Gabriel held his breath. If the truck went through that railing and plunged into the river, everyone in it might die in the crash or be drowned by the fast-moving stream. He had no way of knowing if Mariella Montez was one of the passengers.
The driver was able to bring the truck to a stop a couple of feet short of the railing. Its other front tire had burst now from the bullets ripping into it, and the truck slewed diagonally across the bridge as it came to rest, blocking the narrow span completely.
The driver of the truck in the rear had thrown his vehicle into reverse and tried to back off the bridge. He must have guessed what the bandits were trying to do. He was too slow, though. Bullets shredded his rear tires, and the truck ground to a halt on its wheel rims.
They had the convoy pinned down, Gabriel thought. Now all they had to do was get the men in the trucks to surrender.
That wasn’t going to be easy. Men with rifles leaped from the canvas-covered backs of the vehicles, took cover between them, and opened fire in both directions.
Escalante’s men were too well hidden, though, to be taken in the fusillade. Like phantoms they darted from rock to tree to bush, so that the men trapped on the bridge never knew where the next shot was coming from. Individual shots, quiet and sure, picked off the men from the convoy; one by one they dropped their rifles and sprawled on the bridge planks to lie motionless in death.
After a few minutes of fierce firing on both sides, the shots began to die away. An uneasy silence settled over the bridge. Escalante took advantage of the respite to shout, “You on the bridge! Do you hear me?”
“We hear you!” a harsh voice came back.
“If you want to live, release your prisoner! Allow her to walk off this end of the bridge! Then throw your guns down and walk to the other end! Leave the trucks and everything in them, and you can have your lives!”
“Go to hell!” the spokesman for the trapped men bellowed back, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth, the shooting started again.
The air began to grow hazy with gunsmoke as the fighting continued for several minutes. Most of the shots came from the men in the trucks. The bandits held their fire for the most part, not wanting to waste ammunition and taking a shot only if it presented itself clearly to them. Two more men on the bridge fell, blood welling from the wounds they had suffered.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
The command came from the leader of the men on the bridge. Gabriel was eager to get a look at him. He wanted to know if he was the same ugly, broken-nosed bastard, the one Gabriel had bayoneted in Florida.
“You want the girl? You can have her!”
Suddenly, Mariella Montez stepped out from behind the lead truck. Gabriel recognized her instantly, just as he recognized the man who emerged right behind her and pressed the barrel of a heavy revolver against her head. His right arm was in a sling, but he seemed to be handling the gun in his left hand just fine. Old Broken-Nose, all right, the son of a bitch.
“Gabriel Hunt,” the man shouted. “I know you must be here somewhere.”
Cierra glanced over at Gabriel in surprise. Gabriel shrugged.
“I don’t know who your allies are,” Broken-Nose went on, “but your stamp’s all over this.” The man had a faint accent, Slavic, perhaps, or Russian. What he was doing here in the middle of Guatemala, Gabriel didn’t know. Perhaps Esparza recruited killers from all over the world, selecting the worst of the worst.
“Do you want me to try to pick him off?” Escalante asked quietly.
Gabriel shook his head. “Not with that gun to Mariella’s head. No matter how good a shot you are, we can’t risk him pulling the trigger.”
Mariella was no longer dressed in the evening wear she had sported in New York. Now she wore nondescript fatigues like the men. But she still managed to look beautiful in them, somehow, despite the look of fear etched on her face. Seeing her in person again, even from this distance, Gabriel was more convinced than ever that she was the same woman in the wedding photo he had seen in Villahermosa. Impossible or not.
He raised his voice and called, “You know you’re surrounded. We can kill every one of you, or we can let you live. It’s up to you.”
Broken-Nose laughed. “I knew you must be behind this, Hunt!”
“All you have to do,” Gabriel shouted, “is let the woman go.”
The man shook his head and kept the gun pressed to Mariella’s temple. “Oh, no,” he said. “If you want her so bad…you come and get her, Gabriel Hunt.”
Chapter 17
Cierra clutched Gabriel’s arm as he started to stand up. “You can’t go out there!” she said. “They’ll kill you!”
“No they won’t,” Gabriel replied. “That won’t gain them anything except a quicker execution. These aren’t ideologues, they’re professionals. They don’t want to die. They’ll negotiate if they think that’s what it takes to get them out of this alive.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“Well, we’ll find out.”
Escalante said, “I’ll have the bastardo in my sights the whole time, Gabriel. If he takes the gun away from Señorita Montez’s head and points it at you, I will kill him in the blink of an eye.”
“You do that,” Gabriel agreed. He kissed Cierra quickly, then moved out from behind the boulder where the three of them had taken cover. He wrapped his right hand tightly around the butt of the Colt Peacemaker that hung at his side.
His skin crawled a little as he walked out onto the bridge. Fifty yards away stood his broken-nosed nemesis with the gun still pressed to Mariella’s head. Gabriel strode toward them. From this angle, he couldn’t see the other gunmen crouched behind the trucks, but he could feel their rifles trained on him.
He came to a stop about ten yards from Mariella. “All right, I’m here. Let her go.”
“Why should I do that?” the man asked with a sneer. “Now I have both of you in my power. I can kill you both before anyone can stop me.”
Gabriel shook his head. “You won’t kill either one of us. Señor Esparza wouldn’t be happy with you if you did.”
“Oh? And why is that?” He didn’t bother to deny that he worked for Esparza, Gabriel noted.
“You need Señorita Montez,” Gabriel said with a nod toward Mariella. “She might not have told you the truth about where you’re going, not the whole truth. And because she might not ever tell you the whole truth, you need me alive. Because I do know where your destination lies.”
The man frowned. “You try to confuse me with talk. But my orders are clear. I am to kill you, Gabriel Hunt, wherever and whenever I find you.” He raised his voice in a shout to his men. “Use the machine guns! Kill them all!”
Machine guns? That didn’t sound good.
But Gabriel didn’t have time to worry about that threat, because the man jerked the gun barrel away from Mariella’s head and swung it toward Gabriel, leaping aside as he did so. He must have figured that at least one rifle was aimed at him. Escalante’s weapon cracked, but the bullet whipped past Gabriel and missed his enemy as well, smashing into the hood of the lead truck.
Gabriel raised his gun, but he couldn’t shoot without endangering Mariella. He plunged forward instead, ducking as the man fired his big revolver. Gabriel felt the wind-rip of the slug’s passage past his ear as he left his feet in a diving tackle that sent him crashing into both Mariella and her captor.
As they fell he caught a glimpse of men throwing aside the canvas on the back of the truck to reveal a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a swivel so that it could fire either over the top of the truck’s cab or back behind the vehicle. With a chattering roar it began spitting lead toward the rocks and brush where Escalante and his men were hidden. Cierra was over there, too, in the middle of that deathstorm, but there was nothing Gabriel could do to help her.