Flash Fire Read online

  Miguel’s gaze turned calculating. “When are you bringing the other half?”

  “When I can.” Walker pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it. “I should be able to get it here in a week, on the outside.”

  That second truckload was his only card in the negotiation. The first load was already the Tamchén’s. Nothing to stop them from shooting him and taking his cargo right at this second.

  “I’ll need this truck back tonight.” He puffed on his cigar as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Miguel nodded, then jumped down, waved at the guards to open the gate all the way and let the truck through. He hurried ahead. “Follow me.”

  Walker climbed back into the cab, started up the truck, and rolled forward slowly. He knew the layout of the camp like the back of his hand. He’d sat in the surrounding jungle for weeks at a time on surveillance with his military-grade binoculars, day and night. He had four different observation points like the one he’d shared with Clara the night before.

  Now he took in the sight from a little closer. Five flat-roofed cement-block storage buildings, plus a hangar made of steel beams and aluminum sheet metal for sides and roof. Each building was draped with military camouflage netting.

  Raw heroin came into the hangar, then was moved in batches into the storage buildings for processing and repackaging. None of the buildings had windows, no other opening beyond a steel-reinforced door.

  The Tamchén had gone to that trouble in the middle of the jungle for a reason. When a full shipment was in, tens of millions of dollars’ worth of drugs were housed here. The street price for heroin in the US fluctuated somewhere around two hundred dollars per gram at the moment.

  To keep the camp hidden at night from planes passing over, it was minimally lit. Since all electricity came from generators, this also saved fuel, which was a pain to truck in. No sense in taking the trouble to light up the whole jungle anyhow. No work went on at night. Here in the middle of nowhere, they could work openly in daylight.

  As expected, Miguel directed the truck into the hangar, then began shouting for men. By the time Walker got out again, half a dozen grunts came running from the darkness. Unfortunately, they all had their noses.

  He was beginning to doubt if the noseless man even existed. But since it was the only piece of information he had that might lead him to Ben’s killer, he found himself clinging to the hope that the bastard was real. If he existed, Walker was determined to find the son of a bitch.

  Inside the hangar, only the truck’s headlights provided illumination, washing the empty space in front of the truck with light, leaving everything behind the truck in shadows. Then the door rolled closed, and Miguel flicked on the overhead lights at last for the front half of the hangar where they’d be working.

  Walker turned away from the men walking up to them. “I’d rather that nobody saw my face,” he told Miguel. “Until I’m fully in. I don’t want somebody tipping off the Xibalba before I have full Tamchén protection.”

  Anger tightened Miguel’s face. “You think I work with men who’d talk to the Xibalba?” But then he gestured toward the dark half of the hangar with an exaggerated huff. “You go and wait over there.”

  Walker hurried away, toward the labyrinth of cardboard boxes piled at least eight feet high, and pulled into the shadows where Clara already waited, according to plan.

  “We have about thirty minutes,” he said under his breath, stomping out his cigar. He pulled his phone and surreptitiously snapped a couple of pictures of the men unloading the truck, then stashed the phone in his pocket again. “We’ll go out through the back door.”

  She followed him. “And if your guy comes over to talk to you?”

  “He’s off to report up the chain of command. And he’ll have to wait to reach Chapa, his boss. He won’t be put through in a second. Chapa will have to be found first. He doesn’t carry a cell phone out of paranoia. He doesn’t want to be tracked through it. Then there’ll be questions, then some time for deliberation on what to do about all this, how to distribute the extra merchandise. If Miguel comes looking for me, when I come back in I’ll just say I stepped outside to take a leak. Right now, he’s pretty damned happy with me. He’s not looking to find fault. Since I brought in the drugs through him, he’ll be getting credit for it.”

  They reached the back door in thirty seconds, and he spent another thirty on picking the lock with the piece of aluminum wire that he’d brought for this purpose.

  Once outside, he scanned their surroundings. The nearest building stood forty feet away. Cover was minimal: a handful of cars, some bushes, then water and kerosene barrels in random spots, wherever they’d been dropped off by delivery trucks.

  Perimeter guards watched the fence, but no guards stood stationed at the buildings tonight, same as last night. A serious piece of luck. As he’d hoped, the Tamchén were in between shipments.

  Walker and Clara ran forward in a crouch, then split up as planned, each going to search a different section.

  He didn’t run toward the famous ancient well. The Tamchén wouldn’t have brought Rosita here to kill her. If they wanted to send a bloody message to the Xibalba, they would have shot Rosita down in the street right outside her cousin’s house and delivered that message publicly, a sign of power.

  That she’d been quietly kidnapped meant the Tamchén wanted something from the Xibalba, or Carlos Petranos specifically, in exchange for her return. Either the Xibalba had some Tamchén men, or territory the Tamchén wanted. Or maybe they wanted in on the super-pill profits.

  The kidnapping of the sister of a top-tier cartel boss like Carlos was a big deal. That Walker hadn’t heard a thing, that nobody had breathed a word, meant either that Carlos himself kept it quiet, negotiating on his own to save face, or that things were kept quiet particularly from Walker, because word might have come down that he was not to be trusted.

