Play the Right Cards Read online

  Why did evil bastards like Aguado have to come from such places?

  More immediate problem, dude. Stay focused.

  The woman’s American English was accentless, sounding flat to his Southern ear. Probably from the Pacific Northwest or some other strange part of the country. But there was a thin overlay that matched her Latinate features—full-lipped with dark eyebrows and darker eyes, which was about all he could tell through her camo paint. The slight Spanish lilt shifted her to intriguingly exotic.

  But she wasn’t supposed to be here. No one was.

  “Keeping you in my sights until I get some answers, ma’am,” Duane kept his HK MSG90 A2 rifle aimed right at the bridge of her nose—a straight-through spine cutter if he had to take her down. It would be serious overkill, as the weapon was rated to lethal past eight hundred meters and they were whispering at each other from less than two meters apart. With the silencer, his weapon would be even quieter than their whispers, but he hadn’t spent the last sixteen hours crawling into position to have her death cry give him away. If she so much as squawked as she went down, every goddamn bird in the jungle would light off, giving away his presence.

  She sighed and nodded toward her own rifle that rested on the ground in front of her.

  He shifted his focus—though not his aim—then let out a very low whistle of appreciation. A G28. Even his team hadn’t gotten their hands on the latest entry into the US Army’s sniper arsenal yet. Not quite the same accuracy as his own weapon but six inches shorter, several pounds lighter, and far more flexible to configure. A whole generational leap forward. Richie, his team’s tech, would be geeking out right about now. The fact that he wasn’t here to see it almost made Duane smile.

  “A Heckler & Koch G28. What’s your point, sister?” He drawled it out for Richie’s sake, who’d be listening in on Duane’s radio. Then the implications sank in. If his Delta Force team couldn’t get these yet, then who could? Whatever else this woman was, she would be tied to one of the three US Special Mission Units: Delta, SEAL Team 6, or the combat controllers of the Air Force’s 24th STS.

  Or The Activity.

  That fit.

  The Intelligence Support Activity served the other three Special Mission Units. If she was with The Activity…that was seriously hot. It meant she was both one of the top intel specialists anywhere and a lethal fighter. And that meant that she’d been the one to put out the call that had brought him here and was sticking to see the job through. That at least answered why she was in his spot. It also said a lot that she hadn’t taken any of several easier-to-reach locations that were almost as good.

  “It is about time you caught a clue. Welcome to the conversation.” She picked up her rifle as if his wasn’t still aimed at her. Very chill. “You are being a little dense there, soldier.” At least she got the branch of the military right this time.

  “Hey, they don’t call me ‘The Rock’ for nothing, darlin’,” Duane lowered his barrel until it was pointed into the dirt. “They actually call me that becau—”

  The moment his weapon was down, he suddenly was staring down the dark hole of the G28’s silencer.

  “Uh…”

  “The Rock certainly isn’t because you are a towering black movie star. It must be for your thick head.”

  Duane swallowed carefully, unable to shift his focus away from the barrel of her weapon to see if the safety was on or not.

  “He spells his name differently. He’s Dwayne ‘The Rock’ with a w and a y. I’m more normal, D-u-a-n-e T-h-e R-o-c-k.” He made it sing-song just like the theme song from The All-New Mickey Mouse Club that he’d been hooked on as a little kid.

  “M-o-u-s-e,” she gave the appropriate response.

  He couldn’t help laughing, quietly, despite their positions—him still staring down the barrel of her weapon—because discovering Mickey Mouse in common in the heart of the Venezuelan jungle was just too funny.

  “Normal is not what I need here,” the woman sighed and there was the distinct click of her reengaging the safety on her rifle.

  “Only thing normal about me is my name, ma’am.” Always good to “ma’am” a woman with a sniper rifle pointed at your face.

  “Prove it,” she turned her weapon once more toward the camp half a kilometer away through the trees. Her motions were appropriately slow to not draw attention. However, it was too even a motion. A sniper learned to never break the pulses of nature’s rhythm. She might be some hotshot intel agent—because The Activity absolutely rocked almost everything they did—but she still wasn’t Delta, who rocked it all.

  Duane breathed out slowly and spent the next couple minutes easing the last two meters toward her. Having the camp in view meant that one of their spotters could see them as well, if the bad guys were damned lucky. He and the woman both wore ghillie suits—that’s why he’d gotten so close before he spotted her. The suits were made of open-weave cloth liberally decorated with leaves and twigs so that the two of them looked like little more than a patch of the jungle floor. He’d dragged his on backcountry jungle roads for twenty miles to make sure he smelled like the jungle as well. Having a jaguar trounce his ass wouldn’t exactly brighten up his day.

