Don't Let Go (2 page)

Special Agent Rafael Valentino read the freshly painted sign at the head of a tree-lined driveway.

SECOND CHANCE, HIPPOTHERAPY RANCH

With a stab of his finger, he curtailed the haunting aria from the opera
Carmen
and turned down the graveled driveway, braced for disappointment.

The Jillian Sanders he knew was a nurse in Fairfax, not a horse rancher in Suffolk, Virginia. Still, having seen the name on a roster of incoming calls, he’d decided to pay this house call in order to see for himself.

Mature oak trees gave way to a butter-yellow farmhouse in need of a fresh coat of paint. The front porch listed. Bushes and shrubs overran the walkway. A newly constructed barn stood fifty yards away, displaying a ruddy stain and a fence so recently erected that the tempered wood still looked green.

Rafe cut the engine and reached for the file. Jillian Sanders had made thirty-one phone calls requesting FBI assistance.

As he approached the front door, he listened, hearing only the sloughing of wind and the twitter of a bird. The heels of his Ferragamo shoes sounded out of place on the planks of the sagging porch.

Before he could knock, the door popped open. “Yeah?” said a boy of perhaps fourteen, his gray eyes hostile.

“Special Agent Valentino, FBI,” said Rafe, softening the rasp produced by his injured vocal cords. “I’m looking for Jillian Sanders.”

“She’s in the barn,” said the boy, eyeing the scar on Rafe’s neck.

“Who are you?” asked a young girl, poking her head out from under the boy’s arm.

“He’s the bogeyman,” said her brother.

“Nuhn-uhn.”

“Well, he could be. Go back to your room and play. We don’t talk to strangers.”

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

With a grimace, Rafe backed away. How long had it been since he’d overheard siblings squabble? Eight years, now, long enough that the memories had faded.

Crossing to the barn’s open doors, Rafe peered into the mellow shadows. The faint odor of horse manure mingled with the scent of fresh straw. “Hello?” he called, following a scuffling sound along an isle of empty stalls.

The ears and eyes of a huge bay crested the dividers. The horse gave a whinny, and the stall door slid open. A woman peered out.

“Rafael!” she gasped. Her long, golden hair was caught up in a ponytail. She wore shorts and a T-shirt stretched taut across her pregnant midsection, but he would have recognized her anywhere.

“Jillian.” A feeling of intense satisfaction rushed through him.

“Oh, my,” she breathed, putting a gloved hand to her heart. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Nor I,” he admitted, loving the sweet timbre of her voice, the periwinkle blue of her eyes.

“What brings you to Suffolk?” she asked in delight.

“I transferred from D.C. eight months ago,” he explained.

“You’re here because of my phone calls,” she guessed.

He indicated the file. “I wondered if it might be you.” Not only had she soothed him in the ER as he’d choked on his own blood, but she’d visited him daily in the weeks following his recovery.

“I’m so happy to see you again,” she said, pulling off her glove, extending her hand.

Savoring the warmth and softness of her fingers, Rafe realized this was the first time they’d ever touched.

“Do you live here in Suffolk?” he asked, releasing her regretfully. “I thought your husband was with the Fairfax police.”

She looked away, putting her gloves down. “I moved here to start a therapy ranch. It’s for veterans who’ve lost limbs in the war. Riding helps them regain muscle and get their balance back.”

“I had no idea,” he admitted, intrigued. He eyed her belly inquiringly.

“You caught me mucking out the stall,” she apologized, ignoring the look. “Come into the office,” she suggested. “I have so much to tell you.”

Ten minutes later, with the promise that the FBI would do everything in their powers to help locate her sister, Jillian watched Rafael leave.

With graceful ease, he slipped into the Cutlass and donned his seat belt. She had never seen him dressed in anything but pajamas, yet it came as no surprise that he wore a designer silk suit of unrelenting gray, a snowy white shirt, and no tie. Even in pajamas there had been something elegant about him.

