by Jack Mars
“Let’s just say I’m concerned,” Ed said. “I’d like to be a little closer to the action than Jamaica.”
Now Jacob shrugged. “I suppose we could go there. If someone asks, we could say we had an engine problem. If anyone asks more than that, we could say the mission is classified, and then shut our mouths. They’re used to that.”
“What if they were tracking us?” Rachel said. “What if they saw us come from Jamaica, do a pass near Darwin King’s island, turn back for Jamaica, then turn around again? That hardly looks like engine trouble.”
Jacob nodded. “Right. It looks fishy.”
“We could end up blowing the cover,” Rachel said again.
“How about if we just fly around in circles for a while?” Ed said.
“Did I mention the fuel issue?” Jacob said.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
9:45 p.m. Central Standard Time (10:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)
La Sierra de San Simon (St. Simon’s Saw)
Near Honduras
The Caribbean Sea
A thick hand appeared at the top of the cliff.
Luke sat leaning against the far wall, watching it. It moved around like a spider, looking for something to grip. It didn’t find anything.
“The last rung is missing,” Luke said. “You just have to press yourself up.”
It was true. Luke had inspected the edge while he waited. There had once been a rung bolted at the very top of the cliff face, standing upright, which gave climbers something to grab. It was a good idea. At one time, you could hold that rung and practically step onto the top of the cliff. Not anymore. The bolts were still there in the rock, but the rung itself had broken off.
Bowles’s head appeared over the top of the cliff.
“Did you get the magazines?” Luke said.
Bowles heaved himself up and over. He rolled onto the plateau and lay for a minute on the ground. He breathed heavily. His MP5 was strapped across his chest. Various guns, knives, and explosives were strapped to his legs, his waist, and were hanging from his vest. His cargo pants seemed to be wet up to the thighs. That was odd. Buzz had grounded the boat on the beach. They hadn’t set foot in the water.
“Yeah,” Bowles said. “I got them. They were in the boat, just like I thought.”
“Was Buzz still there?”
Bowles nodded. “Yeah, he was there. He was resting for a few minutes, drinking some water.”
Luke could picture it. It was a hot night. Buzz was old. The hike was at least a few miles around the base of the mountain. He’d probably have to force his way through thick undergrowth.
He shook his head. Buzz was crazy. If Luke was still trying to do this stuff in his seventies, he hoped someone would be kind enough to handcuff him to a radiator.
“Did he leave after you got there?”
Bowles pushed himself up into a cross-legged sitting position. “He’s gone.”
Luke nodded. “Okay. Take a minute and get your head together. We’re already about halfway up, by my estimate. You can see that it’s brighter up here. That’s light from the house and the grounds, right above our heads. This is where it gets serious.”
“Serious,” Bowles said. “I know.”
Now he pushed himself to his feet. He took a long, deep inhale, and let it out. Then he had a pistol in his hand.
“Sorry, Stone. Not sorry.”
He pointed the gun.
For a long moment, too long, Luke didn’t believe his own eyes. “What are you doing, Bowles?”
“You guys are stupid, you know that?” Bowles said. “You’ve been blundering around, and never, not for one second, did you realize what you were dealing with. Now the mission is over, and it’s all been a waste. What did any of this accomplish, do you mind my asking?”
“You had a gun on us in the plane,” Luke said. “If you wanted to kill us, why didn’t you just do it then?”
Bowles shrugged. “And tell the pilots what?”
A terrible idea occurred to Luke.
“Did you kill Buzz? Is that why you went back down there?”
Bowles nodded, almost as an afterthought. He reached with his fingers into a small pocket on the front of his vest. He pulled something out and tossed it at Luke. It hit Luke’s chest, bounced off and landed on the ground in front of him.
It was Buzz Mac’s right ring finger. The doorknocker US Army ring was there, right above the bloody edge where Bowles had cut the finger off.
