by Mark Dawson
“I have some experience in this kind of work—it isn’t the first time that I’ve done something like this.”
“But…” His protest died out, and there was just the buzz of static on the line.
“I’ll call when I have her,” Milton said.
“Please be careful.”
“I will,” Milton said. “There’s one other thing: if anything happens to me, you’ll be contacted by a friend of mine. His name is Harry. He’ll tell you everything that I know. Who is involved, where they are keeping her—everything. I hope that won’t be necessary, but, in the event that it is, I want you to know that you can trust him.”
Milton paused.
“Senhor Smith?” the judge said. “Hello? Are you still there?”
“You’ll have her tonight,” Milton said. “Goodbye.”
He ended the call.
69
Milton lifted the roller door, ducked inside, and lowered it behind him. He followed the path between the trash and other detritus until he reached the false wall. Marks had already slid the door out of the way and was inside the hidden cupboard at the back.
He turned at the sound of Milton’s approach. “All okay?”
“Fine,” Milton said. “If anything happens to me, call Saverin. Tell him everything.”
“I will,” Marks said. He might have said that he hoped that wouldn’t be necessary, but he did not; he knew, just as Milton did, that the night was going to be difficult, and there was no point in wasting time on platitudes that might suggest otherwise. “Let’s get you equipped,” he said instead. “Are you going in big?”
“Reasonably big,” Milton replied.
Milton took off his jacket, took down one of the ballistic vests that hung from a peg, and slid his arms through the sleeves. His muscles ached; it was a reminder that he was far from one hundred percent. He would not have been allowed to go into the field after having been involved in a crash so recently, but, once more, caution was not something that Alícia Saverin could afford.
The vest was made of Nomex and had pockets on the front and rear for armour plates. It had an upside-down scabbard on the left side of the chest with an RAF Aircrew emergency knife fixed inside it. The scabbard was spring-loaded to keep the knife in place, and the weapon was released by pressing the two levers on each side of the handle. The blade was rustproof and had been kept in decent condition with regular sprays of lubricant.
Marks found an eight-inch-by-ten-inch plate in a cupboard and slid it into the front pouch. It was heavier and much bulkier now, but the addition would lend him significantly more protection. There was a very good chance that he would need it. The Nomex was dark and reasonably discreet against the black T-shirt that he was wearing. Milton put his regular jacket on over it.
Next, he took a plain leather sports bag from a cupboard on the floor and unzipped it. He couldn’t take anything too bulky, so he ruled out all of the long guns. Instead, he selected a Heckler & Koch G36 for his main weapon. It was the K model with the shorter barrel, designed specifically for the German KSK special forces. Milton had had experience with the weapon at the training facility in Wiltshire before he’d left the Group. It was made from polymer fibre plastics and was light and durable. It was a 5.56mm weapon, and Milton stocked up with six full magazines. He put them and the gun into the bag.
Discretion was less important now, and he wanted a bigger pistol to exchange for the Walther that he had been using. Marks offered him a SIG Sauer P320. It held seventeen rounds in each magazine; he took three, shoved one into the magwell, and put the pistol and the two spares into the bag.
He was nearly done, but not quite.
“Grenades?”
“What do you want?”
“Flashbangs.”
One of the cupboards contained a box that held a selection of grenades. Marks took out six G60 grenades and dropped them into the bag. Milton zipped it up and hefted it; it was already heavy.
“Anything else?” Marks asked.
“Night vision.”
Marks opened another box. He took out an NVG monocle with a head mount composed of lightweight straps that ran around the crown, a forehead pad and a chin cup. Milton slipped it on and adjusted the straps until he was sure that it was secure and comfortable. The monocle sat over his left eye. He removed the monocle and put it into the bag with the rest of the equipment, grabbed the stick of camo paint that Marks offered and dropped that inside, too. They went back into the garage, closed up the cache, and made their way outside again. Marks gave the roller door a downward shove, sending it clattering down the rails to crash against the ground, and secured it with the padlock.
“Ready?” Marks asked him.
Milton slung the bag of gear across his shoulder. “Let’s get started.”
70
The traffic was heavy despite the hour as they drove to the Hill that accommodated the sprawling favela. A road branched off the main route, and Marks headed up it, but they were only able to drive for five minutes before the road narrowed until it was little more than an alleyway, with a series of other passages and alleys feeding off it like the tributaries of a river.
“This is as far as we can go,” Marks said.
Milton had studied the map and had discussed the local geography with Paulo. This wasn’t a surprise.
“We’ll do it like we agreed. I’ll take the rest on foot.”
Marks eyed the passers-by suspiciously. “I won’t be able to stay here,” he said. “Too much attention—I’ll stick out a mile. There was an opening back there.” He angled his head toward the bottom of the Hill. “On the right. Did you see it?”
Milton said that he did.
“I’ll put the car in there and wait. If it gets too hot, I’ll move somewhere else, but I’ll be close. Call me when you’re on the way down again.”
“You’ve got your weapon?”
Marks reached down beneath his seat and took out the Walther that Milton had exchanged for the SIG.
“When was the last time you fired it?” Milton asked him.
“I think I’ve got this, John.”
