by Tom Clancy
“And,” said the man with the cigarettes, “keep in mind it hasn’t even really begun.”
* * *
Lathrop scuffed down the embankment, Ricci taking the moderately steep grade a little to his side, the two of them pausing there to orient themselves and catch their breaths, the weight of their gear pressing their backs and shoulders. Rocks and grit lay scattered around their boots. Within a few dozen feet of them to the left, the creek bed, more mud than water, serpentined north and east over the humped terrain. Straggly plants grew in a kind of apron around its banks, and higher up the valley ridges through which it wound its slow, undulant path away into the distance, ponderosa and blackjack pine grew in intermingled and surprisingly dense terraces.
Not for the first time since they had left the mesa, Lathrop pulled his map out of his shirt pocket, studied it, then studied the ground. The paper was damp with his perspiration.
Several moments expired. Ricci waited in silence under the lengthening shadows of the buttes as Lathrop raised his eyes from the map and stared out toward the creek, his lips slightly parted.
Then Lathrop turned to him, his finger pointing at a slight angle from the languid waterway.
“Over there through the brush,” he said. “That’s where I think we’ll find the trail.”
On inspection minutes later, he proved to be correct.
They didn’t take it.
* * *
Crouched above the trail with his heels deep in a carpet of pine needles, Lathrop peered down between the evergreen trunks with his binoculars, then handed them off to Ricci.
“How many men you see?” he said in a hushed voice.
“Five,” Ricci whispered. “Three on this side, two on the other. Bunched close together.”
Lathrop nodded.
“Checks with what I saw,” he said.
Still holding the binoculars, Ricci brought their focus up from the stony Indian trail, swept them across the cut it followed through the blunt hillcrest. Then he dropped the lenses from his eyes.
“You were on the money about the guns they’d be toting,” he said. “They’re HK carbines. Five point five-six mills.”
Lathrop nodded. “Good thing I told you to bring one of your own, isn’t it?” he said.
Ricci looked at him, then motioned to the cleft’s opposite shoulder.
“I’ll make my way around this rise, take out the two from over there,” he said. “You stay back and handle the three.”
Lathrop nodded again, lowered the strap of his rifle case, tapped the face of his wristwatch.
“We’d better synch up before you move off for your boys,” he said. “Does that UpLink watch you wear tell time, or is it only for communicating with Moon Maiden in her space coupe?”
Ricci was impassive.
“I’ll need ten minutes,” he said.
* * *
One minute and counting, Ricci thought. His eye was against the scope of his carbine, taking advance measure of his targets.
Down below in the near twilight, their backs to him, the pair of men in camouflage outfits was barely hidden from sight in the thicket. Your boys. The trick for him was to nail them exactly when Lathrop sniped the others. Do it in a couple of accurate bursts, three at most, and mask Lathrop’s rifle shots from however many of the kidnappers had remained behind with Marissa Vasquez. If the plan worked the way it was intended, they would mistake the sound of Ricci’s HK firing at the ambushers for that of their guns shooting him as it echoed through the valley, think that Lathrop had led him into their ambush and he’d been the one who was erased.
He checked his watch now. Thirty-five seconds. Thirty-four, thirty-three…
Ricci’s jaw tightened. A plan for success, he thought.
Except he did not like how it felt to kill men, and especially did not like how it felt shooting men in their backs. Not even men who had set themselves up to kill him.
Your boys.
His watch again. Its digital second readout ticking down the seconds.
Eleven left. Ten. Nine. Eight.
His heart pumped. He breathed through his front teeth. His finger steadied on the trigger.
Six, five, four, three, two…
His eye to the sight, the carbine rattled in Ricci’s hand, its stock bucking against his shoulder.
Your boys.
Beneath him, his bullets ripped into their bodies, knocking them forward into the dirt, snuffing out their lives before they could have possibly known what hit them. And as he fired, Ricci could hear coordinated shots from the opposite slope.
