by Chris Allen
The two men laughed.
“I tell you what, mate,” Morgan replied. “Why don’t we go down to the bar and have a drink? You got time?”
“I’ve got time for one, boss,” AJ replied professionally. Morgan walked into the bathroom as AJ continued to talk about his faux plans for the day, and deftly stashed the dry-sack in the cistern of the toilet. “But then I’ll have to fuck off, you know, because I have to fly back to Belize City on the five o’clock. Still, it’ll give us time for a quick catch-up and you can tell me what you’ve been up to all these years.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Morgan replied, stepping back into his boots. He walked past AJ, grabbed his room key from the writing desk and the two of them walked out. “At least we’ll have enough time to swap a few stories.”
Out in the corridor they spoke openly. AJ Armstrong was a former corporal with 2PARA. He had served in Iraq and Afghanistan with Morgan’s old friend Bill, who had been AJ’s former company sergeant major. Now AJ did occasional contract work for him, operating mainly out of Mexico. It was obvious that he held Bill in the highest regard and his willingness to get on a plane from Mexico City the previous night and fly to Belize, just to source and personally deliver an obviously illegal firearm and knife, was testament to the inherent loyalty written into the DNA of the regiment.
Morgan and Armstrong maintained the pretence of being a couple of old army friends catching up over a beer in the bar. They kept it short and sweet. As soon as they’d finished their beer, Armstrong stood up to leave. They shook hands and he said to Morgan, “I don’t know what it is you’re doing down here, boss, but if you get in the shit and you need a hand, give me a fucken shout, all right? I mean it. I’m fed up with corporate assholes who keep gettin’ themselves kidnapped, you know what I mean? My details are on the card or just leave a message for me with George Hemsworth down the road at the Drop Zone Bar. It’s his place. He’s ex-Reg. 2PARA and Pathfinders, back in the day. Good man. He’ll get a message to me. And if you need a good old-fashioned hard case, then go no further than George. They don’t make ’em like him anymore.” And with that, AJ turned and headed out to get a cab.
Morgan returned unhurriedly to his room. So, he had allies. That was good to know. The paratrooper network was alive and well, even all the way down here. Back in his room he changed into his swimming gear, checked to see that AJ’s package hadn’t been disturbed, and then went back downstairs to spend some time by the pool. At least he could still pretend to be on vacation. That’d give Voloshyn’s spies something to report on, and the chance of a swim would do him good. After that he’d shower, dress, grab some early carbs from the buffet, go back to his room and prepare his gear, take a rest until it started getting dark – and then he would see what he would see.
CHAPTER 47
Three hours later the remnants of the sun had withdrawn behind the Maya Mountains and it was finally dark. Morgan checked the luminous face of his TAG Heuer. He had made the run between the Paradise Palms and Voloshyn’s villa in good time. When he’d left the hotel he’d taken a deliberate right-hand turn out on to the coast road, to all intents and purposes making his way south to the village of Placencia. He took off at a relaxed pace, keen to convey to Voloshyn’s spies that he was doing nothing more than enjoying an evening run before turning in. Quite a normal thing to do, considering his background and cover as a security consultant; of course, he’d be the type to run at night.
The only thing that might have appeared strange to the more than casual observer was his clothing: long track pants, albeit ultra-lightweight and a long-sleeved shirt, also ultra-lightweight. He was, after all, in the Caribbean and the onset of thunderstorm season was giving the humidity reading a solid nudge, although the occasional unexpected downpour did take the steam out of the air a bit. The one concession to looking like a seasoned runner was the Camelbak Classic two-liter hydration pack he always carried with him on deployments, just in case. On this occasion it was also concealing the US Marine Ka-Bar fighting knife that AJ Armstrong had scored for him.
Morgan left at dusk, when he could still be clearly seen. After taking a roundabout detour toward the village, he had successfully backtracked behind the Paradise Palms. With his body now propelling him very definitely due north, Morgan rolled down his sleeves and disappeared into the dark embrace of nightfall.
