The tree she was on was massive, old-growth timber, so large her legs didn’t even reach halfway around the trunk. The bark was rough and not yet beginning to rot. Charity figured it had probably fallen within the last six months, maybe during the last flood.
Switching to thermal, she looked ahead toward the base of the great tree to make sure it wasn’t hiding a predator. Seeing nothing, she switched back to night vision. The trunk was wide enough that she could easily walk up it, using protruding branches for hand holds.
She rose slowly, gripping a large branch that stuck out at an angle next to her. It was slow going, but she was finally able to get past the tangle of branches above the brush at the water’s edge, to the massive root system of the tree. There, she was nearly fifteen feet off the ground. She looked back toward the water and saw Napier about a hundred yards upriver, the boat unmoving against the current, as he watched her. She waved and saw him wave back, then slowly began climbing down the huge roots of the tree.
Dropping to the ground from five feet, she crouched, drew her Sig, and looked all around. Switching to thermal, she scanned the area again, remembering what Napier had said about crocodiles and jaguars. Seeing nothing, she switched back to night vision and started inland.
Suddenly, just ahead of her, what appeared to be a fallen tree trunk moved, twisting toward her. In an instant, she realized that crocodiles were cold-blooded and wouldn’t give off a heat signature. Big mistake, she thought and cursed herself as she danced around the beast’s tail and ran headlong into the dense jungle beyond it.
Safely away, breathing heavily through her mouth, Charity stopped and looked back. No movement and no sound. Checking her compass, she turned and started moving quietly through the jungle toward the wall, figuring it would take thirty minutes to reach it.
Still fifty yards from the clearing, she could clearly see the two towers, illuminated by the small fire on the other side. Thermal imaging showed two men still in each tower. The light of the fire would reduce the capability of their night vision optics, if they had any. It was very doubtful they had thermal imaging, since the technology was only recently made available in a size small enough to be man-portable.
Crouching low anyway, Charity moved slowly toward the edge of the clearing, where she squatted down beside a large log and removed her pack and rifle.
The four men in the towers posed little threat. Quietly, she removed the suppressor from a long pocket on the side of the pack and threaded it onto the rifle’s barrel. At this distance, she could easily kill both men in one tower before they could raise an alarm, and then do the same with the other two.
Stockwell’s words about what had happened at the volcano in Mexico echoed in Charity’s mind. Though she’d been sent in to kill one man, she’d killed nearly everyone in the terrorist camp. He’d told her that the secretary was ready to pull the plug on her assignment if anything like that happened again. From another pouch in the pack, she removed the suppressor for the Sig and threaded it on, just in case.
This was a little different, though. In Mexico, the terrorist leader had been the first to fall, and then she’d gone into a bloodlust frenzy. Now she had twenty armed men between her and her intended target. She doubted he would be the type to join these men at their camp. Most likely, he was holed up in the big house by the pier where she’d seen the light.
She studied the wall, zooming the optics to full power. It extended a good fifteen feet out into the piranha- and crocodile-infested water. No way to swim around it.
There, she thought. Near the end. The top of the wall stepped down as it moved out into deeper water, each board a few inches shorter than the previous one. But for some reason, the last board was maybe two inches higher than the one before it.
Digging into her pack, Charity pulled out the package Stockwell had sent to the hotel and opened it. Inside was a ghillie suit like the ones worn by snipers in the field, along with two rolls of cloth material laced with tattered thread.
She heard the old shaman’s words in her head: Move slowly.
While she kept an eye on the four men in the towers, she scanned the open field between her position and the end of the wall, a plan formulating in her mind. She began selecting weeds, grasses, and large leaves, similar to what was in the field and carefully threaded them into the fabric of the ghillie suit, adding to its camouflage. Satisfied, she took the two rolls and carefully wrapped the fabric around her rifle, starting at the suppressor.
Nearly ready, she heard a low voice from across the field. In the nearest tower, one of the men had disappeared. She looked at the other tower and the head of one of the two there ducked below the wall. A minute later the man in the first tower reappeared.
No, she thought, looking closer. Not the same man. Another voice drifted across the clearing and a few minutes later a new man appeared in the further tower.
Watch relief, she told herself. But why change only one man?
She waited a few minutes, watching both of the small towers closely as the new men got comfortable in the cramped spaces. Then it came to her. The towers were usually manned by only one sentry each. Men whose regular job it was to stay up there all night. The men around the fire and the added lookouts were reinforcements, unaccustomed to pulling an all-nighter.
They were definitely expecting an attack or something. Maybe someone had heard her helicopter, even though she’d swung far to the east, away from the settlement, before arriving at Vicente’s farm. If they’d heard her and sent the men in the boat to investigate, they might have thought an attack force had been dropped off.
Calculating the distance in her head and judging by the density of the jungle she’d just come through, she doubted a group of men could make it from Vicente’s farm to here in much less than a day, and the men in the camp would surely know that. It’d only been about eighteen hours. An overabundance of caution?
She quietly struggled into the ghillie suit, after first removing the things she thought she’d need from her pack and attaching them to her belt under the ghillie top.
