Hot Intent (Hqn) (10 page)

“Gaviota hut,” Alex muttered. “That’s where we’re headed.”

“What’s a gaviota hut?”

“
Gaviota
means
seagull
in Spanish. It’s a ruin where only the birds hang out.”

“Our contact is a seagull? Cool,” she replied.

He smiled briefly and turned up a path that looked more like a washed-out gully at the moment. They wound up the hill about halfway when they reached a massive washout, maybe twenty feet across and at least as deep.

Alex screeched to a stop on its lip and she barely avoided plowing into him and pushing him over the edge. “Whoa,” she gasped.

They stared down into the ravine together. A raging torrent of water rushed down the mountain. If either of them fell into that it would smash them on the rocks before washing their broken bodies down the hill.

She looked up the mountain, and the slash of the ravine was visible all the way to the top. She murmured, “Got a plan C meeting point, Captain Preparedness?”

“No. We’re on our own for now.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

He shrugged. “I’m good at improvising. I’m going to suggest we head toward the area where the ships have been seen coming and going and scout around for ourselves.”

“Where is this area exactly?”

He shrugged. “Up the coast a little ways. I’ve got a map and GPS on my phone. We’ll find it.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, this island is trashed. It’s not like we can just take off hiking over hill and dale. We’ve got no food, no water and, worse, no bug spray!”

He arched an eyebrow at her.

“I’m serious! Think about the size of mosquitoes that are going to start breeding in this mess. In a week, they’ll be carrying off small children.”

“I have industrial-strength bug repellent,” he replied dryly.

“You do? Hand it over.”

“There aren’t any insects out to speak of.”

“I feel itchy,” she declared.

“That’s the sand in your clothes. We need to preserve the supplies we have. I have no idea what we’ll find when we get to where we’re going.”

“Do you know exactly where that will be?” she asked in resignation.

“Nope.”

He took his bearings using his cell phone, and then backtracked cautiously to a side road they’d passed a few minutes earlier. No telling if there were more military patrols out hunting for them or not. She rather thought that they would still be out here.

She stared up the narrow track that disappeared into the darkness. “You’re seriously going to just head off into the jungle?” she asked in dismay.

“There are fresh tire tracks on this road. It’s passable for at least a while.”

Well,
that
was encouraging. This “road” of his looked like a pair of bad ruts and not much more. Her irritation, and her certainty that he was torturing her on purpose, mounted as they hiked up into the hills. The “road” did, in fact, hold up for several miles. But then, they hit a patch where, as far ahead as Alex’s high-powered flashlight could reach, nothing but downed trees was visible.

“End of the road,” he muttered.

“How far to wherever we’re headed?”

“Far enough that it’s time for us to make camp and get a little rest before we finish the hike.”

Oh, God. She watched in dismay as Alex moved a ways up the hill and off into the brush. She followed glumly and helped him spread out a tarp on the ground. They spread another over a downed tree limb lying several feet above the first tarp. They laid big banana leaves in a shingle pattern over the shelter to help it shed water and then covered the whole mess with brush, no doubt to camouflage it from prying eyes.

She crawled into the tiny tent and Alex followed suit. She muttered, “Did I ever mention I hate camping?”

“I got that memo when you went looking for an electrical outlet in a cave in Zaghastan so you could blow-dry your hair.”

“I did not look for an outlet! I merely complained that there wasn’t one.”

“I rest my case,” he murmured.

“Just tell me there aren’t ginormous snakes crawling around all over the place out here.”

“There aren’t ginormous snakes crawling around all over the place out here.”

“Is that the truth?”

He snorted. “Of course not. The locals’ name for the Cuban boa constrictor is the
maja.
They’re native to these jungles. Not the biggest snakes on earth, but they’re aggressive.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Get some sleep, Katie.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He merely offered his arm for a pillow, and she couldn’t maintain enough ire to turn him down. She was exhausted by all this Jane of the Jungle stuff.

