Target Engaged (25 page)

Kyle was on the verge of sleep despite his sitting-up position. He tumbled out the container door when it was opened and landed hard on a rough wooden surface.

The sun was blinding, painful beyond belief, punching straight through his skull and cranking up the headache that was no better after his almost nap.

Immediate action? If he was capable of any, which he wasn't sure of.

The soft clicks of two weapons coming off safety made him squint before he leaped. One close enough to be reachable, but his partner offered covering fire and was well back and to the side.

“It is too pretty an afternoon to be shot.” Bolívar Estevan also stood well back, beyond his two guards.

Pretty? The only thing higher than the temperature was the humidity. Kyle had always hated the idiots who were behind you “110 percent,” as if there was such a thing. But wherever “here” was, he could almost believe in 110 percent humidity. The mere act of breathing had his shirt clinging to him.

“Let us sit under the trees and speak.” Estevan's fluid Spanish reminded him to watch his choice of language. Thankfully, he'd learned gutter Spanish from a Mexican migrant worker who'd spent time at his father's dojo. Carla's Spanish had softened it, but even a trained linguist would tag him as authentically Mexican.

No one approached close enough to help him to his feet, but the gestures of the men with the rifles left no doubt of his best course of action.

It took no acting to look debilitated. He rested a hand on the cargo container to help prop himself up and almost burned it. The sun had shifted while he dozed. It was now late afternoon and this end of the container had been baking in the high tropical sun. He was dehydrated and partly roasted alive.

Once on his feet, he finally took in his surroundings. A small pond, perhaps a hundred meters across, definitely less than two hundred. Some palm trees standing well back from the water. Mostly flatland, barely above the water and covered in thick green growth. Bushes. In his world there were bushes and there were trees. This was mostly bushes with trees farther back serving as a screen against a wider view to the horizon. The trees were far thicker than in the city of Maracaibo, the air moister. Was Lake Maracaibo around the corner, or was he off the map and prisoner in the deep jungle?

The container sat on a dock stilted up out of the water. He was weaving, his breathing wrong.

“I'm not going anywhere.” He hoped that Estevan understood. He had to lower his core body temperature.

Kyle flopped face-first off the dock and into the water. He heard a shout of alarm before he submerged. If they were going to shoot him, they could. He had no defenses, nowhere to run, no energy to do so. But no bullets had slammed into his back by the time he surfaced. The water was not much cooler than the air, but it was enough.

He stayed near the dock, ignoring the guards who still had their weapons leveled at him.

It wasn't a lake. He had to paddle idly to keep from drifting away from the dock. A current. A river.

Perhaps one of the ones that fed into Lake Maracaibo on its way to the sea. That would make sense. It would be more convenient for Estevan if he could hide his operation close to a city, for Kyle had no doubt that's where he'd been taken.

His brain was finally kicking back into gear. He ducked his head under once more to cool off as much as he could in the warm water. There was a deep thrumming—motor noise of some sort.

He brought his head up. During his brief submersion, he'd drifted out from the dock a half-dozen meters. From here he could see just around a point of the land where the lakeshore meandered in and out.

There was a conning tower visible just between two low trees.

A submarine's conning tower.

Estevan was in the submarine business. He wasn't a middleman who might lead them to the kingpin they were looking for; he was the man they wanted.

Except when Kyle's team posed as Sinaloa, who in turn was pretending to be an expanding U.S. distribution operation, they were in direct competition with Estevan.

Oh, crap! They'd accidentally challenged the dragon head-on. No wonder Estevan had risked kidnapping him.

He swam back to the dock.

If anyone else on his team was still alive, they were so screwed.

* * *

Carla used her encrypted satellite phone for the first time on the mission. It took her a few minutes to find her way to Fred Smith aboard the USS
Freedom
from the hotel room.

“Hi, Carla. How are you do—”

“Are you in position?”

He harrumphed at her slicing through the niceties.

A gregarious CIA… Who knew such a thing was possible?

“Yes, we have a ScanEagle drone aloft over the lake with an ELINT package aboard.”

“Just one?”

There was a silence that she hoped meant there were other electronic intelligence assets in the air besides a small two-meter-long drone.

“Our only other asset in the area is the helicopters. We've been holding those back at the ship in case you need emergency exfil.”

If they needed an emergency extraction, it was going to be in the middle of the goddamn storm, but Carla didn't see any mileage in pointing that out.

“Most likely position is at the south end of the lake,” she told Smith when she could be sure of her voice control.

“We can only tap radio waves, cell or satellite. If he's using a landline, then—” Smith didn't sound happy. Like Carla cared.

