Even Vampires Get the Blues: A Deadly Angels Book (15 page)

“I don’t smell chocolate,” her father said. “I smell roses. Lots of roses. Are your roses in bloom now, honey? They must be. Or the florist delivered more flowers. It’s beginning to smell like a funeral parlor, ha, ha, ha.”

Her father cracking a joke?

Camille and Harek exchanged glances. Chocolate and roses. Were they giving off scents to other people now, too, not just to each other?

Camille felt as if she’d fallen into some Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, and all the characters were not what they appeared to be.

“Well, I need to take a shower and get dressed,” her mother said brightly. “We can talk more when I come back down. Will you bring two coffees up with you, darling?”

At first, Camille thought her mother was asking her to bring the coffees, but then she realized that it was darling dad she’d been addressing. He was already at the counter, placing two cups and two beignets on a tray.

“By the way, Harek,” her mother said, causing Harek’s head to jerk up. “Thank you.” There were tears in her mother’s eyes as she addressed Harek. “I don’t know what you did, but Emile tells me that I have you to thank for . . .” She shrugged at her unfinished statement.

But Harek nodded in understanding.

“Yes. I owe you . . . we owe you,” her father attempted to speak in a choked voice. “If there’s ever anything we can do for you . . .”

“No. This is my job. Your job is to . . . you know,” Harek said enigmatically to her father.

What? What job?
Camille wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Once she and Harek were alone again in the kitchen, she stared at him. “You really are one of those things, aren’t you? A vangel.”

“For my sins, yes.”

“Wow!”

“Is that a good wow or a bad wow?”

“I’m not sure. A vangel, for heaven’s sake. I had sex with a vangel!”

“Hot vangel sex, I might add.” He smiled at her, and whoo boy, his smiles were hard to resist. “Wouldst thou consider a quick return to your bed furs and some more hot vangel sex?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Not a bit. If we hurry, I might have time to show you the famous Viking S-spot.”

She shouldn’t ask. She really shouldn’t. “Is that the same as the G-spot?”

“No. The S-spot is far better.” The smile on his face was pure wickedness.

What kind of angel was he anyway? A wicked angel, for sure!

“Where is . . . No, don’t tell me,” she said, then flashed her own wicked smile back at him. “Show me.”

Chapter 13

Surprise, surprise! . . .

H
arek’s sexual relationship with Camille, if it could be called a relationship, was short-lived. In fact, the casualness with which she had treated him since they left New Orleans yesterday bordered on sexist.

The more she treated him like a friend, or a professional colleague, the more he wanted to show her just how friendly he could be. To think, he’d even gone to the trouble of showing her the famous Viking S-spot!
Talk about ingratitude!

For the first time in his life, Harek felt like he was the one-night stand.
Face it, I’ve been used. And I don’t like it. Not one bit.

Harek had been working out with the Deadly Wind mission participants all morning, starting with the obligatory six-mile run in heavy boots before a six a.m., or 0600 (
whoopee-dam-militaryspeak-dee!
) breakfast of “doggie dicks,” a Navy name for small sausages, powdered eggs, referred to as “yellow puke,” and black coffee thick enough to hold a standing spoon, so loaded with caffeine it ought to be called “black bull.” Beignets and specially brewed chicory coffee were a thing of the past. Lunch in the chow hall had been no better. The only good thing Harek could say was there was plenty of it, especially carbs to build up energy.
Can anyone say SPAM?
And he didn’t mean the Internet kind.

Harek was in prime physical health, but this was hard. His brother, guilty of the sin of sloth or laziness, had the energy of a, well, sloth. “How do you do it?” he’d asked Trond at one point.

Trond had just grinned. He was enjoying Harek’s discomfort way too much. “Mayhap you need a break, little brother. There’s a rocking chair in the lounge, I believe.”

“Rock my ass,” Harek had replied.

“Seems to me your ass was already rocked enough this past weekend.”

It was useless complaining to his brother.

The morning had been filled with physical exercises that bordered on torture. Really. The O-course or obstacle course of workout rotations was also called the Oh-my-God course, for good reason. As for the grinder—the concrete arena where many of the maneuvers took place, surrounded by buildings, much like a penitentiary yard—it did indeed grind away at the poor saps, male and female, who participated. And people signed up for this crap, willingly? And they thought Vikings were unbalanced!

Harek would hurl his guts out before he quit now, in light of Trond’s challenge—rocking chair, indeed!—even though he, as an outsider, was not required to complete all the grueling drills. Besides, Camille seemed to have no trouble climbing the cargo net like a friggin’ monkey or freezing her pretty butt off in “surf appreciation” nonsense. He would be damned if he would cry off.

As a result, Harek was practically limping as he entered the classroom for the afternoon tactical session. It had about fifty of those school chairs in it, the ones with a small desk attached. Harek sat in the back row next to an FBI agent, Henry Rawlings, who was hurting as much as Harek, as evidenced by the groan as he adjusted himself on the hard chair.

