A THOUSAND KISSES DEEP Read online

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  Contents:

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  © 2004

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  Chapter 1

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  It began like any other mission, with the same calculated proficiency instinctive to the rat fighters—operatives who had proven themselves to be natural-born survivors.

  They had arrived after dark. Six men dressed in black: special intelligence agents who had survived seven years in the trenches of global espionage. Six Onyxx agents on their last field mission before reassignment. Their last hurrah—as the saying went—before they were disbanded and their expertise took each of them in a different direction.

  But on this night in early September something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. And the question of the hour was, who had sold them out, friend or foe?

  Sly McEwen had been asking himself that question from the moment his point man had gone down and he'd lost contact with the other four agents.

  The surf pounding the jagged rocks three hundred feet below told the story. The only way off the Greek island was the way they had arrived, clinging cliffside on a rope. The rescue boat was two miles out. The aqua gliders and scuba gear that had brought them ashore, purposely sunk in the depths of the Aegean Sea to aid in their escape.

  "So the predator becomes the prey." Jacy Madox sat wedged between two rocks, his tone as easy as ever, as if his life's blood wasn't flowing from his body with every breath he took. "A failed mission, with casualties. Merrick's going to be an ass about this when you get back. Neat and tidy. No excuses. That's the way he likes it."

  Sly had seen it before—the way the half Blackfoot Indian could separate himself from his pain. Some kind of spiritual, out-of-body business, is how Jacy had once explained it.

  He stripped off his shirt, ignoring the four-inch knife wound that had laid open his shoulder. It was bone deep, but he dismissed it and tied his shirt around Jacy's waist to slow his blood loss. After cinching it tight, he pulled his Warhawk from the Kydex scabbard strapped to his thigh. One quick maneuver and the razor-sharp blade sliced through his point man's pant leg.

  Jacy relaxed his head against the rock and closed his eyes as Sly examined his leg. "Tucking tail isn't our style, but you sure as hell were tucking, ducking and dodging coming out of that compound. I knew you could run, but damn, I don't think I've ever seen you pick 'em up and lay 'em down quite that fast."

  "That's because you're usually ahead of me."

  "That's true. Which means you should have left me behind where I lay."

  Sly ignored the comment, knowing the rules on sanctioned missions and fallen comrades. It was bullshit.

  "Now we know why the Chameleon's on the Agency's top five most wanted," Jacy said.

  "He's a slippery son of a bitch," Sly agreed, continuing to assess the mangled leg. "I thought we should have taken more time to prepare. Things might have been different if Merrick hadn't been in such a damn hurry."

  "You don't prepare for a wanagi."

  Sly snorted. "The Chameleon's no ghost."

  "Then what is he? Just another lucky underground criminal?"

  "A damn good criminal," Sly amended. "And why not? If he's an ex-operative, the Agency can take credit for teaching him the tricks of the trade."

  "Then you believe the rumors?"

  "Don't you?"

  "The Chameleon a rogue operative … I don't know. His profile's too sketchy to be an ex-Onyxx agent," Jacy said. "We don't even know what the hell he looks like. Seems to me if Onyxx can pin down the eye color of a gnat on a gorilla's ass in the Congo they sure as hell should be able to harvest a picture or fingerprints of the Chameleon. Especially if he's one of their own."

  Onyxx was one of the National Security's most advanced special intelligence agencies. Sly admitted that something didn't smell right.

  "This guy's flesh and blood," he said, examining the protruding bone below Jacy's knee. "He puts his pants on one leg at a time, same as you and me."

  "Equals, then?"

  Sly looked up and gave his friend one of his rare smiles. "I can't say."

  "You mean you won't until you're breathing down his neck and have him on the run?"

  "How he maneuvers would do it."

  "Because then you'd know if he can piss on the run."

  The pissing joke had survived for seven years along with the rat fighters. Jacy, Sly and the other field agents had been sent to Brazil on their first mission. Caught in a war with rebel fighters, they had fought their way through a snake infested, hellhole of a jungle for ten hours. To survive that day everything—including pissing—had been done on the run.

