War Lord

by David Rollins

  I heard Petinski’s iPad chime. Its screen came to life and the men beside her turned their faces away quickly to preserve their night vision. After a few seconds, she glanced at me then back to the screen, a scowl on her face. Something wasn’t pleasing her.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘The camera.’ She handed over the device. ‘Press rewind.’

  I touched the arrow and the white noise in the frame became the picture of a lanky man in loose clothing pointing a handgun at the camera from the street below, holstering the gun in the front of his pants, then walking backward out of view, into blackness. I ran it forward and watched the lanky guy in loose clothing walk out of the blackness, take a gun out of the front of his pants and point it at the camera. An instant later, white noise.

  ‘They got the camera,’ she observed.

  Fuck. Who finds a tiny camera nestled into a darkened corner at four thirty-five in the morning, for fuck’s sake? I let Delaney know that we’d lost the camera.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he reassured me. ‘These guys know what they’re doin’.’

  I needed reassuring.

  Petinski stuffed the tablet into her pack as the truck came to a stop and the handbrake ratcheted on. External speakers squawked, and Robredo’s voice boomed into the night.

  The truck’s back door burst open and Petinski, Delaney and I were almost pushed out by the eagerness of the men to get their boots on the ground.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Petinski asked Delaney as the PA gave the night a good shake.

  The CIA deputy yelled over feedback, ‘He’s sayin’ that if anyone makes any trouble, his men will bring hell into their beds.’

  Seemed like the perfect segue into a joke about my ex-wife, but there wasn’t time. Meanwhile, the men had formed up in a line in front of the truck. Petinski, Delaney and I stayed behind them, mist that was more like steam drifting around us. About fifty yards farther up the hill, the floodlights on the compound’s wall illuminated the night. Due to a narrowing of the street, the truck could get no closer, at least not without bulldozing through someone’s front steps. It was a still, windless night. Nothing moved, other than the mist. Maybe Robredo’s threat worked. Speaking of the man, he got out of the truck and joined us. Delaney had a quick word with him then informed us, ‘I told him about the camera. He said it didn’t matter.’

  I wouldn’t have expected him to say anything different and I should have felt the same way; so why didn’t I?

  Robredo barked a command and the unit advanced up the street in a line abreast, Delaney, Petinski and I bringing up the rear. But then a sudden boom split the night and the man in front of me fell backward, splashing me with warm wet fluid. I looked down on his face and saw that there wasn’t much of it left, explaining the warm wetness, the remains of his steaming skull reminding me of a large half-eaten Easter egg full of strawberry ice-cream. I turned to look for Petinski and a round cracked like a dry stick as it zipped past my ear, the boom from the rifle that fired it following an instant later.

  Jesus! I ducked. Robredo’s men had split up and run for cover. I was alone with the body spread-eagled on the road. I grabbed the man’s rifle in one hand and his collar in the other and dragged him back behind the truck as Robredo’s men began returning fire. I patted down the dead man and located four mags for the FN in his ammo rack along with a Ka-Bar knife. I stuffed all of these into various pockets and relieved him of his rifle. Then the body at my feet began to shake, the heels of his boots tapping a random beat against the ground.

  I ran back up the street, hugging the shadows. Accurate single shots . . . there was a sniper up ahead somewhere. There were plenty of towers up inside that fortress, perfect hides for a shooter. The dead man had been right in front of me. If he’d moved a couple of inches to the left or right, it would be me doing a tap dance on the pavement. And if I hadn’t turned my head to look for Petinski . . .

  Robredo had taken a knee behind a rough retaining wall and was shouting into his cell phone. His men were on the move, teams of two leapfrogging each other, closing the distance to the compound, using whatever cover presented, shooting as they went.

  ‘Cooper! Here!’ Petinski. I scuttled up to her position and found Delaney beside her, Glock drawn, eyes wide.

  ‘Thanks,’ I told her.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Being here.’