  Even their rifles were well camouflaged except for either end of the spotting scopes and the very tips of the barrels. If he hadn’t recently been lusting over the new specs, he wouldn’t have recognized her HK G28 at all in its disguise.

  Getting into position as a sniper took a patience that only the most highly trained could achieve. A female sniper? That was a rare find indeed. The two women on his Delta team were damned fine shooters, but he and Chad were the snipers of the crew. A female sniper from The Activity? This just kept getting better and better. He’d pay a fair wage to know what she really looked like beneath the ghillie and all that face paint.

  “Maybe you and I should go to the party as a couple.” At long last he lay beside her, close enough that he would have felt her body heat if not for the smothering sauna of his ghillie suit.

  “What party? And we’re never going to be a couple.”

  “Halloween. It’s only a couple weeks off. We could sneak in and nobody would see us in our ghillies. People would wonder why the punch bowls were mysteriously draining.”

  “And why the apples were bobbing on their own,” she sounded disgusted. “What I want is—”

  “Let’s see what y’all are up to down there,” he cut her off, just for the fun of it, and focused his rifle scope on the camp below. He was a little disappointed when there was no immediate comeback, though there was a low muttering in Spanish that he couldn’t quite catch but it cheered his soul.

  The general’s camp was a simple affair in several ways. The enclosure was a few hundred meters across. An old-school fence of wooden stakes driven into the ground, each a small tree trunk three meters high with sharpened points upward. Not that the points mattered, because razor wire was looped along the top. Guard shacks every hundred meters—four total. The towers straddled the fence. Not a good idea. The structure should have been entirely behind the wall to protect it from attack. Unless…

  “You got a name, darling?” Lying beside her, Duane could tell that she was shorter than he was. Her hands were fine, but her body was hidden by the ghillie so he couldn’t read anything more about her looks.

  “Yes, I have a name.”

  “That’s nice. Always good to have yourself one of those,” Duane could play that game just as well as the next person. He turned his attention to the camp. “Our friendly general isn’t worried about attack from the outside or he’d have built his towers differently. He’s worried about keeping people inside.”

  Sofia Forteza had already known that from her research, but she wondered how Duane—spelled the “normal” way—did.

  She’d spent months tracking General Aguado. Cripes, she’d spent months finding him in the first place. He was a slippery bastardo who did most of his work through intermediaries and only rarely surfaced himself.
Tracing him to this corner of the Guatopo National Park—so close to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, that she’d dismissed it at first—had taken a month more.

  Duane had taken one look at the place and seen…what?

  He’d have built his towers differently.

  She leaned back to her own scope and inspected them again. It took a moment to bring the towers into focus because her nerves were still zinging as if she’d been electrocuted. Somehow, in all her training, she’d never looked down the barrel of a rifle or even a handgun at point blank range—perhaps the scariest thing she’d ever seen.

  Scariest other than Duane’s cold blue eyes. He was the most dangerous-looking man she’d ever met, which is why his jokes and his smooth Southern accent were throwing her so badly. He sounded half badass, macho-bastard Unit operator and half southern gentleman. It was the strangest combination she’d ever heard. One moment he was wooing her with warm tones, obviously without a clue of how to woo a woman, and the next he was being pure Army grunt with a vocabulary to match. She simply couldn’t figure him out.

  Finally she shrugged her emotions aside enough to focus her scope properly. Stay in the jungle, not in your head. She rebuilt it in layers. The strange silence of the wind—not a single breath of air reached the jungle floor, instead it stagnated, adding to the oppressiveness of the heat. Macaw calls alternated between chatter and screech. Monkeys screamed and shouted in the upper branches. Buzzing flies had learned to leave her alone and the silent ants were no longer creeping her out. All that was left after she canceled each of those out was the man breathing beside her and the compound of that bastard Aguado that she’d been staring at for the last twenty-four hours.

  The guard towers were supported by four long, tree-trunk legs, two inside the fence and two outside. Outside! Where they were vulnerable to attack. General Aguado hadn’t built a fort in the depths of a national park—he’d built a prison.

  All of her research had only uncovered his location, not his purpose here. Because she hadn’t cared. Cutting the head off the snake one target at a time worked for her.

  She looked again at the camp. Wooden shacks for the most part—workers’ cabins. What else had she missed?

  “Locks on the doors,” Duane answered the question she hadn’t asked in a whisper that was surprisingly soft for such a deep voice. He ignored a fer-de-lance pit viper as it slid up and over the ghillie covering his rifle barrel, slowing to inspect them with a flick of its tongue before continuing on its way in search of mice. If he could ignore the snake, so could she. Mostly. A little. She watched long after it had slithered out of sight.

  Sofia looked at the shacks’ doors again. Locks on the outside. She’d been watching the camp for twenty-four hours and had missed that. The dozens of armed guards weren’t being lazy on patrol as she’d thought. They didn’t care about the outside world—they were worried about the inside one. And because they were the only armed personnel in the camp, and everyone knew it, they could afford to be nonchalant.

