Heart Strike (29 page)

“Just what he said, Ecuadorian Army deserter. I hooked up with him to get in here and he was my way back out. Who the hell are you?” He'd give her spunk points for arguing from her current position of her face planted in the dirt.

“U.S. Special Forces” which wasn't wholly accurate as they were Special
Operations
Forces, not Green Berets. But it was close enough. The Unit never revealed their presence, ever. He let her up carefully as Carla backed off enough to keep them covered.

“Ten seconds to company,” Carla reminded him.

Dayana moved carefully to a kneeling position, “Marco was an Ecuadoran Army pilot.” She waved a hand at one of the small Cessnas.

“Five,” Carla whispered.

Richie wondered if he could trust Dayana, or if he was about to get shot in the back. Chad had chosen her and Chad might enjoy women, but he wasn't stupid about them.

He dropped the Glock into Dayana's hand. “Both of you. Down in the dirt. Prone firing position, aimed into the jungle.”

They both spun and dropped the moment before the first guards rounded the low body of the Gulfstream jet. He'd swung his own rifle to his shoulder and was kneeling between them, one knee still on Dayana's back just in case.

“Shooter! In the woods!” He had to shout to be heard over the loud whine of the BAe's engines all cranking up the scale toward full heat. “They got Marco and I think they went west. Cutting around toward the lab.
Rápido!
”

The guards raced right by them, plunging into the jungle.

The moment they were clear, he looked back at Carla. “We have to get to the Twin Otter and stop Analie from taking off.”

“No!” Dayana grabbed his arm. “You can't.”

He stopped to stare at her. Glanced at the track of the ATV. She'd already visited the Twin Otter. She'd planted a bomb on the
Tin Goose.

“Disarm it!” He demanded, but she was already shaking her head. Her expression said that she wasn't arguing; she was saying it couldn't be done. “How long?”

“Two minutes.”

* * *

Melissa hit the field with one minute to go. They were huddled close by the nose of the DC-3.

Kyle raised his fist for Hold Position. Chad and Duane dropped to kneel behind her. One would be watching her flank, another the rear. Kyle lay in the dirt two steps in front of her, peeking under the nose of the grounded DC-3 for a wider field of view.

The hundreds of residents of the jungle town had filtered out of the tents and their quarters among the shattered planes converted into private apartments.

She considered firing a long stream of bullets close in front of them to scare them back, farther from the lab that was about to go up. Chase them to safety. But a brief hail of gunfire wouldn't do the job and it would attract all of the wrong kind of attention their way.

“Duane,” she called over her shoulder.

“Yo!”

“Blow the DC-3 on a fifteen-second timer.”

“Big or little?” He unslung the small bag he'd had over his shoulder since her first warning aboard the DC-3. She could feel him working close behind her.

“
Muy grande!”

“
Si, señorita.
Ready in five.”

She counted five seconds, felt the slap on her shoulder, reached forward, and slapped Kyle's heel in turn.

No neat two-by-two formation. The four of them lined up and sprinted across the open field toward the
Tin Goose.

* * *

Richie reached the
Tin Goose
at the same instant Melissa did. He stole a moment long enough to squeeze her shoulder. The sense of connection that rushed through him and the smile that lit her face told him that she understo—

Across the field the DC-3 blew up in a towering column of fire and a cloud of smoke. He could see the civilians tumbled back by the force of the explosion.

Then the crowd broke and sprinted off down the length of the runway, racing away from the burning DC-3 and the lab as well.

“Can I cook or what?” Melissa grinned at him.

“Hot shit, lady!”

“Lab in”—she glanced down at her watch—“another twenty seconds.”

He checked his own. “
Tin Goose
in one minute-twenty. We need our weapons.”

“Not the
Goose
!”

“File a complaint with the British government.” He pointed a finger at Dayana. “She slid a charge into the fuel tank. Can't get it back.”

Melissa grimaced at her. “Well, now you make perfect sense. Should have seen it, but you're very good.”

