He'd given up on miracles in kindergarten after a playground drive-by shooting.
Certainly the satellite images of a woman in a drug lord's compound could be her. But then the grainy images scrolling across the screen could be any woman.
A woman who could be Sara's twin.
Lucas downed the rest of his tepid coffee. He had a job to do regardless of the mystery woman's identity. They would either save a captive—or capture a willing participant in Ramon Chavez's suspected dealings with terrorists trafficking opium to fund their operations. The attack on the embassy had failed years ago, but rebel factions like the ones responsible for shooting Sara were still jockeying for control of the country.
No way in hell could Lucas walk away from the chance to participate in this smash and grab—smash in and grab the target. The target. Not Sara. No miracles. No hope.
His fist closed around the empty mug until the handle snapped off, pricking his hand. Crap. He needed to take things down a notch, stick with the facts.
He'd been shown her bullet-riddled dead body in the recovery area at the embassy just before he paid the priest to give her a Catholic burial. Nothing could have forced him to leave the country before seeing for himself that she hadn't survived the surgery. Only his promise to protect her brother could have made him leave her body behind at all.
At least he hadn't failed her when it came to Tomas, or Tom as the boy preferred to be called these days. Tom had survived, thrived even, in spite of Lucas's no doubt inept parenting of a grieving teenager. With Lucas's insane military deployment schedule, he'd been left with no choice but boarding school until Tom entered college. He felt guilty about that sometimes. Most of the time. But overall they rocked along fine, two brooding loners who shared holiday dinners and worked like hell not to think too hard about the woman they'd lost in Cartina.
Or had they?
He stared again at the fuzzy image of an adult female and six children in the courtyard compound owned by the bastard rebel leader known to be Sara's dead father's best friend. Reason reminded him that seventy percent of the world's kidnappings took place in neighboring Colombia. Militants to this region thought nothing of snatching an innocent.
If somehow Sara lived, then either she'd been through five years of hell. Or she'd used and betrayed him. Not an unlikely scenario given his history with women.
"Colonel?" his copilot called from behind him, dropping the lieutenant part of his rank as protocol demanded in conversation, another inexplicable quirk of military lingo.
Pitching the broken handle into his coffee cup with a clink, Quade tore his eyes from the computer screen, resisting the impulse to shut down the whole system and erase the image. Or worse yet—stare at the mystery woman for hours on end as he'd often stared at Sara's picture the first year after she'd died.
Over his shoulder he found Major Carson "Scorch" Hunt jogging down the stairwell from the cockpit. Hunt had flown as his copilot bringing in the C-17 mobile command post that currently housed command and control equipment for the joint CIA and military operation with Cartinian officials.
"Yes, Major?"
Hunt strode past the five CIA operatives to stop at the empty station behind him, hands braced on the back of the seat bolted to the pallet. "Everything okay with you here, sir?"
He must look like hell for anyone in his command to dare ask a personal question, even somebody in the number-three position in the Charleston, South Carolina, based squadron.
Quade thought about loosening the scowl locked on his face, then reconsidered. He knew the squadron called him Darth, as in Darth Vader, behind his back.
Fine by him. He'd never been a warm-fuzzies sort of commander, and if he kept them on their toes with a growl or two, then good on'em. He stood less chance of losing anyone on his watch ever again.
"Sir?"
"I'm all right. Why wouldn't I be?" He leveled his best don't-mess-with-me scowl at the Major.
Which rolled right off Hunt as the man dropped into one of the red webbed seats lining the cargo plane walls, "This situation is extreme. I suspect you would be within your rights to chew my ass later if I didn't watch your back."
The guy was right, although most wouldn't have dared that comeback after an infamous Quade scowl. A big part of why he'd chosen the guy in the first place.
Still, if the glare didn't work, he needed to scrounge up something else to keep Hunt from getting too comfortable, maybe a call sign change. Instead of Scorch—which he'd earned by setting his blond mustache on fire with a flaming Dr Pepper drink—perhaps something like Ivy League and shortening it to Ivy.
He could almost hear Sara's laugh as she would swat his arm and declare he did have a sense of humor after all. Buried deep, of course.
Yeah, being saddled with a name like Ivy might put Scorch in his place, a man with an inbred confidence from inherited privilege.
They'd both gone to Ivy League schools, except golden boy Carson Hunt hadn't needed scholarships like Quade. But thank God for those scholarships. If not for a kick-butt ACT score, he would have died in the same hellhole where he'd spent his first eighteen years.
He didn't resent Hunt's silver spoon beginnings. In fact, he was doing everything he could to give Tomas an easier start in life. But he needed to be damn sure those advantages didn't make Hunt or Tomas soft. Survival went to the fittest.
What kind of hell had that woman—he wasn't ready to believe it could be Sara—in the compound survived?Sara had been a dynamo personality, but pampered by her father. The whimsical woman he'd known sang in the embassy halls and blew bubbles in the courtyard on her lunch break, for crying out loud. How could someone that soft have persevered through five years as a hostage?
Mentally, he'd prepared himself for the possibility of capture. He'd completed POW training, served in war zones, flying both the older C-141 and newer C-17. His assistant attache job had thrown him into hairy scenarios. But Sara would have been totally unprepared.
