Stephen Leather - Breakout

‘Are we off?’

‘We’ll give it another ten minutes,’ Harper said. ‘He’ll need to refuel and the less time we spend hanging around there, the less chance there is of someone spotting us.’

He waited ten minutes, then re-started the engine and drove back to the main road. He took a careful glance up and down it before emerging and then headed east towards the landing strip where Randy had dropped him, Lupa and Ricardo on their way in to La Paz.

As he turned onto the track leading to the strip, he could see the C-47 at the end of the runway and the dark outline of Randy inside the cockpit, leaning forward as if checking something on the instrument panel. There were no other aircraft or vehicles in sight and no sign of the guy who operated the fuel pump.

‘I hope he’s got enough fuel on board to get us over the border,’ Harper said as he braked to a halt, in the shadow of the aircraft.

‘What’ll we do about the car?’ Scouse said.

‘Just leave it here. Randy can have it if he wants to come back for it, but if not, it’ll be a nice little bonus for the guy who pumps the fuel. Come on.’

They got out and walked towards the aircraft. Randy remained unmoving, still head down over the instrument panel. ‘Randy!’ Harper said, as he swung himself up through the doorway. ‘Does fifteen hundred bucks not even buy us a meet and greet?’

There was silence from the cockpit, and as Harper looked towards it, he saw that the Texan was slumped forward over the joystick. A small round hole had been punched through the back of his head and the bullet, exiting through his face, had blown his blood and brains all over the instruments.

Harper froze for a millisecond and then span around to get out of the aircraft and back to the car. There was no time to lose.

‘What’s up with…?’ Scouse started to say as he tried to clamber up after Harper and instead found him coming the other way at top speed.

‘Back! Get back in the car NOW!’ Harper shouted and dived for the doorway himself, almost bowling Scouse over as he hesitated for a fraction of a second before jumping down again. As Harper emerged from the plane, he heard the noise of engines and saw the two Landcruisers he had seen earlier come racing around the crumbling airstrip buildings. They roared across the airstrip towards them. Harper jumped into the Mercedes and was already revving the engine as Scouse scrambled into the passenger seat, and he was in second gear before Scouse had managed to slam the door shut.

There was the sound of gunfire and rounds began kicking up puffs of dust from around them as Harper accelerated away. He was cursing himself for not trusting his instincts when he’d seen the Landcruisers passing their lying up place earlier on. Relying on his instincts had kept him alive before and he was bitterly aware that having ignored them now, might just have cost him his life.

He was certain that the rough landing strip and dirt track they were driving along would make accurate shots from a moving vehicle almost impossible, but just in case, he kept swerving the Mercedes from side to side as he burned up the strip with the Landcruisers close on his tail. The men in the back of them were leaning on the roof of the cabs to try and steady themselves as they fired their rifles at the Merc.

Going flat out, Harper picked his moment and suddenly threw the car into a screaming handbrake turn. He reached across to the wrong side of the steering wheel with his right hand, then jerked it hard right with that hand, while hauling on the handbrake for a split second with his left and then switching to the gear shift as he stamped on the clutch, changed down and then hit the accelerator again. The Merc skidded and fish-tailed as the tyres struggled for grip on the dirt, then roared away, back past the Landcruisers. Their drivers, slow to react at first, skidded past the Merc with screeching brakes and then lurched around to follow Harper. One of the gunmen in the back lost his balance and tumbled over the side of the Landcruiser into the dirt, but his comrades simply abandoned him there, speeding off after the Mercedes.

As Harper approached the dirt road leading off the airstrip, he glimpsed the body of the fuel pump attendant, half hidden behind the fuel bowser. There was no time to spare him another thought as they hit the dirt road, trailing a dust cloud as they tried to out-run their pursuers. There was a crack as a bullet smacked through the back window, starring the glass before striking the metal frame of the passenger seat and ricocheting away to bury itself in the upholstery of the back seat.

Scouse slid down, trying to hide himself on the floor of the footwell. ‘It was a lucky shot,’ Harper said. ‘No one can fire aimed shots from a vehicle bouncing around like those two are.’

‘Lucky shots kill people too,’ Scouse said, remaining half-crouched on the floor. ‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Apart from the obvious? The Merc should be a good bit faster than them providing we don’t try to go cross-country, so we should be able to out-run them but we can’t risk staying on this road or in this car for too long. If they’ve got any comms - and I’m sure they will - they’ll already be reporting in and before long their mates will be setting up an ambush or a road block.’

‘So how do we get out of here?’

‘Well the obvious ways would be to pick up one of the main roads and either head west past La Paz and make a run for the Peruvian border, or south-west towards Chile. But if we want to stay alive, obvious is the last thing we need to be. If they don’t find a way to intercept us on the way there, they could certainly find a means to have us stopped at the frontier. And if we try to drive to the Argentinean, Paraguayan or Brazilian borders it’s going to be a couple of thousand kilometres drive to get to any of them. But we’ve got a couple of other options.’

He was still driving flat out as he spoke and checking his rear view mirror to keep watch on the pursuers, who were slowly but steadily dropping back, but he was also scanning the way ahead for any sign of impending trouble from that direction.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Alternatives. Always assuming we can stay ahead of those guys, we can loop around and head broadly west, passing north of La Paz and then trying to make for Lake Titicaca. We could buy or steal a boat with an outboard, or a dugout canoe or even one of those ones made out of woven reeds, and try to paddle up or across the lake until we’re in Peruvian territory, because the lake straddles the border. The only problems are that it is a very big lake - it’s 120 miles long - so we’d have to cover quite a distance, and there’s no hiding place out on the water, so we’d be dangerously exposed and very vulnerable if the cartel’s thugs came after us. As well as aircraft, they use fast speedboats to transport their cocaine, so they wouldn’t even have to shoot us. All they’d have to do is ram us and in the icy waters at this altitude we’d probably be dead from hypothermia before we could reach the shore.’

‘And the other options?’ Scouse said. ‘What if we head south?’

‘Then we’ll be equally exposed as we cross the Altiplano and even if we made it that far, we’d then be heading into a brutally arid region of desert and salt flats. If we break down or run out of petrol there, even if the cartel doesn’t get to us, we’ll die of thirst and wind up as breakfast for the condors because there’s precious little water and nothing much else there for hundreds of miles.

‘If we head east, even supposing we can get through the mountains, we’ll be into prime cartel territory, not just the towns and cities like Santa Cruz where they process the cocaine and launder their money, but the areas where they grow the coca, which is pretty much everywhere else. Even if we somehow manage to get into the jungle in theory we could eventually make our way across the border and into the Mato Grosso in Brazil, but there are thousands of miles of rainforest and jungle rivers to negotiate. Or we could work our way down one of the tributaries of the Amazon in a boat until we reach a large enough town, but whether we stick to the water or try to make our way through the rainforest, a pair of gringos like us will be vulnerable to attack by all sorts of different people, not just the cartel’s sicarios, but illegal loggers, farmers burning the rainforest to plant yet more oil palms or soya beans, and even indigenous tribes trying to protect their traditional lands or fight back against those destroying them. So whichever side of the border we are, gringos won’t be high on anyone’s list of potential best friends, and anyway, since the cartel we’re trying to escape from actually originated in Brazil, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to be heading in that direction.’