Full Throttle(80)
“No can do,” the drawling man said. “The ambient temperature of the jungle is too hot to use infrared. Basically the whole damned place is glowing like a human body.”
“Last Intel we received before we left the carrier group,” Leo added, “is that he was some fifty miles from the Thai border. What’s his approximate location now?”
“Somewhere closer to ten miles south of it,” Rock replied.
Penni’s level of concern escalated exponentially. It was bad enough that delicate, diminutive Abby Thompson was off traipsing through a snake-infested jungle. Worse still was not knowing why she and Steady had been forced to abandon the motorcycle. A heavy foreboding settled in her stomach like a dense hunk of that rye bread her father used to buy from the Jewish bakery up on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill.
“How can my team get hooked up to track his signal?” Leo asked. “Just in case communications between us and those of you stateside get hinky.”
“Give me the numbers for your cell phones,” Rock replied. “I’ll send y’all the application software from the NSA’s secret server. It’ll take a couple of minutes to download the app and to establish your secure connection. But once that’s done, y’all should be able to bypass the satellite link if it proves unreliable and instead track Steady’s signal through the local cell towers when he’s within the coverage zone. Which means, hopefully, you’ll have a far better time keeping up with him than we’ve had.”
“That’s pretty slick,” one of the SEALs whose name she’d forgotten said.
“Membership has its rewards,” Rock replied. “Okay, I’m ready. Give me those digits, mes amis.”
As Leo and his men rattled off their cell numbers, Dan turned to her. “We got a couple options here,” he said, his expression hard, almost…malevolent.
“Which are?”
“We can go with Leo and his team to pick up Steady and Abby, or we can stay here and try to catch that security director on the off chance he hasn’t already flown the coop.”
“And on the off chance he actually knows something,” she added. “He could be like Irdina here”—she flicked a hand toward the poor, sniffling woman—“and be nothing more than a dupe and a patsy.”
“But what if he’s not?” Dan’s eyes were twin orbs of green fire in the shadow of his face. “What if he can tell us how the hell those JI militants knew the covert locations of the agents on duty? What if he can tell us how they knew about the tracking devices sewn into Abby’s clothes? What if he knows who the mole is? Isn’t it worth our time to try to find out?”
She made a face. “Hello? When you put it like that…”
“Good.” He nodded, throwing an arm around her shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world. She ignored what his fingers brushing against the bare skin on her arm did to her stomach. “It’s decided then. Leo?” He turned toward the man. “While you and the boys go superhero yourselves a rescue, Penni and I are gonna attempt to track down the hotel’s security director. See if he can answer some questions that have been troubling us about this whole goddamned clusterfuck from the very beginning.”
“Ten-four.” Leo dipped his chin and shoved his smartphone into the breast pocket of his military-grade T-shirt. “It’ll take us…” He looked down at the thick, plastic watch on his trim wrist, then over at the swarthy, flirtatious man aptly nicknamed Romeo. “What do you figure, Delgado? Sixty minutes, give or take, to make the flight?”
“I’d say more like seventy or seventy-five,” Romeo replied, punching a finger onto the screen of his own cell phone before sliding it into the hip pocket of his jungle fatigues. His expression was so serious it was hard to fathom he was the same man who’d been grinning so cheerily while slinging insults at his teammates not more than ten minutes ago. “We have to swing by the airport and refuel the helo before heading out, so we’ll be at the mercy of the Malay ground crew there. But according to JSOC”—Joint Special Operations Command—“they know we’re coming and are ready for us. It should be a quick turnaround.”
“Hooah then, boys.” Dan lifted his free hand to bump knuckles with the SEALs as they filed past him toward the door. “Keep your heads on swivel out there.”
“Or as we say in Brooklyn,” she added, “keep chicky.”
“We never do it any other way,” Leo said as he slid by them.
And then, just like that, Penni was once again alone with Dan. Uh-oh. Well…and Irdina. Whew. Which reminded her. “What are we going to do about her?” She frowned toward the woman who sat slouched in the chair, no longer attempting to meet their eyes.