Show No Fear (28 page)
Why was he even wasting words talking about this? They needed to plan a recon mission and rescue Lucy.
“Haiku, get back with the JIC and pass on that information,” ordered the lieutenant.
“Yes, sir.”
As Haiku scurried to one side to relay the message, Lieutenant Lindstrom pulled a rugged laptop from his pack. Powering it
up, he positioned it so Gus and the others could see. “Here’s our position. Gus, this is you,” he said, pointing to a bright
red dot.
He toggled a key, and the image on the screen jumped, showing a blue dot in a field of neon green. “This is Lucy. The map
shows her seven klicks from here, due northwest, at an altitude of three thousand feet. As soon as your gear gets here, we’ll
go after her,” he promised. “Moving at a fast walk, we should be able to assess her situation before sunrise,” he predicted.
“If the odds look good, we’ll plan an ambush and extract on a SPIE rig.”
The special-patrol insertion/extraction rig could be lowered by helicopter straight through the jungle canopy, lifting them
as a group, clipped to a length of rope via D-shaped rings.
Luther made rescuing Lucy sound like a walk in the park. If that were true, then the SEALs had the easy job.
Lucy’s job, withstanding interrogation at the hands of the guerrillas, was undoubtedly tougher. She’d be the first person
to insist she could take a licking and keep on ticking. He’d seen her do it. He just didn’t know if she could do it again.
Goddamn it! He would never forgive himself for letting this happen.
V
iewed through state-of-the-art night-vision goggles, the near-vertical jungle seethed with nocturnal creatures, crawling,
darting, peering through enormous red eyes at the five Navy SEALs moving as quietly as possible up the twisting path.
They had been traveling for several hours now, moving fast and closing in on whoever held Lucy captive. Stopping every half-hour
or so, the squad consulted the laptop, reassured that they were closing in on Lucy’s coordinates.
Here and there, an outcrop of stone or roots crisscrossing under Gus’s feet struck him as familiar. By his reckoning, they
were not too far from Rebel Central or the brick
casita,
where he and Lucy had spent their last nights together.
Along with night-vision goggles, each man carried an MP-5-SD, silenced versions of the classic semi-automatic machine guns.
Harley and Haiku, sniper and scout respectively, had rifles mounted with night-vision scopes.
In new boots that cushioned his soles and left barely discernable tracks, Gus tackled the steep terrain with singleminded
determination. The protein bars he’d consumed while waiting for his gear countered his flagging energy levels. He had to get
to Lucy before they broke or killed her. Anything else was unacceptable.
But what if they showed up too late? His mind refused to accept that as a possibility.
“Alpha squad, rally up.” The OIC’s whispered command cut through Gus’s ragged-edged thoughts.
The SEALs came together in a circular, protective position, dropping to their knees and raising their visors, two by two,
to consult the laptop.
Lieutenant Lindstrom’s sudden frown, illumined by the soft-glowing screen, made Gus’s stomach knot. “She’s moving,” the OIC
announced, swiveling the laptop so they could all take a look.
Sure enough, Lucy’s microchip was traveling in a northwesterly direction, away from
Ki-kirr-zikiz, headed dead north.
No!
Gus inwardly raged. “How fast are they moving?” he wanted to know.
“Almost seven klicks an hour.”
That fast? They would never catch up before dawn. The longer Lucy remained a hostage, the more traumatized she would be. “Fuck!”
he raged, his temple throbbing.
Four sets of eyes jumped up to regard him with compassion and apparent willingness to fight, not just for Lucy, but in retaliation
for the thousands of hostages the FARC had seized throughout the decades.
“Where could they be taking her?” the OIC wondered out loud. “None of the camps lie in that direction, at least not according
to the map you uploaded.”
Gus had to swallow to find his voice. “Arriba,” he said hoarsely. “Maybe they’re taking her to Arriba. That’s where the other
hostages were kept.”
With a thoughtful look, the OIC closed his laptop. “Let’s move,” he said, simply.
