Target Engaged

Chapter 9-2

A loud krump sounded as Duane blew the door.

He and Richie rolled in and tackled the General from behind as he turned toward Duane’s destruction.

They had him facedown on the floor as a line of gunfire raked over their heads. A woman stood in the center of the mattress, firing an AK-47. She was shooting above their heads into the darkness, but would realize and correct her mistake in a moment.

Duane shot the woman where she stood, clothed only in the light of her weapon’s backfire. Her face matched the photo of the General’s wife.

General Vasquez cried out in deep pain from where he’d been pinned to the deep-pile carpet as she crumpled slowly onto the mattress. The fight went out of him in that moment.

They dragged the General down the hall and gathered up the Major as they went. Kyle quickly rifled through the small office off the master bedroom and came out with a backpack of matériel. Richie was doing the same in the Major’s room where the dead girl still sprawled on the bloody mattress, her mouth open in a small O of surprise.

Kyle forced himself to focus and gathered up a laptop, a messy inbox, and an armful of file folders that Richie had unearthed.

Then Richie tugged on a picture above the desk. It didn’t move. He ran his gloved hands around the frame, then under the edge of the desk where he must have hit a switch. The picture swung away from the wall above the desk. There was a safe behind it.

Kyle slapped his shoulder and made the American Sign Language gesture for the letter Q.

Richie grinned. Instead of pulling out some magical safecracking gizmo, Richie waved Duane over to blow the safe. It took him only seconds.

Money. Big wads of it. Bloody waste of time.

Kyle scooped the money out onto the desk. The safe had a hollow panel in the bottom. Two USB memory sticks. He jammed them in a shirt pocket and started to walk away from the million or so in cash. What the hell. He tossed a couple bundles of hundreds into a thigh pocket in case they needed any big bribes to get out of the country, but left the bulk of it.

Someone would sort through the intel later; that wasn’t part of their assignment. They dragged the two men downstairs as the helicopter came to a hover above the master suite, right where it could drop a ladder down onto the balcony.

His team exited the house through the kitchen where he was glad to discover that the matron and her kids were nowhere to be seen. He hoped that the girl in Major Asshole’s bed hadn’t also been one of hers.

Carla met them at the back door, her Mexican drug cartel bandanna now covering her lower face, as Chad shot an RPG into the helicopter from above. The rocket-propelled grenade struck the top of the cockpit, crashing through the windshield before it blew. The pilots and gunners were dead in that instant. The helicopter hovered for several long seconds as if nothing had happened, then plummeted all at once down onto the roof of the master suite.

Rotor blades screeched across clay roof tile as they shredded, then the roof collapsed and the Huey 212 disappeared from view.

Damn thing didn’t have the decency to explode. Then Kyle saw the sharp arc of Chad’s second RPG plunging down from the top of the cliff. He and Carla grabbed the General by the arm, Duane and Richie had the Major, and they sprinted along the cliff away from the main house.

This time the house shattered. The leaking jet fuel from the helicopter went off like a bomb and sent a pillar of fire into the sky that did a partial mushroom-cloud thing, bathing the entire hacienda in a garish red-yellow light and a wave of heat. Kyle hunched with his back to the explosion as chunks of brick and stone rained down from the sky, though none of the heavy stuff reached them.

At farthest edge of the cliff base, a line doubled through a cliff-top pulley was waiting for them. They tied the general and major to one side. The general needed a weight loss program, but the major was whip thin. Richie and Duane hauled on the other end of the line. If the bad guys with their hands bound took a couple of dings as they bounced and scraped up the cliff face, tough. Once they were stopped at the pulley, Richie and Duane ascended rapidly.

Kyle crouched where pavement met cliff and took a moment to survey the results of the last seven minutes. Carla squatted close beside him, her weapon raised and ready, but there wasn’t any need.

No guards were alive atop the perimeter walls. The only people moving were rushing out the small door in the front gate, not trying for their vehicles. Which was wise because Carla would have booby-trapped anything that could move.

There was a massive krump! on the far side of the compound, followed by a cascade of auxiliary explosions and the whine of rounds cooking off, more squeals and bangs than a July Fourth on the Seattle waterfront.

The people at the front gate pushed and shoved more frantically to escape.

“I must have accidentally dropped something in the General’s weapons’ store. Bill me.” Carla spoke the first words of the entire operation.

“So you kept busy while we were inside?”

“Might have,” they traded smiles.

Then he remembered the two shots he’d placed between barely pubescent breasts and sobered. That was an image he wasn’t going to forget anytime soon. He’d half feared she was going to pull a doll out from beneath that pillow as he shot her. He wanted to go kick the Major again, but he was already halfway up the cliff and would be in his own world of hurt soon enough.

