Hostage Zero (29 page)

Authors: John Gilstrap

Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Thrillers

BOOK: Hostage Zero

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While Harvey pulled HemCon packets out of his med kit and ripped them open, Jonathan said, “Tell me what you did, Josie.”

“Am I shot bad?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re shot bad.” No matter what, Jonathan owed him the truth.

“Fatal?”

“Probably.”

“Jesus,” Harvey snapped. “Where did you learn bedside manner?”

Jonathan ignored him. “I need to know the details, Josie. You don’t want to die with betrayal on your soul.”

Harvey said, “This is going to hurt.” He’d donned a pair of latex gloves and prepared to insert the HemCon pads into the wounds. Similar in appearance to standard gauze dressings, HemCon pads were soaked in a coagulating agent that was damned effective at stanching the flow of blood from traumatic injuries long enough to get the patient to a hospital.

“Wait a second,” Jonathan said.

Harvey shook his head. “No.”

No easy way existed to jam fabric into the ballistic pathway of a bullet. Josie howled like a tortured animal as Harvey stuffed first the entry wound and then the exit. The very thought of it churned Jonathan’s stomach.

Josie lay soaked in sweat and heaving for breath when it was all done. He’d nearly bitten through his lower lip. “
Dios mio
,” he moaned.

Jonathan stroked his hair. “It’s over now. That should slow the bleeding.”

“Then maybe I can live?”

Harvey shot a glare.

“Maybe,” Jonathan said. “But Josie, you have to tell me what you did. After you do that, we can give you a shot for the pain.”

Josie locked eyes with Jonathan. They shimmered with fear and shame. “A man came to me,” he said. “He knew of our work together in the past. He had pictures of you. All three of you.”

Jonathan’s heart skipped. No one knew they were coming. “Who was this man?”

“I don’t know him.”

“You know his name,” Jonathan said, his heart heavy with disappointment. “I know it, too, but I need you to say it. Please don’t lie to me. Not now.”

Tears tracked from the corners of the little man’s eyes. “I don’t know how he found me,” he said. “He approached me on the street, showed me a picture of my family, and told me that if I saw any of you—he showed me your pictures—I was to call him and tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

“That I saw you, I suppose.”

Boxers had rejoined them. He stood at his full height, allowing his shadow to keep the sun out of José’s eyes.

“He threatened my family,” José said.

Jonathan understood now. “What did he want?”

The last of the resistance went away. Jonathan saw real remorse. Genuine regret. “He knew that I was raising an attack force. He guessed that it was for you.” He tried a friendly smile. “I’m not the liar I used to be. He wanted me to kill you.”

Jonathan gave a wry chuckle. “With the people I hired to help me?”

Josie closed his eyes against another wave of agony. “It would have pained me,” he said after it passed. “He had pictures of my family. He was going to kill them.”

“What makes you think we won’t?” Boxers asked.

Jonathan didn’t like the question, didn’t like the tone, and didn’t like the implication. But he showed none of it.

José smiled. “You are here to rescue a child,” he said. “People who rescue children don’t kill them.”

Bingo
, Jonathan thought. In fact, a Silver Star citation posted on the wall at Unit headquarters at Fort Bragg gave testimony to the lengths Boxers would go to protect children.

Jonathan cranked his head to look up at Boxers’ silhouette. “Get on the horn with Mother Hen and have her scan the screens. Make sure we’re still alone.”

Boxers backed off a few feet and keyed his microphone. Jonathan tuned him out. “I need to know everything, Josie. Every detail. Start with his name.”

The little man squinted against the sun. “I knew who he was as soon as I saw him. They call him
El Matador.
He is very feared by the people here in the mountains, and he is allowed by the
policía
to do whatever he wants. He kills people, Mr. Jones. His last name is Ponder. First name Michael, I think. No, it’s a different name that sounds like Michael. I don’t know.”

Jonathan didn’t know what to say. This mission had barely begun, yet the battle plan had already been shredded.

“I did it to save my family,” Josie repeated. Another wave of pain rolled through his gut. And he tensed against it. “It was never my plan to betray you, Mr. Jones. You must know that.”

Boxers’ shadow returned. “We’re alone,” he reported.

“Good to know,” Jonathan said. To Josie: “Did you even look for the boy we’re trying to find?”

José’s eyes cleared. “
Sí
. I found him.”

Jonathan shot a look to Boxers, and the Big Guy retreated to one of the ancient Chevy Blazers that Josie had brought for transportation. He returned with a plastic laminated map that was covered with grease-pencil markings. Jonathan unfolded the map and held it so Josie could see it. “Show me.”

Josie took a moment to study it and orient himself. “We are right here,” he said, leaving a bloody dot on the map. He pointed to another spot. “This is where the boy is. You cannot drive to it, and you cannot fly to it. You have to walk.”

“How do you know this is the place?”

