Katrina caught me looking at her rifle. We were both thinking about our conversation on the balcony. We both knew there would be blood on our hands before this was over. But she had Sonny and I had Caroline. It’s all that mattered. It always is in the end.
I felt us slowing and Lovato held his hand up, palm facing back toward the two boats of soldiers behind us. He turned the boat toward the shore.
I didn’t see it at first. Neither did Sanchez or Katarina. Sonny spotted it first and pointed. It was a pathway leading into the jungle, almost undetectable until you were a few feet from it.
“These are Marquez’s coordinates,” said Lovato.
This was the path Marquez had described. The trail which would lead us to Eugene Boon, who had killed Susan Garner, and Cheryl Sanders. Maybe Holly was still alive, maybe Brian, too. We wouldn’t know until we got there.
“If Marquez is correct, it should be approximately a mile and a half up into the hills. We’ll wait here two hours, no more,” declared Lovato. “If we don’t see your flare, I’ll lead the soldiers in after Boon, figuring you were not successful.”
“Your confidence in our ability is heartrending, my Mexican friend,” quipped Sanchez.
Lovato smiled. “I am not Mexican, I am Ecuadorian.”
“Oh, well, excuse the hell out of me, Mauricio.”
They were kidding each other, a camaraderie which probably had its beginnings during the fight. It was like that sometimes. It had been like that with Sanchez and me on Cozumel.
Lovato said, “I was only thinking your mission might be hampered a bit, the chain only as strong as its weakest link.” Then before Katarina could comment, he added, “You know, having someone from Mexico along. Detective Sanchez may slow the rest of you down, wishing to stop for a siesta.”
Sonny laughed and so did I. So did Sanchez. Katarina smiled. It was a moment of much needed levity. Lovato gathered his men and they disappeared into the edge of the jungle to wait for the flare, or orders from Lovato. The rest of us headed up into the jungle.
Forty-Three
The jungle was thick, and once inside, sunlight became filtered through gaps in the canopy. Somewhere there had to be a road, in addition to the runway we knew we’d find farther on, but this was barely a walking trail. We could tell where machetes had been used to lop off branches and vegetation to make the footpath. At times our shoulders still brushed against them because it was so narrow. It was humid, which was to be expected, but the canopy protected us from the rain.
The plants made the trail oxygen rich, which was good because the altitude as we wended our way toward the compound made the air thin. Sanchez had taken point, simply because he’d been the first to head up the jungle path. The soft sound of rain falling above us and finding vegetation was almost restful. The jungle itself had its own sounds, from tiny birds chirping to great caws from bigger birds native to the Amazon.
Katrina spotted a big blue and yellow Macaw. Sonny spotted another big bird looking down at us from the canopy of trees who reminded me of the bird on the box of Fruit Loops cereal. This one was black, with a white neck, and blue around his eyes. His long curved beak was black with a colorful stripe down the center, and an equally colorful ring next to his face at his beak’s largest circumference.
The birds were not the only color to the jungle. There was plenty of green to be sure, but many orange, red and blue flowers of various varieties poked their heads out of the verdure reaching for the streams of sunlight making their way through the lush umbrella of jungle.
We were still far from where we were headed when Sanchez stopped suddenly. We stopped behind him, listening.
“What is it, man?” whispered Sonny.
“I know I heard something. Someone walking parallel to us.”
Katarina slid the shoulder strap down her arm and held the Remington at ready. Sonny, Sanchez and I unholstered the Sig Sauer P226 pistol provided by the military. I also had the Glock strapped to my ankle. Each of us had been provided with the Sig, along with a long sharp hunting knife. Sanchez had a Beretta in his ankle holster. Sonny had opted for a German-designed Heckler & Koch MP 5A5 9 mm submachine gun. All the Ecuadorian soldiers were carrying the HK33. Sanchez and I had decided we’d go in for the close work, hoping we could get Holly out somehow without being detected. If we could set her free, we could hold Boon at bay until Lovato and his troops arrived to clean up. If Sanchez and I were spotted, Sonny could let loose with his submachine gun and Katarina with her Remington 798 rifle to give us cover. But that was when we got there.
