I hate that painting even more in daylight,” Drake sat on the sofa. He couldn’t stop staring at the hideous thing. The nude was so blatant. Too realistic to be ignored. It was almost as if a naked harlot was lying in their midst.

“You only hate it because you have taste,” Nikita curled up on the couch beside him with her bare feet tucked under her. He had his arm over her shoulders and if Altman or Zoe had anything to say about it, they were keeping it to themselves.

Esly sat in her armchair, unaware of anything out of the ordinary—like a Night Stalker getting cozy with a Navy SEAL.

Altman inspected it again. “There’s no card, no secret inscription carved on the frame, we don’t have x-ray vision to see if there is actually a copy of Dogs Playing Poker underneath it.” They had tried holding it up to the muted sunlight lost behind the heavy clouds, but learned nothing that way either.

Zoe tipped her head back and forth to inspect it. “Maybe her head is on another of his paintings and her missing foot on yet another. If it’s a piece in a larger puzzle, we’re nowhere.”

“I can’t believe that there’s a series of these goddamn things,” Drake managed a deep breath but it didn’t calm him.

He went to the window and stared out. They were docked in Mahogany Bay, a narrow, deep-water inlet five kilometers from the town of Coxen Hole. There was room to squeeze in two cruise ships. Beyond the dock a small quaint “village” had been set up—half souvenir shops and half tour providers. Beyond that lay a forest as thick as and even more foreign to him than the Alabama one. Here all he could smell was the sea.

It would have been prettier if not for the high layer of thin, gray clouds that had moved all the way across the blue sky since dawn. It reached to the mainland, sixty kilometers distant across the turquoise water gone dark blue beneath that sullen sky.

“I know this place.”

Esly was from Honduras, so he wasn’t sure why she sounded so surprised. But then Drake turned and saw that she wasn’t looking at the view, she was looking at the painting.

“What place?”

“It is la cascada, a, uh, waterfall near El Carbón. It is deep in the national park.”

He hadn’t even looked at the background of the painting as a picture, merely to see if it hid words or a map.

Drake grabbed his satellite phone and punched a speed dial.

“5E Tours,” someone answered. “How may we help you today? We have special discounts on heli-diving, heli-jungle tours, and women’s lingerie.”

“Say what?”

Then the voice registered.

“Rafe!” Drake was so glad to hear his pilot’s familiar voice that he forgot to use the lieutenant’s title, which was just as well with Esly in the room. “How close are you?”

“Flying, driving, or walking?”

Drake looked at the phone and tried to make sense of the question. Finding no clue as to what game Rafe was playing, he put the phone back to his ear.

“We’ve been in place for a couple of hours, but we were told you were already off ship. I guess you’re back. Been enjoying your luxury transport? It’s a very pretty ship, by the way.”

Drake stepped out onto the verandah and looked down at the dock. Nikita followed him out. She spotted them first, resting a hand on his shoulder to get his attention, then pointing. Most of ten stories below he spotted two guys sitting on a bench in the shade. Both wore outrageously loud Hawaiian shirts. The two of them appeared to be wrestling over the control of a phone.

“Look up and forward,” he instructed them. He and Nikita waved and in moments they were waving back. “Be with you in ten.”

“Damn, Nikita. You look like a major babe in that outfit,” Rafe offered a wolf whistle.

Nikita wasn’t sure how she could possibly be a “major babe.”

“And Zoe, way hot!” Julian offered her a high five that she smacked hard.

“You two are awfully cozy.” She followed Rafe’s attention down to her hand with some surprise.

She’d come down the ramp with her hand tucked around Drake arm as if it was a completely natural thing to do. Perhaps because it had been a perfectly natural thing to do. This whole romantic whatever-it-might-be was getting out of control. Except it didn’t feel as if it was.

“These two not so much,” Julian pointed at Altman standing stiffly beside Zoe.

“And this must be Ms. Escarra. Our friend Parker has told us so little about you.” Rafe bent low over her hand and kissed it.

“Hey,” Julian protested. “Stop trying to hog the hot women.”

Esly looked at Nikita in a bit of a panic.

“Do not worry, Esly. It isn’t just you, they’re always this irritating.”

“I do not mind. Two such handsome men, I very much am not minding. Also, have no reason to complain. I am mostly happy that I am not dead yet and that I do not kill you, Nikita.”

“Nor anyone else…according to our records,” Rafe was suddenly serious, almost nasty. His flirt of a moment before was now schizophrenically set aside between one breath and the next. Usually he made it easy to forget he was the officer in charge of a forty-million-dollar war machine and that both he and his helicopter were known for their fiery temper.

