Trader of secrets

Chapter Sixty-Three

By now the incoming volley of fire into the trailer and the area around the plane had died down. Ben Rabin looked up and winced at the smoldering tail section over his head. A few more minutes and the steel supports holding it to the fuselage would start to give. Half a ton of hot metal would fall on the overturned trailer.

“Take all the ammunition and grenades you can carry,” he told his men. “Get ready to move.”

They started stripping the trailer of anything they could reach, bandoliers of bullets, bags of grenades.

Ben Rabin grabbed two satchel bags filled with C-4, along with a roll of det-cord and two electronic and six pencil fuse detonators. He handed one of the satchels to his sergeant and draped the other over his shoulder. He looked at his watch. “Grab your weapons and follow me.”

Ben Rabin broke cover and ran toward the gate in the chain-link fence. Eleven other soldiers followed him. He watched in amazement as the red sedan continued in the distance driving down the line, rolling up the enemy’s left flank. The driver had a perfect angle. No more than a single soldier, maybe two, could turn and draw a bead on him at a given moment. The car was moving so fast that by the time they turned, the vehicle was on them.

The driver missed a few of them. The survivors lined up and fired toward the back of the vehicle as it sped past.

Ben Rabin and two of his commandos aimed their assault rifles from the shoulder and fired. They dropped the guards who had escaped becoming hood ornaments before they could pull off any more rounds.

Liquida, looking for a vehicle, had worked his way to the end of the complex of small buildings. He found nothing and began to suspect that he was going the wrong direction.

Hauling the heavy money bags was wearing him out. He was breathless and sweating and beginning to wish he had used the cart into which he had piled Leffort’s body.

Occasionally he got a glimpse of the mayhem outside through the various doors in the complex. With the electronic key card from the man in the pay room, Liquida seemed to have access to everything he needed except a car.

He picked up an assault rifle from one of the dead guards who had stumbled back into one of the buildings and died near the front door. The clip was mostly empty, but it still had three rounds. Liquida didn’t plan to use it unless he had to.

He sat for a moment and rested; he felt the weight of the bags and wondered how the hell he was going to get away. Suddenly there was an explosion outside. It shook the building.

Liquida dragged himself to his feet and went to the door. He looked through the blown-out plate glass opening. One of the double doors was missing, reduced to a pile of glass pebbles under Liquida’s feet.

He glanced down the street. A small concrete pillbox at the end of the road was belching black smoke. Chunks of fractured concrete littered the pavement around it. Liquida watched as a low-slung Jeep drove slowly past the smoldering wreckage and turned toward him, heading down the street in front of the building.

He stepped back into the shadows inside the door and watched as if in a daze as the Jeep cruised by. The breeze from the slow-moving vehicle blew curling white tendrils of smoke from the barrel of the recoilless rifle. As he looked on, Liquida was in no doubt as to the existence of the afterlife. Otherwise how was it possible that the man he had killed in a parking garage in Washington three months ago could today be driving a car in the jungles of Mexico?

His eyes remained riveted on the Jeep and its driver. The vehicle pulled sideways in the street as the gunner on the back opened up with a machine gun. The Jeep sat there. Liquida got an even better look at the man behind the wheel. There was no mistaking him. There couldn’t be two that looked like that, the one they called Herman Diggs, Madriani’s investigator. What was he doing here? More to the point, how was it that he was still alive?

Within seconds Ben Rabin and his men vaulted over the sandbags and opened fire into what was left of the confused guards. Mangled arms and legs lay everywhere. The speeding car had left a trail of carnage and chaos that unnerved the remaining defenders. Some of them threw down their weapons and gave up, while others ran.

Ben Rabin could see the black smoke from the blockhouse at the other end of the street three-quarters of a mile away. He could hear the distinctive automatic fire from the SAW. He wondered who the driver of the red car was and whether he was still alive.

