Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Utterly out of air, he tried to grab hold of his straps, and managed to un-clip one of the parachute strings in the process. He dropped fifteen feet without any resistance and came to an instant midair halt. Finding, upon regaining his wind, that it seemed he was dangling sideways maybe twenty feet from the floor of the forest-held in place by a single string connecting him to the entangled parachute.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

He considered with grave seriousness that if this was his opening act, then he probably ought to turn his gun on himself now-or maybe make a run for the nearest airport and stow his way into a luggage hold to get the hell out of here.

Once his eyes adjusted, he was able to see some of what the landing pad below had to offer. It didn’t look too painful-mostly low-lying bushes, maybe featuring thorns, maybe not, but certainly looking less deadly than a sidewalk or log. He swung for a minute on the string, orienting his body for a feet-first landing, then went for it, unlatching the clip. He hit the bushes hard but bounced in a kind of rolling corkscrew, the twigs, stickers, leaves and flowers bracing his fall in trampoline fashion as he found himself, when all was said and done, on his back, earthbound and unbroken.

If he’d landed near where he intended to, he knew he could find the road he was looking for about one mile to the west. On the satellite shots provided by Laramie’s guide, the road had appeared to be a logging trail-cleared sufficiently for trucks to travel back and forth through the woods with their lumber haul but no more developed than that.

Cooper reached into one of the zippered pouches of his jumpsuit. Laramie’s guide had provided him with a portable GPS device of the sort they’d used in Cuba, and he was keeping his satellite phone in the pouch too. Something poked through his skin as he felt around the pouch. He shone his Maglite inside it, only to discover the source of the crunching noise: his collision with the tree had shattered his GPS unit and sat phone.

“Nice work, there, hotshot,” he murmured.

He still had at his disposal a fancy-dancy, luminescent-dial wrist compass-also provided by Laramie’s guide-and found that on the other wrist, his plain old wristwatch seemed to remain in working order.

He used the compass to pick his direction and set out through the woods, encountering, twenty-six minutes later, twin tracks he figured for the logging road. He headed north, setting out at a jog in the relative blackness along the road. It was mostly downhill, which was good; the path was more overgrown than he’d expected, Cooper needing to high-step it most of the way despite the occasional bald-earth truck tracks underfoot. He timed himself based on a slightly slower pace than what he typically ran on the beach; he had only his watch by which to clock the run, but he’d run varying distances on enough different surfaces to know pretty much what his pace would be. He would run for an hour-five miles, if all went well.

At the end of his hour-long jog, he worked his way around for and found a suitable break in the trees and ducked back into the forest. Naples and Conch Bay beach runs notwithstanding, he found he was already winded, with somewhere near half the trek left.

Not good.

He knew from the satellite photographs he’d reviewed that he was four miles from his destination once he made the turn into the woods, but the last four miles would take him through treacherous terrain-thick jungle sloping up a steep mountain. That, he supposed, was the idea: the residence of President Raul Márquez included, along with various other accoutrements, a security perimeter made up of football field-size lawns surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall. The wall jutted up against the mountain range Cooper was about to climb over-a stretch of land impossible to traverse in any vehicle. You could do it on foot, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Something a beach bum should have given more consideration to.

A “source,” which Cooper assumed was dubious at best, had provided Márquez’s weekly schedule to Laramie’s guide. The schedule had apparently been circulated among the various wings of the Salvadoran government. President Márquez had supposedly hosted a Chilean diplomat for dinner at his home five hours ago; he was destined for a session of his cabinet tomorrow, with a press conference to follow, beginning at ten in the morning. The cabinet meeting and press conference were taking place forty-five miles from his residence. Meaning if Cooper was going to nab him under the cover of night, he had until dawn-otherwise he’d be camping in the jungle somewhere near the estate until Márquez returned from his cabinet business and whatever else was on the docket for the day.

It took him three hours to make it over the mountain.

As expected, the perimeter wall was patrolled by an armed military detail. Similar in function and appearance to the exterior fence found at your average prison, the wall included endless coils of razor wire on its crest and a guard tower every two hundred yards or so. The towers were occupied by guards, one man per tower. The men wore brown-paper-bag fatigues and were armed with what looked to be AK-47s. All no surprise. Both the wall itself and the entire stretch of lawn behind it, he saw, were lit like a baseball stadium.

Coming down the last stretch of hill as quietly as he could, Cooper slipped on a mossy boulder and almost crashed headlong into an exterior guard post, which had not been lit on the side that faced the mountain. Even after he caught his balance, he almost walked directly past the open door of the building before realizing there was a light on within, and a pair of guards seated inside.

He peered in from a place a few yards into the trees and observed that the men were playing cards and sipping cups of what might have been coffee. Like the men occupying the towers, these two were armed with AK-47s, plus hip-bound pistols and chunky walkie-talkie units.

Cooper had devised a number of infiltration schemes based on what he’d learned about the facility and its security perimeter, but with these jokers playing cards and probably sipping on spiked coffee while they traded spare change, he thought his life might just get a little easier. He needed the boost, anyway-maybe it had been the ride in the plane, kicking things off with a little airsickness, but he was feeling as though somebody had altered the atmosphere on him and sucked half the available oxygen from the normal mix. He felt like passing out.

The key was to get over the wall. But not here-not where he’d do little but stroll out onto the fucking Best Buy soccer field for all to see. Halfway around the wall, closer to the front of the residence, he knew the sod-moat to be shorter, most notably beside the driveway for the six-car garage, where there was only a few yards of grass behind a series of landscaped foliage beds designed to show visiting dignitaries how immaculate was the home of President Raul Márquez.

The last visible guard tower to the east, he could see-the last one off to his right, where the perimeter wall stretched around the side of the main residence-was close enough to the landscaped driveway to suffice. If I can get up in that tower, he thought, the dash for the shrubs should be easy enough to make without being seen.

This sounded better to him than his original plan A, which involved pulling the shovel from his backpack and commencing to tunnel beneath the section of wall nearest the landscaped driveway. The tunneling strategy, he thought, being the safer of the two-but if I go that route I may die of oxygen debt before I get knee deep in the dirt.

Let’s go, big fella.

He triple-checked his MP5’s screw-on silencer and approached as close as the darkness outside the shack would allow-Cooper thinking maybe he ought to lean right into the doorway just to see whether these poker-playing idiots could spot him. Resisting the impulse, he clicked off two rounds with a one-second gap between shots. He came into the shack immediately, doing his best to catch the guards’ falling bodies before they, along with their chairs, weapons, radios, and thermos crashed to the floor in the wake of his sniper fire.