Wild Justice

Chapter 3

Chapter 3“I still don’t understand.”

“You playing dense or were you born that way?” Duane couldn’t resist teasing Chad as they watched the women piling into the trucks—each clutching the cell phone that had been confiscated from them upon their k********g.

Chad opened his mouth, but Richie cut him off with a professorial, “Well!”

By Richie’s tone, Duane knew that the team’s geek was clearly in his element and couldn’t wait to explain.

Better him than me, he thought as Richie started in.

Like everyone else, Duane kept an eye out for some stray guard. But his attention was mostly riveted on the woman standing quietly off to the side.

Kyle, the team’s leader, stood over General Aguado, who was kneeling in the dirt along the line of the rescued prisoners. Some women spat on him as they passed by to clamber onto a truck. A few kicked him, but most of the women simply scurried by as if he still retained the power to steal their freedom again.

General Aguado’s next stop wouldn’t be before some corrupt Venezuelan court of injustice. He was going straight into the gentle hands of the CIA who would continue the work of learning about and destroying at least the international arm of his trafficking enterprises.

Richie started explaining the Venezuelan economy to Chad. It was fun to watch.

All Chad typically cared about in any country, other than the bad guys, was the women. And he was such a goddamn charmer that the women always seemed to appreciate his attention. But that wasn’t going to stop Richie once he got into his cool-factoids-lecture mode.

“You know that Venezuela has the worst hyperinflation in the world, right? It now takes shopping bags full of hundred-bolívar bills to buy a day’s food. Since US dollars are as illegal as it gets, though they’re still very common, Bitcoin has become the black market currency of choice.” He continued rambling on about the interacting factors of dictatorship, an enormous bounty of crude oil that was such a heavy-weight grade that Venezuelans couldn’t process it themselves—even before their infrastructure descended into shambles from neglect—and everything else that no one cared about except economists and Richie Goldman.

Once Duane and Sofia had unlocked the general’s phone, it had simply been a matter of counting up how many women they freed from the various huts and dividing up his massive Bitcoin account evenly. The few women who didn’t already have a phone, or couldn’t find theirs in the pile, Richie had provided with burner phones from the general’s stash—probably from women long gone. Load the app, transfer the Bitcoins to them, load the women in the general’s trucks, and start them on their travels home. Before they left, the team handed out guns confiscated from the bodies of Aguado’s soldiers to the women who claimed some skill. Others were driving the trucks. Anyone who messed with these women was in for a rude surprise.

They weren’t wealthy—even by current Venezuelan standards—but they were definitely well-to-do now. The women had wept their thanks on anyone they could get to, then hurried away fast.

Sofia looked dazed.

“You a’right?” Duane sidled up to her.

Her nod was far from certain.

They only had a few minutes, but he gave her what space and time he could.

“How…” she waved a hand vaguely at the camp, though he suspected that wasn’t the real problem.

“We ran a similar training scenario about six months ago. That one we spent hours talking out, before and after. I saw this layout and we already knew what to do with it. Must be why we train so much,” he made the last sound like a joke, but apparently she wasn’t in a laughing mood.

Sofia cleared her throat several times before she could speak again. “What did you say to the general to get him to unlock his phone?” Which sounded like another evasion to him, but he answered anyway.

“I asked which hand he m*********d with, then offered to blow off each finger until he told us the code. I may have suggested that the sixth finger I’d blow off was his dick.” He’d have to remember that one, it had worked really well.

Sofia nodded, then shrugged, then nodded again, but she wasn’t looking at anything. Oh, s**t. Duane had seen this before, but not since his early days in the Rangers, first tour in Afghanistan, so it took him until now to recognize what was going on.

A glance at the team and he saw he was no longer needed. He led Sofia around the side of one of the huts.

“Take a breath, Sofia. Just take a breath.”

“I…can’t.”

Duane prayed that she didn’t start crying.

He definitely wasn’t up for that.

“If you’ve never shot someone before, why were you out here alone?” Get her talking; it was the best bet.

“I’ve done field work. A lot of intel…gathering,” her voice was hitching in strange gulps that were almost more scary than tears. “Part of ISA training…first solo mission. It was just recon…in Caracas…spotted the general. Had a radio. If trouble. But this was supposed to be…observe-only assignment. Followed A-gu-ado here.” The name was too much and she had to choke it out on multiple breaths.

“Then you called in my team.”

