by Matt Rogers
Business as usual.
Christ, this scared him though.
What the fuck was he doing, sneaking around the jungle? The cartels didn’t do this shit. They stormed in with their chins held high, obscenely confident. They ordered people around. They didn’t sneak up on them with their tails tucked between their legs. That was weakness. And weakness just didn’t cut it out here. If any of the rival factions caught wind of this particular escapade, there would be hell to pay. But Bautista didn’t plan on letting anyone find out. They would execute the American, sweep him under the rug, and pretend he never existed.
Then they would go straight back to doing what they did best.
Winning.
But life is never that simple. It had been for quite some time, but Bautista was sorely aware he’d needed the pot stirred. The black man’s speech resonated in his head. He couldn’t shake the fact that he’d submitted to the guy. He might as well have bent over backwards and told him to take his time.
The soft trickle of flowing water filtered through the night. Passing between the trees. Tickling the edge of their hearing. The convoy stiffened, and Bautista glanced left and right to observe unfamiliar faces. Vicente and Iván were elsewhere in the procession, leaving him surrounded by drug-fuelled guns-for-hire. Nothing to ordinarily be wary of, but something about the nature of the operation made him pine for the reassurance of men he knew well.
Men he worked with.
Men he bled with.
Santiago paid well, but not enough to instil unwavering confidence. If the tide shifted, and the morale shattered, these men would run. They would value their own necks over the lives of their hired comrades.
Bautista grimaced, and approached the river.
He was overthinking it.
The plan was the same.
Put a bullet in the owner of the compound, and be on their way.
Simple as that.
20
Slater awoke from the afternoon nap to find the sheets stained with perspiration and the sky outside darkening into dusk. He wiped a hand across his face, removing gunk from the corners of his eyes, and tested the waters of the hangover. He’d consumed far too much drink at the bar, and although he’d forced the inebriation aside as he beat down the narcos, he wasn’t superhuman. He couldn’t avoid the effects forever.
So he’d put his head on the pillow as soon as he got home and slept it off.
Now he stretched and shook off the same-day hangover symptoms, grateful that he’d handled the situation remarkably well. Gone were the days of all-out benders, complete with after-effects that almost made him prefer the battlefield. His muscles ached from the fight, and he sauntered straight into the training room and dipped straight into a gruelling vinyasa yoga routine to stretch out his tight hip flexors and loosen the knots bundled in his shoulders. It was daunting, exerting work, especially after such a whirlwind day. But he paid the routine no attention whatsoever, shifting into autopilot.
If he didn’t think, instead relying on the automatic process of carefully refined habit, he barely had time to talk himself out of the vigorous exercise. He’d mastered the process of taming his mind over a decade ago. Not a day went by in his life where he didn’t give thanks for that particular avenue of self-discipline.
Dressed in a pair of athletic shorts and nothing else, he continued through the maintenance work. By the time he clambered off the yoga mat — now damp with the sweat that had fallen off his hardened frame — he felt like a new man. He breathed life into his lungs, inhaling the air as best he could, and showered for a second time that day. He changed into a fresh pair of khakis and a simple white cotton tee and made for the living room.
Altogether he’d vanished for close to twenty minutes.
Shower, shave, dry, dress.
When he reached the hallway, about to step out into the open, he froze. All was not as it seemed. He heard all the familiar sounds, but they seemed hollow. Detached. Unreal. Call it a sixth sense. He knew it was a practice honed from spending years in the thick of combat.
There was a certain unseen electricity in the air. Crackling in the thick heat. Bringing the perspiration right back out of his pores. Firing neurons, activating circuits in the brain, channelling the devastation of years prior.
Still out of sight of the river and its opposing bank, he crossed to the chest of drawers in the hallway and wrenched the top left handle. The compartment spilled open, revealing the Glock 17. Slater touched a finger to the trigger, resting it there. Veins rippled on his forearm as he wrapped a hand around the stock. He tested the weight, getting used to it, linking the gun to his own consciousness. Extending his psyche to encompass the firearm.
They were coming.
Movement in the training room.
Slater dropped without a hint of sound, flattening himself to the artificially cooled tiles like a snake. He crawled forward, inch by inch, breathing deep in his core. Stilling his nerves. It wasn’t hard. His mind was at war, but his soul was at peace. He lived and breathed for these encounters. Strangely enough, they seemed more natural than the time he spent away from the line of fire.
That didn’t bode well for his mental health down the line.
But he didn’t need to think about down the line.
He needed to think about now.
A bulky silhouette appeared in the doorway.
Too easy.