The main house was a collapsing wreck. This would look like a drug hit, a particularly violent one. The shattered helicopter, now at the center of a roaring inferno that had once been a plush mansion, would hide the fact that the General had not died there along with his soldiers. What would happen to him would be up to the CIA, not a half-mad hopefully soon-to-be-ex-President of Venezuela who was also on the take—obvious for how he’d been defending the General against extradition.

Somewhere along the way, Carla had re-buttoned her blouse. Now no one but the Carla soldier knelt beside him.

Kyle found it disorienting. She had this switch somewhere deep inside that she could throw on a whim. He could focus on a mission fine, but that didn’t stop him from being a man who could not get enough of the woman beside him.

Yet at moments like this, there was no woman. There was only Sergeant Carla Anderson the soldier. He had put her at the top of his own list of who he would most like to fight beside. She’d proven that was the correct choice, but she wasn’t the most predictable person.

He was starting to wonder if the correct choice was the wise one.

Carla could feel Kyle thinking as they crouched together at the base of the cliff in the shattered remains of General Carlos Vasquez’s hacienda. And she could feel him thinking about her, despite or perhaps because of what they’d just done.

His plan had gone off like clockwork. There’d been unanticipated variations on the theme as they went, but he’d nailed it—right down to the helicopter destroying any evidence of the General’s continued existence. How could Kyle see so much ahead of time? It was like his brain wasn’t trapped by the clock. Give her a task and she could kick ass, but not view and execute whole operations at once. And he’d done it without issuing a single order or making a single demand.

The only demands Kyle Reeves made were on the limits of her body and her brain. That fiery, testosterone-laden grope and kiss at the top of the cliff had certainly rung her bells. Her adrenal glands had fired up on all cylinders and continued to build under the pressure of the action phase of the operation.

As she’d sashayed across the compound, confounding the guards who were about to die, all she’d been aware of was Kyle’s raking inspection through his sniper scope. Standing in the barracks entry and killing eleven more men had definitely lessened that awareness.

But not removed it completely.

There’d been this thread of connection throughout the action. She knew where the whole team was—that was Delta training. But she could feel where Kyle was.

She didn’t want this connection with any man, including one as exceptional as Sergeant Kyle Reeves. Not that she wasn’t enjoying it, but she didn’t want it.

A glance aloft showed the rest of the team was nearing the top of the cliff. No one left in the compound was showing the slightest interest in the activities going on seventy meters above in the dark of the night.

Kyle tapped her shoulder, and with a nod, they moved together to a pair of ropes. At the last second she peeled off her bandanna and let it flutter to the ground where it would be discovered by anyone investigating the wreckage. The US military had never been here. It was strictly a drug war hit, folks. Nothing more.

Latching on her ascenders and double-checking Kyle’s harness while he checked hers, she felt her awareness of him continue to climb.

Get a grip on your hormones, girl. But it wasn’t only her hormones that were the problem. She liked this man as well—a lot. And that didn’t sit comfortably at all.

Both safely on their ropes, they headed aloft. She climbed ten meters, then turned and unslung her rifle to watch for bad guys—the ones not smart enough to be sprinting for the horizon—while Kyle climbed past her to twenty meters and then shifted to guard position while she climbed past him.

Their passage to the top of the cliff was uneventful. They recovered the lines and unrigged the booby traps on the packs they’d left behind. She cut the ankle ties on the two men they’d captured. They were going to be moving some distance, and it would be easier if their team didn’t have to carry the prisoners.

She heard Chad say quietly to the two bound men, “You can walk, or we can carry you. But if you don’t use your legs, we’ll cut them off to save the useless weight. Comprende?” He didn’t wait for their answers. Chad could be scary as s**t behind that boyish face; she actually believed he’d do it.

Carla checked her watch, fifteen seconds shy of 0220. Under twenty minutes total contact time on the site from top-of-cliff to top-of-cliff.

Precisely on Kyle’s schedule, which didn’t surprise her for a second.

Trusting that, she had set up a surprise of her own. She called the others over to the cliff edge to look down one last time. The fires were still going; not a soul moved in the compound.

She held out her hand where the others could see it lit by the flames below and folded her fingers to count down: five, four, three, two…

Her timing was off a touch. On one a ripple of explosions cascaded across the compound. Every vehicle exploded in a shred of metal and a ball of flame.

“I’ve been taking lessons from Duane. There was a surprising amount of C4 and a completely charming array of triggers and timers in the General’s toy collection. I just tossed one under each vehicle as I went.”

Then the massive gate exploded, and the heavy archway over it, like an old fort’s, collapsed in on itself.