“There’s his precious ring. Of course I killed him. Just like I’m going to kill—”
Luke launched himself across the ground. He was at Bowles’s legs in a split second. Before Bowles could fire a shot, he gripped him behind the knees and lifted Bowles’s feet off the ground. Bowles fell backward, landing on his back on the cliff. His gun slid away toward the cliff’s edge.
Luke slithered on top of him, but Bowles was strong. He pushed Luke off and scrabbled backwards and away on his hands and feet.
He was going for the gun.
Luke couldn’t let that happen.
He jumped up, took two steps, leapt, and landed on Bowles. Bowles reached at his waist for something, a knife in a sheath, but Luke locked up his arm with his own. They wrestled on the ground, arms and legs grasping and clawing. There was no sound but their heavy breathing.
Bowles was strong. Strong. Luke reached to Bowles’s waist and pulled the knife. Bowles knocked it out of Luke’s hand. It flew away off the cliff.
They fought on, rolling on the loose dirt and rock. Bowles punched Luke in the side of the head. Luke’s ear started ringing. He slipped behind Bowles and pushed his face again the ground. Bowles spun and rolled over. Luke continued the spin and now he was on top. They were face to face, very close to the edge. Bowles grunted like a pig.
“Huh! Hnh!”
The sound was barely more than a croak.
Luke covered Bowles’s mouth with the blade of his hand. No one could know they were here. More than anything, this had to be quiet.
Bowles bit down on Luke’s hand. Hard.
Luke’s first urge was to pull his hand away, but he drove it in deeper instead. He pushed Bowles’s head backwards against the ground with it, exposing the throat. Bowles’s hands reached for Luke’s face. Luke slapped those hands away. He punched Bowles in the Adam’s apple.
“Guuh!” Bowles said. It was a sound that was barely a sound.
Luke reared back and hit him again in the same place. And again. And again.
Four punches to the windpipe, and Bowles stopped fighting. He just lay there, making strangling noises. Luke rolled over and lay next to him on the ground at the edge of the cliff.
Luke stared straight up at the sky. His heart was pumping. His brain was thudding. He took a moment to compose himself. Skidding clouds flew by over his head, just as they had done before. But now they seemed malevolent, like something from a horror movie. He glanced at Bowles.
“If you’re going to kill somebody,” Luke said. He could barely get the words out. “You should just do it. Don’t talk about it.”
It was too late for advice. Bowles’s eyes were wide open. His breathing was rapid, shallow and high-pitched, like steam escaping from a ruptured pipe. His hands grasped at his own throat, trying to do the impossible, which was reopen a crushed breathing passage.
Luke waited while his own breathing and heartbeat slowed down. He listened to the wind rushing along the cliff face. He felt the throb of pain where Bowles had bitten his hand. If he thought about, it seemed he could feel where the bite marks were swelling with blood.
A whole series of assumptions came crashing apart. Bowles had been assigned to them, yes. It had seemed that the Bureau had wanted to rein them in. And maybe that’s all it was at first. Run the case into the ground, block it, make it go away. But now it was more than that. Bowles had tried to kill him.
This entire mission was a disaster. And Luke had turned this part of it, this incursion onto the island, into an even wo
rse disaster. He had called off Ed and sent him packing, when Ed was the exact person he needed right now. Luke was here by himself, faced with infiltrating a compound full of soldiers and bodyguards.
Bowles had killed Buzz MacDonald.
Luke had a moment then. It was a moment of despair so profound he might never be able to describe it to another human being. It was more than disappointment. It was heartbreak. This cipher, this zero, this corrupt cop currently suffering through his last breaths, had killed THE Buzz MacDonald.
It made Luke so angry that he wished Bowles could heal, just so he could kill him again. He kneeled over Bowles and looked at him.
Bowles lay on his back, rasping, gasping, eyes staring up at Luke.
“Who were you working for?” Luke said.
Bowles was choking. He was barely getting any air at all. He would never be able to answer any questions now, or ever.
