by Scott McEwen
Mendoza lost all control himself, going completely berserk, screaming vile names at the man in the mask, spitting and snarling, straining against the leather straps with such impotent fury that his bowels let loose in a gush, and the stench of hot feces filled the air.
“Te seguiré al infierno!” he screamed with such ferocity that his voice broke in a painful rasp. I’ll follow you to hell!
A door burst open on the far side of the garage, and a man shouted in English: “That’s enough! Bastante!”
Everyone, including Mendoza, jerked their heads in the direction of the voice as the gringo sniper came stalking across the bay, grabbing the torch from the man’s hand and hurling it across the garage.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he bawled, glaring at the masked leader sitting backward in the chair. “Are you fucking animals? You’re worse than the fucking Taliban!”
The masked man got to his feet.
Hancock snatched a glass jar of bearing grease from a workbench and used two fingers to scoop out a glob of it, tossing the jar aside. “Get the fuck outta my way!” he growled at the torch man, smearing the grease over the woman’s charred nipple. “Sadistic fucking animals!”
“This is not your business!” the big leader said in accented English. He was a head taller than Hancock and stood looking down on him, broad chested and imposing.
“You wanna bet?” Hancock stepped into the bigger man’s space, his eyes blazing fire. “Get on the fucking phone and call Ruvalcaba! You dumb fucks were told to bring these people here and wait for the interrogator. I’m the fucking interrogator! Now back your ass the fuck up before I gouge out your eyes and skull-fuck you!”
The bigger man took a very reluctant step backward, knowing that Hector Ruvalcaba valued the gringo sniper’s life over all of theirs.
Mendoza’s wife and daughter stood sobbing while Mendoza sat naked in his own shit, looking pleadingly toward the gringo. “Please!” he begged, weeping pitifully. “I’ve given them every name that I know.”
Hancock stepped past the leader, spinning the wooden chair around to take a seat in front of Mendoza. “Listen,” he said easily. “These jackasses don’t even know why you’re here. I’m sorry about what they did to your wife, I am, but if you can tell me what I need to know, I promise they won’t touch her again. All I need to know is where to find the Americans. Tell me where I can find Chance Vaught and Dan Crosswhite.”
Mendoza’s eyes grew big around, his heart breaking with the crushing realization that, by saving Vaught’s life—against his better judgement—he had brought this nightmare to his wife and daughter. “I deserve to burn in hell,” he whispered.
“We all do,” Hancock said sympathetically. “Tell me where they are, amigo. Tell me, and all of this goes away. I promise.”
“Toluca,” Mendoza croaked, having now lost all desire to live. “You will find them in Toluca.”
Hancock patted him on the head. “Good man.”
He got to his feet and took a Sig Sauer .357 from the small of his back, blowing Mrs. Mendoza’s brains all over the man standing beside her. Then he shot the little girl. Mendoza’s chin was drooped against his chest when Hancock shot him through the top of the head.
His work done, the gringo turned to leave, but that’s when he noticed a curious trickle of blood on the inside of the child’s thigh. Glancing at the man nearest her, he saw the fellow’s fingers were red with dried blood. “You sick fuck!” He shot him through the liver.
The child molester went down in a heap, crying out in agony.
Hancock could not have known it, but this fellow was the leader’s younger brother.
When the leader grabbed for the gun beneath his jacket, Hancock heard the sibilance of leather and whipped around with unbelievable speed, shooting the leader through the face. The big man pitched over backward into a pile of old radiators with a crash, and his nickel-plated revolver went clattering across the grimy concrete.
Hancock gestured with the Sig at the younger brother, who now lay writhing in the grime. “Let him bleed to death. The rest of you assholes get this mess cleaned up! Now!”
At least a couple of the remaining six men must have spoken English, because they moved quickly to begin untying the bodies.
Hancock went out the back exit, slamming the steel door after him. “Fucking amateur night!”
