State of Emergency (27 page)

A
troop of howler monkeys munched in the wet canopy, soft eyes staring down at the spinning back wheel of the blue Yamaha as it teetered over a football-size stone along the abrupt edge. A hummingbird whirred in the shadows, zipping from plant to plant like a bullet, iridescent green against shades of gray.

A steady rain pattered against dense foliage and hanging moss along the winding, mud-choked Road of Death. Brown streams gurgled through delicate orchids and broom-like ferns. Greenery rose up through thick fog on either side, ghosting through the cloud forest on the mountains above and the sheer drops below.

The Chechens' muddy white Jeep Cherokee sloshed to a stop in the center of the road. There was no shoulder, and even the middle provided little clearance for those getting out on the driver's side of the vehicle.

Three feet below the edge, Quinn pressed his chest against the slick shrubs, feeling them soak through his shirt. Being out of the wind had returned a semblance of warmth to his body. His feet braced against one of the saplings that grew in a small stand along the edge. He clutched another the size of his wrist, bent like a spring under his right arm.

Above him, out of sight, a car door eased shut. Whispered voices barked in guttural Chechen. Footsteps sloshed along the road sending a slurry of mud and gravel skittering over the edge, pelting Quinn's head. His face against the mountain, he waited for the man above to peer over before releasing the sapling he'd pulled with him when he slipped over the edge.

Under tremendous pressure, the arched tree snapped upright, swatting the startled Chechen directly in the face. He staggered backward away from the edge, shouting vehement curses.

Quinn clawed his way through the tangle of slick brush and back onto the road as gunshots cracked to his right.

The man he'd surprised had fallen backwards, landing on the seat of his pants in the mud. Blood poured from his forehead and a nasty gash across the bridge of his beakish nose. A broken branch the size of Quinn's thumb stuck from a wound in his shoulder and a pistol hung loosely in his left hand.

Quinn kicked the weapon from the dazed man's hand, scanning the road for the two others, trusting that Aleksandra was doing the same. A crunch of gravel behind him sent him sprinting again for the mountain edge as the bearded Jeep driver floored the gas and bore down directly on him. The Chechen on the ground screamed as the driver ran over his legs, aimed in on Quinn.

The flat report of two pistol shots cracked the air as Quinn slid over the side, flailing for a handful of branches to keep from tumbling another thousand feet.

Glass shattered and the Jeep's engine revved, gaining speed. Metal groaned as it veered sharply right, glancing off the mountain face to swerve left again. The driver slumped over the wheel, dead from the two well-placed shots to his neck from Aleksandra long before he crashed and rolled through the rocks and trees below.

“Salambek is dead.” Aleksandra nodded toward the canyon as she walked toward the injured Chechen who'd been pressed into a muddy rut by his friend's driving. She held the H&K P7 at her side. “Lucky the driver had the window down,” she said, “or these little bullets might not have penetrated the door.” She spun quickly to shoot the wounded Chechen in the knee. “They do, however go through swine quite easily.”

The man howled in pain, forgetting the bleeding gash on his forehead to clutch at his demolished leg. He was pushing fifty, tall and heavily muscled. His face pulled back in a tight grimace showing a mouthful of gold teeth.

Aleksandra smacked him in the back of the head with her open hand. It was odd to Quinn to see such a small woman exercising such control over such an imposing man.

She spoke in clipped Russian that communicated her disdain for the man. Quinn could tell the Chechen would be difficult to break. He'd likely been on the dispensing end of such questioning before. Aleksandra squatted down beside him, just out of reach, her pistol behind her back.

Quinn understood neither Russian nor Chechen, but he had a pretty good idea what the two were saying. They had no time for a lengthy interrogation. Even as they spoke, Valentine Zamora was getting away. Aleksandra was professional enough to know the man would either talk or he wouldn't. In the end, he spit in her face.

Aleksandra stood and wiped her cheek with her forearm. Despite her small stature, she grabbed the wounded man by the collar of his jacket and dragged him to the edge of the road. He was weak from loss of blood, and though he was defiant to the end, it was little problem for the compact woman to shove him over the edge.

“He kills Russian babies,” Aleksandra said when she wheeled around to face Quinn, as if he needed an explanation for her actions. “I will not waste another bullet.”

“Understood,” Quinn said, already moving to pick up the motorcycle. He'd hoped they'd be able to use the Chechens' Jeep to make it down the mountain, but now that wasn't going to happen. “Did he tell you anything?” Quinn climbed aboard the bike and toed it back into gear. He checked the safety on his 1911 before passing it over his shoulder to Aleksandra, who returned it to the daypack.

“They were supposed to catch up to Zamora and kill him,” she said, throwing a leg over the back of the bike and settling in around his waist.

“After he led them to the bomb?” Seconds counted now, and Quinn was already rolling.

“No,” she said. “He was clear on that. They were to kill Zamora when they caught him, here on the Death Road.”

