“Hey, Boss,” Sage stood up from the three-legged camping stool he had been sitting on, leaning over the open hard case of the laptop, he grabbed a bottle of water and tossed it to Castello before doing the same for the others.
The harsh reality of working under the African sun meant if you didn’t hydrate often, you died. Even if that sun was down for the night the heat and stickiness remained, like the lingering smell of vinegar on freshly steamed floors.
Sitting down again, he turned the laptop to show Castello the intel Grif had sent him. “Meet Axel Shaw, thirty-six-year-old white male from Florida.
His father was road Boss for the Hell’s Eagles until ten years ago. He died in the same accident that killed Grif’s father. Not long after, with Grif’s help, he took his sister and moved from Tallahassee to Miami where he opened his own garage and has become one of the biggest names in Custom Bikes.”
“What the fuck is he doing in The Congo?” Castello studied the photo on the screen. He looked like your average dude, brown hair, brown eyes. He was tall, close to six foot, and had the look of a man who didn’t take shit from anyone. A scar bisected his left cheek.That scar is sexy as fuck!
Castello ruthlessly pushed aside the observation. It didn’t matter if Axel Shaw was sexy or not. If he was here, where no decent man should be, then he was potentially a tango, until he proved otherwise. “What the hell is he doing here?” he repeated his question.
“Grif wasn’t sure,” Sage clicked through the screens until he found the email Grif had sent. “He speculates that it may have something to do with his sister.” At Castello’s grunt of acknowledgement, he continued, “She went missing a few years ago. The only reason Grif could think of is that Shaw has found a link to the LRA.”
“Kinda makes sense, Boss.” Zack propped his M-16 against the wheel of the truck and scooted his ass down until he sat using the tire as a back rest.
Castello knew his second would immediately start breaking down his rifle in a field strip to ensure it was ready should he need to use it. “If it were Rourke, you’d go looking.”
“It’s possible there is a connection to Kony.” Sage flipped files on his laptop, pulling up the intel they had gathered on their target. “He headed to Tallahassee about the time the sister went missing.”
“Anything is possible,” Zack said the words they were all thinking, “If it were me, I’d follow every damn lead I could find, even if it led to this hellhole.”
“Yeah, but a regular Joe in the Congo?” Castello shook his head, “Nope.
I’m not buying that.” He tossed the now empty bottle of water into the trash bag in the truck. “How are things looking down there, Sawyer?”
“They’re all drinking,” Sawyer walked around the truck and turned the handheld controller with a video monitor to show Castello. “Give them a couple of hours and they will be fast asleep, maybe we can sneak in and take him.”
“Yeah.” Castello would much prefer to sneak in and grab the dude. The mud huts set up in the clearing next to the mine, weren’t exactly the most secure location. “Asses in gear,” he ordered, “We got an extraction to plot.”
Chapter 2
Having emerged from the rainforest, Castello’s boots didn’t make a sound as he walked through the scrubland. Every now and again he glanced at the ground ahead, planning where he would place his next footstep. He knew the others with him were doing the same. Looking at the GPS on his wrist, he made sure they were still heading in the right direction, even though he knew Rafe Anderson and Balas, his K9, were out ahead of him. They were ensuring the area was clear of bombs or crude tripwires which may be attached to alarms to alert the people in the camp below to their presence.
Even at this hour of the morning, the darkest hour before dawn, he could feel the sweat dripping down his forehead. The bandana he had wrapped around his head caught most of it, but still it sucked. He hoped like hell their intel was correct and Axel Shaw was a good dude caught in a shitty situation.
“I am never complaining about bad air con again.”
“Roger that, Boss.” Zack snickered in his earpiece. His second was walking slightly to his right, only a couple of paces behind him, just as he always was. Task Force Ambra practiced and practiced their movements, again and again, until they knew exactly where any member of the team would be when in the field.
His eyes trained on Rafe, Castello immediately stopped and crouched down at his dog handler’s raised fist. From this spot earlier, where they had hidden to scope out the camp, faint sounds had drifted toward them. Now only the sounds of the rainforest through which they had trekked, filled the night air. Kneeling, Castello waited for Rafe and Balas to give them the all clear.
He wanted this job done, wanted to rush to the hut they had identified as the one that held Axel Shaw, but he made himself wait. They would only have one chance at this.
***
Axel sat in the dark, his eyes hurt from where the asshole had punched him. Whose freaking idea was it to follow Gavin Fucking Kony again? Who the hell thought taking the money Kony had, would give him leverage to get the fucking mob to tell him where the fuck his sister and her kid were? Even without the prompting from the people at ATF, who were leaning heavily on him, hoping he could help them slow the flow of drugs getting into the United States, he would have come here anyway. That’s right, it was his idea.
Idiot.He only had himself to blame. Straining his ears, he listened to the silence in the camp outside.
Turning his head as much as the chain around his neck allowed, he thought he heard something. Eyes squinting into the dark, over the last couple of hours he had listened to the creaks and groans of the building. This sound was different. Shit, that was scratching, wasn’t it? Fuck, what if it was a snake or another creature from the nearby rainforest looking for a meal. Holy fuck, did they have lions here? “You should have just told ATF to go fuck themselves.” Squeezing his fingers in between the metal of the collar around his neck and his skin, Axel felt the wetness gathering there. Putting his finger in his mouth, the metallic taste told him it was blood and not sweat.Ugh.As he didn’t feel much pain so he hoped it wasn’t too bad, a scratch maybe.
Hopefully! Not that it would matter if he didn’t come up with a fucking MacGyver plan to get his ass out of here, fast.
A small pinpoint of light in the corner of the hut told him he hadn’t been imagining things. There was someone there and it wasn’t a freaking lion unless they’d started carrying Mag-Lites. Axel was almost afraid to hope, but even so, that small flame lit in his stomach. Did he have a friend he wasn’t aware of in camp? Jesus, he’d survived growing up in a 1% club, how the fuck had he managed to get himself blamed for blowing up a fucking bridge?
Castello clicked on his coms, “Four?”
“Looks clear, Boss.” Sawyer immediately answered. He had been monitoring the images streaming from the drone. Castello was grateful to have both him and Sage on his team. Put those two together with something electrical or computer based and they would modify it and adjust it until it gave them more power, longer battery life and a whole lot of other shit that if he was honest he had no clue about. He was just damn pleased they were on the good side of the divide and not the tango side.
