The Geronimo Breach (15 page)

~

Al and Ernesto collected their belongings from the car, and prepared for the hike to the rendezvous point. The area felt deathly still following the rain, and they could hear creatures moving around in the thick foliage.

Sergio shook hands with Ernesto and wished him luck. He seemed like a decent guy. Sergio peered into the dense brush and then glanced back at Ernesto, who was sleepily clutching his backpack to his chest and looking vaguely bewildered.

“Hey, you got a weapon, since you’re going into the jungle pretty much in your underwear?” Sergio asked.

“Uh, no....I didn’t think I’d need one.” Ernesto looked at Al. “Do I need one? Nobody said anything...”

“Come on back here,” Sergio said, “and let’s see if we can get you something, so you can at least kill a snake while you’re sleeping on the ground...” He motioned to the rear of the cruiser. He popped the trunk, and stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the contents.

“This should do the trick,” Sergio said. He extracted a wicked looking survival knife and handed it to Ernesto. He groped around in the trunk, located the missing scabbard and tossed it to him. Al circled around and joined them.

“Whoa, Papa, when did you start carrying around the heavy artillery?” Al asked, reaching in and withdrawing a scarred Kalashnikov assault rifle.

“Hey, careful. I confiscated that from a drug bust a week ago. The dealer looked like a piece of Swiss cheese by the time the shootout was over, so I figured he wouldn’t miss it. And I always wanted my own AK-47,” Sergio quipped, taking the weapon from Al and slapping a magazine in place. “This one’s probably twenty years old, but it’s still in great shape,” Sergio said with pride. Al regarded the battered wooden stock dubiously.

The silence was disrupted by the roar of a vehicle approaching from around a bend in the road.

Sergio and his two companions looked up to see who was coming. This was the first vehicle they’d encountered in several hours, and there wasn’t much south of them but jungle, so they were naturally curious. Al hoped it wasn’t more border control officers – that would throw a wrench in their rendezvous plan. Carmen was supposed to have taken care of that, and ensured none were around for at least an hour. He hoped she’d done so.

~

“Jesus. Keep driving. Just keep going past them. It’s a National Police car,” Don hissed at the driver. This was an unexpected wrinkle. Not a deal killer, but a surprise, and Don intensely disliked surprises.

They rolled by the cruiser, and Don flipped open his phone. Only one bar of service. Sam answered on the fourth ring.

“Sam, your target is a police car with three men in it. What the hell have you gotten me into?” Don demanded.

Sam was silent, processing furiously. Why were the police involved? What did it mean? Richard had made it clear that whatever was going on with the camera, they had to be stopped.

“It doesn’t matter. Take them out,” Sam ordered. “And don’t forget the camera. I can sanitize the rest of this.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Don said, hanging up.

The driver slowed and came to a stop in the middle of the two lane strip of asphalt, then reversed. They’d lost sight of the police car due to the curvature of the road, and now had to reverse down the narrow ribbon of pavement the hundred yards they’d come, so his gunmen would still be on the correct side of the vehicle to fire at the cop car simultaneously. They needed to shoot from the truck’s passenger side, so the driver would be protected and they’d have the front and rear passenger windows to fire out of.

As they backed slowly towards the cruiser, Don had a sinking feeling. This was starting out badly.

~

Sergio watched the ancient Land Cruiser drive by, and then heard it stop and reverse. Instinct kicked in – something was very wrong.

“I thought I saw gun barrels in that truck, and now it’s coming back. Get behind the car, quick,” he instructed, Kalashnikov in hand. He threw open the driver’s door, grabbed the shotgun, and tossed it to Al, who held it like it was a snake.

“What the he...” Al exclaimed as the windows exploded in a hail of bullets from the Land Cruiser, which was slowly reversing around the bend, finally coming to rest thirty yards from the police car.

“Stay down...” Sergio screamed, and then let rip a burst from the AK-47. The volley tore into the side of the Land Cruiser.

Another spray of slugs hit the police car and Al fired off a couple of shotgun blasts at the truck. The first went high, but the second took out the rear windshield.

Sergio fired again, and then Al heard two of the Land Cruiser’s doors open and close. More bullets sprayed the ground around them. Ernesto yelped – a ricochet had caught him in the thigh. Blood oozed through his fingers as he gripped his injured leg.

