Wild Justice E-Book

M. L. Buchman

• Herausgeber: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

-a Delta Force romance- They’re the best counterterrorism force on the planet. SERGEANT DUANE JENKINS • Elite Delta operator—explosives just make him grin • AGENT SOFIA FORTEZA • Top Intel Analyst for The Activity—thinks data is sexy• The team must face their toughest mission yet: take down a massive human-trafficking ring and a corrupt Venezuelan spy agency—without leaving a trace. Sofia and Duane. In common: black sheep of extremely wealthy families, renegades against the status quo. Differences: tactician vs. explosives expert, thinker vs. pure warrior. Together: fight to keep their team alive, and their love.

Leseprobe

Praise for M. L. Buchman

Top 10 Romance of 2012, 2015, and2016.

Booklist: The Night Is Mine, Hot Point, Heart Strike

One of our favorite authors.

RT Book Reviews

Buchman has catapulted his way to the top tier of my favorite authors.

Fresh Fiction

A favorite author of mine. I’ll read anything that carries his name, no questions asked. Meet your new favorite author!

The Sassy Bookster, Flash of Fire

M.L. Buchman is guaranteed to get me lost in a good story.

The Reading Cafe, Way of the Warrior: NSDQ

I love Buchman’s writing. His vivid descriptions bring everything to life in an unforgettableway.

Pure Jonel, Hot Point

Wild Justice

M. L. Buchman

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Chapter1

The low hill, shadowed by banana and mango trees in the twilight of the late afternoon sun above the Venezuelan jungle, overlooked the heavily guarded camp a half mile away. But that wasn’t his immediate problem.

Right now, it took everything Duane Jenkins could do to ignore the stinging sweat dripping into his eyes. Any unwarranted motion or sound might attract his target’s attention before he was in position.

From two meters away, he whispered harshly.

“Who the hell are you, sister? And how did you gethere?”

“Holycrap!”

He couldn’t help but smile. What kind of woman said crap when unexpectedly facing a sniper rifle at point-blank range?

“Not your sister,” she gained points for a quick recovery. “Now get that rifle out of my face, Jarhead.”

Ouch! That was low. He wasn’t some damned, swamp-tromping Marine. Not even ex-Marine. He was ex-75th Rangers of the US Army, now two years in Delta Force. And as an operator for The Unit—as Delta called themselves—that made him far superior to any other soldier no matter what the dudes in SEAL Team 6 thought about it. That also didn’t explain who he’d just found here in the perfect sniper position overlooking General Raul Estevan Aguado’s encampment.

It had taken him over fifteen hours to scout out this one perfect gap between the too-damn-tall trees that made up this sweaty place and, with just twenty meters to go, he’d spotted her heavily camouflaged form lying among the leaves. It had taken him another half hour to cover that distance without drawing her attention.

Where was a cold can of Coke when a guy needed one? This place was worse than Atlanta in the summer. The red earth had been driven so deep into his pores from crawling over the ground that he wondered if his skin color was permanently changed to rustred.

Why did evil bastards like Aguado have to come from such places?

More immediate problem, dude. Stay focused.

The woman’s American English was accentless, sounding flat to his Southern ear. Probably from the Pacific Northwest or some other strange part of the country. But there was a thin overlay that matched her Latinate features—full-lipped with dark eyebrows and darker eyes, which was about all he could tell through her camo paint. The slight Spanish lilt shifted her to intriguingly exotic.

But she wasn’t supposed to be here. No onewas.

“Keeping you in my sights until I get some answers, ma’am,” Duane kept his HK MSG90 A2 rifle aimed right at the bridge of her nose—a straight-through spine cutter if he had to take her down. It would be serious overkill, as the weapon was rated to lethal past eight hundred meters and they were whispering at each other from less than two meters apart. With the silencer, his weapon would be even quieter than their whispers, but he hadn’t spent the last sixteen hours crawling into position to have her death cry give him away. If she so much as squawked as she went down, every goddamn bird in the jungle would light off, giving away his presence.

She sighed and nodded toward her own rifle that rested on the ground in front ofher.

He shifted his focus—though not his aim—then let out a very low whistle of appreciation. A G28. Even his team hadn’t gotten their hands on the latest entry into the US Army’s sniper arsenal yet. Not quite the same accuracy as his own weapon but six inches shorter, several pounds lighter, and far more flexible to configure. A whole generational leap forward. Richie, his team’s tech, would be geeking out right about now. The fact that he wasn’t here to see it almost made Duane smile.

“A Heckler & Koch G28. What’s your point, sister?” He drawled it out for Richie’s sake, who’d be listening in on Duane’s radio. Then the implications sank in. If his Delta Force team couldn’t get these yet, then who could? Whatever else this woman was, she would be tied to one of the three US Special Mission Units: Delta, SEAL Team 6, or the combat controllers of the Air Force’s 24thSTS.

