by Chris Ryan
‘Around five o’clock my time, so that’s – what? – one o’clock local.’
Falcon chewed on it. ‘That sounds about right. John was helping us train in explosive entry techniques up in Florida. He was out on patrol with us yesterday to put our training into action. John wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, you know. He went out on missions to the favela whenever possible.’
‘What the fuck happened?’
‘I’ll explain later,’ Falcon said dismissively. ‘We have to get out of here first. The local gangs are going crazy. My unit retreated to wait for reinforcements.’ He laughed out of the corner of his mouth, shaking his head. ‘Can you believe, we have forty-nine caveirãos – Big Skulls – and we’ve only got twelve in working order. I swear, if we lose the drugs war, it’s because we didn’t have enough crank shafts and gearboxes.’
Flames gushed from the rooftop tyres. Pitch-black, toxic smoke belched into the sky. Gardner smelled burning rubber in the air. Heat shimmered across the horizon in waves.
‘I don’t give a fuck about your war,’ Gardner said. ‘I just want to find my mate.’
‘All of the officers from yesterday are missing. Nine men, including our commander, Paulinho Nava. I hate to say it, but they’re probably all dead, and that includes John.’
‘Someone else told me that. All the same, I’d like to go and check for myself. He’s an old mucker of mine, you see, and I owe him big time from back in the day. So how about you put your fucking piece down and let me go about my business.’
Falcon pointed the Colt Commando at the ground, and the knots in Gardner’s stomach began to unwind. ‘I’ve been separated from my unit,’ said the BOPE captain. ‘And John was part of my team.’ He tapped Gardner on the shoulder. ‘I’ll help you find your friend. We can stick together. That way, we have a better chance against the gangs.’
‘Ain’t happening,’ Gardner said. ‘I’m a solo operator, mate.’
Squinting, Falcon said, ‘You sound like you know where you’re going.’
‘I got a hunch,’ replied Gardner.
Falcon screwed up his swollen lips. ‘OK, and let’s assume your… hunch is correct. Just where exactly are you headed?’
‘North,’ Gardner said. He nodded vaguely in the direction of the peak of the favela, several hundred metres distant and high. He didn’t want to give too much away to some bloke he’d met only a few minutes ago.
‘OK. So let’s say you’re heading north. How do you think you’ll get there?’
Well, fuck. Falcon was right. Between Gardner and the statue stood a maze of alleys and criss-crossing roads, stairwells that seemed to lead nowhere, homes stacked on top of each other. Figuring out a route was impossible. He pictured himself bounding north, winding through the maze and losing his bearings.
‘I know this favela better than I know my wife,’ Falcon said. ‘She’ll tell you this herself, over pork and beans and a cold beer, after we escape from here.’
He removed his black assault vest and unzipped the top half of his assault suit. He was sweating like an Arab at customs. Underneath he wore a black T-shirt with ‘I Belong to Jesus’ on the front in big white letters. He tied the suit sleeves around his waist, then slipped the assault vest on top of his T-shirt.
‘What happened to your hand?’
‘Lawnmower accident,’ Gardner relied.
‘Huh.’ Falcon gave a slight, sceptical nod. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the quickest way.’
He led Gardner north, in the opposite direction from the corpses, yomping up a steep row of steps. The going was hard, each step caked in mud, the legacy of repeated mudslides. The passageways were claustrophobic, no more than a metre wide in places. Gardner saw a couple of dead civvies face down on the concrete, neat bullet holes in their backs. Running for cover, he thought.
Nothing in the favela was uniform. Metal walkways spliced the roofs. Washing lines obstructed every possible line of vision. Gardner had operated in Belfast, Baghdad and Kabul, but he had never seen anything like this.
Falcon glided up the steps. Clearly he’d had a bit of match practice. But Gardner matched him stride for stride. Unlike some ex-Blades, he kept himself in top shape. Being a drifter of no fixed abode meant that the everyday world was his gym. Daily runs, long walks, using park benches for push-ups and swing frames for wide-grip pull-ups. Gardner reckoned he was in better condition than some of the lads on active service. ‘Like a condom stuffed with walnuts,’ his last flame had described him.
