If he had been somewhere else, out on the range, say, picking his way through a forest, breaking trail on horseback, he might have recognised the ambush a few seconds earlier. Perhaps he would’ve been able to do something about it.
But Miguel Pieraro, father, widower, a vaquero’s vaquero, was not a man of city streets and built-up places. He was most at home in the saddle. Not shuffling along a footpath, his arms loaded down with groceries, carried for a woman who was making him feel more and more every day that he might move beyond the horror and loss he had sustained down in east Texas.
The car that hit Miguel and Maive as they crossed the intersection, while his attention was focused entirely on the tall, rake-thin fanatic, was travelling at over sixty miles an hour. A dangerous speed on potholed streets under the best of conditions. Calculated insanity during a heavy snowstorm.
It was a quiet car, chosen for that very reason. Solid-iron bull bars recently affixed to the front of the vehicle absorbed most of the damage when it struck them. Investigators examining the burnt-out hulk of the vehicle – the murder weapon – after it was found not long afterwards, would make a note of that detail. It implied a good deal of planning and preparation.
The police officers who would come to visit Sofia Pieraro on that terrible Thursday, to tell her of her father’s death, were not investigators. They were just beat cops. They couldn’t do much for her. The only solace they had to offer was the assurance that her papa had died instantly, and that his friend, Mrs Aronson, had not suffered. She was in a coma when the paramedics arrived.
8
FORMER URUGUAYAN–ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
The rough path she’d earlier cut through the forest sped her return to the crossroads. Caitlin took up a position where she could fire on the entrance to the building without easily being fired upon. She placed herself so that the heavy mud-brick columns supporting the roof of the portico blocked any line of sight to her from inside.
Then she waited.
They wouldn’t come charging through the door, guns out, the minute their colleagues were overdue. Facility 183 did not impress as a model of world’s best practice for secret detention and torture camps. Unless the tobacco or pornography supply had run out, it would probably be thirty or forty minutes before anyone even noticed the men she had killed hadn’t returned.
Caitlin sought a meditative frame of mind she had learned in Japan, during her eleven months of intensive aikido training on the Senshusei course, at the Yoshinkan Hombu Dojo. It had been an unusual time in her early career. Strangely restful, yet gruelling. Every day of that short year she had spent in pain of one form or another. Not only from combat training, in which broken bones, concussions and voluminous bloodshed were a common occurrence, but also from the insanely repetitive and punishing minutiae of dojo life. The agonies of suwari-waza, for instance – kneeling techniques in which she spent hours of her first weeks dizzy with suffering as the skin peeled from her knees, followed by the thin mantle of flesh over her kneecaps. Those wounds would scab over at night, only to crack open with exquisite pain the next morning as she bent to the tatami mat again.
The dojo was life itself. Unyielding, unforgiving and inescapable.
Lying prone in decaying leaf matter, with insects crawling all over her and slick with sweat, Caitlin reached now for the lesson of Yoshinkan Hombu. It was something she’d learned only at the very end of her training, when her technique, her jutsu, or art, had been honed to a cutting edge as dangerous as a Sengo Muramasa blade, a weapon forged by the infamous Muromachi-period swordsmith and reputedly imbued with his violent madness. It was said that the steel of a Muramasa katana was ‘hungry’ . . .
After eleven months of shit kicking, shit eating and having the shit kicked out of her by remote and often witlessly vindictive sensei and uki, Caitlin Monroe too, was hungry. Chosen to fight in a closed tournament, to test herself against some of the instructors before an audience of invited masters from other schools, she stepped onto the tatami, where she had spilled so much blood and sweat and, yes, even tears. She felt herself to be the most dangerous woman in the world.
I am become death, she thought.
Her first opponent, a potbellied man with only half his teeth and toe-curling halitosis, took her apart as perfectly as a fugu chef removing the poisonous liver from a puffer fish. Before she could initiate her opening attack, she had been punched in the face and taken two shuddering elbow strikes in her rib cage. As the injury exploded through her nervous system with white-hot shock, her opponent swept her leading leg out from underneath her and drove a kick into her sternum when she dropped to the mat.
The young woman regained her feet and took up a fighting stance again, suddenly aware of just how many old masters were watching and judging her. Every time she advanced, the gap-toothed, potbellied fiend was just outside her line of attack. Every defence she threw up, he swarmed over. Within two minutes she was breathing hard, labouring for air. At the end of that first session of kumite, she felt herself entirely defeated. With another nine fights ahead of her.
She fought on.
Every opponent bested her. She failed to land a single blow or kick. Her arms turned black with bruises, as poorly focused blocks warded off strike after strike. But still she fought on. Not because she knew this would end, but because as the other fighters came on, each after the next, she came to understand this would never end. This was life.
It. Would. Never. End. Not until life itself ended.
When they were done with her, the crisp white gi she had specially laundered for the day was heavy with sweat and pink with her blood. And only her blood. Her stiff black belt, the obi of a newly minted shodan, was limp and foul. She hurt everywhere. In her joints, her meat, deep down in her bones. But the pain was a distant, illusory thing.
