by Mark Greaney
Court slowed and turned, expecting to see Davi behind the wheel.
But no, one hundred yards back he saw Davi’s truck, but it was full of armed men in bush hats, and as Gentry turned back to run for his life, he heard the pops of rifles.
“Fuck!” shouted Gentry as he dashed off the road, back into the thick jungle, digging his way through vines and bush and palm fronds the size of truck tires, desperate to make himself small, fast, and slippery.
As he pushed his way into the tangle of undergrowth, he worked on a new plan. His old plan had been simple. He had a canoe stowed under the little bridge just a hundred and fifty yards ahead. He’d planned on running up the road, sliding down the bank, and then making his escape via the little boat, being careful to dodge the choppers by staying under the trees that hung out over the river’s edge.
But now he’d have to approach the bridge from upriver, which presented one extraordinary obstacle. Or a dozen or more obstacles, depending on how you looked at it.
Both sides of the riverbank north of the bridge were literally covered with crocodiles.
Huge fucking crocodiles.
As Court powered through the nearly impenetrable growth, he settled on his new plan—a plan that would require skill he was not sure he possessed, execution he was not sure he could pull off, and luck he was not sure he could count on.
But it was better than dancing down the road ducking rounds from a truck full of rifles.
He heard the men entering the vegetation behind him. A few fired their guns into the trees and bushes. Court knew his trail would close itself as soon as he moved through; he was not worried about the men any longer. Their eyes could not see him and their guns could not reach him.
But he was worried. He was worried about the damn crocodiles ahead.
The rifle fire picked up. It was as if the men were trying to tear their way through the jungle with lead. It would not work, not before Court made it clear. But that was not to say that one lucky bullet fragment couldn’t crash its way through and bury itself into the back of the American’s head.
Court ducked down lower, pushed through on his hands and knees, scraping them raw in the process. He ripped down spiderwebs the size of fishing nets and used the barrel of his shotgun to knock a boa constrictor from a low hanging branch so he could limbo under it without fear of having the angry snake wrap around his neck.
Soon he broke out of the jungle and onto a hill above the riverbank. Forty yards to his left the wooden bridge sat invitingly in the sun. His little boat bobbed in the shade under it, a canvas tarp tight as a drum over it for protection. Below him, and for at least twenty-five of the forty yards along the water’s edge, a dozen crocs ranging in size from six to sixteen feet basked in the mid-morning rays.
Gentry found a thick vine that shot out from the bank in a diagonal off to his left, ran over the riverbank, and connected to the highest, most outstretched limb of a two-hundred-foot-tall kapok tree that hung over the river like a great arm.
It might not take him all the way to the bridge, but it would get him to the bank right next to it. That was far enough from the crocs, and that would be just fine.
He’d tossed his machete ten minutes earlier, so he pointed the wide barrel of his shotgun just above where the vine entered the hard earth.
And then he hesitated. Panting from the exertion, stinging from the abrasions on his hands and knees and the scratches and insect stings he’d picked up along the way, he just stood there, his shotgun poised to fire. He had swung on vines many evenings with the boys in the village; he trusted their strength and their ability to get him from here to there. But in his mind’s eye he saw this plan of his going very, very wrong. In fact, he could not even conjure a mental image of the next fifteen seconds going off without a hitch.
A long, angry burst from an automatic rifle thirty yards behind him in the jungle helped him focus on the task at hand. He fired the pump shotgun at the vine, it split and frayed beautifully, and he caught it with his free hand before it swung away. Hurriedly, he refastened the shotgun to his backpack one-handed and leapt into the air to take the vine at the highest point he could reach. His sore red hands gripped hard, his legs wrapped around tight, and he began swinging off the hill and over the massive reptiles below.
The vine shot him above the near bank; he passed over sleepy crocodiles warming themselves at the water’s edge. Many of the crocs lay with their toothy mouths wide open, cooling their bodies with the intake of air and presenting an especially ominous image to swing over.
