Broken Ice (Immortal Operative Book 1) Read online

  BROKEN ICE

  by

  J.R. RAIN &

  MATTHEW S. COX

  Immortal Operative #1

  Other Books by J.R. Rain and Matthew S. Cox

  WINTER SOLSTICE SERIES

  Convergence

  Containment

  Catalyst

  MADDY WIMSEY SERIES

  The Devil’s Eye

  The Drifting Gloom

  ALEXIS SILVER SERIES

  Silver Light

  Deep Silver

  SAMANTHA MOON ORIGINS

  New Moon Rising

  Moon Mourning

  SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES

  Blood Moon

  VAMPIRE FOR HIRE

  Moon Master

  Broken Ice

  Published by Rain Press

  Copyright © 2019 by J.R. Rain & Matthew S. Cox

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Reading Sample: Devil’s Eye

  Reading Sample: Silver Light

  Reading Sample: Convergence

  About the Author: J.R. Rain

  About the Author: Matthew S. Cox

  Broken Ice

  Chapter One

  An Unexpected Stop

  Determination has kept me going whenever my life became stressful, such as having to spend most of my childhood in hiding, or that time Capone’s men abducted me when I was little. It also comes in pretty damn handy when falling a couple thousand feet from an airplane without a parachute, which I had done a couple of hours ago.

  Yeah. That hurt.

  A lot.

  Go to Nicaragua, they said.

  It’ll be fun, they said.

  Well, I suppose it was, other than my assignment taking a turn for the unexpected… and having every major bone in my body broken. Usually, people rely on mechanical assistance to survive a drop like that. Zip lines, chutes, wingsuits, hell, even hang gliders. Not me. Nope. I’ve only got my determination not to die.

  I mean, I would have happily used a parachute, but the night walker the Agency sent me down here to eliminate didn’t offer me one. Admittedly, I’d knocked him unconscious with a 9mm hollow-point to the forehead before the conversation had gotten around to ‘where do you keep the parachutes’. Additionally, I miscalculated the stupidity of his bodyguards.

  All things considered, diving out the door kept me alive. A high-speed impact with the ground is infinitely more survivable without the addition of a giant fireball and twisted plane wreckage. Yeah, I survived the fall… but could do without the excruciating pain. Broken bones, after all, take a little time to heal.

  Patience, Mina, patience.

  Biding my time is another talent that I’ve developed over the years. Again, I think about 1920 or so—it’s a little fuzzy in my memory—when those Outfit guys snatched me out of my backyard. My family had some money back in those days, and they figured they could get a quick infusion of cash by taking me for ransom. They showed up to rob the place, I think, and it surprised the hell out of them to spot me since no one knew my parents had kids. Sensing opportunity, they kidnapped me. After a few hours tied up with a bag over my head, they finally removed it to give me food and water. They thought they’d grabbed a helpless six-year-old, but as soon as I could make eye contact, game over. Lucky for them I’d only been around thirty at the time, so my vindictive streak hadn’t developed. I merely compelled the men to take me home. I still don’t know for a fact what my father did to them, but it’s a pretty easy guess.

  The squealing of knitting bone in my skull stops, so I open my eyes. I’m flat on my back, surrounded by greenery, staring up at the jungle canopy overhead. Based on the amount of dirt gathered at my shoulders, I still had a bit of forward momentum when I hit the ground. I’d lift my head to check out my impact trench, but merely thinking about it hurts too much. Need a little while more.

  I grit my teeth and choke back a scream while untwisting my right arm into a reasonably normal shape. Luck is with me—no bones punched holes in my shirt. Few things hurt as bad as compound fractures with a puncture. And I didn’t exactly have a sewing kit with me.

  A giant four-winged bug comes in for a landing on my cheek. I puff at it, but the critter ignores me, so I puff harder. It twitches, irritated.

  “Hey, get off,” I mutter past a thick gurgle of blood in my throat. “I’m not dead yet.”

  Again, I puff at it, and the bug flies off.

  Ugh. Seriously. Can’t a girl get a little respect? I’m not a landing pad for giant dragonflies… or whatever that thing is. Gradual cracks and creaks come from my legs, ribs, and spine, each one in time with a jolt of pain as my bones mend. Grr. I’m really going to need to find someone to eat, and soon. I briefly fantasize about mashing Andrew’s face into a table upon my return to Langley, but abandon the idea after only a few humorous moments of daydreaming. My having to leap out the door of a faltering Learjet wasn’t his fault.

  Hmm. The plane had to have been under 2,000 feet since I didn’t lose consciousness. Despite the pain, I still consider that a good thing. I hate being defenseless, especially in a jungle. And if my head had burst open, it would have been at least a couple days before I woke up… longer if any quadrupedal carnivores decided to munch on me.

  To occupy the next hour or two, I go back and forth over my mission in my head. I’d infiltrated the underworld of Managua, Nicaragua and spent the past three weeks observing Miguel Ángel Garza exert mental control over a handful of small (and not so small) criminal gangs. My goal had been both to determine what interest the Dominion had in the Central American drug trade, and eliminate him once I couldn’t learn anything more.

