The creek was only thirty feet wide, and the team quickly made it to the other side without incident.
Troy glanced back as he pulled himself up onto the bank, remembering the images of the huge snakes he’d seen on YouTube before coming down here. He hated snakes — all snakes. It was a primal fear he’d hadn’t been able to shake since his days as a boy roaming the vast Jensen property outside Greenwich. He’d forced himself to handle the garter and black snakes he found there, but it hadn’t helped.
The rainfall intensified, and Troy wiped water from his face as he turned away from the creek to move ahead. It was time to get Daniel Gadanz.
The compound before them, located only fifty miles from the towering cascades of Angel Falls, was set amidst the ruins of an ancient civilization. According to Pablo the small town covered fifteen acres, but Gadanz occupied only two buildings at the center of the village. Pablo had been on the construction crew that had modernized the compound to Gadanz’s specifications a year ago.
Maybe Pablo wasn’t wrong about being watched back in Guayana City after all, Troy figured when they reached the first stone structures of the ruins. During one of their breaks on the trek, Pablo had mentioned how nearly all the men he’d worked with at the compound had died in the last year — most of them victims of strange “accidents.”
At a small vine-covered structure at the edge of the ancient town, Troy motioned for the men to don their thermal-imaging goggles. These devices would function well despite the lack of ambient light beneath the heavy cloud cover.
When everyone had returned Troy’s thumbs-up, he turned and hustled forward. Almost immediately he acquired two glowing red targets, sixty feet dead ahead.
He crouched down beside a well-preserved rock wall to the right, glancing over his shoulder at the team who’d followed him down against the wall, motioning for Bennington to accompany him and for the two subordinates to stay put and cover them. He led Bennington down a narrow alley to the right until they reached a vine-encased statue of a jaguar, where they turned left, moved past four more structures, then turned left again and reacquired the glowing human targets. Now they were close, and Troy confirmed that the two men holding what looked like submachine guns were facing Bennington’s subordinates, who were still down behind that wall.
MP5s leading the way, Troy and Bennington crept slowly ahead between what appeared to be the ruins of two small homes — little more than rubble at this point — careful to avoid the cracked and broken pottery littering their path, until they were within ten feet of their prey. They nodded to each other, put down their guns, soundlessly removed Marine bowie knives from long sheaths hitched to their belts, confirmed to each other which target they would take, then raced the last few strides.
Troy grabbed the guard on the left and sliced his throat with the long, razor-sharp blade before the man had a chance to fire his weapon — as Bennington did to the guard on the right.
Bennington quickly recovered the MP5s they’d dropped, waved to his men, then turned and took a step to move on.
Troy grabbed him by his shirt before he could take a second step, and yanked him backward. Then he picked up a stone the size of a softball and flung it down the path along the ground, as if he were bowling. Despite the driving rain, all four men saw a sharp row of long spikes shoot from the ground after a trip wire had apparently been jolted by the rolling stone.
“Christ,” Bennington murmured as he handed Troy one of the MP5s. He patted Troy on the back and exhaled a heavy sigh of relief. “Thanks.”
Seven minutes later they’d killed nine more guards without firing a shot, made it past three more concealed death traps, and reached two modern structures, which looked to Troy like large Florida ranch homes.
“No more need for these,” he muttered, removing the thermal imaging glasses and dropping them on the wet ground. The deluge had eased to a spit, and the moon had appeared through a break in the clouds behind them. He was glad to have his peripheral vision back now that they were close. “Let’s go,” he called over his shoulder after the others had shed their glasses as well. The fact that they’d needed to take out so many guards to get to this location made him even more optimistic that Gadanz was here. “We’re close.”
As they broke from the trees and stole across twenty feet of open ground toward the nearer of the two ranch houses, a deafening alarm screamed into the night.
“Motion sensors!” Troy yelled as they reached the ranch’s exterior wall. “Fire at will! No reason to hold back now.”
A guard burst from around the corner of the house, but before the man saw them, Bennington shot him down with a volley from his MP5.
“Follow me,” Troy yelled before hurling himself through a darkened window, surprised at the lack of protective bars — and impressed with Bennington’s aim and decisiveness.
He rolled across the bedroom floor and scrambled to his feet as someone rose up from the mattress, screaming. At the last instant, he realized it was an older woman shouting in fear and held his fire. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her roughly from the bed as the other three men crashed through the now-shattered window in rapid succession and jumped to their feet on the shard-littered floor.
“Get in there,” Troy hissed at the woman in Spanish, quickly herding her into a closet. “And don’t come out.”
He raced from the bedroom and down a dimly lit, narrow hall, firing a quick burst at two men who emerged from a doorway, killing them both instantly. He ducked into another bedroom, headed for the window, and hurled himself through it onto the deck of a large pool that lay between the two ranches.
His intent was to confuse the guards, to make them unsure of his position. Was he inside or outside? Even though they’d been discovered, he was still trying to use the element of surprise.
As he jumped to his feet, he spotted two jeeps — fifty feet away with lights on — parked at the far end of the other ranch house. The guards surrounding the jeeps opened fire, and he lunged behind a huge planter holding a towering palm tree as Bennington and the other two crashed through the window and took cover behind other planters positioned at this end of the pool.
Bullets ricocheted angrily off his protection, and Troy peered cautiously around its corner in time to see a fat man in a loose robe, holding a cigar, pull himself awkwardly up into the passenger seat of the lead jeep.
Daniel Gadanz. It had to be. This was a hell of a chance to do the world a great service, and Troy had no intention of missing it.
“Cover me!” he yelled as he broke from behind the planter.
Bennington and the other two men strafed both jeeps, enabling Troy to race across the pool deck as the enemies took cover.
The first jeep squealed off, but as the second one’s engine fired up, the driver and the guard in the passenger seat slumped forward simultaneously, killed by Bennington and his men. Troy shot another guard who popped out from behind a shed wielding a pistol, then dashed to the jeep, tossed the body of the driver onto the loose gravel beside the vehicle, hopped in behind the steering wheel, and jammed the accelerator to the floor.
As the jeep raced ahead, Troy noticed a glow of white light coming through the trees to the left, then spotted the lead jeep’s taillights as he came around a bend in the rutted dirt road. As the front left tire dove down into a huge pothole, the dead man in the passenger seat tumbled out, ejected by the impact just before an explosion twenty feet ahead rocked the jeep and sent it and Troy hurtling into a deep ditch on the right.
When the jeep’s front end hit the dirt at the bottom of the ditch, Troy’s chest slammed against the steering wheel, momentarily knocking the wind out of him. As he groaned he forced air back into his lungs the way he’d been trained. He realized that someone in the lead jeep must have tossed a grenade back at him, causing the explosion that had sent the jeep flying into the ditch.