The Complete Delta Force Warriors Read online

  With the charges set, Mankowski aimed the tiny boat out of the inner La Guaira harbor. They’d landed near the entry of the long harbor formed by a massive two-kilometer-long breakwater that arced outward and then paralleled the Venezuelan coast, creating a narrow line of protected wharves. The autopilot held the little boat in line out into the darkness, plunging over the waves that had so inundated them on the trip in.

  The Zodiac made it three hundred meters out before the charges fired. Even with night-vision goggles it was hard to see the flashes that ruptured all of the bladders and destroyed the motor as well. Already unidentifiable, in seconds it would be at the bottom of the Atlantic.

  “Now what?”

  Kristine surveyed the long breakwater of heavy granite stone as another wave shattered on its far side and sent spray climbing skyward. She wasn’t going to complain about having a bigger boat when they ventured back to sea. Even if it was physically impossible to get any wetter after their night crossing, she could feel her gear becoming heavier by the second with water weight. Especially all of the extra kit for himself. No one had bothered to tell lowly Delta operators why he was so damned important.

  “Go find us a boat.”

  “What?”

  “This harbor has commercial, ferry, and naval piers. I can see a half-dozen boats from here. Night Stalkers will be on station in five hours to retrieve us. You have four hours to find one and pick us up right here. But don’t grab it until I radio that I’ve got him and we’re coming out.” She always did better on her own anyway.

  Mankowski didn’t look happy, but he didn’t argue.

  They went their separate ways. Him scouting the two kilometers of wharves to the southeast while, moving quickly over the big stones that lined the public ferry terminal; her making her way west.

  Just as planned, she ducked out of the passenger terminal, closed for the night, and slipped through the fence into the yard for the goods shipping terminal. What the satellite photos hadn’t really showed was just how few container ships were willing to deliver goods to a country that could no longer pay any of its bills. Some of the largest crude reserves in the world and they were bankrupt. Beyond bankrupt, the people were starving to death before they could die of poor health care, broken sanitation, and all the other disasters here that made Brooklyn, New York look almost habitable.

  She’d planned on dodging through the container field…except there were far more open spaces than containers in the yard. That wasn’t at all helpful.

  While she was surveying her options, one of the country’s notorious blackouts conveniently rolled through. Taking the risk, she sprinted across a long open stretch. The power and lights didn’t come back on until she was out of the yard, across the street, and through the electric fence that was supposed to be protecting Naval Base Antonio Picardi. She even had time to resplice the section she’d cut so that no one would know she’d crossed through. It would also make it that much faster when she crossed back out.

  Inside the base, she lay under some leaves of a palma llanera that the wind was beating into a frenzy loud enough that she couldn’t hear herself think. The storm was really kicking some unpredicted ass, which would make for better cover and made her happier that the Zodiac was at the bottom of the Atlantic.

  Straight ahead lay an Olympic-sized swimming pool with diving boards, lounge chairs, folded up and now flopped over umbrellas, and a serious-looking bar and food stand, currently well-shuttered. It was almost midnight, so that made sense.

  It was a good thing that the general populace wasn’t starving to death or anything. Oh, wait, they were. Just the military wasn’t. No wonder the assholes were loyal—they had the only cushy jobs left in the country.

  At that moment, a surprisingly cold rain slashed out of the darkness.

  Yep! It was a Delta-style fun night.

  4

  Thankfully, the Bolivarian Navy of Venezuela felt themselves to be sacrosanct. In the midst of the storm, there were very few patrols and none with night-vision gear or much interest in anything other than getting back under cover after hurrying along their prescribed routes.

  In an hour she’d worked around a dormitory, mess hall, and training center—probably could have done it in half the time with how lame the patrols were. The sheeting rain didn’t let up and they were doing their duty on the hustle with their heads down.

  Ultimately, Building Fourteen was right where the spy for the opposition had said it would be; not all of the military loved their corrupt, paranoid president-turned-dictator-turned-total bastard. The mole had given the CIA the tip about where to find Dr. Ewing—in the secure detention facility on the third floor.

  Apparently the CIA had gotten tired of waiting for the government to finally collapse under its own weight. In her estimation that wasn’t the issue. The real issue was that if the military and the SEBIN secret police finally went down hard, they sure weren’t going to leave behind any prisoners to tell the tale. Either way, tonight was Ewing’s lucky night.

  Kristine waited for the latest patrol to sweep by. Figuring that the most secure position was close behind them, she hurried along in their wake, circling Building Fourteen. As she went, she strategically placed charges she might need to make good their escape.

  The moment the patrol ducked inside, she stepped out into the courtyard and gauged the height of the building—three stories, nine to ten meters. Reaching back over her left shoulder, she snagged the lifting loop on her grappling hook and pulled it and a hank of 9mm tactical line free from its PALS pouch. With a practiced flick of her wrist, she spread the three tines out and they clicked into place.

  Five fast spins and she had smooth control of the spinning grapple. With a hard upward release, it soared aloft in a high arc. The coil of tactical line slid off her palm in a neat flow. For a moment she thought a gust of wind was going to ruin her throw, but an immediate counter gust dropped it well over the roof’s edge. A sharp tug gave her under a meter of slippage and then a hard set that easily took her weight.