“I don’t hear anything,” I said softly. But even as I said it, I heard what Sanchez had, and so did Sonny and Katarina. Soft footsteps moving very, very slowly. They stopped just to our left. The jungle was thick and we couldn’t see anything. We stood very still, tense and waiting. Would Boon have a sentry out this far? We weren’t anywhere near his compound yet.
And then we saw him, or perhaps her. Sanchez whispered, “Son of a bitch,” in an apprehensive way. “Ocelot. A big one, too. They usually only hunt at night. They’re nocturnal.”
Katrina pointed her rifle at the cat, even though he seemed to be ignoring us. She didn’t fire. “They look like leopards.”
“Ocelot got its name from the Aztec. It means Jaguar. They’re like that. Pretty, sleek, and plenty deadly. They mark their territory with urine, and they take that shit seriously. I’ve seen them in Mexico. This one’s bigger, though.” The gorgeous cat had to be almost four foot long. His tail was that long again, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he weighed forty pounds or more, easy. He was like a big, beautiful housecoat who’d taken more steroids than some major league baseball players.
“Aw, shit, man,” said Sonny under his breath. “Don’t look up.”
Of course we looked up, even Katarina, though she quickly put one eye back on the scope in case the cat decided we were a threat. The ocelot’s mate was sitting on a branch above, looking at us curiously with big brown-gold eyes. You couldn’t help but notice how big the elegant cat’s front paws were as they hung casually over the branch.
“What do we do?” asked Katarina.
“Besides piss in our fatigues?” Sonny said.
“Yeah, besides that,” answered Katarina, grinning but never moving her eye off the scope.
“I say we keep moving up the trail. If they wanted to attack, they already could have. Keep your scope on them, just in case. You too, Sonny,” I said. “Keep that machine gun pointed in that direction till we get clear.”
“Was planning on it, man.”
We slowly began moving again, the big cats watching us for a while, then ignoring us the farther away we got. Finally, when we couldn’t see them anymore, Katarina lowered her rifle, and Sonny let the submachine gun point at the ground again. Sanchez grinned and started whistling Ted Nugent’s, Cat Scratch Fever.
Twenty minutes later we began to hear noises other than the birds. Human noises, and activity. It sounded like a forklift moving something around. We had to be near the compound. We slowed our pace, and began looking for anything out of place; soft earth where a mine might have been recently placed; a trip wire or laser detector. We came across no booby traps. It didn’t make any sense until I suddenly realized this was never meant to be an entrance, but an exit.
The path we were on was Boon’s safety valve. The runway was for deliveries being sent out, the small plane a ruse in case someone ever did close in. Boon probably had an inflatable or perhaps even a wooden boat hidden somewhere near the shore where this trail began. Lovato might even have discovered it already. While everyone secured the compound and the small airstrip so that Boon couldn’t fly out, he would be escaping to safety by a narrow footpath no one knew about but him. No one but old Fernando.
I got to thinking about how Marquez knew about it, and remembered how he’d gathered intel on Carlos Vargas. He’d had Algeria working for Vargas for a while. I was betting Marquez had someone on the inside here, too. It would
explain how he knew about the runway even though it couldn’t be seen from the air. Whoever had infiltrated Boon’s compound hadn’t been here long, of that I was certain. Marquez would never go along with Boon murdering a young, innocent runaway. Marquez was a lot of things, but he had a code he lived by. He’d have already taken out Boon himself if he’d realized what Boon had done.
I put forth my theory in a hushed tone, because we had to be right on top of the compound by now. In fact, we nearly walked right onto the grounds where we’d have been spotted and mowed down easily. The jungle ended without warning, and we had to backtrack and hunker down to prevent being seen.
