The official report suggested that a car full of armed drug smugglers fearing exposure, and seeing the lone officer, decided to eliminate the only witness to their being on the road by gunning him down. Not so far from the truth as far as Sergio could tell. Sure, he imagined there was more to that story than anyone knew, but he also understood that, whether the gunmen had been after Al and his buddy, or had truly been paranoid traffickers bent on murder, the outcome remained the same.
Gunmen zero.
Sergio three.
With a decoration down the road for heroism, and a probable promotion as word of his actions spread.
One of the nearby vehicles contained a stringer reporter for the largest Panama City newspaper so it was just a matter of hours until his face was plastered throughout the country as a symbol of how seriously Panama took the ongoing war on drugs. As well as a figure for a new unofficial slogan for a police force in need of pride, which would go something like: ‘Don’t Fuck With Me Or I’ll Take You Down’.
Sergio was a genuine hero, and looked every bit the part.
Why ruin a good story with inconvenient facts?
~ ~ ~
After an hour of steadily moving deeper into the Darien, Carlos signaled it was time for a break. All three men were soaked through with sweat, and they gulped greedily from their water bottles. Carlos passed out some pretzels from a small package, advising that they needed to keep their salt intake high so that the water would absorb into their cells and not just flush out through their sweat.
Al took his portable GPS unit from his satchel and powered it on. By his reckoning, they’d come seven miles from the road, maybe a little more. That left thirty-three to go. If they were averaging a couple miles per hour, tops, it would take two more full days to get to the other side of the border. He considered the reality of spending another forty-eight hours in the jungle. His heart sank. Al would have already sold his right arm for a Long Island Ice Tea and a carton of Marlboros – and it had only been eight hours. How bad would this suck by Tuesday?
Ernesto and Al sat a few yards apart, panting, resting their already tired muscles. Carlos looked like he’d just woken up after a nice twelve hour nap – soaked maybe, but not even winded, whereas his companions were tottering on their last legs.
Al supposed that if all you did was roam around the wilds in hundred degree heat, you got used to it pretty quickly. He preferred not to think about how much older Carlos appeared – Al fully understood he was in shit shape and didn’t need any reminders from his well-intentioned internal voice.
Al’s abdomen emitted an alarming growl, accompanied by a shooting pain in his lower intestines. Good God. Not again. This was becoming a too-regular feature of his afternoon communion with nature – a moment or two of frantic warning and then he became blow-out boy. He’d taken to carrying one of their two rolls of toilet paper in the pocket of his cargo pants, to save rooting around in the burro packs whenever he was overcome with the urge. He glanced around and saw a promising clump of indeterminate plants maybe forty yards from where Ernesto and Carlos sat.
Al half ran, half trotted to his chosen spot and soon realized he was standing in a pool of muddy water filled with flying bugs. Not good. He really didn’t need his business end getting bitten while he struggled with number two, so he moved another few yards until he found firmer footing. He dropped his trousers and crouched in the now all too familiar field latrine position, eyes squeezed shut and teeth gritted from the heady combination of pain and effort. Alarmed by a nearby crackling of underbrush, he looked up to see a burro’s face two feet from his. Even in the middle of nowhere he couldn’t have a moment to himself and preserve just a little dignity.
Al shooed him. The inquisitive burro stared at him, standing its ground.
Suddenly the air above them filled with a dense, thumping roar – the distinctive sound of a helicopter, deafening in its proximity. Al instinctively bunny-hopped for cover, pants-around-ankles style, and in the process he dropped the toilet paper roll in the swampy muck in front of him. It immediately soaked through with brown groundwater. The burro crashed past him and away from the thundering clamor, almost knocking him over.
And then the jungle clearing where Ernesto and Carlos sat exploded, detonation after detonation blasting the area into a growling fireball. Five, six, seven explosions, an area thirty yards in diameter blasted to smithereens. Al could just make out the chopper, which had risen higher overhead to avoid any shrapnel from the explosions. He listened to it hovering above as the smoke from the detonations gradually cleared. Its rotors thumped rhythmically as it remained fixed over the blast zone.
Al couldn’t see the airship, but his instinct strongly recommended not sticking around to find out what happened next. He could see the smoldering fragments of Carlos and Ernesto alongside the other hapless burro, so there wasn’t anything left to salvage. Self-preservation yelled at Al to get the hell out of there, and quick.
He pulled up his pants and scurried further into the jungle, trying to be as soundless as possible. The panicked burrow bolted ahead of him, frantic to put as much distance as it could between itself and the helicopter. That wasn’t good. If anyone descended from the chopper it would be a lot easier for them to spot a crazy, freaked out burro than Al hiding eighty yards from the detonation area. Al waited breathlessly for something to happen. He winced along with each bump and crash of the burro as it lumbered through the brush, now another forty yards past his hiding place. The helicopter maintained its position overhead.
A minute went by. As did another. And then a pair of combat boots slowly descended through the treetops, followed by a camouflage-clad torso belted into a complex harness, with arms holding a very ugly looking assault rifle.
