CHAPTER 2
When someone envisions hell it usually involves fire, lava, tormented souls dancing about in eternal damnation as demons jabbed them in the ass with pitchforks. Those people never spent a morning trekking through the Florida jungle. Max Ahlgren paused to remove and stow his GPNVG-18 panoramic night vision goggles, one of the few pieces of tactical gear he’d brought along. The mosquitoes, voracious enough while he’d been moving, now descended on any bare skin they could find to feast in earnest, insect repellent be damned. Sweat popped and trickled from every pore in response to the stagnant, stifling humidity.
Could have been much worse, he supposed. I could be doing this with a full combat load like we had to at Camp Gonsalves.
He felt rather naked, actually, accustomed as he was to beginning his missions laden with over a hundred pounds of weapons, ammo, explosives, rations, and miscellaneous gear. But that much gear would have slowed him. His purpose this morning was to subdue and capture, rather than the usual seek and destroy, and required weapons he didn’t normally carry: pepper spray, a million-volt stun baton, and a rag saturated with chloroform that he kept in a zip-lock bag in his cargo pocket. Non-lethal toys. His target would be armed, pissed off, and extremely dangerous, so he’d brought his Glock 21, Ka-Bar combat knife, and four extra magazines of ammo in case he needed to save his skin. Instead of his usual combat-load plate carrier, he’d opted for a low-visibility model worn beneath the camo hunting suit he’d purchased upon arriving in Florida. “Matches the local woods better than any other pattern,” the salesman at the big-box outdoor store had assured him. “The turkey hunters round these parts swear by it.”
“Good,” Max had responded. “Because that’s just what I’m after.” The biggest turkey of them all.
Like that wary and elusive wild bird, Max’s quarry, Swift Carter, possessed incredibly heightened senses. Surprising him on his own property would be a challenge; taking him alive even more so. As much as Max desired to kill the man, Swift was no good to him dead. First, they needed to have a little talk regarding a certain incident.
Max drank what remained of the electrolyte water in his hydration pack as first light intensified in the overcast sky, dimly illuminating woods of palmetto and pine with the thick trunks of cypress intervening in the many boggy depressions. Quicksand had been his primary concern when traversing this area during his recon. Even a man of his size and strength—6’4” and well over two hundred and thirty pounds—would have a hard time freeing himself from a mire.
He resumed his trek, moving as quietly as possible. The dwarf palmettos covering the forest floor precluded total stealth, however. Fortunately, millions of insects and dozens of birds had his back, singing their morning songs loudly enough to eclipse the noise of his movements.
Soon, he approached the tree line that marked the boundary of Swift’s property. There was no perimeter fence. Swift lived off the grid and generated his own power, but he hadn’t the juice to electrify a lengthy fence. And a normal chain-link fence, even topped with razor wire, would only inconvenience a true professional—the only sort who would come after Swift—so why bother erecting one? To ward off unwanted guests, Swift posted his property with slightly altered no trespassing signs. On each one, the generic warning line of violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law had been crossed out with black marker and replaced with scrawled black letters reading: Violators will deal with me! Max could only imagine what that might entail. Swift was capable of dishing out any number of grisly punishments.
Max drew his pistol, dropped to the prone position, and low-crawled the last few feet to the edge of the woods. The view was familiar by now: a field of knee-high grass and weeds giving way to a pond surrounded by a low chain-link fence meant to keep the occupants, several alligators of varying sizes, from running amok on the property. A narrow canal perhaps ten feet across flowed into one end of the pond and out the other through thick metal grating. Through unkempt ornamental palms, Max glimpsed the glint of water in two other ponds. He knew from satellite imagery that there were six ponds altogether connected by the canal, which flowed to the swamp that backed up to the property. Not even Swift Carter could prevent Google Earth from invading his private domain. A well-trodden footpath ran alongside the near pond’s fence, and all the ponds featured a platform built over the water at one end for feeding and observation.
