The Silent Sea (14 page)

Defeat left Espinoza’s mouth bitter. He thought for a moment. “You said you’re about five miles from the Rio Rojo, yes?”

“That is correct.”

“They have a boat,” Espinoza said. “They must have snuck through the border last night when those worthless frontier guards were either asleep or too busy scratching themselves to notice.”

“I don’t think we have the fuel to chase them,” Jimenez said. It was clear in his voice this was a disappointment. “And the pilot says the chopper might have been damaged by the first explosion.”

“No matter, mark Josep’s position on the GPS so we can send a team to get him, then head straight for the base. Radio ahead so our third EC-135 is ready to take off as soon as you land. They probably have a fast boat, but you should be able to catch them before they reach Paraguay. I’m also going to alert the border guards. They can send out some patrol boats and stop anyone who looks suspicious.”

“We’ll have them yet,
Jefe
.” Jimenez’s wolfish grin carried through the static-filled connection.

“We will,” Major Espinoza agreed, and, if anything, his smile was more dangerous.

JUAN AND THE TWO other survivors reached the RHIB a little over an hour later. It had remained undisturbed under its cover of foliage. Juan lashed the power cell to the deck while Murph and Trono stripped away the camouflage. The twin outboards came to life with a turn of the key. Juan knew their boat, with its performance-tweaked engines, could outrun anything on the river, but he had no illusions that a reception wasn’t already being planned for when they neared the Paraguayan border.

“Lines are clear,” Mark said, coiling the dark nylon rope around a cleat. When the Chairman didn’t react, he called out, “Juan?”

“Sorry. Thinking.”

Juan bumped the throttles, and the boat emerged from its hidden lair. The river was clear of traffic, so a few moments later he had them skimming across the surface at better than forty knots, slowing marginally in the blind corners, then giving the RHIB her head once again.

Going with the current, it took them less time to reach the main river than when they’d come upstream earlier in the day. The men were drained by the events of the past twenty-four hours, yet they remained vigilant as they started northward. Mike stood facing aft, his eyes scanning the sky for pursuit, while Juan and Mark studied the river and its banks for anything out of the ordinary.

They saw nothing for an hour, but then Mark Murphy tapped Juan on the shoulder, handed him a small pair of binoculars, and pointed a few points off their bow.

Juan needed only a second to recognize two Boston Whalers coming at them at full speed. He didn’t need to see details of the occupants to know they were armed to the teeth.

“Mike,” he yelled over his shoulder. “We’ve got company.”

“No kidding,” Trono called back. “There’s a chopper crawling up our six.”

Cabrillo didn’t bother looking back. The Whalers were coming too fast for him to worry about the helicopter. With a combined closing speed of nearly ninety knots, the pair of boats would pass the RHIB in seconds.

Juddering lights winked at them from both craft. The Argentines had opened fire well before they were in effective range. Tiny splashes sprinkled the river well away from the charging RHIB.

Juan waited until the two boats were less than fifty yards off, ignoring the lead that was filling the air. He could see three men on each; the driver, and two riflemen lying in the bow. With the Whalers skipping across the water, none of the shooters could aim accurately. The little boats were just too unsteady.

Of course, Mark couldn’t get off a meaningful shot with the RHIB bouncing along either.

“Hold on!” Juan shouted.

He cut both throttles and used his palm to crank the wheel over to its lock. Despite the deflated cells of the buoyancy ring, the assault boat did a perfect one-eighty, shouldering aside a wall of white water and coming to an almost complete stop.

Having practiced the maneuver countless times and knowing it was coming, Trono and Murph reacted instantly. Now that the RHIB was wallowing, they could anticipate her movements and compensate for them with their machine guns. They opened fire as the two Whalers flashed by less than a hundred feet away. The two drivers standing in the open cockpits took the worst of it. One was stitched from thigh to shoulder, the kinetic impact of the 9mm rounds hurling his body over the gunwale. The other took two to the head and slumped over the console.

With its engines still pouring out full power, the Whaler started to veer off course because of the weight of the dead driver on the wheel. The centripetal force pushed the body in the opposite direction, and he slipped from the cockpit, his hand still tangled in the wheel’s spokes. The Whaler turned sharply, caught part of the wave that had been generated by the RHIB, and flipped over. It augered into the water and vanished under the surface only to float up again, its keel pointing skyward.

The second Whaler continued racing down the river, no one sure if there was anyone aboard still alive.

Juan spun the RHIB around again and slammed the outboards to their stops. The bow rose up in an instant, the deep V hull coming onto plane faster than about any boat afloat.