Or The Activity.

Thatfit.

The Intelligence Support Activity served the other three Special Mission Units. If she was with The Activity…that was seriously hot. It meant she was both one of the top intel specialists anywhere and a lethal fighter. And that meant that she’d been the one to put out the call that had brought him here and was sticking to see the job through. That at least answered why she was in his spot. It also said a lot that she hadn’t taken any of several easier-to-reach locations that were almost asgood.

“It is about time you caught a clue. Welcome to the conversation.” She picked up her rifle as if his wasn’t still aimed at her. Very chill. “You are being a little dense there, soldier.” At least she got the branch of the military right thistime.

“Hey, they don’t call me ‘The Rock’ for nothing, darlin’,” Duane lowered his barrel until it was pointed into the dirt. “They actually call me that becau—”

The moment his weapon was down, he suddenly was staring down the dark hole of the G28’s silencer.

“Uh…”

“The Rock certainly isn’t because you are a towering black movie star. It must be for your thickhead.”

Duane swallowed carefully, unable to shift his focus away from the barrel of her weapon to see if the safety was on ornot.

“He spells his name differently. He’s Dwayne ‘The Rock’ with a w and a y. I’m more normal, D-u-a-n-e T-h-e R-o-c-k.” He made it sing-song just like the theme song from The All-New Mickey Mouse Club that he’d been hooked on as a littlekid.

“M-o-u-s-e,” she gave the appropriate response.

He couldn’t help laughing, quietly, despite their positions—him still staring down the barrel of her weapon—because discovering Mickey Mouse in common in the heart of the Venezuelan jungle was just too funny.

“Normal is not what I need here,” the woman sighed and there was the distinct click of her reengaging the safety on her rifle.

“Only thing normal about me is my name, ma’am.” Always good to “ma’am” a woman with a sniper rifle pointed at yourface.

“Prove it,” she turned her weapon once more toward the camp half a kilometer away through the trees. Her motions were appropriately slow to not draw attention. However, it was too even a motion. A sniper learned to never break the pulses of nature’s rhythm. She might be some hotshot intel agent—because The Activity absolutely rocked almost everything they did—but she still wasn’t Delta, who rocked itall.

Duane breathed out slowly and spent the next couple minutes easing the last two meters toward her. Having the camp in view meant that one of their spotters could see them as well, if the bad guys were damned lucky. He and the woman both wore ghillie suits—that’s why he’d gotten so close before he spotted her. The suits were made of open-weave cloth liberally decorated with leaves and twigs so that the two of them looked like little more than a patch of the jungle floor. He’d dragged his on backcountry jungle roads for twenty miles to make sure he smelled like the jungle as well. Having a jaguar trounce his ass wouldn’t exactly brighten up hisday.

Even their rifles were well camouflaged except for either end of the spotting scopes and the very tips of the barrels. If he hadn’t recently been lusting over the new specs, he wouldn’t have recognized her HK G28 at all in its disguise.

Getting into position as a sniper took a patience that only the most highly trained could achieve. A female sniper? That was a rare find indeed. The two women on his Delta team were damned fine shooters, but he and Chad were the snipers of the crew. A female sniper from The Activity? This just kept getting better and better. He’d pay a fair wage to know what she really looked like beneath the ghillie and all that face paint.

“Maybe you and I should go to the party as a couple.” At long last he lay beside her, close enough that he would have felt her body heat if not for the smothering sauna of his ghilliesuit.

“What party? And we’re never going to be a couple.”

“Halloween. It’s only a couple weeks off. We could sneak in and nobody would see us in our ghillies. People would wonder why the punch bowls were mysteriously draining.”

“And why the apples were bobbing on their own,” she sounded disgusted. “What I wantis—”

“Let’s see what y’all are up to down there,” he cut her off, just for the fun of it, and focused his rifle scope on the camp below. He was a little disappointed when there was no immediate comeback, though there was a low muttering in Spanish that he couldn’t quite catch but it cheered hissoul.

The general’s camp was a simple affair in several ways. The enclosure was a few hundred meters across. An old-school fence of wooden stakes driven into the ground, each a small tree trunk three meters high with sharpened points upward. Not that the points mattered, because razor wire was looped along the top. Guard shacks every hundred meters—four total. The towers straddled the fence. Not a good idea. The structure should have been entirely behind the wall to protect it from attack. Unless…

“You got a name, darling?” Lying beside her, Duane could tell that she was shorter than he was. Her hands were fine, but her body was hidden by the ghillie so he couldn’t read anything more about her looks.

“Yes, I have aname.”

“That’s nice. Always good to have yourself one of those,” Duane could play that game just as well as the next person. He turned his attention to the camp. “Our friendly general isn’t worried about attack from the outside or he’d have built his towers differently. He’s worried about keeping people inside.”

