Flattening himself in the dirt and keeping as low to the ground as possible, Harper crawled up the slope, flesh creeping as he waited for the impact of a bullet. He heard the whip-crack of another shot, but it went high and wide of him, striking sparks off a granite boulder. Before the sicarios could fire again, Harper had grabbed Scouse by the ankles and dragged him into the cover of some rocks.
He felt sick as he saw the dark red stain that was slowly spreading across Scouse’s chest. He tore open Scouse’s jacket and saw a dark hole just above his breastbone that was spurting bright, arterial blood. He had no field dressings or any medical kit with him, and all he could do was press his hands against the wound.
Scouse stared down at his chest, watching the blood still bubbling out from under Harper’s fingers, and then looked up and locked eyes with him. ‘Don’t waste your energy, mate. If you stay here to try to help me, you’ll just slow yourself down and let those bastards get you too.’ He shook his head as Harper opened his mouth to argue. ‘You know I’m done. Just like I always told you, even a lucky shot can kill you.’ He choked on the last word as his mouth filled with blood and moments later his eyelids flickered and closed, and with a last sighing breath, his body twitched and then lay still.
Harper pressed his bloody fingers against Scouse’s neck but he already knew that he would feel no pulse there. He hesitated a moment longer, then crawled a few yards to the cover of another boulder and slowly peered around the edge of it, trying to spot the sicarios who had killed Scouse. In the split second he was exposed, he heard a crack and the whine of a ricochet as a bullet struck the boulder. Needle-sharp splinters of rock flew around him, and one embedded itself in his cheek. He pulled it out between his forefinger and thumb and roughly wiped away the blood trickling from it.
In the instant he had been looking around the rock before the bullet struck it, he had caught the movement of figures, dangerously close below him, no more than a hundred yards away. It was well within range of the rifles they were carrying, but too far for a killing shot with the Colt that he still carried, tucked in his belt. He needed them within twenty metres or so before he could be certain of taking them out.
He spent a few more precious seconds scanning the slope around him, plotting a course he could take, using every inch of cover that the boulders, loose rocks and scree could provide. Then he showed himself for an instant at the left hand side of the boulder, dived back into cover as another bullet struck it and then belly-crawled away from the other side, worming his way to the next patch of cover he had identified. Each time he crossed a patch of open ground, his flesh crawled, expecting at any second the impact of a bullet, but although the sicarios kept firing whenever they caught a glimpse of him, and rounds were peppering the hillside around him, he remained unscathed.
After a five-minute eternity spent crawling across the slope, he reached the fissure he had noticed, a boulder-strewn stream bed that had cut a notch into the ridge. Clinging to the near side of it, to make maximum use of the cover it afforded him, Harper crawled his way up, flattening himself against the ground as he reached the top, minimising his exposure to the sicarios as he crossed the ridgeline and then wormed forward a few more yards. There was a narrow ribbon of land along the summit of the ridge, a gentle downslope of weathered rocks and gritty sand before the plunge began down the other side of the ridge. Once Harper had worked himself away from the ridgeline behind him, he could crouch and then stand, unobserved by the sicarios until they had climbed up to the ridge themselves.
He knew he had no more than two or three minutes respite before they would reach the ridgeline and, keeping low, he ran flat out, due west into the now setting sun, counting down from fifty as he did so. Then he dived behind an outcrop of rocks and looked back. The imprint of his boots had left a clear trail in the loose gritty sand back along the plateau. He ran another twenty yards at right angles to his previous course, then worked his way back, looping his track and going to ground again behind a low rock at right angles to the line of his footprints and about fifteen metres from it. He arranged some smaller rocks in front of his hiding place, then pulled up a couple of handfuls of dry mountain grasses and pushed the stems roughly into his hair - as good a camouflage as he could manage in the short time available. He eased the Colt from his waistband, flicked off the safety catch and sighted along its barrel, pointing along the line of the footprints he had made. Then he settled back to wait.
