by Jason Kasper
“Twenty-five. And I had salon-quality hair until this brilliant visionary you keep breathlessly speaking of hooked me up to a fucking electric chair.”
Another grin from Parvaneh before Micah shot back, “You’re not going to prevail over three trained and equipped operators. Whoever they are, they’ve seen worse than you.”
“No, they haven’t. And I’m willing to fight to the death for Parvaneh just like you are.”
“You’re willing to fight to the death for anything. That’s not loyalty, it’s lunacy. Don’t think for a minute that we didn’t read every word of your file before you arrived.”
“Yeah, I keep hearing that. Apparently the only one not to read the fucking thing was me.”
“Major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation. Pronounced posttraumatic stress. And a history of alcoholism.”
“Alcoholism? Would an alcoholic be sober for”—I glanced at my watch—“almost forty-eight hours?”
“David,” Parvaneh said, her hint of a smile fading, “Micah’s right. There’s no way you’ll win in a three-on-one engagement.”
“Every man on that kill team is telling themselves the same thing. And after how they reacted during that last gunfight, I can guarantee they’ll pursue once they see me. This time I’m alone, and I can buttonhook and find a hiding place.”
Parvaneh said, “You’ll be killed in seconds.”
“So what if I am?” I looked at her emphatically, exploiting her lack of immediate refusal to drive my point. “The Handler almost killed me once; he’s certainly going to finish the job once he realizes he’s an asshole for listening to some old crone reading chicken bones in the desert. I’m supposed to save your life? Then let me go save your life.”
Micah summoned her attention with an outstretched palm. “If he leaves, I have to relocate you and establish a new link-up plan in case he’s compromised. That endangers you and gains us nothing.”
“Hiding gains us nothing,” I countered. “She’s not safer the longer she stays here. If the kill team captured Gabriel alive, then he’s already told them our link-up plan. That puts them closer to her than they were before. And let’s not pretend we can’t prevent innocent deaths by calling the helicopter.”
“We can’t,” Micah said flatly.
“You may not have just watched a bunch of civilians get mowed down by Ribeiro’s kill team, but I did. And that was just one of their guys shooting at Gabriel and me. What happens when the entire Outfit invades? Ribeiro will send reinforcements, and the drug traffickers will either fight for him or try to defend their turf. Now we’re talking a three-way crossfire in the most densely populated place in the country. How many more innocent people need to be murdered because you want to hide?”
Parvaneh’s face went cold.
Micah observed her reaction and redoubled his efforts. “The Organization comes first in all things. We will do whatever has the best chance of returning you safely, and right now that is to wait—”
Parvaneh brought her hands swiftly together, steepling her fingertips in front of her face. “Both of you will do whatever I order.”
Micah’s body language shifted to subservience at once—face lowered, hands settling in his lap. I stayed frozen, waiting for her to speak again.
“I will not have further civilian blood on my hands while we have an option to prevent it. If David leaves, he will either die, bring back a radio, or signal the helicopter himself. Two out of those three will save the lives of people endangered by my presence here. My decision is final.”
A beat of silence, her words hanging in the air between us.
As I opened my mouth to respond, Micah spoke.
“Langley has already lost one parent, ma’am.”
Parvaneh’s face turned to nearly the same mask of rage that it had with the evidence of Ribeiro’s betrayal. I glanced to the engagement ring on her hand, saw her watching me, and looked away.
Her next words were spoken with a measured cadence. “I need no reminders about what happened to her father. If David dies, that is on my shoulders and not yours. But he chose to serve. I will not have innocents needlessly lose their lives because of my refusal to assume risk.”
Micah’s gaze fell to the dirt, but I could see his shoulders rising and falling with quickened breath. He had lost some strategic game whose intent I didn’t understand, but the magnitude of this failure seemed clear enough to him.
Parvaneh reached out and clasped my hand in hers, her palms soft and her eyes on mine with an intense stare.
