Wild Justice

Chapter 1-2

Sofia looked at the shacks’ doors again. Locks on the outside. She’d been watching the camp for twenty-four hours and had missed that. The dozens of armed guards weren’t being lazy on patrol as she’d thought. They didn’t care about the outside world—they were worried about the inside one. And because they were the only armed personnel in the camp, and everyone knew it, they could afford to be nonchalant.

Back to the towers. The guards were leaning on the inside rails looking down, not the outside ones looking out. All of her work to slip into this position was probably meaningless. If Duane was right, she could walk right up and knock on the front gate before anyone would pay her the least attention. A band of red howler monkeys working their way noisily through the jungle canopy above the camp didn’t even attract a glance from the guards.

Still, Aguado was here. She’d seen him arrive with his entourage. And he was never going to leave. Not alive.

“Not a nice place,” Duane observed quietly.

“Not a nice man.”

“Sure I am. You just don’t know me yet, sugar.”

Sofia brought her knee up sharply. Lying side by side, she was able to bullseye the Charlie-horse nerve cluster on his outer thigh. Her nana hadn’t raised her to be a target.

“s**t!” He didn’t sound so almighty pleased with himself any longer, though he did manage to keep it to a whisper as he continued swearing.

Why did guys always think they were so charming? With her looks, she should be used to it by now. Except her looks were hidden by the ghillie suit. What had kicked Duane-spelled-the-normal-way into such a guy mode? Just that she was female? When did Delta start recruiting cavemen as their standard? Actually, that one she knew the answer to—since Day One if past experience meant anything.

She hadn’t ever deployed with Delta before, but she’d met enough of them to know the type. They were the rebel super-warriors of the US military. Everyone thought that their team was the baddest, but Delta Force, more commonly called “The Unit,” completely owned that title. Somehow they drew the people that didn’t fit anywhere else in the military. But where they’d been troublemakers in their old units, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta collected them and honed their skills. They were like a barely controlled reaction just bubbling along, waiting for an excuse to explode.

“So, what’s the general’s story?” Duane, once he was done nursing his thigh, went for a subject change proving he wasn’t stupid.

“Deep in the drug trade. Known to have called for at least three high profile murders, including a Supreme Tribunal of Justice judge (that’s their version of the Supreme Court) even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself.”

“Oh, so he’s the one that’s not nice,” as if Duane only now was figuring that out.

She was not going to be charmed by him. His every tone said that just because she was female, he’d switched into some weird-ass flirt mode. She’d had enough of that coming up through the ranks to last a lifetime.

“This isn’t slave labor, so you’d better add human trafficking to your list.” With the speed of a light switch, all the charm was gone from Duane’s voice.

As if to prove his point, at that moment a couple of guards exited a small building, readjusting their pants and laughing. They kicked the door shut behind them and snapped the lock closed. No question what they’d just been doing to some poor women—one of the perks of their job.

Numerous guards. Locks on the outside of the cabin doors. No large central building that might be an illicit drug lab or slave labor textile sweatshop. This was a holding pen, hidden deep in the jungle of a national park. The few people who were circulating around, aside from the guards, were almost all women. Women who were keeping their heads down and trudging about their tasks. The sickness that twisted in her stomach had nothing to do with lying still for the last twenty-four hours.

Sofia wasn’t even aware of raising her rifle until Duane reached over and casually pushed it back down.

“Not yet.” It was all he said, but she could hear the anger beneath the soft words.

Well that wasn’t s**t compared to what she was feeling at the moment. This place needed to be erased from the map. Scorched to the ground, removed permanently from existence!

“Why are you here? I sent for a goddamn team, not some Southern Rock.”

He flashed a smile at her, “If you’ve got me, you don’t need a team.” All of his macho bravado was back. As if she’d misheard his momentary anger. He sounded too much like her useless brother and the rest of her useless family. She couldn’t be rid of him fast enough.

As the last of the sunlight faded from the sky and the bird calls tapered toward silence, Sofia wondered who she was going to want to shoot more by sunrise: General Raul Estevan Aguado or Duane The Rock?

Duane had left the video feed from his spotting scope open to Chad.

“Can’t get a match on her face with all of that camouflage on,” Chad whispered over the open frequency to his earpiece.

Duane did not need to be hearing this. “Were your plans just for the general or the camp as well?” he asked the nameless ISA woman, hoping Chad would get back on track.

“My job is to find the bad guys,” she said softly.

“Found her!” Richie, the team’s geek, jumped in, shouting loudly enough that Richie’s distance from the microphone was all that spared Duane’s eardrum from being caved in. “Once I eliminated any Deltas being in there and checked the cross-team mission coordination database for possible conflicts and still found nothing I—”

Duane sighed.

Chad cut off Richie with a low whistle of appreciation. “Sofia Forteza. Hot, bro. Very hot.”

“JSOC. Listed as unassigned,” Richie was back and only a little calmer. “Has a place near Fort Belvoir.” Joint Special Operations Command had only one asset at Fort Belvoir, Virginia: the Intelligence Support Activity.

