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  Thick black smoke from the burning vehicles was clearly visible from a distance, rising above the trees, a grisly beacon for them to follow. Ahead the first trucks stopped and men scrambled out warily, with weapons at ready. Slowly the remaining trucks followed suit, everyone on edge. Smoke still rose from the shattered frames of the trucks even as they approached. The bodies were in the process of being carefully searched and laid out under guard. It wouldn’t be the first time bodies had been booby-trapped. In some parts of the Middle East it was practically expected, the bombs laced with rat poison so the shrapnel they spewed would be as lethal as the bomb itself.

  The guards were nervous, watching the jungle with wary eyes.

  It was a scene of chaos, death and horror.

  Ty stood in the midst of it looking around and shaking his head, his weapon tucked in against his side, his finger not far from the trigger.

  Whatever had happened here was long over, though. The rebels were gone, knowing the army would respond.

  Still, it didn’t pay to take chances and here taking chances could get you killed.

  Just being here could blow his cover if the wrong someone was watching somewhere. It was a risk he and Buck had to take for the sake of the hostages. Both of them knew the territory around here better than anyone else. It was Santiago’s territory - the rebel leader they’d been trying to get close to.

  Around Ty were the bodies of the guards supplied by the oil company. Most were ex-military, U.S. and local, along with mercenaries from some of the security companies that had risen up of late. The rebels had stripped weapons and ammunition from the bodies, along with anything else of value.

  It was their way, the rebel groups’ second source of weapons and funds.

  The first was arms dealers from the U.S., China, Russia… France…

  Men like the ones Ty and Buck pretended to be.

  It quickly became clear three people were missing from among the dead.

  Reeves - the State Department representative and the reason they were there - the oil man, Gallegos, and the girl. Bright, pretty Callie Martin. Just barely eighteen.

  She had to be terrified.

  The third source of funds was ransom.

  Another body was laid out in front of them. Ty recognized the man from the pictures.

  Callie Martin’s father hadn’t been so lucky. No doubt the man been shot trying to defend his daughter from those who’d taken her.

  It had indeed been Callie’s last trip with her father.

  “We should have seen this coming,” he said.

  Buck took a slow deep breath. “That’s what Reeves was here for, wasn’t it? Apparently the rebels decided they wanted to have a more direct meeting.”

  “On their terms.”

  The decision had been made, much higher up, to try the diplomatic solution with Reeves first, against Ty’s advice.

  This was his section, his area of expertise, but as usual nobody listened once they’d made up their own minds. He was the man in place and on the ground, but none of that mattered. It wasn’t in anyone but the U.S.’s best interest for them to stand down. The latest President of this country wanted the foreign aid the U.S. would pour in and the rebels wanted attention for the suffering of the people. Oddly enough as with most rebel groups, they didn’t seem to care much about killing a few of those people they were so intent on ‘helping’. The illusion only helped gain them more followers…who often joined as kids. At least among the rebels they sometimes got steady meals.

  Ease the rampant poverty and a lot of those kids would stay home. Then there would be no rebels. No one listened.

  Ty sighed and looked up into the jungle, thinking of the hostages.

  According to the protocols and all the rules Reeves was his priority. A career diplomat, Reeves had spent a good part of his time in Central and South America, but never in the jungle. Never down in the dirt. Not like Callie Martin’s father.

  By all accounts, Reeves was a good man who’d done good work, but he’d also been the major reason why no one listened to Ty’s recommendations when Reeves insisted he could negotiate a peace with the Marxist rebels here.

  Tall, aristocratic, his carefully styled dark hair perfectly in place, Phillip Reeves and Ty had gone several rounds at the Embassy over the wisdom of Reeves’s plans. Not least of which was because months, almost years, of Ty’s hard work building relationships with the rebels would go down the tubes. A fact Reeves had used against him.

  Like many rebel groups, Santiago’s group supported itself by growing and selling drugs when it wasn’t ransoming hostages in exchange for money and guns. Narcoterrorism, the new fad spreading around the world. Although it wasn’t really that new, they just had a fancy name for it now, for using the money from drugs to fund ‘revolution’.

  Ty knew these people, he talked to them, had been face to face with their leader, Ocho Santiago - ex-medical student and now revolutionary. He’d been getting close, if not to bringing Santiago down, at least to a place where Santiago had guardedly begun to trust him - at least as much as people like him ever did.

  One small step toward bringing them down.

  Reeves had now discovered the hard way just how wrong he’d been.

  Unfortunately, he’d taken two others with him, at least one of them an innocent teenage girl.

  The face from the picture haunted him.

  She’d graduated at seventeen and turned eighteen over what had been summer in the north. She was supposed to be going to Princeton in a few weeks.

  If he had anything to say about it, she still would.

  Gallegos was a fairly high-level executive with the oil company; he’d had field experience, but it had been a while since he’d been truly out in it.

  If it hadn’t been for Reeves, the government wouldn’t have bothered. It was hardly the first time oil people had been kidnapped for ransom. Hell, half the oil companies budgeted for it. One group of oil field employees had been held for nearly five years.