41
HUNAN PROVINCE, CHINA
17:00 HOURS
“I don’t understand why we didn’t take a plane to Zhangjiajie,” Lena said from the passenger seat of a stolen Land Rover as they rode north along the scenic S10 highway in Hunan Province. They had just crossed the eighth-highest suspension bridge in the world, spanning 1,080 feet above the Lishui River. Of the world’s one hundred highest bridges, forty-two of them were located in China.
“I wanted to see some of the country,” Gil said with a glance at the rearview mirror. “Look at those mountain ranges. They make Montana look like West Virginia.”
Lena, who had never been to the United States and thus could not appreciate the comparison, sat staring at the side-view mirror, watching the black Mercedes-Benz directly behind them. Three Russians had followed them from Chongqing, despite Nahn’s supposed efforts to throw them off the scent.
“A plane would have been a thousand times safer,” she said. “How long have you known we were being followed?”
“Since we left the hotel.”
“And you said nothing?”
“I didn’t want to worry you.” He put his foot on the brake pedal, slowing abruptly to agitate the Russian driver behind him as he’d done a half dozen times since leaving Chongqing three hours earlier. “I like knowing exactly where they are. I also like knowing they’re probably racking their brains trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing in China.”
“Pffft! I’m still trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing in China.”
“We’re jumping the Dragon Wall.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “You know that Victor Kovats was killed jumping the Wall, right?”
“Who’s Victor Kovatch?”
“Kovats. He was the Hungarian wing suit champion.”
“Oh, the Hungarian champion!” Gil chuckled sarcastically. “I’ll bet he had to be pretty good to be the Hungarian champ.”
She suppressed a smile, both amused and offended by his American air of superiority. “You should know the best wing suit fliers in the world are from Europe.”
He laughed. “And they’re apparently splattered all over China.”
She laughed, too, in spite of herself, slapping him on the shoulder. “You Americans think you’re so great!”
For reasons Gil could not quite pin down—competitive reasons, perhaps?—Lena brought out the conceit in him. “Well,” he said, “how many Europeans have HALO’d into Iran from the back of a Turkish 727?”
An experienced parachutist, Lena knew that a HALO jump was a High-Altitude, Low-Opening parachute jump employed by Special Forces to infiltrate enemy territory. Her jaw hung open. “You did that?”
He did not answer the question directly. “So who’s got bigger balls now? Me or Kovatch?”
“Kovats,” she said quietly, her ardor beginning to smolder. She slid her hand along the inside of his thigh. “Why were you in Iran?”
He thought briefly about his plans for the future—should there be a future, considering the insanity factor of the jump he planned to make—and decided to share a classified secret: “I was sent in to assassinate a bomb maker and his pregnant wife.”
She sat back with a gasp. “You murdered a pregnant woman?”
He shook his head. “I shot her, but I didn’t kill her. I killed her husband and her father, though. Then I kidnapped her back to Afghanistan, and she gave birth to a baby boy that same night. The kid’ll probably grow up to become a da
mn terrorist, thanks to me. Last year, I killed the CIA man who ordered me to shoot her without telling me she was pregnant.” He took his eyes off the road just long enough to meet her gaze. “How do you like me now?”
She put her hand on his knee. “No wonder you can’t go back to your old life.”
“How could anyone go back?” he muttered, thinking of Marie. “The things I’ve done . . .”
Her voice felt thick to her as she spoke. “You and I were destined to meet, Gil.”
“Dunno about that.” He was eyeing the mirror again, wishing he could kill the Russians now instead of having to wait, but it was necessary to the plan. “Maybe we were—if you believe that kinda crap.”
An hour later, they were approaching Zhangjiajie, the city nearest to Tianmen Mountain National Park in northwestern Hunan Province. Tianmen Mountain was often called the Dragon Wall because of the winding, serpentine road that led up to the almost five-thousand-foot-high summit from which wing-suit fliers from all over the world launched themselves into the sky like Wile E. Coyote.
