“Can you see out the back?” he asked.
“A little bit.”
“Anybody moving around back there?”
“Not yet.”
It was foolish for the drunk guys in the trucks to forget to surround the location, Court determined, but then he understood.
These were gang members, drunk, not trained soldiers. They wouldn’t understand that although the men on the hillside might have had line of sight on the rear of the building, they wouldn’t be able to target someone who made it all the way to the base of the hill.
Still, what the Renazco gang gave up in tactical acumen, they intended to make up for in sheer numbers and wild enthusiasm, so he knew he had to move now if he and the agent had a chance in hell of getting out of here.
“Okay,” he said, “now that we’re not returning fire out front, they’ll surround us.”
She said, “So we have to run!”
Court raised his own head quickly, then looked out the window. He dropped back down, putting his back to the wall, and she did the same. He said, “If we can make it to that low fence, get on the other side, we can move laterally all the way to the jungle. The sniper in the building above us won’t have an angle on us anymore.”
“Yeah, but we have to cover thirty meters to get to that fence.”
Court reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of smoke grenades. “I want you holding on to my belt for the entire run. We get to that metal fence, we just roll over and fall on the other side.”
“What’s on the other side?”
“Whatever’s there, I’ll take it over a bullet in the chest.”
“Bueno. Okay.”
He opened the back door and stood to the side. Immediately the loud report of a sniper rifle boomed from the hillside. He tossed both grenades out, one farther than the other, and then he dove back into the room, just before another crack of the rifle one hundred meters away echoed, and the wooden wall next to the door, exactly where Court had been standing, splintered.
This sniper had determined in an instant where Court had been when he threw open the door.
Ideally, Court would have liked to give the smoke grenades a full thirty to forty-five seconds to spew the thick obscurant, but he was as worried about the drunk armed wild men at the front of the property as he was about the single weapon operated by the small sniper team at the back.
He counted to twenty in his head, then grabbed Caprice, and they rushed towards the door and into the growing cloud just beyond it.
Wild shooting inside the shack told him the gangsters were just behind them, so he raced out the door, halfway expecting to take a heavy round to the forehead.
There were different schools of thought on how to run through gunfire, even among tier-one-level operators. Some zigzagged, and some preferred the flat-out straight-line approach.
Court was normally a direct kind of guy, but he gave the shooter on the hillside credit for what he’d accomplished so far, and figured that without any new information about where Court and Caprice were, he’d just fire in a straight line along the shortest route to cover.
So Court zigged and zagged with the woman through the dense smoke as booming rifle rounds echoed; Caprice held him from behind and kept up well at first, but then she stumbled right after a shot echoed in the small yard behind the restaurant.
Court thought she’d been hit at first; he slowed and turned to help her, though he could not see her through the smoke, but immediately she crashed into him and he realized she remained on her feet and was still running forward.
The American adjusted, turned back, and ran alongside her, and soon the two of them made it to the rusty corrugated metal fence, only about four feet high.
He went over first, splashing into a low, fetid ditch on the other side; his rifle sling around his neck caught a fence post and hung him up there as Caprice splashed down just behind him.
He unfucked his sling; put the weapon behind him, over his shoulder;covered the woman with his body for a second; then felt all over her. “Are you shot?”
“No!” she shouted, pushing his hands away. She fumbled with her own weapon; he could just make out her face, and he saw that she remained terrified but alert.
They had cover from the sniper, and some cover from the darkness and the red smoke still billowing from the two canisters at the rear of the restaurant, so they rose to a crouch and began racing, back in the direction of their truck.
Gunfire boomed behind them, but Court heard no rounds zipping overhead or impacting the flora nearby, so he figured the drunk gang of killers at the restaurant were just riddling Juan Carlos’s dead body or firing at phantom targets in another direction.
