Final Target

by John Gilstrap

“Cashed in on a few favors,” she said. “You leave a pretty wide swath of people who owe you favors.”

  “Hey,” Boxers’ voice said over the net. “OPSEC.”

  “We’re encrypted,” Venice said. While the risk of anyone tapping into an encrypted signal was asymptotic with zero, the chances hit absolute zero when you refrained from saying shit you shouldn’t say.

  “Point taken, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “Have you got any other information for me? A destination, for example?”

  “I think I may,” Venice said. “I’m still running that to ground. When I have confirmation, I’ll let you know, and I’ll upload the coordinates to your GPS.”

  “You’re the best,” Jonathan said. “Sooner is better than later.”

  “Isn’t it always?” she asked.

  “Nobody likes a smart-ass,” Jonathan said through a smile. “Has Gunslinger turned up any interesting news? Don’t be specific. Just yes or no.”

  “Gunslinger is still out hunting,” Venice said. “In fact, it’s been too long since I’ve heard from her.”

  “Do what you’ve got to do,” Jonathan said. “Scorpion out.”

  “You have no idea how weird that is to listen in on a conversation I can’t hear,” Dawkins said. “So, how is Mother Hen?”

  “She’s doing just fine,” Jonathan said off the air. “Keeping my ass out of trouble, just as she always does.”

  * * *

  “Do you think Scorpion will come back for us?” a voice asked from the belly of the cave.

  “Go to sleep,” Tomás said. “Of course he’s coming back.”

  “Why didn’t he take us with him?” someone else asked.

  “Because we slow him down too much.” Tomás didn’t understand how he had become the expert, any more than he understood why Gloria didn’t answer some of the questions.

  Scorpion had promised that the cave would be dark, but Tomás had not expected this level of darkness. With literally no visual references, you could talk yourself into believing that you were floating. The longer the blackout lasted, the more he noticed that his eyes would make stuff up for him. He saw colors that he knew were not there, and shadows that were not possible without a source of light to generate them. He supposed that maybe his mind needed something to do.

  He thought he might have slept a little, but how could you tell when you didn’t know if your eyes were open or closed? He decided that it must be terrifying to be blind.

  If he moved just so across the cold, hard stone, he thought he could see the opening of the cave far above him. It appeared as an archway of lighter black against blacker black.

  The fight of fights was coming tomorrow. Next day, at the latest. Laguna de Términos was a big area, but it was a finite area, and Alejandro Azul had hundreds of people working for him. As they got closer, spies would be everywhere.

  And Scorpion would have to fight. They would all have to fight. Tomás hoped that no one on his side would die or be wounded, but somebody had to die in a war, and if that somebody happened to be him, then he was okay with that. Those animals killed whomever they wanted, by whatever grotesque means they wanted, and everyone pretended not to notice. Alejandro Azul expected survivors to show gratitude simply because they hadn’t been killed. Animals like him needed to be put down.

  God willing, Tomás would be the one to do it. He’d declared his war, and soon he would fight it. And if, by some queer twist of fate, the fight did not materialize, then the very worst case would be that he would spend the rest of his life in America and would grow old there.

  Starting today, everything would change.

  In the distance, Tomás thought he heard the drumbeat of a helicopter. He closed his eyes tightly to focus his concentration. Was it possible that his ears, as well as his eyes, were playing tricks on him, manufacturing noise where there, in fact, was only silence?

  No, that was definitely a helicopter. It was hard to tell whether it was near or far, probably because the sound had to filter down through the mouth of the cave. He wondered if the Jungle Tigers were out looking for them. Maybe they—

  The cave erupted in light as someone lit a match. Tomás whirled to find Gloria lighting a candle.

  “Put that out!” Tomás snapped.

  “I need to go to the latrine,” Gloria said, and she settled the burning match on the wick of her candle. The light got even brighter.

  “It’s too bright!” Tomás said. He rolled onto his side and leapt to his feet. “Don’t you hear the helicopter?”

