Kodiak Sky

CHAPTER 4

“You can leave now,” Troy said to Pablo before searching him again for communication devices. Bennington had frisked him back at the base camp, but it was always a good idea to check twice in situations like this. “Or you can stay here and wait for us.” There weren’t that many places you could hide something in a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals, so it didn’t take long for Troy to confirm that Pablo was clean. “I’ll make sure we find you before we leave the area, if you want to wait.” He shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

At twenty-seven minutes past midnight the team had reached the outskirts of the Gadanz compound. Pablo had proven himself a worthy guide, but he was no warrior. It wasn’t just fear brimming in those brown eyes; it was outright terror. He’d only be a liability from now on. Maybe this was a raw deal, being left here alone, but Pablo had earned a good deal of cash to lead them here, more than he could in a year at his construction job back in Guayana City. So Troy didn’t feel that bad.

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m leaving,” Pablo answered firmly. “Adios.”

Moments later the small man had disappeared into the jungle. He was more willing to take on the wild animals of the Venezuelan jungle alone than face Daniel Gadanz if this mission went terribly wrong. Pablo wasn’t stupid.

“Come on,” Troy said to the other three when he was gone. “Don’t fire unless you absolutely have to,” he ordered. “If we shoot, we lose surprise, and that’s our most valuable asset at this point.”

The team hustled after Troy as he slipped through the moss-draped trees, massive ferns, and the steady rain, which had begun falling twenty minutes ago. They quickly reached the east bank of a deep, slow-moving creek, where Troy eased into the stagnant black water with a grimace. Twenty-foot anacondas loved to rest on these creek beds, and there were probably piranha schools in here, too. As the other men dropped into the warm water behind him, he started swimming when it reached his chest.

The creek was only thirty feet wide, and the team quickly made it to the other side without incident.

Troy glanced back as he pulled himself up onto the bank, remembering the images of the huge snakes he’d seen on YouTube before coming down here. He hated snakes — all snakes. It was a primal fear he’d hadn’t been able to shake since his days as a boy roaming the vast Jensen property outside Greenwich. He’d forced himself to handle the garter and black snakes he found there, but it hadn’t helped.

The rainfall intensified, and Troy wiped water from his face as he turned away from the creek to move ahead. It was time to get Daniel Gadanz.

The compound before them, located only fifty miles from the towering cascades of Angel Falls, was set amidst the ruins of an ancient civilization. According to Pablo the small town covered fifteen acres, but Gadanz occupied only two buildings at the center of the village. Pablo had been on the construction crew that had modernized the compound to Gadanz’s specifications a year ago.

Maybe Pablo wasn’t wrong about being watched back in Guayana City after all, Troy figured when they reached the first stone structures of the ruins. During one of their breaks on the trek, Pablo had mentioned how nearly all the men he’d worked with at the compound had died in the last year — most of them victims of strange “accidents.”

At a small vine-covered structure at the edge of the ancient town, Troy motioned for the men to don their thermal-imaging goggles. These devices would function well despite the lack of ambient light beneath the heavy cloud cover.

When everyone had returned Troy’s thumbs-up, he turned and hustled forward. Almost immediately he acquired two glowing red targets, sixty feet dead ahead.

He crouched down beside a well-preserved rock wall to the right, glancing over his shoulder at the team who’d followed him down against the wall, motioning for Bennington to accompany him and for the two subordinates to stay put and cover them. He led Bennington down a narrow alley to the right until they reached a vine-encased statue of a jaguar, where they turned left, moved past four more structures, then turned left again and reacquired the glowing human targets. Now they were close, and Troy confirmed that the two men holding what looked like submachine guns were facing Bennington’s subordinates, who were still down behind that wall.

MP5s leading the way, Troy and Bennington crept slowly ahead between what appeared to be the ruins of two small homes — little more than rubble at this point — careful to avoid the cracked and broken pottery littering their path, until they were within ten feet of their prey. They nodded to each other, put down their guns, soundlessly removed Marine bowie knives from long sheaths hitched to their belts, confirmed to each other which target they would take, then raced the last few strides.

Troy grabbed the guard on the left and sliced his throat with the long, razor-sharp blade before the man had a chance to fire his weapon — as Bennington did to the guard on the right.

Bennington quickly recovered the MP5s they’d dropped, waved to his men, then turned and took a step to move on.

Troy grabbed him by his shirt before he could take a second step, and yanked him backward. Then he picked up a stone the size of a softball and flung it down the path along the ground, as if he were bowling. Despite the driving rain, all four men saw a sharp row of long spikes shoot from the ground after a trip wire had apparently been jolted by the rolling stone.

“Christ,” Bennington murmured as he handed Troy one of the MP5s. He patted Troy on the back and exhaled a heavy sigh of relief. “Thanks.”

