Once they had the information from Mercedez, Drake had placed his call, stepping away from the others to place it privately. He’d need an authentic reaction of surprise for this part of his plan to work. He also didn’t want the others to reject it as being too stupid for words. Drake could see it in his head; he just hoped that the reality matched.

Because Altman spoke Spanish and Drake didn’t, Altman then played the role of Gutierrez. He placed a panicked call to the military commander that Mercedez thought was most likely to be involved with siphoning money off a big construction project in his area.

Altman started nearly hysterical, then escalated from there.

Drake could only assume he was on script, since he supposedly was shouting something like: “Not just the local crazies. They have helos and are in-bound. Get up here now. Low profile. Only your most trusted. We can’t risk exposure of your role in—” Altman hung up the phone mid-sentence.

Drake was going to start Spanish lessons the minute he got back to base. Maybe Nikita would give him private lessons; he liked the sound of that. Though he’d suggest somewhere drier. It wasn’t a cold rain, but he was soaked right through. At least it wasn’t Philippine monsoon—if he never hit that again, he’d be a happy camper.

As soon as Luke was done, Drake got on the radio up to Zoe. She had taken over running the Avenger drone from a small screen and set of controls rigged in the back of the other Little Bird.

“Black out their cellphones. I don’t want the military able to call Gutierrez.”

Zoe acknowledged and began working her drone magic.

Drake checked his phone. It took less than ten seconds before his two wavering bars of signal plummeted to No signal.

“How long do we have?” he asked Altman.

“I could hear him shouting orders in the background and he sounded seriously upset. La Ceiba to here in a Huey, which is about the most advanced helicopter they have in their fleet… Half an hour at the earliest, forty-five at the outside.”

“The timing is going to be tight. Let’s go with Stage Two now. Time to take out the rest of their security.”

Drake walked over to the pile of gear that Esly had gathered as she stripped off the guards’ gear. He picked out a radio and keyed the mic.

“Main Gate to Base! Main Gate to Base! We’ve got a problem here.” He copied the New Jersey accent of the trussed-up guard.

Altman pulled out his sidearm and fired six frantic shots into the jungle.

Esly unleashed her M16 at the fallen tower’s shack for half a clip on full auto. She must have hit some stored munitions, perhaps the stockpile of Pike missiles, because the shack suddenly shredded itself and a fiery plume shot several stories up into the night sky.

Drake turned off the radio and tossed it back on the pile. “I think that should do it.”

“Oops,” Esly didn’t look the least bit sorry, but she did put a fresh clip in the rifle.

Drake clicked on the encrypted radio to the Night Stalkers team circling above them. “Zoe, you can jam their radio frequencies now as well.”

“On it,” he heard a quick rattle of keys on the keyboard. “There. Our encrypted radios are in a different frequency band, so we should be fine, but they’re blacked out.”

“Roger that. Okay, Esly. This part is up to you and Altman. Nikita and I have to run.”

Esly gave him a hand sign that might have been a “Hurry Up” military signal or might have been a fist pump prior to starting a happy dance.

He grabbed an M16 and a stack of magazines for himself, and a couple of the guard’s jackets. After a quick stop to make sure Altman was clear on what was happening, he chased after Nikita, who was already halfway to the horizon.

Drake wished she hadn’t shot the Mercedes sedan; he could certainly use it at the moment. The rain, slashed at him by the hard-gusting winds, pounded so hard on his head that it almost hurt. He couldn’t wipe his eyes fast enough to clear the water streaming out of his hair. Maybe Philippine rain wasn’t so bad.

Nikita waited, crouching by the burned-out earth mover. She considered giving Drake a moment to catch his breath when he reached her, but where was the fun in that?

She started to rise but then saw the two Toyota pickups racing by along the perimeter road and settled back down. There was no way for them to see her, as she and Drake had been directly moving across the construction site because it was the shortest distance rather than following the road. And between the rain and their own camouflage clothes, they probably wouldn’t have been seen at three paces, never mind three hundred.

“They’re moving awfully fast,” Nikita knew that would be a logistical problem for Luke and Esly, dangerously narrowing their engagement time.

“Should I have stayed and waved a Caution sign at them or something? I don’t see a way to slow them down.”