  Yeah, we kinda play for keeps in my business.

  Anyway, while Garza undoubtedly had Dominion ties, his activities here appeared motivated entirely by a desire for personal power over humans. That’s not proof his entrenchment in the underbelly of Nicaraguan crime or influence over a handful of key players wouldn’t have eventually become an issue. My first thought had been the Dominion came up with something to add to the drugs that would turn humans back into barely-sentient quasi-apes, but daytime television already exists. In all seriousness though, Garza didn’t appear to be tampering with the drugs. No, he was just a three-bit idiot lording over two-bit idiots. So at least half of the last two months has been a waste of time since nothing traced back to any overarching scheme of the Dominion. Local cops should’ve been able to deal with this guy. Well, assuming they hadn’t been bribed. For damn sure, the CIA didn’t send me down here to clean up narcotics. Someone got some bad intel about the Dominion.

  And being a pile of mushy meat on the floor of the jungle doesn’t exactly help my mood.

  I smile to myse
lf, picturing the Learjet careening into the jungle like a lawn dart, a bloom of orange fire rising up from the crash site. Honestly, it had been beautiful in a terrifying sort of way. While falling, a story I’d heard from somewhere came back to me about a man who survived a drop from a great height because he’d fainted. According to a bunch of internet armchair doctors, his body being completely limp allowed him to walk away from a plunge that should’ve killed him. Not literally walk away, but the guy lived. So, I decided to try it—going limp that is. It might have just worked, too, since I didn’t pop like a tomato on impact. Disembowelment takes a lot longer to recover from—not that I have personal experience with that, just heard stories.

  To my best estimation, about four hours go by of me lying here staring up at the sky before moving ceases being the most painful idea I can come up with. The random creaks and squeals from my skeleton have stopped. My bones don’t feel like they’re moving around inside my muscles anymore, and full-body pain has gone away, replaced with the sort of hunger that requires me to concentrate while eating—so I don’t kill some poor bastard.

  Fair bet if I meet someone running around the jungle with an AK47 and a bandana over their face, they’re going to be high on something… and probably a criminal. Except cocaine or whatever in their system might be a problem. Be just my luck they’d hit me with a random drug test upon my return to Virginia.

  There’s irony in there somewhere… a vampire failing a blood test.

  I’ll just have to take my chances. I need to feed, and soon.

  I sit up, brushing dirt and bits of plant matter off myself. Since Garza’s little plane didn’t have any sort of flight attendant staff for me to impersonate, the sneaky approach got me on board via hiding in the plane three hours before he showed up. The dress that I’d been wearing to blend in among the locals didn’t survive the fall. It’s somewhere along the impact scar I left, ripped off me the instant I made contact with dirt. Fortunately, my bodysuit weathered the crash just fine. The material is on the thin side, and form-fitting, so I usually wear it under clothing when I’m on assignment. Only when it would get in the way of a mission—like a fancy dinner party where I have to show leg or cleavage—does the suit stay behind.

  It’s got plenty of little places to hold gear and gadgets, not to mention it’s quite tough, being partially Kevlar fiber—though not enough to be useful as armor. The major downside, other than it being skin tight, is without having other clothes on top of it, I look like a cross between an action movie spy and that chick from Tomb Raider if she had black hair. My suit is the exact opposite of subtle and unassuming. But, it beats ending up stranded in the jungle naked.

  I don’t do the underwear thing, not since a pair of panties almost killed me in 1994. Don’t ask. It wasn’t pretty. Okay, fine. Ask. The damn things were CIA issued with an antenna wire and electronics in the waistband… military airbase in Czechoslovakia, ECM pod… and yeah, you can see where that’s going. Fire bad. Fire down below even worse.

  Andrew, my handler, still sometimes calls me ‘hot pants.’ And I still sometimes punch him in the nose.

  At least it doesn’t matter if I look like a militarized yoga enthusiast now. My only mission at the moment is to get out of Nicaragua. I open the pocket near my right hip and pull out the smashed remains of a burner cell phone. Damn. Something tells me a 2,000-foot drop isn’t covered in the protection plan.

  I go to toss the useless thing, but stop myself. Humans contaminate nature with enough junk already, they don’t need my help. I’ll carry it back to civilization, throw it in a trash can… and let one of them dump it in the jungle.

  Right. Still stranded… somewhere in western Nicaragua. Garza had been on his way to a meeting in Honduras. I need to get to Dipilto Viejo, a small town near the border. We have a guy there, a former Delta Force operator who can fly me to Cancún. Easy enough to hop a commercial flight back home from there.

