Heart Strike (3 page)

The 747, converted for firefighting, had been put into deep storage in the Tucson desert when its owners went out of business. The CIA had found another use for the massive plane, which now began its dump of twenty thousand gallons—over eighty tons—of defoliant across the exact coordinates that Richie had sent to them just six hours ago.

His Delta team had been to twelve coca farms in the last six months. And the 747 tanker had visited each in turn. Twelve farms that wouldn't produce a single leaf of coca anytime soon.

“Down,” Chad shouted.

They all ducked and hung on as Duane rammed the heavy wooden outer barrier at thirty miles an hour. It blew apart. A four-by-four shattered the windshield and Carla knocked the remains of the glass clear with the butt of a Chinese QBB machine gun she'd acquired somewhere along the way before turning it around to shoot a guard who'd been standing well clear of the gate.

Richie kept an eye out to the rear, but no one was following. If they were, they'd have a long way to go. The team had been pulled out of Bolivia. They were being tasked to a new assignment.

That was fine.

After six months training together and another six in the field, it was the last line of the message that had worried them all.

Proceed to Maracaibo, Venezuela. Acquire new team
member.

* * *

Colonel Gibson led Melissa and her team down the dark central corridor of the hostage rescue training building. She could still hear the amazed voices of the newest class as they attempted to reconstruct the shoot-room attack.

The building had six doors along this concrete hallway—six doors of hell.

The doors had started out as a bewildering array of challenges that she would never understand. Over the last six months she'd been sent through each one of the six so many times that it no longer mattered which one they entered, with how little preparation; there would be no surprises that she couldn't take in stride.

An airliner, a cave-and-tunnel system, an elaborate multistory shoot-house in which the walls and stairs were never in the same place twice, even the one where Gibson was now leading them, the bridge of a ship. Through the last door on the right stood an airplane-hangar-sized space with the upper three stories of an oceangoing vessel standing in its center, complete with a flybridge sticking out to either side like wings.

The white steel tower had given her endless hours of trouble; big ships were designed with far too many sharp corners and narrow ladderways for the bad guys to use to their advantage. The training cadre had helped them beat it, but it had been so much harder than it looked, even tougher to take down cleanly than an airplane filled with passengers.

As a former museum technician, she had to admire each of the sets that The Unit's training cadre provided. When she was in the scenarios, they were incredibly believable. Radar scopes swept, instruments lit, televisions displayed—everything authentic right down to the questionable fashion sense of the mannequins. To add to the authenticity, they often did the raids with Simunitions rather than live ammo. In those situations, armored training cadre shot back.

Melissa had worked at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, for three years before she'd decided to use her dual citizenship to sign up for the U.S. military. At the museum she'd helped build elaborate sets that had to stand up to millions of visitors a year yet still be interactive and intriguing. The cadre's set dressers were of an equally high caliber.

In moments Gibson and their team were all seated in thoroughly believable command chairs of a cruise ship's main bridge. Last time she'd fought her way aboard, it had been configured as a container ship. The set was battered, but the training cadre did a fine job of putting it back together despite stray gunfire and the occasional application of explosives. Thankfully the museum's tourists hadn't been quite that aggressive.

Colonel Gibson sat in the helmsman's seat, looking greyhound fit, his dark hair and light eyes a startling contrast when you noticed them, when he wasn't being invisible. He was dressed in the same ACUs they were—Army Combat Uniform and boots—nothing to distinguish his superior rank or vastly superior skill.

She'd always felt a little uncomfortable around him and could never quite be still when he watched her. She realized that she was fooling around with the switches on the communications officer's panel and pulled her hands into her lap.

A smile quirked at the corner of Gibson's lips, which was wholly impossible, and then it was gone, so she knew she'd imagined it.

“Well done,” Gibson began. “Three Delta against seven terrorists, very well done.”

