by Roger Weston
Finally, he got to where the ledge was slightly wider. Cautiously, carefully, he baby-stepped again and again. Soon he had rock under his feet from heel to toe. He resisted the urge to kneel and kiss the rock, which he actually wanted to do.
The worst danger was past, but he still had thirty yards to go, and even now it was a ledge for the desperate and the doomed.
Then he stopped sidestepping because he heard a familiar sound.
A helicopter was rising up the mountain. That could only mean one thing. Lazar had called for backup.
The chopper was buried in the clouds below, and Chuck continued to sidestep along. He was completely exposed. His chest heaved. He fought off the waves of panic that sprung through his nerves.
He had no chance to escape.
At that moment, his wife’s face flashed in front of him.
A thousand nights he’d awakened in a cold sweat by the terror of falls visited on him by a thousand nightmares. Fear reigned in the darkness and the light. Who could find the faith to overcome it? He was still breathing rapidly, but now he thought of his sweet wife. He remembered her as she was at her glorious best. He saw her angelic face and heard her angelic voice. He saw her reaching out toward him, and he reached out from the cliff, stretching his arm toward her. His fear was gone. He was no longer afraid of falling. He knew that if he fell to his death, that he would be with her again and everything would be alright. Then he began to tip forward… adrenaline flooded his brain. He dropped his hand and was able to right his balance.
Step left. Step left. Hurry up! Slow down. Careful.
The chopper materialized out of the clouds, a hundred yards out, and Chuck froze as it turned sideways and the side door swung open.
Chuck found himself looking eye to eye with a gunman. Time moved in slow motion. The shooter had a long face that slowly broke into a smile as he lifted his rifle. The shooter took aim and opened fire. Rock chipped away as three shots struck the cliff just inches from his body.
Chuck twisted and maneuvered his M16 into position and fired the M203 grenade launcher. As soon as he did, the helicopter erupted into a fireball in mid-air. A swarm of deadly fragments hit the cliff all around him, but he wasn’t hit. He saw the spinning rotors drop into the clouds.
As fast as it had arrived the helicopter was gone. Moments later, Chuck heard the wreckage land on the mountain slope far below.
Step left. Step left…
Chuck was almost to the end of the ledge, but knew that if he got off the cliff, Lazar’s Black Cobra assassins would be there waiting to hunt him down.
***
With his fanatical black eyes, General Lazar watched the screen in a state of disbelief. He watched the video footage of the helicopter as it blew up and dropped into the clouds. He stood there for what must have been a minute. He was numb. His mind was not working. Nobody had caused him more trouble than Chuck Brandt.
Then Lazar got ahold of himself. He picked up his microphone and said, “Muerte, come in. Acknowledge.”
“I read you. Over.”
“Brandt downed the helicopter. Get over to the rim and shoot him off the edge.”
CHAPTER 20
Brandt climbed up the ledge and over the ridge, arriving back in the citadel that dominated the top of the old Inca stronghold. Hiding behind a stone structure he peered around the corner and saw a dozen more round buildings. He could also see the foundations for hundreds more that had crumbled or been dismantled at some time in the past. Chuck limped from one stone structure to another, ducking behind them when armed thugs ran past, armed for combat. It didn’t escape his attention that they all seemed to be running toward the rim, just above the ledge that he’d just come from.
Warily, he slipped into one dwelling because a team of six Black Cobras was running up behind him.
After they passed, Chuck glanced around the inside of the dwelling for a second, then he left the structure and continued on towards his destination.
Fifty yards further down the road, he heard yelling in the distance. He ducked down behind a stone foundation and listened. Black Cobras were yelling back and forth.
“Do you see him?”
“No, I didn’t. Where is he?”
“Did he fall off the cliff?”
“It’s too cloudy to tell. He must have fallen.”
Chuck crawled along from behind one rock foundation to another.
As he got closer to the main rebuilt area of the citadel, several of the restored round stone buildings came into view. Chuck snuck up to one stone house and peeked in through the window. No Lazar.
