A Deeper Blue

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Anastasia was just about worn out; this was just too much of a good thing.

Gonzales had been torturing her practically nonstop, getting every scrap of information she was willing to give. Katya had been there for most of it, and had caught more than a piece, as he brought in guards to rape and whip them both when he got worn out.

Currently she was tied belly down to a saddle with one man raping her in the ass and another taking her in the mouth. Gonzales was back to whipping, his arm having given out twice so far. He didn’t even really seem to be interrogating her anymore, just punishing Mike through her.

As the man came in her mouth and backed away, she looked over at Katya, who was chained up in a corner, and rolled her eyes. The girl snorted through her gag in laughter. Hopefully, the group would take it as some sort of stifled plea.

“What does he want?” Gonzales said, pulling her head back by her hair. “What is he after?”

“The gas,” Anastasia whimpered. “And… and…”

“He’s after my money, isn’t he?”

“Yes!” she admitted, bursting into tears. “Yes. I heard him speak of it. A great deal of money. He wishes to steal it from you. It was to be transferred by… b… p…”

“He knows about the boat,” Gonzales said, straightening up. “Gomez must have talked. Tell Suarez to send a message, right away, to move the shipment.”

“Yes, jefe,” the guard by the door said, darting out.

“Does he know where it is?” Gonzales asked, pulling her head up again. “Tell me, bitch!” he added, striking her on the back with the whip.

“In the Keys,” Anastasia said, taking a guess. “Something Key.”

“Fuck, he even knows it’s in Marathon?”

Katya rolled onto her side, trying to turn the gales of laughter into something else. She’d been tortured by experts over the years and while she didn’t enjoy it, she knew what “expert” meant. And Gonzales was an idiot. If he was the quality of individual that ran major segments of a cocaine smuggling ring, well, anybody could do it.

Come to think of it…

She managed to stop laughing by turning it into a whine as if from terror.

“Katya,” Julia said over the radio link. “That whine is not only extremely annoying, we’re having a hard time hearing what is being said. Did he just say a boat with money on it is in Marathon?”

“Uh, huh,” Katya said through her gag. “Uhhhh…”

“Get that bitch over here,” Gonzales said, gesturing to Katya. “You wanted to make out with this one. Well, make out with her. Do it all with her. I want to watch…”

“Katya,” Julia said. “Be advised that if you can extend the time with your hands undone, it might be advisable. We’re going to need a distraction in a few minutes.”

“There’s the boat,” John Hardesty shouted over the wind, pointing to the water below.

Mike’s regular pilot had eventually turned up and upon Mike’s arrival at the island had had a bit of a tiff with his boss. Tom Chatham, on being informed why Mike needed something along the lines of a Beaver, had insisted on driving. But John pointed out that not only did he have more time with Beavers, he was Mike’s regular driver. The two had worked it out as gentlemen after Chatham pointed out who was the boss. So Chatham was driving the blacked-out Beaver while Hardesty worked the door.

Mike gave him a thumbs-up and considered the angle. Given the reported winds aloft, it was close enough. So he grabbed the edges of the doorframe and hurled himself out.

Since they were only at fourteen thousand feet, the jump didn’t technically qualify as a HALO. HALO only counted if you were using oxygen. But Mike was glad enough to be able to dispense with the bulky bail-out bottle. In fact, all he was carrying was a set of battle armor, a heavy load of rounds for the Whisper .45 caliber sub-gun, a pair of silenced pistols and a few flash-bangs. Jeseph and Ivan, who followed him out the door at fifteen second intervals, were just about as lightly loaded.

He delta tracked in on the anchored yacht, then popped his canopy at 1500 feet, banking around to approach from the stern. There were two guards on the rear deck, armed guards, watching the water for boats or swimmers. Well, couldn’t have that…

He lined up on the open deck, then drew a silenced pistol in either hand. The shots were almost simultaneous, in very rapid sequence. Both of the guards dropped without ever noticing the black parachute dropping out of the night sky like some elder god.

Mike hit the release on his harness while still five feet in the air and dropped soundlessly to the deck. The parachute sailed backwards on the light wind and vanished into the water. With no one in sight he holstered the pistols and lifted the Whisper sub-gun, moving silently forward towards the superstructure.

There was another guard posted to port. Two rounds to the head sent him overside to splash into the water. A guard came from the bow, wondering about the sound. He found out what had caused it, but it didn’t do him much good as two more of the hollow point rounds blasted his brains all over the side of the vessel.

A quick check to starboard showed a fifth guard there. He, too, went over the side, just as Jeseph thumped onto the deck.

Mike looked back to make sure the Keldara had gotten free of his parachute, and that it was out of Ivan’s way, then gestured to the superstructure. The topside guards were down but that wasn’t the whole mission.

As the Kildar ghosted forward, as silent as a murderous shadow, Jeseph followed as quietly as he could. There were souls to gather this night.

Yosif was still having some control problems with his nerves and on one level he knew he shouldn’t be doing the op. But he had scores to settle. These bastards had helped bring in the shit that had probably permanently fucked him and he intended to send at least a few to the Cold Lands.

But he let Vugar lift the ladder to catch on the side of the yacht. He wasn’t sure he had the dexterity for it anymore.

He did have the dexterity, though, to be the first swarming up the ladder. When he got on deck he dropped the rebreather and pulled his MP-5 into a high ready position, then ghosted down the port side of the superstructure.

Below were the guard staterooms. They were his team’s job to “secure.”

He intended to make them very secure.