Victor Kovats had died there on October 8, 2013, during the World Wingsuit League Championships. His parachute had failed to deploy just shy of the landing pad, and he impacted the trees at nearly a hundred miles an hour.
When they arrived at their hotel, Gil parked in front and got out, smiling at the Russians as they drove slowly past and signaling for the driver to roll down his window.
The blond Russian stopped the car, staring with his dead blue eyes as he put down the window, waiting to hear what Gil had to say.
Gil saw the Bratva tattoos on the Russian’s neck. “You can park right over there and just bring our bags up to the room,” he wisecracked.
Without giving any indication that he’d understood, the Russian put up the window and pulled past the hotel.
Lena was afraid of the Russians outside of Switzerland. “Why do you antagonize them?”
“It was necessary,” he said, opening the back of the black Land Rover Defender to remove their bags.
An Asian man on a bicycle emerged from around the corner of the building and pedaled past in the same direction as the Russians. Lena recognized him at once as Nahn. “Hey, that’s—” She turned to Gil. “He got here ahead of us! You wanted him to see which car they were in!”
Gil gave her wink. “Never fuck with the United States Navy.”
She laughed and shook her head. “My God, you’re arrogant.”
“Only around you, baby.” He pulled her carry-on from the back of the truck and handed it to her. “Here. It won’t kill you to carry one up yourself.”
She laughed again, taking the bag. “Fuck you, Gil.”
42
PUERTO VALLARTA, MEXICO
15:20 HOURS
Mariana Mederos had rented a small apartment outside of Puerto Vallarta in order to remain close to Antonio Castañeda, pending completion of Crosswhite’s mission in Toluca. After Serrano and the gringo sniper were dead, she would have to make some decisions regarding her future with the CIA. For now, though, she had a purpose, and that was to arrange for any logistical support that Crosswhite might need from Castañeda’s people in the South. Under normal circumstances, she would have been afraid to remain in the same city as Castañeda, alone and unprotected, but she was beginning to see that, despite his ruthless nature, the former GAFE operator did adhere to a certain moral code. There was no way of divining the limits of that code, but it did provide a small degree of predictability.
She was walking north along the beach with her feet in the surf when her cellular began to ring in her bag. She did not recognize the number, but it was from the DC area code: 202.
“Hello?” she said, convinced that it would be Pope.
“I’m surprised you answered,” said Clemson Fields.
His voice had a nerve-grating nasal overtone that Mariana recognized at once. “What do you want?”
“I see you’re down in Vallarta,” he said. “Do you have time to meet me in Tijuana?”
Mariana’s desire to meet Fields in Tijuana—or anywhere else—ranked right up there with her desire to be eaten by a shark. “For what?”
“By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that Alice Downly was killed by an ex-Ranger sniper working for the Ruvalcabas. I’ve tracked his spotter, Billy Jessup, to Tijuana, and I need you to get close to him so you can learn the sniper’s location.”
“And how do you suggest I do that?”
“That will be up to you,” Fields said, “but Jessup has a fondness for Mexican women.”
“In other words, you expect me to sleep with him.”
“I expect you to do whatever you can to help end this crisis. I won’t waste time sparring with you, Mariana. You know the gringo sniper is hunting Agent Vaught and is therefore hunting Crosswhite as well. Even if you no longer care about the future of the CIA, I believe you do care about Dan Crosswhite. Or am I wrong?”
She realized that both Fields and Pope were under the impression that she and Crosswhite had slept together, and this annoyed her, but they were right to assume she cared about him. This annoyed her as well. They had discovered a weakness, and Fields was exploiting it.
Very well. If men were going to exploit her weaknesses, she would fly to Tijuana to exploit one of theirs, but sleeping with anyone was out of the question; she’d sooner resort to using a pair of scissors to get the information she wanted. “The spotter’s name is Jessup?”