“We're screwed, I get that. But there aren't a lot of services down there. Cell or satellite is far more likely.”

At her nod, Tanya dialed and left her message.

“We're calling out now.” Carla monitored the line.

“The number is a cell phone somewhere in Maracaibo,” Fred Smith reported back. “Because you have us flying at the south end of the lake, we can't locate it any more accurately than that.”

Carla didn't bother answering. For ten agonizing minutes, they sat and waited. Neither she nor Tanya could think of a thing to say, so they just sat, Tanya's hand hovering near the hotel's room phone and Carla clutching the satellite phone so hard that her fingers hurt.

Even the constantly voluble CIA agent didn't buzz in her ear.

She actually cried out when the hotel room phone rang, causing Fred Smith to curse in pain. It rang with a harsh bell, the likes of which she hadn't heard since she was a girl, except as a retro ringtone.

Tanya snatched at the phone, stopped, took a breath, and answered it. She listened for a moment and nodded.

Carla whispered, “Go,” into the satellite phone and could hear Fred Smith relay the order to trace the call. It was hard to do while sitting on a ship a hundred miles offshore, but that was a problem for the signal intelligence folks. She just needed Estevan to stay on the line long enough for them to do whatever they did.

Tanya handed her the hotel phone, then leaned over until their shoulders were touching and she could tip her head close so that they could both listen.

The bodily contact reminded her of Kyle's shoulder against hers and she drew strength from the memory.

“This is Carla.”

“Is it? Not Claudia?” Bolívar Estevan's voice was still as pleasant and jovial as ever.

“No.” Would the real Empress of Antrax break her cover over the phone? Carla thought not.

“Not Claudia Ochoa Felix, who I see by her social media post is presently in a Guadalajaran nightclub?”

Had he seen a photo of the real Claudia? The woman was a Kim Kardashian look-alike; built like a brick shithouse. Far more so than even Tanya. If Estevan hadn't seen her photo, Carla could claim the woman in Guadalajara was a body double that she'd hired while out on a business expedition.

Too risky.

She could continue to deny her link with Sinaloa and Antrax. Or—

“That bitch!” Carla practically shouted for reasons she didn't yet understand. “One of these days the real Empress of Antrax is going to bury her ass. I swear it on my father's grave or my name isn't—”

“Marisol,” Tanya mouthed at her.

“—Marisol Torres.” Which it wasn't, so that made the swear safe.

Most intelligence reports indicated that the real power behind Sinaloa was in the hands of two quieter, far less photographed, and extremely intelligent sisters. Marisol was a good choice; she was even less visible than Luisa Marie. It was these sisters with business degrees and their father's lethal training that Estevan would have to reckon with.

Estevan tried to interrupt, but Carla continued her tirade, layering every foul phrase of gutter Mexican that Kyle had taught her on Claudia Ochoa Felix's head. She went on until Tanya pinched her sharply. Okay, maybe she needed to stop soon, so she made one final slur about the woman only getting off when she went down on her hot-pink AK-47 in a dark closet, and then shut up.

After a lengthy pause, perhaps to make sure she was done ranting, Estevan finally spoke once more.

“As I observed earlier,
señora,
you are a very passionate woman. I too am passionate about what I do. Perhaps we can meet tomorrow under less, shall I say, mutually distrustful circumstances.”

“And why should I do that after today's events?”

“Because otherwise your husband will be, how do you say, rubbing shoulders with the fishes.”

The threat meant to strike fear into her heart instead coursed through her body like an adrenal shot of relief. Kyle and Estevan had been speaking, and Kyle had found a way to communicate to her that he was alive by using that odd turn of phrase until Estevan had repeated it.

Rubbing shoulders.

He was still alive. Still, hopefully, in one piece.

Tanya pinched her again hard.

Estevan had been speaking and she hadn't heard a word.

“I'm sorry,” Carla cut him off, “I was having trouble catching my breath. What were you saying?”

“Tomorrow at nine a.m., be at this number.” His tone had not the slightest hint of friendly. Then he was gone.

By tomorrow at 0900, Bolívar Estevan was going to be sliced, diced, minced, peeled, and fed to wild piranhas. And if Venezuela didn't have piranhas, she'd fly them in from Brazil or wherever they came from. Then—

She picked up the forgotten satellite phone. “Tell me you got him.”

“We have him, and it's ugly.”

She was Delta.

Ugly didn't bother her for a moment.

