Peta looked at him with a worried expression, but Ray, who knew him better, just grinned.
As day became night, with Manny at the helm of the fiberglass boat supplied by Bruzual, they left Trinidad and headed toward the shores of the Orinoco Delta. The stars, bright during the team’s journey across the gulf, were soon obscured by the jungle. Only a few pinpricks of light were visible as they entered one of the narrow channels between overhanging mangrove and palm trees. No one spoke, not even when they reached the first of thepalafitos, sturdy handmade huts that stood on pilings at the water’s edge.
In the lowlands of eastern Venezuela, the slick whisper of water in the caños was like a wet tongue moving through the grasses, thick weeds, and leaf-heavy branches. The night songs of crickets and frogs in the dense underbrush made a din that masked the sounds of the quiet movement of the oars. The fiberglass boat prowled like a piranha through the narrow rivulets. Now, the low strumming of a guitar was added to the nocturnal orchestra as Manny guided the boat up beside Green Impact’s black Zodiac rafts.
The terrorists, falsely secure in their isolation, had not thought to have anyone keep watch.
With Manny leading the way, the assault team slipped through crackling weeds to the sturdypalafito poles. He used worn bumps and notches as if they were a ladder to scramble up the nearest pole to the floor above. McKendry and the three men provided by Venezuelan security minister Bruzual stayed close behind, with Peta and Ray in the rear.
McKendry heard a rustle of palm fronds, small monkeys or rodents scampering across the thatched hut roofs. Through the leaves of a fern he was using as cover, he saw the intense white lights of Coleman lanterns set on tables and attracting swarms of jungle insects. The air smelled of hot oil, fried fish and bananas, and bitter tobacco smoke.
As he climbed the pole behind Manny, McKendry could see a long-legged man through the door opening that led into the next hut over. The stranger’s bare feet were propped up on a windowsill and he was strumming a guitar. It was the young minstrel he and Keene had met in the delta cantina what seemed like forever ago.
Other than that, the compound was quiet. McKendry wondered briefly what had happened to the musician’s girlfriend. Perhaps, he thought, she’s already in bed, somewhere out of sight. He knew that in the jungle, people bedded down once darkness fell, and rose with the dawn. He and his team planned to take advantage of the routine and the darkness.
Manny and McKendry stepped into the first palafito and looked around. It was empty, probably a simple storage hut or one of the dwellings used by a recently killed member of Green Impact. The log floor creaked underfoot.
McKendry motioned for José to slip across to the next dwelling, where the guitarist was making enough noise to muffle their stealthy approach. The mercenary moved like a shadow into the hut and behind the guitar player. There was a flash of metal, a jangling chord, and the guitar fell silent, leaving the jungle with only the insects and amphibians to provide music. Bruzual’s man eased the guitar player back in his chair as he died.
“No,” Ray said, his voice low and angry.
José looked up at him through the window and made an apologetic gesture, as if he’d had no choice but to do what he had done.
“Thank God,” a Green Impact member grumbled from the next hut, unaware of why the music had stopped but evidently pleased. “Now we can finally get some sleep.”
Peta stifled a gasp and moved forward as if to help the guitar player. Ray stopped her and signaled José to come back. They watched until the guitarist stopped twitching and simply bled onto the uneven floor.
Ray faced the Venezuelan. “Now, get your ass back and disable every last one of their boats,” he whispered angrily. “And remember. If anyone else dies, so will you.”
As a scowling José crept through the mud toward the wider caños, Ray motioned for Terris and Manny to move clockwise around the compound while he and Peta and the other two mercenaries headed counterclockwise.
McKendry thought for a moment that Rodolfo would have believed this was exciting. He would have wanted to come along—and he would either have been killed, or have gone back to huddle in the boat, making up stories he would tell later to the women in silvery miniskirts who clung to him in Caracas’s discos and nightclubs.
“Let’s get moving,” he whispered to Manny. “Or we’ll end up like that poor son of a bitch in there.”
31
Taking a roundabout route, Ray Arno circled the outer perimeter of the encampment, with Peta and the mercenaries forming a ragged line, twenty paces between each of them. As he moved through the mud and underbrush, ignoring the insects and the wetness, he reminded himself that he had been on movie sets that had made him more miserable than this.
Following naturally was the thought that those jobs had never been as important as this. It wasn’t hyperbole to say that the fate of the world could depend on their success. And that success depended on this assault team.
Manny and McKendry were good men. Peta was a trooper. The men provided by the Venezuelan minister of security were what gave him pause.
He had worked with mercenaries before, more than once. The whole point of using them was that they did what they were paid to do. Problems arose only if they were serving two masters, in which case they would do what they had been told to do by the highest bidder.
According to the plan, José should have incapacitated the guitarist, tied him up so they could question him to see if he knew where Selene was. Not kill him. There was nothing Ray could do about it now, but there would be plenty he could do when it was time to make the final payment to José.
Frowning, he looked at the encampment, mentally ticking off at least a dozen safety violations that some OSHA representative on a movie lot would have written up. Here, it might even be an advantage. He knew from Manny’s rough map of the camp where the terrorists kept most of their supplies. What wasn’t on the map was where Green Impact kept its munitions. Food was in sealed lockers, some of which were suspended from trees, though the monkeys could still get at them. The rest of the cases and cans remained in the individual huts.
Two large propane tanks provided fuel for grills in what passed for the camp’s mess. He was surprised to note as he circled the building that the tanks also ran a heater and water pump attached to a shower at the back of the mess.
He was examining the tanks when Diego, one of the Venezuelan mercenaries, found the weapons cache in a small, partially camouflaged hut apart from the main encampment. After making whispered calls and gestures, to which Ray, Peta, and the third Venezuelan soon responded, the mercenary used a long knife to pry open the first storage locker.
Both of Bruzual’s other men dropped their old rifles and hauled out assault rifles and boxes of ammunition, making far too much clatter in their excitement. Ray cautioned them to be quiet, but the mercenaries seemed unduly greedy. He wondered if they would simply snatch the contraband rifles, which they could sell at a handsome profit on the black market, and flee with them.
Most of all, Ray was concerned with keeping the resources out of the hands of Green Impact.
He reached a decision. Glancing first at the luminous dial on his wristwatch, he nodded to himself and rapidly opened the rest of the cases. With a shoestring attachment of wires and connected detonators, he rigged up three armed grenades, stuffed them in among packages of C-4 and Semtex, and played out the cord behind himself.
The Venezuelans looked at him, scowling with disappointment as they saw what he meant to do. Clearly, they would have preferred to confiscate the explosives, not destroy them. Ray held the detonator string in the fingers of one hand and urgently waved them away with the other.