His grip was secure; he grimaced with the effort but held firm as gravity took him out over the water now, his legs jutted in front of him, his knees cinched tight against the vine, and his eyes focused on his landing area on the bank by the bridge.
The vine was supple and green and healthy; he could count on it to get him across.
But not so the high tree limb from which it hung. Termites had nested along the crook where it separated from a larger branch, weakening the joint. Without Gentry’s acrobatics the limb would have held for another year, until the rainy season pushed winds across the continent and the brittle wood snapped in a storm.
But this limb did not have another year. It would fail now.
Gentry’s worst-case scenario came to pass in two stages.
The first was more of a slip of the vine at the tree branch; there was a lurching and a catch. Court was well out away from the land, easily ten feet above the water and sailing fast. He kept his grip but jacked his head off of his intended destination and up towards his lifeline’s connection with the tree.
He just managed to focus his wide eyes on the distant point as the tree limb cracked and broke.
Gentry’s momentum, with his legs out in front of him, sent his body spinning backwards one full revolution through the air, twenty feet up. He found himself facedown as gravity took over, and he dropped towards the water emitting a primordial scream of terror.
FOUR
Gentry let go of the vine; it was only in the way now.
He crashed through the black surface in a belly flop, well aware that the crocodiles on both sides of the bank would all be awake, alert, and pissed.
Sinking in the black with the wind knocked from his lungs, it took him longer than he wanted to get the backpack off. With it he sank into the muck; the river was only seven or eight feet deep here. After he removed the backpack, he yanked the shotgun free. Swimming while wielding a 12-gauge shotgun would be ridiculous, but leaving it down here in the mud while reptiles the size of four-man canoes roamed above would be insane.
After grabbing his weapon Gentry pushed off the bottom to shoot to the surface and lost one of his shoes in the process. He kicked the other off as his head popped out of the water. He shook his long wet hair from his eyes and turned back to the nearest bank, twenty-five yards away.
Two big crocs slid into the water before his eyes, heading in his direction. Next to where they entered the river, he noticed the bank empty. He was certain he had swung over a monstrous sixteen-footer in that spot just seconds before.
Court lay on his back in the water and kicked frantically while his head remained up and his pistol-grip weapon pointed in the direction of the bank. It was an uncoordinated half backstroke that derived no speed from its efficiency but much from its intensity.
Crocodiles do not normally eat meals that are alive. Instead they kill their prey by biting down with their clamplike jaws to take hold and then spinning it in the water in order to drown it.
But Court knew that he, as a fragile human being, would not be drowned. The bite would not kill him outright, but the spinning and the flailing and the whipping tail would shatter his neck and break his body, turn him into a lifeless rag doll, even before his lungs filled with the river’s hot black water.
He had twenty yards to go to his boat; he would head straight to the bobbing canoe and avoid the bank now, as crocs were even faster on land than in the water. Panic threatened
to overtake him; he knew he had not even looked at the far side of the river to see how many of the hungry fuckers over there were coming out for a quick and easy one-hundred-seventy-pound lunch of fresh meat.
Instead he focused on the white water churned up by his pounding bare feet.
There it was. The first big beast was upon him; it looked like a fat gray tree trunk through the foam until his big mouth opened, inches from the tips of Gentry’s toes. With a scream of terror Court spread his legs apart and raised the shotgun.
Click.
He had not pumped another shell into the chamber after using the shotgun to sever the vine.
The reptile was on him now.
He jabbed the inside of its mouth with the muzzle of the gun.
In the two seconds since he’d stopped kicking he’d begun to sink in the water, and he felt the fore claws of the animal against his leg as they sank. The smack in the mouth caused the croc to flail back for a brief instant, and Gentry used that instant to charge a fresh shell into the chamber of his 12-gauge as he sank deeper, faceup, into the river.
He went under fully now, pushed his weapon up until he felt the neck of the reptile above him, and pulled the trigger one-handed.
