Chapter Twelve #2
“A little bit.”
“Anybody moving around back there?”
“Not yet.”
It was foolish for the drunk guys in the trucks to forget to surround the location, Court determined, but then he understood.
These were gang members, drunk, not trained soldiers. They wouldn’t understand that although the men on the hillside might have had line of sight on the rear of the building, they wouldn’t be able to target someone who made it all the way to the base of the hill.
Still, what the Renazco gang gave up in tactical acumen, they intended to make up for in sheer numbers and wild enthusiasm, so he knew he had to move now if he and the agent had a chance in hell of getting out of here.
“Okay,” he said, “now that we’re not returning fire out front, they’ll surround us.”
She said, “So we have to run!”
Court raised his own head quickly, then looked out the window.
He dropped back down, putting his back to the wall, and she did the same.
He said, “If we can make it to that low fence, get on the other side, we can move laterally all the way to the jungle. The sniper in the building above us won’t have an angle on us anymore. ”
“Yeah, but we have to cover thirty meters to get to that fence.”
Court reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of smoke grenades. “I want you holding on to my belt for the entire run. We get to that metal fence, we just roll over and fall on the other side.”
“What’s on the other side?”
“Whatever’s there, I’ll take it over a bullet in the chest.”
“Bueno. Okay.”
He opened the back door and stood to the side.
Immediately the loud report of a sniper rifle boomed from the hillside.
He tossed both grenades out, one farther than the other, and then he dove back into the room, just before another crack of the rifle one hundred meters away echoed, and the wooden wall next to the door, exactly where Court had been standing, splintered.
This sniper had determined in an instant where Court had been when he threw open the door.
Ideally, Court would have liked to give the smoke grenades a full thirty to forty-five seconds to spew the thick obscurant, but he was as worried about the drunk armed wild men at the front of the property as he was about the single weapon operated by the small sniper team at the back.
He counted to twenty in his head, then grabbed Caprice, and they rushed towards the door and into the growing cloud just beyond it.
Wild shooting inside the shack told him the gangsters were just behind them, so he raced out the door, halfway expecting to take a heavy round to the forehead.
There were different schools of thought on how to run through gunfire, even among tier-one-level operators. Some zigzagged, and some preferred the flat-out straight-line approach.
Court was normally a direct kind of guy, but he gave the shooter on the hillside credit for what he’d accomplished so far, and figured that without any new information about where Court and Caprice were, he’d just fire in a straight line along the shortest route to cover.
So Court zigged and zagged with the woman through the dense smoke as booming rifle rounds echoed; Caprice held him from behind and kept up well at first, but then she stumbled right after a shot echoed in the small yard behind the restaurant.
Court thought she’d been hit at first; he slowed and turned to help her, though he could not see her through the smoke, but immediately she crashed into him and he realized she remained on her feet and was still running forward.
The American adjusted, turned back, and ran alongside her, and soon the two of them made it to the rusty corrugated metal fence, only about four feet high.
He went over first, splashing into a low, fetid ditch on the other side; his rifle sling around his neck caught a fence post and hung him up there as Caprice splashed down just behind him.
He unfucked his sling; put the weapon behind him, over his shoulder; covered the woman with his body for a second; then felt all over her. “Are you shot?”
“No!” she shouted, pushing his hands away. She fumbled with her own weapon; he could just make out her face, and he saw that she remained terrified but alert.
They had cover from the sniper, and some cover from the darkness and the red smoke still billowing from the two canisters at the rear of the restaurant, so they rose to a crouch and began racing, back in the direction of their truck.
Gunfire boomed behind them, but Court heard no rounds zipping overhead or impacting the flora nearby, so he figured the drunk gang of killers at the restaurant were just riddling Juan Carlos’s dead body or firing at phantom targets in another direction.
The sniper rifle fell silent, and while this would have been excellent news while they were in the building, now Court found the silence disconcerting.
He didn’t know where the person or persons were on the hillside, and he was pushing nearly blindly through the thick jungle and did not want to run into them.
—
After fifteen minutes of slow movement through the foliage on the hillside in the direction of the pickup Court had stashed nearby, he and Caprice arrived at a washed-out road that led down the hill.
He knew the truck was probably another forty or fifty meters on, parked along the main road, and somehow he hadn’t passed this track when he and Juan Carlos infiltrated the area over an hour earlier.
He knelt at the edge of the trees, brought his FLIR to his eye, and scanned to the left and right.
To the left, not more than twenty meters away, a soft glow in his optic told him something registering heat was there.
It took a few seconds to focus on it, but when he did, he determined he was looking at a pickup truck, its warm engine cooling quickly, coming down to the temperature of the warm night.
In another twenty minutes or so it wouldn’t have even registered in his infrared scope.
But it wasn’t his pickup, and there was no one around it.
A thought occurred to him, so he panned all the way to his right, back up the washed-out dirt road and up the hill. Caprice stirred next to him, but he put a hand on her arm to silence her, because he sensed immediate danger.
He stopped his pan when he found what he was looking for.
The heat signatures of two figures moving in the brush on the other side of the dirt track, struggling down the steep hill.
They were picking their way along, not taking the road itself, presumably because they knew, or at least suspected, that squirters had made it out of the restaurant and might still be somewhere in the woods.
But Court noticed something off about the two of them, and for this reason he didn’t feel the fear he would normally feel encountering a sniper team in the darkness.
Both figures appeared to be injured.
They were both male, and the man in front had a long rifle on his back and a pistol in his right hand, but the weapon was down at his waist, and his left hand clutched his right elbow.
