The Omicron Kill - An Omega Thriller (Omega Series Book 11) Read online

  I said to Njal: “How many do you see?”

  “Two at the gate, two at the door of the house, two at the big prefab, two at the door of the smaller prefab. So eight stationary. Then there are…” He paused a moment. “Four patrolling with dogs, so twelve total. It’s taking them…”

  He went quiet and we both checked our watches. Eventually, I said, “Four minutes.”

  He nodded. “Yuh, four minutes. One goes and one comes, so there is always somebody. It is floodlit, so they can all see each other.” He removed his goggles and turned to face me. “Come, we go back to the camp. I don’t like to talk here.”

  We returned to the cover of the trees, pulled the blankets from the kit bag and each took a slug of hot coffee with whiskey.

  “OK, what’s your assessment?”

  “There is a barracks, I figure maybe sixty feet by thirty. You don’t need a barracks this big for ten men, or even twenty men. There are for sure more men in there. So we have minimum twenty men, probably more. They look like professional soldiers and well armed, with four, maybe eight dogs, electric fence, barbed wire, high wall, and no way in. And to make it more complicated, all the guards are visible to the other guards all the time. My friend, Lacklan, my assessment is that this attack is impossible. It cannot be done.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, that was my assessment too.”

  SIXTEEN

  We slept four hours and woke before the sun had climbed over the wooded mountaintops. It was cold and the ground was wet with dew. We had a breakfast of the remains of the coffee laced with whiskey and made our way to the rocky outcrop to peer down at the facility that Samuel Zapata, Xi, called el Castillo del Diablo: the Devil’s Castle.

  As we took up our positions and I adjusted my binoculars, men in military fatigues started emerging from the barracks. They were supervised by a sergeant barking orders. The guards who stood sentry at the gate and on the doors were all replaced, but the patrols with dogs were withdrawn. Clearly they were only deployed at night.

  At eight twenty, a small group of four men and two women emerged from the house. They were having some kind of discussion, stopping and starting as they walked and talked, making their way toward the big prefab at the back, drifting apart, while one or two spoke in animation to each other, then coalescing again as others returned to join in the discussion.

  By the time they’d reached the corner of the villa, another man had emerged. He was short, overweight, with balding, dark hair and a moustache. He stood on the porch and ignored the group who continued their slow drift toward the large building.

  I watched him, but Njal said, “Deep in discussion. Ages, twenty-seven to thirty-five, jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, trainers, the guys are unshaven, the women not wearing makeup. Two of them are definitely Latino, but some of them could be European, especially the women.”

  I glanced at him. “What’s your point?”

  He didn’t look up from his binoculars. He said, “Geeks, nerds, scientists.”

  I frowned. “You sound pretty sure.”

  “Who else has intense conversations at eight in the morning?”

  I focused on them again. He was right. They had that indefinable look about them that said this person talks about up quarks and negatively charged electrons and quotes from the Lord of the Rings.

  “You could be right. It would fit with the prefab being a lab. What the hell are they doing in there? The place is huge.”

  The whine of a diesel in low gear made me look over toward the gate. A red Toyota pickup was bumping and rattling up the path, out of the trees and toward the gate. An electronic buzz and a clang preceded the slow opening of the outer gate. The truck rolled in and the gate closed laboriously behind in. A second, louder buzz and the inner gate rolled back to let the truck drive in. It came to a halt in front of the villa, and the short guy with the moustache stepped down from the porch to meet it, as two guys swung down from the cab.

  I said, “The guy with the moustache is Zapata.”

  “Uh-huh. And the two guys from the Toyota are giving him bad news.”

  He was right. They were spreading their hands and shrugging their shoulders, like they were making excuses. Meanwhile, the guy who was probably Zapata was waving his hands and shouting.

  I said, “They found the truck last night and they’ve been looking for who did it. So far they’ve found nothing.”

  Njal nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  We watched as Zapata slapped and kicked the two men and they cowered away from him. He shouted something, pointing at the gate, and they clambered in their truck and drove away.

