Heart Strike (26 page)

Kyle returned from the rear cabin, escorting a sleepy-looking Analie Sala in a plush robe, the white offsetting her dark skin. She looked exotic and was having trouble keeping the untied robe closed as she stumbled forward. Sala apparently didn't wear much when she slept.

Some remote part of Richie thought how much Chad would be sorry to miss such a sight. Then he figured that Chad was seeing plenty at the moment.

* * *

“Ah,” Pederson said softly. “I suppose that I shall need some new guards.”

“At least better-caliber ones,” Carla agreed.

Melissa couldn't speak.

Her warrior stood at the entrance to the plane, his own weapons still slung on. He brandished the firearms she'd cataloged as belonging to the guards…liberated in his rush to reach her. He bore a Ruger 44 and an Imbel IA2—which was only supposed to be in the hands of the Brazilian military, though she'd been trained on one during the Delta OTC. There was a fire and a rage still burning in his dark eyes. She was in no danger, but he hadn't known that and he'd come hunting for her.

She waved him forward and he stalked into the cabin. When she'd coaxed him close enough that she could grab the front of this shirt, she pulled him down and kissed him. Despite being in full combat mode, it was as gentle and tender as the man behind the kiss.

“Good morning,” she whispered.

“Uh…huh.” That, however, was her warrior.

“Sit.” She scooted down the couch, up against Carla.

Kyle had dropped Analie onto the couch beside Niklas before perching on the arm of the sofa next to Carla. Duane stood back by the cockpit, his rifle turned toward the open front stairs.

Richie surveyed the situation once, then sat, resting the butt of the Imbel on the floor but keeping the Ruger in his hand.

“If”—Melissa waved toward Duane and Kyle, both with rifles poised—“you don't want any actual deaths, you'll want to call off your guards before they come back with reinforcements.”

Niklas reached for his radio. “Julio?” A pause. “Julio?”

“I may have left him in the dirt,” Richie grunted out.

Niklas grimaced. “Miguel?”

“
Sí?
”

“All secure here. Set up a perimeter.”

“I must see you are not under duress.”

“One man only,” Melissa warned him.

Niklas relayed the message.

The guard who had been standing at the bottom of the stairs when she and Carla had boarded came cautiously into the cabin. He inspected the situation carefully then shook his head no. He sent a particularly nasty look at Richie.

“I guess you didn't treat him very well either.”

Richie shrugged. Definitely not.

“Excuse me a moment.” Pederson rose to his feet. “They are not going to believe so easily I am not under duress.” He walked down the aisle, giving Duane a wide and careful berth. Then he walked off the plane with Miguel.

Duane shuffled forward to overhear if they were plotting. Instead, what he repeated from them sounded clean, “See? I am not a captive. They are new, unused to our rules. This once we shall not hold that against them.” Then Duane was backing off from the door as Pederson returned.

The man settled into the couch elegantly, as if bred to such situations.

“You make good on your deliveries. You are not afraid of force. You do not hesitate. I find these admirable traits. I also find myself reluctant to trust them. Your American DEA has tried similar infiltration tactics in other places.”

Melissa didn't bother to answer; she simply pointed at Analie Sala still wrapped in her bathrobe. She was the voice Pederson would trust, not theirs.

“I am able to account for you and your pilot.” Analie nodded. “Smuggling and arms trafficking. The rest of you have a very murky past.”

“Estevan,” Carla said flatly. “Bolívar Estevan.”

She gained the full attention of Niklas and Analie, though Melissa didn't understand why the dead prior owner of their Twin Otter was such a powerful talisman.

“We were working for him, freelance you might say.”

Freelance? No shit. Carla had tried to kill Estevan and Kyle had succeeded.

“And how,” Niklas asked, “was Bolívar killed and you were not?”

“His daughter had recently been freed from kidnapping. She was a pretty woman and had been”—Carla looked particularly grim—“used. Hard. Upon her unexpected release, we were her trusted escort to the hospital. Then Sinaloa took out Señor Bolívar's operation and put us out of work.”

