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CHAPTER 14

ALEJANDRO SERVED brEAKFAST early on the terrace, and as I nibbled a slice of melon, I watched in fascination as a hummingbird buzzed around the fragrant vines that trailed over Eduardo’s pergola. A servant tried to present me with another plate of pastries, but I waved them away.

“You don’t like those?” Eduardo asked.

“They’re delicious, but I’m getting fat.”

“I don’t need to find a new chef, then?”

“No! The one you’ve got is great.” Please, don’t shoot him . I hastily changed the subject. “Do you know where Ramos lives?”

“His compound is much like mine, except it’s not so easy to get to.”

“Not so easy to get to” turned out to be an understatement. The Ramos family home was buried deep in the jungle, around a hundred and twenty miles as the crow, or rather the helicopter, flew from casa Garcia.

Eduardo described the location to the best of his knowledge, and Agent Belcourt and the DEA added their two cents worth. They knew what we were planning, and while the agency couldn’t openly condone it, Belcourt promised they’d buy us all beers if we pulled it off. Then Jed cajoled his buddies at the CIA into making a satellite pass for me, which provided Mack with a detailed set of high-resolution photographs.

They were well worth the Superbowl tickets they cost me.

For the next few days, I spent the mornings training and the afternoons planning. Training consisted of gym sessions, running around the trails on Eduardo’s estate, martial arts drills, shooting, and throwing. Throwing was a skill that shouldn’t be neglected. When I hurled a knife at my enemy or tossed a gun to a colleague, I needed to know it would reach its target.

Seb, Marco, and their core team started joining in with my training sessions. They got frustrated at first because they got outperformed by a girl, but it did make them up their game. In truth, they weren’t bad, but they’d got lax because they didn’t push themselves regularly like I did. Alex yelling via a satellite link did us all good. The following week, as we got closer to action, I picked my team for the assault on the Ramos compound.

Some choices were straightforward.

Nick and Dan were obvious. Both were in excellent physical condition, Nick had extensive combat history, and Dan had street smarts. Not to mention we’d spent so many years working together we could read each other’s thoughts. Plus I wanted Logan and Evan. I knew how Logan worked and trusted him, and Evan’s stint in the army gave him plenty of experience with jungle-based operations.

Other choices were harder. I agonised over Nate, Mack, and Carmen. We needed an electronics specialist on site, which meant Nate or Mack. Ideally, I’d have Nate, as he had far more field experience than Mack. But we also needed a sniper, and Carmen was the best. My problem was Josh, Nate and Carmen’s son. If this job went wrong, as so many things in my life had tended to do lately, I didn’t want to leave him an orphan. Which left me with Mack and Carmen.

Jed was another question mark. He’d only just got the cast off his leg, but since the attack on the house, he’d split his days between the gym and the shooting range. Alex said he’d worked hard on the weights, but his cardio had been limited. The doctor may have given him a clean bill of health, but was that enough? Would I rather have Jed at eighty-five percent or someone else fitter who might not have Jed’s training and ability?

In total, I needed twelve people from Blackwood plus a sniper. Seb and Marco were bringing another half dozen men with them, which took our numbers up to twenty-one. We’d worked on the assumption Ramos would have a similar setup to Eduardo regarding staffing, and Eduardo had at least sixty people on his estate at all times once you added in the domestic staff and guards. The servants might not be trained soldiers, but they were still capable of picking up a gun and shooting somebody if the need arose.

I’d quit drinking by that point, so Seb and I sat down with glasses of mango juice to deliberate over our final team.

“I’ve got my six,” Seb said. “Are you any closer to a decision?”

“Eight definites, including me.” I’d added Alex to my list too. “And I think I’m just about there on the extras.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Jack, Malachi, and Gage are all ex-army, and Isaiah’s a trained medic as well as being a sneaky git.”

“That leaves one.”

“Jed. It’s got to be Jed.”

From the satellite photos, we saw the Ramos estate covered an area of about twenty acres, a large clearing blasted out of the rainforest. In addition to the main house, there were numerous outbuildings, and the whole place was surrounded by the dense undergrowth typical of the region.

Access was via an unpaved road that twisted its way through the forest from the nearest settlement fifteen miles away. As well as that, a small grass airstrip ran along one side of the property, and Seb’s sources said Diego was a keen pilot.

