by Rob Jones
“Dirty old bastard,” Scarlet said. “I’m sure there’s a way to complain about that sort of thing.”
Hawke stared at her. “Really?”
“Sorry. I just cannot stop myself.”
“Said the vicar to the actress,” Lea said.
“Not you too,” Scarlet said.
“It was Kruger,” Hawke said flatly.
Three shocked faces stared back at him.
“That is shocking,” Scarlet said. “Probably even more so than if old Santos really had exposed himself and showed you his old chap.”
“Does this mean Ryan is alive?” Lexi asked.
“Yes.” Hawke said.
“No, not necessarily,” Lea said. “Let’s not get excited. There are a dozen reasons why Kruger could have survived the explosion and Ryan didn’t.”
“No… I know that was him in the back of the Hyundai.”
“Kruger…” Reaper said through gritted teeth. “But I watched him die!”
“Obviously not, Vincent,” Lexi said.
“But what the hell is the little bastard up to with that mask?” Scarlet asked.
“That’s what we need to find out,” Hawke said. “But whatever it is, it’s not going to be good. I think we know enough about him now to know Rich wasn’t kidding when he said he was the luckiest bastard he’d ever met.”
“And the most unpredictable,” Lexi added.
“Who the hell is Kruger?” asked Luis.
Scarlet finished her coffee, lit a cigarette and lowered her sunglasses. “Never you mind.”
“He’s an old enemy of ours,” Hawke said, glancing at Scarlet. “And I think we might need your help in tracking him down.”
“My help?” Luis said, smiling proudly.
“And the assistance of one Alex Reeve, currently resident in Washington DC.”
“Alex?”
He nodded. “Now we know that sack of shit is in Colombia, we can start tracking him but we can’t do that without Alex’s help.”
“Is she up to it?” Lexi asked.
“Of course she’s up to it,” Scarlet said. “She only got a nine mil in the shoulder. She must be bored off her arse.”
“Yes, quite,” Hawke said, looking at all of his friends and seeing the first flicker of hope since the Seastead. “Let’s get Ryan back.”
CHAPTER SIX
The four-hundred mile flight to Bogotá crossed almost due-south over the top half the country and Hawke peered down with a distinct lack of interest at the vast agricultural lands beneath their jet – cotton, yams, cassava. Since the Seastead battle he had found it hard to raise an interest in anything and he doubted Colombian banana plantations would bring him back to the surface, but now he had a new hope, and that drove him onwards like jet fuel.
Not only was he now certain Ryan was alive, but Alex Reeve had worked her magic and found out that Dirk Kruger had taken a flight from Cartagena to Bogotá, the country’s capital city. He had flown alone. The two goons in the raid were Cartagena locals paid for the robbery and no more. When he landed he met with two other men in an obscure hotel. Alex hacked the hotel’s CCTV and had images.
Now, her voice was faint and crackly, but he could hear her clear enough as he stared at the pictures of Kruger and the two men. They were sitting in the hotel bar sharing drinks in tall glasses. “So who are these toerags?” he asked.
“The guy in the black shirt you already know as Dirk Kruger, I believe.”
“You can say that again… and the others?”
“The dude in the beard is Ziad Saqqal, a former military commander with the Syrian Army who defected to the rebels a few months ago.”
“This is a bad start, Alex. Please make the next few words relaxing and peaceful.”
“Sorry, no can do. The other guy with the glasses is Dr Bashir Jawad.”
“Please tell me he’s the Syrian national backgammon champion or something like that.”
“More disappointment coming your way, Josiah. Jawad may or may not play backgammon, but his day job is at the Department of Bacteriology and Parasitology at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He’s a leading bacteriologist with a lot of respect in the academic community.”
“What was wrong with the backgammon thing?”
“You wanted the truth. Are you saying you can’t handle the truth?”
Hawke smiled for a moment, pleased to see they hadn’t destroyed her sense of humor, but his face quickly dropped back into a frown when he remembered what she had said about Saqqal and Jawad. “Bacteriology?”
“This has to be something to do with weaponization, Joe.”
“Yeah… and here I was thinking we were busy enough trying to catch Kruger, rescue Ryan and save the Lost Treasure of the Incas. Now we have a couple of psychos with a bioweapon fixation on our hands.”
“Yup.”
“What else have you got on Saqqal?”
“Not a whole lot, but enough to grease the wheels. In his younger days he was in the Syrian Army where he rose through the ranks with some efficiency until becoming a highly respected general, but that’s where things went wrong. No one knows why but he left the army and ended up joining Hezbollah where his talents were put to use serving as a strategist and field commander in its military arm.”
“Don’t stop now,” he said sarcastically. “I can hardly contain myself.”
“He went back into Syria a few years ago with his Hezbollah troops where he fought to defend Assad against the rebels, but then returned to Lebanon when he was wounded in the arm. It was then he hooked up with Bashir Jawad and a beautiful relationship was born.”
“Certainly sounds like it. What about this Jawad toerag?”
“He’s easy – he has a very public profile from his work at the university. A little older than Saqqal and zero military experience. Educated in Lebanon and France with post-doctoral work in the US, he’s worked in the field of bacteriology for decades and is considered a world authority on the subject.”
