Choke Point Read online

Two guys up on the shore broke from behind the SUVs, and before 30K could adjust his fire, the Rastrojos troops cut loose with a barrage.

  ‘Get back!’ Ross shouted to Pepper.

  They rolled off the deck, into the water, while the still-disoriented crew members were left there, swimming right into the maw of fire.

  As Ross went under then came around, putting the hull between himself and the gunman, the sub began listing badly, the sail coming straight down at him, with smoke still billowing from the hatch.

  He kicked to get out of its path, but it was too late, and all he could do was raise his hands, steal a breath, and let the creaking sail crash on top of him, driving him down toward the river bottom with a rush of bubbling water.

  FOURTEEN

  Pepper should have seen that coming, and he cursed himself for missing it. Knowing their sub crew was being captured, those Rastrojos infantry had had no choice but to kill said crew members. Dead men tell no tales about drug smuggling.

  Between the torrents of rain and cracking of gunfire, it was hard to judge how close those incoming rounds were getting, but it was easy to decide his next move: get his old-timer butt out of there. He dove under the submarine, swimming hard until he came up on the other side –

  Just as the sail crashed into the water and the wave knocked him backward. No, the river didn’t taste like Campbell’s Soup – more like algae and mud. He coughed, nearly choked, and glanced around, searching in vain for Ross as a fresh spate of gunfire ripped across the submarine’s hull, rounds punching fiberglass in a triplet of dull thumps.

  Pepper tugged free a fragmentation grenade from his web gear, grimaced, then let it fly in a high arc toward the SUVs.

  Eat this, mis amigos.

  He imagined the sound of the explosion.

  Where was it?

  He was about to curse when the frag detonated, lifting the front end of one SUV, its engine compartment igniting. Pepper couldn’t see the second car because more withering gunfire drove him back behind the sub. There was an eerie rhythm to the battle, automatic weapons booming at one another one second, followed by an absolute silence … and then a shout, more fire, and then a more distant explosion.

  He craned his neck. Where was Ross?

  Was he – holy shit – inside? Hell, yeah, he was. The package was everything.

  Pepper dove beneath the rippling surface and toward the hatch. He slipped a penlight from his web gear, thumbed it on, and pointed down as the sub drifted away from him, toward the bottom nearly seven meters below.

  He was no Olympic swimmer, no Navy SEAL, that was for sure. But the rigorous cross-training he’d endured during phase II of his recruitment as a Ghost had had him rescuing trapped pilots from downed and sinking aircraft, along with several other water rescue scenarios that had sent him to the edge of a liquid oblivion and back again. He paddled down toward the hatch and pulled it farther open.

  The silhouette of something large passed nearby. He repressed a chill. No, he wouldn’t dwell on what else was in the water …

  Ross hadn’t wasted a second after the sub had rolled and begun to sink. He’d pushed up, clutched the rim of the hatch, and had allowed the rushing water to carry him inside the cramped confines. He turned slightly to his right, a light pen in his hand, and saw a control station on one side with radar screen and navigation controls and GPS. Farther back was a series of modified water heaters and jerry-rigged air compressors, three on each side of the hull. They were used to control surfacing and submerging. The captain would fill the heaters with water to dive, then he’d use the compressors to blow out that water and surface. A label on one of the air compressors caught Ross’s attention, but he had to keep moving.

  Beyond the heaters were four bunks, the blankets floating up near the ceiling now, where the smoke grenade still bubbled and hissed. Still farther back was an actual toilet and air-conditioning unit.

  Ross shifted his light, pulling himself deeper into the sub, and there he was, the package, Delgado, captured in the small light’s beam and floating motionless, eyes closed, cheeks swelling, some bricks of cocaine surrounding him and turning end over end, as though he were caught in a slow-motion tornado and this was a snapshot captured by a daredevil photographer.

  Ross pushed through them and seized the unconscious man by the shirt. He glanced forward where Pepper was just now entering the compartment. Seeing Ross coming with the package, Pepper immediately turned around and headed back outside, holding open the hatch for Ross, who forced Delgado through and into the open water. Pepper took over, seizing Delgado and dragging him up.

