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  The kid in the bush began shouting. “Where is he? Where is he!”

  “We’re dead, man. And I sure as hell didn’t see him.”

  A shrill ring cut through the air. Damn, Rook thought as he rose from his concealed position to answer his emergency line. The thing was a social nightmare. He couldn’t turn it off in theaters, at a game, or while kicking some University of New Hampshire kids’ asses at paintball. He had to be available at all times and that meant the damn phone had to be on at all times—except during a mission—and this little outing was not being funded by the U.S. government.

  The two kids on the ground shuffled away from him, fear in their eyes as he rose looking like an evil Sigmund the Sea Monster. He pulled off his head gear, revealing his dirty blond hair, long goatee, and blazing blue eyes. He lowered his DYE DM8 paintball gun to the ground and held a palm up toward the third kid now rushing out with his rifle aimed. Looking like some Norse god ready for battle, Rook’s hard gaze and outstretched hand stopped the kid in his tracks.

  “Time out. Need to answer the phone,” Rook said.

  “Dude, shoot him!” one of the dead kids yelled.

  Rook opened the phone and placed it against his ear. “I’m here.” He kept his eye on the kid with the itchy trigger finger and listened. “On my way.” He closed the phone, pocketed it, and turned his full attention to the lone survivor.

  “There’s no freakin time-outs in paintball!” one of the grounded kids shouted.

  “And dead people don’t talk,” Rook said, then looked at the last man standing. “Time in.”

  The kid cocked his head. “Huh?”

  Rook pulled his side arm and fired from the hip. A red blotch exploded on the kid’s facemask, blocking his view and effectively killing him. He picked up his gear and started his trek out of the four-acre paintball course known locally as GLOP. One kid started whining. “Cheap bastard!”

  Rook raised his paintball gun and pulled the trigger, peppering the kid from head to toe with paintball pellets, each stinging like a bee. The kid danced and shouted in pain, looking for cover, but found none.

  When the paintball canister emptied, Rook lowered the gun and grinned at the paint-coated kid. “Now I’m a bastard.”

  He headed into the trees and quickly faded from view. The rest and relaxation shooting college students provided would have to wait. King called for backup and that meant that somewhere, shit was hitting a fan.

  Ocracoke Island, North Carolina

  In between tides, small waves settled gently onto the shore, sifting through the sand with a soothing hiss. A slight breeze bent the sea grass growing tall and green on the dunes that separated the sand from the island’s tree line and small town beyond. The beach was pleasantly devoid of the tourists that packed the more popular mainland beaches, which was just the way Queen liked it. Being able to tan her curves free from gawking male eyes and an endless barrage of one-liners so corny even Rook wouldn’t use them was how she believed a vacation should be spent.

  A whistle in the distance caught her ear and caused a wave of discomfort to pass through her bikini-clad body. Ignore it, she thought. The whistle sounded innocent, like a dog call, but in her experience, any sign of men on a beach was the end of her relaxation. The whistle came again, closer this time. Crinkles formed around her eyes as she willed the passerby to keep on passing by.

  “Tito! Come back, boy!”

  No such luck.

  A dog.

  Queen opened her eyes to the smiling face of a half-soaked golden retriever. It carried a drool-laden tennis ball in its mouth and wore a blue bandanna. Had it just been the dog, she would have happily played fetch with it until the sun dipped below the horizon, but her luck had run out. The dog’s owner, probably a local or part-timer on the island, swaggered up wearing rolled up blue jeans and a loose-fitting white dress shirt. Silk by the looks of it. His curly near-mullet and scruffy face completed the image of a 1980s stud starring opposite Julia Roberts. He smiled as he took the dog’s collar. “Enjoying the beach?”

  “I was,” she replied, doing nothing to hide her annoyance at his presence.

  After a brief frown he found his self-confidence again and forced a smile. “I can tell you’re pretty stressed. Why don’t you let me—”

  Queen held up her fist and extended her middle finger. She held it there as the man shifted from surprise to deflation and finally to anger.