He wasn’t exactly stumbling through the thick woods, but he seemed a lot more focused on the injury to his arm than on the way forward, and he leaned against trees from time to time as he passed them.
Just a few meters behind him, a second man had a short-barreled rifle of some sort, and it swung in his right hand, but the man limped, nearly dragging his left leg behind him.
Either Court or JC had hit both of these men while firing up the hill in the initial engagement. They were wounded, the spotter worse than the sniper, apparently.
It was clear to Court that this sniper team was not part of the drunk gangsters who’d arrived in trucks. Obviously both units were coordinating in some fashion, but Court suspected he was looking at Nicaraguan military or intelligence officers.
He didn’t give a shit who they were; he was going to kill them.
It would take another thirty seconds for the pair to make it to the other side of the track from Court’s position, and by then he knew he’d be able to see them, their silhouettes anyway, without the FLIR. He stowed the scope in his bag, then lifted his rifle and brought it to his shoulder.
Caprice leaned into his right ear. “What…what are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m dropping these two motherfuckers.”
“No,” she whispered, her voice tight and tense. “It will make noise. Those other men will know we’re here. Just let them leave.”
Court began aiming at the rear target. “We need their vehicle. It will save us another fifteen minutes of moving through the jungle.”
“But these men…they are not Renazca. They are soldiers. Or else they are DDI. Either way, they are with the Nicaraguan government.”
Court spoke as he sighted in on the first man. “They were, anyway.”
“No,” she whispered again. “Let them go. It will be easier that way.”
Court ignored her and fixed his sights on the man in the back. He was the most badly injured, but his rifle could get up into the fight faster and cause more stress for Court than the sniper’s handgun, so Court decided to drop him first.
Just as Caprice whispered “No” yet again, Court flipped the selector switch on the rifle from safe to semiauto and fired a single round, hitting the silhouette of the man fifteen meters away in the left temple.
He rocketed sideways; gear flew out of his pack as he spun, then he slammed into the ground in the thick brush, but Court had moved his sight off him before the body stilled.
The second man spun towards the sound of the gunfire and swung his pistol up, held in the hand at the end of his injured arm, but Court had him dead to rights in an instant.
His rifle boomed again, one shot, and this man took it in the chest and dropped down into a sitting position, his back against a tree.
The American shot him again through the skull, rose, and ran out onto the dirt track.
He covered the distance to the two men quickly and arrived to find the spotter lying still on his left side, facing away.
The sniper, in contrast, was faceup, somehow still alive, struggling to pull his pistol from the ground on his right side with his left hand.
Court shot the man through the forehead, ending the man’s struggle.
One more shot into the back of the spotter’s neck as an insurance round, and then Court pulled out his tactical light.
He flashed the beam through the red lens briefly, and then the scene went dark again.
Slowly, he took a step back.
“Oh…shit.”
The men were not Nicaraguan.
They were Asian. Quite likely, he determined, Chinese.
“Shit,” he whispered again to himself.
Caprice stepped up next to him. He’d already turned off the light, so he flipped it back on for her to see.
“Ay dios mío.” Oh my God.
Court said, “You said you hadn’t seen any Chinese involved in this. Now you have.”
While she stood there in silence, he stowed the flashlight again, took her by the arm, and hurried back to the road.
If he’d had time he would have rummaged through their equipment, looking for the pickup keys, as well as pocket litter or any other evidence of just who they were.
He would have photographed their faces for ID checks when he returned to the States.
But he did none of that.
Instead, he pulled her along and began running through the jungle.
“I thought you said we would take their truck.”
“We’re going back to mine.”
She said, “But you only shot them so you could save time in getting a vehicle. That’s what you said.”
“Yeah, well, I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
Court pushed on through the thick foliage, ignoring the woman behind him. He wasn’t going to take the time to find their keys. He wanted to be as far away from those bodies as possible.
Whatever had happened tonight was bigger than Hanley had told him. He didn’t think Hanley was lying; it was likely the former DDO just did not get all the information from the current DDO.
China was here, likely working with Nicaraguan intelligence and a Central American drug gang, and clearly involved in a kinetic operation to kill CIA assets.
And Court was still certain his operation had been compromised somehow by the CIA.
—
Thirty minutes later he bounced his Toyota down a two-lane road leading back in the direction of Chinandega and the airfield nearby.
Caprice had been quiet, but now she said, “You didn’t have to shoot those men. You killed them in cold blood.”
Actually, Court felt his blood boiling at the moment, but he didn’t say that to the Nicaraguan police detective.
“It’s a half-hour drive to the airfield,” he said.
“So?”
“So maybe you don’t talk so fucking much right now.”
He could have argued with her, could have made the point that shooting those guys helped his mission, because as long as they were in the area with a vehicle, they could have been a threat to the two of them.
But he did not want to argue. The truth was, she was right. It had not been operationally necessary.
He’d done it out of rage. He’d done it because of the four FORNATs who worked for America who died tonight, and he’d done it because he felt weak for not being able to help them.
He couldn’t save JC, but at least he could avenge him.
Court didn’t regret what he’d done, but he knew he’d just created a much bigger incident than would have occurred if he’d only come down here to Nicaragua and killed some sicarios from a drug gang.
The fact that an American had come here, killed Chinese military or intel types, and gotten away with that information was going to make this entire event a much bigger deal.
The truck raced along in silence, in darkness, towards a quiet airfield in rural Nicaragua, and away from the death they’d left behind.