  It had been a cumbersome and irritatingly slow process at best, and Ross quaked with the fact that every second counted. Just as he was running out of breath, his head beginning to spin, they broke the surface –

  To the sound of so much gunfire that Ross wasn’t sure if they were pinned down yet again. He coughed and spat, then shouted to Pepper. ‘Gotta get him to the shore. He’s out. Need CPR! I’ll be right back.’

  Pepper was already on it, his arm draped beneath Delgado’s chin as he began a hard paddle away from the sub. ‘Where the hell are you going?’

  Ross waved him off and dove back down, paddling hard toward the sub.

  FIFTEEN

  You took the good with the bad, and you should expect a little ugly as well when you are behind the trigger of a Stoner.

  Yes, you dished out superior firepower the way a heavyweight world champion dishes out right hooks.

  But you weren’t exactly stealthy, sacrificing the possibility of being shy or coy regarding your feelings for the enemy.

  And once you expressed those true feelings in the form of an unrelenting and vicious stream of superheated lead, those sons of bitches would, unfortunately, know exactly where you were – which 99.9 per cent of the time meant things would get ugly real fast.

  All of which explained why 30K loved the weapon. You needed some serious brass in your shorts to play with the big guns and draw enemy fire. If you weren’t up for a challenge, then you shouldn’t be a Ghost. Go wear the banana suit outside the frozen yogurt place. Applications being accepted now.

  With his boy Kozak in tow, he reached the next group of trees and set free another twenty rounds into the SUVs, driving the guys firing at Ross and Pepper back toward the dry docks. Before a self-satisfied grin could split his lips, multiple whooshing sounds rose from the jungle behind him.

  And not two seconds after the men firing at Ross and Pepper reached the dry dock, not one, not two, but six rocket-propelled grenades streaked through the air, half targeting the first dry dock, the rest screaming in toward the second, and it was all 30K could do to hit the deck and shout into the Cross-Com, ‘Incoming! Get down!’

  A young SF lieutenant, fresh out of school, with absolutely no combat experience had once asked 30K, ‘In the heat of the battle, do you ever get, like, post-traumatic stress disorder or flashbacks to other battles? Do you ever just sit there and freeze, you know, the whole thousand-yard stare thing?’

  30K had thought about that for a long moment – or at least he had pretended to do so. In truth, he was repressing some serious laughter. Poor guy. He didn’t have a clue. After an appropriate amount of time that might’ve had the lieutenant’s imagination running wild with what 30K had seen and done, he answered, ‘When you’re in the fight, you don’t think about anything. You shoot, move and communicate. You kill anything in your way. And you protect your buddies at all costs. Like I said, you have no time to analyse it. As a matter of fact, you don’t even have time to be scared.’

  Sure, that was one man’s opinion, but 30K had hoped that he could clean out those dirty fuel injectors between the kid’s ears and get him thinking about real life instead of the way things unfolded on TV or in his imagination. Dialing into the ebb and flow of the battle put you in a place both mentally and physically that was much safer. He’d once compared it to riding his mountain bike. You never looked around as you rumbled across
hair-raising terrain; you always looked forward, out there, beyond the bike, past that narrow bridge that was barely wide enough for your front tyre. You looked where you wanted to go. Same thing in battle. Keep looking out. Not within.

  The blast wave from all those grenades hit 30K hard enough to wrench his head back, and when he dared steal a look up, his face warmed as twin mushroom clouds of flames haloed in black smoke roared up through the storm, past the canopy to points beyond the gray sheet of clouds.

  He allowed himself another second to enjoy the bonfires before bolting to his feet and triggering another barrage with his Stoner – cutting down a half dozen troops scattering like insects toward the road leading north.

  ‘Ghost Team, this is 30K! They’re on the run!’ he cried. Off to his right, four of the Colombian SF guys broke from cover to pursue the escapees.

  The battle had taken a quick turn in their favor.

  Or so 30K had thought.

  The Ras-whatever-they-were-called dudes had regrouped about twenty meters down the river, near where the submarine had just met its watery grave, and 30K marked at least ten of them strung along mangroves, laying down fire on the shoreline, trying to prevent Pepper and Ross from getting the package to safety.