Al willed his body to become part of the jungle floor, his face pressed flat in the ooze. He prayed he was undetectable this far away from the destruction, and hoped the attackers would be satisfied with the complete devastation the explosives had inflicted.
The man remained suspended twenty feet above the still-smoldering corpses – no longer recognizable as humans. The less inquisitive, but unlucky, burro had been blown half apart, its cargo destroyed and its torso mainly obliterated. Time halted to standstill as the dangling observer spent an eternity systematically surveying the carnage.
Then Al heard the words that chilled his blood and froze his breath in his chest.
Audible over the muffled chopping of the helicopter, now far above, a male voice said, “Target neutralized. Everything’s vaporized. Pull me up and let’s get out of here.”
The man rose back through the trees, hoisted by the black rope attached to his harness and soon the sound of the airship receded, then faded to silence. But Al stayed glued to the muddy ground, eyes clamped shut, digesting the words he’d just heard, again and again. It wasn’t so much the phrases, nor the tone.
No, the problem was they were in English.
~ ~ ~
Richard leaned back in his chair and wiped his face with both hands. He’d removed his wireless headset but still studied the monitor, where up until a few moments before, a yellow blinking square had dominated the upper left quadrant of the aerial view of the jungle. Now there was nothing. The little yellow icon was gone.
So it was over.
He’d gotten a brief description from the helicopter and a seen the video feed of the devastated blast area. It was clear nothing could have survived the attack. They’d decided on grenades, figuring that, although low tech, they would be highly effective, especially if they dropped a half dozen right on their target’s head. Fired from several grenade launchers, their weight and momentum easily carried them through the thick canopy, ensuring oblivion for anything below.
He would have preferred to have gotten his hands on the camera but given the images from the video he agreed it wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t worth risking a half hour scrounging through body parts and debris to find fragments of it – all that could possibly be left, c
onsidering the amount of destruction levied upon the small target area.
“Sam? Come on in here,” Richard called.
“Yes? What happened? How did it go, sir?” Sam asked, almost afraid to hear the answer. He’d been monitoring the police channels, listening to the description from the roadside shoot-out area, hoping against hope that the bodies of his accomplices were too badly burned to be identified, or at least not until well after Richard had gone back to Langley.
“Crisis averted. I think we can safely say this little episode is behind us,” Richard announced. He seemed to have grown an inch.
“That’s great, sir! So you were able to find them?” Sam fawned.
“All I can say is there’s no longer any threat,” Richard said, clearly fatigued-but-happy now that the long vigil was over.
“I don’t suppose I’ll ever know what was so important about the camera...” Sam muttered.
“Sam. Listen. Closely. You’re lucky you aren’t being packed up to Langley, to spend the rest of your dismal career cleaning latrines. After the fuck up at the whorehouse and then this suspicious shoot-out, it’s really a kind of miracle you’re still in charge here. If I was you, I’d focus on denying everything to the locals when they come asking – make sure and sanitize the situation so nothing can ever lead back here. So no, you don’t want to know why the camera was an imperative. What you want to know is that I’m leaving now, and you’ll want to pray you never hear my name or voice ever again.” Richard regarded Sam with his reptilian stare. Sam fidgeted, feeling like a schoolboy.
“I’m sorry things got off to a rough start, sir, but it seems like everything–” Sam began.
Richard held out his hand, signaling ‘Stop’.
“You can have your office back in fifteen minutes. I can honestly say I hope I never see this place again. I know the way out. Just clean up after me so it’s as though I was never here, and we’ll consider ourselves even,” Richard declared, making a dismissive gesture with his still raised hand.
Sam wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or furious. He silently wished a curse on Richard’s plane; it would burst into flames and crash into the sea; his scorched and bleeding body would become a twitching feast for the sharks – while jellyfish stung him for good measure. He couldn’t help but smirk, just a little, at the satisfying visual.
Chapter 22
Twenty minutes after the helicopter had disappeared, Al cautiously raised his head and looked around. He was alone. A bird fluttered overhead in the trees. The patter of light rain played upon the canopy, the drizzle barely penetrating the tightly woven layer of vegetation.
A sudden crash from behind made his heart jump in his chest. He spun around, prepared to attack or defend himself from whatever new horror the universe had visited upon him.
The prodigal burro had returned.
Al was pleased to see the nosey beast; somehow relieved he wasn’t completely alone. He reached out and scratched the scruffy latrine-stalker behind an ear, then gently stroked his long, fly-bitten nose. The burro showed its teeth – Al pulled his arm away in horror – then it gave Al a little nudge, looking for further reassurance; most likely scared out of its wits by the attack.
As was Al.
Why was a highly-trained Gringo hit squad hunting down a cook in the middle of the Panamanian jungle? And how had the cook been tracked and located? And why, if they could track him, not simply wait until he emerged out of the jungle in Colombia and grab him then? Why blow everything to kingdom come and slaughter Ernesto and Carlos in the process? Given what he’d just witnessed, was the gun battle on the road not obviously part of the same operation? If that were the case, who’d lay odds that the firefight at the brothel wasn’t also connected? It was an awful lot of shooting in a short period of time. And the cook had been in all three locations when the killing started.