Sofia Forteza had already known that from her research, but she wondered how Duane—spelled the “normal” way—did.

She’d spent months tracking General Aguado. Cripes, she’d spent months finding him in the first place. He was a slippery bastardo who did most of his work through intermediaries and only rarely surfaced himself. Tracing him to this corner of the Guatopo National Park—so close to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, that she’d dismissed it at first—had taken a monthmore.

Duane had taken one look at the place and seen…what?

He’d have built his towers differently.

She leaned back to her own scope and inspected them again. It took a moment to bring the towers into focus because her nerves were still zinging as if she’d been electrocuted. Somehow, in all her training, she’d never looked down the barrel of a rifle or even a handgun at point blank range—perhaps the scariest thing she’d everseen.

Scariest other than Duane’s cold blue eyes. He was the most dangerous-looking man she’d ever met, which is why his jokes and his smooth Southern accent were throwing her so badly. He sounded half badass, macho-bastard Unit operator and half southern gentleman. It was the strangest combination she’d ever heard. One moment he was wooing her with warm tones, obviously without a clue of how to woo a woman, and the next he was being pure Army grunt with a vocabulary to match. She simply couldn’t figure himout.

Finally she shrugged her emotions aside enough to focus her scope properly. Stay in the jungle, not in your head. She rebuilt it in layers. The strange silence of the wind—not a single breath of air reached the jungle floor, instead it stagnated, adding to the oppressiveness of the heat. Macaw calls alternated between chatter and screech. Monkeys screamed and shouted in the upper branches. Buzzing flies had learned to leave her alone and the silent ants were no longer creeping her out. All that was left after she canceled each of those out was the man breathing beside her and the compound of that bastard Aguado that she’d been staring at for the last twenty-four hours.

The guard towers were supported by four long, tree-trunk legs, two inside the fence and two outside. Outside! Where they were vulnerable to attack. General Aguado hadn’t built a fort in the depths of a national park—he’d built a prison.

All of her research had only uncovered his location, not his purpose here. Because she hadn’t cared. Cutting the head off the snake one target at a time worked forher.

She looked again at the camp. Wooden shacks for the most part—workers’ cabins. What else had she missed?

“Locks on the doors,” Duane answered the question she hadn’t asked in a whisper that was surprisingly soft for such a deep voice. He ignored a fer-de-lance pit viper as it slid up and over the ghillie covering his rifle barrel, slowing to inspect them with a flick of its tongue before continuing on its way in search of mice. If he could ignore the snake, so could she. Mostly. A little. She watched long after it had slithered out of sight.

Sofia looked at the shacks’ doors again. Locks on the outside. She’d been watching the camp for twenty-four hours and had missed that. The dozens of armed guards weren’t being lazy on patrol as she’d thought. They didn’t care about the outside world—they were worried about the inside one. And because they were the only armed personnel in the camp, and everyone knew it, they could afford to be nonchalant.

Back to the towers. The guards were leaning on the inside rails looking down, not the outside ones looking out. All of her work to slip into this position was probably meaningless. If Duane was right, she could walk right up and knock on the front gate before anyone would pay her the least attention. A band of red howler monkeys working their way noisily through the jungle canopy above the camp didn’t even attract a glance from the guards.

Still, Aguado was here. She’d seen him arrive with his entourage. And he was never going to leave. Not alive.

“Not a nice place,” Duane observed quietly.

“Not a niceman.”

“Sure I am. You just don’t know me yet, sugar.”

Sofia brought her knee up sharply. Lying side by side, she was able to bullseye the Charlie-horse nerve cluster on his outer thigh. Her nanahadn’t raised her to be a target.

“Shit!” He didn’t sound so almighty pleased with himself any longer, though he did manage to keep it to a whisper as he continued swearing.

Why did guys always think they were so charming? With her looks, she should be used to it by now. Except her looks were hidden by the ghillie suit. What had kicked Duane-spelled-the-normal-way into such a guy mode? Just that she was female? When did Delta start recruiting cavemen as their standard? Actually, that one she knew the answer to—since Day One if past experience meant anything.

She hadn’t ever deployed with Delta before, but she’d met enough of them to know the type. They were the rebel super-warriors of the US military. Everyone thought that their team was the baddest, but Delta Force, more commonly called “The Unit,” completely owned that title. Somehow they drew the people that didn’t fit anywhere else in the military. But where they’d been troublemakers in their old units, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta collected them and honed their skills. They were like a barely controlled reaction just bubbling along, waiting for an excuse to explode.

“So, what’s the general’s story?” Duane, once he was done nursing his thigh, went for a subject change proving he wasn’t stupid.

“Deep in the drug trade. Known to have called for at least three high profile murders, including a Supreme Tribunal of Justice judge (that’s their version of the Supreme Court) even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself.”

