Target Engaged (13 page)

She closed the berthing space door, and the dim room wavered along the edges of her vision.

…so alive.

She pitched facedown onto the bunk and was asleep before her face hit the pillow.

* * *

Kyle found his way to the
Freedom
's missile deck. The big RAM surface-to-air missile launcher dominated the space. It was a massive piece of hardware swinging twenty-one missiles on a rolling armature. Fifty-caliber machine guns were perched at the corners, complete with curved shields to protect the gunner from return fire. But there was still some space for him to lean against the stern rail and stare out at the sea rolling lazily off the stern.

As his pulse slowed, as the haze of anger at Carla that he hadn't been able to control cooled, he became aware of the rising heat of the early morning air. Even on the sea off Venezuela, they were too close to the equator for the temperatures to be reasonable. They were far enough offshore that no birds swirled above hoping for scraps. The only sounds were the rumble and vibration of the big Rolls-Royce gas turbines as the ship idled slowly toward the rising sun across the endless liquid plane.

Looking down at the afterdeck, Kyle could see that the rear third of the ship was a big helicopter landing platform marked out in broad white lines that would show up even in a raging storm. Under the stern was a pickup ramp for cargo and small watercraft. And under his skin was Sergeant First Class Carla Anderson.

Damn her for making him lose his control. He should go find her and apologize. He'd never spoken that way to another soldier, not even the asshole ones. So why had he done it to her?

He knew why.

Which only made it worse.

“Going to be a warm one.”

He hadn't heard or felt Chief Warrant Lola Maloney approaching as he leaned there.

She was dressed in standard desert-camouflage ACU pants and plain T-shirt. Woman's body went just fine with that smile and that face.

She stared out over the stern at the rolling wake of the
Freedom
as she worked through the seas, but not hurrying on her way. No other ships were around. A smudge to the north might have been an aircraft carrier or destroyer, somebody big, but he couldn't tell more from here.

“Aren't you supposed to be asleep?” The Night Stalkers, like Delta, did most of their work at night. He'd slept too long last night and now had to stay up for a few hours and then find somewhere other than with Carla to take a nap before mission briefing.

“Thought you might need a shoulder.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“Not to most, no. Met my husband, Tim, on my first full mission with the Night Stalkers. I qualify that because I did a partial mission while still in training. I hauled back your girlfriend's brother.”

“No shit? I met the Colonel.”

“Gibson? Yeah, you know for sure that if he was in on it, it was way bad and seriously major on the priority scale.”

Kyle nodded. He'd figured that one out himself.

“I made sure her brother had a flag over him after I brought him home. And no, I don't know what happened, and no, I can't talk about even the bit that I do know.”

“Uh, thanks for doing that.”

“We give them honor in death.” Lola shrugged at how little that made up for, but it was something. “Anyway, Tim was a handful. Of course, so was I. Looks like you have a dose of that on your hands.”

“Maybe.” And maybe Carla wasn't just reacting to something that had happened on the mission. Maybe it was a reaction to him. But for the life of him, he couldn't think of what he'd done—other than falling in love with her.

Not that he'd said a word about it.

And her look this morning clearly said that, at least for now, the feeling was not at all mutual.

Kyle stared out at the stern waves, then up at the blue sky, then back down at the helideck.

“Wait a sec. Where's your helicopter?”

Chief Maloney stamped her heel against the deck. “You're standing on the roof of a two-bird hangar. You don't think we leave stealth gear out in the daylight if we don't have to? And you're avoiding the topic.”

Stealth? What the… But then he remembered the way that the helicopters had sort of showed up out of nowhere. Almost as if they arrived overhead in the jungle before their sound did. Well, that would certainly explain it. Even an idiot knew there were other stealth birds besides the one that went down in bin Laden's compound, but he'd never expected to meet one.
Welcome to Delta, boy.

Now that he actually had, it had serious implications. It meant that last night's and tonight's missions were important enough to call for the release of those very special assets.

“Gather round, folks. He's starting to put the pieces together.”

He eyed Chief Maloney, but she was just grinning at him.

She was lead pilot, flying the very best equipment of a high-powered outfit like the Night Stalkers. Which meant…what?

