Of Unknown Origins:
Wolf
By
Madelaine Montague
(c) Copyright by Madelaine Montague, Aug 2009
Cover art by Alex DeShanks, Aug 2009
Published by New Concepts Publishing
Smashwords Edition
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Cole surveyed the jungle below them through his night-vision glasses, searching the terrain for any sign that they might have company. He wasn’t completely satisfied when he saw nothing. His gut was telling him that it had been way too easy and that was always a bad sign.
Particularly when he knew from their first fly over that there was an encampment of guerrillas less than ten clicks from the site where the spy sat had gone down. It had to have sounded like a 747 coming down considering the amount of jungle the damned thing had cleared. It bothered the shit out of him that they hadn’t seen any sign that the racket had stirred up the guerrillas.
Shaking his uneasiness, he patted the pilot on the back and signaled for him to drop the stealth chopper lower. They had a hell of a job ahead of them. The quicker they could clean up and hump it to the coast with the debris, the better.
Signaling his best men—Maurice ‘Beau’ Beauregard, Remy Cavanaugh, and Gabriel ‘Hawk’ Hawkins to take point—he killed the light and checked his harness one last time as they bailed from the chopper and repelled to the ground. The minute they passed the halfway mark, the next wave bailed from the chopper.
Sergeant Cole MacIntyre, Mac to his men, surveyed the perimeter one last time before he hooked up and leapt from the chopper, noting that the other chopper had already dropped its load on the other side of the clearing and begun to peel away.
“See ya when ya get back to base,” the co-pilot said.
Nodding, Mac gave him a thumbs-up and leapt out.
As many times as he’d repelled from a chopper, it still gave him a rush. He welcomed it, scanning the jungle with his heightened senses as he dropped. The men had already begun laying out a grid when he hit the ground. Issuing a low, warbling whistle, he signaled to the men designated to keep watch to take their positions and then moved to the other men, urging them to form small groups and begin scouring the broken brush for pieces.
It wasn’t his job to question his orders, but he sure as shit couldn’t figure out why the hell it made any difference if they left a little debris as long as they made sure they got everything important. That was the order, though, and he had the men search each grid in pairs for the tiniest scraps of what was left of the spy satellite that had mysteriously dropped from orbit and crashed in the jungle. They started at all four sides of the grid, worked their way to the center and then crossed, working outward again.
Mac checked his watch when they reached the halfway point, cursed under his breath, and surveyed the jungle around them, listening intently.
He doubted there was a fucking piece of the son-of-a-bitch more than an inch square. It had still been smoldering when it hit the ground and churned up the jungle floor.
Catching a glint in the forest out of the corner of his eye, Mac whipped his head in that direction. Through his night-vision goggles, he spotted a pack of wolves just in the edge of the jungle, watching them intently. Uneasiness slithered through him, but it was a small pack. Despite their intense focus on the men in the clearing, he doubted they would attempt an attack. It almost made him more uneasy, though, when he glanced around the second time and discovered the wolves had vanished as silently as they had approached.
Twenty minutes passed. The men finally reached the outer edge across from where they’d begun. He strode to check their discoveries. Garbage! Shit! He couldn’t tell from looking at it whether it looked like it might’ve once been an entire satellite or not. Just to be on the safe side, he had men fan out and walk a line on either side of the grid that had been laid out.
A half dozen of the men returned carrying bits of the satellite that had been thrown from the main impact site into the jungle. It didn’t make him feel any better, but they’d already spent nearly an hour searching. If the guerrillas weren’t dead, or stone deaf and blind besides, they could be breathing down their necks any minute.
He uttered another warble, the signal to recall the men, and checked his map and compass heading as they formed up. Disgust settled in his gut when he saw the awkward bundles that had been gathered up.
Trust command to overlook the fact that they were going to be slogging through heavy jungle! He hesitated, but they were going to have problems lugging such awkward bundles at best. At worst, they were going to be sitting ducks if they got into a firefight.
Striding to the two squads that had formed up, he told the men to remove anything non-essential from their packs and divide the debris between them. The men gaped at him, no surprise since they hadn’t actually brought anything non-essential with them, but they fell to emptying their packs when he set his own down, tossed out his emergency supplies—everything but his weapons and ammunition—and began stuffing as much of the debris as he could into his pack.
His pack was heavy as a son-of-a-bitch when he slung it on his back again, but he still felt better for having divided the load. He signaled for the men to move out, designating Rider, Mullins, and Mercer to take point and ordering Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh to guard their rear.
They hadn’t been humping it to the coast more than ten or fifteen minutes where their pickup awaited them, he hoped, when the men guarding the rear passed the word up that they had company moving in from the east. He didn’t have to encourage the men to move faster. Nobody wanted to tangle with guerrillas in such an indefensible position.
Waiting until most of the two squads had passed, he tapped the last three on the shoulder. They dropped back, joining him, Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh.
“Want me to get around them and get a head count, Sarg?” Hawk volunteered.
Mac considered it and dismissed it. “The orders are to get this shit out of here—no matter what—and that means every scrap of it. We stick together. No shooting unless they get too close. We’re still a good ten clicks from the pickup.”
Nodding, the men paced themselves, trailing the rest of the two squads.
Sweat, from the humidity, the rough terrain, and nerves began to trickle between Mac’s shoulder blades, from his brow and into his eyes, and down his belly and into his crotch, adding to the misery of biting insects. The itch and sting was maddening. He felt as if fire ants were crawling over him, but he was so tense with expectation of a barrage of bullets that it wasn’t nearly as hard keeping his focus, despite the irritants, as it would have been otherwise. By his reckoning, they were still five clicks from the pickup when a shot cracked through the jungle like thunder.
