SLEEPER (Crossfire Series) (2 page)

As a spotter, it could get pretty cold and miserable, especially if the ground was damp or if the weather decided not to cooperate. But this was a SEAL’s way of life—long periods of waiting before action, and practice run-throughs were taken just as seriously as the real thing.

Reed adjusted the intercom mic. “Sir, I hear another vehicle approaching. Will see it in approximately sixty seconds, over.”

“Keep me updated, Joker, over,” Jazz replied.

“Yes, sir.” He saw the headlights hit the darkness of the woods first. Then the vehicle turned into view. “It looks like a van. It’s slowing down, over.”

“Standing and ready, sir,” came several answers over the mic. A vehicle stopping in the middle of the night could mean anything in these parts.

Jazz arched his eyebrows at Reed’s words. Silently, he turned in the direction Reed was pointing. He looked through the night viewer. The driver hadn’t bothered to turn off the headlights, so it was easy to recognize the female silhouettes moving back and forth. “They’re armed,” he murmured.

“Not all of them,” Reed said. “Three of them are. The others come out two at a time and disappear into the bushes nearby. So far, three pairs, so that makes six girls plus those three. Nine.”

“Eleven now,” Jazz corrected, still looking. “All women.”

“Yeah, and not too concerned about how dangerous it is to stop in the middle of nowhere with the headlights shining for everyone to see.” Reed could only shake his head. He didn’t know who these women were, but it was foolhardy to be driving this late and stopping here on this particular road. He pulled out his night-vision binoculars. “They don’t look like tourists either, not with those weapons.”

“The blonde standing in front of the vehicle is the leader,” Jazz noted.

Reed turned his binoculars on the figure. The woman was taller than the others and held what looked like a small Uzi with the easy assurance of someone who knew how to use it. She was saying something to the two heading back, probably urging them to hurry. At least someone down there knew about the danger.

He adjusted the binoculars, pushing on the zoom button, for a closer look. The woman had shoulder-length blond hair she was flicking back impatiently with one hand. She turned to look upward in the direction of the lookout point, an uneasy expression on her face. She seemed to stare directly up at him, as if she knew someone was up there. A watchfulness replaced the impatience and she cocked her head, listening to the night, looking for clues.

Reed knew she wouldn’t be able to see him and his commander. They were hidden in a natural niche on the side of the mountain, in the shadows of shrubs and trees. But it was still uncanny the way her senses picked up something from their particular spot.

“She can feel us,” Reed said.

“She’s probably nervous. I would be, too, with so many women under my care,” Jazz said. “Bet they’re illegals. Wonder what country she’s heading to.”

Travelers with the right papers and enough cash using the mountain passes could easily move from Kosovo to Macedonia to Croatia to Albania without being asked too many questions. They could be smugglers, mercenaries, ordinary folks looking for a new life, runaways, even reporters doing some independent work. There was nothing surprising about a group of armed people traveling these roads.

“What do we do?”

“Nothing.”

Reed looked away from the binoculars for a second. “Nothing?” he echoed. That was very unusual coming from his commander. Jazz Zeringue had a soft protective core where women were concerned. Usually he would be the first to run off to help any females in trouble. But then, the women below didn’t look like they needed any assistance.

“There’s not much we can do. They are plenty nervous right now. What are they going to do if we show up suddenly?”

A group of men. In uniform. In the dark. “They’ll get the wrong idea,” Reed agreed. He imagined a bunch of screaming women running around in the woods. “So we just let them continue down the pass? They’ll meet up with some mercenaries sooner or later.”

He returned his attention to the scene. Well, a bunch of women screaming, minus that one. The blonde looked cool and steadfast as she gave out calm orders. The last of the girls returned to the vehicle. Then she turned and nodded to the two with her, and they made their way into the bushes while she stood guard.

“Do you have any suggestions?” Jazz asked. “We’re heading off tomorrow, so we can’t actually follow these women to their destination. I can radio back, but by the time anyone shows up, these ladies will be long gone. There are hundreds of illegals moving back and forth in these parts, Joker.”

Jazz sounded concerned, but he was right. There was nothing they could do. Reed wished he could somehow help the women. He didn’t care whether they understood the dangers ahead or not or that they were armed. They were no match for the firepower of a group of hardened criminals.

He looked down toward the vehicle for a few seconds. “They must have good reason to be doing this alone,” he finally said, reluctantly disengaging his personal interest. It was an easy thing for a sharpshooter to do, but then, he hadn’t needed much training to learn how to switch off his emotions. “I’m betting they know what they’re doing and that they’re prepared as best as they can be.”

“I’ll still radio in,” Jazz said as he adjusted his scope. “Maybe they have other teams not far from here who can keep an eye on them or something. For the moment, we’ll make sure they’re safe till they’re off.”

That was how Jazz was. He would go the extra mile to protect women and automatically expected that every other man, especially in uniform, should be like that too. Reed respected both his commanders very much; as leaders they’d taught him different things. Because he was a loner by nature, his decisions tended to be about himself. Now that he’d been working in the STAR Force team for a few years, he’d lately found himself asking what Jazz or Hawk would do in certain situations.

He zoomed in on the blonde woman again as she headed out behind the bushes alone. Unlike the others, who had sprinted like scared rabbits, she didn’t seem afraid. He couldn’t see her expression at this angle, but it was there in the way she held her weapon, the sure gait of her walk, the quick glances back toward the vehicle, as if she knew the girls in there depended on her strength.