Boom!
The recoil pushed him deeper, deep enough to avoid the spinning animal’s huge tail as it thrashed near the surface. Court turned and swam quickly down and away, along the bottom of the river for a moment as he neared his boat. He shot back to the surface and jacked a fresh shell into the breach as he spun back around, found a new croc on him, its mouth just beginning to open to initiate the death grip. This beast was no more than ten feet long but still quite deadly. Gentry shot the gray monster between the eyes.
The blast of double-aught buckshot was roughly akin to ten simultaneous rounds from a .32-caliber handgun. At point-blank range to the face of even a massive reptile, it was almost certainly a mortal wound. But the death throes of such a powerful creature are just as dangerous as the attack, and again Court had to kick and twist and flail at the water to get away.
He also knew the fresh blood in the water would attract hundreds of piranha in seconds; he had to get out of there immediately for way too many reasons to count. He ejected the spent shell, chambered a fresh one, and kicked frantically towards his canoe.
He heard the first snaps of gunfire as he took hold of his little boat under the bridge, but he ignored them for now. With a free hand he unhooked the ties holding down the canvas tarp from two of the cleats. He tossed the shotgun onto the tarp and pulled himself into the craft. The massive open mouth of a twelve-foot crocodile lurched from the water behind him, followed his legs up and over the little boat’s edge, but the jaws snapped shut without taking hold. The animal’s front leg had made it into the canoe, and his thrashing weight threatened to flip the tiny craft over with Court inside it. Court grabbed the 12-gauge and fired one-handed into the reptile’s neck, flipping it back off the boat.
He tried to rack a fresh shell, but his gun was empty. The rest of his ammo was in the backpack at the bottom of the river, so he tossed the shotgun aside as he pulled the rest of the canvas cover free and let it fall into the water. Another long burst of rifle fire shot foam into the boat, but the distant soldier’s gun emptied before he could hit either the canoe or the American.
Court dove flat on the bottom of the ten-foot-long canoe, pushed the outboard’s propellers into the water, flipped it on, and pulled the cord.
The machine burst to life, and Gentry wasted no time turning his tiny craft upstream, away from the guns and the crocodiles and the piranha.
A minute east of the bridge he still panted and hacked river water out of his throat. He looked down and saw his wet pants ripped open at the left thigh. A long slashing wound bled from where the first crocodile had scratched him with its claws. The wound was relatively serious and could use a few stitches in the deepest part, but he knew it was a better outcome than he had a right to deserve. He shuddered thinking about the prehistoric monster on top of him in the water.
And then he let out a long sigh. Looked down at his boat, at what now amounted to the grand sum of his worldly possessions.
An old plastic flashlight, a one-liter bottle of outboard engine fuel, and a rusty speargun.
That was it.
Court wiped his long hair from his eyes, hefted the speargun with his free hand, and turned the throttle on the engine higher, steering the boat upriver towards Fonte Boa.
FIVE
The manhunter stood alone in his hotel room, wiped sweat from his face, and opened the second-story window to let in fresh air that, while cooler than the musty room, smelled like rotten fish and donkey shit.
He fought a wave of nausea.
He turned off his radio and tossed it into his suitcase. The rest of his clothes were packed. He just had to zip up the bag, and he was out of this disgusting and humid hellhole. In ten minutes he’d be at the dock walking up the plank of the steamboat to Coari. In two days he’d arrive in a real city, even if he were only speaking in relative terms by comparing it to this backwater coffee stain on the map. Another two days and he’d be in Manaus, and there he’d run like an Olympic sprinter to the airport, catch a flight to Rio or Sao Paulo and then back home to Amsterdam.
Only then would he breathe easy again. He’d take a day or two to tend to his tulip garden, and then he would regroup. Reacquire his target.
He would find Court Gentry again. And next time, he told himself with finality, he’d get a team of wet boys who would not fuck up the entire operation.