* * *

Kyle watched Estevan walk back from the office container that he'd been called to. Unlike the one that had been his prison, this one had windows cut into the steel sides. Through the open door he could see several desks and chairs.

He'd sat quietly and nursed a glass of iced coconut milk and tea sweetened with guava. His two guards were well trained and vigilant. They sat at two different points that would allow them to fire at him without hitting either Estevan or each other.

Estevan sat back down with a contented sigh.

“Is your wife so passionate in bed? You must be a very lucky man. It is a pity I must kill both of you tomorrow.”

Alive!
roared into his brain.

“A pity,” Kyle agreed, trying to buy time to control his emotions.

Alive, and she'd be on her way long before tomorrow. With any of their team still able to walk or crawl.

“Especially because the answer to your question is yes. She is beyond incredible.” He did his best to remain in the state of poised readiness that his father had worked so hard to teach him. No tension must show. No strong emotion. No exposed thoughts that the enemy could capitalize on.

But it was hard. It was his first hint that Carla was alive. He wanted to kiss the man who had just told him they both were going to die.

And if she lived, that probably meant that at least Chad and Tanya—who had left the church with her—did as well. And yet he'd been worried for her when she left the safety of the church. There was a laugh.

“I like you, Mister Javits, or whatever your name may be.” Estevan sipped his drink as if they were discussing the latest James Bond film. “I knew I had to be cautious if your ‘Carla' was indeed Claudia Ochoa Felix, because I know who is the power behind the Sinaloa curtain. Incurring the wrath of Marisol Torres is not something I would do lightly. Murdering her is an entirely different matter.”

Kyle tried not to groan. No matter how they played this, it just kept getting worse. Estevan's next comment proved that he hadn't hidden his thoughts as well as he'd intended.

“I see you understand waiting and futility both. I will miss you. I thank you for rescuing my daughter. Even though I have sent her to a hospital, under very heavy guard I assure you, I know that what was done to her is not your doing. As a reward, I will give both of you easy deaths.”

The satellite phone rang as Carla and Tanya were racing toward the agreed-upon meeting point well south of Maracaibo. Chad, Duane, and Richie should have long since secured a speedboat and transferred their gear over from the sailboat.

In the last few hours, while they'd been awaiting the phone call, the wind had increased sharply and any hint of sunlight had retreated to ride out the storm somewhere happier. And less wet. The first sprinkles had suppressed the dust; the building rain was now turning it all into mud.

Getting out of the city had been tortuous. Vendors were clogging the roads. They had shuttered their stalls against the rising storm and were now trying to drag them to places of safety. Carla almost killed a spice merchant and hit three different wheeled food stalls before she managed to sling the car out beyond the core market area.

Then they'd gotten lost in the snarl of city streets: narrow, winding, and poorly lit at the best of times. The storm had chosen the moment of the quick equatorial sunset to kill off Maracaibo's dodgy power grid.

It was as much luck as skill that finally freed them from the city's vile clutches and allowed Carla to rocket south, winding around pedestrians and bicyclists who had waited too long to seek cover.

Tanya answered the phone and handed it to Carla as she spun the wheel to avoid a group of three men. They had apparently thought the dusty front yard she had veered through to get around a truck and donkey jam was a good place to play cards and drink.

“What?” she shouted into the phone.

“We have bad news and worse,” Fred Smith announced.

“Don't you dare ask me which I want first.” The man was a goddamn cliché. She jumped off the curb back onto the street and drove through the middle of a soccer game. The kids scattered, but the ball was toast with a loud bang that for a moment she feared was a tire. It wasn't.

“Okay, bad news first. We're not the only drone aloft.”

“And you're calling me on the goddamn phone to make me easier to trace?” How dumb was the man?

“They're out over the lake. We estimate their machine is visual, not ELINT, as it wasn't involved in the call he placed to your hotel room. Their patrol line will pick you up within miles of the dock south of Maracaibo. Worse news: we also don't have decent imagery of Estevan's operations to know what assets he has there. We never inspected it before.”

“So look now.”

“The bird we sent out was ELINT only; if the intelligence isn't electronic, this craft can't see it. We pinpointed his signal, but we didn't have enough payload capacity to send up any cameras.”

She spotted an open stretch of road and hammered down on the Toyota's accelerator. She could see Tanya bracing her feet in the foot well as if they were about to crash.

Carla flicked on the high beams and looked into the gathering darkness. They'd driven out of the rain—at least they were moving faster than the storm—so she killed the windshield wipers. Houses down either side of the road were no longer crammed together. Still a strange jumble of pleasant and shanty, but with more space. This must be suburbs.

