JET - Escape: (Volume 9)

by Russell Blake

  “Have it your way.”

  Chapter 17

  Officer Emilio Lopez had been a proud member of the Cúcuta police force for nine years, during which time he’d distinguished himself by showing up to work sober most days, never having a brutality charge filed against him, and staying awake the majority of his shifts.

  Cúcuta was a gateway for cocaine traffic to Venezuela, but a largely peaceful one, the territory well established as the turf of the Vicente Miguel organization, one of the most violent groups in the country. As such, none of its rivals dared challenge it in its home district, and a cautious peace had prevailed over the growing city for two decades, leaving it up to Officer Lopez to extort money from illegal vendors and prostitutes when he could – even a cop didn’t dare confront the street dealers, all of whom were affiliated with the group. An enterprising man, he bolstered his illicit income by acting as an informant to Mosises’ gang, offering regular reports on the Vicente Miguel cartel’s operations, for which he was paid a pittance.

  All of which meant that he made far less than his police brethren in larger towns like Medellín or Bogotá – a fact that embittered him no end. But today that was all about to change. Mosises had sent over a photograph of a woman he was on the hunt for, along with her companions: a white man with a broken hand, and a little girl.

  When he’d caught a glimpse of a trio matching that description crossing the parking lot on their way to the clinic, he’d done a double take, and then had promptly telephoned his contact in Mosises’ group and claimed the generous bounty for spotting them. He’d been told to watch the small building and report immediately if they left, which he agreed to do, although he couldn’t be obvious about it – he had other duties to attend to, and didn’t want to have to share his reward. So he’d kept an eye on the clinic as much as he could, only pausing to go inside the police station to answer questions or fill out reports.

  He’d caught a glimpse of the woman leaving twenty minutes ago, but the man and the girl weren’t with her, so she’d be back – probably going for breakfast or coffee. The wait to see a doctor was usually terrible in the mornings, he knew from experience.

  Thunder rumbled from a line of leaden clouds gathering by the foothills and he cursed under his breath. The last thing he wanted to have to do was maintain a vigil on the clinic in the rain. So far he’d played off his loitering around the front of the station house as waiting for a robbery victim to arrive and file a complaint, but nobody would believe he was doing so in a downpour. His mind worked furiously on a plausible alternative explanation with which to satisfy his supervisor, who only minutes before had demanded how much more time he was going to waste waiting for his invented victim to arrive, but a long night of coconut rum and cigars with the boys had left Lopez’s head somewhat fuzzy this morning, and he was drawing a blank.

  Another peal of thunder, this one closer and louder, exploded from the sky, causing him to jump. The downpour would start any minute, he knew. The region’s storms came on suddenly and raged for a few hours, and then faded just as quickly as they’d arrived, like the angry mood of a petulant child. The air felt heavy with moisture, and the distinctive smell of ozone and approaching rain drifted on the light breeze.

  An SUV caught his eye as it pulled around the corner and rolled to a stop at the edge of the parking lot, its windows down. Lightning lit the nearby clouds, followed by a loud boom, and he looked over his shoulder at the gathering storm. A flash drew his attention back to the vehicle, and then his mouth dropped open as a woman stepped from the passenger side of the SUV with a rocket launcher and took careful aim. He stood frozen as a smoke trail streaked from the vehicle and through the front doors of the clinic.

  The shockwave from the explosion rattled his teeth as he stood, stunned. Voices yelled from inside the police station, and then the woman fired another rocket from beside the vehicle, into the clinic’s rear window. The detonation blew part of the roof into the air, and an orange fireball blasted skyward.

  The Jeep roared away as Lopez fumbled his pistol into his hand, his movements seeming to him to be in slow motion. He fired at the vehicle as it screeched around the corner – mainly so he would have appeared to have done something, not because he thought he had a chance in hell of hitting it. Three officers, all with guns drawn, surged out of the station entrance as the heavens opened and rain began falling, lightly at first. Lopez stood frozen at the sight of the clinic ablaze, and then his captain was shaking him by the shoulders.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “I…a truck fired two missiles at the clinic,” Lopez blurted.