But then, he was listening for them.
* * *
On his belly in the dirt, Lathrop relaxed his grip on the sound-suppressed SIG-Sauer SSG’s trigger.
It had been neat and precise, just how he liked it. Three cracks of the rifle, three more pieces of dead meat to feed the crawling, wriggling, and buzzing local scavengers.
And making it all the more perfect, he’d ended up with a leftover round of ammunition in his clip.
* * *
Moments after he heard the stutter of the rifles, Pedro entered the hut and glanced knowingly at César. Then he let his eyes sink slowly down to Marissa Vasquez and meet her own disconcerted gaze.
“Gunfire,” he said. “Do you recognize the sound of bullets spat from a gun?”
She kept silent.
“Perhaps you have never heard it in your town’s favored streets. Or at the university you attend, eh?” He grinned, reached for his tin of whiskey, and uncapped it. “Let me know, mi hermosa, are such places too sheltered from the world’s ugliness for such disturbances to their peace and quiet?”
She looked at him.
“I told you your father sent a rescuer,” Pedro said. “And now I can tell you the rescuer is dead.”
Marissa’s gaze, filled with increasing dismay and confusion, finally lost its determined steadiness.
“No,” she said, finally averting it from him.
Pedro’s own eyes stayed on her, roving up and down, lingering in places. Then they went to César.
“Go outside and tell the men to bring their bloody carcass in here when they arrive,” he said, and swigged deeply from the flask. “After that I want to be left alone… The other gringo can wait, am I understood?”
César nodded, left the hut, and Pedro turned back to Marissa.
“You would not believe me when I said someone was coming for you, but now you’ll have a dead man for proof… and to keep us company,” he said, taking another long drink, his eyes studying her again. “Who knows what may occur before his unseeing eyes? What acts we will perform that his mouth cannot speak of? Who, indeed, knows, hermosa, for the dead can tell no tales of what pleasures the living will soon enjoy.”
* * *
“What’s happening?” Manuel asked César. He had emerged from one of the other thatch shelters upon hearing the submachine gun salvos.
César paused on his way toward the brambles screening the trail head.
“They’ve got the one her father sent,” he said. “El jefe wants his corpse brought into the hut.”
Manuel looked at him.
“Why in there?” he said.
“I don’t think about it,” César said. “You shouldn’t either.”
He started forward, but Manuel reached out and grasped his arm.
“Let go of me,” César said.
“Pedro’s lost his mind,” Manuel said. “He’s turned this into something it wasn’t supposed to be.”
César’s eyes bored into him.
“It isn’t up to me what he does,” he said. “I told you to let go.”
Manuel held onto his elbow another moment, sighed, and then released his grip.
“We’re all bastards,” he said.
“And well-paid ones,” César said, shrugging away from him to step toward the fold of brush.
As he did there was a muffled pop from behind it, another.
César grimaced a
nd collapsed to the ground dripping blood, Manuel going down inches behind him.
And then the brush parted.
* * *
Pedro turned from Marissa Vasquez the moment he heard what he recognized as silenced shots outside, instantly reaching for the gun holstered on his belt.
His eyes landed on the two white men standing in the hut entrance, widened. One had a rifle strapped over his shoulder and, more importantly, a pistol in his right hand aimed at Pedro’s chest. The other held a submachine gun.
Pedro straightened, staring at them, his fingers clenched around the butt of his own weapon.
“Fuck you,” he said, and spat. “You might as well do it.”
Lathrop centered his Glock on Pedro’s chest, fired a third round from its barrel, and looked over his body into the hut as it fell.
“There’s our girl,” he said to Ricci. “Safe and sound.”
* * *
Ricci saw Marissa Vasquez shackled on the floor at the rear of the hut and rushed through the entrance a half step behind Lathrop.
Then he noticed Lathrop drop back and halted, not thinking about why, or consciously thinking about why, just turning to look at him.
