by Peter Nealen
The Colonel really was pissed. He usually wasn’t big on roughing up prisoners.
“I promise,” she said sweetly. “I’ll take good care of him for you.”
The glare she turned on Hernando was probably not very reassuring to the young man, or to the whore in his bed.
***
Flanagan and Gomez were on point again. Hancock found himself behind the two of them, trying to slip through the dense trees on the hillside with as much grace and silence, and failing.
He wasn’t even that bad at fieldcraft; he’d been pretty damned good at it, once upon a time. He wondered if all the time trying to stay home with Tammy, trying to be a normal guy, despite the fact that she had never really appreciated it, had taken his edge away.
He forced the thought back. He knew that final argument with Tammy was going to eat at him for a long time, but combat wasn’t the time or the place. He forced himself to focus on the here and now, the next step through the thick vegetation as they got closer to the ramshackle cinderblock and brick houses at the edge of the barrio.
They were quite some distance north of where Burgess had been taken. If they’d kept trying to search a grid around the wreck for him, they’d never have found him. And with the police still out there with the streets around the wrecked Kangoo blocked off, going through the barrio to get to the target had been a non-starter.
Not that it had ever been that good an idea in the first place, even without the police presence to worry about.
Flanagan and Gomez paused, and Flanagan pointed off to the left a little. Gomez nodded, the movement barely visible through the branches in the green circle that Hancock could see through his PVS-14s. The two of them moved out again, angling away from the building directly in front of them.
Hancock followed, feeling like he was battering his way through the woods like a herd of elephants. He was actually being a lot quieter than most people would be, but compared to the two ghosts ahead of him, he was being noisy as hell.
Flanagan stopped suddenly, holding up a fist. Hancock didn’t see it immediately; visibility was short, and it was dark. He took two more crackling steps before he saw the hand and arm signal and froze, throwing up his own clenched fist for Brannigan to see behind him.
Then Flanagan lifted his pistol, and with two faint but harsh snaps, fired twice at something Hancock couldn’t see.
Then the two pointmen were moving again. Hancock followed, Brannigan bulling his way up next to him. They had to be getting close to the target building; Hancock was sure that Flanagan had just dropped a sentry.
Sure enough, in another ten paces he was out of the trees and on the dirt and gravel alley that ran alongside the low, unfinished wall around the target house. Even as he emerged from the woods, Gomez’ pistol spat, and another body hit the ground just inside the wall.
Then they were moving, Flanagan and Gomez already going over the wall, dropping to the ground inside the courtyard and moving toward the door before anyone inside could figure out that anything was amiss.
Hancock went around, grabbing Curtis and Bianco, who were carrying the only rifles they’d brought on this hit, since only the pistols were suppressed, and setting them at the corners to keep any interference away. Then he was joining the stack, just as Brannigan kicked in the door.
The Colonel was a big man. And when he was angry, no simple wooden door was going to keep him out. The jamb cracked and the door juddered inward with the first kick, and then the Blackhearts were flooding into the house.
While it was almost pitch dark outside, the lights were on in the house, probably kept on by the tiny generator chugging back behind it. The Blackhearts flipped up their NVGs as they entered, keeping their pistols leveled.
The door opened on the dining room, with a tiny kitchen to the left and a staircase going up, with a door to a back room next to the stairwell. Two lamps lit the filthy room as the mercenaries stepped inside and got out of the doorway as fast as possible, weapons tracking toward each danger area.
Hancock went through the door just as the first Columbian came through the door to the back room, a blocky machine pistol in his hand. Flanagan and Gomez both shot him at the same time, bullets tracking up his torso and dumping him in the hallway. Then they were at the door and going through.
With Flanagan and Gomez taking the back room and Brannigan and Kirk going into the kitchen, Hancock made a beeline for the stairs, his own pistol leveled, and Wade’s suppressor just visible over his shoulder through his peripheral vision. The two of them hurried up, muzzles tracking toward the single door at the top.