She could hardly stand to bow off the mat, yet she could not leave without doing so. Every man she had fought lined up and bowed deeply to her, the young American whom they had bested. Inside, she felt empty. But happy in a way she had never known before. She had lost herself in battle, her actual self.
An arrogant, self-conscious and pitiably vain student had stepped onto the tatami just a short time ago. A warrior limped off.
Nine years after this, she found that same unspoilt clarity of mind as she breathed out and let go of vanity, of desire, of worldly attachments – including the attachment to life itself. She became death and she waited.
Forty minutes later, Caitlin Monroe attacked.
*
The heavy wooden door swung open on creaky hinges just as the day was reaching its hottest hour. Perhaps if the two errand boys had returned by now, Facility 183 would already have been dozing through an afternoon siesta. But they would never return, and when enough time had passed, the two most junior militia men were sent out to investigate. This they accomplished by slowly stepping off the veranda and squinting into the sun, shading their eyes with their hands.
Concealed within the thick brush growth not much more than a long stone’s throw from them, Caitlin flicked off the safety on her HK-417, laid the iron sights on the centre mass of the larger, closer man and breathed out.
Three rounds sped down-range with methodical, calm, singular squeezes of the trigger. As before, a mix of armour-piercing and hollow-point, with Caitlin channelling the recoil into a short, efficient movement that swept the muzzle of the suppressor from the first target onto the second. The men died instantly. A bloody squall of viscera and shattered bone chips sprayed the dirty white stucco behind them. Instantly, she shifted her aim to the front door where, as she had hoped, the facility’s corpulent, hapless commander soon ducked his head around.
A single pull put a round of 7.62 mm through the officer’s forehead, spraying hair, bone and brain back into the building. Another brace of shots destroyed the junction box, where a single phone line ran into the building.
She rolled to the right, retreating a few steps into the heav
y undergrowth. The assassin moved swiftly along the same path as before, emerging at speed at a point by the side of the road where she could approach the building at a run, without being directly seen from inside. Not that Caitlin expected the altogether more impressive deputy commander, the only surviving militia man in there now, to show himself.
Sprinting across the road, she leapt high onto the old hitching rail, using it to boost herself into a second leap skywards. She grasped the broken clay half-pipe of the building’s guttering and used her momentum to swing up onto the roof in one fluid movement. Caitlin crossed to the rear, where she quickly darted her head over the roof line to recon what lay below. It seemed to correspond with the fuzzy satellite image in her data set. Pressing on with her attack, from a completely different direction now, she swung down from the roof and landed with feline grace, and very little noise, next to a blank section of the rear wall.
Crouching to keep her head below the line of a window, the Echelon agent moved quickly to enter the building through the small cook-house. She adjusted the stock of the HK for close-quarters work. A small hand mirror on a telescoping extension allowed her to survey the interior before swinging in. Two pots stood bubbling on the wood-fired stove, next to an old coffee pot. The kitchen was longer than it was wide, leaving no room for a table. An internal doorway gave out onto the small open-plan office she had spied earlier from the brush. There was no sign of the second militia officer.
She took care now. Unlike his boss and the men under him, this one was no fool. He knew the layout of the building and would use it to good effect. Caitlin eeled around the corner, gun up, safety off, ready to fire and roll.
Nothing. Only the cries of the prisoners in the cell block. They were mostly incoherent, although one did babble, calling for help from his ‘compadre’. Caitlin ignored them. They were not yet relevant.
Covering the small area of the barracks, she could see through the kitchen doorway, she moved forward, cautiously again, taking up a secure position just before the entrance to the office area. Once more, she used the mirror to scope out the room before entering; crouching down at first to take a view from about knee level, before slowly sliding back up and holding the mirror high, so as to look down on the space, hoping to catch the man if he’d hidden himself behind a desk.
Few things were more nerve-racking than trying to single-handedly clear a building of an enemy who knew you were coming, and who knew the ground on which you would have to fight. As important as it was not to just charge in and get your head blown off, Caitlin was aware that it could be fatal to hesitate. Having initiated the attack, she could very easily defeat herself now by giving in to uncertainty. ‘Divided energies’, they had called it back at Yoshinkan Hombu. A fatal tipping point between fight and flight where the unprepared so often died.
She mapped out the room in her head. To her front, a cluster of desks. On her right, the grimy windows overlooking the dirt road that ran in front of the building. The heavy wooden doors hanging open, with the reception counter just inside of them. Behind that counter lay a closed door, undoubtedly leading to the cells.
And like a chess master running through every possible combination of moves before committing their own piece to a new square on the board, Caitlin studied the line of attack from her opponent’s point of view. Which items of furniture would provide him with the best cover, which firing angles the greatest chance of taking her down. To all of the possibilities, she assigned a rough probability.
And then she moved – sweeping into the larger open space, terribly exposed to an attack that might or might not come.
Using the heavy wooden desks as cover, Caitlin advanced across the killing ground with her senses opened to the flood of stimuli pouring in. A fan turning slowly from a ceiling mount, the protests of the prisoners, the buzzing of flies around a plate of beans and sausages abandoned on a desk . . . But no sign of Facility 183’s deputy commander.
