Merciless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 1) (18 page)

Instead, Commander Livingston had assumed the role, moving to DC within a few days of Charity’s disappearance. The message had been from Deuce himself, reporting to her everything that had transpired and saying that even though he didn’t like how it had happened, he’d help her in any way he could. At the end of the message, he’d wished her well and said that he and his wife would pray for her safe return.

As the morning bore on, Charity contemplated the last part of the message. She’d never known her boss to be a religious man. She did recall his saying once that there were no atheists on the battlefield. Aside from that one reference, she couldn’t remember him mentioning religion or saying that he and his wife attended church.

Hours later, with little else to occupy her time, she went below and began putting together the equipment she’d need to take with her once she reached Alvarado. The original plan was to anchor in a secluded cove and use the Zodiac to transport things to a waiting car, once she’d secured one.

Now, she would be forced to tie up at a dock. Which would mean finding a marina where she could bring a car close to the boat. A person walking a long pier, dressed in black, and carrying a sniper rifle and gear, wouldn’t go unnoticed, even in the middle of the night.

With luck, she’d arrive in Alvarado early enough in the evening to rent a car or truck for the fifty-mile drive to the southern slope of the volcano. Barring that, she’d have to wait and rent the car the next day. If she could then get her gear to it without drawing attention, she could drive to within a few miles of the volcano and wait for darkness. The tone of Deuce’s message indicated that time was of the essence. He’d mentioned reports that an attack in South Texas was planned for Armed Forces Day, less than six days away. If it was this cell, they’d wait until the last minute to cross the border, which meant they’d leave the volcano in four days.

Best case, she’d have two nights in which to scout the enemy camp before taking her shot when the terrorists met for breakfast in the crater. Worst case would mean climbing to the high northern slope during the night and taking the shot the next morning.

As the afternoon turned into evening, Charity prepared for another night of sleeping at the helm in short naps.

A
wad woke early. It was still dark when he rolled out his prayer mat for the morning prayer. When he finished, he rolled and stored his mat, picked up his backpack with the lightweight machine pistol inside and left the tent.

Fareed was on watch and had to be relieved so he could prepare the morning meal. Walking along the now-familiar path to the summit, Awad thought about the coming days. Today they were weapons training again, after a couple of days of him and Karim trying to teach the men a few words and phrases of English, and to act a little more like the infidels they hated so much. It was a lesson in futility.

Tomorrow was more weapons training, and after that, each man was to spend a full day in prayer, fasting after the morning meal. At least being on lookout, he wouldn’t have to be shooting.

It took Awad twenty minutes to cross the crater, where they practiced shooting at a large round rock in the center, and climb up to the high spot where Fareed watched over the surrounding area. The only light to guide his way was the waning moon, now high overhead. In a few more days, they wouldn’t even have that. Not that it mattered. They’d be gone.

“
As-salamu alaykum
,” Fareed said as Awad stepped up onto the giant boulder that would be his perch for the next three hours. Since Fareed cooked all the meals, Awad was relieving him early, so he could get his cook fire started.

“
Wa-Alaikum-Salaam
,” Awad replied. “You will remember to bring me something to eat, once the others have finished?”

The cook grinned. “I feel Faud may be right. You do have a tapeworm inside you. Yes, I will make sure to bring you plenty.”

“Have you seen or heard anything?”

“A few sounds down in the darkness below, animals, probably. I have not seen any vehicles on the road all night.”

“Not even on the main road to the west?”

“No, nothing at all,” Fareed replied, rising and starting down the boulder-strewn peak. “I will return in an hour.”

“Thank you, Fareed.”

Awad sat down just below the top of the boulder. Far enough up on it so that he could see down the northern slope, but not so high as to silhouette himself once the sun rose above the eastern rim of the volcano.

“Fareed, wait,” Awad said. “Do you have a cigarette? I left mine in my tent.”

The cook turned around and came back up onto the boulder, sitting down once more. Reaching into his shirt pocket, he took out a pack of strong Turkish cigarettes and shook two out, handing one to Awad.

He struck a wooden match on the surface of the rock, and it flared brightly. When the flame subsided, Fareed held it out to Awad first and then lit his own, as Awad turned his head upward, exhaling the rich smoke.

“In three days, we will not be allowed to smoke anything but the American cigarettes,” Fareed complained.

“At least Hussein agreed to that, my friend. After Majdi and I told him everyone in America smokes them.”

“You couldn’t have told him they smoked a good Turkish blend?” the older man asked, taking a deep draw on the strong smoke and exhaling over his shoulder.

Awad laughed lightly, looking up at the night sky. A bright star directly above them and very near the moon seemed to flicker, growing brighter as the dawn of a new day approached. Awad thought it a good omen.