The house and a couple of outbuildings were located on the other side of the property, which Max had reconned as well. Swift’s dogs had gone apeshit when they’d picked up his unfamiliar scent, but no one had been home at the time.
He knew the general layout of the place well enough. And he knew the time was right.
Upon arriving in Florida, Max had hidden a motion-activated wireless video camera in the brush across the road from the gate to Swift’s mile-long driveway. Swift’s wife, Imogene, left the premises six mornings a week at around 0415 to open their bait and tackle shop. The shop was closed on Mondays, but today was Tuesday, so she would be at work. Max had seen no sign of Swift until two days previous, when he arrived home from wherever he’d gone, probably on a merc job, though he claimed to be retired.
While waiting for Swift as the days dragged by, Max considered infiltrating the farm while Imogene was working but had opted not to. Paranoid as he was, Swift probably had video surveillance cameras posted all over his property or perhaps employed other old-school methods to detect trespassers. Max couldn’t take the chance. If Swift had even the faintest idea that Max was coming, he would never be able to take the man on his home turf.
This is it. He’d waited so long for this moment to finally deal justice to one of the men who had helped murder his wife and young son. And he’s only the first.
Flat as a tabletop, the field was roughly fifty yards across. Max started low crawling, taking his time, bound for a patch of stunted palms near the feeding platform. Upon reaching the palms, he came to his knees in the sand for a look around. Not surprisingly, he spotted a video camera mounted high on a palm tree adjacent to the water inside the fence, pointed toward the sandy path. How many haven’t I seen? Hopefully, Swift wasn’t in the house hunched over the monitors right now.
As he pondered his next move, Max heard a faint yet guttural voice from nearby that put his worries to rest. A moment later, the smell of putrefaction assaulted his nostrils. Had to be feeding time for the gators. Swift was partial to filet mignon, but the gators had less distinguished palates.
Max stood, darting across a patch of overgrown grass to another copse of dwarf palms to get a good look at the next pond. There, on the end of the ramshackle feeding platform, stood the massive silhouette of Swift, his back turned to Max, a once-white plastic bucket stained the color of blood at his feet. He stood slightly shorter than Max, and the breadth of his shoulders made him seem almost as wide as he was tall. A filthy white t-shirt, tucked into a pair of tattered camo cargo shorts, strained to contain his bulk—brawny muscles secreted beneath a thick layer of fat. He wore no shoes but would never have left the house without strapping on a weapon or two. The leather gun belt around his waist held a combat knife and a blued high-caliber revolver, an old Smith & Wesson with classic walnut grips and at least an eight inch barrel.
Swift loved only three things in life: reptiles, vintage guns, and for some reason, his fat and rather homely wife. But reptiles had come long before the others. Henry Carter grew up at a Florida tourist trap, a squalid roadside reptile zoo not far from his present farm. Huge from day one, at the age of fourteen he began wrestling alligators under the name Gator Hank, entertaining crowds of tourists until his father, a noted herpetologist, drank the zoo into bankruptcy. After that he enlisted in the army, matriculated to the Green Berets, and eventually became a CIA field operative, where he earned his facetious moniker. Due to his monumental size, he tended to move slower in the field than his comrades, though in a fight—particularly hand-to-hand—he could still strike faster than
any alligator.
Max first met Swift during his time with the CIA. They’d never gotten along, each man fancying himself the better leader. Twice they butted heads while working counterterrorism missions and would have come to blows once, had they not been separated by other operatives. Their rivalry resumed when Max left the CIA for a career as a private security contractor, the same field Swift had entered upon leaving the Agency several years prior. He was no less cold-blooded than the beasts he loved so dearly. When Swift had the chance to be his own boss, he gave his callous nature free rein.
Less than a year before, Max, Swift, and three other men infiltrated and destroyed a research facility run by the infamous rogue geneticist Gideon Wilde, located on an island off the coast of French Guiana. Wilde escaped, alas, but as reward for taking down the operation, Max learned the identity of one of the men who had murdered his family.
And here we are.
From the bucket, Swift removed a piece of carrion, slimy with dripping blood, some sort of disgusting organ from a prey animal.