His thoughts were all of Scouse, a mixture of bitter, agonising regret at the death of his childhood mate, after going through so much to try and save him, but also blind fury at Scouse’s stupidity in breaking one of the cardinal rules of soldiering. Not breaking the skyline was one of the first things you learned as a raw recruit, but despite his years as a Para and then associating with SAS men, and even pretending to be one, it was one of the many things that Scouse had either forgotten or, more likely, Harper thought bitterly, had never bothered to learn.
He pushed the dark thoughts away. Scouse was gone and there was no point in wasting time and energy on anger, regrets or thoughts of what might have been. Harper was in extreme danger himself and the only way to get out of it was to eliminate the sicarios who had been tracking them and who had already killed Scouse.
He waited as the shadows cast by the low sun lengthened and at last he heard a faint noise and saw a movement at the periphery of his vision. He remained absolutely motionless as two figures peered cautiously over the ridgeline, then climbed up and stood still, the barrels of their Armalite AR-15 assault rifles following their gaze as they scanned the summit plateau in both directions. Harper saw one nudge the other and point at the ground. Both heads then turned in his direction and they began to move slowly along the ridge, following the trail of his footprints, one moving while the other remained still, covering him.
He watched and waited as they moved towards him, still tracking the footprints in the dirt. If they failed to see him, they would have to pass within fifteen metres of where he lay, and at that range even Scouse couldn’t have missed. He waited as the first sicario approached, a squat figure dressed in army-style camouflage fatigues but with the hair and facial colouring of an Aymara tribesman. He paused almost level with him, glancing from side to side, and his gaze must have passed right over Harper, but he evidently failed to detect anything unusual about the loose rocks and the clump of grasses that concealed him, as he then moved on. His body now filled Harper’s sights, but he still held his fire. Only when the first man had passed and the second was in his sights, would it be the moment to fire.
The second sicario was now almost level with him. As he looked to his right, a gust of wind parted the grasses Harper had used to hide himself and blew a few of the stems away downwind. In that instant Harper saw the sicario’s face change and his mouth began to open in a warning cry as his gun barrel swung towards Harper’s hiding place. Harper pulled the trigger and the Colt barked. Still travelling at close to muzzle velocity, the round smashed into the centre of the man’s chest, hurling him backwards as if he had been hit by a sledgehammer, and tearing a hole in his back as it exited, through which blasted a spray of blood and lung tissue.
The first sicario swung around but froze for a crucial instant at the sight of the other one sprawled across the rocks. He had barely had time to register that a second figure was lying on the ground a few yards from his dying comrade when Harper squeezed the trigger again. The Colt bucked twice more, the first round smashing into the sicario’s solar plexus, the next punching a hole a few inches higher as he began to topple backwards, tearing away most of his heart. Harper switched back to his original target and put a final round through his head - a coup de grace that might not have been necessary, but Harper had been in enough gunfights to never assume anyone was dead until you had made absolutely certain of it.
He tucked the two dead sicarios’ pistols in his belt, and picked up one of their Armalites. He swung the other rifle above his head and then launched i
t out over the ridge and it disappeared from sight, bouncing away down the mountainside. He threw the Colt after it, then filled his pockets with the ammunition that they had been carrying. He crawled to the edge of the ridge and spent ten minutes raking the slopes below him with his gaze, making absolutely sure that there was not another party of sicarios following behind the first. Then he climbed down to a few yards below the ridgeline and made his way back to where Scouse lay.
Two condors were already circling overhead, drawn by the fresh carrion they had spotted as they circled on the thermals high above the ridge. He dragged the body right up to the back of the boulder that had been shielding him. He spent another five minutes finding all the rocks he could carry and piling them up over Scouse’s body in a rough cairn that would have to serve as his mausoleum. He saluted the grave, muttered ‘Farewell mate. I’ll see you one day on the other side - if there is one.’ And then he turned and hurried away, keeping on the same contour with the setting sun always in his face.