Nikita dropped into a prone position and swung out the bipod legs on the Tac-50. She’d done so much training in so many weather conditions that the increasing rain only crossed her attention as a blurring of her sight lines. Rain didn’t affect something as big as the rounds the Tac-50 fired.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

She ignored him and focused on the first pickup in the line, then the front half of it, then the front right tire, then the leading edge of that tire. Using the markings in the scope, she used the typical length of a quad-cab full-sized pickup to estimate the distance. At nine hundred meters and a target the size of a truck tire, she didn’t need to factor in much for temperature, humidity, or Coriolis effect. The wind was the major factor, kicking in the high twenties out of the southeast.

Nikita tracked the leading edge of the tire long enough to get a feel for the truck’s speed as it jounced along the rough road. At its current speed, it would travel twenty-two meters in the full second it would take her bullet to fly the distance between them—almost exactly three times the truck’s length.

She swung her rifle ahead more by instinct than thought, fired, and worked the bolt. But she wouldn’t have to fire again. It had been clean. Keeping her line of fire centered in the scope’s field, she saw the tire enter her field of vision just in time to have a hole punched in its sidewall.

The truck stumbled badly. The driver was good enough that he didn’t flip and roll despite the rough ground. But it slowed them abruptly from sixty kilometers an hour to fifteen. The truck following close behind them nearly rammed into the back, skidding wildly in the mud to avoid a collision.

As they straightened themselves out, the two Little Birds descended out of the night sky and turned on blinding searchlights, one fore and one aft.

In moments, Altman and Esly appeared to disarm the mercenaries.

Nikita watched long enough to see Esly boot one in the balls particularly hard after she tied him up. Apparently she’d found Hank.

Drake tapped Nikita’s shoulder and they were up and running again.

“Shit, woman! How did you make that shot?”

“I could teach you.”

“But then you’d have to kill me?”

“No, then you’d be a SEAL.”

Drake would have laughed if he’d had the breath. He’d been able to match Nikita on a treadmill, barely. Over open terrain he was flat out when she was still in graceful-gazelle mode, carrying the rifle that was almost as long as she was and weighed twenty-five pounds to his M16’s nine with the ease of a relay racer’s baton.

“What direction will they be coming from?”

Not able to spare the breath, he pointed the M16 due west. That was the direction of La Ceiba military base.

Nikita veered in that direction and he followed her.

They’d been racing toward the helicopters parked near the shack that covered the entrance to underground. Now they were running west. Fifty meters, a hundred, two hundred.

“This should do it,” she spoke as if she was finishing a morning stroll, not a hard 3K run.

She lay on the ground facing west.

He lay beside her, but facing the other direction, back toward the parked helicopters.

Drake stared at them for a long moment before he saw the problem…nothing was moving. “They’re staying in their bolt hole.”

“Now what, genius man?”

“Genius man?”

“Would you prefer Mr. Mercenary Man, sir?”

“Sir?” Drake nudged an elbow against her ribs. “I like the sound of sir.”

“Maybe try a panic call from Hank?” She ignored him.

“I can fake a random guard’s voice, but I don’t think we can play that card twice. Besides, I didn’t bring one of their radios because I have Zoe blocking their frequencies.”

“Well, we have about five minutes to flush them out.”

How to flush a rabbit out of its hole? Going in the front door would just drive them in deeper. Or out the back door. The problem was, he didn’t know where the back door might be.

Had they built underground because it was a convenient and safe place for their construction headquarters, needing only a simple couple of rooms? Or was it a complex arrangement for other purposes? How could—

Then he had it.

He patted the nearest part of Nikita, which turned out to be her splendid behind, earning him a sigh of exasperation.

Then he tucked in the earpiece for the encrypted radio.

“Zoe?”

“Here, Duck-man.”

“Do you have anything on your Avenger drone that you could rig to act as a ground-penetrating radar?”

“Would an actual ground-penetrating radar do, or do you want something else?”

“You brought—”

“You didn’t say what we’d need, so I had Sophie load up everything I could think of.”

“I could just kiss you.”

“If you do, Nikita would pound the shit out of you. So keep it to yourself, Duck-man.”

“Roger that.” Nikita made no response from close beside him. “We’re right on top of a rabbit warren here. I need to know where it goes.”

“Give me a couple minutes. My baby is up at forty thousand feet.”

“You have thirty seconds.”

“Stingy,” Zoe complained. But it was well under thirty seconds later that he heard the loud whoosh of the Avenger slicing by close above them. She must have descended under full thrust. It was amazing she hadn’t ripped off the wings with that maneuver, but that’s why she was an Avenger pilot and he was merely a DAP Hawk crew chief.

