by Chris Ryan
Ten more metres and Gardner was clear of the smoke. Blinking tears and boozy sweat out of his eyes, he saw that the smoke was coming from a rooftop several metres to his right. Flames licked at a column of worn rubber tyres, toxic fumes disgorged into the air like from an old industrial chimney. Gardner looked at his feet.
Almost there. Just another couple of metres.
His feet hit the ground, but he couldn’t get a firm grip. His boots scraped against something slick, and when he shuffled his feet he slipped backwards, banging the back of his head against the concrete, and, fuck, it hurt.
Ignore the pain. Don’t give in to it, he told himself. Get up!
He released the rope and watched it withdraw through the smoke like a lightning bolt in reverse. The Little Bird was a noisy fucker for such a small chopper. As the bird pissed off, the whock-whock faded and the noise sank big time. Gardner scoped the LZ, glancing over his shoulders. He had landed in an L-shaped street at the base of the favela, two hundred metres from the Tutoia motorway. Might as well have been on the other side of the fucking world.
As he’d calculated, the gangs had swarmed on ahead and out of sight. Now the street was shabby and desolate. Two- and three-storey shanty huts and botched brick buildings lined the street. A lot of the homes seemed to get away with plastic or cardboard rigged up as roofs. Guess it rains less here than in Manchester, Gardner figured.
The sharp crack of rifle shots sounded off to the east. The direction the gang kids had scattered. The volley was furious, then silent.
As he picked himself up he noticed some kind of gunk beneath him, a big puddle, dark red, consistency of melted rubber. A single Timberland footprint marked the spot where Gardner had crashed. Right where his head had kissed concrete lay a pair of intestines, the large one brown and snake-like, the smaller one reddish and flattened by Gardner’s bonce. He couldn’t see a body. Whoever was stuck like a pig had fucked off to go and die in some alleyway.
First things first, he thought, rubbing his sticky hands down the sides of his sandstone combats. Bug out away from the rifle reports. Don’t want your trip to Barbosa to be your last. He took off west, in the opposite direction to the gunfire.
4
0822 hours.
It took Weiss an hour to worm his way through the traffic. He drove north, past the Maracana football stadium and, at the old Imperial Palace on Quinta da Boa Vista, he took a right, hit Avenue Osvaldo Aranha and edged along the gridlocked road for five kilometres. God himself could not make Brazilians hurry. Weiss thought some more about his next move.
All the way to Tardelli district.
Once off Aranha the traffic lightened. Weiss turned into Rua Pedro Cabral and followed it for two hundred metres until he reached the affluent Rua Buenos Aires. A row of houses reserved for rich people presented itself, each one opulent, whitewashed, gated. He made a beeline for the luxury villa at the end of the road, the biggest and grandest of the pile. The entry gate was painted gold and had a miniature video screen fixed above the comms panel. Someone had left it ajar. A gift.
Weiss parked out front and strode across the grounds, past a water feature big enough for a grand hotel and a column of palm trees green as the Amazon. Two men stood guard on the front steps. Armed with Uzi 9mm sub-machine-guns, weapon of choice for gangsters who watched too many Hollywood action movies, they were sharing a joint. Weiss walked unnoticed until he was thirty metres from them. He was a big guy, but light on his toes. One of the guys looked up, eyeballed Weiss and tossed the joint to the ground.
‘Holy shit! Motherfucking Weiss!’
He couldn’t run inside fast enough.
The second guy stuck to the spot, as if he had roots for feet.
‘I need to speak to Big Teeth.’
‘He’s inside.’
Weiss yanked open the heavy teak door and let himself in.
The villa was lavish. It also stank of piss. A Rottweiler licked at a ring of its own faeces. On the walls, between antique mirrors, there were posters of Scarface and The Godfather, and bullet holes pocked the high ceiling. He had to watch his step to avoid the used condoms and crack pipes littering the marble-tiled floor. It was true what they said. No matter which way you dressed it up, or how rich it got, shit was always shit.
