Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (17 page)

In the curious quiet left behind by the departing helicopters, Luke tuned into the sounds around him: the distant bark of a village dog, the soft whoop of an owl, the insistent electronic whine of cicadas as they clung to trees in the nearby forest. The sounds of his Colombian childhood.

They had put down in farmland, just over fifteen kilometres short of the objective, far enough away to avoid detection by García’s perimeter guards, near enough to be able to patrol in on foot. Before they set off, Luke and Martínez huddled beneath a rain-lashed poncho with the recon team, going over the route on the map.

‘
Cuidado aquí
,’ said one, pointing to a stream. ‘Be careful here. One of the farmers says he’s seen García’s people planting mines along the banks.’ Luke and Martínez took careful note: they had both seen what an anti-personnel mine can do to a man’s leg.

Shortly before midnight the team moved off down a path, treading almost noiselessly, spaced ten metres apart, Martínez behind the front man on point, Luke following him. The ground rose and fell, and at times the foliage closed in tight around them, but mostly it was easy going. It was hill country, much of it cleared for grazing, very different from the dense lowland tropical jungle that blanketed so much of southern Colombia. The air was cooler and there was a welcome absence of mosquitoes. The team gave the stream a wide berth and skirted an abandoned farmhouse before entering the forest that overlooked the hacienda of Nelson García, the man they called El Pobrecito.

They had not gone fifty metres into the trees when the commando on point held up his hand and they all sank slowly to one knee. Word was passed down the line in hisses: ‘
Cuerda de trampa.
Tripwire. Right across the path.’ They all knew what that meant. It would most likely be connected to a Claymore, a curved shield packed with plastic explosive that would blast around seven hundred steel ball bearings at everyone in its path. Set one of those off, and the entire patrol would be hit.

Luke conferred briefly with Martínez and it was decided they would take no chances and retrace their footsteps, adding a
necessary hour to the journey. In the dark of pre-dawn, under cover of the rain, they stopped and took up position on a forested hillside. Through a small gap in the trees, the lights of some outbuildings and what looked like a farm down below were just visible. Luke tilted down the night-vision goggles on his helmet and snapped the magnification to the maximum. It took a while for the images to settle down and come into focus but there it was, unmistakably, García’s fortified farm. He checked the layout against the laminated plan in his hand and nodded to Martínez. They would go firm there for the next twenty-four hours, burrowing into the side of the hill, observing, noting routines, numbers of guards, their weapons and changeover times. Only when Luke and the Colombian commandos had a thorough sense of the drug lord’s security precautions would they make their move.

They settled quickly into a routine. Two men on ‘stag’, on lookout, while two crawled forward with high-powered binoculars or night-vision goggles. Four hours on, four hours off. They lit no fires, left no litter, and made almost no sound that could be heard above the constant chorus of tree frogs and cicadas.

‘Sometimes after a mission,’ confided Martínez to Luke, ‘I can’t get that damned noise out of my head.’ Slowly, he unwrapped a strawberry-flavoured boiled sweet, popped it into his mouth and pushed the crumpled wrapper deep inside his breast pocket. ‘I know what you mean,’ concurred Luke, who had stripped down his weapon, oiled it and was now reassembling it in a short respite from the rain.

García’s
finca
, his farm, was well fortified. You didn’t need specialist equipment to see that. It was laid out atop a gently sloping hill, a wall surrounding it. There appeared to be some small hovels clustered around it, rather like those found outside a medieval castle, and Luke was pretty sure he had identified dog kennels, which they would need to take into consideration. After observing for a full twenty-four-hour cycle he and Martínez had done their own counts and come up with the same figure: twenty-six guards, no more than twelve on duty at a time.
Three on the front gate, the others spaced at intervals around the perimeter. They all carried Israeli-made Galil assault rifles, Luke noted, and there was a ‘technical’, a pickup truck with a mounted machine-gun – it looked like a Russian PKM – hidden just behind the guardhouse on the gate. A paved road led from there down the hill, through a wood and towards a distant village. They could not detect any pedestrian traffic, but twice they watched a convoy of two vehicles leave the compound and return, García in the rear, his bodyguards in front.