***
Flanagan stepped over the crumpled body in the doorway, plunging through the opening and stepping quickly to the right to clear the fatal funnel. The man rolling out of a filthy cot and reaching for a shotgun got a rapid pair of shots to the chest, and he flinched as the 9mm bullets punched through ribs and into lungs, but he was still moving as Gomez stepped in, cleared the door, and shot him three more times as fast as his trigger could reset. Bloody spots grew on his white t-shirt, and he flopped backward until a final shot went through the bridge of his nose and he went limp, leaking blood and brains onto the cot.
Almost before Gomez’ first shot, Flanagan was turning to clear the corner to his right, the one he couldn’t see from the doorway. There was another cot, but it was empty, dirty sheets thrown aside. It must have belonged to the man he’d shot in the hallway.
There was no sign of Tom Burgess.
***
The suppressed gunshots from the back room were barely audible on the stairs. And the door was still shut. Hancock hoped that if Burgess and his captors were up there, they couldn’t hear anything.
He could hear voices from inside as they reached the door. Wade squeezed behind him as he moved to the doorknob, keeping his 9mm pointed at the joint between the door and the jamb. Behind him, Jenkins and Javakhishvili were on the steps, poised to follow as soon as the door opened.
Hancock tested the knob. It turned. Unlocked. He threw the door open and Wade went in almost before he’d been able to let go of the knob. Hancock clapped his hand back on his pistol grip and followed.
The room was small, and the window had been boarded up. There were three men on their feet and a fourth sitting on a chair with his back to the door, next to a worklight.
The worklight was trained on Tom Burgess, battered and tied to a chair, but alive.
Wade shot the first man at bad-breath distance, keeping his pistol close to his chest and firing two shots into the man’s chest as he turned. As the man doubled over around the impacts, Wade shifted to the second man behind him, pumping a Mozambique drill into him so fast that the pause between the two shots to the chest and the third to the head was almost imperceptible.
Hancock took the third man standing. He was a step behind Wade, and saw the pistol start to come out of the man’s pants, so he forewent the pair to the torso, punching his Px4 out straight and two-handed, the elevated night sights above the suppressor settling just below the man’s right eye as he squeezed the trigger.
The report was a bang, but a distinctly muted one. The man’s head suddenly vanished from Hancock’s sight picture, dropping toward the floor as he fell like a puppet with its strings cut.
The man in the chair had reacted quickly, lunging forward and tackling Burgess, knocking him over backward, still tied to the chair. The man was midway through trying to circle around behind his prisoner when Hancock shot him in the guts.
The man jerked, losing his momentum and collapsing around his midsection behind Burgess, who was trying to tip the chair over to clear Hancock’s field of fire. Wade cleaned up his first target with a single shot as he stepped over him, shifting his point of aim toward the wounded man.
“Show me your hands,” Hancock said, though he suddenly knew that he wasn’t going to spare the man. They didn’t have the resources for prisoners, these gangster bastards had nothing to do with their real targets, and he was pis
sed as hell that they’d kidnapped Burgess and dragged the Blackhearts into their little power play.
The man was groaning, still mostly in the fetal position. Wade and Hancock advanced on him as Jenkins and Javakhishvili crowded into the room behind them. Hancock had the sudden horrifying thought that Jenkins was about to try a “hostage rescue” shot from the doorway, even though the gangster’s head was way too close to Burgess’s, especially from that angle.
Then the man gave him his opening. He must have thought that he was about to be taken by the police, and wasn’t going to go that way. He jerked the pistol out of his waistband, waving it toward Burgess.
Hancock didn’t know if the man was even mentally coherent enough past the fiery pain in his guts to know where he was pointing the pistol. But he moved just enough that both he and Wade had shots.
The two 9mms clapped almost as one. Two bullets smacked into the man’s head with a sound like a mallet hitting a melon. He flopped, the pistol falling from nerveless hands on to Burgess’s chest.
