Prologue: Cold Open
“On your feet, damn it!” the angel said as she grabbed my load-bearing vest and hauled me from my seat. My head was swimming, and every bone in my body ached. I wasn’t sure where I was at first, but reality quickly came screaming back to me. We were still in the chopper. We’d crashed. The angel was pulling me toward the door. “Can you walk? Come on.”
“Wait,” I protested, steadying myself against the hull. “The others.” I turned to where my teammates were sitting. Several of them were still strapped into their seats, but they weren’t moving. Dim light poured through a gaping hole in the hull. Smoke and dust moved in the light, but behind that there was blood everywhere. My heart dropped into my stomach. I’d worked with these men for years.
“They’re dead, bro,” Tailor said, suddenly appearing in the door frame. At least one of my friends had made it. “She’s right. We’ve got to get out of here before they start dropping mortars on us. This isn’t a good place to be.”
Still terribly disoriented, I shook my head, trying to clear it.
“You’re in shock,” the angel said, pushing me through the door of our wrecked NH-90 helicopter. “What’s your name?” she asked as we stepped onto a large, tiled surface.
“V . . . Valentine,” I stammered, squinting in the early morning sun. “Where are we?”
“In a pool,” Tailor said, moving up a steep embankment ahead of me. “Ramirez is dead. Half the team’s gone.” He dropped the magazine out of his stubby, short-barreled OSW FAL and rocked in a fresh one. “Hostiles will be on us quick. You locked and loaded?”
My head was clearing. I looked down at the DSA FAL carbine in my hands and retracted the bolt slightly. A .308 round was in the chamber. My good-luck charm, a custom Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, was still in its holster on my left thigh. I was still alive, so it hadn’t let me down. “I’m ready,” I said, following Tailor up the incline.
Our chopper had crashed in the deep end of a huge, pear-shaped swimming pool that had been mostly drained of water. It sat at an odd angle, still smoking, the camouflage hull absolutely riddled with bullet holes. The walls of the pool’s deep end prevented the chopper from flipping over, but it was leaning to the side. There were deep gashes in the tile where the rotor had struck. The rotor had blown to pieces, and fragments were scattered everywhere.
“What happened?” I asked. The angel didn’t answer at first. I remembered then; her name was Ling, the one who hired us. She followed me up the embankment, clutching a suppressed Sig 551 assault rifle.
“We crashed,” she said after a moment, as if I didn’t know that. We cleared the top of the incline. A handful of armed people waited for us in the shallow end of the empty pool. Aside from Tailor and me, only three were dressed in the green fatigues of my company, Vanguard Strategic Solutions. I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath. Ten of us had left on this mission. Half hadn’t made it. Goddamn it . . .
“You alright, Val?” Tailor asked. “I really need you with me, okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, kneeling down to check my gear. “Just a little rattled.” We’d crash-landed in the middle of a deserted resort complex. The city had once been covered in places like this, but now they were all abandoned. In front of us stood a cluster of white towers that must have been a luxury hotel once. About a hundred yards behind us was the beach and ocean as far as the eye could see. The place had probably been evacuated back when the fighting started. It was dirty from disuse and littered with garbage and debris. Several plumes of smoke rose in the distance. Cancun had seen better days.
Ling brushed the dust from her black body armor. “Mr. Tailor. You’re in charge now, correct? We must keep moving.” I believed she was from China, but there was no accent to her speech.
With Ramirez gone, Tailor had just been promoted to team leader. He quickly looked around, taking in our surroundings. “And where in the hell do you want to go? This part of town is covered in hostiles.” His East Tennessee twang were more pronounced with his anger.
“Somewhere that is not here. I have multiple wounded,” Ling said, nodding toward the rest of her teammates, all members of the same mysterious Exodus organization. Like her, they were heavily armed and dressed in black. They were clustered in a tight circle near the edge of the pool, waiting for instructions. In the middle of them was a teenaged girl being tended to by their medic. “We have to get her out.”
“Look, damn it,” Tailor exclaimed. “We’ll save your precious package. That was the deal.” He jerked a thumb at the young girl as he spoke. “Let me try to get help again.” Tailor squeezed the radio microphone on his vest and spoke into it. “Ocean-Four-One, this is Switchblade-Four-Alpha.”
While Tailor tried to raise the base, our team sharpshooter, Skunky, ran over to see if I was okay. He was a skinny Asian guy and was in his mid-twenties, same age as me. “Dude, you’re alive.”
“I’m fine,” I said, standing up. “What happened?”
“They hit us with some kind of big gun right after we took off. It punched that hole in the chopper. The pilots were hit with frag. We made it a few miles, but it was too much damage. They were trying to set us down when the pilot died. That’s how we ended up in the pool.”
Tailor looked over at us, flustered. “I can’t raise the base. This is bad, really bad.”