When she was prepared, Charity quietly slipped over the log and went down into a prone position, her rifle beneath her. McDermitt had taught all of her former team the proper way to move using the suit. Deliberately, she pushed the rifle forward, inch by inch. Slower still, she crept forward and covered it. The ghillie top had a hood that completely covered her face. It had two small holes for the headset lenses to stick out of and a mesh opening at her mouth to breathe through.
Over the next hour, she stealthily made her way across the clearing, angling toward the spot where the wall reached the river. It didn’t take long before it became very hot and uncomfortable inside the suit. She’d been warned about this, and though it was still spring back in the States, she was only a few degrees north of the equator here and knew she’d have to stay hydrated.
Halfway across the clearing, she stopped to take a break. Slowly bringing the tube from the canvas water bladder on her back up to her mouth, she drank while watching the towers and listening. The two men in the nearer tower, now only a couple of hundred feet off to her left, were talking quietly, only one of them really looking out over the field.
At his distance, she could tell that neither of these two men had any kind of night vision optics, and they were relying solely on the light from the stars. The night sky was clear and, even though there wasn’t a moon, she knew that as long as they didn’t look toward the fire, their eyes would adjust to the darkness.
Ever so slowly, she began pushing the rifle ahead again and pulling herself up over it. To this point, she’d moved only four or five feet per minute. Closer now, she knew she’d have to go even slower.
The whole concept of the ghillie suit was to be nearly invisible against a background that looked like the suit. But, fast movement couldn’t be hidden. The surrounding grass was a foot tall, which helped as she crept forward again, slowly parting the grass and filling it with her body.
Fi
nally, at the base of the wall, she looked at her watch. It had taken over two hours to get across the field and the sun would be coming up in less than two more hours. A tiny slice of the moon would rise just before the sun, probably in less than an hour.
Charity reached under her and unhooked from her belt a small grappling hook attached to thirty feet of lightweight line. She was just about ready to rise to a kneeling position, when she heard a large splash off to her right and froze.
Ever so slowly, she turned her head toward the near tower. Both men were leaning out and looking in her direction. There was another splash, a little further away and both men laughed, retreating back inside the tower. When she looked out over the river, she saw a huge crocodile swimming away with some hapless creature in its mouth. Scanning the shoreline, she spotted another croc, partly out of the water in the shallows, not twenty feet away, waiting patiently for his next meal.
There was a small bush to her right, apparently overlooked by the men clearing the field. She slowly made her way to the other side of the bush and rose to a crouch, slinging her rifle over her head and shoulder again. Reaching under her shirt, she opened a flap on one of the many pouches on her belt and removed a heavy steel shot about a half inch in diameter. With her left hand, she pulled her slingshot from its pouch.
Charity wasn’t too concerned about the men in the far tower. They were much too far away to see or hear what she was about to do. The men in the near tower were her only concern. Slowly, she shook out the grappling line and got ready. She’d have only one chance; if she missed the spot at the top of the wall with the high end board, the hook would splash into the water. No telling what kind of debris was down there on the bottom and the grapple might get snagged on something.
When she was ready, she aimed the slingshot up toward the top of the wall, angling to the left so the shot would land directly behind the men in the tower. She released it and waited. After a couple of seconds, there was a loud thunk as the shot hit something solid on the other side of the wall.
Not waiting to see if the men in the tower took the bait, she stood and swung the hook two times, before releasing it. Dropping back to a crouch, she watched the grapple fall across the second board from the end, just where she wanted it. There was a dull thud as it fell against the wood. Taking up the slack, she tugged, making sure the hook was set, then turned and looked up at the tower about a hundred yards away.
The two men were leaning away from the wall, looking out over the camp. Knowing that their night vision was now ruined by the low firelight, she stood and ran toward the spot where the croc lay in the shallows, taking up the line as she went.
At the water’s edge, she leapt up and grabbed the line as high as possible, lifting her legs out ahead of her. The crocodile, splashed and lunged at her, but moved too slowly, as she sailed out of its reach. As she reached the bottom of the arc, she felt the hook slide along the top of the wall and catch on the slightly higher last board.
There was a shout from the tower, but it was too late to do anything now. Charity reached the apex of the arcing swing and she kicked her body around, hoping there wasn’t another crocodile lying in wait on the other side of the wall. At the last moment, she loosened her grip and slid to the ground on the other side of the wall, still holding the line.
Dropping quickly to a crouch, she drew her Sig and prepared to shoot anything that moved, man or beast. Nothing moved. She’d landed in a slight depression, probably created by the river’s water moving around the wall during the flood. Craning her neck, she looked over the natural berm at the camp, just in time to see the men in the tower turn back to the side she’d just left, one of them shining a powerful flashlight toward the water. Both men laughed nervously and called down to the two men at the door in German.
Charity spoke some German, though they were too far away to make out anything for certain. She did hear the word krokodil and thanked the big reptile for helping with her diversion.