He hit the dirt and scrambled on his belly across the ground and over a fallen tree.
The other men with him rolled over it in a tide, searching the jungle around them.
“Anybody catch the direction that came from?”
Beau pointed. “I caught a flash just to the left of that palm.”
There was another flash and bark splintered from the tree beside the group. They raised their rifles, peppering the site and directly to either side of it. A cry pinpointed at least one hit even as a barrage of bullets zinged back in their direction. It was no part of Mac’s plan to get surrounded or pinned down and left.
They traded gunfire with the guerrillas for a few more minutes and then he signaled half the men to fall back and take a new position. They rotated. When the first group found positions and began returning fire, he and the remaining men fell back, passing the first group and finding positions to their rear.
Mac lost track of the time and that worried him. Their pickup could wait just so long without endangering the entire mission. As valuable as what they were carrying was, they were still liable to arrive at the beach and discover their ride was gone and they were trapped.
They began moving a little faster, picking off as many of the enemy as they could before dropping back each time but, with the best will in the world, Mac couldn’t convince himself that the numbers were dwindling as fast as reinforcements were coming from the rear.
He finally ordered a full retreat when he thought they must be within a click of their pickup point. He could hear the crash of the surf on the shoreline. Reloading, they switched from sporadic fire to fully automatic, cutting a swath through the jungle growth and then ducking and running at a half crouch before the guerrillas had a chance to return fire.
They burst from the jungle and onto the beach, whipped a quick look around for the boat and charged toward it. Bullets kicked up sand all over them before they’d covered half the distance and he, Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh hit the beach while the others made a run for it, laying down a heavy fire to hold the guerrillas back.
Mac felt as if he’d taken cover in an ant bed. Something was sure as fuck crawling all over him and stinging the shit out of him! The moment he heard friendly fire behind him, he rolled and began crawling frantically for the boat, which had already been shoved from the beach.
The gunfire from both directions was nearly deafening when he and the other men scrambled into the water to swim for it and the night air was filled with unholy screams of pain and fear—and roars of fury that had lost any semblance of humanity. Rage surged through him. The weariness that had been dragging at him vanished. He had to fight the urge to turn and attack.
Struggling against it, he plowed through the water toward the boat, almost surprised when he actually managed to catch up with it and grab a handhold on the side. Instead of the helping hand he’d expected, a hand clamped onto his arm, nearly wrenching it out of the socket as he was jerked from the water like a ragdoll. The breath was punched from him as he hit the deck. Before he could recover, something slammed into him bodily.
The rage that had gripped him before exploded. He heaved the man off of him, tearing at him with teeth and nails. In some distant corner of his mind, he was aware of horror at his own actions, but he had no control. It was as if someone else, or something, had invaded his body and taken control.
The pickup craft had become a seething mass of heaving, struggling bodies. Animalistic growls, grunts, and roars filled the air in a cacophony of deafening sound that made his blood surge in his veins.
“Mayday! Mayday! We’re under attack! The men! Oh my god! Things! Things! Mayday!”
The voice of the man screaming for help over the radio cut off abruptly. Mac flared his nostrils as the smell of fresh blood filled his lungs. Sucking in a deep breath, he launched a final blow at his opponent and looked around for another.
His ears pricked at the sound of a chopper overhead, swooping low, and he tipped his head back, uttering a bellowed challenge at the men he could smell on it, the fear he could smell.
Crouching low, maddened by the smells, he sprang upward, launching himself into the air. He managed to catch a hold on a runner and lifted his head to glare at the white-faced man staring down at him. Even as he heaved his body up to launch himself inside, however, the man shook his paralysis and fired. He grunted as the slugs slammed into his chest and shoulder, trying to ignore the fire running through him and grasp the runner with his other hand.
The man fired again. The bullet slamming into him broke Mac’s hold and he felt himself falling. He blacked out when he hit the water below him.
* * * *
Sylvie’s stomach was cramping with nerves and she had to focus to keep from hyperventilating. She’d told herself that she could play it cool. She thought she’d done well considering she’d never done anything illegal in her life and certainly nothing of this magnitude—which might be construed as treason. Although why the government might view it that way was beyond her! So they had a longstanding grudge against Cuba! She didn’t see why that had to apply to everybody, especially when the Cuban government had offered medical treatment to the people her friends had brought down.
She completely agreed with the views of the group she’d joined. It had actually sounded like a very noble cause, potentially exciting and daring, especially to someone like her who’d never taken any kind of risks before in her life. Talk was cheap. It was the people who took a stand and took action that made a difference and she’d wanted to be one of those people.
She’d been flattered when they’d approached her about borrowing her stepfather’s boat and making the pickup—gung ho to do her part. It wasn’t as if she had to take any real risks like the others were doing. All she had to do was anchor the boat outside Cuban waters and wait.
She’d waited all day. She’d slathered enough suntan lotion on her skin to float the boat to keep from turning into crispy critters Sylvie while she pretended to sunbathe … and waited, and waited some more until the sun had dipped toward the horizon and she’d realized she was going to be moon bathing before much longer.
She could still play it cool. She was just going to have to think of another reason for her prolonged stay at anchor so close to Cuba. She’d almost convinced herself she was going to carry this off …until she heard the blare of the klaxons.
Cold terror swept over her like a rogue wave the moment the damned thing cut loose and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
She settled back on the towel she’d spread on the forward deck of her stepfather’s tiny yacht, squeezing her eyes closed and willing herself to relax. “Keep your head, Sylvie! And keep your cool! You aren’t doing anything wrong. You’re just down in the Caribbean with some friends who are down below scuba diving!