Nope, not toast yet. She kept the accelerator down.

“Well, get me something before the storm lands on Kyle's head and you can't see anything. And get Estevan's drone out of the sky.”

“How? Our bird's a ScanEagle, not a Global Hawk or Predator. It doesn't carry any weapons.”

“Ram it, Smith. Take the ScanEagle and ram it into his drone. I need a clear path. If I have to go in blind, I'll go in blind. But if I'm going in blind while he can see me, that isn't going to work.”

He sputtered for a moment. “You want me to destroy a half-million-dollar UAV by using it like a battering ram?”

“
Smith!
” she shouted loud enough to hurt her own ears. “Get that goddamn drone out of my sky, or I'll come back as a ghost and haunt your ass!”

She beat the phone on the dashboard several times for good measure before hanging up and tossing it to Tanya. Then she hammered the Toyota's horn, scattering a flock of chickens feeding in the middle of her lane moments before she turned them into cutlets.

She was on her way to save Kyle, and anything or anyone who stood in her way was going down—and going down harsh.

* * *

Chad idled the boat out on Lake Maracaibo beyond the end of the assigned dock. They were meeting Carla and Tanya at the south end of the city where the eight-kilometer-wide sea access opened up into the massive, near-circular lake.

The chop on the lake was at two feet and building rapidly. He'd bet that by the end of this night, he'd wish he'd stolen something bigger. The ten-meter aluminum boat had a wraparound rubber fender like a Zodiac on serious steroids, but even so, the ride was going to be a rough one before they were done.

The towering clouds to the north were filled with lightning as they rolled over the city. The weird thing was that there was lightning to the south as well—quick flashes, high up—though the sky directly above still showed the first stars.

“Catatumbo lightning,” Richie said. “That type has its own name, after the Catatumbo River. This is the only place in the world that it occurs. Very cool.” He started into one of his too-much-information things that Chad had long since learned were safest to just let roll over him.

“Wait, what?”

“I know,” Richie answered. “Isn't it amazing? Half the nights of the year, eight to ten hours a night, three hundred lightning strikes per hour. That's like three thousand a night.”

“You dropped a digit, buddy.” Duane handed around energy bars.

“You mean I picked up a digit.” Richie was a nut about precision. “And, no, I didn't.”

“Shit!” Chad spotted a distant set of headlights approaching their pier and kept an eye on them. “People live down there? Are they psycho?”

“It's all cloud to cloud. A couple miles up. Unless there's a storm. That brings the show down to sea level.”

“Oh man!” Duane had also spotted the approaching headlights and unslung his weapon, though they were safely a hundred meters offshore with their running lights doused. “Please tell me we aren't going anywhere near that lightning craziness. I almost got hit once on a training mission in Japan. No three thousand strikes a night for this boy.”

“No, we aren't going near it.” Richie had something up his sleeve as he waited out Duane's exclamation of relief.

Chad kept quiet.

The car pulled right up to the end of the pier and honked its horn three times before shutting off its lights. If Carla had seen the pier in the daylight, there's no way she would have driven onto it.

“We're going right
into
that craziness.” Richie sounded totally pleased. “Estevan is right up the delta of the Catatumbo River itself. Can't wait to see it firsthand.”

“Fucking geek,” Chad offered in a friendly fashion.

“Geeks rule,” Richie agreed happily.

Chad ran them forward, fighting the chop and trying not to look at the growing storm ahead.

* * *

“A police boat?” Carla looked down at the long, powerful craft. “Don't you think that's a bit obvious?”

Chad smiled up at her from beneath the small headlamp he wore. They each wore one. They dragged the bundles of weapons they'd taken from their raid on the Hotel Castillo out of the Toyota and loaded them aboard.

“You said fast, lady. This boat has the prettiest little trio of three-hundred-horse outboards. It's rough and ready.”

“Where's the rented sailboat?”

“What sailboat?”

Carla shook her head. She didn't even know why she asked.

“Oh, you mean the one we bribed the police with to look the other way while we took this one? The cash that was left wasn't enough, so we tossed in the sailboat. They're probably filing off serial numbers and repainting the hull even as we speak.”

“So you basically gave the cops a brand-new drug-smuggling sailboat.”

“Well…” Chad drawled at her and nodded toward Duane who was releasing the last line.

“I might have left a breaching charge down in the bilge somewhere. It should cut a pretty disastrous hole in the hull about four hours from now. Storm should be peaking over Maracaibo about then. She'll go down fast and ugly. Really hope old Freddie Smith selected ‘yes' on the insurance form when he rented it for us.”

