Heart Strike (21 page)

“Fifty.”

Kyle moved up between the seats and clapped Richie on the shoulder.

“How are we doing up here?”

“Just peachy,” Melissa answered for him. “Fifty-five.”

The
Tin Goose
was starting to skip on the waves.

“Duane wants you to start out with a bank to the right and then straight out,” Kyle shouted loud enough to be easily heard through Richie's headphones. “Climb hard.”

“Sixty,” Melissa called out then answered Kyle. “But that will just make us more of a target.”

“Sure will,” Kyle answered pleasantly. “But there will be advantages.”

Richie rode it up until she called, “Sixty-five,” then popped the wheel to break the last of the surface tension. With the floats finally free of the water, even if only by inches, they gained speed rapidly. If he'd guessed correctly what was going on, Kyle was only half-right.

Richie banked briefly to the right then flew straight out, but went for speed rather than altitude.

“Hang on!” someone shouted and the night sky lit up like a searchlight. The cabin was flooded daylight bright. Momentarily dazzled, he had to trust to simply not moving the controls even though his instincts were telling him they were rolling to the right. It was a common problem among pilots. When you couldn't see, your inner ear insisted that being aloft in a flying tin can was just wrong and it would do its best to correct. A lot of early pilot training was on trusting your instruments over your instincts.

The problem was that at the moment he couldn't see the instruments or the horizon due to the blinding flash and his instincts were screaming in panic.

Then the shock wave slammed into them.

“Shock wave!” Melissa shouted as stall alarms rang out.

The barge's explosion behind them was now moving the air forward faster than they were flying and the wings lost all lift.

“Lights,” he shouted as he struggled to maintain flight.

It didn't matter who saw them now.

“Melissa—” he cried out just as she hit the landing lights.

The waves were less than five feet below them and the plane was tipped thirty degrees to the left. He had overcompensated on not overcompensating.

He wrenched the wings level, skipped off the top of a wave with a spine-jarring slam, two waves, three…and he was back aloft.

Speed had been the right choice over altitude—if he'd climbed and been moving slowly when the shock wave hit, they'd have tumbled out of the sky and they'd all be dying in the ocean right now.

“Well.” Melissa blew out a breath. “That was fun. What's next?”

Kyle barked out a laugh.

Richie saw him slap her on the shoulder. “Good job, you two. Damn good. Glad to have you aboard.”

Melissa killed the big landing lights.

Richie turned the plane so that they could see the barge.

A fire still roared aloft from the barge like a warning beacon. Additional explosions rocked the craft as it breached more fuel drums.

And now Richie could see why Duane had said to bank right at takeoff. A large Zodiac had passed close alongside the stern of the barge, looking to circle it and follow the line of the plane's takeoff. Duane had rigged the explosion so that the initial blast had shot out sideways and ripped right through the passing Zodiac. If they had circled around the bow of the barge, the Zodiac could have followed and been merely shaken.

“Any guesses who they were?” Past tense was the proper one in this case.

“The four boys swimming for Cozumel”—Kyle pointed toward the darkened island—“might have said something about Sinaloa still being mad at the Venezuelans.”

“Imagine that. Because of our little drug war?” Starting that war had still been one of the coolest things Richie had ever done.

“How's our fuel?”

“Let's see. We're ten minutes' flight to the delivery point. If the delivery goes as smoothly as the refueling did…”

Melissa burst out laughing, a bright, merry sound that he'd never get tired of. He hadn't meant to be funny, but he supposed it was. He'd just been thinking that their use of fuel both to find and land at the barge had been very efficient.

Richie looked at the gauges and ran some rough calculations in his head and then tried to think of how to make Melissa laugh again.

“Well.” He turned to Kyle and tried for his own best Humphrey Bogart voice. “I think it would be good if Ilsa here started praying for tailwinds.”

* * *

Richie just kept making her laugh. It was one of the things Melissa liked best about him. Somewhere over the last five years, she'd forgotten what laughing felt like. Her brother's direct connection to her funny bone was another piece that had been cut out of her without her even noticing—until Sergeant Richie Goldman had found a way to tickle it.