“I order you to summon my rescue before nightfall. The only failure is in death.”
I thought back to Micah and Gabriel’s response to her order yesterday. “I hear and I obey.”
Micah watched me with a grim expression, saying nothing.
5
I set off uphill in the afternoon light, the MP5 and breacher shotgun slung under my jacket. After splitting the ammunition with Micah, I had 120 9mm rounds and a handful of buckshot to eliminate a three-man team if I couldn’t signal the helicopter first. It wasn’t a lot of ammo under normal circumstances, but I wouldn’t find myself in a protracted firefight. I’d either get the drop on Ribeiro’s kill team, hit them before they realized what was happening, and finish them off together, or I’d be dead long before I fired my last bullet.
My eyes darted to windows, rooftops, spider holes, and staircases layered in all directions. The entire mass of shanties rose ever higher in a human morass through which I moved, never certain that I wasn’t being watched and always knowing that I was being hunted. The sensation was particularly unsettling given that I had come under fire in the same setting a few hours earlier. The undercurrent of adrenaline humming in my veins, normally my greatest incentive, was now rendered a painful reminder of the horrifying and very real possibility of civilian deaths due to my actions.
And shockingly, the very same people who had made their orderly flight indoors when Gabriel and I were ambushed had now returned to the streets and sidewalks, manning their market stands and making their way to and from parts unknown. There were fewer of them than there had been that morning, and though the sparse crowds seemed particularly free from small children chasing each other, they had returned nonetheless.
The best protection I could give them was to move quickly, reducing their exposure time to danger by virtue of my presence. Without Gabriel to translate, I had little alternative. As a non-Portuguese-speaking gringo setting off against three trained killers, my odds couldn’t have been much worse. Throw in the likelihood of a chance encounter with an armed trafficker, and I’d be lucky to last ten minutes.
Yet by all accounts, setting off on my own was the smartest move I could make.
If my current survival owed itself to a false prophecy, then it wouldn’t last for long. But if I could singlehandedly initiate Parvaneh’s rescue, I stood a chance of endearing myself to her. She was important enough to bypass routine security searches, and out of everyone surrounding the Handler—his pilots, Sage, the men who’d delivered me to his building, and certainly Racegun—Parvaneh was the only one who seemed able to help me get close to him, inadvertently or not.
Even with the chance association with her and the .32 I’d been able to scoop, my odds of success were almost nonexistent. But against the concentric and obsessive levels of security I faced upon returning to the Handler’s compound, they were the best I’d ever get.
I heard the unmistakable echo of helicopter blades drumming toward me from the east. Without a second of hesitation, I ran toward a three-story structure whose ground comprised a storefront and desperately called to the vendors inside.
“Roof,” I said, pointing to the sky. “Up.”
They gestured to one corner, where I found a stairwell wrapping crudely around the side of the building. Running up its dirty, exposed stairs, I found the roof to be little more than a few sheets of thin corrugated iron laid over walls. I cautiously tested the surface with my foot, and the s
lapdash arrangement of metal bowed under my weight, nearly collapsing with me on top of it. I found the longest continuous sheet of metal and followed it, threading my way to a more stable balcony on the far side. Once I reached it, I only had to pull myself atop a platform holding two plastic water tanks to catch my first visual of the aircraft.
It was unmistakably the Outfit helicopter that I had seen atop the freighter after my arrival to Rio, now flying perhaps a quarter mile distant. It hammered across the sky at an altitude of three hundred feet over the multicolored matrix below. I watched its shadow coast across a sea of roofs sprouting satellite dishes, their broken-down buildings camouflaged by decades of graffiti. The helo was grazing up the hill in low switchbacks, searching for a signal from its lost delegation amidst the maze.
“Oye porra,” a young male voice called behind me. “Venha aqui.”
I turned to see the voice had come from a youth in his early teens at best, standing on the far side of the roof. A constellation of boys reached the top of the stairs behind him and spread out to his sides. Many of them dangled automatic pistols from their hands, the oldest of the group bearing gold jewelry and designer sneakers.
