“Hemorrhagic fever,” she lied.
“How bad is that?”
“It’s bad,” she said. “And something else you should know — every one of us is going to get this illness. It’s spread by mosquitoes.” If she was right about her diagnosis of leptospirosis, neither statement was true.
Calderon studied her. “I think you’re lying.”
She held his stare. “You’ve already made it clear that I’m going to die, so whether you believe me just isn’t very high on my list of worries. Sooner or later, whether you like it or not, anyone who spends time in this room is going to get bitten by a mosquito that’s taken a drink from Dr. Kaczynski. I couldn’t care less what you do with that information.”
The truth was, it was the only thing she cared about at that moment. As foolish and unlikely as it was, her escape plan hinged on getting their guards out of the room. It was a harebrained scheme, and her chances of success were minuscule, but at least it was a chance.
A bulky phone on Calderon’s belt buzzed loudly. He pulled a small headset from his shirt pocket and plugged it into the brick-sized device.
After a long stretch of listening, Calderon said, “Follow him, but keep your distance.” A pause, then, “This guy is good, even without any gear. If you crowd him, he’ll spot you.” Calderon looked at this watch. “I’m leaving now. Don’t lose him, and make sure everyone understands that they’re not to do anything until I join up with you.”
Calderon punched a button and slowly removed the headset from his ear. His eyes seemed lost in a distant thought.
Megan felt a chill on her neck in the ninety-degree heat.
* * *
Luke knew he was on the right course when he reached the river crossing. It was exactly as Paco had described it. An enormous banyan tree sat alone on an islet where two rivers converged. As he waded across the knee-deep shallows, a large squadron of birds took off from the tree’s canopy in a V-formation.
On the other side, he left behind dense jungle and entered a rain forest. It was an odd combination of enclosure and openness, like the lobby of a grand old hotel. A hundred feet above him, a thick weave of branches and vines let through only a few thin shafts of dusky skylight. The forest’s floor was sparse, covered by a carpet of moss and the occasional stalk of an immature seedling.
It had been almost three hours since he left Paco and a sulking Frankie to make their way back to the rendezvous point with the priest. If the Indian’s information was correct, he was nearing the guarded facility where Paco had seen a truck matching the one that Megan’s abductors had used.
The purple shadows of twilight were descending on the forest. It was the time of day when eyes strained to adapt to diminishing light levels, when the body’s cortisol level slid — and with it, attentiveness — and when guards performing monotonous duties would be distracted by hunger. On a scale that weighed his advantages against those of his adversaries, they were grains of sand, but they were all he had.
He sat against the base of a tree and pulled the thief’s Glock from his shoulder bag. It was filthy, and dry; the weapon hadn’t been oiled in a long while. He popped the clip and thumbed the rounds out of the magazine. His entire arsenal consisted of seven bullets.
Luke quickly disassembled the weapon, cleaned it with his shirt, and reassembled it. Then he began moving forward in a crouch, using the shadows, darting from tree to tree, scanning in a 360-degree arc each time he stopped. Just before nightfall stole the last light, he twice saw fresh tracks in the sodden ground. Neither was human.
Crickets were beginning to chirp when a distant set of lights flickered hesitantly, then swelled to an amber glow. They were spotlights, a quarter mile east of his position.
He went prone.
As he crawled through a humus-covered depression, a small multi-legged creature latched onto his forearm. He stopped and waited for it to pass over him, but instead the thing slowly creeped up his arm until it reached his shoulder, where it stayed.
Luke moved forward.
When he was still two hundred yards from the facility, he spotted one man, then another, patrolling inside the two-acre compound. Three buildings were set back from a Cyclone fence perimeter that was topped with barbed wire.
One of the men passed under a floodlight. He wore a forest camouflage uniform and maroon beret.
Soldiers. Whatever this place was, it was important to someone.
The low hum of insects was everywhere. The creature on his shoulder stroked him with one of its legs, exploring him. Luke brushed off the arthropod.
Twenty minutes later, he’d circled the perimeter and reconnoitered the area. A single dirt road wound its way to a secured entry gate. Outside the entrance was a small unmanned guardhouse. Inside the compound, he saw a large windowless building made of prefab aluminum siding that was flanked by two smaller wooden structures. A single canvas-tarped truck sat in the blackened shadow of an overhang along the side of the main building. It was too dark to make out the truck’s color or any logos.
The compound had its own electrical generator, fueled by a large natural gas tank.
Paired cameras sat atop twenty-foot posts at opposite corners of the compound. One lens in each pair was almost certainly a visible-light camera. The other was probably an infrared night-vision lens or motion detector. He maintained a hundred foot distance and hoped it was enough to avoid detection.
It seemed unthinkable that a remote facility in the Guatemalan rain forest would use security measures beyond what he had already seen. But if these people had set up external security zones with tree-mounted heat sensors or ground-level vibration detectors, they’d soon be on to him.
Both of the sentries carried M-16s, cross-chest position, barrel down, their index fingers wrapped around the trigger guard. Their patrol patterns were irregular, their routes inconsistent. It was no accident. He was looking at well-trained soldiers.
