“Another fuckin’ flatlander, why the fuck we let them people into the fuckin’ state of Maine?” Cobb screamed from inside the truck, his voice only slightly muffled. “You better arrest the whole queer bunch of them, Phipps, ’cause my back’s gonna snap like a twig I stay stooped over like this!”
Phipps eyed Nimec with a kind of hostile exasperation, unconsciously wagging his head, looking uncertain about what to do next.
An instant later Ricci made the decision for him. Taking advantage of Phipps’s distraction, he suddenly stepped away from the door of the pickup, caught hold of his outstretched gun hand at the wrist, and bent it sharply backward, simultaneously turning sideways and snatching the pistol with his free hand.
Phipps released a cry of pain and surprise as the pistol was torn from his grasp. He was still gaping in disbelief when Ricci’s leg snapped forward and up in a powerful front kick, the ball of his foot striking him in the broad, chunky stretch of his stomach. The air whoofing out of him, he stumbled backward and landed hard on his bottom, his legs wishboned in front of him.
Cobbs, meanwhile, had pulled his head out of the pickup’s open door and come charging at Ricci from behind. But before he had gotten more than a couple of feet, Ricci spun in a smooth circle on his left leg, his right leg swinging parallel to the ground and thrusting out at the knee, catching Cobbs in the groin with a roundhouse kick. He flew back against the side of the car and doubled over, groaning, his hands between his thighs.
Ricci ejected the Colt’s magazine and tossed it into the spindling roadside brush, then shoved the gun into his vest pocket. Nodding at him, Nimec rushed over to Cobb and took his pistol from its holster. Its clip joined the one that was already in the bushes.
Ricci knelt over Phipps and patted down the bottom of his trouser legs.
“Nothing there to say peekaboo?” he said.
Phipps glared and shook his head.
“Okay,” Ricci told him, stepping back. “Here’s how it goes. We’re all driving off, me with my catch, you two without your guns, our friendly tourist with his nice wife and rental car. You forget about this thing, maybe I don’t report the little scam you and Cobbs tried running on me to Fish and Game or the attorney general’s office down in Augusta. You really behave yourselves, maybe I won’t tell anybody in town how I kicked both your asses and disarmed you barehanded. In two seconds flat.”
Phipps continued glaring at him in baleful silence for another moment, then slowly nodded.
“Good,” Ricci said. “Stay right where you are until I’m gone. Ground needs thawing anyway.”
Phipps snorted, hawked over his shoulder, and looked back up at him. “How the hell am I supposed to explain losing my gun?”
Ricci shrugged.
“Your problem,” he said.
Behind them, Cobbs was still leaning against the pickup, moaning and clutching himself. Ricci turned, strode over to him, grabbed his shoulder, and shoved him roughly away from the truck. Cobbs tripped and fell on his side, drawing his knees toward his chest.
Ricci looked at Nimec, then moved up close to him.
“Poor bastard should’ve kept his hands off my ignition keys,” he said in a voice too low for the others to hear. “Welcome to Vacationland, Pete. Better get back in your car and follow along behind me. I’ll explain everything once we’re at my place.”
They had come in from the rugged plateau country of Chapada dos Guimarães, a convoy of four dusty jeeps bumping along the unpaved track in the deepening dusk, traversing the seventy kilometers to their destination with arduous slowness. After many long hours of riding shotgun in the forward car, Kuhl had finally seen the compound through a break in the overhanging foliage, and then ordered their headlights dimmed and their vehicles pulled off the road.
Once under cover of the trees, he turned to his driver. “Que horas são?”
The driver showed him the luminous dial of his wristwatch.
Kuhl studied it a moment without comment. Then he glanced over his seat rest and nodded to the man behind him.
“Vaya aqui, Antonio.”
Antonio returned the nod. He was dressed entirely in black and had a Barrett M82A1 sniper’s rifle across his lap. Accurate to a range exceeding a mile, it utilized the same self-loading, armor-piercing.50-caliber ammunition normally fired by heavy machine guns — bullets capable of pounding through an inch or more of solid steel armor. The weapon’s incredible firepower and semiautomatic action were its notable advantages over other sniper guns. On the negative side, it was weighty, long-barreled, and would kick back with a recoil matching its destructive performance. But Antonio’s targets would be shielded, and he would need to penetrate that shield at a considerable distance.
Slinging the Barrett over his shoulder, he opened his door and slipped from the jeep into the darkness.
Kuhl settled back and looked out the windshield. His team was right on schedule despite the wearisome inconveniences of their ride. There was nothing to do now except wait for Antonio to complete his work, and then for the others to arrive and give their signal. Perhaps he would even be able to glimpse them coming over the treetops.
They sat in absolute silence, hard, lean men in black combat outfits, their faces daubed from chin to forehead with camouflage paint. All but the sniper who’d gone on ahead carried French FAMAS assault rifles fitted with modular high-explosive munition launchers and day/ night target-tracking systems.
Still undergoing field trials by the French military, these adaptations of the standard FAMAS guns represented the state of the art in small arms, and were not slated for mass production or issuance to general infantry troops until 2003—two full years in the future.
Kuhl always made it a point to stay ahead of the game. It cost money, true, but unless one was willing to accept failure, the expense was more than acceptable. And he himself was paid handsomely enough that he didn’t mind spreading the wealth.
Impatient, he raised his night-vision goggles to his eyes, swung them from the compound’s checkpoint gate to the pair of men occupying its sentry booth, then studied the irregular outline of the buildings that lay beyond. He wanted nothing more than to get moving. While his team might be outside the observable range of the compound’s guards, he had seen enough in his mercenary career to know that only a fool or an amateur neglected to consider the unpredictable, and that each passing second brought an increased risk of discovery. It mattered little how well they formulated their plans, or how careful they were in bringing about their execution.
Secrecy, he thought. It was an essential requirement of his profession, and yet the very idea paradoxically seemed a joke. In an age when satellites could photograph a mole on your chin from somewhere up in space, there were no true blind spots, and nobody was ever out of sight for long. The best one could wish for was temporary concealment. If his men failed at that, if they were noticed too soon, all their elaborate precautions would be worthless.
Kuhl sat, watched, and waited. In his taut silence, he could almost feel that gigantic, damnable eye overhead, looking down, pressing down. Seeing what it wanted to see, peering through every shadow, its relentless gaze scouring the world….
Yes, Kuhl felt it up there, he did, and was only hoping it would once again blink as he went about the lucrative business of destruction.
“There’s smoke in the cabin. Elevated CA 19-9 and CA 125 levels. LH2 pressure’s dropping. Terra nos respuet. ”
Annie feels her book about to slip off her lap, catches it just in the nick of time. She blinks once or twice, completely out of sorts, guessing she’d sunk into a light sleep while reading on her sofa.