Duane already knew she was ISA, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

“Wow!” Richie again. “She is awfully pretty.”

Duane could feel that he was sharing an eye roll with Chad over the radio. Delta Force veteran of dozens of missions all across Central and South America, happily married to a Delta shooter, and still Richie sounded like a high school geek.

“Your job,” Sofia, the no-longer-nameless, continued her side of the conversation, “is to figure out what to do with them.”

Easy. Smack both Chad and Richie upside the head next time he saw them.

“Code Black on her file. Eyes only,” Chad continued. “Yada yada, but Richie says he doesn’t want to try and crack that without more cause, which means he’s a wussy-pants who’s afraid of the little old Activity.”

“Go on. You try to crack their firewall and see what happens to your life. I’ve heard that the last NSA hacker who took a run at them is serving a five-year deployment to Poughkeepsie, New York. And that was after they formatted his hard drive, his computers at home, and his phone without ever going near him. Those guys are good.”

“I think he’s actually just pouting that you got to see a G28 sniper rifle before he did. Wuss-pants,” Chad chided Richie one more time.

“Where’s the general?” Duane asked, forcing his tone. One of these days he was going to murder Chad in his sleep. It was a nasty thing to do to his best friend—and he’d regret it—but it was fast becoming a necessity. He considered offing Richie while he was at it, but Melissa wouldn’t take kindly to losing her man. Pissing off a Delta woman was never a good call.

“Third building to the right from the front gate,” Sofia guided him toward the general’s location with a tipping of her rifle.

Duane eased his aim over until he could spot it in his scope. A heavy concrete building, windows small and high—not a cozy villa in the jungle. It was the bunker fit for a paranoid bastard.

The sun had finally set but the camp was well lit, no need for night vision here. It was well shielded from observation above; the superstory trees had not been cut down, rather the prison had been built up around their gargantuan trunks. No helo, not even a drone was going to get eyes on this place. This would have to be strictly a ground op.

“So, the fort has a bunker,” Chad was finally on the same mission he was.

“Underground escape?” Duane asked Sofia.

“Possible, but none identified.” Her voice was a combination of lush and highly educated. She kept getting more interesting with every moment rather than less.

“Thought you Activity types knew some s**t?”

“We know plenty,” no reaction that he’d identified her role here. Very chill lady.

“Uh-huh.”

“Mierda! I know that if we miss this guy here, it could take another six months to find him again.”

“So you do know how to swear. Can you swear in English as well?”

Sofia buried her face against the stock of her rifle. This was going better than he’d expected. He debated attempting to elicit a whimper of frustration, but she was Activity and who knew what they could do to you if you really ticked them off—his desire to look down the wrong end of a G28 again was very low.

It was the sworn duty of every Delta operator to put down all other units as not up to their own standards, especially SEAL Team 6. But there were a few exceptions. The guys from the 24th STS Air Force combat controllers were too damned pleasant to really hold a grudge against them.

And The Activity? Way too sneaky to risk messing with.

The fast tropical twilight was shifting the sounds of the jungle, though the day wasn’t done yet. There was the faint buzz of the camp’s inward-facing floodlights starting up, but they were too far away to hear any of their voices.

“So, you’re thinking it’s a bad idea to back off and drop a MOAB on this place?” Chad was back. The Mother of All Bombs was the biggest bomb there was, short of a nuke, and had only recently been used for the first time. It would level at least three square miles of the national park and probably make the window-glass merchants in Caracas wealthy even though the city was over twenty kilometers away. Because they were so rare, Chad was always looking for an excuse to drop one.

“Are you calling in your team or not?” Sofia looked at him again. Her dark eyes were hypnotic in the lingering twilight. Was hypnosis another trick up The Activity’s sleeve?

“My team?” Duane laid on his best Mr. Innocent, careful not to overdo it.

Sofia lifted an edge of her rifle’s ghillie revealing a small device lying on the dirt. “I can see your signal.”

“No one’s supposed to be able to see—” Duane shut his mouth. He was using the most sophisticated piece of communications gear Delta had. Burst-mode transmissions, rotating frequencies so that he never showed up on scanners for more than a moment, deep encryption, low power to the repeater he’d stashed a hundred meters away so that a signal-strength meter would find the wrong target. They’d been told it couldn’t be traced by any… Oh! The whole setup was probably invented by The Activity.

“Voice and video outbound,” Sofia continued in that snake charmer voice of hers. Her accent might be flat American, but the richness of the Spanish undertones and rhythms was slaying him.

His first serious girlfriend had been Mexican, which had pissed off his too-white family to no end—even if they were too well-cultured to show it in public. Or maybe she just hadn’t come from a rich enough family; someone from their own social status. He’d learned far more Spanish from her between the sheets than in the classroom, including the ability to tell that Sofia’s language origin was Spain Spanish just by the rhythm of it, even if the absence from her accent said it was probably a couple generations back.

“It is difficult to tell with the encryption,” she continued her chilly analysis. “But I think you have two different voices inbound.”

At least she couldn’t break the encryption, he hoped, or he really would have to kill Chad.