Hot Intent (Hqn) Read online

  He zeroed in on the nearest soldier, a guy who was smoking a cigarette close to a hole in the fence. Smokers tended to cluster together and return to the same spots to smoke. If he was lucky, that would be the case today.

  Long before he made his way to the fence line, the original smoker had wandered on. But Alex positioned himself so the corner of a building blocked the spot from the sight of most of the rest of the facility, and he hunkered down to wait.

  It took about two hours, but the same soldier strolled around the corner, already shaking a cigarette out of a pack. Alex let him light up and take a long, appreciative puff. He timed his attack for when the soldier was exhaling long and slow and pounced. No air in the guy’s lungs meant no warning shout was possible.

  Alex jumped the guy from the back and, using the butt of his knife, clocked him in the back of the head. It was quick and quiet; however, the blow cut the guy’s scalp and he began to bleed. As the soldier sagged to the ground, Alex caught him, swearing under his breath.

  The guy was heavy as hell. Alex eased him to the ground and hastily stripped off the guy’s shirt before it got too bloody. He went to work fast unlacing the soldier’s boots from his feet. Unlike in television shows, most people had a tendency not to stay unconscious for long. By the time he was ready to strip off the guy’s pants, the soldier was starting to rouse. He chopped the guy hard in the base of his skull to buy himself a few more minutes to make his escape.

  Working fast, he tore a piece of cloth off his own ruined shirt and stuffed it in the guy’s mouth. Out of deference to Katie, he checked the guy’s nostrils to be sure they were clear and that the guy would be able to breathe while gagged.

  He tore more strips off his shirt and used them to bind the soldier’s wrists and ankles together. Housekeeping matters taken care of, he put on the soldier’s uniform. It was a reasonably good fit. Beret jauntily cocked over his right eye, Alex dragged the guy through the fence and behind a pile of stones. He bunched driftwood over the unconscious soldier hastily, and then jumped back through the fence.

  He picked up the guy’s cigarette, which was just burning out. And in the nick of time, too. Another soldier poked his head around the corner and barked at Alex to get back to his post. Face downcast, he ground out the stub beneath his heel and muttered an acknowledgment.

  He took a deep breath and rounded the corner. He had no idea what the soldier’s post was. Rather than try to fake it, he struck out confidently across the yard, as if he’d been sent on an errand for someone.

  He veered first toward the helicopter. It was an easy matter to open the cockpit door, reach under the instrument panel and yank out a big fistful of wires. He grabbed another handful and tore them out, for good measure.

  After that, he made his way to the parked vehicles. His nerves were jumping all over the place, and he had to consciously force them into silence. Funny thing, fear. Once he’d learned to control it and hold it at bay, it had become more of curiosity to him than an actual force in his life.

  He spotted the guy who’d yelled at him heading down toward the dock. Alex hurried his steps to reach the nearest truck before the guy could get where he was going and turn around.

  Alex tested the door handle. Unlocked. He slid into the vehicle and hunted in the usual places for keys. No luck. He lay down on the seat and opened the glove compartment, and voilà. A key on a ring.

  He snatched it out and tried it in the ignition. For once, the gods of luck seemed to be on his side. The key fit. Hot-wiring vehicles was Spy Craft 101, but it took a few minutes he could ill afford at the moment. Pulling on a pair of sunglasses he found on the dashboard, he started the truck, threw it into gear and pulled out of the yard.

  No one yelled at him. Which meant it would take a few minutes for someone to casually ask someone else who’d just left and why. Then there’d be a few more minutes of confusion while everyone was accounted for and then questioned. He figured he would get about ten minutes’ head start, worst case.

  The moment he rounded the headland, he floored the truck. The ride was horrendous, but time was against him and banging his head on the ceiling was a small price to pay for his life.

  The only passable road in the area was the main one back toward Baracoa, so that was the one he followed. Just north of Baracoa, a secondary road cut inland, eventually curving south to rejoin the main highway in the mountains. It was for this he headed.