Three sprawling warehouses lie adjacent to an airstrip. About a dozen men were moving heavy crated munitions into one of the storage buildings. The warehouses had roofs to protect the equipment from the rains but a clear siding of some type allowed us to see inside using binoculars. American Patriot surface-to-air missiles and Russian Scud missiles filled one warehouse. Big mobile platforms for launching them filled another. The final warehouse was stacked floor to rafters with big wooden crates. I surmised they probably contained mines, and submachine guns like Sonny was carrying.
Beside the warehouses stood a long building which looked like a small motel in the jungle. A little single-engine cub and a helicopter waited near the far end of a runway only partially visible through the foliage.
“Jesus,” said Sonny suddenly.
No one asked what had caused the reaction, because we’d all spotted her about the same time. She was probably in her mid-twenties. She was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and nothing else. At a glance she was beautiful. Her skin was golden brown and her hair black. She reminded me of the first native woman we’d seen on the way in, the one with the young daughter. But this woman would have no children, despite her physical beauty.
Her wrists had been bound together and attached to a three-legged hoist from where she hung suspended about three feet off the ground. Piles of blood and flesh lay on a white cloth beneath her feet, like an ancient offering. Two blood-soaked areas on the T-shirt where her breasts should be, and a dark, gaping V of jagged flesh between her legs told us what had been done to her. But it was the way her head was tilted toward the sky, as if pleading to her ancient Gods to save her, which told her story. Her expression said she had met death in agony, but with her eyes wide open. Her mouth had fallen open as she’d gasped for that final breath before her merciful long gray goodbye.
I felt sick, and Sonny was a little green, too. Katarina didn’t look the picture of health, either. But it was Sanchez who buried his face in the verdure and threw up. The fork lifts moving crates drowned out the noise. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He finally began breathing normally. I said in a hoarse voice, because I was trying not to heave myself, “I told you not to drink the water.”
We all laughed sort of silently, the bile we felt rising in our throats finally going back down. Sanchez said, “I hope she wasn’t someone special to old Marquez.”
Sonny said, “She was probably special to someone, man.”
“That’s one sick bastard,” Katarina whispered in disbelief. Death was one thing, even killing when it was necessary. This was something different we couldn’t wrap our heads around because we were still human.
I scanned the area around the warehouses. “That has to be the house, over there,” I pointed. It had been built in an octagon shape, with beams at each corner, creating a porch all the way around the house. If Holly was alive, that’s where she was. I was about to suggest positions for Sonny and Katarina to take while Sanchez and I inched our way toward the house, when dogs started barking. These weren’t normal dogs; the braying sounded more like hounds from hell it had such an eerie quality to it. The sound of the forklifts stopped abruptly and men began hollering. We had to start shooting now, before they had a chance to dig in.
I waved Sonny over to my right and he took off in a crouching run, sliding to the ground feet first — a quarterback slide — twenty yards away. Katarina had already picked off two of the men when Sonny opened up and got two more. Sanchez picked one off as he dove for cover behind the forklift. Some machine-gun fire strafed where Sanchez had fired from, but he’d rolled away already. I waited until the man lifted to fire again, this time in Sonny’s direction, and shot him in the chest. But I’d had to lift my head above the foliage to fire and heard the hounds too late.
They weren’t dogs, but wolves, huge ones, like those I’d read about them finding up in Canada. I got off a shot as I tumbled beneath the heavy beast which slowed it and made it howl in pain, but it was Katarina’s shot from my left which ended its vicious attack. Its big jaws had been inches from my throat.
Sanchez was not so lucky. The weight of the one who jumped him turned him sideways, where he could not use his arms as I had to buy time. It bit into his shoulder before I could fire the Sig and put one into its skull.
I crawled over to him as Sonny and Katarina kept firing at the compound. Sonny was spraying areas of cover, flushing them out, while Katarina picked them off, one by one, like a sniper.
“How bad are you hurt?” I asked Sanchez.
“Oh, it’s just a flesh wound, get over here and fight,” he said sarcastically. I wasn’t even aware Sanchez knew who Monty Python was.