“Come on over here, Betsy, old girl,” he called across the pond.
An alligator roughly fifteen feet long, this pond’s only occupant, gained its stubby legs on the far bank. It trotted to the water, entered with nary a splash, and cruised across the pond like a patrolling submarine, only its yellow, unfeeling eyes visible.
“That’s it, girl, come on.” Swift dangled the gator’s reeking breakfast over the platform’s edge. “Open up. Talk to me, Betsy. You know you gotta speak.”
A groan like a giant’s burp emanated from below the platform.
“Good girl!” Swift dropped the stinking offal, after which Max heard a sizeable splash. Chuckling with amused satisfaction, Swift reached into the bucket for more food. This time Betsy sounded off without hesitation, eliciting laughter from Swift.
Damn shame. If you’d worked your way through college and become a herpetologist, we wouldn’t have to go through all this.
Max allowed Swift to feed Betsy, which took a couple of minutes. Still hungry, Betsy groaned to no avail, then started splashing around.
“That’s all of it, girl. You know how it works.”
Max used her noise to cover his movement as he stepped from the palmettos and onto the path, the red dot in his reflex sight aimed just to the left of Swift’s spine, poised for a heart shot if need be. “Hands up, Carter!”
Swift went rigid. “Ahlgren. Finally found your stealth, I see.” As he spoke, his right hand crept toward the Smith’s butt.
“Don’t even think it. You’re not fast enough.” Max advanced a few steps.
“Can’t argue that.” His hands went into the air.
“Take that gun belt off, nice and slow.”
“What the hell’s this about?”
“The gun belt, asshole. Make it happen.”
“Okay.”
Max stepped onto the platform as Swift unbuckled the leather belt. “Hold it over your head.” Swift complied. “Now toss it in the pond.”
Swift balked at the order and flinched. “Aw come on, Max, not my Model 29.”
“’Fraid so, Dirty Harry.”
“Well, shit.” With no choice but to part with his .44, Swift flung the belt into the water. Betsy lunged toward the splash.
“Now turn around slowly.” Swift’s front half was no more appealing than his rear. Beneath an iron-gray flattop, sweat beaded on his forehead, whether from the humidity or the moment of truth, Max couldn’t say. Almost as ugly as his beloved wife, Swift’s blunt, jowly face looked like something a kindergartner might have sculpted from lumps of clay.
“Can I put my hands down now?” he asked.
“If you can keep ’em out of your pockets.”
“I might just.”
Max ignored his ambiguous response. “You know why I’m here.”
Swift managed to look remorseful, even sad. Max couldn’t have given a shit less about his emotions. “Yeah. I knew this day would come. Who told you? Marklin?”
Max didn’t respond.
“Yeah, that’s about what I thought, fuckin’ shady old jarhead. You should put him to the question.”
“It’s crossed my mind.” Thomas Marklin, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and former liaison to the CIA, had inducted Max into the Agency thirteen years before. For that reason alone, Max didn’t wholly trust the man. These days Marklin worked for some sort of think tank/security firm in DC that catered to high-level government officials. He also served as Max’s informant, a DC insider who had a little dirt on just about everybody.
Swift chuckled, spat a stream of tobacco juice over the platform’s rotting, rickety railing. “You think I’m the only one he knows about?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. And right now, I don’t give a shit. I know for certain that you were on Jarvis’ team.”
This time Swift guffawed, his stout gut shaking in time to his mirth. “Jarvis, eh? That ain’t his real name, you know.”
“Then what is it?”
Swift’s face went flat, then grimly hostile. “Go ask Marklin.”
“Not necessary. You’ll tell me soon enough. I’ll also have the names of the other two pieces of shit on that squad.”
“Cleghorn’s already dead, not that that was his real name.”
“Thought so.” Max had harbored suspicions regarding Cleghorn, a CIA operative he’d met on the Guyana mission, who seemed to recognize Max even though they had never met before. When Max last saw him, Cleghorn was lying in a wrecked French jeep, his body riddled with dozens of 9mm holes. Swift had gunned him down for no apparent reason. Not apparent at the time anyway.