  “No, I don’t hear the helicopter, and I need to—”

  Tomás closed the distance in four long strides. Gloria tried to shield the flame from him, but he grabbed her hand and shook it, extinguishing the light.

  “How dare you!” Gloria seethed in the dark.

  “Listen, damn you!” Tomás said.

  The whop-whop of the helicopter blades increased in volume. And got louder still. If Tomás used his imagination, he could see the aircraft skimming the jungle at treetop height, looking, searching—

  The night sky beyond the mouth of the cave erupted with the light of the sun. The sound of the rotor blades continued to crescendo, and the bright light moved. It swept back and forth. From the belly of the cave, several of the children whimpered.

  “Be quiet!” Tomás snapped. “They’re searching for us.” He didn’t know if there was a chance of being heard. Maybe there were Jungle Tigers searching for them on foot, and the helicopter was merely reinforcement. Maybe . . . anything.

  Tomás realized he’d been holding his breath. He sent up a prayer that they would all be safe. As much as he wanted a fight, he didn’t want it to come before Scorpion was back at his side.

  * * *

  Gail saw the incoming call from Venice, but she ignored it. She didn’t want to talk right now. In fact, she didn’t want to be here right now. She didn’t want to be in this business anymore. Yolanda’s mocking tone as she said bye ate at her. The hollow look in her eyes. She was an evil woman, and in retrospect, Gail was angry at herself for not killing her.

  But even as she thought the thought, she knew that it was a foolish one. As cold as Jonathan Grave could be in his coldest moments, he’d told her a thousand times that they were not assassins. If people had to die in service to the mission, that was one thing, but they were not in the business of cold-blooded murder.

  “Get over yourself,” she said aloud to the car. “Past is past. What’s the next move?”

  Gail settled herself with a long, deep breath and did a drumroll on the steering wheel with her palms. Too many thoughts crammed the plumbing of her brain. She needed to sort the problem. She’d been in the problem-sorting business for a damn long time now, but it had been a very long time since she’d sorted them under this much pressure.

  First, the good. They knew for a fact that Yolanda was the go-between that had set this whole plan in motion. No matter what she called herself, her fingerprints didn’t lie, and between the money that Venice had examined and the pistol that she would examine when Gail returned to Fisherman’s Cove, they had a treasure trove of positive IDs.

  By piecing together what Hector Nuñez had told her with what Yolanda had inadvertently confirmed, Gail was now sure that Marlin Bills had been acting on behalf of his boss, Senator Charles Clark, when he ordered the murder of Harry Dawkins.

  Wait, she told herself. She wasn’t sure of that last part. That was the way the facts could be stitched together, but that didn’t mean it was the only way or the true way. Still, the evidence was pretty damn strong.

  And what, exactly, should she do with that pretty strong evidence? She didn’t know.

  The presence of those security cameras was the worst of it all. They’d worked to clear Gail’s official records to make her less identifiable, but it was impossible to reduce her signature to the zero levels that Boxers and Digger had been able to achieve. She’d been too many places in the private sector for that to be practicable. Every little bit
helped, of course, just as every little bit hurt. Somehow, she needed to get control of that video feed.

  In this case, Gail’s worries were not about arrest. She figured that the likelihood of a murderer releasing video footage to the police department hovered a little south of zero. Instead, she worried about the kind of retribution that could come without an arrest and without due process. The kind of retribution that was unique to Uncle Sam’s covert operators.

  Gail had caught the tiger, and now she had to deal with it, in all its ravenous fury.

  She couldn’t get to Fisherman’s Cove fast enough.

  CHAPTER 26

  Jonathan and his merry band of marauders found the edge of the jungle above a village called San Raymundo. In the distance, the lights of Tuxtla Gutiérrez burned brightly, but this closer village had the look of a farm town at this time of night, which was to say, it looked dead. Lights burned in a few windows, and while there were streetlights, he could count them on two hands.

  “Is that where we’re getting the bus?” Dawkins asked.