Burgess peered up at them, one eye half-swollen shut. “Thanks, boys,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Your timing couldn’t have been better. I was running out of bullshit to tell them.”
Chapter 12
Dust billowed from under the tires of the pair of Hiluxes following a white XTerra as they raced across the salt flats to the south of Laguna Pozuelos. The barren plains of the Altiplano were framed by towering, treeless mountains in the distance, including the range that the two vehicles were making for. Some distance away, a herd of llamas looked up from the scrub they were chewing to watch the vehicles go by.
Winter sat in the vehicle commander’s seat, his ARX160 next to his leg, studying the imagery of the target site on the small tablet, about the size of a smartphone, that was strapped to his forearm. It was new; the flex screen meant that he could wrap it around his arm without a bulky, flat contrivance flapping around like an oversize wristwatch. He could also dial the screen’s brightness down to nothing, making it readable in full light or with night vision, though the latter was harder due to the limitations of NVGs’ focal lengths.
The tablet was currently sending him the feed from the tiny quadrotor drone that he had out in front of them. Commercial imagery was out of date, and deliberately so; the Organization had the financial pull to make sure that anything available to the public didn’t include more recent photos of Site 117, or any of their other similarly sensitive installations. It was still remotely possible that something had gotten out, but it was easy to publicly dismiss such things as Photoshopped, the product of tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.
Winter didn’t pay much attention to such things; he was a quiet, private man. The few times he’d heard of some of the conspiracy theorists on the internet, he’d simply frowned, somewhat puzzled. Many of the theories were so bizarre that he had a hard time believing that anyone could actually believe in them. They had to be entertainment, nothing more. The fact that he was, in truth, employed by an organization that matched some of villains in the slightly less over-the-top theories didn’t bother him.
He spotted what he was looking for, and held out the screen so that Beta could see it. Beta was a dark-skinned man with hawkish features, of indeterminate origin. He didn’t speak often, but when he did, his accent was faintly Midwestern.
“Here,” he said. “That is what we are looking for.” He pointed north. “About fourteen kilometers, at the base of that finger.”
Beta simply nodded, turning his eyes back toward the rutted track that passed for a road out on the flats. A few minutes later, he turned off the road, taking the narrower, rougher track north toward the hills above the lake.
***
The two vehicles paused just long enough to let Zeta and Epsilon off with their rifles. The two men jogged away, through the low, scrubby vegetation, heading toward overwatch positions about four hundred meters from their destination. They were already visible to anyone watching from the ranch houses ahead, but Winter was willing to take the risk.
He was reasonably certain that Site 117’s security didn’t extend out this far. The people at that ranch had no idea what was about to happen.
The three vehicles trundled into the yard, rounding what looked like an old fountain to the right. The buildings, a whitewashed adobe, a white-painted, sheet-metal shop, and a red adobe barn, formed an L-shape around the fountain. A couple of ancient, battered pickups sat next to the barn, and a single tree grew in front of the adobe.
Two people were waiting on the adobe’s porch, along with a scruffy-looking dog. Somewhat to Winter’s surprise, the man’s receding hair was blond, turning white. The woman was clearly an Indio, her black hair already turning gray.
Neither of them was armed. That was good. It would make things easier, both now, and later.
Winter got out of the XTerra and came around the hood while the others stayed in the vehicles. They were all dressed similarly, in tough but overtly civilian outdoor clothing. It was all in various earth tones, rather than the brightly colored stuff that some people used, but none of it looked military, and none of it was camouflaged.
“Hello!” he called out, using his best New Jersey accent. “Do you speak English?”
“A little,” the man said. His accent was Dutch, and very thick. Winter had known that there were quite a few Dutch, Germans, and French living in Argentina; he just hadn’t quite expected to find a Dutchman this far up on the Altiplano. “What do you want?”