“Can you believe these SEALs? They either have a God complex or a Rambo fixation,” Henry muttered.

“Well, they say there are three reasons why anyone would become a SEAL. To prove something to themselves, to prove something to someone else, or because they’re crazy,” Harek commented.
Or because they’re ordered to by none other than St. Michael the Archangel.

“I vote for crazy.”

“Ditto.”

“That F.U. character said I run like a girl. I told him to suck my dick and he said he’d rather suck his own, and claimed he could, if he wanted, it was that big.”

The SEALs
were
rather full of themselves, some more than others. F.U. was known to be particularly obnoxious.

Lieutenant Avenil, Slick, came in then and strode up to the front. “Time to get down to the nitty-gritty,” he said right off. “Open the folders on your desk. On top, you’ll see a schedule for the next week. There will be some modifications as we go.”

Paper rustled as occupants of the room did as they were told, followed by a few groans.

That afternoon they would be engaged in CQ, or close quarter training, in simulated settings, mock-ups of the Nigerian school complex they were targeting. Tomorrow they were off to San Clemente Island for a jungle survival rotation, followed by a day of skydiving at Camp McCall. Everyone on this team was jump qualified, including Harek, or they wouldn’t have been accepted for the mission. There would be instructions regarding the culture that would involve body posture, treatment of women, deference to authority or religious figures. Plus a short course on jungle animals and pests. The Sambisa Forest region was primitive, to say the least.

Harek was coming to realize, if he didn’t know already, that many of the SEALs were highly intelligent, even with master’s degrees. When out on an op, they were often called upon to be not just commando warriors, but also doctors, engineers, mechanics, and survivalists, not to mention a bit of “rootin’-tootin’-parachutin’ ” rodeo cowboy.

“Now, you all know that language is often a problem when we are OUTCONUS,” Slick said. “The bad news is that there are more than five hundred different languages and dialects spoken in Nigeria by the two hundred and fifty different tribes.”

FU exclaimed, “Oh crap!”

Slick ignored FU and went on, “The good news is that English is the official language of Nigeria due to its early colonization. If all else fails, many people there speak a form of pidgin or broken English. Cage and even Camille will give us tips on that vernacular since Cajun and Creole languages utilize forms of pidgin English.” Navy SEAL Justin “Cage” LeBlanc and Marie Delacroix were Cajuns from Louisiana, Harek already knew from Trond; so Camille must be Creole.

“What the hell is pigeon English?” someone called out.

“Not pigeon. Pidgin,” Slick corrected.

Cage stood and turned to face the class. “Di ting wey mai eyes see, mi mouth no fit talk abo. If I said that to you, it would mean something like, Words fail me. I read that somewhere on the Internet.”

“Oh crap!” F.U. said again. “Now we gotta learn redneck.”

“Not redneck, asshole.” Cage glared at F.U.

“Enough, boys!” Slick said. “In between our other drills, there’ll be a shortcut language course to give you, not a proficiency in the local dialect, but a feel for key words and phrases.”

Communal groans followed. If there was anything SEALs and other warriors hated, it was classroom work.

“Back to your folders,” Slick directed them then. “Timing is everything, especially on this mission. As a result, a group of you, Team Red, will go out on Saturday. These will be the ones who will be openly infiltrating the school and community.”

Harek checked the sheet in front of him and saw that Camille Dumaine would go in as a student. How the hell she would manage that, Harek had no idea. In addition, SEAL Sylvester “Sly” Simms, a former black underwear model for
GQ
and other magazines, with his wife, Donita Leone, an ebony-skinned ex-Olympic swimmer, would be newly hired as assistant principal and teacher, respectively. Omar ben Sulaiman, aka Teach, a rare Arab–Native American SEAL—forget rare, the only one of his kind—would pose as a new janitor at the school. Those would be the only inside contacts.

Harek felt an odd chill of foreboding go up his spine at the prospect of Camille placing herself in the midst of so much danger. If she were caught . . . well, her fate did not bear thinking about. He shouldn’t be concerned. She was a trained soldier, after all. God forbid that he should place undue emphasis on her being a woman in such a situation. Still . . .

“The following Monday, Team Yellow will go into the LZ marked on the map behind me. It will be a nighttime drop from a lights-out C–147. The aircraft will be in and out of the zone within five minutes. From then, you’re on your own. Covert and quiet are the key. Do not engage the enemy, unless absolutely necessary. The longer the tangos are unaware of our presence, the better. That’s the reason for the sporadic insertions.

“As you can see, Team Green will enter here.” He pointed to a spot on the map about a football field away from Insertion Point B. “That will be two days later. The drop will be a fast rope down from a copter. Again, quick entry and exit. By Friday, Teams Blue and White should be in place. No more than ten operatives per team. Each with the appropriate specialists: snipers, explosives, communications, recon, etc. I realize that this is a large number. We SEALs operate best in small units of less than five. The logistics of this project are different, though. Any questions so far?”