As he smiled at her, a lightness buoyed her heavy heart, easing the crush that kept her so despondent. How nice to have seen him again, a friend she’d cherished for a short time and then lost, especially since she’d lost so much lately.

With a deft hand on the steering wheel, he backed up and pulled away, and her sorrow returned.

She hadn’t even told him she was widowed. Every morning she awakened to the panicky realization that her family’s welfare rested on her narrow shoulders. Her baby, Gary’s surprise legacy, would be born in two short months, and she had so much left to do before she could give their baby the attention it deserved.

With a weary sigh, Jillian turned to gaze at the barn. She must’ve been crazy to think she could honor her and Gary’s dream alone. But now that she’d started, she had no choice but see it through.

“What’s the plan, Senior Chief?” whispered Petty Officer Vinny DeInnocentis as he slapped at a mosquito boring through the camo paint slathered on his neck. With night falling, the insects were swarming worse than ever.

Solomon McGuire, aka Mako, took his eyes off the rebel-occupied Misión de la Paz long enough to send Vinny a glacial stare. Given the pale, almost colorless gray of his eyes, glacial stares required little effort on his part.

“What?” the kid demanded with inner-city bravado. “We’ve been lyin’ here for like six hours, watching these jackasses scare the locals. When’re we gonna pursue the objective?”

“We haven’t been lying here,” Solomon corrected him. “We’ve been observing.”

“True,” Vinny acknowledged, giving Solomon brief hope that he might one day make chief, but then he added, “and I have observed that a big-ass beetle is climbing up my right leg heading straight to my balls. There’s a venomous snake dangling five meters over our heads, and the vines that we’re hiding in look a lot like poison oak.”

“It’s trumpet flower,” Solomon retorted, nonetheless attuned to Vinny’s restlessness. “We’re going to penetrate at zero one hundred hours. You, Teddy, and Gus will sweep the enclosure while I locate the recovery targets. We find them, flexicuff them, and get them out. Harley and Haiku will meet up with us at the rendezvous point.”

Vinny’s white teeth flashed in the gloom. “Hooyah, Senior Chief. I gotta get this bug outta my pants,” he added, shaking his leg in what looked like a rendition of the hokey pokey as he backed out of the vines.

Solomon thumbed his interteam radio to contact the sniper team. “Four hours to Operation Extraction,” he warned the spotter and shooter.

“Roger,” Harley murmured back. Now that darkness was falling, he and Haiku were making their way along the top of the mission wall, over a ceramic-tiled roof of the outdoor kitchen, up and into the bell tower of the seventeenth-century chapel, an ideal vantage point from which to guard the recovery team’s blazing entrance and subsequent search.

Solomon set his watch to perform a countdown.

Chapter Two

Three hours and fifty minutes later, Solomon watched the seconds tick down on the face of his MTM Extreme Ops Black SEAL watch. He and his recovery team were poised beneath the fragrant vines of a bougainvillea bush, swimming in adrenaline.
Nine. Eight. Seven
. . . They were loaded with gear, wearing gas masks.
Three. Two. One.

At his nod, Teddy detonated the breaching charge. The ancient wrought-iron gate popped open. Vinny, Teddy, and Gus hurled smoke grenades out of the tree line into the courtyard. Summoned by the disturbance and hissing smoke bombs, rebels raced into view and reeled back, disoriented and confused.

From the bell tower, Harley belted out the first stream of bullets while the masked specters of the recovery team stalked into the mission with their MP5s blazing.

Behind the protective wall of their fire, Solomon began his search.

A quick sweep of the medieval-style kitchen revealed that it was empty. His men blazed their way toward the chapel, laying out half a dozen rebels who’d put up a resistance that lasted less than five seconds.