“Then I called in your team,” she collapsed back against the rough wood and closed her eyes. “You just assumed…I would follow you. You made it easy to. So I did.”

“s**t. I’m sorry, Sofia,” Duane didn’t know what else to say. First kill was a brutal shock no matter how much you trained.

Talking to women was Chad’s gift, not his. Women all melted around Chad’s corn-fed Iowa-boy charm…even if he was really from the wrong side of inner-city Detroit lethal.

But Duane didn’t want her melting around Chad. “Wish I’d known, I’d—”

Kyle’s sharp whistle cut the air.

Duane was glad for the interruption, because he wasn’t sure what else to say or what he’d have done differently. Leave her to sit on her a*s alone out in the jungle? Not likely. He squeezed her arm and she nodded once, twice, then opened those lovely dark eyes and looked right at him.

“Thanks.” She pushed off the wall, without ramming her rifle butt into his solar plexus this time, and they headed back around the building.

The camp was now empty except for the Delta team and the general, who lay prone in the reddish mud. Alive but groaning. Apparently the last few women to depart had aimed their final kicks specifically. He was curled up in fetal position.

Now that the camp was empty, she could see the bodies remaining on the ground. Bodies that… She turned.

“No. Don’t look away,” Duane whispered close beside her. “Your imagination will always be worse than the reality. They’re dead. They earned it. It’s okay to look at them.”

So she forced herself to do so. At these men who had kidnapped and imprisoned women for a living. That they were dead was on her shoulders. And, if she was being honest about it, that was a good thing as well as a bad one.

Last of all she looked at the one man by the gate that she had killed herself. She knew his face from looking through the scope earlier. He was one of the two laughing men, enjoying a bit of r**e before going on duty. His companion also lay dead by the gate.

Duane was right. She’d probably have nightmares, but she was going to be okay with this. She returned to the team and nodded her thanks to him. She was a long way from steady, but at least her head was clearer now.

It was the first time Sofia had actually looked at the team. Three men and—two women! She had heard a rumor that Delta had women, but she’d never heard it confirmed. Now she was facing two of them. One was shorter than Sofia’s five-seven, with long dark hair and features that were at least partly Native American. The other was a tall, slender, white-blonde. They couldn’t be more different.

There were three other men besides Duane. A handsome dark-haired guy in charge. Richie, who’d been glad to geek out over Bitcoins (thankfully sparing her the task while she’d been busy fighting to not puke up her energy bar). And the blond guy, who looked even more broad-shouldered and dangerous than Duane, must be Chad.

“Let’s go,” the short brunette woman called out and began heading up the road on foot.

The dangerous blond guy dragged the general to his feet and followed along.

Sofia hung back at the rear guard position with Duane, “I thought that the dark-haired guy was in charge.”

“Depends who you talk to. All of us think Kyle Reeves is the team leader. But his wife, her name’s Carla, is a freakin’ force of nature. She just assumes she’s in charge and no one but Kyle has ever dared to tell her otherwise.”

“They’re married? Serving on the same team?”

“I know. It’s weird, but Richie and Melissa just tied the knot too,” he pointed to the geek and the tall blonde, “as if that isn’t the oddest couple on the planet. We were sure the Army was going to bust them all into separate teams, but my guess is that Colonel Gibson didn’t dare. After all, he might run Delta Force now, but pissing off Carla Anderson would be seriously bad news.”

Colonel Michael Gibson’s reputation said that he wasn’t scared of anything. He was the most decorated Delta operator in the history of The Unit. But Carla was something else again.

Sofia didn’t need anyone to explain the blond guy to her. Delta Force operators were badasses by trade, even the women apparently. But the guy manhandling the general up the trail was a whole different level of nasty.

She checked her watch and almost did a faceplant in a mud puddle. She’d gotten into position yesterday at sunrise. By sunset, General Aguado had arrived and she’d put out a call to see if there was an available action team in the area. Her deskbound counterpart at The Activity had mobilized this squad.

Duane had arrived at five p.m. today, just an hour before sunset.

Two hours to scout the camp, another to circle it and set explosives—the ten-second “go” had been given at 22:07.

It was now 22:37.

That couldn’t be right. She checked her watch again and almost stumbled into another puddle. The rain was still drenching down, something she hadn’t even noticed since the first explosion.

In thirty minutes Duane and his team—Sofia had no illusions about her marginal usefulness in the firefight—had razed the camp, taken down the guards, freed and enriched the imprisoned women, and they were now leaving.