  "You do manage that with amazing coordination, Sly," Jacy complimented. "Makes me wonder what else you can do with that trained animal in a tight spot. Aaah! Go easy on the leg. Damn. You trying to break it clean off?"

  Sly sheathed the Warhawk, rocked back on his hunches. "Your tibia's broken."

  "You mean shattered, don't you? They were using P90's with tumblers. The leg's gone."

  Jacy was probably right. If the leg could be saved it would take a miracle. But the leg wasn't the worst of it. The second bullet had entered along his spine while Sly was running from the compound with Jacy slung over his shoulder. With the amount of blood he was losing, he'd bleed to death before they got off the island.

  The irony was that the bullet that would likely kill Jacy had saved Sly.

  Sly seldom allowed himself to get emotionally caught up in the fallout surrounding a mission. But from the moment they'd been ambushed inside the compound his gut had started to churn—emotions butting heads with a strong suspicion that Merrick had sent them on a suicide mission. It was the only explanation for things turning to shit so fast.

  "Stinks like a setup," Jacy said around a labored breath.

  Sometimes his ability to tap into Sly's mind was downright spooky. "If Merrick set us up, I'll kill him."

  Because Sly never talked much unless he had something important to say, his words were never taken lightly. He was the quiet one in the outfit, the sly one. His size and natural born athletic ability and intelligence made him unbelievably tough and as deadly as a straight-line wind.

  But then manners and popularity hadn't been on Adolf Merrick's list of requirements the day the Agency's commander had seated himself at Sly's table in a little café in Lula, Mississippi. No, Merrick hadn't been searching for a dinner companion who knew how to win friends, or use his napkin.

  He'd wasted no time getting to the point, saying in an educated New England voice, "I'm looking for men with nine lives who are living on number thirteen. Men who have seen hell. From what I've read, you've been living in hell since you were born. Men like yourself interest me, Mr. McEwen. I hire survivors, and pay them a lot of money to do what comes natural to them. You interested?"

  Sly looked over his shoulder to where Castle Rock compound stood lit up like an amusement park. The alarms were still blaring while three spotlights continued to search the perimeter.

  Days ago, from a rented fishing boat, they had gotten their first look at the rocky island in the middle of the Aegean Sea. The compound looked like an isolated monastery high on a rocky cliff, but it was anything but a lamasery for monks. The Chameleon was neither a religious man, nor an ill-bred pagan rebel. But an ex-Onyxx agent? Until he was captured no one would know for sure. All that could be guaranteed was that he was one of the richest international criminals in the country—the richest and the most elusive.

  The monastery's exterior bleakness had been pure subterfuge. Inside, Sly and Jacy had found a pleasure palace of sorts, an exotic recreational facility for the Chameleon's league of supporters and
thieves in between jobs.

  Bjorn and Pierce had gone over the stone wall first, their job to disarm the perimeter. And while Ashland and Sully planted explosives to seal off an underground escape tunnel, Sly and Jacy had scaled the monastery walls and slipped inside to knock out the security system. Only the system had been triggered by sophisticated heat sensors—sensors strategically placed deep within the interior to ensure an intruder's entrapment.

  The sound of shifting rocks warned Sly that someone was on the trail below them. He reached for his H&K, slid the short barrel between the rocks, and aimed it at the footpath. Looking through the weapon's night-vision scope, he spotted an armed force of ten.

  Long minutes ticked by as the men moved along the rocky path unaware that they were being observed. When the danger had passed, Sly pulled back the H&K and relaxed on his heels.

  "You're dead if you don't get going." Jacy's voice was liquid smooth with no hint of the pain that must be ravaging his body. "There's still time. Leave me, Sly. Take off, and don't look back. Go on."

  Sly let Jacy's words roll off his back. "Dead or alive, we're leaving together. If you don't have the guts to keep breathing, I'll carry out a dead man. Makes no difference to me. You'll be riding either way."

