WAR: Opposition: (WAR Book 3) (10 page)

Yeah, he decided, the people with the underground network were still Kirra’s best bet. He double-checked the coordinates of their small arts gallery on his phone. They were only four blocks away. “All right, Kirra. I’m going to walk you over now.”

Without a word, Kirra shouldered her backpack. She followed him silently through the deserted residential neighborhood to the section where it melded with a number of artistic businesses. An occasional cheer from the crowd floated their way, indicating that the rally was a peaceful affair. Even though the rally explained why there were less people out on the street than usual, Seth’s instincts remained on edge.

“Okay,” he said several minutes later, stopping Kirra in the shade between two buildings. “From here you’ll go on alone. It’s too dangerous for you to be seen with me. Stick to this side of the road until you’re opposite that bright green building. Then head over as if something in the front yard drew your eye.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know how to be subtle, Seth.”

“It wasn’t a criticism. I’m just not taking anything for granted with your safety.” From here it appeared as if the front door to the shop was open. Good. “Do you remember what to say?”

“Yes. I’m supposed to tell them that I’m looking for a genie’s lamp.”

“That’s right.” He checked in both directions. “All right. Looks clear. Once you’re moving, don’t look back. I’ll watch from the shadows to make sure you get in okay, but you won’t see me.” He looked down at her and got trapped by her gaze. Damn, but her eyes were a pretty shade of blue. Some blues tended more toward the gray side, but hers held a touch of green, reminding him of tropical ocean water.

He had the sudden urge to lower his head and kiss her. But that would be a stupid move. She didn’t trust him and he had no business trying to change that.

Still, he couldn’t stop his hand from tucking a stray curl back into her scarf. “Good luck, Kirra. I hope you’re a huge success at your concert.”

She smiled at him. “Thanks.” She handed him a business card. “Don’t forget to bill me. Otherwise, I’ll send payment in care of that bartender, Mr. Adebayor.”

“Kirra—” he growled.

“Deal with it.” She bussed a kiss across his cheek, then turned and walked away.

R
io walked
around the interior of the hangar, stepping past shattered glass and leaked fluids as he waited for a call to go through on his sat phone. Damn, but someone had really wanted to make sure the plane wasn’t going anywhere.

The specially scrambled phone line was eventually answered by a curt “Talk.”

Despite the gravity of the scene around him, Rio couldn’t help but smile at Wil Lansing’s bluntness. Damn but it was good to be working with no-nonsense military guys again rather than the always obfuscating assholes out of Langley. “Got a situation here. I need you to run some info through your databases,” Rio said.

Wil snorted. “Wait. I’m the damn boss. What’s with this ordering me around stuff?”

Rio only laughed.

“No wonder the spooks wanted to ditch you.” Wil sighed. “All right. Hit me with it.”

“You’ve heard about the boss man’s delivery that went missing?” Even over a secure line, Rio couldn’t risk being specific.

“Yeah. The rightful owners want it back.”

Rio winced. Morenga was not going to be happy to hear that. He’d been promised that the Angolan government wouldn’t discover the theft of the diamonds. “Well, according to my sources, Bureh’s guys tracked the cargo to a particular bus.”

“Heard that, too,” Wil said. “There are other boots on the ground, so to speak, besides you.”

Rio had always suspected that WAR and Wil’s group had more contact than the U.S. government wanted to admit. “Ah. Right. One of the ghosts just left here and he didn’t look happy.” Dev Neilson had looked pissed. And Rio had been frustrated that once again he’d arrived after Neilson. How was the man staying one step ahead of him?

“Yeah,” Wil conceded. “The ah…ghost’s…sister was on the bus that was attacked, so he’s on the hunt in a big way.”

Well damn, didn’t that just complicate matters. Bureh would salivate over the opportunity to use a sibling to gain leverage over one of WAR’s operators.

“According to my sources,” Rio said, referring to his spies within Bureh’s organization, “the rebels supposedly had the girl secured in a back room but she managed to escape. Now they’re after her because she’s their last hope of finding the package.”

“So you’re now looking for the girl as well as the package,” Wil said.

“Bingo. If the girl is innocent of theft, then she has nothing to worry about. If she stole the package, then my boss will make an example of her.” Not gonna happen. Rio would break his cover before he let Morenga hurt Neilson’s sister because of a theft Rio himself had ordered.