The Echelon agent took a few moments to make sure she hadn’t missed him. But the very fact that she was still breathing, that nobody had fired on her, told Caitlin he wasn’t in this part of the building.
The door to the prison cells stood firmly closed and mute in front of her. In her peripheral vision she could see the legs of a man she had shot down in the road, out front. The stench of his death, an animal stink of voided bowels, was much stronger over here by the main entrance.
Caitlin did not have time to weigh up all of the imponderables; there were too many of them. She detached a couple of flash-bangs from her webbing and advanced on the door leading to the cells. There was no way of telling what lay immediately on the other side. A constricted passageway or more open space? Perhaps even another office. The funcionario could’ve been waiting for her behind a sandbagged machine gun, for all she knew. There was nothing for it but to press on.
She noted from the lack of hinges that the door opened inwards, making her next move just slightly easier. Filling her lungs with air, she pulled the pins on the two stun grenades, then timed a powerful side kick to crash through the obstacle a second before the grenades were primed to detonate.
As the door smashed inwards, she lobbed them down a short dark stairway, diving to her right, still out in the reception area, while a short burst of gunfire exploded up out of the shadows. Part-way through her flight, Caitlin grunted with shock and pain as a bullet struck her body armour a glancing blow, turning her as though she’d been roundhouse-kicked. She went with the movement – spinning out of the doorway before the grenades went off, the detonations following one after the other so quickly, they rolled into a single clap of thunder and a flash of strobed lightning.
There was no time to pay heed to her injuries, or the fact that she was winded so badly, she couldn’t breathe. Caitlin threw herself back into the dimly lit stairwell area and down the short set of steps, her senses questing for the last man she had to kill. She knew he had to be within reach as soon as her boots hit level ground.
There was no light down here, and thick acrid smoke from the flash-bangs burned her eyes. She could not risk firing her weapon yet, for fear of hitting Lupérico, but she had to clear a path ahead. All of her nerve endings sang with the knowledge that even though she couldn’t see him, the deputy was staggering around, disoriented by the stun grenades, not more than a few feet away.
Caitlin twisted her torso and swept her left leg up in a powerful crescent kick that swished through the air directly in front of her, but connected with nothing. She heard the man cough and gag – so close now – and poured more energy into the momentum she had generated with the first kick, turning and spinning as she lashed out with the other foot. This time, connection was made: soft tissue, at about head height.
A male voice screamed and a single shot crashed out in the semi-darkness, ricocheting dangerously around in this closed stone room. Then Caitlin heard the unmistakable sound of a human body dropping to a hard surface. A sick, crunching thud.
She sunk to the floor, too. Although by her count she had now taken care of all the militia men, there was no guarantee more guards weren’t stationed down here. The intelligence data sets were never perfect and there was always a chance she missed someone in her surveillance. She heard movement and a slight groan to her left, where she had dropped the deputy.
Caitlin rolled, drawing her Gerber combat knife as she went, mounting the man’s chest and slitting his throat in one efficient movement. The groan became a wet gurgling sound that persisted for a few seconds as he struggled desperately for air. When all of the life had run out of his body, she relaxed fractionally.
‘Are there any more guards down here?’ she called out in Spanish.
The confusion of voices that came back at her was practically impossible to decipher. They begged for release, for mercy, for the indulgence of their gods.
Rolling off the dead man, she asked again, more loudly this time: ‘Are there any more militia down here?’
‘¿Señora?’ A slight
hesitation, disbelief, as they realised that this killer was a woman.
‘No, no more guards,’ replied one cracked and faltering voice. ‘He was the only one. He hid down here when the shooting started.’
Caitlin’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the low-light environment, but she took a moment to fit her NVGs and power them up. The scene resolved itself into opalescent green, fogged by the residual smoke from the stun grenades. The body of the deputy commander, lying next to an old World War I vintage rifle, was bleeding out on the flagstone floor. A line of four cells ran away from her down one side of a long rectangular room; a bare wall faced them. Material she took to be heavy black plastic had been taped up over the high window openings she’d noted during her surveillance that morning. All the better to disorient the prisoners, of course; to create the impression that time had no meaning down here. She would’ve bet good money that the officer she had just killed was responsible for this innovation. It was almost sophisticated.
The man in the cell directly in front of her was not Ramón Lupérico. He looked about twenty years too old, and fifty pounds too heavy. He was a jabbering mess and had wet himself.
The prisoner in the next cell down was older still. A thin, hatchet-faced character, Caitlin could see him straining to make her out in the gloom. He’d pinned himself up against the bars, as if he might push himself through them by sheer force of will. As she moved further down the long room, he listened intently, hoping to fix her position. Once she was within arm’s reach, he lashed out with one hand, hoping to grab her. Almost absent-mindedly, she slashed off two of his fingers with her combat knife before moving past his cage while he shrieked in shock and outrage.
Lupérico was in the third cell. He too was standing near the bars, attempting to pick her out in the gloom. But unlike the man she had just cut, her target remained out of reach, about a foot back behind the safety of the dark iron bars.
Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 Page 10