“The boy you are looking for has very blond hair, yes?”

“Yes.”

Josie pointed to yet another spot on the map. “Everybody knows that Ponder has a permanent camp here. It’s a—how do you say it?—stage area.”

“Staging area,” Jonathan corrected. “For what?”

“For food and supplies for his factories. They gather the materials there, and then move them out into the mountains to the factories.”

“How many factories are there?”

José shrugged. “I don’t know. No one knows. Many. But one of the men who works there is easily bought. He told me that a blond-haired boy was brought to this staging area two days ago. He was—how do you say it?—asleep, but not normal sleep.”

“Unconscious,” Jonathan helped.

“Yes, exactly. When he woke up, they put him in a truck and drove him into the woods.”

“To one of the many factories.”

“
Exactamente
. This one here.” He pointed back to the spot where he said Evan was.

“How do you know it’s this one?”

“Because of the white hair. Word of such things travels quickly among the Indian villages. This one here”—the spot he pointed to this time had no marking at all—“has been treated particularly badly by Ponder’s men. Many rapes and murders. No men left in the village at all. No boys, even, beyond
ocho años
. They have all been killed or put to work in the factories. Slave labor. So when a boy who looks like the boy you seek comes through, he is noticed. He was there yesterday. Only one factory is close by. That is where you will find the blond boy.” José gave a weak smile, clearly proud of himself.

Then it disappeared. “When Ponder discovers that you’re still alive, he will kill my wife and children.”

Jonathan sighed. “I’m sorry.”

Harvey offered, “Lie to him. Call and say that you killed us. That would buy time.”

“I wish it would,” Josie said. He closed his eyes. “I was supposed to deliver your heads to him,” he said.

Ten minutes later, they were ready to go. While Jonathan and Boxers managed the business of loading two vehicles, Harvey made final preparations with Josie. As gently as possible, he dragged the man to a shady spot and propped him against two rucksacks whose owners no longer needed them.

“Are you comfortable?” Harvey asked.

Josie looked terrified. As promised, Harvey had given him an injection for the pain, but it hadn’t touched the man’s fear of dying. “Please take me with you,” Josie begged. “Don’t make me die out here.”

Harvey avoided eye contact. “Boss says no.”

“Please. You can talk him into it. You look like a nice young man.”

“Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving.”

“Please.”

Harvey’s stomach churned. “I can’t,” he said. He stood.

“Then kill me,” Josie said. “Give me another shot. Give me five shots. Make me go to sleep and—”

Jonathan stepped into Harvey’s space. “We’re not assassins, Josie,” he said. “He won’t drug you to death, and before you ask, I won’t shoot you to death. It’s not what we do.” He put a hand on Harvey’s shoulder. “Go ahead and mount up. We’ll be in the Range Rover.”

José tried to sit up more, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. “Mr. Jones. All those years.”

“They’re all in the past. I’m sorry. I wish you hadn’t done what you did.”

“But my family.”

“They’ll be killed, I suppose.”

“You could help them.”

Jonathan paused. He didn’t want to rise to that bait. The man was dying, for God’s sake. He was desperate for some thread of hope. Behind him, one of the Blazers rumbled to life.

“Good-bye, Josie.”

José took a huge breath and seemed to focus all his energy. “I don’t want to die here!” he shouted.

Jonathan turned his back on his old colleague and walked away.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-TWO

As the sound of the approaching chopper grew louder, Navarro pulled an AR-10 rifle off the rack and hovered it in the air for Gail. “You know how to shoot?” he asked.

Gail swallowed her annoyance. He had no way of knowing her past. “I’m actually pretty good,” she said.

“I hope so,” he said. “Take this.”

Gail accepted the weapon. She recognized it for what it was—a 7.62-millimeter monster that would put a hole through anything. “Aren’t we overreacting a bit?”

“Overreacting would be shooting at a news helicopter,” Navarro quipped, reaching back to the rack. “Repelling an airborne assault is quite the opposite.” He grabbed a pristine 1950s vintage M-14—the precursor to Gail’s rifle, and by most estimates one of the finest weapons ever manufactured for the military.

“I need ammo,” Gail said.

But Navarro was ahead of her. He handed her two full magazines. Including the one that was already installed, that gave her sixty rounds, plus the fifteen in her Glock. Add all of that to the sixty that Navarro took for himself and they could have themselves quite the war.

“We don’t get traffic in this airspace,” Navarro explained. “We don’t get visitors, either. To get both on the same day means that someone’s about to die. I don’t want it to be me.” He headed for the back door.

“Where are we going?”

“Out.”

“Where?”

Navarro didn’t answer, and Gail realized that she’d find out by keeping up.

Navarro moved with surprising agility as he made a beeline for the back door, pausing only long enough to turn the three locks that kept it closed. Out here, the chop of the approaching rotor blades was louder, registering in Gail’s chest as a deep thump that had a physical force to it.

