Hot Intent (Hqn) Page 12

  And she’d made the leap of logic he’d been hoping to avoid her taking. Dammit.

  “Is that why you shot them?” Katie demanded abruptly. “They were doing a cleanup job and would have taken us out?”

  He ground out in a moment of bald honesty, “I killed them so they wouldn’t kill you.” Yes, there were myriad other reasons for a preemptive strike on those two men. But at the end of the day, he’d killed to protect her.

  Katie was silent. At long last, she murmured slowly, “I guess I can live with that.”

  He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. She might not fully understand, but at least she accepted what he’d done. Sometimes, he was grateful she’d grown up in a family full of warriors. There were some things the uninitiated just didn’t get about men like him or her father and brothers.

  He paused and turned to face her. “I would never kill anyone if I did not deem it absolutely necessary. Can you believe me?”

  She stared up at him doubtfully for a moment and then exhaled hard. “Yes. Of course I believe you.”

  He swept her into his arms and kissed her deeply. Her arms looped around his neck and her lithe body stretched against his deliciously. If they weren’t seriously pressed for time, he would lay her down right here and now and lose himself in her body.

  “God, I’m addicted to you,” he groaned against her sweet mouth.

  “Good thing,” she murmured back. “I’m totally addicted to you, too.”

  Something possessive and primitive surged up inside him. He needed to make this woman his and never let her forget it. He contemplated throwing caution to the wind, stripping her clothes off her and having his way with her.

  “We’d better go.” She sighed regretfully. “Work first. Play later. Isn’t that what you always say?”

  He swore under his breath, and she laughed lightly. “Just promise me that someday you’ll truly cut loose with me.”

  “Ahh, Katie. You know not what you ask.”

  “Show me?” she replied hopefully.

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His entire being was galvanized by the notion of losing all control with her. Of turning loose the beast within completely. God, it was tempting. As if his current corner of hell wasn’t tortuous enough. If he destroyed her innocence, there wouldn’t be a pit of fire anywhere in hell deep or hot enough for him.

  The scattered ruins of farms began to cluster more tightly together, and they approached an abandoned village. It was right on the coast and they had to circle wide around the clustered houses to avoid the standing water and mud that filled the main street and hulls of buildings.

  “Where did all the people go?” Katie asked reflectively.

  “They had plenty of advance warning that Giselle was coming. They went across the island to stay with friends or relatives or to shelters inland.”

  “I thought most of Cuba inland was impassable jungle.”

  “The mountainous terrain is the problem. The jungle itself isn’t that bad,” he commented.

  “You’ve seen it, personally?” she asked sharply.

  “Not on the approved conversation list, Katie.” To soften the sting of that, he added, “Any online satellite map of the island will show you what I’m talking about.”

  He angled their steps back to the main coastal road. The silence of the place was eerie. There were no cars, no people, no birds, nothing to disturb the quiet swish and roar of the ocean. Even the trees that normally would have rustled in the breeze were mostly destroyed.

  That was why the sound of an engine in the distance made him grab Katie’s arm, drag her off the road and frantically pull dead palm fronds over them.

  A military jeep rumbled past with four armed soldiers seated in it. It retreated from view, and in the ensuing silence, Katie grumbled, “Fine. They had belts.”

  The corner of his mouth curved up slightly.

  “Now what?” she murmured.

  “If my map is correct, the Zacara factory should be just around that bend in the road ahead.” A rocky bluff jutted out into the surf, and the coastal road wrapped around its base to disappear from sight.

  “Let me guess,” she said dryly. “We get to go over the hill and not around it.”

  “You’re learning, grasshopper.”

  By his standards, the hike was a walk in the park. No one was hunting him, the temperature was reasonable and he only had a quarter mile or so to go. After his arctic-, desert-and jungle-combat survival and evasion training, this was child’s play.

  He led the way at a moderate pace, seeking the easiest route for Katie and pausing often to let her catch her breath. She’d obviously been working out hard while he was gone, for she was significantly stronger than the last time they had to hike a long distance. When they got out of Cuba, he’d love to test the limits of that new strength and endurance in bed with her.

  Finally, the factory came into view below. It was a sprawling collection of big, industrial buildings with block walls. Here and there, the roofing material was peeled back to reveal steel I-beams. That was pretty sturdy construction for a simple cleaning supply facility.

  The big, circular tanks he’d expected, and which no doubt held the raw chemical ingredients of the products Zacara produced, stood in rows on a big platform on the landward side of the largest building. One was tipped over, lying on the ground below the others. From here, he couldn’t see if any of the other tanks were damaged. All of them appeared rusted to one degree or another. The combination of metal tanks and salt air was a sure recipe for corrosion. It lent credence to an innocent explanation for the chemical poisoning deaths he’d observed. Lord, he hoped it was as simple as an unfortunate chemical spill caused by crappy storage tanks and a hurricane.

  He hunkered down to watch the plant and was surprised by the lack of movement. If this was, indeed, ground zero for a secret chemical weapons facility, he would have expected soldiers to be milling around or at least patrolling periodically.

  “Looks deserted,” Katie commented as the shadows lengthened around them. The ocean began to calm beyond the factory.