He had Afghanistan on the mind again. At 0937 hours he’d been shooting the shit with the guy next to him, a cocky lad called Grant who wanted to win the war against the Taliban single-handed.
At 0938 hours Grant had femur bones instead of legs, his dick had been incinerated, his shredded ball-sack flapping in the hot wind. Shrapnel stitched across his belly and neck. Gardner was dazed by the explosion, to the point he looked at his own severed hand and felt no pain, and wondered only how long it’d take before he’d die of his wounds.
Normal protocol was to wait for a sweeping team and dogs to come in. The Talibs were cunning fuckers; they often planted secondary devices around the primary IED, nailing anyone who came to help. A sweep took time, something that neither man had. Bald raced across exposed ground to the crippled WMIK vehicle, flung open the door and dragged Grant across to safety, Gardner leaning against his shoulder. Stringy, purplish bowels gushed out of Grant as Bald tried to plug the gaping hole in his groin.
Gardner looked on as the lads grouped around Grant, the kid screaming for his mum, his fucking mum. As they shot him up with a morphine overdose, Gardner felt the blood loss from his hand. Blue and yellow blotches danced across his vision. A voice, Bald’s, said, ‘Don’t worry, mate. Medevac’s on the way.’
Falcon halted at the top of the steps, breaking Gardner out of his daydream.
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘I see something.’
‘What is it?’ Gardner barely whispered.
No answer.
‘Rafa?’
Gardner moved down on to his belly and slid alongside Falcon. Up ahead the alley widened out into a rubble-strewn yard, the extra space created by a ream of collapsed buildings. The area was vacant, probably because the locals were expecting it all to turn into a bag of bollocks any minute. Gardner scanned the rooftops and windows. No movement, but he couldn’t help notice the bullet holes sprayed across the sides of most of the homes.
A bulky, black-painted van was parked thirty metres away, to their seven o’clock, on the lip of a winding road that zigzagged west from the edge of the favela. The thing barely qualified as a road, more of a slick of caked mud, jutting rocks and knee-deep puddles.
‘A caveirão,’ Falcon said. ‘From my unit.’
A foot-high slab of cement, with lengths of lead pipe jutting out, blockaded the Big Skull’s path. Atop the vehicle, a warped turret revealed the evidence of a grenade lobbed inside. Two bodies lay next to the vehicle and from the way they were positioned, lying on their stomachs with their hands tied behind their backs, Gardner figured they were executed with a bullet through the head.
Gardner walked towards the bodies for a closer look. The stench was powerful. Like a spit-roasted pig smeared in shit. He checked the name tags. ‘SGT. EDILSON ‘SGT. CAMPOS.’ Eight metres from the corpses, Gardner noticed something was missing.
Their heads.
He saw a pair of rugby-ball shaped objects speared to metal posts. If one of those heads is John’s, he thought, I’ll never forgive myself.
Gardner stopped in front of the severed heads. The eyeballs had been gouged out, the noses, ears and lips crudely sliced off. Their mouths had been forced wide open, and inside each one was a sawn-off cock and bollocks. The balls were greenish-brown and covered in glistening red crap. Flies buzzed. Maggots wriggled.
Returning his attention to the decapitated bodies, he spotted a pistol holder on one of them. Sinking to one knee, he hurriedly unhooked the strap. Brownin
g Hi-Power. Fucking yes. He badly needed a tool and this was his chance to snare one.
The Browning Hi-Power was the classic semi-auto handgun. He pushed the release and ejected the clip to inspect the ammo. The Browning was loaded with 9mm rounds less penetrative than the larger 7.64x21mm or .40 S&W brass the Hi-Power also took. Gardner didn’t rate 9mm, reckoned that he pissed harder than nine-mils discharged.
He slapped the clip back in, stood up and tucked the Browning into the waistband of his combats just as Falcon swallowed his fear and approached the bodies.
A wooden placard was propped up by the posts.
‘Falta de Deus,’ Falcon read.
‘I’m guessing that’s not Portuguese for “Have a Nice Day”,’ Gardner said quietly.
‘It means, “Lack of God”. They are saying they are all against God.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘One of the gangs.’