  After that, he did more hollering at the sergeant. The sergeant did some hollering of his own at the troops and marched off toward the barracks building. Five minutes later, he was mustering all his men, with dogs, in front of the villa. I felt a hot, sinking feeling in my gut.

  Njal said, “Thirty-two men, plus eight sentries on the doors and the gate, total forty. Four dogs.”

  “His guests are coming tomorrow. He wants us caught before they arrive.”

  Njal sighed. “But we want them to arrive before we attack.”

  “We need Omicron. This whole damn operation is about General Francisco Ochoa. We need to take him down.”

  “Those dogs worry me.” He turned to look at me. “We call it off. While they are searching for us, we go hit Ochoa.”

  I thought about it and shook my head. “Let’s stay cool. In twenty-four hours we’ll have all three of them in the same place with twenty pounds of C4 and enough artillery to invade a small country. Plus, I want to know what the hell they have going on in that lab.”

  He gave something like a smile, shook his head and looked back down at the complex again. “They are leaving. Two Jeeps and all the men except the sentries.”

  We watched them stream through the gates at a jogging run, then start to fan out into the forest, to right and left. There were seven patrols of four men, and two Jeeps.

  I did a rapid calculation in my head. “They’ll start close to the perimeter fence, then they’ll start spiraling out, the four teams with dogs taking the lead. It’s going to be slow work and heavy going. They won’t get up here till late afternoon, at the earliest.”

  He put down the binoculars and rested his chin on the back of his hands. “But they will find us.”

  “We have the advantage here, Njal. Jungle warfare is all about staying hidden and using the element of surprise. Right now we know where they are, but they don’t even know for sure if we’re here at all. We use the bow and the Maxim 9s.”

  He nodded, but then shook his head. “If we start picking off the troops, Gonzalez and Ochoa ain’t gonna show.”

  I was quiet for a bit. “I’m not sure that’s true. We hold off till late afternoon. Let them find our flask, an empty kit bag, some cigarette butts, leaving a trail moving away, back toward where we left the Wrangler. Let them think we’re trying to escape. Ochoa will come for sure. He’ll want to be there at the capture, and at the kill. My bet is Gonzalez will too. They’ll come today.”

  “Yuh?” He nodded. “That’s good.”

  We went back to the camp, shared out the weapons, and put the C4 and the spare ammunition in one of the kit bags. While we worked, I told Njal my plan.

  “I’d have liked to do a reconnaissance before the attack, but we can’t afford to do that now. So we draw the troops away from the facility, and this afternoon we start picking them off silently, group by group. So even they won’t know exactly how many men they have lost or are losing.”

  “They will be in radio contact with each other.”

  “Yeah, but they’ll also be trying to observe radio silence. Every crackle and every conversation gives us a location.”

  “OK.”

  “We take out a couple of teams, then we start moving back toward the facility. If we come across more teams, we take them down too, but that’s not our priority anymore. With most of the men in the field, we go to the re
ar of the facility, where the lab is.”

  He frowned. “But we can’t get in that way. We have the fence, the barbed wire and the wall. We need come in through the gate. Is the only way.”

  I shook my head. “If we go in through the gates, we will never make it to the lab. We’d get trapped between the fortified troops at the facility and the returning patrols behind us. No, we set small charges on key supports on the fence.”

  “It’s electrified, remember?”

  “We put the explosives in empty plastic water bottles. When we detonate them, the fence falls across the barbed wire and rests against the top of the wall. It also shorts the electricity so we can use it as a ladder. We have to be fast. We scramble up and drop over the wall behind the lab.”

  He grinned, then laughed. “Good plan. Cool. So, next, we don’t want nobody escaping and we don’t want nobody coming in through the gate, so we take out the guards’ hut where the controls for the gates are.”