The detour had added two miles to the run so he’d been at it for almost an hour. He’d kept his pace steady all the way, careful not to overstride and risk twisting or even breaking an ankle in the darkness. The further north he ran, the closer the mangroves grew against the roadway. Still he kept running, his eyes adjusting to the scarcity of light. All that mattered was that there was enough for him to see where he was going. A thin ribbon of white sand along the beach side of the road helped.
The air was warm as he breathed in and perspiration dripped from his face. This time he wasn’t running for the pleasure of it; this time he was running toward an adversary. Toward danger? Possibly. If he was caught snooping it would be pretty hard to explain, but he’d come up with something plausible. “I wanted to see how serious you were about your security.” That was an option. Or, “If you left it up to these goons to show me what measures you have in place, they’d only show me the stuff that won’t make them look bad.” That was more like it. Difficult for Voloshyn to argue with that. Anyway, who knew how this would all turn out?
Whatever happened, Morgan knew this would be Intrepid’s one-in-a-million shot at bringing down not only the Night Witch and Wu Ming, but possibly even a much bigger global trafficking cartel. He owed it to Sutherland.
He counted off the clearings in the mangrove forest that were driveways to the beachside villas. He’d made note of them all on his previous trips back and forth along the road over the past few days. He was familiar with the turnoff to the Voloshyn villa and as he counted off driveway number seven, he reached the large, fallen buttonwood tree he’d selected as his marker. At this point he slowed to a walk and then stepped off the road, across the strip of white sand and into the pitch darkness of the mangrove swamp.
The cacophony of the bugs’ nightly overture was just getting warmed up and the stench of anaerobic decomposition, heightened by the heat and humidity of the day, was an onslaught not yet soothed by the cool night air. The smells reminded him of the open monsoon drains he’d encountered in places like Malaysia and Thailand: rancid. The mangroves in the area had obviously been altered due to the development that accompanied the construction of the luxury villas along the coastline. Where tracts of land had been cleared to make way for homes surrounded by pristine white beach sand, the refuse had been discarded in the no man’s land between the more extravagant properties, Voloshyn’s being the jewel among them. The result was lots of secondary growth and the going would be slow until he managed to get beyond it. With every pace Morgan felt his feet sinking deeper into inches of sludge and prop roots. He would be ankle deep in no time if he strayed too far into it.
Sure enough, within seconds he was swallowing back an impulse to gag when both feet sank deep into the muck and a sudden burst of hydrogen sulfide gas bubbled up as he struggled to release them. Rotten fucking eggs, he thought, stifling a cough. Jesus!
Morgan pressed on, moving mostly by feel and instinct through the darkness. He could make out the lights of Voloshyn’s villa in the far distance, about a hundred and fifty feet away. Not wanting to veer further into the swamp, he decided to keep the road as close to his left as he could. It provided an obvious break between the inland and coastal mangroves. Staying near it would also keep him from wandering too far toward the water. Luxury villa or not, the location had been chosen well, fortified by the thick wall of coastal flora and fauna that surrounded it to the south, west and north. In this part of the world, coastal mangroves attracted all sorts of wildlife, not the least of which were crocodiles, and Morgan wasn’t keen for any unwanted attention.
Once he’d pushed far enough in fr
om the road, he crouched down and listened. He needed a moment to allow his body the chance to settle after the run. Who was he kidding? Any chance to stop for a few minutes felt like a vacation. He really needed one – as soon as this job was done. His general fatigue had exacerbated the impact of the run. In less than a minute bugs were crawling all over the exposed skin of his hands, neck and face – mangrove spiders, crickets, scorpions – whatever they were, they were nipping and tugging at his flesh and hair, while thousands of mosquitoes buzzed deafeningly in his ears. Annoyed, he slapped them away, wiping away the carcass of something big, God only knew what, from the back of his neck. It was winged but too big to be a mosquito. Fuck this.
He slowly, deliberately, focused on his breathing, bringing his body back from the exertion of the past hour so that he could finally begin the task at hand. He had to reconnoiter Voloshyn’s villa, identify any vulnerabilities within her security arrangements and, if possible, attempt to find options for extracting her covertly when the time came to make the arrest.