*

S
HE
WASN
’
T
SURE
if it was the deafening cicadas outside or the steamy heat inside the tent that woke her up, but either way, she roused to bright green light and the sticky discomfort of sand and sweat on her skin. She rolled over and suppressed a groan. Her body ached from head to foot. Her Pilates instructor was going to be so disappointed. “Alex?” she called out low.

“I’m here.”

She crawled out the opening in the end of their makeshift tent and sighed in relief as a stirring of cooler air caressed her. Alex was chopping up a small papaya with the same sort of machete she’d seen those men carrying last night. “Where’d you get that?” she exclaimed under her breath.

“From the tree over there. It fell over in the storm and the fruit wasn’t all blown away.”

“No, silly. The big dang knife.”

“That road we were walking along last night used to have houses beside it. There are all sorts of household goods snagged in the rubble. I picked it up.”

Personally, she’d been too absorbed in her misery to notice such things.

He passed her a dripping slice of orange papaya and she bit into it with a moan of pleasure. She’d never tasted anything so sweet and refreshing in all her life.

“I saved this for last,” he announced some minutes later. He hoisted a big green, roughly triangular fruit onto a big rock and raised the machete over it.

“What’s that?”

“Coconut.”

“No way. They’re round, brown, hairy things.”

He grinned at her and took a mighty whack at it. “The brown bit is the seed. This is the entire fruit.” It split open to reveal what she knew as a coconut nestled inside. He dug it out of the mushy pulp.

He gave the coconut a sharp rap with the machete and it split open. He dropped the knife and caught the two halves in his hand. “Drink the coconut water. We need the fluid.”

It didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t that great, either. It was wet, though, and her body craved the moisture. They scooped out the coconut flesh with their fingers and ate that, as well. She liked hers sweetened, but hey. It could be a worse meal. Alex could be asking her to eat raw fish. Or bugs.

As the morning heated up, Alex stripped off his T-shirt to reveal a glistening chest rippling with muscle. “Are you looking to get jumped, sailor?” she murmured.

“By you? Bring it, baby.”

Her gaze narrowed. She did need to get naked, anyway, and shake the damned sand out of her clothes. She wiggled out of her jeans, which had dried tightly to her body. “I’m going to have to do some serious twerking to get those back on,” she declared.

He grinned. “Can’t wait to see the show.”

Speaking of which, she stripped off her shirt slowly and made a production of reaching behind her back to unhook her bra. She brushed the sand off her breasts sensuously, enjoying the feel of her fingertips sweeping across the sensitive peaks.

Abruptly other fingers were there, pushing hers aside. They brushed the sand off her entire body, in fact, leaving her moaning and gasping with pleasure. And when she didn’t think she could take any more, Alex pushed her back against a fallen tree trunk, arching her backward until her body was taut and unable to move. Once he had her immobilized and at his mercy, he finally unzipped his jeans, freed himself and plunged into her.

She cried out and he pressed his hand over her mouth fast. Good call. She never did have any restraint once he took control of her body. She arched up into him, matching him thrust for thrust sprawled across the giant log, while he took her body fast, then slow, rough, then gentle. He closed his eyes today, lost in his own pleasure. But that was fine with her. Any second now, she was going to...

She screamed against his hand. To explode. Like that. Omigosh. The orgasm had taken her by surprise, ripping through her like Giselle had gone through this end of Cuba.

Alex collapsed against her with a low, shuddering groan, pressing her buttocks uncomfortably into the rough tree bark. But nearly as quickly, he straightened, lifting her up and gently brushing off her backside. “Did we get all the sand off?” he asked wryly.

“I’m pretty sure we shook it all off,” she managed to reply without panting too audibly. She pulled her clothes on with unsteady hands while he efficiently folded the tarps and stowed them in his pack.

He announced, “It’s time for us to get moving. We have a ways to go before night. If you could finish packing, I’ll do a little reconnaissance.”

“Want me to come with you?”

“Good Lord, no!”

Whether he was concerned for her safety or for the burden she would be to him, she couldn’t tell. Either way, he whirled and disappeared into the brush quickly, as if worried she might follow him, anyway.

