Merciless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

movement caused them both to turn. Stepping out of one of the tents, the man who had been doing the cooking for the group started toward them. He only nodded as he passed and headed up the trail to the crater, carrying his pack over his shoulder. If all was clear, he’d light the cook fire to prepare breakfast for the men.
    “I think I will go and help,” Awad said as he stood up.
    Karim grinned. “You are going only to be first in line for the food.”
    Shrugging, Awad nodded and started up the path, following the cook. The truth was, since Hussein’s revelation of the civilian target, he just wasn’t sure about anything any more.
    When he reached the area in the crater where they usually ate, he found the cook there, the fire already going. The spot was surrounded by large boulders, open only on one side, so it was nearly invisible from further down inside the massive basin.
    Fareed Basara saw Awad approaching as he cut up a large piece of meat for the morning stew. He only nodded at the younger man.
    “I thought I might be of assistance,” Awad said.
    Fareed only grunted an acknowledgment as he carefully cut the meat in the near darkness. Fareed was the oldest of the group, two years older than Hussein. He came from a nomadic tribe in the Pamir Mountain range, near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and China. Being a nomad, he’d learned from childhood how to cook and prepare food.
    Fareed stopped what he was doing and looked up at the younger man. “What is America like?”
    Awad considered the question a moment. “There are as many different parts to it as there are rocks on Shah Foladi,” he replied, referring to the highest peak in the Hindu Kush range. “Yet with all their differences, they are still all the same.”
    “Do you like it?”
    Again, Awad felt as if he were being tested. “Most of them are a decadent people. Trapped by an overabundance of technology. They have forgotten how to do the simple things, such as you are doing now. They eat in restaurants, both fine and sickening, allowing strangers to prepare and handle their food.”
    Placing a kettle on a hook over the fire, Fareed said, “Will you bring that water container and pour a liter into the pot for me?”
    Awad did as he was bid, bringing one of the many twenty-liter water cans from its hiding place among the rocks. As he poured a small amount into the cauldron, it began to boil furiously, then slowed and finally stopped.
    Fareed waited a moment, allowing the water to begin bubbling once more, before sliding the meat from a makeshift cutting board into the kettle. From another hiding place, Fareed retrieved a small, sealed container and dumped the whole contents in with the meat. It contained a number of vegetables that Fareed had either bought or collected along the way, along with a few spices he’d purchased in a small Muslim store in Mexico City when he’d first arrived.
    The two men sat down in silence, Fareed occasionally stirring the stew with a long wooden spoon, which he’d carved from a green sapling. After thirty minutes, he lifted the kettle off the fire and placed it on a flat rock, heated by the fire. He did this so the stew could cool enough to be eaten, but not get completely cold.
    Soon, the others began to arrive, each carrying his own bowl in his small canvas pack. Also in the packs were the Russian-made Bizon SMG machine pistols each of them had been given.

B urrs Strip was an ideal location to keep the Huey, Charity realized upon landing. Located in the outskirts of South Miami Heights, it had a grass airstrip and a small hangar, where engine work was done. The whole field was surrounded by mature avocado trees. DHS had leased a section of the hangar to store the chopper on a long-term basis. Charity left the bird on the ground outside the hangar, knowing that it would be wheeled inside as soon as someone arrived in about an hour.
    From the airstrip, it was only a quarter-mile walk through a quiet