“The only people I ever shoot was in the line of my duty,” Esly raised her chin.

“Before you went to the fucking dark side and—”

“Can it, Rafe,” Drake stepped right up in his commander’s face. “Old ground, already covered. Moving on now.”

Rafe glowered and Nikita almost wondered if they were about to fight over the woman.

But Julian gave Esly a reassuring wink. Then he looked at Drake, “What the hell happened to you, Duck-man?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Standing tall, looking like you’re ready to take on my fellow pilot to defend your women,” Julian punched Rafe in the arm hard enough to receive a snarl. That was Julian’s gift, he could always joke Rafe out of a mood. Nikita had seen it a number of times.

“Shit!” Rafe scrubbed at his face. “Sorry about that, but you’re supposed to pick a goddamn side and stick with it.”

“Yes,” Esly nodded. “I know that now. But it was better than ending up dead in the streets. I already knew too much. If I refused when they said I must switch… You do not live in Honduras. Do not pretend that you know its problems.”

Nikita liked that she said it simply, without anger or pushing back against Rafe’s load of attitude. She could see the quiet-spoken police woman despite the pretty clothing they’d purchased for her.

“But something sure happened to the Duck-man,” Julian went for the distraction and it served to finish shifting Rafe’s attention.

His eyes finally focused on how closely they stood.

“I didn’t do this to him,” Nikita protested but didn’t back away. “Drake did it to himself.” It wasn’t in her power to transform a man so wholly.

Zoe’s sharp laugh was soon joined by Esly’s.

“Oh, my friend, Nikita,” Esly actually hugged her. “Of course you did. It is the power we women have on men.”

“I’d rather shoot them,” Nikita grumbled out. That was so much easier. Get assigned a target, complete with a long and bad history, then infiltrate, acquire, take down, and exfiltrate. This whole trying to understand the man beside her was much harder.

“We have the VIP helo at the local airport because we knew you were coming in today,” Julian was explaining to Drake. “The rest of—” he glanced at Esly, “—our people are offshore.”

Nikita didn’t know of an aircraft carrier group in the area. So either a helicopter dock ship or a littoral combat ship was parked outside of territorial waters. Or Belize’s waters, which were less than a hundred kilometers away.

“We’d like to go on a sightseeing tour today,” Esly finally spoke up.

She hadn’t struck Nikita as being stupid in any way. But she…was teasing Rafe just moments after facing him down.

Go, Esly.

“I would so love to see the pretty islands of Roatán and Utila from the skies. I have never seen Honduras from a helicopter.”

“Lady,” Rafe protested, “you know that we’re busy here. Besides, there’s a tropical storm coming. It’s supposed to stay out to sea, but it’s still going to make for some very lumpy air.”

Julian caught on immediately of course, but Esly was able to string Rafe along for several more pedantic declarations before he noticed his copilot’s big smile and figured it out.

Drake could think of far worse ways to travel than a luxury helicopter flown by two of the best heli-pilots in the military.

Whereas the whole maid and butler treatment in a cruise ship’s luxury suite was actually creeping him out. It was like everyone was always watching him, the entire ship’s complement. Nikita and Zoe’s rumor campaign had definitely taken hold and he couldn’t go anywhere without being nudged for exciting tales to fill the other passengers’ boring lives. Thankfully, there’d only been one other like the banker who had actually tried to hire his clandestine services to deal with a competitor.

Word of the treadmill race, and many hints of the steamy aftermath, had also gotten out. That story didn’t appear to need any help from Zoe to spread far and wide. He was propositioned in the dining halls, in the bars, and on the gangway by women ranging from a very sultry Frenchwoman who happened to mention she had just started lycée this year (how did the French look so mature when they were just starting high school), to an Italian grand dame offering him the keys to her Amalfi villa at any time—bringing along “the girl” was optional, but only if she liked the right kind of games.

Sanctuary had not been achieved by clinging ever more tightly to Nikita. For her part, she merely appeared amused, or perhaps bemused.

He’d taken on a mythic persona and the only ones who could see through it were all on this helicopter. And he wasn’t even sure about that. He often caught Nikita looking at him, just watching, as if she didn’t know him at all.

Once again he and Altman were in the back-facing seats.

“Okay, Altman. You’ve got to admit that we are two damned lucky guys,” Drake nodded across the narrow cabin toward the three women.

Altman grunted something that might have been agreement, it might not. What did they do to people when they turned them into SEALs?