  She snapped a pair of hand jumars onto the line, walked her feet up onto the wall, and began working the ascenders. They slid upward without resistance, but not downward unless she hit the release. Two minutes later, she lay on the roof pulling up the line.

  The wind, which had been blocked while she was down among the buildings, whipped hard at her. Much more and they’d be in a tropical storm. Wouldn’t that be a joy.

  A quick tour of the roof revealed the maintenance hatch. Locked from the inside, she snapped together a thermite torch—about the size of a three-D-cell flashlight—put on dark glasses, and cut the hinges off. Five thousand degrees of fun. There were some things she loved about Delta Force, and the cool toys factor was definitely high on the list.

  She dropped into the middle of Building Fourteen’s detention floor. Nightlights illuminated the corridor and a guard sleeping at the far end of it. Make that drunk and asleep because her entry letting in the storm had been far from silent. She woke him up with a strip of duct tape over his mouth, then cuffed him to his heavy chair with zip ties.

  “Which cell is Dr. Ewing in?” Kristine whispered in Spanish as she pressed the tip of the torch under his chin. She’d let him see it just enough to know that it was like nothing he’d ever seen before, not that she was planning to melt open his head with it. “Grunt the number of times for his number.”

  The guy’s eyes rolled in panic.

  “Now or I’ll tape over your nose too and leave you to rot.”

  Apparently he believed her and grunted out a six.

  5

  Cell Six was third on the left. Through the observation window she couldn’t see shit. Flipping down her night-vision goggles, she could see that it was a much larger space than she’d anticipated. A man lay asleep on a corner cot. To the other side was a long workbench with a computer and an array of stuff that looked like a chemist’s lab.

  She hit the light switch—which was on her side of the do
or—and shoved her goggles back up.

  The guy on the couch rolled over and blinked his eyes hard. The face matched the briefing and she unlocked the door.

  “Who?” He grunted out in Spanish, then blinked harder as he focused on her. “You don’t look like the other military. I mean aside from being female.”

  “I’m not. I don’t fit in even among female military.” She dropped her pack and peeled off the IOTV body armor. She suddenly felt thirty pounds lighter. “Put this on. We’re on the move.”

  “To where?”

  “What do you care?” Then she cursed herself. He probably did. “The US, if we don’t screw this up.”

  “Rockin’!” Not quite the staid scientist she’d been expecting. In fact, he sounded New York. And he was somewhere around her age, another detail the briefing docs hadn’t included.

  As she helped him into the gear, and ignored his embarrassed grunt of surprise—civilians were so fussy—as she reached between his legs to pull through the strap connecting the butt- to the groin-protectors. “You’ll need this MOLLE as well.” She freed it from her pack and dumped the vest over his head.

  “A vest named Molly?” Ewing switched to English.

  “M.O.L.L.E. Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment. The pouches are for whatever you want to take from here.”

  “Well, that would have a silent E, not a Y sound,” he continued as he moved about the room and began stuffing various items into his pockets. It looked almost random, but he didn’t strike her as a random sort of guy. Still, it was an odd selection: various sealed flasks, some baggies of assorted powders, and a very dog-eared novel. “Haven’t finished it yet,” as he tore off the first two-thirds before she could see what it was and stuffed the last third in a plastic bag and then into a pouch. Marks for efficiency, cross off absent-minded. “English doesn’t have that sound Y for a final E. If we go back to the Spanish, you would get mol-lay, like the Mexican chocolate sauce with an extra L. Still not Molly.”

  “Do you want to talk pronunciation all day or can we get your ass out of here?”

  He stopped and glanced around the room, looking at last at the chemist’s bench. “If I never have to calculate another mole of cocaine or manufacture another mole of scopolamine (which doesn’t work as a truth serum no matter what the SEBIN thinks), I’ll die a happy man.”

  “A mole?”

  “Not the small one on your right cheek—which looks good on you by the way—nor the brown furry animal, though a mole of cocaine actually weighs about three brown-furry moles, a third of a kilo. I like that as a unit of measure. A mole, not the brown-furry one but the chemical one, is a six followed by twenty-three zeroes’ worth of atoms. It’s not actually a weight, but rather a quantity. Because it’s such a simpler atom, a mole of pure carbon-12 weighs over twenty-five times less than a mole of cocaine or about point-oh-eight of a brown-furry.”

  “That’s a bunch of atoms,” she couldn’t help saying. No way was she getting into a conversation about brown-furries, their mass or otherwise. And she already knew men thought she was attractive, which was way more trouble than it was worth.

  “A mole, the chemical one, is about six hundred times more atoms than there are stars in the known universe. Atoms are seriously small buggers. Why are we still standing here talking about this?”

  There was something about the way he talked that kept her listening. Kristine had to physically shake herself to break the mild hypnosis.

  Back out in the hall, she wasn’t even halfway back to the maintenance hatch when Ewing called out. “What about all of them?” He was looking at the closed cell doors.

