Dead Heat (40 page)

“I have to go back.”

“No time,” Skipper said. “Kane has already set the charges. You’ll be killed or separated. Trust him.”

He had to. He had to trust Kane to get Lucy out.

Blitz said, “Let’s go, Rogan. Or they’ll find the plane. We don’t have time to dick around.”

Sean sat precariously on the backside of the jeep, the boys all crowding into the backseat, sitting on one another except for the boy—Tito—with the injured leg. He sat on Skipper’s lap while Blitz drove through the desert with no lights, the sound of the engine impossibly loud racing over the dark, empty sand.

Blitz got on the radio with Padre. “Start the plane, we need to bolt.”

Sean said, “Padre’s a pilot?”

“He doesn’t have a license.”

That wasn’t a no. That meant he simply flew illegally.

Padre had the plane ready when they arrived. “We don’t know how much time we have,” Blitz began.

A rumbling explosion made the ground shake, and the boys all huddled together. A second explosion, even louder, rocked the plane.

Padre told the boys to get into the plane. Skipper carried Tito. Sean stood and stared at the glow in the east.

“Little Rogan, we need to leave,” Padre said.

Trust Kane. He knows what he’s doing. He’ll protect Lucy with his life.

Sean turned to the plane, his stomach in knots.

CHAPTER 34

Michael hadn’t said a word since they left his dead friends, but he followed Kane’s orders to the letter.

Lucy pushed aside the vision of those dead boys, but they sat in the back of her mind. Kane’s plan was smart, but the families of those five boys would never know what happened to them. They would be forgotten.

Not forgotten. You’ll never forget them.

Michael knew them all. He would never forget, either. Neither would the seven they’d rescued, the seven boys Sean was flying back to Jack’s safe house. The one needed a doctor.

Even though they hadn’t found Brad, they’d saved seven children tonight. It was a victory, she had to remember that. Seven children were alive who would have been murdered if they’d done nothing.

Kane put his hand up to halt them. Lucy and Michael, a step behind, stopped.

Kane pointed to the last truck in the caravan. They’d thought there were only two trucks, but there were five, all filled with men from the town, all of whom had guns. They needed a vehicle, but they had to ensure no one could pursue them.

She nodded. They were going to take the last truck.

They hid behind one of the old shacks on the southern edge of the compound. This might have once been a guardhouse, but it was half gone; bullet holes had splintered most of the wood. Men passed them only feet away, the headlights of their trucks making them appear both ghostly and bigger than they were. There were shouts in Spanish, orders to secure, orders to shoot on sight. Lucy couldn’t make out every word, but these were ordinary men who were tasked with murder. They were not trained soldiers, beyond whatever undisciplined training Vasco had implemented. How could anyone, no matter how bad their lives got, be party to the abuse and murder of twelve-year-old boys?

Kill or be killed.

She had to push reason aside. There was no rationale for this violence. There was corruption and manipulation and the targeted use of fear to control. She had to put herself in the head of men like Jaime Sanchez so she could figure out what they wanted, what their next move was. Trying to understand these men running by with guns, heading to the prison where five boys had already been slaughtered, would only distract her.

Kane held up three fingers. Then two. Then one. Then dropped his fist. The three of them ran low, along the edge of the unpaved road, past the trucks. Though the drivers had remained with the vehicles while their partners moved into the prison, they were standing by the driver’s-side doors and not looking out the passenger windows. As long as they stayed low and close to the vehicles, out of the driver’s peripheral vision, Lucy prayed they wouldn’t be spotted.

They made it to the fourth truck in the line before they had trouble.

The driver was smoking a small cigar and pacing, rifle slung over his shoulder. Kane put up his fist to halt Lucy behind him. She froze immediately.

The driver walked in front of the car. One more step and he’d see them.

He took that step.

The driver wasn’t expecting to see anyone. He hesitated a fraction of a minute. He opened his mouth to shout, dropped his cigar to the dirt, but before he could lay hands on his rifle or utter a sound, Kane shot him between the eyes.

The sound echoed through the night. Lucy’s heart skipped a beat.