“Switchblade-Four-Alpha, this is Stingray-Two-Zero,” a new voice said, crackling over our radios.
That was the call-sign for our air support. One of Vanguard’s Super Tucano turboprop attack planes roared overhead and began to circle our position. Vanguard was one of the best-funded private military companies in the business. We could provide our own air support if we needed to.
“Stingray-Two-Zero, this is Switchblade-Four-Alpha,” Tailor said. “What’s your status?”
“We were going to ask you the same thing, Four-Alpha,” the pilot replied. “We’ve lost communication with the airfield. It looks bad down there.”
“We’ve got multiple wounded and multiple KIA. We need an immediate medevac. Five of us, six Exodus personnel, and the package. Eight confirmed KIA, including the crew of the chopper.” Switchblade-Four was down to just me, Tailor, Skunky, Tower, and Harper.
As Tailor talked to the pilot, trying to figure out what was going on, I looked over at Ling and her people and at the young girl that we’d gone through so much trouble to acquire. I didn’t know who the girl was or why Exodus wanted her so badly. She had to be important, though, since Ling had offered us an ungodly sum of money to go into Cancun, guns blazing, to rescue her. The fact that we’d be violating the UN cease-fire hadn’t seemed to bother her.
Tailor let go of his radio microphone. “Pilot says there’s an armed convoy headed our way up Kukulkan Boulevard. Looks like Mendoza’s militia. They saw us go down, I guess. Couple trucks full of guys and some technicals. He’ll provide cover, but he’s low on ammo.”
“Just like us,” Skunky interjected.
Ling put her gloved hand on Tailor’s shoulder. “I need you to get your men moving,” she said. “I’ll contact my people to see if I can find out what’s going on.”
As Ling trotted off, Tailor turned back to us with a worried look on his face. “Val, Skunky, c’mon, we gotta go.” Nodding, I followed him as he waved to the others. Standing away from the Exodus people, we huddled up. “Listen up, Switchblade-Four,” Tailor said, addressing us as a team. “We’re in some serious shit here. I don’t know what’s going on back at the base. I got a bad feeling.” Tailor looked over his shoulder as an explosion detonated to the southeast. The Tucano had begun its attack run.
“This is the third time we’ve broken the cease-fire this month,” Skunky said, anxiously grasping his scoped, accurized M14. “You don’t think . . .”
“I know what I think,” Tower, our machine gunner said. Sweat beaded on his dark face. “I think they left us here.”
That got everyone’s attention. Being abandoned in-country was every mercenary’s worst nightmare.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tailor said. “Everybody shut up and listen. I don’t trust these Exodus assholes. When we start moving, y’all look out for each other. If we have to, we’ll ditch these guys and head out on our own.”
I flinched. “Tailor, they’ve got wounded and a kid. And where in the hell do you think we’re gonna go?”
“Don’t argue with me!” Tailor snapped. The pressure was getting to him. “We’ll figure it out. Now get ready. We’re moving out. Keep your spacing, use cover, and watch for snipers.”
“Get some!” the rest of us shouted in response.
“Mr. Tailor, I’ve got some bad news,” Ling said, approaching our group. She had a satellite phone in her hand. “I don’t think anyone’s coming for us.”
“What?” Tailor asked, his face going a little pale.
“Something happened. According to my people, the UN shut down all of Vanguard’s operations about an hour ago.”
“The UN?” Tailor asked, exasperated. “But the Mexican government—”
“The Mexican Nationalist government dissolved last night, Mr. Tailor. I don’t have all the details. I’m afraid we’re on our own.”
“All we have to do is get to the safe areas in the city, right?” Harper asked. Since the cease-fire, half of Cancun was controlled by UN peacekeepers.
Ling took off her tinted shooting glasses and wiped her brow on her sleeve. “I don’t think that’s wise,” she said, putting the glasses back on. “All employees of Vanguard have been declared unlawful combatants by the UN. I’m sorry, but we need to go, now.” We all looked at each other, and several obscenities were uttered. We were now on our own in a country where we’d made a lot of enemies.
“They sold us out,” Tower said. “I told you!”
Tailor spoke up. “It don’t matter. Let’s move.” He took off after Ling. The rest of us followed, spacing ourselves out in a small column. Ling rallied the Exodus personnel, and they followed her as she climbed over the edge of the pool. Two of them were always within arm’s reach of the strange young girl. We quickly moved across the courtyard of the resort complex, heading for the buildings. The grass was overgrown, and the palm trees were untended.
Tailor tried to contact the pilots for an update but got no response. It was obvious something was wrong. The small attack plane zoomed back over the resort in a steep right turn, ejecting flares as it went. An instant later, a missile shrieked across the sky, trailing smoke behind it. The Super Tucano exploded in mid-air, raining burning debris into the ocean below. A Rafale fighter jet with UN markings roared overhead, turning to the east.
