Hostage Zero (41 page)
Jonathan pressed his mike button.
“Heads up, Harvey. They’re coming right at you.”
Harvey’s stomach flipped. “Fuck.”
“What?” Evan asked, keenly dialed into the change of emotion.
Harvey hadn’t been aware that he’d spoken aloud. He pressed a hand to the boy’s shoulder. “Get down,” he said. “Lie flat. Bad guys are coming. No matter what happens, you stay put until one of us comes for you.”
Both boys showed alarm. “Who?”
“Your old bosses. Now get down.” Harvey snapped his NVGs back over his eyes, and right away saw them scattering into the jungle. At a glance, he saw seven or eight of them, but they weren’t interested in seeing him. They were interested in getting the hell out of there.
Should he shoot or let them go? It was a tough call. His mission was to get Evan Guinn home alive and healthy. By opening fire, he’d give away his position and invite return fire that would endanger the boy. But by letting them get away, he let them live to attack again.
“
Los banditos están aquí
!” shouted a voice from above and behind. The bandits are here! Harvey whirled on the sound, but when no one was there, he realized that it was one of the kids who were still inside the barracks they hadn’t unlocked. Somehow they knew, and then the one voice was joined by others. “
Los banditos están aquí
!”
Los banditos están aquí
!” shouted a voice from above and behind. The bandits are here! Harvey whirled on the sound, but when no one was there, he realized that it was one of the kids who were still inside the barracks they hadn’t unlocked. Somehow they knew, and then the one voice was joined by others. “
Los banditos están aquí
!”
They started to chant it. And it worked. The fleeing soldiers turned. The closest one raised his weapon to fire.
Harvey’s MP5 chattered out a three-round burst and his target dropped; whether dead, wounded, or just scared, he couldn’t tell. The important part was that he didn’t shoot back.
But a whole bunch of others did. The jungle lit up with muzzle flashes, the staccato pounding of a dozen automatic weapons combining to form the sound of tearing fabric. A fierce and deadly stream of bullets shredded the wall behind them and the foliage surrounding them. Harvey pushed the boys deeper under the barracks hut, while above them the boy who had brought the fire this way screamed in terror and pain as the enemy’s poorly aimed fire passed through the plank walls as if they were made of cardboard.
Harvey knew he couldn’t stay here. If he returned fire from this spot, the response would bring a deadly fusillade that would as likely kill Evan as him.
After all this—after all the blood and the suffering—the one unforgiveable sin would be for Evan to get hurt.
“Don’t move,” he hissed to the boy. “No matter what, don’t move.”
“Where are you—”
Harvey didn’t stick around for the rest. Staying pressed low to the wet ground, he crawled the remaining length of the barracks and emerged into the darkness on the north side. Brilliant muzzle flashes marked the location of the attackers. Where Harvey saw a flash, he fired two three-round bursts at it. The flash suppressor on his own weapon kept him invisible to all but those who would have happened to be looking directly at him when he fired. With all the noise of the continuing battle, his were just more shots fired amid the cacophony.
He damn near jumped out of his underwear as a hand landed on his shoulder. When he spun to confront the danger, another hand blocked the swing of his weapon. “We’re the good guys,” Jonathan said, and then he and Boxers added their firepower to repel the new attack. Within fifteen seconds, it was all over.
As their ears recovered, they could once again hear the subtle sounds of the night. Like the moaning and whimpering of wounded children.
And the sound of an approaching helicopter. Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks.
“You didn’t call for cavalry, did you?” Boxers asked.
Jonathan kicked at the dirt. “Shit. That’s just what we need. An aerial assault.”
“We need that chopper,” Harvey said. “These wounded kids. We can’t carry them down to safety.” He shot a hard look to Boxers. “And don’t even think of saying that they’re not our responsibility. We did this.”
“If you’ve got an idea, I’m listening.”
Harvey sighed and shook his head as he undid the Velcro fastener on his vest and lifted his helmet off his head. “Oh, I’ve got an idea,” he said as he pulled his vest off. “It sucks to be me, but I’ve got an idea.”
To make it work, though, he had to move quickly.
Even from a mile out, the scale of the destruction was ten times worse than the worst Mitch Ponder could have imagined. Bodies lay strewn everywhere, as if dropped from an aircraft. Everything was on fire—even the ground itself in some places—and what wasn’t burning had instead been chewed mercilessly by gunfire. An airstrike could not have produced more thorough destruction.
“My God,” he breathed. “My God, my God, my God ...” He couldn’t begin to calculate the millions this was going to cost him. Into the intercom, he said in Spanish, “Look for white-skinned soldiers. Kill any that you see.”
Behind him in the cargo bay, the gunner made ready his AK-47.
They came in low and fast, barely above the treetops, sweeping by quickly to make the helicopter a harder target to hit. No one shot at them, however. No one moved. The dead remained still, but the physical devastation stood out in sharper relief.
“Incredible,” the pilot said.
And then it was gone, the tableau of destruction giving way to the blackness of the lightless jungle. “Make another pass,” Ponder ordered. “More slowly this time.”
The chopper slid to a stop in the air and then pivoted on its axis to reverse direction. “If we go too slowly, we’re more easily shot down,” the pilot warned.
“If they wanted to shoot us down they’d be firing their guns,” Ponder said. “And if they don’t they’re either dead or they’ve made their escape.” He took a deep breath. “It looks to me like everything’s dead.”