C
hyrel Koshinski was in her office in Homestead very early, well before the sun had even thought about rising. She liked to start her day early and often worked late into the night. This morning, she was up much earlier than usual.

Deuce had texted her late last night from his new office in the nation’s capital. He had an assignment for her that involved moving the surveillance satellite they sometimes used. He said he’d email the location to her office and she could then move the satellite into geosynchronous orbit above a suspected terrorist training camp to begin observation.

With the satellite currently parked in space above the Gulf of Mexico, Chyrel knew it would take several hours to move it into position over whatever Middle Eastern country he wanted to look at with its sophisticated camera equipment.

In her tiny office, Chyrel booted up her desktop computer and waited. When the secure client server came up, she opened the email and was surprised that the target area Deuce emailed her was in Mexico, not the Middle East.

Shrugging, she pulled up a terrain map of the target area, with lines of longitude and latitude laid out on it. Jotting down the exact coordinates of the suspected camp, she opened the control panel for the satellite and entered the numbers from her pad.

The computer told her the satellite would be over the target in less than an hour, so she spent the time studying the geography, using both the terrain map and a satellite image from Google.

Though Google images are sometimes years out of date, she liked playing with them. Sometimes, the angle of the sun would show shadows and give her a better idea of what a place was like. Occasionally, she went to the street view to see regular people going about their day. Lately, she’d been zooming in on boat wakes she saw in the water, to look at people on their boats. This time, even though the Google image was overgrown with trees and shrubs, the shape was still unmistakable.

“Huh,” she said aloud. “Hiding in a volcano?”

Referring to the terrain map, she saw that the mountain, called Vulcan de San Martin, was a long-dormant volcano about twenty or so miles inland and southeast of Veracruz. The concentric rings of the terrain map showed that it rose steeply from the barren plain to a fractured cone at just over a mile above sea level.

The cone itself appeared to be roughly circular, at just over a half mile wide. Looking back and forth from the terrain map to the Google image, she noticed that the western slope was carved with deep gouges, canyons with a vertical drop of several hundred feet in places. The southern and eastern slopes were heavily forested, and the north slope looked like a moonscape, mostly bare rocks and sand. Zooming in, she saw several areas with round depressions that she realized had been made centuries ago by cooling lava forming bubbles.

The rim of the crater was highest on the north side and lowest on the south. It looked like the jungle just spilled into the nearly flat area of the cone from the south side.

A ping from the satellite control panel let her know the orbiting spacecraft was in place. Knowing that Deuce wouldn’t be in his office for at least a couple of hours, Chyrel switched the satellite’s camera equipment on to have a look.

It was still full darkness, so the digital camera showed nothing but blackness. When Chyrel switched it to thermal imaging, what she saw startled her.

Near the center of the crater was a very large, very hot spot. Curious, she zoomed in and activated the sensory systems. The display on the side of the thermal image indicated the surface at the center of the twenty-foot-wide hot spot was over one hundred and fifty degrees. Moving the sensor just fifty feet away, she found that the surface temperature was a relatively cool seventy-two.

When Chyrel zoomed back out to show a five-mile square, she realized what the hot spot was. Molten lava below the surface was heating the ground.

At the same time she realized this, she noticed about a dozen much smaller and cooler hot spots on the southern slope and a solitary one on the northern rim. She zoomed in on the tight cluster to the south. All but four were in groups of two and appeared to be people lying down. When one of them began to move, she was sure of it.

“Guess the reports are right,” she said to herself.

“What reports?” a voice asked from her open door.

Chyrel looked up and smiled at Tony Jacobs, one of the field guys with the Caribbean Counterterrorism Command. A shaved-headed black guy with a muscular physique, he was by far the friendliest of the group of always-serious spec-ops spooks she worked with.

“Deuce has me looking at a volcano in Mexico where reports have said a terrorist cell had set up a training camp.”

Tony came around Chyrel’s desk and bent over to look at the image on her screen. Most of the team members had security clearances as high as, or higher than, her own. Tony was Deuce’s right-hand man and had come with Deuce to work at Homeland Security from the Navy SEALs. They had a lot of history, and the boss trusted him completely.

“Sure looks like a group of people,” he said. “Hey, look. That guy’s moving.”

As they watched, a solitary figure began weaving away from the group, moving to the north. Thermal imaging can’t distinguish features, or even differentiate between a ninety-eight-degree rock and a person. All it measures is differences in heat, so a person against a cold background looks like a ghostly apparition.

“There’s one more about a mile north of these,” Charity said, zooming out. “And check this out.”

“Whoa!” Tony exclaimed. “What the hell is that? A fire?”

“This whole area,” she said, making a circular motion around the bright spot on the screen. “This is the volcano’s crater. From what I’ve found out, it hasn’t erupted in over two hundred years.”

Tony laughed. “Looks like we might not even have to worry about these guys.”