Our entire group froze in disbelief. This day just kept getting better and better. Beyond the noise of the fighter’s engines, the distinctive sound of a large helicopter approaching could be heard.
Tailor grabbed my shoulder and pulled me along. “Move, move move!” he shouted, breaking into a run.
“Into the hotel, quickly!” Ling ordered. Behind us, a huge Super Cougar transport helicopter descended past our crash site and set down in the courtyard. Like the fighter jet, it bore UN markings. More than twenty soldiers, clad in urban camouflage and blue berets, spilled out of the chopper. They fanned out and immediately started shooting at us. Rounds snapped past my head as I ran across the hotel lobby. I jumped, slid across the reception desk, and crashed to the floor below. I landed on top of Tailor. Harper landed next to me.
“What do we do?” I asked, climbing off of Tailor. The water-damaged lobby was illuminated by hazy daylight streaming through the huge, shattered skylight. The wall in front of us was pockmarked with puffs of plaster dust as bullets struck. The reception desk was heavily constructed out of marble and concrete, so it provided decent cover. The hotel interior was ruined from disuse and stunk of rot.
“Why are they shooting at us?” Tailor screamed.
Ling was crouched down next to Tailor. She shouted in his ear. “I told you, they declared you unlawful combatants. We broke the cease-fire. They’re just following orders!” She then reached up, leveled her assault rifle across the counter, and ripped off a long burst. “Protect the child!” The Exodus operatives under her command obeyed her order without hesitation. The two men guarding the young girl hustled her, crouched over, to the very back of the room. The rest started shooting, causing the UN troops outside to break their advance and dive for cover.
I glanced over at Tailor. “What do we do?”
Tailor looked around for a moment, the gears turning in his head. He swore to himself, then raised his voice so he could be heard over the noise. “Switchblade-Four! Open fire!”
My team was aggressive to the last. Tower opened up with his M60E4. The machine gun’s rattling roar filled the lobby, making it difficult to hear anything. I saw a UN trooper drop to the ground as Skunky took the top of his head off with a single, well-placed shot from his M14. Harper’s FAL carbine barked as he let off shot after shot.
I took a deep breath. My heart rate slowed down, and everything seemed to slow with it. I was calm. I found a target, a cluster of enemy soldiers advancing toward the lobby, and squeezed the trigger. The shortened alloy buttstock bucked into my left shoulder as I fired. One of the UN troops, much closer, tried to bolt across the foyer. Two quick shots and he went down. Another soldier crouched down to reload his G36 carbine. The palm tree he was hiding behind didn’t conceal him well. The blue beret flew off in a spray of blood as I put two bullets through the tree.
I flinched. Something wet struck the right side of my face. Red droplets splashed my shooting glasses. Ducking back down, I reflexively wiped my glasses, smearing dark blood across them. Harper was lying on the floor, a gaping exit wound in the back of his head. Bits of gore and brain matter were splattered on the wall behind him.
I tugged on Tailor’s pant leg. He dropped behind the counter. I pointed at Harper. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t find anything to say. “He’s dead?” Tailor asked, yelling to make himself heard as he rocked a fresh magazine into his weapon.
I nodded in affirmation. “We have to move! We’re gonna get pinned down!”
“Got any grenades left?” Tailor asked. I nodded. He got Ling’s attention. “Hey! We’ll toss frags, then I’ll pop smoke. They’ll find a way to flank us if we stay here.”
Ling shouted orders to the rest of her men. Tailor and I pulled fragmentation grenades from our vests and readied them.
“Frag out!” We lobbed them over the counter. The lobby was rocked by a double concussion as the explosives detonated nearly simultaneously. Dust filled the room, and the remaining glass in the skylight broke free and rained down on top of us. Tailor then threw his smoke grenade. It fired a few seconds later, and the lobby quickly filled with dense white smoke.
“That way!” Ling shouted, pointing to my right. At the far wall was a large doorway that led into the main part of the hotel. Her men filed past us at a run, stepping over Harper’s body as they went.
One of Ling’s men stopped. He was a hulking African man, probably six-foot four and muscular, so broad that the rifle he carried seemed like a toy in his hands. “Commander, come on!” Behind him, a Chinese man fired short bursts through the smoke, keeping the UN troops busy as we fell back into the building. Then came the young girl, flanked by her two bodyguards.
The girl looked down at me as they hustled her by, and everything else dropped away. Her eyes were intensely blue, almost luminescent. Her hair was such a light shade of platinum blond that it looked white. It was like she was looking right through me. ’m sorry about your friends,” she whispered. At least, I could’ve sworn she did. I don’t remember seeing her say anything, but I definitely heard her.
Tailor grabbed me by the arm. “Val, go, goddamn it!” It snapped me back to reality. He shoved me forward and we followed Ling’s people into the building.