“Oh, so he’s the one that’s not nice,” as if Duane only now was figuring thatout.

She was not going to be charmed by him. His every tone said that just because she was female, he’d switched into some weird-ass flirt mode. She’d had enough of that coming up through the ranks to last a lifetime.

“This isn’t slave labor, so you’d better add human trafficking to your list.” With the speed of a light switch, all the charm was gone from Duane’s voice.

As if to prove his point, at that moment a couple of guards exited a small building, readjusting their pants and laughing. They kicked the door shut behind them and snapped the lock closed. No question what they’d just been doing to some poor women—one of the perks of theirjob.

Numerous guards. Locks on the outside of the cabin doors. No large central building that might be an illicit drug lab or slave labor textile sweatshop. This was a holding pen, hidden deep in the jungle of a national park. The few people who were circulating around, aside from the guards, were almost all women. Women who were keeping their heads down and trudging about their tasks. The sickness that twisted in her stomach had nothing to do with lying still for the last twenty-four hours.

Sofia wasn’t even aware of raising her rifle until Duane reached over and casually pushed it backdown.

“Not yet.” It was all he said, but she could hear the anger beneath the soft words.

Well that wasn’t shit compared to what she was feeling at the moment. This place needed to be erased from the map. Scorched to the ground, removed permanently from existence!

“Why are you here? I sent for a goddamn team, not some SouthernRock.”

He flashed a smile at her, “If you’ve got me, you don’t need a team.” All of his macho bravado was back. As if she’d misheard his momentary anger. He sounded too much like her useless brother and the rest of her useless family. She couldn’t be rid of him fast enough.

As the last of the sunlight faded from the sky and the bird calls tapered toward silence, Sofia wondered who she was going to want to shoot more by sunrise: General Raul Estevan Aguado or Duane TheRock?

Duane had left the video feed from his spotting scope open toChad.

“Can’t get a match on her face with all of that camouflage on,” Chad whispered over the open frequency to his earpiece.

Duane did not need to be hearing this. “Were your plans just for the general or the camp as well?” he asked the nameless ISA woman, hoping Chad would get back on track.

“My job is to find the bad guys,” she said softly.

“Found her!” Richie, the team’s geek, jumped in, shouting loudly enough that Richie’s distance from the microphone was all that spared Duane’s eardrum from being caved in. “Once I eliminated any Deltas being in there and checked the cross-team mission coordination database for possible conflicts and still found nothingI—”

Duane sighed.

Chad cut off Richie with a low whistle of appreciation. “Sofia Forteza. Hot, bro. Veryhot.”

“JSOC. Listed as unassigned,” Richie was back and only a little calmer. “Has a place near Fort Belvoir.” Joint Special Operations Command had only one asset at Fort Belvoir, Virginia: the Intelligence Support Activity.

Duane already knew she was ISA, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

“Wow!” Richie again. “She is awfully pretty.”

Duane could feel that he was sharing an eye roll with Chad over the radio. Delta Force veteran of dozens of missions all across Central and South America, happily married to a Delta shooter, and still Richie sounded like a high schoolgeek.

“Your job,” Sofia, the no-longer-nameless, continued her side of the conversation, “is to figure out what to do withthem.”

Easy. Smack both Chad and Richie upside the head next time he sawthem.

“Code Black on her file. Eyes only,” Chad continued. “Yada yada, but Richie says he doesn’t want to try and crack that without more cause, which means he’s a wussy-pants who’s afraid of the little old Activity.”

“Go on. You try to crack their firewall and see what happens to your life. I’ve heard that the last NSA hacker who took a run at them is serving a five-year deployment to Poughkeepsie, New York. And that was after they formatted his hard drive, his computers at home, and his phone without ever going near him. Those guys aregood.”

“I think he’s actually just pouting that you got to see a G28 sniper rifle before he did. Wuss-pants,” Chad chided Richie one moretime.

“Where’s the general?” Duane asked, forcing his tone. One of these days he was going to murder Chad in his sleep. It was a nasty thing to do to his best friend—and he’d regret it—but it was fast becoming a necessity. He considered offing Richie while he was at it, but Melissa wouldn’t take kindly to losing her man. Pissing off a Delta woman was never a goodcall.

“Third building to the right from the front gate,” Sofia guided him toward the general’s location with a tipping of her rifle.

Duane eased his aim over until he could spot it in his scope. A heavy concrete building, windows small and high—not a cozy villa in the jungle. It was the bunker fit for a paranoid bastard.

The sun had finally set but the camp was well lit, no need for night vision here. It was well shielded from observation above; the superstory trees had not been cut down, rather the prison had been built up around their gargantuan trunks. No helo, not even a drone was going to get eyes on this place. This would have to be strictly a groundop.