Up out of Cozumel, it seemed but moments before they were sidling up to a beach a handful of miles north of Cancún in the heart of Yum Balam Reserve. A wide sandy beach backed by the pitch black of a towering palm jungle.

“You know what this reminds me of?”

“Yeah,” Richie answered pleasantly but without quite the fervor she'd expected. At night it could easily have been Cat Island in the Bahamas. With a little perspective, the image of their arrest struck her as fairly amusing. Apparently not Richie.

Melissa remembered how Richie's hand had felt as it had traced ever so lightly between her bare breasts…the moment before they were arrested. She'd have preferred a little more enthusiasm on his part as she was having troubles with her emotions at the moment. Too little time for tenderness while afloat in the Bahamas. Interrupted need in the Maracaibo hotel. Shutting each other out for three days because Richie was dumb enough to listen to Chad.

Okay, maybe she could have not reacted by totally shutting him out too. Bad decision.

Cat Island had been a good memory. If she could choose a reset to any point in whatever this was between them, that would be it.

“You promised me things at that resort.” She tried to make it funny, but it still didn't come out right. She ran down the pre-landing checklist, almost none of which could be applied. No caution lights, control tower briefings, landing lights, or even a “fasten seat belt” sign. She couldn't think how to fix this. There was nothing for her to say.

Richie twisted them back and forth as he descended slowly. They were only fifty feet up according to the altimeter. The light of the moon off the waves looked about right for fifty feet. The descent was so slow it was almost painful.

“I know that I owe you,” he spoke carefully. “I'll have to fix that.”

“I was just teasing you.”

“Oh. I missed that.”

This time she caught the tension in his voice. Richie was so unflappable that all of her internal alarms finally sounded off. “What?”

“Sandbars,” he muttered just as the floats kissed the waves with a bright hiss.

She swallowed hard and strained forward against her harness to see if she could see anything other than the dark water and moonlight reflected off low waves. She hadn't thought about sandbars—there hadn't been any near Clearwater, at least not that Vito Corello had used for training. If they caught a sandbar at night along this unknown shore while moving at landing speed, the plane would stop, nose over, and they would be in a one-plane accident at seventy miles an hour. She and Richie wore full harnesses, but the rest of the team only had lap belts. A hard crash would not end well for any of them.

And she'd just been a self-centered bitch, whining because Richie wasn't delivering on his sexual promises? Dumb! Maybe she and Carla were more alike than she'd considered—a very uncomfortable thought. Even if she was starting to like Carla, it didn't mean that she wanted to be like the Wild Woman.

Her attempt to whisper an apology didn't make it past the choke point in her throat until they'd slid down to taxiing speed.

“This doesn't make any sense.” Richie was also leaning forward to stare out the windshield, but he was looking toward the beach.

“Us?” No. The mission.
Stay focused, girl.

“This delivery. A hundred kilos when we can carry a thousand.”

“Another test?”

“Maybe.”

Melissa thought about it and decided that no matter what Richie might think of his instincts about people, he was Delta. Forcing herself to look away from the beach and her own attempts to see sandbars in the dark, she twisted to face Carla, who sat in the front-most seat of the passenger cabin. Melissa held out her right hand as if she held a pistol and then slapped at her right wrist with her left hand—the signal for “enemy.”

* * *

Richie eyed the beach as he taxied fifty feet offshore. Why was this giving him such an itch? Far worse than the barge.

He wasn't afraid of the U.S. authorities. If it was them, they would try to make an arrest, which would then be up to Fred Smith to straighten out. If it was the Mexican Federales, they were more inclined to shoot first and ask later, but his radar detector hadn't picked up anything during their approach except for the Cancún airport.

He wasn't worried about their safety…particularly—not any more than was normal for a Delta mission.

Richie was worried about…

He raised a fist for the team in the cabin to see and held it there, signaling “freeze.”