Slater fired twice, blowing the back of the man’s skull across the training room. Juxtaposed against the muted glow of the halogen lights overhead and the faint monotonous buzzing of insects outside, the gunshots exploded with twin roars. Slater would have flinched, had he not lived in this zone for most of his adult life. When he saw the gore spray he calculated the angles and leapt to his feet, using every part of the flexibility and dexterity he’d formed through daily yoga. He closed the gap between himself and the now-dead intruder in an uncanny burst of speed, still deathly silent as he ran. He screeched to a halt and caught the man by the front of his ceramic vest, freezing the guy in place before he could collapse. He noticed the two gaping holes in the man’s forehead and admired his handiwork for half a second, then tightened his grip on the Glock as he held the corpse upright for just long enough to confuse the hell out of whoever else had deemed it necessary to intrude.
And there would be more.
There always was.
The positioning shielded him from view of the other hostiles. However many there were. He stood hunched over, concealed just inside the lip of the hallway. The intruder’s frame filled the doorway. He was a big guy. Colombian, around six-three, with a giant frame to boot. All that muscle hadn’t helped him one bit. A colossal mistake in a single moment in time and his life had ceased.
But that was the price you paid.
Already his eyes were glazed over. The milky film of death had developed in front of his pupils, awfully quick. Slater had lost count of the number of times he’d witnessed it up close, but it never got any stranger. He became oblivious to it, though.
Do anything enough and you can compartmentalise it.
So he held the corpse there without reacting. Not for long. A second or two. But it wasn’t the natural way things developed. Usually gunfire resulted in chaos, one unsuppressed shot leading to a firestorm of bullets that shredded everything in sight and killed almost everyone on both sides of the firefight.
Not here.
If there was someone behind the first guy, he would see his friend’s brains spurt out the back of his head. And then he would see the guy frozen in place, his view of Slater blocked by the big doorway.
Which would have rattled him even more.
All hypotheticals.
Now Slater put it to the test.
He timed the pause to perfection and shoved the corpse aside, clattering the body off one side of the doorway. It was an ugly sprawl. Limbs tangled and twisted and the dead guy went down in ungainly fashion.
The kind of brutal thwack and flailing tumble t
hat seized attention, regardless of how well-trained you were. Your eyes darted to it. Because it was so strange.
Slater stepped into the doorway, now fully visible to the room, and his brain kicked into overdrive. He took in the sight of two men, both roughly the same size, spread across the room, clutching big chunky Colt AR-15s at the ready, their wide eyes focused on the body of their friend.
Surprised.
Not because of the presence of death.
They’d been expecting that, and no doubt hopped themselves up on stims to compensate for the trauma they were likely to experience up close.
No, it was because of the few seconds where the body seemed to levitate in place. Anything that strange demanded attention.
Shame.
Because putting attention in the wrong place in a situation like this, even for half a second, got you killed.
Slater shot the guy on the left in the forehead, then flicked his aim to the guy on the right and executed the exact same command.
Line up.
Trigger pull.
Done.
Thwack-thwack.
Two bodies hit the marble floor of the training room.
Slater heard it, but he didn’t see it.
Because he was already out of sight, ducking back into the hallway.
A ghost in the wind.
21
Casey tried her hardest not to cry, but the endeavour proved useless.
The chassis of the big SUV rattled all around her as it jolted over potholes in the seedy darkness. They’d been driving for what seemed like hours, and she wasn’t sure if it was a deliberate ploy to disorient the four of them so they had no chance of co-ordinating a rescue, even if they escaped. Looking out the window with misty eyes and a lump in her throat, she swore the terrain seemed familiar. She couldn’t quite discern whether it was a coincidental bout of déjà vu, or if they were truly driving in circles.
But then the rural trails turned even more barebones, and the driver veered off into the real jungle and abandoned any shred of civilisation they’d been holding onto over the course of the evening. Night encompassed the vehicle, blackening the view outside. True night. The kind of uniform emptiness that removed all hope entirely. Casey stared into the blackness and considered leaping out of the moving car. At the speed they were travelling, almost reckless on the uneven terrain, she would probably break both her legs upon landing. But even that might be preferable to what fate had in store for them later that night.
No.
She didn’t have the guts.
Because two men sat silently behind the middle row, taking up most of the space in the SUV’s large trunk. They had guns — she’d seen the glint of metal as the big ugly man in the passenger seat had funnelled them into the car hours ago. They sat crammed shoulder-to-shoulder — Harvey, then Whitney, then Jake, then Casey. Neither the driver, nor the passenger who seemed to be in charge, nor the two men in the back had said a word the entire time. But the implicit threat was there. If Casey or any of her friends moved unnaturally, or reached for the door handle, or tried to call for help, they would catch a bullet in the back of the skull. And that terrified her endlessly, in a way she hadn’t thought possible. She wasn’t ready to die. Maybe the road ahead would involve torture and unimaginable pain, but it still came with a chance of survival. Getting all her senses cut off at once by a piece of lead pulverising her brain wasn’t something she was willing to risk. No matter what.
She wasn’t ready for that.
She wasn’t ready for any of this.
Tears streamed silently down her face, and she caught a sob at the top of her throat. But a tiny fraction of sound followed it out. A guttural noise, making it startlingly obvious what she was trying to do.