“So, the fort has a bunker,” Chad was finally on the same mission hewas.

“Underground escape?” Duane asked Sofia.

“Possible, but none identified.” Her voice was a combination of lush and highly educated. She kept getting more interesting with every moment rather thanless.

“Thought you Activity types knew someshit?”

“We know plenty,” no reaction that he’d identified her role here. Very chilllady.

“Uh-huh.”

“Mierda! I know that if we miss this guy here, it could take another six months to find him again.”

“So you do know how to swear. Can you swear in English aswell?”

Sofia buried her face against the stock of her rifle. This was going better than he’d expected. He debated attempting to elicit a whimper of frustration, but she was Activity and who knew what they could do to you if you really ticked them off—his desire to look down the wrong end of a G28 again was verylow.

It was the sworn duty of every Delta operator to put down all other units as not up to their own standards, especially SEAL Team 6. But there were a few exceptions. The guys from the 24th STS Air Force combat controllers were too damned pleasant to really hold a grudge againstthem.

And The Activity? Way too sneaky to risk messingwith.

The fast tropical twilight was shifting the sounds of the jungle, though the day wasn’t done yet. There was the faint buzz of the camp’s inward-facing floodlights starting up, but they were too far away to hear any of their voices.

“So, you’re thinking it’s a bad idea to back off and drop a MOAB on this place?” Chad was back. The Mother of All Bombs was the biggest bomb there was, short of a nuke, and had only recently been used for the first time. It would level at least three square miles of the national park and probably make the window-glass merchants in Caracas wealthy even though the city was over twenty kilometers away. Because they were so rare, Chad was always looking for an excuse to dropone.

“Are you calling in your team or not?” Sofia looked at him again. Her dark eyes were hypnotic in the lingering twilight. Was hypnosis another trick up The Activity’s sleeve?

“My team?” Duane laid on his best Mr. Innocent, careful not to overdoit.

Sofia lifted an edge of her rifle’s ghillie revealing a small device lying on the dirt. “I can see your signal.”

“No one’s supposed to be able to see—” Duane shut his mouth. He was using the most sophisticated piece of communications gear Delta had. Burst-mode transmissions, rotating frequencies so that he never showed up on scanners for more than a moment, deep encryption, low power to the repeater he’d stashed a hundred meters away so that a signal-strength meter would find the wrong target. They’d been told it couldn’t be traced by any… Oh! The whole setup was probably invented by The Activity.

“Voice and video outbound,” Sofia continued in that snake charmer voice of hers. Her accent might be flat American, but the richness of the Spanish undertones and rhythms was slayinghim.

His first serious girlfriend had been Mexican, which had pissed off his too-white family to no end—even if they were too well-cultured to show it in public. Or maybe she just hadn’t come from a rich enough family; someone from their own social status. He’d learned far more Spanish from her between the sheets than in the classroom, including the ability to tell that Sofia’s language origin was Spain Spanish just by the rhythm of it, even if the absence from her accent said it was probably a couple generationsback.

“It is difficult to tell with the encryption,” she continued her chilly analysis. “But I think you have two different voices inbound.”

At least she couldn’t break the encryption, he hoped, or he really would have to killChad.

Chapter2

Something had shifted.

Between one moment and the next, “normal-Duane” the overly-garrulous macho Unit operator was gone. A very precise man took his place.

He handed her an earpiece as he announced to his team, “Twoon.”

Sofia wondered just what comments had been occurring before that made him feel that it was necessary to announce her addition to the circuit, then decided that she’d rather notknow.

“Hey there, Sofia.”

So, they knew who she was. That in itself was interesting information about the abilities of Duane’steam.

“I’m Chad. Ignore the other voice, Richie was born a dweeb and still hasn’t recovered. I mean his nickname is Q, like the geek in James Bond. How sad is that. He’s even more of a dweeb than the dude you’re all cozied up with at the moment.”

“Main gate,” Duane declared, shutting Chad down quickly. He shifted to a rapidly whispered monologue, breaking down the encampment for his team. “Designate A. Fence ranging three to five meters high, topped with single-coil razor wire,” tracking his rifle scope over each item he described. He broke down the fortification in minute detail—weak spots, close proximity of large trees, and so on—working his way around clockwise. “B,” he began describing the left side of the compound.

Not only was he describing details she hadn’t noticed, he was describing things he couldn’t possibly see. When she figured out that he’d scouted all of the way around the camp before coming up to her—and that she hadn’t caught a hint of him—it said that in addition to acting like a macho jerk, he also had incredible skills.

Then he did the same narration for the camp itself, layer by layer.

It felt like a painfully slow process, but the twenty minutes by her watch flew past. Half of it was practically in code, giving her trouble keeping up, but Duane sent a surprisingly detailed description to go with the images he was transmitting as he tracked his scope around thecamp.

