Chapter One

It took her a moment to pick him out of the stream of passengers exiting customs at the airport in Iquitos, the Peruvian city hacked out of the jungle of the Upper Amazon. Even with his shaggy blond hair and three- or four-days’ worth of scruffy gold whiskers, he could have passed for a local. Thousands of Europeans had flooded into Iquitos during the Rubber Boom of the 1880s. The rubber barons of that period acquired immense wealth, built fantastic mansions and give the city its unique cultural identity. Generations later, Iquitos still boasted the largest gringo enclave in Peru.

In boots, jeans, and a canvas bush shirt, this gringo might have been one of the tough, macho guides who escorted would-be adventurers into the vast Amazon rainforest. The clothes and the battered duffle bag slung over his shoulder suited his tall, muscular build. They also, she knew, served a vital military necessity. To conceal their identities, operators assigned to the U.S. Army’s super- secret Delta Force usually wore civilian clothes. For the same reason they were allowed-correction, encouraged-to adopt civilian hair styles and beards or mustaches to blend in with the locals. The practice also allowed for plausible deniability, that useful shield the U.S. government could hide behind if one of Delta Force’s dangerous and usually politically sensitive ops went bad.

Aviator sunglasses shielded his eyes as he did a quick sweep of the terminal before zeroing in on her. He could hardly miss her. The waiting area wasn’t much bigger than your average living room and she was the only female present wearing jungle BDUs. He detached himself from the stream of arrivals and crossed the terminal. Removing his sunglasses, he hooked them in the open neck of his shirt. His eyes were a deep, electric blue and more than a tad disconcerting as they drilled into her.

“Chief Dawson.”

It was a statement, not question, but she answered it anyway.

“That’s me.” She thrust out her hand. “Charlene Dawson, Charley to my friends and fellow river rats. Welcome to Iquitos.”

She went into a mental brace as he folded his big hand around hers. After eleven years in the U.S. Navy, four of them as a member of a Riverine Patrol crew, Charley was used to having her metacarpals crunched by the Special Ops types she and her crew inserted into and extracted from various hot spots around the world.

Apparently Sergeant First Class Jack Halliday felt no need to prove his manhood by crunching anything. His grip was firm but not bruising. The hard callous on the web between his thumb and forefinger was a dead giveaway, though. As Charley knew from her work with Special Ops teams, that telltale callous was the mark of shooters who’ve fired thousands upon thousands of training rounds and God knew how many in actual, life-and-death situations.

She kept her welcoming smile in place as Halliday’s penetrating blue eyes made a quick trip from her pinned-up-and-out-of-the-way auburn hair to her un-glossed mouth to the neckline of her regulation issue brown T-shirt.

“My crew get in okay?” he asked, the inspection completed.

“Two arrived last night, one this morning.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

Obviously a man of few words. That was fine with Charley. She tugged on her floppy brimmed boonie hat and led him to the exit. “It’s quicker to get to the base by boat. We’ll take a taxi to the dock and cruise up river.”

“Taxi” being an extremely loose euphemism for the putt-putts that comprised the main means of public transportation in this remote jungle city. Called motokars by the locals, they consisted of rickshaw-type seats perched precariously on the back of motorcycles. Dozens of them were lined up outside the terminal, puffing exhaust fumes into the sweltering afternoon heat. Charley signaled for one and waited for the inevitable mad scramble to produce a clear victor. The winner roared up and screeched to a stop that set the mildewed tassels on his gaudy yellow canopy to dancing.

“Where you go?” he said in cheerful, broken English.

“To the Navy dock,” she replied in the idiomatic Spanish she’d polished during her two months in Iquitos. Prior to that, she’d operated out of a navy base in Brazil. Spanish, thankfully, came a whole lot easier to her than Portuguese.

She climbed aboard and scooted over to make room for Halliday. Not enough room, as it turned out. Dropping his gear bag on the deck, he wedged in. They were knee to knee, hip to hip, and the contact sent a completely unexpected thrill chasing up Charley’s thigh.

Her stomach tightened as a sudden tension stirred deep in her belly. It was the kind of tension she hadn’t felt, hadn’t allowed herself to feel, for longer than she could remember. With a silent curse, she inched her leg away from his. She was hours away from launching a dangerous op. She’d be ten kinds of an idiot to go all twittery at the brush of Jack Halliday’s hard thigh. Which brought her back to the curiosity that had dogged her since HQ SOUTHCOM notified her they were flying him and his Delta Force team in to conduct this op.

The U.S. and Peru had signed a bilateral Riverine Plan more than a decade ago to increase joint military-police patrols against the narco trafficers who used the Amazon waterways to move their product. In support of that effort, the U.S. had shipped in patrol boats, set up radar surveillance at Iquitos and several other sites along the river, and assigned a contingent of thirty-three Green Berets to “advise” on interdiction efforts. The Green Berets rotated out every ninety days, but they were tough. Bite-through-steel tough. Charley should know. She and her crew had skimmed them and their Peruvian counterparts up and down the brown waters of the Amazon often enough to see them in action.