Across from them were three very attractive women who couldn’t be more different if they tried.

In the middle sat the dark, sultry Esly. She wore the tough-as-nails outfit on a killer body.

Zoe was across from Altman, still just as cute as hell in the outfit she’d been wearing all morning—an airy silk caftan in wild tropical colors that was constantly falling off one of her fine shoulders. The plunging neckline could only be worn by a woman as lean as she was. And it just brushed her knees.

On Nikita it would be…he pictured it…then tried to picture anything else, but couldn’t. On Nikita’s taller, more powerful build, she’d reveal deep cleavage rather than an expanse of smooth skin. And it would land ever so high on her thigh. That he definitely had to see. He looked at her dressed in a long flowing skirt of woodsy colors, and the simple white blouse that said it wasn’t about the clothes at all, it was all about the woman inside them.

And it was true.

They left Roatán and flew sixty kilometers across the storm-dulled Caribbean Sea. After they made landfall they flew the same distance again up into the rugged hills of eastern Honduras. Drake spent much of the flight chatting softly with Altman about just what it had taken for the first woman to become a SEAL. Slowly at first, but warming to the tale of his prize pupil, he revealed just how impossibly high Drake was shooting if he was going after Nikita.

Time to really gear up, Duck-man. Because going for her was Number One on his personal mission list.

“It is all so different from the air,” Esly sounded deeply perplexed.

Nikita had finally switched seats with Esly so that she could look more easily out the window. Julian had fished out a small pair of binoculars and handed them back for her to use.

The rolling eastern mountains of Sierra Rio Tinto National Park were covered in trees completely foreign to Nikita. Southern Alabama was mostly river flood plains and bottomlands of the Tombigbee and Alabama Rivers. Even Cheaha Mountain, the highest point in the state, topped out at twenty-four hundred feet and had a resort lodge and RV park atop it.

The mountains of eastern Honduras climbed little higher, but they did it in steep slopes covered in dense jungle. Trails were few and roads fewer as they flew further inland.

Nikita had carried out missions in these kinds of jungles and they were hard work. It always seemed she spent half her time trying not to be bitten or even eaten. It was her first trip to Honduras, but she’d been plenty close. She’d had to shoot a variety of fauna: a cougar in Nicaragua, several charging wild boars in Guatemala, and there’d been a time in Panama where it had been touch-and-go as to who got who first—her shooting a Mexican drug lord brokering a major deal or the jaguar that had been stalking her hideout through the long, motionless afternoon.

She didn’t like these jungles.

They were following the Sico River up into the hills as well as they could, but it meandered as it flowed, occasionally disappearing entirely in dense growth. The flat light of the overcast sky wasn’t helping: hiding instead of revealing terrain and water.

She alternated between looking out over Esly’s shoulder and Zoe’s.

“You have changed him, you know,” Zoe whispered without turning as Julian announced they were crossing from Sierra Rio Tinto to Sierra El Carbón National Park. It didn’t look any different to her.

“We have gone too far. Make the pilot turn us back. We are very close. I have not been here since my first lover when I was sixteen, but I remember it well. I will know when I see it.”

Drake passed Esly’s instructions to the pilots and they circled.

“How have I changed him?” Nikita kept her voice low.

“The Drake Roman I know was always a follower. Good at what he does, damn good. Like he’s born to it. But it still felt like he was just loafing.”

“You have to be better than good to ‘loaf’ along in this crowd.”

Zoe nodded her agreement, “He is. And if you doubt that, look at who one of the 5E’s most eligible bachelors is attracted to.”

“What…”

Zoe turned, her bright blue eyes only inches away. “You, you goof. Drake Roman is completely and totally gone on you. How many other female SEALs do you see in the military who qualified the hard way? None. Duh! Delta has what, two or three now? That puts you in a very elite category. I don’t think he understands yet what it means that he’s attracted to such an amazing woman. You really, really make me wish I could be more like you.”

Nikita sat back and stared straight ahead. Between Drake’s and Altman’s seats she had a small view out the forward windshield. So far the flight had revealed more jungle-covered peaks undulating ever higher into the distance. They’d overflown a line of high-power transmission towers leading to a big construction site lower on the river. Now they were headed back that way.

She’d actually been envying Zoe her apparent ease with the world around her and with her own body. Again Nikita faced that strange dichotomy of the SEAL who knew exactly what to do with her body and the woman who didn’t have a clue.

Esly and Drake were both leaning forward and looking down at something, probably still trying to trace the elusive river toward the unknown waterfall.