“Still not getting it, Chief.”

She clapped him on the shoulder. “Then just do like Mama Rici always say: ‘Fry up the next chucklehead, girl!'” She said it in a thick Creole roll.

“Chucklehead?”

“Where you from, boy?”

“Washington. The state, not the capital.”

“What do you call a catfish up there?”

“Uh, we call them catfish.”

“Heathens! It means stop worrying at what you can't fix.” With that, the Chief offered him a smile and strolled off. “Got to go get me some shut-eye and dream o' my man.” Then she laughed a crazy-woman laugh that sent chills up his spine and made him wonder if someone had just pricked a pin into a voodoo doll of him.

If that's what had happened, he hoped to hell Carla wasn't doing the pinning.

However, she might be.

For reasons he still wasn't sure of, Kyle guessed that his waking-up dreaming of Carla was what had caused the trouble in the first place.

“Agent Smith. Yes, that's really my name. I'll make it worse. My given first name is Fred. Honest to God. Fred Smith. And, please, I've heard every single joke there is about being a CIA agent named Fred Smith.” He held up his hand. “Especially the ones from
The Matrix
, so please try to resist the temptation, and this will go a lot faster.”

All Carla cared about was that he wasn't one of the three CIA sadists who had questioned her last night. The night before. Yesterday. Whatever.

They were back in the same briefing room she'd been stuck in for so long last night. Steel table, steel chairs, no windows, no air.

She hadn't been near a single piece of intel during the whole mission and hadn't interacted with the prisoners except to offer to shoot one in the butthole if he jumped off the waterfall. She didn't even know Richie and Kyle had extracted any documents until she saw the two of them sorting through paper after the hike out.

But she had been the one to cover the most ground, crisscrossing the compound several times. The CIA apparently wasn't going to be happy until she personally identified every stone and bush she'd met along the way.

Any other evidence extractable from the Venezuelan General's drug-fort hacienda had died along with the men in the explosions. The vehicles were, without exception, U.S. military purchased through a FMS—Foreign Military Sales—package to the Colombian antidrug effort and then moved to the Venezuelan military, which had really pissed off the debriefing team. This morning's satellite-pass photos had shown that the destruction Carla had wrought with her explosives and Kyle's “kill the copter” ploy had totally burned out any remaining evidence.

The guys resisted harassing Agent Smith, but it was a close thing. Duane and Chad were trading dangerous smiles… They'd get him later if he ticked them off the least bit.

“We're offshore Venezuela,” the agent started.

“Been there. Did that.” Chad started the riff that wasn't going to end well. They had to do something to suppress the “Agent Smith” jokes that must be rolling through their brains. If he hadn't made a point of it, she'd just have taken him at his word about his name and moved on.

Smith rolled right on. “The country with the largest oil reserves in the world.”

“Which is why we're here.” Duane wasn't about to be one-upped, not by Chad, at least.

“And”—Smith was tenacious—“one of the three worst drug-trafficking countries there is.”

“Which is why
we
actually were there night before last,” Kyle said softly and calmed the whole team down. He did that somehow and made it look easy and effortless.

Usually Carla appreciated it, just went along for the ride. Tonight was different. Tonight she didn't want to cooperate.

Introspection wasn't exactly her long suit. So, she kept her own fit of unvoiced rebellion against Kyle quiet, because she knew one thing for damn sure—it was personal. Aside from the fact that it wasn't the least little bit appropriate, it was totally ridiculous. The briefing continued while she did her best to beat her feelings back into the box where they belonged.

“Their networks are built in layers that we haven't been able to crack. We knew General Carlos Vasquez was a major player in the Cartel de los Soles. He—”

“Wait.” Carla popped a hand. “What? Cartel of the Suns?” Focus on the briefing. Good idea. And it helped.

Agent Smith turned on a screen on the wall behind him and flashed up an image. It was a close-up of the man they'd dragged through the jungle last night, but in happier times wearing his full uniform.

Damn it!
Carla hated being predictable almost as much as she hated whatever Kyle was doing to her.

