Fixed Asset (Downrange), page 21
Fuck, fuck, fucking hell.
We were in an alcove with a small beach that would open up to a ravine. We needed to hurry up and get to higher ground.
I glanced down at my Suunto, checked where we were on the GPS, and motioned forward. Pete led, taking the western route avoiding the structure to the east. It was the longer route, but safer.
Calista dogged Pete’s heels, Catarina behind her, with me after Cat, and Mase taking our six. Single file, we trekked the valley—a fetal funnel with a pucker factor of ten. I felt sweat trickle down my back and didn’t breathe a full breath until we climbed a small hill.
My relief of being out of the ravine was short-lived—not a single tree, bush, or building for cover. The lights of the village shone to the north, then total darkness beyond. It was eerie as fuck, a fishing village in the middle of nowhere surrounded by inky black.
The next twenty minutes were silent.
Utterly so.
As the silence stretched, the sweat continued to trickle down my neck, and a ball of unease formed in my gut.
It was too quiet—like an ambush you didn’t see coming.
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, Murphy’s Law of Combat number two kicked in: incoming fire has the right of way. Or was it fifteen: anything you do can get you shot, including nothing.
Either or, shots rang out.
Catarina dove forward, taking Calista to the dirt. From behind me, Mase blindly returned fire. I hit my knees and did the same. Pete was on his stomach diagonally in front of the woman, barrel of his rifle pointing behind Mase’s position, now covering our backs.
“Come on, fuckers,” Mason grumbled. “Show daddy where you are.”
“Did Mason just call himself daddy?” Calista snickered.
It didn’t take long for more shots to pop off, the muzzle blasts giving away the enemies’ location on the eastern hilltop. Which brought us to Murphy’s Law of Combat number one: if the enemy is in range, so are you.
“Cover me,” Pete ordered. “I’ll meet you at the cemetery.”
Before I could reject Pete’s plan for a solo mission to get to the enemy, he was up and running.
Fuck.
I laid down cover fire until Pete disappeared down the side of the hill.
“Get up, baby,” I demanded. “Take Calista and find cover.”
“Not a chance, hotshot.”
“Catarina.”
“Jack.”
“Baby, get the package secure. We’ll catch up.”
“Goddamnit, Jack,” Cat snarled. “I don’t like—”
“We’ll be right behind you,” Mase put in.
Cat rolled to her hip, then up to her knees, her right arm straight out, holding her Sig pointed toward where the enemy was holed up, her other hand reaching for Calista.
“If you’re not at the airport right after we get there, I’m coming back to find you,” Catarina angrily clipped.
Of course she would.
At one time, I would’ve called that reckless. Now I understood it for what it was—loyalty. She’d never leave me behind, or anyone on the team.
“Got it. Now go, baby.”
Catarina let out a colorful string of obscenities that in no way made sense, though I couldn’t miss their meaning or her level of displeasure.
“See you soon, Kitty Cat.”
Cat shot me an unhappy look before her anger cleared and her hand wrapped around my wrist.
“Be safe.”
“That’s my line.”
Then because that knot in the pit of my gut was twisting, I took the time we didn’t have to tug her close and press a hard kiss to her mouth.
“Get on that plane no matter—”
“Save your breath. I’m not leaving you.”
Fuck.
I lost her hand when she stepped away, then I lost sight of her when she took off in a sprint, and I turned back to the direction the gunfire was coming from and unloaded half a mag.
“Reload,” Mase called out. A moment later I heard him reengage.
I quickly glanced to the left. Cat and Calista were nowhere in sight.
“Ready?” I asked Mase.
“Yep.”
Mase took off in the same direction as Pete. The decline wasn’t steep, but it was unsteady. Rocks and sand made it possible to slide most of the way down.
“This shit was easier when I was twenty,” Mason griped.
He wasn’t wrong.
“True story.”
We hit the valley, slowed to a walk, and Mason came up next to me.
“I can’t believe she actually followed orders.”
He was talking about Catarina.
“She’s not dumb. She knows Calista’s the mission.”
“Fuck you very much,” Mase huffed. “I wasn’t implying she’s stupid. I’m just surprised she left you under my protection.”
I snorted.
Mase finished, “But it’s good to know she trusts me to keep you safe.”
I hated to say it, but damn if I could shake this feeling.
“Something’s off,” I told Mase.
“What kind of something?”
I couldn’t answer that.
“Pete never called Tom back.”
“You think Tom fucked us?”
Did I?
He was the one who’d sent us to find Calista, but Shep had been the one to get us the intel.
“Calista didn’t know who broke into the hotel room and killed Carlos and Gloria. We don’t know who was driving the Toyota that hit the gas pump. We don’t know who was on the plane from the UAE to Mexico City. Too many unknowns. I have a bad feeling Pete did exactly what they wanted him to do.”
Mason didn’t need me to explain. “If I wanted to draw the enemy into an ambush, I’d give away my location and wait.”