Above the burning tingle of panic, I reminded myself that the surest way to get shot was to show fear. Maintaining the same calm assurance that I’d addressed Enzo with, I called back, “English?”
“Não fode, maluco.”
There were six, standing close enough together for me to mow them down like dry grass with the four shells of buckshot in my shotgun.
He pointed to the weapons under my jacket. “Porque que tu ta armado?”
I heard a noise behind me and glanced over my shoulder. Another group of boys now blocked the way I’d come, a few of them pointing sideways pistols at me and, therefore, at their comrades as well.
Behind them, the helicopter worked its way closer.
The boys were unconcerned about the aircraft, having a short lifetime of experience to tell them that threats didn’t come from the sky in their urban rainforest. If the Complex operators spotted me, the helo doors would slide open, and I’d need only hit the deck before the gang was killed outright or sent scattering from an opening salvo of precision fire.
I had to buy myself one minute, maybe less. “Enzo,” I said confidently. “Enzo. ADA.”
I waited for the reverence of this name to quell the immediate physical danger. Instead it provoked a low chant from the boys, rising in pitch with the taunting intonation of a schoolyard challenge. The group’s attention shifted at once to the kid who’d addressed me, waiting for his reaction with a “what you gonna do about it” anticipation.
“O Enzo que sa foda,” he shouted with sneering contempt, before breaking out into a long, chattering rant in Portuguese that was intended, I supposed, for the benefit of his associates.
A rival gang.
“Ribeiro!” I called in desperation. “My boss is Senhor Ribeiro.”
This evoked a louder burst of laughter—of course it did. I could barely talk my way out of execution when I had Gabriel translating for me. Without him, I was fucked. Nothing was more dangerous right now than a group of kids who were armed, thought themselves invincible, and were possibly on drugs. They probably couldn’t hit a man-sized target with a handgun unless they were close enough to touch it anyway, but at that range and in those numbers, they wouldn’t have to. I could exploit their poor marksmanship with lateral movement, but that meant a blind leap that was becoming more likely with each passing second.
Instead I hoped for the helicopter to drown out his voice, for its descending rotor wash to whip a tornado of sand as the shooters onboard opened fire, for the Handler’s wrath to descend like the hand of God to save me. But its noise grew distant as the aircraft cut a path in the wrong direction, swinging west as the ringleader’s pistol raised toward me, the black pit of the barrel staring at my face.
More barrels pointed in my direction, all exits blocked by the boys holding them.
I was already a target; now I had seconds to become a moving one.
Taking two running steps sideways, I leapt over the blind edge and off the roof.
A pair of booming gunshots followed, but my attention shifted to the immediate physical danger of the void opening beneath me. My stomach lurched into my throat. I tried to bring my feet and knees together to keep my bones intact, but there was no time. Ten vertical feet went by in a flash, and my feet slammed into a flat roof outcropping.
I felt a searing, burning pain in my right knee upon impact. Instead of becoming stationary and evaluating my next move, I fell sprawling off the side as my leg buckled.
As I fell through a bed sheet strung over the street, my vision became a cocoon of white. A split second later, I crashed into a table below it.
The table flipped sideways under my weight and I rolled to the ground.
As I flung the table off me, my first view at street level revealed a mass of people scattering with only slightly less urgency than I felt, fleeing with a practiced efficiency from the sound of more gunshots.
I fought my way upward and took off in a sprint for the far side of the street, my run an awkward accommodation of a suddenly resistant right knee. A splattering of bullet impacts cracked off the building in front of me just before I kicked open the nearest door and flung myself into a home.
I glanced back the way I had come but regretted doing so at once.
It looked like I was watching a film in fast-forward. The child gangsters bounded down the stairs to street level, hurdling obstacles and snaking between fleeing bystanders at lightning speed.
