War Lord

Seventeen

Céu Cidade — Sky City. As the name suggested, the favela held high ground. It sat on the saddle between two peaks with a valley on either side, the one where von Weiss had his home and the other given to warehouses. It was in this light industrial valley forty minutes later that Petinski and I crawled through mostly deserted streets, eventually parking among sprawling rundown buildings with shattered windows.

‘Leave the car and it’ll get stolen,’ Petinski observed.

‘Not if you stay with it,’ I told her.

‘Sorry — if who stays with it?’

‘Who do you think?’ I said.

Petinski sighed like she knew this was going to come up. ‘Look, Cooper, I’m quite capable of taking care of myself. And if you get yourself into trouble, maybe I’ll take care of you too.’

Sure. Petinski was well under a hundred pounds and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a fair proportion of them kept her bra occupied. I turned toward her and was about to say, ‘I don’t think so,’ when she took my hand and twisted my thumb in a way that felt like she’d dislocated it, providing a flash of intense pain that caused me to cry out. ‘Okay!’ I snapped. My hand was released and the pain instantly evaporated. ‘Jesus, Petinski… What the hell was that?’

‘I gave gymnastics away after the Olympics and took up Jiujitsu and Taekwondo. I was US Women’s Kumite Champion 2006 and 2010.’

I wiggled my thumb. ‘So I’ll stay with the car and you check out the damn favela.’

‘No. Let’s both do this,’ she said, getting out of the vehicle. ‘Forget about the car. We can steal something else later if we need to.’

You learn a lot about people when you travel with them.

We each drank some water from bottles we’d brought with us, stuffed the essentials into a small pack, and a few minutes later we entered Céu Cidade via a brightly lit section of road containing a Hamburger Bob’s, a general store, a drinks and candy store, as well as shops selling furniture and welding services, a gas station, a motorcycle repair garage, a tire repair shop and a post office. I found a street number and confirmed that this was the post office on the FedEx package’s consignment note. Petinski snapped off a photo with her phone for future reference, and then took a shot of some graffiti on an adjacent wall of three monkey heads side by side: one with no ears, one with no eyes and one with no mouth. The rules to live by in Sky City…

Above the retail area the streets darkened, became narrower, and the incline sharpened. The airless night was hot and thick with humidity and my t-shirt was already sticking to my back, my feet sweating in my Adidas. Starlight behind thin high cloud provided meager illumination. It was late and not too many folks were around for such a densely packed area — a few shirtless men in shorts doing late-night chores, the odd group of women sitting on stoops, the wet breeze funneling through open doors providing some relief from the heat. Dogs stood around, cats cantered between the darker shadows. Occasional motorcycles roared by, heading up or down. Almost no one paid us any heed.

Even up close the homes here seemed to be piled on top of each other. And they were constructed from whatever material could be slapped together quickly: brick, cinderblock, wood, corrugated steel, poured concrete, old auto panels, metal sheeting and some items I couldn’t identify. Here and there light bulbs burned inside windows with no glass, electricity provided via a tangled spaghetti of black wiring over the streets and alleys. And in the air, hints of sewage, old grease, kerosene and samba music.

We climbed up through the human anthill, following winding paths, uneven stairwells and narrow lanes. At one point, three shirtless young men appeared suddenly from the shadows and followed their own pungent body odor down the narrow chute toward us. I tensed for trouble, but none materialized. We came out into a wider alleyway and saw the silhouette of a young guy ahead lounging against the wall, smoking, a Belgian FN FAL assault rifle in his other hand, muzzle pointed absently at his toes. A red ember glowed in front of his face and smoke drifted in our direction. I smelled weed. The guy was humming a tune, occasionally breaking into the lyrics, and stopping regularly to spit on the ground. Hmm. Stoned, bored and armed. In short, trouble. We detoured around him, backtracking ten yards or so to cut through a slit of a walkway between houses that leaned into each other and seemed to meet in the dank, airless darkness overhead, blocking out the stars.

We followed the walkway and exited soon after in a relatively open space, the intersection of a number of roads and paths. A view opened out to the east, toward Ipanema a couple of miles away, where the lights from another favela overlooking the beach glittered like gold dust tossed onto black velvet.

Farther behind us up the hill, above the intersection, a row of spotlights burned with a white-hot intensity unusual in these parts. It appeared to be coming from a collection of walled houses, some kind of compound. Two motorcycles roared up the hill toward us. I drew back into the shadows, my arm across Petinski’s chest so that she got the message. The KTMs roared into view, passengers on the back armed with more assault rifles; they sped across the intersection and were cloaked by the shadows.

Schloss von Weiss was close. Keeping out of the open, we reconnoitered the intersection and found the cavern that had swallowed the motorcycles. The lane kinked back on itself, followed a tunnel between some houses and came out below those spotlights, which were blazing down from a high cinderblock wall built by folks who knew how to build.

We kept moving, scouting the wall. Twenty minutes later we had circumnavigated it and were back where we started. Down one end, back toward the location of the crooning doper with the FN, was a gate manned by four men. All were armed. One of them carried what appeared to be a light machine gun, a Belgian Minimi perhaps, or maybe the US version of the same, the M249. Whatever, it meant going through the front gate wasn’t an option. Not tonight.

