White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel (24 page)

Nick stood between Flores and Duardo,
the third man in their conversation, but he had only spoken once or
twice, because this was a military operation.

“Risks must be taken in war,” Duardo
replied. “I’ve considered the odds. They’re not as bad as it
appears at first. There’s an experienced climber in my unit. And
there are precautions we can take that will minimize the
risks.”

Flores started to shake his head before
Duardo had finished, then he chopped his hand sideways. “I will not
consider it,” he said flatly. “It is utter madness.”

Nick stirred and cleared his throat. “It
is my decision, General.”

Flores grew still. Then he straightened
to attention. “It is your order that we do this, sir?”

“It is,” Nick said mildly. “Use
volunteers for the higher risk elements that we’ve talked about.
But no one gets to stay home for this. We will need everyone.”

Flores considered Nick for a moment,
then smiled, showing crooked teeth. “
Me cago en
Dios!
I still say it is madness, but perhaps that is what we
need, yes?” He clapped Duardo on the shoulder. “I will take the men
in overland. You, the mad one, you can take the cliffs.”

“Thank you, sir,” Duardo said, although
it had been his intention to do that, anyway. He turned and climbed
down into the cabin to retrieve the roster of personnel. He could
pick his team from anyone suitable.

Nick stepped into the cabin behind him.
“I’ll come with you, if you’ll have me.”

Duardo straightened up, the file in his
hand. “You can’t. Sir,” he tacked on belatedly.

“I can’t?” Nick raised a brow. It was
another mild reaction, but Duardo knew he had gone on alert.

“Sir… Flores was right, this is as high
risk as it gets. But that’s my job. Now you’ve told him the
decision is out of his hands, the general will throw himself into
executing the plan, too. But you can’t be a part of it. You’re the
temporary president and the spokesman for every Loyalist here. You
have to go back to the big house and get everyone there to shelter.
You have to talk to the United States and keep that dialogue going.
I can’t do that and the general can’t. It has to be you.”

Nick stared at him, then rubbed the back
of his neck. “You have a point,” he said reluctantly. Duardo
relaxed.

Then Nick smiled. “I thought you might
play the family card. Tell me that Calli would castrate you if you
let me come along.”

Duardo grinned. “I was going to try that
next.” He waved toward the door. “This is the fastest boat we have
in the fleet. Flores and I will move to the next fastest and you
can use this to get back to the house. If you leave in the next
five minutes, you’ll be there by three.”

Nick nodded and held out his hand. “It’s
going to be a long night for all of us. I want to be able to take
your hand again, come the dawn.”

Duardo shook it and held Nick’s gaze.
“I’ll do my best.” He paused. “Minnie….” he began.

“I’ll know what to say, if it comes to
that,” Nick said quietly.

“Thank you.”

Nick surprised him by pulling him into a
hug. “Take care,” he said roughly, then turned and leapt up the
stairs to the main deck.

The next three hours were a blur of
frantic preparation and detailed briefings. Equipment was the
biggest challenge, but Emile was sanguine. “Any steel wedge will do
for pitons. We can split the heads and bend them to take rope. It’s
rough, but it’s effective. Hell, we used ice pitons once or twice
in a crunch, on Kilimanjaro. If it can be driven into a crevasse
and will hold tight, it will do.”

In the end, someone discovered a bag of
fishnet repair needles and the little runabout that was taxiing
between boats brought them over to the dory Duardo and Emile were
using to pull the team together. Duardo looked over Emile’s
shoulder as the private turned one of the six-inch long metal
needles over and over in his hand. One end was a blunt point. At
the other, there was a very large eye, about an inch wide.

“It’s almost perfect,” Emile declared.
“If we split the eye at the side here and bend the metal up
slightly, it will make a hook. The climbing rope can be slipped
into it.”

Duardo whistled sharply and his aide
snapped off a salute. “Sir?”

“The sergeant who made the tent poles,
the one who repairs the stairs to the big house,” Duardo said.

“Macias, sir?”

“Did he bring his tools with him?”
Duardo asked.

“I will find out, sir.”

“Bring Macias and his tools here. We
need these pitons made pronto.”

“Yes sir!”