He stood up by another stone house and looked in the doorway. Nothing there. He moved quickly, threading a needle between the updated round dwellings, checking each one. Then he came into a stone-walled quad and saw stairs that led back into the underground. He was hurrying past the stairway when he heard the voices of an approaching Black Cobra hunter-killer team. He had no choice. He entered the catacombs once again.
CHAPTER 21
Carrying his M16, Chuck moved like a shadow through the underground labyrinth. As he came around a corner in the passageway, a man lunged out at him, attempting to stab him with the bayonet on the end of his rifle. Chuck batted the gun sideways and spun on his momentum. Swinging his rifle around, he slammed the butt into the side of the man’s ribs, causing him to groan and collapse. Unfortunately, the man was wearing a flak jacket, and he wasn’t badly hurt. He landed on his back and fired at Chuck point blank as Chuck dove around the corner just in time. Chuck listened carefully. When he heard the man running, he swung his M16 around the corner and aimed, but it was too late.
Chuck limped after him, but took a side tunnel instead. He saw a pair of shooters roaming an offshoot. He found an air hole behind a mummy nook and climbed up the funnel. He came out in a rugged area at the back of a large underground cavern. He started to walk through the darkness when General Lazar and three henchmen stepped around the corner, guns raised.
CHAPTER 22
“End of the line,” Lazar said. “You were a challenge. I’ll give you that much. It’s rare that I find a man whose skills in action are a match for mine. Yes, you challenged me.”
“I challenged your hired killers. Best as I can tell, you didn’t do much.”
Lazar’s eyes glittered. “I am the brain. These men are my hands and my feet. They carry out my plans just as your American football players follow the orders of their quarterbacks.”
“I never saw a toad-faced troll like you playing quarterback.”
Chuck saw Lazar’s facial muscles twitch with fury. Anger filled his eyes.
“Put the gun down!”
Chuck obeyed.
“Now kick it away.”
Using his foot, Chuck shoved it off to the right.
“Let me shoot him,” said a black-clad thug with a hateful smirk.
Lazar raised his hand. “In a minute, Salvador.”
To Chuck, Lazar said, “I misjudged you, Brandt. You’re just another malcontent, and I’ve killed too many to count. A man’s last words are always his sharpest. I should know. You see, I know something about you. I know that you’re a patriot. That makes you a dinosaur. The country that you love so much—your wonderful United States—it is history, except it won’t even be that because we re-write history to suit our own purposes. Freedom will fall and very soon. You can count on that much. It will have to because hundreds of thousands will die. You had your chance to do something about it today, but you failed.”
“You’re a sad person, Lazar.”
“I am a genius. Believe me. When the public is ignorant and passive, history repeats itself.”
“There’s one other thing that repeats itself.”
“What’s that?”
“My gun.” Chuck dove and rolled over by his gun, which he snatched up and came up firing. He sprayed bullets at the second gunman and dove into the shadows behind the stone altar. He dropped into the rat-hole that he’d just emerged fr
om, and staggered through the cave into an underground pyramid. In great pain, he climbed to the upper passageways above the galleries, but then he heard someone following.
Salvador burst into the chamber firing, emptying his clip in a fit of rage. In that moment, Chuck dropped onto him from a ledge just over his head. Still hanging from the shelf, Chuck wrapped his thighs around Salvador’s head and crossed his legs under his chin.
It had seemed like a good move on the spur of the moment, but Chuck soon regretted it when he lost his grip on the ledge. Essentially riding on Salvador’s shoulders while he squeezed the killer’s neck with the power of his thighs, Chuck had ignited the man’s survival instinct and turned him into a raging beast. In a fit of desperation, Salvador dropped his assault rifle with attached flashlight. He ran forward, and the slanted inner ceiling of the top of the pyramid pushed Chuck backwards until he was falling. He pulled Salvador down with him, but landed hard on solid stone. He not only took a blow to the head, but took a hard shot to his hip and ribs. The blow was so hard that Chuck allowed himself a few seconds before he got up.
