Castigo Cay

by Matthew Bracken

  The radio squelched and Prechter spoke again. “Andre, go over there and see what’s happening with Vuko. He might be having a problem with his radio. That might have been a signal shot he fired. Or a warning shot. Over.”

  It was only two hundred yards east of me to the little palm grove where we’d been tied and psychologically tortured. The grove was on sort of a grassy plateau where the island’s dune ridge ended at the channel. Andre was probably another hundred yards on the other side, at the Atlantic end of the channel.

  After a long pause I heard the radio squelch again, and then Andre’s voice. “Ahh…I think I am already in the best place for me.”

  Prechter came back immediately. “Andre, I think you’d better go check on Vuko, or I’m going to send Captain Ridley to check on you, over.”

  I wondered if Prechter was reconsidering his hobby of fighting boredom with murderous psychodramas. He had to at least consider the possibility that I had the Serb’s AR, with its easy five-hundred-yard range. His first option was to send Andre across the top of Castigo Cay as a recon scout. No, as a pawn, to be sacrificed if necessary. He wanted current information about Vuko, and even more, current information about the status of Vuko’s rifle. Andre’s life would not be much of a price to pay for that crucial intel.

  After a pause the radio crackled again. “Merde. Okay. Okay. I’ll do it.”

  I didn’t have Vuko’s rifle yet, but his radio was turning out to be useful. If Andre was still on the ocean side, it would take him less than a minute to walk to where I was crouching. Could I climb down into the water among the coral and get the rifle before then? If I didn’t, Andre would be looking down over the cliff edge at me, an easy kill shot even with his little .380 pocket pistol. Or he might already have Eddie Medina’s MP-5, in which case he could open fire on me from a much greater distance.

  So I decided to take out Andre first and then go for the Serb’s rifle. I turned off the radio, lest it betray me now with an untimely squawk, and stuck it in my empty back left pocket. I crabbed my way east along the rocks toward the ocean, staying below the broken rim as much as I could. I sneaked a few quick peeks toward the palm grove.

  In a minute I had covered less than fifty yards from where the Serb had gone over, always staying below the cliff’s rim in the ten or fifteen feet between the inflowing sea and the escarpment. My bare feet were cut and torn from the sharp rocks, but I ignored the pain. I could worry about them later, if I was still alive.

  Another quick glance above the natural parapet. Andre was walking past me but he was well inland, away from the edge. Good thing for me, because he was carrying the MP-5, his hands on the grip and magazine, the sling over his shoulder. Maybe he hadn’t been so worried about the blood on the weapon after all. Or maybe he’d picked it up from Medina’s corpse on the way over to check on his comrade, Vuko.

  And maybe the Belgian chef didn’t even know how to shoot it. On the German-made MP-5s that I’d handled, the thumb selector switch offered three choices. E for Ein meant one shot. S and F were for safe and full-auto, just as in English. I wondered if Andre knew what the letters meant. What were they in French? I didn’t know. Maybe there wasn’t even a round chambered. Maybe he’d never fired it before. Maybe if he fired it, he would waste the entire magazine on a single full-auto burst.

  Wishful thinking was the one thing I had in abundance.

  Another quick peek and he was past my hiding place. If Andre saw the Serb’s body in the coral, or didn’t see him at all, he would report him KIA or MIA, either of which would put Prechter and Ridley on ultra-high alert. There was no more time to wait, so I hoisted myself up onto the plateau behind him. I was entirely in the open, as I’d been when stalking the Serb. The round file catching Vuko in the throat had been pure luck, luck I could not expect twice. If Prechter or Ridley were above me in their future dream house, having previously cached rifles there, I would know it soon. Or would they let me take out another one of their expendable minions? It might be amusing for them to watch me at this deadly business, even through their rifle scopes.