“Correct,” Fields said. “I’ll fill you in on the gory details when you arrive. You can call me at this number with your itinerary. How soon should I expect you?”
“Maybe tomorrow afternoon. But all future meetings between you and me will be in a public place.”
He chuckled. “You’ve nothing to fear from me, Mariana. I’m not an assassin.”
“I’d never accuse you of possessing the courage, Clemson. I just don’t trust you as far as I can pick you up and throw you.”
There was a tense moment of silence at Fields’s end before he said, “I’ll wait to hear from you.”
With the call ended, she dug the satellite phone from her bag and called Crosswhite to tell him about the conversation.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“It sounds legit,” she said, “but if Pope has been working with Serrano, how can they not already know how to find the sniper?”
“Consider this possibility: Suppose the sniper actually works for Pope. Suppose he’s part of a cell within the ATRU? If that’s the case, Fields might be in the dark. I don’t know how much he knows.”
“But if the sniper was part of the ATRU, Midori would know.”
“Not necessarily,” Crosswhite replied. “Midori said Pope has become more secretive lately—maybe even paranoid—and if Pope had Alice Downly assassinated, he’s got every reason to keep her in the dark.”
The idea chilled Mariana to the bone. Could Pope have gone that far? “But why would he want Downly dead?”
“Who the fuck knows?” Crosswhite said with disdain. “I’ve never understood how he thinks. Hell, he stabbed a dude in the face with an ice pick last year during the hunt for the loose nuke. He didn’t even give Gil a proper chance to interrogate the guy—just buried an ice pick in his face and started asking questions.”
Hearing this told Mariana that Pope was capable of anything. “Speaking of Gil, can you reach him by sat phone?”
“No. As long as he’s in China, he’s completely blacked out, and you can bet that’s exactly why he picked China, too. Whatever the fuck he’s up to, he doesn’t want Pope poking his nose in it.”
“What if he doesn’t make it back? Can you and Vaught handle the sniper without him?”
Crosswhite snorted. “Will we have a choice?”
That made up her mind. “I’ll leave for Tijuana in the morning.”
; “Listen, I don’t want you taking any unnecessary risks for me.”
“Would you say that to me if I was a man?”
“You being a woman doesn’t have shit to do with it. The difference is that I care about you, and I don’t trust Fields any farther than I can throw his skinny ass.”
She laughed without sharing why. “This is the business we chose, remember?”
“That it is,” he admitted, knowing she had to go to Tijuana—regardless of the danger.
43
TOLUCA, MEXICO
15:25 HOURS
Dressed in a black SWAT uniform, Crosswhite tucked the phone into his leg pocket. “Fields is on the move.”
Vaught stood leaning against the outside wall of the police station, a dip in his lower lip, an M4 slung over his shoulder. “What’s he up to now?”
“He’s drawing Mariana north to Tijuana, away from Castañeda; says he’s got a line on the sniper’s spotter. Sounds like it might be a legit lead, but it’s too soon to tell.”
Chief Diego Guerrero was there too, equally armed, but he understood almost none of what was being said. “What’s happening?” he asked in Spanish.
“Our enemy in the CIA is making his move.”
Diego carried an ugly cut over his right eye from where he had collided with the barrel of another officer’s carbine the day before during a house-clearing exercise. He had begun to move much more like a soldier over the past couple days of drilling. Crosswhite and Vaught were both satisfied with his progress, and they never passed on an opportunity to build him up in front of his men, who were catching on faster than he was.
All of the officers had taken to wearing black balaclavas over their faces whenever they patrolled in public now, as did Crosswhite and Vaught. This was not an uncommon sight in Mexico, and it solved the problem of Crosswhite’s drawing unwanted attention because he looked like a gringo. As expected, the Mexican Federal Police had spent less than a day investigating the ill-fated assault, rushing back to Mexico City as soon as possible, where they were still badly needed to maintain order in the wake of the earthquake.