So why the heck were Halliday and his team here?

She waited until their putt-putt had barreled into the stream of other motokars and motorcycles heading into Iquitos center to ask. The whine of engines and deafening roar as a maverick accelerated out of the pack covered her quiet comment.

“I was surprised when HQ SOUTHCOM advised they were sending in a Delta Force team. So were the Green Berets on base. What’s up with that?”

His glance sliced into her, as sharp and lethal as the serrated K-bar she suspected was strapped to his forearm or calf. Like the American Express Card for ordinary citizens, these super macho warriors never left home without one.

Silence strung out between them, and his obvious reluctance to answer her question generated a spurt of irritation. She was one of the good guys, for Pete’s sake! Controlling that irritation, Charley laid her cards on the line.

“Look, Halliday, my crew and I know this is going to be a hairy op. We don’t have a problem with that. Each of us has pulled at least one combat tour in Iraq, patrolling the Tigris and Euphrates. Several of us more than one. Since being shipped across the pond to the Amazon, we’ve bumped up against some nasty bad guys. My crew is good at Riverine Ops, damned good, but if you know something about this mission that could impact their lives, I want to hear it now.”

His jaw went tight, which was a pretty impressive considering it already did an excellent imitation of the Rock of Gibraltar. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the mirrored sunglasses but could certainly feel their heat. The intensity of it blocked her peripheral perception of Iquitos’ rough-and-tumble outskirts. The small, ramshackle brick and wooden houses. The giant palms and profusion of flowers. The dirt roads jammed with putt-putts, motorcycles and wooden buses. As the only major city in the world inaccessible by road, Iquitos still managed to rack up the traffic.

It was now early April, the end of summer and beginning of fall south of equator. Temperatures hovered at a balmy eighty-nine degrees. Unfortunately, this was also the peak of the rainy season. Even when the skies weren’t dumping torrents of rain, soul-sucking humidity wrapped everyone and everything in a wet blanket. Perspiration dewed Charley’s face and sweat coursed between her breasts as she waited for Jack Halliday to crack his stony silence.

“I trained Sean McMasters,” he said at last.

“Whoa! Our target is a Delta Force operative?”

“Was,” Halliday corrected, “until he went rogue.”

She almost wished she hadn’t asked. Halliday’s terse revelation had just shot up the pucker factor of her mission by exponential degrees.

Going after the narcos who traversed this stretch of the Amazon was dangerous enough. For the most part, though, they were poorly educated and relied on cunning and brute force to move their cargo. In recent months Charley and her Peruvian counterparts had been given a new target-the illegal gold mines dumping tons of toxic mercury into the river that provided life to so many animals and humans in the region. Not only were these mines raping the earth and polluting the environment, they sprouted rough-and-ready camp towns where drugs, alcohol, and prostitution flourished like blights.

Charley and her crew had helped take down a number of these illegal mining operations over the past few months. Small operations for the most part, but they’d recently got a tip about a major site. They’d probed dozens of inlets and minor tributaries, trying to find it. Then, just when they nailed their first real lead--a rumor that an American ex-patriot by the name of Sean McMasters had supposedly taken command of a camp on a narrow tributary about a hundred miles down river--US Southern Command advised they were sending in Sergeant First Class Jack Halliday to lead the take-down. Now Charley knew why!

“This is not good,” she murmured as their motokar chugged its way into the heart of Iquitos.

With its unique Amazonian/European architecture, the city contained a lively mix of theaters, shops, dance halls and palatial mansions built during the rubber boom. The boom lasted only thirty years, but Iquitos still reflected some of the enormous wealth amassed by a handful of entrepreneurs. The Plaza de Armas formed the city’s central hub, and many of the buildings ringing it were adorned with colorful ceramic tiles imported from Portugal and Italy. On one corner of the square stood the famous Iron House designed by Gustave Eiffel and forged in the workshops of Belgium. One of Iquitos’ mega-rich rubber barons had purchased the two-story structure at the Paris Exposition of 1889, had it dismantled, and shipped it back to Iquitos.

The mansion was Iquitos’ best known landmark but Charley didn’t bother to point it out to Sergeant Halliday. Her one thought, her only thought, was for her crew. They were battle hardened and Amazon savvy. Still, knowing their target had once been a member of the U.S.’s elite Delta Force changed the whole complexion of the op.

Unlike most Special Ops units, you wouldn’t find Delta Force listed on any Army TOA-Table of Allowance. On paper, every Delta Force operator was assigned on paper to other Army units. Trained specifically for hostage rescue and counter-terrorism operations, they deployed in small, lethal teams. The fact that SOUTHCOM had sent Halliday and his team in for this particular mission told Charley there was more to it than a simple search and destroy.