  It became a straight-up-the-back stalk, more of a panther’s rush. I had the choice of the heavy iron nut on a string or the toy knife, and I chose the former. The paracord loop went around the three middle fingers of my right hand; the big hex nut was gripped in my left fist. My forearms were up, ready to flip the loop of paracord over Andre’s head from behind. I visualized the classic sentry-stalking garroting technique. It had been a lot of years since I’d practiced it against other Marines with a rolled-up towel, and they against me. The drill was to throw the loop over his head, then jerk him back by his neck as I’m crossing my forearms to tighten the noose. Turn smartly about-face, so that we’re suddenly back-to-back. Lean over hard at the waist and jack him up, the cord over my right shoulder, his feet kicking against the air until he relaxes in death.

  Five yards, the final rush. Mind of a panther, a leopard, an assassin.

  ****

  I had only a few steps to go when for no discernable reason Andre half turned and then threw up his hands in utter shock at seeing me. The MP-5 was forgotten, swinging at his hip by its shoulder strap. His eyes and his mouth went wide and he blurted, “Oh!” I’m sure he didn’t hear me approaching, so perhaps his awareness was on some sort of ESP level. Or perhaps some primal node of his brain had registered my human scent, carried to him on the sea wind.

  Instead of flipping the paracord loop over his head, which was impossible now with his hands and arms up and in the way, I let go of the hex nut and swung my right arm out and around like a side-arm baseball pitcher. For the second he was staring at me, he didn’t notice the steel nut coming around from the side in a half circle. The cord partly deflected off his upraised hand, shortening the radius of the shot so that the rusty iron caught him only a caroming blow off the front corner of his temple. It jolted and stunned him, and he hardly moved while I brought it around again like a lasso-swinging cowboy.

  The half-pound chunk of steel had accelerated almost to slingshot speed with the whiplash leverage of the yard of paracord added to my arm after a full circle. The second strike hit him just above his left ear with a sickening crunch and spray of blood.

  Andre collapsed, and I followed him to the ground. His scalp was split open and the depression wound was gushing a torrent of blood over his face and off his nose onto the sand. He never saw what hit him. Eyes open but lights out. I felt his carotid. Weak and fluttery. The chef-videographer was going… going…gone. The rusted hex nut went back into my right front pocket, after I wiped the blood onto his white vest.

  His VHF radio spoke from the ground. Prechter’s voice. “Andre, what’s happening down there? What’s happening? Did you find Vuko yet, over?”

  I picked it up and again considered sending Prechter my own personal message. Do a little psyops. But that would have to wait. The mission had to come first. The less he knew and the more he wondered, the better. For now, both Richard Prechter and Trevor Ridley would have to operate under the assumption that I had Vuko’s scoped AR carbine, with its five-hundred-yard killing range. That fear would significantly limit their freedom of movement. In fact, they’d be scared shitless if they believed I had his rifle in my possession. That gave me more room to maneuver, but no more time.

  The tide was still coming up.

  I grabbed the MP-5 and dropped its mag into my left hand: it was loaded with thirty rounds of hardball ammo, round-nosed full-metal jackets. Lots of penetration but no expansion. I shoved the mag in and yanked the cocking handle back to chamber a fresh cartridge, just to be sure, and a live round flipped out onto the sand. So Andre had been prepared to shoot. The gun was ready to go, the thumb selector set on E to fire single shots. The German sub-gun had only iron sights, but they were quality ones. I extended the skeleton stock all the way rearward to turn it into a little carbine.

  Then I went through Andre’s zippered and velcroed vest pockets. Found a few items of use. A high-quality P
ro-Tech switchblade knife that any SWAT cop or special ops troop would have drooled over. Probably a gift from a lover—I couldn’t see Andre buying it. His tiny Ruger .380, which I slipped into my left front pants pocket after checking to ensure that a round was chambered. I searched all his pouches and found some other items. His video camera, of course. Battery packs. A still camera. A small tube of KY jelly. Por moi, Andre? Not any more.

  On the side of his vest was a netted pouch containing a half liter of bottled water. I drank it in one long swallow as I took a look at Andre’s white high-tops, but a glance told me his feet were several sizes smaller than mine. He was no more use to me, so I rolled him over the cliff’s edge; he landed facedown on a broken rock shelf a yard above the flooding channel and didn’t move. You know when they’re faking, you know when they’re dying, and you know when they’re dead. Andre was dead, no loss to the world.

