Дэвид Балдаччи - The Forgotten

At least for those who survived.

He left the building at the ground floor and headed west.

The people were good.

Not because they had found him at the Sierra. That would take no skill at all.

No, they were good because they had followed him from his room down to here. Even now he could sense their approach, one set from the left, one set from the right.

He slipped his gutting knife into his waistband and then spun the suppressor onto the end of his pistol.

He kept walking, zigzagging his route and moving closer and closer to the water.

These back streets were deserted. Not even the duenos were out. He wondered about this. But then he thought perhaps they had been told to stay off the streets tonight.

The duenos considered themselves tough until they ran into those who were truly formidable. Then the street toughs melted away into little balls of dough and found places to hide in the darkness, like the mice they were.

Mecho was not and never would be a mouse.

He walked on, instinctively varying his route but heading inevitably to the water, to the Gulf.

It had carried him here from a position of slavery, though the last part of his journey had been as a free man swimming for his life.

He would go back to the sanctity of the water tonight.

It would either be his final resting place or simply one more bump in a long road of them in his life. Sometimes all a person could do was not good enough. So be it. He had never been one to regret. Not when it came to survival.

He passed some late-night stragglers who were too drunk to see that he was walking along with a pistol. He turned down one more street and the deepness of the ocean stretched ahead of him.

It was secluded.

It was completely dark.

There were no people around who could see or be harmed by what was about to happen.

And the tide was coming in.

Tides were often handy.

He quickened his pace.

In a few more seconds he was on his scooter, which he had hidden behind a trash receptacle, and was flying down the sand.

This had surprised the men following him.

That was his intent. His other intent was to draw them farther down the beach, away from the town, away from any eyes, drunk or not.

Two miles later he was away from all such eyes except for the ones still chasing him. He had not gone fast enough to lose them. Mecho’s thinking was simple. He could deal with this now or he could deal with it later.

Might as well get it over with.

Mecho calculated he was facing six men.

They would be trained, armed, cagey, cautious, but with enough close-quarter combat skills to size up the ever-evolving battlefield.

The dunes were up ahead. He left his scooter behind and set out on foot. A minute later he skirted a narrow cleft between two dunes. His front flank was now a funnel his pursuers would have to breach. But it was only wide enough for one man to come through at a time. A classic defensive measure. The same one the Spartans had employed to hold off the far larger Persian army so the Greeks could escape destruction. That same technique had been taught in war colleges ever since.

If your opponent has far larger numbers, make it as difficult as possible for them to employ those numbers to their advantage.

Mecho knew this sort of confrontation might happen, so he had hunted for this sort of tactical advantage shortly after he had arrived in Paradise. And then he had spent time doing something to it that would hopefully work to his advantage.

The dunes were thick enough to stop any ordnance unless they were going to attack him with shoulder-fired missiles, and he doubted that was the case.

Mecho only had two worries now.

His rear flank.

And something coming through that opening other than a man.

His next steps would address both issues at once.

The men after Mecho fanned out in a classic attack formation. With a numerical advantage of six to one it would be successful against just about any foe.

The cleft in the dunes was just ahead.

A funnel. These men had seen that one before.

One way in and one way out.

None of them had any plan or desire to breach that opening with Mecho waiting to pick them off as they came through.

But they had come prepared for just such a scenario.

The first man approached, keeping well back of the cleft. He lifted the fist-shaped metal object from his pocket, engaged it, and tossed it through the opening.

It wasn’t a grenade, but it was as good as one.

He turned away from the cleft and used his hands to cover his ears as additional protection over the plugs he wore.

The flash-bang went off.

Blinding light, paralyzing sound.

And a concussive-force kicker.

Anyone in the dune would now be immobilized, easy to kill.

The six men swarmed through the cleft. Sand dislodged by the flash-bang was swirling everywhere. They had guns ready to fire into the paralyzed man who should now be resting on the sandy floor.

He would never know how he died.

The space between the dunes was barely ten by ten. The space had resulted from erosion, wind, and different compactness levels of the sand. The men crowded in, but there was no one lying immobilized on the ground.

What the leader of the squad did see was a now visible knotted rope dangling in the center of the space. He looked up to where the rope was attached to the thick limb of a tree twenty feet up.

None of the men had looked up before coming in here. They had focused on the cleft.

But what was currently up was now coming down.

Mecho landed on two of the men and they broke his fall by breaking their necks.

A third man was gutted by Mecho’s knife, the bodies of the first two kills covered with blood from his dissected belly.

Number four caught two rounds in his face from Mecho’s pistol.

Number five tried to run.

One big arm around his neck stopped that retreat and the snap of the spine was followed by the man collapsing to the sandy ground.

Number six got lucky, however.

Mecho had stumbled over number five as the man’s legs involuntarily kicked out as he went through the last spasms of death.

Six drew his bead on Mecho with his MP5. Shot selector on full auto, thirty rounds fired in a couple seconds, if that.

Not survivable.

Pistol and knife useless against that.

Mecho looked at Six.

Six looked back at Mecho.

A triumphant smile, a finger on the trigger, ready to finish the job.

Mecho had a millisecond left to live and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

One shot erupted.

But it didn’t come from the MP’s muzzle.

A hole opened in number six’s forehead. The MP had no chance to do its killing because its owner had just died.

Six fell headlong into the sand, some of his brain splattered along the wall of the dune behind him, because the shot had come from in front of him and behind Mecho.

Mecho whipped around in that direction, pistol and knife up and ready.

Chrissy Murdoch stood there. She was not outfitted in Hermes and Chanel tonight. Nor a bikini.

She wore all black. Dark smudges were under her eyes and over her thin, high cheeks. The eyes looked very different from the pampered ones of the person lounging around the pool at Peter Lampert’s estate.

They were hard and dark and cold.

They are like mine , thought Mecho.

She held a pistol. It was pointed at Mecho’s heart.

She looked at him and he looked back at her.

She slipped the gun into a belt holster and said, “We have to get rid of the bodies. I have a boat. Let’s move.”

As she came forward to do just this, Mecho could only stare.

She struggled to lift one of the men.