They’d be upon me in seconds no matter what I did, probably in far greater numbers if I killed one of them. I pulled the MP5 from beneath my jacket, raising it to fire a few rounds out the doorway to stall them and continue my escape.
As I raised the stock to my shoulder, the lead boy fell mid-stride as he raced across the street. It looked as if he’d tripped until the bloody puddle appeared beneath him.
The whistling howl of suppressed gunshots flew in from somewhere down the street, and a few boys reacted by returning fire to my left. They fell where they took their last stand, screams of pain silenced by kill shots as the rest of the child gang reversed course and faded into the shantytown behind them.
Ribeiro’s kill team wasn’t interested in seeing me killed by gangbangers—they wanted me alive and were intervening to keep me that way. Parvaneh was their real prize, and they’d use me to find her however they could.
I turned and plunged deeper into the home, passing through a curtain separating a living room attached to a half-kitchen. Searching desperately for an ambush position, I saw a single loveseat, a bathroom the size of a phone booth concealed behind a half-open sheet, and, behind a short counter, a waist-high cabinet big enough for me to squeeze into.
Without time to second-guess my decision, I threw open the home’s far door, leaving it ajar to reveal the alleyway beyond as if I’d continued running. Then I opened the cabinet, finding a sparse collection of what few cooking pots and pans the occupants owned. Noisily shoving them aside to make room for myself, I ducked inside the cabinet.
I arranged the MP5 over my chest and pulled the doors almost completely shut behind me, leaving a crack so I could see into the kitchen.
Then I placed my foot against one door so I could kick it open and settled the breacher shotgun into my grasp with its barrel angled forward.
The kill team probably wore body armor. That was no problem—in that event, the pelvis was an often-overlooked target. I’d score mobility kills outright, and even if they were able to return fire from the floor, they wouldn’t be able to do so for long. Femoral arteries converged at this fragile junction of the human structure, and the effects of a load of 12-gauge buckshot searing into it from behind at close range would quickly be fatal.
A sudden thumping of footsteps in the room behind me signaled the arrival of my first pursuer. I tried to quiet my breathing, pal
ms settling on the worn synthetic shotgun grip. The footsteps drew closer toward the kitchen until a shadow fell across the floor, and I drew a final breath and held it as a figure crossed in front of me.
It was a young girl.
I burst out of the cabinet as her terrified eyes found me, my shotgun lowered and a finger pressed to my lips to indicate silence.
I pointed to the door behind us. Lacking sufficient Portuguese vocabulary, I reverted to the graffiti I had seen in the alley with Gabriel. “Monsters. Monstros.”
She covered her throat with a tiny hand and replied shakily, “Monstros?”
“Yes, yes. Monstros. Go,” I told her, gesturing to the far door. “Run.”
But she was riveted with fear, even as a renewed flurry of screams from the street indicated the kill team’s arrival.
I grabbed her with one hand and yanked her into the cabinet with me, pulling the doors closed just as more footsteps sounded from the room behind us. Placing a hand over her mouth, I tensed the other on the shotgun grip as the kill team flooded into the kitchen.
Their entry was quiet, their movements a graceful, unscripted free-flow dance of room clearing. Short-whip radio antennas protruded from plate carriers that held it all: water supply, grenades, ammunition, medical supplies, and, most importantly, radios. Everything I needed and more to rescue Parvaneh, mine for the taking save the unexpected intrusion of the girl who had returned home a minute too soon.
The dark shapes flowed past, sweeping suppressed M4 assault rifles over the space as they headed for the back door that I had deliberately left ajar. But as the three men slipped into the alley, a fourth man entered the kitchen.
Then a fifth.
A hot flood of tears joined the little girl’s breath on my hand as I waited for the kill team to pass, mentally cursing my unexpected odds. Three against one was bad, and five against one far worse than I was equipped to deal with even if the girl hadn’t shown up. In the seconds it would take me to open fire on the first three, two others would be burning me down.
