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Sierra wiped grittygrains of sleep still pricking her eyes from their corners while she sat waiting in the briefing room of Shield Security. It now was day seven since her return from Somalia. Jack Driscoll, the big boss, wandered in, looking sharp in his black chinos and his crisp, white collegiate shirt, open at the neck. Alex followed in next, looking like he’d only just awakened about as recently as she had. He was in a pair of Levi’s and a red cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows. And then, she was surprised to see Lauren, Alex’s wife, walk right in behind him. She wore a soft-lavender corduroy set of pants and a pale-pink long-sleeved sweater. Her red hair was tamed up into a knot on the top of her head. Usually, briefings only included people who knew something about the area, land or mission. They would fill her in on all the need-to-know intel that would help her during the op. But Lauren? Sierra nodded and smiled as her sniper sister sat down across opposite from her at the long, tiger-maple table.
Jack took the head of the table, Sierra on his right, and Alex on his left. Someone shut the door, and it grew quiet in the room. Jack provided the mission brief to all of them by clicking the ‘Send’ icon on his screen. The brief came up on the monitors of the computer desktops at each chair. He picked up the remote from the tabletop and clicked it toward the laptop set up on another small table to his left. The screen at the end of the room lit up with the power-point briefing he had put together for them.
“Okay,” he said, looking over at Sierra, “here’s the story. The CIA is asking for another of our snipers down in Peru.” He flashed the map of the country on the screen. “That red circle is where you’re going to be operating out of Sierra. It’s called the Highlands, which sit anywhere between eight to fourteen thousand feet on the slopes of the Andes mountains.” He picked up the laser pointer. He spun its beam tightly in such a way that the blurred, red dot encircled the area. “Your base of operation is going to be Cusco, which sits at nearly twelve thousand feet. It’s closest to the Highlands. Your other base is going to be Aguas Calientes, a small tourist town at the foot of the world heritage site, Machu Picchu.”
Sierra made notes on the separate, lined, yellow legal pad she always carried with her during a briefing. She never typed anything into her laptop.
Jack continued, “There are three US Army Special Forces hunter-killer teams, three men in each, assigned to this same area. They are under CIA directive. Over the last seven years, the Russian mafia, via a power base in New York City, has aggressively been entering this area. The Russians are the new players in this war, sparring with two drug lords who have controlled the growing of coca for the last twenty years, harvesting the leaves, and cooking them into cocaine. One of the old-school drug lords is Diego Valdez, out of Boliva, and the other is Marcos Suero, from Lima, Peru. The Latino leaders had a good, working relationship with the Q’ero Indians who live throughout this entire region. They are a tribe that was pre-Incan. And when the Incans took over to rule South America until the mid-1500’s that lasted one-hundred years. Then, the Spanish came in and destroyed their empire but the Q’ero people, because they lived in such remote areas in the Highlands, had little contact with the Spaniards. Now, the Russians, who we all know are not very kind or generous, are constantly battling the Latinos and taking over their cocaine territory. And they aren’t nice about it. And what is worse? The Q’ero people have been more or less pushed into or enslaved by the Russians to make and carry their cocaine up to an area where it can be transported by Russian helicopter out of the region.”
On the screen, Sierra saw the photo of a hard-faced white man with a scar along his jaw, bald-headed, his large nose crooked severely to one side from an old break, his dark brown eyes glaring out at whoever had taken the picture. She got a chill down her spine, warning her that this man was evil personified. His mouth was thin, just a tight line, his jaw clenched, chin thrust out, as if he dared anyone to take him on. Apart from the startling one on his jaw, she saw a lot of other old scars here and there across his face. Flinching inwardly, she saw the top half of his right ear was missing. He was wearing military camos that she realized were Spetsnaz in origin.
“Who’s this?” she asked Jack, glancing up at her boss.
“Your nemesis. Ex-Spetsnaz Captain, Olezka Volkov. He’s forty years old, six foot three inches tall and two-hundred and twenty pounds of raw, hard muscle. His best friend, Petrov, who used to be the leader of Vlad Alexandrov’s drug team, was killed by Sergeant Mace Kilmer. Mace is the head of one of these three-man spec force teams. After Pavlovitch was killed in a firefight at the village of Orilla, in the Peruvian jungle, a new Russian mafia leader in New York City, Rurik Burgov, chose Volkov to head up this team. I think Alex might have something to add?” and Jack looked over at the Ukrainian operator.
Sierra saw Alex’s brows move downward, felt a shift of energy around him, saw the banked anger in his hazel eyes. “Who is this Volkov, Alex?” she asked.
“Someone you need to be very, very careful of ever meeting, Sierra. The only way you want to meet this cold-blooded bastard is to site him through your scope and pull the trigger.”
Her nostrils flared. Volkov looked like an evil menace to her. “Okay, give me background on him?”