  Muzzle flashes sparkled just inside the compound’s main entrance. Full automatic fire from a belt-fed light machine gun. Red fluorescent pencils of light lanced through the night and skipped off the road beside us, and shouting filled the blackness along with gunfire. Lights, weak incandescent lights, went on here and there as the people of Céu Cidade woke up to the gun battle. Ahead, the searchlights on the compound wall snapped off. The world went dark but for the little multicolored floaters that hung in front of my eyes. I couldn’t see for shit. Shots rang out from somewhere in our rear. We were being cut off, the situation deteriorating fast.

  Robredo’s men began retreating, not firing, unsure where the attacks were coming from. Two of the men were wounded, being helped along by their buddies. The sergeant joined us and spoke rapidly with Delaney.

  ‘Another two units are on the way,’ said Delaney, passing along Robredo’s news. ‘And there’s a chopper inbound.’

  I hoped it had a minigun. Failing that, sharp shooters in the doors. I tapped Petinski on the shoulder. ‘Follow me. Stay close.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait for the reinforcements?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  Petinski hesitated, but then changed her mind. ‘You’re impulsive, you know that, Cooper?’

  I made a dash for the truck, giving Petinski no choice but to follow. Impulsiveness had nothing to do with it. I just didn’t want to arrive too late to find another person I knew – Shilling – killed.

  The truck wasn’t far, and we made it in a handful of seconds. I jerked open the back door, Robredo’s men swearing and shouting around us, pissed at being pushed back, and helped myself to a coil of rope, a pair of flashlights and a tomahawk. I ditched the rifle, threw the coil over my shoulder, handed Petinski one of the flashlights and we went off to find the alley reconnoitered the previous night.

  We broke into a run. This time, Petinski was half a yard ahead. I pulled the NVGs from my rucksack and juggled them with the tomahawk as the path zigzagged up the hill. We soon came out of it into the open intersection, the golden lights of the favela I’d seen away in the distance the night before now glowing a dirty yellow behind a veil of fog rising up the valley.

  ‘What’re you going to do?’ Petinski asked, adjusting her NVGs before fitting the straps over her head. ‘Wait a minute . . . you don’t know, but that never stopped you before, right?’

  ‘We’re going over the wall, hence the rope.’ I gave it a pat while I considered the details.

  ‘And the tomahawk?’ she asked.

  ‘Scalps,’ I replied.

  The passage at the base of the compound wall was as dark as a drain. I slipped the NVGs’ double lenses over my head and the world became the familiar Kermit green. I scoped out the intersection and found what I’d hoped to find – a nest of densely tangled electrical wiring feeding into a large drum: a substation. A cluster of those wires disappeared over the compound wall. I pulled the Walther and shot three rounds into the drum. A section of the internal compound went dark. That should do it. Now that the lights were off, I didn’t want them being turned back on.

  ‘This way,’ I said, and jogged down the lane, stopping twenty yards or so from the dwelling Petinski vaulted into on our last visit.

  ‘Again?’ she asked and took off the NVGs before I could answer. She handed them to me. ‘Can’t climb with these on.’

  Sucking in a few deep breaths, one foot forward, she bobbed back and forth, judging distances and heights, getting her balance sorted out. And then she was running at the wall and I saw a blur as she scaled it. I jogged to the front door and
waited. Something inside came crashing down. Then a heavy thump. I put my ear to the door. Nothing. I tried the handle. Locked. Petinski was taking her time. I heard a bang, not a gunshot.

  The lock gave on the fourth swing of the tomahawk. I kicked the door in and raced up the stairs into some kind of storeroom. Three males were slumped on the floor, broken shelving and various cans and other items around them. A fourth man had Petinski in a headlock, her feet off the ground. They’d been making so much noise that they hadn’t heard me. Petinski was in a chokehold and was starting to go into convulsions. I swung the axe backhand at her assailant’s neck and the blade bit deep into his spinal column and stuck there. He collapsed to the right, his legs falling away like a wall with its foundations sapped. He didn’t cry out. He wouldn’t need an MRI to tell him he was now a quadriplegic. Still, somehow the guy’s left hand went for a weapon tucked into his belt. I had no choice and put the toe of my boot into the tomahawk’s head, pushing the blade all the way through into his esophagus. The guy stopped going for his gun.