Luke went cold in a way he did not remember going before. He reached down and unclipped the strap holding Bowles’s MP5. He took the gun away. He reached in various pockets of Bowles’s vest, and pants. He took the three extra magazines for the gun. He took three grenades off of Bowles’s vest. He laid them all aside.
The merciful thing would be to simply kill Bowles now. He couldn’t be trusted, and there was nowhere to get him emergency medical attention anyway. His throat was crushed. Maybe Darwin King had a doctor working here, but Luke doubted he was a trauma surgeon.
Bowles’s pistol was along the cliff’s edge. Luke went over and picked it up. It was a Ruger P90. Might as well take that, too.
He looked at Bowles again. The man had stopped moving. His eyes were wide open and staring.
Luke took a deep breath, and then exhaled all the way. It was like the air going out of a tire. He kneeled down next to Bowles again, and pushed the man’s heavy body to the very edge of the cliff. Then he rolled it over the edge. Seconds later, he heard it crash into the trees and underbrush four stories below. If he hadn’t been quite dead before, that had finished the job.
Luke shook his head. He steeled himself. It was going to be a hard night. He felt something settling over him, a feeling of anger, but even more than anger. It was a feeling of murderous rage. These people, Darwin King and whoever was protecting him, thought they could act with impunity, steal children, do whatever they wanted, kill whoever they wanted. But they couldn’t.
He looked over the edge. In the darkness, he fancied he could just make out Bowles’s body down there, limbs spread at strange, broken angles. Like a matchstick man whose little wooden arms and legs had been snapped.
“Goodbye, Bowles,” Luke said.
* * *
There was nothing to do but go forward.
Luke moved higher through an enormous boulder field. The stones formed a winding stairway. Someone had put effort into this, in the days when this was a hotel. It had all been for nothing.
Ahead, the trail meandered up a steep switchback. He followed it. He climbed another ladder of iron rungs, and a few minutes later, another one. He did not stop. He did not think. He moved quickly, in a kind of a daze.
He was strapped now with two MPs, six extra ammunition magazines, the sniper rifle case, Bowles’s pistol and his own, knives, and grenades. He was like a mule, the things he was carrying, but he barely noticed.
Soon, the trail leveled off and he walked through some dense forest, before one final climb to the summit. Just in front of him was a steep drop-off, a dozen stories down a sheer cliff. The spot offered a commanding view of the shimmering water disappearing into the dark distance. Buzz was dead. Bowles was dead. No one was left but Luke.
He turned and the mansion was right there. Many of the rooms were lit up, as were the grounds surrounding it.
It was still a bit above him, but not by much. Now he got low to the ground, and moved in a crouch. He needed to go quickly. He was in a vulnerable place. Though he was dressed all in black, to the right kind of eyes, he should be easy enough to spot.
The fence was just ahead of him. He crept closer. He stared up at it—two stories high, looping razor wire at the top. There was another fence ten meters beyond the first one. The space in between was the dog run.
He looked both ways—no dogs here at the moment. He dropped his backpack on the ground, dug through it, and pulled out the heavy wire cutters. He crouched at the bottom of the fence and touched it with one finger. Nothing. It was not electrified. Give Trudy credit. She had guessed correctly.
He started at the very bottom, and began to cut away the fence. He cut the metal loops easily, with a little bit of pressure—Snip! Snip! Snip! Even so, it was going to take a while to cut a hole that he could fit through, enter the dog run, and then cut another one through the other fence.
A few more snips, and the first hole was open. It was just enough space for Luke to slither through. He took out his pistol and threaded the silencer to the barrel. He bent back the fence, pulled it as far as it would go, and ducked under.
His pack snagged on a jagged edge for a few seconds, but he pulled it free. He dragged the rifle case in behind him. He had so much stuff, he was like the Joads driving across country to California.
He placed the silenced pistol on the ground and kneeled by the next fence. From the corner of his eye, he caught a movement. He looked to his right. A large black dog with a massive head and jaws trotted toward him along the narrow gap between fences. It growled deep in its throat.
He watched it come. It was an adult male Doberman, ears pinned back.