  “Negative,” Jonathan said. “The bus lot is in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, those lights on the horizon.”

  “Oh, Christ. How far is that?”

  “As the crow flies, about five, six miles,” Jonathan said. “But I’m done with this hiking shit.”

  “You say things like that and I hate you less,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan chuckled. “It’s one thing to wander the jungle, looking like G.I. Joe, with enough ammo to invade, well, Mexico, but this isn’t the au courant urban wear.”

  Boxers said, “There you go, talkin’ dirty again.”

  “It sounds like you have a plan,” Dawkins said.

  “Scorpion always has a plan,” Boxers quipped. “That’s why we carry so much ammo.”

  Jonathan flipped him off. “We’re going to wander down there and steal us a car that we can drive to the bus yard.”

  “In for a dime, I always say,” said Boxers.

  “You never say that,” Jonathan said.

  “Jesus, you two sound like a married couple,” Dawkins said.

  Big Guy faked a laugh. “Haw, haw, haw. It’s all funny until your teeth are on the floor.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Jonathan said. “He’s just a big pussy.” He sensed by Boxers’ posture that he was precious close to crossing that line. “I wouldn’t call him that to his face, though.”

  Jonathan stood and adjusted his gear, trying his best to make it comfortable. As many hours as he’d spent in this kit—cumulatively, probably more than a decade of actual wear time—you’d think that the hot spots would eventually become calluses. Or maybe they had become callused, and without said calluses, he’d be in agony. Either way, he yearned for the shower that was still many hours away.

  “Are we ready?” Jonathan asked. He didn’t wait for an answer before he stepped out and started down the hill.

  * * *

  It was farther than Jonathan thought it was going to be. They walked for thirty-five minutes. The undergrowth became tall grass, which became short grass, which ultimately became dirt. He and Big Guy kept their NVGs in place for the first twenty minutes of the journey, but they forbade Dawkins from using his red light. If someone in the village was nervous—and who wouldn’t be with the Jungle Tigers and their nemeses constantly embroiled in an ongoing fight for dominance?—it would be disconcerting enough to see three figures approaching out of nowhere without seeing that one of them flashed red with every step.

  The clouds kept the team’s edges blurred enough that the details of their weaponry and equipment did not show until they closed to within a half mile or so. At that point, they stopped, and Jonathan and Boxers stashed the night vision in their packs. Now they looked less like invaders and merely like heavily armed hikers. At night. Yeah, the whole concept was borderline stupid. But it felt like the right thing to do.

  “I’d feel better if I saw a vehicle that had more than two wheels,” Boxers mumbled as they crossed into what was obviously the outer margin of the town proper. Assuming, of course, that there was a town proper.

  As his eyes adjusted to the non-enhanced night, Jonathan could see the lighter-colored dirt streets against the darker-colored dirt . . . yards? And he could see the closely arranged single-story houses that lined the streets. He could make out windows and doors in the walls of the buildings, and he could make out the crisscrossing spiderweb of electrical lines that drooped between sagging poles and their connections at the eaves of the structures. It was hard to tell in the dark, but most of the roofs appeared to be made of the glad-handed pottery that was the staple of architecture in Southern California, where they managed to make it look a hell of a lot classier than the residents of this burg did. The second most popular roofing material, it seemed, was corrugated metal.

  The walls of the structures seemed uniformly made of painted concrete block, and Jonathan found it startling that the structures had so few windows. Given the climate, if he built a house here, it would be a pole barn with screen walls, anything to profit from the limited breeze. But here it was exactly the opposite, with long stretches of block interrupted by maybe two—and, at the most, three—undersized windows on a side. He took special note of the fact that each of those undersized windows was open.

  “There’s a pickup truck parked up there,” Dawkins said, pointing ahead and to the right. It was old school and American made, with a brush guard on the front and a tubular metal frame rising out of the bed, which, Jonathan imagined, was designed to haul a ladder to be used by either a painter or a construction worker.