  “It’s too deserted,” he replied.

  “Like a trap? Why would someone set a trap way out here? Who would they expect to catch? No international aid groups are allowed near here. From what I can tell, the Cuban authorities themselves have yet to reach this area after the hurricane.”

  “We should wait till dark. An ounce of caution is worth a pound of cure.”

  “Learn that at Harvard?” she retorted.

  “My father used to say it. He wasn’t wrong about everything, you know.”

  That silenced little Miss Mom and Apple Pie. She still struggled to wrap her brain around a world where Uncle Sam wasn’t only a short step down from holy. He sighed. Uncle Sam was his employer now. He supposed he was obliged to show a little loyalty to the Stars and Stripes.

  Katie muttered, “We’ve been here all afternoon. If someone were patrolling the area, we’d have seen them by now. My guess is the soldiers or workers who would normally be here have been sent out into the countryside to help the locals. I say we go down there, get whatever samples you want and get the heck out of Dodge. It’s going to get pitch-black out here and we’ll miss something important if we wait any longer.”

  He sighed. “Fine. Pass me the bag.” She did so, and he pulled out what he’d spent nearly twenty-four hours straight performing surgery in Baracoa for. A small, handheld sensor that was preprogrammed to sniff for various chemicals in the air. Civil defense agencies all over the world had them. The physician in charge of the Baracoa emergency room had been reluctant to lend this one out but hadn’t been able to pass up the services of a top-notch trauma surgeon in return for it.

  They had moved him from patient to patient to perform the difficult portions of a dozen surgeries, while another surgeon opened and closed for him. He’d never done so much work so fast in his life. It was assembly-line medicine at its best. However, they’d completel
y cleared out every surgical case in the entire hospital. He’d even performed a simple coronary bypass and repaired a hernia before it was all said and done.

  The electronic sensor he’d gotten in return was of Russian make. It took him a minute to decipher the various buttons and the readout, but once he understood it, he started down the hill with the device activated.

  As they neared the factory, the sensor indicated trace amounts of ammonia in the air, but not in enough quantity to pose any kind of threat. The high hurricane fence around the plant had turned out not to be so hurricane-proof, and its tangled ruins were easy to step through.

  Deep silence enveloped the facility. Up close, more damage was apparent and they were able to duck into the main building through a ten-foot-tall hole in a wall. Some sort of bottling-and-labeling assembly line was trashed inside. It looked like the hull of a giant centipede.

  “Sheesh, this place is creepy. I half expect a zombie to pop out of the shadows,” Katie muttered.

  He was too busy watching for possible threats to register such things. Something skittered in a corner, and he nearly shot a rat. He was grateful to see the rodent. It was tantamount to a canary in a mineshaft. The rat’s presence meant the air was probably safe to breathe throughout the factory.

  What intrigued him most was how abandoned this place looked. Had the hurricane done all this damage? Or had the factory been decaying for a while before Giselle hit?

  “This is the place with the dock, right?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “That’s what our driver said. He said ships come in here regularly.”

  Alex made his way to the ocean side of the building, and he and Katie shoved opened a big sliding door facing this supposed dock. Unlike the decrepit facility behind them, this area looked relatively well cared for. The damage from the hurricane was severe, but there was very little rust or corrosion, and the mangled equipment looked reasonably modern and maintained.

  A paved road and a torn-up rail line must have been the main points of debarkation for cargo. One of each curved into the cluster of buildings behind them. But a second, smaller road seemed to pass beyond the fenced Zacara buildings. Frowning, he started to walk down it.

  “Should we go ninja and be more sneaky now?” Katie breathed.

  “Anyone else in the area won’t expect us to be here. They won’t try to mask the noise of their presence.”

  “So we’re just going to march down that road into the unknown?”

  “Pretty much.” Funny how he wasn’t worried about what would come around the corner. He’d been trained to handle just about any eventuality on the fly.

  The chemical sensor beeped a general warning, and he stopped to run a specific analysis. The electronic face identified the airborne chemical it sensed as “Unknown.” The parts per million displayed on the gauge were still very low, though, so he continued walking forward.

  “Should we have gas masks or something?” Katie asked nervously.

  “If the levels of unidentified gasses climb too much, we’ll go back. Wind’s at our backs, though, so we should be okay to proceed.” In fact, a stiff breeze was picking up, blowing in to shore. Given the time of day, there must be a front of some kind moving into the area. Rain was a pain in the ass, but it did make stealthy movement easy. Not to mention it tended to keep possible pursuers indoors.

  He spied a dark lump on the side of the road ahead. Intuition and many hours in emergency rooms made him murmur to Katie, “Wait here.”

  He moved ahead and knelt beside the dead soldier. The body looked like it had been here a few days. It was bloated and flies crawled on the exposed skin. But the signs of how this man died were still visible. Dried blood stained the corner of his mouth and had run from his nose, and the soldier’s hands clutched at his own throat as if he’d choked in some way.

  Alex photographed the soldier dispassionately with his cell phone before pulling out a scalpel and removing tissue samples from the inside of the man’s nasal cavity, his lungs and his stomach lining. He finished by scraping dirt stained dark with blood from under the corpse into a plastic bag.