Richie glanced between them as like acknowledged like. He still didn't see it at all, but if Melissa did, then it must be true.

Carla had already unlocked the rear baggage compartment.

They'd come to the jungle airstrip heavy…and been adding to their armament with each trip. Kyle raced to the small shed where they'd stored the plane's spare parts and placed a large ammunition cache. He came back out with two heavy bags, passing them off to Duane and Chad, before coming back with two more.

Richie looked down the row toward the BAe 146. Whoever was piloting rode the controls forward hard. The engines awoke with a deep-throated roar that drowned out all other sounds.

It also sent a blast of intense heat straight back into the trees. They must have expected to tow the jet out onto the field before starting the engines, and certainly before hitting full throttle.

The jungle burst into a towering wall of flame.

A figure came stumbling out of the jungle, his body burning brightly, his mouth open in a scream though there was no way to hear it over the jet engines' roar.

One of the guards, still carrying his rifle. They had all been racing through the jungle to find the fictitious shooter. Richie didn't have time for sympathy. And even if he had, the guards' main job was to make sure that that workers didn't run away into the jungle. His sympathy level was set very low for them anyway.

* * *

The lab went up in a bright bloom—an inferno that shot up fifty feet into the air. Melissa could barely hear the explosion, adding only a basso roll to the much closer BAe 146's roaring engines. The size of the charge had looked plenty big over Duane's shoulder.

A whole section of the fuselage, perhaps ten feet square, shot a dozen feet into the air. A blinding wave of light shot to either side. Then one of the chemicals inside the lab must have breached its container.

The entire top half of the fuselage lifted as a single piece ten stories into the jungle before shattering and cascading back into the pillar of fire that erupted into the jungle's high canopy.

Analie Sala's jet began rolling down the runway.

Melissa shouldered a rifle—an M-16 she'd grabbed out of the baggage compartment—aimed at the pilot's window on the BAe 146, and spotted a dim figure inside leaning forward to see the exploding lab.

Melissa fired.

And the round bounced off the glass. Armored glass.

A dark, narrow face twisted to look out at her. Analie Sala. She'd expected Pederson.

“C'mon, bitch!”

She fired three more shots around the window, hoping that Sala hadn't armored the whole cockpit, but the jet kept accelerating. More shots at the wing tanks, but by now the angle was bad and the distance long.

Then Sala was aloft and flying out the hole in the canopy.

Over the jet's fading thunder, she heard a lot of shouts.

The civilians' panic as they raced away from the series of explosions.

The guards as they stumbled out of the fire on this side of the field lit by Sala's departing jet.

Then Pederson came running across the compound. He wore underwear and one shoe.

“Analie!” he shouted up at the departing plane. “Analie!”

Kyle raced over and grabbed him just as Richie grabbed Melissa's arm.

“Got a plane to catch, Ilsa.” Richie grinned at her as they raced away from the ticking
Tin Goose
.

“We do?” Melissa was feeling a little dense and a lot charmed. Racing with her lover hand in hand through the heart of a battlefield was impossibly crazy for a girl with a frozen heart to imagine. So her heart must not be frozen at all.

They dodged around the little Cessna; it wasn't big enough to carry their whole crew, even without Dayana or Pederson.

Behind them, the farthest plane in the line exploded in a ball of fire, which then set off a large secondary explosion as the fuel tanks were breached.

“Dayana only left two planes untouched.”

Melissa stumbled to a halt as the second plane they'd left behind them blew up.

The Gulfstream G250 was sixty-plus feet of sleek twinjet. It looked fast sitting on the ground.

“Who's flying it?”

She didn't like the way Richie was grinning at her.

* * *

The team set up a secure perimeter as Melissa raced along close behind him and shouted out the checklist.

Richie did his best to figure out what each instruction meant. He'd never flown a jet, but how different could it really be?

Not very. Because if it was very, then they were dead and that just wasn't an option.

The timer on his watch beeped.

