did good, Captain. You’re a real hero. None of us thought you’d survived that direct rocket hit. You’re one tough son of a bitch, for a marine.” Maya saw one corner of his mouth rise at her teasing comment. She felt heartened. Maybe this guy was going to make it, after all. Still, his blood loss was horrific. And her sergeant was working like a wild woman over his mangled, continually bleeding leg. Right now, the last thing Maya wanted this heroic officer to know was that his leg looked like hell and there was every reason to believe that, once they reached Cusco, the surgeons would remove it.
That was heartbreaking to her. A man like this, who had incredible courage, would now became an amputee. He didn’t deserve such a reward, Maya thought. Looking up at the girl who huddled in the corner, her eyes huge with tears, Maya felt for her, too. Life was nasty sometimes. Valerie Winston would never forget this. And Maya hoped she would never forget the men who had given their lives to rescue her. People like Captain Hamilton made the world a little better place to live in. A safer place for people like Valerie.
Leaning down, her lips close to his ear, Maya said, “Just try to rest, Captain. We’re going to be landing in Cusco in less than thirty minutes. I’ve got the best paramedic in the world taking care of you.”
Thane forced out the words. “Thank you…for everything.”
Angel looked up momentarily, her lean, angular, dark brown face tense, the corners of her full mouth pulled flat. Her hands were bloody as she wrapped his injured leg.
Maya looked down at the marine once more. He had lost consciousness again. That was good. “It’s sad, Angel. This guy deserves medals and it looks like he’s going to lose this leg instead as a reward for what he just did.”
“I dunno,” Angel rasped as she reached around Maya and dragged her paramedic pack toward her. “If Dr. Del Prado is the bone surgeon on duty there at the Cusco hospital, he might try and save this dude’s leg. He’s got the ability to do it, but he’s the only one in Peru who could pull it off.”
“Better hope our best bone doctor is on duty, then,” Maya said grimly.
“Captain?”
It was her copilot, Dove Rivera.
Maya lifted her head and looked toward the cockpit. “Yeah?”
“I’m receiving a top secret message for you, Captain. It’s from Rolling Thunder. You expecting something from them?”
“Yeah…” The mission they were currently on was run by Perseus, a covert agency that often collaborated with the government. “That has to be the head of the organization, Morgan Trayhern. This mission was his ops—operation.” She had never met Trayhern, but had worked with other officials within Perseus because it, too, operated in conjunction with the CIA, as did her base and operation in Peru.
“Oh, okay. Want me to patch it through to you over the private intercom?”
“Yeah, do it, Dove.” Maya didn’t care if her sergeant heard the message or not. They all had top secret clearances. Releasing the marine’s limp hand, Maya pressed her fingers to the ear of her helmet to listen closely to the incoming message. Sometimes, such satellite transmissions were broken up, particularly in the mountainous regions of Peru where they were presently flying like a bat out of hell to save the marine.
“This is Kingbird to Rolling Thunder. Over,” Maya said. Kingbird was their call designation indicator when satcom messages of this type had to be broadcast. In the event that anyone was able to capture the encrypted message, that person would have no idea of the caller’s true identification or position at the time of the transmission.
“Rolling Thunder. Kingbird, have you got the goods? Over.”
The “goods” meant the girl, and Maya knew the code language. “Roger, we have the goods. Alive and well.”
“Roger. And Checkerboard? What is their status?”
Grimly, Maya knew that Checkerboard was the marine Recon team sent in to rescue Valerie. “Rolling Thunder, we have one survivor of Checkerboard. Right now, we are heading for the nearest hospital, where we have an emergency team on standby. Over.”
“Roger. I will contact you when you arrive at your destination. Be on standby. Over.”
“Roger that, Rolling Thunder. I’ll await your call. Over and out.”
“Rolling Thunder, out.”
Maya watched as Angel placed a very tight tourniquet bandage around the bleeder, which seemed to have stopped leaking for the most part.
“That means we have to hang around for a call,” Dove lamented.
Maya didn’t like being on the ground wherever there were people and prying eyes. Especially in the second largest city in Peru. Because their mission was one of utmost stealth, top secret to everyone except two Peruvian government officials, she didn’t like to draw attention to herself or her crews. “Yeah, I know. But Rolling Thunder wants the ID on this marine. He’s going to have to contact his family and get him some medical help stateside. It’s gotta be done.”
“We’ll stay with the Cobra,” Dove said unhappily. “You gonna take the call inside the hospital?”
“Thanks,” Maya said dryly, with a smile. She saw Dove’s own smile as she turned her head briefly and met her eyes. Her copilot was also Que’ro Indian, from the highlands of Peru. She was only the second woman pilot in the Peruvian Air Force. Dove had turned into a fine helicopter pilot, thanks to training she’d received at Fort Rucker, Alabama, many years earlier. Now she was back in her own country to help the Peruvian people eradicate the drug trade. Nearly all her family had been murdered by drug lords, and she’d barely escaped with her young life. Dove Rivera had an ongoing vendetta against them, and with good reason. She lived to fly. She lived to kill every last one of them she could set her gun sights on. Maya didn’t blame her.
“This guy’s pressure is slowly dropping,” Angel reported unhappily as she studied the reading on the blood pressure cuff. “Man…this isn’t good. I was hoping he’d stabilize…. Del Prado isn’t going to like this. The question is can we get him there in time or not?”
Maya slowly eased into a crouched position, because no one could straighten up fully within the tight confines of the helicopter. “Do the best you can,” she soothed, and patted Angel’s slumped shoulder. Picking up a nearby blanket, Maya made her way over to Valerie. The teenager was white-faced and scared looking. She needed to be held. The paleness of her freckled face, the darkness in her eyes, told Maya that much. Maya would play nursemaid until they landed, and then Valerie would be turned over to awaiting U.S. government agents, who would whisk her into a private jet back to the U.S. and into her anxious father’s waiting arms, no worse for wear—at least on the outside.
Smiling gently as she approached, Maya slowly opened the blanket and slipped it around the girl’s huddled form. She knew that she looked dangerous and threatening to the teen in her black uniform with the pistol at her side. A smile helped to ease the panic she saw in the girl’s eyes. Valerie wasn’t hooked up to the communications system, so she was unaware of what was being said or what was going down. The teenager was like a stranger in a strange place—a place where she had almost died.
As she knelt down in front of the girl and wrapped the blanket around her, Maya introduced herself and said, “Valerie, you’re going home. You’re safe now. We’ll be landing in