Drake Roman.

Zoe was right. Nikita had always liked him well enough, as much as she ever liked anyone. But now Drake stood out from the crowd. And not just in the ship’s dining room, but in the crowd that included two top pilots, and maybe even Luke Altman. There was a focus, a drive that Drake had never revealed before.

Nikita had wondered at Zoe’s original selection of each of their roles, placing Drake in the character of Head Mercenary. It was not a selection she ever would have made. Now she couldn’t imagine it being anyone else. And if he was leading a contracting firm instead of flying for the 5E, maybe, just maybe she’d be willing to work for him.

Oh god, she was losing her mind!

There was no way she was leaving DEVGRU, not until she was too old to maintain the training level. And certainly not for a merc outfit, not if God herself was in charge.

But Drake was an amazing man to serve with. He hadn’t been mad when she’d been injured, he’d been furious. When Rafe had threatened Esly—a team member in only the most tenuous sense—he’d tromped down on it. He commanded loyalty as easily as—

Esly’s shout of excitement said that she’d finally spotted what they were looking for.

At the same moment, dead ahead, Nikita saw a telltale spark in the jungle.

“Incoming!”

Her shout had Rafe slamming the controls in a hard evasion to the north. “Where?”

“Downriver. Range two thousand meters, minus.”

As he twisted the helo around and plunged toward the trees, the side view opened to the east. They’d overflown somebody who now was very unhappy about their return.

“I’m guessing that we finally found what we’re looking for,” Zoe spoke up.

“I’m so thrilled,” Altman tone was impossibly drier than usual as he actually teased her back. There was no time to be surprised.

Nikita could see whatever was coming at them still burning fuel against the dark clouds. And it turned!

Not an RPG—rocket propelled grenades didn’t have guidance systems. This was a guided munition of some sort, but not a SAM. Surface-to-air missiles were generally supersonic and would have fried their asses already; an American Stinger or Russian Igla hustled along at Mach 2, ten times the speed of a helicopter. From just two thousand meters, they’d have been dead already.

The Bell 429 wasn’t a DAP Hawk. There weren’t countermeasures. Nothing aboard to return fire.

“It’s following,” she shouted.

Drake and Esly were now staring at it as well.

As the helicopter twisted down and away, she turned in her seat to follow it but lost it. No more heat trail.

“Too small to show on this radar,” Julian called. A civilian Bell’s radar was all about not hitting another helicopter or a massive squall line. Actually, their helo was new enough, it should be able to see one of those stupid hobby drones as well.

Which meant whatever was following them was very small.

Rafe began twisting and turning the bird in hopes of losing its track.

“Bank hard right and climb!” Nikita shouted out.

Zoe was forced against her as they carved the turn. Maybe, if her guess was right—

She was looking too high to see the explosion, but she saw the flash coming from close below them.

The helicopter pinged and rattled as shrapnel peppered the helicopter.

There was a sickening twist—the kind that reminded her of other helicopter crashes.

“Someone find me a landing zone,” Rafe called out as warning alarms began bleating from the cockpit.

Everywhere Nikita looked—which was a wide range as the helicopter began spinning awkwardly—was jungle. Tall trees and helicopters were a lousy mix. She’d gone down once very memorably in an Alaskan cold-weather training mission and never wanted to do it again. The only reason they hadn’t all died had been because they were on the verge of a scheduled night parachute jump.

Her team made it out, though one lost a foot to a bad tumble and a slice of the rotor blade. The two pilots had died high in the trees.

“Waterfall,” Esly called out. “There was a large pool below a waterfall. Would that work?”

“If I can reach it,” Rafe banked them carefully back toward where they’d been shot as he bled altitude. They were already below the ridgeline, soon they’d be below the treetops. At least they would be out of the line of fire that way.

“Whoever shot us is going to come looking for us,” Drake was looking right at her.

She nodded, exactly her thought. “Julian, do we have a flare gun aboard?”

A moment later, he tossed a plastic case backward between the pilots’ seats.

It hit Drake in the head as the helicopter slewed one way, bounced off Altman’s lap as it carved the other direction, and Zoe managed to grab it. She popped the latches and turned it to Nikita.

As she was reaching for the flare gun, they almost lost it to a gut-wrenching yaw that meant the helicopter had almost no time left aloft.

“Shrapnel must have caught both the rear rotor and a main blade,” Drake shouted to her.