Firing across the valley wasn’t an impossible distance if the shooter was a good marksman who understood bullet drop, crosswind, powder load, and a slew of other shit that made long-distance shooting an art form. That was not who had been shooting at us. And I knew because we were all still alive. A good marksman would’ve been able to pick us off.
But they got their desired outcome.
Pete had run toward the danger to eliminate it.
“Watch my back,” I said as I let my M4 go.
It caught on the sling, and I shrugged my pack off to get my phone out.
Thank fuck for dry bags.
As soon as I had my phone out, I was reminded Cat’s bag was still on the runway back on Cedros.
Motherfucking shit.
“Cat has no comms,” I mumbled, and scrolled to find Tom’s contact.
“I’m getting the woman a fanny pack,” Mase returned.
I was thinking more along the lines of asking Tom for another subcutaneous tracker.
The call went to voicemail. I disconnected and dialed again. I was getting ready to try again when Tom picked up.
“Who is this?” he clipped.
“Jack. You called—”
“You’ve got two Emiratis there and two former . . .”
“Tom?”
“Watch your back . . .” The connection cut off again. “. . . here . . .”
“You’re breaking up.”
I heard three tones indicating the call dropped. I looked at my screen. Full bars. That meant Tom had shit service.
“Bad copy,” I told Mase. “All I got was two guys from the UAE and two former something before he broke up. He said to watch our back and the word here.”
For a long moment, Mase didn’t say anything, though he didn’t need to.
It was one thing to be dealing with the cousin of a gangster who thought he was a predator—and he was to women and children—but the big dogs in the cartel would eat him alive. It was another to be dealing with professionals.
Pete thought we were dealing with locals, so he made the call to eliminate the threat.
He would’ve made a different choice if he’d spoken to Tom before he’d taken off.
“Let’s hope Pete didn’t just step into a heaping pile of shit.”
We could hope.
But my gut said we’d be buried in shit before the night was over. And part of that was missing Catarina’s deadline, then my woman would circle back.
“We need to get to the airport before Cat comes looking for us.”
A look I couldn’t decipher flooded Mason’s features, and before I got a lock on it, his mask fell back into place.
But it looked a lot like panic and his voice was tight when he said, “Let’s hit it.”
“Mase—”
“She’ll be fine. The woman’s tough as fuck.”
I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince me or himself.
But right then I didn’t have the time nor the headspace for contemplation.
We needed to get to Pete, then haul ass to the airport.
The knot sinched tighter.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Is that the cemetery?” Calista asked.
There hadn’t been a tree or bush in sight for the last thirty minutes we’d been walking. Which made the aboveground tombs stand out in stark relief.
Rows and rows of them. Some with tall monuments, others just the vault. It was an odd place for a cemetery—on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. Then again, it wasn’t. It was peaceful up here. A place to come and mourn with a view of the sea. If we were in the States, houses would dot these hilltops, the bluffs would be littered with homes, the natural beauty decimated, the tranquility lost to mankind.
But right then, all was peaceful. I hadn’t heard gunfire since I’d left the guys. For my mental health I wasn’t going to contemplate what that could mean—at least not right now. I had a mission: get Calista to the airport and find a safe place to wait. If the guys were a no-show, I’d figure it out then.
I hadn’t answered Calista when she went on, “It’s kinda creepy in a beautiful sorta way.”
“I’m not a fan of cemeteries in general,” I told her.
“So you’d never go on one of those ghost tours of an old graveyard.”
That was a hell to the no!
“Hard pass.”
I stayed well away from the tombs as we walked the dirt path toward the village.
“How much farther?”
I was impressed Calista hadn’t asked sooner. Although she hadn’t complained once since her initial squabble about coming with us.
“About twenty minutes. But in three hundred meters we’ll hit a street with houses.”
“Pete said the airport was hot,” she unnecessarily reminded me.
I hadn’t forgotten what Pete had relayed from Shep, nor had I forgotten the part about Shep telling Pete we’d have backup. Which was both good and bad. The good was obvious, the bad was I didn’t know who the backup was or where they were, and with no phone and no comms I couldn’t shoot first, ask questions later.
“We’ll get as close as we can and wait.”
“Were you in the military?”
Her question came from left field, but I got it. This wasn’t my first long walk in enemy territory. Some of those conversations had been off-the-wall strange. Others had been informative. There was something about trekking through the desert with thirty pounds of kit on with your mortality top of mind—not knowing if you’d be returning back to post with your team, or worse, the person next to you wouldn’t—that loosened your lips. It had also been a way to cut through some of the tension.
“Yeah, Army.”
“Good thing you didn’t go with the Navy,” she teased.
“Right, I would’ve gone AWOL the first time I got assigned to a carrier group. You’re a journalist,” I prompted.
There was a moment of hesitation before she answered. A moment I didn’t quite understand.
“Yeah.”
One word, no elaboration.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s a means to an end.”
Her sister.
I changed the subject. “Do you know where you’ll go after here?”
“You mean since I can’t go back to the US?” she asked, but didn’t wait for confirmation. “Probably Canada.”