Fifty minutes before dawn, the team
assembled and the equipment was parceled out, along with Emile’s
detailed instructions, with many repetitions of the advice to do
everything the man above did, exactly.

They used an inflatable dinghy with an
outboard motor to circle the island and come to the cliffs from the
sea. From the little dinghy, the cliffs looked huge. So did the
waves. But the inflatable sides and lightness of the boat would
help cushion any impact with the rocks.

The private steering the engine moved
them slowly closer and closer, watching the waves behind him.
“Now!” he called, as the waves subsided after the big seventh one.
He revved the engine and the boat leapt forward, right up to the
base of the cliffs.

The whole team was already roped
together and as the dinghy nudged up against the cliffs themselves,
Emile stepped over the gunwale and thrust a boot into a crevasse
Duardo hadn’t seen until that moment.

The rope leading from Emile to Duardo
held the boat steady. Duardo waited until Emile climbed out of the
way and waved to him, then Duardo hauled on the rope, bringing
himself and the boat closer to the flat wall of the cliffs. As soon
as he was close enough, he thrust out a hand and a foot and grabbed
the same piece of rock Emile had. He transferred his weight and
found himself hugging the cliffs, the sea surging around his
boots.

He reached up for the handhold he had
seen Emile use and began to climb. Behind him, the team repeated
what he had done, until they were all clinging to the cliffs. The
boat drifted away, pulled by the wash back of the waves, then the
motor fired up and the dinghy turned and headed back for the fleet.
They were on their own.

Duardo lifted his chin and studied
Emile’s movements, blanking out any thoughts about the rocks below,
the unforgiving sea and how far above them the top was.

The next three hours were a test of
mind, sinew, nerves and muscle. As the day grew, the wind picked up
force and speed. It whipped at them from the side, trying to peel
them away from the cliff, tearing at their exposed flesh and making
their eyes water, blurring their sight. The high screaming one-note
song the wind made blanketed thoughts.

Shortly before the two hour mark,
Adjuno, the sergeant just behind Duardo, slipped and fell. He was
brought to a halt, dangling in mid-air, held up by the rope, which
yanked heavily at Duardo’s torso. He gripped the rock, gritting his
jaw, as he took Adjuno’s full weight, for there was no piton
between them. Rickardo, behind Adjuno, reached out to help Adjuno
swing back toward the rocks and find grips once more. After what
felt like a year, the weight on the rope lessened and Duardo looked
down. “Sergeant?”

“Fine!” Adjuno yelled back, his voice
hoarse. He started to climb again.

They went on, Adjuno’s near-miss
stirring their adrenaline and making them even more cautious.
Duardo copied Emile’s movement even more carefully, testing each
hand and foot hold before moving on. The pack on his back, which
was a conservative thirty pounds, kept trying to pull him outward.
The lactic acid build up in his hamstrings and quads and his biceps
and triceps was murderous, turning his limbs into heavy iron
appendages that didn’t want to work properly.

The rope connecting him to Emile tugged
and he looked upward. Emile was lying on the edge of the cliff,
looking back down at him. Duardo was six feet below the top.

“Take care!” Emile called. “The edge is
powdery.”

The warning was well-judged. Suddenly
finding himself so close to the top gave Duardo a spurt of
adrenaline and spiked his pulse. It was too easy to grow careless
in the last lap. Forcing himself to move slowly, he climbed up to
the edge and finally put his hand over the top…only to have the
earth crumble under his grip and shower him with sediment and
pebbles. He turned his face away and waited.

Emile picked up his hand and guided it
to a sharp rock and curled his fingers over it and Duardo hauled
himself over the edge and rolled away from it. The pack halted his
roll, leaving him on his side.

“Help the others,” he told Emile
breathlessly. He gave himself a mere twenty seconds to recover,
then got stiffly to his feet. It was incredibly good to be able to
stand and walk normally.

He picked up the rope that connected him
to Adjuno and took up the slack on it, reeling in the inches as
Adjuno got closer to the top. Then Emile reached over and guided
him over the edge.