  The sky stayed thankfully empty of helicopters. He must have done a number on the bird back there. As he reached the south end of the flat plateau of plantations and farming co-ops, he spied a long puff of dust in the distance behind him. The good news was the vehicles were so far back he couldn’t even count how many there were. The bad news was that even the cloud of dust looked pissed.

  The road rose out of the long valley into the hills and he banged along, trying not to get thrown out of his seat while looking for the turnoff he wanted.

  There. The intersection loomed just ahead. He careened around the corner and screeched to a stop. Leaping out of the cab, he used a big palm leaf to rub out his tire tracks hastily. It cost him precious time, but he hoped it would throw the convoy behind him off his track at least temporarily.

  The quality of this road was significantly worse. More than once he tested the limits of the truck’s heavy-duty suspension. He almost got stuck crossing a swollen stream, but the spinning tires caught at the last minute and hauled him up onto the slippery far bank.

  He stopped again to erase his tracks from the mud and then proceeded onward. His entire world narrowed down to walls of green growth crowding him, and watching his rearview mirror. Whenever a patch of sky opened up overhead, he scanned it anxiously for helicopters. His hands ached from gripping the steering wheel, and the tops of his thighs were sore from banging into the steering wheel’s bottom rim.

  The afternoon passed in a green haze, and as night was falling, he finally emerged into a decent-size intersection. He’d reached the main highway again. Gratefully, he turned south. The quality of the road didn’t improve much, and the tree cover was substantially less. His nerves stretched tighter and tighter.

  If he was insanely lucky, the Cubans had pegged him for a simple thief and hadn’t thrown their whole damned military at him. But he wasn’t counting on that much luck. At some point, they would put up another helicopter and his run of luck would cut off. If only Katie was all right, he wouldn’t mind having the entire Cuban Army on his tail. He’d purely hated splitting up with Katie, but it really was the only way. Not that she was likely to forgive him for pushing her down that hill any time soon.

  Not long after dark, he spotted blinking lights in the distant sky. He pulled the truck over quickly underneath a tree and hopped out to throw what downed tree limbs he could lift over it to obscure its profile. He crawled under the truck and prayed its warm engine would hide his human silhouette on any infrared radar the chopper might have.

  He didn’t have long to wait to find out. The helicopter, a small two-seater, landed in a field maybe a hundred feet from his position. Swearing, he rolled out from under the truck and crept away fast as a soldier disembarked from the passenger’s side of the helicopter.

  The terrain sucked for cover. It was open country with only small rocky outcroppings, and the grassy valley sadly lacked for bushes or tree cover. He could low-crawl on his belly through the knee-high grass without being seen, but that was about it. Staying low, he eased around behind the soldier carefully.

  A bold idea struck him. It was crazy. Stupid, even. But it just might work. He waited until the soldier’s full attention was lasered in on the truck. The guy had a weapon drawn and was approaching the vehicle cautiously. Alex darted behind the soldier’s back, sprinting for the helicopter.

  Even if the guy turned around and spotted him now, the soldier couldn’t safely fire toward the ’copter and its flammable fuel tanks. Not to mention, it was the guy’s ride out of here.

  Alex closed the last few
yards to the passenger door. Sure enough, the soldier behind him shouted. The pilot, not understanding, looked out his own door toward his colleague, who was waving his arms frantically. It was the opening Alex needed.

  He threw open the passenger door and slid into the seat, pointing his pistol at the pilot. The guy lurched and shouted incoherently at him. Alex held up an imperative hand to silence the pilot.

  Tersely, he explained in Spanish, “I know how to fly this. I can kill you and toss you out, or you can take me where I want to go and no one will get hurt. You have my word on it.”

  The pilot babbled a little bit but put his hands on the controls. Alex watched the guy like a hawk as he strapped himself into the passenger seat. The bird lifted off jerkily.

  “Easy, buddy. No need to kill us both because you’re panicked.”

  The pilot keyed the radio transmit button on the collective, but Alex swatted the guy’s hand away, tsking. He reached across the guy’s body and yanked the plug for the guy’s headset and microphone, and then efficiently turned off all the radios, the radar identification system and the exterior lights.