“And why the fuck they aren’t back yet when the damned sun is already setting is a mystery to me!”
The music she’d been playing, partly as a ‘prop’ and partly in the hope that it would help her focus on anything except what she was actually doing anchored less than a mile beyond Cuban waters wasn’t loud enough to completely drown out the sounds of mad activity that accompanied the alarm, unfortunately. After lying for several moments with her ears pricked to pick up the escalating sounds around her, she finally decided to try for a casual roll onto her belly.
She nearly swallowed her tongue when she saw what was coming toward her.
Military boats, bristling with guns and soldiers from Guantanamo!
“Oh shit! Oh fuck! Ohmigod! Breathe, Sylvie! Deep breath in, slowly release.”
She was so paralyzed with sheer terror that her brain was sluggish but eventually it occurred to her that there was nothing ‘natural’ about continuing to sunbathe when it looked like half the base was coming straight toward her. She sat up then and glanced around her at the sea, hoping against hope that she’d see another ship or ships that was the focus of the military vessels steaming toward her.
She didn’t see a ship but as she completed the circuit of her search, she saw what looked like dozens of men plowing through the water—swimming and trying to outrun the boats!
She leapt to her feet in a blind panic when her shocked brain finally connected three little words—Klaxons —Escapees—Military. She forgot all about trying to play the cool, unconcerned vacationer minding her own business. Leaping from the deck, she charged toward the pilot deck, slammed her hand down on the anchor retractor button, and started the engine.
The wet smack of bodies tumbling onto the deck made her hair stand on end. She threw a panicked glance behind her and saw that she hadn’t imagined it. Men, mostly naked and with the setting sun gleaming on their water slickened skin, were pouring over her bows. She slapped a hand over her mouth to muffle the scream that rose in her throat. Despite her efforts, though, the men who’d bounded onto her deck swiveled their heads in her direction instantly like pointers.
Throwing her hands out, she screamed in earnest, looking wildly around for a weapon or someplace to run. There was no place and the urge to hide, she realized dimly, was probably useless. Just as it finally dawned on her that her only option was to bail out of the boat and let them have it, the men, who’d seemed almost as frozen with indecision as she was, charged toward her.
There was only one way on or off the pilot deck. She had to charge straight toward the men coming at her. The hope that she could outrun them, reach the side of the boat, and leap off was dashed when the man in the lead, a wild-eyed black haired devil built like a tank, slammed into her, manacling his hands around her arms like titanium cuffs. Gunfire exploded around them in almost the same instant. Splinters of wood flew from the deck in every direction. The man who’d grabbed her hit the deck in response, on top of her.
Shock prevented her from feeling any pain at all for several seconds but nothing shielded her from the collapse of her lungs beneath his weight. A grunt was forced from her.
“Get us the fuck out of here, Hawk!” the man on top of her bellowed, deafening her.
They rolled over as the boat shot forward in a wide arc. The man who’d tackled her leapt to his feet anyway, scanned the deck in an all encompassing glance, and scooped her up, running at a half crouch across the deck and leaping through the open hatch.
Dangling from one of his arms like a ragdoll, Sylvie grunted again when they landed, still too stunned to focus on anything but trying to catch her breath. After quickly scanning the tiny main cabin, he released her. She promptly landed with a thump on the floor. “You hurt?”
Sylvie looked up at his face owl-eyed.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded impatiently.
She was beginning to feel like every bone in her body had been crushed or mangled. Before she could summon speech, though, he ran his hands over her. Apparently satisfied when he didn’t see any blood or find any holes, he surged upright. “Stay put if you don’t want your head blown off.”
Sylvie managed a shaky nod, but he didn’t even wait to see it. He threw the warning at her as he turned away and bounded up the ladder to the deck. Sylvie managed a squeak of terror as another barrage of bullets cut through the side of the boat. A shiver skated through her. Within a few moments, she was shaking so badly her teeth were chattering. She drew up into a tight ball, trying to conserve what little warmth she had, but it wasn’t nearly enough when she wasn’t wearing anything but a bikini that wasn’t much more than a couple of postage stamps joined together with strings.
She’d figured it might be a good distraction if anyone happened to get nosey enough to investigate what she was doing.
There were at least two dozen hard-faced, mostly naked men on the boat with her at the moment, though, and drawing their attention was the last thing she wanted. Easing up cautiously, she glanced around to get her bearings in the darkening cabin. The bedding was stored beneath the benches that formed a dining booth during the day and made up into a queen-sized bed at night. She slithered across the floor on her belly, her ears pricked for any sound that might indicate they could hear her. When she reached the bench, she eased the seat up and levered herself up high enough to peer inside. It was too dark by now to really see anything, but she remembered that the bedding only took up a little over half the space.
After darting a quick glance toward the stairs, she climbed in, burrowed as deeply under the folded covers and linens as she could and slowly lowered the seat again. It was a snug fit with her body mass added to the contents, but it wouldn’t make much of a hiding place if she dumped the covers on the floor. In any case, she was freezing.
Thankfully, she began to warm up by degrees until the shivering finally stopped. Her mind seemed completely detached from everything, however. Disconnected thoughts drifted through her mind between mental inventories that catalogued everything on her that hurt. All things considered, the pain was minimal. She felt bruised all over, ached from being body slammed on the deck, but nothing hurt enough to suggest she was actually injured.
The gunfire continued sporadically for a while and finally died altogether. Since the boat was still moving through the water at its top speed, bucking like a wild bronco, she decided that didn’t mean everybody up top was dead. In any case, she could hear them moving around, could hear snatches of conversation.