“And for some reason these two clowns are hanging around with Dirk Kruger and they’re all searching for the Lost City of the Incas.” He blew out a long breath and tried to gather his thoughts. “Gotta say Alex, none of this is filling me with confidence.”
“There’s more.”
“Oh, happiness.”
“I was reviewing the hotel’s external CCTV and the three of these guys left together in a hired Jeep an hour or so ago, and they were joined by two other men.”
“Who?”
“Can’t help with the driver – he was already in the car when it pulled up at the hotel, but the other guy got out and they spoke for a moment. “His name’s Ross Chastain, an American hired gun from Alabama. Former Delta soldier who was kicked out for insubordination and is now way past his prime. He was involved with FARC via a drugs-running operation bringing coke into the US but he left them too.”
“Kicked out of the Deltas, eh?” Hawke said, thinking aloud. “Maybe that explains why he turned, but why did he leave FARC?”
“Chastain and his men disagreed with the main movers and shakers at FARC headquarters when they declared their unilateral ceasefire back in 2015 and that’s when he broke off and formed the Colombian Guerilla Force, or the CGF. So now he’s all wrapped up with a FARC splinter group and it looks like he’s hiring his men out to Saqqal and Kruger,” Alex said. “These guys have trafficked coke to fund their terrorism since they started, and they use camps like this to train their men. They also have a good sideline in high-level kidnappings and ransoms.”
“Is he what Americans call a douchebag?”
“Yup,” Alex said. “Nailed it.”
“Thanks. I have to say that this is not filling my day with sunshine and bluebirds.”
“Mine either, but that’s all I have. I wish I could help you more, but between my injuries and the whole Dad Thing it’s impossible.”
Only Alex Reeve could refer to her father’s impending Presidency of the United States a
s the Dad Thing. Hawke knew in his heart she would have to stay in DC not only while she recovered from the attack on Elysium, but longer if she couldn’t persuade her father that she could be safe from threats away from Secret Service protection, and that was going to be a tall order after Elysium. If she could be reached in that way on an isolated and heavily defended island then Jack Brooke was going to have a tough time letting her go anywhere else.
“And how is your dad?”
“Busier than usual, that’s for sure. He keeps making jokes that the Electoral College is going to put Peterson in the White House instead of him and he can go back to Idaho, but it’s just nerves.”
“And how about you?” he asked, his voice quieter now. He expected an evasive response from her, as was her way, and that was exactly what he got.
“Just sitting in hospital hacking crap for you.”
“I meant when you’re out of hospital?”
A long pause. He heard the sound of a car horn outside her window and then a nurse said something to her before there was the sound of a door closing.
“Shit, I don’t know, Joe! Everything’s happening so fast. We were a team and then we got attacked and our base was smashed up, and now my Dad’s the President-Elect and I’m in DC. What do you want me to say?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget about it… listen – at first I wanted to tell Dad and his shadows to go screw themselves and that I had my own life to lead… that I was coming back to you guys, but now I think maybe this is a chance for us to build a bridge to each other, you know? Maybe the only chance.”
“I understand.”
“Listen, I’ll look into these assholes more later.”
“Thanks. We need to concentrate on the connection between them.” he said, rubbing his temples. “Why are they working together?”
“That is for you to work out, Joe. We all have our problems. I have to decide whether to have chicken or beef for dinner tonight.”
“A tough choice?”
“Not really. They both taste like plastic.”
After he disconnected he waited in silence for a few moments, unsure how to break the news to the rest of the team. As far as they were concerned, they were hunting Dirk Kruger, a corrupt archaeologist and part-time treasure hunter, with a view to stopping him getting to the Lost City. Now things had changed. A few simple words from Alex Reeve in Washington DC had changed the game completely. Why the hell would Dirk Kruger be associating with a Syrian terrorist rebel and a world-renowned expert in bacteria? He rubbed the back of his neck for a few seconds and sighed before getting up from his seat and walking to the others.
“And?” Lexi looked up expectantly.
“And we’re in more shit than we thought,” he said frankly.
“When were we ever in less shit than we thought?” Lea said.
“This is true…” Reaper said with a sympathetic nod of his head. “Always much more shit than you think… in life, I mean.”
Scarlet yawned. “Spit it out, darling, and while you’re at it, why not turn that frown upside down?” She punctuated the flippant comment by cracking the lid off a bottle of beer. He watched the low cabin lights of the jet illuminate the tiny cloud of condensed water vapor as it escaped from the neck of the bottle.
“Our South African friend has hooked up with a Syrian rebel of unknown affiliation and a bacteriologist.”
“Shit,” Scarlet said, pulling the beer away from her mouth before she had even taken a sip. “You’d better keep that shagging frown exactly where it is and tell me where I can get one.”
“Quite, and I think this just about quadruples the pressure on us finding them before they get to whatever the hell they’re looking for.”
Reaper nodded and exhaled sharply. “Oui.”