It was perfect. Information that only an insider could know. And there was no questioning Carla's deep anger at the events. It made her sound even more loyal to the family, though the root cause was obvious to Melissa.

“That was six months ago,” Analie commented.

“Six months of total suck,” Kyle responded. “We worked the coca fields for most of it.”

“You heard of the disasters in Bolivia?”

“What disasters?” Kyle leaned forward with a casual interest.

Analie raised an eyebrow and dropped the topic, but Richie had told Melissa all about it. Ten percent of the Bolivian production lost to a 747 spreading great swaths of defoliant with pinpoint accuracy at a dozen coca fields—all mapped by this group of Delta. They hadn't heard of the “disaster”; they were the disaster.

“And how did you come to team up?”

“After six months of total suck,” Kyle answered, “we were back in Maracaibo trying to find work. We hooked up with these two who were in a similar boat. They had a plane; we had muscle. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“I see two people who have stolen Estevan's plane from a Coast Guard station. I see four more who worked for Estevan. All American military trained. All who happened to meet in Maracaibo. I don't like coincidences.”

Kyle shrugged. “Doesn't mean they don't happen.”

“I suggest,” Pederson rejoined the conversation, “that you need a better answer than that.” He raised his radio.

Richie lifted the Ruger, aimed it at the center of Pederson's forehead, and pulled the trigger. Pederson barely blinked.

Then Richie whispered softly, “What the hell?”

Melissa broke her eye contact with Pederson to look over at Richie. With a quick flick, Richie opened the cylinder, then turned it for her to see. No bullets. He didn't even bother looking down at the Imbel rifle, simply flicked the magazine release. The magazine hit the carpet with an empty clatter.

It took less than a heartbeat for Richie, Duane, and Kyle to drop their confiscated weapons and pull their own.

Pederson lowered his radio and held his hands out. “It is no matter. I simply wanted to delay any gunplay until we'd had a little chat.”

Duane did a flash check out the aircraft's forward door. He pulled back in and held his hand high with his fingers shaped like a fake gun, then he pumped it three times. Three rifles. If he could see three, that meant there were more around. The windows were curtained, but the location of the couch would be well-known and Miguel had seen them perched there. Gunmen outside the plane, perhaps even ones down in the cargo bay ready to fire upward, could easily target the couch positions.

Melissa decided against moving as that would display fear. She'd bank on Pederson not wanting to damage his plane. She tipped her head to indicate that the next move was his.

His smile was chilly. “Dayana is making sure that your blond friend is also, shall we say, well occupied. Now would anyone care to explain the coincidence?”

Delta had done many things to Melissa, one of which was instilling a sense of absolute calm in a crisis situation. The worse the situation, the calmer she felt. So she didn't leap into the silence; instead she did her best to look like she was considering her best answer while really hoping someone else had a plausible one.

“That would be my doing,” Duane finally rumbled.

Melissa again didn't turn, forcing Pederson to keep watching her.
I have perfect confidence in my crew,
was the message she wanted to get across to him.

“We were looking for work. Then Melissa and Mr. Doofus there…”

She assumed he meant Richie and did her best to suppress a smile at Duane offering a tease to his teammate in the middle of the situation. It said much about how close they all were.

“…showed up in a plane with the tail number of our former boss. Didn't even change it. I tracked them down. Turns out that Chad and Mr. Doofus had served on a couple of missions together. Some interagency crap. We were all broke, so we threw in together.”

It was the longest speech she'd ever heard from Duane. By the looks that briefly crossed the others' faces when she did glance aside, it was the longest they'd ever heard as well.

Pederson turned to Analie, awaiting her analysis of the situation.

After a long moment, she shrugged. “It fits. No one except his personal guards or Sinaloa would know about Estevan's daughter. If they were Sinaloa, they wouldn't have been out of work. It is clear that while those two”—Analie indicated Richie and Melissa herself—“know the plane, it is equally clear that the other four know next to nothing about aircraft.”

Pederson nodded, accepting his expediter's assessment. Then he turned to them with a big smile.