They were speaking English—with American accents.
That didn’t make any sense to her at all, but she couldn’t decide whether it really didn’t or if the terror she’d experienced had totally screwed her mind up. It didn’t seem to matter much. As frightened as she still was, as unreliable as her thought processes were, there were facts about her situation that were unavoidable and indisputable.
The men had to be escaped prisoners from Guantanamo.
The alarm had sounded and not only had boats been dispatched to recapture them, but they’d wanted the men back dead or alive and hadn’t cared which.
* * * *
Hawk settled heavily on the deck beside Mac, trying to ignore the burn of the wound in his left arm. “We’ve managed to put some distance between us and them, Sarg, but we’re pretty much out of ammo. What’s the plan?”
Mac snorted with disgust. “Aside from trying to stay alive? No clue.”
Hawk nodded. He hadn’t really expected Mac to have a plan, but he’d hoped he did.
“Guess it’ll be a short ride.”
“How’s the fuel holding up?”
Hawk shrugged. “This thing’s built for speed. The good news is that it was fast enough to outrun ‘em—what they had to throw at us so far, anyway. The bad news is, fast equals fuel guzzler at this speed. It’s anybody’s guess how far we can get in it.”
Mac frowned. Coming to a decision, he got to his feet wearily. “I think I’ll go have a chat with our ‘guest’ and see what she knows.”
Hawk looked at him with surprise. “You think she’d know anything about the fuel consumption?”
“She’ll know where she came from. I’m guessing whoever the boat belongs to, they were expecting to get it back.”
“Duh,” Hawk muttered, irritated with himself. “You think, whatever this thing is we’ve got, it’s gonna turn us into mindless beasts permanently?”
Mac flicked a sharp look at him. He swallowed a little sickly. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Hawk. You lost a lot of blood.”
A flicker of relief went through Hawk. “Hadn’t thought about that.”
Mac glanced around at the men on the deck. “Get some rest while you can. Everybody needs to be sharp. No telling what we’ve got ahead of us.”
“It’s a fuckin’ shame it didn’t occur to those bastards that we might need to be fresh when we escaped their fuckin’ torture chambers,” Hawk said dryly. “I ain’t slept in … shit! I can’t remember. Not since ‘it’ happened, I don’t think.”
Mac sent him an irritated look when he followed him down into the main cabin. He didn’t say anything, though, and Hawk decided it was a warning to cut the chitchat rather than irritation that he’d followed him.
It was dark as shit down in the main cabin, but that was one of the few benefits they’d discovered about the parasites they’d picked up in the jungle. Their vision was a hell of a lot better than it had been before, better than the ‘perfect’ required just to get into Special Forces—because it was better than human—which they weren’t anymore.
Not that any of them wanted to admit it, but they all knew it.
Mac glanced around and finally moved to a light switch. It controlled a wall sconce by the couch. After studying it a moment, he decided not to worry about it. No doubt they were still on radar anyway and the bastards from Guantanamo knew exactly where they were.
It was no surprise to see that their guest wasn’t where he’d left her. He scanned the room, sniffing the air. Whatever it was she had all over her—suntan lotion if he didn’t miss his guess—was strong enough to seem omnipresent, though, making it pretty well impossible to pinpoint her exact location.
It was too small a craft to have many places to hide, though.
Shrugging, he took a few moments to check out what they had and discovered the craft boasted a fairly luxurious captain’s cabin at the bow, two smaller guest cabins barely big enough for the beds in them, and two ‘heads’. The head, or bathroom, for the guests was barely big enough to turn around in and the one for the main cabin not much bigger. He had the impression, though, that the boat had never been intended for any sort of prolonged voyage and had probably never been used for one.
It hadn’t completely lost the ‘new’ smell.
The question was what was the woman doing on the boat alone?
He found a couple of canvas bags when he did a more thorough search of the cabins, but those only seemed to present him with more questions. There was clothing for two or three different people in each bag—a curious packing arrangement.
Shrugging, he emptied the bags and tossed them to Hawk. “These will work for supplies. Check out the mess and see what kind of stores they brought with them.”
“Any sign of the woman?”
“Not yet, but she didn’t go far,” Mac said dryly.
Chapter Two
Mac was disconcerted when he found the woman. For a handful of seconds, it hit him that she was dead and he felt his heart contract painfully in his chest. Then he realized she was asleep and amusement and irritation vied for dominance.
Poor kid, he thought! They’d scared the ever-loving shit out of her, he didn’t doubt.
Which might’ve made him wonder how she could be sleeping so peacefully now except that he was familiar enough with nervous exhaustion to know it when he saw it. There were dried tears on her cheeks. She wasn’t sleeping like a baby because she was too stupid to live, to know what danger she was in. She’d just reached the point of shut down from overload.
He hated like hell to wake her, not the least because he knew she was liable to go berserk on them since they had her cornered. Not that he was particularly worried about his own skin, but she was liable to hurt herself.
His hesitation redirected his mind down a road it shouldn’t have gone, allowed memories to surface of things his mind had recorded that he hadn’t even realized he’d noticed—the way she’d felt beneath him, the way she’d looked in her bikini.
The terrified doe eyes she’d trained on him when he’d cornered her.
Shrugging inwardly, he carefully lifted the blanket she was huddled under to see if his imagination had gone wild or if she really was as fine a specimen of female anatomy as he’d ever laid eyes on. He excused his curiosity on the grounds that it had been a hell of a while since he’d gotten the chance even to look at a woman and it was bound to be a while more before he got another chance—if ever.
