scattered around the ranch these days. The rest of their immediate family might be dead, but the Gomezes had a lot of cousins. Many of whom were more than slightly comfortable with violence. Francisco had been a Ranger. Joaquin and Martin had been in the 173rd Airborne. Julian, Aaron, and Rafael had all been in the Army, and Rafael had been contracting off and on ever since. Dante was only there for a week every once in a while; he was a cop in Albuquerque. Which occasionally made things a little tense with Luis and Cristobal, who, Mario was pretty sure, were both gang-bangers. He didn’t know which gang, though given the way they usually dressed, he suspected they were mixed in with the Sureños. Right at that point, he didn’t especially care. They were family, and they could do violence when the situation called for it.
The cousins were doing a halfway decent job of running the ranch, though it was still a shadow of what it had been under Mario’s father, Juan. Francisco had turned out to be a better ranch foreman than Mario, to his utter lack of surprise. Mario was a hunter, a predator. He knew it. His parents had never been comfortable with just how adept he was at violence, how drawn to it he was. He’d always been quiet, but that quiet masked a savage streak that he had always attributed to the Mescalero Apache blood in his veins, the blood of his mother’s people.
Now that the ranch was protected and in good hands, Mario was free again. Free to go to war with his real brothers, the Blackhearts.
He started up the bluff to talk to Francisco. He’d say goodbye to Sonya later.
***
Flanagan knocked on the apartment door again, trying not to think too hard about what he might see when the door opened. Going to Kevin Curtis’ apartment was rarely a comfortable experience.
Once, he’d nearly had to shoot an irate Latina woman who had been ready to stab them both, apparently because Curtis had been in the middle of breaking up with her.
The barely-dressed blonde who had answered the door when he’d come looking for Curtis before they’d gone after the Espino-Gallo cartel had been
almost as uncomfortable, for entirely different reasons.
He sometimes wondered why he stayed Curtis’ friend. The other man had only ever gotten him into trouble, and seemed to revel in it.
But the truth was, they’d been through hell together, and despite the shenanigans at home, he knew that Curtis would give his life for him. And vice versa.
He just wished the other man would finally grow up.
He knocked again, frowning. Like Brannigan, he hadn’t been able to get through to Curtis’ phone. Which had precipitated a one-man manhunt through Curtis’ usual haunts in Las Vegas. The two men had known each other long enough that Flanagan knew where most of them were.
When he hadn’t turned up at any of them, Flanagan started to get concerned. And now he wasn’t answering his door.
He pressed an ear to the door, acutely conscious that he was in an open hallway. But there wasn’t anyone else out there.
There might have been a faint sound. His eyes narrowed as he pulled away from the door. With a long-suffering sigh, he pulled a key out of his pocket and let himself in.
The entryway to the apartment was dark. In fact, the whole place was dark, lit only by the neon glow of Las Vegas coming in the big picture window facing the street. The Luxor’s spotlight stabbed up into the Nevada night sky, made hazy by gauzy curtains over the window.
“Kevin?” he called, though his eyes had already moved to the figure sitting in a chair near the window. His hand moved toward the butt of the .45 in his belt, just in case.
“Joe?” It was Curtis, but he sounded like hell. Flanagan reached over and flipped on the light.
“Oh, hell.”
The living room was a mess, littered with empty bottles. Curtis was slumped in an overstuffed easy chair, another bottle dangling from his hand, mostly empty. He hadn’t shaved his face or his head in days, and his squinted eyes were bloodshot and bleary.
“What the hell happened to you?” Flanagan asked, his hand falling away from the pistol. Curtis looked away, starting to lift the bottle to his lips, but Flanagan stepped in and tore it away from him. He glanced around. Knowing the partier that Curtis was, it must have taken most of the booze in the apartment to get him this loaded.
“Talk to me, Kevin,” he said. “What happened?” He didn’t think he’d ever seen his friend like this before. The bodybuilder, gambler, ladies’ man, and machinegunner was usually the bounciest and loudest of them all. He wasn’t given to depression or alcoholism, despite his wild life.
Curtis finally looked up at him, his eyes reddened spots of white in his ebony face, framed with black stubble.
“She rejected me, man,” he mumbled. “Didn’t want anything to do with me.” He slumped deeper in the chair.
Flanagan frowned. Curtis had a way with women, but Flanagan himself had seen the man get rejected plenty of times. What would…
“Oh, hell,” he said. “You came on to Sanda, didn’t you?”
Ma Sanda had been a Burmese student whom one of their earlier teammates, David Aziz, had brought on to act as an interpreter when they’d gone into Burma. It had turned out that the two of them had been banging, and Aziz had done it mainly to get one over on the team, bringing a bedmate along on a mission. But Sanda had toughened up quick and had gotten through the mission, and as a result had become something of a little sister to the rest of them. She hadn’t been remotely interested in going back out, but several of the Blackhearts who’d gone to Burma still kept in touch.
But Curtis being Curtis, he’d started to make his moves some time before. He’d been slowed, or so Flanagan had thought, by warnings that trying to screw the team’s little sister wouldn’t be a good idea. But it seemed that some lessons Curtis just had to learn the hard way.
Though, apparently, he’d learned it from her, rather than from an irate teammate.
Curtis nodded miserably and drunkenly. “Said she knew I was a tomcat,” he muttered. “That she wasn’t into that anymore. And that she ‘loved me like a brother,’ anyway.” He sniffed. “That’s not as comforting as women think it is.”
