by Mark Greaney
Instead he focused on the white water churned up by his pounding bare feet.
There it was. The first big beast was upon him; it looked like a fat gray tree trunk through the foam until his big mouth opened, inches from the tips of Gentry’s toes. With a scream of terror Court spread his legs apart and raised the shotgun.
Click.
He had not pumped another shell into the chamber after using the shotgun to sever the vine.
The reptile was on him now.
He jabbed the inside of its mouth with the muzzle of the gun.
In the two seconds since he’d stopped kicking he’d begun to sink in the water, and he felt the fore claws of the animal against his leg as they sank. The smack in the mouth caused the croc to flail back for a brief instant, and Gentry used that instant to charge a fresh shell into the chamber of his 12-gauge as he sank deeper, faceup, into the river.
He went under fully now, pushed his weapon up until he felt the neck of the reptile above him, and pulled the trigger one-handed.
Boom!
The recoil pushed him deeper, deep enough to avoid the spinning animal’s huge tail as it thrashed near the surface. Court turned and swam quickly down and away, along the bottom of the river for a moment as he neared his boat. He shot back to the surface and jacked a fresh shell into the breach as he spun back around, found a new croc on him, its mouth just beginning to open to initiate the death grip. This beast was no more than ten feet long but still quite deadly. Gentry shot the gray monster between the eyes.
The blast of double-aught buckshot was roughly akin to ten simultaneous rounds from a.32-caliber handgun. At point-blank range to the face of even a massive reptile, it was almost certainly a mortal wound. But the death throes of such a powerful creature are just as dangerous as the attack, and again Court had to kick and twist and flail at the water to get away.
He also knew the fresh blood in the water would attract hundreds of piranha in seconds; he had to get out of there immediately for way too many reasons to count. He ejected the spent shell, chambered a fresh one, and kicked frantically towards his canoe.
He heard the first snaps of gunfire as he took hold of his little boat under the bridge, but he ignored them for now. With a free hand he unhooked the ties holding down the canvas tarp from two of the cleats. He tossed the shotgun onto the tarp and pulled himself into the craft. The massive open mouth of a twelve-foot crocodile lurched from the water behind him, followed his legs up and over the little boat’s edge, but the jaws snapped shut without taking hold. The animal’s front leg had made it into the canoe, and his thrashing weight threatened to flip the tiny craft over with Court inside it. Court grabbed the 12-gauge and fired one-handed into the reptile’s neck, flipping it back off the boat.
He tried to rack a fresh shell, but his gun was empty. The rest of his ammo was in the backpack at the bottom of the river, so he tossed the shotgun aside as he pulled the rest of the canvas cover free and let it fall into the water. Another long burst of rifle fire shot foam into the boat, but the distant soldier’s gun emptied before he could hit either the canoe or the American.
Court dove flat on the bottom of the ten-foot-long canoe, pushed the outboard’s propellers into the water, flipped it on, and pulled the cord.
The machine burst to life, and Gentry wasted no time turning his tiny craft upstream, away from the guns and the crocodiles and the piranha.
A minute east of the bridge he still panted and hacked river water out of his throat. He looked down and saw his wet pants ripped open at the left thigh. A long slashing wound bled from where the first crocodile had scratched him with its claws. The wound was relatively serious and could use a few stitches in the deepest part, but he knew it was a better outcome than he had a right to deserve. He shuddered thinking about the prehistoric monster on top of him in the water.
And then he let out a long sigh. Looked down at his boat, at what now amounted to the grand sum of his worldly possessions.
An old plastic flashlight, a one-liter bottle of outboard engine fuel, and a rusty speargun.
That was it.
Court wiped his long hair from his eyes, hefted the speargun with his free hand, and turned the throttle on the engine higher, steering the boat upriver towards Fonte Boa.
FIVE
The manhunter stood alone in his hotel room, wiped sweat from his face, and opened the second-story window to let in fresh air that, while cooler than the musty room, smelled like rotten fish and donkey shit.