“Perfect!” She managed to grab the bright orange pistol and the three flare cartridges. She shoved one in the gun and the other two deep into her pocket. She then clutched the weapon to her chest with both hands to make sure that she didn’t drop it when they impacted. It was the same training that had let her hang on to the beer bottle in the bar fight—never let go of your weapon.

She’d enjoyed that fight.

The trees were now flashing close by either side of the helicopter. If a rotor blade clipped one, they’d be going down hard. Trust the team. Not in your hands.

Instead she thought about having a beer and a girl talk in a rowdy bar with Sugar. She actually hoped that she’d have a chance to do that. She’d bring along Zoe, maybe Esly too and—

A blade caught and the helo twisted hard. Flew backward for a moment, then continued around in a corkscrewing flight.

Trees…

The river running away from them…

More trees…

A massive waterfall towering over a hundred meters above them…

Trees…

Another view downstrea—

They plowed into the water, tail first. A horrendous shearing sound of ripping metal sounded close behind her.

The twist continued, tumbling the helicopter on its side.

The rotors beat water and shattered just as surely as if they’d hit concrete. Out at their tips they were spinning at nearly the speed of sound.

The helo flailed and jolted for a long moment, but the water buffered the motion.

With a last ratcheting grind, the transfer gears sheared. Then the racing turboshaft engines ingested a load of river water and died.

In slow motion, the helo tipped the rest of the way onto its side.

Zoe lay on her and she lay on Esly, their seatbelts only keeping their waists in place.

One heartbeat. Two. Three. The engines gurgled to a shattered halt.

All stable. As a bonus they apparently weren’t going to blow up right away. She’d have to send Bell Helicopter a thank you letter.

“Go! Go! Go!” Altman shouted. He opened the high-side door, the downward facing one offered a clear view of rounded river rocks beneath the water.

In moments, they were out. No obvious blood or breaks.

She pointed at the First Aid kit floating in the water and Drake grabbed it as he followed her out.

“Nice landing, Dude,” Julian’s voice was thick with sarcasm as he climbed out the pilot’s door.

Nikita could barely hear him over the roar of the waterfall. Instead of a clear fall, it spilled down over a massive, water-carved rock face thirty meters wide and twenty stories tall. A fine mist of spray filled the air over the broad pool at the base of the fall. Jungle crowded close to all sides. Even taking root up the rocky face to either side of the cascade. It would be a breathtaking view if she had time to admire it.

“Hey,” Rafe replied as he crawled out of the cockpit favoring one wrist. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.”

“You call that good? This helicopter ain’t walking away from anything. So who is gonna tell the Army they have to buy a new one? It isn’t me, I can tell you that much. The base commander is gonna be so pissed.”

“Why?”

“Because we only borrowed it to go to Miami. I sort of didn’t bother to tell him we were taking it to Honduras with us. It’s his personal bird.”

“Fine,” Rafe tried to use his bad hand, which wasn’t working. He did a tumble and flop into the water, then stood in the waist-deep current. “Then it’s definitely you that gets to tell him.”

The two of them kept at it as they were splashing toward the shore, though Julian had a solid grip on Rafe’s upper arm to guide him along and keep him steady. The river was warm and not moving too quickly here.

She still had the flare gun in her hand.

“Herd them to shore,” she shouted at Drake. “And get them behind something solid. Bind Rafe’s wrist.”

“Yeah, he broke it, just hasn’t noticed it yet.” He dragged her against him for a quick kiss. “Don’t go blowing yourself up. I’ll be pissed as hell if you do.” Then he headed to shore.

No insistence that he should do this next dangerous part because he was the guy.

Nikita located the cap to the fuel tank. She cracked it loose, and fuel began to spill because of the mostly inverted angle of the helo.

Drake didn’t even treat her like an equal.

She checked to make sure everyone was ashore and mostly out of sight. The timing on this was going to be tricky.

He treated her as if she was the DEVGRU warrior and he was the Night Stalker. Even a lot of her teammates didn’t do what he’d just done. Drake actually treated her as if she knew what she was doing.

She sure as hell hoped she knew.

She popped the fuel cap all the way off and Jet A spilled out, adding a sharp slap of kerosene to the thick moldering jungle and brightness of the fresh water mist. Most of the fuel ran down the hull and into the open passenger bay door. A trickle of it spilled into the river as well.

The shore was too far away to trust that this would work from there. She had to sink the first shot.

She swam halfway toward shore.

No one in sight except for Drake, peeking around the side of a tree.

Nikita stood up, hoped this wasn’t the last time she ever saw him, turned, and fired.