“That’s full sweep.”

“Roger that,” and the radio circuit went silent.

Now there’d be some long drawn-out plan that was probably being discussed in Washington who would then… That part of it might be out of her control, but if the general showed his face, she’d take him down herself and worry about other details later. The more she learned about General Aguado, the creepier he became. Worse than her Uncle Maximiliano, the pederast who had mysteriously died during a family hunting expedition. Eaten by a bear or fed to a bear? Her grandmother—who’d been the only other one along that day—neversaid.

“Let’s go for awalk.”

Sofia could only look over at Duane in alarm…then realized that she couldn’t see him. While they’d been concentrating through their scopes, observing the well-lit camp, night had fallen over the jungle. The bird calls, which had been a constant throughout the day (sometimes so loud she thought she’d go mad with it), had faded away. A jaguar roared in the distance and the fast flap of wings above said that the bats were emerging for their nightlyfeed.

The sweltering heat hadn’t shifted a single degree down here on the jungle floor. The temperature might only be in the high eighties, but in tropical jungles, the humidity climbed at night and was now nearing a hundred percent.

No, exactly a hundred percent—it began to rain. A loud pattering began high in the trees. Within minutes, massive raindrops bigger than the end of her pinkie were plummeting down out of the sky. The water gathered on leaves in the canopy far above until a sudden release would scatter the oversized rain to the jungle floor far below—each drop almost big enough to hurt. In moments she wondered if a person could drown lying atop a hill in this godforsaken place.

She wanted to protest, but Duane had already moved out of sight of the camp behind a tree and was shedding his ghillie suit. Unsure what he was up to, she finally followed and unsuited herself.

With a quick flick, she had her night-vision goggles clipped to her helmet and swung down into place. The jungle turned from black to shades of green and pink. The image intensifier made her view as bright as day, and the blended infrared mode lit up everything with heat. Even in the rain, every guard, now huddled beneath the roofs of their open-sided green towers, was painted in shades of hotred.

It was her first time in the field with Delta. She’d been out with DEVGRU, better known by their thirty-year-gone name of SEAL Team 6. They moved in packs with the aggressiveness of Marines.

Duane moved alone as if he was dancing. He wasn’t a particularly big guy, just a few inches taller than she was, but his movements were light and smooth. He wore a large pack that didn’t seem to slow him down at all. It wasn’t a major survival pack, but it was still hard to believe he’d been wearing it the whole time under the ghillie.

He moved so smoothly that, if not for her night vision, she’d have lost him within a dozen steps as merely being an element of the landscape.

It had taken her seven hours to infiltrate to within half a kilometer of the encampment.

It took less than two hours to cover that final distance.

At the speed Duane was moving, it should have taken ten minutes, but he was following a crazily weaving path, cutting sharply east, then back west. His movements were a study in smooth confidence or she’d have begun to worry that he was stoned.

He finally leaned back against a gigantic Ceiba tree within fifty meters of the tree-trunk fence. The Ceiba’s roots rose like vertical walls, rising out of the soil in great triangles a foot thick and climbing to twice her height before joining the huge trunk. They leaned side by side against an expanse of smooth bark that was as wide as her apartment’s living room wall and rose for fifty meters into the darkness.

“Eat. Drink,” he grunted ather.

“Drink? I’m drowning!” The rain hadn’t eased but once or twice in the last hour. Still, he was right. She knocked back half a water bottle and began chewing on an energybar.

Duane kept chewing in silence.

“Why are you doing the drunkard’swalk?”

“Searching for bobby traps, trip wires, anything to warn them that we’re coming. Haven’t seen squat. You sure this guy is as bad as you think?”

“Worse.”

“Okay, sister. Guess we should do something about himthen.”

“Not your sister.”

“Whatever you say, sugar.”

Well, she’d walked into thatone.

“You remind me of my brothers.” She used her rifle butt to push herself back to standing, planting it firmly in the middle of Duane’s gut. His grunt sounded sincere.

“They that good?” He’d recovered too fast—next time she’d ram hisgut.

“That awful.” She hated even thinking about Emilio and Humberto.

He offered no answer to that, which actually felt like unexpected sympathy—if she was to credit a man with having an actual emotion unrelated to sex, food, or power.

Her nerves must have topped out at some point, because she was perfectly calm as they walked close around the perimeter wall. Duane barely broke stride at the towers, leaving her to watch cautiously upward at the base of the guard cabin directly above them for less than thirty seconds each time. Nothing, not even a spy cam of any sort. The general was an incautious man and she was going to make sure it costhim.

The rain streamed off her night-vision and over her cheeks like warm tears.

It was the dead of night when they rested again, this time behind a huge vertical liana vine close beside the main gate, so thick it made the tree it covered unidentifiable.