Vinny and Teddy flattened themselves against the stucco wall of the church as Gus, a lieutenant, kicked the double doors open and tossed in a flash bang. Simulating a stun grenade, its purpose was to disorient occupants and encourage their evacuation. Solomon peeked inside, just in time to glimpse through his NVGs the orange-red silhouette of a man darting behind a partition.

Time to question a rebel,
he thought, as Gus signaled for him to enter. They left Vinny and Teddy to guard the door as they slipped along a peripheral wall toward the cowering man. “Come out with your hands up, and you won’t be harmed,” Solomon called out in Spanish, as they drew closer.

Flipping up his mask, he determined that the emerging figure was just an adolescent and probably not a rebel, given that he wore the robe of a cleric. He held his arms high above his head, quaking from head to toe.

“We’re looking for gringos,” he said, watching the youth’s reaction.

His panicked gaze darted to the right.

Solomon took note. “Where are they?” he asked again, and Gus hefted his gun threateningly.

“
Abajo,
” squeaked the youth.

“Below?” Solomon countered.

“In a cellar,” Gus guessed.

“
Aquí,
” the boy confirmed, shuffling back into the alcove and pointing at the floor.

“Show us,” commanded Solomon. “Quickly.”

With fluid movements that indicated this was an accustomed task for him, the boy drew a key from his robe, pulled aside a rug that covered the floor, and unlocked a trapdoor, pulling it open. “
Soy yo,
” he called down, identifying himself and adding that he was in the company of American soldiers.

Given the odor rising out of the cellar, those in hiding had been down there for days. Solomon knelt, pulling out his penlight. Gus peered over his shoulder as they strobed the area below.

At the base of a run of rickety steps, they counted three Caucasian adults and four indigenous children all blinking into his light.

“Jordan Bliss?” Solomon asked, centering his light on the adult male.

“No, sorry,” answered the man, who was obviously a Brit. “I’m Father Benedict. Miss Bliss, our teacher, is there.” He nodded.

Miss?
He should have guessed.

The beam of Solomon’s penlight revealed a woman in her early thirties—reddish brown hair, pretty features, eyes that braved the beam to regard him with suspicion. “Who are you?” she demanded in a voice rusty from disuse as she hefted a boy child in her arms.

“Navy SEALs,” he answered curtly. “I’m Senior Chief McGuire. This is Lieutenant Atwater. We’re here to extract you and the British citizens.”

“Praise God,” exclaimed an older female.

“Did you hear that,
niños
?” Jordan Bliss whispered to the little ones. “These men are going to help us.”

“Just adults, ma’am,” Solomon corrected her, gruffly, in a tone that brooked no argument. “No children. Let’s go.”

She looked at him like he’d shot her in the heart. “No,” she protested, on a note as obstinate as his. “We
can’t
leave the children here.”

Solomon glanced up at Gus as he fingered the flexicuffs in his vest pocket. It was standard operating procedure to cuff and even gag, if necessary, the recovery targets to keep them from jeopardizing the operation.

“We are under orders to extract
you,
ma’am, and these two British citizens. No one else,” Gus explained, saving Solomon the trouble.

“Take them, then,” she retorted, her knuckles white as she backed away, drawing the children with her. “I need to go to Ayacucho anyway.”

“They’re orphans,” the priest explained, sending Solomon a look that held great power to influence. “They’ve no one to look after them. And the rebels are a vicious lot, according to Pedro.”

Solomon sneaked a peek at his watch. He thumbed his mike. “Status check.” He did not have time for this.

“No movement in the courtyard,” answered Haiku, “but we can hear what sounds like reinforcements coming, one klick out. Copy.”

“We have the targets sighted,” Solomon reported, weighing his options. Gus, though an officer, lacked experience in search and rescue. This was Solomon’s call.

“I won’t leave without the children,” Jordan Bliss repeated.

He wanted to snap back that he was going to grab her, will she or nill she, but with the priest gazing at him so expectantly, he heard himself say, “We’ll take the children as far as the Landing Zone. No farther. Everyone out.”

