Thrill Ride (Black Knights Inc. #4)(16)
“Watch the stump!” he yelled, barely seeing the remains of the fallen tree before he was forced to hurdle it. Much to his surprise, Vanessa was right there with him, vaulting the sucker like a gold-medal Olympian as the pop and crack of automatic weapons fire echoed through the jungle.
Sweat trickled down his face and neck, burning the fresh wound there, but he didn’t give it a moment’s notice. Because they had a very short window of time—during the initial pandemonium caused by the two helo teams fast roping in—to make their escape. And with each passing second, and each additional set of boots on the ground, that window shrank.
“We’re going the wrong way!” Vanessa yelled beside him. “We need to head east if we want to get back to Santa Elena!”
If only it were that easy. One of the fundamental precepts of warfare was to never go out the way you came in…
“That’s exactly where they’d expect us to head,” he hollered above the racket of the firefight just as he was forced to execute a swift juke move lest he run face first into a low-hanging vine. The sudden change in direction caused Vanessa to stumble, but she rallied like a true operator and quickly regained her footing.
And, then, suddenly it appeared the helo teams lost track of their location. Because the rounds were no longer cutting through the foliage all around them and seemed, instead, to be focused more toward the west. But that wouldn’t last long. No doubt those boys were wearing night vision goggles, which gave them all the advantages in this little game of cat and mouse.
“Where are we going?” Vanessa panted, now keeping pace beside him as they dodged left and ran smack dab into a thick curtain of wet vines.
This goddamned jungle is gonna get us killed quicker than those helo teams…
“Almost there,” he assured her in a whisper. Now that the gunfire was dwindling, he needed to keep their sound signature to a minimum. Wrestling with the vines, cursing under his breath, he reached out to grab her hand. He felt better when he was touching her and, oui, he was going to chalk that up to the fact that it was difficult to see and he needed to know exactly where she was at all times and not the fact that…well…he just liked touching her.
“Where?” she hissed, calling into question someone’s paternity when one particularly spiny vine snagged her ponytail, jerking her back like a puppet on a string.
Unsheathing his Bowie knife took all of half a second. Then he was reaching up to slice through the thickness of her ponytail, effectively freeing her and severing several inches of her hair in the process.
Pity. She had the most beautiful hair he’d ever seen…slick and black as a raven’s wing…But they didn’t have time to mess around.
Again she surprised him when she didn’t so much as utter a squeak of protest. Instead, she whispered, “Thanks,” as she lowered her chin and doggedly pushed ahead, breaking into a sprint he was hard-pressed to keep up with.
“This way.” He steered her to the right and, saints be praised!, there it was.
Dropping her hand, he bent to snatch his pack from the hollow of the tree, briefly overwhelmed by the smell of decaying foliage when he thrust his head into the small space.
“What in the world?” she asked when he backed out.
“Operators, especially those raised out on the bayou, hide gear the way squirrels hide nuts,” he said by way of explanation while tearing through the protective plastic bag and digging into the pack to check that both his spare SIGs were just where he’d left them, chambered and at the ready.
Stuffing the pistols into his waistband, he shouldered the pack and turned to her.
“What?” Even in the dimness she must have recognized the look on his face.
“You’re bugged, chere,” he said, and she was shaking her head before the last word left his mouth.
“No. No way. I checked my clothes before I left San Jose. There was nothing that—”
“Then you were tagged at some point in Santa Elena,” he interrupted her, taking this small, momentary reprieve in the firefight to catch his breath and mentally run through their dismally few options. Few? What a joke. One. They had one option. And it wasn’t going to be easy. “It’s the only way they could’ve found us. And you see how they’ve lost us now? It’s because you’re out of range. So that means it’ll be a low-tech tracking device. Like a sticker or—”
“No, I—” She suddenly stopped, the whites of her eyes glowing in the night as her lids flew wide and she reached into her pocket, pulling out her cell phone. “There was a little boy,” she explained quickly, “he bumped into me at the CASEM store this morning.” She handed him her iPhone, and he was dismayed to see her hand was shaking—the poor woman was a lot more scared than she was leading on, and goddamn you, Rwanda Don, and what you’ve brought on us both! “The screen brightness is set to dim,” she panted, turning around. “Shine it on my back and see if there’s anything stuck to me.”
Silently promising slow and thorough retribution to Rwanda Don, Rock thumbed on the phone’s screen, pointing the nearly infinitesimal light it provided at Vanessa’s back and—
There. Stuck to her back pocket. A tiny, metallic-looking sticker.
A sick foreboding settled in the pit of his stomach. He peeled the sticker off, raised it and the phone close to his face in order to see, and…sure enough.