  “What? Description. What kind of truck?” the captain barked, and Lopez turned from the grim scene and began earning his finder’s fee in earnest. He would describe an SUV, maybe a Dodge or a Ford, dark color, but they’d never find it – he’d see to that.

  Any sense of guilt or responsibility for the slaughter quickly vanished as his own complicity dawned on him. Colluding with a cartel on a savage attack on a children’s clinic would easily land him in jail for the rest of his short life if his role were discovered. He pushed the mental image of dead mothers and babies aside and began doing damage control – there was nothing he could do to help the kids now, and it wasn’t like he’d known that Mosises’ people would stage a stunt like this.

  “It was an older Ford, I think. An Explorer. I don’t think it had any plates.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Jet was only a few meters from the first mugger when the whump of an explosion reached her. The man was momentarily startled by the sound, and she used his hesitation to pivot kick the knife from his hand, sending it skittering across the pavement as she followed through with a pair of strikes to his chest that sent him tumbling backward.

  A second explosion boomed, and Jet parried the remaining assailant’s clumsy knife swipe and brought her elbow down on his forearm, snapping the radius and ulna with a crack. He howled in pain and released the weapon, his arm now useless, and she rabbit-punched him in the throat, dropping him like a bag of rocks.

  The entire confrontation was over in seconds, leaving both men disabled, lying on the ground. Rain splattered around them, and after kicking their knives down the street, Jet bolted for the clinic – her stomach in a twisted knot as she ran through the drizzle, the sound of explosions impossible to mistake for thunder.

  Jet covered the distance in under a minute. When she arrived at the parking lot, she stared at the clinic in horror, the structure belching black smoke from every opening. The rainstorm was intensifying, the cloudburst now coming down in sheets, but she sprinted for the smoldering building’s gaping entry, oblivious to the downpour.

  “Hannah! Hannah!” she cried as she neared the gutted structure, ignoring the deluge as her panic mounted. She slowed as she approached the demolished doors and swallowed hard when she spotted the charred remains of a child’s arm in the wreckage. “Oh…God, no…”

  “Mama!” Hannah’s voice cut through the storm. For a moment Jet thought she was hallucinating, and she looked around wildly.

  “Hannah?” Jet called, and was rewarded by Matt’s voice from the rear of the building.

  “We’re back here.”

  Jet tore around the corner of the clinic. She pulled up short when she saw Matt holding Hannah in his arms, his bag hanging from his shoulder, water running down their faces. “You’re alive!” she cried and ran to them, simultaneously laughing and crying with relief.

  “Barely,” Matt said. “We have to get out of here. This was a rocket attack. The first one blew through the front of the clinic. We were in the back with the doctor, and I barely got Hannah out the rear door before a second one hit the exam room.”

  “Rockets?” Jet repeated in disbelief. She peered around the area, the heavy rain limiting visibility, and turned to Matt. “Come on. I see our way out.”

  Chapter 18

  Drago finished with the woman at the rental car desk in the Cúcuta airport termin
al and followed her directions to a nearby bus stop, where a shuttle took him to the rental parking lot. He tossed his bag onto the passenger seat and glanced up at the clouds, the storm off the Andes rushing towards him. The final half hour of his flight in the prop plane had felt like an amusement park ride, the turbulent air over the mountains combining with the front making for an unpleasant approach to the border city.

  A tree of lightning flashed nearby, answered a moment later by thunder. He slid behind the wheel and started the engine, and his phone vibrated. He scanned the messages that were being intercepted from Renaldo’s phone and stopped at the latest one – an informer had spotted his quarry at a clinic ten minutes from the airport.

  He pulled up a map on his cell screen and studied it. The quickest way would be to stay on the Boulevard Libertadores until he neared the major intersection on the western side of town, and then take surface streets that paralleled the river. Once the course was committed to memory, he dropped the transmission into gear and wheeled out of the lot, barely pausing to hand the attendant his voucher.