He fought a wave of nausea.
He turned off his radio and tossed it into his suitcase. The rest of his clothes were packed. He just had to zip up the bag, and he was out of this disgusting and humid hellhole. In ten minutes he’d be at the dock walking up the plank of the steamboat to Coari. In two days he’d arrive in a real city, even if he were only speaking in relative terms by comparing it to this backwater coffee stain on the map. Another two days and he’d be in Manaus, and there he’d run like an Olympic sprinter to the airport, catch a flight to Rio or Sao Paulo and then back home to Amsterdam.
Only then would he breathe easy again. He’d take a day or two to tend to his tulip garden, and then he would regroup. Reacquire his target.
He would find Court Gentry again. And next time, he told himself with finality, he’d get a team of wet boys who would not fuck up the entire operation.
He still could not believe it. Six men out of twenty killed. Including the AUC commander. Five of them by goddamned bee stings, and the other after slipping into a river full of crocodiles. Seriously? The helicopters had radioed that they were heading back over the border to Colombia with both their dead and their living.
And they were leaving him out here alone.
Bastards.
A knock at the door.
A chill ran up the manhunter’s sixty-two-year-old spine. He turned away from the window and pulled the old.32-caliber revolver from its leather shoulder holster under his arm. He held it up with a quivering hand.
Slowly and quietly he took the four steps to the door, the weapon raised in front of him.
“Who’s there?”
“Sir? Do you need help with your bags?”
The manhunter unlocked the bolt and flipped the latch, hiding his pistol behind the door as he opened it.
He sighed in relief. It was one of the little savages from the front desk.
“No. I can manage.”
“Yes, sir. The ferry leaves in twenty minutes.” With a nod the savage turned and headed back down the rickety staircase.
The manhunter shut the door. Locked it back tight. Holstered his ancient pistol as he turned back around to zip his suitcase shut.
On the other side of the room Courtland Gentry, his target for these many months, stood by the window. Gentry wore a short beard and hair longer than in any of the photos the manhunter kept, but it was undoubtedly him. He sported a cream-colored shirt, unbuttoned, wet, and filthy. Brown cotton pants, ripped at the thigh and blood smeared.
He held a speargun in his right hand.
The manhunter grabbed at his pistol in its shoulder holster as he cried out in shock.
The loud spring mechanism of the speargun firing snapped in the air of the hot room. The manhunter felt his body slam back against the wooden door; his arms flew out wide from his body.
Only by looking down, away from his target, did he see that he’d been run through by a long bolt from the weapon. He was pinned to the door through the stomach. Blood wet the insides of his legs as it trickled down from the wound.
After taking the time necessary to recognize what had happened, the manhunter looked slowly back up to his target. The American tossed the empty speargun on the tiny twin bed and came closer. With a growing weakness the manhunter softly pawed again at the pistol under his arm.
The Gray Man gently moved the manhunter’s hand away from the shoulder holster and pulled the revolver out. He looked it over, shrugged, and slid it into his pants at the small of h
is back.
“You’ve been on me since Chile, haven’t you?” The manhunter was surprised by the gentleness of the American’s voice. The Dutchman had lived and breathed Court Gentry for over half a year but realized now that he’d never heard him speak, had never even wondered what he sounded like.
Pain burned in the manhunter’s gut. Weakness grew in his extremities, in his eyes. Still, he said, “Since Quito.”
Court Gentry smiled. His face was close to the manhunter’s, his tone still soft and familiar like they were father and son. “I didn’t feel you in Ecuador.” He raised his eyebrows. “That was one hell of a chase, you and me.”
The manhunter’s legs went slack, and he cried out with the pain radiating from the spike through his belly. Quickly the Gray Man grabbed him, held him up against the door, braced him to take away a measure of the agony. The American looked up into the manhunter’s eyes. “You know how it is. Men like me. We can’t help what we are. It’s not our fault. The man who sent you… he knew who I was. What I was. He was the one who killed you. Not me.”