His men started to round up the guards. Ben Rabin handed the satchel bag to his sergeant, nodded toward the huge satellite dish, and told him to take it down. “Find the control room. Gather any papers, laptops, data drives-whatever you can find-and get it ready for transport. And find the technicians. Get them all together. They don’t know yet, but they’ll be joining us for the trip back home.” In the meantime, Ben Rabin had to find a phone or a radio. By now the backup C-130 should be waiting for them in Belize.

Resistance seemed to stiffen at the other end of the road. Flurries of rocket-propelled grenades whistled past the Jeep. Adin sensed they were down to hard-core fanatics, the handful of guards who would fight to the death rather than give up.

He told the commando to stick to short bursts on the SAW. They were running low on ammunition.

He tapped Sarah on the leg and motioned her toward the back of the Jeep. “Time for you to get off,” he told her.

“Why?”

“Between here and the end of the road it’s liable to get hot,” said Adin. He was worried that if one of the rocket-propelled grenades ripped into the Jeep, she could be seriously wounded, or worse.

He grabbed a pistol from a box in the back of the Jeep, a Glock 23 with a fifteen-round clip. “I’ll catch up with you,” Adin yelled to Herman.

Herman looked back and nodded. The Jeep moved on down the street.

Adin took Sarah by the hand and walked her toward one of the buildings. “You’ll be safe inside until we get back.” They crossed the small strip of grass and headed toward the door, Adin with the pistol in his hand to make sure they would have no problems.

“Wait here.” He peeked inside. It was a small lobby. The building had taken the brunt of some of the fighting, window glass on the floor. One of the doors was missing.

He checked inside, took a couple of minutes, and found the place was empty. “Come on in.”

Sarah stepped over the broken glass.

“We’ll look for Bugsy when I get back.” He smiled at her. “We’ll find him, I promise. He won’t go far. He’s a good dog.”

“I know he is. I just want him back,” she said. Sarah started to cry.

He wiped her cheek with the back of his hand. “Don’t think about anything now. Just sit and relax.”

She laughed. “How can I? That’s easy for you to say. This is probably all in a day’s work.”

He gave her a serious look. “No. This is at least two days’ worth of work.” They both laughed.

Sarah had seen enough violence in a few hours to last her a lifetime.

“Here, take this.” He handed her the pistol.

“What about you? Aren’t you going to need something for protection?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No, really.” She tried to press the gun back into his hand.

Adin looked down and lifted his left pant leg a few inches. Strapped to his ankle in a holster was a small snub-nosed revolver.

They were still laughing when Sarah looked over his shoulder and saw him. At first she just stood there with a quizzical look on her face.

“What’s the matter?”

“Look out!”

Before the words cleared her lips, the shot rang out. The explosion of the Kalashnikov reverberated through the room as Adin flung himself into Sarah. They landed in a heap on the floor.

Liquida tried to line up for another shot, but the guy was on top of her. He moved for a better angle. As he did, the wall behind him came alive with bullet holes as the blast of gunfire echoed through the room. At first he wasn’t sure where the shots were coming from. Then he saw the gun in her hand pressed to the floor by the weight of the man’s body.

A second flurry of shots, one of which nicked his shoulder, told Liquida he’d had enough. He fired another round from the rifle as he retreated out through the back door, the way he had come in.

Sarah pulled herself out from underneath Adin and fired two more well-aimed rounds at Liquida’s fleeting shadow. “Are you all right?” She turned and looked at Adin. He wasn’t moving. There was blood on the floor. She rolled him over and looked into his face. She put her cheek to his nose searching for breath and felt for a pulse at his throat. There was nothing. She knew that the spark of life that had danced so freely in those large brown eyes had been extinguished. He was dead.

Sarah knelt there looking at him. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. She tapped the muzzle of the gun on the polished stone floor as rage crowded out every other emotion. Fury filled her as she raised herself up and glared at the dark hallway and the wall with the two shadowed bullet holes.

With purpose she walked toward the rear of the building, squeezing the pistol in her hand. She saw drops of blood where Liquida had gone. Sarah knew she hit him. Now she would track him into the bush and kill him. She was not without caution, but anger filled her every pore. Her body was awash in a sea of adrenaline.