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“Hands off,” Nate warned him good naturedly.
Shrugging, Cale said, “She’s certifiably hot. She’d stand out no matter where she was. Most likely has a dude in her life, for sure. It doesn’t hurt to appreciate her attributes.”
Mace scowled. He said nothing. It wasn’t lost on his men, who he’d worked with for four years, that Sierra Chastain was like a beautiful goddess out here in this godforsaken, toxic Peruvian jungle. He worried over her safety. He’d worried over Lauren Parker being assigned to them for the exact same reason: a female operative could be captured, tortured, and raped. The Russians would have their way with any woman, no question, and then kill her. It made his gut clench when he thought about any of that happening to Sierra. She was tougher than Lauren Parker had been. They both had the same level of confidence, but there was just something rare about Sierra. Mace couldn’t put his finger on it.Yet.But he would, sooner or later. He had to know what made Sierra tick. He had to know she was someone they could utterly trust when the shit hit the fan. With the Russians around, Sierra was a liability because she was female. And he worried a lot about that angle of this dangerous dance with the Russian drug runners.
Igor Belov glared at his ten-man team. They were in the village of Tuyur and had pushed three families out of three huts and moved right in. These Indians lived in province of Paucartambo, the Highlands, only a handful of villages strung out along the cliffs at nine to twelve thousand feet of altitude. The Q’ero women knew what was expected. They would feed his team, bring food to them. He sat outside the largest hut where he and his second-in-command were staying, along with their medic, Sacha Pavlov.
Igor’s thick, black eyebrows drew downward as he sat on a tree stump out in front of the thatched hut.Pavlov.The man was a pain in the ass. Yet, they didn’t dare be in a jungle and not have a competent medic among them. Scowling, Igor watched the annoying medic, who had gone down halfway through the hundred-person village to set up a medical clinic. Rubbing his stubbled jaw, Belov supposed it was because of the breed, the medic service desire to help the sick and all that shit, that he set up these clinics. The ex-Spetsnaz medic had been the lone survivor of the old drug team in which his best friend, Petrov, had run. They’d mixed it up with one of those US Special Forces hunter-killer teams that had been dropped into Peru to take them out.
He idly watched the children and mothers lining up to be cared for by Pavlov. The man knew Quechua, the language of the Q’ero and Spanish, which were good things to have picked up. What Belov didn’t like was the Russian’s squeamishness when it came to raping a woman or two in order to bring a village around. It was necessary. Not that Belov didn’t enjoy the demonstration. Scratching his crotch idly, he smiled a little, gazing around the village. The sun was up over the eastern horizon and the morning was just beginning. The steaming cooking pots of littered the village that curved around a small nearby stream. The black iron tripods all had fat kettles suspended over small fires with couscous, a grain that had thirty percent protein in it, their thin smoke rising languidly into thick clouds hovering all above at treetop level.
After having grown accustomed to the damned noisy howler monkeys that infested the jungle outside the haven of the village meadow, the peaceful morning calls of birds sounded a helluva lot better to Igor’s ears. Much nicer than those screeching bastards swinging all around overhead. He glanced around and saw his men outside their huts, tarps spread on the ground, oiling their rifles and pistols. It was a daily ritual. Or rust would leap at the chance to corrode the barrels and could make them miss a shot.
Pavlov.Something bothered Belov about the medic. He didn’t know what, but his warrior’s instincts told him the man was not to be trusted. His scowl deepened as he thought back to when Vlad Alexandrov headed this team. Some other medics, Alex Kazak and Nik Morozov in particular, knew Pavlov. The three of them had been best friends from what Belov understood. Their teams had been working together in ops in and out of Russia at that time. Those three has been like brothers. And then Kazak had turned traitor on Alexandrov and fled. Belov idly wondered if Pavlov missed his brothers-in-arms. Combat medics were a breed apart from the regular Spetsnaz teams. Now, Pavlov was close to no one in the team and that irritated the hell out of Igor.
He watched as Pavlov, who was sitting on a wooden bench, brought a little five-year-old girl with tiny black braids onto his lap. He saw the mother, who was also smiling, standing nearby as the medic gently looked in the child’s ears, checked her eyes and then asked her to open her tiny mouth. There were seven other mothers lined up, with children ranging in age from newborn to, perhaps, ten years old. Belov knew that Pavlov was well-known among the Q’ero villages. Wherever he went, he held medical clinics. And out in this green hell of unrelenting jungle, there was no other medical help available to these Indians. They were, for the most part, cut off from the rest of the world.