Quinn grabbed a handful of brake and brought the little Yamaha to a slithering stop. A brown slurry of mud and gravel ran around his mud-caked boots.

“Wait a minute,” he said, turning to look at Aleksandra whose face was just inches away. “You say these men worked for Rustam Daudov?”

“I am sure of it,” she said.

Quinn blinked, letting the words sink in. Turning, he released the brakes, giving the bike as much throttle as the muck would allow.

“That means the Chechens already know where the bomb is,” he yelled. “If they get there before Zamora he's a dead man.”

“Or the bomb is already gone,” Aleksandra said.

T
he incident with the Chechens had cost valuable time. Periodically, the clouds would thin and Quinn caught a glimpse of another vehicle ahead, winding its way along the steep edge of the twisting road as it snaked back and forth, down toward the Amazon Basin.

The lower they went, the thicker and warmer the air became. Quinn found it easier to think and the suffocating panic of near drowning began to seep away. Feeling crept back to his hands and face. Aleksandra too became more animated, looking around to take in the sights rather than ducking in behind him.

Nestled in the rolling hills, the subtropical village of Coroico was a favorite weekend getaway for more well-to-do La Paz residents when they grew weary of the stark, airless Altiplano. They were, in effect, coming down for air.

The clouds parted, revealing a swath of blue as Quinn pointed the little Yamaha toward the edge of town. Two boys of nine or ten walked barefoot, whacking sticks on the ground at the edge of the lonely road. A low sun hung over the tree-covered hills to the west, drawing clouds of steam from the jungle.

The boys stopped, interested in what the two frozen-looking crazy people were doing on a motorcycle in their town. Quinn rolled up beside them.

“How's it going?” Aleksandra said from the back, her voice trilling in perfect Spanish. The dark skin of his Apache grandmother allowed him to blend in, but for all his language ability, this was one he'd never learned to speak. Aleksandra was close enough to Quinn's ear, though, that she was able to give him the gist of their conversation.

The boys waved politely, ducking their heads.

“We're looking for some friends who came in ahead of us,” Aleksandra said. Quinn couldn't help but think of how sweet she could make her voice considering what he'd seen her do just an hour before.

“Which ones?” the smaller of the two boys in a dirty white T-shirt asked.

“Have there been many?”

“Not many,” the boy said. “I hear there was a mudslide and the miners are marching.”

Alexandra translated in quick whispers.

Word traveled fast in the Andes, a fact that Quinn knew they would have to depend on if they wanted to find Zamora.

“Our two friends are traveling together,” Aleksandra said. “One has a tiny mustache like a little mouse.” She made her voice go higher as if she was telling a story. “The other has a flat nose like he fell against a wall.”

The boys laughed at her impressions. Though Quinn didn't understand all the words, he knew who she was talking about with each description. He couldn't help but think she would have made an excellent schoolteacher if she hadn't gone the professional killer route.

“He stopped at my auntie's store for a coffee,” the boy said, smacking his stick against the ground as he spoke. “Then they left for Rurrenabaque.”

“How far away?”

The boy consulted with his friend. “All night at least,” he said, scratching his nose. His friend nodded his head in agreement.

“Are there any airplanes here?” Aleksandra asked.

Laughing at the thought, the boys suddenly looked up the road. “More friends?” the boy in the white T-shirt said.

Quinn turned to see Jacques Thibodaux's big face looking at him from the passenger window of Adelmo's van. Bo leaned forward from the backseat, a broad grin spreading across his face when he saw Aleksandra.

 

 

Valentine Zamora beat on the dashboard with the flat of his hand, cursing at Monagas and ordering him to drive faster. Though not as steep as El Camino de la Muerte, the road from Coroico to Rurrenabaque wound its way deeper and deeper into the jungle, more like a river of thick mud than an actual road. Less than two hundred miles, the trip took nearly ten hours—all night—and Zamora had not slept for a moment.

The sun was just pinking the horizon by the time Monagas rolled the Land Cruiser into the river town of Rurrenabaque, known as simply as Rurren to the locals. It took Monagas less than twenty minutes to rouse a sleeping fisherman and rent his open wooden boat for the river. Zamora rarely used the Beni River camp and had little in the way of staff in the area. He'd thought it better to keep Yesenia and Angelo and a couple of others to guard Pollard and the bomb. Many men would have made it too much of a target.

Once on the boat, he held up his finger to have Monagas wait a moment to start the engine. He took the satellite phone from his pack and punched in the number. Ever the calm adventurer, his hands trembled at being so near his prize.

“
Sí
,” Diego Borregos said, answering the phone.

Zamora had expected the Yemeni.

“We are almost there,” Zamora said.

“Good,” the Colombian said. “I am not so fond of your friends. May I have the location now? I am ready to be rid of them.”

“Of course. But there may be a problem,” he said, thinking of the Chechens. There had been no sign of them either on the road or in the camp, according to Pollard, but one could never be too careful.

