When Avery took his head away from the scope, the slightest movement in his peripheral commanded his attention. He flicked his eyes in that direction in time to catch a dark blur disturb the stillness of the jungle, so quick that he nearly missed it, and an untrained eye would have likely not caught it at all.
Avery focused on the thick layers of jungle understory, studying the smallest details. He heard leaves rustling and twigs snapping, but his eyes couldn’t find the source of the sound. Finally, several seconds later, fifty feet away, he saw hanging branches shudder, and this time, through his night optic, he clearly caught a glimmer of a man hurtling through the foliage, arms raised high with his rifle in front of him to clear and push his way through the tangled growth.
Avery’s eyes followed the trail of shuddering brush and shrubs to a clear space, where the man turned around to check his six, facing Avery without seeing him.
It was Aarón Moreno.
How the hell did he manage to slip away?
More importantly, why the hell did he have to make his escape right near Avery’s hide?
Moreno stopped until a second man caught up with him, and then they continued forward, swallowed by the understory growth.
Avery waited a couple seconds, expecting gunshots to follow, or Colombian troops in pursuit, but there was nothing. Instinctively, he started to get up, but then he stopped himself. It wasn’t like he could go after them. The last thing he needed was to be spotted and mistakenly dropped by a Colombian soldier.
As he nestled back into his hide, content to wait out the assault, Avery recalled the pre-mission briefing with the Colombian squad leaders. Moreno had personally killed a number of undercover operatives, including Americans, and friends and former teammates of Aguilar’s men. Reyes might be the man the politicians in Bogotá and Washington wanted, but Moreno was the man that the Colombian cops, intel operators, and special ops troops, plus the DEA agents, wanted to see taken down.
Avery pictured the debriefing sessions, having to explaining how he sat back and watched Aarón Moreno make a clean getaway.
Shit. He hated when his conscience kicked in.
Avery sprung up from his hide, coming up onto one knee while shouldering his M4, then rising onto his feet, letting the camouflage netting fall behind him. His legs felt stiff and sore from the lack of circulation, and the small of his back was briefly uncomfortable suddenly supporting his full weight in an upright position.
He scanned his surroundings. Turning his head slowly left, he gave a startled jump when he came suddenly face to face with a boa wrapped around a drooping limb from a kapok tree. The massive snake hissed and began to stir. Avery jumped back and stepped clear of the boa. Then something scurried quickly by on the forest floor, brushing against his leg, and he gave another jump, but didn’t bother to look. He also didn’t want to think about the spiders and bugs that he knew were crawling along his back.
Visualizing his movements in advance, Avery carefully covered four yards through the understory foliage, maneuvering around trees, over deadwood, through the understory curtains, and over the mud and decaying plants on the jungle floor, ducking and weaving around low-laying branches, following Moreno’s path. He stopped when he caught the blur of movement somewhere far ahead — strands of branches parting.
Avery was immediately reminded of another aspect of the jungle he detested. It was damned near impossible, especially at night, to track and subsequently hit a target through the endless trees, hanging branches, and vegetation. Absolutely no light from the moon or stars penetrated the canopy top.
To make matters worse, the rain began to pick up again, muting out all surrounding sound as water poured steadily through the treetops and pooled into puddles in depressions in the ground. Fortunately, Moreno was desperate to get far away, which made him easy to track. In the jungle, you had to sacrifice stealth for speed.
A couple yards deeper into the forest, Avery couldn’t even see the flame and lights from the FARC camp off to his right anymore. There was only darkness transformed through his night optics into a wild, cluttered green alien landscape.
He stopped briefly alongside a wide tree trunk for cover, and carefully studied the environment for movement. Finally, he saw a dark, man-shaped target pass along a copse of diseased trees that were nearly bare. The head whirred once round, panning left to right, oblivious to Avery’s presence.
Anticipating his target’s path now, Avery aimed ahead through a space between two trees offering him clear line of sight. This time he caught sight of the fleeing figure — the FARC soldier accompanying Moreno — aligned his crosshairs over the target’s back, and broke the trigger with a firm three pounds of pressure. He felt the M4’s stock buck against his shoulder and saw his target drop, as if the forest floor had opened up and swallowed him.
Less than a second later, Moreno sprung out from behind the same copse of dead trees. He jumped over the body of the FARC soldier, sprinting now, frantically maneuvering around trees and shrubs with natural ease. He turned and fired off a blind burst from his M16 before leaping over and throwing his weight behind the thick, sturdy trunk of a fallen kapok tree overturned on its side.
Avery lost sight of him. He studied the thick and high carpet of shrubs and decaying plants directly behind the driftwood, looking for motion or shapes that did not belong, but the forest floor remained completely still.
Although Moreno was an assassin, Avery remembered that he was also a trained jungle warfare fighter, having been brought up through the ranks of FARC as a foot soldier over two decades before. Moreno definitely held the advantage if it came to a duel in the jungle, which Avery sought to avoid at all costs, knowing that he wouldn’t stand a chance. He needed to end this quickly, before Moreno gained the upper hand.
Avery held his rifle in the ready position with his finger indexed over the trigger. Leaning into the stock, he ventured forward, staying behind trees, careful not to disturb branches or bushes, while simultaneously searching for a vantage point offering suitable line of sight. He took high steps to avoid kicking loose twigs or leaves, and with each step, he gently lowered his foot onto the leaf litter and saturated mud to reduce the risk of audibly signaling his approach.
The problem with jungle warfare was the poor visibility. You could be completely oblivious to the enemy’s presence until you came within a couple meters of him, especially if the enemy had good discipline, knew how to blend in, and didn’t so much as move a muscle. Meanwhile the same enemy was tracking you the whole time, waiting to get a clear shot. Operating solo, Avery was at a further disadvantage. Ideally, he’d have someone staying stationary, putting down fire, while he moved in on the enemy’s position.
A helicopter whipped by low overhead, one of the Mi-17s, its bright white searchlights cutting through the overhead canopy. Taking his eye away from the night optic, Avery used the noise of the helicopter’s rotors and engines to mask his approach, covering an ambitious five meters in one go. He kept his unblinking gaze locked on the driftwood, to make sure Moreno didn’t have the same idea and tried to slip away.
Once the helicopter passed, Avery became aware of silence in the surrounding jungle. No longer were there the sounds of combat coming from the camp some thirty meters away.
Then he heard twigs snap from behind the fallen tree, and something splashed against the mud. Before Avery’s mind could process the sounds, a muzzle flash lit up over the side of the driftwood, and there was the familiar report of an M16 with a selector switch at three-round burst. The barrel shifted several degrees to the right and lit up again, releasing another burst. Avery ducked into a half crouch and reeled back behind the nearest tree for cover. The incoming rounds chewed through the leaves of hanging branches three feet to his left, near where he’d just been standing.