  The MP-5 was a fine weapon, but I wanted the Serb’s scoped rifle. I still felt strongly that the outcome of the day would be determined by precision rifle fire. I backtracked along the edge to where the Serb had gone over and looked down into the water, but his body was gone. He was nowhere to be seen. Lifted on the surging tide and carried through the channel, and there was no time and no way to search for him in either the channel or the lagoon.

  Or had he recovered from his neck wound and was now hiding somewhere nearby, waiting for me with his rifle?

  ****

  So I had the MP-5, still a fine weapon. There was no time left to develop some brilliant strategy. I knew where Prechter had been ten minutes earlier. It wasn’t far from where Nick and I had studied the harbor on our night recon. He was further south along the sand ridge, on the other side of his future vacation home, watching the girls from above as they struggled not to drown. And he had heard one rifle shot.

  I decided to circle back around by the harbor and approach him from that direction. Spot the back of his feet again, if I was lucky. He had only my Glock pistol and any shot he took would be from a couple-hundred-yard range, so I just went for it. I ran down the inland side of the salt-pond yacht basin. I was past the barracks trailer when the first shot rang out and kicked up the sand twenty feet short of me, but on a disturbingly accurate azimuth. All he needed to do was correct for elevation. He had as many as seventeen tries left in the magazine. I had almost double that in mine.

  So I zigzagged and the next shot landed long behind me, snapping through the air as it passed. There was no cover until I reached the cargo trailers and pallets of construction materials. Another shot zipped past me, close enough to hear its hornet’s breath. I dived behind a yard-high spool of electrical cable, thick wood at top and bottom. Black insulation over copper wire, cables thick as welding leads. Good cover, but he knew right where I was hiding.

  A bullet thwacked into the spool. He had the range. I was impressed; it was damn fine pistol shooting for using just Kentucky windage and guesstimated elevation. I’d have to expose some of myself to take aimed shots at him, and he might just get lucky. Another shot cracked off the top of the spool, sending splinters flying. He wasn’t wasting his chances; he was taking his time and aiming carefully, getting the range with each shot. I looked around the side of a spool, my face in the sun, therefore visible to him. I hoped his eyesight wasn’t as sharp as mine, but probably it was. If not naturally, he would have had the surgery to max them out.

  My spotting scope was only a Mark-1 Eyeball, peeking around the side of the spooled cable. Prechter was almost two hundred yards away, sitting on his backside below the crest of the ridge, his elbows on his knees. This gave him a nice stable firing position for maximizing his long-range pistol accuracy, but absolutely nothing for cover. He had left the concealment of shrubbery to move along the bare dune ridge closer to his house—probably as a result of hearing a single rifle shot, followed by Vuko and Andre going off the air.

  Both of us were on the move when he’d decided to stop and plink at me. He thought he’d caught me in the open, and look at him now. He should have reached some cover before deciding to trade shots with me. Maybe he was a brilliant CEO, but his tactical instincts were nonexistent. But then it was highly unlikely he’d ever faced a pissed-off former Marine sniper with an MP-5 submachine gun in his hands. Chasing down unarmed and terrified girls was more his sport.

  CEO or not, he sure as hell wouldn’t have been the first guy I’d shot at against a sandy ridgeline, but it was the first time I’d tried it with iron sights. The first time with a nine-millimeter submachine gun. First time by the ocean and not in the middle of a desert. First time the guy was wearing just shorts, and not a cheap suit of clothes from Hajis-R-Us or the ever-popular man dress.

  I didn’t see better cover or concealment potential or a position of greater tactical advantage nearby worth dashing to. I was already proned out, so I just leaned the MP-5’s barrel against the coiled electrical cable on the side of the spool. The bottom of the skinny curved magazine rested in the sand as I shouldered into the stock, got a cheek weld, and put my right pupil to the rear peep sight. I estimated the range to be a hundred eighty yards.