Weiss entered the lounge. It was like walking into a shadow. He squinted, saw a girl of sixteen or seventeen, spread-eagled on a red leather sofa. She could have been asleep, but her wide-open eyes had rolled back into her head. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 played on a widescreen TV. The air was redolent with the smell of marijuana and fear. Weiss counted twelve goons in total around the dark room, and he didn’t need to look twice to realize that every one of them was busting a tool.
He relaxed. No goon dared point their weapon at him. Not unless they had a death wish.
Luis ‘Big Teeth’ Oliveira was sitting at a sofa in front of the TV. There was a coffee table in front of him with half of Colombia cut up on it, but it wasn’t the coke making him jumpy. It was Weiss. Big Teeth furiously chained on a cigarette.
‘Nestor,’ he said, opening his arms, like he was preparing to hug a bear. ‘What brings you down to Rio? Can’t get enough of Carioca pussy, eh? You know what they say – once a man’s tasted wine, he can’t go back to water.’
‘Your jokes bore me almost as much as your country,’ replied Weiss, running a hand along the mantelpiece above a baroque fireplace. Dust coated his fingers.
Big Teeth shifted in his seat. ‘Then… you’re here because of the Carlitos thing?’ His voice accelerated. ‘I promise, we didn’t have shit, not a shit, to do with Gonzales ripping him off. That boy is mad, amigo.’
‘Calm down,’ Weiss said, smiling, enjoying Big Teeth’s fear. ‘I’m not going to kill you. And this isn’t about Gonzales.’
Big Teeth laughed nervously. His goofy, golden front teeth jutted out, like some kind of grotesque bunny. All that money, Weiss wondered, so why didn’t the guy get his teeth fixed?
‘I’m looking for someone.’
‘We’re all looking for someone special, eh?’
‘Enough of your jokes, Luis.’ Big Teeth looked at his feet, the TV, the comatose girl. Anywhere but Weiss. ‘This man – he’s a foreigner working with BOPE. A unit you keep a close eye on, I’m sure.’
‘Forget it,’ Big Teeth said, stubbing out his cigarette in a Jesus ashtray. ‘We don’t live in Barbosa no more, as you can see. Nowadays we’re out of the drugs game. We’re trying to go legit, man. Recording rap music and shit.’ He blew out a last gust of smoke. ‘I can’t help you.’
Weiss angled his head, trying to lock his eyes on Big Teeth’s.
‘Luis, my friend, what’s the problem? You seem very nervous. Is it me?’
Big Teeth held in his breath.
‘Or maybe something else has you concerned.’ Weiss looked at the coffee table, lacerated with knife marks. ‘Is your gang in trouble, my friend?’
Big Teeth couldn’t take it any more. He stood up and shouted at Weiss. ‘What the fuck does this look like to you, man? We’re just local players. Local, brother. And now you come here asking me about some out-of-town guy? Shit, I don’t even have no fucking passport.’
Weiss sat on the edge of the opposite sofa, the one with the bitch. She didn’t flinch. Not even the twitch of an eyelid. He stroked her hair.
‘Luis. I know this man is with BOPE. There’s only four hundred men in the unit, and I’ll bet you know the names and address of each of them off by heart. And I know you’re aware of him. You might think you’re Mr Big Shot these days, with your swimming pool and nice car, but at heart you’re still a favelano. You keep your ear close to the ground. So don’t fuck me about.’
‘Nestor, I swear—’
‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way. I gave you my word I would not kill you today. And I will not. But tomorrow is a new day. Maybe I’ll come again…’ The threat lingered in the air.
Big Teeth watched out of the corner of his
eyes as Weiss ran a hand down the girl’s cheek. He seemed to be weighing something up in his head. ‘OK, OK,’ he said, stubbing out his Marlboro. ‘What’s his name?’
‘John Bald. He’s Scottish.’
‘Shit. Fuck.’ Big Teeth took a scrap of paper and a ballpen and scribbled something. A barrel-chested goon pressed it into Weiss’s palm. He read a name and address, scrawled in appalling handwriting. Weiss was amazed Big Teeth could even write. He looked him square in his mismatched eyes, one brown, one green.