  He waved Katie forward. As she drew near, averting her face, he moved on down the road with her. And he paid very close attention to the face of the gauge in his hand. The road led inland a few hundred yards uphill into thick undergrowth. It stopped in front of a low mound of weeds.

  “This is it?” Katie asked, looking around in confusion.

  “Bunker,” he muttered, walking around to the side of the mound. Sure enough, a heavy-duty steel door was recessed into the side of the hill.

  “Is this where they store the explosive furniture polish?” she asked dryly.

  He smiled slightly. His gauge beeped, urgently this time. “I think we may have found the source of our chemical leak.”

  “And we would be leaving now, right?” Katie said, backing up already.

  “Wind’s blowing steadily. As long as we stay upwind of this place, we should be okay.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “How are you at holding your breath?” he asked, studying the steel door, which, at a closer look, appeared heavily damaged.

  “Not bad. I can go around two minutes.”

  “I can do three. I’ll go in,” he announced. He started stripping off his clothes in a pile beside her.

  “As much as I love sex with you, now’s not exactly the time—”

  He cut her off. “I don’t want my clothes getting contaminated.”

  She threw him an alarmed look.

  “Count two minutes in your head and then yell out,” he directed her. “If I’m not out in four minutes, hold your breath, and come drag me out.”

  “Are you sure we should be doing this? It seems really dangerous.”

  “That would be the point, now, wouldn’t it?” he commented as he moved forward, eyeing the door.

  It looked like some sort of mudslide had come through this steep area, for the door was badly dented like boulders had slammed into it. If the mudslide had happened early in the hurricane, the later rain could have washed the evidence of it away. A big, horizontal bar that looked like part of the locking mechanism was twisted and broken. It was this he focused his attention on. He took one last deep breath and moved forward to try lifting it. It moved a little but was too heavy for him.

  He backed up to her side. “I need your help, Katie.”

  She took a deep breath and moved forward with him. By both of them planting their shoulders under the bar and lifting with their legs, they were able to prize the bar free of a broken bracket. It thudded onto the dirt at their feet. The door behind them gapped open a little. A black abyss yawned beyond.

  They both backed up and breathed again.

  Alex grabbed handfuls of plastic bags and test tubes, nodded at her to begin counting and moved forward gingerly.

  Katie positioned herself outside so she could point their flashlight—a high-powered, directed beam affair—into the darkness. It was enough for him to see stacks of barrels mostly filling the space. Labels in Arabic script, which he couldn’t read, were visible. Next trip in here, he’d bring his phone and take pictures of those.

  Careful to avoid any puddles at the bases of the barrels, he took air samples near the barrels with his plastic bags and sealed them. Katie called a two-minute warning, and he filled a couple of test tubes from the puddles on the floor before he started to see spots before his eyes. He backed out carefully and when well clear and facing into the wind, took a bunch of deep breaths.

  He passed Katie the test tubes and bags. “Cover these completely with duct tape, and label them with the time, date and GPS location.”

  She worked on that while he pulled out his cell phone and got ready to go in again. Three more times he went inside the bunker to pull samples. The last time, he actually pried barrels open and very carefully dipped samples of the liquid contents. Modern chemical poisons were generally most lethal in an aerosolized form and inhaled. Blisteri
ng agents that relied on skin contact were harder to disseminate and less effective on a large scale, hence had gone out of fashion.

  The rational part of his brain informed him in no uncertain terms that taking these samples was madness. But it was also his job. Better that he risk his life and potentially save thousands of other people from harm or death, right?

  But at the cost of Katie’s and Dawn’s lives? He should get the hell out of here, pretend they’d never found the bunker and get on with his life like his father had told him to. He didn’t for a minute doubt that Peter would follow through on his veiled threat to kill Katie and Dawn if proof of the existence of this bunker’s contents got out.

  But the United States really did need to know these chemicals were here. No way would America tolerate chemical weapons in the control of a hostile foreign government so close to its own soil. God knew, there were enough chemicals in this bunker to wipe out several major metropolitan areas in their entirety.

  He was deeply undecided as to how to proceed. For now, he would collect the damned samples. There was still time to destroy the evidence. If there was a way to both give the United States the evidence and to protect his family, he had yet to figure it out. He’d threaded some tricky needles in his day, but this might be the one that was too much for him.

  He passed the last test tubes to Katie to seal up and label with an admonition to be careful with these ones.

  When she finished, he said, “If you could pick up my clothes, I’m heading back to the beach for a bath.”

  “You do realize how silly you look prancing around out here buck naked, yes?”

  He made a face at her. “That’s me. The stark-naked spy.”

  She laughed and followed him down the road. He picked his way down the rocks to the water, which was brutally cold. He hoped the salt water would help neutralize any chemical residue on his skin. Katie tossed him their bar of soap, and he scrubbed his skin until he felt raw all over. After washing his hair and rinsing it out with salt water, he climbed out of the water shivering. He was just making his way up the jumble of man-size boulders when a man-made sound rose over the surf. He swore under his breath as he leaped from rock to rock.