Spy Hard (15 page)

“Not anytime soon.” Maybe not ever.

He put a hand under her elbow and helped her over to the nearest chair. She sat carefully, and when Chico ran over to her and jumped on her leg, she pulled the puppy onto her lap, ran her fingers through its soft fur. She looked tired and discouraged but thoughtful, nowhere near ready to give up. He could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she sat there, trying to come up with a plan.

He was doing the same, cataloging everything he saw, trying to figure out what might be useful to them.

“How about the Jesuit mission?” she asked after a few minutes.

That stopped him in his tracks. “What Jesuit mission?”

“A couple of weeks ago, Consuela got word that her oldest son, the drug runner, got sick in prison. She took a few days to walk to the Jesuit mission to have prayers said for him.”

A place like that within walking distance to camp…Why hadn’t he heard of it? Then again, the men weren’t the churchgoing kind. “Are you sure?”

“As far as I know, it’s farther from camp than this place, but it’s definitely there. I think one of Don Pedro’s underlings had a camp that was built on the ruins of an old Jesuit mission. The army took it out recently. It was a big deal on the news. I heard it on the radio. The church stepped up and decided to take the place back and minister to the natives.”

Sounded like a PR opportunity nobody could resist. But he didn’t care whether the army had acted because they were genuinely interested in stamping out the drug trade, or because Cristobal had bought a small unit to take care of his rivals for him.

If the mission had been a camp in the not-too-distant past, that meant it was near one of the jungle roads. The drugs were usually distributed by old army jeeps, except in the most remote areas where the men still used mules.

But a Jesuit mission… Sounded like an important place. It would have a road for sure, and vehicles, very likely.

He grinned wide as something suddenly occurred to him. “I think I know exactly where that mission is.”

He had the GPS coordinates from Mitch Mendoza, an SDDU operative. Mitch had been sent into the jungle last year to rescue someone from one of Don Pedro’s underlings, a guy called Juarez who’d since disappeared. The camp Mitch had described had been built on the ruins of an old mission. It had to be one and the same.

The SDDU had gained a lot of usable intel on that op. In fact, Jase’s current mission was a direct result of what Mitch had started. He wished he had Mitch here right now, but since the man had been known around these parts in the past, he worked the op from another angle now with his new wife—no slouch herself, ex-CIA. They were undercover on the Mexican side of the U.S. border, keeping tabs on the human trafficking business.

Jase grabbed a pen from the floor, then picked through the hundreds of printouts and charts that had been tossed around until he found a torn map. He laid it on a desk and did his best to mark it up, using his few points of reference.

Melanie leaned over to watch.

“We’re about here.” He drew a big X. “This is Don Pedro’s camp.” He marked that with a square. “Cristobal’s men are probably still there, fighting. The army troops we ran into are about here.” He closed his eyes and brought up a picture of Roberto’s satellite map in his head and Mitch’s coordinates. “The mission should be somewhere around here.” He marked the spot with the sign of the cross.

“How far?”

“At least another day’s walk. But it’s a straight shot, nowhere near that army unit, so we don’t have to worry about them.”

But time was not the only issue. She was as tough as anyone he’d ever met. Still, she couldn’t be pushed endlessly. He rubbed his hand over his face.

“But?” she asked, picking up on his change of mood.

“We have no more food. We have to hunt as we go.” And that would slow them down.

“You said a person can go for days without food.”

“In an absolute emergency. But (A), you’re pregnant, and (B), the weaker we get the slower we’ll be able to go. It wouldn’t make any sense starving ourselves on purpose. It’s a lot easier to hang on without food for a day or two when you’re holed up somewhere. Marching on an empty stomach is a lot more difficult.”

He kept an eye on Mochi, who was examining the research station wide-eyed, looking at machines he’d never seen in his life. Just the building must have seemed like magic to him, a sprawling unit of wood and Plexiglas, twice the size of Don Pedro’s hacienda and probably twenty times bigger than the largest dwelling had been in the boy’s village.