If I was wanted for murder, Canada wouldn’t be my first choice, but to each their own.
The first house of the neighborhood—if you could call it that—we had to walk through came into view. I stopped to get my bearings; Calista did the same beside me. The village was lit up to my far right. A pier jutted out into the bay with a bright light at the end of it. In front of us, there were fifteen structures on the road we needed to travel. Behind ten of those homes was a steep hill. The other side of the street had five homes spaced a good distance apart. There was no good way to do this. We couldn’t skirt the town. The terrain to my left became too extreme.
I had yet to decide the best way to get around the houses unseen when four dark figures appeared on the path in front of us.
Fuck.
“Down,” I clipped.
Calista immediately dropped.
If I can see them, they can see me.
I did not want to fire my weapon this close to the village and alert everyone to our presence. Which would mean we’d have to take our chances traversing the mountains. That was going to seriously suck. With no choice, I gently pulled the slack out of my trigger, chose a target, let out a breath, and . . .
“Don’t shoot me.”
Tom?
Three of the men fanned out, taking a defensive position to guard the man in the middle, who was now coming at us at a fast clip.
Calista got to her feet and voiced my thought. “That’s Tom.”
What the hell was he doing here? And how did he find us?
“Stand down,” he commanded.
Screw that.
I kept my Sig leveled and at the ready.
And Christ, he needed to stop yelling before he woke up the whole damn town.
“Get behind me,” I told Calista.
“But Tom—”
“We don’t know why he’s here or who those men are.”
“They’re Tom’s team.”
Tom’s team?
Since when did CIA officers have teams? And how the hell did Calista know Tom had a team?
“Tell them to lower their weapons,” I called out when Tom was close enough I didn’t have to shout.
Tom waved a hand. The men followed his silent order and lowered their rifles.
“Your turn,” he returned.
“First tell me why you’re here.”
“To get Calista.”
“Are they our backup?” I motioned to the men with the barrel of my Sig.
“No. They’re here with me.”
Of course Tom would only be out for himself.
“Here.” Tom held out his hand when he stopped in front of me. “This is for you.”
He opened his palm, presenting me with a white earbud.
“What’s that?”
“Your backup.” When I didn’t immediately take Tom’s offering, he continued. “Jack called in, but we were still in the air. Service was cutting in and out, so I don’t know how much he heard. Ahmad Sindi sent two of his people along with two guards to retrieve Calista. Those guards are former British Special Air Service. Only one of those men went to the island. The other one is still here.”
Well, fuck a duck.
“Who is Ahmad Sindi?”
“An Emirati real estate billionaire and known trafficker. He’s also untouchable.”
No one was untouchable.
“How did you find us?”
“I didn’t. Shepherd Drexel told me where to find you, and he asked me to give you this.” Tom shook his hand again. “Your plane’s on the tarmac. It landed right after we did.”
I took the earpiece from Tom with my left hand and awkwardly placed it in my right ear while still pointing my Sig at one of Tom’s men.
As soon as it was in my ear, I heard, “Let them leave. We need to move.”
Shep.
Just hearing his voice calmed my nerves I’d been working overtime to suppress.
“Copy.”
“It’s time to leave,” Tom said, and motioned again to one of his men.
The man stepped forward, swung a rifle off his shoulder, and handed it to Tom.
“Here.”
I took the SBR from Tom and hooked the sling over my shoulder. He immediately held out another hand and two magazines were handed to Tom, who held them out to me. I took those too.
“Thank your team for the assist.”
The assist.
Typical.
I probably should’ve thanked him for the rifle and extra ammo, but I wasn’t going to. What could I say, I was a petty bitch and didn’t like to be used and lied to. As sweet as the 300 Blackout he’d handed over was, it didn’t come close to making up for his bullshit.
Calista grabbed my arm and squeezed.
“Thanks for the ride. And again, sorry for the whole gun-in-the-face thing.”
“No worries. Good luck, and be safe out there.”
“You too.”
With that, Calista moved to stand beside Tom, then they moved out, with Tom’s guards circling them, turning their backs on me. Not the smartest move when I could’ve shot them in the back, but whatever.
“SITREP,” I asked Shep through the earpiece as I jammed my new magazines into the empty pockets on my vest.
“Pete walked into a trap.”
My heart sank before it started pounding in my chest so hard, I feared cracking a rib.
“Where’s my team?”
“At the dock.”
If Pete was captured, Jack and Mason would already be there to rescue him.
“Where are you?”
“At your back.”
I spun to look behind me. Nothing. I looked left, then right, and still nothing.
“You know better than that, Sphynx.”
Damn, he was right. If Phantom didn’t want to be seen, he wasn’t seen. Further from that, the man could materialize and dematerialize right before your eyes.
Like vapor.
“How are we doing this?” I asked.
“East to the dock. It’s less than two klicks. I got your back.”
I continued walking toward the neighborhood, but instead of walking through it, I’d veer right and go into the town proper.
