Stephen Leather - Breakout

‘For what? Christmas? Godot?’

Harper smiled. ‘No, just until we see a Douglas C-47 Skytrain coming in to land at the dirt strip a mile or two east of here.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But we’ve got a couple of hours to kill, so you can catch up on some more sleep if you want.’

‘I could have done that back at the hotel if we’d set off a bit later.’

Harper gave him a world-weary look. ‘You could, but then by the time you’d done that, you might have opened your eyes to find yourself squinting down the wrong end of a couple of Kalashnikovs with some more of your friends from the drug cartel that arranged your kidnapping and imprisonment on the trigger end.’

‘But we’re safe now, surely. They’re hardly likely to be chasing us across Bolivia.’

‘Aren’t they? Well, let’s see. Since I got to this country a week or so ago, and admittedly it was with a little extra help from Ricardo and Lupa, I first killed eight of their guys in Santa Cruz. Then we came up to La Paz and wiped out another ten or so in San Pedro prison, including the man who was running their cocaine operation there and all the muscle who were making sure no-one else could move in on it - oh, and not forgetting your friend, the chief warden of the prison, who no doubt they were paying to make sure their cocaine trade ran smoothly. I’ve also liberated the man they were hoping to sell to a superstitious property developer for a pretty hefty price and, worst of all from their point of view, whether or not they’ve twigged that yet, they’re now in the process of having their very, very lucrative cocaine operation in San Pedro and La Paz as a whole taken over by their most hated rivals, the Colombians. So I’d say they’d have some pretty powerful reasons for wanting to track down and get rid of the man who has caused them all their problems here, wouldn’t you? Hence the need to get the hell out of La Paz before daybreak, and to be lying up here, off the road, just in case our new best friends are out looking for us.’

‘All right, all right,’ Scouse said. ‘No need to be so arsey, I was just saying.’

Harper gave a slow shake of his head. ‘Why don’t you rest your eyes and maybe get a little more sleep while I make a phone call?’

Scouse shrugged, slid down in his seat, tipped the peak of the baseball cap he was wearing forward and closed his eyes.

Harper picked up the sat phone and called Standish. ‘Sam,’ Harper said. ‘Job done. I’m getting ready to move on but I wanted to tell you that I found Scouse. Alive. I’m telling you because I want to be sure that the company knows that he didn’t take the money, and there won’t be any come-back on him.’

Scouse had now re-opened his eyes and was sitting up in the passenger seat and paying close attention to the conversation.

Harper winked at him. ‘When Scouse flew in to Bolivia, he was arrested in the Customs Hall by a bent customs officer and a couple of cops, working for one of the cartels. They took the ransom money, beat the piss out of him and then dumped him in an isolation cell in San Pedro prison. And had we not found him, he would have been wearing a concrete overcoat by now. So he’s blameless and the only reason Risk Reduction should be contacting him from now on is to give him the back-pay you owe him. Okay?’

‘Thanks Lex, good to know that you got him out of there. I’ll pass that on,’ Standish said. ‘Funnily enough, I got a bit of a garbled version about some strange goings on in San Pedro from our go-between in La Paz. He called me up this morning to say there were reports of explosions, gunshots and gang fights from inside the jail, and quite a few guards and inmates were rumoured to have disappeared.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose that has any connection to you getting Scouse out of there, does it?’

‘You know me, Sam,’ Harper said. ‘I go out of my way to avoid trouble like that.’

Standish laughed. ‘It’s because I know you, Lex, that I know the opposite is true. If any trouble is kicking off, you’re usually not far away from it. Anyway, that’s none of my business, but if you were involved, my advice would be to find a covert way out of Bolivia - and quick. I don’t know if you already know this, but the chief warden you killed…’

‘Technically, I didn’t,’ Harper interrupted, ‘but I’ll let that go for now.’

‘Well, he was not only being bribed by a Brazilian cartel, the most vicious one in Bolivia - and that’s saying something, believe me - but he was also the brother of the gang boss’s chief sicario, and they’re not the sort of people to bother about technicalities like who actually pulled the trigger, or wielded the knife, or whatever it was that you or your friends did to him . So my guess is that there is now a price on both your heads. In which case, don’t even think about attempting to fly out from La Paz, because they’ll be watching the airport and the roads and, as Scouse has already discovered by the sound of it, the cartels have more inside men at the airport than we do, and they’re higher up the food chain. I’ll give you any help I can, but to be honest, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do from here, even if we weren’t in the middle of another ransom negotiation.’

‘Forget about it,’ Harper said. ‘Thanks for the tip-off, but we’ve no intention of flying out from the airport anyway.’

‘And don’t delay getting out of the city. The cartel has informers everywhere. The word will have gone out that two gringos are wanted by them. There’ll be a reward for any info about you and a warning that anyone who helps you will meet the same fate as you. Sorry, but that’s the way it is here; your own grandmother would give you up if the cartel got hold of her.’

‘Mate, we’re already out of the city and barring any mishaps, we’ll also be out of the country by the time you’re settling down to your lunch today. So all good. I’ll ship this sat-phone back to you when I get to a safe place to do so.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Standish said. ‘Either keep it if you can use it, or destroy it.’

‘Okay, if you’re sure and thanks for everything, Scouse and I are both really grateful to you.’

‘No thanks needed. Be safe and the beers are on you the next time our paths cross.’

‘You can count on it,’ Harper said and broke the connection.

‘Everything all right?’ Scouse said.

‘Sounds like half the country’s out looking for us, but apart from that, yeah, all good.’

Scouse tipped his cap back over his eyes and reclined his seat a bit more, but Harper kept alert, watching the traffic passing along the main road, a couple of hundred yards away. Most of the vehicles were trucks, grinding their way to and from the outlying towns, but there were a handful of cars and two Toyota Landcruisers also passed, driving fast and with men clustered in the open back of each one. Harper tried to tell himself that they were probably just peasant farmers on their way out to the fields, and attempted to ignore the inner voice pointing out that there didn’t really seem to be any fields worth the name out here on the Altiplano and anyway, farmers tended to be earlier risers than this. He hesitated, then shrugged, deciding he was probably just being paranoid. There were a million reasons why people would be driving along this road.

Nothing else had caught his attention by the time, forty minutes later when, through the open window, he heard the drone of an aircraft approaching from the south-east. He spotted the familiar shape of a C-47 outlined against the deep blue of the sky and watched as it banked around and then disappeared from sight as it came in to land. Scouse had heard it too and had sat up and brought his seat back to the upright position.