Target Engaged (16 page)

“Look like you've seen a ghost.”

She nodded, though she wasn't sure which question she was answering. Shaking her head didn't make it any clearer for either of them.

Chad was starting to look worried. The roughest soldier on their team was being solicitous; she must really look a total mess.

“He's asleep,” she kind of blurted out.

“You should get some shut-eye too, while he gives you a chance.” He offered a wink.

At her blank nod, he looked even more concerned.

Without another word, he guided her into the bunk room, the other only space on the boat with a door, and nudged her onto the lower bunk before closing it behind his exit.

She lay down on her side, could feel her eyes stinging with the strain of staring at the blank wall. She forced herself to blink, which did nothing to ease the burning.

Rather than get eyestrain from staring, Carla finally forced her eyes closed. She curled up in a ball around the fist she still didn't dare unclench.

“Here we go!” Kyle called out.

An hour after sunset, Lola Maloney had flown her Black Hawk by, a hundred meters ahead of the sailboat at less than five meters above the waves. They were getting close enough to the Venezuelan shore that they didn't want her flying overhead to lower their cargo because she'd show up on the Coast Guard's radar. Dead ahead, she tumbled out the two bundles of gear that they'd assembled while still on the
Freedom.

Kyle kept his gaze on the packages' blinking lights. It was just like a drug delivery, which was an amusing parallel.

He eased the sailboat to a near standstill, bow to the wind, coming even with their supplies to the lee side. Duane and Richie manned boat hooks. When they drifted down on the bundles, they snagged them and heaved them over the lifelines and onto the deck.

He eased off the wind. The boat leaned back in and began making way once more. Lola flew by once more off their bow, far enough out to not rock the boat overly much. With a side-to-side wobble of her bird, the equivalent of a wave, she disappeared back into the darkness. She'd turn on her running lights when she reached the LCS ship steaming slowly a hundred miles offshore—out past where she'd draw any Venezuelan attention.

“What did we catch, boys?” Kyle called forward.

Boys? No Carla visible. Man, he'd slept like a baby after the massage she'd given him. Solid right up to the moment Chad had knocked on the forward hatch above the stateroom bed and told him the helo was inbound. He'd crawled out the hatch and taken over the helm. Carla must be down below; he'd have to remember to thank her. He rolled his shoulders again. They felt good and loose.

“Caught us a load of good shit.” Duane peeled open the waterproof cover and flotation ring from the first big pack. He toted it to the companionway ladder and handed it down to Chad, who'd gone below. Man probably couldn't wait to get his hands back around a gun.

Richie hauled back the next one and handed it down as well. “What should we do with the covers?”

“Sink 'em. We don't want any signs that we were picking up cargo.”

“Roger that, boss. We don't want a country rife with corrupt cocaine smugglers to think that someone else is doing smuggling on their turf, do we?”

Duane went forward to lose the delivery packaging. Kyle handed the tiller off to Richie; he wanted to see for himself that the gear had arrived intact and was stowed out of sight.

He swung down the ladder. Chad had a big pack set out on each table and already had one open.

“Where's Carla?”

Chad nodded toward the bunkroom. “Probably still sacked out.”

Kyle had bolted from the bed so fast that he only now registered that he'd been sleeping alone. That was odd.

“I'll get her. We need to go over this gear carefully.”

When he went to move past Chad, the man didn't give way.

Kyle went to push by, but the man didn't budge as if he was anchored in place despite the bob and sway of the sloop as she cut once more through the waves.

“What?”

Chad studied him for a long moment before speaking very softly. “Not sure. But you might want to think about walking softly there.”

“We're Delta. We always walk softly.” Kyle's attempt at making a joke of it fell flat. He took a breath, then nodded.

Chad studied him again before moving aside.

As Kyle squeezed past, he spoke softly. “Thanks, buddy.” Whatever was awaiting him, he'd have to face it.

Chad nodded and turned to pull a stack of C4 blocks from the open bag.

* * *

Carla had slept.

How in the world had she slept?

At least until the guys started running up and down the decks like a herd of elephants. The packs hit the deck with a wet splat right above her head, resounding through the thin fiberglass.

She heard the helicopter whisper by once more and knew it was gone.