The manhunter’s eyes were vacant. Still, he nodded slightly.
“Give me his name, and I’ll make him pay.”
After a moment, the mouth opened. A trickle of blood ran down the Dutchman’s chin. He tried to speak; a small sound came out but no words.
Court leaned close to the man’s face.
The Dutchman winced with pain; his eyes relit somewhat, tempered with new concentration. He wanted to speak.
And finally he did. So softly Gentry had to lean almost into the man’s lips to hear him say it.
“Sidorenko.”
Gentry leaned away. Stood fully erect in front of the man. Nodded. Gregor Sidorenko, the Russian mafia kingpin and Court’s old employer, was apparently still sore about a double-cross Gentry had engineered the previous spring.
“I’ll punish him for sending you to me. You can rest now.”
Gentry pulled the spear out of the door, out of the man; the manhunter did not even feel the movement, nor did he feel himself being helped to the bed. He watched the American lay him down, lift his feet up one at a time, and pull off his boots, but he did not feel anything.
He wanted to rest. His eyes softened even more, and the last thing he saw before the lids shut was his target looking through his suitcase, taking his wallet and a first-aid kid and some clothes, and leaving through the front door.
The manhunter’s eyes shut then, and he thought of his tulips.
He would not see them soon after all, and that was a shame.
SIX
Thirty-eight-year-old Major Eduardo Gamboa surfaced slowly, his black neoprene head covering, the black waterproof greasepaint on his face, the black swim mask, and the black covert breathing regulator in his mouth all helping him blend in with the three a.m. black water shifting here in Banderas Bay. Fifty meters in front of him, a one-hundred-twenty-foot luxury yacht floated, backlit by the late-night artificial illumination of the Malecon, the boardwalk running the length of Puerto Vallarta’s downtown. To the north, to Gamboa’s ten o’clock, the bright lights of PV’s hotel district twinkled like fireflies.
The yacht was called La Sirena; it lay at anchor here seven miles out in the bay, wide of the shipping lanes that ran to the port or the marina but close enough to shore so that its owner and his entourage could enjoy all that Puerto Vallarta had to offer. It was long and sleek and beautiful, and crowned by a state-of-the-art black Eurocopter helicopter resting on the helipad above the upper aft deck. But Eduardo Gamboa ignored the style of the ship in front of him and focused fully on the substance. After forty minutes under water his night vision was tuned to its peak. With his naked eye he saw two guards on the upper sundeck standing near the bow. He imagined the same number on the opposite side.
Slowly another head rose from the water to Eduardo’s right. Then another. Then three more men on Eduardo’s left. Then two more men just behind him.
Eight divers in total bobbed in the water fifty meters from the La Sirena. And after a nod from Major Eduardo Gamboa, they each released a few ounces of air from their buoyancy-control devices, and as one they slowly lowered back below the black surface, leaving not a trace of their existence.
Gamboa and his men were from the GOPES, the Grupo de Operaciones Especiales, the Mexican Federal Police’s elite special operation’s group. But these eight cops were a level of elite unknown to all but a few. They’d been pulled from other police and military commando units and organized separately from the rest of the GOPES. Together they comprised a special assault-team task force run secretly by the attorney general in Mexico City.
Their mission? Extrajudicial execution of Mexico’s top drugcartel bosses.
Their target tonight? The owner of La Sirena, one Daniel Alonzo de la Rocha Alvarez. In a world where everyone had a nickname, de la Rocha was known simply by the initials of his last name, DLR, pronounced in Spanish as “de, ele, ere.”
DLR was the leader of Los Trajes Negros, the Black Suits, one of the nation’s leading criminal drug and kidnapping organizations.
Four minutes later, two of Gamboa’s team resurfaced at the stern of La Sirena. Martin and Ramses had removed their scuba gear, their masks and their fins, and they carefully climbed the sea stairs onto the lower deck. They carried suppressed Steyr TMP submachine guns and held them at the ready as they crouched at the top of the stairs. Their night vision gear helped them peer up the deck towards the galley and the bow. After a moment Ramses spoke into his headset.