“I sense a goat fuck coming on, with us tripping over each other,” Geek said.

“It will be your job with logistics to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Slick told Geek.

“Great!” Geek muttered.

There was silence for a moment as everyone searched the lists to see where they, or their comrades, were on the teams. Harek was on Team Yellow, along with Henry, the FBI guy next to him; a CIA agent, Brad Omstead; and SEALs Jacob Alvarez Mendoza, or JAM, the team leader; and Justin “Cage” LeBlanc; F.U.; and Geek. Trond was on Team Green. Slick was leading the last unit, Team White, in, which would allow them to cover the four corners of the square perimeter, about one mile on each side.

SEAL Torolf Magnusson spoke up, probably expressing the opinion of some others in the room, “Man, I don’t like the timing on this. Flash and dash, quick in and out is more our speed.” Magnusson was a Viking whom Harek had met several times before. No, he was not a vangel. He was from the Norselands, though. The tenth-century Norselands! But that was another story. “The longer we’re in hostile territory, the more we become targets,” Magnusson pointed out. “The more time for shit to go wrong.”

“I understand your concern, Max, but we’re dealing with a whole other animal here. BK is expecting shock and awe. We have to give them the unexpected. Silent but deadly.”

“It’s not called unconventional warfare for nothing,” someone remarked.

“Right,” Slick agreed. “This mission will be well-orchestrated down to the last detail. No blind date here. In the most successful mission, no shots are fired; we had that message hammered into us throughout BUD/S. That will not be the case here, I damn-fucking-guarantee. But let’s make sure there are no mistakes. We do not want another ISIS debacle.” Slick’s warning referred to the failed attempt to rescue one of the American captives in Iraq, who later had been beheaded.

“We go in as ghosts. Full-ruck ghosts,” he added with a smile. The backpacks and weaponry SEALs and other military carried often weighed as much as seventy-five pounds and contained everything from camelback water packs to night-vision goggles to KA-BAR knives to medical kits to breacher bars to heavy radio equipment or collapsible machine guns. “Now, you may have noticed that some mission-essential people are absent this afternoon.”

Harek glanced around quickly. He hadn’t realized . . .

“Let me introduce you to Desmond Buhari and Fatima Tinibu, the new assistant principal and the language arts teacher at the Global School in Kamertoon.” Sly and his wife Donita came out, dressed in traditional African professional attire. They nodded to the group and stood to the side.

“And this is Abdul-Karim, a new janitor at the school. He is an Arab Muslim, new to the country, interested in joining Boko Haram.”

Omar came out wearing regular clothing, but a checkered cloth was wrapped around his head, Middle Eastern style. A
keffiyeh
.

“Next up,” Slick said, “is the new assistant attaché at the American embassy in Abuja, Mr. Gerald Larson and his wife, Sally Larson, from Alexandria, Virginia.” Out came Kevin “K–4” Fortunato and Trond’s wife, Nicole. K–4 wore a tan business suit with a brown and white striped dress shirt and a solid brown tie. Nicole, who must have dyed her hair red since he’d seen her this morning, wore a conservative green sheath dress with medium height, darker green high heels. Both K–4 and Nicole seemed to have aged by ten years, due to makeup or something.

“And their daughter, Linda Larson, who is about to enroll at the Global School, a fifteen-year-old ninth grader. The school only goes up to grade nine. We had originally planned for three students, but decided later that three would be pushing it. So, only four bodies inside the school. The KISS principle.”

That would be: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

“As few operatives in plain sight as possible.”

Out came a slightly pudgy young girl in a school uniform of short-sleeved, white blouse tucked into a navy-blue, pleated, knee-length skirt, white anklet socks, and loafers. She had frizzy red hair, the same color as her mother’s, and a light smattering of freckles. No breasts at all, to speak of. And knobby knees. The sulky expression on her face was typical of young teens, and her posture was pure hunched-shoulders, insecure-pubescent girl child.

Holy frickin’ clouds!

It was Camille.

Harek blinked several times to make sure his eyes weren’t betraying him.

There was a ripple of applause at Camille’s appearance, and she did a little bow, immediately resuming her young girl posture.

“As usual, Camille has earned her WEALS nickname of Camo for camouflage. Those of us who know her have witnessed her transformation in the past to Persian crone, Iraqi boy, beauty pageant contestant . . . some say the movie
Miss Congeniality
was based on one of her experiences. I’m not saying that’s true. I’m just sayin’.” Slick winked at Camille.

Harek didn’t like Slick winking at Camille. In fact, he didn’t like the too-handsome SEAL knowing her better than he did.
Not that I have any proprietary rights. I’m just sayin’, or thinkin’. Or going out of my blippin’ mind.

How was he going to focus on killing Lucipires in Nigeria when Camille was walking around like a blinking neon sign to Boko Haram?
Take me, take me!

He wondered for one brief moment if he could “take her” to his private island and hide her for the duration.