“Josh Patterson said to say hello.”

The brusque comment jerked her from a grim contemplation of the challenge ahead. “You know Josh?”

“We played football together in high school.”

A smile spread across Charley’s face. She’d met USMC Staff Sergeant Josh Patterson some months back. She and her crew had been participating in joint river training exercises in Brazil at the time. Patterson had air dropped into the jungle to rescue a kidnapped Healing Hands worker-who just happened to be the daughter of a Marine Corps general. Charley and her crew had done a hot extraction and even then she could see Patterson had met his match in Allison Landon.

“Aly sent me an invitation to the wedding,” she related. “I hated to miss it.”

Halliday regarded her steadily for several moments. “We have another acquaintance in common,” he said coolly.

“Who’s that?”

“Your husband. I ran into him during my pre-brief at SOUTHCOM. In a bar just outside the base.”

Charley’s lip curled. “That sounds like Alex. And just to keep the record straight, he’s not my husband. Hasn’t been for more than three years.”

She was tempted to ask Halliday what he and Alex talked about but deep-sixed the impulse. She had a good idea. Besides, she didn’t want to give her ex the satisfaction of knowing she’d asked about him in the unlikely event the two men ever hooked up again. Instead, she channeled the conversation to the mission ahead.

“We’ll be taking a Riverine Command Boat down-river.”

The RCB was a fast, lethal, shallow-water vessel. Originally designed and built for the Swedish Navy, the U.S. had ordered their own version of the craft for its brown water navy. Charley was the first female to command one and she didn’t take her responsibilities lightly.

“The RCB has a three-foot draft, twin diesel engines, and carries more firepower per square inch than any other military vehicle except maybe an…”

“An Abrams tank. I’m aware of your craft’s capabilities.”

“Right. We’ll be manned by a combined U.S. and Peruvian crew and carry an assault team of…”

“Four Peruvian Special Ops troops in addition to my team.”

Not even the buzz of motorcycle engines could drown the brusque edge in his voice. Instinctively Charley bristled. Just as instinctively, she told herself to cool it. She’d worked with too many of men like Halliday to let him get to her.

Except…There was something different about this one. Something that belied the stereotype. Not his hard, muscled body. That was most definitely primo. Every rattle of the motokar telegraphed an unmistakable signal from the steely muscles pressed against her shoulder and hip. But she didn’t get the same chauvinistic vibes from him she’d encountered all too often from others of his ilk. Whatever had Sergeant Halliday wound so tight didn’t hinge on her sex.

Too bad.

Just as quickly as the thought slipped into her mind, she booted it out. There was nothing like working in a male dominated environment- and jumping into a brief, disastrous marriage!-to make a gal wary of instinctive physical responses. Halliday and his men had been dispatched to the Amazon for a specific mission. Charley and her men would assist in that mission. Then she and Jack Halliday would part ways, never to cross paths again.

Too bad.

Dammit! What was with her this morning? It had to be his closeness. The sharp, clean tang of his sweat. The rub of his thigh against hers. Not to mention the fact that Charley could give an entire cloister of nuns lessons in celibacy since she’d landed in the Amazon eight months ago.

For any woman reach the upper ranks in the Navy they had to develop a rhino-tough hide along with a magic blend of leadership, skill, empathy, guts, determination, and dedication. Not much room in there for fooling around. Or for girly-girly stuff, although Charley made an effort with her hair. Twisting the dark red mass into a rope and pinning it up every morning was a pain but vital to her sense of self. It was her one vanity, her one concession to being a woman in a what was still pretty much a man’s world. Without thinking, she reached up to tuck a sweat-damp strand behind her ear.

Jack caught the movement from the corner of his eye and smothered a curse. This op had been gnawing at his insides since the moment he learned he’d be going after one of his own. A man Jack himself had trained. A bastard who’d not only betrayed his country, he’d made a mockery of everything Delta Force stood for. Bad enough McMasters was knee-deep in the illegal gold trade. Latest word was he’d used some of that gold to buy and subsequently sell arms to terrorists high on the U.S. most wanted list.

Jack had been sent in to take the bastard down. To accomplish that, he would have to depend on Chief Dawson and her crew. He had nothing against women in the military. Had served with some damned fine ones. But this particular woman’s ex had bent his ear for a good half hour. According to Alex Dawson, his wife had slept her way into several juicy assignments before dumping him.

Jack knew better than to accept at face value the ravings of a half- drunk and obviously bitter ex. Particularly since those ravings didn’t square with Dawson’s glowing fitness reports and her steady rise within the ranks of the riverine community. Although not as tight as Delta Force, the river rats wouldn’t tolerate a phony for long. The woman had to know her stuff, had to be as good as she claimed.

