скачать книгу бесплатно
“She is not my—”
“Anyway, they’ve met him. They can spot him, where your men might think he’s just another gringo tourist looking for some action.”
“Photographs would do as well,” Herreira said.
Downey ignored him, saying, “More importantly, my men can take him out with no reflection on your team.”
Herreira wasn’t easily deceived by specious arguments. The Brazilian government had no qualms about jailing foreign intruders or killing those who resisted arrest. A simple-minded blind man could’ve seen that Downey’s primary concern was to prevent embarrassment for the United States.
The doctor had been bad enough, but if he’d started to recruit allies from the U.S., some might regard it as more than intrusion. It could mean invasion, perhaps an act of war.
“Your men must willingly submit themselves to my authority,” Herreira said.
“Sure thing, Major,” Downey answered with a broad smile in his voice.
Herreira knew that he was lying, that his agents would behave as they had always done in “Third World” countries for the past two hundred years. Imagining that only the U.S. was fit to form opinions, dictate terms, decide what should be done in any given situation from Latin America to Europe and Southeast Asia.
“In that case,” Herreira replied, “I welcome their assistance.”
“That’s my boy. Expect a call within the hour.”
So, Herreira thought, they were already in Cuiabá or well on their way. His agreement, once more, meant no more to Downey than a rubber stamp on plans already finalized. He’d have to watch them every moment, to be certain they didn’t overstep their bounds.
Or if they did, and tragedy ensued, Herreira had to make sure that he couldn’t be blamed.
And if some accident befell them in the process, it was Downey’s job to deal with it, smother the breath of scandal.
Let the Yankee do his job, then. And together, they might just manage to save Herreira’s career.
“I STILL THINK it’s a bad idea,” Bolan insisted.
“Senhor Cooper, I’m Tehuelche. What you see—” the hands that smoothed her dress had polished nails “—is only one facet of what I am.”
“I understand that, but—”
“I know the jungle,” she informed him. “I was born and raised there, educated in a mission school. Your high technology may locate map coordinates, but it won’t tell you if the doctor has been forced to flee again or where he’s gone this time.”
“He’s moving?”
Marta Enriquez shrugged. “We won’t know that until we reach the meeting place.”
“I’ve done some tracking of my own, from time to time,” Bolan informed her.
“Were you hunting men?”
“Yeah, I was.”
She frowned at that. Sometimes the newbies asked what it was like, killing and almost being killed, but Enriquez had to have seen that for herself. Instead she simply asked, “Why are you here, really?”
“Bones is—or was—a friend of mine. If he’s in trouble now, I’d like to help him.”
“With no politics involved?” she asked.
“The man I knew wasn’t concerned with politics. He was a healer.”
“Tell me why you call him ‘Bones.’”
Bolan explained, briefly. When he was done, she asked, “And you would help him, even if he now heals those who might be enemies of the United States?”
“If he needs help—wants help—I’ll do my best. I didn’t come to join a cause or fight against one. If there’s fighting to be done, though, you’ll be in the way.”
“In any case,” she said, “it makes no difference. I have supplies for Dr. Weiss. If I don’t go with you, then I must go alone into the forest.”
Bolan saw that argument was futile in the face of such determination. He had no doubt that Marta would proceed without him, and it was entirely possible that she’d withhold Weiss’s location if Bolan refused to cooperate.
At last, resigned, he said, “All right. We need an early start tomorrow.”
“Is dawn early enough?” she asked him, smiling.
“Just about.”
“I’ll let you sleep, then.” At the door of Bolan’s hotel room, she paused and turned. “What if they follow us, your people?”
It was Bolan’s turn to shrug. He didn’t think he’d seen the last of Downey’s people yet. “I shook them once,” he said. “I can do it again.”
But shaking might not do it in the jungle. He might have to bury them, if they were bent on doing some irrevocable harm to Nathan Weiss or to himself. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d clashed with Company spooks, where lives were at stake.