He swallowed a little thickly when he’d looked, struggling to keep his cock from bursting through his fatigues. If anything, he decided his imagination hadn’t done her justice. She was soft and round in all the right places, alright, her muscles toned enough to show she regularly worked out—maybe jogged to stay in shape? Or maybe she was a dancer? She had the body to rake in some kind of dough if she was a stripper.
Maybe that was how she’d acquired the boat? Some rich old bastard that was drooling after her bought it for her?
Reluctantly, he dragged his gaze from her body to examine her face again and decided she didn’t look young enough to be a dancer—unless she was retired? Not that she was old, but it was usually the barely legal girls that danced and there was a mature look about her face that made him think she was probably closer to thirty than twenty.
Not that that mattered one way or another, he thought, feeling anger begin to build in him. He couldn’t touch her—didn’t dare.
Jesus he would like to, though! All over, several times.
He was struggling to banish the image of burying himself hilt deep in her, watching her face go slack in the throes of ecstasy, when Hawk, who’d been standing over him, released a ragged breath that made her stir.
Her eyes opened slowly. For several moments, she stared up at the two of them without comprehension and then her eyes grew so wide he could see the whites all the way around the irises—hazel, he mentally noted, not brown as he’d first thought.
She sat up abruptly, but to his surprise and relief, she didn’t start screaming.
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you, baby,” Hawk murmured in a voice that might have been soothing if it wasn’t so rough with desire.
Mac flicked an annoyed look at him but finally decided she might not have noticed that the two of them were hanging over her with raging hard-ons, drooling.
“Who are you?” she asked shakily.
“I’m Staff Sergeant Cole MacIntyre, US Marines, Special Forces,” he replied, nudging his head at Hawk. “He’s Corporal Gabriel Hawkins.”
Sylvie studied both men, trying to assimilate what they’d told her and make sense of it. “I don’t understand,” she said finally. “Is this … some sort of military exercise?”
The two men exchanged a speaking glance.
“Yeah,” Hawk responded.
“No,” Mac said at almost the same instant and then glared at Hawk.
Hawk glared back at him. “You tryin’ the scare the shit out of her?”
Mac met Sylvie’s gaze. “That what you thought that was all about?”
Sylvie swallowed with an effort. “It seemed like it might be a possibility,” she hedged.
“But that isn’t what you thought.”
It wasn’t, but she didn’t think she wanted to bring up what she’d thought. Maybe if she pretended they weren’t convicts they wouldn’t feel any need to do anything to her?
“I won’t tell anybody anything—because I can’t, you know? I didn’t really see anything and I have a really bad memory for names and … uh … faces,” she said a little hopefully.
Mac studied her sardonically. “Where do you suggest we drop you? We’re miles from the coast … any coast.”
“Where are you taking me?” She held up her hand before either man could answer. “No! Don’t tell me. I don’t really want to know.”
Mac studied her thoughtfully. “You want to get out of there?”
Sylvie smiled at him a little weakly. “Not really,” she said, her chin wobbling noticeably.
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you,” Hawk said again.
She sent him a wide-eyed, disbelieving look.
“We just want the boat and whatever supplies you’ve got.”
She seemed to relax fractionally. “Take whatever you want. You can just drop me anywhere.”
Mac scanned her length, lingering a lot longer than he’d intended. She was pale when he met her gaze again. “Lady, I think that’s just about the worst idea I’ve ever heard. We drop you off anywhere dressed like that and you’ll be damned lucky to get two feet without ….”
She looked for several moments as if she was going to burst into tears. To Mac’s relief, she sucked it up. He felt like pure shit, though, seeing her eyes swimming with unshed tears—like he’d been pulling the wings off a butterfly.
The look Hawk bent on him pissed him off.
“You should get dressed,” he said gruffly. “I’m not trying to scare you, but we’ve got two squads on board and none of them have been within sniffing distance of a woman in six months—let alone one like you.”
Sylvie nodded jerkily, all too happy to oblige. Gripping the blanket she’d been covered with, she surged to her feet.
Unable to resist the opportunity to see if she felt anything like she looked, Hawk grasped her waist and lifted her from the box where she’d been hiding. It wasn’t one of his brightest ideas. He didn’t want to let go of her once he’d set her on her feet. His hands tightened reflexively on her tiny waist.
Mac punched him in his wounded arm. Rage surged through him at the sudden burning pain, but he managed to tamp the urge to punch his superior back.
It still took an effort to peel his fingers off of her when he had visions dancing in his head of throwing her down on the deck and fucking her until he was exhausted.
“Let go of her, Hawk!” Mac growled warningly.
Swallowing a little convulsively, he ordered his fingers to loosen their grip.
Flicking a frightened look at his face, the woman raced toward the cabins, struggling to cover herself with the blanket she was dragging.
“I didn’t catch your name, baby.”
Sending him a terrified look, she slammed the door. They heard the distinctive click of a lock.
Mac sent him a look of disgust. “Jesus, Hawk! Get a fucking grip!”
Hawk glared at him, but after a moment he managed to force himself to relax. He ran a shaking hand over his face. “Sorry, Mac. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I do,” Mac retorted grimly.
Hawk frowned, seemed to wrestle with himself. “It ain’t the parasites,” he growled. “Man, that is one beautiful woman. Don’t tell me you don’t want her so bad yourself you can taste it.”
“Like hell! I’ve known you a lot of years, Hawk. Don’t tell me you don’t know you aren’t the same man you were six months ago.”
Hawk swallowed a little sickly. “You think it’s starting to affect us all the time? Even when we aren’t … you know?”
“I think it has been from the beginning.”
Hawk glanced around and finally flung himself down on the couch. “Maybe it would’ve been better if they’d just killed us,” he muttered. “I’m not sure I want to live like this.”