Nate set up a video link so I could brief everyone stateside. I felt a bit under-equipped sitting in Eduardo’s chintzy lounge while they were surrounded by state-of-the-art technology, but needs must. At least Eduardo had found me some decent guns by then. We ran through the outline of my plan, the team selection, and each person’s role. In a couple of days, the guys from Blackwood would fly over to Colombia to join me, and I’d made a list of equipment for them to bring.

“Where are we landing the jet?” Nick asked.

“Eduardo’s arranged for us to borrow the private airstrip he uses.”

“Is that going to cause us a problem with our luggage?”

Eduardo spoke up from his place at my side. “The staff will turn a blind eye as long as we’ve paid the landing fee.”

“Are you sure?”

“ Hermano , nobody’s worried about anything being smuggled into Colombia.”

So the preliminaries were sorted, right?

Wrong.

The day after the briefing, Nate called while I was in the gym. “Carmen and I had a discussion last night.”

For “discussion” I heard “argument.”

“And?”

“I’m coming instead of Mack. I’ve got more experience at this type of operation in that type of terrain.”

A minor setback but not an entirely unexpected one. Nobody could shoot like Carmen, but if I had Nate, he’d be able to fight dirty at the compound as well as just sorting out the electronics.

“I’ll find another sniper to replace Carmen. You know it was a decision I agonised over in the first place. What do you think of Slater?”

“Well, here’s the thing. Carmen’s also coming. She refuses to stay behind and, quote, let me have all the fun.”

“What about Josh?”

“Bradley’s going to look after him while we’re away. I understand your thinking but, Emmy, neither of us plans on dying.”

“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”

“No.”

“In that case, I hold no responsibility when Josh comes back from Bradley wearing a pair of pink skinny jeans and a faux-hawk.”

Despite my worries, I was secretly happy to have both of them coming. I loosened up inside a little knowing that Nate would be next to me when we went into the compound. Out of everyone at Blackwood, I’d known him the longest, and I trusted him to get the job done.

The team arrived two days later, and we spent the next fortnight researching, planning, rehearsing, and training. Or in more normal language, cursing, sweating, suffering, and aching.

Mid way through the first week, Nate and I took a trip out to the Ramos compound, trekking through the dense rainforest from the next valley. Just going a couple of miles took most of the day.

“I hate the freaking jungle,” I muttered as I clambered over a slippery log.

Ahead of me, Nate hacked at a clump of tough, leathery vines with a machete. “We’re on the same page.”

It wasn’t like in the movies where the hero and heroine skipped down a mossy path while birds chattered happily in the trees. Here, it was an impenetrable wall of green. Everything had to be either skirted around, climbed over, or chopped through, which in thirty-degree heat and high humidity wasn’t fun, let me tell you.

Add in assorted wild animals to watch out for and nasty flying things that bit any piece of exposed skin they could get their jaws into, and you get the picture. After slipping off an algae-covered rock into a pool of fetid water, I found myself wondering what in the world I was doing there. And, darn it, I’d just trodden in monkey poop.

Why didn’t I just retire? I could sit at a country club sipping drinks with the occasional game of tennis thrown in for fun, instead of crawling through rotting vegetation on my way to dance with death while getting dive-bombed by a squadron of angry mosquitos.

Because I owed it to Black. That was why.

I slapped another of the little bloodsuckers away and got on with it.

At least perimeter security at the compound wasn’t up to much, just a flimsy chain-link fence and a few pairs of armed guards on patrol. I threw a handful of dirt at the fence and waited. Nothing. No alarms went off, no troops came running.

“Much easier than Syria,” I muttered, recalling the trip I’d made out there not so long ago.

We hunkered down in a tangle of bushes and waited. And waited. And waited. Nate glanced at his watch as the guards sauntered past again. “It’s been an hour since the last pair.”

They didn’t even look alert. The two of them smoked and laughed, guns slung over their backs rather than at the ready, clearly not expecting anybody to be stupid enough to come through the jungle.

After the guards had been past once more, confirming our suspicions they were on an hourly schedule, we snuck around to the entrance. Security there was better. A metal barrier spanned the drive, five feet high, manned by a team of four guards who sheltered from the early afternoon sun in a brick hut. The good news was they looked bored out of their minds, more interested in watching television than checking for an imminent attack.

“Doesn’t seem like they’re expecting us, does it?” I whispered to Nate.