C
OLD WATER SPATTERED
L
UCY’S FACE
, rousing her from a blissful well of unconsciousness. She sputtered and jerked awake, only to be skewered by sharp, insistent
pain radiating from her lower back.
Buitre’s scarred face swam into focus as he bent over her. Her gaze flew to the only window, where golden light flooded in,
letting her know that it was morning. She’d been lying on the dirt-packed floor unconscious for half the night.
And Gus hadn’t come for her.
The realization ripped through, testing her faith that he was still alive. What if he was dead or injured and alone in the
jungle? Surely she would sense it if something awful had happened to him.
In the same instant, memories of the prior evening raked her tender consciousness. Inflicting agony, Captain Vargas had dug
in her hip for the microchip until she’d passed out cold. She assumed he’d found it and cut it out. She couldn’t remember.
She felt desecrated, violated, numb. A glance back at the ravaged flesh on her hip made her head spin. Dried blood encrusted
the material on her trousers, but at least she still wore them. That wouldn’t be the case, would it, if they had raped her?
“Get up,
puta,
” ordered Buitre, removing the belt that kept her wrists tightly bound. Blood surged into her freed arms and sent fire licking
toward her fingertips. As he yanked her to her feet, pain knifed up one side of her back.
“Time for you to go,” Buitre informed her. “Dress quickly,” he commanded, thrusting her jacket at her.
Lucy weaved on her feet but refused to move. Gus couldn’t be dead.
“Now,
puta!
” Buitre roared, startling her from her shock.
With awkward fingers and hampered by the pain in her hip, she buttoned her jacket mechanically, donned her mutilated boots,
and tied them.
Cool, wet air roused her briefly as Buitre pulled her through the door. Only one other rebel stood outside—David, who glanced
at her quickly, then averted his eyes.
Where had Captain Vargas gone? she wondered absently.
But then a thought—both terrible and wonderful—had her tripping over her own feet. The captain might have taken her microchip
to lure her rescuers into a trap. That would explain why neither Gus nor his teammates had come for her. It wasn’t that he
was injured or dead. He simply had no way of knowing where she was.
Oh, God.
Without the microchip, she had vanished into the mountain mists, just like Howitz and Barnes before her.
C
LOAKED IN A THICK MIST
, with Haiku on point, the SEALs crept along the steeply ascending path with renewed stealth. The ruggedness of the terrain
and the thin mountain air left them straining and out of breath. It came as a great relief when they consulted the laptop
and realized the microchip, and therefore Lucy, had ceased to move.
At last the SEALs were closing in on a fixed location—a remote crag standing twelve thousand feet above sea level.
Rather than feel relieved, Gus eyed the still, shadowy undergrowth with foreboding.
The jungle was too quiet. He had spent enough time in the rainforest to know that monkeys were the first to expose Special
Forces trying to sneak unseen through the jungle. Perhaps it was the muggy humidity keeping them listless this morning. Rumbles
of thunder portended an afternoon rain shower. High above the clouds, the fixed-wing Predator tracked their movements with
the FLIR patches on their shoulders that distinguished them from the enemy. If worse came to worse, they could call upon the
Predator to drop a missile or relay a request for reinforcements, even extraction.
Gus could not stop thinking that the enemy had questioned Lucy extensively by now. They would have had substantial time to
beat her, rape her…
Another possibility made the hairs on his nape rise to stiff attention. He thumbed his mic. “Sir.”
“Go ahead,” panted the OIC, who tackled the rise several paces behind him.
“What if the hostiles don’t have her?”
“Come again?”
“I don’t know. I just have this feeling Lucy isn’t here.”
“Why wouldn’t she be here?” countered the lieutenant. “We’ve been following tracks for hours now.”
“No, sir. We’ve been following her microchip,” Gus corrected him. “What if they took it from her body in order to lure us
here?”
The sudden, thundering report of a dozen assault rifles cut his question short.
Startled, Gus dove behind an earthen wall carved by rain-water and fired back, three rounds at a time, knowing he had thirty
in his magazine.
