He laughed, shaking his head, but thankfully, he turned around.
Quickly, she stepped out of the water, grabbing his shirt and using it to dry off as best she could. Unfortunately, she’d lost both her panties and her bra under the water. Why had she thought it was so essential to wash her underwear? Obviously, she’d been wrong. But she pulled the clean tee shirt over her head, cringing at the way the material clung to her damp skin. The cargo pants were easier to pull on because they were loose around her waist, but the now damp tee shirt made it obvious that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “I’m covered,” she told him, bending down to brush her feet off before slipping them into the boots.
“Nice,” he commented, then turned toward the Jeep. “Now we just need to figure out a good place to steal a phone and make a call to your brother.” He pulled the map out to examine the details. “Here,” he said, pointing to a place near the coastline. “There’s a resort here. I can sneak onto the grounds and find a phone. Maybe I won’t have to steal a cell phone if I can break into one of the offices and make the call from there.” He folded the map, his eyes scanning the other equipment in the Jeep. “That would actually be better. It’s harder to trace a call from a specific person from a landline.”
Calista pulled one of the cans of food out of the pillow cases. “How about some…” she looked at the label. “This doesn’t look like any ravioli I’ve ever eaten,” she said with a shrug. “But I’m pretty sure it’s edible.” She tossed him a can with the same red label, then dug the can opener out of the bag. They didn’t have forks, but Calista discovered that the faux Italian meal was simple enough to eat with her fingers. They turned orange from the overly sweet sauce, but that was okay. The food satisfied the hunger and she reached for a bottle of water. “That was better than I would have thought,” she commented as she tossed him a water bottle as well.
“I agree, but I wouldn’t mind a thick, juicy steak.”
She ignored the pang of longing his words created and searched through the rest of the supplies. “I don’t see anything else that might help in our stealth plan, so let’s just get this over with.”
“I need a status update!” Neville demanded, his voice tinny over the burner phone.
Ned rolled his eyes and turned away from the site of the enormous trucks and drills and other mining equipment that was currently shuttling down the hill. Somehow he was supposed to hide this stuff? He shook his head and mentally laughed.
“Everything is going according to plan,” he assured the man. Ned glanced at his watch and wondered why he hadn’t received an update from his team in Costa Rico. They were five minutes late.
Looking up again, he pointed towards the east end of the staging area, silently ordering one of the drivers to park his massive truck in that area. “Look Neville, I have twenty trucks and five drills that I need to get covered up before the next satellite pass. That’s going to happen in exactly five hours and twenty-six minutes. Is there anything else you need to know?”
Ned could almost hear the old man’s yellowed teeth gnashing together. Ned just wasn’t the kind of man who could come up with a subservient tone while talking, especially when speaking to this old bastard.
“No. Your assurance that everything is on schedule is all I need to hear.” The call ended after that and Ned shook his head while stuffing the phone back into his pocket. But he made a mental note to call his team down in Costa Rica in ten minutes if he didn’t hear something from them. There wasn’t any chance that the two prisoners had escaped. He’d built a freaking tree house to ensure that they couldn’t! It was like a jungle Alcatraz! Even if el Istara and his princess somehow came out of their drug induced sedation, they’d then have to break free from the plastic zip ties, take down his highly trained guards and somehow get down from the shelter that he’d had his men build into the tree’s canopy. The ladder was removed by the guards on the ground. Without the ladder, his prisoners would break their legs, as well as several other bones, if either of them tried to jump in order to escape.
“Sir!” one of the mining experts called out, running over to Ned and looking as if he’d just come through a sand storm. The guy had a thick layer of dust covering him, which was expected since driving these massive trucks kicked up a lot of dust. Which was why Ned stood here on this dirt mound, well out of the way from the dust that was finally settling now that the trucks were parked.
“What is it?” Ned demanded, crossing his arms over his chest as a way to deter idle chit chat. For the next several hours, he handled issues in order to get all of the equipment hidden so that they could settle down for an hour or two before getting back to work. Everything had to be silent and non-moving before the satellites passed overhead or this operation was finished!