They had no special gear — no sniper scopes, no headsets, no night-vision goggles. Either they had no such equipment, or they weren’t expecting an intruder. Luke hoped that both were true.
He spent the next several minutes considering his options. He didn’t like any of them. He might be able to draw one of the sentries outside the compound and take him out, but no more than one. These soldiers wouldn’t be duped in tandem, and whichever one remained inside would immediately raise the alarm. He had to assume that inside those buildings there were other armed men. Someone, somewhere, was probably monitoring the security cameras. And if they were holding Megan and the priest in there, he guessed he’d find at least two more guards.
Before he made his move, he wanted to know more than just their numbers. He wanted to know their positions, their capabilities, their methods.
But that would take time, and fatigue was already sapping his strength.
He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. The shoulder infection was worsening, the throb swelling.
Waiting was not an option.
43
Luke found a gully deep enough to conceal his movements and belly-crawled along its path until he reached a culvert that passed under the road, about fifty feet from the compound’s gate.
The entry gate, he decided, was his only way into the facility. If necessary, he’d coax one of the guards outside with a ruse, but he was hoping for an opportunity that fell within the natural cadence and rhythm of their duties: patrolling the outside perimeter, or opening the gate for an arriving vehicle.
To take advantage of the moment when it came, he had to get closer. Twenty feet from the entrance the hulk of a fallen tree lay along the side of the road. From that position he could close the distance to the front gate faster than the guards could process and respond to an unexpected attack.
Luke lay back against the embankment and mulled whether to sprint to the fallen tree, which carried with it the risk of awakening the forest and drawing the guards’ attention, or to creep slowly and silently, which meant more time in the
camera’s lens.
He checked his Glock one more time. Given its condition, the gun probably wasn’t accurate beyond twenty-five or thirty feet, but he had no plans to use it. He had quieter ways of eliminating his enemy. Using the weapon would mean that something had gone terribly wrong, that his mission had failed.
That was when he heard an echoed sound so soft that it almost joined with the pulsing hum of the woodlands.
He froze.
Behind him, in the forest, a leafy branch fluttered.
Fluttered in the perfectly still night air.
He rolled noiselessly, his eyes rising over the edge of the gulch like a crocodile breaking the water’s surface. He let his eyes’ focus drift, relaxing his pupils, letting in the dim shadows.
A movement on his left, low to the ground. He raised the Glock and aimed, slowly taking in the trigger slack.
The truck inside the compound rumbled to life.
“Uh-oh,” a small voice squeaked. “Boss. Where you are, boss?
Luke relaxed his trigger finger. “Damn it.”
The truck’s headlights flashed on, its beams converging on Frankie’s yellow jacket. He lit up like a candlestick.
“Down, Frankie. Get down,” Luke said in a shouted whisper.
Luke lifted his head and glanced back at the compound. A soldier was climbing into the passenger side of the truck.
“I no can see you, boss.”
Luke threw himself against the opposite embankment, showing himself to the boy. “Down on the ground, Frankie. Now!”
“No mueva!” The shouted command came from inside the compound.
The boy went bug-eyed and stared at the lights as if they were a homing beacon.
Luke heard the chain-link gate fly open with a metallic shiver, then the sound of rapid footfalls and a gun belt rubbing against the coarse fabric of a soldier’s uniform.
A single set of sounds — one man.
Luke gripped his handgun with his right hand, the ground with his left. An old habit, feeling for vibrations, but the ground was too soft and moist.
Frankie started jabbering in Spanish.
“Silencio!” the soldier shouted.
A flashlight beam swept over Luke’s position.
“Cállate!” The sentry’s clipped voice erupted in staccato bursts. “No mueva!”
The soldier’s head, then upper body, came into Luke’s field of vision. The man was sidestepping, moving in a semicircle around the boy and edging closer to Luke’s position with each step.
Luke flattened himself against the embankment.
Suddenly, the soldier brought up his M-16 and fired three quick shots into the air.
Luke swung his gun around toward the man.
A fusillade of bullets riddled the soldier’s body before Luke completed the arc. The volley lifted the man’s body and hurled it onto the ground next to Luke.
Rifle fire. It had come from the forest. What the hell is happening?
Luke leapt from his hiding spot, grabbed the downed soldier’s M-16, and lunged at Frankie, who was standing bolt upright, frozen in terror.
He tackled the boy, clutching Frankie to his chest as they fell to the ground and rolled behind a tree.
A burst of gunfire from the compound bit into a patch of dirt near them.
Luke reached around the tree and aimed his handgun at the second guard, who was crouched in a shooting stance near the gate.
He fired two rounds at the man’s chest.
The soldier’s right shoulder exploded and he fell to the ground, screaming.
The truck’s engine roared, its gears gnashing furiously.
Luke peered around the tree trunk. The truck lurched forward and made a run for the front gate. A man in civilian dress ran out of the main building and jumped into the truck bed.
A searing pain shot through Luke’s left arm just as a rifle report reached his ears. The sound came from behind them, in the forest.
He grabbed Frankie with his right arm and rolled in a violent motion toward the gully. Another bullet chewed up the dirt behind them as they tumbled into the depression.