As he helped them up the stairs, Gus flexicuffed the older children to each other to decrease the chance that one or two might get lost in the rain forest. He let the little one remain in Jordan’s arms.

“Listen to me,” he growled, inspecting them quickly, “and make sure the children understand this. We are going to hike six miles to the Landing Zone, moving fast, with no time to stop, for any reason. There will be no talking. No crying or whining. Do I make myself clear?”

“Very,” said Jordan with equal heat.

He glared at her. “Let’s go,” he said.

“
Vayan con Dios,
” murmured the youth, as they left the nave, heading for the chapel doors.

Jordan’s arms ached. She had a permanent kink in her spine, but she would not put Miguel down to be swallowed up in Las Amazonas’s dense foliage. The older children, latched together, struggled to keep pace, as it was.

Senior Chief McGuire, Lieutenant Atwater, and two heavily armored SEALs escorted them out of La Misión into the pathless rain forest at a pace just short of a jog. They were joined by two more SEALs, who startled a gasp out of Jordan as they materialized without warning.

Miguel echoed her gasp with a disoriented wail.

“Hush, baby, hush,” she soothed, terrified that the senior chief would demand that they ditch the children. Even in the murky forest, she detected the frown he cast over his shoulder.

Heartless man. Did he even care that she was carrying thirty extra pounds? The mud sucking at her boots felt like glue. The air was so wet she could scarcely draw enough oxygen out of it to feed her aching lungs.

“How’re you doing, ma’am?” inquired one of the SEALs drifting alongside her. Bristling with weaponry and carrying a pack, he hardly sounded winded. Unlike the other four SEALs, he didn’t wear special binoculars, either. He peered, instead, through the infrared scope mounted to the top of his rifle.

“You want me to carry him for you?” he offered, kindly.

“No, thank you,” she replied, laboring on. “Miguel’s afraid of strangers.”

As well he should be. His shadowy history had taken shape at the end of last summer, six months after Father Benedict had discovered him in the care of the older street children. Small for his age, with enormous brown eyes that reflected innocent confusion, Miguel would not speak, other than in whispered words to his companions. It took Jordan’s tireless devotion to coax even a heartfelt giggle out of him. The last thing she wanted was for some stranger to manhandle him and send him scuttling back into his shell.

Leaving him at the mission last summer had nearly broken her heart. Miguel had become her second chance to give love and be loved in return. She’d immediately taken measures to adopt him, which Venezuela’s new government had made possible. But with the Moderates now struggling to keep a foothold, she feared the laws would revert back, putting an untimely end to the painful process of home studies and document gathering, all requirements to securing his dossier.

She had to convince these SEALs that she’d adopted Miguel already, though she still awaited the approval of the court in Ayacucho. Praying the priest and the nun would understand the purpose behind her lies, Jordan hurried to the front of the pack. A frond slapped her wetly in the face. She stumbled over a root. “Excuse me,” she called, to slow down the senior chief.

He swung his masked face around, reminding her of Darth Vader—evil aura and all. “What now?” he demanded, curtly.

“I have to tell you something,” she panted. “I’ve adopted this child, Miguel,” she lied. “He’s my son, and I won’t leave him at the Landing Zone. He’s coming home with me.”

“Show me his adoption papers,” he demanded.

“They’re in Ayacucho, being held by the adoption agency. I have to pick them up,” she explained without exactly lying.

The SEAL ignored her. Glancing at the compass on his watch, he adjusted their direction and pushed on.

Panic made Jordan’s extremities tingle. “I won’t leave him,” she said, chasing after him. “This isn’t even the way to Ayacucho. I need to go east.”

“We’ll talk about your options when we get to the LZ.”

He was implacable. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded with maternal fervor. “Were you raised by wolves? Did you never have a mother?”

He rounded on her, so swiftly, so abruptly that the others bumped into them.