And suddenly Melissa felt about three meters tall and, like Alice in Wonderland, wondered how she still fit in the room. She reached out to slap a high five with Mutt, who sat in the radar tech's chair beside her.

“Gosh, Colonel. You sure know how to make a girl's head spin.”

His smile was wintry.

Then she pointed at Mutt and Jeff. “I mean, just look at them.” They were clearly feeling the same effects she was from the rare compliment.

That earned her the first laugh she'd ever heard from the Colonel. Mutt stuck his tongue out at her. When she was foolish enough to turn her back on him, he tugged on her short French braid. Jeff merely sighed.

The three of them had plagued each other from the first day. They'd tried to tag her as M&M because, “Melissa Moore, you gotta know you're total eye candy.” She might be, but she'd walked more than a hundred other top soldiers into the ground to get here.

Most men who'd tried to bed her called her The Ice Queen because she froze them out. She had a dream of finding someone who brought the heat and the heart, not just fun but someone who would be a keeper. She had that dream as a young girl…she'd had a lot of stupid, naive dreams back then.

In vengeance for M&M, Tom Maxwell and Sem Jaffe became Mutt and Jeff.

Worse for them, she'd made sure that M&M didn't stick and that Mutt and Jeff did.

She'd left behind Charli from her middle name Charlene, because that had been her brother's nickname for her. The name had died with him. Her middle initial was turned into “Cat” because she could sneak up on anyone, except Gibson. And just as cats sometimes had too many toes, she had too few. She'd lost two toes and her brother to an ice storm during a winter climb up Washington State's Mount Rainier.
Shut it out. Shut it out.
Even after five years, the memory still hurt like a knife.

“Mutt and Jeff.”

Melissa The Cat wanted to purr when Gibson called them that.

“We need you on fireteams based out of Saudi Arabia. Are you ready for that?”

“Sure,” they chimed in together. They were always doing that, which is why her tag for them had stuck so well.

She'd be up for that too. Her Arabic was poor—okay, dismal—but she knew from experience just how fast she could fix that. There wasn't anyone in The Unit with less than three languages fluent and several more at least serviceable.

“Good.” Gibson nodded. “Your flight leaves in forty-five minutes. You have time to shower, pack your gear, and get to Hangar Seventeen. Go.”

There was a stunned second or two as they realized that they wouldn't all be deploying together. They'd known that was unlikely of course, had talked about it, but it was still a shock. For six months of OTC plus the additional month of Delta Selection with Jeff, the three of them had rarely been apart. They'd become her friends. Her team. They had, as the saying went, gone through hell and hell together.

There wasn't a third second of hesitation—The Unit's operators were trained to adapt rapidly.

Maxwell and Jaffe offered her high fives; instead she gave each of them a hug.

“Now she lays some flesh on us,” Mutt quipped. Jeff was quiet as usual, but gave her a good hug
and
a high five. Then he whispered quietly to her, “Kick ass, sister.”

Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded and they were gone.

The shock of their departure left her in the lurch, like she'd leaned up against a wall that had always been there and suddenly it wasn't.

Colonel Gibson was silent, waiting patiently in his helmsman's chair.

She did her best to school her nerves into a calm state—wasn't working, so she shot for a calm
er
state and made it only partway there—before sitting down. Not quite sure how, she'd landed in the captain's seat. Now that she was in it, the chair felt odd, wrong, too big and too important. Hell, she'd only graduated OTC a dozen minutes ago and already her two closest friends were up and gone out of her life. The military was like that, but it didn't make it any easier.

Melissa forced her attention back to Gibson and shot for casual to hide the lack of calm. “So, what's the deal, Boss?”

He glanced at his watch uncertainly.

Nervous? The most highly trained soldier in any military in any country was nervous? Oh man, this was going to be so bad.

“I have—” He cleared his throat and started again. “You are fluent in Spanish?”

He must know that she was from her file. “
Ja, ich spreche Spanisch. Auch, Italienisch und Französisch
,” she answered in flawless German.