To Luke it felt strange, and almost wrong, not to be reporting in all these details, feeding them up the chain of command to appear in some intelligence officer’s situational briefing on ‘Enemy Forces’. But, of course, he couldn’t do that now. He looked at his watch. In around twelve hours he was supposed to be meeting John Friend at the check-in desk at Bogotá airport for the 23.05 Avianca flight to London. That was not looking too likely. But Luke had made a contingency plan. If he was still on this mission at 1000 hours then the Jungla commander on the base would call Friend, assure him all was fine and buy Luke some more time.

On the evening of the second day Martínez and Luke conferred once more, this time beneath Luke’s basha, the thin stretched camouflage-pattern tarpaulin that was keeping most of the rain off them. They spoke quietly, despite the rain.

‘So we know García travels in a convoy of two cars,’ began Luke, brushing a trickle of rain off his cheek. Just beyond the basha the fronds of a fern were trembling with the onslaught of rain, and rivulets of mud streamed past them down the hill. It was impossible to stay dry in this, and Martínez had expressed concern that it was only a matter of time before one of the team was sneezing. It was time to firm up their final plan for the snatch.

‘The chassis on their vehicles are so low to the ground we’ve got to assume they’re armour-plated,’ continued Luke, ‘and you’ve got the kit to deal with that. His close protection team travels in front, we’ve established that, and both the drivers will
have done defensive driving courses. My guess is they’re Colombian ex-military.’

‘It happens.’ Martínez shrugged. ‘You should see my pay cheques,
amigo
. My wife complains every month!’ Luke laughed with him. In the short time he had worked with the officer he had grown to like and respect him. Dead professional on the things that mattered, yet he didn’t sweat the small stuff. A man after Luke’s own heart.

‘So, the way I see it,’ continued Luke, sketching out a diagram of the fortified farm and the road that led from it, ‘there’s only one place his convoy has to slow down and that’s here.’ He jabbed a finger at a bend in the road just before it crossed a stream. ‘We’re going to need to set the main charge right there, beneath the lead vehicle. We’ll have to get our own Claymores pre-positioned and the M60 machine-gun to try to punch through the armour plating. That should take care of Vehicle One.’

Martínez was nodding. A veteran of several such operations, he was under no illusion as to the risks. ‘You know that by this stage in the plan those sons of bitches are going to come swarming out of the farm like ants?’

‘Yes, they will,’ agreed Luke, ‘so we need two of your guys set up with the M60 where they’ve got a free field of fire, right across the front wall of the farm. This is not going to be pretty.’

‘And you?’ Martínez raised an eyebrow. ‘Because, I tell you, my bosses will hang me out to dry, Señor Carlton, if you get hit. I have orders to keep you safe!’

‘We can argue about that when it’s over,’ replied Luke. ‘I’ll take care of myself. You just concentrate on the prize: García. He’ll be boxed in by then and he’ll want to go down fighting – you may have to use the Taser.’

‘Timings?’ asked Martínez.

‘H hour will be oh five hundred local. We need all your team in place by then, ready for García’s oh six thirty convoy out. That’s if they follow their routine.’

‘And if they don’t?’

‘We wait. If it’s two cars we execute the plan. If it’s three we
abort and come back the next day. We’ll need that extraction by Blackhawk thirty minutes after we launch – and make sure they’ve got a medic onboard.’

‘
Claro
,’ Martínez grunted. He was about to get up when he gave Luke a light slap on the back. ‘I like your plan,’ he said simply.

Now Luke gripped his arm. ‘Martínez? Don’t forget the plasticuffs and sandbag. We’re taking this bastard alive.’

AN HOUR AFTER
dawn a cloak of mist still hung about the gullies and ravines of Ituango. For a few brief minutes the sun broke through, bouncing off the tin-roofed livestock pens and lighting up the whitewashed walls of houses down in the valley. At least, reflected Luke, it had stopped raining for the first time in two days. They had been in position now for more than an hour, Martínez and the rest of the snatch team, with Luke a short distance from them, where he could control the action and issue orders.

The adrenalin that had coursed through their veins as they crept down from their hillside hideout in the forest to the ambush site by the bend in the road had given way to something else. Not quite boredom but certainly frustration. Nothing was stirring at the farm, and the only sound was the murmur and burble of the stream that flowed nearby. Perhaps, after all, today was not the day.

But the Jungla commandos remained poised and alert, their index fingers extended flush with the trigger guards on their US-supplied M4 assault rifles, waiting for the order to engage. For some reason that Luke could never quite figure out, his body had its own way of dealing with a long wait. The scarred knuckle of his middle finger would start to ache in the place where the Taliban bullet had taken it clean off a couple of years back. He rubbed it now, straining his eyes and ears for any movement from the farm three hundred metres up the road.