He seemed excited and impressed at this strange place in the middle of the jungle. He didn’t seem scared of any of it, just curious, conversing with the puppy rapidly in his native language.

“Can you hunt around here before we head out?” Melanie asked.

“I’ll try. But keep in mind that there was a fairly big fight here recently. Then the rescue chopper coming and going. Fire, too, at one point. The smell of charred wood is still in the air. Game might avoid the surrounding area for a couple of days.”

She looked grim at that assessment.

And he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The last thing he’d wanted to do was discourage her.

“How about this? You go and get some rest in one of the bedrooms, in a real bed, and I’ll go look around. If there’s game anywhere nearby, I’ll bring it back. That’s a promise.”

She brightened. “They have real beds here?”

“You bet.”

She slid off the chair. Hesitated. “Can I do anything to help?”

He couldn’t do anything but smile. “You’re doing good. With the independence thing. Here you are, eight months pregnant and offering to follow me into the jungle to look for game. That’s pretty self-reliant.”

Her eyes went wide with unspoken pleasure, the corners of her mouth turning up. “You think?”

“You bet. You’re so independent you barely even set off my protective instincts anymore.”

“Really?”

He looked at her and fought the urge to pick her up and hand-carry her out of the jungle. “Okay, I might still feel a little protective. But that’s my fault, not yours,” he assured her. Then he turned to Mochi and told him in Spanish to stay and guard the
señora,
a task that seemed to please the boy to no end.

Jase left the old pistol with them. Not because he thought Melanie would need it, but to increase her sense of security. The building smelled like smoke and humans. That should keep the wild animals at bay. She and the boy should be perfectly safe. Yet Jase found himself reluctant to leave them as he walked away.

And, not for the first time, he had a feeling that his protective feelings toward her might not come from his usual must-save-all complex, that there was something else between them, some sort of a link he couldn’t name. He shook off that weird notion and headed off into the forest for some bush meat.

*

“I
T’S A SNAKE,
isn’t it?” Melanie looked at the chunks of white meat that had been carefully cleaned and chopped and could have easily passed for chicken, except she knew better.

Jase fired up the propane stove, one of the very few things that had miraculously escaped damage. He’d brought the meat neatly wrapped in a banana leaf, but dumped it into a proper skillet now that they’d found one in all this mess. “Constrictors are perfectly safe to eat. And they’re tasty.” He gave her a patent
used-car-salesman smile, smarmy and fake. “Honestly.”

And made her laugh, which, under the circumstances, was a miracle.

She stirred the meat while he hunted for spices in the ransacked cabinets, came back with a jar of steak sauce and sprinkled some into the skillet.

She drew a deep breath. Her stomach wasn’t as queasy as it had been in her first trimester, but the pregnancy hormones did still affect it. She wasn’t sure how she was going to handle this. “I’ve never had snake before.”

He gave her a patient look. “Of course you have. What do you think bush meat is?”

The women made bush meat stew a lot. The menu at camp contained little else, in fact, except when they had someone coming in for a meeting from a bigger town nearby and they brought a side of beef, but that only happened once a month maybe, or less.

“Bush meat is deer,” she said with confidence. “Rabbits at the very worst.”

“Bush meat is whatever the men find in the bush. Monkeys, snakes, frogs, anything with meat on it.”

She pressed a hand against her stomach, which gave a sudden roll. “Stop. Please.” She drew a deep breath to steady herself, but that might have been a mistake.

As the meat began to fry, its aroma filled the small galley kitchen. But no, okay, she had to admit, the contents of the skillet just smelled like frying meat. She steeled her spine. Fine. A stupid chunk of meat wasn’t going to defeat her. She needed the nutrition to get out of here and take her baby back home safely.

She would do whatever it took. “Okay.”

He smiled at her. “See that? You’re tougher than you think.”

She could get used to him telling her that, she decided as he served her a plate. He handed another one to Mochi, who fell on the meat and gobbled it up. Chico didn’t even chew, just inhaled everything.

She drew another deep breath. If they could do it, so could she.