“Suck it up, soldier!” Mac growled. “We can deal with it.”
Hawk shook his head, but he didn’t argue. He grimaced after a moment. “It ain’t safe to touch her, is it?”
Mac frowned. Instead of answering immediately, he began to pace restlessly. “I don’t know. Nobody at the fucking ‘medical center’ got infected that I know anything about.”
Hawk snorted. “Now who’s living in a fantasy land? We infected our pick-up, remember? Everybody in the lab was wearing hazmat suits.”
Mac frowned and finally shrugged. “We didn’t infect the team they sent in to pick us up,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but we were dead—or close to it after they strafed the pickup boat. Maybe the parasites were too busy fixin’ us up to change hosts?”
“Maybe. Maybe they just had better timing? Maybe the parasites were satisfied with the hosts they already had? Maybe, maybe … that’s all we’ve fucking got, a whole hell of a lot of maybes. Maybe she won’t catch whatever the fuck we have as long as we keep our hands off of her? I don’t know, but as much as I’d like to fuck her until I’m too exhausted to think anymore, we don’t have time for it. We need to keep our minds on escape if we want to stay alive—and I do.”
A sudden thought occurred to Hawk that made him feel distinctly ill. “Shit! What if we’ve already … contaminated her? What if she passed it to everybody she meets up with?”
Mac chewed his lip thoughtfully and finally shook his head. “They said it was parasites—they seemed pretty sure of it, anyway. If it was that easy to ‘catch’ it, somebody else sure as hell would’ve when they were stacking us in the morgue.”
Hawk considered it and relaxed fractionally. “Well, that’s a relief, anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I hate those fuckin’ bastards, but I wouldn’t like to think we were a threat to everybody we run across.”
“That might not come up. We aren’t out of the woods, yet,” Mac said dryly. He glanced toward the door of the cabin then, trying to decide whether the woman had had time to dress yet and finally decided she had. Striding to the door, he tapped on it. “You dressed?”
He heard a grunt of exertion from inside the room. “Not yet! Just a minute!”
Shaking his head, he stepped back and kicked the door in. As he’d suspected, her ass was framed in the porthole in the bow of the boat above the bed. Crossing the cabin in two strides, he caught her by the waistband of the shorts she was wearing and dragged her back in. She surprised him by putting up a fight. The moment he’d dragged her upper body back inside, she whirled on him. He caught both wrists as she swung at him and pitched both of them back onto the bed, pinning her beneath him and manacling her wrists on either side of her head.
“Don’t piss me off, woman!” he growled. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m mad.”
Sylvie stopped struggling to buck him off of her abruptly—not because of the warning in his voice or even because she’d run out of steam. She was frightened enough adrenaline was pumping through her at about ninety miles an hour.
It was the change in his expression and the hard ridge rising against her mound that finally filtered into her frantic mind and set off warning bells. Gasping for breath, she went perfectly still. He studied her face for a long, long moment, breathing raggedly, but she didn’t think for a moment that it was from overexerting himself in trying to subdue her. His weight alone was enough to do that when he seemed to be solid muscle from the neck down.
Almost as if he couldn’t control it, he curled his hips into hers. A faint tremor went through him.
“You’re gonna hurt her,” Hawk growled from the door.
Mac tensed but he didn’t glance at Hawk. “Don’t do that again. Understand? I wouldn’t mind, at all, tying you to this bunk and giving you something else to think about.”
Sylvie swallowed with an effort, nodding jerkily.
To her relief, he eased off of her. Instead of getting off the bed, though, he sat up, propped his back against the wall and causally adjusted the raging erection tenting his military fatigues.
Drawn by the motion of his hand, Sylvie watched him, staring at the bulge until it suddenly dawned on her what she was doing. She flicked a quick glance at his face then, feeling her face heat. To her surprise, he was staring stonily at the other man standing in the doorway.
Relieved that he didn’t seem to have noticed her fascination with his ‘problem’, Sylvie sat up and put a little distance between them. “What were you doing out here?”
Sylvie blinked at him. Fortunately, she’d gone over and over her lie all day. It spilled out before she considered changing it. “I’m on vacation with some friends. They were scuba diving, but I decided to wait for them on the boat.”
He sent her a sardonic look. “That’s the story you cooked up to serve if anybody asked you what you were doing there?”
Sylvie reddened. “It’s the truth,” she said without conviction.
“No scuba gear on board,” Hawk said.
Sylvie sent him a resentful look. “I told you they were diving. They took it with them.”
“You haven’t been diving before, have you?” Mac said, amusement threading his voice.
She gaped at him. “No,” she said cautiously.
“Well, thing is, there’d be extra tanks—all sorts of spare gear. There’d be a large tank to refill the swim tanks.”
“There would?”
“So, how many friends were diving?”
Sylvie blinked at him, trying to remember how many people she was supposed to pick up. “Uh … six.”
“Wrong. I found clothes for nine different people.”
Sylvie folded her lips together. This wasn’t going well at all. She thought, maybe, it would be better to plead the fifth.
He shook his head dismissively. “Never mind. I don’t particularly give a fuck what you were doing there. What I need to know is where you were going after the pickup?”
Sylvie had a bad feeling that telling him their destination wouldn’t be a good idea. “Why?”
“We want to know how much fuel we have.”
Sylvie glanced at the man who’d introduced himself as Hawk when he spoke. “There’s a fuel gauge.”
He stared at her a moment and chuckled. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Sylvie reddened. “It was fully fueled when I left Fort Lauderdale ….”
The two men exchanged a glance. “And that was where you were planning to return to?”
