Spy Hard (21 page)

But soon half a dozen men were on the ground. Then a dozen. Their buddies up front realized at that point what was going on, turned to shoot at the forest, abandoning their attack of the hacienda. They looked bewildered, firing wildly, not particularly aiming at anything.

It seemed as if the forest itself had risen up against them and fought against them with some ancient magic.

She felt as stunned as they had to be, the short hairs rising at her nape. Then she saw a brownish shape fall from one of the trees. She couldn’t make out who he was until he hit the ground: a native Indian, dressed in nothing but a loincloth. He still clutched the blowpipe he’d been using as a weapon. He stayed where he’d dropped, unmoving, red blooming on his chest.

Some tribal warriors had arrived, fighting with poison darts. Probably from one of the nearby villages. It made no sense. According to Pedro, they avoided him and his men, the loggers and the drug runners. She could understand why: Pedro and the men he employed gave nothing to those villagers but grief.

Yet they were here now, invisible in the trees, and they had very accurate aim. They were bringing down Cristobal’s men one after the other. The bandits were still spraying the trees blindly with their automatic weapons. And the sheer volume of bullets was starting to show results. Several of the native warriors fell as she watched helplessly, contractions gripping her.

She slid to the floor, doing whatever Lamaze breathing she’d seen on TV. She hadn’t gone to actual classes yet. Nor would she get to, at this stage.
Too late,
she thought.
Too late for everything.

Then, after what seemed an eternity, Jase’s gun fell silent at the top of the stairs. And soon the guns outside, too, quieted.

“I think whoever the Indians didn’t get ran off.” Jase picked her up and carried her to the closest room with a bed: Pedro’s. She was beyond caring.

He left, but came back a minute later dragging the Don behind him. He tied the injured man up and shoved him into the corner without ceremony.

Then he turned to her, his gaze immediately softening. “Sorry. Can’t afford to let him run off at this stage.”

“Please. Not here.” She had her limits.

He nodded after a moment and dragged the man out, came back in shortly. “Tied him up in his office and locked him in. How are you?”

Breathing hard.
“How soon is that chopper coming?”

He looked her over, the way her face twisted with the next contraction, his gaze falling to the hand that held her belly. “Probably not soon enough.” A twinge of panic underlined his words.

She wasn’t used to seeing him unsettled, his unbreakable composure shaken. Made him a little more approachable, actually.

“I’ll be fine. Women have been doing this since the beginning of time.” Whatever confidence she didn’t feel, she faked.

He laid his gun down, but didn’t step closer.

She gulped some air. “At least that’s what they always say on TV in situations like this.”

He flashed a pained grin.

Then spun and went for his gun. But didn’t shoot.

Mochi stood in the door. The kid was smiling from ear to ear, his chest puffed out a mile. He sauntered in, surveyed the situation, then moved to the window and shouted a couple of sentences in his native language.

Jase went to look out from behind him. A strange look crossed his face as he surveyed whatever was going on out there.

She wanted to see, too, but couldn’t get up. Not even between two contractions now. They were too close together. “What’s happening?”

“About two dozen warriors are picking up their dead. They are pulling back into the forest.”

Mochi came to her, a proud smile on his face.

“Oh, Mochi.” Tears sprung to her eyes. “You are really something. Thank you. You saved our lives, you know that?”

Then she couldn’t say anything for a while as the next contraction came.

“I think we’re going to need clean water and clean sheets,” she said when the contraction passed.

“More TV wisdom?”

She flinched.

“I don’t suppose you took one of those classes?”

“I was going to do that after I got back from delivering Julio’s ashes to his family.” That trip didn’t turn out as planned, to say the least.

He raked his long fingers through his hair. “You should puff your cheeks out. I mean breathe.”

“You think?”

He’d gone from supersoldier to rattled man pretty quickly, clearly out of his element with the whole childbirth thing.

“I’m going to help,” he said heroically, even as his eyes said he wanted to run for the hills.