The big man with the fat lips wheeled around in the passenger seat, fixing his beady eyes on her.
‘Don’t be scared,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ she muttered.
‘We’re not going to do anything unnecessary. We just need to send a message.’
‘To who?’
Silence answered her. She returned her gaze to the darkness outside the window, watching the murky black outlines of tree trunks flash past. She wondered what she’d done to deserve this fate. Surely stupidity didn’t cut it. She’d go back stateside and put her head down and never venture anywhere she wasn’t welcome. She’d never be blissfully ignorant of a region’s problems again. But to do any of that, she had to make it out of this alive. And with each passing second she found that a less likely outcome.
She shook her head from side to side, deriding herself for believing the promises of the big man for even a second.
He’d said it to calm her down until they got to their destination.
Some kind of jungle encampment?
Somewhere private, for sure.
Somewhere no-one would hear them.
She thought of the man from earlier that afternoon. Tall, dark, handsome. Radiating silent confidence. No wonder she’d made such a brazen move. She’d never cheated on Jake before, and never intended to, but something about the strain on their relationship and the mysterious aura of…
She hadn’t even asked for his name.
He was lost to anonymity.
And she and her three closest friends were making a beeline for gruesome deaths.
She sobbed again.
22
The compound hadn’t been designed for urban warfare. It was a long low structure with massive open sections leading right out onto the riverbank, allowing the hot air to flood into the rooms. Slater had deliberately constructed it that way, creating a permanent aura of discomfort that never allowed him to settle.
He’d been taught from an early age to fear the warmth of his bed.
All progress was made on the other side of resistance, so if he removed the possibility of an artificial atmosphere and instead drenched his body in the unbearable jungle air twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, he would return to his old self in no time.
And it had worked.
He’d lost the thirty pounds put on when he lay bedridden. Pounds stacked on through no fault of his own. He’d lost his Olympic-level conditioning, lost the uncanny power that enabled him to blast through human opposition like they were children’s playthings. That kind of strength could only be forged in relentless discomfort. Hence the move to Colombia after his brain had sifted itself out of the shit. Hence the gruelling daily workouts. Hence the pain on top of pain on top of pain.
It had all been for a reason.
He knew that now as he stalked down the hallway, feeling right at home in the madness. There were three dead bodies in the training room, and it meant nothing to him. He made it to the front door and tapped a series of commands on the digital control panel fixed into the entranceway. Darkness plunged over the compound. All the lights petered out at once, their auras vanishing, replacing the stark white glare with rapidly diminishing fields of view.
Without a sound, he slipped out the front door, cradling the Glock in his right hand. He stayed low and ghosted around the perimeter of the property, keeping his back to the thick concrete slab composing the entirety of the left wall. No windows here. No vantage points to use as a barricade, firing out through glass. Just concrete. And steel. He descended a low ditch packed with wet dirt and circled around to one side of the building.
And ran straight into a hostile.
Almost chest to chest.
The speed at which Slater was able to react meant he could have blasted the guy’s nose apart before the man even knew what had hit him. But that would create a blaring report, which would resonate through the otherwise quiet jungle and reveal his position to everyone in the immediate vicinity. So instead he continued through the motions, not changing his trajectory in the slightest, which shocked the hell out of his adversary. Usually if two parties ran straight into each other in the dark there was the inevitable flinch, followed by a hasty scramble for weapons as each man took a
backward step to try and make sense of what the hell had just happened. Instead Slater barrelled forward like a freight train, giving the other guy no time to react. He slammed his forehead into the lower part of the guy’s jaw, probably knocking a few teeth loose and silencing any outcry the man could muster in the next couple of seconds.
Which was all the time he needed, anyway.
The headbutt had enough force behind it to stun the guy into taking pause. He knew why. Sneaking through the darkness, thinking you had control of the situation, then a rush of movement in front of you and a blinding fast burst of speed and a vicious crack on the lower half of your face and a flaring blitz of pain. It was enough to freeze anyone in place.
Bad news against a guy like Slater.
Slater went as far as dropping his weapon to free himself up for the couple of seconds he had to capitalise. There was no-one else around, and the nature of the terrain shielded him from catching a bullet from a distant hostile, so he deemed it safe. In ordinary combat it would be considered a suicide tactic. But Slater hadn’t approached combat normally for as long as he could remember.
He immediately used his free hand to thunder a right hook into the side of the guy’s head. Pinpoint accuracy. Uncanny power. Nothing had changed. It almost shut the guy off at the light switch but he kept his legs underneath him.
In fact, the AR-15 in his hands started a dangerous upward trajectory.
But it looped and wobbled as it did so. The punch to the temple had thrown his equilibrium out. The darkness didn’t help. He was utterly disorientated. Slater snatched the gun and hurled it aside. It clattered off the wall. Inhuman strength. He elbowed the guy in the throat, destroying soft tissue, then loaded up the exact same right hook. It landed on the same patch of temple. It flipped the switch.