Maines ran down the hallway, still looking down until the blood stopped in front of one of the apartments. The number matched the one in his memory and the station chief cursed again. He pulled his key, unlocked the door, and let himself inside.
“Stryker?” he called out. There was no answer. The lights were on and the red line led into the bedroom. Maines pushed the door open.
Stryker was on the bed, not moving. He ran over, saw her eyes were closed. “Stryker!” he repeated. She didn’t answer.
Her leather jacket was on the floor alongside one of her shirtsleeves, crumpled in a bloody red heap. A crude bandage was wrapped around her upper right arm. He checked the rest of her limp form for wounds and found none, then exhaled the deep breath he hadn’t realized that he was holding. Flesh wound, he thought. She won’t bleed out. He searched around, found the empty QuikClot package and morphine syringe in the bathroom. Good girl, he thought. Kyra had packed her own wound with the coagulant, then dosed herself to kill the pain. She’d probably ingested too much morphine, but she would survive that if it hadn’t killed her by now. Her breathing was still regular, her pulse thready and fast, but not enough to scare him.
Could move her, he thought, if Rags and Pitkin can get the van here. The blood trail in the hall was still a problem … or an opportunity, he thought.
He dug through the trauma kit in the bathroom and extracted a ziplock bag and a pair of the latex gloves inside. He donned the gloves, then retrieved Stryker’s blood-soaked sleeve from the floor and stuffed it into the plastic bag.
Maines ran back out into the hall, then down the stairs to the first floor. He pulled open the bag, pulled out the shirt, and began to squeeze the cloth gently onto the floor, extending the woman’s blood trail away from the stairs. Hate to do this to some poor sap, but better them than us, he thought. He dripped the blood down the hallway another thirty feet, then curved the line to a random apartment door. The bloody sleeve went back into the bag along with the latex gloves. Maines stuffed the gory package into his coat pocket and sprinted back to the service entrance. A janitor’s closet was nearby, locked, and he kicked the door in. A mop and bucket were sitting inside. He lifted the bucket into the utility sink, filled it a quarter up with water, and hauled it and the mop back to the stairs. It took him less than ten minutes to run the wet implement across the forty stairs to the fourth floor, erasing the bloody line that led to the door. Another thirty seconds cleaned up the tile leading to the safe house, and then he was inside again, the evidence of Kyra’s run wiped away. The Venezuelans would still be able to find the trail on the stairwell using luminal and a UV light, but he prayed they wouldn’t be so thorough once they found the second trail he’d created.
Maines touched his earpiece. “This is MALLET,” he called out, the broadcast encrypted by the radio clipped onto his belt behind his waist. “I’ve located GRANITE, condition stable. Site MANGO is not secure, repeat, not secure. What’s your status?”
“Still looking for a hole,” Raguskus called back. “Bad guys are everywhere. We’re parked five hundred meters from your position, engine cold, lights out at the moment.”
“Hold your position,” Maines ordered. “Will advise… wait.” The sirens, which had been rising and fading since he’d dismounted from the van, had gotten close now. He moved to the window, split the blinds a hair, and looked down.
At least five cars, some unmarked, had stopped on the street. Men in tactical uniforms were spreading out along the sidewalk, some senior officer directing his subordinates down the side streets. “Hostiles at my position,” he reported. “They’ll be coming in the building.”
“Any possibility of evac?” Pitkin asked.
“Negative,” Maines replied. He looked back at Kyra. The woman was still unconscious on the bed. “I’d have to carry GRANITE out… no good cover for action on that one.”
“Roger that,” Pitkin answered.
Maines moved to the apartment door, leaned against it, listening for voices or footsteps. They were four stories up, and he doubted he would hear anything, but the stairwell was close.
Two minutes passed and he heard a yell, then other cries… heavy footsteps somewhere below, he couldn’t tell how many, but he would’ve guessed a dozen men if he’d had to lay money on a number. Then yells again, cries of surprise, someone protesting in guttural Spanish. The SEBIN search team had found the blood trail and followed it to its obvious end. They’d found nothing, assumed the family living in whichever apartment Maines had set up had treated their wounded prey and helped her escape to some other site. They would spend a long night in an interrogation room. Maines truly hoped that the SEBIN would accept their story and let them go, but if not, it was not his problem.
“This is MALLET,” he called out. “Hostiles have been diverted. Wait fifteen, then start her up and see if you can’t find a hole. I think the cordon will start to break up.”
“Roger that,” Raguskus called back.
Maines parted the blinds again and watched the SEBIN lead a struggling couple out of the building into the street. The man and wife had no raincoats and they were soaked to the skin in seconds. Their hands were bound in front with zip ties. They protested their innocence and no one cared. The security team forced them into a waiting van, then boarded their own cars, and pulled out. The area was clear within ten minutes except for the onlookers and gawkers, still awed and amused by the spectacle.
“MALLET, this is PIGGYBACK, we have a hole,” Pitkin called out. “Will be at the way point in two minutes.”
“Roger that,” Maines replied. He let the blinds fall closed, moved to the bed, and checked Kyra’s pulse. The girl was still down, but her pulse was steadier now. He grabbed her leather jacket and lifted her in his arms, her head cradled against his shoulder.
He moved slowly, careful to avoid the doorframes, handrails, and walls as he maneuvered his unconscious charge through the apartment, the hallway, and down the stairs. Maines didn’t bother to look around corners or down bends on the stairwell. If there were still SEBIN in his path, he would not be able to outrun them with Kyra in his arms. He encountered no one. The blood trail on the bottom floor was smeared now from the bootprints of a dozen soldiers who hadn’t been interested in collecting evidence for a prosecution.
Maines reached the door to the service entrance and managed to open it. The rain outside hadn’t slackened in the least. The van sat five feet beyond the door, engine idling. The double side door slid open and he lifted Kyra in, Raguskus reaching out to pull the unconscious woman inside. He didn’t bother to close the building door behind him and Pitkin had the van in motion before Maines could slide the van door closed.
“What’ve we got?” Rags asked, opening the trauma kit.
“One gunshot wound to the right triceps. Looks like she packed the wound, tied it off, and dosed herself with morphine without checking the syringe. Lost a significant amount of blood, but I don’t know how much,” Maines replied. Abrams nodded, checked Kyra’s handiwork, and set to work fixing her shoddy bandage. “Any word on an exfil plan?”
“I talked to Kain five minutes ago. She’s got a private cargo flight lined up out of Colombia. We’ll have to drive her across the border, but I know a few back roads across that aren’t patrolled by the locals. Chávez uses them to ship supplies to the FARC, so we’ll have to watch out for guerrillas, but we can manage them. We’ll meet up with one of our pilots at a small airstrip outside of Cúcuta. Flight runs to Panama, then to Florida, then to Dulles. It’ll take her a couple of days to get home and some of the puddle jumpers will be running pretty low to the ground and the Atlantic, so I hope she doesn’t get airsick.”