A cell phone had appeared in Lathrop’s left hand.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
Lathrop flipped open the phone. “We need to contact Salvetti and tell him we’re done,” he said.
Ricci stood looking at him.
“That can wait,” he said. “He’ll find out when we get back to the mesa.”
Lathrop held the cell phone open in his left hand. The Glock had remained in his right.
“The plane needs to get warmed up,” he said.
“That plane can take off on a dime,” Ricci said. “And you know it.”
Lathrop’s gaze went to his.
“I’m making my call.”
“To Salvetti,” Ricci said.
Their eyes remained locked.
“Or whoever I want,” Lathrop said.
Ricci shook his head.
“What’s the game this time?” he said. “You call Salvetti and he calls somebody else with a message? Or did you only toss his name at me on the spot.”
Silence. Lathrop held the phone.
“Give it to me,” Ricci said. “This isn’t worth it.”
Lathrop shook his head. “Sure it is,” he said. “We can double our take on this job. Triple it. Doesn’t hurt anybody or anything except some dope dealer’s bankroll.”
Ricci nodded toward Marissa Vasquez.
“How about her,” he said.
Lathrop nodded, the phone raised in his left hand. Ricci had grown more aware of the Glock in his right.
“She just gets home a little later,” Lathrop said.
“All we have to do is play this out. Tell Esteban we saved his daughter’s life and want something more for our efforts. He’ll give us whatever we want of his dirty money. Any amount.”
“A new play, new rules,” Ricci said. “That it?”
Lathrop looked at him. “Explain why not,” he said.
“Maybe because it would make us no better than the men we killed,” Ricci said.
Another silence. The stillness of Ricci’s eyes did not betray the close attention he was paying to the Glock.
“We made a deal and it isn’t going to change for money we don’t even know how to spend,” he said. “Damn you, Lathrop, give me the phone and let’s take her the hell out of here.”
Lathrop looked at him a second longer.
“And what’s my other choice?” he said.
Ricci nodded his chin slightly toward Lathrop’s gun.
“Think you know,” he said.
“Could be I do,” Lathrop said. “But I want to hear you say it.”
Ricci waited a beat, nodded toward the gun again.
“We see which one of us is quicker,” he said.
Lathop stared at him for several long moments, his head angling a little to one side. Then his lips parted, took in air… and shaped themselves into the faintest of grins.
Keeping his Glock pointed down at the ground, he tossed the phone into Ricci’s outstretched hand.
“You going to want my gun, too?” he said.
Ricci shook his head. “You might need it later on,” he said, and then turned toward Marissa Vasquez.
* * *
Ricci stepped to the back of the hut, saw Marissa’s expression, paused before he quite reached her. Her captors had used battery lanterns for lighting as dusk closed in around them, and their stark radiance had washed any hint of color from her face. She looked afraid, but mostly she looked to be in shock, her wide, glassy eyes seeming to stare at everything and nothing.
He crouched in front of her and glanced over at Lathrop, nodding toward the bodies of the men they’d killed. Lathrop began searching them for the keys to her restraints.
Ricci looked at her again.
“Marissa,” he said. “We’re taking you out of here.”
Her gaze went to him. At first its remoteness, coupled with the strange, flat look on her face, made him feel only half in her attention. Then she appeared to draw it upon him with an effort.
“My boyfriend needs help,” she said, her voice thin. “They’re keeping Felipe here somewhere.”
Ricci looked at her a moment, then shook his head.
“His name is Manuel Aguilera,” he said slowly. “He was with them from the start.”
She took a while to react. Ricci wasn’t sure she’d grasped the meaning of what he had told her and gave it a while to sink in. But there was Lathrop behind him in the hut, and the possibility of stragglers outside from among the group who’d abducted her, and he could afford only so much time.
“No,” she said at last.
Ricci kept looking at her.
“It’s the truth,” he said.
“No.”
Ricci started to reach out a hand, saw her flinch back, and held it still.
“It hurts,” he said. “But it’s the truth.”