  “Hey, you—”

  Her cell phone rang loudly. She popped it open and put it to her ear. She listened, then hung up after saying, “You got it.” She stood, looked at the man, and said, “Who names their dog Tito?” She then quickly wrapped herself in a towel and retreated from the beach, leaving her chair, cooler, and novel as mementos for the emotionally castrated man.

  Land O’Lakes, Florida

  Thirty feet below the surface, Knight poked his head out of the ship’s flooded hold to see if the coast was clear. It wasn’t. The cloud of rapidly moving silver bodies pursued by scores of frenzied hammerhead sharks still blocked out most of the shimmering blue surface above. Normally, hammerheads didn’t attack people. With only twelve reported unprovoked attacks on humans they were one of the safest sharks to swim with. But in the midst of a feeding frenzy, everything within reach of their snapping jaws was fair game.

  Knight had come to Florida to visit his aging grandmother, his last surviving relative, but he could only take so many bingo games and retreated to the coast. He rented a boat, scuba equipment, and headed to the coordinates of one of his favorite shipwrecks. The Anne Marie was a cargo ship, sunk by a U-boat during World War II. While much of its cargo had long since been raised to the surface, the inside of the solid-steel ship still held scattered remnants of a time and war that would soon see its last survivors die out.

  Knight checked his oxygen levels. Fifteen minutes. On such a shallow dive he didn’t need to stop to decompress, so reaching the surface could be done quickly. He had time to wait, but if the human garbage disposer twisting above the wreck didn’t ebb or move away, he’d have to choose between asphyxiating on an empty tank or being torn to shreds. With the frenzy well into the thirty-minute mark, he felt sure it would slow down soon enough.

  A vibration on his side caused him to flinch back into the ship. He thought for sure he’d come face-to-face with a hammerhead, but found only open water. The nudge came again and this time he recognized it as his phone vibrating. He opened a pouch on his side and removed the phone, sealed in a Ziploc bag. Its blue glow filled the dark ship’s hallway. He answered it, pressed the phone hard against his ear, and heard Deep Blue’s muffled voice. He pushed “1” on the phone twice, letting Deep Blue know that he had received the message but was unable to reply audibly.

  He tucked the phone back into the pouch and peered out of the portal once more. His fifteen minutes disappeared with a phone call. The giant ball of fish and shark above continued to twist and coil in on itself. Chunks of fish floated down toward him where smaller sharks and predatory fish took advantage. Even they might take a bite at him. But he had to risk it.

  He kicked out and away from the wreck’s protection and stopped on the sandy bottom. He took one long drag from the oxygen, then purged his tank. Bubbles exploded toward the surface in a cloud of energy. The sharks ignored it at first, but when their prey fled from it, the sharks followed. As though flying up through the eye of a tornado, Knight kicked hard, heading toward the surface, rising with the cloud of bubbles. As the bubbles reached the surface ahead of him, the water suddenly cleared and the wall of silvery fish began to close in around him. Massive bodies pounded through with jaws wide open. With only feet remaining on either side, Knight hit the surface and launched himself up and over the side of the small motorboat. As his legs cleared the water he felt something blunt strike him. He rolled onto his back, looking down expecting to see flesh torn away, but discovered himself fully intact, though a rising bruise revealed where a shark had blindly rammed him. He started th
e engine and hammered the throttles, gunning for the shore.

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  The right hook came like a blur, connecting with Bishop’s cheek. He stumbled back a step and kept his guard up, waiting for the next attack. It came in a three-punch combo. He blocked the first two. The third snuck by but only glanced off his shoulder. He bounced around the ring, eyeing his opponent—a beefy freshly crew cut recruit who thought he could take on the world with a pistol and win. And after spending ten minutes pummeling the older Delta operator he believed it more than ever.

  He came in straight and sloppy, wide open. Bishop allowed the kid to throw his punches. Five of them this time. Three blocked. Two connected. The last was a good shot that connected with Bishop’s forehead and knocked his head back.