Kyle was coming. She heard him clambering down the ladder like it was second nature to him. The sailboat had remained foreign to her though she'd picked up a lot watching Kyle and Richie. The boat was both too big and too small. It felt large and clunky compared to the high-speed rubber boats they often used. And it felt too small because there were only the five of them rather than a hundred on a ship of war. No guns, no torpedoes, no radar watch officer. Just them. And its normal state wasn't level, but rather heeled over. She was lying as much on the hull as the bunk.

Kyle was still coming, and she still didn't know what to do about it.

There was a discussion that she couldn't make out through the stateroom walls. A long silence followed by a soft knock on the door. And then it cracked open and Kyle peered in at her.

“You awake?”

“No. Duh!”

“The gear is here.”

“I heard.”

Kyle squinted at her carefully. The light was behind him, so he was in silhouette in the doorway. “You sleep okay?”

“Sure.” Much to her surprise.
No thanks to you!
But she kept that thought to herself. “You?”

“After what you did for me?” He rolled his shoulders to make his point. “You're fantastic.”

Carla closed her eyes for a moment. So, he didn't remember speaking the words as he fell asleep. Could she pretend everything was unchanged and somehow make it be?

She was Delta. She could do anything.

Sitting up, she nodded to Kyle that she was ready. The space was small enough that she couldn't really rise as long as he was standing in the doorway. He backed off and held the door wide for her.

She looked down at her right hand, still clenched closed even while she slept.

Sure, pretending was something Delta trained for. It was a key part of infiltration and recon—the fine art of blending in. But no matter how much she wanted to pretend, those two words had been spoken.

She unclenched her fist and set the words free, could almost see the whisper of “Love you” slide out into the light.

The one thing she couldn't pretend away was that the words weren't out in the world.

Now if only they didn't make a circular run, like a bad WWII torpedo, and destroy her.

Kyle and Carla were fixing breakfast in the galley down in the main cabin. They were about four hours out of Maracaibo, and everyone had gotten at least six hours of sack time. The other guys were on deck and all the gear from the packs was stowed where a casual inspection wouldn't find it.

If a customs agent tried a more thorough inspection, well, Kyle had a plan for that as well.

They worked together in easy familiarity even if the ingredients were strange. Breakfast was going to be strong coffee and a bowl of yogurt filled with some of the strangest fruits he'd ever seen. Pineapple and papaya were normal enough, but the others…

It was fun, tasting two similar round, red fruits, one like a plum and the other a sour cherry.

“Wow.” Kyle saved his comment until after Carla had tasted the unholy combination that made her eyes cross as well. “There are two fruits that should never be eaten together.”

“You got that right.” She rinsed her mouth out with a glass of pineapple juice. “Ick. That's even worse.”

“Try this one. Vendor said it's called a
mispel
.”

“You try it.” So he did. It was egg-shaped, but the size of his fist. The flesh was dark brown. He bit the edge carefully and was almost overwhelmed with flavor. He swiped at the juice dribbling down his chin and licked his fingers.

“That good, huh?”

He held it out to her and she took a bite right over where his had been, causing more juice to dribble down his hands. He licked them clean again and still the flavor washed across his senses: powerful, sweet, almost a woody taste, but more like liquid sunshine.

“Wow! That's almost as good as sex.”

“Nothing's as good as sex with you.” That earned him a smile, but nothing stronger. Normally he'd get a saucy smile, a deep kiss, a quick grab. Something.

Instead she turned to the counter and began cutting more of the vari-shaped fruit. The next one was conical and peach yellow inside. She tasted a small piece and nodded her approval before she started cleaning out the center seeds.

“Is this what normal couples do, normal families?” she asked without looking up.

“What do you mean, cook together, treat each other decently?”

She nodded once, tightly, without looking up from her knife work.

“What the hell kind of a past…” He clamped down on his tongue. He could feel the impossible tension in the air. Could see it in her white knuckles. In fact, if she kept cutting that way, she was going to end up with several fewer fingers.

Chad had been right about walking softly.

Kyle rested his hand over both of hers to stop her before she hurt herself. With a brushstroke along her cheek, he turned her gaze toward him.

Carla was putting up a good front about something. She looked straight into his eyes, brave as ever, but he could see the caution there. No cringing as if she expected a blow, so her past hadn't included that kind of abuse. It was something else. Well, he would hope that offering her the truth somehow helped, even if he wasn't ready to risk the truth that he loved her.