Kane pulled a radio from his pocket, dialed in a frequency, then pressed a button.

The explosion knocked them to the dirt.

“Run,” Kane ordered.

Lucy stumbled, got up, and grabbed Michael’s hand to make sure he kept up with them. Kane started for the driver’s side of the last truck, taking out the guard with a hard blow to the head with the butt of his rifle.

Another man stepped out of the passenger side, his gun aimed at Michael.

Lucy fired three rounds and the man dropped. She kicked the dead body aside so she could fully open the door. “Get in,” she ordered Michael.

Kane was already in the driver’s seat and had swept the back of the truck in case there were more shooters. There were none.

But there were a whole lot of guns.

Kane hesitated, just a moment, surprise crossing his face.

“Kane?” Lucy said. She looked back but didn’t think she saw what he was seeing. All she saw were wooden crates of guns—mostly military-style assault rifles.

Kane didn’t comment. He turned the ignition and made a wide turn. He didn’t head toward the village, but drove across the desert, looking at his compass to guide him. He tossed her a map. “I marked the route to Trejo’s mansion.”

She said, “You know something.”

“Now’s not the time.”

“Tell me! What did you see back there?”

“American guns.” He didn’t say anything else, so Lucy pushed.

“Did our government send them down? Supporting one faction over another? Or are they stolen? Jack told me once about a group of soldiers who stole guns that were supposed to be destroyed. He’d tracked them down to Guatemala, retrieved the guns.” She didn’t know what happened to the thieves; she hadn’t asked. “Is this something like that?” He still didn’t answer her. “Kane, what the hell is going on?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“But you
think
you know.”

“You need to stay out of this.”

“I’m already in the middle of it!”

He didn’t talk, and Lucy grew increasingly frustrated. She glanced back to where Michael sat staring at nothing, his face hard. His face blank.

The face of a victim.

“Sean and Kane’s team will get your brothers back home,” Lucy said. “I promise.”

He turned his dark eyes to hers. They were empty. Then he turned away.

Her heart twisted at the pain the young man had buried inside. The grief that would consume him if he couldn’t figure out how to let it out. Learn to live with it, learn to let it go.

Let it go? It would always be there. He has to learn to manage the pain, the cold, the unbearable drive to seek revenge.

Lucy faced forward and looked at the map under her pin light. “There’s a wooden bridge about two kilometers away, then we’ll be going into the mountains.”

Kane kept driving. The silence of the desert was broken only by the rough transmission of the covered truck.

It was several minutes before he said, “A few months ago, a transport plane made an emergency stop in southern Mexico. Hostile territory. My team was called to assist in repairs and rescue. It was a potential diplomatic nightmare because the United States wasn’t supposed to be flying across that part of airspace, but when they had a mechanical failure, they had no choice. By the time we arrived, the crew was dead and their cargo gone. The cargo was guns that had been stolen from a military base in the states, and the DEA tracked them to a cartel in Colombia. A small Special Forces team was sent, seized the weapons, and were returning when they went down.”

“It wasn’t a simple mechanical failure, was it?”

“I never saw the report; I don’t know what happened. But those Marines were slaughtered. The weapons that disappeared are the same type we have now.

“If Trejo was behind it—he’s planning something bigger than I suspect. Bigger than the DEA realizes. The DEA was the only nonmilitary group involved with the op—they provided the intelligence. They knew the flight information. Even if the cartel created the malfunction, someone had to give them the information in the first place. And someone who knew where the plane had gone down had only eight hours before I arrived to locate and kill the team and get away with several truckloads of guns. It would have taken time—which means they had hard intelligence.”

“There’s a mole in the DEA.”

“There are many, but I usually figure out who they are real quick.” He glanced at her. “To be honest, I give Sean information and suspicions, and he identifies the traitor. He’s better with computers and tracking money than I am.” He paused. “Are you okay with that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not to me. It would to Sean.”

She didn’t comment. Why would she have a problem with Sean helping root out corruption in law enforcement? She might have to turn a blind eye if he crossed lines, but she could live with it. She was well aware of what Jack had done in the past, what he likely still did now on a smaller scale. She would not hold Sean up to an arbitrary higher standard than she did her own brother.