Unfortunately, that was a second too long. Salvador gained his feet and whipped out his machete. From the light of the flashlight on the floor, Chuck could see the long blade as Salvador jabbed it at him.
“You stinking American, I kill you.”
He swiped the machete at Chuck, who dodged and avoided it by just inches. Chuck shuffled around and almost stepped into a big hole in the floor that dropped down into the lower chambers of the pyramid. In fact, Chuck knew there were men down there because another flashlight beam was shining up through the hole.
Then a man from below yelled, “That’s right, Salvador, kill him.”
Salvador lunged at Chuck. The blade flashed through the air like the propeller blade of an airplane. Salvador slashed left and then slashed right. He was trying to back Chuck into a corner and was doing a good job of it. Salvador’s swipes were controlled so that it was hard to take advantage of his moments of vulnerability. The man was clearly a fighter who knew the strengths and weaknesses of an attacker.
After two swipes where the blade nearly ripped his face open, Chuck ran. He leapt over the square hole in the floor, but Salvador was right on his heels.
Chuck spun around just in time to duck a machete attack that threatened to take his head off. He dove and rolled and came up into a crouching position.
Now Salvador was backing Chuck up again, right toward the hole in the floor. When Chuck started to angle away from the hole, Salvador lashed out with his machete. Chuck ducked and delivered a chest kick that launched Salvador backwards. The Black Cobra fighter somehow landed on his machete. It was not a pretty sight.
Salvador screamed a couple of times, then lost consciousness, permanently.
“Salvador!” The voice was from the chamber below. “Are you alright? Sal!”
Chuck heard the sound of a cocking gun in the chamber below. There was no way out for him except through that space. For the second time in one day he was trapped.
“You’re dead, Brandt.” It was Lazar’s voice now. “We’ve got seven shooters down here. Surrender or die.”
Chuck rifled through Salvador’s rucksack. “Alright,” he said. “I’m coming down.”
CHAPTER 23
Lazar waited with rising satisfaction. He was relishing the moment that was about to unfold when Brandt surrendered. Lazar would personally execute him with all the Black Cobras watching in order to inspire them with even more fear.
Lazar and his revolutionaries stood around in the dim chamber, waiting for Brandt’s arrival. Nobody said a word because they were listening for him. Lazar looked over at Rico, a flat-faced killer with bloodlust in his eyes. Beyond him, stood Chano, a brutal thug with a goatee and a mustache. He had big rounded shoulders, big neck, and big gut. Rico had a long history of kills to his name. Then there was Teyo and another stone-cold killer named Kemen, both dressed in black and awaiting their next victim like panthers in the night, and there were a couple of other Pacura men just waiting to deal with Brandt. Lazar had brought these Pucura men here for a good reason. They were known for a particularly brutal form of torture. Lazar bestowed the title of ‘Alpha’ to this team of assassins. They were his inner circle and he took them with him everywhere he went.
Lazar could hear some scuffling through the hole above him in the stone floor between the two levels.
“Hurry up, Brandt. You’ve got another twenty seconds. Then we’ll gas you out of there like a sewer rat.”
A large object dropped down through the hole in the ceiling. The rope went taut as a body swung on the end of the rope. Lazar and all his men jumped back, startled by the incident. One man screamed in horror. Lazar dove for cover. As the body swung back and forth, Lazar cursed Chuck for hanging himself and denying Lazar the satisfaction of killing him. As he rose, he saw the body swing around, but it wasn’t Brandt; it was Salvador—and he’d been run-through with a machete.
Just as Lazar yelled a curse, a grenade from above dropped into the chamber, blowing away the corpse and shaking up the thugs who took cover just in time, eliminating two that didn’t.
***
Two seconds after the grenade detonated in the chamber below, Chuck slid down on Salvador’s rope as he twirled around firing on automatic. His bullets raked the lower chamber in all directions. He heard ricocheting bullets.
