Chapter 54
FIFTY-FOUR
The orange Beetle rolled to a stop behind a low ridge, its engine ticking in the silence. Ryan stepped out slowly, jaw clenched against the pain in his thigh. The stitches were holding, but just. Every step felt like walking with a nail in his leg.
He reached into the footwell behind the driver’s seat and pulled out the pair of binoculars he’d swiped from the dead merc, alongside his FN SCAR rifle and ammunition rig. What was a rescue mission without a little grave robbing?
The Santa Loma airstrip cut across the valley like a scar.
Lights lined its edges, low and industrial, the kind that threw long shadows.
To the east, the compound sat tucked behind fencing and floodlights.
Tin-roofed structures. A hangar. Outbuildings and a squat tower. Armed men moved in regular paths.
“Two at the fence,” Ryan muttered. “Another near the hangar doors. What do you bet that’s where they’ve got her?”
Gates stepped up beside him, resting hands on hips. “No doubt.”
He chewed his cheek for a moment, watching the pattern of the guards’ movements. They weren’t amateurs: they moved in tight formations covering each other’s arcs.
Ryan dropped the binoculars. “Phalanx.”
Gates gave a short nod. “And they’re expecting someone. You don’t pull in that kind of muscle for an overnight fuel run.”
“They’ll have her inside,” Ryan said. “Somewhere with no windows. No exits.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment, as they both contemplated the reality of Lucía’s situation.
“She’s tough,” Gates said.
Ryan didn’t reply. All he could think was everyone breaks eventually. And the thought of someone breaking her made him want to snap their bones with his bare hands.
The sun slid lower, dragging long shadows across the desert floor.
Ryan turned and looked at the boy asleep in the back of the car. “Noah’s not going in there with us.”
“No,” Gates agreed. “But we can’t leave him here either.”
“There was a service shed about two clicks back.” Ryan nodded at the road they came in on. “Cinderblock. Empty. Still has a roof. We leave him there. Give him my burner, tell him to lock the door and wait for us to come back.”
“And if we don’t?”
Ryan looked at him. “I’ll preload a message on the phone to the U.S. embassy. We tell them where to find him. Who he is. What he’s seen. If we don’t come back in a few hours, all he has to do is hit send.”
He unclipped a black handheld radio from his belt. It was still crusted in dried blood. “I took this off the guy back at Punta Roja. Might still be synced to their frequency.”
Gates gave a dry smile. “Now we’re talking.”
They left Noah in the small stone building a few yards from the main road, with three water bottles, a flashlight, Ryan’s burner, and instructions to contact the embassy if they weren’t back in an hour.
The boy just nodded solemnly, then settled himself in the corner with his comic book.
He must have read it over a hundred times by now, but he wasn’t complaining.
Ryan wanted to say more, do more, be more for the kid but he had nothing in him left to give.
Just survival. And then maybe a way out of this mess for all of them.
Back at the vantage point above the airfield, Ryan racked the charging handle on the salvaged rifle and slung it over his back, adjusting the strap so it wouldn’t thump against his bad leg. Gates had a shotgun they’d yanked from the SUV’s rear, plus his Glock.
Ryan crouched behind a boulder and slid the binoculars up. “Three on the gate. Two by the fuel tanks. Another doing circles near the hangar. No clear path in.”
“Listen,” Gates said, holding up the radio.
They both stilled. A voice came through—crackled Spanish, but clear enough.
“Bravo team rotating. East quadrant clear. Lights cycling in fifteen.”
Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “That’s our window.”
They watched for five more minutes. Patrols shifted. The east side—near the service access gate—dropped to one man. The lights along that section flickered, then went dark.
“Let’s move,” Gates said.
They ghosted through the brush, moving like shadows. The stolen radio buzzed again: routine check-ins, minor updates. No hint yet of trouble.
At the fence, Gates clipped the wire with bolt cutters Ryan had salvaged from the old pickup’s toolkit. It took them less than thirty seconds to breach and slip inside. Once past the perimeter, the compound swallowed them whole.
Ryan knelt by a low crate, listening. The place was alive, but only in pockets.
Ryan said, “I’m going in. You cover me, keep eyes on the perimeter. Let me know when we have an out.”
Gates nodded, and Ryan took off at a limping jog, heading for the cluster of attached buildings beside the hangar.
The door he chose was half ajar, light seeping through.
He moved room to room, through storage closets, mechanical rooms, a gutted kitchen.
Finally, he reached a tiny guard post at the end of the corridor.
It was empty, but terminal screens lit the darkness.
They showed surveillance feed on monitors, from different locations around the airstrip.
He crept closer. There. Top left.
Lucía.
She sat in a hard-backed chair, completely naked. Her hands were bound again, her posture straight. A tall figure loomed in front of her.
Ryan didn’t recognize the man, but something about the way he was standing over her suggested he wasn’t some grunt tasked with extracting information from her.
No, he looked like this was personal to him, and that he was enjoying every moment.
The pistol grip of the rifle was sweaty in Ryan’s hand. If he could have raised it and fired at the man through the screen, he’d have unloaded the entire clip, then reloaded and emptied that one, too.
But he couldn’t. All he could do was watch.