Secret Maneuvers (28 page)

“My head is exactly where it needs to be, Sir.”

Jaxon scrutinized me from head to toe. “If I think for one second that you will jeopardize this mission… I. Will. Pull. You. Do you understand me? I don’t care if she’s your holy fucking grail, you will be with this team every step of the way or I will hog tie you myself and leave you behind.”

It grated on my last nerves, Jaxon threatening to pull me from the mission. How would that jackass feel if it was his woman on the line? It irritated me even more that he had a point. I had to keep my head straight to not put any of us in danger. “You won’t be leaving me behind and I’m not a risk to this team. I’ll do whatever you say, but I’m going.”

Jaxon studied me for another minute or so before nodding his head in acceptance. Turning his head to take us all in he barked like a drill instructor, “Listen up! We’re taking these choppers five miles outside of that signal’s location where they will drop us off and then circle the perimeter at a safe distance. You have the coordinates of our rendezvous point and our target. The goal is a quiet extraction. We’re not Rambo here, boys. The mission is to rescue Annabelle Roberts, not blow this place sky-high. That being said, take out anyone in your way and, if you happen to lock cross hairs on Miguel Rivera, you take his ass out. Once we have secured the package, we’ll head back to our rendezvous point with the chopper and bug out. Any questions?”

Silence was his answer. The rhythmic thwump-thwump-thwump of a Black Hawk’s blades drew the attention of all of us in the hanger, standing there silently to watch as it landed. Jaxon gave the signal for us to load up and, for the first time in seven hours, I took in a real breath.

Finally. I was going to get my girl and God help anyone who got in my way.

Annabelle

If I was still here when Rivera came back, I was a dead woman; which meant that I had to find a way to get out of here. The monsters had just left, promising to come back soon, and leaving the broken, crying, strawberry blonde in a heap on the floor. She was covered in their sweat, spit and semen, but that was nothing compared to the fact that they’d raped her so badly that she was bleeding out of two of the three body parts they’d used. The only thing that terrified me more than having watched what they’d done to that poor girl was the promise that I was next.

I’d rather die.

There were a couple of problems with trying to escape. The first was that I was still tied hand and foot to this metal chair. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been something simple that they’d tied me down with, like duct tape. That could have easily been ripped off by the girl. However, I had finally figured out that they’d secured me with zip ties, and I’d figured that out because the dag-gum things had cut into my skin pretty badly during my struggles. The ripped skin above my hands and feet were also now throbbing in agony with the rest of my body, as well as bleeding, but not as badly as the large cuts on my chest and thigh that were still oozing blood at a steady rate. That was problem number three. Too much blood loss and I was already getting hazy and weak from it. If I didn’t find a way to get out of here, and soon, I wouldn’t be getting out of here at all. My only hope was still lying on the floor like a lifeless rag doll.

Finding the strength to keep my head up and eyes locked on the body lying there, I croaked, “What’s your name?”

She gave me no answer.

“My name’s Annabelle. We’re going to find a way to get through this together, honey, I promise. Now what’s your name?”

A sniffle sounded, then another sob. Still no answer.

Even though I knew it was useless, I was still pulling at my bonds like a madwoman. Wiggling around in my chair in the hopes that a miracle would happen and I would suddenly be free. On a frustrated huff I begged, “Come on, you’ve got to talk to me. We can help each other get out of here.”

“You’re wrong,” she whispered. “No one ever leaves here unless they’re being sold to another buyer or dead. There is no escape.”

“No, honey, you’re wrong. I’m sure none of the girls you’ve met were trained ATF Agents, right? Well, I am. And I refuse to die in this shit hole. So trust me, tell me your name, and let me help you get the hell out of here!”

She finally lifted her head and aimed her tortured, tear soaked face at me. “You’re ATF?”

Nodding, I said, “YES! I am and, if you’ll just come over here and help me get free, then I can see about getting us out of here.”

She feebly pushed herself to her hands and knees, too weak to do much else, and started crawling towards me; cringing when she came close to Rivera’s dead wife’s body, making sure not to touch it as she passed. “You promise to take me with you? PLEASE. I can’t take another day of this. I just want to go home and see my sister.”

My heart broke in a million pieces for her. How these men could do the vile things they did to anybody at all, I would never understand. How they could do them to this woman, who was so fragile, was even worse. “I’m taking you home just as soon as you tell me your name and help me get out of this chair. Promise ya, honey I’m going to do my best to get us the hell out of here.”

Fresh tears rolled down her face. “Laura,” she whispered. “My name is Laura.”

Relief and a surge of hope crashed over me. That was one small step, the next thing she would need to do would be closer to a leap across the Grand Canyon. “Okay, Laura, I’m going to need you to look over her body and see if she has anything that could cut through my zip ties. You do that, and then we can leave this place and never look back.”

I thought for sure the girl would balk at touching the dead body, break down and tell me that she just couldn’t do it. To my surprise, she frantically started to pat down the former Mrs. Rivera’s body, looking for anything that might help us.

“There’s no pockets or anything!” she screamed in mounting frustration.

“Shh... You’re going to have to keep quiet, Laura. Be thorough. Look under her clothes just to make sure.”

Laura tore open the dead woman’s shirt to expose a see through lace bra, but no hidden weapons. Sliding her hands down the body, she grabbed the hem of her skirt and jerked it up to expose the corpse’s legs. Still nothing.

“It’s useless!” she wailed. “There’s nothing. NOTHING!”

I tried not to let my disappointment crush me, but it was hard. I completely understood why Laura would sit there, crying hysterically at the dead woman’s weaponless body. I wanted to do the same damn thing, but when she started throwing wild slaps at the now half naked corpse, I realized that I’d have to figure something else out, quickly, before she completely lost what little mental sanity she had left.

