TWELVE
Hades followed Mercury and Atlas through the black smoke filling the library, rising from the bookshelves to the right of the door. They realized quickly that Mars’s satchel charge had collapsed a large portion of the floor of the library and the bathroom. Water shot from pipes, and dust and smoke rose from a twenty-foot hole in the hardwood.
The three men covered different portions of the room with their rifles, until Mars entered behind them. He looked at his handiwork and said, “Shit. Sorry, boss. Little overkill, I guess. House is a piece of shit.”
Before Hades could respond, a voice came through his headset. “Thor for Hades. I have one unknown subject on the rear veranda. Looks unarmed. Do I take the shot?”
Thor was in overwatch on a nearby hillside and had a better view of the veranda than the men in the smoke-filled room. Hades headed to the French doors, now ripped and shredded; glass and plaster and wood were everywhere. He pressed his transmit button. “Negative, hold for target ID.”
“Holding,” came the terse reply.
Hades spun out through the ruined doorway, sweeping his rifle right to left. He saw a middle-aged man on the veranda in front of him, with one leg over the railing. The American mercenary raced forward and grabbed the man by the arm, then swung him off the rail and down to the ceramic tiles. He held his gun on him and actuated the weapon light in the man’s face.
It was Clark Drummond, his target.
The older man shouted in panic. “You can’t kill me! Call your masters! You can’t—”
“Oh, okay,” Hades said, and then he shot Drummond twice in the chest from a distance of three feet, and then a third time between the eyes. Blood and tissue splattered across the tile.
Hades clicked his mic and spoke authoritatively. “Target is KIA. Mercury, pull the hard drive from that computer.”
“Roger that, snagging it now.”
Hades broadcast to all elements now. “Are we clear?”
One at a time his men began responding, each assuring that their area was clear of any hostiles.
But only five of his seven men counted off.
“Hades for Ares. Hades for Atlas.”
After a few seconds a reply came. “Atlas for Hades. Ares is down! Say again, Ronnie’s down!”
“Where are you?”
“Hallway.”
Hades found Atlas on his knees over Ares, a thirty-eight-year-old Kansan named Ronnie Blight. Atlas had ripped off the man’s body armor and was now performing frantic chest compressions.
Hades shined his light on Ronnie now. A jagged bullet wound had opened his neck; blood was everywhere, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding from the hole any longer.
“Heart’s stopped,” Hades said. “He’s dead.”
Atlas sat back on his haunches, giving up on the compressions. His gloves and bare forearms were covered in blood. “Shit!” he shouted in frustration.
Hades sighed, looking down at his fallen man. Just then he began to feel the heat from the growing fire in the library reaching him out here. He knelt down and took the corpse under his arms, began lifting him up to drag him towards the staircase. Ares’s head hung back, his eyes open, and blood stained the forearms of Hades’s tunic. But he’d only begun to move him when Atlas squeezed him on the shoulder. “We gotta exfil, boss. This whole place is gonna go up in flames.”
But Hades was barely listening. He transmitted to his men, even though most of them were within a few feet from him, standing over the body of their comrade. “Anybody see any other hostiles?”
“That’s a negative,” Mercury replied as he came out of the burning room, slipping a computer hard drive in his bag as he did so. “Gunfire came through the door, tagged Ronnie as we covered Mars while he prepped the C-4. I never saw the shooter.”
“Me, either,” said Atlas, then added, “but I caught a pistol round in my plate right before Ronnie dropped.”
Several feet away from the cluster of men around the body, Mars came out of the bathroom, having just rechecked it for hostiles. He brushed the doorway with his right arm as he exited, and then he winced with pain. He touched his gloved hand to a spot right below his elbow on his forearm.
“Shit, guys. I took one, too. Not bad.”
Atlas stepped over to him to check it out, pulling out his flashlight as he did so. He put it away when he saw that the growing firelight would provide plenty of illumination.
“Yep. That ain’t shit, bro, but you definitely got lucky.”
Hades put Ronnie Blight’s body back down in the hallway, and stood back up. “Three of us got hit? By Drummond?” He turned and moved quickly back into the burning library. He ducked below the ever-thickening smoke and sprinted back to the veranda. Here he found Zeus already searching Drummond’s body.
“No weapon, boss. He either lost it or tossed it.”
As Hades weighed the slim possibility that Drummond might actually have been the man who killed Ares and shot both Atlas and Mars, the voice of Thor, still positioned on the opposite hillside with a long gun trained on the veranda, came over the net.
“Thor for Hades. Be advised, I’ve got four squirters movin’ down the driveway. They’re staggering along like they’re hurt or on drugs or some shit. No weapons visible. I got a shot if you want me to waste ’em.”
“Negative,” Hades said. “Intercept. I’ll come to your poz.” He then rallied his remaining men, and they all began climbing down the rope hanging from the veranda, leaving their dead comrade behind to be consumed by the growing fire.
Court Gentry woke slowly, shook his head to clear it, then felt the lumber and plaster pressing down on his back. He pushed with all his might and after several seconds managed to free himself, though when he looked around he saw it was too dark to make out much of his surroundings.
Water from burst pipes somewhere above rained down on him, and though he smelled smoke, he could see no light from a fire here. He climbed out of the tub, pushing his way through flooring that had collapsed with him, and slowly oriented himself.