Suarez flipped through the security screens, then backed up. The guard at the starboard security position was missing. Flipping to port, at first he didn’t see anything. But checking the forward looking camera he could see a body down on the deck.

As he leaned forward to hit the alarm there was a thump outside his door. Several. Two quiet thumps then a louder one, like something hitting the deck.

He hit the alarm switch and turned to call for a guard when the door opened.

A man in black was pointing a silenced submachine gun at his head and Enrico slowly raised his hands.

“Hola,” the man said in a friendly tone. “Enrico, isn’t it? Tell you what, back away from the computers and nobody gets hurt.”

“Find out what it is,” Gonzales said, picking up a knife and advancing on the two women on the bed. “It is probably your boss, come to pick up his little whore,” he said, reaching across the bed to grasp Anastasia’s hair. “Well, let him find a dead body instead.”

Stasia lifted an arm to block but she needn’t have bothered. A blow from Katya on a nerve juncture opened Juan’s hand and sent the knife spinning across the room.

Katya continued the strike into an arm-bar and rolled the man backwards onto Stasia.

“Hold onto this prick,” Katya said, her accent back. “I’ve got things to do.”

One of the many enhancements that the Americans had given her was a combat drug that enhanced speed, strength and reactions. Katya sent the mental command to start the drug as she performed the complicated finger twist necessary to get the poison sack in her palm opened.

As the first, nearly naked, guard charged her, she stooped and swept her fingernails upwards, ripping the man in the crotch and lower belly. As he continued forward she knelt and used his momentum to toss him over her head in the general direction of the bed. Of course, it was only the general direction so what he really hit was the side of the bed. With the back of his neck. The modified cobra poison became moot at that point.

That only left four more to take out.

No problem.

Yosif blew open the first door and entered the room as the guards started to react to the alarm. The shots weren’t his usual precise three-round bursts. On the other hand, in those close quarters just spraying and holding the barrel down worked. Messy, but it worked. He tried hard, though, to get all the rounds into the bodies. The Kildar had been strangely insistent that the boat not get too shot up…

Kacey brought the Hind into a hover over the back deck and waited as Pavel’s team slid down the fast-ropes, then she drifted sideways and checked the bridge of the yacht. The Hind had been in a hover just beyond the nearest island, waiting for the go word. It had only taken thirty seconds for her to fly to the yacht and begin dropping Pavel’s team.

There were men moving on the bridge, obviously trying to get the yacht into motion. That wasn’t part of the plan so she turned, slightly, bringing the doors around…

Lasko targeted the moving figures on the bridge and fired three rounds, nearly as fast as a machine gun would have fired. All three of the figures dropped, red splotches on the windows behind them.

“Bridge secure,” Lasko said.

Stella swarmed up the side of the ship and headed for the computer center. She passed two small firefights on the way but didn’t slow down until she skidded through the door of the room.

The Mexican intel manager was wrapped into a chair with about a mile of rigger tape and his mouth covered by it as well. But his eyes bugged out eloquently when the girl sat down at the computer and typed in his password.

“Let’s see,” Stella muttered. “Boat, Marathon, dollars… Ah, here it is… Keldara base,” she continued, keying her throat mike. “I’ve got a lock on Gonzales’ money transfer. The boat is docked at Ocean View Marina in Marathon with sixty-two million dollars onboard. It isn’t shown as having left, yet. Does the Kildar want us to pass on the information, or keep the money for ourselves?”

Mike knocked politely, then opened the door to the “dungeon.”

Katya was standing in the middle of the room, stark naked and covered in blood. Most of it had come, apparently, from one of the guards who was more or less hacked to death. Three others were twisted in positions that indicated she’d used the modified cobra venom in her fingernails on them. The stuff was a very close cousin to VX and had much the same effect. A fifth appeared to have broken his neck in a fall.

Anastasia was on the room’s sole bed, holding Gonzales immobile in a full-Nelson. From the looks of it, one of his arms had been dislocated.

“Hello, Juan,” Mike said, stepping into the room. “I’d like you to meet Katya Ivanova. And I’d like to formally thank her for not only wiring your boat to a fare-thee-well with electronic devices but also for giving us a full layout. It made taking it down so much easier.”

“You’re going to die for this, you pig,” Gonzales said, struggling to break free. The dislocated shoulder made that rather hard, though.

“Yes, well, others have said that,” Mike replied. “And here I am. I’m not much of a gloater but I’m going to tell you something and then I’m going to write it down and return it to your bosses, attached to your dead body. It’s like this. You want to run drugs, you want to fuck around with your own government, you want to blow up Colombian civilians, that’s your business. People like me most of the time just won’t care. But you start helping terrorists get shit like VX into the U.S.? You help kill American civilians. Then we care. That’s pretty much it. Oh, except for one thing. The lady who’s holding you? My harem manager? Major league masochist. Comments, Stasia?”

“He can’t whip as hard as you, Kildar,” Anastasia purred. “And his dick is tiny.”

“Another county heard from,” Mike said. “And I promised a lady something. Katya?”

“Thank you, Kildar,” Katya said, walking over to the drug smuggler. “I’ve been beaten and raped by the worst pimps on earth; you’re a piker compared to them. But you like to get off beating on women, women who don’t enjoy it. Just like the bastards that raped me so many times over the years. You like to watch? Watch this.”

She drew back her hand and struck with middle and index fingers, straight into the man’s eyes.

“Oops,” she said as the screaming man began thrashing and Anastasia rolled him to the floor, “I did it again…”