“Note the epaulettes on his shoulder boards. Their military doesn't use stars like we do; they use suns. He wears the three suns of a major general. The Cartel de los Soles isn't a typical price-fixing single cartel like the Mexican and Colombian cartels, nor is it restricted to command tier. It's actually a series of competing drug cartels that exist in every division and rank of the Venezuelan military. There have been many migrations of Colombian drug cartels into the country, but this is Venezuela's homegrown version.”

“How effective are they?”

“Twenty percent of U.S.-consumed cocaine and fifty percent for Western Europe transports through Venezuela.”

That earned the room's attention.

“As I'm assuming that the five of us aren't expected to take on a hundred metric tons of cocaine traffic ourselves, what's our part in this?”

Carla kept meaning to ask Kyle how he did that. She'd been on the verge of whining, maybe even pinging Agent Smith about being a block of CIA code, and Kyle had jumped past that and put it in perspective.

Of course, talking hadn't ever been a big part of their relationship. Every time they were alone together, the heat exploded into sex. On the rare occasions that they remained conscious afterward, they ended up reviewing missions, assignments, training, and all that other noise. She'd have to put “talking to him” somewhere on her Kyle to-do list. Maybe. What if she didn't like the answers?

She looked over at him: calm, ready to proceed, and still too goddamn handsome. Even now, in the briefing room, she wanted to jump him. Or kill him for crimes unknown. Christ, she was a total basket case. If anyone ever managed a good look at what was inside her head, they'd lock her away in a padded cell for sure.

“Your part in this”—Agent Fred Smith went to the next slide—“are these.”

The image he put up earned the room's silence.

It was a submarine, thirty meters long and three or four across, based on the man standing beside it in the photo. It was painted in a pattern of blues and grays that looked like water. Or a camouflage that would work well if it was just under sun-dappled ocean waves. It had a proper conning tower and looked very well done.

“It's made of wood framing with a fiberglass and Kevlar shell, so it has almost no radar signature. It can carry up to ten metric tons of refined cocaine. Diesel, ten days en route to the southern U.S.”

“That means it needs air and we can take it on the surface.” Richie put the tech pieces together even faster than Kyle.

“Sounds like a Navy job if they're out on the ocean.” Carla wasn't about to be outdone.

“The subs also have batteries for fourteen hours submerged operation, so they only have to surface at night for running the diesel and recharging. They can run at a depth of sixty meters.”

Crap. How were they supposed to fight something like that?

“To make it worse, they're disposable.”

“What?” Richie bolted upright in his chair. “That thing must cost north of a million dollars to make and they throw it away?”

“This one was closer to two million.” Agent Fred smiled and waited for someone to take the next step.

None of the guys had a clue. Carla saw Kyle's lightbulb go on, damn him. He traded a smile with Agent Fred.

Wait a sec!

“What's the street price on ten metric tons in the U.S.?”

“A billion dollars U.S. per ton, more or less. Trafficker's take is usually thirteen percent, so call it a hundred and thirty million, times ten tons. Double that if they also hold the in-country U.S. or European upper-level distribution. Per trip.”

That's why a two-million-dollar sub was disposable. Hell, you could run a fleet of them.

Carla started thinking about the kind of military force that would be hanging around to protect an investment of that size. Suddenly it didn't look so amusing.

“That's why we're here.” Her voice was a whisper, but the nods around the room confirmed her conclusion.

The DEA could find and take down a submarine, or at least a percentage of them.

But to take down the command structure behind them…

“Shit!” She put the pieces together and sat up to look at Kyle.

His nod of agreement was grim.

“You want”—she had to ask the question—“the five of us to take down the Cartel de los Soles?”

“That might be asking a bit much,” Agent Fred acknowledged, “but we certainly want you to handicap them.”

* * *

Three hours later Carla was little clearer about what was going on. Fred Smith was gone, and now it was just the team sitting around the steel table in a black hole inside the USS
Freedom
.

“How can they use so many words to say so little?” Carla wanted to know. Her head was torn between a desire to spin and an equal need to throb.

“Special training,” Chad replied.

“Spook training,” Duane followed on.

“Deep, dark secret-agent training.”

Carla put her head down on the table. With Richie joining in, they were jumping from
Mutt and Jeff
to
The Three Stooges
. Wasn't that just too perfect.