He still could not believe it. Six men out of twenty killed. Including the AUC commander. Five of them by goddamned bee stings, and the other after slipping into a river full of crocodiles. Seriously? The helicopters had radioed that they were heading back over the border to Colombia with both their dead and their living.
And they were leaving him out here alone.
Bastards.
A knock at the door.
A chill ran up the manhunter’s sixty-two-year-old spine. He turned away from the window and pulled the old.32-caliber revolver from its leather shoulder holster under his arm. He held it up with a quivering hand.
Slowly and quietly he took the four steps to the door, the weapon raised in front of him.
“Who’s there?”
“Sir? Do you need help with your bags?”
The manhunter unlocked the bolt and flipped the latch, hiding his pistol behind the door as he opened it.
He sighed in relief. It was one of the little savages from the front desk.
“No. I can manage.”
“Yes, sir. The ferry leaves in twenty minutes.” With a nod the savage turned and headed back down the rickety staircase.
The manhunter shut the door. Locked it back tight. Holstered his ancient pistol as he turned back around to zip his suitcase shut.
On the other side of the room Courtland Gentry, his target for these many months, stood by the window. Gentry wore a short beard and hair longer than in any of the photos the manhunter kept, but it was undoubtedly him. He sported a cream-colored shirt, unbuttoned, wet, and filthy. Brown cotton pants, ripped at the thigh and blood smeared.
He held a speargun in his right hand.
The manhunter grabbed at his pistol in its shoulder holster as he cried out in shock.
The loud spring mechanism of the speargun firing snapped in the air of the hot room. The manhunter felt his body slam back against the wooden door; his arms flew out wide from his body.
Only by looking down, away from his target, did he see that he’d been run through by a long bolt from the weapon. He was pinned to the door through the stomach. Blood wet the insides of his legs as it trickled down from the wound.
After taking the time necessary to recognize what had happened, the manhunter looked slowly back up to his target. The American tossed the empty speargun on the tiny twin bed and came closer. With a growing weakness the manhunter softly pawed again at the pistol under
his arm.
The Gray Man gently moved the manhunter’s hand away from the shoulder holster and pulled the revolver out. He looked it over, shrugged, and slid it into his pants at the small of his back.
“You’ve been on me since Chile, haven’t you?” The manhunter was surprised by the gentleness of the American’s voice. The Dutchman had lived and breathed Court Gentry for over half a year but realized now that he’d never heard him speak, had never even wondered what he sounded like.
Pain burned in the manhunter’s gut. Weakness grew in his extremities, in his eyes. Still, he said, “Since Quito.”
Court Gentry smiled. His face was close to the manhunter’s, his tone still soft and familiar like they were father and son. “I didn’t feel you in Ecuador.” He raised his eyebrows. “That was one hell of a chase, you and me.”
The manhunter’s legs went slack, and he cried out with the pain radiating from the spike through his belly. Quickly the Gray Man grabbed him, held him up against the door, braced him to take away a measure of the agony. The American looked up into the manhunter’s eyes. “You know how it is. Men like me. We can’t help what we are. It’s not our fault. The man who sent you . . . he knew who I was. What I was. He was the one who killed you. Not me.”
The manhunter’s eyes were vacant. Still, he nodded slightly.
“Give me his name, and I’ll make him pay.”
After a moment, the mouth opened. A trickle of blood ran down the Dutchman’s chin. He tried to speak; a small sound came out but no words.
Court leaned close to the man’s face.
The Dutchman winced with pain; his eyes relit somewhat, tempered with new concentration. He wanted to speak.
And finally he did. So softly Gentry had to lean almost into the man’s lips to hear him say it.
“Sidorenko.”
Gentry leaned away. Stood fully erect in front of the man. Nodded. Gregor Sidorenko, the Russian mafia kingpin and Court’s old employer, was apparently still sore about a double-cross Gentry had engineered the previous spring.