“I see movement in the jungle,” the gunner said. “On the right-hand side.”
Ponder turned. Thanks to the night vision, he could see them now. A dozen people moving about. They were children.
“Those are the workers,” Ponder said. At least they were still left to him. Even as the thought formed in his mind, he realized that with his soldiers and supervisors gone, the children would have to die now, too. He could not afford to let the story of his weakness filter back to the villagers.
“Look there,” the pilot said, pointing. “One of the supervisors is still alive.”
Sure enough, a dark-skinned man, barefoot and shirtless, staggered out into the clearing, waving his arms and beckoning the chopper down to the ground. The pilot parked the aircraft in a low hover, blasting the man with the rotor wash and making him cover his head.
“Do you recognize him?” the pilot asked.
Ponder shook his head. “I don’t know. He looks half-dead.” The man stood with a distinct list to his left, and he appeared to be wounded in the leg.
“It could be a trap,” the pilot said. “What do you want me to do?”
Harvey hoped he wasn’t overselling the limp. Playing decoy had never been a part of his repertoire in the past, and as he staggered out into the open, he couldn’t help but fear that his hunched, staggering gait was a little too Quasimodo. As the chopper slowed and drew to a hover, he knew that he had their attention, but as they continued to hover, he could feel the gun sights settling on his chest and head, readying to call his bluff.
He’d removed his protective gear, shirt, and shoes just to look more like the guards he was impersonating; but the lack of clothes meant no place to conceal a weapon. He was entirely dependent upon his acting ability and on Jonathan’s and Boxers’ marksmanship. Otherwise, he was going to die right here in a place where he’d never in a million years choose to live.
The roar of the rotor wash kicked up dirt and soot and firebrands, enveloping him in a cloud of crap that made it impossible to see anything.
Careful to keep in character, Harvey closed his eyes, covered his head, and hoped that God and great aim would make it all right.
When something changed in the pitch of the helicopter noise, he knew they’d made their decision to land.
Then the shouting started.
Crouched low, with the corner of the barracks as concealment, Jonathan settled his sights on the helicopter’s cockpit, while above him, Boxers had taken a kneeling pose to aim at the cargo bay, where the doors had been removed from this Cadillac of executive helicopters to provide for a door gunner. The plan was simple: the instant the wheels touched the ground, Jonathan would take out the pilot first and then the front-seat passenger, while Boxers killed anyone in the cargo bay. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.
Jonathan found himself feeling an odd paternal pride in Harvey and his willingness to take this risk. To willfully disarm oneself in the middle of a firefight took a unique brand of courage. When this was over—
A terrified scream split the night from behind. “Help! Mr. Jonathan! Mr. Jonathan! Help!”
As Jonathan scrambled to see, something heavy hit the side of the barracks building hard enough to create the sound of splintering wood.
Evan worried that he might have pissed himself. It was hard to tell in the pooled water under the sleeping hut where the crying and moaning and pleading continued without break. It probably didn’t even matter, except to him. It was just such a baby thing to do.
Lying here like this, unable to see anything that was going on around him, but hearing the sounds of so much violence, he had to talk himself into believing that they had not been abandoned, that Mr. Jonathan was stating a fact when he assured them that everything would be fine if they just didn’t move.
Next to him in the muck under the hut, Charlie had fallen completely silent except for his breathing, which sounded a lot like the old steam trains from the movies, chugging and huffing at a rate that couldn’t be healthy.
“Are we going to die?” Charlie whined.
“I don’t think so,” Evan said. He tried to sound more certain than his words, even though his mind was screaming the same question. He didn’t have the luxury of panicking, though, because Charlie had gotten there first, and one of them had to keep a level head.
“Who are they?” Charlie asked.
“It’s a long—”
Before Evan could finish his answer, his head exploded in pain, and he found himself being dragged through the miserable soup of mud and cold water. “Ow!” he yelled, and when he reached for the top of his head, he found a fist wrapped around a handful of his hair. By touching the fist, he seemed to have accelerated the rate at which he was being dragged out from under the hut.
He clawed at the ground with his heels, but there was no stopping his attacker. In just a couple of seconds, he was completely clear and dangling on tiptoes from his hair.
It was Victor, towering huge as ever, and now slicked with what looked in the dim light to be blood. His eyes burned with an anger that Evan could actually feel.
Evan wrapped his hands around the man’s forearm for leverage and kicked out for the man’s crotch, scoring a hit solid enough to make him lose his grip, but not enough to make him drop.
“Help!” Evan yelled. “Mr. Jonathan! Mr. Jonathan! Help!”
Victor still had his Louisville Slugger. He unleashed a two-handed home-run swing at the boy’s head. Evan ducked, barely dodging the blow that splintered the hut’s wall, and fell back into the mud. He screamed again.
In the flashing, dancing light of the fire, he saw Victor smile as he brought the bat high over his head. Evan shrieked, first in terror, and then in agony.
Jonathan understood in a single glance what was happening, and he kicked himself for having dropped his guard. You never put all eyes in one direction, and you never leave the precious cargo alone. He had done both, and now a large and very pissed-off local was threatening to ruin everything with a baseball bat.
Jonathan pushed away from the wall. “Stay on the chopper,” he commanded to Boxers. With Harvey’s ruse on the edge of working and the helicopter flaring to land, Jonathan couldn’t afford the noise of a gunshot. He drew his KA-BAR and rushed the man.
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