Беар Гриллс - The Hunt [=The Devil's Sanctuary]

‘Yeah. A major facility, with several hundred men needed to run and guard it.’

‘Plus the wife and kids.’

Raff was right: Jaeger hadn’t missed the smaller figures dashing about the dirt streets. Many of the narco workers had brought their families. And as both men were well aware, that complicated matters: neither of them was keen to get into a fight that risked women and children getting caught in the crossfire.

Jaeger glanced around at their ridgetop location. ‘Positions? Defences?’

‘Keep two on permanent watch, looking west with eyes on. And the others in the rear, resting. The ridge’s northern wall falls away almost vertical, so no one’s about to take us from there. East is the slope we just climbed: no one’s coming up that without us knowing it. South the ridge rolls on for a good few kilometres. That’s the main threat.’

Jaeger nodded. ‘Agreed. Let’s go.’

As silently and swiftly as they could, they dropped down. The last of the light was fading to deep shadow by the time they reached the foot of the descent. Jaeger gave a quick heads-up before they all heaved up their bergens and began the climb.

It soon became clear that Narov was having real problems. She was moving slowly, and twice she took a fall, once collapsing against a tree and the next time plunging face forward, awkwardly catching her side on a rock.

Finally, wordlessly, Jaeger managed to prise away her assault rifle and pass it to Alonzo, whilst he and Raff each took one of her arms and more or less propelled her up the steep slope.

Narov hated accepting the help and didn’t offer the slightest word of thanks, despite the fact that it was almost dark by the time they reached the top. Another few minutes on the slope and she would have been trapped there in pitch darkness.

They crawled across to the point that Jaeger and Raff had selected as their base of operations – their observation post, or OP. Jaeger gave Narov and Alonzo a quick brief about their position, plus the orientation of the narco gang’s base.

‘I’m setting an ERV seven hundred metres due east, so at the base of the slope we just climbed,’ he explained. ‘If we’re hit, or split up, that’s where we regroup.’ ERV stood for emergency rendezvous point, which pretty much did what it said on the tin.

That decided, Jaeger went about making contact with their Falkenhagen headquarters. He pulled out a compact military-spec Thuraya satphone and punched in a short message: In position. Grid 183746. Nothing further. Out.

Using an inbuilt cipher programme, he encoded the message, sending it in data burst, which basically meant it was compressed to a tiny fraction of its size, taking barely a split second to bounce to the satellite orbiting high overhead, and from there to where Peter Miles would be listening.

Jaeger lived by the mantra that presumption was the mother of all screw-ups. If they presumed El Padre had no monitoring and direction-finding kit in place, they would likely die by that presumption. The gang’s boss was running a multi-billion-dollar narco business, and he could afford to hire the best. Hence the precautions.

Message sent, they set the first watch rota. Jaeger and Raff would take up position at the vantage point, while Narov and Alonzo got their heads down. Much as she tried to hide it, it was clear that Narov was beat. By contrast, the hard-as-nails African American still looked relatively fresh.

That was Alonzo: unbreakable. He would keep a watch over Narov while she rested.

As Jaeger crawled forward, he reflected upon Narov’s condition. He’d never known her anything other than indestructible. He was getting a sense now of what the Dubai mission, plus her subsequent escape, must have taken out of her.

There was no doubt she’d suffered to prove her conviction that Kammler was alive and plotting mayhem and mass murder. And it was her balls and brass that had brought them here to uncover the dark truth and put a stop to him.

Quite a woman, Jaeger thought.

With darkness, Dodge truly came alive.

The throbbing beat of generators reached Jaeger and Raff clearly, as DIY street lighting sparked into life. Bare bulbs were strung from wiring looped along the dirt roads on makeshift telegraph poles. And with nightfall the narcos appeared to love nothing more than parading their weaponry.

As the ridge was shrouded in shadow, Jaeger and Raff didn’t need to worry too much about being spotted. There was no need to use night-vision goggles either. They could scan the well-lit streets with bog-standard binoculars.

They counted the individuals as they moved about, and ID’d their hardware. The gang was remarkably well armed. Apart from the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifles, Jaeger noted rocket-propelled grenade launchers, scores of M60 light machine guns, and even the odd .50-calibre heavy machine gun mounted in the rear of a pickup truck.

In short, a ready-made war in a box.

But it wasn’t until approaching midnight that things really started to get interesting. Horribly distorted Latino-style music started pulsating out of speakers set around the central crossroads. More and more figures gathered in that area, nearly all of them male. They were drawn to a couple of neon-lit buildings – Dodge City’s main drinking dens. Every so often a pickup would arrive, disgorging more figures. Occasionally a scantily clad woman would emerge from a bar and drag one of the men inside.

It didn’t take a genius to work out that these had to be ladies of the night.

Shortly after midnight, the shit truly hit the fan. A group of men came tumbling out of a doorway and a massive brawl ensued. It culminated in several of them drawing their sidearms and loosing off wild shots. The chaos only subsided when a couple of trucks arrived, complete with some seriously tooled-up narcos.

The fight was broken up, some of the worst offenders relieved of their weapons and sent on their way. No one had been shot, and despite the obvious lawlessness of the place, there seemed to be a means of keeping order. Clearly El Padre would tolerate a degree of high spirits, but nothing that would endanger his operations.

At 0100 hours, Jaeger signalled that he was heading for the rear position. His five-hour watch was done. They’d stagger the changeover so that there was always one set of eyes on Dodge. Raff would be relieved in turn by Narov.

‘Change of shift,’ Jaeger whispered to Alonzo. ‘Raff’ll brief you in situ .’

Feeling exhaustion creeping up on him, he curled up on the waterproof poncho that Alonzo vacated. He dragged his lightweight sleeping bag out of his pack, zipped it open to act like a blanket, and got his head down. He was fully clothed and still wearing his boots, and his weapon was cradled at his side. That way, if they were hit during the night, he was good to move and fight.

He sensed the scores of mosquitoes homing in on his position. They began to dive-bomb him, their incessant whining drilling into his head. He flailed around groggily, found his mozzie head-net and pulled it on, bagging it out around his face like a beekeeper’s helmet.

Then he lay back and drifted into a deep sleep.

He awoke sometime later with a start.

He sat bolt upright, his hand on his weapon.

Gunfire cut the night; that was what had woken him. This time, though, it wasn’t pistol shots. It was the distinctive crack of ‘longs’ – assault rifles.

He glanced across at Raff, who was equally wide awake. ‘What the hell?’

Raff shrugged and glanced in Alonzo and Narov’s direction. ‘If it was aimed at us, they’d be here by now to warn us.’

‘High spirits in Dodge?’

‘Sounds like it’s party-bloody-city.’ Raff gave Jaeger a hard look. ‘Hardly strikes me as the kind of place where Kammler’s gonna build his INDs.’