‘Señor Carlton!’ One of the Jungla police commandos crouched beside him and gripped his arm to alert him but Luke had already seen it. The farm’s reinforced gate had swung open. First one, then another car nosed out of the compound and drove towards their concealed position. A pair of customized black 4x4s, low to the ground, almost certainly armour-plated, probably bullet-proof glass. The gangster’s choice. They seemed to be in no hurry, which puzzled Luke but he spoke calmly into his mouthpiece, reminding every member of the team through their headset not to jump the gun. ‘
Espera
,’ he told them. ‘Wait.’ Timing was everything: he needed the convoy to pass the exact spot before he gave the command. Two hundred metres . . . one hundred metres . . . The gap between them was closing and still the vehicles were not speeding up. Fifty metres . . . and . . . ‘Execute!’ shouted Luke into his head-mike. He braced himself instinctively for the hot blast of a remotely detonated explosion followed by the ear-splitting cacophony of automatic gunfire when his team would open up on the lead vehicle.

Nothing happened.

In a sickening moment, Luke knew immediately that this was no accident. It wasn’t just that the device buried in the road had failed to detonate: it was the fact that no one was firing. And now both vehicles had stopped in front of them. ‘
Disparar!
Shoot!’ he ordered into the head-mike, but the response was silence. His team had vanished. As if watching a film in slow motion Luke saw the doors of the second car swing open and two men step out.

They were in no hurry at all. Nelson García was a big man, his chest made bulkier by the Kevlar body armour he wore beneath his tailored hunting jacket. Now he was looking straight in Luke’s direction, as if he knew where he was hiding. His voice boomed across the few metres between them.

‘You can stand up now, Señor Carlton,’ he called. ‘Your stupid games are over.’

Luke’s training kicked in. Fight or flight? His finger was on the trigger and he had less than a second to decide. And in that
moment, he knew the decision had been taken out of his hands. From out of the undergrowth around him gunmen appeared, scruffy, unshaven, heavily armed, training their weapons on him. García’s men. It was a hopeless situation and he knew it. He might be lucky and take a couple with a quick burst but then it would be over: they would cut him down in seconds. Luke placed his weapons on the ground and raised his arms. Who had betrayed them? Surely not Martínez. He felt sick.

The second man from García’s vehicle stepped forward and stood beside the drug lord, smoothing the creases in his police uniform.

‘What the fuck . . .’ Luke was almost lost for words.

It was Major Elerzon, the chief of police in Tumaco.

COLD AND BORING.
That was how Luke remembered his teens. Almost five years on from the accident that had killed his parents, his life had not turned out as he had hoped. Still blaming himself for what had happened that day in Colombia, he was growing up fast on his uncle’s farm in Northumberland. By his fourteenth birthday he knew a lot about sheep. He could help deliver lambs in the freezing dawn of an April morning on the moors and could tell from a hundred yards off if one of the flock was infected with parasitic flukes. Older than his cousins by several years, he had been given the one-day-all-this-will-be-yours speech and had worked hard to show his gratitude. He knew that, after what had happened to his parents in South America, he was lucky to have a family to take him in and treat him like a son of their own. There had been nothing on the windswept patch of northern English farmland he couldn’t do.

But what Luke really liked to do, when he had finished his jobs around the farm, was to hang a rucksack on his back and set out through the heather to a place called Otterburn. It was a military training area, its sixty thousand acres of wild, rain-lashed hills and fenced-off forestry blocks home to one of the largest live firing ranges in Britain. When the bullets were zipping across the valleys, and tiny, distant figures moved slowly across the landscape, fourteen-year-old Luke Carlton was not put off by the red danger
flags or the stern ‘Keep Out’ signs. He would jump over the stone wall to hide where he could watch without being seen, making his own judgements about where was safe and where was not. It was a game he played, lying low, concealing himself deep in the heather, then bringing out a notebook and binoculars and noting down everything he could see. On certain days, he would watch them firing the MLRS, the great batteries of multiple launch rocket systems that could deluge an area the size of a football pitch with high explosives in just a few seconds. But mostly he envied the men on foot, sprinting and ducking among the rough terrain, rifles cradled in their hands, shouting commands, taking cover, crawling, their faces streaked with paint and mud.