Carla grinned at them. She was last to jump down off the dock into the pitching boat. As an afterthought, she tossed the keys back toward the car. Maybe at least one of the vehicles they had rented would get back to the agency.

“You guys are nasty. I like that in a team.”

She high-fived each one and then she and Tanya started arming up as Chad turned the police boat south and opened up the engines with a bone-shuddering roar. In moments, they were slamming wave top to wave top on their way south.

* * *

A guard rushed up to Bolívar where he sat with Kyle Javits-Torres at the small table beneath the gently swaying trees. The wind was already making small waves on this side branch of the Catatumbo. The storm was coming, but it would still take another hour or so to cross Lake Maracaibo, and he was quite enjoying his talk with his prisoner.

“The drone, sir,” the guard panted out. “It is gone. Not crashed. One moment we had signal, the next we didn't. Not on any channel.”

Bolívar Estevan was unable to suppress his curse. He did not like revealing anything in front of this calm, cool lover of the Empress of Antrax seated beside him.

Their story had checked out.

Forty-eight hours after the eradication of that bastard Major Gonzalez, they had popped up out of nowhere in Aruba as if by magic and rented a sailboat to come to Venezuela. His own people had sighted it leaving, not suspecting then who was aboard. They had called in his shore crew to intercept it. His “acquisitions” crew had radioed that they'd located and were overtaking the sailboat, then silence. They'd never been heard from again. When the sailboat showed up with a window shot out, he knew that the five who had arrived on the boat had beaten his most experienced and ruthless crew.

Then there had been the strike at the Hotel Castillo that had freed his daughter. Four bodies and who knew how many others who simply had vanished.

He, like every other person in Venezuela, had assumed it was a battle won by one faction of the Cartel de los Soles over another. He had believed it until his lovely, abused daughter had arrived by taxi and told him of the beautiful woman with long, dark hair and the men who leaped to her commands.

This Empress of Sinaloa he met at the church had unquestionably been the same woman.

Sinaloa was a threat past imagining. And the seriousness of the threat was that one of the Torres sisters was here personally. Not an emissary, not an underling thug, but one of the sisters in person. This wasn't her research trip for the “export” business; this was the tip of the spear striking at the heart of his entire enterprise.

He looked up quickly as the night was riven by the first shocks of Catatumbo lightning. Darkness that revealed itself to night-adapted eyes, blinding bright light, then a black so deep in comparison that the world might have ceased to exist.

His drone had gone down before the lightning began in that region of the sky. If his drone had failed on every channel simultaneously, it had been shot down. And the operator hadn't reported anyone on the lake's surface. No one who knew the lake was foolhardy enough to ignore the oncoming gale. The unique geography of the lake made for brutal chop that slapped from every direction during a storm.

That meant that his drone had been taken down from the air. The Empress of Antrax had air assets in Venezuela and didn't want him to see that she was coming.

Well, her power was not as great as this storm. It would soon wash the most advanced helicopters from the sky. The compound was lit like a strobe light by three successive flashes, his men moving in jerky stop-frame motions.

Nor was Marisol's number of forces even close to his own. He had thirty fighters here in addition to the workers. He had never counted more than the five with her, one of whom sat here beside him looking up at the lightning show as if he had all the time in the world.

Six. If that Tanya Zimmer woman arrived here, then that meant she was with them rather than an innocent dupe. They would come by air, flying before the very teeth of the gale. He would be ready for them.

One thing was certain. He no longer needed the Empress's husband. She was already on her way to rescue him. He had no idea how his signal had been tracked, but the death of his drone promised that it had been.

Well, the rescue would be the death of them all. Then perhaps he would take the fight to Sinaloa for dreaming of coming into his country uninvited.

Estevan signaled his guards. “Take him down to the end of the dock and kill him. Let him truly rub his shoulders with the fishes.” He liked that phrase. It was personal and reminded him of
The Godfather
.

The man didn't protest. He simply walked, head bowed, toward the water with three guards following close behind him.

It was like a stage drama in strobe light.

A lightning flash.

The prisoner and three guards close beside him.

Darkness.

Flash.

Grouped at the head of the dock.

Darkness.

Flash.

The husband turned to face his firing squad at the dock's far end. A brave fool.

Darkness.

Then a massive double-strike close by—the first of the storm-driven Catatumbo lightning to reach the ground—rattled the empty glasses on the small table by Estevan's chair.

In the aftermath of its blinding light, the man's body tumbled into the water.

The next darkness was broken by the gunfire flashes that the guards were pouring down onto him to ensure his death.