Melissa's signal for “enemy” had been correct, but he was guessing that it wasn't their enemy.

There were two separate blinks of flashlights from under the verge of the trees, showing him where to beach—about two hundred meters apart along the shore. One was in the same pattern used by the drug runners along the Orinoco. The second one wasn't.

Richie tried not to smile as he turned the
Tin Goose
and idled through the light waves toward the first set of lights.

Rather than beaching the plane as he'd originally planned, he turned parallel to the shore, close enough that the water was probably less than two feet deep. The waves were perhaps a foot high, so they started making a lazy side-to-side roll that would make everyone seasick soon. But he wasn't going to be here that long.

With the engines still running but the props feathered, he held his fist out with his forearm vertical and double-pumped for “hurry!”

It went down exactly as he'd anticipated.

Men rushed down the sand and into the shallow water as someone threw open the rear hatch on the plane. Six of them moving in a pack, rifles at the ready. A plastic five-gallon bucket was tossed in and moments later the two boxes of cocaine were handed out. They'd now been paid. And if the hundred thousand that Analie Sala had promised was the standard one-tenth share for their leg, there'd be a million dollars U.S. in that bucket.

The drugs would quintuple in price as they made their journey from Cancún, across the U.S. border, and finally into the cities, but their leg of the smuggling operation was complete and paid for.

The group that had flashed the correct signal was less than five steps back toward the beach when the firefight began.

Richie had never let the plane come to a true stop nor slid the engines fully to idle.

“Props now,” he shouted at Melissa and he reached up to the overhead power levers and eased them back up as fast as the engines would take it. Their hands brushed on the side-by-side controls, almost as if they were holding hands. A heady feeling considering what was going on up and down the beach.

* * *

Melissa had to admire how cool and steady Richie was being as mayhem lit up the night sky.

She tried to look everywhere at once while Richie was getting them the hell away from it all.

The second group—the ones with the wrong signal from two hundred meters down the beach—were firing wildly at the men who'd taken delivery of the drugs. Blinding muzzle flashes of heavy automatic fire must be heaving a lot of lead into the air. There were one or two reverberating
Thunks!
that sounded like they'd hit the
Tin Goose's
wings.

Like most thugs, and most soldiers for that matter, there was a lot of shooting but less care for accurate aiming. It was one of the unique things about Delta, making every single shot count, even in combat situations. Even the general ranks of the U.S. Army fired over two hundred thousand rounds per kill in Afghanistan. Delta averaged under five, and three of those were planned on every one.

In the rear cabin, the two guards from the Orinoco were crouched in the rear hatchway and now spraying fire at the ones racing down the beach to steal the delivery.

One way or another, the drugs were going to go to market.

“Richie?” He'd known that. So why had he delivered the—

“Watch down the beach. If I'm right—”

And she saw it. The dim flash of a heavily suppressed single shot. And a second later, one of the two men carrying the drugs ashore dropped into the surf. A moment later, the one carrying the other box was down. Others in the group that had taken the delivery were too busy returning fire up the beach at the gang that was trying to hijack the drugs to notice. Then one of the intended recipients did and plunged back into the surf.

Each person who touched the drugs elicited another shot from the sniper down the beach. Far down the beach. This wasn't the cover man for one of the two teams; this was a trained pro, dug in a kilometer away.

“One of Fred's people?”

“What?” Richie had been wholly focused on getting them out of there. They were most of the way up to flight speed. “Was I right?”

He was. He'd anticipated exactly how it would go down, readjusting the plan they'd discussed the moment he'd seen the second flashing signal. Maybe even before that.

It was only now that Melissa understood what had happened.

Richie had signaled Fred Smith of their expected time and place of delivery. Fred had filtered that information out to a rival gang who'd arrived to make a grab for the drugs. In the ensuing firefight, no one would notice that a trained American sniper would be the one who won final possession of the shipment. The Delta team had completed their assignment, delivering under harrowing conditions with the drug runners they had onboard as eyewitnesses.