Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

‘I’ll take this,’ he said.

‘No, no,’ the hunter protested. That one was his main personal hunting rifle, and it wasn’t for sale. Definitely, absolutely not. It wasn’t until Ben took out his wallet and started thumbing through notes that he relented and seemed to decide that maybe it was for sale after all, as long as Ben agreed to buy every last round of ammunition he had for it.

‘And this one for my friend here,’ Ben said, picking out a Savage in .223 calibre. ‘You have cartridges for this?’

‘I ain’t gonna shoot a rifle any more,’ Nico insisted with a sour look. ‘Not after what happened last time.’

Ben looked at him. ‘I don’t seem to recall you holding back on emptying a magazine or two at me, just a couple of days ago.’

‘That was different,’ Nico replied. To the hunter he said, ‘You got any kind of handgun? I’d be happier with a handgun.’

The hunter hesitated, then glanced again at Ben’s wallet and threw open another cabinet. ‘Holy shit, this old timer’s got more guns and ammo than Cabela’s,’ Nico muttered, looking down at an assortment of pistols and hundreds of boxed cartridges. ‘Let me see that Colt Python there. Okay,’ he said, inspecting the heavy revolver. ‘I’m happy.’

‘You’re going to take a six-shooter into a fight with Serrato’s whole army?’ Ben asked, staring.

‘Way I see it, if I can’t get up close and personal enough to use this on him I’m dead anyway,’ Nico said.

‘Just don’t expect me to look out for you all the time.’

‘Yeah, and don’t cry to me when you have to tote that goddamn shoulder cannon miles through the jungle.’

‘As long as I don’t have to lug your Colombian arse along behind me, I’ll manage fine.’ Ben turned to the old hunter, who had been following their exchange with growing confusion. ‘Two hundred for the rifle and another hundred for the pistol, ammo included,’ he said in Spanish.

‘Get the fuck out of here,’ the hunter rasped indignantly. ‘Four-fifty for the two, plus another fifty for the ammo.’

‘Four hundred’s nearly all I have,’ Ben said, showing him the open wallet. ‘It’s yours if you throw in the loan of that truck you have out there. That’s if it still has an engine in it.’

A loan for how long, the hunter wanted to know. Ben assured him it wouldn’t be for more than a couple of days.

‘If it don’t get all shot to pieces,’ Nico muttered.

‘I’m not the one who shoots cars to pieces,’ Ben said. ‘Deal?’ he asked the hunter, switching back to Spanish.

It was. The old Indian grabbed his wad of money and counted it suspiciously while Ben and Nico carried their weaponry outside, yanked the tarpaulin off the faded red late seventies Ford F-150 pickup under the lean-to and saw about getting it started. The engine fired up second time with a throaty roar and a cloud of smoke.

‘That’s good enough.’ Ben flicked a switch on the dash and the row of four grille-mounted lamps blazed into life. He let the motor run while he jammed the bags behind the seats, then loaded up his rifle from the munitions supply the hunter had sold him and stowed the weapon in the rack in the back of the cab. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said to Nico. ‘You navigate.’

Nico clambered up into the passenger’s side with a look of grim determination. ‘You ready to go?’ Ben said, getting in behind the wheel. He gunned the engine.

‘I’ve been ready to go for seven years,’ Nico said.

Chapter Forty-Five

It was night now. The temperature had fallen dramatically. The dark jungle loomed over them and cast menacing shadows everywhere as they jolted and lurched their way through a green tunnel lit by the Ford’s powerful grille-mounted lamps. Any obstacle the truck couldn’t go roaring over on its oversized wheels and jacked-up suspension, it smashed through like a bulldozer.

The hunter’s track was even harder going than it had seemed at the outset. Just as Ben was becoming certain that the twisting, ridiculously uneven path was going to lead nowhere, it widened out and a junction with another road appeared up ahead. The new road was still rough as hell and impossible to navigate at more than thirty miles a hour, but after the endurance test of the track it seemed like a motorway. Nico said he recognised it from when he’d driven around the area in his Winnebago. Now that he’d regained his bearings he gave sporadic directions as Ben drove.

An hour passed. It was rare to meet another motor vehicle. The landscape was variable, sometimes thick forest on all sides, sometimes open country and rocky hills, now and then a lonely farm or a ruin passing by in the night. As they rounded a sweeping bend Ben noticed Nico gazing across towards the high ground on the right. From the Colombian’s heavy silence afterwards, Ben understood that he’d been looking at the spot where he’d fired the bullet that had killed Alicia Serrato.

‘You know, I never cried for them,’ Nico said after a while. ‘For Daniela and Carlos. My children. Not a tear.’ He gave a bitter chuckle. ‘Never told nobody that before.’

Ben didn’t reply. There was no reply he could make.

A little while later he heard the soft clicking noises as Nico toyed with his revolver, slipping slender .357 cartridges into the chambers, spinning the cylinder, ejecting them, beginning the process again. Ben had seen a thousand men suffer the same kind of nerves as they faced going into action. He’d suffered them himself enough times. Tonight, though, he felt nothing more than a numb sense of purpose. All that existed was the task ahead, whatever its outcome might be.

Without a word, he held out the crumpled pack containing the last three of his Gauloises. Nico drew one out; he took another, and they smoked in silence, the tips of the cigarettes glowing orange in the darkness of the cab. Ben reached into his pocket for his whisky flask and shook it. There was a little left. He offered it to Nico. Nico shook his head. Ben put the whisky away untouched and drove on.

‘Pull into that track there,’ Nico said presently, pointing to the left at a gap in the trees. Ben turned the truck and they went jolting and bouncing over rough ground for a couple of miles. ‘Okay, pull up,’ Nico said. ‘This is as close as it’s safe to drive. We walk from here. Compound’s due west through the jungle.’

‘How far?’

‘An hour, maybe longer.’

Ben killed the engine and the lights. They climbed down from the truck and grabbed their gear. In the faint moonlight shining through the trees they shrugged on their packs, checked their weapons one more time, turned on their torches and then set off with Nico showing the way.

The jungle came alive at night in all its incredible diversity. The constant chirping and whistling of insects all around them was so loud that it drowned out the soft crunch of their boots on the mossy forest floor. As they walked, Ben felt a sudden, startling impact against his back and whirled round, instinctively raising his rifle halfway up to his shoulder with his hand reaching for the bolt – then saw that what had hit him was a giant flying insect, some kind of winged beetle not much smaller than a bird. He watched it gyrate off in the beam of his torch, then walked on.

The march continued for an hour, as Nico had said. The closer they got to their target the more Ben could see the Colombian’s gait stiffening as the tension spread through his body. Ben could feel it too. They both glanced constantly left and right and strained their ears over the din of the insects for any suspicious snap of a twig or rustle of a branch that could signal one of Serrato’s patrols approaching.

Then Nico halted and raised a hand to signal before turning off his torch. Ben killed his own. For a few moments they stood immobile, waiting for their eyes to get used to the dark. A few steps onwards, they parted the branches and saw the lights of the compound in the distance. Ben felt his heart heave and uttered an inward prayer that it was all true and that Brooke was here, alive, almost within his reach. If that was so, then all that stood between them now were a cruel, sadistic, power-crazed former drug lord, his murderous personal guard and maybe twenty or thirty heavily-armed troops-for-hire.