Twenty minutes later, all seven of them
were lying and standing on the cliff edge. Duardo let them rest for
a few minutes, while he studied the sky. The bright day had
disappeared while they climbed. Overhead, the cloud was thick and
gray and moving fast. The air was warm as he pulled it into his
lungs. Even if he had not studied every forecast for the area he
could find, the scaly clouds and the air pressure alone would have
told him now that a very bad storm was coming.

He glanced at his watch.
“Ten-forty-three,” he pronounced. “We move out at ten-fifty-five,
gentlemen. We have to make the compound by eleven-forty.”

The compound was seven kilometers away.
If they kept up a steady jog, which was more than do-able on the
flat wind-swept ground ahead of them, they would make it with time
to spare for reconnaissance before heading in. All of his team were
among the fittest men he knew. He had confidence they would make it
now. The worst of the physical challenges was behind them.

He studied the rate the cloud was moving
once more and his gut tightened.

Perhaps the worst was still to come,
after all.

Josh climbed out of the little Cessna and stretched
mightily. It had been a cramped three-hour flight down to Acapulco.
His shirt, the one he had thrown on as a passing thought as he’d
left the house in the small hours of the morning, was sticking to
his back. The front of it had the sort of set-in wrinkles that came
from sitting too long.

He looked around. This section of the
airport was reserved for small, private planes. The hangars were an
ants’ nest of prop planes, small jets and the golf carts that
personnel used to move around the tarmac.

The sky was a dismal dun color and the
wind was pushing at Josh, coming from a south-westerly position.
Most of the frantic activity on the tarmac was because of the
coming storm. All these planes were too small and too light to be
left out unprotected. Even tied down, they were vulnerable. The
planes were being towed into the hangers, where they would cram
like sardines until the storm was over.

Nick was striding across the tarmac, in
the black cargo pants and camouflage shirt he wore when he was
participating in army exercises or maneuvers. Even in this low
light his red hair was distinctive. There was a Loyalist non-com
with him, carrying a heavy canvas bag over one shoulder and wearing
green fatigues.

Did the combat clothes mean Nick had
been mixed up in something? Was the offensive already underway?
Josh had spent three hours trying to figure out what the panic was
about, when the storm coming in would bring everything and everyone
to a grinding halt.

Nick surprised Josh by giving him a hard
hug. “Thank you,” he said. “This will make a huge difference.
They’re inside?”

“In the cabin with me. You’re right,
they don’t take up much room, packed down.” He jerked his thumb
back toward the interior of the plane. The door was still ajar and
rocking backward and forward with the wind surges.

Nick nodded. “I have another favor to
ask.”

“You’re going to be buying me drinks for
a century at this rate,” Josh told him. “What now?”

“I need to borrow the plane.”

“And fly it to where?” Josh asked. “I
don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a hurricane heading in
our direction.”

“You looked up the reports then.” Nick
pointed toward the west. “That-a-way,” he said.

“
Into
the storm?”

Nick shook his head. “If we go now,
we’ll be back before the storm hits. But your Cessna is the only
way I can get the goggles where they need to be in time.”

He patently wasn’t going to explain
himself beyond that cryptic remark. But he had already said on the
phone this morning that it was urgent and he had repeated himself
just now when he had said this would make a difference.

“I’ll send the pilot into Acapulco to
hunker down for the duration,” Josh said. “Your fixed-wing license
is current, right?”

Nick rolled his eyes at him, then waved
the non-com toward the plane. “Go do your stuff, Pedro.”

“Sir.” Pedro stepped around them and
climbed into the plane, hauling his heavy bag in with him.

“After you,” Nick said. “I’ll let you
break the bad news to the pilot.”

“That he doesn’t have to personally fly
into the face of a hurricane?” Josh asked. “Oh, I think he’ll take
the bad news quite well.”

Twenty minutes later, they were airborne
again after a hasty refuel and consultation with traffic control.
Josh sat in the copilot seat next to Nick. He could tell from the
sure way Nick handled the controls that he was a good pilot.

Behind them in the cabin, Pedro was
doing something mysterious with the big carton of goggles that
involved stuffing it in an even bigger heavy-duty plastic bag and
attaching yet another plastic bag and glow sticks to the opening.
When Pedro pulled a heavy air canister out of his bag and pushed
the spout into the mouth of the bag around the carton, Josh
suddenly understood.