“Get him into the brush. I’ll take care of these bastards,” Sergio screamed, firing again.

More shots thudded into the ground around them. Al let off another shotgun blast at the truck, aiming for the tires.

“You sure?” Al yelled.

“Get out of here. Go do your meet. I’ll handle this,” Sergio said through clenched teeth. He fired off another short burst, and heard a scream from behind the truck. He thought he’d seen a man’s leg there. Guess he had. “I think you owe me $800, not $500, Al,” he chided, then popped off a few more rounds.

“Check’s in the mail. Let’s call it $750...” A slug ripped a chunk of metal from the fender by Al’s head. He ducked down, scanning the jungle behind them.

Sergio sprayed short bursts at the Toyota to provide cover, and Al motioned Ernesto to crawl into the dense vegetation. Al fired another potshot at the attackers while Sergio supplied staccato bursts of cover fire. Al dropped the shotgun and hastened after Ernesto, military-crawling into the heavy green underbrush. He spotted Ernesto limping ahead a few dozen yards and rushed to join him. Within a minute the gunfire receded to distant popping as the pair charged headlong into the jungle, Al supporting Ernesto around the waist.

“How bad are you hit?” Al whispered to Ernesto, who was keeping up, but favoring his good leg.

“Not too bad, I don’t think,” Ernesto said. “It hurts, but it isn’t bleeding much.”

They stopped. Al unzipped his backpack and pulled out a T-shirt. He tore it in half and tied the strips together, creating a primitive bandage. Al knelt down and inspected the wound – Ernesto had been lucky – grazed, nothing more. He fastened the cloth strips together and cinched them, covering the bloody area.

“You’ll live. It’s just a cut,” Al said, taking stock of his surroundings. They’d come maybe a hundred yards from the road so far, which meant the track to the rendezvous point should be somewhere off to the left. He pressed through the brush to where he thought he’d seen the faint impression of a trail. “This is it. Let’s move.”

The plants around them whistled as random slugs tore through the vegetation. The thick foliage deadened much of the noise from the road – the gunshots now sounded like muffled firecrackers in the distance. But the bullets were still deadly. Another one shredded through the leaves by Ernesto’s head, passing so near he felt the air displaced by the slug.

They instinctively ducked and ran down the trail, Al taking the lead.

~

In the SUV, Don pried the driver’s door open and pulled the dead man from behind the wheel. The corpse collapsed heavily onto the road. Don’s wounded wingman continued to exchange fire with the cop car, and then his foot exploded, spraying blood and bone against the fender. He screamed, dropping his weapon. Don looked at the man’s leg – he wouldn’t ever figure skate again.

What the hell had happened? He had two men down, was taking machine-gun and shotgun fire, and was trapped in a deadly shootout with no obvious escape – with a cop or cops. The cops seemed really pissed and were giving better than they’d received.

Don glanced at his companion and made a swift decision. Fuck this. He hadn’t signed up for a bloodbath. Sam could keep his money – this wasn’t Don’s day to die. He’d agreed to shoot fish in a barrel, not walk straight into a kill zone.

Don sprayed the cop car and surrounding trees with a barrage of lead, exhausting his magazine. He leaned over and grabbed his partner’s rifle, and emptied it at the police vehicle for good measure. Maybe he’d hit one or all of them. Maybe not.

Don hauled his companion into the back seat, and slid behind the wheel of the still-running truck. He peered out the driver’s door at the road, put the transmission into drive and gassed it. The heavy four wheel drive vehicle surged forward, gaining speed despite both rear tires having been flattened from gunfire.

~

Sergio stood, and rounding the cruiser’s rear fender, emptied the AK-47 at the escaping attackers. He reached into his trunk and grabbed another full clip, slamming it into place as he jogged after the Land Cruiser. Closing the distance, he emptied the fresh magazine into the vehicle. The truck swerved and then slowed, coasting to a stop. Only twenty yards away. Sergio pulled his pistol from its holster, and fired seven shots into the now stalled SUV. The eighth round did the trick – the sizzling slug hit the gas tank and the Land Cruiser exploded in a cascade of flames, the whump of the blast searing Sergio’s face and knocking him back several feet.

