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Long story short—Jorge Gomez flipped back to Team Blanco and sent Shay to Colombia as a peace offering to be a cage fighter, some type of entertainment Luca Blanco supposedly enjoys. RT1+2 flew down with EP and DP, former colleagues from Hillcroft. Your agent knows them. They are scheduled to enter Colombian airspace within the next couple of hours, followed by EJ and JH coming in from Europe, your dad and uncle from New York, and another Hillcroft contractor from DC. Everyone is heading to Pasto.
Oh my God.
Oh my fucking God. It took all my strength not to fidget like an idiot, and I just passed the phone to Adrien so he could read the update. Holy fuck—I was speechless. And enraged. Shay washere? Then he wasn’t fucking safe at all. We had to save him. We had to get him out of here.
Vincente had slit Adrien’s partner’s throat for merely rejecting his fucking flirting. Who knew what the others were capable of? And who hadn’t heard of what entertainment they found amusing? I’d heard of rape farms and jungle chases and torture and, yeah, cage fighting. Death matches.
I turned to Adrien, pretending to be aloof, and used a name known by the cartel.
“Petrov?” I had no real reason to utter the name. Scratch that, I wanted an excuse. Let the driver and the other one think it was a casual exchange. Whatever. Fuck.Whatever.
Adrien’s jaw ticked with tension, but that was the only reaction he showed. Then he shrugged and returned the phone with something he said in Spanish. He knew I didn’t speak the language, so it couldn’t be important.
I nodded and took the phone again, and I replied to Squeezy.
Thank you for the update. We will try to keep the phone as long as we can. We’re all hedded to the same place. We should probably COMMUNICATE ASAP. Also, fuck you, Gramps, you called my dad. And my uncle! You’re off the Christmas card list. CF
Mom sent Christmas cards. It felt like a good threat to showcase I was serious without being genuinely angry. I was…annoyed as fuck. I couldn’t believe him, and yet…I could. Man, thissucked.
I reread Squeezy’s previous text and made a quick correction.
*headed CF
I ran a hand through my hair and blew out a breath.
We needed to fucking coordinate. How many times had I been balls deep in missions that had suddenly changed course? Too many to count. No plan survived the first contact with the enemy and so on, but that only meant we had to get reorganized. Adrien and I had emptied his cache of explosives, small as it had been, and distributed C-4 along the western edge of the Blanco perimeter, closest to their main entrance. It was a large area, and I sincerely doubted our guys would actually set anything off, but as a Marine, I knew that everything that could go wrong…could go wrong.
The silence was stifling all of a sudden. I needed to talk. To vent. To strategize with Adrien. We had strengths and we had weaknesses. We needed manpower for a full-scale rescue mission here, and as irritated as I was with Gramps, he was one of our best assets in a jungle. He was a damn sniper. Why hadn’t he joined Elliott and Joel?
I chewed on the inside of my cheek and reckoned… Fuck. They’d probably need him with Carillo too. That man didn’t travel alone. He had seven guys with him. Okay, so whatever. We had Joel. He had to be the best of the best. Who else? I was good but not flawless. River and I were probably about the same. Reese was better with close combat—and so was I, for that matter. Uncle Greer was awesome, thankfully. He was a marksman. Dad…eh. Every Marine was a rifleman, but he’d walked away from the service and never looked back. Deer hunting wasn’t quite the fucking same.
Uncle Greer still visited a shooting range frequently.
I placed Dad in the close-combat category too. I had no doubts about his abilities in that arena.
Adrien? I mean, he was thebrains. I hadn’t seen him in action, though I’d picked up a hint or two that he might be good with martial arts.
My fucking God, it was a merry band of has-beens. We might as well call in the action stars of the nineties. Where were Arnold and Stallone?
I pinched my lips together, still struggling not to drum my fingers or bounce my knee, and then I saw Adrien’s phone. He angled the screen toward me, just enough for me to see what he’d written on the display.
EP = Emerson Payne. DP = Daniel Payne. Hillcroft PMC instructors, former contractors, special forces: SAS and Green Berets. Worked extensively with Elliott and Darius.
And River and Reese, I noted to myself. I knew those names. Ryan had mentioned them, right? Elliott too. Right after the attack at his ranch.
British SAS and Army Green Berets? Cancel the action stars. We had a fighting chance.
Jesus Christ, I was seriously nervous now.
We. Had. No. Plan.
A few minutes later of trying not to freak out, I checked the phone once more and saw an update from Squeezy.
I’m adding you to a new server for this op. Does your agent need his own connection, or are you a team? If you lose access to your phone before the others have landed, stand by. I mean it. Stand by. Do not act on your own. We have to merge our ops to make this work.
I scrubbed a hand over my face and feigned a yawn as I slid the phone to Adrien. It was his call.
He nodded with a dip of his chin, probably his most reluctant agreement ever.