Flanagan sighed. “No, it isn’t,” he agreed, setting the half-empty bottle on the counter and reaching down to haul his teammate to his feet. “Come on. I’ll get you over to the shower then start making some coffee. You can sleep the rest of this off on the way to the Colonel’s place.”
Chapter 6
The weather was nice enough that the Blackhearts were back at their usual “briefing room,” a campsite about half a mile up the mountain from Brannigan’s cabin. Towering firs encircled the clearing, where Brannigan had put in a semi-permanent wall tent and a fire ring. The rocky peak rose high above to the north.
Ignatius Kirk had shown up, though Brannigan hadn’t been sure who had contacted the man, or even how. If Brannigan was somewhat reclusive, Kirk was a hermit. To the best of his knowledge, the man didn’t have a phone, and hadn’t since he’d left Special Forces. His place was deep in the woods, and they’d only recruited him because Tom Burgess had known where to find him.
He was clearly something of a chameleon, too. He’d shown up in an ancient-looking beater truck that looked like it was held together by spit, bailing wire, and bird droppings. But a moment’s listening had revealed that there was a very powerful, very smooth-running engine under that battered, rust-spotted hood. Kirk looked like a bum because he wanted to.
Brannigan could somewhat appreciate that, as little as he knew the bearish, red-bearded man sitting on a stump at the edge of the circle. Hell, he’d had to ask whether Kirk was his first name or his last name. Once he’d found out that his first name was “Ignatius,” he could kind of understand why he went by Kirk most of the time.
He looked around the group that was standing, sitting on camp chairs, or sitting on stumps and log rounds. The face of the Blackhearts had changed a little since he had first met with Santelli, Hancock, Flanagan, Curtis, Aziz, and Villareal prior to the Khadarkh job. They were a little more numerous, but the gaps where the dead had been still lingered.
So far, no one had really quit the Blackhearts. Sanda and Townes had been strap-hangers, not really Blackhearts themselves. The others who were gone had been killed.
“All right,” he said, pulling out the folder and laying it on the folding camp table he’d set next to the fire ring. “I know I told everyone over the phone that this was a retrieval mission, because we were on the phone. ‘Retrieval’ can mean just about anything. In this case, it’s a manhunt for a High Value Target who blasted his way through an FBI cordon and left a lot of dead agents behind him when he fled the country. Our instructions are to kill or capture Jason Bevan, billionaire playboy, and apparently something of a facilitator for the Humanity Front.”
There wasn’t a stir at that. None of the Blackhearts were the type. But he felt their attention sharpen.
“What kind of facilitator?” Wade asked.
“Fundraising, money laundering, influence peddling, buying politicians, that sort of thing,” Brannigan said. “It’s doubtful that he’s had much of anything to do with the down-and-dirty operations, but he’s definitely been something of a financial mover and shaker. And he’s apparently important enough for a platoon of shooters and a helicopter to get him out before the FBI could drop the hammer.”
“If he’s out, where is he?” Burgess asked. He was lounging in a folding camp chair, his feet up on a log.
“Argentina,” Brannigan said, spreading a map on the table. “Way up near the Peruvian and Bolivian borders, in a recently-built, very expensive villa. A very, very expensive villa, I should mention. Whatever’s in there, it’s probably more than just a fancy mansion. I’ve seen the figures on the money that went into building the place.”
“Where did the information come from?” Hancock asked. His face and voice were flat, almost disinterested, and Brannigan shot him a glance, the faintest trace of a frown creasing his brow. Then he sighed, knowing what was coming next.
“I got the informati
on from Erika Dalca,” he said.
That did cause a bit of a stir, though Kirk and Burgess just looked around at the others, unsure who they were talking about.
“Dalca again?” Flanagan asked. “Her contact in Transnistria didn’t exactly work out well, as I recall.”
“No, he didn’t,” Brannigan agreed. Anatoly Gorev had been hired or recruited to aid them on their infiltration, but he had disappeared and left them high and dry when they’d run afoul of his own local competition. “But while her contacts have been of wildly variable quality, her information’s been good. And from talking to Van Zandt, this looks like it’s worth moving on.”
Wade shrugged. “I’m down. As long as we get to kill some more of these fuckers.” He grinned without much humor. “And if the mission defaults to the ‘kill’ option, I’m not going to shed any tears. I like ‘kill’ better than ‘capture,’ anyway.”
Brannigan glanced over at Hancock. Ordinarily, his second would have been the one to speak up just then; while Hancock was, in his way, every bit as bloodthirsty as Wade, he tended to take his leadership role a little more seriously, usually meaning taking up the mantle of voice of reason, even when he didn’t feel like it. But this time, he was silent, his face stony.
Well, after what they’d seen in Chad, and what had been done to Sam Childress, Brannigan couldn’t say he blamed any of his men for being a little eager to get some payback.
“If possible, we need to take him alive,” Brannigan said. “And believe me, that’s not out of any sense of mercy. We don’t know how much information on these bastards this son-of-a-bitch has in his head, but we want to wring him dry. If he’s as important as he seems to be, then we might be able to take down a good chunk of the Front’s organization Stateside, possibly internationally, based on what he can tell us.”
“Unless,” Flanagan put in, “he’s not actually as important as he seems to be.”
“Oh, come on, Joe,” said Curtis, who was clearly nursing a headache, but couldn’t help himself. “Can’t you be an optimist for once in your life?”