And that was good. Belov needed to keep the Peruvian policia out of the area. Right now, the ruthless Russian teams were winning the war against the Latin drug lords who had once ruled this region. And Lima’s officials were hard pressed budget-wise to bring enough policia into the area to get rid of them. Slowly, they were taking over and pushing the other drug lords out of business. He smiled. Lima, the capitol of Peru, sat on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Those rich enough to live in the capitol held the power and purse strings. And they could care less about the areas where the struggling Q’ero Indians, the remnants before the great Incan empire arrived, still outlived them and the Spaniards. These people were farmers. They had no voice in the government. They were the descendants of pre-Incan people. And then, the Spanish assault came in the 1500’s. And they escaped the murderous soldiers of Spain, as well. Their lives had all worked out well until Igor Belov and the other Russian teams, took over.
But it was a worry. And he knew that the Peruvian government had granted permission to the US to help undercover operatives down here. Bankrolling them with stateside government funds. Belov estimated that at least three black ops US Army hunter-killer teams were on the ground in their area. He was in touch with the other Russian team leaders. And in the last six months, the six Russian teams had lost three of their leaders to the stealthy Army Special Forces soldiers. There was a price on his head, and he knew it. And he understood these black ops teams were as good as Spetsnaz. Belov trusted no one. Especially Pavlov, although he couldn’t pinpoint why. Maybe because his best friend, Kazak and Morozov had turned yellow and run. Would Pavlov, someday, do the same?
Belov grimaced and considered the question. He spread a cloth across his thick thighs and picked up his pistol. Beginning to quickly disassemble the weapon in order to oil it, he considered Pavlov once again. It was hard to get a medic for each Russian team. But down here in this fucking green hell of a jungle where, if a man scratched his hand, he could die twenty-four hours later of some damn bacteria, a medic was essential. He wished he could trade Pavlov off for another medic. A more trustworthy one. This one refused to join the rest of his men when they took young women from a village to satisfy their sexual appetites. The coward always turned away and left, anger in his eyes. Belov wondered if Pavlov, if he ever had the chance, wouldn’t maybe shoot all of them in the head as his judgement for all the rapes he had walked away from.
Of course, Pavlov was a medic. His whole life, his passion, was saving lives, not taking them. Igor had never seen the medic fail to return fire in a firefight, however. He was a deadly accurate shooter as they were, no question. It’s just that the medic lacked a set of balls when it came to taking a woman.The pussy.Still, Pavlov was important because clearly, the villagers were not afraid of him. They loved and eagerly welcomed him. When they saw the medic come into the village the children, who were always frightened of the rest of the team, were not afraid of Pavlov. The children surrounded him like he was St. Nicholas, and it was Christmas. He always carried candy in his cammo pockets for them, without fail.
Maybe it was good that Pavlov was there. The villagers, once his soldiers raped a few of their women right in front of them, usually fell into line quickly. The men would take time out of their farming practices and tend the coca fields for them. If they didn’t get the point the first time around, Belov would grab a few more women out of the village and rape them too. Those that survived, well, Pavlov had to take care of them. Growling a curse, Belov continued to clean his pistol, oiling it well. There wasn’t a Q’ero village who didn’t see Pavlov like some saint to be worshipped, while being scared as hell of the rest of the team.
Maybe it was just as well. Igor knew from his decades as a Spetsnaz officer, that they all feared him and his team. He knew from long experience, that fear was the greatest controller of people. And it was fine by him that this village, like all the rest, were terrified of him and his men. They damn well better be. Let Pavlov be seen as the good guy. Sometimes he was able to get intel out of the local Indians about the Special Forces teams operating in the area. They too, visited these villages. And they had a medic with them also, from what he understood. And sometimes, children talked, and Igor would find out when one of these Army teams had come through or even stayed overnight in one of these villages. That was useful intel because, like a player in an invisible chess game, Igor was making moves in hopes of finding the Americanos and killing them first.
CHAPTER 5
Sierra slowly wokeup. She rubbed her eyes, feeling drowsy. Light peeked around the plastic doorway of her hut. Slowly sitting up, she heard the low voices of the Special Forces team nearby. Her hair had come partly loose from her ponytail as she’d slept. She fumbled behind her head with the twisted band, eventually freeing her black hair to tumble across her shoulders. Trying to tame down the strands, she slowly moved around. What time was it? Looking down at the watch on her wrist, she saw it was 1600 or four p.m. She’d slept a long time! Sierra knew she’d been tired.