  Hadn’t he just cleared that area?

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Kozak from behind him, bringing in the drone above their positions.

  ‘I’m going, bro. Get the drone in there, draw their fire. On three. One, two –’

  Kozak cried for him to wait, but he just grinned to himself and took off jogging across the riverbank, rushing up past the dock and alongside the dry docks – now flaming skeletons of timber and smoking debris.

  A secondary explosion lifted from the smaller building, probably some diesel fuel igniting, and then came the fireworks show of ammunition the drug runners had stored there, now beginning to cook off like popcorn on the stove, rounds bursting, ricocheting and sparking skyward.

  All right, Jimmy Boy, he warned himself. Don’t screw this up …

  He juked right, and even as he moved, the Cross-Com showed him the targets ahead, the ground at his feet thumping with rounds that either paralleled his steps or cut through his boot prints. You play with fire and you will get burned, the old saying went. He was going to need cover in about two seconds.

  Holding his breath and still running, he opened fire on the first target, panning away not a second after that guy went down. He struck the second guy and the third before he broke left now, heading toward the river. To hell with cover. He was on a roll now …

  Three more guys accepted his free bullets before he had the remaining four all shooting at him as he reached the muddy bank. He answered with one more salvo, then abandoned the machine gun and dove beneath the waves.

  As he swam, sensing they were tracing his path with their shots, he drew his FN Five-seven from its holster, then came up on his hands and knees, firing one, two, three, four 5.7mm rounds, striking two men. He stole a look back at Ross and Pepper dragging Delgado onto the shoreline. Their CIA operative was not moving.

  Two guys left, with only 30K standing in their path. The captain needed time.

  He scowled at the mangroves within which hid the last two soldiers. Get out here and fight like men …

  The razor’s edge between bravery and insanity was a place few operators visited. 30K had bought several acres there, planned to build himself a house, three-car garage, have some horses out back. It was all about location, location, location, right? If you wanted to save your buddies, you had to be in the right place at the right time. You had to make your own luck. You had to stop thinking in clichés and start firing your weapon –

  Which was exactly what he did. Took out the ninth guy with a single round. Missed the tenth guy with the first shot but got him with the second.

  But shit, he didn’t realize he’d been nicked in the arm until the needles took hold and his sleeve grew bloody. He cursed again, jogged back toward the captain and Pepper.

  Only then did he realize that Kozak had never brought in the drone to draw their fire. He glanced up in the kid’s direction –

  And realized why.

  Aw, no. No, no, no …

  Delgado was turning blue, and Ross was trembling with the desire to save this guy.

  They each carried a medical kit, but those were mostly stocked with supplies to treat wounds you’d expect in battle: trauma, gunshot, etc. Automatic defibrillators were a bit too cumbersome to pack along, and Ross seriously doubted that Jiménez’s team had one.

  So it was up to him to perform CPR on Delgado, who was still unconscious, not breathing, looking DOA. Two breaths followed by the chest compressions. Over and over. Ross knew the routine, had his CPR cert refreshed every year, but after the first round of compressions, he couldn’t go on.

  Memories …

  He looked at Pepper, his eyes burning, and said, ‘Take over. Do it!’

  Pepper jumped right in – just as 30K ran past them, crying, ‘Kozak! Kozak!’

  SIXTEEN

  Kozak knew he was lying facedown in the mud, and he understood that his brain must be short-circuiting like a laptop left in the rain, but he didn’t care. He was ten years old again, up in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and he’d just tossed his Heddon Torpedo lure into the lake, hoping to catch a bass. He slowly worked the reel, drawing in more line, and the lure’s forward prop created a perfect bubbling noise and ripple across the surface. Pepper, a fellow bass-fishing aficionado, would’ve been proud of the city boy’s technique, but it wasn’t Pepper who’d been proud:

  ‘That’s really good, Johnny,’ said David, the college guy with the funny beard who’d served as Kozak’s camp counselor.

