Hearing a gunshot and then a man shouting in Spanish, he looked down and saw a Venezuelan soldier standing over Ritchie, pointing an AK-47 at his head.
Completely vulnerable as he hung from the branch, Crocker took a deep breath, shifted his weight to his left arm, and used his right to find the HK45CT pistol with full-sized Ti-RANT suppressor. From fifty feet away he aimed and squeezed three rounds into the soldier’s back and watched him buckle at the knees and fall.
Letting go of the branch, he hit the ground and rolled. Ignoring the lightning bolt of pain from the base of his spine, he got up and crossed to Ritchie.
Ritchie’s eyes were open, and his right hand held his jaw. When Crocker carefully pulled Ritchie’s hand away, he saw his jawbone and a row of lower molars. The round had hit him near the chin and exited near his ear.
Crocker used his index and middle fingers to fish the shattered teeth and bone out of Ritchie’s windpipe. The injury didn’t appear life threatening, since the bullet hadn’t hit a major artery. Nevertheless, Crocker quickly completed the last three steps of the medical ABCD checklist.
Ritchie’s breathing was regular, his pulse was strong, and there appeared to be no damage to his spinal cord or neck. However, his tongue was probably fucked up, because he was trying to speak but having trouble.
Crocker held a finger to his mouth to tell him not to try, then pulled off his T-shirt and tied it around Ritchie’s head. The wound, though ugly, was not likely to produce a great loss of blood because the injured vessels weren’t large. Nor was there much risk of secondary hemorrhage, though it was important to keep his head elevated.
The next challenge was to get the two of them out of there alive.
As Crocker lifted Ritchie up and hoisted him over his left shoulder, a flash of pain ran down his spine into his legs. That was the least of his problems. He retreated to the shadows at the back of the house and quickly appraised his situation. Mancini had climbed onto the wall and was reaching for the tree. Crocker waved him back.
There was no fucking way he’d be able to lift Ritchie high enough, even if he put him on his shoulders, because the cedar branch was at least sixteen feet from the ground. His options were limited. Other guards had been alerted. He heard hurried footsteps approaching from his left and turned right with the HK45CT clutched in his right hand and an extra magazine in his left. With Ritchie’s warm blood dripping down his chest, he crossed to the other side of the balcony and stopped. More footsteps were coming from the right.
Five feet ahead stood a white door leading to the bottom floor. He tried it. Locked. He kicked it in and entered, all his senses alert. Loud rock music reverberated through the narrow hallway-Lynyrd-fucking-Skynyrd singing “Free Bird.” It happened to be one of the songs he worked out to in his dad’s garage.
He passed from a dark passageway to a brightly lit kitchen. A stout young woman in a white uniform stood at a giant sink washing dishes. She stopped midbreath when she saw the two men. Her eyes locked onto Crocker’s. What a sight he was-bare-chested, with an injured, bleeding man slung across one shoulder, a pistol in the other. He grinned and raised the.45 to his lips as a signal to be quiet. She nodded.
He pushed through a swinging door that led to a formal dining room. The lights were out and the room was filled with shadows. He crossed quickly to another room, past a portrait of President Chávez as a young man, to a sitting room that opened through an arch to the front hall.
An ornate wooden stairway rose to his right. He was so pumped up on adrenaline that he considered climbing it, finding the colonel and his visitor, and finishing them off right then. But he had Ritchie on his shoulder moaning quietly, as if humming a song.
People were moving above. Angry voices drifted down. Crocker clutched the extra magazine of.45 rounds in his teeth, grabbed the front doorknob, turned it with his left hand, took a deep breath, and pulled it open.
It was as though his whole life and all of his training had been leading to this moment. In warp-speed time, he took in everything. To his left stood an armed soldier with his back to him. Beyond the soldier was a partially open metal gate with blue jeeps parked on either side of it.
The soldier turned in slow motion and opened his mouth. Before any words came out, Crocker fired three bullets into his side and chest. The soldier’s eyes darkened, and he fell backward into a pot of white geraniums.
Crocker hurried down three steps, making sure to keep his balance, and turned sideways to squeeze through the half-opened gate. That’s when he spotted another soldier crouched in front of one of the jeeps, speaking urgently into a radio. Crocker raised the HK45CT, ran to the front of the jeep, and fired until the gun was empty. Ejected the warm, empty mag and inserted the second. Another soldier standing across the street aimed his AK-47 and squeezed off a round that whizzed over Crocker’s head and slammed into the wall and gate.
He knelt alongside the jeep. Ritchie was trying to whisper something in his ear. Tactical advice, no doubt, which amused Crocker in a graveyard humor kind of way.
“I got this one, Ritchie. Conserve your energy.”
On the other side of the jeep, in the driver’s-side mirror, he saw the soldier run a few feet down the street, stop, and shout something over his shoulder. Desperate words in Spanish that ended when Crocker stood and fired a silenced burst from the pistol that took him down.
The alley was narrow, flanked by high walls covered with vines and ivy, and topped with brass owls. One direction led to the street; the other to more houses and a dead end. But he couldn’t tell which one went where, so he had to decide which to take.
Eeny-meeny-miny…
Getting out on foot was going to be a problem. Looking inside the jeep, he saw no keys in the ignition. Still, he sat Ritchie in the front seat and buckled him in. Crocker had hot-wired so many cars as a wild punk growing up in New England that starting it was relatively easy. After locating the access cover under the steering wheel, he smashed the plastic lid with the butt of his pistol and pulled it off. Then he reached behind the ignition switch harness, located two red wires, used his teeth to strip about an inch of insulation from both, and twisted them together.
He heard a vehicle approaching, but didn’t look up. Finding the brown ignition wire, he pulled it out of its harness and touched it to the two red wires.
The jeep started with a growl. Now, which way to go? Ritchie raised his arm and pointed right.
“You’d better be correct,” Crocker whispered, gunning the engine, the pistol now clutched in his right hand.
Almost immediately he was blinded by headlights that swung into the alley. He turned the wheel sharply right, causing the side of the jeep to graze the wall and sending up a shower of sparks that cascaded onto Ritchie’s head. The other vehicle passed, then screeched to a stop. He heard boots hitting the street, mags slamming into rifles, men shouting in Spanish.
“Alto! Alto!”
He turned sharply right onto Avenida los Cedros and floored the accelerator. The jeep swerved and skidded past another military truck. The driver stared at Crocker with big saucer eyes, then ducked as Crocker opened fire, shattering the side window.
Bullets sailed over Crocker’s head as he shifted into fourth and sped past the entrance to the country club through a red traffic light, then burned serious rubber onto another street, then another and another, and stopped, breathless.
Ritchie moaned something that sounded like a question. Fishing a phone from his pocket, Crocker punched Neto’s number.
“It’s Crocker,” he said, out of breath.