  “That’ll do just fine,” Boxers said, and he picked up his pace.

  The hard-worn Ford Ranger might have been red at one time, but the original paint had faded to the point where it was hard to discern at night. The body appeared to be in pretty good shape, considering the vehicle’s ancient age. It was parked in front of a sagging single-story restaurant called Tortillería La Esperanza, whose owner, God bless him, had tried to make the best of a bad situation by painting wavy red and yellow racing stripes down the length of the whitewashed front wall.

  “Doesn’t esperanza mean ‘hope’?” Boxers said with a chuckle. “Oh, the friggin’ irony.”

  “Is Big Guy always this much of a snob?” Dawkins whispered.

  Jonathan didn’t answer and hoped that Boxers hadn’t heard. Big Guy didn’t like being called names, and frankly, he’d earned the right to a bit of snobbery given the number of times he’d been shot at in this shitty excuse for a country. Okay, maybe Jonathan was a bit of a snob, too.

  Boxers made a beeline for the truck and opened the driver’s side door with a barely audible snick. He stuck his head in the opening, and when he looked back out, Jonathan could see the smile, even in the dark. Big Guy waved them over with big scooping motions of his arms. When they closed to within whispering range, Boxers said, “The keys are in the ignition.”

  Maybe the night is about to un-suck, Jonathan thought.

  Boxers unslung his 417 and put it down across the center console, then threw the seat back as far as it could go. He tossed his ruck into the bed but kept his assault vest in place as he slid in behind the wheel and cranked the engine to life.

  “PC gets to ride shotgun,” Jonathan said to Dawkins, indicating the passenger seat. “I’ll take the flatbed.”

  Jonathan unslung his M27, then placed his right foot on the top of the rear tire and mounted the flatbed as if mounting a horse. He turned around, facing backward, and knocked the metal bed twice, the signal that he was ready to go.

  The pickup’s engine sounded loud in the quiet of the night, and the transmission screamed as Boxers dropped the vehicle into gear.

  A light came on inside the Tortillería La Esperanza.

  “Time to go,” Jonathan mumbled under his breath.

  The tires spewed dirt and gravel as Boxers pulled away. An instant later, a man appeared in the restaurant’s doorway, wearing baggy pants and nothing els
e. He yelled at them to stop, but Jonathan didn’t reply.

  Other lights came on in the other buildings.

  Jonathan re-slung his carbine, then put his NVGs back on. He didn’t want trouble with any of these people, but if one of them came out with a gun, he’d have no choice but to shoot back. He sensed that the easy part of this adventure was over.

  * * *

  Alejandro Azul had many homes. A few of them he had bought with his own money; others he proclaimed to be his own. A necessary nuisance of his line of work was the need to be always on the move. One could not accomplish all that he had without ruffling feathers along the way. He collected enemies like others collected dust on their shoes, and while he did what he could to keep those enemies terrified into sensible actions, people sometimes just broke and went insane.

  It was best for them not to know where he was at any given time.

  Even his inside circle was unaware of where he slept from one night to another. The problem with buying loyalty was that there was always the possibility of a higher bidder, and it was incumbent upon Alejandro to build varying levels of security into his routine. He never drove his own vehicle, for example, and he never used the same driver two days in a row. He varied his travel patterns and never gave advance notice of what those patterns would be. And, of course, he switched houses.

  The single most important and effective level of his security precautions was the brutality shown to anyone who so much as hinted at disloyalty. There were 206 bones in the human body, and a talented torturer could break each of them several times while the accused remained awake and lucid. Then there were the softer parts. Eyes, nipples, fingernails, penises, testicles, vaginas, tongues . . . There were too many vulnerable and sensitive parts of the human body for a torturer to inventory.

  There had been too many such sessions over the years, but they had been necessary in order to preserve order. People had watched the agony and had reported it to others, who in turn had passed the word from lips to ears all across the country. That fear in turn had bred cooperation. This was not, as the Americans liked to say, rocket science.