  The pilot’s eyes widened.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” Alex shouted over the engine noise. “I don’t need you alive to fly this thing. So be cool. Okay?”

  The pilot nodded, the fight gone out of him.

  Dammit, Katie was a lousy influence on him. He should’ve killed this guy the minute he opened that door. But here he was, giving the pilot a shot at being smart and saving his own life. Still, he watched the Cuban like a hawk and his finger never left the trigger of his pistol.

  “Fly south,” he ordered. “Gitmo.”

  The pilot looked alarmed but banked the bird to the left and pushed the throttle forward. Without any navigation aids turned on, he and the pilot were going to have to find Gitmo the old-fashioned way. By looking down at the ground.

  The trip was tense, but shockingly fast. In fewer than twenty minutes, the mountains fell away beneath them and the ocean came into view. It was pitch-dark below. Power was still out to most of this end of the island. But off to their right, a very faint glow lit the horizon. Alex punched up the GPS function on his cell phone to verify that Gitmo was a half dozen miles or so to the west.

  “Fly that way.” Alex pointed.

  The pilot whined a little about getting shot down, but Alex ignored him. The Americans would let them land. A major hurricane had just turned the entire island on its head. Nothing was ops normal right now.

  Following the coast, the sprawling naval facility came into sight soon. Pockets of light here and there on the base indicated where emergency generators were up and running.

  “Land in the first open space you see inside the fence,” Alex instructed.

  Throwing him a skeptical look, the pilot did as ordered and landed in a parking lot. “Now what?”

  Alex snorted. That was Katie’s favorite question. “Shut down. Get out. Lie on the ground, facedown.”

  “You said you wouldn’t kill me!”

  “I’m not going to. I’ll be lying down beside you, buddy.”

  Indeed, Alex held his gun on the Cuban until the fellow was facedown, his fingers linked behind his head. Then Alex stripped off the Cuban military shirt and beret he’d stolen and knelt beside the pilot, keeping his pistol trained on the guy until the cavalry arrived.

  Which took about three minutes. Three jeep loads of heavily armed soldiers with no senses of humor whatsoever pulled up. Alex let the glare of their headlights catch him, and then he slowly popped the clip out of the pistol. He tossed the weapon one direction and the clip the other. Then, in cautious slow motion, he linked his hands behind his head and laid down on his stomach beside the pilot.

  “Are you crazy, man?” the pilot demanded.

  “I have been called that before,” Alex commented before the soldiers started shouting at him to be quiet.

  “They’re going to kill us both,” the pilot cried out.

  “Not if you lie still and do what they say—”

  The pilot panicked. He jumped to his feet and made a run for it. Whether he’d planned to head for his helicopter or the fence, Alex couldn’t tell. But the guy was gunned down so hard his torso was almost cut in half by the barrage of lead. Blood sprayed all over him, hot and metallic tasting.

  “You gonna try to run, too, asshole?” someone snarled at him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “KATIE MCCLOUD?” a voice said out of the darkness behind the headlights. “Come with us.”

  Thank God. That man’s English was as American as apple pie.

  How on earth did he know her name, though? She had no identification on her to indicate that was her name, and she hadn’t used it once while she’d been in Cuba. Regardless, they had the big-ass guns pointed at her. They won.

  She stood up hesitantly.

  The voice turned out to belong to a tall African-American man wearing a lot of stripes on his arm. A senior noncommissioned officer, then. He said gruffly, “Technically, we’re not supposed to be out here, so if you’d get in the vehicle quickly, ma’am, we need to get back to base.”

  As if on cue, a radio crackled from inside the Humvee. “Return to base, Diesel. We’ve got Cuban forces inbound to the area. A crap-ton of ’em.”

  The other soldier, a whipcord-lean kid with a classic Marine-buzz haircut, took her by the arm and hustled her to the military vehicle. She hadn’t even finished fastening her seat belt before the Humvee was Y-turning in the road and accelerating back in the direction it had come from.

