That was all Ben needed. The rifle was never going to be more than an initial entry weapon, though as a medium-to-long-distance means of striking at the enemy with the surprise and aggression that they least expected in the dead of the night, it was a pretty good option. The scope wasn’t exactly military-grade night-vision optics, but it was far more than he might have dreamed of stumbling across out here in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Once he’d established his method of entry into the compound and neutralised as many targets as it took to get him inside the perimeter, he could improvise, if necessary ditching the rifle in exchange for something more appropriate to the situation.
‘I’ll take this,’ he said.
‘No, no,’ the hunter protested. That one was his main personal hunting rifle, and it wasn’t for sale. Definitely, absolutely not. It wasn’t until Ben took out his wallet and started thumbing through notes that he relented and seemed to decide that maybe it was for sale after all, as long as Ben agreed to buy every last round of ammunition he had for it.
‘And this one for my friend here,’ Ben said, picking out a Savage in .223 calibre. ‘You have cartridges for this?’
‘I ain’t gonna shoot a rifle any more,’ Nico insisted with a sour look. ‘Not after what happened last time.’
Ben looked at him. ‘I don’t seem to recall you holding back on emptying a magazine or two at me, just a couple of days ago.’
‘That was different,’ Nico replied. To the hunter he said, ‘You got any kind of handgun? I’d be happier with a handgun.’
The hunter hesitated, then glanced again at Ben’s wallet and threw open another cabinet. ‘Holy shit, this old timer’s got more guns and ammo than Cabela’s,’ Nico muttered, looking down at an assortment of pistols and hundreds of boxed cartridges. ‘Let me see that Colt Python there. Okay,’ he said, inspecting the heavy revolver. ‘I’m happy.’
‘You’re going to take a six-shooter into a fight with Serrato’s whole army?’ Ben asked, staring.
‘Way I see it, if I can’t get up close and personal enough to use this on him I’m dead anyway,’ Nico said.
‘Just don’t expect me to look out for you all the time.’
‘Yeah, and don’t cry to me when you have to tote that goddamn shoulder cannon miles through the jungle.’
‘As long as I don’t have to lug your Colombian arse along behind me, I’ll manage fine.’ Ben turned to the old hunter, who had been following their exchange with growing confusion. ‘Two hundred for the rifle and another hundred for the pistol, ammo included,’ he said in Spanish.
‘Get the fuck out of here,’ the hunter rasped indignantly. ‘Four-fifty for the two, plus another fifty for the ammo.’
‘Four hundred’s nearly all I have,’ Ben said, showing him the open wallet. ‘It’s yours if you throw in the loan of that truck you have out there. That’s if it still has an engine in it.’
A loan for how long, the hunter wanted to know. Ben assured him it wouldn’t be for more than a couple of days.
‘If it don’t get all shot to pieces,’ Nico muttered.
‘I’m not the one who shoots cars to pieces,’ Ben said. ‘Deal?’ he asked the hunter, switching back to Spanish.
It was. The old Indian grabbed his wad of money and counted it suspiciously while Ben and Nico carried their weaponry outside, yanked the tarpaulin off the faded red late seventies Ford F-150 pickup under the lean-to and saw about getting it started. The engine fired up second time with a throaty roar and a cloud of smoke.
‘That’s good enough.’ Ben flicked a switch on the dash and the row of four grille-mounted lamps blazed into life. He let the motor run while he jammed the bags behind the seats, then loaded up his rifle from the munitions supply the hunter had sold him and stowed the weapon in the rack in the back of the cab. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said to Nico. ‘You navigate.’
Nico clambered up into the passenger’s side with a look of grim determination. ‘You ready to go?’ Ben said, getting in behind the wheel. He gunned the engine.
‘I’ve been ready to go for seven years,’ Nico said.