“Don’t look at it,” Jase advised, sitting across the table, which he’d cleaned off and propped up to make up for the broken leg. “Look into my eyes and think of something else.”

She put the first piece into her mouth and held his gaze. He gave her an encouraging smile. “So what’s your favorite food?”

“South American cuisine. Got used to it in Rio. Julio was a fantastic cook. He really did well with that restaurant,” she said as she chewed carefully. If only everything else in their life had gone as smoothly.

He’d been handsome and hot-blooded, gave her 100 percent of his attention. She’d soaked that right up. But once they were married he had that project in the bag, so to speak, and moved on to the next: opening a second restaurant. And gave his full attention to that.

He’d also become a lot more authoritative. He’d even demanded that she give up her work. Not that she had ruled that out, once the baby was born, or even had time to think about it at that point. She would just have liked to be the one to make that decision.

“I’m a steak guy, myself,” Jase was telling her.

She refocused on him. “Protein is supposed to be healthy.” It sure built muscles, of which he had plenty. He could have been some beef company’s spokesperson.

He shrugged. “Most of the time I’m off on some mission, existing on MREs.”

“MR what?”

“Meal, Ready-to-Eat. Government-issued military food. Freeze-dried, nasty stuff you have to reconstitute with water before you can eat. Doesn’t have much of a taste.”

He glanced over at Mochi and Chico. They were both already done, eyeing the leftovers in the skillet. Jase divided it between them.

He hadn’t touched his food yet; he was too busy distracting her.

It worked. Before she knew it, she cleared her plate, and she felt comfortably full. She needed that protein, both for herself and for William.

The baby seemed to appreciate it, too, because he started kicking. Mochi stared at her belly where he could see the movement even through her clothes. He laughed and ran to put his hand on the spot, nodding like crazy.

She glanced up at Jase, amused, but caught such a look of longing in his gaze that it made her look away.

He finished his meal while she went to the bathroom—some sort of a composting toilet—then they gathered up their belongings and started out in the direction of the rebuilt Jesuit mission, looking for an animal trail that went in that direction, to make things easier.

“Are you sure the scientists won’t be coming back?” She’d counted on this place. And even if it was missing some walls and most of the roof, it still provided more protection than the jungle.

“Very unlikely. But we’ll make it to the mission. It’s not that much farther.”

He was right, of course, so she followed him. They found a faint trail after a while and settled into a comfortable but productive pace.

They stopped regularly, and were looking for a spot to spend the night when they reached an area that had been logged in the past couple of years. With no tall trees to block the sun, the undergrowth grew especially dense, visibility reduced to no more than a couple of feet.

Heat and humidity pressed down on them. She felt as if she was surrounded by green walls in a small space, an uncomfortable, claustrophobic sensation. You couldn’t see any distance, had no idea what waited for you beyond the next few steps.

Mochi prattled on about something to the dog.

She didn’t understand a single word, but she liked looking at him. He was comfortable in the jungle, and the way he handled the trek, as if it was no big deal, helped her to relax a little, helped her to remember that countless people lived here and survived the forest every single day.

Jase would signal the boy to be quiet every once in a while, and he’d fall silent for a few minutes, but then he would start up the chatter again, breaking out in laughter now and then. Presumably he’d said something funny. He and the puppy were having a grand old time together, taking walking lessons with the peg leg at every stop, talking up a storm in between.

Then Jase slowed at the head of the line. He lifted his hand again for silence. Even as Mochi quieted, Chico started barking at the bushes. Mochi quickly held the dog’s muzzle shut, shooting an apologetic look to Jase.

Too late.

A metallic click came from their right.

She held her breath. Maybe it wasn’t a gun. Could be she heard wrong, and nothing more had happened than a branch snapping under the weight of a snake.

Mochi held the dog tighter. She pulled the kid closer to her and held her arms protectively around him.

Then Jase signaled to them to get down and aimed his gun in the direction of the sound at the same time. But another click came from behind them, and another from ahead, then another and another.

Definitely guns being cocked.