He looked up as Westland joined him. She kept her pistol pointed at Maria and gestured over her shoulder. "Is it Stevens?"
Riley turned his attention to the man in the chair. It was Stevens. Riley felt conflicting emotions as he stared at the bound figure. This was the man who had betrayed his team and caused the death of four of his friends. The Colombians had been doing quite a job on the DEA man. A car battery was on the table and electrodes were attached to Stevens's scrotum. A flick of a switch and current would flow. It also looked as though they had spent some time pounding him about the head and shoulders. From the droop, Riley guessed that both his collarbones were broken.
"Yeah, it's him. Keep her covered. Shoot her in the legs again if she tries moving."
"She's bleeding pretty bad. If we don't stop it she'll be dead soon."
Riley ignored the last comment and moved over in front of Stevens. The man looked up but without recognition. He was too far gone. They hadn't been torturing him for information, Riley realized. They'd been torturing him for vengeance. Riley could see where one of Stevens's fingers had been cut off.
Riley pulled his knife and cut the straps that bound Stevens to the solid wood chair. He was just starting to pull Stevens up when he realized he had made a mistake. "Get down!" he screamed as he dove for the ground, letting go of Stevens in the process.
The blast stunned Riley. He lay on the ground for a few seconds and did a mental scan of his body as debris clattered down about him. His ears were ringing and he could hear nothing. He slowly sat up and looked around. Westland was dragging herself to her knees from where the blast had knocked her down. Riley could see blood spattered on her shirt. He looked down at himself. He was covered in blood also.
Then he saw the source of the blood. A piece of gnarled meat was all that was left of Stevens. Riley suddenly remembered Maria. He got to his feet. The Colombian woman was trying to crawl away. Riley admired her guts. He tried yelling at Westland but could barely hear himself, and it was obvious that she was still too deaf and dazed from the explosion to hear him. He ran after Maria and blocked her way. She had left a copious trail of blood behind her. Weakly lifting her head, she glared at Riley.
She was trying to work up the saliva to spit at him when she died. Riley looked down on her for a few seconds. A link gone, along with Stevens. He went back to tend to Westland.
Kate had regained her senses, except for the ringing in her ears. She was staring, mesmerized by the remains of Stevens. Riley took a quick look around to see if there was anything they could use, then grabbed Kate's arm and led her out.
Riley swung up his MP5. He could hear noises ahead where they had left the car. Signaling Westland to stay behind, he crept forward.
As he got closer he could hear what sounded like two people in the vicinity of the car. He slid forward and peered out from the tree line. A pickup truck was pulled up behind the Pinto and two men were trying to pry open the hood.
Riley shook his head in amazement. After all he'd been through, he couldn't believe that these guys were trying to rip off his car. This country was worse than the South Bronx.
He pulled off the goggles and gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust, then put down the submachine gun and pulled out his Beretta. As he broke through the brush, the two men swung around to face him, one pulling a knife, the other brandishing the tire iron they had impolitely been using on the hood.
"You have three seconds, then I blow your heads off, my friends."
The pair were in their truck in two and gone in less than ten. Riley called for Westland to join him as he retrieved his sub.
"What was that?"
"Two assholes were trying to rip off our car. You believe this place?" Riley looked at Kate with concern. "Are you all right to drive?"
She nodded weakly and got behind the wheel. Riley jumped in the other side and they headed back the way they had come. As she drove, Westland asked the question that had been disturbing her. "What happened back there in the warehouse with Stevens?"
Riley sighed. "I fucked up. One of the rules of rescuing hostages is to make sure they aren't booby-trapped before moving them. I forgot all about that when I cut Stevens free. They must have wired him up. The charge was probably a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass, because I didn't see anything. I'm lucky I heard the fuse release when I started lifting him and that there was about a second delay on the charge. His body contained most of the force of the blast. We're also lucky it was a simple wood chair and there wasn't much, other than Stevens, to turn into shrapnel when it blew, otherwise we'd both probably be dead."
Westland shook her head. "What the hell are we going up against here? Why did they still have Stevens? What were they hoping to get from him? If he compromised the mission he must have told them everything they wanted to know by now."
From what he had seen of Stevens before the explosion, Riley knew that the Colombians had wrung the DEA man dry well before this night. "I think they were letting Maria work on him for fun. Maybe that was her payment for having screwed Stevens to get the timing and locations on the missions. Just remember that these people are working with a different set of values than we are. You need to keep that in mind. Don't hesitate because of sympathy or doubt. If you do you'll be dead."
Westland glanced over at him. "I think you had that in your mind when we came down here. What you did in that bar didn't leave much room for sympathy or the possibility that you might have been making a mistake."
Riley met her gaze. "When you're in hell you play by the devil's rules."
They flashed by the turnoff for the Ring Man's villa again. Riley rechecked the magazine in the submachine gun and placed the empty magazine in his vest. He waited until Westland pulled up next to the stream. "Don't pick up any strangers."
"Be careful, Dave."
Riley got out of the car and strode off up the hard-to-find trail next to the stream. He draped his night-vision goggles over his eyes and switched them on.
After fifteen minutes of walking he turned off the trail and beat his way cross-country to the southeast toward a knoll he had located on the map. The glow of the security lights from the Ring Man's villa lit the sky to the south. Riley clambered up the slope until he got to the tree-covered knoll, designated by its elevation on the map as 8548, that looked down on the villa's grounds about five hundred meters to the south.
Riley climbed one of the taller trees and settled himself down on a forked limb. It wasn't comfortable but would have to do. He scanned the grounds.
He could easily see over the ten-foot stone wall into the interior. The house was well lit with floodlights pointing down from along the edge of the roof. The main house was two stories tall with one-story wings on either side. A large oval swimming pool was behind the house. The driveway and circular parking area in the front were bordered by an extensive garden that stretched out to the walls on the front third of the grounds. The helipad was barely in sight over the east wing of the house.
Riley carefully watched the grounds and gradually started locating the guards. They moved in seemingly random patterns about the grounds. Whoever set up the pattern obviously had more of a security than military background. It would have been more effective to have hidden the guards in good defensive positions. There were six in the outer grounds that Riley could spot. Four were assigned one to each side of the compound; the other two roved the entire perimeter, one in each direction. It was a good system in that these two could quickly spot whether any side guard was no longer at his post.