“Just be careful.”
Milton reached for the door handle.
“You know where you’re headed?” Marks asked.
“Up,” Milton replied, nodding to the confluence of alleys and passages, all of them tracking their way up the Hill. “And I can track Paulo. I can see where he is.”
“Good luck, Milton.”
Marks put out his hand and Milton shook it. “Thanks, Harry. For everything. I’ll see you later.”
He got out of the car, took the bag from the back seat, and followed the quietest alley around a bend until he found somewhere that he wouldn’t be observed. He checked the holstered SIG that he wore at his waist, tightened the straps of the ballistic vest, and then arranged his jacket so that it covered both the vest and the gun. He put a cap on his head and pulled it down to cover his face, slung the bag over his shoulder, and set off again.
71
Milton heard the distant thump of bass. He followed the sound of the music until he reached Rua Um, the road that snaked up the Hill and around which the favela had coalesced. There was a late-night chemist on the other side of the road, and the posters in the window advertised shampoo and headache pills. The road ahead was blocked by a makeshift barrier: fuel barrels, shopping carts, and old vehicles had been put together to prevent anyone from continuing up the Hill. The blockade wasn’t guarded, but, as Milton looked through the flickering flames of a bonfire that had been set just behind it, he could see men with automatic rifles. He doubted that was the extent of the defences. He knew that the favela had not yet been subdued by the military police, and he doubted that they would choose a night like this to try to begin an operation. No, Milton thought, these defences were against the other gangs who might regard what was going on tonight with jealous eyes and seek a slice of the action for themselves.
Milton watched the men from the other sid
e of the barrier and determined that they were not particularly vigilant. He waited for the next large group to squeeze around the barrier and followed close behind them. The guards were smoking cigarettes—Milton recognised the sweet smell of dope—and, perhaps since the rest of the group was comprised of kids who were obviously here for the party, they paid him little attention as he slipped through the line.
Paulo had explained what was happening tonight: this was a baile funk, a street party organised by Red Command, the cartel that controlled the favela. The traficantes had cordoned off the Hill partway up, transforming the area into what was effectively an enormous open-air nightclub. The street was thronged with people. Local entrepreneurs had set up counters made from breeze blocks and planks of wood; they sold bottles of beer and scooped ladles of something alcoholic from giant bowls and poured them into paper cups. Dealers were selling cocaine out of large plastic bags. Shirtless teenage boys paraded up and down the street, their sweat-slicked torsos decorated with tattoos that extolled the gangs and denigrated the police. Others held aloft AK-47s, and Milton heard the sporadic rattle of automatic gunfire as the rifles were fired into the sky. Apart from the AKs, Milton saw men and women with M16s and rocket launchers. No one cared.
There was no sign of the police, and Milton could see that it would have been impossible for them to intervene, or even to try to prevent the multiple breaches of the law that were being committed with impunity.
He followed the road to a section where it switched back on itself to continue its climb up the contours of the Hill. A square had formed around the turn, with businesses on all sides. The square looked as if it was the epicentre of the party. One end of it had been given over to a wall of loudspeakers, and deafening, aggressive local rap pounded out of them so loudly that Milton could feel each thudding beat in his gut. The square was packed with revellers of all ages: youngsters, middle-aged parents, and even the elderly all danced together and whooped along as an MC with a microphone led a call and response routine. Milton’s Portuguese wasn’t good enough to translate it, but it was evidently directed at the authorities. The music changed, and ‘Fuck Tha Police’ by N.W.A. roared out.
Milton stopped and looked, unable at first to see how he could make his way farther up the Hill. The space was crammed with people, and two large bonfires, one burning an effigy of the president, spilled smoke into the night sky. A firework whooshed up into the darkness and exploded, scattering colourful sparks down onto the rooftops, and, as Milton blinked the glare of its detonation from his eyes, he saw what he was looking for. There was a narrow alleyway, little more than a blade of darkness between two buildings; it would have been very easy to miss it. He turned sideways so he could slip through a gap between two women who were shaking their arms to the repetitive thud of the music and made his way to the mouth of the alley.
It became gloomy. The alley wound left and right as it traced a path away from the square. There was a little light from the bonfires that lit the way, but, as Milton took a sharp right-hand switchback, that light was extinguished and the alleyway became almost completely dark. The buildings reached higher overhead, the gap between them distinguished by a scattering of stars and the occasional flash of a firework. Milton proceeded, realised that he had taken a wrong turn, and retraced his steps to the junction where he had gone wrong. He was about to take the alternative branch when a man appeared from around a corner, his face briefly illuminated as a rocket detonated in the sky overhead. He had painted his face to look like a zombie, with pale skin and gore around his mouth. Milton stepped back; the man hooted at him before staggering away to be absorbed by the darkness.
Just a drunk.
Milton turned into the passage from which the man had emerged and continued to climb.
72
The alley narrowed the farther Milton followed it. The buildings drew closer on either side until the walls brushed his shoulders. He could see why Garanhão had chosen an area like this for his base of operations: apart from the fact that the locals were most likely on his side—because he either paid them or frightened them—the warren of narrow streets and passages, full of choke points and bottlenecks, would have been almost impossible to assault. A single operator had a chance, but a group of police or soldiers would have had to proceed with extreme caution.