“So why did they take Donnelly?” she asked. “He has information they need?”

“He pissed them off. When you get noble cops, they usually get themselves killed. Donnelly isn’t bought and paid for. He’s given a long leash because Sam Archer wants to do the job, but doesn’t have the balls for it.” He looked at her. “Not because she’s a woman, so don’t get your feminist sensibilities in a wad. You would have the balls for it.”

“Another Kane Rogan compliment,” she said dryly. “I might faint from the praise.”

He almost smiled, then said, “If they took Donnelly for fun and games—he was in the Army, he was in Special Forces, he’s not going to crack and give information—then he doesn’t have much time.”

“Don’t you have anyone in the DEA or another agency you can call? Anyone you trust?”

“Don’t be obtuse. This is a foreign country. Clandestine ops are the rule; the U.S. gets caught they need plausible deniability. Why do you think I do such a healthy business? How do you think RCK started in the first place? It sure wasn’t protecting the rich and famous.”

Kane was bitter about something, and Lucy couldn’t put her finger on it. She didn’t know him well, which made figuring out his angle that much more difficult. And he wasn’t Jack—they were similar, but Kane was harder, angrier, edgier. That he’d told her so much surprised her. Maybe being shot at together had earned his trust.

But she knew her brother Jack, and the one thing that stood out as the same was a deep sense of honor and duty. They were both former military who still fought wars no one else wanted to fight. Except Jack had reconnected with his family, had fallen in love, had found a balance that kept him grounded.

Kane didn’t have that. He rarely spoke to Sean or Duke. They rarely saw one another. Any conversations were work-related. There was no grounding in Kane’s life, which meant, to Lucy, that his work was his only salvation. That made him both extremely good and extremely dangerous.

She filed away her assessment and focused on where they were. Kane was driving without lights, going too fast in her estimation, but she didn’t comment. The truck bounced uncomfortably over the rough, open terrain, the engine labored.

Suddenly he made a sharp left turn and stopped the truck. He depressed a button on his radio a couple times. There was a rhythm, and Lucy wondered if it was code.

Half a minute later a brief flash of light reflected from a hundred yards away. Kane rolled the truck slowly in that direction, then grinned. When he smiled, he looked more like Sean. So much that it unnerved Lucy.

A man in black emerged and climbed into the back of the truck.

“Good to see you, buddy,” he said. Not only was the man dressed in black, he
was
black, his skin as dark as his clothes.

“Ranger, Lucy. Lucy, Ranger.”

“Jack’s little sister.” Ranger extended his fist. Lucy did the same, and he bumped hers. “Guess I’m on protection detail.”

“She’s fine. You’ll stick to the boy.”

“Hmm” was all Ranger said.

“You think I’d bring Jack’s sister out here if she couldn’t handle herself?”

“Why are you talking about me like I’m not here?” Lucy asked.

Ranger grinned, and all Lucy could see was his teeth and his eyes. “Kane has no manners.” He looked at Michael and said, “Tough day.”

“Tough fucking year,” Michael responded, the first words he’d said since they’d fled the prison.

But his eyes were no longer empty. They were focused and intelligent.

The road changed, from rough desert to a narrow wooden bridge. The truck barely fit over it. Lucy couldn’t see below, but she heard the water, and it sounded to be at least a thirty-foot drop.

As soon as they crossed, they were on a road—if the narrow, packed path could be called a road. It had been forged only because trucks had driven this way hundreds—thousands—of times.

Ranger said, “There’s a hidey-hole around the next corner. Pull in to the left, go up the mountainside about twenty feet. It’ll be tough. But there’s a flat area there. I set up camp here during recon, and found a back way into the compound while waiting for your late ass to arrive.”

Kane did as Ranger instructed, and Lucy thought for certain that they weren’t going to make it—worse, that the truck was going to flip over, trapping them inside. The engine revved and groaned as Kane shifted to first gear. Then, miraculously, they reached the landing and were level again. Kane turned off the truck.