Chapter Eleven
Eleven
The Toyota pickup turned off the broken two-lane road and began negotiating a washed-out dirt path that led up a gentle rise, scrubby jungle just visible in the moonlight on both sides, and the man in the passenger seat wiped a forearm across his face, trying to keep a measure of the sweat out of his eyes.
He succeeded, but then he caught a thick plume of hot dust in his face as it blew in from his open window.
The dust turned to mud on his forehead and cheek as he wiped again.
“This blows,” he muttered, and then he glanced down to his watch, the tritium dial giving him the time.
Ninety degrees, high humidity, at 1:22 in the morning.
In December.
He had been all over the developing world, but this was his first visit to Nicaragua, and so far, he couldn’t say he’d found much to recommend it.
In the driver’s seat next to him, a younger man turned his way. In a thick Hispanic accent, he spoke in English. “This…blows?”
Court Gentry switched to Spanish. “Just an expression, amigo. All good.”
The driver looked back out the windshield in time to negotiate a boulder jutting into the road. These were lowlands, vegetation all around, but the massive San Cristóbal Volcano was just a few klicks to the northeast, and volcanic rock lay all around.
Court wore a loose-fitting blue denim shirt and black jeans, his cross-training shoes were black, and he carried a Glock pistol on his hip, with three extra magazines in his pants pocket.
Behind him in the truck was an M4 rifle with an optic and a three-power magnifier, a backpack with extra rifle mags and medical gear, along with binoculars, a thermal imager, water, and a few other tools of his trade.
This was a light load-out for Court, but this was what had been left in the Cessna for him at the airstrip in Costa Rica, and the airstrip had been empty and dark; there was no one to bitch to about getting himself some more kit before this mission.
He looked over to the driver now. He’d read Juan Carlos’s file on the flight down today. He’d been a local agent of the CIA for over ten years. An ex-soldier, he ran a team of three other men who helped Managua station down here from time to time.
Juan Carlos was a shooter; he had been deemed reliable by the local CIA station, along with his men, and Court hoped like hell the Agency was right about them, because they were his lifeline on this hastily thrown-together op.
Juan Carlos had a big G3 rifle in the backseat, next to a vest full of magazines and a cheap knapsack and a radio.
His buddies were already at the location he and Court now raced to, and Juan Carlos had been in contact with them nearly constantly since he picked Court up from the dirt airstrip to the north of Chinandega a half hour earlier.
Court sighed again, and this time he spoke only to himself.
“What the fuck are we doing?”
He’d been rushed here, given little intel, and he was expected to execute an operation nonetheless.
Once he met up with Caprice, he’d determine if she had performed the duties necessary for her to be safely extracted, and then he would get the asset back to the dirt airstrip sixteen miles to the west, where he’d left his Cessna 210 single-engine aircraft at the end of a darkened and abandoned runway.
Court would pilot the aircraft out of here with the woman, leaving the four FORNAT shooters behind, and then he would head west, out over the Pacific Ocean.
From there he’d turn to a southerly heading and land one hour later in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, where CIA San Jose station would have further instructions for the asset, and Court would head to the international airport to board a private jet back to Virginia.
A lot could go wrong along the way, Court knew, and this, along with the dust and the heat, had him in his current foul mood.
JC looked his way again, however, and said, “Quince minutos.” With this came a thumbs-up. Fifteen minutes. Court returned the gesture, then returned his eyes to the road.
—
Forty-five minutes later Court lay on his belly, swatting a mosquito on the side of his neck, probably for about the thirtieth time in the past half hour. He peered into the darkness ahead and wondered if he had time to take a piss before the asset showed up and the show began.
Ultimately, though, he decided to hold it.
His rifle was in the brush next to him, a water bottle next to that.
In front of him sat a ramshackle brick roadside restaurant, closed for the night.
Picnic tables ran along either side of the little shack, and a clothesline hung between a pair of minquartia trees, a few dishrags swaying in the faint breeze.
Cheap hammocks were strung near the tables, rocking gently back and forth.
A water-filled ditch ran alongside the property; a low metal fence with untreated timber posts separated it from the outdoor dining area. Corrugated metal that showed deep rust even in the darkness ran along the back of the restaurant, and firewood for the oven sat in tall piles.
