Merciless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 1) (23 page)

Chyrel switched back to the night optics camera and zoomed out to show the whole crater. The men at the fire had now formed a semicircle around the fumarole. Though she’d watched it happen yesterday, she was still amazed at their stupidity.

Just as the men began to open fire on the lava dome, the one on the left side went down, followed quickly by two more. Suddenly, the terrorists began firing wildly in all directions. Another went down and then a fifth when he tried to run to the south.

“It’s a firefight!” Tony said. “The guy in the rocks is a sniper.”

The remaining terrorists ran toward the fumarole, one colliding with it, then falling backwards. The sniper shot him as he struggled to get up.

“These clowns don’t stand a chance,” Tony said. “That guy has to be one of ours. He never looked up, so I couldn’t get a picture for facial recognition.”

At the side of the fumarole, they clearly saw a man toss his weapon away and step out into the open. The merciless sniper shot him where he stood, and the remaining men ran fast for the south side of the crater.

Two more terrorists were shot in the back, as the remaining three made it to the safety of the rocks at the edge of the jungle and took cover. One was suddenly yanked backwards, as if a spring had been released. The last two disappeared into the foliage.

“Dayum!” Tony exclaimed. “That crater’s three-quarters of a mile across!”

Chyrel switched to thermal imaging and followed the two men through the jungle. They were headed to their camp. When they reached it, she zoomed out, to bring the sniper’s hide back into the screen.

A laser-like line shot out from a spot on the north rim, appearing as a thin, white line of heat, striking the fumarole and erupting in a blinding flash of heat.

“Holy shit,” Chyrel said. “He’s shooting at the volcano!”

“Those are incendiary rounds!” Tony added, sitting forward.

One by one, three more shots struck the fumarole, when suddenly the whole screen went white.

“What the hell just happened?” Deuce asked.

Chyrel quickly zoomed further out, the widening hot spot expanding. “I think the volcano is erupting!” She glanced at the temperature sensor display, and her mouth fell agape. “Deuce, the temperature at the fumarole is over eighteen hundred degrees.”

“Good God,” Deuce said with a sigh. “She can’t possibly survive that.”

Chyrel switched to the regular camera and zoomed in. The sun was getting higher, and the glow from the spewing lava flow provided enough light that the night optics were no longer needed.

“Show me all the known locations,” Deuce said.

Chyrel was frozen, mesmerized at the sight of the lava tumbling out of the fumarole and flowing like a red-hot river toward the gap in the rim.

“Chyrel!” Deuce snapped over the vid-com.

“Sorry, Boss,” she replied and quickly pinpointed the camp, the sniper’s hide and the cooking area.

As the three watched in horror, the lava swiftly flowed past the rim’s gap, pouring freely down the southern slope, igniting and vaporizing everything in its path. The fleeing men didn’t stand a chance.

“There!” Tony yelled, coming to his feet and pointing at the top of the screen. “Is that the sniper?”

Zooming in quickly, Chyrel found a solitary figure, dressed in black, scrambling down the north slope, in a straight downhill run.

“He’s on rappel,” Tony said. “Go, man! Get the hell out of there!”

The fleeing sniper must have reached the end of the rope and started moving along a trail to the northwest. Suddenly, the figure stopped and looked up into the sky. Chyrel quickly zoomed in tight on the sniper’s face and gasped.

“That’s Charity!” Tony exclaimed.

“Chyrel,” Deuce said. “Stop recording now. Delete everything after you just zoomed in.”

“Deuce! Charity’s alive!” Chyrel said and it suddenly dawned on her what the man had earlier said, “
She
can’t possibly survive that.”

“You two are to forget what you just saw,” Deuce ordered. “Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Tony replied, with a bit of a grin. “Forget what?”

“Chyrel?” Deuce asked.

Her hands danced across the keyboard, zooming the camera out to a five-mile radius and stopping the record function. Suddenly, the whole mountain seemed to explode, throwing rocks and ash in all directions.

Chyrel’s hand flew to her mouth, and Tony’s sardonic grin disappeared.

N
early a week later, Deuce and Chyrel videoconferenced, having both tried and failed to find out more, or piece together Charity’s movements to get to the volcano. All they could come up with was when Tony had zoomed out and noticed the truck driving on the rutted dirt road with its lights out. They had no way of knowing how she had arrived in Mexico, or where. And Stockwell wasn’t giving up anything. Further, he’d ordered the deletion of the entire video file.

“She had to have flown,” Chyrel said.

“That Huey just doesn’t have the range,” Deuce replied over the encrypted videoconference call. “Besides, that’d be too conspicuous.”

“An airliner’s out. Too much chance of being spotted on the security cameras.”