“Decorative bunch,” Carl stated.
The voice in my radio earpiece was not reassuring. “Lorenzo, I’ve got three at the gate. Two in the tower. FLIR shows lots of movement in the camp.” Reaper was a quarter mile up the hill, one eye on the glowing blobs on his laptop screen and the other on the road to make sure the actual United Nations troops didn’t show up.
I was signaled to roll down the window. Complying let in the humid night air and the scents of cook fires and diesel fuel. The lead guard shouted to be heard over the rumble of our engine. My Burmese was rusty, but he was gesturing with the muzzle of his rifle toward the only building with electricity, indicating our destination. I saluted. The guard returned it with a vague wave.
The heavy metal barricade was lifted and shuffled aside. Carl put the truck into gear and rolled us forward. “They bought it.” The gate was shut behind us, effectively trapping us in a compound with a thousand Marxist assholes. My driver smiled as he steered us toward the command center. “That was the hard part.”
“For you,” I responded as I took my earpiece out and shoved it back inside my uniform shirt. Scanning across the compound showed that our aerial reconnaissance had been spot-on for once. The main generator was right where we thought it would be, ten meters from the loading dock. The machine was a thirty-year-old monstrosity of Soviet engineering, and our source had reported that it went out constantly. Perfect.
More soldiers, if you could use the term for a group this disorganized, were watching our big white truck with mild curiosity. Many of the local peacekeepers moonlighted smuggling munitions, so our presence was not out of the ordinary. I opened the door and hopped down. “Wait for my signal,” I said before slamming the door.
Carl put the truck into reverse and backed toward the loading dock as a pair of soldiers shouted helpful but conflicting directions at him. The truck’s bumper thumped into the concrete. The tarp covering the rear opened, and a giant of a man stepped from the truck and onto the dock. My associate, Train, spoke in rough tones to the thugs on the dock, pointing to the waiting crates of mortar rounds. They began to load the truck. The rebels paid him and Carl no mind. The various UN peacekeepers they had on the take changed constantly. Only the officers, like I was pretending to be, actually mattered.
The guard at the entrance held the door open for me as I walked up the steps. The building had once been part of a rubber plantation, and this had been a reception area for colonial-era visitors. It had been rather nice once but had slid into the typical third world shabbiness of faded paint, peeling wallpaper, and spreading stains. The air conditioner had died sometime during the Vietnam War, and giant malarial mosquitoes frolicked in the river of sweat running down my back. There was a man waiting for me, dressed nicer than the others, with something that casually resembled a uniform. The guard from the door followed me inside, carelessly cradling his AK as he stood behind me.
“Good evening,” the warlord’s lieutenant said in heavily accented English. ”We were not expecting you so soon, Captain.”
“I need to speak with your commander,” I said curtly.
He looked me over suspiciously. I had practiced this disguise for weeks. The fake beard was perfection, my coloring changed slightly with makeup, my extra inches of height hidden with thin-soled boots and a slight slouch, and my gut augmented with padding to fill out the stolen camouflage uniform. I had watched the Pakistani captain, studying his mannerisms, his movements. I looked exactly like the fat, middle-aged, washed-up bureaucrat hack from an ineffective and corrupt organization.
Since the receptionist didn’t pick the AK off his desk and empty a magazine into my chest, I could safely assume my disguise worked. I watched the guard over the tops of the Pakistani’s spectacles. I had replaced the prescription lenses with plain glass after murdering the real captain this afternoon. Finally the lieutenant spoke. “Do you need more money?”
“Those border checkpoints won’t bribe themselves open,” I responded, my accent, tone, and inflection an almost perfect impersonation. I made a big show of looking at my watch. Carl and Train had better be loading that truck fast. “I must be back soon or my superiors will suspect something.”
“General is busy man,” he said, the sigh in his voice indicating what a bother I was being. He gestured toward his subordinate. “Search him.”
I raised my arms as the soldier gave me a cursory pat down. I was, of course, unarmed. I couldn’t risk the possibility that one of these amateurs might take their job seriously. Bringing a weapon into the same room as a rebel leader was a good way to get skinned alive. The search I received was so negligent that I could have smuggled in an RPG, but no use crying over spilt milk. I lowered my arms.
“Let’s go.” The lieutenant motioned for me to follow. The three of us went down a hallway that stank of cigarette smoke. The light was provided by naked bulbs that hummed and flickered with a weak yellow light. We passed other rooms flanked by soldiers. Quick glances through the windows showed village laborers, mostly old women and children, preparing narcotics for shipment. Revolutions need funding too. Finally we reached a set of double doors with a well-fed guard on each side. These boys were bigger, smartly dressed, wearing vests bristling with useful equipment, and kept their rifles casually pointed at me as we approached.