  “Shit, Diesel. Look at that radar!” the kid exclaimed.

  The driver glanced at a circular green screen mounted in the dashboard. She couldn’t see the display from the backseat, but the man said over his shoulder, “Who the hell are you, lady? It looks like half the Cuban army is headed this way. They comin’ for you?”

  She sincerely hoped not. “I’m just an aid worker. I came down here to help out after the hurricane.” Best to stick to her cover story until she knew who these guys were.

  In hopes of distracting her captors from who she was exactly, she leaned forward and asked, “Why aren’t you technically supposed to be out here?”

  “That’s the deal with the Cubans,” Diesel bit out. “We stay on our side of the fence. They stay on theirs.”

  “Did you come out looking for me, then?” she asked, curious.

  Diesel started to say something, but the sound of a helicopter approaching interrupted him. It got loud fast. And then it got really loud.

  “Fuckers are buzzing us,” the younger soldier shouted over the noise. “Want me to pop a cap in their asses?”

  “Keep your gun in its holster, Johnny,” Diesel bit out.

  It seriously sounded like the chopper was coming in for a landing on the roof of their Humvee.

  “Almost there,” Diesel shouted. “Radio the gate. Tell ’em we’re coming in.”

  “Roger that.”

  A tall, heavily fortified fence loomed ahead, glinting silver in the starlight. The Humvee roared toward it, and at the last minute before they blasted onto U.S. soil, the helicopter peeled away from them. She could see individual rivets in its belly before it banked away and flew into the darkness.

  She was no expert on helicopters, but that was a military bird. Had the Cubans somehow found out she had nearly reached Gitmo? How? Why did they care about her? Oh, God. Had they captured Alex? Had he talked? She shuddered to think what they must have done to him to get him to crack. Or was the ’copter just a reaction to an American military vehicle going off the U.S. reservation?

  “The Cubans buzz you guys often like that?” she asked as her pulse slowed a little.

  “I ain’t never seen anything like it,” Johnny declared. “That was awesome. But you shoulda let me shoot ’im, Sergeant Truck.”

  Truck? Ahh. Now the nickname Diesel made sense.

  They drove onto what looked like a pretty traditional American military base. It was alrea
dy cleaned up from the storm, although neatly stacked piles of firewood here and there by the side of the road looked out of place. Most of the buildings showed damage, but they were neatly boarded up or tarped.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  Diesel answered grimly, “Boss man’s gonna wanna talk with you, ma’am. You and I both know there aren’t any aid workers on this island from the U.S.”

  *

  ANDRÉ FORTINAY GROANED under his breath as his cell phone rang. He rolled over in bed and picked up his phone in the dark as his wife mumbled a sleepy protest. No phone call that came in at this time of night was good news. He recognized the incoming phone number with a jolt and sat up in bed. The director of the entire Cold Intent op.

  “Fortinay, here. What’s up?” His voice was hoarse with sleep, but there was no help for it.

  No greeting. Just a clipped voice in his ear saying, “Flash traffic has come across my desk in the past few minutes that Alex Peters and Katie McCloud have been picked up at Guantánamo. They’re requesting immediate transport to the United States.”

  “Anything else in the message?” André asked cautiously.

  “A request for instructions from the Guantánamo station intel chief.”

  André winced. If his operatives were at Gitmo, things hadn’t gone as planned in Cuba. At all.

  “They were supposed to get caught by the Cubans!” his supervisor burst out. “The girl was supposed to screw up the mission. What the hell happened instead?”

  André sighed. He’d never liked that part of the plan. He happened to be fond of Alex. The young doctor had a great deal of potential if he were properly developed as an asset. André got why the CIA didn’t trust Alex farther than they could throw him, but personally, he thought it was a mistake. For that matter, Katie was a decent girl. Patriotic. Kind. Good for Alex.

  Aloud, he replied, “I thought from the start that you people were underestimating the McCloud girl. She wasn’t supposed to make it out of Zaghastan alive, and not only did she walk out of there, but she brought a newborn baby out with her.”