“Twenty meters to the gate. Two guards outside. Rain’s easing,” Duane spoke for the first time since they’d started circumnavigating the fenceline.

“In ten,” a woman’s voice broke the radio silence that had lasted more than two hours.

“What’s in ten minutes?” Sofia asked Duane.

“Go ahead and slip your weapon around the tree. Aim for the left guard.”

She shrugged and did so. Just the barrel and the scope, nothing else showing. The scope fed the image into her night-vision goggles. As she aimed her rifle squarely at the man’s nose, she herself remained safely tree-protected. It was an odd position, but she’d been trained init.

Sofia glanced at her watch. Just past twenty-two hundred hours. Ten-oh-seven at night. “Howlong—”

“Three. Two. Fire…now!”

Not ten minutes.

Ten seconds.

She fired. Twice. And then a heartshot.

Exactly like training.

Except this was a live person. She’d—

“Duck!” Duane grabbed her around the waist and hauled her against him with a hard power that knocked the wind out of her in more ways than one. Part of it was his whip-strong forearm wrapped across her gut and slamming her back against his chest, but part of it was simply the effortless strength with which he’d movedher.

Then he held his other hand in front of her face, allowing her just enough time to see that he held a remote trigger.

His thumb wentdown.

The response was immediate. A blast of light washed the jungle beyond their hideaway as if daylight had suddenly been reborn.

A cascading heavy Thump! of powerful explosions followed a moment later.

“What the—” Though Sofia still lay in Duane’s arms, she had to shout to be heard. The jungle went insane: screaming bird calls, grunts of wild hogs, and the monkeys. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the monkeys were beyond loud. It was like a secondary explosion of pure sound had been lit off by his trigger.

But Duane was up and on themove.

“Stay close behind me,” he shouted.

She raced to keepup.

“Check for shoulder badges before you shoot.” He tore aside the covers on his shoulders revealing small squares that were brilliantly bright reflectors in her infrared imaging. She pulled her own shoulder tabs open to identify herself as a friendly to any other shooters wearing night vision as she raced afterhim.

Straight intohell.

The four towers were gone. Cut off at the legs, they’d fallen outward exactly as Duane had planned. During their “walk” around the encampment, he’d placed cutting charges of C-4 plastique explosive on each leg outside the wall. He’d also placed a contact explosive where he’d expected the tower cabs to hit. Sure enough, all four towers hit their charges and the secondary explosives shredded them, along with any armed guards who might have otherwise caused trouble.

All of the camp lights had conveniently been attached to the towers, so the camp was plunged into darkness. Stupid design—perfect for his purpose though.

He’d also placed a larger charge against the midpoint of each tree-trunk wall. Those charges had punched massive holes that could be used three abreast.

“Better overkill than underkill,” his explosives instructor had always been clear about that and Duane had thanked him for the lesson any number of times. There was an art to precision, but if the wall didn’t come down, it could screw the whole operation.

He slapped a quick set of charges on the main gate and once more pulled Sofia against him before hitting the trigger. This time he merely blew off the hinges so there wasn’t much to hide from, but she felt so damn good against him the first time that he couldn’t resist even the briefest excuse to hold her again.

She felt even better thistime.

Women never really worked out for Duane, they were always too mild. Sofia Forteza felt like she was ripped steel—inside andout.

After the explosion, he let her go and turned back to thegate.

“It’s still standing, Mr. Rock,” Sofia even looked amazing. Her face covered by goggles and camo paint. Her body hidden by an armored vest adorned with more electronics and less ammunition than he’d ever carry, but still pure soldier. And a G28 in her hands.

“You just keep giving me that sass, sister.”

“I said I’mnot—”

He kicked the gate. With the hinges gone, it tipped slowly inward, finally crashing to the ground.

“Okay,” she said just a little louder than the quieting jungle. “That wasnice.”

“Uh-oh, a compliment. Hold on to that thought.” Then he moved in. “Follow behind me with security shots. Only shoot people that I shoot.”

Exactly as planned, the guards were still moving about in bewilderment at the shock-and-awe with which he’d just slammed into the compound.

He fired two rounds in the face of the first one he spotted.

No third round came from behindhim.

He glanced over his shoulder.

Sofia was standing there like a statue. Staring.

“In the heart, like this.” He fired a round into the falling guard’s heart. He was already dead, but it was an absolute guarantee that he wasn’t getting up anytimesoon.

He took out thenext.

He only waited a heartbeat before adding the third shot himself. It arrived at the same moment as Sofia’s.

Good, she was back from whatever had thrownher.

Duane spotted the rest of his team rushing in through the other three holes he’d breached in the perimeter fence.

Three other holes in the wall, five other members on the team. Didn’t matter which was which, not at a Unit operator level of training.

“Comeon!”