The general’s personal bodyguards and the lieutenant exchanged some indecipherable dialog. I was patted down again, only this time it was brutally and invasively thorough, making me glad that my weapons were in the truck. The guard pulled my radio from my belt, yanking the cord out from under my shirt. He started to jabber at me.
“Regulations require me to have it at all times,” I replied. The guard held it close to his chest, suspicious. “Fine, but I need it back when we’re done here.” The two led me into the inner sanctum while the lieutenant and the first guard returned to their post. That just left me with two heavily armed and trained thugs to deal with. The odds were now in my favor.
Now this room was more like it. Most warlords learned to like the finer things in life. While their army slept in mud huts and ate bugs, they lived plush and fat. Being the boss does have its perks. The furnishings were opulent, but random and mismatched, a shopping trip of looting across the country. It was twenty degrees cooler as a portable AC unit pumped air down on us.
The warlord was waiting for me, reclining in an overstuffed leather chair, smoking a giant cigar, with his feet resting on a golden Buddha. This man had spread terror over this region for a generation and grown obscenely rich in the process. He’d also become soft and complacent, which worked to my benefit. He was grizzled, scarred, and watching a 56 inch TV on the wall, tuned to some situation comedy that I couldn’t understand. The volume was cranked way too high. “You want see me, Captain?” he grunted, puffing around the cigar. “What you want?”
He was ten feet away. I had a guard standing at attention on either side of me. “If I am to continue smuggling ordnance for you, I will need more money.” I put on an air of meekness, of subservience, while in reality I was taking in every detail, calculating every angle. My pulse was quickening, but I gave no outward indication. I coughed politely against the cloud of Cuban smoke.
“Eh? I already pay you. Pay you good. Maybe too good . . .”
“They set up another checkpoint just north of the river. I’ll need cash to pay off the garrison commander there.”
The warlord sighed as he stood. “UN troops so greedy.” He limped over to the wall and pulled back a tapestry, revealing a vault door, just where the informant had said it would be. “Old days, we just kill each other. Peacekeepers make it so complicated now. Peacekeepers . . .” He snorted. “No better than my men, but with pretty blue hats.” No disagreement from me on that one. The UN was less than useless, though their ineptitude created plenty of business opportunities for men like me. “Maybe someday my country not have war. Then my men get pretty blue hats, and we can go to other countries and rape their women and take their money. Hah!”
I waited patiently for him to spin the dial. That vault was state of the art, rated TXTL-60, and would have required quite some time and a lot of noise for me to defeat on my own. Better to just have the man open it for you. I glanced over at one of the waiting guards. He had a Russian bayonet sheathed on the front of his armor. He smirked, taking my look to be one of nervousness. After all, what did he have to worry about from a middle-aged Pakistani who was just padding his paycheck? The guard turned his attention back to the TV.
“How much you need?” the warlord asked. The lock clicked. The vault hissed open.
The man at my right snickered along with the laugh track as my hand flew to his sheathed bayonet. “I’ll be taking all of it.” Steel flashed red, back and forth, and before either guard could even begin to react, they were dead. I jerked the knife out from under the second guard’s ear and let the body flop.
“Huh?” The warlord turned and saw only me standing. His bleary eyes flicked down to see his men twitching on the ground, then back up at me, dripping bayonet in hand. Then he said something incomprehensible but obviously profane as understanding came. The general’s pistol started out of his holster. I covered the distance in an instant and ran the knife up the inside of his arm before driving it between his ribs. I removed the gun from his nerveless fingers and left the old man tottering as I went back for my radio. The warlord went to his knees as I hit the transmit button.
“I’m in.”
Carl came back before I even had the earpiece back in place. “Truck’s loaded. Status?”
Stepping over the dying warlord, I glanced inside the vault. It was about the size of a walk-in closet. Rebellions ran on cold, hard cash. There were stacks of money inside. A quick check revealed that much of it was in euros and pounds, which was good, because many of the regional denominations weren’t worth the effort to carry out.
“Status? Filthy rich. The intel was right on. Train, bring three of the big packs. You’ve got two guards in the entrance, three more in the hallway. Carl, you got a shot at that generator?”
“No problem.”
“Execute,” I ordered before noticing that the warlord was still breathing, gasping for air around a perforated lung, one useable hand clamped to his side, the spreading puddle of blood ruining the nice Persian rug beneath. I squatted next to him. “I must’ve hit you a little lower than expected. You should already be dead. Sorry about that.”
“Who . . . who . . .” the old man gasped.
“You don’t know me. It’s nothing personal, just business.” The lights flickered and died as Carl killed the generator. It was pitch black inside the old plantation. I rested next to the dying man and waited. The warlord finally breathed his last and embarked on his short journey to Hell. A moment later the door opened and a hulking shadow entered. Train pressed a tubular object into my hands and I quickly strapped the night-vision device over my head. The world was a sudden brilliant green. “You get them all?”
