Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(72)
The place was awash with the smells of spent aviation fuel, various aftershaves, and healthy, hulking males. And she thought maybe, if she tilted her head just so and squinted her eyes a tiny bit, she might actually be able to see the testosterone floating around in the dense, humid air.
If it was like walking around in a testicle before, then this is like—
“…Irdina says she saw the hotel’s security director talking to the same Jemaah Islamiyah militant who offered to give her the money for Jaya’s treatments,” Rock said. And, okay, so that got her attention. And as another Rock, a far more famous Rock, was wont to say, she could totally smell what he was cooking.
Dan could too, if the fierce frown on his face was anything to go by. “And surprise, surprise. The asswipe called in sick today.”
“He’s probably on the next flight to Dubai,” the tall, sandy-haired SEAL named Leo surmised. “If he hasn’t already fled to another non-extradition treaty country, that is,” he added in a drawn-out drawl, his brownish-blond beard twitching with the movement of his heavy jaw muscles as he vigorously chewed on a piece of gum.
“And FYI,” Rock’s smooth Cajun-country accent sounded again through the phone’s speaker. “We lost Steady’s signal a while ago. The jungle canopy and a crap-ton of cloud cover over the region created too much interference, and the satellite couldn’t compensate. It happens. We weren’t all that worried initially. But the storm passed, and we’ve been able to pick up his signal again. It’s showing he’s hell and gone off the logging road. He seems to be on foot and currently near some sort of small clearing. Our best guess given the sat imagery is it’s a native village of some sort.”
“What the f*ck?” Dan growled, running a hand through his hair.
As if on cue, the seven SEALs began checking their weapons. The loud clanks and shnicks as clips were slid from the butts of handguns and knives were pulled from ballistic nylon sheaths were particularly loud in the little room. Irdina began to cry again, her soft wailing muffled by the shaking hands she used to cover her face.
“It could be nothing,” Rock continued, as the hair rippling over Penni’s arms told another story. “Maybe he ran out of gas, or maybe he was being tailed and needed to lose them by hoofing it through the bush.”
“Can you use the satellite’s infrared to see if it looks like he’s been followed?” she was quick to ask, figuring if they could track Steady from a little signal emitted by a device that could fit inside his watch, then that satellite Rock mentioned more than likely came equipped with all the latest bells and whistles in the ever-changing arena of spy technology.
“No can do,” the drawling man said. “The ambient temperature of the jungle is too hot to use infrared. Basically the whole damned place is glowing like a human body.”
“Last Intel we received before we left the carrier group,” Leo added, “is that he was some fifty miles from the Thai border. What’s his approximate location now?”
“Somewhere closer to ten miles south of it,” Rock replied.
Penni’s level of concern escalated exponentially. It was bad enough that delicate, diminutive Abby Thompson was off traipsing through a snake-infested jungle. Worse still was not knowing why she and Steady had been forced to abandon the motorcycle. A heavy foreboding settled in her stomach like a dense hunk of that rye bread her father used to buy from the Jewish bakery up on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill.
“How can my team get hooked up to track his signal?” Leo asked. “Just in case communications between us and those of you stateside get hinky.”
“Give me the numbers for your cell phones,” Rock replied. “I’ll send y’all the application software from the NSA’s secret server. It’ll take a couple of minutes to download the app and to establish your secure connection. But once that’s done, y’all should be able to bypass the satellite link if it proves unreliable and instead track Steady’s signal through the local cell towers when he’s within the coverage zone. Which means, hopefully, you’ll have a far better time keeping up with him than we’ve had.”
“That’s pretty slick,” one of the SEALs whose name she’d forgotten said.
“Membership has its rewards,” Rock replied. “Okay, I’m ready. Give me those digits, mes amis.”
As Leo and his men rattled off their cell numbers, Dan turned to her. “We got a couple options here,” he said, his expression hard, almost…malevolent.
“Which are?”
“We can go with Leo and his team to pick up Steady and Abby, or we can stay here and try to catch that security director on the off chance he hasn’t already flown the coop.”
“And on the off chance he actually knows something,” she added. “He could be like Irdina here”—she flicked a hand toward the poor, sniffling woman—“and be nothing more than a dupe and a patsy.”
“But what if he’s not?” Dan’s eyes were twin orbs of green fire in the shadow of his face. “What if he can tell us how the hell those JI militants knew the covert locations of the agents on duty? What if he can tell us how they knew about the tracking devices sewn into Abby’s clothes? What if he knows who the mole is? Isn’t it worth our time to try to find out?”