“No. I’m not sure whether to be pleased or concerned.”

“It’s about time we got a break.”

Altogether, we counted ten guards patrolling, which with the four game show fans, made fourteen.

“Two shifts or three?” Nate mused.

“I’d go with three. Eduardo reckons that’s standard.”

“So there’s another twenty-eight foot soldiers somewhere.”

“Plus more in the house, I’m betting.” I did a bit of adding up. “I reckon forty-five to fifty men.”

“Probably about right.” Nate jerked his head forward. “And don’t forget the ladies.”

I trained my binoculars on a dour-faced woman collecting washing from a line and folding it into a basket. A nervous-looking girl scurried up to her carrying a tray of food. She said a few words, frowned, then moved on. From her facial features, I guessed she was Japanese, and although her baggy dress came to her feet, there was no hiding her swollen belly.

“Who would want to have a baby in a place like this?” I muttered.

“Wonder what she’s doing here? Everyone else looks native.”

I stiffened as Diego walked out of the main building. The two-storey stucco-covered villa looked alien in the jungle setting with ornamental stone dragons either side of the front door and a trio of large-chested ladies forming the centrepiece of an ornamental fountain. Who thought that was classy? And no, you don’t want to know where the water was coming from.

Diego looked at ease in a pair of board shorts and flip-flops, a far cry from the suit I’d seen him in at the party. I couldn’t see a weapon on him, but to wear that outfit, he must have been doused in mosquito repellent. Or maybe they just found him as repulsive as I did? He scratched his unmentionables as he wandered across the courtyard to chat with a guard on the other side. Delightful.

I’d hoped to see Carlos, but there was no sign of him. Curiosity ate away at me. Would he look as much like Black in person as he did in the photos? Would he walk like him? Talk like him? I hadn’t told Nate of my plans to have a little chat with Carlos when we stormed the place. Before I killed him, that was.

We didn’t see Hector, either, and after a day of skulking around, we figured he was either holed up in the main building or somewhere off-site. I’d taken hundreds of photos, and Nate had put together a rough map of the compound, adding little details that the satellite photos couldn’t give us like the guards’ patrol routes and the most frequently used doors.

As dusk fell, we backtracked out the way we came, and the trek back was slightly easier as we were more familiar with the terrain. The RIB we’d motored down the river in was still exactly where we’d left it in the next valley over, moored to a sturdy tree and hidden under camouflage netting.

“I was thinking we’d come in the same way for the actual operation,” I said.

“Makes sense. We know we can do it now.”

“Then we spread out around the compound and come at them from all angles. I want to hit the place hard and fast, take out as many men as possible before they realise what’s happening.”

“And leaving? You’re sticking with the choppers?”

“I don’t think there’s a better option.”

Eduardo had offered a pair of ex-military Hueys to pick us up at a pre-appointed time and fly us straight back to his place. It wouldn’t matter about noise at that point, and I wanted to get clear of the area fast.

I also had to plan for the worst. If anyone got hurt, speed would be of the essence. A trek through the jungle or a bumpy road trip would lessen a casualty’s chance of survival if their injury was serious. Helicopters were definitely the way to go.

Once we got back to Eduardo’s place, Nate and I updated everybody on what we’d found. As pictures of the Ramos’s jungle lair and the main players popped up on the projector Eduardo found for us, the operation became real.

“I’ll send a couple of men to watch the road in and out,” Seb said. “That way we can see who comes and goes.”

“That’s the biggest unknown.” And my biggest fear, put into words. “I want to get all three of the Ramos clan. Hector, Diego, Carlos. I don’t think I need to explain how much difficulty we’ll be in if any of them escape.”

And people in that line of business would always have an escape plan. If they went to ground, it could be weeks, months even, before we found them.

“They may try to fly out when we attack,” Nate said. “Our first priority is to disable anything in the hanger.”

“Agreed.”

We’d taken a look inside a few of the buildings while we were there. The one next to the airstrip contained a single-engine prop-plane, but more concerning were the two empty spaces next to it. I guessed there was another plane or two around, or maybe a helicopter. Possibly a boat too, since the river was nearby. Drug money bought a lot of toys.

We spent most of the night formulating our plan, and the resolve hardened on my team’s faces as we assigned tasks and hashed out the details. We would win this thing, no matter what.