She sighed. The man was such a loner sometimes. Darned if that wasn’t part of his appeal, though. The fact that he’d chosen to let her inside his personal fortress of solitude was sexy as all get-out to her. Were they not fugitives who’d be arrested or shot on sight, and were there not boa constrictors out here, this wouldn’t be a bad little spot to stay for another day or two and have lots of hot monkey sex.

But after that, she would want a hot shower in a real bathroom in a decent hotel. One day at a time, Katie. One day at a time.

CHAPTER SIX

A
LEX
HURRIED
AWAY
from their hiding spot, nervous that Katie would do something stupid like try to tail him. She’d done crazier things before.

Where had all those soldiers last night come from, and why the hell hadn’t the contact met them at either the primary or secondary rendezvous points? Last night had been a setup. The Cuban army had been there with the intent to ambush the two of them.

Something was very wrong with this mission. He felt it in his bones. Of course, it was possible that the contact had been injured or killed in the storm. Or that he was tied up helping out his own family and hadn’t been able to peel away to come pick up the two Americans illegally in the country.

But none of those reasons rang true with his instincts. If he was right, someone had tipped off the Cubans where to find him and Katie. He had a hard time believing his father would betray his only son...but then, maybe it wasn’t so hard to believe if he stopped to think about it. His father’s brand of love would follow a scorched-earth policy in the face of betrayal.

The hot sun beat down on him and he let it. In a few days, he would be tanned darkly and, with his dark hair, would blend in for the most part with the locals. Blonde Katie, however, was going to burn like a lobster, loudly announcing her non-Cuban heritage to anyone who cared to look at her. He had to get her off the main roads and tucked away somewhere safe. Soon.

Every noise was a threat to her, every snapping twig a potential disaster that could cost him the woman he loved. His nerves were frayed and they hadn’t even been here a full day yet.

Baracoa sat at the eastern tip of Cuba, on the most isolated piece of the island. In fact, many people called the city the Siberia of Cuba. For decades, political dissidents had been sent there because it was so completely cut off from the rest of the island. After Giselle, the single decent road into this region was undoubtedly knocked out from both directions, cutting off the area again.

Which, of course, brought up the question of why the CIA had felt such a burning need to insert him and Katie at exactly this place on the island. What in the hell were the two of them supposed to be seeing out here?

He made his way up the hill toward a relatively clear mountaintop. If his maps weren’t wrong, a decent-size village lay in the valley just beyond this ridge.

Or at least what was left of one. He topped the ridge and stopped cold as the destroyed remains of a big valley sprawled beneath him. Here and there a stone structure seemed intact. The concrete buildings more or less were standing. But the rest of the village and most of the surrounding trees were trashed. A bomb might as well have landed here. Man. The main street through the village was flooded. A woman plodded slowly through thigh-deep water, her skirt hiked up around her hips. Even from here, he could see shock and despair in the set of her shoulders.

He knew exactly what it was like to be living normal life one day and wake up the next to find everything you knew and loved totally destroyed. Except for him it hadn’t been an act of nature; it had been his father’s arrest for espionage against the United States and Peter’s subsequent expulsion from America that imploded his world.

He watched the village through his binoculars for a long time and saw nothing to arouse his suspicion. No army patrols moved through the area. All seemed quiet.

Nonetheless, his instincts were yelling at him to pull up stakes and get the hell out of Cuba. It remained to discover, though, what Peter had to do with all of this. An unfamiliar sensation of being torn in two ripped through him. God, he hated this. His entire life had been based around becoming the best spy his father could possibly mold him into. He wasn’t functioning at anything approaching full capacity. Katie was a liability to him he could not afford to continue operating within.

He and Katie would scout out the area as quickly as possible, figure out what his old man was up to and then the two of them were getting the hell out of Dodge before something bad happened to both of them.

He made his way carefully back to his and Katie’s hiding spot. They ate the last of the papayas he’d salvaged from the downed tree and got ready to head out.

He did not have a good feeling about this.

*

K
ATIE
WAS
GLAD
to see civilization again, even if it was in tatters.

It hadn’t been hard to find the village’s health clinic. The cinder-block building they were directed to was slightly less ruined than most, and a path had been shoveled to the door through the debris and mud. Ahead of her, Alex poked his head inside the white stucco building that was now stained with a waist-high coating of dried mud.