  Petinski propped herself up on one elbow beside him and hacked a few dry, choking coughs. ‘Thanks,’ she croaked. ‘I got three of them. Fourth one jumped me. Didn’t see him.’

  Ambush. They knew we were coming and baked us a cake.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ I said, but I knew exactly what it was – the unmistakable funk of corpse.

  ‘Out there,’ she said, motioning at the veranda.

  I went to have a look and the smell got worse as I went out into the open. Lying on his back, a black male, one-eighty pounds, maybe five ten. The eyes were empty, death having repossessed everything. His throat had been cut and a curve of blood spatter arced across the plastic sheeting that hung from the guttering. Blood pooled under the body’s neck and shoulders. I could hear a few flies buzzing around the corpse. Petinski walked out of the storeroom, rubbing her throat with both hands. I lifted the arm a little and the whole body moved: rigor had set in. I wanted to know when he’d been murdered. A corpse loses roughly two degrees Celsius every hour. A thermometer up the bunghole would’ve been the correct method to check the core temperature, but as I had no thermometer, I placed two fingers in the crease of the armpit. Though it was still vaguely warm in there, his sweat was cold.

  ‘How long’s he been dead?’ asked Petinski.

  ‘A few hours.’

  ‘Perhaps the folks over the wall thought he helped us plant the camera.’

  Or maybe he played loud music once too often. We had no time to mourn the guy. And offering an apology for perhaps getting him killed wasn’t going to help him at all. I stood up, pushed the plastic sheet aside, grabbed the mattress and repeated the procedure from the night before. Once the plank was in place, I secured one end of the rope around the pipes under the sink, and threw the coil up and over the mattress.

  ‘Me first,’ Petinski demanded, climbing up onto the plank. She refitted her NVGs, took the rope in one hand, and sprang up to the mattress. Then she turned to face me, the rope around her back and shoulders, and was gone in an instant.

  I didn’t get it done quite so elegantly but the result was the same, and a minute later I dropped beside her at the base of the wall inside the compound. No alarm was raised. No shout. In fact there was no movement anywhere that I could see. The shooting had stopped. Outside, sirens were whoop-whooping but here inside the wall all was quiet except for a humming sound. It was a large generator. Emergency power. I went over and had a look at it. The lights throughout the compound were now all off, and while the place seemed deserted, power was still being used somewhere. I levered open the control panel with the Ka-Bar, hit the kill switch and the motor died instantly.

  Scanning the area I saw a window about fifteen feet up, some kind of retaining wall beside it. I pointed it out and we ran at a crouch toward it. ‘Me first this time.’ I said as we paused to catch our breath.

  Petinski nodded and rested her hand on my arm, so I rested a hand on her sports bra.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Cashing in my brownie points for saving you back there. They dissolve unless you use them quickly.’

  ‘You want to keep that hand?’

  I removed it and told her to wait until I gave the all clear. Shinnying up the wall, I then scooted along a top edge that stepped up several times. The window was open, a leap of three feet or so to reach it. I jumped out, my fingers finding the ledge, and pulled myself up with a grunt, re-bruising my forearm. A last effort and I was inside, panting. Petinski was inside too, sitting on a chair at a small table, waiting.

  ‘I found a door and used the stairs,’ she said with a shrug.

  ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  Another shrug. ‘The place feels like a morgue. There’s no one around.’

  Proving her wrong, a gun battle erupted somewhere close, a large volume of automatic fire.

  ‘Call Delaney,’ I said, squeezing past her into a stairwell. ‘Get him in here. I’m gonna see if I can locate the shooter’s hide.’

  Around fifteen minutes later, after getting lost in this deserted rat’s nest several times, I stumbled on a circular staircase to a room with a trapdoor in its low ceiling. Using a chair I opened the door, lifted myself up and found a 7.62mm sniper rifle with a night scope set up on a table, its bipod and wood stock resting on sandbags. Half a dozen casings were on the floor. The window had a view down the hill, which was swarming with fifty or so BOPE troops, the gunfire now sporadic, a chopper roaring in a hover overhead while its spotlight quivered over the compound’s entrance.