“I appreciate it.”

But someone else showed up before he would have been put to the test. An old Indian woman appeared in the doorway.

Mochi greeted her respectfully. She measured up the situation, looked out the window as if orienting herself, then picked a corner and set down her bundle, pulling out a dried birdwing with the black feathers still attached to it.

She swept out the corner with it, then reached to her waist and unwrapped her skirt, laying the reddish colored cloth down. Now she stood there in nothing but a loincloth that was way too skimpy in the back—just a stringy thing, really, revealing way too much sagging and wrinkly skin.

Not that Melanie would have criticized her for anything. She was so grateful for help she could have wept.

Jase, who’d stared at first, then turned away, not knowing where to look, snapped back to the task at hand at last. “Where are the towels?”

“I have fresh sheets in my armoire.”

He shot out of the room.

Mochi just kept grinning, a pleased look on his face. All was well in his book. They’d been saved and he’d somehow even gotten a medicine woman here. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with the whole giving-birth thing.

Melanie had the sudden thought that being a child of a close-knit village, the boy might have seen dozens of babies born. Certainly more than she and Jase.

His optimism was beginning to rub off on her. He really was an exceptional little boy.

“Any mother would be proud to have a son like you, you know that?” she told him in between contractions.

The medicine woman seemed to be done with her preparation, because she came over to the bed and looked into Melanie’s eyes. And for a moment the room and everyone else disappeared. Melanie felt pulled into a swirl of soothing murmurs, although the woman’s lips didn’t move.

Oh, God. Exhaustion was making her loopy, she thought, more than a little discombobulated.

Then the woman broke eye contact, and the strange dizzy sensation immediately disappeared. She said something to Mochi. The boy left the room.

Jase checked in with those sheets, still looking nervous around the edges.

The woman motioned him inside, then did the eye-lock with him next, cocking her head to the right, staring at his face unblinking as if wanting to see inside him. He looked almost hypnotized, as if compelled not to look away.

The strange spectacle lasted only a few seconds. Then the woman gestured to him, indicating that he should pick up Melanie and carry her to the cloth she’d laid out. She made him sit down, too, his back braced against the corner of the room. Then she manipulated Melanie until she was sitting between Jase’s pulled-up knees, her back braced against his bare chest.

She would have much rather stayed in the bed, but she was beyond protesting. A contraction gripped her. She couldn’t breathe for a minute.

“It’s too early.” The woman simply nodded, reached into a pouch that hung from a cord tied around her waist, and sprinkled some dried herbs around them while muttering the same few words toward the north, east, west and south.

Mochi came back with water, then went out again.

The woman put a different kind of herb into the bowl, mixed it up with her hands. The water turned red. Then she removed Melanie’s pants and underwear without ceremony, pushed her legs up and began to wash her. Her skin turned red wherever the herbal water touched it.

Talk about embarrassing. She couldn’t look at Jase. Hoped he had his eyes closed.

“What is she doing?” she asked him under her breath.

“Whatever it is, her people have probably been doing it for thousands of years. She’s probably using some astringent plant juice to fight against bacteria.”

Whether he was right or not, it sounded good. The room was far from sterile.

By the time the medicine woman finished, the contractions came one on the heel of the other. The baby seemed to be in a rush. Was that a good sign or a bad one?

“Where is the evacuation team?” she demanded, expectation mixing with fear.

Jase held her against his body, held her up. “On their way. Hang in there. We’ll do this together.”

If embarrassment didn’t kill her first. She only hoped that where he sat behind her, he couldn’t see her naked bottom half. She tried to move her head into position to block his line of vision and make sure.

But when the medicine woman finished with another batch of incantations, she grabbed the edge of Melanie’s T-shirt and pulled it over her head before she had a chance to protest.

“No, no, no.”

Too late.

Another contraction gripped her, and she was helpless as the woman divested her of her bra, which had been her very last stich of clothing. This was so wrong on so many levels. She couldn’t protect herself. All she could do was wrap her arms around her chest.

