Damage Control

that had killed Mitchell Ponder and cost him so much. Who but the American military, after all, could have pulled off that kind of operation with such precision? Now that they’d lured the same operators into Mexico, their ingenuity and capacity for violence made Munro’s denials more credible.

But the American commandoes were still but a few against many, and soon they would be dead. Palma’s guess that they would choose the nearest tunnel had turned out to be correct. And now, according to his last report, they were surrounded.

Soon, they would be dead, and this long, annoying distraction would finally be over.

Even better, if Felix’s intelligence gatherers were correct, Munro would soon be the associate deputy director of the CIA, with access to all of that agency’s assets. He’d be in a position where one word from Felix could bring him down, with a future measured in prison time.

This blooming reality was far greater than any fantasy Hernandez had ever dared to dream.

One million candlepower.

For the last twenty years, that had been the standard wattage for helicopter searchlights. Jonathan figured that was the minimum wattage of the beam that lit them up, and he could tell from the way that Boxers ripped at his NVGs that the blast of light had damn near blinded him. When he swerved, he ran head-on into three steel-and- concrete bollards that stood sentry outside a warehouse building.

“God damn it!” Boxers yelled. The plume of steam from under the hood told them that the Sandcat was dead.

As the chopper continued to circle overhead, the floodlight remained fixed on the ruined vehicle, a beacon to the horde of pissed-off soldiers who would soon be racing after them.

“Big Guy, you all right?”

“I so want to kill somebody right now!” Cursing, he undid his harness and shouldered his door open. He grabbed his ruck and shouted, “Where’s my weapon?”

Jonathan handed it to him, and without pausing even a beat, Boxers rolled out of the Sandcat, pressed the weapon to his shoulder and fired two quick rounds into the artificial sun that had lit them up.

The chin light flared and went black. You just don’t get to see marksmanship like that very often.

Palma saw the shooter step out of the vehicle and drop to his knee, and as the enormous man took aim, he thought for sure that his bullet was somehow going to go straight between his eyes. In the wash of the light, the muzzle flash registered more as smoke than light. The world went dark, and Palma could not have been more impressed.

“Set us down!” he commanded.

Instead, the pilot pulled pitch and they rose higher.

“Down there!” Palma yelled. “Our prey is down there!”

The gunfire had frazzled the pilot. He was not trained in combat tactics. His job was to track traffic and deliver VIPs to their venues of choice. Getting shot at was not part of the deal.

“Everybody out!” Jonathan commanded. “Everybody bring weapons.” God knew they had a big enough selection. Jonathan shrugged back into his ruck, and by the time he stood to his full height outside the vehicle, the others had gathered in a semicircle.

“Where are we going, Maria?”

She seemed startled by the realization that they were depending on her to be their guide. “I haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “I don’t know where we are, exactly.”

In the distance, Jonathan heard the sound of approaching vehicles. If he used his imagination, he could see the distant phantoms of red and blue emergency lights. Staying put was out of play. He had to assume that the people in the chopper had weapons, and a stationary target would be their greatest gift.

“Okay, this way,” he said. Relying on instinct and his memory of the map he’d studied on his GPS, he led them off in what had to be north. “Stay close to the buildings and move fast.”

In the canyons created by the low-rise warehouse buildings, the chopper overhead appeared to be everywhere. The grinding hum of the rotor blades pounded the night from all directions.

The fact that the aircraft had had a chin light in the first place gave Jonathan hope that the flight crew didn’t have night vision, but hope was a lot like prayer-always welcome, but rarely dependable for results. The chopper would find a place to set down soon, and in the meantime, the crew was no doubt working the radio to coordinate ground forces.

They needed to keep moving.

“Maria, is any of this looking familiar?”

“It all looks familiar,” she said. “The buildings all look the same. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here.”

“What’s the unit number again?”

“Twelve-seventy, I think.”

“You think?”

“That’s what I remember.”

“Is that the number you gave to the FBI?”

“I think so, yes.”

Jonathan felt a swell of anger, but he swallowed it down. What was it about civilians that once the tension ratcheted up, made everything become a question? No one was sure of anything anymore. Well, there was a solution for that.

Jonathan tapped the transmit button on his chest. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

In Fisherman’s Cove, Venice jumped when the SkysEye image refreshed and she saw the wrecked vehicle, the horror of the image made even worse by the fact that Jonathan hadn’t checked in afterward.

She was just reaching for the transmit switch when her speakers popped. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

Relief. She fought hard to keep the emotion out of her voice as she replied, “Is everybody all right? Looks like a bad wreck.”

“We’re fine, but we’re in trouble. A little lost in the forest. Can you talk us in?”

Venice spun her chair a little to view a different screen. “Where are you exactly? I won’t get another satellite image for two, almost three minutes.”

A pause. “We’re in front of unit seven-thirteen.”

“Stand by one,” she said.

“We don’t have much more than one,” Jonathan quipped. “The quicker the better.”

Anticipating a challenge like this, Venice had called up a schematic for the storage facility over an hour ago. It appeared on her screen as checkerboard of north-south streets intersecting with east-west streets. Depending on size, some blocks had more units than others.

She keyed her mike. “From seven-thirteen, you need to go five blocks north and three blocks east.”

“Roger,” Scorpion said. “Keep an eye on the SkysEye feed. I know the bad guys are close, but I don’t have a visual. We need to know where they are.”

“Will do,” she said.

Venice hated this part of her job-the passive watching and waiting while people she cared about fought for their lives. She knew they needed her-that the technology she tamed and interpreted was as critical to every mission as the weaponry wielded by the guys, but from this far away, the team felt very small and terribly isolated.

When her image finally refreshed, she used thermal imagery to find Jonathan and the team, and was pleased to see that they were making progress toward the target building. When she saw that the pursuing troops were taking the wrong path, she smiled.

The happiness evaporated in an instant when she realized what she was really seeing.

Jonathan’s earbud popped. “Scorpion, they’re trying to flank you on your right. It looks like they’ve figured out