And forgive her He would.
When the phone rang, Jackie let out a yelp. She turned from the window and its panoramic view of Arizona’s rolling hills and walked across the plush baby-blue carpeting to her six-by-eight-foot glass-topped desk to lift the receiver from its cradle.
“God bless you,” she said. It was her standard greeting for any caller who got past her assistant.
“Would’ve been nice if he did,” Abrams said. With his thick New England accent, there was no need for him to introduce himself. “Unfortunately, it’s as bad as it can get.”
CHAPTER TWO
Jonathan Grave ignored the drop of sweat that tracked down his forehead and over the bridge of his nose. It made no sense to wipe it away when there’d just be another to follow. What was it about jungles, he wondered, that made them so attractive to bad guys? Perhaps it was a kind of insect-borne mass psychosis.
The same variety of sickness that kept bringing him back to the stifling heat time after time. He’d long ago stopped telling himself that he’d get used to it after a while. He concentrated instead on getting past it, and he did that by focusing on the misery of the people whose rescue was his responsibility.
The bud in Jonathan’s left ear popped to life. “Scorpion, Mother Hen,” said the voice that had guided him through way too many difficult moments. “The satellite picture just refreshed. You have what appears to be a squad of five soldiers approaching your location from the west. I’ve only got heat signatures because of the canopy.”
Jonathan pressed the transmit button in the center of his ballistic vest. “Range?”
“Close. Quit talking.”
They moved cautiously, but still made too much noise. His mind raced to make some sense out of it. They could not be reinforcements because no one outside his very small circle knew he was here. That made them bad guys until proven otherwise, and their presence made this operation vastly more complicated.