Matt Hilton - Cut and run

'Wasn't no samurai move.' Rink grinned at Harvey as he joined us. 'Got that one from West Side Story.'

We gathered up our weapons. Harvey was muttering at Rink in good nature, eliciting an even wider grin.

'You want this?' Rink showed me my damaged SIG.

I took it from him. It was an old friend, and you never left a friend behind. 'I'll fix it.'

Rink went out the window first and covered while I negotiated the space. I didn't want to feel like a hindrance, and when he offered me his elbow, I showed him I was OK by lifting my H amp;K to cover the opposite direction. Life in the old dog yet.

Harvey clambered out and we pepper-potted back towards the cleft in the cliff. Nunez scrambled down the rocks and then dropped to a knee, covering our retreat. Above him, Charles also covered us, his adrenalin-pale face looking as solid as the boulders surrounding him.

It was tough scaling the rocks up to the cleft. My right hand was alternating between numb and screaming in pain. I couldn't decide which I preferred. When it was hurting I could at least use it. In the end, Rink swarmed past me, grabbed hold of the back of my jacket and dragged me up and past Charles. Harvey followed, and then Nunez came up as fleet as a cat.

The cleft was no place to linger. Not because there were sentries up on the cliffs any more: Rink and Harvey wouldn't have joined me without finishing them first. Anyone – with the exception of Luke Rickard – who'd seen any of us was now dead. However no one down at Cesar Calle's house was aware of our presence and it was better to keep things that way.

We hurried through the cleft, climbed down at the far end and got back on the trail where we followed the river upstream. We didn't slow down for a mile. Then Rink called a halt. He was concerned about me.

'Keep going, guys. I'm not so bad now that I've shaken off the effects of the explosion.' I caught glances from the Jungla troopers. Neither one of them were party to how close I'd come to being shredded by the frag grenade. Now they were studying me like I was a walking miracle. Maybe I was.

Nunez handed me a flask. 'Drink.'

It wasn't in me to say no. I swallowed noisily. The bottle contained distilled water, glucose, electrolytes. I needed them all.

No one followed us from the valley.

We were pretty sure, but Charles fell back to keep rear guard while Nunez went ahead. As we moved along the trail, I brought Rink and Harvey up to speed with all that had gone down and what I'd overheard.

'The woman was behind all this? She ordered the hits on Bryce's team?' Rink shook his head. 'Goddamn…'

'I couldn't save her.'

'Why would you want to?' Harvey had the same hatred for men who hurt women as I did, but he wasn't thinking of Jimena Grajales in the same way as me. 'She's responsible for more murders than Hannibal freakin' Lecter.'

'She was hurting…'

'She was insane.'

'Yeah,' I nodded. 'But maybe we would've been the same if we'd seen our child murdered.'

The silence that followed my words was interrupted only by the flap of a bird's wings as it broke cover. We had already paused in our march, but the bird's frantic flight now made us crouch and scan the forest for whatever had disturbed it. In the end I decided that it was most likely only the weight of our words and I gave the all-clear sign. We moved on.

'So what do you make of Rickard turning up here?'

Glancing at Rink, I lifted my shoulders in a shrug. 'Revenge? From what I heard, he blamed Jimena for sending a team to kill him. He was talking about Del Chisholm and his men.'

'He didn't know that they were only there to take Alisha to safety?'

'Jimena told him she'd nothing to do with that, but it made no difference. Rickard came here to kill her, and nothing she said was going to change his mind.'

'The guys that were with Rickard,' Harvey said. 'Who were they?'

Harvey, I recalled, hadn't been party to the conversation I'd had earlier with Nunez when he'd recognised those attacking Cesar Calle's stronghold. I kept it simple.

'A rival outfit. Jimena mentioned someone called Silva. It looks like Rickard changed sides but my guess is he was only using Silva's resources so he could get at Jimena.'

'Looks that way,' Rink said. 'You think Rickard has run back to this Silva dude now?'

'No. I think he's done what he came here for. If he was going to stick around, he'd just have waited at Calle's place for Silva to arrive.'

'So what's your best guess?'

'He's on his way back to Miami.'

'You sound pretty sure about that.'

'I am. Jimena told him that Alisha survived.' Scrubbing a palm through my dusty hair, I could feel gobbets of blood sticking to my scalp. 'And knowing what he is now, I think he'll want to put that right.'

'First chance we get, we should warn Walter.'

'We'll do that once we're back at the staging post. The Junglas have satcom: I want Walter to pull a few strings and organise us a fast pick-up and get back there before Rickard does.'

'You're planning on using Alisha as bait?' Harvey rolled his head.

'Rickard's going after her. It's best that it's under controlled circumstances when he makes his play.'

'She's in a hospital, Hunter,' Harvey said. Not that I required reminding. I just nodded. The logistics were troubling, but there was one good thing going for a showdown at the hospital. Rickard wouldn't have far to travel if we met again: the hospital also had a morgue.

Walter met the news that Rickard had given us the slip with less hostility than I expected. He was sticking his neck over the headsman's block on our behalf and he'd have preferred it if we'd buried the son of a bitch in a nameless grave out in the Colombian jungle. His decades of experience in black ops had somewhat tempered his reaction to the possibility of failure, though, and he simply asked the question, what did I need?

First on the list was establishing a pick-up point and a rapid evacuation. Next I needed him to influence the turn out of events here in Colombia. I then told him what I wanted to do with Alisha. Everything else could wait for our return to Florida.

Nunez and Charles delivered us to a hilltop designated only by coordinates punched into a GPS system. Undulating foothills spread out beneath us. The sky was pale blue with a bank of grey thunderheads building on the Andes to the west. The sun was hidden by the clouds but made a last-gasp attempt at holding back the night, making a fiery display of gold and lapis lazuli over the tallest peaks. It was a pretty way to end this trip to Colombia.

From the north a black speck grew steadily larger and more defined. We'd come in at high altitude but we'd be leaving below radar. As we waited for the arrival of the helicopter, I shook the hands of the Jungla troopers.

'It was a pleasure working with you both.' My words sounded standard, but I meant every one of them.

As usual it was Nunez who did most of the talking. 'The pleasure was all ours. Thank you for what you did here, Hunter. You have been of great service to this country.'

I nodded at his words. Anything I'd done for his country was a mere consequence of my attempt at finding Rickard, but both Nunez and Charles seemed pleased by the result. We'd already discussed what had befallen Cesar Calle, and how Alvaro Silva had now doubled the size of his empire. But the Junglas seemed unconcerned by that. The way they saw it was that one enemy of the country would be easier to bring down than two, and they had enough evidence to destroy him through what they'd witnessed. We wouldn't enter the equation: Nunez and Charles were to receive backdated orders to conduct CTR – close target reconnaissance – of Calle's activities. The order was arranged between Walter and a local contact with DET, Colombia's own intelligence-gathering community, and the Junglas would report their findings. The fact that they witnessed the massacre of Cesar Calle and all his people was enough that a strike force was already being assembled to take down Organizacion Halcon de Roja.