“Relax,” Jase said from behind her. “You’re okay.”

“I’m naked!”

“I noticed.” His voice was a notch lower as he said that. “Think of it as natural.”

“As long as you don’t think of it at all.”

A second passed. His fingers brushed against the spot between her shoulder blades. “You have a tattoo.”

“Not going to talk about that right now.”

He brushed over it again. “Okay. But we’re definitely talking about it later.”

The woman prepared a thicker concoction, also red, and dipped her fingers into it to draw circles around Melanie’s stomach, then her breasts, all the while murmuring. Then she drew geometric signs over the circles, until her skin was covered and she looked like she was wearing paint-on clothes.

It kind of made her feel a little less naked. Or maybe she was beyond the point of caring.

The contractions were hard enough by now that she could no longer focus on anything other than the baby coming. She gripped Jase’s hands, feeling as if she were about to burst.

The woman pulled out another roll of bunched-up dried herbs, took a beat-up cigarette lighter out of her pocket that seemed ridiculously out of place and lit the end of the bundle, then circled the smoke around Melanie.

She tried to hold her breath at first, but could only do it for so long. With the next contraction, she had to breathe. The smoke smelled sweet. Settled into her lungs. And eased the pain.

The woman’s incantations got louder, not shouting but rather vibrating, into her, through her. The sound waves rocked her, soothed her. Soon she felt as if her body bobbed on top of ocean waves. She could feel her baby and his strong heartbeat, felt Jase’s heart beat against her back, mixing with hers and the baby’s, the three distinct rhythms harmonizing.

For a second she felt that she was melding with Jase’s body, even as the baby melded with hers.

Then a sudden urge came to push, and she did, bracing her back against Jase, pushing back against him, holding on to his hands, digging her heels into the floor.

“There you go. You can do this,” he murmured into her ear, his voice soft and encouraging.

The urge passed and she rested for a minute before the next came. And the next, and the next.

She grunted hard with the last one.

Then the baby was in her arms, naked and slippery against her skin.

She looked into her son’s eyes. She reveled in the sight of his perfect nose and lips as the medicine woman tied off the umbilical cord and took care of everything.

Her son—small, but alert and breathing just fine, holding on to her pinky finger. She glanced back over her shoulder at Jase. He looked stunned, his eyes suspiciously glistening, filled with awe and wonder.

All his hard edges were gone, all his shadows. He looked as if he’d just witnessed a miracle.

She was pretty sure they all did.

*

H
E FELT AS
if he’d just given birth, a darn strange thing, not something he would have believed if anyone had said something like this to him. Melanie held her baby, and he held Melanie. The sense of oneness was palpable, an overwhelming, almost surreal feeling.

She was naked and in his arms, but there was nothing sexual about the moment. The emotions he felt were primal, elemental, overpowering.

Dozens of half-formed thoughts swirled in his mind, but only one was coherent:
they were his.

The old woman cleaned the baby without removing him from Melanie’s arm, took care of the afterbirth, said more prayers or whatever it was she was doing. He didn’t move, unwilling to break the bond, but when the sound of a chopper filled the air, he did let them go at last, laying her down gently before he pushed to his feet.

“I better check outside.”

Melanie just looked at him, as if not registering his words. He couldn’t blame her.

He walked out to the balcony, his knees shaky for the first time that he could remember, then stepped up onto the railing and from there onto the roof, and searched the sky, a different man from the one who’d called for rescue.

Somehow the last hour had changed everything.

He spotted the chopper, waved, and the camouflaged bird began to lower toward the clearing in the middle of the camp. Men holding guns poured out, secured the area immediately before heading for the hacienda.

By the time he climbed down and went back to Melanie, she was wrapped in a clean sheet, her baby bundled in with her. She looked up at him, her eyes moist. “Isn’t he perfect?”

“Perfect.”

“Thank you. We wouldn’t have made it without you,” she told him.

But the tender moment they shared ended too quickly.