Target Engaged (27 page)

Kyle really had to remember to come back from the dead more often. The perks were great.

Carla's kisses and throttlehold by both of her arms around the back of his neck were almost as powerful as the full-body impact of her flying into his arms and driving him backward into the mud.

By the time he'd untangled himself from Carla, the battle was finished. The others filtered into the clearing until they stood staring at the submarines.

The worst of the storm had blown through and only the higher-elevation lightning, now rippling and rumbling benignly across the heavens, lit the subs in successive flashes.

“I am so damn proud of you, guys.” He hugged the sopping wet Carla who was still clinging to his side. She hadn't spoken yet, but she hadn't let go either, so he wasn't complaining.

“Thought you'd be dead, bro.” Chad slapped him on the shoulder away from Carla.

“I was. At least Estevan thought so. I was about to try to tackle my personal firing squad barehanded when a ground-strike lightning bolt had them blinded for a moment. So I tumbled into the water and curled right back under the dock while they shot up the empty river. Then I swam well out and let myself drift to the surface. Good thing these guys didn't know to do an extra shot to make sure I was dead. Would've stung like hell.”

He said it with bravado, but he'd been far more terrified when he'd spotted Estevan with a pistol aimed at the back of Carla's head as she lay helpless before him.

“You, by the way”—he kissed her temple—“were magnificent. We definitely need to add that to our training. I started swimming over from the opposite shore of this piece of the river when the mayhem began. I thought the entire team was here, not just you.”

Carla squeezed him a little tighter around the ribs but didn't look at him.

Richie came over from where he'd been inspecting the subs. “You know, I think these things would actually work. And all three are already loaded.”

“Loaded?” Chad looked at him in surprise. “With what?”

“Large bales of very expensive drugs. Fred Smith said around ten metric tons in each boat. So figure thirty tons total or about twenty percent of what enters the U.S. each year is sitting right here. We found their main submarine guy.” He gave Estevan's expensive, Italian leather boot a kick.

“Dude.” Chad high-fived Richie. “If I was still on the street, I'd be rich.”

“Yeah, too bad we can't get it out of here. Only one of the subs looks finished, at least I think so. The other two don't have fuel or their electronics suite yet.”

“The one in the water works,” Kyle agreed. “When I was swimming in the lake, I could hear them testing the engines.”

“Too bad we can't tow the others outta here and get rid of them somewhere deep.”

“Richie, my man.” Chad wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “You just said the magic word. C'mon, babe.”

Tanya fell in beside him and they disappeared back into the woods.

* * *

Carla was still having trouble speaking. She did manage to stop clinging, but she'd be damned if she let Kyle out of her sight. She was far from over the miracle of his resurrection.

They prowled through containers and sheds, marking several for destruction.

When Chad and Tanya had pulled the
policía
boat into the backwater of Estevan's compound, they returned to the subs. Duane loaded up on charges and moved off to blow shit up. In a matter of moments, Chad had pulled the other two subs into the water where they rode comfortably, tied so that they could be towed in a line off the powerboat's stern. They wouldn't be able to go fast or far, but it would be enough to get the subs out into the lake and sink them deep.

“Too bad we won't have anything to show for it.” Richie was looking at them sadly. “They're actually impressively well-thought-out craft.”

“You know…” Carla knew her voice was rough, and she could still only speak facing away from Kyle. Each time she looked at him, her heart was too full to allow words to escape. She tried again. “You know, Q…” She drawled the moniker. “I'll bet that you could pilot a submarine.”

It only took a moment before he latched on to the idea and was racing to the finished sub still tied to the dock to study it in more detail.

“That was cruel.” Kyle came up close beside her and slid an arm around her waist.

Carla nodded. Richie would never tire of telling stories about the day he'd captained a narco-sub. They'd be living with that for a long time to come.

She turned into Kyle's arms and looked up at his eyes for the first time since he'd miraculously come back to life. By the flickering light of the now-distant Catatumbo lightning she could see how he looked at her.

That too was something she could live with for a long time.