For a full minute, it swept back and forth making multiple passes. For a full minute, he lay there trying not to be driven deeper into the mud by the blasts of wind-driven rain. If it was this bad here, Roatán and the ship—over a hundred and fifty kilometers deeper into the storm—must be getting hammered.

“These are rough, but it looks as if there’s a small complex and it runs south, away from you and toward the jungle, but doesn’t reach it. On the last pass I did a thermal scan and I don’t see that anyone has come out.”

“Okay. Drop a pair of JDAMs on their backdoor.”

“How about a few SDMs instead? The radar and the jamming packages took up too much space and payload for me to carry any of the bigger weapons.”

“A pair of small diameter bombs should serve my purpose just fine.” At two hundred and fifty pounds each, they’d shake the place hard without doing much damage.

“SDMs. Wow!” Nikita spoke loud enough to be heard over the ripping wind while they waited for the next pass of the Avenger. “They have put you in a bad mood.”

“They tried to kill, then kidnap, you. Then that guard was going after your breasts and I’m sorry, I have prior claim to that territory.”

“That territory?”

“Your breast territory. I have rights of sole passage until you revoke them. No two-bit mercenary hired hand gets to trample all over my territory.”

Nikita’s reply was smothered by the pair of bombs that struck a few hundred meters to the west. Great fountains of dirt shot upward, lit in the darkness by the central explosion like a blooming night flower. What kind of flowers did Nikita like? He didn’t know.

Considering that she was a DEVGRU SEAL, probably exploding ones just like these.

Dirt spattered down all around them along with the rain, but nothing big was thrown this far.

He waited for nine heartbeats, then on the tenth saw a stream of people scrambling out of the hut and racing to the parked helicopters.

“Bingo!”

“Good timing,” Zoe announced over the radio. “I have three birds incoming from the west that must be Gutierrez’s military connection. Ten kilometers and closing.”

The trio of Gutierrez’s own Bell TwinRangers began cranking to life. The timing of the meeting between the two helicopter groups was going to be too close. Nikita’s Tac-50 had an effective flash suppressor. His own borrowed M-16 didn’t—and they’d be able to see where his shots were coming from.

That would ruin the whole play.

He draped the guard’s jackets that he’d taken into a jumbled pile in front of him, weighting them in place with a couple of stones. Then he nudged the muzzle into the folds of the jacket and flipped the firing mode to semi-auto. He’d just have to hope that the jackets hid his muzzle flash.

“In sight,” Nikita whispered.

“Hold…hold…hold,” the first two TwinRangers crawled aloft. These were the two armed patrol ships that had flown out to check on their downed 5E helicopter at the waterfall. The VIP craft was still waiting for the last people to board.

“Tell them to hurry,” Nikita whispered. Both helicopter groups had to be aloft and nearby at the same time for this to work.

“Remember not to actually shoot them down.”

“This is crazy.”

“You want to face five heavily armed helos with a rifle?”

“I’m not that crazy.”

“Just crazy in love with me?” Wow. Time for another one of his do-overs. His timing sucked.

“Definitely not that crazy,” but she didn’t sound upset. “Damn it, Roman. Don’t make me laugh when I’m about to shoot at multiple gunships loaded with corrupt military.”

Laughter wasn’t exactly the response he’d been hoping for.

The third of Gutierrez’s helicopters—the transport with the suits aboard—made it aloft. The two gunships were hovering fifty meters up.

“Go!”

Nikita began plinking at the three helicopters incoming from the military base. Firing a half-inch round out of a high-precision sniper rifle, it was actually hard not to shoot them down. It should be two shots right through the windshield. Dead pilot and copilot. Crash. Done.

But that wasn’t Drake’s master plan.

So, instead, she shot at one of the skids and missed. The wind had continued to pick up and was playing havoc with the bullet’s and the helicopter’s flight paths.

She worked the bolt and aimed for something bigger. She dropped a round on the FLIR camera in the front. It would knock out their night-vision camera, but it shouldn’t go through the frame and kill anyone.

Nikita could hear Drake firing down by her feet. Snap!...Snap! Snap!

She chose another helo and shot it high in the windshield. Her round would either skip off the windshield or punch through into all of the electronics directly over the pilots’ heads.

It took surprisingly few shots before Drake called hold.

