The Treadstone Resurrection

by Joshua Hood

  Vega twisted toward the open troop door on the left and saw the ground erupt in flame and dirt. The pilot kicked the rudder to the right and banked into a tight turn, the g-force pushing Vega into his seat.

  The pilot twisted the helo around and the door gunner opened up with the .50.

  Ddddddduuuu . . . ddddddduuuu . . . ddddddduuuu.

  50

  PENDARE, VENEZUELA

  Hayes sprinted through the jungle, the bullets snapping overhead as he ducked around trees and vines. He leapt over the fallen log that lay at an angle across his path and threw the shotgun’s barrel over the top.

  His backtrail was alive with men in camo BDUs. They weren’t bothering with tactics, choosing instead to form up into a skirmish line and spray the area ahead of them with rifle and machine-gun fire.

  There was no time to aim, and with so many targets—no need. Hayes simply fired, his finger working the trigger until he’d run the Benelli dry. Then he was up and running.

  He tugged the radio free, and just in case Boggs couldn’t hear the running firefight crawling toward him, Hayes thumbed the talk button.

  “I’m compromised!” he yelled over the growing rate of fire. “Get out,” he ordered, zigging to the left.

  Hayes thumbed the last of his shells into the shotgun on the run and was about to turn and fire when he heard the helo thumping over the trees. He glanced skyward and saw the Huey through a break in the canopy diving toward him, flames flashing from the pylons.

  “Oh, shit,” he yelled, a moment before the first rocket exploded high in the trees.

  The second rocket hit the ground to his rear. The explosion lifted Hayes off his feet and shot-putted him through a tangle of vines and down a ravine. Something snagged the Benelli, ripping it from his hand as he tumbled down the hill.

  Hayes landed face-first in the brackish water, ears ringing, sweat and blood dripping down his face.

  Overhead the Huey had set into a tight orbit, and the bullets from the door gun were shredding through the canopy. The bullets splintered limbs and eviscerated leaves before slamming into the ground in great geysers of earth.

  Keep fucking moving! the voice screamed.

  Hayes scrambled to his feet and followed the cut to his right. He tore the compass from his pocket, got a quick heading angled up the opposite slope. The vines and branches tore at his face, slapping tears into his eyes.

  But there was no time to think about pain, only surviving. He tugged his last grenade free, ripped the pin, and threw it over his shoulder. Up ahead he saw a break in the trees at the top of an embankment. His legs burned and his breathing was ragged, his pursuers closing in fast behind him.

  He was halfway up the hill when the Jeep burst into view and slid to a halt. Hayes felt a flash of hope, the realization that he had a chance if he could only make it up the incline.

  “Cole!” Hayes yelled, digging deep, ignoring the burning in his chest and the darkness at the edge of his vision.

  The grenade exploded behind him, drowning out the screams of the men caught in the explosion.

  Hayes could see the Jeep clearly now, and Boggs standing up behind the wheel, neck craning toward the sound of gunfire chattering behind him.

  “The saw . . . throw . . . me . . . the . . . SAW,” he gasped, ducking his head against the bullets snapping through the limbs behind him. “Throw it,” he choked, bursting out of the trees.

  “It’s locked and loaded!” Boggs yelled.

  The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon weighed seventeen pounds, but with all the adrenaline flowing through Hayes’s veins, it felt light as a feather when he plucked it out of the air, dug his feet into the ground, and slid to a halt.

  He spun, snapped the stock to his shoulder, and pressed the safety to fire just as the men appeared through the trees. According to the manual, the SAW’s max rate of fire was one hundred rounds a minute before the barrel started to melt. Hayes had never been in a situation to test it, but as he slammed the trigger to the rear, he hoped someone had.

  The SAW chattered to life, the recoil vibrating through his body, forcing Hayes to lean all of his weight into the machine gun to keep it under control. He held the trigger down, working the muzzle back and forth like a fire hose.

  He could feel the heat coming off the barrel through the handguard, but he stayed on the trigger, even when smoke obscured his vision and he could no longer see his targets. He slung lead until he ran through the hundred rounds inside the cloth drum.