  The sparse morning traffic grew heavier as he neared the town center, and he battled his impatience as the cars around him jockeyed for position, darting in and out of openings without warning, turn indicators considered a sign of weakness. As he approached the intersection where he would divert to the smaller streets, an orange flash lit the sky, followed closely by the flare of a second detonation, and then a column of inky smoke snaked into the overcast sky.

  Drago stood on his horn as an overloaded truck crawled along, blocking his way, and then he pulled impatiently onto the shoulder and passed illegally. He narrowly avoided a concrete post and swerved back into the lane, cutting the lumbering conveyance off as he accelerated for the off-ramp. Rain began pelting the car, and he wrenched the wipers on. Ahead of him, he could see smoke rising like a signal, and he rode the rear bumper of the car in front of him until he could get around it. The driver made an obscene gesture at Drago as he roared past, which Drago ignored. He tried to contain the ominous feeling deep in his gut – he’d underestimated the extent to which Mosises’ hit men would go to get the woman.

  Drago had no problem with their tactics, only their competence. The Colombian cartels had a long history of brutal violence, but in spite of their reputations, were largely inept, using a sledgehammer where a scalpel would suffice. His fear was that they would make an attempt and fail, putting Matt and his whore back on alert, and that this time when the loving couple went to ground, they would stay gone. The thought of failure when he was this close made Drago physically ill, and he had to choke back bile as he drew near the clinic.

  When he arrived, uniformed officers were swarming over the area, and it took him a few moments to realize there was a police station down the block. A grim-faced cop in a rain parka waved him past what remained of the clinic, smoke still bellowing from it in spite of the intensifying rain. He’d had more than enough combat experience to recognize the handiwork of rockets, and he wondered at the audacity of the attackers, given the proximity of the station.

  This was typical of the sort of blunt-force trauma Drago had feared the cartel would employ: butcher dozens in an effort to kill a few, and hope their quarry died in the process of the complete destruction of the clinic.

  He shook his head in disgust. Not at the loss of innocent lives; at the sloppiness. If he’d arrived only a few minutes earlier, he could have walked in, gunned his target down, dragged the woman and little girl out, and been gone before anyone realized what had happened. Now, his revenge against the woman who’d put him into the hospital was gone in a fiery blaze.

  A gray sheet of rain pounded the roof of the car and he sighed to himself. “Well, that takes care of that, I suppose,” he muttered, and followed a line of vehicles away from the area. “Rot in hell, you miserable bastard. You certainly caused me enough grief.”

  He debated sticking around but thought better of it. The cops would eventually begin looking for whoever carried out the attack, and would likely search questionable vehicles. He couldn’t afford to be caught with his tools of the trade. In light of the destruction, the police would be looking for a scapegoat and would be all too ready to hang the crime on the first person they caught who seemed a reasonable fit.

  Drago retraced his path toward the airport and pulled off at a shopping complex with an American chain restaurant, its yellow sign glowing like a beacon in the rain. His growling stomach announced that he could use some coffee and breakfast – he hadn’t eaten since the prior night and had worked up a serious appetite with the lovely Alana. Now that Matt and his woman were ashes, he could afford to relax. Once he confirmed Matt’s death with his agent, money would hit his bank, and then he’d be off to the islands with a new identity. Perhaps Malta. Someplace off the beaten path, where his friends in the CIA would never think to look for him.

  He parked and slung his bag over his shoulder, and then dashed to the front entrance, the cloudburst pelting him with the intensity of a jilted lover as his shoes pounded on the wet pavement.

  Chapter 19

  Officer Lopez watched the fire trucks arrive and stepped away from his fellow policemen. He fished his cell phone from his shirt pocket and, after looking around to confirm that there was nobody close enough to overhear him, pressed redial and listened as the line rang. He’d debated not making the call, but had decided that if the three targets materialized at some point in the future and he hadn’t called, he’d be dead meat. As usual for him, self-interest won the day.