She tried to account for the time. The attack had lasted…minutes. Less than five. Maybe less than three. It had felt like hours. The—

“You’re late,” a voice announced over her earpiece.

Late? They’d achieved the mission and so much more in thirty minutes and they were being called late? Who were these people?

Sofia had been the most competent person in her family—except for her grandmother. Nana was still the fierce fist behind the prosperity of the family’s winery. Sofia had made a point of always striving to be the best: college, Army Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, and now The Activity. This Delta squad had just proven that they were the same way.

Walking beside Duane suddenly felt very different. Out of all of the options, they’d sent him in as their point man. A sniper and demolitions expert. It was no surprise that he looked so dangerous—he really was.

“We’re less than two minutes late, Patty,” Carla called back over the radio. “Give me a goddamn break!”

“Dream on, Wild Woman.”

Sofia would bet that Carla had earned that nickname fair and square.

Duane offered a big smile, looking surprisingly genuine despite the heavy camo paint he wore. Yes, it said, Carla is Wild Woman. Absolutely. And Richie was definitely Q.

“What are the other’s nicknames?” Sofia kept her voice low as they trotted along.

“Kyle is simply Mister Kyle—like Mister Steed from The Avengers. Melissa The Cat moves with all the grace and silence of one. Chad The Reaper is our best shooter.”

Then maybe Duane really was The Rock—strong and stable. It certainly felt that way to be jogging beside him along the dark jungle trail.

It was only then that Sofia became aware of the sound of helicopters close overhead. There was something odd about it—they sounded both louder and as if they were moving away.

Carla upped the pace as she shouted back over her shoulder, “Come on, you lazy sods.” Though they were all within ten paces of her.

“That’s our cue. She calls and we must bow,” Duane whispered beside her again. She liked his quick humor. It was…unexpected to find a Delta operator with one. The view from her desk at The Activity was that Delta were all rough rebels—the military’s outsiders who found the one place they could to serve. The former Delta operators who’d been recruited into The Activity were very hardcore guys—all about the mission.

It made Duane twice as unexpected.

They stepped into a small clearing at the same moment two MH-6M Little Bird helicopters descended out of the rain and darkness. Except there was something strange about them. Their shapes were bizarrely angular and the sound still wasn’t right.

“Stealth,” Duane nudged her forward.

She wasn’t even aware of stopping.

“We aren’t supposed to be in Venezuela anyway, so it’s better if no one knows we’ve been here all week.”

Part of ISA’s purpose was to know everything and share everything. The Intelligence Support Activity was founded to gather and synthesize all those little bits and pieces of information from a hundred sources—CIA, Interpol, Mossad, whoever—and turn it into actionable intelligence for the nation’s top-tier Special Operations Forces.

Stealth helos? Other than the one that had gone down in bin Laden’s compound—she hadn’t heard of even one.

A Delta team embedded into Venezuela all week? Not that either. Something was broken here. She could sort of understand about hiding the stealth helicopters, but Central and South America were her specialties. She should have known this team was nearby for a full week. Instead, Delta had retasked them from some other unknown assignment when she’d submitted an asset requisition.

Inside, there was only room for the pilot and copilot. Extended bench seats ran along the outside of the Little Bird helicopters—either side capable of carrying three soldiers with their feet dangling in the air. She and Duane ended up together on one of them.

Facing sideways, they snapped on belts; Duane double-checking hers, which she completely didn’t need. She knew how to ride on a Little Bird, even if it was a stealth one.

“Hey, Patty, could you circle us once over the compound?” Duane looked toward the cockpit so the pilot must be female as well.

“Taking your lady out for a spin? Now that’s a fine, fine thing to do on a dark summer’s night.” The pilot’s accent was thickly Gloucester, Massachusetts. Sofia’s sophomore roommate at Yale had the same, and the tone made her smile.

“Not his lady,” Sofia wished she could take the words back even as she said them.

All she got back from the pilot was a rough snort of laughter. She sounded like one of the big, fat, bar-mamas. “Good luck with that. Duane’s a cutie. Good thing I’m already married to a hunky pilot.”

“Damn straight!” The low voice of the other pilot agreed.

They circled back over the camp, still being pelted by the last of the rain. There wasn’t really anything to see through the leafy canopy. A building here. Another there.

