Sphere Of Influence (54 page)

"You're one lucky woman," her partner said. "Those guys wanted you something awful when you went for the truck. They all came out in the open and started shooting--pretty much an act of suicide. It's a fucking miracle that we took them all out before you caught a bullet."

Chapter
67

BEAMON wouldn't have guessed that it was possible, but his luck seemed to have actually taken another turn for the worse. At the behest of a major international crime lord, he was being force-marched through a hot, wet Mexican jungle by a column of angry-looking soldiers who seemed to speak no English. And to top it off, the whole thing was being captured on camera by the enthusiastic kid behind him.

Looking on the bright side of things was starting to be a little difficult. The only truly positive things in his life right now were the shotgun in his hand and the .357 holstered in the small of his back. Beyond that, the only thing he could think of was that they were going generally downhill. The column stopped abruptly and Beamon used the brief rest to look around him. He and his new companions weren't really on what anyone in his right mind would call a trail, but his sense was that they were moving in a generally straight line. The five well-armed men behind him and seven in front didn't exactly inspire confidence. About half were grossly overweight and no fewer than four were wearing gaudy gold jewelry that negated the effectiveness of their camo and marked them as "consultants" to the local drug trade.

"Would you turn that fucking thing off," Beamon whispered harshly.

The cameraman took a prudent step back but kept rolling. "Are you kidding, man? This is great stuff! Super-dramatic."

Beamon leaned his shotgun against a tree and toweled the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. "What's your name?"

"Tim," the kid said, panning the jungle and the men around them.

"Look, Tim, why don't you get your ass out of here? Get one of these guys to take you back to the helicopter. I don't know where we're going but I'm guessing it's not somewhere you're going to want to be."

Tim looked around the camera's eyepiece. "Then, how come you're still here?"

"Because I figure somebody's going to shoot me either way."

The column started again and Beamon grabbed his shotgun before being swept forward.

"Nah," he heard the kid say. "I think I'll just stick with you guys." His tone suggested that he thought Beamon was trying to trick him into giving up an easy Pulitzer.

The man directly in front of them looked back and put a finger to his lips. The rest of the soldiers were taking their guns off their shoulders and checking them as they continued forward. Beamon pushed the safety off his shotgun and stepped behind a tree, grabbing the young cameraman by the collar and pulling him off the trail. Surprisingly, the rest of the column moved by without protest.

"What are you doing?" Tim said.

"When you're not sure who to trust, it's best not to have anyone behind you." The last Mexican passed by and Beamon stepped back out, following at a distance of about ten feet.

The jungle seemed to get denser as they continued, the songs of invisible birds growing in volume and coming from every direction. What he wouldn't give to be standing on Carrie's back deck, eating one of her horrible low-fat appetizers and looking forward to a fibrous, organic, salt-and sugar-free entree.

A colorful bird finally came out of hiding and Beamon heard his new video biographer stop to get a shot of it. A moment later the entire jungle erupted in the sound of automatic gunfire. A thick tree branch was cut in half onl
y
about a foot away, and Beamon felt a sudden, searing pain in his shoulder.

He dove toward the frozen cameraman and managed to take his legs out from under him. Tim landed hard, trying to protect his camera, and Beamon dragged him behind the trunk of a tree.

"You all right?" Beamon said.

At first he thought the kid was terror-struck from the bullets singing through the air, but it turned out that the little bastard was just calculating a better camera angle. He shoved Beamon out of the way and eased his lens around the tree--apparently to make sure he got an artistically composed photo of the person who was about to kill them. Beamon just shrugged and stayed close to the tree. His shoulder was killing him and he ripped the sleeve off his shirt to take a look. It wasn't pretty, but the large area and relative shallowness of the wound suggested that he hadn't been shot. More likely, it was just wood splinters from a bullet impacting one of the surrounding trees.

He was starting to seriously consider trying to get a look at who was shooting, but then it occurred to him that the less-than-cautious cameraman was already taking care of that.

"See anything?" Beamon shouted over the noise.

"Just our guys!" Tim said, panning the camera. "They're moving toward the edge of a clearing. I can't see into it, though. I think whoever's shooting at us is probably there. Should we move up?"

Beamon pulled a slightly bent cigarette from his pocket and lit it. A bullet smacked into the edge of the tree he was behind and he ducked involuntarily. This time the wood shrapnel missed him.

"Come on, let's go up!" Tim said excitedly. "I've got everything I can from here."

"I don't know if you've been paying attention, son, but there are people shooting at us up there."

"You're just going to hide back here and let your guys do the fighting for you?"

"They're not my guys," Beamon said, not elaborating on the fact that he figured at least one, maybe all, had bee
n
slipped a few bucks to make sure he caught one in the back.

"We can't just sit here forever," Tim observed. Unfortunately, that was probably true. So what were their options? Make a run for it, get lost, and die of Montezuma's revenge somewhere in this godforsaken jungle? Or . . .

He suddenly remembered that this was what he'd been telling himself he'd wanted for years--to go out in a blaze of glory. Film at eleven. He'd quit the FBI, he was guilty of planning the murder of four Afghan drug dealers, he'd gotten Chet killed. Was there any real point to hiding behind this tree like a coward? Even if he managed to get out of here alive, Christian Volkov and Alan Holsten would almost surely come after him to make sure he never talked about what he knew. Well, fuck them. Fuck all of them. He took a final drag and flicked the cigarette into the jungle. "You want some good footage? Let's go get you some."