He took a drink from the Camelbak and then checked the holster he was wearing under his shirt. In addition to the Ka-Bar, AJ had scored him an M9 Beretta with a DeGroat suppressor and an elasticized holster rig. During the run Morgan had worn the rig beneath his shirt, higher than usual across his torso to reduce bounce while he was moving. Now that he was in situ, he adjusted it, dropping it back down to his right hip. He had a spare magazine and the suppressor on the rig, and an additional spare mag in a pocket on the Camelbak.
He had pushed through the mangroves for almost half an hour since leaving the road to begin his surveillance of the area and approaches to the Night Witch’s villa by the sea. But he had reached a dead end, stuck within the thick undergrowth of the swamp, in the right angle formed between a long wire-mesh fence to his right and a high, whitewashed brick wall directly ahead. He was cornered, frustrated and dog tired. The wire-mesh fence was constructed around what appeared to be a small cabin with a single door standing in the very heart of the mangroves. The fence ran completely around the cabin and then formed a tunnel at its northern end, enclosing a path that led all the way to the whitewashed wall, which disappeared in either direction across the rear of Voloshyn’s villa. No doubt the continuation of the perimeter wall Morgan had seen at the front of the property when he’d first been taken there. At the foot of the wall the mangroves had been cleared to provide a path around the perimeter, but also allowing just enough moonlight to give him a clear view of his predicament.
He definitely hadn’t been expecting to see the cabin. He could see that the pathway’s fenced tunnel ended abruptly at a large gate within the wall. This was shut. Now, the idea of having the wire-mesh fence around the cabin made sense: it was to keep out unwanted visitors from the mangroves. But why have a caged cabin all the way out here in the first place? The thoughts that streamed through his naturally suspicious mind weren’t encouraging.
Morgan froze, listening, shutting out the excruciating distraction of bugs crawling all over him. His entire body was coiled. Eyes closed. Mouth open. breathing steady. His whole world became nothing but a single sound among the raucous chaos of the mangroves. He focused on it with concentration and discipline.
Splosh. Splosh. Drag. There it was again. A slow, muffled sound through the mangroves, getting closer. What was it? How close was it? Splosh. Splosh. Drag. It was impossible to tell.
Morgan remained locked in place, his fears about the cabin on hold as the mysterious sounds continued around him. Even the screeching of the competing bug species seemed to be hushed as the thing moved. It sounded long and cumbersome, and was passing by somewhere close, though it was impossible to define just how close. All he had to go on were the sounds. And those sounds left him in no doubt that this was a large crocodile.
Morgan slowly reached for the Beretta M9 and peeled it silently from the elasticized confines of the holster. With equal caution he slid the suppressor out too and carefully fitted it to the gun. If he had to fire, the last thing he wanted was to announce his presence to Voloshyn and her goons. With the Beretta prepared and ready to fire, he repeated the eyes-closed-mouth-open routine again, heightening his ability to hear what he could not see. But there was nothing more to be heard – the croc had stopped moving. Had it stopped and locked its attention on Morgan? Had it sensed danger now, predator against predator? The almost impenetrable wall of mangroves that surrounded him made any kind of unfettered movement by the crocodile against him challenging at least. Of course, that applied equally to Morgan. The pitch darkness, stifling proximity of the mangroves and legions of crawling, buzzing insects, were a claustrophobically small space that was shrinking around him by the second, leaving him with no way out.
Morgan racked his brain, searching for anything he’d stored away years ago when he’d undertaken survival training in northern Australia where salt- and freshwater crocodiles were prevalent. Soon there was another sound. More splashing and dragging. Only this time, it was to his left and a little further away. And then more ahead of him. Fuck! So not just one. This was a pack. What did he know about crocodiles? How did they hunt?
Oliver the barman had told him that in this part of the world they were American crocodiles. They hunted primarily in the first few hours after nightfall and the average male grew to around fifteen feet in length and weighed about eight hundred pounds. Among the largest crocs in the world, they were also an endangered species. Not tonight, they’re not, he thought. And what was it that Oliver had said about the croc that got his father – twenty-five-feet long and two thousand pounds? Domingo. Jesus!
