Ghost Sniper (17 page)

40

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

00:30 HOURS

In the dark of night, the first two Ruvalcaba men stole silently, albeit somewhat awkwardly, into the bedroom of PFM Agent Luis Mendoza's twelve-year-old daughter, clumsily clamping a chloroform-soaked cloth over her mouth and nose. Not until the girl was secured with nylon cable ties and removed from the house did the other men move on Mendoza and his wife.

Agent Mendoza was smacked awake to the sight of his wife sitting on the edge of the bed with the barrel of a nickel-plated revolver stuck into her mouth.

The blood in his veins ran cold with horror. “Take me,” he said calmly to the four men in black ski masks. “There's no need to involve my family.”

Mendoza and his wife were thrown onto their bellies, secured with cable ties, and put to sleep with chloroform before they, too, were removed from the house.

A half hour later, Mendoza was brought back to consciousness with a bucket of water. He was strapped naked to a metal office chair in a dingy auto repair garage. His wife and daughter were tied naked, also soaking wet, to a support beam in front of him, their arms stretched above their heads, wrists bound with wire. There were eight masked men standing around, two of whom were in the midst of sexually molesting Mendoza's wife and daughter.

The wife and daughter were sobbing with fear and revulsion, and the sight of the abject terror in the eyes of his daughter—the light of Mendoza's life—was more than he could endure. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and he began to plead.

The largest man, the apparent leader, came forward and sat down backward on an old wooden folding chair, resting his arms along the chair back. “You are going to give me the names of the agents you work with, amigo. Also, the names of your superiors. You will tell me where they are working and where their families live. And for every lie you tell me . . . every question you refuse to answer . . . your wife and daughter will suffer.”

Mendoza had broken out in a cold sweat. “I'll tell you all that I can. Just make them stop.”

But the men did not stop, and the hysterical sobs of his wife and daughter continued.

Mendoza tried in vain to block out the plaintive cries of his little girl as she begged him to help her. He tore his eyes away from her molester's bloody fingers, gnashing his teeth in anguish. His scrotum contracted, and his penis shriveled. His heart raced with excruciating anxiety, and for one frightening moment, he was so tightly gripped by despair that he was unable to breathe. “Make them stop!” he gasped. “I'll tell you all that I can! Just make them stop—
for the love of God
!
”

“They will stop when you tell me what I want to know,” the masked man replied. “Now, who do you—”

Mendoza's daughter squealed in pain as her tormentor's probing became more invasive, sending Mendoza into a mindless a rage.
“Make them stop!”
he shrieked, his vocal cords nearly tearing in his throat.
“Make them stop! Make them stop! Make them stop!”
He continued to shriek his demand over and over like a man coming unhinged, veins bulging as he strained against the leather straps binding him to the chair.

Fearing that Mendoza's mind might be on the verge of snapping, the leader—who had never personally interrogated anyone—signaled for the tormentors to back away from their victims.

The men did as they were told, and Mendoza fell to weeping, unable to meet the shattered gaze of his wife. His head drooped forward, swaying from side to side as he muttered prayers for God to intervene.

The leader produced a tape recorder from his jacket pocket and switched it on. “Now give me the names, amigo. Give me the names, and this will end.”

Mendoza's mind reeled with dread. Of course he was willing to give up every deep-cover agent working for the PFM, but there was a major problem: he didn't know any of them. Deep-cover agents were kept isolated from one another, and on the rare occasions they did meet face-to-face, their real names were never used. He knew only the real names of three direct superiors, and he was horrified because he knew the man in the mask would never be satisfied with just three names.

“I am a deep-cover agent,” he croaked, his voice raw from the force of his shrieking. His daughter was still crying, but his wife had managed to calm herself, and she was attempting to soothe the child in her own trembling voice. “We're kept separate from one another,” Mendoza went on, “but I can give you the names of three of my superiors.”

The masked man held the recorder to Mendoza's mouth. “Say their names.”

Mendoza spoke the names of each man as clearly as he could, providing all of the personal information that he remembered.

“Very good,” said the man in the mask. “Now, I need more names, amigo. Give me more names.”

Mendoza did not bother repeating the truth. He made up a name, claiming the man was a deep-cover agent working in Tijuana.

The man in the mask switched off the recorder and sat with his hands drooped over the chair back. “You just told me you are kept separate from one another. But now you suddenly have another name for me?” He shook his head with a heavy sigh. “Either you were lying to me before, amigo, or you are lying to me now. Which is it?”

Mendoza understood there was no escape from the impossible paradox in which he was trapped. “That might not be his real name,” he explained, trying his best to speak directly, to keep the fear from his voice. “We don't use our real names—
none
of us do—and
this
is why. Surely, you must understand that.”

