Chapter 49
El Salvador
It was a bright, clear morning in the mountain highlands where the Lenca people lived.
The newly constructed rural hospital stood like a small glass jewel on the flat, emerald plain nestled beneath the forested hills above.
A crowd of over six hundred Indigenous local people dressed in colorful native garb had gathered in front of the elevated dais for the morning’s festivities. Two dozen local officials were also there, along with the hospital’s staff of white-coated doctors and uniformed nurses.
President Olmedo had just finished his speech commemorating the Peace and Unity Hospital and how it proved his government’s war on corruption and violence was paving the way toward a future of prosperity and peace for all.
Ever the showman, Olmedo saved his best rhetorical flourish for the finale.
He spoke his last words in the Lenca tongue, promising continued unity, health, and peace for all of El Salvador, “especially her first sons and daughters, the Lenca people, gathered here today.” The audience exploded with grateful cheers and applause.
Cabrillo stood in the midst of the cheering audience still clapping and shouting. To blend in, he dressed in a traditional linen huipil shirt and slacks. He also wore a red bandana to hide his short-cut blond hair and a comms earpiece.
“Quite a stem-winder, from what I could tell,” MacD whispered in Cabrillo’s comms. “He’s got the magic.”
“Magic doesn’t make him bulletproof. We still clear?”
“Clear,” Linda Ross reported. A half dozen other operators reported clear as well.
“Wepps?”
Murph was at his weapons station on the Oregon running the surveillance drone. “A couple of parrots and a toucan—just like on the cereal box.”
Juan glanced around the compound. His operators were well hidden and out of sight, as per Olmedo’s wishes.
A half dozen of his crew and operators with Murph remotely operating a surveillance drone was hardly adequate for the president’s security detail, but the president was insistent on a very low profile.
Cabrillo and his team arrived on-site early and conducted a sweep of the grounds and facilities for explosive devices and other weapons of mass destruction but found nothing. Cabrillo reluctantly gave the president the go-ahead to begin the celebration.
With Olmedo’s speech ended and the applause still ringing, a signal was given and the musicians began to play a combination of traditional and local instruments, beginning with the deeply resonant beat of great wooden drums. Marimbas, guitars, and rattles followed suit.
The drumbeat signaled the sixty costumed dancers to form a circle.
The Danza de la Unidad, the Dance of Unity, was a riot of color and texture.
The men and women both wore huipils and long, flowing skirts called faldas.
The men’s shirts bore bold geometric patterns in deep reds, blues, and greens, while the women’s blouses were vibrant florals in bright yellows, reds, and blues.
All were adorned with various bracelets, mirrors, feathers, and metal ornaments.
Most important, the dancers all wore carved wooden masks symbolizing deities, animals, and mythological creatures.
The dancers turned rhythmically in synchronized steps, twisting their bodies and raising their hands and arms in ancient, symbolic gestures.
After the first turn, the circle separated and re-formed into three concentric circles moving in unison, the second circle turning in the opposite direction of the inner and outer ones, like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope.
Olmedo smiled and clapped along with the audience as the dance progressed.
A small girl in native garb approached him on the dais and held out her tiny hand. Utterly charmed, Olmedo took it and was led down the few steps and into the center of the dancing circles.
The audience cheered and clapped as Olmedo entered the innermost center.
An old woman, a tribal elder, hobbled up to the president, took one of his hands, and began showing him a few simple dance steps.
Her bright, toothless smile and twisting skirt encouraged the president to mimic her movements.
He raised his hands, swayed his hips, and imitated the simple box step his guide provided. The audience cheered and laughed.
At that moment, the old Lenca chief approached the president.
He carried an unusually heavy ceremonial mask exquisitely carved from black mahogany.
Cabrillo wasn’t overly concerned. His team had closely examined the oval mask before the festivities began.
But Juan suddenly wondered if they could have possibly missed something.
He needed to get closer to the president.
A translator had explained to Juan that the mask’s exaggerated, almond-shaped blue eyes represented vigilance, and the soft red, slightly open mouth symbolized peace and honesty.
Most striking was the prominent golden sun in the center of the mask representing the president’s ability to safeguard the Lenca community and guarantee a prosperous future.
Olmedo could not have been more pleased and promised that the deeply symbolic mask would hang in a place of honor in his presidential office.
The chief held up the mask and Olmedo accepted it with humble gratitude. The chief gestured for him to put it on. The audience went wild again—they were nearly frenzied.
Cabrillo began to wonder if some of them were high on something other than enthusiasm. President Olmedo was definitely scoring a home run with these folks, Cabrillo told himself, and rightly so. The president seemed to genuinely enjoy being with his people, and they obviously relished his presence.
Once his mask was secured, Olmedo resumed his dance steps inside the turning circles.
★
Vargas stood on the hilltop above the hospital, hidden beneath a canopy of trees, his eyes fixed on Olmedo and the mask just attached to the president’s face.
Without looking away from his binoculars, Vargas growled at the technician by his feet, a remote-control unit firmly in the man’s grasp.
“Arm the unit.”
“Yes, sir.”
The tech’s left thumb clicked off the safety as his other thumb hovered over the red firing switch.
★
Juan scanned the audience now also shuffling and dancing to the native music. They were pressing in close like sardines in a crowded tin.
Cabrillo turned his eyes back toward the president.
One by one, the Unity dancers came forward from the inner circle and approached Olmedo, and improvised a smaller dance with him in the ever tightening Unity circle.
Each dancer spun a few moves, then placed a thin beaded Unity necklace around his neck, then returned to the larger, moving circle.
Juan felt the pressure of shuffling bodies surge forward behind and in front of him as the Unity circle pressed in closer and closer.