No smile. Not even a hint that he could. He had actually laughed with her not a moment before; Melissa was sure he had…fairly sure. She knew he wasn't about to confess to being her father, because Mom and Dad were living happily on their houseboat in Victoria Harbour on Vancouver Island in Canada.

“And you can fly planes.”

“Small ones, sure. I can even take off a helicopter without crashing, if I have an instructor beside me.” Melissa and her brother had gotten their private pilot licenses together, and she'd had a few rotorcraft lessons for the fun of it. She'd kept her private pilot's license current more in his memory than anything else.

So what the hell was going on? Why was he asking her things he must already know? And she could still read the nerves on him. She tinkered with the captain's command board, wondering what it would take to navigate out of this moment. That switch there? Or the darkened map display? Key in a new GPS coordinate and go, full throttle outta here.

“I have recommended that you be assigned to our top South American team.”

“Sounds
muy bueno
,” she agreed cautiously.

“Good. Your transport is in one hour, Hangar Three.”

He rose to his feet and headed for the door.

She took a deep breath and jumped in. “What's the other shoe, sir? The one you don't want to drop.”

He stopped with his back to her, hands braced on the door.

Melissa held her breath, could feel the fear squeezing in on her—a place dark and bitterly cold. A feeling she had struggled with often on particularly long and lonely nights.

“I'm sorry.” Gibson turned to face her, his face carefully controlled, then whispered, “I'm sorry that I couldn't save your brother.”

Though he looked at her for a long time, Colonel Michael Gibson was gone long before she could recover from the shock.

At least now she knew why she both had and hadn't recognized him. On a bitterly cold and cruel mountain five years ago, Colonel Michael Gibson—as unrecognizably swathed in as much mountain gear as she had been—had saved her life. Saved it and completely changed it.

* * *

“
I
didn't ask for anyone else.” Carla “Wild Woman” Anderson was on a roll. The same roll she'd been on fairly continuously since the orders had come in.

Richie kept his head low, pretending to concentrate on sorting out their radio gear. He'd spread it across one of the hotel suite living room's rosewood coffee tables and then propped up the tablet computer to catch up on the news. The remains of his chili-laced hot chocolate had long since cooled from breakfast. But he sipped at it anyway to try and appear thoughtful.

It must have worked, as she headed over to the window to stare south once more as if she could divine who was flying in from five miles away.

The room was something of a shock to his body with its broad clean windows, luxurious furnishings, and stunning view of Maracaibo, Venezuela. Hot showers and efficient room service only made it all the stranger. The suite had five bedrooms, but as Carla and Kyle shared one, there was a spare.

An ominous spare, as they knew someone was inbound to occupy it. Kyle had gone out to the airport to meet him, and his buffering effect on Carla's temper was much missed.

Richie was just hoping they were done with their six months posing as itinerant Bolivian coca plantations laborers. Nothing to connect their team with the large, unmarked CIA and Colombian planes that flew low overhead in the middle of the night and blanketed the plantations with defoliant. They'd destroyed over four thousand hectares of coca that would never be processed into cocaine, though that ten percent felt like such a small dent in the estimated sixteen thousand hectares in cultivation. Thankfully, one farm didn't talk much with the next, so no one in the camps knew to ask how the intel for the planes was so perfect despite rough terrain, camouflage nets, and remote locations.

His problem, and he suspected half of Carla's—as she stormed into Richie's bedroom again because he had the best view of the airport—was that he was sick of the Bolivian fields. So much of it had been scout work. It was time for a little action.

Now the team had been directed to a quiet hotel suite along the waterfront in Maracaibo. Then they'd been told to plant their asses and wait.

Carla wasn't good at waiting, except when actually on a mission, and then she had the patience of a sphinx. But now, in a room that she insisted was too beige, looking out at a city that was too crowded and a river that was too wide and a sky that was…