But the words were still locked up, so she merely tucked her face into his collarbone and breathed him in. He smelled damp, muddy, and one hundred percent Kyle.

* * *

They gathered for a moment around Bolívar Estevan's corpse.

Kyle felt as if he deserved a moment of silence. Another drug lord would rise up in his place, and he too would have to be beaten down, but the bastard had been a good and worthy opponent and a major kingpin.

Tanya was last to join them and wore a wicked smile.

“What?”

“Found these in your kit bag.” She held up an Antrax black kerchief with the silver jaw of a fanged skeleton on half of it. And, by the next fading flash of lightning, he saw that she held aloft one of the shoulder boards from his Venezuelan general's military uniform. On it was the round “Sun” pin of his pretended rank.

“Shall we confuse them out of the living daylights?”

“Timothy Dalton's first Bond film,” Richie intoned. “Bond girl was Maryam d'Abo.”

They turned to stare at him.

“What?
The Living Daylights.
Opium wars, bad generals dealing drugs. Maryam is pretty hot. It all works.”

They turned to stare back down as Tanya tied the kerchief over Estevan's face as a declaration of who had done the deed. And then attached the sun pin right between the fangs on the kerchief.

Kyle had to smile. He wasn't sure he had a laugh in him, but it was very good.

It was an invitation to a war. Drug cartel against drug cartel right across international boundaries. The bloodbath at Estevan's compound by the hands of a supposed alliance between Sinaloa and an unknown faction of the Cartel de los Soles would change the entire landscape of the Latin American drug trade.

For the worse, if you were in it.

Chad swept Tanya into his arms to plant his approval squarely on her lips.

Kyle nodded his thanks.

“Now let's get out of this place.”

There wasn't a single complaint.

Chad and Tanya towed the two nonfunctioning subs out to the deepest point of the lake with the rest of them following in the sub that Richie was driving.

Kyle really hoped that Richie got the hang of it soon. He was improving, but they tended to yaw side to side unexpectedly, once doing a full circle before continuing forward and then nearly diving with the hatch still open.

Once they were out over the deepest part of the lake, Duane spent time aboard each of the derelicts before joining them on the operational sub. The unfinished boats were already sinking out of sight.

“I opened the ballast tanks to the lake. I rigged a thermite charge in the cabin to go first. That should burn up the cocaine or at least most of it. If someone had told me I was going to be incinerating twenty metric tons of the stuff, I'd have come better prepared.”

“Twenty billion delivered, six or seven times that on the street.” Chad sighed. “Now that's some walkin'-around money.”

“Yep,” Duane agreed, “but then you'd have assholes like us after your sorry ass. See, crime doesn't pay, bro. Anyway, after that burns for a while, around when the sub reaches the lake bottom, the small charges I set will slice each sub into about eight parts. Shouldn't see anything up here but bubbles.”

“Like a giant fart.” Chad sounded as pleased by that as by the idea of twenty billion cash in his pocket.

“A sweet one.” Duane had to have the last word.

Tanya had been at the controls of the police boat, shuttling Duane where he needed to be with Chad as his assistant. In between, they'd moved their gear and finally all boarded the functioning sub.

She pulled up close alongside.

“Come on over.” Chad held out a hand. “We can just let that boat drift. No one will care.”

She didn't bring it any closer.

Carla tucked her hand in Kyle's and clamped on hard.

He turned to look at her, but she was watching Tanya with a look of pain on her face.

Oh shit! And Chad didn't see it coming.

Kyle didn't know what to do to help him.

“You are so sweet,” Tanya said in that teasing tone of hers from across the watery gap between their craft. “I think you have something wonderful started here. I have many contacts other than the General and Estevan. No one still alive except you knows which side I'm on. With the right misinformation, we might really get something done here.”

“No wait!” Chad was edging out as far as he dared on the curved deck of the sub, but Tanya expertly idled the boat a few meters farther away.

“Maybe next time, cutie.”

She waved at Chad.

Then, after slamming down the throttle but before the engines really took hold, she blew a very sincere-looking kiss to Carla.