“Don't worry so much, my friend.” Borregos laughed. “If you had no problems you wouldn't need my services. I will handle whatever issues I find as long as I can get your friends what they want and be rid of them. Now . . .” The Colombian's voice grew grave. “You pay me for transport along our . . . established routes. Give me the location and I will meet you there.”

The Colombians knew nothing of the bomb itself, thinking only that he was selling arms as he usually did and had had a run-in with his tyrannical father.

Zamora held his breath. In the end, he had to trust someone.

 

Q
uinn's eyes slammed open when the van bounced over a downed log half sunken in the middle of the road. He'd been dreaming about a walk with his daughter and the rutted road provided a rude awakening. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked around to get his bearings. The sun was fully up, but it was still early and the relative cool of night still hung in the trees. Roosters crowed behind a line of shanty houses along the road leading into town. Two blue and gold macaws perched like sentinels high in a gnarled branch, looking more like vibrant jungle ornaments than actual birds.

Aleksandra sat in the back of the van beside Bo, and Thibodaux thumbed through a pamphlet in the front seat beside Adelmo.

Quinn sat up in his middle seat, stretching his back, waiting for the old wounded parts of him to wake up. At thirty-five, the life he had led made the years doubly hard on his body. He turned half around in his seat.

“Have you got any kind of signal?” he asked Aleksandra.

She nodded. “He is on the river.”

Adelmo negotiated with a fisherman to secure a boat and a sack of provisions including bottled water and several dozen
cunapes
, a sort of bulbous Bolivian cheese bread that, Adelmo explained, got its name because it resembled a woman's breast. Thibodaux ate them like popcorn and took to calling them boob biscuits.

The unflappable Aymara driver had become caught up in the chase and offered to come with them downriver for no extra charge. Quinn wouldn't allow it. Where they were going there was bound to be bloodshed. It was bad enough to have Bo along. They paid him well and said their good-byes while they boarded the slender wooden craft that looked like a sort of canoe made of planks from a wooden privacy fence. It proved to be watertight, though, and the little Nissan motor was sound and had them nosed out into the muddy river in a matter of minutes.

“Where are we now with a signal?” Quinn asked, popping the lid on one of the water bottles. As cold as he'd been the day before, he preferred it to the oppressive heat and humidity of the Amazon Basin. He was an Alaskan at heart and always would be.

“My battery is dying and there was no time to charge it,” Aleksandra said. “I have it turned off for the moment, but he was a mile ahead of us when I last checked. Just before we get to that spot, I will check again and so on. Until then we must keep watch.”

Thibodaux sat on an overturned plastic bucket at the tiller, steering away from the muddy bank to head downstream through the low green hills toward the Amazon. A youth spent exploring the Louisiana bayou made him the natural choice to drive the boat.

Three miles from town, the boat slid past a group of chunky capybara grunting in the thick reeds along the bank. A giant ceiba tree grew on a heavily buttressed trunk behind the pig-sized rodents. Hanging moss and aerial ferns hung like decorative feathers from the great tree's crown, spread high above the surrounding canopy. Troops of squirrel monkeys scolded from the surrounding trees. The rolling hills gradually flattened. Flocks of birds wheeled above open marshes and grassy pampas that reached back in pockets surrounded by the black green of seemingly impenetrable rainforest. The jungle crowded closer as they motored farther north. Dense branches drooped along muddy banks, skimming the brown water.

Bo dangled his hands in the water with Aleksandra, who crouched beside him on the floor of the boat.

A sudden pop and a whooshing spray caused everyone on the boat to jump. Quinn's hand fell instinctively to his pistol. He smiled when he saw the patches of slick, rubbery skin break the surface of the water beside the boat.

Thibodaux popped another boob biscuit in his mouth. “That's a good sign,
l'ami
,” he said. “The little book Adelmo's bride gave me said that when you see pink dolphins you don't have to worry about the crocodile caiman things and can go in swimming. Sort of reminds me of home . . . minus the pink dolphins.”

Bo leaned over to take a whiff of his armpits. “I still smell like rosy lilac water.” He grimaced at Jericho, the wind blowing a lock of blond hair across his face. “You, however, ought to jump in. You know how you get when you haven't bathed for two days.”

“We don't have time,” Quinn said. “And besides, just because the caimans are afraid of dolphins doesn't mean the piranhas are.”

Bo jerked his hand out of the water. “I hadn't thought about that.”

“Or how about those teensy little catfish?” Jacques observed around a mouthful of
cunape
. “The som-bitches swim up inside you when you pee underwater and get stuck in there.”

Aleksandra crinkled her freckled nose in disgust. “How do you know this revolting thing?”

Jacques took slug of bottled water. “Jungle training.”

“I didn't know you'd been to jungle training,” Quinn said. “That'll come in handy out here.”

“Truth be told”—Thibodaux grinned—“I haven't really. I saw it in that Tom Berenger
Sniper
movie.”

“Who knows,” Quinn said, looking ahead at the thick foliage along the river. He swatted a mosquito that landed on his forehead. “Maybe that will come in handy too.”