‘This is where I can find him?’
Big Teeth shook his head. ‘This is someone might know where your guy is. I can’t guarantee shit, though. You know how it plays in the favelas, all kinds of fucked-up stuff happening all the time.’
‘I’ll check it out. Pray this does not rebound on you, my friend.’
‘It won’t,’ Big Teeth replied, finally going eye to eye with Weiss. ‘But you need to worry about watching your fucking back in Barbosa. Those kids don’t know you like we do. Shit’s all different there.’
5
0930 hours.
His leg muscles throbbed from the intense vibration of the Little Bird. His olive-green T-shirt, drenched with sweat, clung to his back. Thirty minutes since his insertion into the favela, Gardner was breathing out of his arsehole.
He’d exited the LZ via a maze of walkways so narrow he couldn’t even stretch his arms. A wrong turn almost saw him slip into a crater in the road filled with excrement. Unguarded rectangular holes, the best part of a metre wide and half a metre high, were fixed to the sides of each home and along public walls. From the foul smell wafting out of them, he figured they led directly into the local sewage system.
Gardner tabbed at a fast pace. He was conscious of the fact that the sooner he got to Bald, the better the chance he had of finding his old mucker in one piece. Five-eight, angular and bony, Bald was tough as old leather and built from the same granite as the houses in his native Aberdeen. With his face locked in a permanent frown, Bald looked stern and cold. Get a few jars of McEwan’s down his neck, though, and he’d soon be scrapping civvies with the best of them. But in a place like Barbosa, Bald would need all of his evasion skills to survive, because he’d stand out like a fake tit.
Same for you too, mate, Gardner realized.
He emerged into a market square. Or what once counted as a market round these parts. It wasn’t exactly fucking Lakeside.
Sunlight razed an area fifty metres deep and thirty wide. In the middle of the street was an abandoned police car, next to a fountain with a stream of clothes floating in it. Flames hissed from the roof of the police car. Gardner counted three bodies on the ground. Two weren’t moving, their legs and arms contorted, red patches the size of coffee mugs on their chests. They were wearing the beige slacks of the state police. The third man coughed, shook his head and, spotting Gardner, began crawling towards him, digging his nails into the pockmarked concrete and dragging his rag-order legs behind him.
Gardner heard voices. Shouting. Single-burst shots.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
His instinct was to help the cop. But he was unarmed and knew he wouldn’t be able to get to him in time. The shots were close, and all Gardner would achieve by rushing to the guy’s aid would be to fuck both of them.
There were so many exits out from the street Gardner needed to take five just to get his bearings straight. Fucking hell, he thought, navigating here is tougher than the jungle.
Four exits from the market square. One to his six o’clock, the one he’d emerged from. Two open stairways to his left, twenty metres away. The fourth escape route was an alleyway opposite, partially obscured behind the torched car, where the tin-roofed buildings were so tightly bunched a man on a bike would have a hard time squeezing through. All he could make out was an endless warren of stairways, pavements and dirt tracks.
He looked for a reference point. The Jesus statue poked out above the shanty huts on the horizon, atop the Corcovado mountain to the north-east.
‘My Troop times forty north. Your Troop times twenty west,’ he remembered.
Gardner headed for a north-leading alleyway. He paused a few metres into the alley mouth, edged up to a grey wall with a half-washed portrait of Pablo Escobar along its length, hunkered down by the corner and peered back down the street. Though hidden, he was north-east from the van and saw a gang of six kids, none of them looking old enough to be on the Special Brew, springing out from the far alleyway. Red scarves covered the lower halves of their faces and they brandished their squaddie-proof AK-47s like they were water pistols, pointing them at each other when they spoke and waving them in the air. Careful to stay behind cover, Gardner looked on, wishing he had a juicy .50-cal heavy machine-gun to wallop these fuckers.
One of the kids shouted excitedly in Portuguese, pointing to the wounded cop. The brats laughed as they closed in on the poor sod. He moved on his hands and knees towards the car.
The tallest kid took out a fourteen-inch machete and slashed the guy’s back with it twice, crossways, in an ‘X’.