  “There’s no way I can extract them with you. If I release them all, they’d just be recaptured or gunned down.”

  “If they’re in their cells, they don’t stand a chance at all. Give me the keys.”

  “We don’t have time for this.”

  Dr. Ray Ewing drew himself up to his full height—about an inch over her own five-eight—and did his best to stare down at her haughtily. The effect was also ruined by how gaunt he was. She was a little surprised that he was still upright beneath the weight of the IOTV’s armor plates and everything else he’d been through. But there was no doubting his grimly determined eyes. He’d face down the Devil herself to give his fellow prisoners a chance.

  Feeling small in a way she didn’t appreciate, she tossed him the keys.

  He unlocked the first door, then the second.

  “We don’t have time for this.” But he ignored her mutter.

  Ewing walked up to the first prisoner to stagger out into the open. “Here are the keys. Unlock every door before you leave. Every single one, si?” The man glanced down the hall at the muzzled guard, then nodded fiercely before snatching away the keys and moving to the next door as fast as his feet could carry him.

  “They still don’t have a chance, but I feel better about it.”

  Kristine inspected him and liked what she saw. Liked it a lot. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Good!”

  That earned her a confused laugh.

  She fished out the spare she’d brought for him just in case he did, and after a moment’s debate, her ankle piece as well.

  “Who here knows how to shoot?” she asked the prisoners gathering in the narrow hallway. Three came forward. She handed over her two weapons with extra magazines and sent the third person to where she’d kicked aside the guard’s rifle. Then she pulled out an explosive’s digital timer, without the explosive attached, and set it for three minutes. Starting it, she set her own watch to match a three-minute countdown.

  “You,” she reached out and grabbed the first unarmed man who came to hand. “Do not let anyone leave this floor until this counter hits zero. At that time, the guards below will think there is an attack all along the north and east side. If you wait for that, then rush out of the building to the southwest, you’ll stand a chance. Comprende?”

  “Si, bonita señorita. Si! Si! Gracias! Cero segundos,” he held the timer with both hands like it was precious.

  6

  This time, Ewing came when she dragged him down the corridor to the maintenance hatch ladder. He gasped in surprise as he crawled out the hatch into the battering rain and wind. And here comes the whining...

  “I forgot what fresh air tastes like.”

  “It tastes wet.”

  His laugh was encouraging, but he didn’t look strong enough to control his own descent. She tied the end of her grapple rope to his MOLLE vest’s lifting ring and took a bight of rope about her waist before guiding him over the roof’s edge.

  “Don’t drop me,” he pleaded as he eased over the lip.

  “Well,” she grunted as she took his weight, “you weigh a lot more than a brown-furry. More like a mole of brown-furries, but I’ll try not to.”

  “No, that would be roughly two to the twentieth tons and that’s—” she lowered him out of sight and let the wind snatch the math right out of his mouth.

  By the time he was down, she was running short on time. Kristine took a loop in between her feet and hand-over-handed her way down. On the ground, she grabbed Ewing’s hand so that she could gauge his capabilities and sprinted away. In another twenty-eight seconds the Venezuelan Navy was going to have something far bigger than a mysterious rope to worry about.

  They rushed out past the corner of the mess hall and the dorm. He didn’t stumble often, though he tended to slide around on the muddy ground. She could also feel him lagging even after a twenty-second sprint—she’d have to account for that.

  Her watch hit zero just as they ducked out of sight beneath the marginal shelter of a yellow ipê tree. She hoped the freed prisoners hadn’t jumped the gun. Pulling out her remote detonator, she selected all the charges she’d set to the north and east, then hit their firing transmitters simultaneously.

  The whole corner of Building Fourteen seemed to explode.

  “Holy s
hit!” Ewing cried out.

  “Quiet, unless you want a patrol coming up our asses.”

  “You blew up the building with those poor people still in it. What kind of person are you?” He sounded seriously pissed, but at least he was a little quieter about it.

  “I’m Killer Kristine. But try looking again.” She needed to be in motion, but she wouldn’t mind at least one person in this screwed up world thinking well of her.

  Every door and most of the windows had been shattered, but she’d only used breaching charges. A flash and hard bang; most of the energy had been directed into destroying the doors themselves.

  “Here,” she unclipped her night-vision googles and held them out before pointing off to the west. By the fire’s light, she could see the stream of prisoners departing the building in the other direction. The patrols and guards stumbled forward to stare into the firelight to the northeast like so many pigeons. It was very tempting to unsling her rifle and start picking them off, but that would draw the kind of attention she didn’t want.

  “They’re getting away,” Ewing sounded so pleased.

  “We’ll see.” Their chances still weren’t great, but at least they were free for now. “About time we were doing some of that ourselves.”

  7

  Clear of the Naval base, out through the bypasses she’d set in the electric fence, they were resting between a pair of containers in the shipping yard that blocked the worst of the slashing rain.

  “Do you have any food?”

  She should have thought of that, and dug out a pair of MREs from her pack. “Pick one.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  She shrugged. “Twenty-four so-called menus; these are two of them. Once you get rid of all the extra wrappings, heaters, and candy, they’re all pretty much the same.”