The terrain was rough and getting rougher, and she was unable to maintain a speed much over five miles per hour. The heat was nearly unbearable, even though the thickness of the jungle canopy almost totally blocked the sunlight. The air seemed saturated with humidity and Tracie forced herself to drink plenty of water.
And the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were everywhere.
At one point she stopped and stared in wonder at the sight of a massive crocodile sunning itself on the remains of Slough Road. It was a beast, easily twenty feet long, with the creased, leathery skin of a dinosaur and an utterly disinterested demeanor.
Tracie inched the truck forward, hoping to frighten the animal into retreat, but the croc only lifted one eye, unconvinced the vehicle posed a threat.
She pictured razor-sharp yellow teeth tearing one of the truck’s tires apart and then attacking the sheet metal of the driver’s side door. She decided she wasn’t willing to bet against the big beast in such a confrontation and imagined the powerful jaws clamping down on her body, tearing her apart as he made a midday snack out of her.
She continued moving forward until the front wheels were almost on top of the animal. Any closer and the truck would drive right onto its back, which didn’t strike Tracie as the smartest move to make. The big crocodile didn’t seem interested in attacking the truck but wasn’t showing any signs of abandoning its position, either.
It was a standoff, one she didn’t think she could win.
She shifted into reverse and backed slowly away from the stubborn animal. When she had put enough distance between them, she spun the wheel hard to the left and hit the gas, plunging into the vegetation, praying she could maintain enough momentum to fight through the thick jungle cover until she had gotten past the croc and could regain the semi-road.
The truck screeched and groaned as vines and branches scraped its sides, scratching the paint, likely destroying the finish. Tracie bounced and jolted in her safety harness as the truck plunged into deep depressions in the jungle surface and clawed its way up the other side.
She didn’t dare slow and couldn’t afford even a half-second’s glance in the rear view to see if she had gotten past the croc yet. Given the thickness of the underbrush, she doubted she would be able to see it, anyway. But the truck’s forward progress was slowing badly and she knew she had to get back onto what was left of Slough Road right now, or she was going to be stranded.
Just a few feet away from a twenty-foot-long predator.
She wrestled the steering wheel and punched the accelerator to the floor, sweating and cursing, and the truck’s four drive wheels whined, kicking up mud and muck and the detritus of an ancient wilderness. Waterlogged dirt splattered the windows, the engine screamed in angry protest, and Tracie realized she was muttering, “Come on, come on, come on,” repeating the words like a mystical talisman.
And then the truck broke free of the jungle. It slammed up onto the remains of Slough Road, getting airborne and then nearly bottoming out before careening toward the equally thick jungle on the other side of the ancient trail.
Tracie stood on the brakes and the truck ground to a halt. She was panting and shaking and had almost forgotten about the mosquitoes.
Almost.
She sighed deeply and raised her eyes to the rearview and smiled despite herself.
The damned crocodile hadn’t moved an inch. It lay across Slough Road, still ignoring the truck, utterly confident inside its lizard brain of its status at the top of the local food chain.
Fine, Tracie thought. You win. Hopefully I’ll be alive for Round Two on the way out of this godforsaken jungle hellhole.
She took a moment to regroup.
Gulped water.
Slapped at the ever-present horde of mosquitoes, knowing it would do no good but unable to stop herself.
Consulted the map again.
Hit the gas and kept moving forward.
37
Eventually, a nearly invisible trail appeared to Tracie’s left. Slough Road had long since become nothing more than a vague rumor, and Tracie prayed she hadn’t accidentally left the primeval track behind.
Still, the faint trail looming in the windshield seemed to be in the approximate location of a turn indicated on the map, so Tracie said a quick prayer and veered left, keeping steady pressure on the accelerator.
The jungle vegetation seemed marginally less dense here than it had been during Tracie’s showdown with the crocodile, and the truck was able to fight its way through the brush for a longer distance than she had initially feared would be possible.
Following the trail was a problem. Often it was nothing more than a tantalizing hint, a potential depression in the sawgrass that might have been nothing more than her imagination. Sometimes it disappeared entirely. Tracie was well aware of her limited experience as a tracker and hoped she hadn’t missed Carranco’s cabin.
She forged ahead, picking her way forward, reversing course when she got off track. The thought occurred to her that even if she was successful in recovering Maria Carranco, unless she could convince the young terrorist to help her navigate back to Slough Road she might never make it out of here alive.
She forced that disturbing thought to the back of her mind.
First things first.
She had to get Carranco.
***
Tracie was surprised to discover that she could probably continue most of the way to Carranco’s cabin without getting out of the truck if she chose to do so. The vegetation was uniformly dense, enough so that making forward progress was a challenge, but not so much so that it became impossible to accomplish.
Of course, whether she could do so or not was irrelevant, because even the most dimwitted of fugitives would be spooked by the sound of an approaching engine way out here at the end of the world. And Tracie didn’t think “dimwitted” would be an apt description for the Omega 7 terrorist. “Cold-blooded” definitely, “dangerous” certainly, but she doubted “dim-witted” would apply.