After sunset, he found a little shelter in the lee of some rocks, and lay up there for a while dozing and drifting into a troubled sleep, but the cold bit into his bones, and when the moon came up, he moved off again at once, picking his way among the rocks.
Dawn found him west of La Paz, which lay some miles to the south of him, and already emerging from the last ridges of the mountains, back on to the Altiplano that ran from there all the way to the Peruvian border.
The eastern arm of the Andes rose behind him and the snowy peaks of the western arm spanned the far horizon but he was now moving across a flat grassland plain. Without Scouse to slow him down, he could cover the miles far more rapidly and was now taking a direct lower level route, making for the shore of Lake Titicaca, though it was still a long forced march ahead of him. He didn’t know if the cartel bosses had called off the hunt or still had their sicarios scouring the area, but the faster he moved, the greater his chances of escaping.
He hadn’t eaten now for more than four days and a gnawing hunger griped at his guts, but he forced himself to ignore it. He had lost some weight already, burning first what little body fat he’d had and then his solid flesh and muscle, but he would survive that and could soon put the weight back on once he had reached a safe haven. Trying to find or buy food could only increase the risk that he would not reach safety at all.
Occasional dirt roads ran from north to south across his track, but the land ahead of him was punctuated by very few buildings and even fewer trees. He kept well clear of any towns or villages and held to a course roughly parallel to, but about a mile from the Ruta Nacional. He was far enough from it to be invisible to the naked eye, but if any sicarios were patrolling it and using binoculars, Harper would have been easily spotted so wherever possible he used the undulations of the terrain and the occasional low hills to shield himself from view.
There were some isolated farms near his route but most were sited closer to the main road and when he did see one in his path ahead he gave it a very wide berth. Farm dogs sometimes barked in the distance as he passed and occasionally he disturbed small groups of vicuna and guanaco, the wild relatives of the domesticated llama and alpaca that had been kept by the indigenous farmers since Inca times and were still used both as beasts of burden and for their wool and meat. However he saw no trace of anyone appearing in answer to the noise of the dogs or the movement of the animals as he kept on steadily to the west.
There were two possible ways to reach the Peruvian border. One was to turn more to the south-west, aiming to cross close to Ruta Nacional 1, which ran pretty much due west from La Paz and along the southern shore of Lake Titicaca all the way to the border at Desaguadero, by repute a dirty and lawless frontier town. The other way was to continue on his present course, reaching the eastern shore of the lake near the town of Huarina, and then carry on parallel to the course of Ruta Nacional 2, which hugged the shore before turning to run down the peninsula that led to San Pablo de Tiquina.
The problem with that route was that the road ended there, at the point where Lake Titicaca narrowed to a strait less than one kilometre across, connecting the lower and upper halves of the lake, Lago Pequeño - the little lake - and Lago Grande. The strait also separated San Pablo de Tiquina and the rest of Bolivia from its sister town of San Pedro de Tiquina at the end of the peninsula facing it on the other side of the strait. The eastern half of that peninsula was still Bolivian territory but the border with Peru ran right across the middle of it. That was the route Harper had decided to take.
He carried on to the north-west, tracking the road. Lake Titicaca came into view as he moved on, its beautiful waters reflecting the azure blue of the sky and shimmering like silver as a gentle breeze ruffled the surface. As it reached the start of the peninsula that jutted out into the lake, the Ruta Nacional turned to the south, and began the run down towards the tip. The terrain of the peninsula was much hillier than the plain Harper had been traversing and the road ran through cuttings for parts of the way. That suited Harper fine, helping to keep him out of sight of the road as he trekked onwards. He was further aided by the rough, rocky ground, studded with eucalyptus trees, which offered much better cover than the flat lands of the Altiplano. He was still moving parallel to the road, but kept working his way through the dry, stony heights above it.