The man in the ski mask scratched his head. “Why do you lie to me, amigo? Why do you want to make me hurt your family? Can't you hear your beautiful daughter crying? Do you think I would go to all of this trouble for three little names?
Eh?
No! I would not!” He turned to a man standing near a red metal cabinet.
“Usa el soplete.”
Use the blowtorch.

“No!” Mendoza shouted. “No! Please!”

The man near the cabinet turned up the hissing blue flame of a propane torch and stepped over to Mendoza's wife.

“Noooo!”
Mendoza shrieked as the man grabbed one of the woman's ample breasts and put the flame to her nipple.

Mendoza's wife let out a screech of agony, writhing violently as her daughter's screams of terror were added to the horrifying chorale.

Mendoza lost all control himself, going completely berserk, screaming vile names at the man in the mask, spitting and snarling, straining against the leather straps with such impotent fury that his bowels let loose in a gush, and the stench of hot feces filled the air.

“Te seguiré al infierno!”
he screamed with such ferocity that his voice broke in a painful rasp. I'll follow you to hell!

A door burst open on the far side of the garage, and a man shouted in English: “That's enough!
Bastante
!
”

Everyone, including Mendoza, jerked their heads in the direc
tion of the voice as the gringo sniper came stalking across the bay, grabbing the torch from the man's hand and hurling it across the garage.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he bawled, glaring at the masked leader sitting backward in the chair. “Are you fucking animals? You're worse than the fucking Taliban!”

The masked man got to his feet.

Hancock snatched a glass jar of bearing grease from a workbench and used two fingers to scoop out a glob of it, tossing the jar aside. “Get the fuck outta my way!” he growled at the torch man, smearing the grease over the woman's charred nipple. “Sadistic fucking animals!”

“This is not your business!” the big leader said in accented En­glish. He was a head taller than Hancock and stood looking down on him, broad chested and imposing.

“You wanna bet?” Hancock stepped into the bigger man's space, his eyes blazing fire. “Get on the fucking phone and call Ruvalcaba! You dumb fucks were told to bring these people here and wait for the interrogator.
I'm
the fucking interrogator! Now back your ass the fuck up before I gouge out your eyes and skull-fuck you!”

The bigger man took a very reluctant step backward, knowing that Hector Ruvalcaba valued the gringo sniper's life over all of theirs.

Mendoza's wife and daughter stood sobbing while Mendoza sat naked in his own shit, looking pleadingly toward the gringo. “Please!” he begged, weeping pitifully. “I've given them every name that I know.”

Hancock stepped past the leader, spinning the wooden chair around to take a seat in front of Mendoza. “Listen,” he said easily. “These jackasses don't even know why you're here. I'm sorry about what they did to your wife, I am, but if you can tell me what I need to know, I promise they won't touch her again. All I need to know is where to find the Americans. Tell me where I can find Chance Vaught and Dan Crosswhite.”

Mendoza's eyes grew big around, his heart breaking with the
crushing realization that, by saving Vaught's life—against his better judgement—he had brought this nightmare to his wife and daughter. “I deserve to burn in hell,” he whispered.

“We all do,” Hancock said sympathetically. “Tell me where they are, amigo. Tell me, and all of this goes away. I promise.”

“Toluca,” Mendoza croaked, having now lost all desire to live. “You will find them in Toluca.”

Hancock patted him on the head. “Good man.”

He got to his feet and took a Sig Sauer .357 from the small of his back, blowing Mrs. Mendoza's brains all over the man standing beside her. Then he shot the little girl. Mendoza's chin was drooped against his chest when Hancock shot him through the top of the head.

His work done, the gringo turned to leave, but that's when he noticed a curious trickle of blood on the inside of the child's thigh. Glancing at the man nearest her, he saw the fellow's fingers were red with dried blood. “You sick fuck!” He shot him through the liver.

The child molester went down in a heap, crying out in agony.

Hancock could not have known it, but this fellow was the leader's younger brother.

When the leader grabbed for the gun beneath his jacket, Hancock heard the sibilance of leather and whipped around with unbelievable speed, shooting the leader through the face. The big man pitched over backward into a pile of old radiators with a crash, and his nickel-plated revolver went clattering across the grimy concrete.

Hancock gestured with the Sig at the younger brother, who now lay writhing in the grime. “Let him bleed to death. The rest of you assholes get this mess cleaned up! Now!”

At least a couple of the remaining six men must have spoken English, because they moved quickly to begin untying the bodies.

Hancock went out the back exit, slamming the steel door after him. “Fucking amateur night!”

41

HUNAN PROVINCE, CHINA

17:00 HOURS

“I don't understand why we didn't take a plane to Zhangjiajie,” Lena said from the passenger seat of a stolen Land Rover as they rode north along the scenic S10 highway in Hunan Province. They had just crossed the eighth-highest suspension bridge in the world, spanning 1,080 feet above the Lishui River. Of the world's one hundred highest bridges, forty-two of them were located in China.

“I wanted to see some of the country,” Gil said with a glance at the rearview mirror. “Look at those mountain ranges. They make Montana look like West Virginia.”