The cop screamed and reached down to his hip for a holstered pistol. Bad move. Two of the other kids pounced on him and pinned his arm down. The tall kid went to work. Using the rusted machete he began sawing through the wrist. Gardner shuddered as he heard the blade grind against bone. Blood spewed.
With a high-pitched scream the guy begged him to stop. He cursed. He cried.
But the kid kept on hacking away.
Halfway through, the guy gave up his squealing. When the kid was done playing surgeon for the day, he taunted the man by slapping his face with his own severed wank paddle. Another kid produced an old-school sawn-off and shot up the cops arms and legs. Each time a subsonic boom accompanied the blast and the body spasmed, as though 10,000 volts were surging through him. The kids cheered. Then one urinated on him.
The tallest kid put the cop out of his misery. Holding a sledgehammer, he instructed the others to turn the man over so he was lying on his back. The guy tried to protest. But the kid wasn’t interested. He raised the hammer with both hands.
And swung the black metal head down.
Gardner heard the shattering of the cranium from behind the steps, thirty metres away.
Staying behind the wall, he waited. The posse marched east, playing football with the dead cop’s hand.
Keep heading north.
Get to Bald’s location – before the kids do.
He U-turned. Went to climb the steps.
Found himself face to face with the business end of an assault rifle.
6
0959 hours.
The rifle was a Colt Commando. It was in crap nick, the paintwork chipped and brown masking tape wrapped around the mag to stop it from falling apart. The user wore a one-piece flame-retardant Nomex 3 assault suit, of the type used by the Regiment in Close-Quarter Battle ops.
He shouted something in Portuguese. Sounded more like a Brazilian football commentator.
‘Easy, mate.’ Gardner raised his hands. Fuck knows what the bloke is banging on about, he thought. But his face summed it up: trembling lips, knife-slit eyes darting left and right, the Colt Commando shaking in his hands. An edgy man with a gun more often than not led to an AD – accidental discharge.
‘I’m not looking for any trouble,’ said Gardner.
Someone else had already given this guy plenty of the stuff, by the looks of it. His face was mashed up, as if someone had discharged a shotgun beneath his chin. A deep cut was drawn above his right eye, and when he spoke rivulets of blood trickled between his teeth. His skin was white. Though he’d been in Rio for less than six hours, Gardner just assumed everyone was more tanned than his pasty English arse. Not this guy.
‘You’re English?’ the police officer asked in a perfect English accent that put Gardner’s Manc to shame.
He nodded.
‘Go back to the beaches. This isn’t a tourist area,’ the guy snapped.
‘Says w
ho?’
‘BOPE,’ he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Captain Rafael Falcon, Second Squad. What’s your name?’
Gardner lowered his hands to his sides, eyes on the BOPE captain. First impressions, he didn’t rate the guy. He looked tense, jaws locked, like he was pushing out a massive fucking turd. Ruperts lacked the nerves of steel they demanded from their men.
‘Heard you boys got caught in a shitstorm yesterday?’ Gardner smiled.
Falcon’s face hardened like concrete. ‘You still didn’t answer my question.’
‘Say again, mate?’
‘I asked you what your name was.’
‘Joe Gardner.’
Falcon tilted his head back, revealing a thin neck smothered in blood. ‘Gardner? That name sounds familiar.’
‘I’m a mate of John Bald’s.’
Falcon’s facial muscles relaxed into a relieved smile, the kind a man paints when he sees a friendly face in a rotten place. He lowered the Colt Commando. Gardner was tempted to rush him and box the crap out of him, but decided against it.
‘John mentioned you,’ Falcon said. ‘You were in the SAS too, yes?’
Gardner gave it the air-force shrug. ‘He’s an old friend.’
‘He said you were a good warrior. One of the best.’
On a rooftop eighty metres to the north, two kids stacked worn car tyres one on top of the other. One of them produced a jerry can and started dousing the tyres in petrol.
‘I got a call from John yesterday. He said he was in trouble. That all sorts of shit was going down, and he was stuck in this favela.’
‘What time did he call?’