Seven minutes later they’d killed nine more guards without firing a shot, made it past three more concealed death traps, and reached two modern structures, which looked to Troy like large Florida ranch homes.

“No more need for these,” he muttered, removing the thermal imaging glasses and dropping them on the wet ground. The deluge had eased to a spit, and the moon had appeared through a break in the clouds behind them. He was glad to have his peripheral vision back now that they were close. “Let’s go,” he called over his shoulder after the others had shed their glasses as well. The fact that they’d needed to take out so many guards to get to this location made him even more optimistic that Gadanz was here. “We’re close.”

As they broke from the trees and stole across twenty feet of open ground toward the nearer of the two ranch houses, a deafening alarm screamed into the night.

“Motion sensors!” Troy yelled as they reached the ranch’s exterior wall. “Fire at will! No reason to hold back now.”

A guard burst from around the corner of the house, but before the man saw them, Bennington shot him down with a volley from his MP5.

“Follow me,” Troy yelled before hurling himself through a darkened window, surprised at the lack of protective bars — and impressed with Bennington’s aim and decisiveness.

He rolled across the bedroom floor and scrambled to his feet as someone rose up from the mattress, screaming. At the last instant, he realized it was an older woman shouting in fear and held his fire. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her roughly from the bed as the other three men crashed through the now-shattered window in rapid succession and jumped to their feet on the shard-littered floor.

“Get in there,” Troy hissed at the woman in Spanish, quickly herding her into a closet. “And don’t come out.”

He raced from the bedroom and down a dimly lit, narrow hall, firing a quick burst at two men who emerged from a doorway, killing them both instantly. He ducked into another bedroom, headed for the window, and hurled himself through it onto the deck of a large pool that lay between the two ranches.

His intent was to confuse the guards, to make them unsure of his position. Was he inside or outside? Even though they’d been discovered, he was still trying to use the element of surprise.

As he jumped to his feet, he spotted two jeeps — fifty feet away with lights on — parked at the far end of the other ranch house. The guards surrounding the jeeps opened fire, and he lunged behind a huge planter holding a towering palm tree as Bennington and the other two crashed through the window and took cover behind other planters positioned at this end of the pool.

Bullets ricocheted angrily off his protection, and Troy peered cautiously around its corner in time to see a fat man in a loose robe, holding a cigar, pull himself awkwardly up into the passenger seat of the lead jeep.

Daniel Gadanz. It had to be. This was a hell of a chance to do the world a great service, and Troy had no intention of missing it.

“Cover me!” he yelled as he broke from behind the planter.

Bennington and the other two men strafed both jeeps, enabling Troy to race across the pool deck as the enemies took cover.

The first jeep squealed off, but as the second one’s engine fired up, the driver and the guard in the passenger seat slumped forward simultaneously, killed by Bennington and his men. Troy shot another guard who popped out from behind a shed wielding a pistol, then dashed to the jeep, tossed the body of the driver onto the loose gravel beside the vehicle, hopped in behind the steering wheel, and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

As the jeep raced ahead, Troy noticed a glow of white light coming through the trees to the left, then spotted the lead jeep’s taillights as he came around a bend in the rutted dirt road. As the front left tire dove down into a huge pothole, the dead man in the passenger seat tumbled out, ejected by the impact just before an explosion twenty feet ahead rocked the jeep and sent it and Troy hurtling into a deep ditch on the right.

When the jeep’s front end hit the dirt at the bottom of the ditch, Troy’s chest slammed against the steering wheel, momentarily knocking the wind out of him. As he groaned he forced air back into his lungs the way he’d been trained. He realized that someone in the lead jeep must have tossed a grenade back at him, causing the explosion that had sent the jeep flying into the ditch.

He grabbed his MP5 from the floor of the passenger seat, staggered from the jeep, and climbed out of the ditch. When he reached the road, the thump-thump of an accelerating rotor filled his ears. The noise was coming from the direction of the white glow filtering through the trees.

Gadanz was escaping on a chopper.

Troy raced across the road, down into the ditch on the other side, and into the jungle. The rotors were almost to liftoff revolution — he’d been dropped off on missions enough times by helicopters to recognize the beat. He sprinted through the trees, slogged through a shallow marsh, and then broke through the trees just as the aircraft lifted from a brightly illuminated helipad thirty feet away.

He emptied everything left in the MP5’s dual banana clips, hitting the driver of the jeep and another guard as he closed in on the helipad and the chopper’s nearer landing bar, then dropped the submachine gun and lunged as the aircraft lifted away. For an instant he had a good grasp on the bar with both hands as he was hoisted into the air. But it was slick from the rain, and the air rush beating down on him from the blades felt like the gales of a Cat 5 hurricane.

He’d come so damn close, but there was no choice. It was time to cut his losses while he still could.

