Chapter 55
Panama
“We need to move,” the Mexican squad leader said to his mercs. “Saddle up, and let’s go.”
The other two men shouldered their packs and picked up their weapons as the Mexican grabbed Varik by the collar and dragged him to his feet. Eidolon’s hands were already flex-cuffed in front of him.
“Hope you’re ready for a hike, little cockroach,” the Mexican said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
“I don’t know if I can make it,” Eidolon said. “My health isn’t so good.”
“If you slow us down, you won’t like it. After all, you don’t need your fingers to remember a passcode, do you?”
Varik swallowed hard. “I’ll do my best.”
The squad leader pulled him close. “And if you’re lying to me about this passcode?” He ripped off a string of epithets that would make a Danish sailor blush.
Varik could smell his cigarette-stale breath. He wanted to gag.
“If I’m lying to you, then your boss will kill me.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about, cucaracha.”
“But if I’m telling the truth, he’ll thank us both—and make you a very rich man.”
The Mexican squad leader nodded to the Guatemalan, who flung the door open. The Mexican shoved Varik onto the wide porch and followed him out with one hand gripped on his collar. The Cuban came next, trailed by the Guatemalan, who didn’t bother shutting the door behind him.
Five steps out onto the front porch the Mexican stopped and looked around. The thick clouds heavy with rain shadowed the moonlight. It was nearly pitch-black. He scanned the area for his two men standing guard outside, but didn’t see them.
“Paco! Ramiro!” He looked around. It was deathly quiet. Even the insects were silent. The Mexican’s neck tingled as his eyes made out a shadowed lump on the ground several yards away.
“Quick, back into the shack!”
Too late.
Bang! The Cuban’s head split open like an overripe melon as the heavy AK round ripped through the side of his skull. Varik screamed as the hot gory mess splattered over him.
The Mexican dragged Varik behind him, close on the heels of the Guatemalan racing back inside the cabin.
Two sharp cracks of a 9-millimeter pistol echoed in the house, dropping the Guatemalan to the floor.
His ears ringing from the gun blasts and nearly blinded by the flashes, the Mexican pulled his weapon and fired in the direction of the pistol shots, but Raven had already ducked behind the cabinet in the kitchen.
The Mexican pulled Eidolon close just as heavy footsteps thundered through the front door. The Mexican whipped around firing point-blank, but the big African American judo-rolled to safety behind the nearest wall.
The Mexican wrapped an arm around Eidolon’s throat and pulled him against his chest like a Kevlar vest, and pressed his back against the wall, using Eidolon as a human shield.
Link and Raven drew their weapons and put a bead on the Mexican from behind their respective covers.
“There’s no way out. Give him up,” Raven called out in Spanish.
The Mexican pointed his pistol at Raven’s slim profile, then swung the barrel back over toward Linc in the opposite direction, trying to make himself as small as possible.
Both Raven’s and Linc’s weapons were pointed directly at him. There wasn’t a clear shot. They couldn’t take the chance of killing Eidolon.
The Mexican pressed his pistol against Varik’s temple.
“You’re right, there is no way out,” he said in English.
“We can figure this out,” Linc said.
“I already have, yanqui.”
Bang! Eidolon’s head jerked violently as blood geysered from the wound. Without hesitation, the Mexican put his pistol to his own temple and pulled the trigger. Both bodies hit the floor with a sickening thud.
Link and Raven rushed over to the pile of carnage.
“What was that?” wide-eyed Raven asked. “Why?”
Linc shouldered his weapon. “The man’s job was to kill Eidolon, but somehow the little guy sweet-talked him into taking him out of here instead.
But when we showed up, that guy must have remembered his mission was to kill Eidolon.
If we had gotten to Eidolon instead, his boss would murder him in ways I don’t even want to think about.
” Linc nodded at the Mexican’s corpse. “He figured a bullet to the head was the easy way out.”
“What do we do now?” Raven asked.
Linc sniffed the air. “Smells like someone had fried electronics for dinner. Let’s take a look around.” Linc spotted the microwave oven. He dashed over, yanked open the door, and looked inside.
