Show No Fear - By Marliss Melton Page 0,77

trouble recognizing Harley. “Sir, you hurt?” The blue eyes and the rumbling baritone gave him away.

“I can walk,” Gus answered. Barely.

“This way,” said Harley, forcing him into a trot that sent shards of pain up his legs. On the far side of the field, well away from the cinderblock building, the SEALs rallied up—Luther, Harley, Vinny, and Haiku. The other four SEALs had evidently remained at the JIC, on call for backup.

“What happened?” asked the OIC as they crouched in a tight circle.

“The FARC have Lucy,” Gus grated, a fresh wave of fear rolling over him. “I think one of the Elite Guard recognized her from the warehouse last year. The FARC were already suspicious. They tried dumping me in a river. I lost my boots and the sat phone, but I’m pretty sure they consider me neutralized. We need to get to Lucy,” he finished.

Luther glanced down at the tattered remains of Gus’s booties. “Vinny, take a look at his feet.”

The soft blue beam of Vinny’s penlight cut through the inky darkness. Gus pulled off the booties and spared a cursory glance at his ravaged soles. “I’m fine,” he insisted.

Opening his medic’s kit, Vinny set about cleaning the open lesions.

“We should’ve pulled you out,” Luther reflected.

“No. Sir, I am not leaving Lucy on this mountain,” Gus growled with heat. “Get me boots, gear, and firepower and I’ll be good to go,” he insisted. At the same time, his heart sank. The request would take up to three hours to fulfill.

Lieutenant Lindstrom seemed to weigh his options. “Haiku, relay that request to the JIC,” he ordered softly.

“Size-thirteen boots,” said Gus. He ground the heels of his palms into his eye sockets.

“Rumor has it she was shot,” said Harley.

Gus snatched his hands out of his eyes. “You heard that already?”

“The UN team touched down in Bogotá just as we were leaving, delaying our departure,” the OIC explained. “We heard all kinds of strange reports.”

Gus shook his head. “Whatever you heard was wrong.” In a tight, flat voice, he explained the Elite Guard’s duplicity, how they’d dressed themselves in lamb’s clothing.

“That is fucking brilliant,” marveled Harley.

“We trained them,” Gus reminded him with a hard look. “That’s why they’re so good. And if the truth isn’t made known, the Colombian army is going to take the rap for something they didn’t do.”

Why was he even wasting words talking about this? They needed to plan a recon mission and rescue Lucy.

“Haiku, get back with the JIC and pass on that information,” ordered the lieutenant.

“Yes, sir.”

As Haiku scurried to one side to relay the message, Lieutenant Lindstrom pulled a rugged laptop from his pack. Powering it up, he positioned it so Gus and the others could see. “Here’s our position. Gus, this is you,” he said, pointing to a bright red dot.

He toggled a key, and the image on the screen jumped, showing a blue dot in a field of neon green. “This is Lucy. The map shows her seven klicks from here, due northwest, at an altitude of three thousand feet. As soon as your gear gets here, we’ll go after her,” he promised. “Moving at a fast walk, we should be able to assess her situation before sunrise,” he predicted. “If the odds look good, we’ll plan an ambush and extract on a SPIE rig.”

The special-patrol insertion/extraction rig could be lowered by helicopter straight through the jungle canopy, lifting them as a group, clipped to a length of rope via D-shaped rings.

Luther made rescuing Lucy sound like a walk in the park. If that were true, then the SEALs had the easy job.

Lucy’s job, withstanding interrogation at the hands of the guerrillas, was undoubtedly tougher. She’d be the first person to insist she could take a licking and keep on ticking. He’d seen her do it. He just didn’t know if she could do it again.

Goddamn it! He would never forgive himself for letting this happen.

CHAPTER 16

Viewed through state-of-the-art night-vision goggles, the near-vertical jungle seethed with nocturnal creatures, crawling, darting, peering through enormous red eyes at the five Navy SEALs moving as quietly as possible up the twisting path.

They had been traveling for several hours now, moving fast and closing in on whoever held Lucy captive. Stopping every half-hour or so, the squad consulted the laptop, reassured that they were closing in on Lucy’s coordinates.

Here and there, an outcrop of stone or roots crisscrossing under Gus’s feet struck him as familiar. By his reckoning, they were not too far from Rebel Central or