In moments the military Hueys and Gutierrez’s TwinRangers were in a full-fledged battle directly over where he and Nikita lay in the mud.

It had been so simple. The two groups of helicopters had approached each other with their radios out of commission due to Zoe’s jamming. Add in a nighttime rainstorm and a panicked evacuation.

A few shots head-on at each group of helicopters with no detectable origin, and they’d each assumed the worst and attacked each other.

“There goes one,” Nikita called out as one of the military’s Hueys appeared to stumble in the air. It didn’t autorotate down, it plummeted.

Drake tapped her shoulder and led her racing back the way they’d come.

As they circled behind the parked earthmoving equipment, a helicopter flew close above them. The blast of wind said that it was far bigger than any of the helos currently fighting it out in the storm, but the sound was odd, far more like a washing machine flying away from them than a five-ton DAP Hawk flying toward them. It settled on the mud for the briefest of moments and she and Drake piled aboard.

She was glad to be sitting once more on a hard steel deck instead of the red mud of Honduras that had penetrated her every pore. She was sopping wet.

Someone at the crew chief position handed her a headset.

She recognized one of the gunners from the 5E’s big Chinook helicopter but couldn’t remember his name at the moment.

“How goes the battle?” she asked over the intercom.

“The locals,” Julian called from the front seat, “are tough contenders this year. They’re not to be put down lightly, sports fans. Each side is down one bird, and I mean down as in hard. Nobody walking away from those.”

Nikita looked out the open cargo bay door, but the battle must be on the other side of the aircraft. The DAP Hawk was circling back out of the way. She dangled her feet out the door and over the abyss.

Someone—Drake—snapped a harness around her waist. She felt him tug it to make sure that she was securely attached to the frame. Then he slid his feet out beside her. For a moment they both just sat with their rifles across their laps, staring out at the wind-torn darkness.

She leaned her shoulder into his and just listened to Julian’s play-by-play as the DAP Hawk jounced through the turbulent winds.

The Honduran Navy was down to one as the second bird autorotated into deep jungle, snared high in the trees, and exploded long before it hit the ground.

Julian’s slow circle brought the construction site back into view.

Drake pointed an arm.

Three helicopters spinning and twisting across the sky. Actually two doing the dance and one hightailing it out of there.

“Gutierrez,” Drake knew he was right. “Julian, we can’t let that third bird escape.”

“I’m not supposed to shoot them down. Any suggestions?” But he climbed, circling wide around the continuing battle, and laid down the hammer to chase the departing aircraft.

Drake looked down at the M16 in his hands. That wasn’t the answer.

If the military won, they would declare themselves heroes. If they lost, well, they’d probably be declared heroes anyway.

But if Gutierrez was shot down, there would be far too many questions. He was too important. Everything could come to light. But if he escaped, he would just start all over again somewhere else. Still, there couldn’t be any cause to look beyond a conflict with the military.

Drake watched the last two helicopter pilots battling it out. Neither was Night Stalker caliber, but they knew their machines. Their battle was lit in strobe flashes of lightning and distorted by sheets of rain. The drops stung his legs where they dangled out in the DAP Hawk’s slipstream, but neither he nor Nikita pulled their legs in.

Instead they watched.

Watched until the military Huey made the first mistake. Apparently noticing that Gutierrez’s aircraft was slipping away, it turned to shoot him down.

The remaining armed TwinRanger raced directly at it with a fusillade of fire streaming off its side-mounted M230 chain gun.

Realizing his mistake, the military pilot carved a hard turn to bring his own weapons to bear, but they were too close.

The two helicopters tangled their rotor blades as they passed. They twisted and slammed their tail sections together as they sped by one another. A moment later, they were both gone from sight, plunging into the river at unsurvivable speeds.

So much for the military solving the problem. Now Gutierrez was free—unless Drake could stop him.

Stop him but make it look like an accident before they lost him in the storm.

The storm!

“Julian.”

“Yes, Mr. Roman of the dangerous reputation?”

“Screw you.”

“You wish. Only the finest of the ladies get to play with this body.”

“Julian,” Drake started over. “Is he following the power lines?” Drake could picture the tall transmission lines climbing the hill toward the interior, away from the storm.

“He’s right over them, following their break in the jungle to keep out of sight.”

“Does he know we’re here behind him?”

“No, he’s now flying at a standard cruise speed.”

“What happens if we fly over him?”

“Not much.”

“I mean right over him. Like a couple meters.”