Chapter Forty-Five
It was night now. The temperature had fallen dramatically. The dark jungle loomed over them and cast menacing shadows everywhere as they jolted and lurched their way through a green tunnel lit by the Ford’s powerful grille-mounted lamps. Any obstacle the truck couldn’t go roaring over on its oversized wheels and jacked-up suspension, it smashed through like a bulldozer.
The hunter’s track was even harder going than it had seemed at the outset. Just as Ben was becoming certain that the twisting, ridiculously uneven path was going to lead nowhere, it widened out and a junction with another road appeared up ahead. The new road was still rough as hell and impossible to navigate at more than thirty miles a hour, but after the endurance test of the track it seemed like a motorway. Nico said he recognised it from when he’d driven around the area in his Winnebago. Now that he’d regained his bearings he gave sporadic directions as Ben drove.
An hour passed. It was rare to meet another motor vehicle. The landscape was variable, sometimes thick forest on all sides, sometimes open country and rocky hills, now and then a lonely farm or a ruin passing by in the night. As they rounded a sweeping bend Ben noticed Nico gazing across towards the high ground on the right. From the Colombian’s heavy silence afterwards, Ben understood that he’d been looking at the spot where he’d fired the bullet that had killed Alicia Serrato.
‘You know, I never cried for them,’ Nico said after a while. ‘For Daniela and Carlos. My children. Not a tear.’ He gave a bitter chuckle. ‘Never told nobody that before.’
Ben didn’t reply. There was no reply he could make.
A little while later he heard the soft clicking noises as Nico toyed with his revolver, slipping slender .357 cartridges into the chambers, spinning the cylinder, ejecting them, beginning the process again. Ben had seen a thousand men suffer the same kind of nerves as they faced going into action. He’d suffered them himself enough times. Tonight, though, he felt nothing more than a numb sense of purpose. All that existed was the task ahead, whatever its outcome might be.
Without a word, he held out the crumpled pack containing the last three of his Gauloises. Nico drew one out; he took another, and they smoked in silence, the tips of the cigarettes glowing orange in the darkness of the cab. Ben reached into his pocket for his whisky flask and shook it. There was a little left. He offered it to Nico. Nico shook his head. Ben put the whisky away untouched and drove on.
‘Pull into that track there,’ Nico said presently, pointing to the left at a gap in the trees. Ben turned the truck and they went jolting and bouncing over rough ground for a couple of miles. ‘Okay, pull up,’ Nico said. ‘This is as close as it’s safe to drive. We walk from here. Compound’s due west through the jungle.’
‘How far?’
‘An hour, maybe longer.’
Ben killed the engine and the lights. They climbed down from the truck and grabbed their gear. In the faint moonlight shining through the trees they shrugged on their packs, checked their weapons one more time, turned on their torches and then set off with Nico showing the way.
The jungle came alive at night in all its incredible diversity. The constant chirping and whistling of insects all around them was so loud that it drowned out the soft crunch of their boots on the mossy forest floor. As they walked, Ben felt a sudden, startling impact against his back and whirled round, instinctively raising his rifle halfway up to his shoulder with his hand reaching for the bolt – then saw that what had hit him was a giant flying insect, some kind of winged beetle not much smaller than a bird. He watched it gyrate off in the beam of his torch, then walked on.
The march continued for an hour, as Nico had said. The closer they got to their target the more Ben could see the Colombian’s gait stiffening as the tension spread through his body. Ben could feel it too. They both glanced constantly left and right and strained their ears over the din of the
insects for any suspicious snap of a twig or rustle of a branch that could signal one of Serrato’s patrols approaching.
Then Nico halted and raised a hand to signal before turning off his torch. Ben killed his own. For a few moments they stood immobile, waiting for their eyes to get used to the dark. A few steps onwards, they parted the branches and saw the lights of the compound in the distance. Ben felt his heart heave and uttered an inward prayer that it was all true and that Brooke was here, alive, almost within his reach. If that was so, then all that stood between them now were a cruel, sadistic, power-crazed former drug lord, his murderous personal guard and maybe twenty or thirty heavily-armed troops-for-hire.