In a few minutes they would be on their way, another image in his collection of unexplained interesting scenes during an operation. Maybe it was good it would be one of the unexplained ones. That way he could write a happy ending for these women. The real stories never gave him any satisfaction.

The woman emerged from the shadows and walked quickly back to the vehicle. She waited till the others got in on the driver’s side then slammed the door shut. The van started up. She moved to the passenger side and opened the door.

Reed watched her duck inside and was expecting the door to close and the van to take off. Suddenly, her head reappeared over the top of the van and the bright glare of a spotlight hit his binoculars.

“Damn!” Jazz said as he and Reed quickly pulled the scopes off their faces. The light wasn’t from a regular flashlight but from professional search and track teams. It could pick off reflections from glass and metal, just like sunlight.

The unmistakable sound of gunfire. A spray of bullets hit near the lookout point, some close enough to shake the leaves off the branches above onto them.

“I fucking hate Peeping Toms!” a female voice called out in Croatian just before the squealing of tires. More gunfire. Then darkness again.

Reed crawled forward and looked through the binoculars. The van was zipping down the road at a dangerous speed. Behind him he could hear the rest of his team climbing to their aid.

“What the hell was that all about?” Cucumber asked when they found that no one was injured.

Jazz gave them a brief account.

“Let’s see. We’re going to report to Hawk that tonight we saw a bunch of women traveling down the road and they all stopped for nature’s call. Then one of them turned her Uzi and nearly killed you,” Dirk said dryly. “He’s going to laugh his ass off.”

“At least it was just one person who was onto them,” Mink said. Reed could hear the laughter in his voice. “Imagine a whole bunch of very mad women shooting at the two of them and we’ve to come to their rescue.”

Lily looked straight ahead into the darkness. “Drive on,” she ordered quietly. They had been on the road for days now, so she knew they were tired. “We’ll be with the others soon.”

“There was no one there!” Marisa obstinately persisted. “And even if there were, they could have followed us and killed us all.”

Marisa was right, of course, about the possibility of being shot at. But that was nothing new, everyone had been right for a long time now. Lily smiled bitterly. It seemed, even with her eyes wide open, she was determined to live life on the edge. But she’d been sure someone was watching. Those reflections hadn’t been her imagination.

“They were there.” She knew she sounded brusque, but she didn’t feel like arguing. “I got our first group through safely to Albania without a hitch. Don’t you trust my skills?”

“Of course we do, but why didn’t we just drive off? What if they had shot back?”

Lily looked behind her. She’d ordered the girls to duck down before she’d started her gunfire, telling them not to panic. Most of them didn’t seem particularly traumatized by her actions. But then, most of them had seen more than their share of violence during their captivity. Only the few who had been rescued before their imprisonment in the brothels were sobbing quietly.

Once upon a time, she would have shrugged and told anyone questioning her authority to shut up and just do as they were told. She would have replied that being shot at was half the fun. Besides that, she would have hired a few more bodyguards, giving the impression to any mercenaries or gang members roaming the countryside roads this was just another batch of kidnapped girls being transported to various
kafenas
around these parts.

But everything was different now. She had to do this alone because she couldn’t trust anyone. But could she even trust herself? “I don’t care about ‘what ifs,’” she finally replied. “It didn’t happen and we gave them warning in case they’d gotten any ideas of coming closer. Look, either you all have to trust me in this or we can’t do this at all. I gave you a choice and you chose to follow me instead of going with the peacekeepers. So are you all in or not?”

Lily had left out many parts of the truth when she’d told them what had recently happened. When she’d gathered them from the safe houses in which she’d found them hiding, she’d informed them the authorities had finally taken Dragan Dilaver’s illegal
kafenas
apart. The girls had cheered because many of them had been captives in those hellholes, but Lily cautioned there would be many gangs roaming around now, each one trying to be dominant, and they would, sooner or later, reopen similar places, and their clients would still be the same people.

This she knew without a doubt. The way these scumbags ran their illegal trades was the only thing she was very sure of.

They had to leave earlier than planned, she’d told them. She would transport them in two groups to a safe place, where they’d hide until she could get “legal” papers done for everyone.

“You know we’ll follow you, Lily,” one of the girls said from the back of the van. “You saved us.”

There were other murmurs of agreement from behind her. She knew the girls would understand what she was saying. Many of the brothel clients were, in fact, the peacekeepers themselves, because they were the ones with the cash flow to spend in the kafenas. There was no guarantee that if the girls went to the local authorities for help they would be safe from corrupt officials who were looking to make some money on the side. That was how they had been transported from country to country in the first place—through illegal channels and corrupted officials.

“Good. Go take a nap now,” she advised. “We’ll be joining the others sooner than you know, and then we’ll be okay for a while.”

Lily thought about the choice she had offered them: either place their lives in the hands of the local authorities or peacekeepers, whichever they liked, or come with her and she would do her best to get them to wherever they wanted after they were healed. There were two dozen girls in her care right now, most of whom weren’t able to travel without being noticed. They all needed time to lay low and recuperate.

Not much of a choice, she bleakly acknowledged, staring out at the road as the van sped into the darkness. They didn’t know it, but by giving her their trust, they had saved her life. She didn’t know what she would have done if she’d been left alone, without anything ahead of her. She had nearly—No, she wouldn’t think about that right now.