“Definitely coming here,” Navarro said, perhaps to himself, but loudly enough for Gail to hear. He seemed to know where he was going and what he had planned. And why not? He’d had enough years of solitude to plan for just about any eventuality.

From the back door, he picked up his pace toward the woods line, about seventy-five feet from the back wall. If he had, in fact, designed this property as a fortress of sorts, then he had obviously planned more for defense than offense. The wide fields of fire were great for fending off an attacking force, but they were exactly the wrong choice if you were trying to make a break without being seen. Ask any prison yard designer and he’ll agree.

The rotor sound crescendoed at about the halfway point of their run for the woods, and Navarro really poured on the gas to get to the tree line before being spotted. With the carry handle for the AR-10 clutched in her right fist, and the spare mags in her left, Gail kept up step for step.

With ten yards left, she would have sworn the chopper was immediately overhead. As if to confirm her worst fears, the voice of God said, “Federal agents. Stop where you are.”

For an instant—no longer than the width of a heartbeat— Gail considered complying. Even Navarro slowed by half a stride. But this wasn’t right. She didn’t quite know why yet, but something about the scenario was wrong for an action by any federal law enforcement agency. “Keep going!” she yelled. “Go, go, go!”

It was all Navarro needed. He picked up speed again.

There’s no way to accurately track time in stressful conditions, but in the seconds that separated them from some measure of shelter, the hairs on the back of Gail’s neck went to full attention. Out of sheer instinct, she cut hard to her right, and then back to the left again to ruin any shooter’s aim.

The first bullet didn’t arrive until after they’d crossed into the trees, and at that, it went two feet wide, drilling a pine between the two of them.

Navarro dove to the ground for cover, and Gail was three strides past him before she realized what he’d done. “Bruce!” she yelled. They weren’t deeply enough into the woods yet for adequate cover. Two more rounds screamed in, way too close to him. The shooter was getting better.

“Stay down!” Gail yelled. She took a knee behind a hardwood and brought her rifle to bear, trying her best to stay invisible as she searched the horizon for a target. The hammering sound of the rotors hadn’t lessened a bit, but it seemed to be coming from directly overhead. She didn’t have a clue what the shooters were up to, but she knew that if she couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see her. “Bruce, get up now. Find cover.”

Navarro reacted quickly, again surprising her with his lithe flexibility. He got his feet under him and more sprang than ran to a different tree. “What are they doing?”

The rotor noise had stabilized, as if they’d parked the chopper in the air overhead.

Directly overhead.

“Oh, shit,” Gail breathed. “Run, Bruce!” she yelled. “We’ve got to move. Follow me.”

She took off at a dead run, staying inside the tree line, but running parallel to the clearing, sprinting in the direction she thought they’d least likely anticipate.

Inside ten seconds, the grenades started falling through the canopy of leaves. The explosions were not as loud as she expected them to be—no louder, really, than the flash-bangs she’d used during her HRT days—but the fragmentation damage was staggering, obliterating bushes and smaller trees, and stripping bark and leaves off the larger ones. She knew for a fact that she heard three explosions, but after that it was just a cacophony that reduced their abandoned hiding spot to a lifeless crater. She ignored the two hornet stings in the back of her right leg, which she knew had to be grenade fragments finding their mark.

She drew to a stop behind another tree, the largest one she could find, and Navarro joined her. “Bombs?” he shouted, nearly hysterical. He’d lost his steely calm, and what had replaced it was not at all endearing.

“Hand grenades,” she said. “I suspected they were going to drop something once they moved over the trees, where a sniper would have no shot. Then, when they went into a hover, I knew for sure. Are you okay?”

“They threw hand grenades at me!”

“Are you hurt?”

Navarro shook his head, then grew concerned as his gaze shifted to Gail’s backside. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

“I’m hurting, too,” she said. “Seems only reasonable.” Now that they’d stopped running, she could feel the trails of blood running down the back of her right leg.

“Are
you
okay?”

“They dropped grenades on me!” Gail tried to match his incredulous tone, and succeeded in eliciting a chuckle. “I think I’m fine.”

She forced herself not to look, deciding that as long as the pain was tolerable, and the flow was a trickle and not a gush, it was a minor wound. To look now and discover otherwise would help no one and change nothing. The bones were intact, and she was alive. In times like these, it pays to take things one step at a time.

The chopper was moving again, circling around to hover over the clearing between the house and the tree line. It was a fairly old-style Bell Jet Ranger, popular among police forces in the 1990s, and it had no markings that showed it to be anything other than a private aircraft. The chopper pivoted in the air, bringing its port side parallel to the trees, its nose pointed directly at Gail and Navarro.

She could see the pilots clearly through the windscreen—so clearly, in fact, that she wondered how they were not seen in return. Then she got it: they were surveying the damage they’d wrought.