  Reeves, though, was State Department. They couldn’t leave him.

  That made it their job.

  His job.

  It wasn’t Gallegos or Reeves Ty thought about, though.

  He looked up into the jungle around him.

  Experience told him the rebels were long gone. They’d marched their hostages deep into the jungle and far from here, knowing that with Reeves in their possession the army or the Americans would come after them. The jungle was their home and they knew it well.

  Finally, someone would pay attention.

  Ty and Buck’s months of hard work, though, might still pay off after all and give them a chance to find the hostages.

  If it was the same group and if it was Santiago who’d taken them.

  He suspected it was. There’d been signs Santiago was up to something, but not what exactly.

  Now Ty knew.

  Getting the hostages out wouldn’t be easy. Santiago and his people knew the jungle intimately, its ins and outs, its sounds, its rhythms. Unlike him.

  It would take time, though, and in the meantime young, pretty Callie Martin would be going through hell. He could imagine far too easily what they might do to her.

  With luck, though, not too much if they could get to them in time. The rebels would want the hostages in pretty good shape at first.

  That wouldn’t make any less frightening for Callie.

  Chapter Two

  After days of being marched through the jungle, they finally stopped. The forced march had taken them up and over mountains, through ravines and canyons of heart-stopping beauty Callie was too frightened and exhausted to appreciate. Rain had soaked them so they were constantly chilled, Callie shivering any time they stopped moving for too long, only the exercise had kept her from getting too cold. It had been grueling, exhausting and their captors hadn’t been gentle, pushing, shoving and shouting all the while. Fear was such a constant companion she no longer thought of it. It simply was.

  Th
eir respite was brief. Only minutes.

  It continued. The shouting, pushing, shoving. Stumbling through leaves that slapped and branches that whipped.

  Finally, they arrived at a camp of sorts. Callie was thrust into a rough, drafty stick hut with a thatched roof that dripped in places. She was cold, wet, alone, and so past pain and exhaustion all she wanted to do was collapse and sleep. After the first half day of walking, her wet shoes and socks had chafed, by the end of it her feet were covered in blisters. Pain was all she knew. After the second day she’d stopped feeling her feet so much and just stumbled along where she was led.

  She’d gotten something to drink by tipping her head back to catch the rain on her lips.

  There was no food. Her stomach cramped with hunger, but she knew better than to ask to eat after Mr. Gallegos did.

  Her mind flinched away from the memory of the sounds of fists on flesh, of his grunts of pain, his cries for mercy that became pleas for them to stop. And then, finally, an even more horrifying silence punctuated only by the sound of blows.

  Callie was more frightened than she’d thought possible. With an effort, she pushed her mind away from that memory again, hearing the sounds once more as an echo of memory, shivering as she dropped to the dirt floor of the hut.

  They fed her finally, something with beans, rice and little bits of something she didn’t want to think about too hard. By then she’d been so hungry she’d have eaten almost anything.

  How long ago had that been? More than a month now, she thought. She wasn’t sure, although she tried to keep track of the days that passed. Not always successfully.

  For a while, she’d expected someone to rescue them, but now she wondered if rescue would ever come.

  She didn’t know what was happening in the outside world. It all seemed so unreal now.

  Her socks hung in the only dry place in the hut, up near the eaves. In the jungle, as she’d learned on camping trips with her local friends, one of the most important things was to keep your feet dry. Another was keeping them healthy. The air was so damp, though, it took a long time. At night, she stuck her socks in her jeans pockets to let her body heat help dry them.

  Mostly the rebels left her alone except for the looks some of the men gave her, manhandling her or playing with her hair. So far, that was all they did.

  All but their leader.

  He was a grim man, stocky, only a little above middling height with dark heavy eyebrows, thick black hair in a square, pockmarked face, and keen, intent black eyes that watched everything.

  Including her.

  He watched her on the few times they’d let her out of the hut to relieve herself, his dark eyes narrowed, an expression on his face she’d seen more than once before on the faces of men in the streets both here and at home.

  There they couldn’t touch her. Here…?

  The possibility of rape was a very real one in this place. As abhorrent as the idea was, she had to accept the possibility.

  She’d never had sex. The thought made her want to cry so she pushed it away and tried not to think about what might have been.

  Instead, she’d dug a trench and a hole on a downward and downwind side of the tiny hut so she wouldn’t have to go out as often.

  In the meantime, she’d been cold, wet and miserable.

  Most days she watched between the gaps between the thick sticks that made up the side of her hut, daydreaming when she wasn’t sleeping. What kept her from going completely batshit were those daydreams. For a little while, she could sometimes escape into them as she’d done during her school classes, but she had to be careful. More than once she’d caught herself daydreaming about food, which just made her hungrier. Hunger was another very real problem in this place. The hostages were the last fed. Already her jeans were loose, and she’d never been particularly fat.

  She’d seen Mr. Gallegos going to and from the latrines and he didn’t look very good. He stumbled and appeared battered. The rebels seemed to have taken a special dislike to him, shouting at him, pushing and shoving him. She guessed it was because he worked for the ‘capitalist’ oil company.