  I’d had a day on a range with an MP-5 when I was getting cross-trained for embassy duty, before I got out. Only time I’d fired one, but I’d handled a few before and since. They were generally battle-zeroed to shoot to point of aim at twenty-five and one hundred meters. At two hundred yards, the typical nine-mill bullet would drop about twenty inches, so I’d use an estimated foot and a half of hold-over to compensate. If it was zeroed, the MP-5 should have been capable of putting shots in a ten-inch circle at one eighty. A ten-inch circle at that range was easily “minute of man,” in the sniper’s arcane vernacular. Close enough for government work, as we used to say.

  But a civilian could zero his weapon where he liked, or nowhere at all.

  A large steel protective ring around the front post sight matched the tiny round peep sight in the rear, making it easy to get on target. Another slug from the ridge crashed into the spool. Many layers of insulated copper wire said that nine-millimeter hollow points were not getting through. I took careful aim at the top of his head to account for the hold-over, exhaled half my breath, squeezed the trigger gently, and fired my first shot.

  A puff of sand kicked up a yard to the left of his feet, and low. The MP-5 had probably never been zeroed, so I’d have to do this the hard way. I couldn’t believe he was still sitting there, elbows on knees, aiming carefully, completely exposed. Another of Prechter’s shots struck the ground a foot to my right and snapped past, showering me with sand. I held what I estimated was four feet up and across from his head and fired again: the sand erupted a foot to his left.

  A little more correction for my third aimed shot, but he was on the move as I fired, rising and turning, showing me his back, churning parallel sand tracks up and across the berm to get on the other side for true cover. I estimated the four feet of hold-over again, factored a lead that was a wild-ass guess, fired four times rapidly and watched him stumble. I’m not sure which of the fan of shots took him, but he didn’t make it to the crest. He spun and fell down the slope, rolled and came to rest on his back, clutching at his belly and writhing. The Glock was a black dot against the sand a few yards below him.

  No time to wait. I sprinted up the hill, white sand crunching and slipping as it grew steeper nearer the top. If he went for the pistol I was ready to shoot him again, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Richard Prechter suddenly had his hands full with some important personal business of an urgent nature.

  He was lying against his backpack, bare-chested and sandy, feet downhill, holding pressure on the exit wound just above his belt line. I couldn’t see it, because both of his hands were attempting to stanch the flow of blood rapidly turning his khaki shorts red. I snatched the Glock in passing and shoved it into the small of my back. He looked up at me. Finally I saw what I had wanted to see: genuine mortal fear in the eyes of the invincible Richard Prechter.

  “You’re good,
Kilmer,” he groaned, his eyelids fluttering. “Oh, you’re damned good.” The blood gushing around his hands and through his fingers was mixed with green fluid, bile from his gall bladder. Behind the gall bladder was the liver, shot through and through judging by the location of the exit. He was bleeding heavily on the outside, but I knew that much more of his bleeding was internal, into his abdomen.

  So he was finished. How long it would take him to die an agonizing death depended on what had been sliced open inside him during the passage of the hardball slug. But whether he had ten minutes or ten hours to live, he was a dead man unless he was dropped onto a trauma-level surgical table like pretty damn quick.

  And I sure didn’t see anything like that on Castigo Cay.

  He moaned and gasped, “You’ve got to help me, Kilmer.”

  “Save your breath. You’ll need all your strength to hold your guts in.” He was already in a lot of pain and it was going to get much worse, but at that time he was still fully conscious and articulate.

  “I know. I know. But it’s survivable. It’s survivable. I can get my seaplane here in two hours with a surgeon on it. I have a sat phone in my pack; he’s on speed dial. If you keep me going until he gets here, I’ll pay you millions. Millions, Kilmer! You’ve had combat medical training, I know you have. Everything you need is on Topaz. Keep me alive until my seaplane gets here and it’s worth millions—”

  “We’ll talk about that later. I still have one more of you assholes to deal with. You just hang on, and I’ll be right back. Then we’ll discuss your future.”

  9

  I low-crawled over the top of the berm to the Atlantic side. The girls were forty feet below me and a hundred yards away, buried up to their shoulders in the wash zone. Brunette Cori was to the left of blond Brooke. They were shoulder to shoulder buried in the same pit, sitting with their hands cuffed behind their backs, rendering them helpless to escape.