“We’re on board, moving into position.”
Gamboa had come along the portside hull with two more of his team. “Entendido,” he whispered into his radio. Understood.
A minute later Martin and Ramses had hoisted themselves up the helipad ladder, climbing silently in the dark. Then they lay prone on opposite sides of the Eurocopter, their weapons trained ahead on the four guards on the sundeck, some seventy feet forward on the yacht. Martin and Ramses’s job was to prevent any attempt by those on board to flee in the chopper during the assault and to eliminate the deck guards when given the order by their commander. “Team One, listo,” said Ramses into his headset. Ready.
“Entendido,” replied Gamboa again from the softly rolling surface of the bay. He removed his scuba gear as he spoke. “Team Two, execute.”
“Executing,” came the call, and three men began climbing the anchor chain at the port bow, forty feet below the guards on the sundeck.
Two minutes later these men were aboard, and their suppressed weapons scanned the bridge deck. “Team Two, listo.”
“Team Three, vamos,” said Gamboa, and he and two men rose dripping out of the water at the rear stairs, climbed to the upper deck, passed a large lifeboat covered with a tight canvas tarp, and began moving forward, proceeding cautiously. They made it to the hallway to the galley, heard noises and saw lights coming from the great room ahead, and flipped up their night vision goggles. They entered the room slowly, found two guards seated on the large white leather sofa in front of a fifty-two-inch plasma-screen television.
Gamboa took the man on the left, shot him once through the skull as he stood. The report from his suppressed weapon was drowned out by a protracted gunfight on the TV.
The officer behind Gamboa shot the guard on the right three times in the chest; both guards tumbled back to the sofa, handguns falling out of their hands and blood pools spreading out and meeting between their bodies on the white leather.
The three federales moved across the room quickly now. The television was running a movie that Eduardo easily recognized: Los Trajes Negros 2, the second in a very popular series of Mexican-made films romanticizing the life and exploits of Daniel de la Rocha, the man sleeping in the master suite just beyond.
Arrogant pendejo, Gamboa thought. It was typical of the narcissistic drug lord to have films glorifying his evil playing on his yacht. Gamboa continued across the room with his men stacked behind him and entered the hall to the mast
er suite. They passed two other guest suites; they would clear them all after dealing with de la Rocha, but they did not expect them to be occupied. Forty-eight hours of surveillance of La Sirena had indicated that Daniel was on board tonight with only a few bodyguards and the crew of his yacht.
Once in place at the door to the master suite, Team Three waited. Within seconds, one deck above them, Team Two announced they were outside the crew quarters.
“All teams, execute in three. Uno… dos… tres.”
On the helipad Martin and Ramses each fired two suppressed rounds from their Steyrs into the head of each guard on the sundeck.
Team Two opened both the crew quarters and the captain’s stateroom; one man trained a weapon on the captain’s bed, and two more flipped on the lights of the crew’s quarters and held their weapons on the eight men expected to be sleeping there.
Team Three, with Major Eduardo Gamboa in the lead, kicked in the door of the master suite. They actuated the flashlights attached under the barrels of their submachine guns but found the room already awash with light. The fifty-two-inch plasma in this room was on as well; this screen was broadcasting an interview with Daniel de la Rocha. He spoke to a reporter off camera. Gamboa ignored it and rushed to the king-sized bed. A large lump under the silk sheets was his target.
But before he made it to the bed, his weapon raised to fire, a voice to his right caught his attention.
“Welcome to La Sirena, Major Eduardo Gamboa.” It was de la Rocha’s voice. Gamboa looked up in shock. DLR was on television looking right into Gamboa’s eyes. He appeared to be in a studio, dressed in his impeccable and ubiquitous black Italian-cut suit. “A government assassin, here, to eliminate me. Dios mio!” The handsome face on the screen said it with a slight smile; his slick hair, goatee, and thin mustache gleamed black; his eyes seemingly locked on Gamboa.