by Chris Ryan
‘Reckoned he had a Page Three stunner for a bird. Speak to him for more than a minute, out came the wallet and the picture of his missus. Then we found out she was actually from Page Three. Kid had just cut her picture out of the paper and scanned it into a photograph. Bloody joker.’
Bald’s voice grew closer. Ten, maybe twelve metres away.
‘Hard to watch a kid like that die. And it could so easily have been you, Joe. Do me a favour and—What the fuck?’
The clatter of a gunshot. Gardner heard Bald grunt, a separate set of footsteps rustling the dry leaves and a voice cussing in Portuguese. He ducked away from the kopak tree and saw a burly guy in a black duster coat, using his weight to pin Bald to the ground. Bald kicked and flailed at him, but the guy was immovable as a rock. His face was pale as the coke packets and his shaking hand held a needle ten inches from Bald’s face.
‘Son of a fucking bitch. Help me, Joe!’
For a split second Gardner’s Regiment instincts kicked in, and he made towards Bald, fists clenched, ready to kick seven shades of shit out of the attacker. John’s lied to me, he told himself. But he’s still an ex-Blade, and I can’t stand back and let him die.
A rush of air above. Whirl of blades, whip of an engine. Gardner arched his head up and saw the Bell Ranger overhead. Low, seventy feet, rails almost touching the canopy below. So low he could see the pilot’s face, and the pattern on the sniper’s sneakers.
The sniper was aiming directly at him.
He broke left just as the sniper pulled the trigger. The bullet thwacked into the butt of a tree. Then the chopper lifted and circled around the creek, the sniper indicating to his pilot that he needed a clearer shot.
Gardner’s eyes followed it as it hovered to the east. Below, shadows moved along the ridgeline. They shouted and pointed towards Gardner. Bald still struggled with the guy in the duster. The shadows stopped seventy metres away. Two of them kneeled and aimed their weapons at Gardner.
Shit! Fucking surrounded.
He shot a final glance back towards Bald.
A needle suspended above his eyes.
‘Joe, I’m fucked! Help!’
I can’t, mate, Gardner thought as a crackle of gunfire erupted to his right. He ducked behind the eastern side of the kopak tree. He heard the furious splitting of bark as rounds smacked into the trunk.
Get out of here. You can’t save Bald, but you can still save yourself.
His survival instincts kicked in. He darted towards the creek. Once there he stared at the drop. The decline was practically vertical, all the way down into another area of the Barbosa favela. He had a widescreen view of Rio, from the clutter of rooftops and electricity cables to the Hilton, to Copacabana beach.
He cross-grained diagonally along the drop. Ten metres down, he caught a scream at his rear, like someone strangling a dog. Bald. He pictured the needle plunging through John’s eye socket, piercing his lizard brain. He didn’t know who the attacker was, didn’t give a crap.
Shake hands with the devil, expect him to stab you in the back.
The creek flowed directly past the favela, where it grew into impassable jungle. Half a dozen women were washing their clothes in the water. They stopped and stared at Gardner as he ran parallel to the creek. Twenty metres on, past a dead goat, he found a small fence, bounded over it and crossed the street. The Bell Ranger circled the air above. A Big Skull accelerated past, almost running over his foot. Slammed on the brakes. The passenger door swung open. An officer shouted at him.
You need to bug out, and quick, Gardner decided. The last thing he wanted was to be detained by BOPE. From what Bald said, Falcon wasn’t the only corrupt guy in the unit, and the other dodgy officers wouldn’t hesitate to execute a foreigner who knew too much.
Then he smelled shit and clocked a sewage hole on the side of an adjacent home. He had his escape plan.
19
1811 hours.
Gardner crawled into a tunnel tight as a coffin.
His body slithered into hot, foul waste the consistency of mud. The shit-and-piss brew touched his chin, and he clamped his mouth tightly shut, fighting his gag reflex. The space was so narrow he had to tuck in his elbows; they scraped along the walls of the tunnel, scouring the skin.
He rowed with his arms, his fists acting as flat blades that pushed beneath the surface and splashed sewage against his face. He was forced to breathe in through his nose, and the smell was wet and vicious, like burned skunk. Shards of light from the sewage holes lighted up the crap he ploughed through. He saw used condoms, bloodied tampons, nappies, tissues and even a foetus. But most of all, he saw shit: a mass of brown, as if he was squirming behind a donkey with a bad case of Montezuma’s revenge.
God, how long will it take to wade through this shit? Keep going until you’re out of the favela, he told himself. But the favela’s a mile long. A whole fucking mile. It’s two miles to the beach. You have to get out of the area. It’s not safe. Not with BOPE on your case. Fuck it, then.
He struggled on. The sewer flowed downward at an angle from the creek – three hundred metres above sea level – towards the beach. Occasionally a powerful surge of excrement rushed past him, pushing his head fully under the surface. Globs of shit filled his ears, his nostrils, prised at his clamped lips.
The holes in the street finished abruptly.
When the dark arrived, the fear rode its back.
And suddenly Gardner was back in the torpedo tubes during waterborne insertions training in Boat Troop. He watched the hatch batten shut, the darkness so complete he couldn’t see his hands. The tube flooding with water, and the agonizing wait for the chamber to open, releasing him into the sea.