Navarro raised his rifle. “Let’s take them out.”

“No!” Gail snapped. Her mind raced to review their options. This was their perfect moment of advantage. The aircraft was completely vulnerable. If they opened fire now, they could knock it out of the sky and neutralize the danger. Except they didn’t have cause. They were not in imminent danger, and every professional law enforcement officer knew that in the absence of immediate threat, deadly force could not be used. It was always a last resort. That’s the way things worked in an ordered, civilized society. There was
always
another way.
Always
a better option than killing, right up until the moment that those options proved impossible.

A man with a rifle appeared in the Jet Ranger’s open side door. He raised the weapon to his shoulder and opened fire, blasting bullet after bullet into the smoldering, ravaged remains of what had been their hiding place.

Fuck it.

Gail brought her AR-10 to bear. “You take the pilots,” she said. “I’ll take the shooter.” Without waiting for an answer, she steadied her rifle against the trunk of her sheltering tree and lined up for a slam-dunk fifty-yard sure thing. She double-checked the firing selector to make sure it was set to single-fire, she corrected for the downwash of the rotors, squeezed the trigger and—

Navarro opened up on full-auto, emptying his twenty-round magazine in less than two seconds, and filling the air with twenty deadly projectiles that hit nothing. Nothing! Jesus, how was that even possible?

Gail’s shot went high and right, harmlessly shattering the window of the open sliding door.

The pilot reacted instantly, pouring on power and pitch. The nose dipped dramatically—perilously, Gail thought—as the rotor blades dug deeply into the air and pulled the aircraft up and away with amazing speed. Buffeted by the downwash, she tried to react, shifting her aim to the cockpit, but she wasn’t fast enough. She fired three shots in their direction, but they were wasted. She was reasonably sure that she hit the chopper somewhere, but if she’d done any damage, it would have been from pure luck. As the aircraft pulled up and away, the pilot also slipped it sideways, a combat tactic that made even a relatively slow target like a chopper difficult to hit with ground fire. She considered firing again but decided against it. Chances of a kill shot had dropped to nothing, and even out here, all those bullets had to come down somewhere.

To her right, Navarro finished reloading and shouldered his rifle again.

Gail slapped the muzzle down. “What was that?” she yelled. “How do you miss something that big when it’s that close?”

Navarro’s face glowed an unnatural red as he shouted back, “I was a little stressed, okay? I’ve never tried to shoot anything down before. What about you, Miss Expert? You didn’t do any better. I say we make a run for it.”

“To where?”

“To anywhere. You’ve got your truck, and I’ve got mine. We just get in and drive.”

“Not with them in the air,” Gail said, rejecting the plan out of hand. “Any advantage we have is tied to our mobility. A car is dependent on roads, and roads bring predictability. That’s the last thing we need.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait to see what
they’re
going to do, and then react.”

She led the way deeper into the woods, and then left, back toward their first hiding place. Drawing on her HRT counter-sniper training, she knew that that people on the move tend to stick to one direction, rarely doubling back.

“Why are we going back this way?” Navarro asked.

“Because we are,” she said. Sometimes the simplest answers were the best ones.

They both paused and gasped in unison as they passed by the ravaged section of woods that had been ground zero for the grenade attack. The earth had been ripped open, and tree roots avulsed from the dark soil. Hundreds of white gashes showed the tearing force of the fragmentation explosives against the tree trunks. Looking at the damage made her leg hurt even more. It had gone from a searing sting to a dull vibrant ache. Almost without thinking, she dared to touch the fabric of her denim jeans, but regretted it when she saw her wet, red fingertips.

“We’re not there yet,” she said, and she nudged Navarro on with a gentle push on his shoulder.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll know it when we see it,” she lied. What she meant was,
Anywhere but here.

When the distance felt right, she turned to the left and moved to the tree line again. With great effort, she lowered herself to her left knee, and peered out from behind a sheltering oak. At first, it appeared that the chopper hadn’t moved. It just sat there, parked in the air over the distant forest, well out of range. Were they radioing someone for instructions? Awaiting reinforcements, perhaps?

The thought of backup forces made her heart skip, but then she rejected the idea as unlikely. If they’d had more troops, they would have waited for them. No, whatever they decided to do, they would either do it alone, or they would do it another day.

“Okay, I’ll come with you,” Navarro said, a propos of nothing. “I’ll testify.”

Gail had almost forgotten he was there. “Yeah? Why the change of heart?”

He chuckled wryly. “I’d say my cover’s kind of blown, wouldn’t you?”

Gail didn’t respond. There was more, and he’d either share it or he wouldn’t, but that answer was too easy.

“Nobody should have this kind of power,” he said. “Too much violence, all to cover up a murder.”

Gail liked that. She acknowledged his decision with a nod.