“So you’d better hope either you or her brother finds her first,” Wil said.

“Yeah, well, you’d think locating one white girl in the middle of black West Africa would be easy. But a little bird told me she’s hooked up with an American pilot named Michael Hughes who does a lot of flying for certain unsavory elements. Including my boss and our happily departed Hospital Massacre mastermind.”

Wil cursed.

“That’s not even the worst of it.”

“Just spit it out already,” Wil growled. “How much trouble is she in?”

“Oh, I’d say she’s in it so deep she’s lucky she can still breathe.” Literally. What he’d seen here indicated that an even deadlier player than Bureh’s rebels hunted the girl and Hughes. “I tracked the pilot to the hangar where he keeps his plane. Only, someone beat me to it.” Rio put his handkerchief around his hand, picked a bullet out of the wing of the plane, then added it to the plastic baggie holding the other bullets. “Someone shot his plane to hell using EXP99k bullets.”

A heavy pause. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah. One of my previous assignments included tracking down a missing crate containing both the rifles and their special ammo.” Rio glanced at the bullets in the baggie. Made with an experimental new metal, they were a strange, purplish-black color with red undertones. “There’s no way to mistake these for normal bullets.”

The ammo had been custom made for a new, high-tech rifle developed specifically for American military snipers. Only a few hundred rifles had been produced and the military had guarded them ferociously. Then, fourteen months ago, the project had been axed due to budget cuts.

Wil let loose with a long stream of heartfelt, vicious curses with which Rio completely agreed. “I guess your team missed something,” Wil said.

“Negative. According to the manifest we’d been given, we recovered the entire shipment. It’s more likely that, despite the order to turn it all in, someone in the military held onto a rifle and, based on the number of bullet holes decorating the plane and the hangar, several boxes of ammunition. Because none of these puppies are supposed to still be in circulation.” That hadn’t stopped Morenga and every other player in the illegal arms market from attempting to obtain one. But so far, they’d all failed.

“What the hell is going on here?” Rio demanded.

“I haven’t a fucking clue,” Wil said. “But I’m going to get our research team on it right away. I’ll also warn her brother that he’s dealing with a professional assassin, possibly military.”

“Oh, yeah. That’ll go over well. I wouldn’t want to be the pilot when the girl’s brother catches up with them.”

“Trust me,” Wil muttered. “Her brother will have to stand in line.”

“What?” Did Hughes have a connection to Wil? How?

“Never mind. I’ll let you know what our research guys find out.” Wil disconnected.

Rio stared at the phone and tried to ignore the ball of dread in his stomach. He didn’t like having an unknown player such as the assassin working the field. Particularly since the assassin might kill the girl before the diamonds were retrieved. And if this unknown shooter vanished into the wind with Morenga’s diamonds, Rio would have to do a hell of a lot of tap dancing to keep his position secure and his life intact.

But it was possible Hughes would keep the girl safe. Morenga had a file on the guy, but it was sketchy. The guy had flown all over Africa, never staying in one place long, before finally settling in West Africa about eighteen months ago. Hughes had the reputation as a tough son of a bitch and one hell of a pilot, which wasn’t going to do him any good with his plane shot to pieces.

The one time Rio had met Hughes had been last year, when Rio had been in charge of briefing Hughes on the mission he was flying to pick up a special cargo for Morenga. Hughes had been professional, knowledgeable, and respectful. He certainly didn’t give off the dissolute, immoral vibe of so many of Rio’s current co-workers.

Rio dialed the number he had for Hughes, but it went into voicemail. He didn’t want to risk giving away information, so he simply said, “This is Rick Martin. Call me.”

After he disconnected, Rio stared into space. Maybe Hughes would do the right thing and get the girl to safety.

He preferred that option over the alternative, that by the time he caught up with them, they’d be corpses.

T
hrough his Jeep’s windscreen
, Dev scanned the jungle to either side of the dirt road. The sun shone brightly, mocking him with its cheerfulness. How was it possible that Kirra continued to elude him and the rebels? She knew beaches and she knew cities. Scrubby coastal forests and this thick inland jungle were alien to her. Yet somehow, she remained at large.

The villagers he’d questioned that first night had denied seeing Kirra. After grabbing a few hours’ sleep, Dev had returned to the beach and checked the small section he’d ignored in his initial search. But there’d been no sign of her. He’d spent the rest of the day inquiring about Kirra along the coast, until finally he’d heard a rumor of a white lady who’d been spotted at a village fifty kilometers inland.