“Smoked ‘em,” he answered as he handed me my suppressed pistol. The can was warm to the touch. “Where’s the cash?”
The two of us stuffed as many bills as would fit into the three big backpacks. I threw on one, and Train, being half-pack animal, took the other two. I took point and led us out. One more guard blundered into the hallway from one of processing rooms. We didn’t even slow as I put a pair of nearly silent 9mm rounds through his skull. Bodies were scattered around the entrance. It had started to rain. Carl started the truck as Train climbed into the back. I handed up my pack of cash.
I crawled into the cab and pulled off the NVGs. “Let’s go.” Carl nodded and put the 6x6 into gear. I kept my pistol in my lap, and I knew that Train was ready to fire a belt-fed machine gun through the fabric back of the truck, just in case the alarm was raised before we made it out.
The rain comes hard in Burma. The gate guards barely even paid us mind as the truck approached. I watched them through the windshield wipers as they sullenly left the security of their overhang to move the barricade. The man with the finger-necklace glanced back toward the command post and shrugged as he noticed that the lights were out again. We rolled through the gate uncontested, the muddy jungle road stretched out before us. We were home free. I activated my radio. “Reaper, we’re out. Meet us at the bridge.”
“On the way,” was the distorted reply.
“We did it,” I sighed. The spirit gum pulled at my cheeks as I yanked the fake beard off and tossed it on the floorboards. The glasses and idiotic blue beret followed. “There had to be close to a mil in the vault.”
“That was too easy,” Carl said, always the pessimist.
“No. We’re just that good.”
There was a sudden clang of metal from the back, then a burst of automatic weapons fire. I glanced at Carl, and he was already giving the truck more gas. Somebody had raised the alarm. “Told you so.”
“Lorenzo, taking fire,” Train shouted into the radio. Then there was a terrible racket as he opened up with the SAW. Bullets quit hitting our truck, which was a relief, since it just happened to be filled to the brim with high explosives.
I checked the rear-view mirror. Through the raindrops I could see headlights igniting. They were coming after us, and they were going to be really pissed off. Train had just popped the men who would normally be moving the barricade, so that would buy us a minute, but our stolen truck would never outrun all of those jeeps on this kind of road.
It could never be simple. “Go to Plan B,” I said into the radio.
We reached the bridge over the Salawin River nearly a minute ahead of our pursuers. A hundred yards long, it was the only crossing for miles and had been built by captives of the Japanese army in the waning of World War Two. The wood creaked ominously as our heavy truck rumbled over it. We stopped halfway across and bailed out. Headlights winked through the rain three times from the other end of the bridge, confirming that Reaper was waiting for us. Train tossed a bag of money to Carl and the detonator to me. He shouldered the other two bags with one hand and carried the SAW like a suitcase.
The three of us walked to the waiting Land Rover. I could hear the approaching rebel vehicles. “Bummer about the ordnance,” Train said. “That would’ve been worth some serious dough back in Thailand.”
“Beats having our fingers end up on a necklace,” Carl muttered.
We reached the waiting vehicle and piled in. Reaper scooted over as Carl got behind the driver’s seat. Carl always drove. He spun us around through the mud so we could head toward the border. I glanced back at the bridge, noting the swarm of flashlights swinging around the UN truck. I waited until we were several hundred yards down the road before pressing the button.
The C4 that Train had stuck to the crates of munitions detonated. The truck was destroyed in a spreading concussion that blew the pursuing rebels into clouds of meat and turned the Say-Loo River bridge into splinters.
My crew gasped at the intensity of the display. “Impressive,” I agreed before turning my attention to counting the money.
Reaper, our techie, was proceeding to get drunk. He was young, skinny, and it didn’t take a whole lot of alcohol. Carl, our wheelman and my second-in-command, was slightly less sullen than usual, beady rat eyes darting back and forth while he chain-smoked cheap unfiltered cigarettes. Train, the muscle, was his usual good-natured self, laughing at every stupid comment. I was enjoying some nuclear-hot curry death mushroom dish and basking in the glow of another excellent score.
The beads leading into the private room parted, allowing a giant whale of a man in a three-piece suit to enter the room. He was taller than Train and probably weighed more than my entire team put together. He was freakishly large. My crew was instantly quiet. There was a slight motion to my right as Carl drew his CZ-75 and held it under the table.
“Lorenzo, I presume.” The fat man pulled up a chair and sat. The chair creaked ominously under his mass. “Is that supposed to be your first name or your last?”
I finished chewing, savoring the eye-watering pain. “Neither. Who the hell are you?”
“My name is not important. I am the man that provided the information for your latest job. I take it that the warlord’s vault was full, as promised.”
I had never met the informant in person. The job had been arranged through intermediaries. That was normal in my line of work. The fewer people who knew me, the better, yet the fat man had found me, and I did not like being found. “We had an agreement. Your share will be left at the drop tomorrow.”