“
Bueno!
All is forgiven. We pay one million per ton for delivery to Honduras or Mexico, two million for direct to the U.S., plus an extra half million for danger pay if you cross into U.S. territorial waters. You will have secure refueling in Maracaibo, so you can make the big crossing if you wish to try for it. After you deliver, your plane will be clean and may enter the U.S. properly for refueling.”

Melissa nodded and leaned forward to shake Pederson's hand.

Analie also leaned in to proffer her hand, a little faster than Pederson. Melissa shook with both in turn.

With the extended range tanks, the
Tin Goose
could carry their full crew plus a ton and a half.

“The U.S. works just fine for us.”

It was nine in the morning as Richie walked along the trail that led from the bathing stream back to the jungle airfield close beside Melissa and marveled at how many changes it was possible to become comfortable with and how quickly they could occur.

After three weeks of flying every other day, he could land through the opening of the jungle airstrip without even breaking a sweat. Living the alternate days beneath the jungle's canopy now felt as normal as the barracks at Fort Bragg.

And sleeping, flying, and keeping fit with Melissa Moore had become as natural as breathing. He'd seen it before. His parents, Kyle and Carla, and… Okay, he couldn't think of anyone else offhand, but he'd seen it. But to feel the miracle of being together? That was a life-changer. His first thought each day: Where was Melissa? And to discover that the answer as often as not was “in his arms” was a joy he'd never expected for himself.

What had been an awkward, uncertain, and occasionally painful first week of having her on the team had settled into a well-oiled, Delta Force drug-running machine.

True to his word, Pederson kept the money flowing into the offshore account that he had set up for them. And Fred Smith kept funneling the funds out to make it look real.

The deliveries themselves always made it to land because Moore Aviation delivered. Of course with added electronic markers and drone surveillance—Richie often wondered if the FAA was in on the latter, he'd guess not—the shipments always seemed to go astray over the next few days.

A truck blew a tire in Milwaukee, because a female sniper on loan from the Hostage Rescue Team had shot it. A DEA agent, dressed as a state cop, pulled over to “assist,” and found the load of drugs because he “just happened” to be a K-9 officer and his dog alerted to the truck.

A boat went under a bridge in Natchez, Mississippi, and never came out the other side.

Shortly after delivery, a Houston gang was jumped by another Houston gang—one they'd never heard of and would never hear of again, but were all crack shots.

The victories were kept out of the news, even though ten tons of cocaine had hit the ports without ever making it to the streets. Their system had to break at some point, but Richie figured they were good for another week at least.

Meanwhile, he'd appreciate the routine they'd fallen into.

He and Melissa had run their normal 10K, four laps of the airfield, then went down to the stream that served as the local bathing pool. There were a few more private pools farther upstream. Most of the Americans and Europeans, and there were any number of them in a variety of positions, gravitated to these. But by this time of the morning, their privacy was guaranteed because most of the camp had gone to sleep—except for those overseeing the purification, drying, and packaging process. The drug lab's operation was staffed twenty-four hours a day.

And none of them could get near it. Not even Chad, who was still shacking up with the sultry Dayana, had found a way in to view the operation.

But they knew where it was, and Chad had managed to get a photo of the exterior.

“Well, that solves that, like anyone cares,” Fred Smith had complained when they met briefly during an Alabama refueling stop. “Tail number HK-1707X was a Colombian DC-6 cargo plane lost without a trace in that region in 1978 along with three crew members. Probably been a drug lab ever since.” He'd then suggested that they just firebomb the place out of existence.

“There's a small city here,” Melissa muttered as they wandered back from bathing together, restarting the whole non-argument.

They often made love at the quiet pool, but not today. It was like one of Chad's itches—the pressure was building—Richie just didn't know from where.

And no one had come up with a comfortable solution about the several hundred people working in this city under the trees. Pilots, cook staff, servants to the wealthy, mechanics, chemists, accountants, satellite comm technicians who worked in a concrete bunker… It was an incredible operation.

