Chapter 14

14

JAKARTA, INDONESIA

"Surge's signal disappeared, and I can't get her on comms."

Garrett looked at the MWD Tracker app on his SAT phone screen as Zim negotiated the SUV through the crowded Jakarta traffic. Rogue, where are you? He closed his eyes for a split second, hoping he wasn't seeing what he was seeing. But when he opened his eyes, her signal hadn't appeared.

Delaney and Surge had vanished in the trainyard.

"Where do we need to go?" Zim sounded tight as he straddled the SUV on the line between the lanes to pass the motorcycle in front of them.

"Trainyard is all we know."

"Copy that." Zim kept zooming through traffic in that direction.

Garrett turned in the passenger seat and eyed Caldwell tapping away on his phone. Maybe his intel . . . "Got anything?"

The spook shook his head. "Some stuff about hydrogen cyanide," he answered without looking up.

Garrett clenched his jaw. Delaney gone, LD3s missing, and the spook looked for chem intel. Doing his own thing as usual. Eager to jump through his phone to Delaney and Surge, Garrett looked down at his screen. A slow smile spread across his face. "The tracking signal reappeared. Northeast, Zim."

The tires screeched as Zim steered around a car pulling out of an office parking lot in front of them.

He eyed his screen again for the tracker and stilled. "What . . . this can't be right." He frowned, watching Surge's tracker sliding across the screen. Fast. Too fast. "The tracker is going nearly two hundred miles an hour now! Southwest."

"That's strange." Zim squealed into a parking lot, spun the SUV around, and drove southwest.

"What is going on? It doesn't make?—"

"Pull over," Caldwell said.

"Are you insane? Those chems, not to mention Delaney?—"

"Nobody can catch a train going three hundred fifty KPH." Caldwell held up his phone to show a picture. "She's on Whoosh, the Indonesian bullet train they just extended all the way to Surabaya."

"You sure?"

"Nothing else in Indonesia goes three hundred fifty kilometers an hour."

"Augh!" Garrett banged the dash as he felt the SUV slow and pull to the curb.

A new problem to work. Garrett tapped fingers on the console. Delaney was with Surge. But they needed to find her now. It made sense that she'd followed the LD3s onto a bullet train.

"Wait. Passenger or freight train?"

"Freight," Caldwell said, reading from his phone. "They started a freight bullet train once a week last month. With security, but otherwise, only freight. A piece of technology worth more than seven billion dollars."

Garrett ground his teeth. The intel of that lone wolf Caldwell was . . . almost . . . perfect. He didn't trust the man. Hated to trust him. But he had to. He twisted in his seat. "Can you reach out to Damocles?"

"Of course. Why?"

Garrett grinned. "To catch a bullet train, we're going to need a helo."

"I think it's too high profile and high risk, but . . . we can't afford to let the chems get out of country." The spook grabbed his phone and punched speed dial.

Garrett turned forward.

Zim glanced back at Caldwell, who had reached Chapel, and shifted in the driver's seat. "You trust him, Boss?"

Garrett pinched his lips together, then gazed out the window as they passed the Merdeka Palace, lights starting to come on as the sun fell. It hurt to be in a position to rely on the spook. "Caldwell attacks a mission in his own way," he finally said in a low voice. "Holding the silicone evidence until he knew for sure what it was? That's not a team way of doing things."

"I see why you brought him with us. Keep your eye on him."

Garrett nodded, lowered his voice even more. "Trust is hard, but he is effective?—"

"A helo will meet us at a nearby Navy base," Caldwell said from the back seat. "I'll send the directions to your phone, Zim."

Garrett started when it appeared on the screen of Zim's phone, propped up on the console. "That's Indonesia Navy."

Caldwell chuckled, shrugged. "This is the kind of thing Chapel does. I don't ask how. We meet the helo there in twenty mikes. Let's move."

Zim scrolled through the directions to the airport, then headed the car out, hit the gas. Nearly hit a car and steered crazily onto the shoulder of the road.

Garrett grasped the grab handle to keep from sliding as the SUV swerved back onto the road just as a motorcycle shifted into the same lane. Zim swerved back onto the shoulder, then sped past the motorcycle and finally got back onto the road.

"Sorry," Zim said. "We're almost out of downtown."

The red color of the road on the phone's GPS map did turn yellow, then green just ahead. At the moment, he hated red. "But will we make it to the base in time?"

Tongue sticking out of his mouth in concentration, Zim nodded.

Silence reigned. For a second.

"By the way, the support team is bringing explosives," Caldwell said. "You're SEALs—you'll know what to do when we get to the bullet train. And that stuff will be off the planet."

Explosives? Garrett exchanged a look with Zim. "That's not the plan." He held his ground when Caldwell gave him a long look. "Not with Delaney and Surge aboard the train!"

* * *

Delaney had never planned on being in a freight car with containers full of potassium cyanide and sulfamic acid vials. In the dark. Only moonlight pushed past the black veil of night, slanting through the narrow window of the loading door.