Sylvie stared at him in dismay. The problem with being scared shitless, she reflected, was that one was also scared brainless. She cleared her throat.
“All we need to know is the range,” Mac said almost gently. “Nobody’s trying to trip you up for information. Is there enough fuel to reach … say … Mexico?”
She really didn’t want to go to Mexico. “I don’t know. I’ve never taken the yacht out before. Actually, dad never has. He bought it for my mother. They’d planned to sail around the world together, but then they discovered she had cancer ….” Sylvie bit her lip, realizing she was babbling.
She saw sympathy in their eyes but skepticism, as well. It brought forth a spark of reviving anger even though she could see their point, could see why they might think she was making a bid for sympathy.
She swallowed against the lump of misery that rose in her throat with the memory of her mother. “There’s a manual.”
“Where?”
“It’s with the charts in the cabin beneath the wheel.”
Hawk turned and strode from the room as Mac slid off the bed. Instead of immediately following Hawk, however, he moved to the pile of clothing on the floor and sorted through it, tossing her a man’s shirt that looked big enough to swallow her whole and a pair of sweat pants. Sylvie stared at him blankly when she’d caught them.
His lips tightened. “When I suggested you get dressed, a halter top and short-shorts wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said dryly. “Which part of two squads of horny soldiers cooped up too long didn’t you catch?”
Sylvie felt her face heat for a split second before all the blood drained away. “This was all I brought.”
His eyes narrowed. “You like to flaunt that stuff, huh?”
Sylvie gaped at him in disbelief before indignation swept through her. “I was told to provide a distract ….”
Something flickered in his eyes when she stopped abruptly. “Well, you are that, baby, but I don’t think you’re going to be too happy with the results of distracting my men.”
“But … you’re their commanding officer …?”
“I’m not an officer. I’m a grunt, just like they are. I just happen to be the highest-ranking grunt here. We need to focus on staying alive—not watching the sway of those beautiful tits and that fine ass of yours. They’re less likely to break ranks and do something you’ll regret if you keep all that temptation under wraps and stay out of sight as much as possible.”
Sylvie clutched the clothing he’d thrown at her more tightly. Struggling with the fear he’d instilled in her, she nodded a little jerkily. Despite her fear, though, her discomfort swam to the forefront of her mind when he turned to leave. “Can I …? Will it be alright if I take a quick shower?”
He sent her a look that made the color fluctuate in her face again and sparked a touch of resentment that he so obviously thought she couldn’t resist the urge to primp. “I just wanted to wash off the tanning lotion.”
“Make it quick,” he said tightly. “If you’re not out and dressed in five minutes, I’m going to consider it an invitation.”
He strode from the room as her jaw slid to half-mast in stunned surprise. The sound of the men on the deck above galvanized her after a moment. Leaping from the bed, she dashed into the bathroom with the clothes he’d given her, locked the door behind her even though that hadn’t proven to be much of a deterrent before, and skimmed out of her clothes. She’d didn’t wait for the warm water to kick in. Wetting herself down, she slathered soap all over, worked shampoo into her hair, and then rinsed as quickly as she could. The wind had damaged her hair and skin almost as much as the sun, and she took a couple of minutes to put cream rinse in her hair and lotion her skin.
Contrary to what the asshole thought, it hadn’t occurred to her, once, to primp to incite lust! As scared as she was, she was still uncomfortable enough not to be able to dismiss it. Her scalp itched and every inch of skin that had been exposed—which was most of it—stung in spite of her efforts to keep from getting burnt up.
The shower and lotion soothed a lot of her discomfort. She didn’t doubt that she was going to be miserable for a while, until her skin healed from the abuse, but at least she didn’t feel like she was still baking. When she’d dried off the best she could, she jerked the clothes on as quickly as she could, combed the tangles out of her hair and left the bathroom.
To her relief, she didn’t meet up with Mac. After standing uncertainly in the doorway of the bathroom for a moment, scanning the room and then studying the open porthole she’d tried to climb out, she moved to a corner where she wasn’t in view of the bedroom door—which Mac had shattered—and curled into a tight ball.
Truthfully, she was grateful now that Mac had saved her from her terror-spawned insanity. Death by drowning or shark wasn’t any more appealing than facing a boatload of horny, extremely dangerous soldiers. Being gang raped didn’t have any more appeal, but Mac’s behavior, oddly enough, had reassured her that she wasn’t on a boat with pure animals whether she was right and they were escapees from prison or not.
That assumption bothered her once she’d had a little time to calm down and think. There was something about it that just didn’t ring true. From what she’d noticed, it seemed to her that all of the men were Americans, and soldiers. She didn’t know anything about the military, granted, but how odd was it that they’d have so many American prisoners—soldiers—in Guantanamo? They had Federal prisons on American soil for military men that had been convicted of serious crimes, didn’t they?
* * * *
Hawk had found the manual and dragged it out along with a stack of charts by the time Mac arrived. He sent Mac a questioning look, which he ignored. “Find what we need in the manual?”
“Not yet. I was looking at the charts.”
“You focus on the manual. I’ll study the charts.”
Shrugging, Hawk glanced around for a perch and finally settled on the deck with his back against the wall surrounding the pilot deck. Mac flipped through the charts until he found the Caribbean and the coast of South America. The one thing that had firmed up in his mind about a destination was that they couldn’t head home. Aside from the possibility of infecting others with whatever they had, they didn’t stand a chance of being free long if they headed for the US. The military would have a nationwide manhunt going on the minute they landed and there were just so many places one could hide.