  ‘Cooper,’ Petinski yelled out from somewhere below. ‘You up there?’ Her head came up through the hole in the floor. ‘Been looking for you. Come down. There’s something you need to see.’

  Twenty-three

  Petinski led the way through a series of rooms and narrow passageways, ever downward into the bowels of the place, passing BOPE personnel who were either directing the occasional sullen cuff-locked male or carrying large numbers of captured weapons. The von Weiss compound was in fact a warren of twenty or more individual homes interconnected by doorways cut through adjoining walls and trapdoors in the ceilings and floors.

  Eventually Petinski led me to a large storeroom full of packaged and tinned food, sacks of grains, sugar, flour and so forth. Preparations for a siege, perhaps? One end wall appeared to be hinged at the floor and ceiling and was pushed out of alignment, revealing that it was, in effect, a secret door. Delaney and Robredo and a couple of his men loitered outside it, waiting for us.

  ‘How’d you find this?’ I asked Delaney.

  ‘There’s a control room. What’s inside this room was up on one of the screens. They just kept searching till they found it.’

  ‘Why? What’s inside?’

  ‘Take a look,’ said Delaney, patting his stomach with his hand as if he had a bad case of indigestion.

  On the other side of the door was a large well-lit space, a cross between an operating theater and a forensics lab. The floor was tiled, a stainless-steel grate set in its center. A stainless-steel table stood over the grate. Along the three walls were benches with equipment, much of which I couldn’t identify other than to guess that it was medical. Placed on benches were glass cases lit from above with heat lamps, and large jars containing reptiles, animals and various unidentifiable gizzards suspended in formaldehyde. A flat-screen TV on one wall showed a dozen small windows that recycled surveillance camera views. But all this was incidental because beside the stainless-steel table was a large mass covered by a sheet of black plastic. Small rivers of red ooze ran like capillaries to the grate in the floor from whatever was under the plastic.

  I had a bad feeling about what it might be, but I didn’t have too much time to ponder as one of Robredo’s men pulled the sheet away. Yeah, as I thought, a body. But not Shilling’s, and that was a relief. The sight of what had been done to it still made me catch my breath, though, because sitting strapped into a chair was a man, n
aked, and the state of him was just plain disturbing. His limbs, hands, fingers, feet and toes were swollen to ridiculous proportions. What I was looking at could have been a grotesque balloon animal. There were splits in the skin on his arms and legs where the swelling appeared to have exceeded the skin’s elasticity. His tongue was black and bloated, and had forced its way out of his mouth, spreading the jaw so wide apart that it appeared to have been dislocated from his skull. His eyes were hidden beneath puffy pillows of flesh. His neck had inflated to at least twice its normal size, a small pressure-split through a tattoo of a skull inked below his ear. A thin steel wire tied to the back of the chair cut deep into the skin around where his Adam’s apple would be, and blood had run from the wound. Quite possibly, as he’d puffed up like the Michelin Man the unfortunate bastard had garroted himself.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  Delaney produced a driver’s license taken from a black leather wallet – the victim’s. ‘Accordin’ to this, Gustavo Santos. He was one of von Weiss’s security team.’

  Delaney passed me the license. The photo bore almost no resemblance to the male duct-taped into the chair, except that a little of the skull tattoo was visible, an identifying mark that was as good as anything.

  ‘Why do you think von Weiss would do this to one of his bodyguards?’ I asked. ‘He must have had a reason.’

  Delaney shuffled. ‘Um . . . Santos was the guy we separated from von Weiss during the bomb scare.’

  I digested that. Shit, not good news. We already knew von Weiss was paranoid and believed his inner circle had been infiltrated. If Santos had been killed, then what about Shilling? She’d been isolated, too. ‘We saw von Weiss’s men bring Shilling to the compound earlier,’ I reminded him. ‘We’ve got it on tape. That’s what brought us here in the first place. So where is she? Why’ve we found this guy and not Shilling?’