  “That’s more like it,” he murmured.

  “You say something, old man?” the kid said as he walked around Bishop sporting a cocky grin.

  What the recruit didn’t know is that the only people on base who would fight Bishop in the ring were recruits. Everyone else knew better. They knew he liked the pain. Absorbed it like a sponge and released it in a burst. Right now he was nearly full up. When the fight ended Bishop would retreat to his small ranch just off base, put on Vivaldi’s Spring mvt 2: Largo and meditate, controlling the rage that had built up since childhood.

  An unplanned and unwanted birth, his Iranian parents had abandoned him on the side of a road. Found parched in the desert, he became a black-market baby. Bought by a British organization posing as parental buyers, he was eventually adopted by an American family at the age of two. Raised in the U.S., he became Erik Somers. His life reflected the American Dream, but at his core, those two years, the ones lived while his soul took root in his body, left him raging inside. Before joining the military he’d been something of a bar room brawler, but first as a Marine, then a Ranger, and now an elite Delta operator, he had found the discipline—and outlet—he needed to control his rage.

  A flash of red caught Bishop in the gut, followed by a second to the temple. The bystanders cringed with loud “oohs!” but not because of the pain Bishop was being dealt, but because they knew it would be returned on the recruit, and then some.

  Sufficiently motivated, Bishop changed his stance. That alone caused the kid to back off. Bishop hadn’t changed a thing since the fight began. He merely hopped around the ring, accepting punches. But a new presence in the gym caught Bishop’s attention. Brigadier General Michael Keasling, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a task force commissioned with making sure U.S. special ops weaponry and tactics were the best in the world. The man didn’t make social calls and he never made an appearance at the gym. The grim look on his mustached face confirmed Bishop’s fear. Something was wrong.

  Keasling didn’t make a motion. Just met Bishop’s eye. Bishop nodded. The fight was over.

  But not for everyone. The recruit saw the moment of distraction and took it. He came in low and swung up with a massive uppercut. But Bishop was no longer playing the part of punching bag. As the punch came up, Bishop tilted his head back. The gloved fist caught nothing but air, throwing the large man off balance. Bishop followed up the dodge with a quick blow to the recruit’s midsection, doubling him over. He chased it quickly with a crushing right hook that put the kid on one knee. Had the recruit been less cocksure he would have let it end there, but this one would get himself killed in combat if his ego wasn’t broken. The third punch spun the kid’s head around and put him on the mat.

  As the men watching cheered him on, Bishop shed his blue gloves, dropped them to the mat, and slipped between the ropes. He toweled the sweat from his body as he approached Keasling. “Is it King?”

  Keasling nodded. “The others are on their way back. You ship out in three hours.”

  “Where to?”

  “Best guess at this point? Peru. But the exact location has yet to be determined.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mercs killed a bunch of civies on King’s watch. Kidnapped his friend, too. He’s out for blood,” Keasling said. He started to leave, then paused. “Leave the dog tags. This one’s off the books.”

  Bishop nodded. The general left without another word.

  Bishop entered the showers and stood beneath an ice-cold, high-pressure spray of water. He leaned his hands against the wall, closed his eyes, and controlled his breathing. Vivaldi would have to wait.

  13

  Ayacucho, Ica, Peru

  King sat in the jeep, foot eager to hit the gas. As the engine clicked and cooled he forced his hands to release the steering wheel. A painful tingle filled his hands as blood rushed to fill crushed digits. He and Atahualpa had followed the mercenaries’ tracks through the Nazcan desert and into the mountainous region that divided the desert from the jungle. The wet dirt roads created an easy trail to follow at first, but as they neared larger cities the tracks became muddled in with others and disappeared. They’d resorted to questioning locals. Luckily, the large silver SUV driven by the mercenaries stood out to those who had seen it speed past.