“I hope you can do it,” she answered. “They may be here already.” And having said that, she slipped out of the room.
Alone, Bolan got busy with his fear. He would be wearing street clothes when they left the following day, in Enriquez’s car, but he wanted his canteens full and his weapons ready to go. He’d change clothes when they reached their jumping-off point, where they’d have to ditch their wheels and take to water, then proceed on foot. There were no roads where they were going, yet.
What was waiting for them at the end of the trail?
A friend, perhaps—or maybe not.
Time changed minds, hearts, people. Bolan didn’t think that Nathan Weiss had been transformed into a villain or mad scientist since they’d last seen each other, but it was entirely possible that Bones had found himself a cause to follow. And it might be one that ran against the grain with Bolan, one way or another.
Insurrection, revolution—the American tropics bred them like fever. Most countries south of the Rio Grande had battled their way through long series of rebellions, civil wars and military juntas over the past two centuries, and some were still embroiled in that struggle. Brazil had seemingly beaten the trend.
Bolan would see what waited for him when he reached trail’s end, and not before. Meanwhile, he needed sleep, in case he couldn’t find it in Green Hell.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cuiabá
“I hope the dirty SOB resists,” Dirk Sutter said.
“I’m counting on it,” Clement Jones replied.
They sat together in a plain brown van, with three secret police types huddled in the back. Waiting. Jones had a MAC-10 submachine gun in his lap, fat sound suppressor extending its abbreviated muzzle, but the weapon still looked almost toylike in his black-gloved hands. Sutter had picked a micro-Uzi, likewise silenced, and was feeding it a magazine of Parabellum hollowpoint rounds.
“It needs to look good, though,” Sutter remarked.
“That’s why we brought the three amigos,” Jones reminded him.
The locals all spoke English, more or less, but Jones saw no reason to spare their feelings. He was an American, for God’s sake. Anywhere he set his feet was home, thanks to the megabillions spent on foreign aid and the new atmosphere of militancy prompted by the War on Terror.
It wasn’t the natives he worried about, sitting sweaty and tense in the van. He worried about Downey and the man they’d come to neutralize.
Jones still wasn’t sure how Downey had zeroed the target’s hotel in Cuiabá. Some kind of high-tech hocus-pocus, he supposed, or maybe an old-fashioned squeal from an informant. Either way, they had his crib on quarantine, nobody in or out, and in another five minutes or so they would be going in to smoke him out.
Or waste him, as the case might be.
Downey had given them some latitude, after the fuck-up in Belém. He wasn’t letting them forget it—likely never would, the bastard—but at least he hadn’t sent them out unarmed this time. They were prepared, complete with reinforcements duly authorized to make arrests.
Not that he planned on taking Mr. Hot Shit into custody.
Not even close.
There’d been a time when asshole bullies used to get their kicks by stuffing Clement Jones in lockers, trash cans and the like, but Jones had turned that trend around by pumping iron for two years straight, then kicking ass and taking names. To save himself from bullies, he’d become a bully, and his path was set for life.
Until the moment in Belém, when all his muscle got him was a headache and the stink of garbage in his hair.
Somebody had to pay for that insult, the damage it had done to him in Downey’s eyes, and one Matt Cooper was about to rue the day he ever fucked with Clement Jones.
But Jones was nervous, sweating through his lightweight suit despite the early morning chill. The three studs waiting on the van’s rear bench seat seemed immune to nerves, but Jones saw Sutter fidgeting behind the steering wheel. Jones wasn’t psychic, but he had a fair idea of what was going on in Sutter’s head.
He didn’t want to give this Cooper prick another chance to kick their asses, nothing hand-to-hand unless the guy surrendered and they got him handcuffed. Maybe tune him up a little then, to settle scores, but if he offered anything resembling physical resistance, they would put him down.
Case closed. No second chances.
“Room 228, you said?” he asked Sutter.
“You got it.”
“And the woman’s in 230?”