  When the SAW finally fell silent, the barrel was bright red and starting to droop, and Hayes let it fall and jumped into the back of the Jeep.

  “Go, go, go!”

  “What the hell happened to stealthy?” Boggs demanded.

  “Just fucking drive.” Hayes tugged the substantially lighter bag of guns toward him and refilled his magazine and grenade pouch.

  The only rifle left was a battered AK-47. Hayes racked a round into the chamber and climbed into the front passenger seat.

  “What did you see?” Boggs shouted over the wind rolling through the open Jeep.

  “Money, a fucking warehouse full of hundred-dollar bills,” Hayes said, twisting open a Nalgene bottle full of water and pouring the contents down his throat.

  “Are you serious?” Boggs asked, slowing as they approached the dogleg in the road.

  “I’m—” he started to reply, but then they came around the corner and saw the pair of mud-spattered pickups pulled across the road, the PKM machine guns mounted to the back pointed at the front of the Jeep.

  Hayes didn’t have time to do anything but get the AK-47 up to his chest and his finger on the trigger when the gunners opened fire and the windshield exploded inward.

  The DEA agent yelled out in pain and his hand shot to his chest, blood splattering over the side of Hayes’s face.

  “Boggs!” he yelled, catching the man slumping face-first into the wheel out of the corner of his eye. He expected the Jeep to slow, but instead it surged forward. Hayes realized Boggs’s foot was pinning the accelerator to the floor.

  Hayes dropped the AK and reached over for the wheel, knowing that since they couldn’t stop, his only option was to try to run the roadblock. He managed to center the Jeep on course and had resigned himself to trying to smash through the trucks when a fighter in a baggy T-shirt stepped out into the road five feet in front of the speeding Jeep, a black handkerchief tied over his mouth and a dark green orb in his right hand.

  At first Hayes didn’t understand what he was seeing. The fighter was too small to be a man, and for a moment, he thought that he was about to be killed by a midget. But then his mind cleared, and he realized what was really going on.

  It’s a kid.

  But there was nothing childlike about the frag in his hand.

  The Jeep was less than two feet away, close enough for him to read the yellow stenciled writing on the olive-drab body: GRENADE, FRAG, DELAY, M67.

  Hit him.

  At that moment Hayes was so desperate to survive that he would have hit a priest if he was standing in the road with a fragmentation grenade. But he couldn’t kill a kid, no matter what it cost him, and he pushed the wheel hard over at the same moment the boy fastballed the grenade at the Jeep.

  51

  PENDARE, VENEZUELA

  The frag hit the hood of the Jeep with a solid thump. It rolled up to the windshield wipers and stopped. Hayes’s adrenaline took over, and he violently shoved the wheel to the left, hoping to fling it free.

  The Jeep shot off the road, its brush guard tearing a hole through the undergrowth. The front end cleared the edge and the nose dipped down. Outside the Jeep, the trees blurred past the window, and even with the brake pedal pushed to the floor, the Jeep continued to pick up speed.

  A glance at the speedometer showed the needle creeping past forty miles per hour.

 
By the time Hayes looked up and saw the massive rubber tree in his path, the only thing he could do was step on the gas and yank the wheel hard over.

  The passenger side of the bumper clipped the tree hard and sent the Jeep spinning. Hayes fought to regain control, tried to hold on, but the wheel was ripped from his hands.

  His head slammed into the frame, a sharp blow that sparked his vision.

  The back end banged into a second tree, shattering more glass, but Hayes ignored it. He grabbed the wheel with his left hand, forced his tingling right to comply to his will, and then he had both hands on the wheel. Hayes turned into the spin, putting everything he had into it.

  The Jeep was slow to respond, but he felt the tires get traction, which allowed him to get some forward momentum, and finally he managed to straighten it out when he looked up and saw the edge of a cliff.