However, as he moved down towards the end of the peninsula, there were a growing number of houses to negotiate and they were set closer and closer together, as if jostling each other for prime views of the lake. That made it increasingly difficult to work his way around them and in the end, to make any further progress without straying into people’s yards and small fields, he was forced to move down within a few yards of the road. He advanced at a wearyingly slow pace now, flattening himself in the ditch at the side of the road whenever he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He kept following the road, which was now dropping steeply, twisting like a snake as it ran down towards the lake.
At the water’s edge at the bottom of the last steep hillside, Harper could see the small town of San Pablo de Tiquina laid out along the eastern shore of Lake Tititcaca, and beyond it was its sister town of San Pedro de Tiquina, facing it across the water and what looked to be no more than eight hundred metres away. He left the road, slipped between two brick-built, workshop buildings that were locked and shuttered, perhaps for the siesta, and then crouched behind a low wall beyond them that overlooked the waterfront, allowing him to get the lie of the land and watch for potential dangers before approaching any closer. There were rows of houses on the hillside behind him looking out over the lake, and in the little town itself there were a couple of shops, a café and what looked like a small amusement park with a roundabout and some swings, and a stall selling toys, sweets and neon coloured kids drinks.
Vehicles and people were queueing to be carried across the water to San Pedro on a number of flat-bottomed barges, but the people were travelling separately from their vehicles. The pedestrians - and the drivers, once their cars were on one of the barges - used a concrete-surfaced, stone pier with a small wooden jetty leading off to one side of it to board their barges, while cars, buses and trucks were driven along a series of precarious ramps - thick wooden planks embedded in the shingle beach - on to the vehicle barges. Those had low gunwales on three sides but an open rear, allowing the vehicles to be driven straight on to the deck. Ferrymen with punt poles provided the motive power to push off from the ramps and through the shallows, and then an outboard motor drove the barge the rest of the way across the narrow strait.
A prominent sign at the landward end of the jetty ordered passengers to “Use salvavidas” - wear lifejackets. His jaw tightened as he spotted two men, leaning against the side of a battered white Landcruiser, who were scrutinising the faces of the passengers waiting to board the barges. They were both wearing jeans and black leather jackets and had the look and the arrogant attitude of sicarios. That impression was reinforced by the bulges he could see under the armpits
of their jackets.
He shifted his gaze, looking across the water. If he were to move a couple of hundred yards along the shore in either direction, he would be out of sight of the sicarios and any onlookers in the town. He could then have slipped into the water and swum across to the other side, had it not been for one factor that made it inconceivable. He would not normally have hesitated for a second about making an eight hundred metre swim, especially across a tideless lake. It was well within his capabilities, for he regularly took swims of two or three miles in the sea off the beach at his home in Pattaya, but there was a crucial difference. In Pattaya he was swimming in a warm tropical sea, but this lake was at an altitude of almost four thousand metres and the temperature of the water, fed by snow melt from the Andean glaciers, was bone-chillingly cold. In such waters, without a wet suit, a man could rapidly become hypothermic and lapse into unconscious. Even so, Harper would have attempted it had he been in his normal excellent physical shape, but he had now been without food for five days and had barely slept during that period. He was close to exhaustion, his stores of body fat had been exhausted and his muscle mass was being rapidly depleted as his body drew on it to survive. Whatever means he was going to use to get across, it could not be by swimming the strait.
As he watched, a bus was being loaded that was almost as big as the barge that would be carrying it across the strait. As it was inched aboard, the gunwales of the barge sank dangerously close to the water level. The people on the shore, including the sicarios, now had their attention entirely focussed on the barge, watching as it creaked and groaned under the weight of the bus. That gave Harper his chance. He broke cover, ran down to the waterfront and slipped into the icy water of the lake, alongside the next barge in the queue. He swam to the end of it and then ducked under the surface, pushing himself off from that barge with his feet and using the momentum to swim underwater, only coming to the surface again as he saw the dark shape of the barge that was carrying the bus looming in the water above him.
Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller Page 22