“Fred's patience is wearing thin,” Richie continued the never-ending discussion. They had to keep reminding him of all of the drug-dealer channels that they were rolling up in the U.S. at the moment because of the delivery information that the team was supplying.

“I'm on the verge of agreeing with him.”

“Civilians,” Richie said what had been said a thousand times as the trail bent around a towering Para nut tree several meters across. Most of these people were just workers trying to do the best they could.

“Damn them!” Melissa's curse told him just how frustrated she was getting when she ducked into the last cluster of chupa-chupa fruit trees.

They came out of the trail. A sweeping view of the whole complex was visible from the slight crest at the end of the field.

He rested a hand on Melissa's arm to stop her just where the trail broke clear of the chupa-chupa. They hadn't even been holding hands, which said almost as much about their mutual distraction as not making love at the pool.

“What?”

Richie looked out at the field, the working aircraft down one side, the broken ones down the other used for housing. Behind those, the tents protecting chow lines, spares, machine shop, extra sleeping quarters. Barely visible deep in the trees beyond that, the fat fuselage of the crashed DC-6 turned into a drug lab.

When they normally would have returned—roughly an hour later than now, because there were some things about Melissa that were absolutely not worth rushing—the entire camp would have been asleep. A few guards and the drug processing operation were the only activity during the long, hot days.

“What is it, Richie?”

“Something's different. What is it?”

“Why are you asking me? You're the systems genius.”

“Just do me a favor and look.”

He watched her rather than looking at the airfield. He'd hoped that her gaze might jump to the incongruity, but it didn't. A Unit operator's attention was trained to find the break in patterns, terrorist versus hostage were distinctly different. A trained militia fighter moved and reacted completely differently from the civilians they were trying to hide among. It became more difficult when the hostages were also military, but The Unit trained for that as well.

But Melissa's gaze started at one edge of the camp and swept to the other.

A forklift making a delivery of cocaine paste drove to the rear cargo door of the DC-6. A dozen guards were active, four around the lab, two lounging atop the communications bunker, and six others roving the rest of the compound and airfield.

If it had been Richie's operation, he'd also have had a few snipers high in the trees. The jungle offered any number of good hides, so it would be impossible to check them all.

In frustration, the team had risked breaking out some of their high-end infrared scopes to scan the canopy…and found nothing.

That wasn't quite precise. They'd found any number of monkeys, a family of sloths, and a pair of jaguars. Outside of the class Mammalia they'd also found an astonishing number of parrots and other birds. But no perched snipers. It was the first flaw he'd seen in Pederson's whole operation.

Melissa finished her scan without even an unexpected eye blink.

But the itch wasn't going away.

“Kiss me.”

She eyed him sideways.

“C'mon, pretty lady. Kiss me.”

* * *

Melissa was sure they'd never kissed so publicly. They were effectively on a display pedestal above one end of the field, even if there weren't many people active at this hour. Paused as they were, they'd already drawn the attention of a couple of the roving guards who were down this end of the field. And it was certainly something that Richie had never asked for.

“Weren't you all worried about something just a moment ago?”

“I was.”

“And now you want me to kiss you?”

“I do.”

Would she ever understand this man? “What changed?”

He shrugged and pulled her against him. Hard. Almost brutally.

She offered a brief kiss and received raw heat in return. She melted against him. Richie always did that to her, gave her his complete and perfect attention. He always did, but she'd long ago learned to expect far less from men. Though Richie was slowly convincing her there was an alternative—one she thoroughly enjoyed.

His hands started to rove and for a moment she forgot where she was, lost in the intense sensations that his slightest touch evoked. But when his hand slipped under her shirt and began traveling upward, she blinked her eyes in surprise and remembered they were standing on a slight rise, exposed to the whole field.

Over Richie's shoulder, she could see that they had the interest of three of the nearer guards.

“Richie,” she managed to mumble against his kiss, just as his hand cupped her breast. After their swim she hadn't pulled her sports bra back on because it was sweaty from the run. Instead, she'd wrapped it in her towel.