“Maybe you should thank me. Consider it repentance for my sins.”
“If you want to repent, give me two other names. You’re gonna give ’em up anyway; whether we do this the easy or hard way is up to you.”
Swift shrugged his ox-like shoulders. “I like things as easy as the next guy.”
“Then tell me their names right now. If I believe you, I’ll put a slug in your forehead, quick and merciful. I’ll even feed you to Betsy if you’d like.”
Swift took a step forward, then another. “And let me guess: the hard way is you chaining me to a chair and toasting my balls with a blowtorch.”
“If you’re lucky. I’ve stepped up my torture game as of late. Practice makes perfect.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Max, but neither option works for me. I’m not goin’ anywhere with you unless I’m in a rubber bag… if you think you can put me in one.”
“I can, and that’s far enough, Carter.”
Swift had continued his slow and—in his mind, perhaps—surreptitious advance. They now stood about ten feet from one another. His grin burned red with tobacco juice. “My ranch, my rules. Shoot me if you like, but the secrets die with me.”
“Bring it.” Max holstered his gun and took up the stun baton.
Swift closed the last few feet and lunged for him with outstretched hands like two sides of beef. He could ruthlessly tear a man apart with his bare hands—Max had seen him do it. Getting to the fight was his weakness. Max feinted right, darted left, and drove the stun baton into Swift’s ribs before he could grab it in one of his meaty hands. Electricity discharged with a crackling pop. Grunting, Swift twitched and veered to the right, hitting the railing. The rotten wood yielded beneath his weight, the crack loud as a pistol shot, yet somehow the railing held.
The high-voltage charge would have dropped most men but not the likes of Swift Carter. Down but not out as Max descended on him with the baton, he caught Max’s right wrist in both hands. The end of the baton crackled as Max involuntarily pressed the trigger button in response to Swift’s vice-like grip. Max tried to drive a left into his face, but Swift heaved a mighty shove and pushed him away before he could connect, driving him back several feet.
To his alarm, Max realized he was now the one cornered on the platform.
Swift advanced, slow and wary this time. With his left hand, Max pulled the pepper spray cannister from his belt, raised it, and shot a stream at Swift’s face that flew over his head as he ducked and charged. Max triggered another stream that caught Swift right in the eyes an instant before he plowed into him. The platform shook when they went down in a tangle, Swift growling in agonized rage over his burning eyes. But he kept his discipline, didn’t try to rub the spray away, which would only drive it further into his eyes and pores. He still had the upper hand as he lay atop Max, who drove the baton into his ribs once more, delivering a one-second discharge that rolled Swift off him.
Now back in command, Max got to his knees and aimed another baton thrust at Swift’s gut as he lay there blinded and reeling. But blindness and pain were only minor obstacles to a man of Swift’s fortitude and training. Though he had only a vague idea of where Max might be, he launched a vicious kick that caught Max on the chin and sent him reeling backward, darkness enveloping his consciousness in the moment before he crashed into the platform railing. The warped gray wood gave a little beneath his weight and momentum, cracked once, but did not shatter. Max shook his head, tried to clear the bursting fireworks from behind his eyelids.
A wrecking ball slammed into Max’s solar plexus, driving the air from his lungs, followed by a wicked uppercut that snapped his head back. His mind swam with vertigo, as though he were drifting in outer space.
From somewhere he heard, “Like them stun batons, eh?”
Max twisted to evade the baton to no avail. The sting in his ribs made him pop and twitch, his incapacitation complete. He pressed the trigger button on the pepper spray, only to find he’d dropped the canister. Swift jabbed him in the neck with the stun baton, laughed, then drove one of his beefy knees into Max’s balls.
Max felt as though every neuron in his body had overloaded and short-circuited. His vertigo took on new dimensions, physical dimensions, as he felt Swift first pull him forward, only to shove him backward an instant later. The railing shattered with a final mighty crack.
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