The Hunt

32

It was late afternoon on their second day when Jaeger and his team withdrew from the ridge, descended the slope at the rear and set out due north. They’d kept a close watch on Dodge all through the hours of daylight, but there had been zero sign of Kammler or his cohorts, which made the CTR a real priority.

They looped around their former hilltop position until they were barely 250 metres short of Dodge. There they cached their bergens, covering them in thick vegetation, at a point they could easily find their way back to. Each prepared a separate day sack stuffed full of the bare necessities – medical pack, twenty-four hours’ rations, batteries, spare ammo – which they could grab and go if compromised.

That done, Jaeger and Narov set about ensuring that any exposed skin was streaked with mud and dirt, to break up the human form. Once they had finished the DIY camo, they stood nose-to-toe, scrutinising each other minutely. She was barely an inch shorter than him, and it was easy enough to check for any exposed skin that might have been missed. As he did so, Jaeger found himself catching her gaze.

Narov’s ice-blue eyes betrayed not the slightest hint of emotion: not excitement, not trepidation and certainly not fear. They were about to step into the heart of the narco gang’s territory, and capture would lead to a whole world of horror and pain.

In fact, it would be much better not to allow yourself to get captured. Better to save a final bullet for yourself.

But Narov appeared to be not the slightest bit fazed.

If he hadn’t known her better, Jaeger would have worried that she was in shock or denial. But he’d seen her like this before: suffused with an empty-seeming calm. It made you wonder if anyone was at home. And then, in an instant, she’d transform into a lightning-fast killer, as if some switch had been flicked inside her head.

It was weird. But that was Narov. And Raff was right: on a CTR, she made for perfect company.

They did a final check of their kit, making certain nothing would clatter or clunk as they moved about. Anything that threatened to make the slightest noise was coated in layers of khaki gaffer tape, deadening it.

When they were done, they could move silently as panthers.

Finally they settled upon some comms-under-duress key words. If either was captured and forced to make contact, they needed some seemingly normal phrase to insert into their messages. Otherwise, with a gun held to their heads, they could be forced to call for a rescue helo, luring it straight into a trap.

Key words sorted, and with the evening shadows lengthening, Jaeger gave the signal to move out. All knew the plan. As far as possible, the CTR would be done silently, without a word being spoken and using hand signals only.

Silent as ghosts, the four flitted through the trees. They reached a point set a hundred metres back from the fringes of Dodge – the drop-off point for Raff, who would be acting as their backstop.

As they crept closer to the clearing, Jaeger rolled out a length of paracord. This was their insurance policy: he and Narov could trace it back to Raff’s position, moving in utter silence and darkness.

The sights and sounds of the narco base were beginning to bleed through now: slivers of light, the put-put of generators, plus the odd burst of Latino beat blaring distortedly through the trees.

Alonzo took up position just inside the cover of the ragged fringe of jungle. He was here for two reasons. First, to provide fire support if it all went noisy. And second, to act as a marker to guide Narov and Jaeger back to their entry/exit point, from where they could trace the paracord back to Raff and their route to safety.

Jaeger moved ahead in a low crouch, Narov following some five feet behind him. They crept a yard or two into the open and went down on one knee, utterly motionless. They needed to allow their eyes to adjust to the change in light: from the dark of the jungle, they were now at the outer limits of Dodge City’s makeshift street lighting.

Before them stretched a patch of rough ground, littered with burnt tree stumps and waist-high bushes. Heaps of recently cut vegetation lay drying in the sun, ready for burning. From long experience, Jaeger knew that regular clearance and fire were the only ways to keep the jungle at bay.

Eyes adjusted, he turned left and crept along the fringe of vegetation, counting his left footfalls. After a minute or so, he found what he was looking for. He went down on one knee again, Narov doing likewise at his shoulder.

He nodded at a massive skeletal tree just to his left, glowing silver in the moonlight. It was strung with vines thick as a man’s thigh. ‘Okay, that’s our datum point.’

‘Got it. A hundred and forty paces.’

‘One forty,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘We get here, it’s a hundred and forty paces north to Alonzo.’

Fixing the datum point was crucial. Alonzo was a dark figure crouched amidst a fringe of trees. They’d never find him without an instantly recognisable feature that would lead them back to his exact location.

From the skeletal tree, Jaeger set off due south, towards the point where the drainage ditches should intersect with the fringes of the forest, the lights of Dodge throwing an eerie halo into the dark sky.

Sound drifted across to them. A burst of raucous laughter. Someone singing. The howl of a scooter burning down the nearest dirt track.

Jaeger could feel the tension gripping him as they pushed into more open terrain. The adrenalin was pumping. His senses were incredibly heightened.

A part of him loved it, as he sensed the danger crackling back and forth between the shadows. But he had no illusions as to what he and Narov were heading into.

The two of them were pitting themselves against several hundred of El Padre’s gunmen. An anarchic drugs mafia in a land of chaotic lawlessness.

As enemies went, it didn’t get much worse.