“Right next door,” Sutter replied. “Connecting rooms, for all I know. Maybe they’re playing house. Guy wants to change his luck.”
“It’s changed, all right,” Jones said.
Sutter glanced over at him from the driver’s seat. “Remember, now, the first move’s his. We’re playing by the rules.”
“No sweat.”
It wouldn’t have to be much of a move, Jones thought. The prick could blink his eyelids, maybe clear his throat, and that was all the physical resistance it would take to spark a storm of automatic fire.
Their cleanup gear included body bags.
Jones didn’t really care about the woman, one way or the other, though the trouble had begun with her. He wished someone had taken care of her in San Diego, maybe left her in the desert with the others who were robbed and killed crossing the line from Mexico. It would’ve been the easy way, but no one thought of it.
Dumb bastards.
Now Jones had to kill a man who’d kicked his ass and dropped him in a garbage Dumpster. Maybe kill the woman, too, though she’d done nothing to offend him yet.
“It’s time.”
Sutter was out and moving, even as he spoke, tucking the micro-Uzi underneath his jacket. Jones opened his door, half turning toward the goons in back, and said, “Let’s rock and roll, amigos.”
They breezed through the lobby without opposition, rode the elevator up two floors, and followed the wall-mounted arrows to their target. Jones and Sutter took the door to Cooper’s room. Their three companions, pistols drawn, staked out the entrance to the woman’s crib. On three they kicked both doors and rushed inside, shock troops of the apocalypse.
And found both rooms deserted.
“Shit! He isn’t gonna like this,” Sutter said.
Jones scanned the empty hotel room and muttered, “That makes two of us.”
THEY WERE MAKING fair time, but Bolan still wished the old riverboat could’ve gone faster. Its diesel motor labored, fouled the air around them, and propelled them at a steady four to five knots with the current, but he’d hoped for more.
Broad daylight now, and if the Company was looking for them in Cuiabá, then its spooks would soon know they were gone. The question would be where, and Bolan wished they could’ve gained a better lead before the hunters started tracking them afresh.
An airlift would’ve done the trick, but Marta didn’t skydive and she’d finally convinced him that trackers would waste more time questioning Cuiabá’s several thousand river rats than checking out a hundred-odd bush pilots. It made sense and gave the warrior time to think.
But he still wished for speed.
The Rio Cuiabá flowed southwestward from the city that shared its name, winding through primal forest toward the Bolivian border, where it met and fed the Rio Paraguai. Bolan and his companion didn’t plan to follow it that far, however. They were landing fifty miles downriver and would hike from there, through wilderness that one early explorer had described as “Hell on Earth and Eden, all rolled into one.”
So far, it wasn’t Bolan’s notion of a holiday.
It felt like coming home.
Bolan had grown up in a jungle, spilled his first blood there and earned the nickname that would follow him through life, even beyond his early grave. That jungle was located on the far side of the world, but all of them were more or less the same. The predators and prey varied by continent, but it was still survival of the fittest in a world where no quarter was asked or granted.
The one rule carved in stone was kill or be killed.
Bolan knew that rule by heart, and he was still alive.
The captain of their boat ignored them after he’d collected cash up front, which suited Bolan perfectly. He lingered at the rail and watched the forest pass, unscrolling like the background footage in a wildlife film. Bright-colored birds hovered or swooped among the trees, while monkeys swarmed and chattered. Caimans waited on the bank for fish or careless swimmers to present themselves.
Forest primeval. Given half a chance, he knew that it would eat him up alive.
And somewhere in the midst of it was Nathan Weiss.
Bad choice, Bones, Bolan thought. And once again, Why here?
Enriquez was suddenly beside him at the railing. She’d changed into khaki hiking clothes and sturdy boots, hair pulled back from her face and cinched with an elastic band. She wore no makeup, and she didn’t seem to miss it.
Both of us were going home, Bolan thought, but it didn’t warm the cockles of his heart.