She drove as far as she dared, then stopped the truck and killed the engine. She didn’t need to worry about hiding the vehicle, because unless Carranco happened to come along the other way and run into it, everyplace was a suitable hiding place.
The terrorist would have to get within ten feet of the truck to have any chance of seeing it, and her cabin was still at least two miles of rough terrain from here. According to Gonzalez’s girlfriend, Carranco had planned to stay out here several days, maybe as long as a week, to allow the Omega 7 leader time to cool off. It had only been two days so far, so barring a stroke of the worst kind of luck the truck would be just fine where it was.
She opened the door and stepped to the ground, feeling the squishiness of water-saturated soil the moment her feet plopped onto the earth. Immediately, a cloud of mosquitoes surrounded her. She had prepared by wrapping a spare blouse around her head and had secured it by tying the sleeves together, leaving just a tiny slit in front of her eyes to see through.
Immediately, sweat began to soak the material and she knew the protection it offered—minimal to begin with—would decrease markedly within just a few minutes. Still, it had to be better than nothing.
She started walking, gun in hand, backpack slung over one shoulder. She imagined a crocodile behind every tree and an alligator submerged in every section of standing water, and wished fervently she were back in Washington, tracking down a Soviet collaborator.
Get your head straight, she told herself sternly. Maria Carranco is just as deadly as any alligator. More so, probably. Allow yourself to be distracted, and getting eaten by an overgrown lizard would be a better fate than the one you’ll suffer.
She swatted at the hordes of mosquitoes and moved on.
38
Maria Carranco’s hideaway looked to be in much better condition than it had appeared in the yellowed snapshots Tracie had found in Juan Gonzalez’s map book. Someone had obviously done a fair amount of maintenance on it—likely Carranco, since
there couldn’t be many other lunatics anxious to spend time out here.
Tracie had slogged through the damp, marshy terrain for nearly two hours after leaving her vehicle behind. The cabin was located exactly where it appeared on the map, its position marked with a ball point X. But despite the fact it was less than two miles away in a straight line from where she abandoned the truck, the hike had been a grueling one.
Between climbing over or moving around fallen trees and standing water, sinking ankle-deep into the muck with every other step, and moving carefully in order to keep a sharp eye out for predators, Tracie felt wrung out and exhausted by the time she realized she was getting close.
She slowed her progress even more, forcing herself to ignore the ever-present mosquitoes, and fifteen minutes later the tiny one-room log cabin she had seen in the photographs presented itself in a clearing in the distance.
Tracie moved as close as she dared, careful to avoid giving herself away by stepping on and snapping a twig or tree branch. Then she hunkered down, determined to gather as much intel as she could on her foe before finalizing a plan to deal with Maria Carranco.
For nearly two and a half hours Tracie remained unmoving in her surveillance position, screened from view of the cabin—she hoped—by trees and Big Cypress scrub brush.
She was close enough to observe the front of the shack without binoculars. There was a door squarely in the middle, flanked by a small window on either side. She couldn’t be sure, but Tracie guessed neither of the windows actually contained glass. It looked as though a pair of screens—one fastened to the cabin’s exterior, the other to the interior—served to protect its inhabitant from the mosquitoes and snakes and other Everglades/Big Cypress animals and insects. Each window also featured a set of heavy wooden shutters that could be closed to seal the cabin.
How Carranco had gotten here from Miami—and whether, in fact, she was even here at all—was a question Tracie could not answer. There was no vehicle parked in the vicinity of the cabin. No Jeep, no four-wheel-drive truck, nothing. Tracie guessed there must be more than one arrival route here from the Tamiami Trail, and even with as close a relationship as the young woman had with Gonzalez, she would protect herself by keeping knowledge of at least one of those routes to herself.
Of a more immediate concern, though, was Carranco’s whereabouts. Tracie had kept her attention glued to the little shack and had been rewarded with nothing to indicate the presence of another human being. No figures moved behind the screens covering the windows. No footsteps sounded from inside the cabin.
Nothing.
The mosquitoes continued to swarm and Tracie found she was able to ignore them—more or less—by adopting a Zen-like focus on her mission. She had duct-taped her jeans to her ankles and worn a long-sleeved blouse to complement the shirt tied around her head and face, offering the insects as little exposed skin as possible at which to aim their relentless attacks.
But the drawback to all that clothing was obvious: the midday heat and humidity pounding down on Big Cypress and the Everglades was stifling, worse by far than anything Tracie Tanner had ever experienced. Sweat flowed from every pore, soaking every article of her clothing and making dehydration a very real concern despite the bottled water she had been sipping virtually nonstop.
And she was getting hungry. She had packed little food, preferring to include mostly water in the limited space of her backpack.
All of these problems were manageable, though. With the exception of the brutal heat and humidity, Tracie had faced worse—much worse—in her career as a covert operative. She estimated the temperature to be close to one hundred fifteen degrees, with humidity at least seventy percent, but even those blast-furnace temperatures were marginally easier to endure when she thought back to some of the bitterly cold temperatures she had faced on assignments in Soviet Russia.