  The sky was black. No moon. No stars. Just rocky terrain, and the smell and sound of the pounding surf below. Sly waited another thirty minutes, then made his move. He pulled Jacy to his feet and hoisted him onto his good shoulder, the action forcing an odd whooshing noise from his point man's lungs. He was out in the open, a hundred yards away from cover, when he heard footsteps behind him. He swung around, his gun anchored against his hip. But there was no need to fire when he heard Bjorn Odell's Scandinavian accent swearing at Pierce Fourtier to slow down.

  Seconds later the shadows materialized into men, and Sly saw why Bjorn was cursing. Pierce was moving as swiftly as a low soaring eagle, while Bjorn was hobbling on one good leg, leaning heavily on Ashland Kelly.

  Bjorn's bloody thigh guaranteed he carried lead, and Ash had a bandanna tied around his head to keep the blood from flowing into his eyes. As for Pierce, the Frenchman from Louisiana had more visible skin showing on his muscular body than clothing—he looked like he'd been run through a human cheese shredder.

  They were one man short. Sly asked, "Where's Paxton?"

  "Sully's dead."

  Sly could hear the guilt in Ash's voice. The two men had gone into the underbelly of the monastery together, and only one had come out. It was clear in Ash's voice that he blamed himself. Sly understood; Jacy should be on point right now instead of riding his shoulder.

  "What happened to the breed?" Bjorn asked.

  "Hit twice. Alive, but bleeding like a leaky faucet."

  Pierce eyed Jacy. "You sure he's alive? He looks dead."

  Sly saw Bjorn lower his head. Over the years the man from Denmark and the breed from Montana had become close friends.

  He said, "Dead or alive, he's going out with us."

  "Damn right he is." Bjorn's head came up fast. "I'll carry him."

  "You worry about that lame leg of yours and keeping up. I'll carry Jacy." Sly asked Ash, "Was Sully able to plant the explosives before he went down?"

  "I'm not sure. I was forced to fall back when they started unloading tumblers a dozen at a time. I tried to get to him, but they had him pinned down."

  "There's ten guns out hunting our asses." Sly looked at Pierce. "You're on point. Get us out of here."

  Sly shifted Jacy on his shoulder and the breed moaned. He was still alive—hanging on by a thread. That thread would break before they reached the boat, but dead or alive, Jacy Madox was coming off the rock. Sly would have it no other way.

  When they reached the cliffs Pierce quickly lashed Jacy to Sly's body, saying, "If Sully set that detonator those explosives should go off any minute. Buy us some time."

  Sly grabbed hold of the rope he'd pinned into the rock earlier. "I'll see you at the bottom. If I get hung up, don't wait for me. Haul your asses out of here." He pinned Pierce with his unforgiving steel-blue eyes. "Make sure Bjorn and Ash make it back."

  Washington, D.C.—six days later

  "Casualties are always hard to swallow, McEwen. Especially if the mission is written up as a failure. But this one won't be. You were able to verify that the compound exists even if you weren't able to confirm that the Chameleon was there."

  Merrick's voice was as cut-and-dried as his manners. Sly hadn't expected different. From the moment he'd met his commander, he'd suspected Adolf Merrick had survived his own hell once upon a time.

  He was one chilly bastard, all right. Even his winter-gray eyes and silver hair fit Merrick's code name of Icis.

  Ignoring the guest chair that his commander gestured to, Sly remained standing. At six foot three, his legs widespread, his back steel-pipe straight, he appeared as constant and unforgiving as Mississippi mud.

  "I read your report, cross-referenced it with the others. Too bad about Paxton. He was a good operative. A helluva thing to have happen weeks before he would have been transferred out of field duty."

  "A helluva thing." Sly was no longer able to keep the emotion out of his voice. "Sully's dead. Jacy is still in the hospital fighting for his life. That sure is one helluva thing, all right."

  Merrick said nothing.

  "Was the mission a bogus manhunt?" Sly asked. "Was it a suicide mission? Rumor has it that the Chameleon took out one of our agents in Istanbul while we were being shot to shit in the middle of the Aegean Sea."