‘What now?’ Petinski whispered.

I looked around. Not much to play with. The compound wall was smooth. No way to climb it.

‘What are you planning, Cooper? You can’t storm it. There are only two of us, remember?’ Petinski pulled a cigarette packet — sized box from her pocket, turned it on and held it up. ‘A neutron detector,’ she explained before I could ask her what she was doing.

‘That’s gonna pick up a bomb in a basement over the wall?’

‘So they say. Uses a gallium arsenide wafer. Detects neutrons emitted from fissile materials. Extremely sensitive. If our bomb’s in the area, it’ll tell us.’ She tucked the instrument into a vest pocket.

‘Well, is it?’ I asked her.

‘Is it what?’

‘In the area?’

‘Doesn’t appear to be,’ she said.

I checked left and right. A house piled up in one spot near the wall had a roofline that extended beyond its neighbors’. I went up to it and found the front door — solid, and locked. I brought out my gadget — the Glock.

‘You want to gain entry?’ Petinski asked.

‘That’s what I had in mind.’

‘Put the gun away,’ she said, backing up half a dozen steps. She then bounded toward the brickwork beside me. At the last instant she leaped and hit the wall with her front foot and pushed up so that her hand found a ledge at least ten feet off the ground. In one fluid movement her other foot sprang off a crack and she was in midair, reaching for a pipe. I watched her swing herself completely around it and then push herself up, feet first. One leg hooked over a balcony and the next instant Petinski was over it and gone. The woman climbed like a monkey.

Moments later the front door opened. ‘Coming in?’ she asked politely.

I put my finger to my lips.

‘Relax, the place is empty. Could be a shift worker lives here.’

Inside it smelled of boiled meat, cheap tobacco and urine. My least favorite Air Wick. Petinski led the way up a steep, narrow flight of concrete steps ending in a covered veranda, the one through which she’d gained entry. The top of the von Weiss compound wall was three feet above our heads, and about the same distance away. I looked down over the balcony and confirmed a drop of about twenty feet to the ground. Starlight caught on the jagged shards of broken glass set into the top edge of the compound wall’s cinderblocks.

The home we were in was small and open to the elements on the side facing the wall. Plastic sheeting hung down from the ceiling, a makeshift screen against the rain. Behind the plastic and down one end was a stove with gas cylinder, a sink, a compact bar fridge covered in football decals, and a small table and chair. Down the other end, a narrow wire bed frame occupied the compact space with an old mattress on top. There was also a long plank of wood between cinderblocks on which stood various electrical appliances, magazines and football kitsch. A nearby floodlight on the compound wall lit the place like it was under arrest.

‘Got any cash on you?’ I asked Petinski.

‘No, why?’

I took some reals from my pocket and left them on the fridge. Next, I grabbed the mattress. The smell of it reminded me of the A-Star as I hauled it out onto the veranda and set it down. ‘Keep an eye on the guards at the front gate. Let me know when no one’s looking.’ I readied the Glock.

A few seconds passed. ‘Now,’ she whispered.

I squeezed the trigger, shot through the nearby floodlight’s metal shroud and killed the light. No glass tinkled to the laneway below, which was the general idea. Passing the Glock to Petinski I hoisted the mattress to the veranda’s wall, picked it up by its bottom end and half pushed it, half threw it at the top of the wall across the way. The mattress came to rest straddling the top edge, covering those glass shards. I went inside and came back out with the plank of wood. The damn thing weighed a ton — hardwood. I propped one end on the veranda wall and lowered the top end onto the mattress.

‘Put a foot here.’ I pointed at the end of the plank and Petinski secured it as I leaned on the makeshift bridge, testing its strength.

‘Hurry,’ she told me.

‘I’m hurrying.’

‘You call that hurrying. If it had been me up there we’d be in the bar ordering—’

‘Something virginal with an umbrella in it,’ I said. I shinnied to the top of the plank and popped my head over the wall. It was dark. Wrestling with the pack, I removed the NVGs and slipped them over my head. Then I got hold of the camera, a small remote video recorder attached to a sticky base. I popped my head over the wall again to ensure that the coast was clear. It was. There wasn’t much open area on the other side of the wall, though more than was usual in this housing compress. Down the far end, behind the gate manned by the armed sentries, was a brightly lit courtyard. A black Mercedes SUV gleamed under those lights. Could it be the same vehicle that had driven out of von Weiss’s compound earlier in the evening? Sure it was. What were the chances that identical black SUVs would be in both places? Limited.

This compound had been set up to operate like a fort. I already knew that a wall went all the way round it. Snipers in the rooms of the uppermost houses, plus a machine gun or two behind sandbagged emplacements up high, could keep an assaulting force with only small arms at bay for some time. Any attack would probably also have to deal with armed resistance sniping at it from the rear, from the homes farther down the hill. And no doubt there would be underground tunnels for escape if necessary.

I went back to concentrating on those armed guards at the gate. When I was sure the coast was clear, I threw the sticky camera at the wall of the house opposite. It stuck, finding a brick ledge above block. Lucky throw.