  Not a comfortable thought. The distance between a man’s loyalties being questioned and that man being dead was pretty short in this part of the world.

  His muscles tensed as he passed one building, then another. The storage buildings hugged the hangar in a half circle. He’d start searching on one end, Clara on the other. The plan was to meet in the middle, at the building nearest to the hangar’s back door, then slip back in unseen.

  In another dozen steps, he reached the starting point for his search, the outmost building. He made quick work of the lock, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him before turning on his pocket LED flashlight.

  Four rows of stainless-steel tables filled the space, some holding lab equipment, the rest holding scales. Unprocessed, grade one, raw heroin came in here, then grade three, “brown sugar” for smoking, went out, or grade four, white powder, the purest form of heroin that could be easily dissolved and injected.

  He could see the entire interior from where he stood inside the door. No sign of Rosita. He turned off his flashlight, ducked out, locked the door behind him, then headed to the next building.

  The second building was identical to the first. He moved on to the third, the one where Clara was supposed to meet him. He saw no trace of her. Since no alarm had been raised, he didn’t worry.

  Judging by the empty pallets piled next to the building, Walker figured this was where the drugs were packaged for distribution. The building had one steel security door and no windows, same as the others.

  Not the same as the others, he saw as he went for the door. This one had a fancy keypad lock.

  He didn’t even try. He didn’t know whether an alarm would sound if he punched in the wrong number.

  As he stared at the lock, contemplating his next step, footsteps sounded from his left. One of the sentries was looping around.

  Walker ducked around the corner of the building and hurried to the back, waited until the sentry passed, then got a running start and lunged for the roof. He made it on the first try, pulled himself up by his fingertips, lay flat for a moment and waited
.

  Nobody raised the alarm.

  He looked toward the hangar where his truck was being unloaded. Nobody was outside looking for him.

  Walker turned toward the last two buildings in his row. He saw no movement. Where was Clara?

  He hadn’t worked as part of a team in years. He’d gotten used to not having anyone to worry about. Having a partner all of a sudden threw him off his game.

  Which he couldn’t afford.

  She could handle herself. He had to trust her. She was a DOD investigator. She’d had her training. She was an impressively good shot.

  He stopped thinking about her and crawled to the ventilation unit on his stomach.

  When the cartel had a shipment in, they had guards on the roof so nobody could get in through here. But now, nothing stood in Walker’s way.

  Only four screws held the ventilation unit in place. He took out his knife and unscrewed them. He hefted the fan box to the side and lowered himself down the hole, then dropped, landing on his toes, knees bent.

  He stayed in a crouch and waited, only the moon illuminating the space through the hole he’d just created. He could hear no other sound but his own breathing.

  He slipped the flashlight from his belt, turned it on, and panned it around as he straightened. More pallets, more scales—much larger here than the tabletop lab scales in the other buildings. Industrial-size rolls of plastic wraps lined the wall in the back.

  And there were other rooms. He hurried toward the four doors neatly lined up in a row. Tried the first. The door opened to an empty three-foot-by-three-foot closet. He panned the light and saw bloodstains on the walls and floor. The space had been used as a prison cell before.

  The second door led to a similarly small space, as did the third and the fourth. All empty. No sign of Rosita.

  He hoped Clara had found the girl and was waiting for him outside with the good news.

  He checked his watch. They had roughly ten minutes before the truck was unpacked and somebody would start looking for them.

  They couldn’t afford to get caught. First of all, he couldn’t afford to get killed, not yet. He had to stay alive, and he had to keep up the pretense at both cartels that he was a friend. Only then could he nudge them onto a path of mutual annihilation.

  When your goal was to move pieces around on a chess board, you had to be close enough to touch them.

  And he wasn’t willing to let anything happen to Clara either. He’d brought her in here, and he was going to take her back out. And then he wasn’t going to let her around his cartel mess again.

  He hurried back to the middle of the main room, stepped on the table nearest to the hole in the ceiling, jumped for the edge of the hole, and pulled himself up and out. As fast as he could, he screwed the vent back into place, then slid to the edge of the roof, ready to go and track down Clara.

  But as he reached the edge of the roof, he found one of the sentries sitting right under him, having a smoke and a beer.

  He checked his watch again. Five minutes left.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Clara was in some kind of an armory. The door had been open a crack, so getting in hadn’t been a problem. Looking around proved a tad more difficult. Two guards were having sex against the wall in the far corner.

  She held her breath, her back pressed to the wall just inside the door. Rows and rows of gun crates towered between her and the lovers, blocking her view. She couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see her, but when the men were done, they’d be leaving, so she couldn’t stay by the door. She needed either to go back out and stay out until they left, or move away from the door and search the place while they were busy.

  The clock was ticking. She had five minutes left—three to search the place, then another minute or two to run to the back door of the hangar and get in there. She had to hide under the truck again so she could leave the Tamchén camp with Walker.

  She inched to the left, careful not to knock the crates.