“She had to get there in a boat of some kind,” Deuce said, thinking. “I’d like to think she’d survived the eruption. But, without knowing where and how she exfiltrated, there’s just no way to know for sure.”

“Until Travis sends her on another mission.”

“If so, he’ll have to bring me into the loop,” Deuce said. “Until then, the only ones who know it was her at the volcano are me, you, and Tony. As much as I hate it, we’ve been ordered by the secretary to continue the lie that she stole the chopper.”

“And if Travis doesn’t send her on another mission?”

“Then we’ll have to assume she was killed. It’ll be months, maybe years, before the Mexican authorities can get in there to see the devastation firsthand.”

“She kicked ass, though. Didn’t she?”

Deuce smiled slightly. In just the two weeks since he’d taken the job in DC, Chyrel thought years had been added to his face.

“Yeah,” Deuce replied. “She most definitely kicked some major ass.”

Meanwhile, Travis Stockwell was living up to the illusion of a retired public servant, drinking and carousing up and down the middle and lower Florida Keys. Jesse McDermitt was barely taking out a charter a week, so he had plenty of free time.

While Deuce was in DC, trying to figure things out, Travis and McDermitt were on McDermitt’s boat, ten miles south of the Keys. It was only the second charter since the rescue and takedown of the Haitian gang in the Ten Thousand Islands, two weeks ago.

The first actual charter that Travis went out on as first mate had been only a few days after the rescue mission. A group of veterans, some disabled, from a town halfway up the Florida coast, had arranged that charter weeks before. They were with a nonprofit organization that built and remodeled homes for deserving vets. Most were members of a veterans’ organization called Space Coast Paratroopers, though not all the volunteers were Army jumpers. Some of the volunteers had already received a newly remodeled house and now volunteered for the Homes for Warriors Project every day they could.

After that one, McDermitt canceled the next two, ostensibly to give Travis time to find a place to live. But the real reason was so McDermitt could spend some time with his family.

Today’s charter was a group of tourists from Topeka, Kansas. They’d been fishing and drinking all day. McDermitt’s daughter had come along to help show Travis what the actual duties of a first mate were. As near as he could tell, they were to keep the tourists happy, drinking, and catching fish.

Travis wasn’t as charming as McDermitt’s daughter, but he was able to build a rapport with the men in the charter and was soon laughing with them, baiting hooks, and handing out beers.

The charter customers were lounging in the cockpit below, drinking and already exaggerating about the fish they’d caught, as
Gaspar’s Revenge
motored toward the town of Marathon.

Travis, McDermitt, and his daughter, Kim, were all on the bridge, off limits to charter customers, enjoying the daily dance the sun played with the water as it slowly sank toward the far western horizon.

Travis looked down at the Midwesterners and grinned. “You call this work? I feel like I’m robbing you of the two hundred.”

“Be more than glad to not pay you,” McDermitt said with a kind of lopsided grin that Travis had quickly learned meant he was sedately content.

“Oh no,” Travis replied. “I’ll need that money to wine and dine a tourist woman from Texas I met last night.”

Both McDermitts laughed, and Travis noted it was a similar laugh. Then McDermitt turned suddenly serious. “Have you heard anything new on the search for Charity?”

Just then, Travis’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and saw that it was an encrypted message from the bowels of the Pentagon. Clicking the icon, he read the short message.

Mission accomplished. Taking a couple of weeks in the Yucatan to recover. I need a new Barrett, optics, and a few other things. I’ll call when ready.

Travis deleted the message and glanced up at McDermitt with a frown. Inside, he was very happy and relieved, though.

“No,” Travis replied. “So far, nobody’s told me anything about what’s become of Charity Styles.”

In the little Mexican port city of Progresso, Juan Ignacio had just finished bartering with a local restaurant owner. The man had ended up buying all sixty pounds of his day’s catch for two thousand pesos.

Juan would never get rich at this rate, but he lived a simple life. His boat was his home. The cantina owner promised to return with his cart in less than an hour, so Juan went below to shower and dress for the evening.

Twenty minutes later, while hosing down the deck and waiting for the man to return his cart, Juan looked out to the jetty at the mouth of the harbor.

A beautiful sailboat was passing by close to the coast, its blue-and-white sails pulled in close as it sailed near the wind. Suddenly, the boat turned sharply through the wind and into the inlet. The sails crossed the deck cleanly fore and aft, and in perfect unison. But they were still hauled in tight.

When the wind caught the sails again, the boat heeled over sharply, coming into the harbor at a very fast rate of speed. Only a hundred meters from the pier, Juan saw the pretty woman that had been here nearly two weeks earlier.