Chapter Seven
No fire made the choice of dinner easy, at least in Caitlin's opinion. Hawke's MREs were almost palatable when warmed -- the chicken tortellini MRE almost tasted like chicken and pasta when it was hot – but faced with a choice between a cold MRE and one of the sandwiches she'd brought, it was chicken salad on whole wheat bread, no question.
"So, Marella's back." She tilted her head back and drained the last drop of water from the plastic bottle before capping it and stowing it back in her bag. Carry in, carry out, Hawke had said, as if this was a National Park, which come to think of it, it might very well be; just a different nation.
Sitting in the dark without a fire and surrounded by the low hum of night insects in the surrounding woods, her companions' silence was conspicuous. Frowning, she turned first to Dominic, who shrugged.
"I don't keep track of Snow White's harem. They come, they go, sometimes they come back." He shrugged again. "So she's back."
His tone said so what?
"It's nice to have her back, that's what," Caitlin protested. They had another three or four hours to kill and as long as they kept their voices down, Hawke had reluctantly agreed that stretching their legs outside Airwolf wasn't completely out of the question. He didn't want them cramped and stiff when it was time to sneak into the camp.
"She's not."
Hawke's voice came out of the darkness behind her where he was returning from a quick patrol around the edge of the clearing. Caitlin was pretty sure it was the type of patrol men liked to use as an excuse when nature called.
"Not what?"
Hawke settled in next to where they'd sprawled against the helicopter, crouching down and letting his eyes sweep the area almost continuously. His attention was elsewhere but Caitlin knew he'd heard her, wasn't ignoring her.
"She's not back." He turned his gaze in her direction. "She's not working for Michael anymore."
"So why was she in the office for the briefing?" Dom protested, not fully engaged but starting to sound a little curious.
"Because she's a friend of this Orchid person." Caitlin had suspected during the briefing, was sure of it now and Hawke's brief nod confirmed it. "Nice of Michael to let her go with him to Bangkok."
"Not sure he had a choice," Hawke said, a thin trace of humor in his voice
"Oh-ho!" A flash of white in the darkness as Dominic grinned. "And I bet she lets him think he's still in charge."
Hawke sniffed the air, turned his head towards the trees and studied the tree line, all the tension he'd carried earlier in the helicopter suddenly back and visible in the tightness of his shoulders. Caitlin and Dominic fell silent, waiting and watching.
After a few minutes, he whispered, "I can smell the river."
He hunkered down, closer to the ground as if he could blend into the shadows and his eyes darted furtively around the perimeter.
Caitlin exchanged a quick, panicked look with Dominic.
"Let's go over the plan," Santini said quietly, in a warm, steady, familiar tone. "Archangel should be calling soon to tell us whether we're a go." He glanced at his chronometer, squinted slightly and finally lowered his head until it was inches from his wrist. "Now would be good," he muttered under his breath.
Caitlin held her breath, straining to hear the trill of the scrambler engaging, the slight chime of an incoming call.
Still nothing. Just forest noise and Hawke's tight, controlled breathing.
"So we fly to the coordinates they gave us," she said, taking up the figurative baton that Dominic wordlessly passed to her. "Dom stays with the Lady, while you and I sneak into the camp and look for Orchid."
The lilt of her voice, the small uptick in tone that indicated a question somehow reached Hawke. He looked over at her, saw her, and nodded.
"Okay," she said and then looked back at Dominic. Now what?
He lifted his shoulders, shot a glance at Hawke and then sighed.
"You two find that flower lady, hopefully before you wake up the whole camp. Bring her back." His expression soured. "Might have to carry her back after the amount of time they've had her."
Hawke jerked half a second before Caitlin heard the chime. They'd turned down the sound because it would travel at night and while the scanners indicated no humans for at least five kilometers, the situation was too fluid to risk unnecessary noise. Hawke had the hatch open, in the pilot's seat and had opened communications after the second quiet chime.
"Michael?"
"Hawke."
Archangel sounded guarded, even a little cool, but then Caitlin couldn't remember Briggs ever being anything but guarded on satellite transmission, certainly not while in the midst of a mission and when both he and they were on foreign turf.
"Are you in position?"
Hawke snorted his reply.
"I'll take that as a yes. Latest intel confirms she's still being held in that location." A sigh filtered through the transmission. "You're a go. Be careful. I'll see you in Manila."
Hawke triggered the transmit key again before Briggs could sign off.
"What's your wheels up?"
"An hour after you clear Vietnam airspace with Orchid on board."
Hawke was leaning his forehead against his fist and he frowned.
"Yeah, all right. Airwolf out."
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Who is Braxton working for?"
