woman’s arms, a hardworking man who realized his boss was on the wrong side, and tried to right some wrongs.
Wasn’t going to happen. Not with Ramon Salinas.
From the tight, sad expression on her face, he figured she knew. Smart girl.
“So if he was working for you, why did you kill him?” she asked.
“Because every time I turned around, he was standing there with his hand out. When he started bitching about either getting a bigger cut or else running his mouth to the wrong people, he left me no choice. I buried the bastard. Frankly, my dear, you’re better off without him. Well, relatively speaking.” They’d all be dead by morning, and not one of them was naive enough to doubt it.
Not even the lovely Eva.
He let his gaze run over her from top to bottom and back up again, not missing a curve. The lady was built. He had a soft spot for smart, gorgeous women, and this one was starting to look like a lost opportunity. He should have done the right thing eight years ago and been there to console the grieving widow.
Oh, well. Jane was a safer bet—and she had the same mean streak he did, which made them a good team.
“You weren’t supposed to make it out of Lima,” he said, holding her gaze. “Jane was contracted for the hit.” He gestured to the kick-ass blonde at his side, and saw dawning recognition in Eva’s and Mike’s faces. “She still wants to finish the job, professional pride and all that. She wants her pound of flesh.” And he was inclined to let her have it. His boys deserved the best, and Jane was the best.
He slid his gaze over the three of them, all that was left of the One-Eyed Jacks. That’s what they’d been—his boys, and he couldn’t help but feel a small twinge of regret. They’d been the best team he’d ever had, and they’d been their own worst enemies.
“You were too good,” he told them. “You couldn’t keep your heads down and ignore what needed to be ignored. It was a simple deal: drugs and guns. Lawson and I delivered the guns, and the Afghani warlords delivered the opium. But you guys”—he shook his head, and a small grin curved his mouth—“you guys just kept screwing their pooch. I don’t want you to think I gave you up. There wasn’t a choice to be made. It was purely a question of logistics. You had to go.”
“OSD was a setup from the get-go,” Mike concluded.
“And your own Salinas lead you into the trap.”
“Why not just kill all of us that night?” Cooper looked genuinely puzzled. “You knew we were out there hiding.”
“Ah, that was the genius of the plan. We could have killed you, yes, but then how did we explain what happened? Nothing like a whodunit to bring on a major investigation.”
“So you deflected the attention to us. Put the blame on us for killing those civilians.”
Brown always had been intelligent.
Brewster nodded. “Which got Karzai good and riled. He put pressure on the White House. Told the President that if he wanted to maintain any kind of presence in the region, he needed to pull all Spec Ops teams out or he’d blow this incident up in the international press to the point where it looked like Abu Ghraib all over again.”
“How’d you get it buried from the media?” Taggart wanted to know.
“Same way every potential political bombshell gets buried. Money. Karzai made out like a bandit. Plus he got his warlords off his back when the Spec Ops teams were booted—which was exactly what Lawson and I wanted. It got you out of our hair so we could continue to run our opium pipeline without interference.”
None of them had anything to say to that.
“If you had just left it alone”—he turned back to Eva—“everything would have stayed status quo. You’d all still be alive tomorrow.”
“Then why did you leak the OSD file to me?”
He frowned, puzzled, then let out a soft chuckle. “Someone leaked the OSD file? To you? God, that’s what set this whole thing off? Well, that explains a lot. Leak the file? No, that wasn’t me. Though now that I know someone’s playing fast and loose with information I had made certain was buried… well, when I find out who did it, they’ll be as dead as you’re about to be. And that’s the irony, isn’t it? Apparently they thought they were doing you a favor. Instead, they signed your death warrant along with their own.”
“So why are we still alive? Why not get it over with?”
Taggart. Always impatient, to his own detriment.
Brewster looked at the men who had once been under his command and actually felt regret. “Don’t worry. We will. But right now we have pressing business that can’t wait.”
Lawson’s walkie-talkie squawked, then a disem-bodied voice crackled over the radio. “ETA on the chopper, five minutes.”
“Stand by,” Lawson said into the radio, then looked at Brewster and nodded. “We need to cut this little reunion short. Our guests are about to arrive.”
“Your pressing business?” Cooper was insolent as ever.
“ ’Fraid so. Duty calls,” Brewster told them, then regarded them with a regretful look. “I know you don’t believe this, but I am sincerely sorry about the way this turned out.”
Cooper, Taggart, and Brown all looked at him, looked at each other, then as one, lifted their bound hands and flipped him twin birds.
Arrogant bastards. “And that attitude, gentlemen, is exactly why you’re going to die.”
35
The silence that fell over their prison after Brewster and his entourage left could have filled a football stadium. It lasted all of five seconds before Taggart cut it off at the knees.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here. Steak dinner to the first one out of the cuffs.”
“You are
Like old times, Mike thought, going to work on the plastic straps binding his wrists. They’d felt invincible once, and found out the hard way that they were far from it. But their lives weren’t going to end here. Not like this. No way. Not like rats in a cage.
Jesus. Brewster. He still couldn’t believe it. The man had been a verifiable hero in the Spec Ops community. He’d had the chops, done the deeds, and he’d made good, all the way to a three star—and then he’d gone bad. So fucking bad.
But there was no time for that now. He had to get Eva out of this rat hole, and to do that
“The nice men from Mexico must have arrived.” Cooper looked grim. “Sounds like a Shithook.”
Eva scowled. “A what?”
“A civilian version of the CH-47 Chinook,” Mike explained. “Big bird. Can carry a lot of cargo.” Like guns, they all thought, but didn’t voice.
“We’ve gotta boogie.”
It had to be over a hundred degrees in the small, airless room. Sweat ran down Mike’s forehead, burning like fire when it trickled into the cuts on his face, as he went back to work on the flex cuffs.
“Winner and new champeen,” Cooper crowed in a whisper as he lifted his hands, free of the restraints.
“I’ll make sure you get a medal,” Mike grumbled. “If my friend Simmons hadn’t tried to beat my face into hamburger, you’d still be second best.”
“Nice try, but your face has nothing to do with ditching the cuffs.” Cooper went to work on Mike’s cuffs. “Did sort of improve the way you look, though. Too bad you’ve lost your edge.”
As soon as Mike was free, Cooper helped Taggart finish up. Mike helped Eva.