And if it wasn’t so …
If his darkest fears were proved right …
Somebody was going to pay a very dear price.
They would anyway.
The perimeter wall stood a hundred metres distant across a stretch of close-cropped stubble. The span of buildings beyond shone creamy-white in the lights from its windows and the strong floodlamps that stood on masts around its edges. To the left, some three hundred metres from where Ben and Nico were hiding in the trees, they could make out the line of the single road that led up to the gates.
They dumped their packs on the ground. Ben unzipped the compartment of his rucksack containing the rifle ammo, and loaded as many rounds as he could comfortably carry into his pockets. While Nico was doing the same for himself, Ben reached for the binoculars, scanned the visible section of road and lingered carefully for a few moments on the compound entrance. ‘You said there were how many guards on the gate?’ he asked Nico.
‘Enough to stop the US Marines from getting through,’ Nico muttered. He was breathing heavily as the adrenaline accumulated in his system.
Ben passed him the binocs without saying anything more. Nico put them up to his eyes, and a moment later snatched them away and stared at Ben in bewilderment. ‘There’s nobody manning the fucking gates,’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘They’re just hanging wide open.’
Ben took the binocs back from him, ran his gaze past the top of the perimeter wall and slowly scanned the breadth of the buildings from left to right.
‘Well?’ Nico whispered tensely.
Ben said nothing. The magnified image showed that the main building was in fact a fine-looking house, large and sprawling on several floors, modern in design with hacienda-style arches and balconies. The rest of the buildings clustered around it were more basic and workmanlike, but painted the same pale colour, which gave the whole the appearance of a little Mediterranean village which had sprung up incongruously in the middle of the endless jungle. Ben was looking for movement in the lit-up windows, but saw none. Then he paused, backtracked a little way and looked again at what he’d just noticed on the upper floor of the main house.
The fact that the three windows were grilled over with thick iron bars bolted to the outside wall would have been enough to get his attention. He’d seen enough remote kidnappers’ strongholds in his day to know what a well-appointed captivity room looked like.
But what made his eyes narrow to slits and his breathing stop for a long moment were the black soot marks all over the walls where thick billows of smoke had recently been pouring from the barred windows, as well as two other windows either side and two more above.
There had been a fire inside the house. A serious, major fire – and from what Ben could tell, at its heart had been the room with the barred windows. Even after the flames were extinguished, the gutted rooms would have gone on smoking for a long time. He could see no smoke at all coming from the windows. Which meant the fire had happened many hours ago.
Still not breathing, Ben darted the binoculars’ field of vision downwards to where he could make out part of the courtyard between the buildings. He could still see no movement. There wasn’t a sound except the chirruping of the insects.
The house and surrounding compound appeared completely deserted.
‘Something’s wrong here,’ he murmured to Nico. ‘Something’s happened.’
Chapter Forty-Six
No alarm was raised as Ben and Nico crossed the open ground to the compound gates. No guards appeared to challenge them. Up close, they could see that the tall iron gates were buckled and bent, as though they’d been rammed violently open from the inside. There was nothing to stop anyone walking straight in.
Ben worked the bolt on his rifle, but even as he chambered the round he knew he wouldn’t be needing it. Not here, not now.
‘It’s weird,’ Nico muttered. ‘Last time I was here, this place crawled like a fucking rats’ lair. Where’d they all go?’
Ben said nothing. He would almost rather have been shot at. Every step nearer the cluster of buildings deepened his conviction that something terrible had happened here: something that his instincts told him was connected with Brooke.