“If we go into Venezuela directly, it will appear too obvious,” Kyle said as if that clarified anything.

“So…” Carla didn't bother raising her head but continued talking to the table. “We're going to swim to Aruba with fake passports, pretending that we're tourists who haven't just been dropped offshore out of a Special Operations helicopter.”

“Then we rent a sailboat,” Chad began the round-robin again.

“Sail it to Venezuela.”

“Pretending that we're tourists, but only as a thin disguise for being drug lords looking to expand their business with local contacts in the drug-transport business.”

“And then we leverage those contacts to start a war inside the cartel.” What the hell, she might as well join in with the other lunatics. She raised her head to look at Kyle. “And this somehow makes sense to you?”

He nodded.

Carla put her head back down on the table. It would be really convenient at the moment if she didn't trust the man so implicitly.

But she did.

* * *

Kyle found Carla at the same back rail overlooking the stern of the ship where he'd spoken to the SOAR pilot this morning. It was as if he'd blinked and the scene had simply changed.

Chief Warrant Lola Maloney shifted to Sergeant Carla Anderson.

Day for night.

Night had fallen over the tropics while they were in the briefing. The ship used limited lights in these waters—running lights to warn other ships and soft lights by the doorways. The few ship's spaces with outside windows were darkened to allow the ship's officers a clear view out at the night, though there was not much to see at the moment.

It was dark enough on deck that only the silhouette of his teammate showed. That and the slash of the Milky Way like a white band across the heavens.

“Hey, girlie.” He went for light.

“Hey, tough guy.” Her voice was soft and amused. Or soft and relieved?

“We okay?”

He could see her nod as he joined at the rail. “Sure. Why wouldn't we be?”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not so much. You?” She sounded as if she'd dealt with whatever had cost her a night's sleep.

Kyle considered.

Shooting a naked girl maybe not even into her teens. He didn't want to discuss that for a second.

Being in love with Carla? Yeah, that was going to get him absolutely no mileage. “I'm good.”

“You're very good. Think we can do it quiet enough here for no one to notice?”

“Sure.”

She sidled toward him until they were a breath apart.

Kyle nodded back over his shoulder at the ship's superstructure. “If you don't mind entertaining the deck watch officer up there wearing his night-vision gear.”

“Spoilsport!” She leaned back against the rail. “Crap. I tell you, Kyle, the military does have drawbacks.”

“Serving with you isn't one of them, Wild Woman.”

“Aww. You really know how to sweet-talk a girl, Mister Kyle. Right back at ya, buddy.”

Buddy?
Yeah, guess he deserved that.

“Hey, Carla.”

“What?”

Kyle opened his mouth, but that was far as he got. He never chickened on anything. So why was he chickening on this?

Because she's the best thing that ever happened to you and you're scared to death of screwing it up.
So his body came up with a comment when his brain didn't supply one.

“Bet we're not headed into the land of personal privacy.”

Lola Maloney was going to be dumping them back in-country at 0300. Six hours from now.

“Well, time's a-wasting, sailor.” She turned and walked away from him.

Even the woman's silhouette slayed him. The heat pounded into his body as he imagined taking her that way, walking away from him. It didn't take much effort to let himself go with the flow.

* * *

Kyle caught up to her just as she entered their bunk room. She didn't want to think. And she sure as hell didn't want to explain.

She
did
want to feel. Not in her heart, but very much in her body.

His heat had followed her down the corridors of the USS
Freedom.
The passageways that had been so cluttered before were blessedly empty. Which was good because their mutual awareness would have scorched anyone who passed too close.

She peeled off her T-shirt and bra in a single motion as he closed the door to their quarters. She managed to loosen her slacks before his hands wrapped around her from behind.

He was so strong, so powerful. Kyle Reeves could keep the world at bay. One hand scooped up onto her breasts; the other plunged down the front of her pants. She braced her hands against either side of the closet door as he took her.

The soft wash of a night-light came out of the bath. It made her body look as if it were glowing softly in the mirror mounted on the closet door. His tanned arms, dark serpents against her reflected skin, snagging and ensnaring her.