Then something changed. There was another sound. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. He strained to catch it through the background noise, trying even harder to pick his way through the ephemera of swamp noise. To Morgan it was a new sound, but was it new to the crocs? He realized they were quiet, too. Also listening. Also waiting, nostrils quivering above the waterline to discern the exact location of the source of the noise. And there it was again. It was human. Someone else was out here.
Morgan rose to his feet, hoping that some extra height might help. Now he could hear clearly. It wasn’t a cry or a yell, it was the faintest whimper, somewhere close within the mangroves. The final prayer of someone desperate, exhausted and alone, who had lost all hope and accepted that there was no escape from their fate: “Help. Help me, please.” The crocs weren’t after Morgan at all. They were already on the hunt and now they were spoiled for choice. The voice he could hear was that of a young woman, and she wasn’t local. Her accent was different. European? Whoever she was, she was terrified, alone in the darkness, being stalked by a pack of nature’s most evolved killing machines. And if Morgan could hear her, the crocs could, too.
He had to do something.
Morgan was on his feet and moving, carefully at first, clawing his way free from the mangrove cell that had briefly imprisoned him. Crocodiles or no, he had to find the girl before they did. Ankle deep in muck, the Beretta clasped tightly in his right hand and reaching through the branches and vines with his left, Morgan set off as fast as he could. He’d accepted that there were probably even more crocs out here than he’d heard already, but he had a gun and if he was going down he’d go down fighting. He had to find her. He was torn between his desire to call out to her, to let her know she wasn’t alone, and his instinct not to inadvertently incite her into a flurry of hopeful cries and movements that would only draw the crocodiles straight to her. Coldly, objectively, he erred on the side of caution and remained silent, tracking her against the odds, against a pack of prehistoric reptiles that were somewhere nearby, using hunting methods honed over millions of years. Man against beasts. One trying to save a life, the others fueled by blood lust, hell-bent on killing.
A confused pause seemed to fall over the swamp, as if the beasts had worked out that there was now competition; a race for the prize. And then it was on, Morgan and the crocodiles – moving, pausing, listening; moving,
pausing, listening. The girl was crying now, her desperation carrying across the overwhelming humidity of the blackened, eerie hunting ground. Morgan felt rather than knew he was getting closer. Her sobs and pleas seemed just within reach. But where? Where was she? To find her he had moved away from the cabin, away from the dead end that had stalled his progress, deeper into the swamp, toward the edge of the sea. The water was around his knees now and he realized that the girl must be up to her waist in it, blinded by the darkness, clinging to the roots of the mangroves with nowhere else to go. But the crocs had her scent, there was no doubt of it. Morgan could sense them, preparing to make their move. Cold, calculating, knowing the prize was just a snap away. Morgan heard the splashes as the animals submerged in succession, like a fleet of submarines. They were ready to close in and he knew he didn’t have a hope of getting to her in time. Fuck! FUCK! He had no choice but to call to her.
“Crawl into the roots!” he bellowed into the darkness. “As hard as you can! Now!”
For a split second, a total, terrifying silence fell upon the mangroves. Then, from behind him, back near the cabin, voices, men’s voices, began to shout.
“Fuck, there’s someone else out there!”
“Get a light on him!”
“Who the fuck is that?”
There was no mistaking the last voice. Godek Kajkowski, Voloshyn’s enforcer. Beams of brilliant white light suddenly exploded from the vicinity of the cabin like air-raid searchlights and streamed through the latticework of trees and vines, seeking Morgan. With the illumination saturating him, he found himself exposed, caught in a rare patch of wide-open space.
“Help me!” the girl cried from somewhere nearby, followed by a scream. “Help! Help!”
“There!” Kajkowski yelled. “Straight ahead.”
A hail of gunfire instantly followed. The short automatic bursts were from at least two 9mm sub-machine guns, most likely HK MP5s. The crack and ping of ammunition slicing and ricocheting through the heavy foliage of the vegetation sent Morgan flat on his face into the water. A lot of yelling ensued as the crew, safely ensconced behind the wire-mesh fence, barked directions at each other, laughing and goading, as they brought more firepower to bear upon the place where they’d spotted Morgan. To them it was a turkey shoot, nothing more.