“Bottom line is, trying to stop Kruger finding the world’s most famous lost city is one thing, but trying to stop known terrorists working alongside an expert with those sort of skills is quite another.”
The tone he used was totally without his usual optimism, and he knew it. The pressure was on all right, and not just for the team to find Kruger and the Syrians. He had an extra pressure on his shoulders now, not only to lead these people into battle but to coordinate the whole operation as well. The heavy responsibility of this coupled with the recent loss of his friends and produced an almost unbearable burden, but he would die before he let his friends down.
Gagged and bound in the back of the Hyundai van, Ryan Bale felt himself turning inwards yet again. It always happened this way. No one understood him. Had anyone ever really loved him? Lea had left him. Sophie was taken from him.
At least he still had Maria.
But would he ever see her again? Kruger had played Russian roulette with him a few hours ago and he just didn’t know if he was going to make it. In response, he had folded away into himself as if he were no more than an origami man, making sure the inside was hidden and nothing was exposed to the outside world. It always happened this way. No one understood him. He thought about his family back in London. His mother and father.
What were they doing now? If only he knew. Maybe they could help him, but he doubted it. His father’s gambling and drinking had ended the relationship when he was still a teenager, and his mother… who knew where she was now? This was why he had ended up in an abandoned paint factory, launching DDOS attacks on American Government servers.
It always happened this way. No one understood him. They didn’t know how noisy it was in his head sometimes. The thoughts fired through his brain like freight trains thundering through the night… they never stopped. He never forgot anything, and did people really know what that was like? Memories from twenty years ago fought for disk space with noun declensions and verb conjugations and the endless procession of historical facts and figures that rattled in his mind like old water pipes.
No one understood any of this. No one understood how noisy it was inside his head, and how Maria calmed it down. How her touch was a distraction sent from heaven. With her, he actually thought he could be normal and tune into the same frequency as his friends. If anything happened to her he knew any chance he might have of normality would be reduced to static, an uncontrollable white noise sending him inside himself over and over again.
Where’s your spirit of adventure?
He could hear him say it.
But what would Hawke do in a situation like this? Grab the weird masked man at the wheel, knock him out… take his gun, kill the others and then slam open the rear doors and tumble to safety in the street? Ryan didn’t have the strength or skills to fight his way through these men and he knew it would end in failure. He felt his spirit of adventure slowly evaporate and disappear into the ether.
Since Kruger had dragged him unconscious out of the ocean beneath the Oracle’s Seastead his life had been a living hell. Kruger had kept him alive for his mind and what he could get out of it, but also as a bargaining chip with the ECHO team. How long this would continue he had no idea. He had been beaten and lived with the threat of murder every minute. All he could do to get through the torture was to cling to the hope of seeing Maria Kurikova again. He hadn’t seen her since they’d split up on the Seastead, and he hated that she thought he was dead. Being back with her on the safety of Elysium was all that was keeping him going.
CHAPTER SEVEN
As soon as he saw it through the field glasses, Hawke saw Alex’s research had been bang on the money. This was no full-scale FARC rebel camp. Those were ten times bigger than this and usually far away from the prying eyes of the cities. What he was looking at now was an impressive three storey mansion perched in the hills high above Bogotá — terracotta tiled roof, intricate white Colonial architecture and a neat balustrade running around the top floors.
It sat like a Puna hawk on a cliff-edge, overlooking a vast valley of feijoa trees and partially hidden behind the passionfruit vines twisting up its Roman arcades and double-hung windows. From their elevated position in the hills above the house, Hawke was able to see a good two acres of flattened ground in the property’s west where some smaller chalets were situated and a jumble of other less impressive buildings. This must where Chastain’s CGF training goes on, he thought.
Two Bell Kiowas were taking in some sunshine in the center of the training area. Normally used for direct-fire support, these were probably just used for transporting men and weapons through the mountains. The roads here were unsealed and the hairpin bends were very unforgiving if you made a mistake.
He watched small groups of men and a handful of women as they went about their business in the camp. They would feel totally safe up here, and that was a sense of false security Hawke was going to exploit.
They seemed relaxed as they milled about, and now a man in a hard-worn sweat-stained Gambler hat strolled out of the mansion with his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the training area. He leaned forward and casually spat on the ground, and then removed his hat for a second to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
Beside him was the unmistakable figure of Dirk Kruger in his battered suede safari hat, black shirt and crocodile boots. A moment later two more men appeared in view — Hawke instantly recognized them from the Cartagena CCTV as Ziad Saqqal and Bashir Jawad. Chastain appeared to be showing them the training area and was pointing out the choppers and the contents of some plastic banana crates, but something told Hawke they weren’t admiring bananas.
“They’re our guys, all right,” Hawke said, passing the field glasses to Reaper. “The whole Groovy Gang all together… but no sign of Ryan.”
Reaper looked through the binoculars and gently nodded his head. “Oui — we know Kruger and the others all match Alex’s description perfectly, but as you say — no Ryan.”
Chastain yelled some orders and moments later a number of the men were running around the training area while holding their assault rifles above their heads. Another man was shouting at them in Spanish. Another group of men began loading the banana crates into the Kiowas.
“There goes the gear for the Inca mission,” Hawke said. “I wonder what goodies a man like Chastain packs for a holiday to the Lost City?”
“Certainly not deodorant by the looks of his shirt,” Scarlet said.
Lea sighed. “Guns, ammo, rappel lines, Maglites, glow sticks… you name it.”
Hawke nodded. “I think you’re on the money.”
“They don’t look too scary to me,” Scarlet said.
“Don’t get cocky. These are the men who have turned their backs on the peace settlement that FARC have committed to with the Colombian Government. I’m thinking they’re not going to be a pushover.”
Reaper watched through the field glasses as a small crew of men in the far corner of the training quad set up a machine gun.
“They’ve got an NSV to play with mes amis,” he said, passing the binoculars back to Hawke.
“A what?” Luis said from the Jeep.
“It’s an old Soviet heavy machine gun,” Hawke said. “Eats up fifty-round boxes like a hungry wolf on a lamb. Replaced now by the Kord, but still a savage little beast. Eight hundred bullets per minute in our faces so try and stay out of its way everyone.”
“Good advice,” Reaper said with a calm nod of his head.
“Time for the off?” Lea said.