M.I.A. Hunter: Miami War Zone (25 page)

"What?"

"
Feliz
. . . is here. Got away." It was an effort for
Wofford
to talk.

"Where?"

"In . . . inside."

"Damn."

"Go . . . go get him. I can handle . . . gun."

Stone had not questioned
Wofford's
bravery that day in Vietnam when he had run into the village. He didn't question it now. He handed him the Ingram and drew his Beretta. "I'll get him for you."

"Thanks."
Wofford
took the Ingram.

Stone slipped back inside.

F
eliz
and his two henchmen had found a storeroom and hidden. When the building stopped taking a pounding from the chopper, they had emerged. They wandered through the halls, looking for a way out.

"Here we go," one of the men called.

Feliz
looked where the man was pointing. Part of the wall had caved in where a shell had exploded. Most of the firing was coming from the other side of the building, and this looked like their best chance.

Still,
Feliz
wanted to be sure. "Check it out," he ordered.

The man went through the opening in a crouch. No one shot at him. He walked a few steps away, then returned, motioning for them to follow. "It's okay. Nobody's shooting on this side."

Feliz
went to the hole, sending the other man through first. Still, no one shot at them.

Gripping the Uzi,
Feliz
followed them through.

I
t was down to sniping, now, Hog thought as he watched from the roof. Whoever showed any part of himself was going to get dead, real quick.

Just as he thought it, a man near the fence leaned out from behind the trunk of a tree, trying to get a clean shot at the doorway. His Uzi stuttered, and then he ducked back. The returning fire from the door was erratic and way off the mark, chopping at the leaves above his head and sending a small shower of them down on his head.

Gaining confidence, he leaned out for another shot.

Hog plugged him through the ear, sending part of his head into the chain-link fence, where it hung like a scalp taken in battle by a savage.

Hog wondered if Loughlin was all right. It wasn't like him to miss by such a long way. It wasn't like him to miss at all.

He didn't have time to wonder about it long, because he heard a noise on the roof behind him.

A trapdoor to the roof had opened. Hog turned to watch it.

For a full minute, nothing moved. Someone was below, waiting for a telltale noise or motion to let him know if anyone was waiting above.

Hog watched patiently.

Suddenly a man catapulted through the opening and rolled across the roof, cradling an Uzi in his arms.

Hog opened fire at the movement, bullets from his Model 10 chopping across the roof and sending chunks of it high into the air, but the man had been too fast and had guessed correctly, rolling to Hog's left and avoiding the shots.

He came to his feet behind a vent and got off a quick burst at Hog, who dodged to avoid it.

The bastard had him at a disadvantage. Hog was a long way from cover, and the shooter was too near the chopper. Hog didn't want to shoot his own transportation. Besides, the army wouldn't like it.

The roof was flat, covered with tar and gravel. Hog grabbed up a handful of the small rocks and tossed them to his left.

The man blasted at them, but he didn't uncover.

At the first sound of his gun, Hog moved, the faint scraping of his feet on the gravel hidden by the noise.

The man must have sensed something because he whirled around, but it was too late for him.

Hog triggered the Ingram, and the bullets jerked the man like a puppet without strings, his arms and legs dancing loosely on his body and his Uzi skittering across the roof.

Hog moved back toward the edge of the roof. Just as he got there he heard a scratching at his back. He twisted around and saw nothing.

His eyes searched the roof.

Still nothing.

Then something moved.

It was a gigantic palmetto bug—a roach, as Hog had called them in East Texas. It looked at least three inches long as it crawled rapidly over the gravel.

Hog drew his .357 and took aim.

The bug probably never heard the shot that pulverized his chitinous body.

"
Fuckin
' roach," Hog said. He hated roaches.

L
oughlin moved efficiently through the building, planting his plastic explosive where he thought it would be effective.

Hog had already done a damn fine job of demolition on the place. There were holes in the walls, and small fires burned here and there. But Stone wanted to level it, utterly destroy it, and that was
Loughlin's
job.

As he put each bit of explosive into place, he molded it around an electronically activated detonator. When they left, he would set off the charges and blow the lab—and whoever was left in it—to kingdom come.

S
tone saw
Feliz
go out through the hole, but he didn't risk a shot.
Feliz
was too well covered, and Stone didn't want to warn him that there was somebody gaining on him.

Instead, he followed.

When he put his head through the wall, a bullet socked into the concrete blocks above him and showered him with dust.
Feliz's
man with the pistol had seen him.

"Kill the sonofabitch,"
Feliz
snarled. He didn't stop moving. He was looking for a way back to his airboat.

His hip was still hurting, so he walked with a limp, but he was able to move fairly swiftly. Fear is a great motivator.

