Jaeger raised his head again and eyed the scene. ‘Bar brawl. Four o’clock. I figured you got that. Plus I got a pickup incoming, with what look like enforcers. I got—’
More gunshots. Jaeger hit the dirt again and froze, face scrunched into the mud. Those had been high-velocity rounds from an assault rifle. Most likely an AK-47. They’d sounded up close and personal. The only thing he could do now was keep utterly still, and use his sense of hearing to try to work out what the hell was going on.
Yelled orders drifted across from the direction of the bar, punctuated by the crunch of rifle butts on human flesh. From the sound of things, the brawling had come to an abrupt halt.
Jaeger raised his head a little, using the back of his hand to wipe the gunk from his eyes.
Absence of the normal, he reminded himself. There was nothing he could see that wasn’t symptomatic of a normal night in Dodge, which was a huge relief. It meant that their presence here was unlikely to have been detected.
He glanced at Narov. ‘Warning shots?’
‘Got to be.’
Dodge’s enforcers had seemingly broken up the brawl. They’d been on it in record time. Jaeger figured El Padre wasn’t going to put up with any kind of serious ruckus, which maybe meant that there was important business being done tonight.
Narov resumed her commentary, as the gunmen in the pickup dismounted at the warehouse and others took their place. Two took up position at the building’s massive sliding door, which was open just a crack, light bleeding out. The others dispersed inside. It was a change of sentries.
Further to Narov’s left, figures were still busy on the airstrip. Dodge seemed to be split into two categories of activity. On one side, off-duty narco workers getting in some serious partying. On the other, on-duty workers engaged with the core business of refining and trafficking drugs.
There was a businesslike feel to the warehouse side of town; a sense of dark purpose.
As if to confirm this, the airstrip itself suddenly flared into life. Shadowy figures darted up and down its length, lighting a series of beacons, metal baskets stuffed with paraffin-soaked rags. Put a light to the rags, and hey presto, you had crude runway lighting.
Moments after the flares had been lit, an aircraft put in an appearance. The Latino beat that washed over the ditch was so loud that Jaeger and Narov barely heard it, before the shadowy form swept across at low level and bumped down onto the dirt.
The light aircraft – a Twin Otter by the looks of things – taxied to a standstill at the warehouse. Figures gathered at its cargo hatches, unloading sacks of what had to be raw coca paste, and loading up bales of white from the warehouse in turn.
The entire operation took maybe ten minutes. It was smooth and well practised. But when they were almost done, one of the men dropped a bag of refined cocaine, which split open, spilling its contents across the dirt. As the hapless worker went to try to scoop it up, a voice started yelling maniacally and a figure strode out of the shadows, machete clutched in his hand, a small entourage of bodyguards with him. With barely a pause, he brought the cruel blade down hard. The man who’d dropped the cocaine let out a bloodcurdling scream and keeled over, wailing pitifully. The man who had struck him didn’t let up. Instead, he started to put the boot in.
Jaeger watched with a growing sense of unease. ‘El Padre,’ he whispered to Narov. ‘Like the briefings said, he’s one evil fucker.’
Moments later, the Twin Otter taxied to the end of the runway and took to the skies again, banking hard. Even as the shadowy silhouette disappeared over the jungle, the DIY runway lighting was being doused.
Slick. This was the business side of Dodge.
And here, cocaine was serious business.
35
One thing had surprised Jaeger. No one had seemed to bother to check either that the coca paste being unloaded from the aircraft was genuine coca, or that the cocaine being loaded aboard was genuine cocaine. But then why would they? If whoever supplied El Padre had tricked him, they wouldn’t get to live for long.
That was how the system worked. Billionaire narco barons had a long reach. It was a system based not upon mutual trust, but upon mutual fear. If you messed up, you died. And probably most of your loved ones as well. Men like El Padre had been known to wipe out entire families – infants and babies included – to drive their message home.
Dodge City was a Class A narco operation, that was for sure. But as to Kammler and his IND team being here? Jaeger hadn’t seen the slightest sign that this was the place where his arch-enemy was going to mastermind his dark machinations.
There was only one way to know for sure, and that was to get closer. Jaeger’s eyes met Narov’s across the surface of the stinking water.
‘We need a close-up look at the warehouse,’ he whispered. ‘To be certain.’
Narov nodded. ‘I will go.’
Jaeger was about to object, but her look silenced him. They’d found themselves in a similar position a while ago in Africa. They’d needed to get inside an elephant poachers’ camp. Not easy. Narov had argued that she should go because she could move more stealthily. The same argument held true now.
She handed him her assault rifle. ‘Cover me.’
With that, she grabbed some of the stinking gunk from the edge of the ditch, smeared it over her face and hands as an extra layer of camouflage, wormed her way over the lip and was gone. Swallowed into the darkness.
As best he could, Jaeger traced her movements with his weapon. She was far from easy to follow. Repeatedly he lost track of her as she flitted to and fro, silent as a wraith. Finally he glimpsed a darker patch of shadow flattened against the wall of the nearest warehouse, a hundred yards away.
For the briefest of moments Narov’s head was silhouetted against the oblong of light that bled out of the building. Jaeger could envisage her eyes making a rapid sweep of the warehouse’s interior. Just as quickly, she ducked down again.
He lost sight of her completely now. She was moving almost due west, sticking to the thick scrub that fringed the dirt airstrip. That would take her to the second warehouse, a couple of hundred yards away.
For a moment he wondered what he would do if he saw her surrounded or captured.
Go in solo, all guns blazing?
What other choice was there?
Either way, it would be a suicide mission.
He kept his eyes glued to that distant building, squat and dark against the moonlit sky. He figured he saw movement: a silhouette working its way along the nearside wall. Narov – had to be. He saw the flash of a head at the window. Good girclass="underline" almost done.
But then his grip on his weapon tightened. Narov had levered open the window, and moments later, she’d slipped inside. As Jaeger waited with bated breath for her to emerge, he spotted a figure heading around to her side of the building. The guy was moving with the bored gait of someone coming to the end of yet another long night’s watch.
Jaeger tracked him with his gun sights. If he were forced to open fire, their cover would be blown. He had to hold off doing so until all other options were exhausted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Narov slip back out through the window. Maybe the guard would fail to spot her.
She melted into the shadows and Jaeger lost track of her.
Suddenly a lithe form rose behind the sentry and an arm whipped around his neck, choking off all possibility of a cry. The other arm came around, driving a blade downwards behind the sentry’s clavicle and clean into his heart.
Jaeger knew the move well. The victim would be dead within seconds. He watched as Narov lowered the body to the ground, before dragging it into the undergrowth.