  Behind them lay the lush grounds of Saint Tikhon’s Monastery and Seminary, and Kozak was there attending the annual one-week summer camp sponsored by the Diocese of Eastern Pennsylvania. Russian Orthodox Christians like himself attended services and learned about courage, good sportsmanship, and how to raid a girl’s dormitory to steal their pyjamas (the older boys called it a ‘panty raid’).

  Suddenly, a bass came up behind the lure and exploded on it. Kozak’s line pulled taut, and he screamed, ‘I got one!’

  But now he wasn’t pulling on a line; he was clutching Amy Weismann’s arm after she’d just shoved the engagement ring back into his hand.

  They stood in her parents’ Manhattan duplex on the Upper West Side, near the window, and Kozak was trying to convince her that this was for the best, that he’d be gone for too long, that they were from two different worlds and had somehow fallen in love but it probably wasn’t meant to be.

  ‘How could you do this to me?’ she said through tears and clenched teeth. ‘You just led me on.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But I know what’ll happen.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s not fair to you.’

  Kozak sensed pressure on his shoulders, and for a second, he was floating, but then there it was, the feeling of the ground on his legs and rump, and when he opened his eyes, he realized he’d been propped up against a tree, and this wasn’t the duplex or even Central Park …

  ‘I didn’t mean to leave you, buddy! I know, I know. I shouldn’t have done it. But you’re okay! You’re going to be okay!’

  He knew the guy talking to him. 30K. ‘Where’s Amy?’ he asked.

  30K frowned. ‘Who’s Amy?’

  ‘My fiancée.’

  ‘Her? You dumped her a while ago.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘Look, you’re good, dude, you’re good.’ 30K’s gaze swept over Kozak’s fatigues. ‘Don’t see any wounds. Probably just got the wind knocked out of you.’

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  30K shrugged. ‘Grenade maybe. Looks like that tree hit you from behind.’

  Kozak craned his head, the motion making the world turn sideways for a second before his vision cleared and he spotted the tree, cracked in half lik
e a piece of balsa wood from a toy glider. ‘No, look –’

  Near the broken tree lay a jagged piece of tin roof that had blown off one of the dry docks. It had struck the tree like some oversize ninja dart and knocked it down, into Kozak.

  30K’s eyes widened. ‘Damn, that thing could’ve taken your head off.’

  Kozak nodded as a chill rushed up his spine.

  A sudden cracking of more fire sent 30K groaning to his feet. ‘We gotta go.’ He seized Kozak by the wrists and hauled him up.

  ‘I got this,’ said Kozak, but then a realization sent him into panic mode. ‘The remote? Where’s the remote?’ His eyes probed the mud, past the rotting brown fronds, until he spotted the slight trace of something rectangular barely peaking out from the sludge.

  He wrenched the device from the ooze, wiped it off, and breathed a sigh. The drone was still wheeling overhead on autopilot, the signal full strength. ‘Okay. Ready.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Captain, but he’s not coming back,’ said Pepper, removing his palms from Delgado’s chest and letting his gaze sweep the jungle as Jiménez’s men charged up, forming a perimeter around them.

  Ross stared at Delgado, cursed, then began shaking his head in disgust.

  Captain Jiménez himself hustled up to them and dropped down beside Ross. ‘The area’s secure. I’ll have my men search the bodies.’

  Ross glanced at him. ‘Good.’

  ‘Will he make it?’ Jiménez asked, his gaze riveted on Delgado.

  Ross practically leapt on the CIA agent and began doing more compressions. ‘Come on, you, you son of a bitch!’ he screamed. ‘I didn’t come all this way for you to die on me!’

  Pepper shifted around and put his hand on Delgado’s neck, checking for a carotid pulse. He waited, then held up his palm.

  After a few more compressions, Ross finally surrendered and glanced up at Jiménez, who shared an equal look of helplessness and frustration.

  No, this wasn’t the first time Pepper had been on a search and rescue mission only to have the package expire on them. And it wouldn’t be the last. The anger was always palpable. You’d spend months going over every decision you made, second-guessing yourself, considering all the what-ifs, then finally trying to justify why you had failed so you’d do better next time.