The line was looped around the end of the wall. She flipped it in a loop out over the last board and the grapple fell. She jerked the line quickly, and the grapple fell into the mud at the river’s edge. Charity hauled it in, coiled the line and reattached it to her belt.
The crops were only twenty feet away, and Charity slowly crawled toward the first row, then disappeared into the maze of vegetables.
Erik Wirth woke with a start, a loud thud disturbing his restless slumber. He heard something bounce and roll off the roof of the house. Getting quickly to his feet, he went to the closet and grabbed his hunting rifle.
“What is it, Karl?” his wife asked. Gretchen was a stout woman who’d borne him three sons and a daughter. Their three sons had left the settlement a year ago—bent on making it to anywhere else—and they hadn’t heard from them since.
“Perhaps nothing,” he replied. “Maybe the wächters playing tricks. Stay here.”
Erik knew she wouldn’t. It just wasn’t in her nature to be the demure housewife. When he left the bedroom, he heard the bedsprings creak as she got out of bed.
Jenifer’s door opened and she stuck her head out. “What was that noise, Vater?”
“Probably nothing,” he repeated to his only daughter. She’d been acting strangely all afternoon and evening, and hadn’t eaten much of anything at dinner. Now there was a look of terror on her usually calm face.
Gretchen came out of the bedroom next to him. “Go to Jenifer,” he told his wife, as he moved noiselessly toward the front door, facing the fields.
Opening the door slowly, Erik stepped out onto the porch. It took only a moment for his eyes to adjust to the moonless night, and he stood on the elevated porch and looked out over the small clearing between his home and the crops.
Nothing moved. He heard one of the men out by the wall say something, and several laughed. Quietly, he moved to a rocking chair by the door and sat down. The chair squeaked slightly, protesting his considerable weight.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement. But when he looked in the direction of the first row of corn he saw nothing there.
Erik watched for several minutes, but nothing happened and he didn’t hear any more sounds. Through the front door, which was slightly ajar, he could barely hear his wife and daughter whispering to one another. He continued to wait, certain that one of the men out there had thrown a rock onto his roof.
After nearly half an hour, he heard his daughter quietly sobbing, and his wife making comforting sounds. It wasn’t like Jenifer to cry over a sound in the night. He rose and, after looking around the yard again, went back inside to check on his wife and daughter.
Charity moved quickly through the low rows of what she recognized as tomato plants, some of them blooming. Halfway down the row, she cut to the west, passing rows of other vegetables until she reached the unmistakable corn rows. Ducking through the first row of corn, she turned north, heading toward the small houses tucked under the edge of the jungle canopy.
Just as she reached the end of the row, she heard something creak and froze in her tracks. Slowly, she went down to one knee and looked out across the small clearing between the crops and the houses. A man sat in a rocking chair on the porch of one of the houses. At this range, she could eliminate him easily and continue on. But Stockwell’s warning about collateral damage came back to her mind, so she went down into a prone position and stealthily crawled across the yard, angling away from the man on the porch.
A light appeared in the back of the man’s house. He didn’t seem to notice it, as he stared out over the crops to where the men were camped. As she got abreast of the man’s porch, she saw that he was armed, and slowly drew her Sig. At only thirty feet, it would be an easy shot, and she knew she could kill him with just a single round.
Just as she was bringing the gun up, the man stood and went back inside the house. Charity rose and trotted quickly to the corner of the house, then moved slowly toward the rear, where the lighted window was.
App
roaching the open window, she heard a girl’s quiet sobs and a woman’s gentle voice, speaking soothingly in German. “Quiet now, dear. We cannot tell your father. He will surely kill the man.”
“Tell me what?” a man’s voice said, in an even tone.
There was a rustling sound, and Charity heard heavy footsteps on the wooden floor. In hushed whispers, the woman tried to tell the man that it was nothing.
Then Charity heard a young girl’s voice. Through her sobbing and Charity’s less than perfect grasp of the German language, she couldn’t quite make out what the girl was saying, but could tell she was probably a teenage girl.
The man pressed the issue, and Charity slowly rose to eye level with the window, raising the night vision headset and hood, so she could see inside. The room was dimly lit by a single lantern on a desk just below the window. The man was huge. Not as big as Napier, but nearly as tall as Jesse McDermitt, and much broader in the shoulders and chest.
A woman sat on the edge of a small bed, a pretty blond girl beside her. It was obvious the man was the girl’s father; they shared the same hair color, eyes, and facial features. The woman had darker hair, streaked with gray.
Through the girl’s sobs, Charity heard her say in German, “Karl took me. I told him no, that we had to wait, but he forced himself on me.” Then the girl collapsed against her mother’s ample bosom, sobbing.
The woman looked quickly at the man, tears running down her face, as she reached out to him. “No, Erik.”
The look on the man’s face slowly changed. Charity recognized the rage that lay just beneath the surface, as a single tear streaked down his tan cheek. Without a word, he turned and started back through the door.
Charity knew what she had to do. She knew the girl’s father would charge into the camp, looking for the one who had defiled his daughter. She also knew that he would probably get himself killed, and she didn’t need the armed men put on edge.
Ruthless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 2) Page 18