Except he couldn’t see what the hell he was shooting at. There was nothing but leaves and trees and bushes looming over him.
But the hidden shooters were marksmen, no question. Bullets pelted the ground right behind him, pinning him in his tenuous
location.
Haiku, who’d been on point, was in a similar quandary. Crouched behind a fallen tree, he sought to return fire while keeping
himself covered.
“Shit!” Gus raged, cursing his instincts for warning him too late.
A flash of movement caught his eye. Two figures slipped through the undergrowth flanking their left side. He fired at them
and missed.
“Sir, they’re flanking left,” he warned. At least they couldn’t flank them on the right, where the earth dropped away into
a steep ravine.
“Harley, head them off. Haiku, Atwater, can you fall back?”
“Negative, sir. They have us pinned,” Gus shouted, ducking as a rock, knocked out of the dirt, whistled past his ear.
“Use your grenades,” advised Luther. “Vinny, contact the Predator. Tell them ‘Danger close.’ We need support fire now, only
don’t hit us!”
“Yes, sir!” Vinny called.
“Hold them on the ridge!” the OIC commanded, shooting his weapon over Gus’s head.
Easier said than done,
Gus thought, using his teeth to tear the clip from the grenade he tossed. It was just a matter of time before he or Haiku
got hit.
No sooner did that grim thought occur to him than a bullet flung Haiku onto his back, in plain sight of the shooters. They
would have made mincemeat of him, if Gus hadn’t laid out a wall of fire, giving the point man time to drag himself to safety.
“Haiku took a hit, sir!” Gus informed his OIC.
“How bad is he?”
“I’ll live,” Haiku grated. Slamming a new magazine into his rifle, he glared uphill with the ferocity of a ninja and went
back to firing.
“We can’t hold ’em off much longer, sir,” Gus warned.
“Predator estimates two minutes to strike,” Vinny cut in. “Haiku, you need me, man?”
“Sorry, can’t have company right now,” Haiku gritted. “Forgot to clean house.”
“I got some friends who’ll clean your house,” muttered Harley. In the next instant, cries of agony let them know he’d eliminated
the left flank.
But then the Elite Guard retaliated, throwing grenades that made the ridge tremble and rained gobs of dirt on Gus’s helmet.
Artillery from the ridge escalated, cutting swaths through the vegetation. The SEALs had nowhere to go but down into the ravine.
“Sir, avoid the ravine!” Gus warned as the memory of Buitre’s mine-laying flashed through his mind. “Mines. Mines!”
“Roger that, Gus. Missile incoming, ten seconds to impact. Fall back down the trail.”
No sooner had Luther spat out those directives than a high-pitched whistle announced the imminent arrival of a hellfire missile.
In the next instant, a thunderous explosion snuffed out the staccato of gunfire as the missile slammed into the ridge a hundred
meters north of the SEALs’ location.
With bits of bark and leaves and chunks of granite pattering his back, Gus dove into the alcove next to Haiku. “You good?”
he asked, dismayed by the size of the stain on the scout’s jacket.
“Sure,” said the Japanese American, but his face was waxen, his eyes too bright.
“Fall back!” shouted the OIC.
Haiku pushed to his knees, then collapsed.
“I got you,” Gus assured him. Holding him from behind, he backed swiftly down the trail.
Several hundred yards later, he caught up with the others, laying Haiku at Vinny’s feet. “He’s losing blood fast.”
Vinny dropped to one knee to assess Haiku’s injury. “Sir, we need to get him outta here,” he corroborated, tearing open his
medic’s pack for supplies to help staunch the bleeding.
As Vinny worked to get Haiku hooked to an IV, Gus’s hopes of finding Lucy plummeted. The team would look to their members’
safety first.
With apology in his dark blue eyes, the OIC met his overwrought gaze. “We need to pull out,” he said to Gus, gently.
“Sir,” Gus pleaded. “What about Lucy? We can’t just leave without her.”