He climbed up into the cab and positioned himself in the driver’s seat with Juana beside him. Behind him, Aurora Soto and a handful of Wade’s most loyal acolytes jumped on board and clambered into the rear of the truck. Not as impressive as the massive locomotive he used to drive, but it did the same job.
Their orders were simple enough: ensure the Hummingbird was delivered to the airfield then fly her to the agreed location. Not a problem, Señor Wade… no pasa nada.
He nodded with satisfaction as remembered how he would drive the train of death, revving up its monstrous 3500 horsepower V16 diesel-electric engine as it groaned to life. This then was the truck of death, and when they were in the air they would soon be over the border with the gabachos and the new age of the Sixth Sun could start at last. Only then would the world be cleansed and mankind finally able to transform one step closer to the gods. His brother and Aurora didn’t believe in any of this, but that was their failing. He knew it was all true. He had seen Wade talking to the gods.
He moved up through the gears and got the Hummingbird on her way. Jorge missed riding the rails. He missed the feeling he got when he increased power to the throttles and the massive freight train began to move forward along the searing-hot tracks. Beside him, Juana Diaz glanced over her shoulder at the rear of the truck and lowered her head in terrified silence.
It was good that she knew her place, he mused. That would come in handy later, but for now he had serious business to attend to. He crunched up through the gears and tried to focus on the mission but then his brother’s voice drifted into his mind on the breeze, mingling with the sweet scent of the pitaya vines…
Eat the heart, Jorge… tu debes comer el corazón!
He shuddered at the thought. Yes, he had done it.
But only because Silvio had told him to do it.
It was the only way into the serpientes, but now he felt like crying. It would all be over when he rode the Hummingbird into the heavens.
In top gear now, he pushed the Mercedes Atego along the dirt track but in his mind he was on the rails again, increasing power as he brought the five thousand tonne freight train up to cruising speed. He looked ahead. The dirt track and soaking wet rainforest had melted away. All he saw was the sun flashing on the twin steel tracks that he knew so well, stretching out to the vanishing point in the vast Sonoran Desert ahead of him.
It would all be over soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The ECHO team had landed in Mexico’s rainy season, and thanks to the tail end of a tropical storm front, the helicopter journey out to Wade’s coffee plantation was longer and more turbulent than even Hawke had considered it might be. The UKSF had trained him many times in this part of the world — Belize mostly — so he knew vaguely what to expect in terms of landscape and humidity, but this place was something else altogether.
As they weaved their way over the undulations of the luscious landscape below, it reminded him of something out of Jurassic Park with the steep drops at the side of the roads and the dense tropical rainforest as far as the eye could see — and then they were almost at the plantation.
With some chunky binoculars, he looked at Wade’s hideout from the air and made his calculations. It was vast, with Wade’s hacienda in the center. Moving out were plush tropical lawns and even what looked like an artificial lake with an island in the middle of it. Surrounding all of this were the coffee fields — an endless carpet of the precious commodity that stretched to every horizon.
Lexi offered him a stick of gum and when he declined she ran her finger up his leg.
“You might have noticed but I’m with someone,” he said, glancing over at Lea who was in animated conversation with Kim and Reaper.
There was a short moment of awkward silence and she gave him a look of disappointment. “Don’t you want to finish what we started in Zambia?”
Hawke lifted her hand away, distracted by the mission ahead. “We already finished what we started in Zambia, Lexi.”
He liked Lexi, but she was unpredictable. On the flight she had spoken to him about the Zodiacs and that had made him realize she wasn’t invulnerable to attack after all. She had the same concerns and worries as everyone else. He thought about the assassins she had described — Tiger, Rat, Monkey and Pig. Their simple names had the desired effect of dehumanizing them and making them hard to read or understand. That was why they did it. He took a deep breath and tried to relax, but if these assassins were half as good as Lexi then that meant more trouble.
Of even more concern was the fact Alex Reeve was on the mission. She had successfully appealed to Richard Eden to let her go into the field and he had agreed, but Hawke wasn’t so sure. He had a bad feeling she wasn’t ready.
Two miles out, the choppers landed in a clearing and the pilots killed the engines. Any closer and they risked giving away their presence to the enemy. That meant a hike through the rainforest before they could properly case Wade’s hacienda, but they were all up for it, except for one.
“This humidity is ridiculous,” said Ryan.
“It’s not that bad,” Scarlet said. “Stop being such a baby.”
“Are you kidding? It’s like walking through a bowl of hot soup.”
“In that case,” Hawke said, “you’ll be glad to know you’re staying here with the choppers.”
“What?”
“You heard me, mate. I want someone here to guard these birds while we get about our business over on the plantation, and that someone is Maria. You can keep her and the two pilots company. Any objections?”
Ryan shook his head, and Maria’s reply was to slide a bullet into the chamber of her gun and sit back down inside one of the choppers.
Hawke led the way into the jungle, taking the occasional compass reading as they went. He knew from experience that the lack of light meant getting lost inside a heavy rainforest was easier than falling off a wet log so he kept his wits about him.
The hike was made easier by the usual banter which continued with much eye-rolling until they reached a rise in the jungle, at the top of which a break in the undergrowth offered just the view they were hoping for.
Hawke took up the monocular and studied the compound on the far side of the valley. It was breathtaking in its beauty and the limitless opulence of the property impressed even the former SBS man, who wasn’t exactly known for his appreciation of the finer things in life.
He was looking at the large white hacienda that Wade had converted at considerable expense from an old monastery, and it was surrounded by immense tropical gardens. A luxurious spa house glistened beside some tennis courts, and just behind the main house Hawke spied some stables and a horse-riding facility Wade had carved out of the side of a gentle rise.
To the east of the house was a sprawling coffee plantation over one hundred acres in size, and at the far end of it in a shady valley was a jumble of broken-down huts made of plywood and canvas flapping in the breeze. This was the little favela where Morton Wade’s plantation workers lived. Paid no more than sweatshop workers, Wade worked these people in the toughest conditions.
If they were anything like many coffee pickers, these men and women would pick hundreds of pounds of coffee beans a day for which Wade would pay them no more than three dollars. It was for this reason that many workers in the coffee fields put their own children to work in order to increase the pay they received at the end of the day. Hawke thought about Wade’s private jet and nearly crushed the monocular in his hand.
He handed it over to Reaper and the burly French mercenary viewed the same scene, lingering as Hawke had done on the favela.