Despite the fact that whoever was shooting didn't seem to be specifically shooting at him, there were a hell of a lot of bullets flying overhead as he slithered out from behind the tree. He stayed on his belly, inching his way toward the nearest of the soldiers they'd hiked in with.

It turned out that he was dead--hung up on a branch with bullet holes everywhere but mostly concentrated within the loop of a heavy gold chain he'd been wearing. A twenty-four-karat bull's-eye.

Beamon pulled the body down and used it for a shield as Tim crawled up beside him and gleefully propped his camera on the dead man's bleeding chest.

A quick look around suggested that the force they had come in with was nearly gone. There were broken bodies everywhere and the few men still alive were hiding, not shooting. Beamon wasn't in a position that allowed him to look into the clearing, but the sound coming from it was enough to be sure that he wasn't up against an M16 or AK-47. He was willing to bet that whatever was being used to pin them down came off the top of a tank or something. A bullet impacting a tree behind him confirme
d
that suspicion when it created a deep crater eight inches in diameter.

When he looked over at Tim, the camera was pointed directly at him again.

"What are you going to do now, Mark?"

Beamon laughed. For some reason the question sounded like a TV commercial he'd once seen. If he remembered right, the appropriate answer was something about a trip to Disneyland.

The constant stream of bullets ripping through the forest seemed to have redirected itself about twenty feet to his right, so Beamon rolled over and crawled to a large tree at the edge of the clearing. Peering around it, he saw that they were at the edge of a narrow landing strip. It was about forty feet away and covered with an enormous camouflage net that would make it impossible to spot from the air. A medium-sized metal building splashed with earth-tone paint was another fifty yards beyond. The gunfire, though, was coming from two fixed machine guns surrounded by sandbags. Both were manned but the rate of fire was slowing a bit. They seemed to be aware that they had made their point.

Beamon pulled back and scanned the jungle behind him. As near as he could tell, there were only three men left alive and uninjured from the group he'd come in with. Volkov had done a hell of a job setting this up--no one was going to walk away.

He looked over at Tim and saw that he was still filming, no doubt pretending that there was some kind of bullshit war-correspondent heroism in all this. Beamon knew better.

He leaned out around the tree and aimed his shotgun at the closest of the machine-gun nests. The person manning the gun wasn't even visible behind the huge metal plate at the back of the barrel, so Beamon just fired at the narrow slit used for sighting.

A direct and utterly pointless hit. He threw himself to the ground as the guns revved up again and focused on his position. The destruction around him was filling the air with enough dust and vaporized wood to make it hard t
o
breathe. If they couldn't shoot him, they were going to suffocate him.

Beamon covered his ears and remained motionless, waiting for some body part he'd become fond of over the years to get blown off. It seemed like an hour, though it was probably only a few seconds, when the bullet impacts suddenly stopped. The guns were still firing, but no longer at him. A moment later a deafening mechanical whine combined with a deep, rhythmic thudding became clearly audible over the machine guns.

He inched forward and peeked out from behind the tree, holding a hand up to protect his eyes from the sudden wind that had kicked up. It took him a moment to compute that it wasn't wind at all but the downdraft from a helicopter hovering over the clearing. He squinted and looked up at it, seeing that it wasn't anything like the one he'd flown in on. This one was black, angular, and bristling with dangerous-looking weapons.

The Gatling gun hanging beneath its fuselage had already completed its work on the first machine-gun nest, and Beamon watched the line of small explosions in the dirt as the helicopter redirected its firepower to the other nest. The sandbags blew apart and the gun itself was shredded in a matter of seconds.

The airship turned gracefully and brought its gun to bear on the small building across the airstrip, causing it to completely collapse in less than a minute. Then the helicopter just turned and disappeared into the bright blue sky.

"Enough with the camera already!" Beamon said, turning on the young man who had been following him around for the last hour. "I swear to God I'm going to shoot you!" Tim didn't look particularly intimidated by Beamon's tirade. It probably seemed kind of mild after the day they'd had. When Beamon began reaching for his gun, though, he took a step back.

"I guess I've got some background stuff I could do."

"I thought you might," Beamon said as he watched th
e
cameraman stroll off toward a neat line of bodies baking in the setting sun.

Only five of the Mexicans he'd come in with had survived--three without a scratch and two with relatively minor injuries. The men who had manned the machine-gun nests hadn't fared quite so well and had been left where they'd died. Removing their bodies would have involved a shovel and a sponge.

A survey of the collapsed building revealed that it had been stacked with individual bags of what he assumed was heroin. Most had been penetrated by- bullets, and no one seemed anxious to get too close without a respirator. If anyone had been inside when the Gatling gun had turned on the building, they were dead. Nothing could have survived.

What all this had to do with him remained an unanswered question. The surviving Mexicans seemed to have no interest in shooting him and had been genuinely impressed by his futile shot at the machine gunners. They also suspected that he was the one who had called in the chopper. Of course, that had to have been Volkov. But why?

The satellite phone that he'd turned back on about half an hour earlier started to ring and he picked it up. "Hello."

"Mark! It's Laura."

"What happened?" he asked, sitting down on the edge of an old stone well.

"You aren't going to believe it."

"Tell."

"We got it."

"What did you say?"

"I said we got it."

His breath leaked from his mouth and he felt some of the tension in his body ease.

"You're sure. You got the launcher?"

"And another rocket! There isn't much left of the launcher itself--the truck caught on fire. But this is definitely it. The FBI is now the proud owner of one slightly melted Russian rocket launcher!"

Beamon started to lean back but caught himself whe
n
he remembered he was sitting above a well. "Congratulations, Laura. You did it. Any of our guys get hurt?" "Nothing worth mentioning."