  “Exactly, you do that while I take out the guards at the lab and the barracks. Then we move forward to the back of the house and take out the guards on the door at the house and, if they are still alive, the guards on the gate. We do it fast and efficient.”

  “It’s good. I like it.”

  “We hope by then Gonzalez and Ochoa will have arrived. If they haven’t, we take Zapata and we decide what to do next. Either way, we photograph and film the lab, then destroy it.”

  “What about the nerds?”

  I sighed. “Logically, we should take them out.”

  “Logically…”

  “Let’s find out what they’re doing… If they are prisoners, or if they don’t know what they’re involved in…”

  “Yuh, OK, I hear you.”

  We left no trace of our presence at the site by the rocks, but we left a subtle trail, something only a pro would be able to follow, leading away from the woods near the compound back toward the valley to the south of Cosalá, and the track that led to our Jeep. All the while, in the distance, we could hear the occasional howl and bark of the dogs, slowly, steadily getting louder.

  By late afternoon, as the sun began to sink toward the mountain tops, and the shadows of the peaks started to stretch across the valleys and the canyons, the howls and barks grew louder and more excited. The dogs had picked up our scent, and the soldiers had started to find clues that we had been there: an ill-concealed cigarette butt, half a boot print, a crushed fern or even the discarded kit bag. All of them, to a trained special ops soldier, would be evidence of a prey who was close to panic. That, as darkness started to close in and we heard the dogs getting excited, that was when we started to work our way back along the trail we’d left, searching for a spot to wait for them.

  We found it deep in a gully where a narrow, beaten track forded a mountain stream. The slopes were densely wooded with pines, and down by the watercourse, the shade and the moisture had made the ferns grow thick and tall, some reaching up to five feet in height. It was quiet, dark, and the smell of damp, rotting leaves and pine needles was strong on the air. There was no sound but the lapping of the water, and the whining and howling of the approaching dogs.

  Njal took the left slope, scrambled up and hid among the ferns behind a large pine tree. I took the right slope, on the far side of the stream, set up the bow, strung it and nocked an arrow. Then we settled to wait.

  We didn’t have to wait long. Within five minutes, a squad of four soldiers in camouflage came down the path at a half-run. The guy in the lead had a large Alsatian on a chain and was being dragged along by it. The three guys behind him were all carrying assault rifles. The dog crossed the ford and started to go crazy, running around in circles, sniffing the spot where Njal and I had split up. The soldiers immediately started scanning the trees. I had already selected my mark and had him tabbed. I drew back to my ear and loosed in a single fluid movement. There was a slight rattle as the arrow slid over the wood, and a whisper as it slipped through the air. I saw my mark frown and half a second later, the broadhead had buried itself in his chest, slicing through his heart, and punched out of his back. His body gave a tremor and I heard him say, softly, “Ay…!”

  Then there were two quiet, phut! phut! sounds. The dog keeled over and his handler frowned down at him an instant before his forehead erupted in blood, brains and gore.

  By that time, I had nocked my second arrow. The two remaining troopers were paralyzed with confusion and growing fear. Death had come out of nowhere and three of them had gone down in a split second. I drew and loosed. Again there was the rattle and whisper followed by a second suppressed double tap from Njal and the two soldiers went down.

  We ran silently to the scene of the carnage. Silently, we picked up each body between us and carried them in among the ferns, behind the trees, and, using a couple of their canvas camouflage hats, we carried water from the stream and washed away the blood.

  After that we carried on up, following the track, but keeping in among the trees. Soon, after maybe ten minutes, we heard the crackle of a radio. The sun had dipped behind the mountains and it was getting dark in the forest. It was hard to make out any detail among the foliage, but the sounds of muttering voices carried with clarity, seeming almost to be enhanced by the closeness of the woods. Njal signaled to me that he had eyes on something over on the right. Without having to speak, we each backed away, separating, in among the tree trunks to where the ferns were thickest. There I picked up a small branch and broke it. The snap was like a gunshot echoing under the canopy. The voices stopped instantly. I knocked an arrow and we waited, motionless and silent.