He spun around, tackled Melissa, and pinned her to the ground with his body over hers.

“What the—” was all she managed before the
Tin Goose
blew up like a Roman candle. The fuel tanks deep in the hull breached separately in a cascading set of explosions that shredded the Twin Otter. Shrapnel whistled by over their heads, some of it pinging off the Gulfstream's hull, but the Cessna between them took most of the abuse.

“Let's hope nothing critical was hit here,” he whispered to Melissa, not letting her up yet.

“Just my pride.”

“I'm sorry,” he tried to apologize. “I know I shouldn't have. But I needed you to react and—”

“Richie!” Melissa cut him off.

“Yes?”

“Get off me, save our lives, and we're square. Okay?”

“You're the best woman ever!”

“Thanks. Get off me!”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” He levered himself up. “What's next on the list?”

She grabbed his shirt collar and pulled him in, spending a precious second on a kiss.

“That's one,” she said, ending the kiss as fast as it began. “Two. Remove wheel chocks.”

He dove and rolled under the low plane to pull them from the farside wheel as she pulled the nearer ones.

There was sporadic gunfire.

He couldn't waste time looking up to see what the targets might be. It wasn't until they were in the cockpit and going through the cold-start checklists that he managed a peek. People were storming toward them to board the plane. The Gulfstream could carry a dozen safely. There were six Delta, Dayana, and Pederson. Each of the Delta had at least eighty pounds of weapons and ammo. And he had no time to check what was in the cargo hold. It was official; they were full.

The team laid down warning shots to brush the crowds back, and it was working for the moment.

There was another booming explosion, muffled by the Gulfstream's hull, and a blast momentarily blinded him through the windshield.

“I spotted a large propane tank behind the chow tent. That must be it,” Melissa informed him between APU start and temperature range targets, which he managed to find despite the bright dots and blotches swimming across his vision.

He flipped open the small pilot window when he had the engines up to temperature.

“Now! Now! Now!” Richie shouted it as loud as he could.

The team tumbled toward the plane. He could feel it shift on its shock absorbers as each person dove aboard.

“Go! Go! Go!” Kyle shouted from the back.

There were red lights, green lights, and a half a hundred switches that Richie didn't recognize. It didn't just have a yoke like a steering wheel. There was also a control beside him that looked like a helicopter's cyclic, a joystick with a bulbous head covered in switches. For all he knew, it was a
Star Trek
auto-destruct switch, so he didn't touch it and prayed that he wouldn't need to.

But he knew what throttles looked like and he rammed the two large silver levers in the center of the console forward as fast as he dared.

In moments they were rolling and people who had run out onto the runway were diving aside to get out of his way.

To the left were the ongoing explosions of the drug lab and chow tent. A fire had formed and was sweeping toward the tents and wrecked planes of the living quarters.

“The DC-3?” Richie was very fond of that plane.

“Sorry,” Melissa replied, “I had Duane blow it up.”

“Oh.” He didn't know quite how he felt about that. There were memories there that…

“Don't worry, Richie. We'll make some new memories in the future. That's a promise.”

He wanted to look over at her, acknowledge it somehow, but there wasn't time. And there was a tightness in his throat that he couldn't speak past.

To their right was a line of burning planes blown up by Dayana, the British NCA operative, and a wall of the jungle alight in two places directly behind where the BAe 146 and the Gulfstream each had been parked.

Melissa was the sort of woman that a man made promises to.

And that was an awfully big thought for an awfully small moment because straight ahead was a wall of tree trunks a hundred feet high and a dozen feet across.

Above them was a wall of massive trunks and tangled branches. Above that was a hole that looked far too small to slip this huge plane through.

As he raced past the
Tin Goose
, he sent a thank-you its way and was glad that he didn't have time to look over at its shredded remains. He also wished that's what he was flying. Wished it was just he and his Ilsa, off seeking adventure.

Melissa was reading aloud take-off speeds and rates of climb. He managed to locate his speed in the bewildering array of instruments spread across the dash.