Falcon bowed his head and made the sign of the cross.
Even the Taliban weren’t this evil, Gardner thought.
‘Your friend—’ the BOPE man began.
Gardner frowned. ‘They might have taken him hostage. For ransom. The done thing round these parts, right?’
‘Yes,’ Falcon said vacantly.
‘Focus, Rafa. This gang – they might have captured John?’
‘If they have Bald, he’s probably dead. And if they find us, they’ll kill us too.’
‘No they won’t, mate. Not on my fucking watch.’
‘You don’t understand who we’re dealing with. This is not an ordinary gang.’
Gardner wondered what a normal outfit constituted round these parts. Probably the little wankers who chopped up the officer.
‘Tell me more about this gang,’ he said.
‘This was the work of Big Teeth’s boys.’
‘Who the fuck is that?’
‘Luis Oliveira. People call him “Big Teeth”. He doesn’t operate in the favela personally, but he’s the head of the largest gang in Barbosa, the Messengers of God. They control most of the drugs and weapons coming in and out of the favela. His number two is a guy called Roulette, and I’d bet my house on this being the work of Roulette’s special murder crew.’
Gardner scanned north. Seems calm enough, he told himself. Still, he didn’t want to take any chances. ‘We should bug out, Rafa. Before we bump into them and they turn us into a soup of the day.’
He tugged at Falcon. The BOPE rupert’s eyes were fixed on a spot past his shoulder.
‘We’re too late,’ he said. ‘They’ve already found us.’
7
1018 hours.
Weiss breezed past the police. Four saloon cars were massed at the side of the road, a dozen pot-bellied cops scratching their stubble and kicking gravel, afraid to enter the favela without BOPE. They busied themselves with questioning people entering and leaving Barbosa, mostly white, middle-class kids looking to score weed. Weiss, on the other hand, went unnoticed. With his tattered Arizona Cardinals baseball cap and a Barcelona football shirt underneath the duster coat, the UNICEF logo smeared with old blood, he looked like the kind of guy who’d spent all his life in Barbosa.
The favelas were like prisons. They didn’t care so much about who went in as who tried to break out.
Weiss had ventured only a hundred metres into the favela but he felt like he’d pitched up in another world.
Cracked old pipes poked out of each house, pumping shit into large puddles in the streets. Plastic bags and Coke bottles tumbleweeded across the road. Twenty-five metres further on a rickety man foraged through a heap of garbage, picking out wrinkled sheets of metal and dumping them in a shopping trolley. Motors stripped of their parts lined the street; telephone and electricity lines straddled its width like Chinese lanterns.
A hundred metres ahead, Weiss could see three teenagers sitting on upturned banana crates. Two of them appeared twelve or thirteen years old, skeletal frames, the one in a loose-fitting Lakers basketball top and the other with his hair made up in corn-rows, stabbing the crate with a blade.
The leader, Weiss figured, was the older boy. He looked about eighteen and sported spotless black-and-white Converses, with a golden crucifix dangling from his neck, a diamond-studded Jesus on the end. He sucked on a joint. At ten metres, Weiss smelled the pungent aroma, and felt three pairs of eyes burn holes through him.
‘Stop right there,’ the leader said.
Weiss kept on walking.
‘Motherfucker, I said stop.’
The young guy took a final pull on the joint, jumped off his banana crate and stepped over to Weiss. He exhaled, blowing greenish-smoke into his face, eyefucking him.
‘When I talk, you listen, bitch,’ he growled, prodding a finger into Weiss’s duster. ‘You’re in Batista’s territory now. What I say, you do.’
Weiss slow-burned. He had places to be, people to grease, money to make. He didn’t view the kid opposite him as a threat. More like a rat nibbling at his toes.
‘Step aside, my friend, and I’ll spare you.’
Batista grinned and lifted up his Chicago Bulls basketball jersey to reveal a pistol grip sticking out of the waistband of his jeans.
‘Empty your pockets,’ he said.
‘You want it,’ Weiss raising his hands, ‘why don’t you come and get it?’
He stuffed his hand into his right pocket and pulled out a whole lot of nothing except the bloodied surgical gloves. He did the same on the left and gave his evil eye to the Basilica statue. Batista blazed up like a flame to petrol.