“We are part of a study group from the International Sustainable Stewardship Council?” Winter said, waving in the general direction of the three vehicles. “We are doing a survey of the ecosystem around Laguna de Pozuelos. We were hoping that we could stay here with you for a week or so while we do our work. We can pay well, and we promise we won’t get in the way of your lives or your work.”
The old Dutchman glanced at the dark-haired woman, who was probably his wife, though Winter was experienced and jaded enough not to assume it anymore, and they conversed briefly and quietly. Winter couldn’t quite make out the language, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t Dutch.
“Most groups like yours have tents or trailers,” the Dutchman said, squinting at them.
Winter looked sheepish. “And we were supposed to,” he said apologetically. “Unfortunately, it looks like somebody lost them on the way here. No idea where. They were supposed to be in Salta when we landed, but there was nothing. Hell, half our equipment was missing, too. Not enough that we can’t keep driving forward and collecting our data, but it’s a real annoyance.” He smiled and spread his hands. “All I can say is, ‘please?’ We’re going to be sleeping in the cars for the next couple of weeks otherwise. And like I said, we can pay. We won’t be freeloading.”
The old man still looked doubtful, but the woman was speaking. He still couldn’t identify the language, and presumed that it was one of the native languages still spoken in some of the wilder parts of South America. The man looked down at her, then glanced at Winter and the other men in the trucks and the SUV doubtfully. He was wavering, though; the woman was probably advising him to be hospitable. Perfect.
Finally, the man sighed, said something long-suffering to the woman, who smiled radiantly at Winter. He returned the smile, as the old man said, “We don’t have much room, and we don’t have beds. You’d have to sleep on the floor.”
Winter shrugged. “We have sleeping bags, at least. We could even stay in the barn, if that would work better for you. We really don’t want to be much trouble.”
The old man nodded resignedly, as the woman chattered and hurried inside. Winter waved the all clear to the rest, and they started getting out of the vehicles, pulling out their rucksacks as they did so. Zeta and Epsilon could wait out on overwatch until after dark, when he’d send Beta and Eta out to relieve them. He wanted someone on watch out there until they were sure that Site 117 didn’t have this side of the mountains covered. They were only about eight kilometers f
rom the installation as the crow flies, after all.
That eight kilometers was going to be interesting, especially given how rough the terrain was. He was already feeling slightly out of breath and light-headed; they were well over three thousand six hundred meters’ altitude, and the air was thin. They technically didn’t need supplemental oxygen, but it sure felt like they did. This was going to be an interesting operation.
The others started carrying their gear inside the barn, which had a couple of horses and several pack llamas inside. The loft was going to have to be where they bedded down, at least for the moment. They had bags for the weapons and combat gear, so he wasn’t too worried about the old man and his wife seeing what they were carrying.
Not that it was going to be a problem for long. Winter was already looking around for a good place to bury the bodies once they disposed of the old man and his wife.
This had to be a clean operation. No one outside the Organization should ever be able to put the pieces together afterward. And Winter prided himself on being a thorough, careful man. He never left loose ends untied.
***
Dalca led the way back to the Ciela International villa. As soon as he saw that they were headed that way, Kirk spoke up.
“If this Dalca’s organization is leaky enough that we almost lost Tom, why the hell are we going back to one of their buildings?” he asked.
“Because we’re on a shoestring down here, and we don’t have any other support,” Brannigan said over his shoulder as they pulled up to the villa. The security guards outside waved them through and they trundled through the gate. “Like it or not, we’re tied to her organization for this one. Just keep your eyes open and your weapons close at hand.”
Kirk just grunted, looking out the window and eyeing the Ciela International guards. As disgruntled as he was with the situation, he was still watching them critically, taking note of their kit, their weapons, the way they conducted themselves and watched the perimeter. They were a bit stiff; he didn’t think they had a lot of experience. Their kit was high-end, though, as were their weapons. He couldn’t tell exactly where they’d come from, but he suspected that they were mostly ex-cops and one-enlistment former military.