  Hayes was reaching for the emergency brake when the vegetation cleared. He yanked the lever upward, the metal hitting the stop and tearing free from his hand. The tires locked up and the back end fishtailed, but the SUV was too fast and way too heavy.

  He watched the ground coming, knowing there was nothing he could do.

  The front wheels bounced over the edge and the front end pitched forward. Hayes was weightless, and then he was falling.

  “Hold on,” he yelled at Boggs.

  The Jeep slammed into the ground with enough force to fold the brush guard backward into the engine compartment. The radiator exploded. Hayes’s head rebounded off the wheel and stars sparked in his vision. He tasted blood in his mouth, and slowly his vision faded to black.

  * * *

  —

  Hayes’s eyes blinked open, his vision hazy from the blood running down his face. The view from the shattered windshield was wrong, but his mind reeled to place the problem. The smell of gas, burning oil, and plastic scorched his nose, and when he tried to move his arm, Hayes realized that he was upside down. Trapped inside the burning vehicle.

  He forced his head to the left, looking for his friend. Shards of safety glass dug into his scalp. Slumped against the wheel, Boggs looked dead.

  “Hey, buddy, you still with me?” he said and groaned.

  “Fuck,” the DEA agent mumbled. “I can’t . . . I can’t feel my legs.”

  The voices were getting closer.

  “Here, he’s here!” a voice yelled.

  “Alive, the colonel wants them alive,” a second voice shouted.

  That ain’t happening.

  Hayes could smell fuel and knew he had to get out of the Jeep. He kicked at the folded windshield and managed to create a hole large enough to fit through.

  Beside him, Boggs moaned.

  Hayes turned to him. “We got to roll, man. I’ll climb through, then I’ll pull you out.”

  He ducked through the opening where the windshield had been. Hayes felt his flesh catch on something, but ripped free and scrambled from the wreck, and forced himself to his feet. Hayes was trying to get his balance when he saw the top of a head pop up at the back of the truck that had followed them.

  The narco rushed around the truck, a sawed-off shotgun in his right hand.

  They were face-to-face, close enough for Hayes to see the man’s eyes widen in surprise over the bandana tied around his mouth. The narco froze.

  Hayes didn’t.

  With the pills finally out of his system, the conduit that connected Hayes to the training he’d received at Treadstone was wide open, and he reacted without hesitation, emotion, or thought. He was a machine, programmed for one purpose: to kill.

  Hayes fired a left-handed jab to the man’s sternum. It was a solid blow that landed square and knocked the narco back on his heels. Before his knuckles found flesh, he’d stripped the Glock from the holster with his right hand. The moment the barrel cleared leather, Hayes double-pumped the trigger.

  Boom . . . boom.

  “You want some of this?” he yelled in Spanish, the Glock coming up into a two-handed grip.

  Rifle fire erupted from the other side of the SUV. The hollow cracks followed the bullet pinging off the Jeep. Hayes grabbed Boggs, making sure to keep his neck steady in case the man had a spinal injury, and slowly pulled him free of the wreck.

  Hayes was spent, his arms useless, legs barely keeping him up, but he managed to drag Boggs around the back of the Jeep and set him against a tree.

  “Here, take this,” he said, tugging Boggs’s Glock from its holster before ripping his shirt open.

  “J-just go,” he wheezed.

  One look at the wound and the uneven movement that came with the pained inhalation told Hayes that Boggs had a sucking chest wound. He needed to relieve the pressure or the man was going to die.

  The trauma kit in the Jeep.

  “Hold tight.”

  “G-go,” Boggs whispered.

  “You hold on, buddy, I’m going to get you out of here,” Hayes said, crawling inside the Jeep, his head throbbing like someone was beating on his skull with a chisel. He flattened himself out, crawled under the roll bar, and snatched the kit off the back of the driver’s seat.

  Hayes winced when a round punched through the passenger seat, leaving a jagged hole in its wake, and ripped the kit free. He banged his shin on the way out. Another stab of pain, but he was working off pure adrenaline now and pushed it away.

  “Burn him out!” someone yelled in Spanish.