“Mmmm,” he made a very contented male sound as he stroked her.

“Richie!” She managed a harsh whisper when he shifted down to nuzzle her neck.

This time it might have been a contented noise or it might have been a snarl of irritation at her attempts to interrupt him.

A fourth guard wandered over to the base of the trail as if they were enjoying the show.

“Hey!”

He shifted one of his legs behind her knees, taking her to the ground. She landed hard in the red dirt and he landed atop her.

This time he clamped his mouth where his hand had just been, coaxing her to arch her bare breast up against him as he lifted her T-shirt.

“No. God damn it!”

He winked at her. “So hit me.”

She couldn't believe it. Had the dichotomy of Richie the Geek versus Richie the Warrior that she'd always found so captivating and charming been a lie all along? No. He was up to something, but she had no idea what.

Melissa fisted him in the ribs and he didn't slacken his attack on her breast for a moment.

“No!” he whispered sharply and drove his hand down between her legs and grabbed her hard enough that it almost hurt. “Make it real.”

She hauled back and delivered a right cross to his chin that sent him tumbling off her and into a tree hard enough that she heard the
klonk
of his thick skull smacking the wood.

“Didn't have to make it
that
real,” he mumbled as he cradled his head.

His painful pinch had made her apply more force than she'd intended. Melissa rolled to her feet. If it was looking real that he needed…she kicked a cloud of the red dirt at his face.

She aimed a kick at his ass. The Delta training that had taught him to roll away when blinded caused her to catch him sharply in the kidneys instead.

“Ole, señorita!”

“En los cojones!”

“De neuvo!”

“In the balls! Again! Again!”

They'd gathered quite a crowd.

Melissa turned to stare down at Pederson's people.

The jeers and cheers increased. And they were looking…

She yanked her shirt back down. Being careful to make sure she caught the padded muscle of his butt this time, she kicked Richie once more in the ass. Shoving through the crowd of guards, she stalked down the field toward the DC-3 where the rest of the team would be bedding down.

Behind her she could hear that fucking male solidarity thing that she hated so much. Every military unit she'd ever served in had just been a bad variation of the old boys' club.

Which she knew was exactly what Richie had been counting on.

“
Oh amigo,”
she heard behind her. The guards really were that predictable.

She hoped that was the advantage Richie had sought, but it was disgusting.

She was halfway back to the plane, blessing that The Unit
was
different, when she figured it was safe to look back. Melissa shook her hair loose then bent down to retie her boot. Glancing sideways through the shield of her hair, she saw Richie still sitting on the ground with his head hung down—she hadn't hit him
that
hard, though she did feel bad about the boot to the kidneys. Seven guards were circled about him, giving him sympathy and commiseration for being beaten up by a woman.

Bonding, exactly as Richie had intended. It was a maneuver worthy of Chad. Another example of how his brain used another person's skill set as his own. And half the time he didn't see how brilliant he was.

She rose and stalked over to the DC-3 and ran head-on into Carla—would have fallen back on her butt if Carla hadn't grabbed her arm.

“You're all red.”

Melissa looked down at her shirt and pants. She was coated with dirt. Brushing at it did no good. Everywhere she'd touched the dirt, or Richie had touched her after they'd hit the ground, was red. There was a particularly rude palm print on her crotch that she was finally able to brush enough off to blur what it was.

Carla was grinning at her.

“Well,” Melissa offered a reluctant smile in return. “You should see the other guy.”

“What happened?”

Melissa peeked over the nose of the plane back toward Richie. The guards had turned the event into a major rest break. Several of them were now sitting atop the hill with Richie and they appeared to be chatting back and forth.

Carla peeked around the fuselage close beside her.

“He wanted the guards' sympathy, so he pretended he was going to rape me.”

“He did what?” Carla spun to face her, a dark anger seething to the surface. “I'll fucking castrate the bastard. He used you to get their sympathy? I'll stake him to a fire ant hill and coat his balls with honey.”

“Carla?”

She sputtered to a halt long enough for Melissa to get a word in edgewise.