Starting with the floors, I scanned the room. Covering every inch with my eyes, looking for something, anything, that could be used to help us. After precious minutes lost, I knew, without a doubt, that there was nothing and moved my eyes along the walls. Scanning them from top to bottom. Over and over again, on every wall, in the desperate hopes that there would maybe be a picture frame left behind, but nothing again. The only thing that was in the room besides a hysterical young woman, a dead body, and me was this stupid metal chair I was tied to and the light.

Wait. The light.

Suddenly, I had the overwhelming urge to kiss the person who’d first claimed there was light at the end of the tunnel. I might not be in a tunnel, but it was close enough.

“Laura!” I hissed.

She didn’t hear me over her own rambling and the steady slaps she was landing on Mrs. Rivera’s body. “LAURA!” I excitedly screeched. She abruptly stopped and looked at me. Nodding my head towards the dangling light bulb, I whispered, “Take the bulb out and break it on the ground! Use a piece of the glass to cut the zip ties!”

Jerking her head back, she looked at the light bulb and then, on unsteady legs, climbed to her feet. Moving underneath the light source, she stood on her tippy toes and reached with the tips of her fingers, coming nowhere near the bulb. Then she started jumping up and down trying to reach it, but her fingers only skimmed the bottom, causing the bulb to start swinging around on its short chain. She couldn’t reach it at all. And there was only one thing in the room that would help her reach it. My chair.

“Come here, grab my chair, Laura, and pull it over to stand on.”

Dragging me and the chair, physically, took a lot out of her, but she somehow managed to do it. When she had me placed just under the light, she looked down to the chair’s only free spot to stand and the color drained out of her face. It was the bit of seat exposed between my spread legs, with my blood all over it. Knowing she was mortified for both of us, I tried to soothe her.

“Don’t worry about it, honey. Do what you got to do to get us out of here. Just be careful not to slip on my blood. I don’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”

Turning my head to the side, she placed her hand gently on one of my shoulders, one of her feet on the seat, and pulled herself up using my body as leverage. My upper body was racked with fresh pain since she was inadvertently pulling on the skin and flesh attached to the large cut across my chest, but I managed to hold the scream of pain in my head so that I wouldn’t scare her. She acted as if the heat from the light bulb was nothing, quickly unscrewing it, immersing the room into darkness, and then carefully climbing off the chair.

“So you want me to break this and then use it to cut your arms and legs free? What if I cut you?” Bless her heart, she was actually worried about that.

A hollow laugh slipped out of me. “You can’t cut me any worse than he already did, Laura, and this is our only hope. Just do it. Don’t worry about me.”

A few seconds later I heard glass shatter somewhere behind me. Holding my breath in anticipation, suddenly her hand was there. Reaching out tentatively in the dark as she waved it in front of her, she patted the air until she found me. She made contact with my shoulder and then used her fingertips to trace it down my arms until she reached the zip tie that held me bound. As she started to saw frantically with the piece of fragile glass at the plastic keeping me captive, I didn’t even care that she was cutting me to shreds. Freedom was a beautiful pain.

Bobby

Thank the sweet baby Jesus for bug spray. Since it was eleven o’clock at night, the flying dinosaurs that the natives here called mosquitos were out in full force. Even with most of my body covered in our standard black BDU’s, with nothing except my head and hands uncovered, those buzzing, little bastards seemed to be circling us like sharks in bloody water, looking for the inch of skin one of us might not have covered in cloth or bug repellant. I had enough on my mind, the last thing I needed to worry about was malaria or dengue.

We were spread out in small groups from each other as we traveled over the rugged terrain, navigating ourselves through the dense forest of pine and oak trees, towards the house that still had the tracker signals pinging their location. Jaxon had paired himself off with me, probably worried that I was too emotionally involved to keep a level head on what we were doing. He couldn’t possibly understand that because I was so invested in what was going on, my head had never been clearer. There was no leaving Mexico without Belle. End of story.

Lights from the house came into sight, approximately three hundred feet in front of us, and suddenly I was hyperaware of everything; the nocturnal animals scurrying around in the tree branches above our heads, the bead of sweat trickling down the back of my neck until it was absorbed by my shirt, the soft sounds of my controlled breathing as we continued to advance on the house.

As we came up to two hundred feet from the house, I heard the sounds of at least two men laughing somewhere over to my left. A softly whispered, “I got this,” over the comm. link by Arturo was followed by the sudden silence of that conversation. No shouts of warning from the men who had been speaking. No violent, thrashing sounds of struggles. One minute they were talking and the next minute they weren’t. Arturo Chavez was one of the best and that made him a scary motherfucker.

Approximately fifty feet later, to my far right, I heard another voice that was echoing through the empty forest from up ahead. Whoever the man was, he was angry and yelling, only no one was speaking back to him, so he was either talking to himself or on the phone. Logan whispered, “Mine,” and, a few seconds later, there was the soft thump of a body hitting the ground and then silence. Logan Price’s sniper skills were the reason he’d been recruited out of the Marine Corps Special Operations Command. That close to his target the shot would have been like child’s play for Logan. No challenge at all.

The team was a well-oiled machine. So, by the time we were a hundred feet from the front of the house, the smaller teams started peeling off until we surrounded it; analyzing the possible entry and exit points and watching for more guards who could pose as potential threats to us. The house was a two story monstrosity and the small windows at the base of the house, next to the ground, indicated there was also a basement. My guess was, that was where Belle would be held.

All in all, the house was easily eight thousand square feet; including the basement and the massive garage set on the left side of the house. That was a lot of area to search. The only good news seemed to be that it was plainly visible, through the windows, that the house utilized a roomy, open floor plan, making it easier to search while we were going through it; less places for people to hide in order to surprise us. That also meant that there weren’t that many places for us to take cover if bullets started flying.