There was another one behind the first.
“Don’t come here,” Luke said.
He heard a sound behind him, a breath, a heavy pant—he turned, and here came another one the other way.
Three adult male Dobermans, all converging at once. They were coming.
He grabbed the gun and bounced to his feet. Instantly, he assumed a shooting position—it was a deep squat, arms out, two-handed shooter’s grip.
The first dog was the biggest and most aggressive. He came straight on without hesitation. He didn’t bark. He approached in a loping run, and then launched himself from about five feet away.
Everything slowed down.
Luke fired.
CLACK!
The gun made that sound that silenced guns made. To Luke, it always sounded like someone punching a typewriter key.
The dog’s massive head snapped sideways, its entire body following, carried by its own momentum. It crashed into the fence and fell to the ground. It landed on its back, and did not move.
The next dog came.
CLACK!
It rolled over, its paws scrabbling at the dirt, a high whine in its throat. It dragged itself to his feet and began to stumble away. Luke shot it again, to end its misery.
CLACK!
The last dog was there. It stared at Luke, and Luke stared back. He looked deep into its eyes. There was a spark there, of intelligence, but also an uncertainty. The dog wasn’t sure if it wanted a piece of Luke anymore.
“Don’t do it,” Luke said. “Go home.”
The dog turned away, whined, then trotted off down the dog run.
“Good dog.”
Luke looked at the dead dogs. One of them had its teeth bared as it had died. It was brutal to look upon. This was a brutal job. Now he had killed two dogs. They’d made him do it. Who used dogs like this? Who put dogs at risk like this?
Bad people, that’s who.
That surge of anger, of rage, went through Luke again. He had to stay calm. He had to stay poised, and in control. Angry people slipped up, made mistakes, and died in situations like this. In the end, he had benched Ed for being angry. That’s what it was. Anger would get you killed.
And yet, anger was driving him now. He raced along with it, surfing a wave of anger. He was angry at them, at Darwin King, at Henry Bowles, at whoever and whatever they were. He was angry at the world, the violence of it, the injustice, the unfairness. And he was angry at himself.
&
nbsp; He went to the fence, kneeled, picked up the wire cutters, and got back to work. In a few moments, he had cut a hole in the second fence.
He squeezed through it, and now he was inside the compound.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
11:05 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Headquarters of the FBI Special Response Team
McLean, Virginia
“Tell me,” Don Morris said.
The entire building was darkened, except for this conference room, Don’s office, Trudy’s office, and the strange dense warren of wooden shelves, laptop computers, desktop computers, standalone hard drives, wiring, electronic equipment, and empty soda cans that Mark Swann called his office. The overhead lights weren’t on in there, but the machinery gave the place an eerie glow.
Swann was good at his job. Don wouldn’t normally let an office like that stand. In this case, he was prepared to make an exception.
The three of them—Don, Trudy, and Swann—sat in various corners of the room. It was late, and he was sure these kids wanted to go home, but Don needed to see this through. They had been flying blind until moments ago, no idea what was going on out there, on the ground or in the sky.
“We got a message from the jump plane,” Swann said.
“Okay.”
“It was sent in the code we’ve been using, and it took me a few minutes to decipher it. It reads Big man did not go. Boss held him back. Proceeding to destination 2.”
Don sighed. “What does that mean?”
Swann shrugged. “Well, Ed is the big man. The boss is Stone. It sounds like Stone told Ed not to jump with them. Why he would do that is beyond me. Destination 2 is Airbase Amistad in Honduras. For some reason, Ed is still on the plane and the plane itself isn’t going back to Jamaica. It’s going to Honduras instead.”
“I know that much, Swann. I mean, what is the reasoning behind it?”
He looked at Trudy.
Now she shrugged. Her eyes were tired behind her red glasses.
“Stone always has his reasons. He goes by instinct. You know that. It sounds like he kept Ed on the plane, and told them to go to Honduras in case he needed backup. Why he would go with Henry Bowles and not Ed is anybody’s guess.”