“Oops!” Duane sounded upset as something tumbled out of his hands toward the ground. “Oh, my word!” Another. “Oh, I’m such a clod,” two more objects followed. “We can go now, Patty. I simply don’t know what came over me.” In another moment he’d be holding his wrist to his forehead like a fainting Scarlett O’Hara.

The Little Bird helicopter circled around to the northeast, but stayed low over the trees creating a wild rollercoaster ride that had the bench seat and Sofia’s butt losing contact with each other with far more frequency than she’d like. Maybe she was glad that Duane had double-checked her seatbelt.

Sofia managed to look back before the camp was out of sight.

A fire had bloomed in the distance. The camp would soon be scorched earth, nothing remaining. No signs of forced entry. Nothing but a few bodies that probably wouldn’t be missed and that Mother Nature’s scavengers would clear away soon enough.

“What about forest fire?”

“Calculated risk but, with the heavy rain, it shouldn’t get far. The buildings, being deadwood, will burn easily enough though. Hopefully it will catch the towers as well so there won’t be any sign of the explosions used to take them down.”

“Damn, Duane,” Patty cut in. “Full sentences there. Clear explanations. What the hell’s up with you? You must have it bad.”

Duane tapped a frequency on his radio, along with an encryption key, and showed it to Sofia. He watched as she set the same one on hers; he really didn’t need s**t from Patty. The helo flashed past the beach and settled down to race mere meters above the waves. The rain that had been inundating the jungle was now just dispersing clouds over the Caribbean.

But now that he was on a private frequency with Sofia, he wasn’t sure what to say.

“You okay?”

There was a long silence before she responded. “Getting there. But thank you for asking.” Her voice still sounded tight and thin compared to the richness of when they’d first met beneath the trees. It also sounded like a conversational closer.

He knew they were punching for international waters, so it would be at least an hour before they met their ship. That was going to be a long, awkward time to sit in silence beside her.

“Full sentences, huh?” It was the first lighter tone he’d heard from her. Until that moment she’d been one serious chick.

“I’m trying to cut down. They’ve threatened me with detox programs if I use them too much.”

He began counting waves flashing by below their dangling feet. Cruising at a hundred and thirty knots, roughly two and a half miles a minute, he lost count pretty quickly. They blurred into mere ripples in the moonlight that was just cracking over the ocean’s horizon and punching through a hole in the clouds.

“I’ve seen the tapes of Delta team attacks before,” Sofia restarted the conversation.

“The Unit. If you’re gonna hang with us, we call ourselves The Unit. The 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta is for Pentagon geeks.”

“I know. I know. Combat Applications Group.”

“Army Compartmented Elements,” Duane made it sing-song.

“And a partridge in a pear tree,” Sofia finished on a near-laugh that tickled Duane. The women of Delta weren’t exactly laughing types—Melissa more quiet and thoughtful, and Carla so damn serious about everything that he couldn’t recall her ever laughing.

“Almost as bad as you guys.” He knew that The Activity wasn’t actually The Activity. Their name had been changed so many times—Centra Spike, Torn Victor, Gray Fox, Task Force Orange—that no one except the bureaucrats in The Pentagon could keep up with it, so the Intelligence Support Activity or just The Activity had been what stuck, out in the field.

“It works for us.”

The helicopter began swaying gently back and forth. Not like trouble, more like…dance music? “What the—”

“You,” Patty cut in, humming a dance tune that fit the timing of the helo’s sway, “really need to learn how to use a two-channel radio.”

He double-checked, it was set right. He’d muted their transmissions from the second channel.

“Or to unplug your intercom cable,” Patty sounded utterly delighted.

He’d plugged in the connection to the helo without even thinking about it. He was in the command position at the head of the outside bench on the pilot’s side, close beside Patty’s right elbow. It had been an automatic gesture to make sure he was patched in.

He hoped that whoever was on the bench seat on the other side of the helo wasn’t plugged—

“I think it’s sweet,” Melissa chimed in for her and Richie.

Across the water, on the other helo racing above the waves, Duane could see Chad sitting beside General Aguado—Kyle and Carla must be on the far side of the second bird.

Aguado was looking everywhere he could except at his seatmate, whereas Chad appeared to be in full predator mode. Chad reached over as if he was going to release the general’s safety harness and dump him in the ocean at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The general became very focused and started talking fast. It was a safe bet that Chad was recording everything and saving the CIA a lot of debriefing time.

At least Chad wasn’t paying any attention to him and Sofia. He hoped.

Patty started humming a waltz.

Duane yanked the intercom cable.