He wasn’t surprised because the point of the dance was to demonstrate the closeness and unity of the people to its leader.
But the press of bodies only added to Cabrillo’s growing sense of urgency to get closer to Olmedo, and he began inching his way forward against a wall of resistance.
Juan watched the next male dancer drape another beaded necklace around Olmedo’s neck and withdraw.
Cabrillo scanned the other dancers. He wished he could see their faces, and especially their eyes, but their masks prevented it.
Even cold-blooded killers had facial tells that betrayed their intentions, especially in the moment just before they struck their victims. All Juan saw were the weaponless hands and rhythmic bodies of the well-choreographed dancers as they moved in synch to the swelling music.
Cabrillo’s eyes fell on the next female dancer waiting in line to approach Olmedo.
She seemed the least talented of the group—almost staggering rather than dancing.
Her movements were so awkward even the other dancers next to her held her hands trying to steady her.
As soon as it was her turn to approach the president, she let go of their hands and danced forward in a stumbling gait.
An adrenaline rush hit Juan and he pushed his way ahead.
Standing nearly a head taller gave him an advantage over the locals as he wedged himself between bodies, ignoring the angry looks thrown his way.
He was under strict orders from President Olmedo not to cause a disturbance or frighten the Indians.
The last thing Olmedo wanted to do was poison relationships with the Indigenous communities that he’d worked very hard to reconcile with.
But Juan’s primary concern at this moment was protecting the president’s life. The woman’s jerky movements raised an alarm. If she was truly a dancer, she was a terrible one, or she was drunk, which seemed odd.
Cabrillo saw no weapons in her hands or on her person. He pressed in closer, and stood just a couple of rows away from the outer circle of dancers. The music was swelling toward a crescendo and roared in his ears.
As the woman got closer to Olmedo, Juan’s eyes focused on her ornamental mask. His eye caught the slightest detail. On the fringe of the mask stood a nearly imperceptible piece of wire standing tall amid a clump of feathers.
It had to be an antenna.
The woman was four feet away from the president, staggering toward him slowly. Juan surged forward, but the bodies in front resisted his urgency and blocked his path. The woman stepped closer.
Three feet away.
Two feet away.
★
“Any second now,” Vargas said to his technician. “Remember: on my mark.”
“Yes, sir.”
★
The woman stepped even closer.
Juan strained to burst through the crowd, but the wall of flesh wouldn’t budge. He reached for the pistol beneath his shirt as he shouted into his comms—
“Jammers! Jammers! Jammers!”
But nobody answered.
★
“On my mark. Fire,” Vargas said.
The tech stabbed the firing toggle.
★
The dancing girl came right up to Olmedo and took his offered hand.
Olmedo began his dance with her, but she suddenly stopped, clutched her stomach…
…and vomited.
Stomach juices burst from beneath her mask as her knees buckled and dropped her to the ground.
Olmedo pulled off his mask and fell to his knees next to the girl, ripping off her mask.
“Somebody call a doctor!”
★
“I said fire the weapon! Fire it now!” Vargas demanded.
“I’m hitting the button, sir!”
“Hit it again.”
The tech hit it again. And again. And again. Nothing.
Vargas raised the glasses back to his eyes. He saw Olmedo hovering over the girl as doctors and nurses pushed their way toward them.
But what caught Vargas’s attention was the tall man in the red bandana who suddenly turned and scanned the tree line. Their eyes locked somehow. It was as if the man were staring right at him.
Vargas’s mil-spec binoculars saw the clear blue eyes as clearly as if the man were standing two feet in front of him.
“I know him—”
“Sir?”
“We need to leave. Now.”
★
Aboard the Oregon
“We’ve got a squirter, Chairman,” Murphy said. “Heading southeast.”
He had a clear, drone’s-eye view of two men leaping into an SUV.
The 4K image showed both had pistols on their hips.
The one carrying some kind of controller yanked the driver’s door open and jumped in.
The other hesitated at the passenger door and glanced up, giving Murphy a full-faced view of the man.
He was already running video, but he snapped a screenshot anyway.
Seconds later, the SUV’s engine roared to life and the vehicle launched down the rutted dirt path.
Murph’s drone stayed hot on his tail.
“Can you stop him?” Juan asked over the comms.
“I can try.”
Murph mashed the throttle and pushed the drone over a hundred miles an hour.
It soared over the bucking SUV, slowed by the crappy road.
Murph took up a position two hundred yards ahead at the mouth of a mountain tunnel.
He couldn’t follow the truck inside for fear of losing his signal. He only had five minutes of fuel left.
Murph’s quadcopter drone carried a mini Gatling gun slung beneath its fuselage. It hovered menacingly five feet above the road. Murph watched the SUV barrel toward him in his monitor, refusing to slow down.
“He’s not stopping,” Murph said. “And we’re going to lose him.”
“Then take him out.”
Murph hit the firing switch. A dozen rounds of 5.56 armor-piercing ammo burped from the mini gun, punching through the hood, spidering the glass, and shredding the roof as the SUV raced beneath the quadcopter’s skids and plunged into the tunnel.
Murph spun the bird on its axis and emptied the rest of the drone’s magazine. The rear window shattered and the tailgate puckered beneath the fury of lead, but the vehicle roared ahead and disappeared into the dark.
★
El Salvador
In the front seat, Vargas clutched at his chest wounds as blood spilled over his lower lip like an overtopping dam.
“Get me…to…a hospital,” Vargas said in a gargle of blood. His panicked eyes shut as he doubled over onto the floor.
“Jefe!” The tech shook him hard by the shoulder.
Too late.
The tech mashed the throttle to the floorboard and rocketed through the dark. He was fearful of his boss, whether he lived or died.
He would obey his last order no matter what.