How had she even ended up here, sitting between two stacks of Sachaai containers, her hands buried in Surge's fur? "I didn't freeze like at the store shooting," she muttered to him.

He reached up and licked her smack across her face.

She chuckled, wiped off his slobber with her sleeve. "Okay, okay. I admit it. I froze."

He snorted.

"But I didn't stay frozen. And I won't. I promise." Please, God.

He nudged her cheek and downed, his head on her knee as usual when she needed it.

Delaney ruffled the fur of his jet-black head that seemed to meld into the darkness and tried to call Garrett. Didn't work. Not in a speeding train, she guessed. Comms had stopped ages ago. He'd tracked her once via Surge's implant, and she hoped he could do it again.

God, keep Surge's tracker working. Please. Please. She rubbed the spot between Surge's shoulders where the tracker had been injected.

What would she do when the train stopped?

Delaney couldn't just sit here and pet her maligator, and she couldn't jump out and risk bumping into security. Wait. Hadn't she seen a door at the end of the train car? Yep. She walked over and pressed a button on the wall next to it. It slid open for her. Open sesame, right? She stepped through to the caboose, Surge right behind her, and found herself in a kind of foyer. The caboose, apparently, was only lit by the last rays of falling sun shining through the window in an outside door.

She could jump out with Surge, find someplace the SAT phone would work. Refusing to think how that jump would hurt, she looked through the window. Trees and buildings blurred by so fast it almost made her dizzy.

This had to be a bullet train. She couldn't survive a jump out of a speeding train.

"With me, Surge," she said, heading back to the LD3 stacks. Tension tightened the muscles in her shoulders, so she stretched her neck from side to side. Her hip brushed up against a piece of paper taped to the middle Sachaai container. She shone her SAT phone light onto the page with the flashlight app. A shipping document.

Wait . . . coffee ? Seriously? What'd happened to the shoes and plastic butterflies? She glanced around the interior, trying to make sense of why these containers were headed to Cantika Coffee Farm, near Surabaya.

An uneasy thought churned through her—what if she'd somehow followed the wrong containers?

No. She hadn't. She'd never taken eyes off the semi from the time it left the market. So why on earth were these headed to a coffee farm? Not that she was mad—she loved Choca Cantika coffee, the coffee she and all her friends paid extra for at every opportunity. Her friends had posted about the new Choca Cantika Barbecue Sauce on their socials last week. She recalled once reading the "About" paragraph on the back of one of their coffee packages. The owners grew it and roasted it here in Surabaya, Indonesia . . .

Wait. Wait-wait-wait. She turned a circle, as if the wheels grinding in her brain were moving her body. But it all suddenly made sense. Crazy, stupid, evil sense.

Or was she the one with the evil mind? After all, at this point it was just a theory, but what if the shoe factory loaded cute plastic children's shoes with the chemicals, then shipped them to said coffee farm . . . then sliced open the butterflies and laced the coffee beans, shipped them across the Pacific . . . to where they were selling like wildfire across America?

She paled. That was the coffee she'd stopped for at Coffeeshop Nation on her way to the plane to Singapore. That was the coffee in the monthly coffee club she subscribed her dad to.

Terrorist Coffee.

She pulled the sandal out of her pocket, jiggled the vial in the right side of the butterfly body. It clicked and easily popped out. Knowing it was filled with either sulfamic acid or potassium cyanide, she didn't dare open the twist lid. She eased the vial back into the butterfly body, shoved it into her pocket.

Delaney had to hand it to the Sachaai—this was pretty genius. Terrifyingly so. After all, who'd ever think to look at cute kids' shoes? Then who would ever think that coffee, which Americans drank by the billions of cups each year, would be laced with a toxin?

An explosion could kill hundreds or thousands, depending on where it was set off, but if terrorists wanted to kill possibly millions of Americans, Sachaai just needed to put hydrogen cyanide in the number one favorite coffee brand in the US.

Merciful burnt beans! This was awful.

Garrett needed to know— now !

Again, she eyed her SAT phone. No signal at all. At least she'd told him there were six LD3 containers before she'd jumped onto this train. She scratched Surge between the shoulders. Garrett had the MWD tracking app. And without a doubt, even if he wasn't coming for her, she knew he and the others would be coming for the chemicals.

As long as his SAT phone had a signal. If the signal made it out of the freight car.

Oh no. She hadn't thought about that. Maybe she needed to get Surge into the open, onto the platform, but that . . . that seemed too dangerous. Please, please, God!

She sighed. Having no clue where the train was headed or how long it would be, she turned off and pocketed her phone. Surge's nose nudged her cheek again.

Was she foolish, or had she fearlessly—thanks to the peace and strength of God—leapt into action by jumping onto this train with Surge? She hadn't frozen but had been spurred into action by a deep conviction that losing sight of this shipment meant terrible things. That deep-down voice of Garrett's stayed with her . . . he had trusted her to follow these containers. When you trust a man, you jump on a train. She chuckled.

Since they'd started the mission, they had a few moments to review the Krav Maga self-defense, the shoulder grab from the front and the choke hold. Realization spread through her—God trusted him, had put him in charge of this mission, and it was God she ultimately trusted. And she'd learned to trust Garretttoo . . .