He’d raced to the village, but Kirra wasn’t there. In truth, the villagers hadn’t seen any white person since the height of the tourist industry over a decade ago.

Since then, Dev had chased a dozen rumors. Not one had proved true. He didn’t know if the locals had deliberately misled him, but in only two cases had there been white people involved. The first trail had led to an elderly Canadian hippie who’d been half-stoned out of his mind and following some fanciful story of hidden treasure. The second time, Dev had come across a coed group of four students from Germany on break from university.

Dev grimaced as he drove down the road. When he’d discovered the German students instead of Kirra, his disappointment and fear had been so great that he’d burst into a furious tirade about selfish, stupid foreigners who didn’t have the sense to stay the hell out of such a dangerous region. Since he’d been carrying a rifle he’d retrieved from one of Rene’s informants, the students had been scared he was going to shoot them. There’d been a lot of hysterical screaming and crying before Dev had apologized and driven away.

That was typical of the extreme behavior Kirra brought out in him. Still, he shouldn’t have released his frustration on those poor students.

He bit back a sigh. It was probably better that he was working this mission solo. His teammates wouldn’t have recognized their always calm second-in-command as this frantic older brother who’d nearly scared those German students to death.

A bead of sweat trickled down his cheek and Dev swiped it away. After the incident with the students, he’d finally received a break. One of Rene’s informants had indicated that Kirra might have hooked up with an American pilot-for-hire named Michael Hughes. Yet when Dev had tracked the pilot to an airplane hangar not far from the ocean, he’d found Hughes’s plane shot to hell.

He’d frantically searched the hangar and the nearby forest until he was satisfied that Kirra’s body wasn’t nearby. Then he’d followed a motorcycle’s trail through the trees until it dumped him out on this road. People in Rene’s network claimed to have seen a white woman on the back of a motorcycle along this inland branch of the road.

That’s where his luck ended. The relentless sun had already dried the mud from the other night’s storm to the hardness of concrete. He’d lost the motorcycle tracks and so far he hadn’t seen any obvious signs that the bike had turned into the jungle. Driving slowly, he searched for flattened vegetation or tire marks in the softer earth along the sides of the road.

A public minibus roared up behind his Jeep, honked in annoyance, then swerved around.

In large letters above the front windscreen someone had painted the words Fear Woman. Muttering under his breath about troublesome sisters who could benefit from a little more fear for their own safety, Dev continued his search.

Damn, he wished Hoss was here with his mad tracking skills.

Not that Dev would ever say that to his teammate’s face. Hoss didn’t need any stroking of his oversized ego. Yet despite his bold personality, the Oklahoman was far better at picking up nuanced changes in the environment than Dev.

He’d gladly endure the months of teasing that would arise over losing his sister if Hoss could help him locate Kirra. But the entire team was still out on a mission.

Spotting an indentation in the grass, Dev braked and leapt out of the Jeep. He moved into the grass until he found a tightly tied bolt of cloth. It must have fallen off a truck and rolled.

He kicked the fabric, which did nothing to relieve his frustration. The background report he’d been sent on Michael Hughes indicated that he’d flown for Natchaba, and that he likely had transported the deceased rebel leader’s men up country the day they’d committed the Hospital Massacre.

The government had convicted and executed the men involved in the actual slaughter, leaving Dev no one to vent his anger on. Now that he knew of Hughes’s possible involvement, he looked forward to administering a little justice of his own. It wouldn’t stop his nightmares or erase the memories, but it sure as hell would make him feel better.

Feeling his temper rise, Dev struggled for control as he trudged back to his Jeep. In contrast to Kirra’s excessive emotions and death-defying exploits, he’d always been the calm, laid-back child. Except when it came to dealing with his sister. Then his temper had erupted with a ferocity that rivaled Kirra’s.

Poor Kyle had often stepped in between Dev and Kirra during their fights, since he was the only one who could talk his twin down. Not that Kyle’s calming words, Dev’s angry rants, or the stern lectures from their parents did anything to stop Kirra from seeking out the next hair-raising adventure. And more often than not, she had dragged Kyle along with her.

Dev loved Kirra, but as this latest exploit proved, she made it difficult for him to protect her.

Dammit, Kirra. Where are you? And why did you hook up with a low-life loser like Michael Hughes?