“Where’s the body?” Commander McCoy demanded tersely, arms folded tightly over her chest as she sat on the table facing the North Korean.

“I do not know of what you speak,” the man answered calmly in perfect English.

He was secured tightly to an uncomfortable wooden chair in the living room of the thatched-roof hut located at the edge of a sprawling rice paddy. But he didn’t seem concerned about his dire situation — or the least bit uncomfortable in the chair. Oddly, he seemed more intrigued by what would happen next than anything else.

“You know exactly who I’m talking about,” McCoy countered. “Last week the United States lost a pilot off Tanchon when his jet blew an engine. He ditched in the Sea of Japan, and you people picked him up.”

“Well, if that is true, you would have to kidnap a member of our esteemed navy to obtain more details. I am an economist at the Central Bureau of Statistics. I have no knowledge of what occurs off the coast of Tanchon other than what I read in the newspaper. And I do not recall reading anything about that.” He sighed as if he wasn’t proud of his career but had become resigned to it over the years. “I am just a mid-level bureaucrat.”

“Bullshit.”

He certainly looked the part of a North Korean bureaucrat. He was clean-cut and dressed in a dark suit, button-down shirt, conservative tie, and large-lens bifocals. In fact, he looked more like a professor than anything. But he wasn’t. She knew that for a fact. She had the right man.

“You’re a senior member of the National Security Bureau.” She removed a small .22 revolver from her coat and placed it on the table beside her leg so he could clearly see it. “You’re the secret police. You’re the bad guys in this part of the world, and you’re one of their worst.”

“I beg your pardon,” the man said politely with a perplexed smile. “I am—”

“You interrogated that pilot personally after the navy delivered him to you.” This bastard was good, very good. But she was better. “Then you executed him. You suffocated him with a steel cable.”

The man shook his head sadly. “No, I did not. It sounds so terrible. I am very sorry if it is true.” He sighed again. “I wish we could all just get along.”

She pulled a single bullet from the top pocket of her shirt, inserted it into a chamber of the .22’s cylinder, spun the cylinder, and placed the revolver back down on the table beside her leg, when it stopped spinning. “I just want to know where his body is so I can take him home. His family needs closure.”

“Well, I—”

“He wasn’t just a pilot.” McCoy eased off the table and picked up the gun. For the first time she’d seen concern on the North Korean’s face. Just a little, but it was there. “You and I both know that.”

“We do?”

“He was a spy. I’m not denying that. But I want his body. His mother is a devout Catholic. She must be able to lay his body to rest properly to have peace.” McCoy pressed the gun barrel directly to the North Korean’s forehead. Again, she had to give the man credit. He didn’t flinch as most did when metal touched skin the first time. “Tell me, or you have a one-in-six chance of surviving this first round of roulette.”

“His body is gone.” The man’s voice had gone low and gravelly in a heartbeat. His expression had gone grave as well. “There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry. If I’d known, I would have made arrangements.”

She nodded as she turned and placed the gun back down on the table. “I appreciate your honesty.” She removed a thin steel cable from her coat pocket and uncoiled it. “But not your action.”

The man’s eyes went wide when she turned to face him and he saw the cable in her hands. As she moved behind him, he began to struggle violently against the ties binding his wrists and ankles to the chair. And as she slid the cable over his head and tightened it around his neck, he began to scream. But there was no one in the paddy field to hear him.

Tighter and tighter she twisted the cable. At first, the blood only seeped from the 360-degree wound cutting into his neck. But as she twisted harder and the cable dug deeper, blood gushed down and soaked his shirt collar.

When he was dead, she let go of the cable, and his head fell forward. “Good riddance,” she muttered, “and good revenge.”

The pilot who had ditched in the Sea of Japan had been a close friend and a good man. His death had been avenged — and now she could get to Kodiak.

After falling fifteen feet from the helicopter to the concrete pad, Troy had picked himself up and sprinted into the jungle. Miraculously, he’d avoided being shot by the guards and hadn’t been injured by the fall. His chest was still sore from the jeep crash, but it was nothing serious.

He spent several hours scouring the ruins for Bennington and his men, aware that Gadanz’s were searching for him. But he didn’t care. He didn’t leave anyone behind if at all possible.

However, when dawn began to break he headed out. It was possible that Bennington had been doing the same thing — searching for him — and they’d never find each other if they were both on the move. Hopefully, Bennington and his men had headed back to camp, and they could rendezvous there. So he began to retrace his steps through the jungle.

As he was about to reach the small clearing where he’d burned the pictures of Jennie and his family, a low growl came from above. He stepped back quickly and glanced up, appalled by the sight. Pablo’s bloody body lay sprawled across several branches, and a beautiful orange and black jaguar lay beside it, long tail twitching as the cat stared down at him menacingly.