She warned herself off personalising his back story. Just because Luperico was important to her, it didn’t necessarily make him important to the regime in this part of the world. The fact that he’d ended up in this backwater, rather than being tortured by professionals down south at Puerto Belgrano, implied that the Seguridad had not clued in to Luperico’s potential value.
Steam was rising from the undergrowth as the sun climbed higher with the morning’s passing. Caitlin was sweating inside her brush camouflage. She wished she was closer - take down this officer and the two unfortunates flinching under his harsh commands, and she’d almost certainly draw a couple more guards out the door, scratching their heads and squeezing their dicks, wondering what the hell was going on. With her brand new HK-417 providing kick-ass moral support, she’d wipe out most of the opposition and force an entry in just a few seconds. She pondered the odds.
The Heckler & Koch had been selected as Echelon’s long arm for non-urban field work, just five months earlier. Bearing some similarities to the M4 carbine on which it was based, it had been re-engineered by the old German gunsmithing firm primarily for use by special forces. A proprietary short-stroke, piston-driven system kept the weapon’s interior free of combustion gases, making it much more reliable than the impingement systems used in the M16 and the M4.
Dozens of other tweaks, some major, some minor, had gone into the design of the 417 to craft an exemplary killing implement. Added to which, Echelon had provided an unusually hefty flash and sound suppressor, courtesy of the agency’s engineering shop in the London Cage. It fitted snuggly onto a bespoke barrel for those occasions when operators such as Caitlin Monroe needed to send a withering bullet storm down-range, into the body mass of some ne’er-do-well. Discreetly; in a quiet, voiceless reproach.
But her observation post now was too far removed for such precipitate action. She watched, chagrined, as all three men returned to the dark, unknown interior of Facility 183.
*
Two hours later, with the noonday sun burning through the canopy, she lay on her stomach, concealed by a thicket of brightly coloured foliage; all waxy green leaves and startling pink and red flowers that formed giant cups in which rainwater collected so deeply that dozens of tiny frogs had colonised the self-contained ecosphere. The former police station was directly across the road from her new position.
The screaming had stopped abruptly an hour earlier, giving her a few moments of concern that these clowns had killed Luperico, if indeed that was who the torture victim was, before she could ‘debrief’ him herself. But nothing else indicated anything untoward. No bodies appeared, being manhandled by the dishevelled guards, and the movement she had glimpsed inside the front windows spoke of no urgency. Quite the opposite. The militia troops moved about with languorous sloth. She saw cigarettes glowing and once or twice heard raucous laughter. She wondered when they might eat lunch, and whether any of them would sneak away into a quiet corner afterwards for a siesta. That fucking ramrod-straight
At half past twelve, smoke drifted up from a small chimney pipe she’d previously observed at the rear of the facility. She couldn’t see it now, lying in this shallow, overgrown depression by the side of the road, but she knew there was only one such stovepipe, protruding from the roof of a small annexe at the administrative end of the building, well away from the cells. It carried scents of wood smoke and meat. Caitlin had last had a hot meal nearly twenty-four hours ago and her mouth watered now at the rich smells. She spat quietly into the brush mulch on which she lay.
She had just resolved to give the guards another hour when the portico’s heavy wooden door creaked open and two of them emerged, smoking and laughing. She recognised both characters from earlier on: the latte sippers. The pair walked around to the motor pool and took one of the muddy pick-ups parked there before driving away to the south. They certainly didn’t look like men with an important mission hanging over them. More like errand boys sent out to fetch tobacco and
The front door remained open. Caitlin withdrew into the forest, fading back into the gloom until she was sure she could move without being seen. She then shifted position round to the south before creeping forward again. With a better view through the open door, she could make out more details.
The reception area did indeed appear to give onto an open-plan office, leading back to the annexe where she had noted the chimney, a kitchen of sorts. With the two men just gone, she was able to mark three other militia: two of the guards and what looked like an older, fatter man in an officer’s uniform, but he was not nearly as well turned out as his deputy. For Caitlin was sure now that the more impressive-looking
After a few minutes she withdrew into the brush again, the germ of a plan having formed as she observed them. She would need luck. If the coffee-and-cigarillo twins had driven away at the end of their shift or gone off to fetch more personnel, this wouldn’t work. Not if they returned in a number of vehicles. If, however, they’d simply fucked off to the small village about twelve miles down the road for more supplies, as the Echelon agent suspected, she had a good chance.
Caitlin took a moment to study the digital map in the Navman unit on her forearm. The road curved gently for a mile before climbing into a series of switchbacks as it approached the small hilltop community. There wasn’t much to the place: a cluster of mud-brick huts, a cantina, a chapel, a couple of stands where the local farmers sold produce in the mornings. Her briefing set hadn’t included any more data. The village was tiny and poor, but this had undoubtedly protected it as
The electronic map together with some quick and dirty math indicated she had about half an hour to get into position at the base of the climb, to catch the two guards on their return journey. Caitlin could run the mile there in much less than that if she took the road, but that would be ill-advised. She could be seen anywhere along that long, gentle curve. There was nothing for it but to cut a path as fast as she could through the thinner scrub at the road’s edge.
She made slow but steady progress, sometimes being able to dash forward through shaded patches of trees and brush. Only once did a vehicle pass by - an old Chevy, with what looked like close to a thousand goats crammed in the back. It didn’t slow down.
Caitlin made it to her ambush point with a notional five minutes to spare. The terrain rose steeply from the river basin here, climbing nearly three hundred yards up to the plateau where the village lay. She made a brief study of the area before deciding to lay up inside a curving U-shape formed by the thick root system of an ancient hardwood tree. It gave her a clear line of fire into the second-last switchback before the road levelled out. The ground fell away steeply into tangles of liana on the open side, while a small creek gave her an escape route if needed.
She prepared her main weapon, the HK-417, before pulling out the hand-tooled flash suppressor from her pack. She screwed the black, foot-long tube tightly into place on the barrel. The suppressor wouldn’t completely eliminate the sound of gunfire, but it would muffle things considerably. The forest would do the rest. She checked her mags, lined up a spare and pulled the charging handle, racking a round into the chamber.
She then settled her cheek against the cool, plastic stock of the German-made assault rifle. With the grip seated firmly in the palm of her hand, she thumbed the selector switch from safe to auto. She waited over iron sights. No need for fancy optics this time.
Birdsong, the buzz of insects, the gurgling of the stream behind her, all seemed to grow louder as she ignored the torrid humidity. Caitlin listened for the sound of an approaching engine. She thought she heard one, but the drone, somewhere far off in the distance, faded away. Her webbing and equipment weighed her down and chafed wherever they happened to rub against her skin. Sweat trickled down her legs inside the trousers she had bloused into her boots to prevent stingers crawling inside. She took a sip from the camel-back water bladder just as the unmistakable sound of a vehicle grinding through its gears reached her. Whoever was coming was having trouble negotiating the steep descent.