Beyond the metal fence, a hill rose sharply in the direction of the distant volcano.
On this side of the restaurant, a gravel drive led from the dirt road to the front porch. A single black crew-cab pickup truck was parked there with its lights off, its tailgate backed up to the porch, and the grille facing the driveway and the road beyond, as if ready for a fast getaway.
A trio of redbrick hovels a couple hundred yards away, much higher on the steep hillside, had caught his attention the moment he’d arrived. There were no lights in any of the buildings, no vehicles around them, but they did not appear to be abandoned.
Hillside produce fields staked out around the buildings looked well tended.
He’d determined that someone was living in these homes, but so far, he hadn’t seen any movement.
He and Juan Carlos had been lying in the scrub at the edge of the property here for only fifteen minutes, but the other three men who worked with Juan Carlos had been here over an hour already.
Two sat in the truck facing the road, and the third had hidden himself behind a pile of firewood at the rear of the property, with a better view up the road that led to Chinandega, ten kilometers to the west.
Court couldn’t see this man in the moonlight, but he had picked out his heat signature easily with the help of his infrared monocular, a military-grade Teledyne FLIR Scout Pro that was only seven and a half inches long and two and a half inches wide.
Both lenses of the device kept fogging up in the high humidity, even with the anti-fog spray he’d applied minutes earlier. He wiped off condensation and brought it to his eye.
Both to get a better understanding of the location and to take his mind off the fact that he had to pee, he scanned the FLIR up on the hillside once again, saw nothing but a few chickens scratching the dirt near the three dark buildings, and then he took his eye out of his device and listened.
A rooster crowed, bugs buzzed, and the sound of a poorly tuned bus engine rumbled far in the distance.
It was a calm scene, for the next few moments, anyway; the moonlight illuminated it all, and the noise of bugs in the air told him he and his team were low profile enough.
He examined the jungle on the other side of the clearing for heat signatures, and as he did so, Juan Carlos said, “We could have brought in the asset ourselves. Taken her over the border to the Ticas, in fact. We didn’t need you coming all the way down here for—”
“Caprice demanded an American face at the pickup. No offense.”
“Well…you do have an American face.”
“Gracias.”
“Not a compliment, my friend.”
Court liked this guy. He brought the monocular back to his eye and scanned the dark buildings on the hill again.
The houses bothered him, because they would make for a good overwatch for an enemy, but he tried telling himself he had nothing to worry about.
This extraction location had just been disclosed a short time earlier.
Anyone establishing overwatch would need time to get here, to get set up and in cover, and it didn’t seem possible the Nicaraguans could have made this happen, even if there was some sort of an intelligence leak.
But just as he was about to put the monocular back down, his eyebrows furrowed as he noticed something he hadn’t before.
Whispering, he spoke Spanish to the man lying next to him. “JC…that little wooden structure on the far side of building three. Behind the wire fence. What is that?”
He heard the man in the brush next to him bring his binos up to his eyes. After a moment, he said, “Looks like a chicken coop.”
“Could it be a doghouse? A pen?”
After a moment, the Nicaraguan said, “Yeah. I think you’re right. Most people, if they have coops, don’t put them right by the house. That’s gross. It’s probably for a dog.”
Court scanned some more. “Didn’t hear a dog barking when we got here. Your boys hear a dog?”
The Nicaraguan made a call on his radio, received an answer. “No sign of dogs present on the hill.”
To Juan Carlos, Court said, “There’s like…no movement in that house up there at all. That look right to you?”
“Maybe the homeowners are out of town.”
Court took his eyes out of his binos, turned to the agent. “Like…on vacation? South of France, maybe?”
Juan Carlos sighed at the sarcasm. “These are red bean fields all around here. Maybe they go sell their crops at the produce markets in Chinandega or Managua. Must have left their dogs with someone, or taken them along.”
“Did your guys check the houses out?”
“I ordered them to stay out of sight when they got here. But they’ve been watching the windows. Curtains haven’t moved. No vehicles.” He looked to Court now. “We were given this location about ten minutes before your plane landed, we didn’t have time.”
“I know, amigo. We’ve all been handed a shit sandwich here.”