“Do I need to cuff and gag you?” he threatened, startling Miguel awake. The boy loosed a wail of fright.

“Hush, baby.” Jordan immediately sought to quiet him. “It’s all right.”

But the stress of being locked up for four days only to be rudely awakened in the jungle, terrorized by a stranger toting a submachine gun, was too much for Miguel. His cries grew in strength, rising up through the dense vegetation to echo beneath the jungle canopy.

Senior Chief McGuire went rigid. “Make him stop,” he ordered hoarsely.

“You’re the one who frightened him with your threats,” Jordan retorted. “Don’t you know how to speak in a civil voice?”

“Jordan.” Father Benedict stepped between them. “Please don’t argue with the senior chief,” he pleaded. “I’ve decided to take all the children to Puerto Ayacucho. I’ll collect your dossier from the agency there and keep Miguel safe until you can return for him.”

She refused to hear the offer, let alone consider it. No. This was the summer she was going to bring her baby home with her.

Turning away, she drew all the children in her wake, soothing Miguel as she went. “Hush, baby. Hush. You’re safe now. You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.” She prayed she was right. If she left without him, she risked losing him forever in a country ripping apart at the seams. It was unthinkable. She couldn’t survive another separation.

They came abruptly on the LZ, a clearing hacked out of the jungle and burned weekly to keep Mother Nature from taking back what was hers. Solomon spied the silhouette of a Chinook helicopter, backdropped by a sky now the color of pewter. Its rotors spooled lazily at their approach, stirring up a breeze that smelled of mud and rotting fruit.

With a glance at his watch, he thumbed his mike. “Put the women on the helo,” he said to his men. “The children stay with the priest.” He spoke loudly enough for Jordan Bliss to overhear him.

She drew up short, causing all the children to bunch up behind her.

“It’s nothing personal,” he called, turning his head to intercept her horrified look. “My orders don’t allow for extra passengers.” Through his thermal-sensitive NVGs, he saw that she glowed more green than red, as if the blood in her veins had drained right out of her, leaving her cold.

“I won’t leave Miguel!” she insisted, a tremor in her voice, as she gripped the boy fiercely. “I’ll go to Ayacucho with Father Benedict.”

The priest stepped over to intervene. “Give him to me, Jordan,” he persuaded, holding out his hands. “It’s time for you to leave. You shouldn’t have stayed this long in the first place.”

She clutched the boy harder, shaking her head in silent, vehement refusal.

Solomon sent Teddy and Vinny a surreptitious signal. In the next instant, they descended on Jordan and wrested the boy from her arms.

“No!” she shrieked, kicking and flailing as Teddy hoisted her off the ground, carrying her into the chopper’s wind. Vinny handed off the wailing child to the priest and followed.

With a bad taste in his mouth, Solomon nodded at Father Benedict and turned away. He watched in amazement as Jordan wriggled like a cat out of Teddy’s arms and sprang free. In the next instant, she was racing for Miguel, her arms outstretched, screaming out his name.

The indigenous boy cried back, his face wet with tears, mouth agape with confusion and terror, as he struggled in the priest’s hold.

With a whispered curse, Solomon intercepted Jordan’s path. With a lunge and a hook, he caught her up from behind, coiling her in a hold that no amount of twisting or kicking could compromise. “No!” Her cries of raw pain ricocheted inside his head, reawakening memories that had barely faded after five years.

Like a lioness, she fought him, knocking askew his helmet, raking his face with her nails. The heels of her boots pummeled his shins as she writhed in his grasp and, still, he managed to wrestle her to the thundering Chinook, where Vinny and Gus contributed hands to haul her, screaming continuously, into the cabin.

No sooner were they inside than the helicopter rose, racing the sunrise as it bore them up, up, up into the brightening sky. The lush terrain rolled beneath them like a dark ocean, and still Jordan Bliss fought with every ounce of strength to claw her way to the open door.