“Who’s in charge here?” Alex asked cautiously.

“That would be me.” The woman who stepped onto the porch had strands of silver in her black ponytail. She was small. Sturdy. No-nonsense. At the moment, she wore latex gloves covered in blood.

“My name is Alexei.” With a glance down at the woman’s hands, he did not offer to shake hands.

“I’m Sylvia Vasquez. Are you or the woman hurt?”

“We’re fine. Do you by any chance need a doctor?”

“Are you kidding? If you know how to get one here, tell me!”

“I’m a surgeon. What can I do for you?”

The woman stared at Alex in shock for several long seconds. Then she shook herself a little and muttered something fast in Spanish about answered prayers. She said briskly, “This way.”

Katie trailed Alex and Sylvia deeper into the building, whose back half was split into four tiny examining rooms. As Katie’s eyes adjusted to the dim interior—on account of the boarded-up windows—she placed Sylvia in her early fifties. Dark eyes. Tired-looking. Like she hadn’t slept in a few days.

The woman resumed stitching a nasty gash in a man’s forearm in one of the rooms as she talked. “I’ve got a patient in the next room. Needs surgery. Beyond my abilities. Take a look.”

Alex nodded and passed Katie his pack. “Come with me,” he muttered.

A camp cot stood against the wall, and a man laid on it, writhing in obvious pain. Alex knelt by the injured man’s side and lifted a blood-soaked pad off the man’s middle.

“What have you got for medical supplies?” Alex called tersely.

Katie knew that tone of voice. The trauma surgeon was in the house.

Sylvia called back a shockingly short list of supplies and equipment.

Alex nodded and then glanced over at her. “The light’s as good in here as anywhere, so we’ll sterilize this room as much as possible. Katie, you’ll assist me. Sylvia can keep working on the other patients.”

She nodded and commenced unpacking the plastic tarps he’d brought for this purpose. Using the roll of duct tape they’d brought, she tacked clear plastic over the window frame while he sprayed the tarps, ceiling and floor with disinfectant. Makeshift operating theater in place, Alex scrubbed his hands in a bucket of water with the iodine-based soap he’d brought.

Katie cringed and joined him in washing. She knew what came next. They donned surgical gloves and masks, and he parked her next to a small tray of surgical tools he laid out. Grumbling about primitive medicine, Alex administered ether by dripping it onto a gauze pad over the man’s mouth, but in a few minutes the patient was unconscious.

Surgery never failed to gross her out. But at least she didn’t pass out as he dug into the man’s gut to repair something or other. Alex asked for tools tersely as he worked, and she passed them to him quickly.

In maybe twenty minutes, Alex started to stitch the man up. Which was just as well. The patient started to move a little and moan as the ether wore off. At least she was getting a firsthand look at what medicine would have looked like a hundred years ago.

Alex commented, “He could use a pint of blood, but there isn’t any to give him.”

“I could donate a pint,” Katie offered. “I’m O positive.”

“That’s a noble offer. But if you donated blood to everyone who needs some around here, you’d be drained dry. You need the blood more, anyway. We’re going to be working long hours for a while.”

Alex was not kidding. When word got out that a doctor had arrived, patients started to pour in from the surrounding area, and he worked nearly around the clock. Katie did what she could to ease his load, but there was only so much she could do to help him.

They survived on bottled water and canned food Sylvia scared up from somewhere. A hastily dug outhouse behind the clinic served much of the populace, and baths consisted of sponging off over a bucket of cold water.

How Alex kept going like he did, she had no idea. He moved from lacerations to broken limbs to major surgeries without pause for twenty-four hours at a stretch. He went down for four hours’ sleep, and repeated the whole routine again.

Three days passed this way, with Katie working frantically in the background. She collected scrap wood, built a fire, put a huge kettle of water over it and spent hours dipping towels, sheets and surgical tools into buckets of boiling water. She fed children and passed out bottles of water, mopped blood off the floors and sweat off Alex’s brow and forgot what it felt like to sit down and rest.