He wasn’t in favor of merely hiding any damned way! There had to be somebody somewhere that could treat them, maybe cure them. If that had been the objective of the fucking assholes at Guantanamo, like they’d believed at first, they might’ve already been cured. It pissed him off to think of what all he’d fucking endured, believing they were honestly looking for a treatment or a cure, before it had finally been drilled into him that they didn’t give a shit about a cure. They wanted to know if they could replicate it, make more monsters like the ones they already had.
What pissed him off the most was that it had taken him so long to figure it out and the fact that he’d felt downright stupid for not figuring it out sooner when he should’ve known better!
His memories of that first transition weren’t clear. He’d realized after a while that, once the change was upon them, they hadn’t just physically turned monster, though, they’d had the mentality of animals, turning on each other, tearing at each other with their teeth and claws. The smell of blood and the rage burning through him were his clearest memories, but he’d had nightmarish flashes of the results—torn and bloody bodies lying all over the place. He could remember the absolute horror of the men sent to ‘rescue’ them. He could remember the way the bullets had felt slamming into him when their ‘rescuers’ had drawn down on them and filled them all full of holes.
He’d come to from his fall into the water and had just managed to pull himself back up on the boat when the men on the rescue craft had decided it would be better to shoot first and figure out what they were later. Semi-conscious, he could remember being moved from the boat to the ship, being carried, being dropped on the cold metal deck among the bodies of his squad members.
He could remember thinking he was dying, the fear, and then nothing until he’d woken up and discovered he wasn’t dead and none of the others were either. Relief had been fleeting. When he’d had time to examine himself and found all the holes—already closed and healing—he’d been too shocked to think for a while, but his shock was nothing compared to the shock of the men who’d been detailed to remove the ‘bodies’ for autopsy.
He should’ve realized right then that the military would think they’d stumbled on something with tremendous potential—soldiers that turned into hideous monsters capable of amazing ferocity, who healed miraculously.
He’d been too shocked and horrified by his memories, too relieved to find himself alive after all, and too terrified of what was happening to him, had happened, to think past a treatment to make him normal again. He supposed everyone else had been in the same shape as he was—scared shitless.
Shrugging his thoughts off, he focused on the maps, trying to figure out the best possibility for survival to give them time to figure out what to do next. He’d circled a couple of possibilities for refueling and was studying the map of South America when Hawk got up and headed down to the engine room.
“We aren’t goin’ home?” Beau, who’d taken the wheel, asked him.
Mac lifted his head, stared at him for a moment, and finally shook his head. “I’m not sure we can ever go home again.”
Chapter Three
They gathered on the deck, partly because Mac didn’t want the woman to hear the plans and partly because he wanted to keep the men as far away from her as he could. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have worried about keeping the men in line. They were the Marine’s finest, as well disciplined and trained as they came. Moreover, he knew most of them personally, had worked with them on a number of missions.
They weren’t the men they had been, though, any more than he was. Aside from that unknown, dangerous side to them now, there was the simple fact that they weren’t actually in the military anymore. Technically, they were. In actuality, they were just fugitives with prices on their heads. He didn’t know how many of them, if any, had already digested that, but if they hadn’t yet, they would begin to realize soon enough that military ranking didn’t mean shit anymore.
“Assuming we can get here—and Hawk’s assured me we have the fuel for it—we’re going to head for the coast here. They may or may not still be tracking us on radar—I’m guessing we slipped them, but I’m not going to bet on it. Fortunately, our heading when we left them behind had us was on a course for the U.S. gulf coastline. It isn’t going to take them long to figure out we changed course regardless, so this is our best bet for now. We’re going to have to split up if we don’t want to make it easy for them. We’ll drop the first group here, the next here, the next here, and the final group will ditch the boat and come ashore here.
“There isn’t much in the way of supplies on the boat. We’ll divide them up, but we’re going to need to scavenge. Just be damned careful how you go about it. We don’t want to leave a trail and that means taking a little here and there that won’t be noticed, which also means it’ll take a while.”
“What’ll we do about witnesses?”
Mac stared at the man, trying to remember his name. “Leaving bodies to be found isn’t my idea of keeping a low profile,” he responded tartly. “Make sure nobody sees you—none of us, with the possible exception of Hernandez and Gomez, are likely to pass for natives—and neither one of them can speak Spanish worth a shit. If you screw up and have to take any witnesses out, just make damned sure it looks like a local crime—not a military hit.”
Several of the men chuckled at his remark about Hernandez and Gomez, who both grinned and shrugged good-naturedly, but they turned serious again with the next question.
“What if … what if the change comes over us?” Cooper asked uneasily.
Mac felt his belly tighten. “Control it,” he responded tightly.
“But …. Never mind,” Sawyer muttered.
“We can’t afford to linger in a populated area long,” Mac said pointedly. “Grab what you can as quickly as you can and head into the jungle. If you pick up a tail, make damned sure you put them down again before you head for the rendezvous. We’ll meet here,” he pointed to a spot on the map, “in, say, ten days. We’ll wait one day for any late arrivals. If, for any reason, any of you can’t make it, we’ll rendezvous here ten days from the first.”
“What then?” Cavanaugh growled. “We just gonna ramble around in the fucking jungle forever?”
Mac fixed him with a hard look. “I don’t have the answers. Once we’ve thrown off the hunters and have a little breathing room, we’ll see what we can come up with.”
“What about those fuckers that have been torturing the fuck out of us?” Hawk said. “If anybody knows anything about this, it would be them.”
Mac shrugged despite his irritation with Hawk’s suggestion. “Maybe. And maybe they weren’t focused on curing it any of the time? Still, it’s a possibility. When we rendezvous, we’ll discuss whether we want to break back in to the fucking prison we just broke out of.”