Marella dug her thumb into a knot of coiled muscle as Michael groaned and shifted uncomfortably on the bed. Oh, yes, he was sore and would be for days. Male pride was a ridiculous thing: he'd lugged the crutches more than 8,000 miles from California and then had left them in the hotel room rather than appear weak.
"Jamie Braxton works for Jamie Braxton. Everyone else is a client or a potential client."
The bed was smaller in the new room but they wouldn't be there long enough for it to matter, and neither their former suite nor this small single contained a bathtub deep enough for a good soak, which was what Michael really needed. It would be at least a day until they were stateside again, so Marella kept up her constant, careful massage of his right hip and leg, eliciting an occasional gasp, grimace and more than a few sharp inhalations through clenched teeth before things started to ease.
"So we pay him to set up a meet and guarantee our safety."
"And the other side either pays him either a flat fee or a percentage of the deal…"
"For luring us into a trap," she interrupted.
"That would be bad for business," Michael countered. "Braxton provides the neutral territory and the security. Both parties come and go safely." He rolled onto his back and didn't even try to hide the wince. "His reputation is his business."
Braxton's reputation notwithstanding, they'd switched to two small adjoining hotel rooms on a different floor shortly after the man had departed. Contingency planning, Michael had said and she'd wholeheartedly agreed, images of Sam Leung's body still fresh in her memory.
Marella held out two pills and the glass of water that had been sitting, ignored, on the nightstand and he took them with obvious reluctance. Once Airwolf started the recovery operation, they'd need to move quickly and Michael needed to be able to keep up. She watched him struggle back into trousers, stand and cautiously stretch.
"What is it that you think Sam knew?"
Michael took careful steps across the room, loosening his limbs. He reached the door to the bathroom and then turned back, managing a slow but steady stride without limping too badly. He sent a blinding smile at her.
"Thank you. Excruciating though it was at the time, it's helped immensely. And I was hoping Sam might have an idea exactly who or what Orchid had been investigating before she disappeared, and particularly what was excised from the reports I saw."
Marella frowned and glanced at the small overnight bag she'd brought. She'd stowed the filmstrips, encased in Mathilde's 'wrappers' amongst her own toiletries. The photos might give them a clue to that but by the time they could have them printed and enlarged, they might get all the answers needed from Mathilde herself. Please God.
"Are you thinking that whomever she was investigating took her and killed Sam?"
It was a tricky situation. Technically, she wasn't cleared to know whatever Mathilde might have been doing and she'd had to remind herself of that – more than once -- as Michael met with Nitaya, Braxton and the other contacts that he'd done by phone, meetings and contacts that she once would joined.
Michael was chewing at his bottom lip, expression thoughtful as he studied her, apparently deciding what he could safely share.
"What I know wouldn't fill a shot glass."
Marella winced; the bitterness in his tone was the closest he'd come to any expression of emotion about Samaritan's death.
He picked up the water glass and studied it for a moment, probably wishing it was filled with a more soothing liquid, something that could take the edge off jangled nerves, something that might have been poured into a shot glass.
"What I know is that intelligence from a number of different sources indicates that a major player in the drug trade, someone who controls both the source and the distribution networks, is buying some powerful associations in Washington."
Which explained why she'd looked at the filmstrips and seen a field of unknown crops, while Michael had looked at the same image and seen poppy fields.
"You remember that job Laban ran on Hawke? Bringing in the Company guy with the fake dog tag?"
Marella nodded.
"Most of it was true, up to the point about St. John's dog tag." He frowned and rubbed at skin next to the dark lens. "DEA was working the case inside the country, the Company ran it outside, and that arrest they made was a big player, but not the only player or the boss."
Marella frowned. "If the Company is running it outside the country…?"
"I wanted to know who and what they'd bought."
She bit back a smile at his matter-of-fact admission. Of course, he couldn't let it go or wait for the Company to decide to share what they learned.
"And after Mathilde's report was modified?"
He nodded, grimly confirming what she'd only hesitantly considered.
"You started thinking they bought someone inside the Firm?"
Michael shrugged. "Or we have someone working for whomever they bought in DC."
"And now they know you're trying to find them," she concluded, her level of uneasiness rising by the minute. "They just don't know how much you already know or suspect."
And they'd tortured Sam Leung to try to learn that.
She glanced at the adjoining room where their security team was waiting on their next move and then back at Michael, who was leaning against the wall between the two rooms and regarding her with a steady gaze.
"They don't know how much my office knows or suspects," he corrected. "I'm not running a one man show, Marella. It's a distributed system, one that increases the chance that one of us will unearth the critical piece of information." He grinned. "You know how much I love to delegate the actual work."
She tried to smile back at him but knew her version was weak tea in comparison. Try as she might, her mind kept drifting back to a filthy room in the Banglampoo district, and the terrifying notion that the people who'd killed Samaritan might at this very moment be looking for Archangel.