I’d heard tales of punishments being carried out by way of the machete.
Attract the attention of these men and you could expect to have your arm stretched over a rum barrel, and your hand chopped off. Really upset them and they took your feet as well. It was stories like those that gave me no qualms about going in with a “shoot on sight” policy.
Making my way along an overgrown footpath, the papaya trees and palms forming a canopy overhead, I could hear the drumming of the rain. It wasn’t abating one bit. On my way here my friend Rink had warned me that Hurricane Irene might just touch land in the Caribbean, but it hadn’t come as far west as Jamaica, having skirted the eastern shores of Cuba before heading north past Florida for the Carolinas. Nevertheless, the tail end of the storm was enough to make the night pitch-black, and the wind and rain insured no one would hear my approach. Even the ever-present nighttime chorus of insects was hushed beneath the battering rain.
I came across the next guard standing beneath the lintel of a conical building that used to serve as a grill and pizzeria. The cooking ranges and ovens were long gone, and now the space inside the circular brick walls was home to a stand of bamboo that had grown clean through the holes in the tiled roof. Rainwater sluiced from the tiles, and made it difficult to see the man beyond. If he hadn’t struck a lighter to his cigarette at the opportune time I might have missed him. Taking a good look I could see he was also armed with a pistol that was holstered beneath his left armpit, but he also had a machete with a black matte blade hanging from a loop on his belt. By the looks of things the blade hadn’t been employed to cut back any of the jungle, so there was only one reason that the guard was carrying it. I was in no rush to lose any of my appendages.
The water was spilling from the roof hard, but it was no hindrance to my bullets. I placed one in the man’s heart and then one in his head. He slumped to the floor, the machete making a clank that was dulled by the storm’s fury. I immediately moved in on him, ready to put another round in his skull if necessary, but as I inspected him I found that he’d be no trouble. The bullet had took him through the left eye, and exited a little behind his left ear. It had bounced around in his skull cavity a few times before finding a place of egress. He was as stone cold dead as he could be. For a moment I thought about relieving him of the machete. I’m all for proportional retribution as a rule, and there were two or three guys here who should be made to pay for their crimes at the tip of the blade, but I couldn’t allow myself the distraction. Taking some of them out of the picture was a bonus, but secondary on this occasion. My job wasn’t to punish the gang members, but to extract their hostages.
Kidnap for ransom was largely a forgotten crime in the Caribbean. Nowadays you had to look to the east coast of Africa, and Somalia in particular, to find groups of pirates willing to take ships both large and small. Generally, when it was one of the larger ships, the pirates demanded ransoms from the shipping companies, and the payment was made through insurance brokers and mercenary intermediaries. These days the payouts could count in tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of dollars, but it was still a small price to pay to insure that the shipping companies got their boats back, and, more important, their cargoes. Occasionally, the Somalian pirates would take a smaller yacht or pleasure cruiser, and then the demands for money would be directed at the families of the rich men and women they held. Largely, the ransoms were paid and the hostages returned unharmed. Pity that this upstart Jamaican crew hadn’t based their operation on the Somali blueprint, then it wouldn’t have been necessary for me to be on the island. The trouble was, instead of trusting to the family’s desire to get their loved ones back, the Jamaicans had started negotiations rolling by mailing one of their hostage’s index fingers to his parents, wrapped in a bubble wrap bag to keep it fresh. Pay up, they’d said, or the next thing in the mail would be the rest of the boy’s hand. Next his parents should expect a bigger box, this one large enough to contain a bowling ball. The family had paid up. Because there were express instructions not to involve the police, the FBI or any other law enforcement agency, the family had been directed to deliver the ransom payment in used U.S. dollars to an apartment block in SoBe, Miami. Using a local private investigator to conduct the drop, the family handed over $500,000 on the promise that their son would be returned to them safely.
Greed, and the ease at which the family had been manipulated, told the Jamaican crew they were onto a winner, and instead of returning Stephan Pilarcik to his parents, they moved the goalposts, now demanding that a further half million dollars be raised to cover their expenses for keeping the boy in food and water and for delivering him home to Florida.
It was apparent that without outside assistance the Pilarcik family would see the eventual return of Stephan, albeit piece by piece, and each time after further demands for money. There would be no resolution to the scenario for the Pilarciks that didn’t end with a dead son and a zero bank balance. They were on the cusp of calling in the FBI, but their PI counseled them against it. The Jamaican crew obviously had connections in Miami, and it was highly likely that any involvement by the FBI or police would be spotted and reported back to the main players, who would chop the boy to chunks as a warning to the other families they were extorting. That was when the PI, a guy named Charles White, made the Pilarciks understand that the only sure way to get their son back was through what’s known in the trade as a “successful rendition”: in layman’s terms, a snatch and grab. He wasn’t in business for the job, but he reassured the Pilarciks he knew some guys that were. That was where Rington Investigations came in. And why I was on the job.
Rink was there too. He’d entered the compound earlier sans his brightly colored shirt. His choice of clothing was as dark as my own, but he’d enhanced the camouflage capacity by adding patches of green and brown rags stitched to netting that he’d draped over his shoulders in a makeshift ghillie suit. He’d smeared dirt on his face, blackened the steel of his KA-BAR knife over a candle flame, and gone hunting. He was one of the best recon soldiers I’d ever known, and against the type of sentries here could probably sit in silence a few feet away from them and never be noticed. Minutes earlier, before I’d made my assault on the three lazy guards, Rink had confirmed that he’d located the hostages through the stick mikes and earbuds we wore.