Frankie yelped as they hit bottom.
When he put his hand over the boy’s mouth, Luke noticed that the sensation in his fourth and fifth fingers was gone. He straightened his arm and worked his grip. The muscles obeyed grudgingly. He palpated his elbow and winced when a jolt of electrical pain shot down his forearm. The bullet had grazed the outside of his elbow, damaging his ulnar nerve.
Frankie said, “Boss, I scared. What we do?”
“Stay down and crawl that way.” Luke pointed to where the gulch emptied into the culvert. “There’s a pipe that runs under a road.” He drew a circle with his hand. “Get into it and stay there.”
“I come with you.”
“No!” Luke pointed again. “Get going. Now.”
The boy scurried away.
Luke stayed put while struggling to reason through the chaos. Someone had clipped him while he was lying prone behind a tree, in darkness. They had found their mark with one shot.
Someone out there had a nightscope.
An explosion of gunfire erupted from the forest again, but this time from the other side of the road. Luke slung the dead soldier’s rifle over his shoulder and used the clatter of gunfire to follow the gully into the forest. He reached a spot where the depression narrowed and deepened, curving in an S-pattern around two large trees. Using the trees as a shield, he lifted his head to ground level, looking back at the compound.
The truck, now outside of the compound, had veered off the road and slammed into a copse of trees. Automatic rifle fire from the other side of the road ripped through the canvas tarp. The right side of the windshield shattered and glass shards glinted in the wash of the headlights.
He followed the deadly green tracers back to their sources. The firing positions were too distant to get a fix on. He thought about the type of men who killed from long distances, men who used nightscopes and worked in teams.
The searing pain in his elbow told him there was another firing team on his side of the road. The assailants had set up a crossfire solution for the compound’s only exit — or perhaps, they had figured, his only way into the facility.
The guards had not behaved like men springing a trap. They had reacted like soldiers defending their site. They were pawns caught in the crossfire.
Had the hunters been waiting for him? That seemed impossible. He hadn’t known he’d be coming here until hours ago. More likely, they had followed him from Mayakital, and he’d made it all too easy. He had marched through the jungle without bothering to circle back or cover his tracks.
The gunfire stopped. In his mind’s eye he saw men scanning the forest — their world alight with ghostly green images — searching for their target. The shooters on his side of the road would hold their fire, not wanting to give away their position.
Did these men know something about the man they were hunting?
A lethal darkness boiled in Luke’s mind. His pulse slowed. His breathing quieted.
He let the demons take hold of him.
He rubbed his hands in the wet soil and rubbed it over his face and arms. His breaths came in a whisper as he sifted and filtered each sound, each smell, until only those made by humans would reach his senses.
The hunters probably expected him to either run or press the fight, so instead he waited, crouched in a hollow of earth between two enormous tree trunks protruding from one side of the gulch.
He didn’t have to wait long. He almost missed the sound when a monkey squealed overhead.
A boot lifting from the mud.
Seconds passed before he heard a twig strain under the weight of a footfall. It was barely a wisp — the sound ending too suddenly — a skilled tracker interrupting his step in mid-stride, revealing himself with his agility.
The hunter was in the ditch, closing on Luke’s position. A second hunter would be nearby, probably on ground level, moving in a
parallel path.
Luke detached the bayonet from the M-16 and ran his finger along both edges of the six-inch blade.
Another footfall. Images of the takedown played in his mind, the kind of mental rehearsal he’d used in another life.
When the moment came, it felt as if he were in another place, watching it unfold on a video screen.
Luke flicked a pebble with his middle finger, sending it straight up, toward the shadowed outline of a branch.
When the pebble hit its mark, he heard the sudden movement a few feet away.
He leapt from his earthen pouch. The killer was still looking up to the sound when Luke plunged the bayonet into the side of the man’s neck. The blade disappeared under the corner of his jaw, severing his vocal cords.
A burst of gunfire left the hunter’s rifle before the dying man reached for the knife handle protruding from his neck.
When the dark outline of a second man appeared at the lip of the gulch, Luke was already crouched in a shooting position. He caught the killer with a three-round burst. The orange muzzle flashes created a strobe-light effect, catching the hunter’s stunned expression as the bullets punched through his chest.
When Luke released the trigger, his skin tingled with the presence of a ghost that had come back and reclaimed his soul.
44
Luke grabbed one of the dead assailants’ rifles, swung it over the rim of the gully and peered through the bulbous nightscope.
On the other side of the road, two black-clad figures retreated into the wooded darkness, alternating their movements, one man withdrawing while the other covered their egress. The smaller one moved more expertly than his partner. Luke considered taking a shot at the man who was making a bigger target of himself, but the receding figures were already at the outer envelope of what, on a good day in another life, was his effective range.
So instead he followed the two men. Fifteen minutes later, when he was satisfied that they were not circling back, he returned to the compound.
The bullet-riddled truck was pinned against a tree. It was green and had no markings on the doors. The engine was still running, its rear tires churning the soil and digging grooves so deep that the axle had come to rest on the ground. It looked like a dying animal.
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