He was dazed still; his hearing protection had saved him from burst eardrums, but the jarring impacts had taken a toll on his already weakened body. He had to reach out to a wall to hold himself up as he shook the haze and exhaustion from his brain several more times. He wasn’t badly hurt, he realized, especially after what had just happened, though the surgical wound in his shoulder screamed in agony and blood dripped from his nose.
He didn’t know if Drummond had made his way off the veranda, but he knew he had to go and find out.
He’d lost the Glock and the Walther somewhere during the explosion, but he did have the HK VP9 he’d taken off the bodyguard in his dump pouch. He drew this and headed for the stairs.
Seconds later he was back in the upstairs hallway, kneeling low to stay out of the thick smoke. He saw a body outside the doorway to the library; the man had been stripped of his weapons by his mates, so Court just moved past him, then directed his attention to the fire raging in the last place where he’d seen Drummond.
Shit.
Court didn’t go directly into the fire. Instead he found a bedroom across the hall, pulled the comforter off the bed, went into the bathroom, and threw it in the tub there. He turned on the shower and let it run over the fabric, then looked back over his shoulder only to find the bedroom filling quickly with smoke as the fire spread. He dropped to his knees to stay below the rising black cloud, then sloshed the comforter around in the water for a few seconds, making certain the entire thing was soaked. Then he rose again to his feet, pulling the heavy waterlogged comforter around his shoulders and head as he moved towards the fire-engulfed library.
Moving into the room, he looked immediately towards the veranda but couldn’t see it through the smoke and flame, so he dropped to his kneepads and began crawling, still holding the wet comforter around him for protection.
But as he made his way to the doorway outside, he stopped his advance. There, some twenty feet away from him, a clearly dead Clark Drummond lay on the tile.
Court shifted his attention to the far wall of the room. To the right of the old executive desk there, the floor had caved in, taking bookshelves, most of the bathroom, and Court down with it. But when he checked the desk, he was happy to see both the computer and the printer still there on a waist-high stand.
The heat was all but unbearable, so Court rose, ran for the printer, and snatched the one sheet of paper on top. He stuck it in his dump pouch without looking at it, then reached for the computer. Upon inspecting it, though, he saw that the back had been removed. He felt around inside and realized the hard drive was gone.
“Dammit,” he said to himself. Hanley was going to blow a fucking gasket.
He considered checking all the drawers in the desk but almost instantly decided against it. He had no choice now; the acrid smoke and the flames were forcing him out of the library. Forgoing any more of his rushed sensitive site exploitation, he turned and made his way towards the veranda, though he couldn’t see anything in front of him.
Once outside he found that the flames behind him were still too hot to bear. He threw off the comforter and ran for the railing, passing Drummond’s corpse as he did so. He fell over the side of the veranda, landed on the steep gradient of the jungle hill thirty feet below, and began rolling down, faster and faster.
Mercifully, he came to rest in especially thick jungle foliage, and here he spent nearly a minute coughing and wiping soot out of his eyes.
His camo pants were burned below the knees, but he didn’t feel like he’d been burned himself. Still, his wound stung as hot as the fire he’d just braved, and his body was racked with pain and exhaustion.
He vomited into the brush around him, ravaged by both his sickness and the smoke.
Tonight was a nearly complete mission fail, no doubt about it, but now the only thing he could do was cut his losses and get out of the country without getting caught.
Court rose slowly, stiffly, and began moving down the jungle hill, some forty yards away and obscured by trees from the driveway on his left.
At the bottom of the driveway, three men and a woman were on their knees with their hands behind their heads. Thor guarded over them with his rifle as Hades appeared out of the darkness behind the prisoners. He wore a large shemagh bandana around his neck, and this he pulled up to cover the lower half of his face as he stepped in front of them.
Looking at the four, he instantly took the woman in the dark skirt as the one in charge due to the fact that she was older than the men and possessed an air of authority. He said, “English?”
“Yes,” she replied, her face straight ahead and her fingers still laced together behind her head.
“Who are you?”
“SEBIN. Venezuelan intelligence.” She looked up to the man now. Unafraid. “Who are you?”
Hades didn’t answer. “Which one of you killed my man?”
The woman shook her head. “These are bodyguards. They were disarmed, and we were all drugged. We didn’t shoot anybody.”
Hades cocked his head. “Who disarmed you? Who drugged you?”
One of the young security men said, “He was fast. He was alone. He knew what he was doing.”
Hades narrowed his eyes. “One guy?” He wasn’t buying it.
But all four nodded, and to Hades they appeared adamant.
“What did he look like?”
The woman shook her head. “Not like you. Not like any of you. He looked . . . normal.”
“That’s it?”
“A gringo. That’s all.”
Now the American mercenary sighed audibly. “A gringo.” He thought things over a moment, then said, “I don’t like losing a dude. I’d love to shoot you four as payback, but I don’t have approval for that shit.” He considered using the sat phone to call his masters in the Middle East to see if he could terminate Venezuelan intelligence officers. But he decided against it. “Fuck it,” he said. “Stay right here for twenty minutes, then get up and go.”
Mercury had collected the panel truck the team had arrived in, and he pulled up now. Hades and the others climbed in, and then the truck backed out of the driveway and began hurtling down the hillside towards Caracas.