Lena, who had never been to the United States and thus could not appreciate the comparison, sat staring at the side-view mirror, watching the black Mercedes-Benz directly behind them. Three Russians had followed them from Chongqing, despite Nahn's supposed efforts to throw them off the scent.

“A plane would have been a thousand times safer,” she said. “How long have you known we were being followed?”

“Since we left the hotel.”

“And you said nothing?”

“I didn't want to worry you.” He put his foot on the brake pedal, slowing abruptly to agitate the Russian driver behind him as he'd done a half dozen times since leaving Chongqing three hours earlier. “I like knowing exactly where they are. I also like knowing they're probably racking their brains trying to figure out what the hell we're doing in China.”

“
Pffft!
I'm
still trying to figure out what the hell we're doing in China.”

“We're jumping the Dragon Wall.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “You know that Victor Kovats was killed jumping the Wall, right?”

“Who's Victor Kovatch?”

“Ko
vats
. He was the Hungarian wing suit champion.”

“Oh, the
Hungarian
champion!” Gil chuckled sarcastically. “I'll bet he had to be pretty good to be the Hungarian champ.”

She suppressed a smile, both amused and offended by his American air of superiority. “You should know the best wing suit fliers in the world are from Europe.”

He laughed. “And they're apparently splattered all over China.”

She laughed, too, in spite of herself, slapping him on the shoulder. “You Americans think you're so great!”

For reasons Gil could not quite pin down—competitive reasons, perhaps?—Lena brought out the conceit in him. “Well,” he said, “how many Europeans have HALO'd into Iran from the back of a Turkish 727?”

An experienced parachutist, Lena knew that a HALO jump was a High-Altitude, Low-Opening parachute jump employed by Special Forces to infiltrate enemy territory. Her jaw hung open. “You did that?”

He did not answer the question directly. “So who's got bigger balls now? Me or Kovatch?”

“Ko
vats
,” she said quietly, her ardor beginning to smolder. She slid her hand along the inside of his thigh. “Why were you in Iran?”

He thought briefly about his plans for the future—should there be a future, considering the insanity factor of the jump he planned to make—and decided to share a classified secret: “I was sent in to assassinate a bomb maker and his pregnant wife.”

She sat back with a gasp. “You murdered a pregnant woman?”

He shook his head. “I shot her, but I didn't kill her. I killed her husband and her father, though. Then I kidnapped her back to Afghanistan, and she gave birth to a baby boy that same night. The kid'll probably grow up to become a damn terrorist, thanks to me. Last year, I killed the CIA man who ordered me to shoot her without telling me she was pregnant.” He took his eyes off the road just long enough to meet her gaze. “How do you like me now?”

She put her hand on his knee. “No wonder you can't go back to your old life.”

“How could anyone go back?” he muttered, thinking of Marie. “The things I've done . . .”

Her voice felt thick to her as she spoke. “You and I were destined to meet, Gil.”

“Dunno about that.” He was eyeing the mirror again, wishing he could kill the Russians now instead of having to wait, but it was necessary to the plan. “Maybe we were—if you believe that kinda crap.”

An hour later, they were approaching Zhangjiajie, the city nearest to Tianmen Mountain National Park in northwestern Hunan Province. Tianmen Mountain was often called the Dragon Wall because of the winding, serpentine road that led up to the almost five-thousand-foot-high summit from which wing-suit fliers from all over the world launched themselves into the sky like Wile E. Coyote.

Victor Kovats had died there on October 8, 2013, during the World Wingsuit League Championships. His parachute had failed to deploy just shy of the landing pad, and he impacted the trees at nearly a hundred miles an hour.

When they arrived at their hotel, Gil parked in front and got out, smiling at the Russians as they drove slowly past and signaling for the driver to roll down his window.

The blond Russian stopped the car, staring with his dead blue eyes as he put down the window, waiting to hear what Gil had to say.

Gil saw the Bratva tattoos on the Russian's neck. “You can park right over there and just bring our bags up to the room,” he wisecracked.

Without giving any indication that he'd understood, the Russian put up the window and pulled past the hotel.

Lena was afraid of the Russians outside of Switzerland. “Why do you antagonize them?”

“It was necessary,” he said, opening the back of the black Land Rover Defender to remove their bags.

An Asian man on a bicycle emerged from around the corner of the building and pedaled past in the same direction as the Russians. Lena recognized him at once as Nahn. “Hey, that's—” She turned to Gil. “He got here ahead of us! You wanted him to see which car they were in!”

Gil gave her wink. “Never fuck with the United States Navy.”

She laughed and shook her head. “My God, you're arrogant.”

“Only around you, baby.” He pulled her carry-on from the back of the truck and handed it to her. “Here. It won't kill you to carry one up yourself.”

She laughed again, taking the bag. “Fuck you, Gil.”