“It looks like a clean bite, and it’s your left shoulder, at least.”
“Yeah, but what about rabies?”
“Oh, they won’t catch it, they’re already dead.”
“I don’t think I say this often enough, my friend, but Fuck You.”
We both started laughing as we crawled back into position.
“I count nine bodies,” I said to Sanchez, holding up fingers so that Sonny and Katarina could verify the count. They nodded. We’d counted twelve, so that only left three, plus Boon and whoever else was in the house. Boon had to know we’d come up via his escape route, which would be blocked now. I realized almost too late what he’d do. “Shit!” I hollered, pointing at the runway. He was halfway to the helicopter. “Cover me!”
I ran straight toward the hanging girl, using her body as a shield. They could fire all they wanted because they couldn’t make her any deader. One of the slugs got past her as I cut her down, however, and I felt something warm on my right side. It was blood. Someone fired from behind me and scared the crap out of me. It was Sanchez. He’d picked off the man who’d stuck his head out to fire.
“What’s the plan?” Sanchez hollered through the barrage of gunfire.
“Forklift!”
We made a run for it. I climbed in with the dead girl and I put her on my lap. It was a little gruesome, but not as gruesome as being dead would be. Sanchez shifted his position from the back of the forklift to the side as I headed toward the copter, trying to keep the girl’s body between me and another bullet. Sanchez was trying to keep metal between himself and a bullet.
The rotors were beginning to move as we reached the helicopter. I shoved the dead girl off me as I dived for the dirt runway. I came up ready to fire, in perfect position, but Boon had a weapon I’d never have counted on — a whip. I heard a snap and my gun was gone, skittering along the ground. My hand had been cut. Boon used his left hand to fire at Sanchez, with what looked like a Browning 9 mm. He’d pinned him on the opposite side of the fork lift, unable to help me. I went for my Glock, but even though I tumbled back, Boon was so quick and accurate with the whip that I couldn’t reach it without getting my hand sliced off.
A figure had run from the helicopter back toward the compound. It was female, possibly Holly, but that was all I could discern from the split second I had to look.
Boon was big and muscular, but agile. There was something cold and calculating about his movements, even as swift as they came, one after another. The remaining men were still holding off Sonny and Katarina, so Sanchez and I were on our own.
I knew when I saw Boon smile cooly that I’d made a mistake leaving the forklift running. He struck with th
e whip at the shifter as I was reaching for the Glock again, and it moved before Sanchez could. Sanchez fired and caught Boon in the shoulder, but the left shoulder, leaving his whip hand free. He struck quickly like he had with me and Sanchez’s weapon was gone.
I had managed to get my Glock out and I put two slugs into Boon before he used the whip again and disarmed me. I wasn’t certain what he had on the end of the whip, but my hand was now a bloody mess. I’d put a bullet in Boon’s hip and one in his gut, to go with the one Sanchez had put in his shoulder, but you’d never have known it. I’d only made him angry, his cold eyes burning with hatred now.
He struck with the whip at Sanchez’s ankle holster and the entire thing, leather, gun and all went flying behind him. Then he pulled his knife, smiling. Sanchez and I both pulled ours. Despite there being two of us, I knew we were at a disadvantage. This was Boon’s weapon of choice, and he’d be as good with it as he was with the whip. We tried to circle him, but he thrust and parried us to death, toying with us. He sliced across Sanchez’s arm, ducked, and in an upward motion, sliced my jeans and leg open. We were panting and sweating, injured and on the defensive.
Boon was smiling, having a good time. Behind us the shooting stopped. In the silence as we danced this dangerous dance with knives, I head a crack. Boon got a strange look in those hard, slightly inhuman eyes, and stopped circling. Then he fell flat on his face. A red dot had appeared on the back of his shirt about where his heart would be. Katrina had plugged him from a fairly lengthy distance.
The Long Gray Goodbye: A Seth Halliday Novel Page 26