Carlos ran over every step in his mind, again, looking for anything he might have missed. He’d spent the past five days coordinating this op from BAD’s headquarters in Nashville, dispatching agents to investigate possible chateaus in St. Gervais based on occupancy and activity. The ground teams had quickly narrowed the choices to six and kept each site under surveillance, watching for unusual movement.
He received word twelve hours ago of four snowmobiles and a Range Rover arriving at one chateau now protected with armed guards. Bingo.
Thirty minutes later, Carlos and his team were wheels up. The mission felt rushed and unplanned, but that’s what dropped it squarely in the hands of BAD. They could-and would-move on a hunch when other agencies had to go through proper channels.
“There’s more coming through,” Gotthard said, his eyes locked on the small monitor. “Another notice received…this one identifying courier…”
Courier was code for the identity of the kidnappers suspected of delivering Mandy to the Fratelli.
“Have they found the messenger?” Carlos asked, indicating the identity or location of the mysterious informant Mirage.
“Not yet,” Gotthard replied without looking up as he scratched on his notepad.
If misinformation from this Mirage character sent his team into an ambush or put Mandy at risk, Carlos would be looking for blood when he returned.
If they returned.
Gotthard hit a button on his wrist unit, ending the connection. “Here’s the courier.” He lifted the paper he’d written the kidnapper’s name on for everyone to see.
Anguis.
Rae’s lips moved silently mouthing ahn-gee as she absorbed the information.
Carlos blinked. He stared at the letters, trying to make them mean something else, but there was no mistaking Anguis. Not the largest organized-crime family in South America, but one of the most dangerous to cross. Merde! If the tip was correct and the men guarding the chateau worked for Durand Anguis, they might recognize Carlos. And if they did…
“Pilot just radioed a ten-minute warning,” Gotthard announced.
Everyone went into motion, forcing Carlos from his shock. Could the Anguis really be involved with the Fratelli? This smelled like a setup, but who would know to set him up? He switched his 02 tube from the console to the bottle attached to his jumpsuit and accepted the busted hand he’d been dealt, then focused on his role as team leader. “Sound off.”
After making the same oxygen-supply switch, Korbin nodded. “Check.”
Rae and Gotthard both confirmed.
“Synchronize altimeters.” Carlos gave his reading and finished with “Six minutes.”
The next check would be two minutes, then showtime with no second takes.
Carlos adjusted his goggles and strapped on his helmet. “Korbin is on point, me, then Rae. Gotthard sweeps cleanup.”
Irritation fumed in Rae’s gaze.
Carlos didn’t care what she thought of him putting her in the crib position, the safest slot in an assault.
One woman had died in his arms years ago.
He wouldn’t be responsible for another.
Highly skilled and lethal as any man on this team, Rae was more than capable of protecting herself. A damned good agent. But Carlos had seen too many women die in inhuman ways, one grotesque example only three months ago. A female informant had missed a meeting then disappeared, until Carlos discovered her inside a building in a remote mountain range in Brazil where rebels hid a stash of weapons. And caged women.
But the rebels were killed in a skirmish with the government over a week before Carlos and a team located the building.
Carlos could still smell the baked stench of rotting bodies. He found the weapons and the informant along with seven more women in chain-link cages waiting to be sold. The metal building had turned into an inferno when the temperatures roared over a hundred degrees every day. One nineteen-year-old female’s fingers clung to the chain- link where she reached for help.
Nightmares were the vanguard of his conscience and every decision he made.
Carlos shook off the morbid vision and focused on the living. “Two minutes.” Time to head for the rear.
Korbin moved forward, careful not to tangle his feet in the loose hoses. Everyone filed in line behind Korbin toward the rear of the cavernous fuselage, the silence now filled only with the roar of the jet engines. The aircraft’s transponder pinged a signal to local air traffic control that this was a commercial flight delivering cargo.
The ping just didn’t elaborate on the lethal capability of the aircraft’s cargo.
Carlos forced a long, easy breath through his lungs. Anything to slow the blood slamming through his veins from the shock. Anguis soldiers could be waiting at the chateau. One had seen, and recognized, him in the past sixteen years. That man hadn’t lived to tell anyone.
Because of that incident three years ago, surgical alteration had been necessary. Durand’s massive soldier nicknamed El Toro, the bull, had recognized Carlos during an undercover operation in Argentina before Carlos saw him. The six-foot-seven Anguis soldier had once taught him how to hit a baseball as a teen, but when he encountered Carlos in the undercover operation, all El Toro saw was the half-million bounty Durand offered to deliver him alive. The Anguis soldier planned a perfect ambush with an additional man. Jumped on his way to meet Gotthard, Carlos refused to go down without spilling blood, most of which was his. But he’d managed to send a double-click radio signal to Gotthard for backup. Two minutes later Gotthard arrived, neutralizing the men, and found Carlos beaten close to death, his face hamburger.
Agents were at their most vulnerable while undercover, which influenced Joe’s orders for the plastic surgeon to create a new look to protect his man in the future.
The face that stared back at Carlos from a mirror was at times similar and other times startling. Different enough no one would easily recognize him and put his team at risk, his only true concern. BAD operatives were some of the most highly skilled, and dangerous, in the world. He’d stake his life on them, and had many times.
He couldn’t ask for a better team tonight.
But Durand Anguis operated like no other criminal entity, using the most unexpected tactics.
The rear load ramp groaned open. Icy air blasted in as a precursor of what to expect. When Korbin moved forward, so did the team. A bottomless black void loomed beyond the gaping hole to suck them from the aircraft. Carlos shifted closer to the roaring wind. The half-pie moon shone down on a low-hanging blanket of clouds dumping fresh snow across the French Alps.
Folding each finger into his gloved hand as he silently counted down, Korbin closed his fist at five-the signal to go.
Carlos followed suit, a buffeting thirty-degrees-below-zero wind jarring him. Legs tucked in a sitting position, he yanked the rip cord, deploying his ram-air parachute. When the square canopy caught, the sudden change of airspeed wrenched his body backward and up. Jaw clenched to keep his teeth from banging together, he lifted his hands and grasped the risers, instinctively maneuvering the parachute.
His heart drummed faster than a machine gun with the trigger pinned. Adrenaline exploded through him, then he drew a deep breath and settled in for the ride. To be honest, he did enjoy this one part of jumping, loved the sudden quiet and sense of floating in ethereal peace. Seconds evaporated faster than the moisture on his goggles as the team glided twenty kilometers toward the landing spot. He lived his life in minutes, one op to the next, watching over his shoulder for the past sixteen years, waiting to be killed.
If things went to shit tonight, the wait could be over.
He squinted. Two tiny lights appeared in the greenish view of his night-vision goggles as Gotthard’s wide shape and Rae’s long form came into focus. Where was Korbin?
A flicker of light dropped diagonally across his path at last. The adrenaline junkie settled into the front spot. All lights were extinguished, radio silence in force.
Alex Sanderson, the fifth operative, known as Sandman for putting the enemy to sleep, was an ex-Air Force combat controller, otherwise known as an assault weatherman, highly trained. Sandman would be in place by now setting the infrared strobe as a beacon for the landing spot. He’d been on the ground two klicks from the target for the past week camping in a spider hide, invisible to everyone while performing reconnaissance vital to the