As miserable and demanding as the work was, Katie found reassurance in discovering that the Alex she’d first met and fallen in love with still existed. The doctor passionate about his work and about saving patients was still inside him. The physician was just buried beneath the spy. Now, if only the man and his feelings could be located beneath the spy, life would be perfect.

The fourth day dawned, and something dawned on Katie, too. She asked Alex over their breakfast of powdered eggs and canned tomatoes, “Isn’t it about time for us to be moving on? When we were in Zaghastan, it took about three days for word to get out among the locals that we were in the area. It must work about the same here.”

He nodded around a slug of water. “I’m counting on it working about the same.”

That wasn’t exactly an answer. She pressed. “Are we going to leave soon?”

He shook his head and picked up his trash. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I’m timing how long it takes the Cuban army to show an interest in us.”

What the heck did that mean? “They showed quite an interest in us the night we arrived. Isn’t the whole point of being here avoiding those guys?” she asked.

“Someone in the intelligence service no doubt told the army to ambush our arrival point. What I’m watching is how quickly they track down reports of a foreign doctor showing up in the area.”

“You’re using us as bait?” she squeaked.

“More or less.”

“There’s no ‘less’ about it. You’re sitting here waiting for them to come after us! And what exactly are you planning to do when they get here?”

He shrugged. “Evade them.”

“Just like that?”

“Yup.”

God, she hated it when he went all monosyllabic on her like this. “Isn’t that just a wee bit dangerous?”

A shrug.

Great. Now he wasn’t speaking at all. At least her vocal cords were functioning normally. “This is a lousy idea, Alex. Just because your father is in bed with the Cubans doesn’t mean they’ll embrace you like a long-lost son.”

“I’ve got to go,” he bit out.

“You’re avoiding me,” she called after him as he beat a hasty retreat. “I’m not done talking about this with you!”

Apparently, he was done talking about it with her, though. He dived into the morning’s line of patients with enough vigor for her to be certain he was dodging her.

Old Alex would not have taken such a risk with her around. New Alex was far too cavalier about danger for her taste.

As quickly as the deluge of patients had come, it stopped around noon that day. Sylvia told the two of them to take a few hours off. They went to her little cottage next door, which was missing part of its roof, crawled wearily into hammocks draped with mosquito netting and crashed.

It was very dark and the insects had gone quiet for the night when Katie roused to a hand shaking her awake. It was Sylvia.

“Alex, Katie, a truck just drove in with a dozen patients.”

Katie groaned and rolled out of the hammock. She ached all over even though her cell phone said she’d been asleep for nearly twelve hours. She pulled on her last clean T-shirt and followed Alex and the nurse next door.

The patients were crowded into the front room of the clinic, and they looked terrible. Several were barfing into bags, while several more twitched on the floor in continuous convulsions. A few more gripped their bellies and smelled of excrement.

Alex swore under his breath. “Where have they come from?”

Sylvia collected answers to his rapid-fire questions while he started examining the worst of the bunch. It turned out they all came from a small village to the north along the coast. They had eaten enough different foods that he ruled out mass food poisoning. Cholera would have made them all explosively empty their bowels and not just a few of them, so that was thankfully off the table as a possibility.

Alex looked down throats, poked bellies and moved limbs, a frown intensifying on his brow all the while. At last, he murmured, “Sylvia, I need to know exactly where these people live and how they got here.”

The nurse collected descriptions of several plantations and collective farms in a cluster along the coast.

Alex asked with chilling calm, “Find out how many have already died from this sickness.”

Sylvia stared at him in alarm. “What is it? Are we looking at an epidemic?”

Katie’s blood ran cold. She and Alex were vaccinated against pretty much everything known to man that had a vaccine. But this could get ugly fast if something infectious had hit the local population.

Alex merely repeated over his shoulder as he held down a convulsing woman, “How many dead?”

Sylvia asked the question.

“Taking into account that some of them may duplicate counting some of the deaths, maybe fifty. Another forty or fifty have milder symptoms, and a dozen or so were too far gone to move and are probably dead by now.”