  When the phone picked up, he whispered urgently to Mosises’ contact person. “You botched it. The rockets didn’t get them.”

  The voice on the other end sounded surprised. “What?”

  “They got away.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw them take an ambulance.”

  “An…ambulance?” the contact sputtered in disbelief.

  “That’s correct. But now you have the entire police force, and soon, the military, in the mix. I can’t believe you bombed the place.”

  The voice ignored his protest. “What can you tell me about the ambulance?”

  “What do you mean, tell you? It’s an ambulance. Blue and white.”

  “How long ago did it leave?”

  “Maybe…five, ten minutes.”

  “Which is it? And why didn’t you call immediately?”

  “I have other things going on, what with World War Three down the block.” Lopez shook his head in disgust. “It was probably closer to ten minutes. Happened right after the blasts. You’ll be able to figure out the exact timing. That’s all I have. I need to get back to the job. You left a hell of a mess to clean up.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Fernanda and Ramón were entering the airport grounds when Ramón’s phone vibrated. He punched the line to life and listened, the color slowly draining from his face as he muttered an acknowledgement and disconnected. Ramón pulled to the side of the road and stared at his cell like it was a poisonous snake, and then slowly slid it into his pocket and turned to Fernanda.

  “They escaped. Our informer just reported that he saw them steal an ambulance.”

  Fernanda’s face could have been carved from wood. One eye twitched almost imperceptibly, and then both narrowed to slits.

  “That’s impossible,” she hissed. “Nothing could have survived that.”

  “Maybe, but that’s what he said, and he has no reason to lie.”

  “Damn it. If they were inside the building, they should be dead.” Her voice grew dangerously quiet. “Your informer screwed us. There’s no other explanation. Nobody walks away from a direct hit with two rockets. Nobody. Somehow they were tipped off.”

  “I doubt it. He wants his finder’s fee as much as anyone.” Ramón hesitated. “So now what do we do?”

  “Do? We find them and kill them. That’s what we do. Put a bulletin out to the cops that they’ve been spotted in a stolen ambulance and had something to do with the
explosion. We don’t need it to all hang together logically, just for the police to throw everything they have at finding them.”

  Ramón made another call and, after a muted discussion, hung up. “It’s done.”

  “They’re headed for the border. We need to get there immediately.”

  “There’s no way they’ll get across.”

  “They just walked away from the impossible. Of course they’ll get across, you idiot.”

  Ramón looked like he’d been slapped. His mouth tightened into a thin white line and he glared at her. “You’d be well advised to calm down,” he whispered, his voice glacial. “I don’t care who you are. Do you understand?”

  She inhaled noisily and softened her tone. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I’m just…I need some sleep, and this comes as…an ugly disappointment. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

  Ramón held her stare for a long beat and then turned away. “It will take us some time to make it to the river in this rain.”

  “Please get us there as quickly as possible.” An idea occurred to her. “Maybe we can use the helicopter to patrol the border?”

  Ramón shook his head. “Not in a million years. The police, the border guards, everyone will be on high alert after this. We’d be stopped inside of a minute, even assuming the pilots were willing to try in this storm and the tower gave us clearance for takeoff, which they probably wouldn’t.”

  She stared through the window at the terminal on her right, and nodded slowly. “You’re right, of course.”

  They had stopped and jettisoned the empty single-use rocket launchers in a dumpster at a construction site, so they had no fear of being discovered red-handed, but Fernanda had her rifle and associated gear in her rucksack, so there was some risk in returning to town. Still, Ramón had his orders, so he took the frontage road loop back toward Cúcuta and tried not to be furious with the Brazilian psychopath riding next to him. Her calm deliberation as she’d murdered God knows how many people had chilled him to his core, and he was no stranger to brutality. But this…this was a completely different level of indifference to slaughtering innocents than he was accustomed to.