He forced his breathing to stay even. It wasn't her, so he could just focus on his damn job.
"Well, Hunt, have you checked the maintenance status of the airplanes? Make sure they're ready to get us out of here at a moment's notice. Don't wait for maintenance to come seek you out."
"Yes, sir. Both aircraft are in the green, only minor write-ups, a seat cushion doesn't meet minimum comfort levels, a scratch to repaint, nothing that can't wait—"
"Have you checked the weather?"
"Pretty much like you see it now. Chance for thunderstorms—we're near a rain forest after all—but nothing below minimum standards for flight—"
"Are our crewdogs all billeted up for the night? No breaking crew rest before we fly out tomorrow."
"Got it covered."
"We need weather for here, there and in-between, too."
"Right. That's why I was coming to check in with you in the first place." He tugged papers from under a chart by the computer. "I've got printouts right here."
Quade thumbed through the pages, found the data sufficiently detailed, but then he wouldn't expect less from a flyer as seasoned as Hunt.
He was beating the guy up for nothing. If anything, Hunt went above and beyond after being shot down in the Middle East, then held for a week by warlords.
"Sir? Anything else?"
Hunt was too damned perceptive and the cavernous cargo hold was shrinking fast. Six more hours of gut-burning waiting with suddenly sensitive Hunt? Screw that.
Lucas shoved to his feet, restless and in need of the solitude he was only likely to find in the jungle outside. He secured his weapon strapped to his waist and shrugged into his survival vest. "Looks like you've got it covered. I'm going for a walk."
"Are you ready for our walk, chica?" Sarafina Tesoro Quade asked as she fished out the survival backpack from deep in her closet.
She tried to keep her tones lighthearted in spite of the ticking clock easing away precious seconds to make her escape, louder in her head than the ornate grandfather clock in the corner of her bedroom. Lighthearted? Whimsy came slower to her these days, a good thing since the frivolous fool she'd once been wouldn't have stood a chance of surviving what lay ahead.
"I like walks in the woods." Lucia jumped higher on the queen-size bed, dark curls bouncing, Sara's bilingual daughter babbling in a mix of Spanish and English. "And bugs. Will we see bugs? Please? I won't eat'em this time. Promise."
"I'll hold you to that promise." Sara tugged her daughter's ponytail and prayed her shaking hands wouldn't betray her. The last thing she needed was a frantic four-year-old on her hands while trying to slip out of Ramon's compound, her lavish prison-home for the past five years.
When she'd woken from her surgery after the embassy attack, groggy and in fiery pain, she'd found her father's old friend at her bedside, ready to console her over Lucas's and Tomas's death. Through her hoarse screams of denial, he'd explained that his contacts documented they'd died in a helicopter explosion on their way out of the country.
She'd feared Tomas landing in Ramon's care, but anything was better than death. Yet she'd wanted to die, as well, had curled up inside and out, crying until she was dry and proving everything her father had ever said about her being a piece of fluff.
Then came a surprise reason to haul herself out of her depression and heal. The baby she carried had survived the shooting and surgery. For Lucas's child, she would fight, even if it meant depending on Ramon.
The following months had passed in a blur of bed rest, then caring for her fragile premature daughter, planning her life. Slowly, she'd emerged from her grief enough to realize she didn't have a life since she couldn't leave. Ramon still swore it was for her own good since she was ill—apparently she entertained unwise yearnings to betray their homeland by leaving. Her father may have been soft with his children, but Ramon wouldn't repeat the mistake.
Ramon cut off all her contact with the outside world, keeping her as a pampered captive, handpicked for her family connection to be a nanny to his five grandchildren. He controlled this little corner of Cartina, after all, and carried an obsessive adherence to familial and friend connections with a mafia like lethal intensity.
She'd found no alternative but to bide her time as she nursed her premature child through one medical crisis after another. Although these days little Lucia certainly appeared healthy enough, working off her endless supply of energy by jumping on the bed. She hoped she was making the right decision in leaving now, but she feared staying any longer after what she'd overheard while standing outside Ramon's study this morning.
"Will we see frogs, too, Mama? Oooh, and a lizard. I want a lizard. It can live in my pocket and be my friend."
Thank goodness her tomboy child preferred jeans and T-shirts instead of dresses so she wouldn't arouse suspicion by suddenly appearing in more practical clothes. She allowed herself a reassuring second to study her precious baby, her mirror image. She liked to imagine Lucia had inherited her black hair and leanness from her papa, even though she certainly hadn't received his genes for height.
Lucas. Even thinking his name and envisioning him made her long to sink into memories the way she'd often replayed their dates and lovemaking in her mind five years ago, anticipating the next time her lean, stark lover would...
But she wasn't a daydreamer any longer.
"I am certain we will see plenty of frogs, butterflies and lizards today, maybe even a snake." Sara shuddered at thoughts of the human snakes slithering in the compound and the jungle beyond her barred window.
She inventoried her bag—bottled water, not much, though, because of the weight and most likely there would be plenty of rain. Two ponchos. Bug repellent. Mosquito netting. Flashlight and a purloined stash of PowerBar packets for energy in case they did not reach their destination by sundown.