What she knew because of that was that Garrett was coming after her and Surge. And of course the chemicals, but somehow accepting that he'd come for her spurred and inspired her. It didn't matter anymore how she was going to get off this train. What mattered was how she was going to destroy the Sachaai's plan and prevent the butterfly shoes bearing tubes of toxic chems from reaching Cantika Coffee Farm.

How exactly, genius?

Yeah, she wasn't a Navy SEAL. But the team wasn't here. She was. The weight of the mission's success was on her shoulders—no wonder they were balled tight. Subconsciously, she'd known the responsibility she bore. But worse . . . what was the price if she failed?

Surge gave a low-throated growl. Looking up, she saw a flashlight bobbing around the front of the car as the sound of steps reached her. Could be help.

The beam bounced off a silver container and lit the face of a man as he looked around. Three-day beard, longish black hair, power in his every move.

A tremor went up and down her spine.

Hakim.

Surge's hackles rose.

Delaney drew him out of sight into the narrow space between the last LD3 stack and the door into the caboose. She signaled him into silence, then squatted behind him, letting him be the fury Hakim would meet if he came at them. Hands on the shoulders of her four-legged protector, his tense muscles rippling, she willed her own breathing to slow and quieten.

Hakim stopped and turned in the aisle they'd just vacated. He traced the area with his beam, then each of the six Sachaai containers before he pulled a radio from his belt.

"Everything looks good back here, Tariq," Hakim said into his radio. "We're underway, so once the engineer knows our exact arrival time, contact Alina. Her team will need to get busy with the vials at Cantika."

Tariq was on the train too? God, now what?

"Are you sure?" crackled Tariq's voice. "Rashid and I can handle the exchange. Don't need her."

Delaney's stomach clenched. Rashid too? Good heavens! The three men were so dangerous Garrett had almost made her remain at the safe house. So dangerous that she was sitting here, hiding behind LD3s. Frozen.

What do I do, God?

Hakim snickered. "Alina has more passion for Pakistan leading the true Muslim world in her little toenail than the two of you have together in your whole bodies. She will get it done, and the widespread damage will let America know we do not need or want them! That's why I put her in place there—maximum damage!"

The door between the two cars opened and shut.

Easing back against the vibrating hull of the train car, Delaney kept Surge close as she listened for any sign that Hakim was still in the box with her. Smooth strokes along Surge's spine kept Delaney's nerves from fraying any further . . . for the first five minutes. But her mind worried over the things she'd overheard and what she'd learned. Who was Alina? Hakim had said he had her in place—for maximum damage.

And the chemicals in the containers . . .

When Surge stretched forward, swiveling his head around the corner of the container stack, she realized she'd been sitting here for quite a while, ruminating. Since no shot or shout erupted when he'd eased out, she released him.

Surge rose to all fours, seemingly confident and calm instead of muscles tensed, ready to attack. That was good, right? She peered around the stack and, finding it empty, sagged against the wall of the freight car . Call Garrett! She yanked out the SAT phone and groaned . . . still no signal. And sweet mercy—the power bar was fading.

Tears welled, and she pressed her hands to her eyes. No tears now. Mission. She had to get word to Garrett, but the phone wasn't working. What do I do? Her heart screamed for help, but then in whispered the still, small voice . . . reminded her to trust.

She'd just said that, hadn't she? That she trusted God, that she trusted Garrett? And where was that trust and peace now that her SAT phone wasn't working?

Still there. She drew in a deep breath, reaching for the inner quiet stillness. Let it guide her.

If the SAT phone wasn't working because of interference with the train somehow, how could the tracker possibly work?

Nerves thrumming, she tightened her jaw. God . . .

Mentally, she stepped back, drew in a breath. She couldn't do anything other than be here. She more-than-ever believed God had her exactly where she needed to be—but her limitations didn't limit God. Or Garrett.

He knew she'd gotten on the train. As a Navy SEAL operator, he could easily discover it was a bullet train. Probably already had. And he knew where they'd last been before boarding the train. So with Caldwell's intelligence help, he could ascertain the destination, which she knew only because of the label.

But the coffee beans . . . She eyed the containers. Was this shipment important? Or did they already have more chemicals at the coffee bean farm? No . . . she doubted that simply because she recalled Zim saying this was enough to wipe out thousands. What worried her second-most, after the spread of this horrific chemical mixture, was when the train stopped. How would she get out of here without being seen? How would she follow them to this farm?

Okay. That seemed next to impossible. So . . . yeah. She needed Garrett here. Now. And she wanted him here. Even if he got in her face about being a rogue and found her frustrating to no end. He was likely the best guy she knew . . . after Dad. And Surge.

But would he make it in time?

Augh! Stop stop stop.

"‘God is my refuge and strength. An ever-present help in time of trouble . . . '" Psalm 46:1 infused her with more peace, staying the panic that threatened her. "I know you don't have signal interference God, though sometimes it seems like it, but, uh, yeah—I'm in trouble here. Please, help."