Al wondered what the poor bastard could have done to bring the wrath of hell down on them. Stealing someone’s shit didn’t really compute as a plausible explanation, but Al was unlikely to ever discover what had actually happened.
As he scratched the burro’s nose it slowly dawned he had a major new problem. He had no way of knowing whether they, whoever they were, would have men stationed at the road in case anyone got away; or whether a hit squad was even now prowling down the same trail Carlos had forged through the underbrush, following it to verify no stragglers had survived the aerial attack. He really didn’t want to believe that was the case, but he also had no idea what he was involved in or what kind of shit was waiting for him back the way he’d come. If they’d wanted the cook so badly, maybe they’d also be after Ernesto’s travel companions. And if they’d wounded Sergio and taken him alive it was quite possible they’d gotten info out of him, in which case if he went back he would be walking into a death trap.
Al’s suddenly fertile mind conjured up a dozen different scary scenarios that placed him in imminent danger, and all seemed plausible in the wake of the last few hours.
Luckily, the burro had some useful knowledge – it knew its way to their destination. So it ambled off into the trees, untroubled by Al’s mental turmoil. And the sedulous donkey had the water bottles, Sergio’s old machete and rifle, and the rest of the contents of the bulging pack slung on its back; so survival meant sticking with the burro.
Al almost called after it – then stopped himself. He remembered Carlos’ caveat about voices in the jungle. It was possible the helicopter attack had drawn enough attention to attract fierce armed gangs of predators, who were even now making their way through the foliage to his location…
Pull yourself together, Al.
He homed in on the swaying bottom of his newly appointed guide; about twenty yards in front of him and moving steadily farther away. Al picked up his pace. As unappealing as it was, his only real option was to follow the bouncing burro and hope the local cutthroats were too occupied murdering someone they knew to be interested in chopping a complete stranger to pieces. He broke into a trot – which spurred his new-found rationalizing ability; if he was going to survive he needed to get his hands on the water. And the gun. Though Al truly hoped he wouldn’t need the rifle, he couldn’t rely on hope to save him in the Darien Gap. Carlos had been their safe passage guarantee – but Carlos was now evenly distributed over about a hundred square feet of rainforest floor, so Al didn’t really expect anyone he encountered to greet him with open arms.
He didn’t need a slide-rule to work out he’d have to be extremely lucky to stay alive for the next couple of days.
But so far, luck didn’t really cut it as a likely bedfellow, considering his experiences over the last 24 hours.
Chapter 23
Four black gunships skimmed a few feet above the brutal terrain’s treetops as they pressed towards their destination. The grimly determined faces of the SEAL Team Six commandos glowed in the red lighting of the helicopter interiors. No one had spoken since they’d lifted off from the base staging area.
The helicopters moved with an almost eerie silence, their heavily modified forms sound-deadened with specially designed synthetic materials that also made them near radar-neutral. It was impossible to completely silence the massive turbines that powered them, but these choppers were nigh on ninety percent quieter than a stock Sikorsky Blackhawk. The tail rotors bristled with six tempered blades – not the standard four, allowing the rotor speed to be slowed while delivering the same thrust at lower RPMs. That dampened the sound from the rotors slicing through the air, as did the specially designed casings for the tail section, which rounded all sharp edges. The technology, originally developed for the Comanche ‘stealth’ chopper program, virtually eliminated radar signatures.
The choppers were on radio silence, so the only communications were via the headsets on a local area broadcast network, which was scrambled to prevent interception. The encryption technology was undefeatable – any detected communication would have appeared to be randomly oscillating static.
Th
e SEAL team sat silently watching the ground fly by, mentally preparing for the mission they’d be carrying out. All their gear had been triple checked, and nothing left to chance. The many weeks of preparation would soon culminate in the real thing, and as always, it was impossible to determine how many of the team would make it out alive. There were risks to everything and it was a point of pride for these men to put themselves in harm’s way. If some lost their lives, that reflected the price of being one of the elite. It was a cost each man had committed to paying, if necessary.
The group of eight older men who comprised the lead team traveled with each other in their own helicopter. The rest of the squad was fine with that – separation from the others had been the dynamic since day one, and was by now accepted as a perennial aspect of the mission. Once the ships touched down, they’d play out every step that had been choreographed and rehearsed for months. Nothing left to chance – except the fickle unexpected – and every eventuality carefully permutated. Barring their intel having gotten everything wrong, the confidence level, success-wise, was high.
As they came over the crest of the final hill before their target came into focus the pilot of the lead helicopter broke radio silence, “Thirty Seconds to Drop,” he announced, almost casually. The wind buffeted the chopper, knocking it around – they’d been warned to expect thirty to forty knot gusts; the forecaster had sure gotten that part right.
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