  Hayes threw the kit to the rear of the Jeep and drew the revolver.

  “Where is he?” one of the men asked in Spanish. “Did you get him?”

  “I’m here,” Hayes said, stepping into the open, then centered the revolver on the closest target, a stocky man with black hair sticking straight up.

  “No, no, no!” the second shooter yelled, trying to throw his AK to the ground, but it was too late.

  Boom.

  The Smith & Wesson roared, bowling the fighter over, and Hayes turned to the second man and dropped him with two quick shots. But more were coming, and Hayes knew that he was out of time. He ran the pistol dry, shoved it into the holster, and was turning back to Boggs when a narco came around the corner, his AK up and ready. Hayes lowered his head and speared him.

  He felt the man’s breath rush from his body as he drove him into the ground. Hayes brought his elbow down across the man’s face and felt blood spurt onto his arm. Achieving the mount, Hayes ripped the AK from the fighter’s grip, breaking a few fingers in the process. Every second counted. He knew that he needed to end the fight quickly.

  He launched a blade-hand strike at the man’s throat, fracturing his larynx and crushing his windpipe. The narco desperately gasped for air, but was soon still.

  Hayes swayed when he got to his feet. His vision was blurry, and rounds tore at the ground around him. He scrambled back to Boggs and dumped the kit’s contents on the ground. The gunfire was getting closer and Hayes could hear voices when the firing died down. Boot falls pounded the dirt on the other side.

  Hayes’s hands shook when he ripped open the pack of gauze. He managed to stuff it into the bullet hole and secure an ACE bandage around Boggs’s torso.

  The narcos were gathering for another attack, but this time the rifle fire started slowly. The hits sounded like rocks being thrown against a tin shed, and the misses whizzed overhead like angry hornets.

  Hayes ignored it, focused everything on trying to save Boggs’s life and knowing that he was fighting a losing battle. He remembered the Iridium satphone in his assault pack and crawled to the rear of the vehicle, but it wasn’t there.

  Realizing that it must have fallen out during the rollover, Hayes shot a glance up the hill, where a gun crew was trying to set up a PKM machine gun.

  Hayes knew he had two options: He could go now, before the machine gun was up and functioning, or sit back and watch Boggs die. It was a no-brainer. He didn’t even
hesitate.

  He simply rushed the hill, snagging a fallen AK from a dead fighter, and emptied the magazine on the run. He was lucky one of the rounds hit the fighter before he could get the PKM into action. Hayes scooped up the man’s weapon, and the men on the road turned and fled.

  Ducking into the sling, Hayes snatched a frag from the dead man’s belt. He ripped the pin out, took two steps, and let the spoon fly free.

  Counting in his head, he forced his battered body up onto the road.

  Hayes set his feet, heaved the frag at the men.

  The grenade detonated right above their heads. It bowled the fighters over in a cloud of blood and flesh, peppering Hayes with bits of metal.

  And then it was still.

  Hayes ditched the empty rifle and stumbled back to his pack. He reached inside, yanked out the satphone, and ran back to the Jeep, where he found Cole already dead.

  There was no time to mourn, only time to sling the assault pack, snag a radio from one of the dead fighters and a pistol from the other, and then he was running back toward the trees, seeking shelter in the jungle.

  52

  PENDARE, VENEZUELA

  Run, you idiot.

  Hayes sprinted toward the tree line, ignoring the leaden weight in his legs.

  A gunman’s excited voice boomed over the radio in Hayes’s hand. “Pedro, he is here. Bring the dogs.”

  “Air One, I’ve got a runner.”

  Hayes ducked his head and crashed through the brush, the stinging slap of a tree branch hot across his face. He wanted to head east, but it had been years since anyone had thinned the woods, and the forest floor was choked with wait-a-minute vines, briars, and knee-high saplings.

  The obstacles made it impossible for Hayes to travel in a straight line, and he was forced to constantly change directions. He’d been on the wrong side of a tracking team before and knew his only chance of staying alive was to split up the K9-handler team.