Less than twenty seconds from breaching the main gate, they were up against the general’s bunker. It was the only concrete building in the camp. The door was heavy steel. Really heavy steel, like a bank vault.

Duane’s smile suddenly turnedevil.

“What?” Sofia wondered what he was going to do now after the spectacular job of taking out the towers and breaching every wall of the encampment simultaneously.

If she was overwhelmed, then the guards must be in cardiac arrest. The Delta shooters who came in through the walls moved so fast they were little more than blurs in her memory.

No radio traffic.

No elaborate planning. Definitely no achingly long conferences in some remote Washington office as she’d expected. Delta simply got itdone.

They’d blown into the camp, as hard and fast as their explosive charges, and were fast taking down anyone holding a weapon.

“I’m just a Southern boy havin’ a heyday, sugar,” Duane was practically chortling. “Watch myback.”

Not that there was much to watch. Armed guards were falling faster than mayflies, far too busy to worry about two soldiers blended into the night.

He dropped his pack and pulled out a large rope, coiled tightly. He began unrolling it and smashing it into the wall, several meters from the door. The rope stuck to thewall.

“But thedoor…”

“Belongs in a bank,” he finished slapping on the rope in a rough circle four feet in diameter, which must be more C-4 explosive. “Besides, going in through the door is what’s expected, darling. Where’s the fun in doing the expected?”

He stabbed in a pair of detonators, then signaled her to lie flat against the wall well to one side of the circle of C-4. He flattened himself against the wall on the far side, then slung his rifle over his shoulder and pulled out a handgun.

Again, he showed her the trigger as he pressed it so she was ready for the explosion. Without Duane’s arm around her, she wasn’t ready for the shock wave—it almost knocked her down. Note to self: lean into the explosion nexttime.

Before she was steady on her feet and the cloud of concrete dust cleared, Duane dove fast and low into the new doorway he’d blown right through thewall.

There were four loud reports from his weapon. Then two more before she nerved up enough to go through the doorway herself.

Two corpses lay on the floor. Duane was kneeling on a third person, face down and struggling even as Duane zip-tied his wrists together behind hisback.

“Is this your boy?” Duane flipped the man over. The lights in the bunker were still working.

Sofia flipped up her goggles and looked. Six months she’d been chasing that face, she’d know it anywhere: graying hair, pinched nose, worm-crawl style goatee around thin lips. “That’shim.”

“Alpha target in captivity. Building A-4. Two friendlies inside.”

“Roger, west clear,” someone called over the radio.

“South clear,” a deep voice that she was fairly sure belonged toChad.

“Hang on,” the geek’s voice, Richie. So he might have been born a dweeb, but he was still an operator for The Unit no matter what Chad said abouthim.

She didn’t breathe for the next ten seconds. There were several loud rattles of gunfire outside, but all of Delta weapons had silencers—so what she was hearing was panicked fire from the last of the guards. Finally the audible gunfire stopped.

“Okay, east clear aswell.”

“C’mon, Richie. Get it in gear,” the deep voice needledhim.

“Eat shit, Chad. The guards’ main bunkhouse is over here. What did I hear from you, three lousy takedowns?”

“Five.”

“Liar. You never—”

“Full sweep. Assemble on A-4. Three minutes,” a no-nonsense woman cut them off. She must be the mission controller, back in some remote aircraft.

“Let’s check the room while we’re waiting,” Duane suggested.

No ledgers. No handy safe. No records of any kind. Not his main base of operations. But there was a large bin stacked solid with cell phones, probably taken from the women as they’d been kidnapped and imprisoned here before being trafficked off to the highest bidder.

Hadn’t anyone thought to trace the phones’ chips?

They were powered off, which didn’t necessarily make a trace impossible. Then Sofia tapped the bin they’d been stashed in. Metal—blocking any ping from thechip.

She began booting them up. They all had some degree of charge on them. Most of the login screens were unique, meaning the women in captivity here should be able to pick out which phone was theirs.

“Find the general’s phone,” she called out to Duane.

He handed it to her a moment later.

Locked.

“Password?” Sofia asked nicelyonce.

The general barked out a laugh.

She nodded to Duane, expecting him to deliver a kick to the general’s kidneys.

Instead, Duane slammed Aguado into a desk chair, cut his hands free and pinned them both to the desk with one big hand around the general’s two wrists. The general struggled, but it was useless against a man of Duane’s strength.

Duane snarled something into the general’s ear and one of his hands twitched.

Duane rammed the muzzle of his sidearm down on the back of the general’shand.

“Five. Four. Three…”

General Aguado gave up his code atTwo.

She opened his phone and discovered exactly what she’d expected. A Bitcoin account—a very well-fundedone.

Sofia flashed what she’d found at Duane.

His brilliant blue eyes were still hard as steel, but she could get to like his smile.