Page 102 of Duty Devoted
Across the cargo hold, Andrew Volante ran through the same check with Bravo team. He caught my eye and repeated the signal—his team was ready too.
We staged at the ramp in two lines, Alpha on the left, Bravo on the right. The yellow caution light bathed us all in its glow. Waiting.
The light turned green.
I stepped into the void. The slipstream hit like a sledgehammer, spinning me once before training took over. Arms and legs spread, I stabilized into a perfect arch. Around me, seven other bodies fell through the night—my team, every one of them here because Lauren mattered.
At 180 miles per hour, you didn’t think about much. But Lauren’s face filled my mind anyway. The way she’d looked that morning in Chicago, finally smiling. Finally believing we had a chance.
My fault she was here. My failure that let them take her.
The altimeter spun down. At 3,000 feet, I deployed. The chute snapped open with a violent jerk, slowing my descent from terminal velocity to a gentle drift. Below, the jungle canopy looked like a black ocean in the darkness.
The drop zone rushed up—a small clearing Jace had identified from satellite imagery. I flared at twenty feet, boots hitting soft earth with trained silence. Around me, the others landed like shadows.
I collapsed my chute and buried it quickly. The jungle pressed in immediately, humid and alive with night sounds. I flipped down the night vision goggles attached to my helmet,and the world transformed into that artificial green. Everything glowed with familiar clarity.
“Comms check,” I whispered.
Everyone confirmed.
“Compound is two klicks northeast,” Jace said, already working his tablet despite having just fallen from the stratosphere. “Aerial recon shows normal patrol patterns. They don’t know we’re here.”
“Let’s keep it that way. Bravo, you take the north approach to the helipad. Alpha moves to the storage shed from the south.” I chambered a round in my suppressed HK416. “Rules of engagement are simple—if it’s not us or Lauren, you can kill it.”
“Understood. My favorite type of ROEs,” Volante said. “We’ll secure that Bell 412 helicopter and hold for your signal.”
We moved out in tactical formation, the jungle swallowing us whole. Every step calculated, every sound cataloged. This wasn’t my first time in Corazón’s jungle, but it was my first time seeing the Silva compound.
Forty minutes of careful movement through dense undergrowth, around fallen logs, through streams. Two kilometers that would take fifteen minutes on a road stretched into an eternity when stealth mattered more than speed.
Finally, through gaps in the canopy, lights pierced the darkness ahead.
“Movement,” Ty whispered. “Two tangos, northwest, forty meters.”
I spotted them through the night vision goggles—guards walking a lazy patrol, AKs slung carelessly. They had no idea death was watching from the shadows.
“Ben, Ty.”
They moved like smoke. Two soft puffs from their rifles, the barely audible sound of rifle bolts cycling, and the tangos fell. We dragged the bodies into the undergrowth and kept moving.
The compound materialized through the trees—high walls, multiple buildings, exactly as the satellite imagery had shown. Lights blazed everywhere, turning night into day. Bad for them, good for us. All that light would destroy their night vision while we stayed in the shadows.
“Jace, you’re up,” I said.
He found a concealed position and opened his laptop. “Give me ninety seconds to loop their cameras and disable the motion sensors.”
While he worked his magic, I studied the storage shed through my rifle scope. Single story, concrete construction, one door visible. Two guards stationed outside. According to the thermal imaging from the flight, Lauren was in there. Alive. Waiting.
I tamped down my fury that Silva was keeping Lauren in a goddamned shed. She was alive. That’s what mattered.
“Done,” Jace whispered. “You’re ghosts for the next twenty minutes before they might notice the loops.”
“Bravo, status?”
“In position,” Volante reported. “Helicopter has two guards. Ready to take them on your signal.”
“Take those guards and verify the bird’s operational,” I told Volante. Without that, we weren’t going to have any way out of here.