  They took about a minute to come. They were not sure if what they had heard was a man, or some forest creature. A crack was not enough to call for back up, and they had heard nothing before and nothing since, so they proceeded cautiously, one step at a time, being quiet, listening. They appeared through the green shadows, spread out in a line, their weapons cocked and trained forward. These had no dog, only their assault rifles.

  The way they held their rifles made a shot at the heart impossible. A barb through the belly would be a slow, painful death, and a noisy one. This would have to be a headshot, and that would take skill. I drew back to my ear, measured the distance, breathed out, saw the arrow hit its mark and loosed. It happened in a second, but time seemed to slow. The soft rattle of the arrow on the wood, the four men frozen, listening for that second sound, the whisper of the feathers though the cool, dark forest air, and then the cruel thud as the long, razor-sharp barb rammed home through his eye and shattered the back of his skull.

  Njal was quick. Two double taps: phut-phut! Phut-phut! followed instantly by four eruptions of black-red blood from two of the soldiers. By then, I had drawn again and loosed a second arrow, which skewered its mark through his back as he turned to run.

  Eight down and one dog. That left twenty-four men and three dogs, plus the guys back at the facility. We left these bodies. It didn’t matter anymore if they were found. The longer the teams delayed, searching for us in the woods, the better. We set off at a quick march, keeping away from the tracks, heading as directly as possible toward the Devil’s Castle. Now it was time to open the gates to Hell.

  SEVENTEEN

  We climbed for fifteen minutes through the woods without coming across another patrol. We could still hear the dogs. But they had grown more distant and were falling behind us. They thought they were chasing us in our escape, but we were driving for their heart. Soon they would pick up our scent again and start to follow, realizing what we had done, but by that time I hoped we would be storming the compound, and it would be too late.

  It seemed we had a clear run, but when we were about ten minutes from the back of the enclosure, we heard the distinctive rustle and crackle of bodies moving through the undergrowth. I laid aside my bow and pulled the Maxim from my belt, and we both hunkered down.

  We saw them after another two or three minutes. There weren’t four, there were eight, about fifty paces aw
ay. It looked like they had met up and decided to stop and have a smoke. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they started exchanging cigarettes and several of them sat on the ground to light up. There was a lot of shoulder shrugging and hand waving and I figured the sergeant was the subject of discussion.

  I looked at Njal and he gave his head a jerk toward the slopes to my right: climb up and circle around them. There were too many to take silently, and there was no telling how long they might sit there. I nodded.

  Very slowly, by degrees, one step at a time, we moved away from them and then started to climb and circle around. After another five minutes, we came out of the woods and onto a clearing dotted with shrubs and clumps of tall grass. It was about thirty feet across and at the far end fell away suddenly into the valley, where the Castillo del Diablo was located.

  The sun had gone behind the mountain peaks some time back, and though the sky was still clear and blue, the valley was in deep shadow and evening was closing in. We dropped on our bellies and crawled to the edge of the clearing, where we could get a view of the complex. It was quiet and very still. Our view was from the rear, so we could see the two guards by the gate and the two at the barracks door, but the other four were hidden from view.

  I had a look around and was satisfied that we had plenty of cover to make our way down. I glanced at Njal and pointed, but he wasn’t looking at me. He shook his head and jerked his chin toward the far side of the valley. I followed his gaze and saw, about half a mile away, the two jeeps moving along the track beyond the trees, headed toward the compound gate; but they were not alone. They formed the vanguard and the rearguard of a small convoy of vehicles.

  There were two Range Rovers and a Land Rover, with a military Jeep at the front and another at the rear. I peered through my binoculars. Each Jeep was occupied by two soldiers, one driving and the other riding shotgun. They ground their way slowly up the track and now we began to hear the whine of the diesel in low gear. It was not possible to make out who was in the cars. What I could see was that the Range Rovers had just a driver and a passenger, while the Land Rover seemed to be full.