Still, she’d made a vow. Walked down the aisle. Went the “for better or worse” route. Then bailed when the going got rocky. That didn’t square with Jack’s rigid sense of right and wrong, of hanging tough against all odds. Loyalty was a trait that went bone deep in him.

With good reason. The son of an oil rigger, he’d grown up in the gritty, dust-whipped West Texas town of Rush Springs. His mother decamped when Jack was four or five, and his father took out his anger at her desertion by beating the crap out of their son until Jack was big enough and strong enough to fight back. His one salvation, his only outlet, during those dark years was the fact that he was good at sports. All kinds of sports, but he’d come into his own on the football field.

Over four injury-wracked, teeth-rattling years his high school team had battled from last place in division standings to state champs. Along the way Jack and five of his teammates got tagged as the Sidewinders for their ability to strike without warning and get the ball down the field. They also became so tight, so mentally attuned to each, that no one in Rush Springs was surprised when all six enlisted in the military right after graduation. Or that every one of them went into Special Ops. They served in different branches of the military but the Special Ops community was small enough that their paths crossed often.

And fellow Sidewinder Josh Patterson had nothing but praise for Charley Dawson’s skills. Jack trusted Josh, so he would trust Dawson’s skills. He’d put that crap about her sleeping her way up the ranks out of his head.

Although…

He could see how it might happen. Not even her baggy jungle BDUs and boonie hat could disguise this woman’s femininity. Add a pair of doe- brown eyes and those damp red tendrils framing a heart- shaped face, and you got an enticing package. Then the putt-putt swerved around a corner, throwing Dawson against him, and Jack swallowed another curse. The press of a high, firm breast confirmed just how feminine Chief Dawson was.

“Sorry,” she muttered, righting herself.

As their driver zoomed past a block of warehouses and aimed for the docks dead ahead, Jack breathed in a familiar stench. He’d made enough river assaults to appreciate the combined stink of rotting vegetation, muddy water and diesel fumes.

He appreciated even more the craft tied up at a wharf guarded by heavily armed Peruvian troops. Jack raked an approving glance from stem to stern as he hefted his gear bag and Dawson passed the putt- putt driver some Peruvian soles.

“This way.”

She approached the guards at the checkpoint with a sure stride and an easy smile. Jack’s Spanish was passable, but nowhere good enough to catch more than a phrase or two of what sounded like good- natured insults before the guards waved them through.

“They don’t need to see an ID?”

She flashed him an amused glance. “How many female American boat skippers do you think there are in the Amazon?”

“Point taken. They don’t know me, however.”

“You’re with me,” she said with a shrug.

He followed her down the long wharf to the patrol boat. It was painted in jungle camouflage colors of gray, green and muddy brown. Despite the drab paint scheme, though, the Riverine Command Boat was a thing of beauty. Unlike the Special Ops insertion boats Jack had jumped out of more times that he wanted to remember, the RCB was big and roomy and fast. Its three-foot draft made for easy access to shallow rivers, and its reinforced bow allowed it to run onto shore at full speed without damage.

The boat also bristled with armament. Jack gave the Browning .50 caliber machine guns mounted midship his wholehearted approval. The 12.7mm guns on the prow and aft were Lemur-sited and could be remotely controlled from inside the interior compartment-which was armor-plated and air-conditioned and boasted seating for twenty fully armed troops and room all their equipment. Helluva way to fight a war!

Jack fully intended to take Sean McMasters down with minimal collateral damage. If things went south, though, it never hurt to have this kind of firepower as backup. In full operational mode, the RCB carried a crew of four. There was only one sailor aboard at the moment. Sprouting a haystack of sun- bleached yellow hair and a gap-toothed grin, he looked like a sixteen- year-old who’d run away from a red dirt Georgia farm and lied about his age to join the navy.

Jack soon found out that assessment wasn’t far off the mark. Charley Dawson introduced Gunner’s Mate Third Class Michael “Bubba” Burke and stressed that the kid had racked up an impressive record during his scant years of service.

“Bubba served on my crew in Iraq,” she said as the two men shook hands. “He took a hit during a particularly nasty firefight but stayed at his gun.” She gave the kid a look that was two parts pride and one part affection. “The idiot was up for a nice, cushy shore job after that tour but volunteered for Amazon duty. Beats the hell out of me why.”

“C’mon, Chief. You know why.” Burke turned to Jack and treated him to a shy smile. “Me ‘n the rest of the crew, we’d swallow half of this here river if the Chief told us to.”

“Good to know,” Jack said easily.

He wasn’t overly impressed by Burke’s obvious devotion to his boat captain. As young as the kid was, he’d most likely only served under one or two superiors. A few more years under his belt, and he would have better grounds for comparison.

Still, it said something for Charlie Dawson that she could inspire such loyalty.