Marissa Vasquez moved her head slightly from side to side.
“No.”
Ricci hesitated.
“I’m not saying I know how he felt about you,” he said. “He might’ve gotten to care, but maybe cared more about things you weren’t part of. It isn’t always one way or the other with people.”
Though Marissa was shaking her head more vehemently now, Ricci saw tears gathering on the rims of her lower eyelids. She seemed to be trying to hold them back.
“His name is Felipe Escalona,” she said.
Ricci looked at her.
“His name isn’t what matters,” he said. “What does is that he helped those men bring you here. And that I’m bringing you out.”
She stared at him. Then her eyes sharpened on his face and she made a choking sound and began to sob, the tears running down her cheeks.
“I love him,” she said, a desperate, pleading quality in her voice.
Ricci extended his hand a little further.
“There’s a plane waiting for us,” he said. “We’re taking you home.”
“I love him.”
Ricci hesitated again, reaching his hand out until it was within an inch of hers.
“I know,” he said. “But you need to trust me.”
A moment passed, and then several more. Marissa Vasquez bent her head, crying hard, her entire body shaking with the release of emotion.
Ricci crouched in front of her without saying anything else, waiting, leaving his offered hand out there between them.
And then, finally, her chained hand came up and took it.
EIGHT
BOCA DEL SIERPE, TERRITORIAL TRINIDAD APRIL 2006
Nimec brought the pontooner in toward the mangroves that hemmed the island’s wild northwestern shore, getting it as far under the trees as he could, sliding through their pale web of roots to finally pull beneath their arched, outspread limbs.
He throttled to a comple
te halt and turned toward Annie. She was knelt over Blake, who had for the past few minutes shown signs of awareness, if not quite consciousness, squeezing his big hand weakly around hers as she held it, once even half opening his eyes to look at her face with seeming recognition.
“You holding up okay?” Nimec said.
“So far,” she said. “There’s nothing to do but try, I suppose.”
He ran a hand across his chin in thought, still looking at her. Unable to guess the severity of Blake’s injury, they had been careful not to move him from where he’d fallen, and done little in the way of treating him other than to pat some of the blood off his head with gauze from the boat’s first-aid kit, then gently ease it from the hard deck onto her folded windbreaker, providing whatever minimal comfort they could.
“Been about fifteen minutes since we radioed base on the mainland,” Nimec said. “The Skyhawks are taking off out of San Fernando, and fast as those birds travel, it’ll be another ten or fifteen before they show.” He paused. “I’m guessing we can buy enough time right here… or at least that right here’s our best chance.”
Annie nodded her understanding. Overhead the sky was almost unseen through the roof of branches, cut into thin slivers of blue that scarcely showed between their interstices. In the Stingrays that patrolled the island, men they could no longer trust — and had every reason to want to elude — might very well be out searching for them. And what blocked their view of the sky would also block any view the chopper crews might have of the pontoon boat from above. That gave Annie some measure of hope. But she had been a pilot most of her life, had flown above the atmosphere in a space shuttle and trained others to do the same, and it had occurred to her there was more to be concerned about than visual observation.
“Pete,” she said, her expression troubled. “If our people can fix on your GPS signal…”
He looked at her, and she let the sentence trail.
“Yeah, Annie,” he said. “We’d have to figure theirs can, too.”
* * *
Jarvis Lenard crouched in the shadows of the mangroves and wondered what was going on.
Drawn to the sound of the marine engine, he had picked his way through the undergrowth to investigate, gotten as close as he dared to peer at the approaching vessel from the gloom at the forest’s edge. It was, he saw from his concealed position, a pontoon boat. A pleasure boat. To his knowledge, the Sunglasses would not come out looking for him in such a craft. Not unless they were trying some deception, no… but what would be its logic? The wilderness area was large, and he reasoned that it was unlikely they would stop the boat expecting he would be close enough to hear it, never mind be moved to risk being exposed to those aboard.