  Atahualpa dashed out of a small house on the outskirts of town built from corrugated metal and tree limbs. His help had been indispensable so far. King could get by in the modern, Spanish-speaking portions of Peru, but here, where Quechuan was the language of choice, he was lost. Atahualpa spoke English, Spanish, Quechuan, and several other Peruvian dialects, some close to extinction. Hopping into the jeep, he was all smiles.

  “Good news?” King asked.

  He nodded. “I know where they’re going.”

  King raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “They headed northwest,” Atahualpa pointed toward a muddy dirt road leading northwest. “That way. There is only one village. Jauja. My cousin lives there.”

  King took the steering wheel again and hit the gas, having never taken the vehicle out of drive. “What else is in Jauja?”

  “Farming village. Cows. Goats. Not much else.” He looked at King. “It is dead end. No roads out.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Just the river. Rio Urubamba.”

  “Where does the river lead?”

  “Why would they use the river?”

  King shot him an annoyed glace and slammed into a water-filled pothole as a result. Water splashed onto the windshield and slid away.

  “The river goes nowhere,” Atahualpa said. “Just jungle. Rain forest. But we cannot go there. If we get lost no one will find us.”

  King tapped the GPS unit attached to the jeep’s dashboard. “I won’t get lost, and you’re not coming.” King dodged a second pothole and slammed the gas to the floor. Mud shot into the air behind the jeep as it reached eighty miles per hour. He was closing in on them. If they took the river instead of a plane, that meant they were close. He’d find them in the jungle.

  An hour later they reached Jauja. Atahualpa jumped from the jeep, clearly thankful to be alive after King’s sprint to the village. Speeding in the open, flat desert was scary enough; the mountainous jungle, with its tall cliff drop-offs, twisting turns, and overgrown roadsides had terrified the man. King would get no argument from Atahualpa over leaving him behind. The man had paid his penance by helping get King this far. Now it was time to pay back the money he’d earned selling them out.

  “I need a boat,” he said to the nervous guide.

  Atahualpa nodded and led the way through the small village. Homes of reed and corrugated metal stood on stilts that kept them safe from seasonal flooding. Clothes hung on lines stretched between huts. A brown capuchin monkey tied to a rope sat on an old wooden fence staring at King intently as a group of girls doing one another’s hair didn’t spare a second glance as they passed. They seemed invisible to the rest of the village, who either didn’t care about strangers in their midst or, more likely, had a recent run-in with less friendly strangers. King kept his eyes open for a silver SUV. It had to be there.

  Then he saw it, by the wide, lazy river. A burned-
out husk. Any evidence of the men who’d been inside had been erased. An old man dressed in what had once been a suit coat, now tattered and dirty, approached from a hut by the river, his toothless mouth spread wide with a smile.

  “My uncle,” Atahualpa said. The two embraced and began speaking quickly in Quechuan. Atahualpa turned to King after a few minutes of rapid-fire discussion. The old man was nodding. “He says the men we are looking for went upriver. He has a boat and will sell it to you for five hundred.”

  “Does he have a gun?”

  Atahualpa asked. “Yes, but it is old. A rifle.”

  It wasn’t ideal, but there were no alternatives. “Tell him I’ll take both for five hundred.”

  Atahualpa relayed the message, then smiled. “He agrees.”

  “Good,” King said. “Now pay the man.”

  Atahualpa blanched. But he did not question King. They both knew where the wad of money in his pocket came from. He paid his uncle, who then led them to the river. The long wooden boat held an outboard motor that looked ancient but well maintained. While the old man fetched the rifle and a gas can, King retrieved his gear and the GPS unit from the jeep. After loading his bag into the boat, King took stock of the river and jungle. The dark water flowed slowly and would make for easy travel as long as it stayed that way, but trees and overgrowth filled the river side opposite the village. With the sun already lowering on the horizon, he’d probably have to spend the night in the boat. He looked at Atahualpa. “Are there crocodiles?”

  “Caimans, yes,” the man answered. “But they will not attack you in the boat. The jaguar is what you should watch for.”