‘Some kind of a joke?’
‘I’m not laughing,’ Weiss replied. ‘Are you?’
‘Man, screw this goat-fucker. Gotta be a wallet somewhere.’
Weiss slowly peeled back his duster. Something held Batista’s attention. Behind him, the two other kids leaned in for a closer look. Sewn into the inside fold of the coat were fourteen holstered syringes.
‘Puta que pariu. This guy’s a doctor or—’
Weiss snatched a needle with his left hand and in an instant plunged it into the side of Batista’s neck.
White-eyed, wobbling on his feet, Batista stumbled backwards. He dropped like a pigeon in mid-flight, while the other kids looking on, bug-eyed.
The syringe was filled with a concentration of hydrocyanic acid. Weiss had a range of such syringes, the concentration of each one varied, depending on whether he wished the mark to suffer for ten minutes or sixty seconds. This Batista was an arrogant cunt, and in a perfect world he’d have stabbed him with the ten-minute needle. But Weiss was up against the clock, so he’d selected the one-minute syringe.
That was his idea of sympathy.
Batista jerked on the ground. His muscles flinched. He grimaced as they locked up, as if his body was shrinking in on itself, squeezing his guts. He drooled, his eyes were runny. After twenty seconds he voided his bowels. Thirty seconds and his breathing became short, raspy, rapid. Like a forty-a-day guy climbing a set of stairs. Cherry-red blood slid out of his eyes and ears. Funny how cyanide changed a man’s blood colour, Weiss noted, as he watched the other two kids. They looked on, horrified but curious, like they’d discovered their parents fucking.
As Batista gargled and shat his way to death, Weiss pulled out a second syringe and lurched forward, grabbing the boy with the corn-rows in a headlock, the needle point tickling his neck.
‘This one carries infected blood,’ he told Corn-Row Kid. ‘The homosexual disease. I push a little harder, and you will take many years to die. It will not be quick like your leader.’
The kid didn’t answer. There was a piss patch the size of Africa on his jeans.
‘I need to speak to the man called Xavier.’
Still nothing from the kid.
‘Tell the man, Shorty,’ Lakers Boy said.
‘You’re going to take me there, aren’t you?’
‘He’ll do it,’ Lakers Boy answered for him.
‘Good. Because if he doesn’t, I won’t j
ust kill you, but your families too.’
Shorty knew all the shortcuts. Many favela kids earned a few reals escorting French tourists around the favelas, unaware that their cash was going straight into the gangs’ coffers.
They wove through the streets for twenty minutes until they were in the belly of the favela, where the police feared to tread. It was darker in these streets, the shacks ordered in a zigzag style, like going through sheet-metal trenches. He saw no one on the streets except gangsters decked out in shades and Mac-10s, and the occasional crack addict shuffling along.
‘This is the place,’ Shorty said. They were in front of a slum dwelling that looked smaller than a wardrobe in the Hilton. More like a lean-to with a brick front. The kid rapped his knuckles loudly twice on the door and shouted something.
Before Weiss could stop him, the kid was sprinting off.
No answer, so Weiss stepped inside.
He found himself in a square room. Thick dust blanketed the floor, and he seemed to crush a cockroach with every step he took. No windows and no furniture, just a wooden table at one end. Dead spiders hung from old cobwebs. Nobody had been living here for longer than a little while.
Weiss stopped.
About-turned.
Three figures blocked the doorway.
His eyes darted from one figure to the next. The man on the left was armed with a pair of brass knuckles. The second tapped a tyre iron against his leg. The guy on the right held a duo knife, both sides of the serrated blade extended.
‘I’m here for Xavier.’
‘He’s not home,’ said the guy with the brass.
They closed in on him.
Weiss met duo knife guy’s eyes. ‘Xavier’s not really a person, is he?’
‘Good fucking guess.’
8
1042 hours.
They ran as fast as their legs could carry them.
Sun in their faces and a dozen Messenger gang members a hundred and fifty metres to their rear, a ragtag army in Real Madrid shirts and Ray-Bans.
Looking for trouble.