Her mind and her heart turned to Mace Kilmer. He was a confusing man in her life. As she searched for her brush and comb among the toiletries she kept in a small plastic bag, Sierra didn’t want to be drawn to him. But damn, she was. And why? Why him of all men? He didn’t want her in his life. Well, okay, he’d seemed a little less abrasive earlier when she’d connected with them and they’d asked her questions, probing her, finding out more about her. She knew this was part of the evaluation. It was the same with any team she’d worked with. Being an unknown in a tight team could disrupt the flow between the members of it. Sierra got that. She knew what teamwork was. As she slowly pulled the brush through her hair, she thought that the last thing she wanted to become was a bump in their daily grind. Something that threw the team out of rhythm, that destabilized them. That was a no go. No one understood that better than her. And she knew part of Kilmer’s growliness was due to his unspoken worry that she’d be a problem child, gumming up the fluid mechanics of his band. Sierra knew, if that happened, it could get someone killed. And she had no desire to be that person.
Part of her job as a security contractor was to fit seamlessly into any group, and not stir up a bunch of turbulence across her incoming wake as she did so. But Kilmer didn’t know how good she was at doing so, and that she wouldn’t ruffle the heart of the crew’s unified performance. And he was more than aggressive about protecting his men as a whole. That wasn’t a bad thing in her book. A good leader looked after her or his soldiers. And Mace was an alpha-wolf leader, no question.
Her fingers moved through her long hair, separating and weaving it. Quickly, she tamed the wild strands into one united braid, and snapped a rubber band around the end to stop it from fraying apart again. She flipped the braid over one shoulder, so that it hung between her shoulder blades. It was simply too humid and hot to wear her hair down. And a braid, or braids, always kept it out of her way when she was in stalking mode as a sniper. Right now, Kilmer was standing down the men for three days. It wasn’t a bad idea because it would allow Sierra to move into the group during a less stressful and dangerous time. Her appreciation of Kilmer’s wisdom as a leader impacted her. She just wished he’d stop hating her because she was a woman, instead of the male soldier he’d expected. What the hell had happened to him previously to make him so distrusting and wary of military women? Or was he a patriarchal male, harking back to the days when women in combat just hadn’t even been imagined as a possibility or, much less, tolerated? Mouth quirking, Sierra got to her hands and knees, took a deep breath, and crawled out of her hut.
She saw the three Army soldiers sitting together in front of Kilmer’s hut. They had a waterproof tarp spread out between them and the men were oiling their weapons and other equipment in order to protect them against the humidity and the ever-present possibility of rust. As she rose to her feet, scrubbing her face, trying to wake up, she automatically keyed her hearing, tuning it to the baseline sounds of the jungle surrounding them. Mostly, she heard birds calling, and she relaxed a little.
Moving over to the group, she saw Mace lift his head. The men all wore baseball caps, and each had a holster with a .45 in it around their waists. They remained armed at all times. She’d left her own hut without a pistol.
“Hey, guys, can you tell me where your latrine facilities are around here?”
Kilmer hitched a thumb to his right and said, “Over there. There’s a small trail. You’ll see it. And Chastain? Wear a pistol on you at all times.”
She knew that was coming. “Right,” she murmured, nodding. Kilmer was just doing his job. Letting her know the lay of the land. Turning, she walked back to her hut, crawled inside, and grabbed the green nylon web belt and holster. She stuffed some toilet paper into the large thigh pockets of her cammies. Re-emerging, she headed toward the eastern edge of the meadow. Spotting the trail entrance, she walked down the damp, muddy path, surrounded by trees, darkness falling as their canopy of leaves cut the sunlight off from reaching the earth.
The path emerged into an area that was about one third the size of the meadow back where the huts were located. Looking around, she saw that a lot of holes had been dug here, and then filled in. It was an Army latrine thing. In other areas, there was nothing but litter and a lot of toilet paper rotting in the jungle. Getting her business done, Sierra had questions for Kilmer when she walked back into the village meadow.
“Get a good nap?” Nate asked her.
Sierra halted. “Yes. Thanks for letting me catch up.” Her gaze drifted to Kilmer. He was frowning, his attention on the pistol in his hands. She felt her lower body stir, completely taken aback by it. The man was undeniably male. A beautiful specimen, in fact. Sierra took in a deep breath. “Is there anything I can do around here to help out?”
“Yeah,” Cale spoke up, looking at her. “We’re going to give you the wood-collecting patrol.” He grinned. “Might sound easy, but it’s not. All the wood is wet and damned hard to get to burn.” He pointed to the last hut. “We usually find and stack wood in there. Not a lot, but enough for three fires a day. When we get here to what we term our ‘safe place’, we try to cook some local food we’ve bought from the villagers along our route instead of eating MREs.”
“That’s a great idea,” Sierra said. “Is there any particular place you want me to go fetch the wood? Length? Size?”