The unarmed man with him was even more frightened, and he was the one who saw the gap in the fence, probably made by one of Hog's shells when he was strafing the grounds. The links were ripped apart for three feet or so off the ground.

The man began pulling on one side of the rip, separating the links even farther.

"C'mon, c'mon,"
Feliz
urged him, looking back over his shoulder for any sign of the man who was pursuing him.

Stone didn't see how he was going to catch
Feliz
. The man with the pistol had him pinned down. He looked out and another bullet ricocheted off the concrete.

Stone cursed, not because he had nearly been hit, but because he had seen
Feliz
squeezing through the opening in the fence.

The man who was firing at Stone was behind a small tree, with a trunk no thicker than his body. Stone could think of only one way to get him.

He jumped through the hole, rolled, came up firing the Beretta.

Nine-mm death slammed into the tree trunk, startling the man behind it.

Instinctively he reacted, leaning to the side to fire back.

The Beretta's bullets hammered him backward. He went limp and died.

Stone was on his feet and after
Feliz
again. He got to the fence and went through, knowing that the Cuban would head for the airboats. He hoped Tim
Congrady
would stay out of the way.
Feliz
would kill him otherwise.

Stone had no idea what had happened to the pilot of the Cuban boats, though they had been tied up at the edge of the island. He had probably hidden himself at the first sound of Hog's chopper, or maybe he was one of the men who had been waiting outside the fence.

Feliz
circled around to get to the trail from the front of the lab to the boats. Stone was too far behind to shoot in the dense growth. There was too much likelihood that something would throw the bullet off the track.

Stone could hear the shooting at the lab, but it was only sporadic. The Cubans and the Colombians had no doubt wiped each other out, with plenty of help from Loughlin and Hog. It was all cleanup now.

He wondered how
Wofford
was doing, or if he was even alive. More than ever he wanted to get his hands on
Feliz
.

W
offord
was still alive, but not by much. There was massive internal trauma, and he had bled freely.

He thought briefly of his wife, but mostly he thought of the major without a name. He had never hurt as much as he hurt now, except in the camp. When he had been beaten and kicked past the point of exhaustion for those who were beating him, he had felt as if his organs were on fire and as if they might simply swell to colossal size and burst through his skin.

He felt that way now.

His fantasy in the camp had been to awaken one day and find the cage bars gone and himself with a machine gun in his hands. He had visualized himself stepping from the cage like some ancient god of doom, striding through the camp dealing out death to all the grinning little men who had hurt him and destroyed his friends.

He looked down at the Ingram Model 10 that he held now, and then he looked back at the lab grounds. The heat, the humidity, the lush vegetation, even the calling of some bird far off in the swamp—all these things reminded him of the camp.

And suddenly he was there again, just as he had been in the drug-induced dreams at Crazy Charlie's house. Except that this time he had the gun in his hands, the way he had always thought it should be.

Wofford
stood slowly up in the doorway. He felt strong, refreshed. They could beat him and kick him. They could hang Creel's rotting corpse on his cage, but they couldn't break him.

They should have known that. They could never break him.

He looked out from the shadows where he stood. They were out there, hiding from him, but suddenly it was as if he could see them all, as if the trees and grass clumps behind which they were hiding were invisible and they were all exposed to his gaze.

He walked out from the doorway.

Bullets flew past him, striking the building. They churned up the ground in front of him and to the sides.

He kept on going.

"W
ho the fuck is that?" Hog said to no one in particular as he watched from the roof. "He must be crazy."

Wofford
wasn't crazy, just possessed by something that somehow seemed to lend him invulnerability. Not a bullet touched him.

Wherever he walked, he left death behind.

Three men behind a large stump fired at him. He turned calmly to face them, and the Ingram ripped them to shreds. It was as steady in his hands as a cap pistol.

He saw movement to his left, turned without haste, and blasted two more men, their bodies flying backward until they fell sprawling.

Hog watched in awe from the roof. He had never seen anything like it, and he knew that he never would again.

W
offord
went on, his head swiveling from side to side as he searched the ground. At every look, a man died, his bullets tumbling them like straw men.

And then suddenly it was over.

There was no more firing, because there was no one left to fire.
Wofford
had cleared the grounds. Occasionally a body would twitch, a last muscular spasm, but aside from that nothing moved.

Wofford
knew that he had done his job, and done it well. Now he had to free the others, release them from the bamboo cages where they had been whipped and starved and humiliated.

He turned back. He could hear them cheering, rattling the bars of the cages, calling out his name. He could see the smiles that threatened to stretch right off their faces.

Even Creel.

Creel hadn't died after all! He was there with the others, cheering him on, wishing him well!