Inside, he tuned to the helicopter crew’s communications.
“Green on fuel. Green light from the flight line.” Captain Morgan finished his preflight checks. “Your team’s a go?”
“Ready.” Deavers’s voice crackled as he handed Wulf one of two metal cases the size of a quart of milk. “Got our toys.”
“No fireworks?” The pilot waited for Deavers to say no, then continued. “Right then, let’s pick up our delivery and boogie.”
Despite swinging a loaded twenty-foot shipping container, the tactical flight over the barely lit land was fast and stomach-dropping. Wulf rehearsed what-if scenarios, but the stretch of Theresa’s T-shirt when she leaned on her elbows intruded. He’d been surrounded too long by Afghan women swathed head to toe, or army women dressed to resemble chunks of concrete, because her gray cotton tee had seemed revealing. Thirty-two hours later, he could conjure her next to him, her legs stretched alongside his, butter-rich cookies and Turkish-style coffee mingling with that damn citrus scent that clung to her. He’d eaten an orange with every meal since Cinderella, proof of his stupidity.
Focus. Bringing his rifle stock to his nose, he sucked in dark oil and metal. His weapon. His mission. His team.
In the twenty minutes before they reached Firebase Rushmore on a ridge commanding a valley bend, he managed not to think of her six more times. The Black Hawk never touched ground while the firebase grunts worked with the crew chief to swap the supply container for its empty twin. Eight and a half minutes, and then Morgan lifted their new load off the packed dirt rectangle next to the sandbagged compound and soared away. The poor bastards at the firebase wouldn’t see another friendly for fifteen days.
With Rushmore three ridges and two valley twists behind, the pilot called Wulf and his commander forward. “See the weight?” Morgan pointed to a dial. “Six bucks heavy, when all it’s supposed to have is outgoing mail and unburnable plastics.”
“Jackpot.” Wulf’s arms and chest tingled with anticipation. They had over six hundred kilos of secrets hanging below. “Pick your spot. We’ll execute.” Distractions fell away as he became one with his squad. They had separate arms and legs and beating hearts, but one mission: the box. Find out what it held and why Chief was dead, then balance the books.
“Studied topos,” the pilot said. “There’s a partially concealed saddle fifty klicks west.”
“We saw it. Drop our snipers on the overlooking ridges.” His commander nodded as Wulf continued, “Our commo will stay on board to coordinate. The captain and I go in the can.”
“Roger that.” The pilots would hover, prepared to haul the container off with Wulf and Captain D inside at hostile contact.
Before the dust boiled from the ground, Wulf had an instant to gauge the distance to the corrugated roof of the half-size twenty-footer. Reassembled, his welds would be easier to conceal on the rippled metal than on flat steel, where they would look exactly like a trap door.
He fast-roped to the top, the zip a rush that was always over too soon. Next to him, Deavers was nearly invisible through the brownout. Wulf’s blowtorch had to be roaring, but the massive rotor blades overhead left no air for other noises. Dirt scoured his goggles until it was impossible to see past his arms. No way could his commander spot an elephant next to them, let alone a Taliban fighter with a rifle a half klick away. For the other man’s sake, he hoped the team snipers had clearer views.
The steel square of roof fell into the void. Odd to see it disappear, to know it clanged metal on metal as it landed, when he could only hear the overhead thwacks.
He dangled on the edge and dropped, followed by his commander. The dusty light that filtered through their entrance point revealed four shrink-wrapped pallets of white bricks fixed to tie-downs on the floor. An instant after he registered the incongruity of commercial packaging in the wilds of Clusterfuckistan, the pickle-barrel smell walloped him. It wasn’t the lethargic dream-scent of raw poppy resin, so Deavers wouldn’t fail his next piss test just by breathing. This was the stink of hundreds of bricks of processed base.
His flashlight played over the cargo and lit his commander, who tried yelling loud enough to be heard. Even inside the can, the Black Hawk obliterated every noise, but his lips were easy to read. “O-pi-um?”
“Morphine,” Wulf mouthed back. He unstrapped the metal case from his chest. Flat transmitter chips, the size of match heads, nestled inside in packing foam eggcups. While he peeled protective paper from a wood-patterned chip and fixed it to a pallet, he calculated the requirements to prep and pack this much junk. Water. Fuel. Lime. Ammonium chloride. Space. Multiplied by the number of containers Morgan had noted, the processors would need more square feet than a hilltop firebase like Rushmore offered. The lab had to be somewhere else.
At the other end, Deavers slit a tiny hole in the plastic and inserted his last tag between paper-wrapped blocks. In two minutes, they’d marked the whole load for satellite tracking, but the bigger problem sliced through Wulf’s gut like a seax.
How were drugs getting inside containers at different firebases?
Not via American soldiers, please. Let it be someone else. The kids out there couldn’t be responsible for loading this shit. The army and marines had enough to do being policemen and border patrol for places the Afghan government didn’t reach. If soldiers tried to tackle poppy production, they’d also end up being the chamber of commerce, the farm bureau and social workers, so they usually stuck their heads in the sand and left drug policy to the State Department and politicians.
Now that would change. Because someone had killed Chief, someone inside the wire who was neck-deep in the opium trade, that fucking ostrich was about to raise its head and come up locked and loaded. His team would find the truth.
He hoped the truth didn’t suck as badly as he suspected it might.
Chapter Seven
“Will you stop that already?” Jennifer’s annoyance caught Theresa off guard.
She jerked her eyes away from the dining hall door to her roommate’s frown. “What?”
“Stop jiggling. You’re moving the table. You haven’t sat still since Friday.” Jennifer’s eyebrows merged over her nose. “I can guess, but what the heck’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Theresa stared at her barely touched Greek omelet. When had she eaten the hash browns?
Her friend muttered a profanity at the same time that part of Wulf’s team entered the mess. Theresa’s lips and cheeks automatically stretched into a wide smile as she fixed her gaze on Jennifer. “So, what are you doing today?”
“Working. Like you. You know, at the hospital?” She leaned across the table. “Relax, my partner in crime. He’s not with them.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” So she and Wulf were playing that never-crossing-paths game again. Her spine drooped into a curve.
“You’re full of shit, Ms. Captain Promotable, but I’m the only person who knows.”
“There’s nothing to know.” She picked olives and feta out of her eggs. The situation had escalated too far during the movie. Damn if she’d think about touching that overconfident piece of man again, not after he’d left her sitting on the floor like a sack of trash. If her near-mistake with a sergeant had demonstrated anything, it was that her next job had to be a place where the vast majority of eligible men weren’t off-limits, somewhere like a big university hospital. “Last night I read about another position in New York.”