ride, would tear them apart. Suddenly the river was deep again, running smoothly into calmer water. Max gazed up at the jungle that clawed its way across the forty-meter cliffs. Brightly colored birds swooped to catch insects; others sang, being answered by birds across the chasm. It was an unblemished paradise, wild in its majesty, untouched by man’s hand. Max felt a strange contentment.
Riga sat in the open door of the Bell 222 helicopter as it thundered through the sky at 175 kilometers per hour, thirty meters above the ground. His feet were braced on the helicopter’s skids, keeping him balanced precariously as he sat on the helicopter floor. It was an older model, but tough and serviceable, deliberately chosen by Riga because it was such a common aircraft and would not attract undue attention. Drug runners would have had the latest model with the most powerful engine, but this old 222 could travel at 240 kilometers per hour with a range of 600 kilometers, more than enough for the job at hand. Across his lap he gripped the wooden stock of an M14 sniper rifle. This, too, had been field-proven over the years and was still used by U.S. Special Forces, as the 7.62 mm round had enormous stopping power. He could have chosen any weapon, but Riga was, at heart, a simple man, who needed a simple, uncomplicated killing tool.
He mentally replayed the Coast Guard’s pursuit. He had given the pilot the coordinates, and they weaved along the coast. The pilot brought the helicopter down to sea level a hundred meters offshore, just as the mercenary had ordered. Riga did not want to disturb any evidence supporting his belief that Max had survived. Riga pointed, waving his hand slightly, telling the pilot to move slowly from right to left so that they could get a clear view of the small beach and tree line. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; there were no footprints, no sign that anyone had been on that beach. The helicopter edged into the estuary. The tide had moved into the mangroves, half submerging them, but again there was no sign of life. And no sign of any wreckage from the boat. As there should have been.
Riga motioned the pilot forward, and when they were fifty meters off the beach, he signaled him to hover. The skids almost touched the surface of the water, and Riga stepped down into the warmth of the lagoon. He was in up to his chest and held the rifle clear of the water as the helicopter’s downdraft flattened the small waves. It banked away and held station a kilometer offshore, waiting for Riga’s command to return. Riga walked out till he was ankle-deep in the water and let his eyes move across the sand and into the trees, looking for anything out of place; if Max Gordon and a second person had had any chance of survival, this was exactly where they would have come ashore. The lapping water reached up and gently sucked back across the sand, never going higher than the line of seaweed. Riga put the rifle butt onto his shoulder and slipped off the safety catch, ready to kill.
He spent an hour searching the immediate vicinity and saw no sign of anyone being there until he came across scuff marks on a tree trunk-not the gouged scratch marks of a hunting jaguar, but possibly made by monkeys. He squatted down, listening to the jungle sounds, and let his eyes find a way into the tangled forest. He picked a spot close by, then moved his vision inward another couple of meters and then repeated the action again until he had penetrated the forest to about fifteen meters, which was about as far as anyone could expect to see. There, at knee height, was a stem, not broken but bent backward. He stepped cautiously in that direction. It would take time, but he knew he would find more evidence of someone or something moving into the jungle.
Slowly but surely, he followed the almost invisible trail that Max had left by bending and breaking branches. Max had taken away the pieces of cotton, but he could not alter a few broken sticks that told their own story. Riga reached the bamboo thicket and saw the signs of Max’s water-tapping. For a moment his guard was down as he knelt in front of the bamboo. A black mottled shadow unfurled itself from the jungle and crouched to attack.
The big cat had barely snarled its warning when Riga brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired two rapid shots. In the couple of seconds it took for the jaguar to fall, roaring in agony, Riga didn’t retreat but strode fearlessly toward the stricken animal and shot it once more, killing it instantly. He stood over the dead cat, whose breath still curled from its jaws. The amber eyes dimmed, and the muscle spasms stopped. Riga looked about him carefully-he had obviously stepped into the jaguar’s territory. So, too, had Max Gordon, and Riga wondered if the boy had come face to face with the jaguar. It didn’t matter-there was now only one hunter in this patch of jungle. Riga gazed down at his victim and felt neither sorrow nor exhilaration for the kill. It was what Riga did. Then he heard the softer and less threatening snarl of another jungle cat. He raised the rifle and aimed quickly at the young cub’s head. He hesitated, though unsure why he did so. He decided to let it live; maybe it would survive on its own. Everyone had to learn to do that at some stage of their lives.
Retracing his steps, Riga went back to the beach, but now he looked more carefully. He soon noticed that a tree’s fibers had been teased away from its trunk. Another had a shadow that curved upward, as if a clinging vine had been pulled away from it. Skirting the beach where the sand gave way to the jungle, his eye was caught by an oddly shaped clump of leaves in the undergrowth. He reached in and pulled out torn palm fronds. Someone had been trying to make something out of them, and their failures had been cast aside. So Max Gordon had found water and used a supple vine to tie or make something. The torn palm fronds gave him no clue, until he made a circle from one strand and saw that it could fit neatly over his head. Clever boy. Water and shade. But how would he have got away from this place? There was only one way and that was by river. That was what Max Gordon had done-he had made a raft and escaped.
Riga smiled. He had him. The boy was as good as dead.
15
Charlie Morgan might have been MI5 with the FBI on her side, but she did not have Riga’s sources of inside information. She had scoured the town for any knowledge of an English boy who might have tried to rent any of the rooms available without any luck or word from the FBI. It seemed that Max had disappeared off the face of the earth. She could not know that Cazamind’s influence hid even the news of the Coast Guard cutter’s seek-and- destroy attack.
Charlie hated being inactive, and sat in her sweltering room beneath a creaking old fan with a map of Central America spread out on the floor. Beyond the small city were scattered settlements and the occasional speck of a town, but there were vast areas of dense forest and remote mountains where rivers cut through gorges and where it was probably impossible to survive for any length of time without proper equipment and supplies. Her finger traced the coast from Panama up across the isthmus-the major drug corridor from South America to Mexico and into the United States-and then continued her search along the coast, up to the desolate Yucatan Peninsula. Borders merged into each other, and she knew that some of the countries had endured horrendous civil wars. Kidnapping and murder were still commonplace in various parts of Central America, and she could not imagine how, if Max Gordon had survived, he had managed to get down there. He had no money, no passport and probably only the clothes he wore; that was a pretty desperate state to be in.
Morgan allowed herself an amusing indulgence-her mobile ring tone. The unmistakable theme tune from
“Charlie, it’s Tony. We’ve picked up something pretty strange from an intercept. One of our Coast Guard cutters in the Caribbean was involved in a firefight. We caught snatches of the pilot’s voice transmission as he attacked a drug runner’s boat. The whole thing is being locked down, and we don’t have direct access to the intel on it. There are other agencies involved, and we’re being told to ignore it.”
“You’re being kept out of the loop?” Charlie asked. “Is that normal?”
“Didn’t you say your MI-Six guys leaned on your boss?” he answered.
“Right, yeah. So what do we have, a foreign operation under way, keeping out intelligence agencies inside your own country?”
“It happens. But there’s more. Is it likely your boy Max Gordon could have any association with those drug runners who took him?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it,” she said.
“These guys run go-fast boats from Central America in and out of Miami. Maybe your boy wasn’t kidnapped, is all I’m saying. Maybe he had contacts. We’re just trying to figure it out.”
“Are these the people Max got involved with in Miami? Was he on the boat your Coast Guard shot up?” Her heart sank as she thought of the carnage that would have occurred and that Max might have been caught up in it.