An instant later she was gone.

Duane moved in to console his friend and to keep him from tipping off the side of the sub into the lake.

Kyle looked down at Carla's smile as she watched Tanya shoot away across the now-quiet lake. “Any explaining you want to do?”

Damn woman only smiled and shook her head before moving over to console Chad.

* * *

Once they were below, Richie insisted on being the tour guide for “his” sub. It was broken into several compartments, none of them meant for comfort. Most of the central area was taken up by bales of cocaine. They were stacked everywhere, barely leaving slither space between them.

Richie sat on a high chair that reached up inside the conning tower. He had a dashboard of controls, wheel, foot pedals, radio, sonar. Carla had to admit that she was impressed, but she didn't look beyond that.

“Imagine their faces on the
Freedom
when we surface beside them with ten tons of cocaine.” Richie was crowing, but Carla barely heard him.

There were words forming inside her. They'd be coming, and coming soon. Though she still wasn't sure what they were or what they meant, they were slowly filling the aching void inside her. Except the void no longer ached as badly as she'd grown used to.

The sub's rear compartment was filled with diesel engines and the big battery packs for when they had to run submerged, like through the channel across from Maracaibo. Chad and Duane took over engine operations right away.

The forward compartment was mostly food and two very narrow bunks to stretch out on. Hot-bunking. One person would roll out and another would roll in, sleeping in shifts.

All she cared about was that the others were soon busy with their own tasks.

The sound of the engines thrumming through the hull smoothed out as Chad and Duane worked their magic. Richie had finally gotten control of the ballast and trim tanks. The soft light of the breaking dawn, muted by the thick fiberglass of the hull, shifted as the sub sank to a lower profile until only the engine's air snorkel and a short periscope showed above the surface.

She pulled the curtain on the cramped forward area.

Finally, it was just her and Kyle.

He dragged her down beside him onto the lower bunk. They leaned back against the curved hull and propped their feet up on packs of foodstuffs. It couldn't have been more like the end of the Forty-Miler unless there was a campfire. The pressure of his shoulder against hers reassured her that it was safe to continue.

No, it was safe. Full stop.

“There was a cavern inside me.”

“Guessed that.”

“Shut up.”

Damn man just grinned at her, cocky bastard. So full of himself and every bit of it deserved.

She thought about trying to explain the emptiness that had been the last four years of her life since Clay's death—a cavern so vast and wide that she'd become lost in it.

But now, sitting beside Kyle's quiet strength, she understood that the only thing that mattered was how full her heart was, not how empty she'd been.

“Sergeant Kyle Reeves.”

“Yes, Sergeant Carla Anderson?” Having found herself, she could happily get lost again in his voice. Every single time, even on that first day, she had trouble hearing him because she so enjoyed listening to that deep, warm voice.

She could make a life's plan out of doing just that.

What the hell, why not? She knew for a fact she would never find a better place to be than beside Kyle Reeves. Never find anywhere else that she wanted to be. If she didn't know what that meant, then she was impossibly stupid. And as she'd told Colonel Brighton,
I ain't stupid.

Carla finally understood what had been building inside her over the seven months since she'd first rolled into The Unit's compound. And like Delta training, it made perfect sense once you'd gotten through it and could look back. Typical Kyle, he'd seen it long before she had, but she'd gotten there.

She raised her right hand.

“Kyle Reeves. I, Carla Anderson, do solemnly swear that while I may be a wild woman, I am completely and desperately in love with you and that I will, from this day forth, bear true faith and allegiance to you.”

Hey, if she was going to mangle the Oath of Enlistment of the U.S. Armed Forces, she might as well do it the whole way.

“So help me God.”

Kyle burst out laughing—a sound that filled the sub's chamber and filled her heart. He pulled her into his lap and held her tight in the circle of his powerful arms.

She buried her face against his neck and breathed him in, could feel his chest rumble when he spoke.

“May he help us both.”

Carla breathed him in again. “It's she.”

Order M. L. Buchman's next book
in The Night Stalkers series

By Break of Day

On sale February 2016