The sun would begin setting soon, which in turn would lower the temperatures, at least marginally. But nightfall would bring its own set of problems. While she felt relatively safe from attack by crocs, alligators and snakes during daylight hours, she knew she would become a sitting duck once she could no longer see.
One way or the other, she would have to take shelter before sunset. She would either have to force her way inside the cabin or hike back to the truck. And the second option was becoming less feasible by the minute, given the fact it would take at least two hours to accomplish.
And she still had no idea whether Maria Carranco was even here.
She sipped her water and watched the cabin and considered her steadily dwindling options. She decided she would give it another forty-five minutes. An hour at the outside. If by then she had not gotten a line on Carranco’s whereabouts, she would begin making her way toward the cabin with the intention of breaking in.
It wasn’t the best of plans. She couldn’t even convince herself it was a good plan, but at least—
Ch-chunk.
She froze. The sound was distinctive. There was only one thing it could be.
Someone had racked a shotgun.
Someone behind her.
How far behind and from what range was impossible to say. Not that it really mattered. With a shotgun, precision aim was a luxury, not a necessity.
She debated spinning and firing a blind shot—she was still holding her Beretta, by this time more as a defense against an attacking crocodile than out of any real expectation that she was going to see Maria Carranco—but she had been crouched in the same position for so long, the odds of turning smoothly and cleanly and getting a shot off without falling on her ass were slim.
The odds of doing it without being blasted by buckshot were nil.
“Turn around slowly and show me your hands,” a female voice behind her instructed.
Carranco.
Tracie dropped her gun onto the spongy turf, hoping the terrorist’s view would be screened by Tracie’s body and the terrorist wouldn’t see her do it. She didn’t think the woman would be foolish enough to believe she had come all the way out here unarmed, but she couldn’t imagine any drawback to trying, either.
The gun plopped to the ground and she raised her hands, fingers splayed, as she turned slowly.
And saw Maria Carranco for the first time.
The woman was young, breathtakingly beautiful, and tiny. From this distance, perhaps twenty yards, she looked more like a twelve-year-old girl than a woman in her mid-twenties, a fanatic capable of murdering more than a half-dozen innocent people in cold blood.
Carranco held the shotgun down by her hip almost casually, although Tracie noted the two-handed stance: right hand on the pistol grip, finger resting on the trigger guard, and left hand on the foregrip.
She looked comfortable, like holding the shotgun was the most natural thing in the world, and despite the brutal heat Tracie felt a chill in her bones she wouldn’t have believed possible just a moment before.
“Who are you and what do you want?” the woman asked in Hispanic-accented English.
Tracie smiled brightly. “Avon calling. Beautiful place you have here. Nice and private.”
Anger flashed in Maria Carranco’s eyes. Tracie could see it even from where she stood, and the woman spat, “Do not play games, or you will die where you stand.”
Tracie cleared her throat, thinking hard. She needed to buy some time, wait for Carranco to make a mistake.
And judging from the way the terrorist was handling herself, a mistake didn’t seem likely.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, speaking loudly enough to be heard through the material of the shirt wrapped around her head, but calmly and levelly. Taking even the chance of spooking Carranco struck Tracie as a very bad idea.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Holly.”
Maria Carranco tightened her grip on the shotgun. “How did you find me, Holly, and what do you want? You should know this is the last time I will ask these questions.”
Tracie cleared her throat and took a chance.
“I have a message from Juan. He needs you back in Miami as soon as possible, and since he had no other way of contacting you, he sent me.”
Uncertainty showed in Carranco’s expression face. She paused a moment and then took a couple of hesitant steps forward. “Juan needs me? Why?”
Tracie shrugged, doing her best to affect a lack of interest. “Beats me,” she said. “He didn’t tell me. He said to bring you back, so here I am.”
Carranco stopped walking and raised the gun to her shoulder. Tracie couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a Mossberg 500 pump-action 12 Gauge that had been fitted with a pistol grip and fold-down stock. At the moment, the stock was locked in place. “That is bullshit,” she said.
Tracie spread her hands innocently. “What are you talking about? You think there’s any other reason in the world why I would come out to this godforsaken mosquito-infested swamp?”
“Omega 7 is not that big. I know everyone in the organization, at least by sight. Take off the shirt you have wrapped around your head. I want to see your face. If I do not recognize you, you die. Right here, right now.”
39
“Who says I’m a member of Omega 7? I never made that claim.” Tracie struggled to keep her voice steady and felt she managed it fairly well under the circumstances.
“Take the shirt off your face. Do it now.” Carranco held the shotgun steady. It looked as big as a cannon to Tracie, staring down its barrel.
“Fine,” she said. “But you’re not going to recognize me because I’m not a member of Omega 7. And Juan is going to be even angrier at you than he already is if you kill me.” She untied the sleeves she had wrapped around the back of her head and let the shirt fall to the wet ground, waiting for the shotgun blast that would pepper her body with pellets and end her life.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Tracie stood arms spread, her sweat-soaked flame-red hair framing her face in greasy strings.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 69