“Yep, Eidolon must have had some sort of early warning and destroyed his equipment.”
“But why? His value was in those machines and hard drives,” Raven said. “Unless he had access to other hard drives through some secret account or something.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Linc checked his battered Timex watch. “Let’s see what we can find and then we need to vamoose.”
They tore through the small cabin searching for anything of value, but after fifteen minutes of searching found nothing.
Linc crossed back over to Eidolon’s corpse and rifled through his clothing, hoping he had a thumb drive or something else on his person.
All he came up with was an old wallet with a Panamanian driver’s license, a couple of Panamanian balboas, and a U.S.
ten-dollar bill. The sleeves where the credit cards were usually stored were empty, but Linc pried them open anyway with his thick fingers.
“What’s this?”
“What’d ya find?”
Linc held up his hand. Pinched between his thumb and index finger was an old-style memory card, smaller than a postage stamp.
“That’s an old MicroSD card. For cameras.
We used them back when I was in the military police.
” Raven looked around, then dashed over to where an old Canon point-and-shoot digital camera hung from a wall peg.
She popped open the drive door. It was empty.
She tried to power it on, but the battery was dead.
“Worthless. Probably just tourist photos anyway.”
“Bring it, just in case,” Linc said. He put the memory card back into the wallet and pocketed it. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got a hard march through rough country and the landing zone is at least eight hours away.”
“One sec.” Raven dashed over to the other La Liga man’s body.
His ruck was larger, in better condition, and mil-spec.
More important, it was partially open and stuffed with water bottles, candy bars, and fruit.
She dropped her own pathetic thrift-store pack, pulled the rucksack off the body, and shouldered it.
Linc came up behind her, saw the Cuban’s ruck was loaded as well, and swapped out his, too.
“No rest for the wicked,” Linc said. “And the righteous don’t need any.”
Raven grinned despite her fatigue. That was one of Cabrillo’s favorite sayings.
“Easy peasy,” she said.
Linc laughed. That was his signature line.
The two of them marched off the porch and sped out into the night. They wanted to clear the area in case there were more thugs headed their way. They’d call Cabrillo at their first rest break with the bad news about Eidolon.
The two Oregon operators worked their way through the jungle, navigating by the stars when the canopy and clouds permitted it, and relying on the GPS inside Linc’s phony Timex when things got sketchy.
They mostly walked in silence, their hearts heavy with tonight’s outcome, their minds reviewing what they could have done better.
Delayed by the swollen river and muddy terrain, they had arrived late to Eidolon’s compound, just at the moment when his captors had burst through the front door.
Linc, the more experienced operator, made the call to hold back and wait to see what developed while he formulated a plan.
There was no chance of breaking Eidolon out of the cabin, since they were outnumbered five to two.
Instead, the former SEAL operator made the hard call to take out the two outside guards first and wait for the others to appear.
Raven dropped one guard with Linc’s borrowed blade, while the big former SEAL slipped behind the other and snapped his neck with a quick twist of his massive hands.
Cabrillo had drilled into his team that killing was always the last resort.
The truth of the matter was Linc and Raven were both beyond exhausted after the brutal cross-country march to the compound after several hard days and nights of trekking through the Darién.
With their energy reserves utterly depleted, tracking the five bandits and Eidolon for another long distance over hard terrain would have proven impossible, let alone racing ahead of them to set up some sort of ambush, lethal or otherwise.
Unfortunately, the shortest distance between them and Eidolon was a kill box, taking out the tangos as quickly and efficiently as possible—especially given the importance of the target.
The improvised plan had worked to perfection—right up to the moment Eidolon had his brains splattered all over the cabin.
Failing a mission was never an option in the Chairman’s mind, and he never failed to meet his own high standard.
Raven and Linc both dreaded disappointing him.
Worse, Eidolon’s secret didn’t exactly die with him—only their access to it.
The infamous hacker had hinted at something very big and dangerous and that mysterious thing was still in the wind.
Each ragged step toward the landing zone only added to their fear that failing to bring in Eidolon had put the United States in its fatal crosshairs.