  "It's true that an Onyxx agent was assassinated in Turkey. We can't prove it was sanctioned by the Chameleon, however. To answer your question, this was no bogus manhunt. We had solid information that led us to Castle Rock. And as far as being a suicide mission, that's ludicrous. Here at Onyxx we don't dispose of our agents once they've maxed out their field service, McEwen. We find them a new home within the Agency according to their expertise."

  A field operative's tour lasted seven years, and once the tour was up, the agent was reassigned. Although it was rare for agents to return to civilian life, they had a choice to do so. Of the rat fighters, less than one percent ever left. Not ordinary men, the rats had no reason to leave the nest since the Agency was the closest thing to a real family any of them had ever had.

  Sly studied Merrick's face for the slightest sign that he was lying. A subtle twitch. A slight tightening in his jaw. But there was nothing. His boss was as chilly as always, his mouth concealed behind a full gray mustache, and his eyes obscured by a pair of gray-tinted glasses.

  "The mission smells sour, Merrick. Like we were set up."

  "There's nothing in your report to support that. Are you working on a hunch, McEwen? Yours, or Odell's? Or did the breed have another vision?"

  Sly ignored the sarcasm. He wasn't going to apologize because Merrick was a facts-and-data military man, and he was a street survivor who played his gut and had a second pair of eyes in the back of his head.

  "All I can tell you is that I received information pinpointing Castle Rock as one of the Chameleon's compounds. The tip needed to be checked out."

  "First it was a solid piece of information, and now you're calling it a tip. Which was it?"

  "In my report I'll be referring to it as a tip."

  The bureaucratic bullshit games the Agency played made Sly sick. "Because the mission was doomed from the beginning, and you knew it."

  "No!"

  "Then bring your informant forward so he can be questioned."

  "That's not how we do things here and you know it. At the moment I'm satisfied with what we have. Proof that Castle Rock is, or was, a compound for the Chameleon's band of criminals. That explosion you authorized blew one helluva hole in that monastery, and our mop crew isn't having much success finding anything we can use to sanction another mission. But we aren't giving up."

  "Ever consider that your informant is working for the Chameleon? That he sold you out?"

  "I've considered
it. I'll be investigating the possibility, but I don't believe for one minute that's the case."

  "What about a mole inside the Agency leaking information to the outside?"

  "If you have proof of that you neglected to put it in your report."

  Sly had purposely left out certain details so he could witness Merrick's reaction to his news. But none of it hinted that Onyxx was harboring a mole. "I have no proof that someone inside is working for the opposition. All I've got is one dead friend, and another one who may never walk again. That is if he lives at all."

  "Casualties come with the job. And these two men are not your friends, they are your comrades. Yes, I know that working so closely together forms certain bonds, but you knew when you came aboard that the odds were stacked against all of you surviving. As cold as that sounds, it's fact. Your team has fared better than most. Consider yourself one of the lucky ones, McEwen, and leave it at that."

  Sly watched Merrick closely when he said, "Holic Reznik was there."

  "What?"

  "I said Reznik was at Castle Rock."

  "Why wasn't that in your report? Any of the reports?"

  "I was the only one who saw him. I thought I'd save it for a private conversation."

  "We have no information connecting him to the Chameleon."

  "Exactly."

  "He's an independent professional assassin."

  "Right again."

  "Why would he be there?"

  "The Chameleon has been steadily gaining momentum. That doesn't happen without gaining enemies. Maybe he needs to thin some of them out," Sly offered.

  "That's a good point."

  The price on Holic Reznik's head was as high as the price on the Chameleon's. The only difference between the two men was that Reznik's identity had been confirmed, and the Chameleon's identity was still anyone's guess.

  A man with no face, is how the spy world described the Chameleon. In Jacy's words, a wanagi.

  Merrick leaned back in his chair and stroked his silver mustache. A moment later, he removed his tinted glasses, allowing Sly to see that his commander's eyes were bloodshot.