RAUL JIMENEZ IGNORED the wind buffeting him as he stood in the helicopter’s open door, incredulous that the first Boston Whaler had barrel-rolled and then sunk. The second border-patrol boat continued downstream behind them. At first he thought the cowards were running away, but then the Whaler slammed straight into the riverbank. It folded like an aluminum can. Its outboards tore from the transom and vaulted into the underbrush while the three men were tossed like mannequins. Jimenez neither noted nor cared if any of them was alive. All his attention was focused on the fleeing boat below.

He recognized the black craft as an RHIB, the type favored by the United States Special Forces, though it was also available on the commercial market and could easily be operated by a group of mercenaries. He needed just one of them alive. He wanted the others alive, too, but when he was finished with them they would be in no condition to be paraded in front of television cameras.

This chopper wasn’t equipped with a door gun, but they had pulled the weapon from the one damaged in the explosion and concocted a makeshift mount using straps threaded through eyelets in the ceiling. Jimenez stood behind it now, watching the RHIB grow larger and clearer in his sights. Just a few seconds more and he’d tear away the back of the boat. While one of the thieves drove, the other watched the approaching helo with a machine pistol tucked up hard against his shoulder. The third man was flat on the deck, either dead or wounded. Either way, he didn’t appear to be moving.

Ever since his boyhood, Raul Jimenez had loved to hunt. He’d made his first slingshot out of tubing and a forked piece of wood, and killed birds by the hundreds around his family’s farm. With his first rifle, a gift on his tenth birthday, he went after larger and larger prey until taking a jaguar from a hunting blind with a nearly seven-hundred-yard shot his companions said couldn’t be made.

But on the day he killed his first man, a deserter who then-Captain Espinoza had told him to track, Jimenez knew he would never find satisfaction hunting mere animals again. He had stalked the deserter for five days through some of the toughest jungle Argentina has to offer. The deserter had been wily, and made the hunt the best of Jimenez’s life, but in the end nothing could keep him from his prey, and the man had died despite his cunning.

Jimenez felt that same sense of satisfaction as he lined up the sights on the black RHIB. Just as he squeezed the Browning’s trigger, the nimble boat cut sharply, and the heavy .30 caliber rounds peppered the water, turning it into a constellation of tiny white fountains.

He cursed, lined up, and fired again. It was as if the driver fifty feet below was reading his mind because the bullets arrowed into the river off the RHIB’s port flank. He was certain the boat would dodge left this time and let loose a hammering string of tracers. And like before, the driver outwitted him by veering farther right, going under the helicopter and emerging on its blind side.

“Spin around,” Jimenez shouted into his headset. “Give me an angle.”

The pilot pushed hard on the rudder, pivoting the Eurocopter on its axes as it continued to race up the river. It was flying almost sideways, crabbing across the sky, but more than able to keep up with the speeding RHIB.

In the three seconds Jimenez had lost sight of the boat, the man he thought was injured had gotten to one knee. Behind him was an open space in the deck that had been a covered storage locker. On the man’s shoulder sat an ominous dark tube pointed straight at the chopper. The range was less than two hundred feet.

Jimenez and the man holding the rocket moved at the same time. Mike Trono lit off the Stinger missile the same instant the Argentine soldier unclipped his safety harness. The rocket’s infrared system only had a fraction of a second to come to life, find the heat plume billowing from the helicopter’s exhaust, and make a minute adjustment. Jimenez leapt from the chopper just before the missile slammed into the turbine housing directly below the spinning rotor. The six-pound warhead detonated. The bulk of the engine saved Jimenez’s life, but he was still caught in a flaming overpressure wave that ignited his clothing and slammed him into the water as if he’d jumped from twice the height. Had he not landed feetfirst in the roiling waves churned up by the RHIB’s outboards, the impact would have been no different than landing on cement. The water extinguished his burning uniform and prevented the burns on his face and hands from going past second-degree. He came thrusting back to the surface, coughing up a lungful of river, his skin feeling like it had been dipped in acid.

Fifty feet ahead of him, the Eurocopter crashed into the river, smoke pouring out the doors and blown-apart windshield. Jimenez didn’t have time to fill his lungs, as the craft tipped and the rotors hit the water. They came apart like shattering glass, shards of composite material filling the air. Several skimmed across the river surface inches above Jimenez’s head and would have decapitated him had he not ducked under the waves.

Through the water he could see flames licking at the chopper’s shattered carcass, a wavy, ethereal light that silhouetted the pilot still strapped in his seat. The dead man’s arms swayed in the current like tendrils of kelp.

He struggled to the surface once again, the roar of fire filling his ears. Of the RHIB, there was no sign, and with the chopper down and the border patrol’s two Whalers destroyed the thieves had a straight run to Paraguay. As he started the painful swim to shore, his burned hands screaming with every stroke, Lieutenant Jimenez could only hope they would be stopped before they could sneak across.

“NICE SHOT,” JUAN SHOUTED as the Argentine helicopter fell from the sky in their wake.