He sat in the middle of the road, pistol still clutched tightly in his hand, watching the truck burn in the early morning light.

God he loved being a cop.

Al heard the explosion and increased the pace, his lungs burning with the unfamiliar exertion. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d exercised harder than walking up the stairs to his apartment – but it was amazing what naked terror could do for a guy’s quarter mile time. He hadn’t moved this quickly since high school.

If Ernesto couldn’t keep up, that wasn’t Al’s problem. He’d done his job, which was to get him to the rendezvous point. Al had never signed up for shooting it out with murderous gunmen on a muddy road to oblivion – that had never come up when Carmen had described the gig. He was supposed to be a glorified taxi service, not a ninja assassin. Thank God circumstances had landed them with Sergio – if he hadn’t been around they’d be worm food by now.

Which got Al thinking. Even as he followed the trail deeper into the jungle his mind thrashed over the events of the last few hours. The conclusion he arrived at was anything but reassuring. Al had lived in Panama for the last eight years and the closest he’d come to real danger was slipping in the shower whilst drunk and almost splitting his head open. Now, in less than half a day he’d been in the thick of full-on gun battles – not once, but twice. Sure, perhaps the first one at the whorehouse had been total coincidence – he’d buy that, although reluctantly. But this was anything but. There weren’t a lot of ways to misconstrue armed attackers at dawn trying to stitch you with lead.

Al slowed and turned to face Ernesto, who was also flushed from the effort of running. “What’s going on, Ernesto,” Al asked. “Why does the whole world want to kill you?”

Ernesto glanced nervously over his shoulder, gasping for breath. “I haven’t done anything, Al.”

“Armed goons with machine-guns just tried to kill us, Ernesto. And to refresh your memory, we very recently had to sneak out a back alley because of a gun battle in the lobby of the building where I met you. So why don’t you tell me why you need to get out of Panama so badly, Ernesto?” Al stared at him. Ernesto stared back, saying nothing.

“Look, let’s just get away from this, and once we’re safe, I’ll tell you everything,” Ernesto offered.

“You’ll either tell me right now or I won’t take you to the guide, and you’ll be on your own with the gunmen back at the Transamerican,” Al threatened.

“I...I stole something that’s obviously very valuable to some extremely dangerous men, Al. But I swear, I didn’t know what I was doing, and if there was any way to reverse things...” Ernesto looked like he was about to cry.

“Why are they trying to kill you? And who is they?” Al asked.

“I...I suppose they want to know what I did with their property,” Ernesto said.

That sounded like pretty routine criminal retribution stuff so far.

“And who’s trying to kill you?” Al pressed.

“I...I honestly don’t know for sure...”

Something crashed and clattered overhead. Could have been a large bird, or a monkey. Or it could have been something else.

“This isn’t over, Ernesto. You
will
tell me what’s going on,” Al whispered as he started moving down the trail again.

Ernesto nodded, then put a finger to his lips.

Al recognized that was a good idea right now. They could sort out Ernesto’s drama once they were reasonably sure they weren’t going to be exterminated within the next few minutes. After all, why they were being hunted was secondary to whether or not they would be killed.

Al was nothing if not pragmatic.

He looked at his watch. Quarter after six. He hoped the guide hadn’t been scared off by the shooting, and then realized that a half mile into the jungle it was unlikely the guide would have heard anything. That was one of the benefits of a virtually impenetrable rainforest – sound didn’t travel far.

Al unzipped his satchel and pulled out a small handheld GPS. He activated it and selected a screen. They were on a north-easterly heading, and the device, which he’d used on past trips to locate the clearing, confirmed they were almost at the rendezvous point. Maybe another three hundred yards. The technology literally made finding a needle in a haystack as simple as following the arrow and moving in the direction it indicated until X marked the spot.

After one more glance at the device he powered it off, then set off towards where the clearing should be.

They were running short on time.

And in the last few minutes, Al realized he had a teensy little problem. Namely, that he couldn’t return to the road, where the killers were waiting for him – or if not those killers, their replacements. Which left him in with two choices he wanted no part of – being forced by circumstance to make it through the jungle and into Colombia, or trying his luck with whatever was waiting for him back at the road.