Show No Fear - By Marliss Melton Page 0,80

a hellfire missile. In the next instant, a thunderous explosion snuffed out the staccato of gunfire as the missile slammed into the ridge a hundred meters north of the SEALs’ location.

With bits of bark and leaves and chunks of granite pattering his back, Gus dove into the alcove next to Haiku. “You good?” he asked, dismayed by the size of the stain on the scout’s jacket.

“Sure,” said the Japanese American, but his face was waxen, his eyes too bright.

“Fall back!” shouted the OIC.

Haiku pushed to his knees, then collapsed.

“I got you,” Gus assured him. Holding him from behind, he backed swiftly down the trail.

Several hundred yards later, he caught up with the others, laying Haiku at Vinny’s feet. “He’s losing blood fast.”

Vinny dropped to one knee to assess Haiku’s injury. “Sir, we need to get him outta here,” he corroborated, tearing open his medic’s pack for supplies to help staunch the bleeding.

As Vinny worked to get Haiku hooked to an IV, Gus’s hopes of finding Lucy plummeted. The team would look to their members’ safety first.

With apology in his dark blue eyes, the OIC met his overwrought gaze. “We need to pull out,” he said to Gus, gently.

“Sir,” Gus pleaded. “What about Lucy? We can’t just leave without her.”

“We’ll have to come back,” the OIC replied. “We don’t know if she was here or not.”

Gus’s frustrations bubbled over. “She’s somewhere on this fucking mountain!” he raged. “We can’t just leave her here!”

“We’ll be back,” the lieutenant repeated, his volume increasing just enough to get Gus’s attention. “Now, let’s move, in case the enemy recovers.”

Gus nodded. He had no right to argue with the OIC when Haiku was fighting for his life.

Moving to a safer location, the SEALs waited for the rescue helicopter, a Longbow Apache, to lower a SPIE rig and extract them.

Twenty minutes later, the helicopter descended over their location. A thick rope dropped though the trees, and Harley ran to catch it.

Feeling nothing whatsoever, wishing he’d wake up from what had to be a nightmare, Gus clipped himself to the SPIE rig, as did the others. Luther checked their D-rings before hooking himself up. Within seconds, the rope whipped taut.

It lifted them one by one off their feet.

Gus clawed his way through layers of wet leaves, sticky spiderwebs, going up, up…

All at once he surfaced, rising over a carpet of green that undulated in all directions—east, west, north, south. Dangling in the air with wind whipping at his clothing, he searched for the camouflaged lookout tower that pinpointed the front commander’s hideout.

But it remained elusive, swallowed up in the enormity of vegetation below him. Thanks to Gus and Lucy’s endeavors, the JIC knew exactly where it was. But Lucy, without a microchip, could be anywhere on this mammoth-sized mountain.

They could search for a hundred years and never find her.

Showered and shaved and wearing a fresh battle dress uniform, Gus felt marginally more human, except that he hadn’t slept since his and Lucy’s last night strung up in hammocks in the casita, more than forty-eight hours ago.

His red-rimmed and watering eyes burned with the effort that it took to follow the debate raging in the JIC between the CIA staff and the Navy SEALs.

“I just spoke with the Colombian ambassador,” John Whiteside informed them, pacing from one side of the room to the other. “He’s outraged that we dropped a missile on the FARC.”

“It wasn’t the FARC, sir,” Lieutenant Lindstrom calmly pointed out.

“He doesn’t care who the hell it was,” Whiteside interrupted. “The United States dropped a hellfire missile on Colombian soil, and if it happens again, he’ll declare it an act of war. The Predator has been called away from that area. There will be no more attacks on the FARC—period—until the Colombian government resolves this issue with the UN.”

Oh, Jesus. Gus raked his hand through his damp hair. Despite his testimony that the Elite Guard, dressed as Colombian soldiers, had only pretended to attack the FARC and jeopardize the UN team, there was still an inquiry underway. Colombia had frozen its military to keep from looking any more aggressive. Nor did they want their ally, the USA, taking any military action.

But they couldn’t just leave Lucy on La Montaña and not go back. He sent Lieutenant Lindstrom a pleading look.

“Sir,” said the OIC, putting his career on the line to argue with the station chief, “we’re not asking for permission to fight the FARC. All we want is to return to rebel territory. We’ll recon the target