Page 28 of Strike Fast

Women were weak and useless, except for three things: sex, providing children, and making money off of.El Escorpiondidn’t approve of human trafficking or sex slavery, per se, but he didn’t do anything to stop it, either. As long as business continued to increase and their territory expanded, the head of the cartel overlooked everything else.

“Seven. Eight, if you want to include our special guest.”

“How is our guest doing?” Carlos asked.

“Finally coming around to her training, I think. Close to breaking.”

“No.” Carlos didn’t want her broken when she came to him. He wanted to do that himself. “Keep her there for now. Give her a while to rest up and regain her strength. You’ll bring her to me in New Orleans next Friday night.” He had a distributor there who owed him a favor and would be happy to arrange everything. “I’ll text you the guy’s number.”

“All right. You sure you want her to regain her strength? She was a handful when we first got her.”

“I’m sure. Text me when you’ve got it set up.”

He ended the call, his dick throbbing like a damn toothache at the thought of what would happen between him and Victoria Gomez in that New Orleans hotel room. Once he was done with her, when she was broken in spirit and maybe in body as well, depending on how she behaved, he’d hand her over to a courier to be sold overseas.

Lust roared through him, the throb of his cock too delicious to waste on his own hand.

He texted one of his bodyguards posted out front of the house. “Call Teresa. Get her up here now.”

Chapter Eight

Near Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi

“Six minutes!” the jumpmaster yelled over the drone of the C-130’s turboprop engines. The tail ramp was open, revealing a sea of darkness below where the flat Mississippi swampland spread out several thousand feet beneath them.

“Six minutes!” Reid and the others shouted back.

Emerald Warrior was already into its fourth day, and the entire team was feeling the fatigue. Yesterday they’d spent nine hours out in the field covering procedure on how to call in close air support fire missions with an AFSOC combat controller named Ryan Wentworth, who they knew from their deployments to Bagram. Today they were doing a static line jump into “cartel territory” and linking up with another unit to search for drugs and hostages in a simulated village together.

Reid and his teammates climbed to their feet and hooked their lines onto the cable that ran toward the open tail ramp.

“Stand by!” the jumpmaster called out.

Ten seconds to go.

Third in line, Reid did the familiar airborne shuffle across the C-130’s deck toward the tail ramp. Hamilton was in front of him, and Freeman was first in line, the former SEAL in his usual position of point man, since he was the most experienced operator on the team.

The jump light turned from red to green. “Go!” the jumpmaster yelled.

Freeman hopped off the ramp first, then Hamilton a second later. Reid was a step behind him. He launched himself off the back of the tail ramp, the sudden tension on the static line deploying his D-Bag.

He immediately started counting. Just before he hit three seconds, the canopy opened over his head in the dark night sky, and he caught sight of the remainder of his teammates exiting the aircraft above him in rapid succession. The Hercules was traveling at around 130 knots, so it was critical to stay as close together as possible. Any delay between jumpers caused big gaps that were hard to make up for on the ground.

The muggy Mississippi night air rushed around him as he descended toward the edge of the swamp that marked the boundary of the DZ. He toggled the chute to slow his fall at the end and executed a running landing, then quickly unstrapped and stashed his chute.

He spotted Hamilton and Freeman about thirty yards away. He waved his arm to signal that he was ready to rock, then brought his M-4 up into position and took a knee to scan his portion of the DZ.

Four more figures floated downward through the dark sky to land in various spots in the empty field. All around them, everything was silent.

When everyone was on the ground safely and ready to go, they moved toward the western tree line in a wedge formation, maintaining all around security. The mission plan called for them to rendezvous with another element on the northern edge of the swamp, one-point-three klicks away, before moving to the target.

Reid stayed on the left side of the formation with Maka. They picked their way through the trees and underbrush as they skirted the edge of the swamp, with Freeman and Hamilton in the lead. At the rendezvous point they formed a defensive perimeter and crouched down to await the other squad.

Six minutes later, Hamilton signaled that he’d seen something through his IR goggles. Had to be the other team making contact with an IR strobe.

Sure enough, a second later someone hidden in the trees called out the challenge word. Hamilton gave the predetermined response and waved Reid and the others forward.

A group of figures appeared through the trees in the distance. On a real op Reid and the others would have been on high alert in case it was a setup or ambush. Since this was a training exercise no one was going to shoot them, so while they would still act like professionals and keep their game faces on, they could afford to relax their guard a little.

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