“Bottom line is, trying to stop Kruger finding the world’s most famous lost city is one thing, but trying to stop known terrorists working alongside an expert with those sort of skills is quite another.”
The tone he used was totally without his usual optimism, and he knew it. The pressure was on all right, and not just for the team to find Kruger and the Syrians. He had an extra pressure on his shoulders now, not only to lead these people into battle but to coordinate the whole operation as well. The heavy responsibility of this coupled with the recent loss of his friends and produced an almost unbearable burden, but he would die before he let his friends down.
*
Gagged and bound in the back of the Hyundai van, Ryan Bale felt himself turning inwards yet again. It always happened this way. No one understood him. Had anyone ever really loved him? Lea had left him. Sophie was taken from him.
At least he still had Maria.
But would he ever see her again? Kruger had played Russian roulette with him a few hours ago and he just didn’t know if he was going to make it. In response, he had folded away into himself as if he were no more than an origami man, making sure the inside was hidden and nothing was exposed to the outside world. It always happened this way. No one understood him. He thought about his family back in London. His mother and father.
What were they doing now? If only he knew. Maybe they could help him, but he doubted it. His father’s gambling and drinking had ended the relationship when he was still a teenager, and his mother… who knew where she was now? This was why he had ended up in an abandoned paint factory, launching DDOS attacks on American Government servers.
It always happened this way. No one understood him. They didn’t know how noisy it was in his head sometimes. The thoughts fired through his brain like freight trains thundering through the night… they never stopped. He never forgot anything, and did people really know what that was like? Memories from twenty years ago fought for disk space with noun declensions and verb conjugations and the endless procession of historical facts and figures that rattled in his mind like old water pipes.
No one understood any of this. No one understood how noisy it was inside his head, and how Maria calmed it down. How her touch was a distraction sent from heaven. With her, he actually thought he could be normal and tune into the same frequency as his friends. If anything happened to her he knew any chance he might have of normality would be reduced to static, an uncontrollable white noise sending him inside himself over and over again.
Where’s your spirit of adventure?
He could hear him say it.
But what would Hawke do in a situation like this? Grab the weird masked man at the wheel, knock him out… take his gun, kill the others and then slam open the rear doors and tumble to safety in the street? Ryan didn’t have the strength or skills to fight his way through these men and he knew it would end in failure. He felt his spirit of adventure slowly evaporate and disappear into the ether.
Since Kruger had dragged him unconscious out of the ocean beneath the Oracle’s Seastead his life had been a living hell. Kruger had kept him alive for his mind and what he could get out of it, but also as a bargaining chip with the ECHO team. How long this would continue he had no idea. He had been beaten and lived with the threat of murder every minute. All he could do to get through the torture was to cling to the hope of seeing Maria Kurikova again. He hadn’t seen her since they’d split up on the Seastead, and he hated that she thought he was dead. Being back with her on the safety of Elysium was all that was keeping him going.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bogotá
As soon as he saw it through the field glasses, Hawke saw Alex’s research had been bang on the money. This was no full-scale FARC rebel camp. Those were ten times bigger than this and usually far away from the prying eyes of the cities. What he was looking at now was an impressive three storey mansion perched in the hills high above Bogotá – terracotta tiled roof, intricate white Colonial architecture and a neat balustrade running around the top floors.
It sat like a Puna hawk on a cliff-edge, overlooking a vast valley of feijoa trees and partially hidden behind the passionfruit vines twisting up its Roman arcades and d
ouble-hung windows. From their elevated position in the hills above the house, Hawke was able to see a good two acres of flattened ground in the property’s west where some smaller chalets were situated and a jumble of other less impressive buildings. This must where Chastain’s CGF training goes on, he thought.
Two Bell Kiowas were taking in some sunshine in the center of the training area. Normally used for direct-fire support, these were probably just used for transporting men and weapons through the mountains. The roads here were unsealed and the hairpin bends were very unforgiving if you made a mistake.
He watched small groups of men and a handful of women as they went about their business in the camp. They would feel totally safe up here, and that was a sense of false security Hawke was going to exploit.
They seemed relaxed as they milled about, and now a man in a hard-worn sweat-stained Gambler hat strolled out of the mansion with his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the training area. He leaned forward and casually spat on the ground, and then removed his hat for a second to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
Beside him was the unmistakable figure of Dirk Kruger in his battered suede safari hat, black shirt and crocodile boots. A moment later two more men appeared in view – Hawke instantly recognized them from the Cartagena CCTV as Ziad Saqqal and Bashir Jawad. Chastain appeared to be showing them the training area and was pointing out the choppers and the contents of some plastic banana crates, but something told Hawke they weren’t admiring bananas.
“They’re our guys, all right,” Hawke said, passing the field glasses to Reaper. “The whole Groovy Gang all together… but no sign of Ryan.”
Reaper looked through the binoculars and gently nodded his head. “Oui – we know Kruger and the others all match Alex’s description perfectly, but as you say – no Ryan.”
Chastain yelled some orders and moments later a number of the men were running around the training area while holding their assault rifles above their heads. Another man was shouting at them in Spanish. Another group of men began loading the banana crates into the Kiowas.
