She picked up the 417, resettled her pack a little more comfortably, and took a mouthful of chilled Gatorade from the camel-back bladder woven into it. The brush reappeared in eldritch green as she snapped the PVS-14 back down over her dominant eye. The potbellied beast (was it a tapir - was that what they were called?) scuttled into the undergrowth as she began to move.
You’re a long way south, Caitlin thought of the tapir. Maybe it had got loose from a zoo or something.
Time to move on herself. Quickly setting the GPS unit to vibrate when she had covered two-and-a-half kilometres, Caitlin carefully stepped down onto the sandy creek bank from the small grassy bend on which she’d been resting.
She was her own point and cover, responsible for her flanks and rearguard. She was alone; her natural state of being. Consciously pushing away thoughts of her husband and baby back at the safe house in Scotland, wilfully forgetting the life they had tried to make for themselves on the farm in Wiltshire, Caitlin Monroe, Echelon’s senior surviving field agent, let her true nature take over. A predator, she stalked through the primordial heat - teeth out, fangs ready, all of her senses twitching and straining, searching for prey.
It didn’t matter to her that this part of the country, thinly populated before the Disappearance, was even more sparsely peopled now. She had been trained to assume the worst, to prepare for ill chance and disaster as a certainty. There were no large townships within thirty kilometres, and the terrain between here and the objective was undoubtedly deserted. La colapso had emptied it, and Roberto Morales’ regime kept it that way. But still, she would move forward as though snares blocked her path at every turn.
She advanced in a creeping crouch, her knees bent, her thigh muscles and core strength tested by the weight of her equipment and the unnatural movement. Her body had recovered well from pregnancy and childbirth, however, and from the rigours of hunting and fighting in the huge, open mausoleum of New York last spring. Three months back home with Bret and Monique had helped with that. Three months in which she regained her strength, and bound it tightly with new layers of resolution, and a fierce will to lay her hands on the man she blamed for nearly destroying her family.
Bilal Hans Baumer. Al Banna.
Or whatever he was calling himself these days. In Manhattan he had been known as the Emir. Now he was ‘the target’. Her target. As he had been for a year before the old world had fallen.
The barrel of Caitlin’s 417 swept back and forth in a tight arc as she moved up the creek like some nightmare black arachnid. The burbling splash of the stream covered the sound of her boots. She took care to step where the flow of water would quickly erase any sign of her passage. Mosquitoes hovered around her in a cloud, drawn by the opportunity to feed, but thwarted at the last moment by the odourless insect repellent she wore. As the environment adapted to her presence, it also disguised her advance, enfolding her in the shrill, creaking chirrup of a billion insects, the shriek of bats and nocturnal birds of prey, the rustle of larger animals moving through the undergrowth, and once, as she ducked under the limb of a half-fallen tree, the dry hiss of a viper slithering languidly along.
Caitlin dropped a hand to the knife at her hip and, with one fluid motion, threw it at the snake, spearing it to the branch. While it was fixed in place, she crushed the skull with a swift stroke of the Heckler & Koch’s butt stock. Pythons didn’t worry her, but vipers were incredibly foul-tempered. Best not to take chances.
After forty minutes the Navman on her forearm began to vibrate ever so slightly, warning her that the stream was about to veer away from her intended heading. She slowed to a stop and took her time absorbing the signs … She listened for the slightest fluctuation in the wall of sound thrown up by the insects in her immediate vicinity, the splash of water across the creek-bed, slightly rockier here. Her eyes took in the noticeable brightening of the world in her goggles under a thinner canopy, as a strengthening breeze opened a hole in the silver-grey cloud cover to let moon and star light spill through.
But nothing human.
Still she waited. The slight delay gave her an opportunity to measure her endurance against the task at hand. She ignored the humidity, which lay on the landscape like a wet woollen blanket, making breathing difficult and leaving her with a clammy sweat on the back of her thighs. No one in their right mind would’ve been out in this, Caitlin realised - but it was a thought that neither eroded her attention to detail nor made her lower her guard, even marginally.
Satisfied she remained alone, the Echelon agent moved off, carefully climbing the northern bank of the stream. Old mineral survey maps had indicated that the soil was thinner here and the vegetation less dense. It was still thick enough to slow her progress. With no natural track for her to follow, she was forced to push and occasionally hack her way through, while trying to keep all noise to a minimum. As much as she could, she traded caution for speed, keen to make as much ground as possible on her objective before the sun climbed over the horizon.
*
Screaming.
The screaming began sometime before dawn as a feeble, plaintive wailing, a trembling warble of utter hopelessness. Caitlin recognised the exhausted protests of a man who thought he was close to the limit of what he might endure. She knew from personal experience that he was wrong. In the hands of a capable torturer, you could endure far beyond the point where you’d first thought you wanted to die to escape the pain and humiliation.
The humiliation of torture was the surprise for most people. They expected the pain, at least intellectually - although, unless they’d been trained for it, the shock was still enough to send most over the edge very quickly. The humiliation and shame, however, clung to them for years after the pain had subsided. And that was the jangling note she recognised in the screaming: the shame of someone who’d already broken and given up whatever they had, to no avail. The torture had continued.
It was no concern of hers, save from a tactical viewpoint. She didn’t want her target, Ramon Luperico, checking out before she’d had a chance to interrogate him.
She exhaled slowly, took a sip from her camel-back, and peeled the wrapping from a mocha-flavoured protein bar. Breakfast of champions.
The detention facility - a grand name for an adobe hut at a straggling, muddy crossing of the two main local roads - was a single-storey, off-white building fronted by a slumping, shaded porch. A high stone wall ran around a compound at the rear. From her position on a small hill two hundred metres back into the woods, overlooking the site, Caitlin couldn’t see the prisoners’ enclosure, but she’d studied the satellite images closely at the pre-op briefing. A well appeared to provide drinking water, and a beaten-down path marked the circuit the inmates were allowed to walk during their exercise each day.
Assuming they were allowed any, of course. She’d half expected to see wooden poles driven into the earth for the traditional blindfold and last cigarette, complete with bloodstains from the coup de grace, but there were none. The guards most likely executed their victims in the cells and ordered any surviving captives to clean out the mess.