  All she knew about Mr. Reeves was his voice. It was distinctive, the carefully modulated voice of a trained orator, and there were words he would use words that were too literate for this place. Occasionally she would hear his voice as if he shouted to or at someone…although that last was unlikely.

  Today, though, something was different. That was what caught her attention.

  First to Callie’s shock and surprise, her captors brought her a big tub of water and an old bar of soap. She didn’t know what it meant, but she wasn’t going to question it or turn it down either. She hadn’t been clean in over a month.

  Even though the water was lukewarm and the soap harsh, she washed her hair first and then, watching through the cracks to see if any of her captors watched, she stripped down to her skin and washed every inch. For the first time in weeks, she didn’t stink or itch. It was absolute heaven.

  Secondly, everyone rushed around to hide things or straightened up the camp to make it look presentable, stoking a bigger fire.

  Visitors were coming.

  A flicker of hope sparked.

  When the visitors arrived, though, they came from a different trail than the one Callie and the other hostages had used, she thought. She didn’t really know. She hadn’t been paying attention and she would have to if she were going to get out of here.

  Most of the usual visitors were of Spanish or native origin with dark hair, dark eyes and mostly dark skin. Most of them. These two weren’t and they were clearly together. They were also either American or European by their clothes and their looks.

  Both were tall, about the same height. One was so fair that here in this place he stood out. His close-cropped hair was either very light colored or prematurely white. He had a lean, hollow, clean-featured face, with a firm mouth and jaw. Broad-shouldered, his body was lean to match his face, narrow in the waist and hips. There was a calm confidence in the way he walked and a watchfulness in his eyes. Even in motion, he seemed contained; there was a stillness to him.

  That wary watchfulness was mirrored by his partner.

  He was about the same height, darker in coloring, but handsome too, an interesting mix of ethnicities, a little heavier in build, his face a little more square. His nose had been broken at some time in his life by the look; it seemed a little crooked. He walked like a boxer, with his shoulders squared over his hips, as if he were ready to go a round in the ring at any minute.

  Since they walked in of their own accord with no guns visible on them, it seemed they were here of their own choice. Either gun or drug smugglers then, she guessed.

  The part of her that hoped let out a sigh. She fought the urge to cry.

  She wanted to go home so badly.

  The camp was about what Ty had expected and seen before. Groups like this – rebels, drug smugglers – tended to move around a lot to keep from being caught, so their camps were hodgepodges of huts, shelters and sometimes tents. The biggest, best, and driest was usually reserved for the leader.

  Here that central tent was instead a large - large being relative here - cabin with a shed-roofed porch in front.

  Ocho Santiago was the leader of this particular group.

  Whether there had been seven children before him or the number eight had had some significance to his parents, Ty didn’t know, didn’t really care, and had never asked. It wasn’t a good idea to get curious around someone like Santiago or even for Ty’s alter ego to appear interested. Bradford was a gun smuggler. All he cared about were the guns he sold and the money he could get for them.

  Santiago was a little above average height for this region. Despite his medical background he had only about half his teeth, was as mean as a junkyard dog, and only about half as sane.

  Carefully Ty scanned the camp, looking for the hostages, hoping for some sign of them, but there was nothing. He hadn’t really expected it, not with
strangers, himself and Buck, in the camp. The rebels wouldn’t want anyone to know they had the hostages or where they were located. Not until they were a little more certain.

  With luck Santiago believed Ty and Buck were the gunrunners they pretended to be, here to sell his people the latest and newest toys.

  It had been a carefully crafted background, with a long period spent establishing themselves in the city. Ty in particular, had built a reputation of being a tough negotiator and dealer with Buck as his muscle. His very lethal muscle.

  It was delicate and nerve-wracking work and vastly unappreciated in the days after 9/11.

  Yet here was another group of people who had no love for the United States. Another breeding ground for terrorists. Since Hugo Chavez had become President of Venezuela, they were as likely to blame the oil companies and the U.S. as their own government for their troubles.

  Santiago kept them waiting a few moments, the usual power play, establishing his importance, his dominance of the situation.

  “Hola,” Ty said as he climbed the steps to Santiago’s hut, holding his hand out to the other man as he arrived and came forward to greet them.

  Originally, this trip had been planned to arrange to deliver a small supply of guns as a token of good faith to Santiago.

  Despite how hard it would be on the hostages, there had been no way of moving the date up that wouldn’t have risked alarming Santiago and his friends.

  Even so the negotiations to free them by diplomatic and other means were ongoing and a good cover for this part of the operation. Business as usual. There were companies who made it their business to discuss such an exchange, kidnapping specialists brought in by the oil company to be the intermediaries for the return of Gallegos and, secondarily, Callie Martin. With her father dead, her only practical value to the company was as publicity.

  Ty had sat in on those negotiations, remaining silent in the background.

  It had been a shock to hear Reeves’s voice on the other end of the first radio communication, and foxy of Santiago to make the man participate in liaising his own return.