Bald and sweaty, the giant shrugged. He was obese, but there was something about the way that he moved that suggested there was a lot of dense muscle under all that blubber. “Do not be alarmed. This is not a trap. Keep the money. Consider it a tip. You see, I work for Big Eddie.” He trailed off as he spoke, smiling with that strange quality of the slightly schizophrenic. He must have noticed my unconscious flinch at the name. “Big Eddie has an assignment for you.”
My crew exchanged nervous glances. Oh hell no. Everyone here knew what working for Eddie entailed. They all looked to me for confirmation. I slowly put my chopsticks down. “I retired from his organization. Me and your boss are square.”
“I am afraid you are mistaken,” the fat man stated. “Our employer does not believe in retirement, merely extended leaves of absence, and then only at his convenience. You have been away from the fold so long. He merely arranged this last assignment as a test to see if you had maintained your previous skill sets.”
I had always known that some sort of reckoning would come. Standing to leave, I pulled some Thai baht from my wallet and threw them on the table. I had no interest in anything related to Big Eddie, one of the most brutal crime lords in history and an all-around bad dude. Prior jobs performed for the man had left me independently wealthy, but with a lot of scars and a trail of bodies from here to Moscow. “Come on, guys; let’s go.”
“Our employer insists that you are the only person who can complete this assignment. Your knowledge of languages, of disguises, your ability to blend in with any culture, to infiltrate any group, and your gift for violence are legendary. He spoke very highly of you, that there is no place safe from you, no item you cannot steal, no target you cannot eliminate. You, sir, are the best of the best, and he is prepared to compensate you generously for your valuable services.”
It didn’t matter how much money he was talking about, because it just wasn’t worth it. “Tell him to find somebody else.”
The fat man laughed, but it never reached his eyes. “Our employer said you would say that.” He placed a manila folder on the table and shoved it toward me. He passed other folders to Carl, Train, and Reaper. “He said you should look at this before you make any rash decisions, Mr—” And then he called me by my real last name.
I froze. There was no way he could have known that. He opened the folder.
Pictures. Lots of pictures.
My crew began to flip through the pages of their files, eyes widening in shock, mouths falling open. Carl began swearing in Portuguese. Reaper, dumbfounded, stood and pulled his Glock from his waistband, letting it dangle, folder still open in his other hand. Finally, he raised the gun and pointed it at the fat man’s head and snarled, “You’re threatening my mom?”
“Of course.” The fat man wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief as he began to read from my folder. “Mr. Lorenzo, your adoptive family consisted of six siblings, oh my, I do love large families. Robert, Jenny, Tom, George, Pat.” He shoved a list of addresses toward me, paper clipped to a series of photos. “Big Eddie knows where each of them lives, where they work, what they do, and how to reach them at any time. Should you attempt to contact them, Big Eddie will find out, and he will be most displeased.”
“They know about my daughter?” Train asked in disbelief, his big hands crunching the edges of the folder.
“You bastard.” I knew he was not bluffing. Eddie was capable of anything. They must have been gathering this information on me for years.
“All five of your siblings are married. You have nine nieces and nephews, with one bundle of joy on the way,” he told me as he passed me another stack of photos. School photos. I was across the table before he knew what was happening, my knife open and pressed hard between his second and third chin.
He didn’t even flinch. “Your mother lives with your sister Jenny now, still in your hometown. On Tuesday evenings she goes to her book club. During the week she baby sits while Jenny goes to work as the night manager of an International House of Pancakes.”
I twisted the knife, and a small trickle of blood splattered on his white collar. His little pig eyes were hard and cold as he stared me down. “Your oldest brother, Robert, is, surprisingly enough, a federal agent. I take it he has no idea what you do for a living. He has a lovely home in the suburbs, a beautiful wife, a son, and two lovely daughters. You will take on this assignment or Big Eddie will take care of them first. You know how he feels about police officers.”
“And if I just cut your throat and disappear?” I hissed, leashed anger bubbling to the surface.
“You won’t. We’ve studied you. You will do what it takes to protect your family. Plans are in place so that if I do not return, or if you are not observed attempting to complete this assignment, then your family will pay the price. You may try to warn them, you may try to protect them, you may even attempt to locate our organization. If anyone is capable enough to try, it is you. But you cannot save all of them. You know how great our employer’s reach is, and there is no place in this world where you can hide them all. At the first sign of a failure to fully cooperate, a terrible bloodbath will be on your head.”
He wasn’t bluffing. Eddie was more powerful than most governments, a shadowy figure involved in every criminal enterprise on the planet. I had never met him, and like many who had done his bidding, I suspected he wasn’t a lone individual at all, rather a very ruthless organization. Either way, if Eddie wanted somebody dead, it was only a matter of time. I withdrew the Benchmade, wiped the blood on the fat man’s shirt, folded the blade, and put it back in my pocket.