“I was with Vlad Alexandrov’s team,” he told her. “Me and Nik Morozov both: another combat medic. When we were in Spetsnaz, we were like long-lost brothers. When we left the military and came over to South America, I needed a lot of money to help my sister, Kira. Nik was in a similar situation, with his brother Dan, who had a TBI, traumatic brain injury. We joined Vlad’s group. There are five Russian teams in that area. Volkov ran one of them. He used harsh methods to force the men of these Q’ero Indian villages to work for them, growing and making cocaine so it could be exported.” Alex grimaced and rubbed his large hands together, scowling. “Worse? Volkov would have his second-in-command choose a young girl or teen daughter from the chief of the village’s family. He would rape her in front of them, to force them to grow, gather and produce cocaine for them. Instead of for the Latin drug lords.”
“Vlad Alexandrov and Volkov both employed rape as a weapon. I and Nik tried to stop it in our group. Alexandrov threatened to put a bullet in our head if we tried to stop the rapes by him and several other men on his team, including Petrov. We had to walk away,” Alex went on, sadness in his tone. “I’ll never get the screams of those poor, innocent women… the ones they raped, out of my head.”
“Those bastards,” Sierra hissed. She knew Alex and his friend, Nik, had come out of a drug team in South America. Knew that he had saved Sky’s life after Vlad had captured her, and Cal’s along with it. If not for Alex turning traitor on his drug team, the both of them wouldn’t be alive today.
“Volkov,” Alex warned her heavily, “is ten times worse. He will not only drag out the wife of the chief, but he will take every daughter as well, no matter what their age. He’ll have his men rape them in front of the terrified villagers. And then, he will shoot the oldest son of the chief in the head to bring home his point that he should work for the team or else.”
“No…,” Sierra whispered, feeling her stomach clench. She looked up and saw the rage in Lauren’s eyes. She sat tense, her hands gripped together, her knuckles white.
“Volkov is willing to do whatever it takes to claim the territory,” Alex said unhappily. “He has enslaved men from the ten Q’ero villages that comprise his territory in the Highlands all the way down to the jungle area near Aguas Calientes.”
“But,” Sierra said, consulting her hand written notes, “Nik Morozov is now with us.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “He’d been a CIA mole working for the US government.”
Alex snorted. “Volkov is a monster. You must be very careful.”
More cold chills ran down through Sierra’s spine.
“A fitting word, Alex,” Jack said, “they are indeed all of them monsters. Look at this new photo, Sierra,” and he flicked the remote.
Sierra turned her attention to the wall at the end of the table. The man who appeared was obviously American. He was wearing US Army jungle cammies. Her heart lurched. It surprised the hell out of her. Why? What was this reaction all about? She unconsciously rubbed her white sweater where her heart lay beneath it. The man had a hard face, straight black eyebrows over large, intelligent gray eyes. His hair was military short. The look in his eyes was flat, and she could tell he took no prisoners. Sierra saw no life in them. Just… grimness. His nose was long and had been broken, a bump at the root of it. He was a warrior who had led a rough life, she thought. And if his mouth had been a thin line, she’d have said that he was Volkov’s cousin. But it wasn’t. His mouth was humane looking to her. Even the corners of his mouth naturally lifted upward. It was his saving grace, Sierra thought. Still, her body responded to his man who wore a black baseball cap, sunglasses perched on its brim, his shoulders so damn wide that he looked like a football player, not the spec force operative she guessed he was. “Who am I looking at now?”
“Sergeant Mace Kilmer,” Jack said. “There’s a lot of intel on him in your mission brief. He’s thirty years old, six foot three inches tall, two-hundred and ten pounds of mean muscle. This guy is a weapon’s specialist and runs a team of two other men, Sergeants Caleb Merrill and Nate Cunningham. The first is a communications specialist and the latter is an 18-delta combat medic. They’ve been fighting and taking down HVTs the last two years in the area. No one knows this region better than Kilmer.”
Lauren stirred. “I was assigned to Kilmer’s team, Sierra. And Jack is right. This guy is a gruff, hard, son-of-a-bitch, but he’s the right man for the task.” She shook her head. “And he doesn’t sit well with a woman in the team, believe me. A real patriarchal bastard.”
Groaning, Sierra cut Driscoll a glance. “So, why not pick one of the male operators to go down there with him?”
“Because none of them speak Spanish, and you do.”
“Gimme a break,” Sierra groaned. “I don’t need that shit, Jack. I really don’t. It’s a damned distraction of the worst sort.”
Lauren smiled a little. “Kilmer grows on you after a while. Sorta like a friendly fungus. At first, he’s snarly and growly, but after you show him, you know what you’re doing, he backs off and supports you one-hundred percent. He’s old school chauvinist until you prove to him differently.”
Rubbing her brow, Sierra muttered, “This is a pain in the ass to deal with, Jack. It really is.”