The fear burrowed into his spine, paralyzing him. With every passing second it required greater effort to move forward. Every muscle in his body seemed to resist. The irrational part of his mind urged him to crawl backwards and exit the nearest street hole, but he fought hard against it. No, you have to push on. Like exploring caves, the darker and deeper you foraged into a mountain’s guts, the closer you came to the other side.
He lost count of time. There was no way of judging how far he had slithered or how much further he had to go. It felt as if he was sinking into a bottomless pit. The sewage level rose, reaching his bottom lip. He thought he might choke and drown.
Squeaks pierced his ears. He saw a light, white and irresistible, like an onrushing train. The exit. The light energized him. He picked up the pace. Then the squeaks grew louder, and he spotted a pack of rats at the exit hole, swarms of the fuckers picking at the build-up of sewage. He came close to the exit. The rats were excited. They scuttled around the hole, jumping on to his hands. One landed on his head, and he shook wildly from side to side, screaming, the rat in his hair clawing at his scalp, but all he wanted was to escape the tunnel, to breath fresh air, and he climbed through the hole and blinked in the sunlight.
He was out.
The rats scattered like pool balls at a break, and Gardner checked his surroundings.
He’d been coughed up in a backstreet of a residential neighbourhood. Split bin bags in a rubbish dump attracted the rats. He followed the street to a main road. Pleasant whitewashed villas, tan apartment buildings and colonial architecture. In the background he made out Corcovado mountain. You’ve crawled through more than a mile of shit, he thought.
A street sign told Gardner he was on Rua Alfredo Chaves. From his memorized Google map of Rio, that placed him in Humaitá district, east of the statue and outside the cluster of favelas to the north: Barbosa, Santiago and the rest. A clock outside a shop told him it was seven-thirteen in the evening. The work crowd had retired for the night. There weren’t many people about.
Not many, but a few. Across the street a fair-skinned girl in her twenties shot him a disgusted look and quickly moved on. Gardner glanced down at himself, and understood why. He was caked in shit from his toes to his neck. Some of the sewage was beginning to harden and fester in the heat.
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br /> Time for a wash, he told himself. He crossed Rua Humaitá, headed down a maze of tight roads and blue- and green-doored bungalows, drawing stares from the locals, and hit Rua Real Grandeza. Passing the São João Batista cemetery, its winged angel looking over the graves, he continued south for several hundred metres until he finally reached Avenida Atlantica and Copacabana beach.
He staggered across baking sand the colour of flax seeds. The beach wasn’t so busy at this time of day; the tourists were wining and dining and heading out to town. Topless girls covered up their breasts and blokes in brightly coloured beach shorts stopped playing football, and stared. A group of teenagers shared a joint and pointed at him. Gardner didn’t care. He looked ahead to the water, turquoise and foamy like cappuccino froth. The tide licked his feet. He shuffled into the Atlantic Ocean and swam out a hundred metres to a spot where no one could bother him. He let the cool water clean his body.
When he was done washing, he collapsed midway up the beach and let the fading sun dry his soaked, dirty clothes. Fuck me, he thought. Shaves don’t come any closer. He’d come to Rio to rescue his mate and found himself tricked and ambushed by a man he’d once been proud to call his best friend. And he’d escaped. Now he was lying on a paradise beach surrounded by topless women with arses that would make a grown man cry. One girl, dark-haired and topaz-eyed and wearing just a black thong, grabbed his attention. That size, her tits have got to be fake, he reckoned. Either way, he admired the view.
Gardner laughed. Then closed his eyes. Sand grains blew across his face, clinging to his eyebrows and nose. For the longest time, his world was dark.
Then he felt the sun cool. He opened his eyes and saw a shadow standing over him.
Faster, Grittier, Darker, Deadlier… Chris Ryan Extreme
Mission 1: REDEEMER
When an old friend makes a desperate call for help, former SAS Warrant Officer Joe Gardner is thrust back into the line of fire. His journey leads him into the deadliest favela in Brazil, where violent gangs, crazed hitmen and trigger-happy paramilitaries lurk. Gardner’s only hope of staying alive is through his supreme survival skills and warrior’s instinct.
Mission 2: THE ROCK
A chance encounter with an agent from MI6 leads Joe Gardner into a perilous mission in Gibraltar. His objective: bust a major cocaine-smuggling ring involving former a Regiment operator and the Royal Navy. But Gardner isn’t alone. A mysterious killer with expert martial arts skills is shadowing his every move. And it’s about to get noisy.
Mission 3: DIE TRYING
Dispatched to a postwar Belgrade crawling with criminals and bad memories, Joe Gardner is on a collision course with his one-time Regiment friend John Bald. Gardner plans to put a stop to Bald once and for all. But with the Russian mafya and Italian mob closing in, is Gardner too late? If he fails, tens of thousands will die.
Mission 4: FALLOUT
In the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack, Joe Gardner discovers a terrifying secret. In order to protect the truth, he must escort special agent Aimee Milana to safety, all the while hunted by government agents and a former Navy SEAL operator equipped with a lethal weapon. The race is on to reach Parliament Square before the clock runs out – and the world descends into all-out war.
All available in exclusive ebook edition.
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