I lived under an assumed name. We all did. In this world, anything that was precious to you became a liability, potential leverage against you. How had Eddie found them? Where had I screwed up? I knew that if I tried to warn them, even if they believed me, there was no way I could protect them all. I slowly sat back down. My crew followed my example.
“That’s better. Here is your mission packet. There are three phases. As you can see from the deadline, time is of the essence.”
I opened the proffered folder, read a few lines, then laughed out loud. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is impossible.”
“The clock is ticking, Mr. Lorenzo. Complete this mission or we will kill everyone you have ever loved.” He gestured at the mushroom dish. “Are you going to finish that?”
***
“Shoulda just shot him,” Carl muttered before downing the last of his beer. He crushed the can in his fist and tossed it out the fourth-floor window of our seedy Bangkok hotel room. Odds were that the can hit a tourist or a prostitute. “Suicide, this job, I tell you that. Better to run.”
Train rubbed one callused hand across his face. Haggard, he looked like he’d aged ten years in the last hour. “And then what? Hide? Where are we gonna go?”
“We aren’t the problem,” I stated. Each of us was fully capable of going to ground and totally disappearing. The four of us exchanged knowing glances. If we thwarted Big Eddie, we were going to be knee-deep in dead babies. I hadn’t even spoken to my family in years. They thought I was some sort of international businessman. I sent them a Christmas card once in a while, that kind of thing, but it wasn’t like we were close. I’d checked out of the normal world. But I couldn’t let my brothers and sisters pay for my sins. They weren’t like me. They were good people. They were the only people who had ever shown me any kindness in my miserable youth.
We were quiet for a long time as my crew mulled over our predicament. Finally, I broke the silence. “Eddie’s men will be randomly watching these people. As soon as any one of them is contacted, they’ll kill all the others. We could maybe save some, but I don’t want to take that chance. I’m in. If any of you want out, I understand. Take your share and go. If Eddie sees that I’m on my way to the Mideast, he’ll know I’m working the job. It might buy you some time to get to your people.”
Reaper immediately raised one bony hand. “I’m with you, boss.” He was the youngest member of my crew. I had hired him in Singapore, where he’d been avoiding extradition to the US for a host of felony charges, and put him to work as our technical geek. I was the closest thing he had to a father figure, and that was just sad.
“This is going to be the toughest thing we’ve ever done,” I warned. “There’s no shame in backing out. We’re probably going to get killed if we’re lucky or thrown into the worst kind of prison you can imagine if we’re not.”
“I’m in,” Reaper repeated with a lot more force than you would expect from looking at him. I had known that whatever I had voted for, Reaper would have my back.
I nodded. “Carl?”
My oldest friend grunted as he leaned forward in his chair. We had worked together for a very long time. When we had first met, Carl had been a Portuguese mercenary helping to overthrow an African government. Between the two of us we’d killed piles of people in dire need of killing, and a quite a few who had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’d robbed, conned, stolen, and murdered our way across four continents. The contents of Carl’s folder were a mystery. He was like my brother, but I didn’t know what he had left behind in the Azores all those years ago. He wasn’t exactly the conversational sort.
Carl shrugged. “Whatever . . . I’m in.”
The last member of my crew hesitated. I knew that Train’s folder contained pictures of his estranged wife and little girl. Omaha, Nebraska, wasn’t out of Eddie’s reach. Train’s ex had divorced him while he had been serving time. She didn’t like being married to a criminal, but she apparently had no moral problems cashing the checks he mailed to her after every single one of our jobs, either. Train loved his young daughter more than life itself, and I could see that fact roiling around behind his eyes as he made up his mind.
“I can’t,” he said simply. “Sorry, Lorenzo.”
I nodded.
“Ah, Train, come on,” Reaper whined. “We need you, big guy.”
“I don’t trust Eddie,” Train spat. “And you’d be an idiot to trust him. He knows about my kid, man. I’ve got to go get her.”
I extended my hand. He hesitated only briefly before crushing it in his big mitt. He was one of only a handful of people in this world that I actually trusted. I had worked with Train for nearly a decade and his decision didn’t surprise me at all. For a man who could snap a neck with one hand, he had a remarkably soft heart. “Watch your back,” I ordered.
He gave me a sad smile. We both knew that this was the end of a long run. “No problem, chief.”
***
Train took his share of the money and slipped out that night. At the time, none of us had realized that our hotel room had been bugged even though we had swept the room.
The next morning I had awoken to a knock on our door. When I answered, gun in hand, the messenger was gone, but there had been a cardboard box left there addressed to me. The size and weight told me what it was even before I opened it. Train’s severed head had been neatly wrapped in newspaper. The only other contents were a note.
I AM WATCHING YOU.