“Yes. This is what a normal couple does together. Cook. Take time. Talk.”

She bit down on her lower lip before speaking. “I—I don't know how to do that.”

“It's like girl clothes. Wear it for a while. See how it fits.”

She nodded once, then again. And then she returned to cutting up the fruit for breakfast as if everything was exactly as it had been moments before.

He might have even bought into the show, if he hadn't seen the salt stains where she'd wept against the dark pillow. He hadn't known Carla to ever be even sentimental. To have wept…

Well, whatever it was, knowing Carla, she'd find a way to swallow it down and be back to normal soon. Or it would explode full force when she finally decided to let it out.

Two things were for certain: no matter what it was, it wouldn't affect her performance as a soldier one iota, and no matter how rough the ride, he'd be there for her. One of the best lessons he'd ever learned from his dad.

* * *

“We've got incoming.”

Carla heard Duane's call from up on deck and stopped slicing the
mispel
to peer out the small galley window. It was still a smudge, but it was a fast-moving smudge.

“We're still too far offshore for a customs inspection. It's not moving like Coast Guard.”

Carla would take Kyle's word for it. “Who else is in these waters? Agent Smith said there were no other U.S. operations in the area.”

Chad squatted at the head of the companionway ladder. “They're pleasure-craft size: ten meters long and throwing a big bow wave. No way to outrun them. I'll give you one guess.”

“Or two guesses, but the second one doesn't count.” Duane was standing behind Richie at the helm so that he'd be mostly hidden, looking through binoculars. “Yup, bad news. At least three aboard. All
hombres
, at the rail, one with binocs.”

“What would pirates want with us?” Richie called from the tiller.

“Not pirates, Richie,” Carla called out to him, “smugglers. Okay, sure, pirates. Attacking on the high seas and all that. They see our hot sailboat and think it's perfect for the first leg of the Maracaibo-Aruba-Europe cocaine run. So smugglers and pirates.”

“Problem is”—Kyle peeked out the windows at the rapidly approaching craft—“that means that they want our boat for their own uses. Best scenario?”

“They take the boat and then they shoot us,” Chad answered.

“Worst case?” Duane continued to study them through the field glasses. “They shoot us first.”

Carla had studied piracy as part of OTC training. How to counter it and how to retake a ship. They'd practiced on oil tankers, cruise ships, and pleasure yachts. But now they were on the receiving end.

“Well, they've certainly seen the three of us,” Chad reported. “If we go below, they'll just shoot up the hull. What's the next bright idea?”

“Get them talking,” Kyle called out.

“Great advice, dude.” Duane turned away.

Kyle pointed to the row of windows behind them on the opposite side of the cabin.

Carla nodded and pulled the curtains across them. Now she and Kyle wouldn't be silhouetted from behind. It would be very hard to see into the shadowed cabin through the other windows. Kyle was already pulling up the bunk that they'd stowed the rifles under.

She went for handguns first, then she pulled out a Milkor MGL. The U.S. Marines had been the first to get the Multiple Grenade Launcher…after The Unit. Like a revolver on steroids, it shot six 40 mm grenades as fast as she could pull the trigger. It had been one of her favorite toys in training. She pulled out a box of six more loads and set it on the cutting board, close at hand though she couldn't imagine using it.

Kyle handed her an HK416 rifle that she set across the galley counter in front of her. He slipped a trio of Glocks onto the top step of the companionway ladder, but there was no way to distribute them topside under the watchful eye of the approaching pirates.

Carla hoped they were wrong but could feel in her bones that they weren't. A vessel in distress would radio or signal, and they wouldn't be approaching just astern so that their last turn would place them close alongside.

The cruiser pulled up on the port side and almost ate a sail boom as Richie performed an “accidental” jib and it slammed across. The pirates' boat had a main cabin and a small flying bridge up high. There would be helm and engine controls in both places, but they couldn't see which the boat's driver was using. Three men were lined up along the lower rail.

“Douse your sails!” someone shouted over a loud-hailer in Spanish. “This is an official Venezuelan inspection.”

“Nice of them to talk first,” Kyle commented.

“It is. Doesn't strike me as very official. It's not your average Coast Guard who runs around in a Carver 38 sport boat,” Carla offered drily. They had no official logo on the boat. Instead, it looked very civilian, as if it too had been recently captured.