The acrid stink of the burned-out section of the house wafted across the compound on the warm breeze. He knelt, examining the vehicle tracks on the hard-packed earth. There were dozens of them, made by knobbly all-terrain tyres and dug in hard, leaving furrows, as though one four-wheel drive after another after another had gone speeding out of the gates in such a tearing hurry that nobody had bothered closing the place up behind them, or even leaving anyone to guard it. The tyre tracks all led out of a large square building with doors like those of an aircraft hangar. The doors gaped open. Ben shone his light inside. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight. He tried to imagine the kind of emergency situation that would make a high-security fortress like this empty itself so completely. Possibilities filled his head. None of them was reassuring.
Through an archway and along a short path flanked by flowerbeds, and they were at the grand entrance of the main house. It too was hanging open, as unguarded as the front gates. Ben tensed, darting his gaze all around him. Was he walking straight into a trap here? Had Serrato somehow been alerted that they were coming?
But if it was a trap, it was taking a long time to spring. Nico muttered something in Spanish as they walked into the huge marble-floored entrance hall. Ornamental plants and colourful flowers spilled from decorative urns. Paintings adorned the walls. The hallway was surrounded by doors. Ben stepped across to one of them, his rifle ready, and pushed it open. He switched on the light and found himself staring into a large empty salon with a grand piano at the far end.
Across the hallway, Nico called softly, ‘I think you need to see this, man.’ Ben shut the salon door and stepped over to see what Nico wanted to show him. He was pointing inside another empty room, one that was decked out with wood panels and leather furniture.
‘The picture,’ Nico said.
Ben looked where he was pointing, and saw with a cold shiver the gilt-framed oil portrait of the woman he’d instantly have taken for Brooke if he hadn’t known better by now.
‘Alicia,’ he murmured.
‘I told you, man. She’s like a sick fantasy for him.’
And that sick fantasy was the only thing keeping Brooke Marcel alive. But where was she? Ben raced through the ground floor, flinging open door after door, flipping lights on in room after room with his finger on the trigger.
Nothing. Between them they combed methodically through the house as far as the sweeping crimson-carpeted staircase. Nico motioned towards it with a questioning look. Ben nodded. The two of them started making their way upwards, barely breathing, listening hard for any tiny sound and hearing nothing. There seemed to be no sign of life – but Ben would open every door in the whole damn place before he’d be satisfied there was nothing here to find. ‘Split up,’ he whispered to Nico. ‘Yell if you find anything.’
‘I find anything, you’ll hear more than yells,’ Nico said, brandishing the revolver.
‘Be careful. Meet you back here in five minutes.’
Alone, Ben followed his nose through the opulent passageways towards the source of the burnt stink, so much stronger up here. Within minutes, he’d found it.
> The suite of rooms had clearly been a luxurious one before the fire had ravaged it and turned it into a blackened shell. It had taken several fire extinguishers, their empty canisters discarded about the floor, to quell the blaze. The worst of it seemed to have been concentrated in the bedroom, where he found the charred remains of a four-poster bed. The curtains had been burned away from the open windows. The steel bars bolted to the outside were covered with soot.
Had Brooke been here? Ben’s intuition told him so. But his emotions were so badly frayed that he didn’t know if he could trust it. He searched through both rooms for some kind of trace of her. Lying on what was left of the bedroom rug was a scorched piece of clothing of some kind. He picked it up. It wasn’t anything he recognised as Brooke’s. It was the remains of a silky negligee or nightdress, most of the thin material blackened and burned away. Whose had it been? Alicia Serrato had been dead for some time. Had it been intended for some other woman? For Serrato’s captive?
As he let the ruined garment slip from his fingers, Ben felt broken glass crunch under his boot. He knelt down, poked around in the ashes and picked up a sliver of glass. He wiped the soot away carefully with his finger. The piece of glass was printed ‘HANEL’, the C missing. He sniffed it and caught the faint whiff of perfume.
Ben tossed the piece of glass back into the ashes and stood up with death in his heart. He’d come so far, and Brooke was still lost to him. Time was slipping through his fingers like fine sand.
The Armada Legacy Page 27