  But first…

  I extricate myself from the shallow grave my landing dug, dust myself off more, and turn in place looking at trees. From my landing point, I’ve got no idea which way the plane crashed. It went down way faster than I fell. Since my cell died an inglorious death, I check over the rest of my gear—handgun, sword, mini toolkits, electronic lockpick, etc. Everything else appears intact, though the sheath on my left thigh has a small dent. I still draw the wakizashi to check the blade. Fortunately, it didn’t bend. Then again, it’s a tungsten alloy with a chromium steel edge. Even I couldn’t snap this blade if I wanted to. Though, my muscles can’t compete with crashing into the ground at terminal velocity.

  And yeah, I have a sword. Night walkers are effing stubborn. The two best ways to kill them are beheading and complete destruction of the remains. A fourteen-inch blade is a lot easier to carry around than say, an active volcano or bathtub full of acid.

  I slide it back into the sheath until it locks in with a click.

  The orientation of my impact gouge tells me the direction the plane had been going. I’d be remiss in my mission if I didn’t try to make visual confirmation of a kill, so I make my way into the jungle. One good thing about this place: the thick vegetation overhead keeps the ground level dim enough that I’m not constantly squinting. Talk about a grapevine effect. While the sun doesn’t hurt us, my kind prefer the dark since our eyes are designed to cope with it. The Agency saves quite a bit of money by not having to issue me night vision gear. Desert ops generally require sunglasses, but unlike the movies, we don’t burst into flames or anything. I honestly have no idea who even came up with that whole sun equals spontaneous combustion thing. My best guess is someone back in the 1400s or so heard a vampire complain about the sun because it made him squint, and somehow over the years that turned into instant death. Even the night walkers aren’t like that, though daylight does hit them a little harder.

  ***

  At 5:38 p.m. local time according to my watch, a whiff of burning finally blows by on the wind.

  The soft scratching of aluminum shards on the breeze steers me a bit to the right. Soon, I discover the clearing the crash made, still with a few smoking patches of flames around it. I’m no NTSB investigator, but I strongly suspect this sucker went straight into the dirt like a dart.

  My nose leads me to the heavily-blackened remains of several bodies. The pilot died before the plane hit the ground, courtesy of the idiots. I eventually locate what I think is Garza’s remains, but the piece I find is just that… a piece about the size of my fist and squishy. Could be a partial kidney. Were he alive, I’d probably be able to identify him by sniff, but the overwhelming stink of overcooked barbecue and jet fuel is far too strong to pick out something as faint as a human’s personal scent. “Okay, I don’t see any tracks walking away and… yeah.” I look at all the parts and junk strewn about. “No way he made it out of that… the body is in pieces. I can’t even find the head.”

  For extra assurance, I decide to take a sample and bring it back for DNA analysis… but the two phials in small pockets near my hips are pulverized. So much for that. I’ll get enough weird looks walking into a civilized area in this suit, the last thing I need is to be carrying around a burned piece of human kidney.

  Screw it. He’s done.

  Well-done to be exact.

  I toss the lump back to the ground, check my compass, and head north-northwest.

  ***

  A few minutes after the sun sinks beyond the trees along the horizon, a whole mess of screaming breaks the silence of the jungle.

  I’m passable with Spanish, though I studied Mexican Spanish… so parts of the local dialect go over my head. However, I can make out a middle-aged woman, a younger woman, and two men having an argument. The older woman alternates between pleas ‘not to take her’ and threats of divine retribution, which the men laugh off. Screaming coming from the younger woman mostly consists of ‘get off me.’

  Ugh. Probably a tiny gang kidnapping a young woman for obvious reasons. Normally, I’d avoid
contact with the locals while making my way to an extraction point, but I can’t let this go.

  Besides, I’m hungry. Extreme skydiving takes a lot out of me. It’s kind of a high-impact sport.

  I pick up the pace and divert toward the commotion, reaching a dirt road about thirty seconds later, which I follow to the left in the direction of the shouting. Beside an old, battered pickup truck, two men struggle to contain a panicking girl of around sixteen while a third man holds a fortyish woman—who I assume to be the girl’s mother—at bay with his AK-47.

  All three guys are dressed in T-shirts, with either jeans or camo pants, their clothing so worn out a thrift shop wouldn’t take it as a donation. Yeah. These guys are part of a small-time gang involved in less-than-voluntary prostitution.

  They pin the girl against the side of the truck, forcing her arms behind her back.

  She screams for her mother like a child half her age.

  “Adriana!” cries the woman, her body language suggesting she’s close to rushing in even with a man poised to shoot her.

  He’s my first priority.

  I hurl myself into a sprint as fast and quiet as possible in the daytime. I’m way faster than humans, but not so fast they can’t see me. I do, however, get lucky and reach the guy aiming at the mother before the other two react to my approach. My target doesn’t notice me until I grab his rifle and shove it upward. He squeezes off a burst that goes over the woman’s head an instant before I ram the weapon into his face hard enough to knock him senseless. Both other men abandon their hold on the girl’s arms to go for the rifles slung over their shoulders. I fix them with a stare, stabbing them in the brain with a mental command to stand still. Their arms fall slack at their sides and they stare vacantly into nowhere.

  “Mama!” shouts Adriana, running to hug her mother before bursting into tears.