  Little light filtered through the barely cracked door, and the building had no windows. The overhead lights were off. The only source of illumination came from somewhere around the lovers, probably their flashlights dropped to the ground, two lit-up circles that left the rest of the space in darkness.

  Clara waited until her eyes adjusted, then moved ahead a little faster.

  Some of the crates had US Army stamped on the side, as if they’d come straight from an army depot. She frowned. That didn’t seem right. But since she was here to investigate something else, she kept moving forward.

  She stayed around the perimeter, checking three walled-off storage areas. One was empty, one held explosives, the other piles of MREs, packaged meals the military used. Rosita wasn’t there.

  Clara couldn’t see the entire main room of the building since stacks of crates blocked the view, but having an empty room with a lockable door available, it wouldn’t make sense to keep a prisoner out in the open.

  She backed away, toward the door, the men in the far corner still moaning and growling, bodies slamming against each other. She was so focused on them, she didn’t notice the new guy stepping in the front door.

  “Alto!” the man shouted at her, going for his gun. Stop.

  She was close enough to rush him, so she did, knocking him into the doorframe. Then she drove the base of her palm hard into his chin with all her strength.

  His head snapped up, bounced off the cement-block wall, and he slid to the ground, but boots were already pounding on the ground behind her as the two lovers came running.

  Clara darted outside.

  Nowhere to hide.

  A few bushes and a barrel here and there wouldn’t hide her now, not when people were looking for her. Those would be the first places they checked.

  The back door of the hangar waited a hundred feet away. The men chasing her would be outside before she reached that door. They’d catch her in the open. So instead of running for her rendezvous point with Walker, she ran in the opposite direction, around the armory, going toward the back.

  The outdoor overhead lights came on. All of them. Men were shouting somewhere behind her.

  Busted.

  Her heart beating wildly, she ran for the scant shadows, half-blind from the sudden brightness.

  Where was Walker?

  Before she could panic, he appeared next to her. “This way. Toward the fence.”

  But two men came around the next building’s corner with rifles in their hands, and immediately began shooting. Walker grabbed her wrist and yanked her right, darting between two storage buildings. They ran deeper into the compound, away from the gate.

  An open area waited up ahead, some weird stone circle in the middle, then half a dozen open-sided bamboo huts on the other side, basically sleeping platforms with a roof, furnished with nothing but a couple of hammocks and mosquito nets.

  Clara figured Walker planned on hiding under one of those huts, and she was cringing already at the thought of the plethora of spiders and snakes that probably lived under there.

  But when they reached the stone circle, he stopped. “Jump!”

  And because she hesitated, he grabbed her by the waist, lifted her over the edge, and dropped her into the abyss.

  * * *

  Walker had one foot on the well’s lip to jump after Clara when someone slammed into him. The man must have been running from the sleeping platforms, checking his gun and not paying attention. For a moment, the two of them tangled.

  Walker had the advantage. While the guy didn’t know whether Walker was friend or foe, should be helped or attacked, for Walker everyone at the camp was an enemy, so he didn’t hesitate.

  He went for his knife to avoid the attention gunfire would bring. He grabbed the guy with his left hand, half turned him to gain access to his throat. But then, as the man’s head came around, Walker cut a glimpse of the bandana that covered the guy’s face.

  The piece of fabric had half slid off. Because the man had no nose to
hold it in place.

  A sense of triumph shot through Walker, along with an extra shot of adrenaline.

  He’d found the bastard!

  But at the worst possible time. He couldn’t interrogate the man right there. They were seconds from being discovered. And he couldn’t take the guy out of the camp. He couldn’t even get himself and Clara out at the moment. He only knew one thing: he had no time to think.

  So he knocked the guy over the lip of the well, then jumped in after him.

  * * *

  One second, Clara was in a free fall, her stomach dropping out, then she hit water and she realized she was in a well. Definitely a well. She could see the stone walls now. Thank God, the moon was almost directly overhead, providing a little light. She would have been even more petrified if it’d been pitch-dark.

  The water was stagnant and stank to high heaven. She didn’t have time to so much as swear at Walker before he dropped on top of her, pushing her under.

  She struggled up, fighting for air, blinking rancid water out of her eyes only to find herself staring into an unfamiliar face. And she shrieked, every zombie movie she’d ever seen pushing into her brain.

  She desperately flailed back. Even with the moonlight, she could barely see the bottom of the well, but the eyes that glowed at her from the darkness, the ghastly face, and the weapon the man was pulling were way more than she needed to see.

  Her brain barely had enough time to grasp reality and kick up the solution—the noseless man—before someone else dropped on top of them and pushed her underwater once again.

  They all came up sputtering, breaking the surface together. Thank God, the new addition was Walker. He lunged at the noseless man without paying any attention to Clara, tangling with the guy for a second before disarming him and pushing him against the rounded wall, the glint of a knife at the man’s throat.

  He whispered a single word: “Quiet!”

  Boots slammed on the ground above, men running and shouting.

  The well was pretty large, about eight feet in diameter. Clara pressed herself against the ancient stone wall roughly three feet away from Walker, staying in the deepest darkness in case someone thought of looking down.