A bullet glazed his arm, tearing shallow flesh, and Chuck lost his grip and fell. When he hit the rock floor, his head took a blow that made him see static for a few seconds. Fortunately, it was not fatal. More bullets flew in his direction, and he barely made his escape down a floor hatch.
As he scrambled through darkness and felt spider webs wrap around his face, he heard Lazar’s frantic voice.
“Follow him. Bring me his body!”
For twenty minutes, Chuck crawled through the ancient labyrinth that ran beneath the lost city. He crawled through shafts, shimmied down rat holes, and darted down passageways. At one point, he heard Lazar’s voice and this time it wasn’t on the television monitors. It was close by and resonating through the tunnel.
He was skulking down a dark tunnel when he passed a wall phone at a dimly-lit intersection. A little red light was glowing, indicating that the communication system was in use. He picked up the phone and heard Lazar giving a man orders. Chuck interrupted and said, “Lazar, you should have been good to your wife and daughter.”
“What do you know about that, Brandt?”
“Your wife is a good woman,” Chuck said.
“Look what happened to yours. You’re responsible for her death.”
“You lie, Lazar. Your wife lives in mortal fear of you. You’ve imprisoned her and tried to control her. You’ve done that to her, and she is nothing but an angel.”
“Don’t you dare mention her! You know nothing about my wife. My daughter betrayed me. She betrayed me because of you! I’m going to carry your head on a stake after the ants lick it clean. All you men who are listening in—I want every man on the hunt. Fifty thousand dollars’ cash to the man who brings me Chuck Brandt alive so I can gut him like a pig. Muerte, did you hear that? Where the hell are you?”
Chuck continued to stagger through the tunnels, he was forced to get on his back and slide beneath several recently-installed tripwires. He’d barely gained his feet when six henchmen came around a corner. They’d been right behind him.
When they opened fire, Chuck bolted around the next corner. He stretched his M-16 forward around the corner and squeezed off a few bursts. This was answered with a swarm of gunfire. They went back and forth several times. Then Chuck ran.
It sounded to Chuck like a dozen killers pursued him. They’d heard his footsteps as he ran away. Now, he heard theirs as they tried to earn the fifty grand that Lazar was offering for his head.
All keyed up with greed and adrenaline, at least some of them forgot that they’d set up a trip wire at that corner. Chuck felt the concussion wave
of the explosion as he fled. Explosions ripped through a cavern, probably taking out half a dozen Black Cobra revolutionaries. Evidently, the roof was stable in that section because other men kept after him.
Chuck was lost in the underground maze. He had no idea how to get out of there so he kept moving, always watchful, always thinking about how to get Lazar. He entered a well-lit section that featured reinforced Inca construction where the walls and ceilings joined in stone-block arches. The shape of the arched tunnels here reminded him of subway shafts he’d seen in big cities around the world, the main difference being that these were constructed in blocks of stone. No doubt the Incas worked countless Chachapoyas to death to create this underground labyrinth. It was only fitting that Lazar took this place over. Truly, the architecture would rate among the wonders of the world on par with the Roman aqueducts. Unfortunately, Chuck wasn’t on a sight-seeing tour or he might have slowed down to take pictures.
As it turned out, he was slowed down for another reason. He heard the voices of two assassins just around the corner, approaching from a side tunnel.
Chuck pressed his back against the wall. As they entered the main shaft, he said, “Drop your guns and get down on the ground.”
It didn’t go the way he’d hoped. One of the brutes charged him, raising his own rifle as he did so. Chuck squeezed off a burst and dropped the first fighter, but the second piled onto Chuck, knocking him down. Chuck got up fast, but now neither one of them was armed.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Chuck said. “I would have let you go.”
This was rewarded with a disgusting and profane response.
“Have it your way,” Chuck said.
“Sure, this is your grave, capitalist pig.” The heavy aimed a blow at Chuck’s neck, but Chuck countered it with a vicious hit to the soft underside of his wrist. The killer let out a scream of pain.
As a follow through, Chuck slammed an open palm into his face. The killer landed on his back, but swung right back onto his feet, spitting blood and cursing Chuck’s name.