“They might at least have thought to say ‘please.'”

“It was rather rude of them, don't you think?” Carla was searching through the scope. With only the small kitchen window to aim through, she didn't have a lot of options. “The sail boom is really in the way.”

Kyle pitched his voice low to Chad, who still stood at the head of the ladder. “Into the wind. Get the boom amidships.”

Chad passed the instruction to Richie. They looked like tourists, each of them still in their “I
heart
Aruba!” T-shirts and baggy shorts. They made a show of wrestling the boom into place as if they didn't know what they were doing. Chad managed to slip one of the pistols into his waistband in the confusion.

“I still count three unsavories along the rail. They're keeping their right arms out of sight, but I spotted the butt of a rifle stock on the leftmost guy,” Carla reported.

“Roger, three.” Kyle was sighting through the next window down, which wasn't open.

Her window was open, but it had a bug screen across it that she'd have to punch out before firing if she didn't want the grenade going off right in her face.

“Go for the wheelhouse,” Kyle told her.

“Now, or when they're in motion?” Carla loved Kyle's perfect calm and perfect patience. It steadied her and made her a better soldier every single time. He was screwing up Carla the woman, but that didn't get in her way right now.

“I'm seeing rifle stock on middle unsavory.”

No longer any question what to do. “In one,” Carla said and felt that connection between them as they fired in unison.

Middle bad guy was just lifting his rifle as Kyle fired. The first shot shattered the window; the second passed through the man's forehead.

Carla punched her weapon a half step forward, knocking out the screen. She fired the first High Explosive round at the side of the cruiser's cabin. The HE punched a hole in the fiberglass. Half a second later, she sent the second one through the new hole in the side of the cabin where it would shred whoever was inside. For good measure, she shot one onto the flying bridge.

She dropped the MGL and swept up her rifle, but it was over. No one remained at the rail. Well, one did, flopped over it with a gaping hole in his back directly behind where his heart had been.

Winding back in her memory, she counted five shots from Kyle and two from Chad with the pistol he'd managed to grab.

Coming from the galley, she was closer to the ladder than Kyle and sprinted up the steps. She tossed the remaining handguns to Duane and Richie, and then she and Kyle covered their teammates as they jumped across the gap and swarmed the boat.

There were the sharp single spits of “security” shots and then a call of “Clear.” They tossed over a couple of lines so that the boats didn't drift too far apart.

“Just need a couple of strip breaching charges and a timer to clean this up,” Duane called back. “Shit! Bloodstains still on the interior carpet. Whoever they grabbed the boat from didn't do so well.” He leaned out to glance over the stern. “Panama is now shy a couple of tourists.”

Carla ducked back down, dug out the charge, and tossed it up to Kyle.

They weren't in position to report the location of the boat without having to explain themselves. And after their treatment of it, they didn't want anyone else seeing it either. The bad guys were dead, but…

“Hey, Richie,” she called out the window she'd fired the MGL through. He was still on the Carver 38 and she'd been reloading the MGL six-shooter. “See if you can find some info on the real owners. Name of someone we can notify.”

He disappeared into the cabin.

“Hope y'all signed the damage insurance before we hired our boat,” Chad called out. “Mr. Rental is gonna be ticked about having his window shot out.”

Carla had also dropped the Milkor grenade launcher right in the middle of their breakfast, scattering the yogurt and most of their fruit to the floor. That was probably the least of their worries, but it meant day-old sandwiches for breakfast.

They cast the derelict boat adrift, Carla's grenades had destroyed both control stations as well as two more bad guys. Richie handed her a small packet of papers for a Panamanian couple. She'd have to find something to do with them. If they went to the CIA, no one would ever hear a thing.

Once they were clear of the boat and about a hundred meters out, there was a loud
krump!
and a splash of water around the sides of the boat.

“She no longer has a bottom and is going down,” Duane announced with obvious satisfaction.

“Bye-bye.” Chad waved at the boat as the Carver slipped rapidly out of sight with its load of dead bodies, tied to the craft to make sure they stayed down. “Assholes.”

She and Kyle returned below, reloaded and re-stowed the weapons.

“Nice job, Wild Woman.”

“Good shooting, Mister Kyle.” The smile was easy between them.

She
loved
working with Kyle.

It was safe to think that, wasn't it?