  Back to the towers. The guards were leaning on the inside rails looking down, not the outside ones looking out. All of her work to slip into this position was probably meaningless. If Duane was right, she could walk right up and knock on the front gate before anyone would pay her the least attention. A band of red howler monkeys working their way noisily through the jungle canopy above the camp didn’t even attract a glance from the guards.

  Still, Aguado was here. She’d seen him arrive with his entourage. And he was never going to leave. Not alive.

  “Not a nice place,” Duane observed quietly.

  “Not a nice man.”

  “Sure I am. You just don’t know me yet, sugar.”

  Sofia brought her knee up sharply. Lying side by side, she was able to bullseye the Charlie-horse nerve cluster on his outer thigh. Her nana hadn’t raised her to be a target.

  “Shit!” He didn’t sound so almighty pleased with himself any longer, though he did manage to keep it to a whisper as he continued swearing.

  Why did guys always think they were so charming? With her looks, she should be used to it by now. Except her looks were hidden by the ghillie suit. What had kicked Duane-spelled-the-normal-way into such a guy mode? Just that she was female? When did Delta start recruiting cavemen as their standard? Actually, that one she knew the answer to—since Day One if past experience meant anything.

  She hadn’t ever deployed with Delta before, but she’d met enough of them to know the type. They were the rebel super-warriors of the US military. Everyone thought that their team was the baddest, but Delta Force, more commonly called “The Unit,” completely owned that title. Somehow they drew the people that didn’t fit anywhere else in the military. But where they’d been troublemakers in their old units, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta collected them and honed their skills. They were like a barely controlled reaction just bubbling along, waiting for an excuse to explode.

  “So, what’s the general’s story?” Duane, once he was done nursing his thigh, went for a subject change proving he wasn’t stupid.

  “Deep in the drug trade. Known to have called for at least three high profile murders, including a Supreme Tribunal of Justice judge (that’s their version of the Supreme Court) even if he didn’t pull the trigger himself.”

  “Oh, so he’s the one that’s not nice,” as if Duane only now was figuring that out.

  She was not going to be charmed by him. His every tone said that just because she was female, he’d switched into some weird-ass flirt mode. She’d had enough of that coming up through the ranks to last a lifetime.

  “This isn’t slave labor, so you’d better add human trafficking to your list.” With the speed of a light switch, all the charm was gone from Duane’s voice.

  As if to prove his point, at that moment a couple of guards exited a small building, readjusting their pants and laughing. They kicked the door shut behind them and snapped the lock closed. No question what they’d just been doing to some poor women—one of the perks of their job.

  Numerous guards. Locks on the outside of the cabin doors. No large central building that might be an illicit drug lab or slave labor textile sweatshop. This was a holding pen, hidden deep in the jungle of a national park. The few people who were circulating around, aside from the guards, were almost all women. Women who were keeping their heads down and trudging about their tasks. The sickness that twisted in her stomach had nothing to do with lying still for the last twenty-four hours.

  Sofia wasn’t even aware of raising her rifle until Duane reached over and casually pushed it back down.

  “Not yet.” It was all he said, but she could hear the anger beneath the soft words.

  Well that wasn’t shit compared to what she was feeling at the moment. This place needed to be erased from the map. Scorched to the ground, removed permanently from existence!

  “Why are you here? I sent for a goddamn team, not some Southern Rock.”

  He flashed a smile at her, “If you’ve got me, you don’t need a team.” All of his macho bravado was back. As if she’d misheard his momentary anger. He sounded too much like her useless brother and the rest of her useless family. She couldn’t be rid of him fast enough.

  As the last of the sunlight faded from the sky and the bird calls tapered toward silence, Sofia wondered who she was going to want to shoot more by sunrise: General Raul Estevan Aguado or Duane The Rock?

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  About the Author

  M.L. Buchman started the first of, what is now over 50 novels and even more short stories, while flying from South Korea to ride his bicycle across the Australian Outback. Part of a solo around the world trip that ultimately launched his writing career.

  Three times, his titles have been named “Top 10 Romance of the Year” by the American Library Association’s Booklist. NPR and Barnes & Noble have named other titles “Top 5 Romance of the Year.” In 2016 he was a finalist for Romance Writers of Am
erica prestigious RITA award. He also writes: contemporary romance, thrillers, and fantasy.

  Past lives include: years as a project manager, rebuilding and single-handing a fifty-foot sailboat, both flying and jumping out of airplanes, and he has designed and built two houses. He is now making his living as a full-time writer on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife and is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing and receive a free novel by subscribing to his newsletter at: www.mlbuchman.com

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