The passage opened out a little so that he could walk normally again, but it remained restricted and claustrophobic. Milton gazed up and saw that he was only about two-thirds of the way up the Hill. He reached a branching point and turned left into it, following the path as it ascended a flight of uneven stone steps. Milton stopped counting at the hundredth step, his quadriceps burning as he lugged his bag of gear up and up and up. The passage wound left and right as it climbed, cleaving between the flanks of exposed brick houses, across a tiny plaza—thankfully deserted—and back to the steps once more.
Milton kept climbing for another five minutes until the steps stopped and the passage emerged from between the buildings to deposit him in another plaza. This one was much larger than the one he had passed through earlier. He waited in the shadows and observed his surroundings: there was a tiny chapel across from him, a wooden cross fixed to its roof, and a corrugated metal door standing open so that the light from inside could spill out. The chapel was hemmed in by houses that were distinguished by the numbers that had been spray-painted on their sides. He saw a large water tank made from rusted metal, with a nest of rubber hoses emerging from an opening and snaking across the plaza to supply the houses through doors and windows. The plaza was atop the Hill, and, when Milton looked through gaps between the houses, he could see the staggering vista beyond: the rump of Sugarloaf Mountain, the statue of Christ the Redeemer with His arms spread wide and, laid out beneath him, the lights of downtown Rio. Volleys of fireworks were being launched from the favela. One would explode, sending its colourful debris back down to earth, and then, a moment later, the eye would be drawn to another and then another. The booms rolled over the city, a hundred different peals of thunder.
Milton turned his attention back to his immediate surroundings. There were more people here. A group of teenage boys came out of a brick shack with a wooden patio that had evidently been turned into a bar. Two of them carried four large one-litre bottles of Itaipava while the other two carried AK-47s. Milton doubted that they were older than fifteen. He waited in the shadows as they passed, listening to their raucous conversation until he couldn’t hear it any longer. The bar was doing a brisk trade. The proprietor had set up a makeshift barbecue, with a metal grid laid on two brick pillars with a fire burning beneath it. A man was cooking chicken on the grid, selling the cooked meat to a loose queue of waiting customers. A half-dozen little kids gambolled across the cobbles of the plaza, dragging a kite behind them and trying to get it to take flight in the limp breeze. They whooped with pleasure as a gust of humid wind caught the kite and sent it high overhead, the string cracking as it sought to break free. Others were turned away from him, leaning on a rickety fence that marked a steep drop, watching the colourful display over the city.
Milton took out his phone and swiped across to the app he needed. It allowed him to plot his position against the GPS signals of the two others who had agreed to be added to his account. His position was represented by a solid blue dot. There were two rectangles below the map: one was labelled ‘M’ and the other ‘P.’ He tapped the rectangle for ‘M’ and waited as the map updated, showing a second dot that was to Milton’s south, farther down the Hill. Marks hadn’t moved far from where Milton had left him. It looked like he was in position for the extraction. That was good.
He tapped the rectangle that was marked with a ‘P.’ A third dot appeared, this one to the west of his position. Milton tapped the dot, and the phone reported that it was a quarter of a mile from his present location. Milton turned to the west and looked: a road fed into the plaza. It ran along the top of the Hill, following a ridge. There was a warehouse there, perhaps three hundred me
tres from the plaza. Milton recognised it from Paulo’s video.
Milton heard a cry of dismay and turned to see the kite floating up into the darkness, the string snapped. The children hooted and hollered, and the men and women at the bar turned to watch them. Milton seized his opportunity, stepping out of the alley and following the shadows that gathered around the buildings to skirt the open space until he was at the road.
He walked quickly—but not too quickly—in the direction of the warehouse.
73
Milton closed in. The warehouse was made out of bare brick that had not been well cared for: chunks of the wall were missing, and the rest had been covered in graffiti. Milton walked on. He saw an alleyway just before the building; it plunged down between two shacks made of brick and sheets of corrugated metal. Feral dogs pawed at the dirt in front of the houses, slinking out of his way as he cut between them and stepped down into the alley. The alley bent around to the west and approached the warehouse from the side facing the slope. It was the route Paulo had taken on the video.
Milton moved more slowly now. He would have had a difficult time explaining to a local why a gringo was at the summit of Rocinha, and he knew that his difficulties would be multiplied now that he was close to the seat of Garanhão’s empire. He dropped his right hand to the holster, popping the snap button and releasing the loop holder so that he could take out the SIG quickly should he need to.
The alley reached the building and opened into a road that, while wider, was still only wide enough for a car to pass with a few inches at either side. The road climbed up from the Hill, levelled out for a short stretch, and then descended to a roller door that Milton knew from the video opened into the main body of the warehouse. Milton waited in the darkness that surrounded the junction of the road and the alley. He looked back to the roller door and saw that it was closed, with a little light from the interior leaking out from beneath the bottom edge. His eye was drawn up to the roof of the building. He saw the shape of a man. The man moved, and Milton saw that he was carrying a long object: a rifle, most likely an AK.
