The sniper rifle fell silent, and while this would have been excellent news while they were in the building, now Court found the silence disconcerting. He didn’t know where the person or persons were on the hillside, and he was pushing nearly blindly through the thick jungle and did not want to run into them.
—
After fifteen minutes of slow movement through the foliage on the hillside in the direction of the pickup Court had stashed nearby, he and Caprice arrived at a washed-out road that led down the hill. He knew the truck was probably another forty or fifty meters on, parked along the main road, and somehow he hadn’t passed this track when he and Juan Carlos infiltrated the area over an hour earlier. He knelt at the edge of the trees, brought his FLIR to his eye, and scanned to the left and right.
To the left, not more than twenty meters away, a soft glow in his optic told him something registering heat was there. It took a few seconds to focus on it, but when he did, he determined he was looking at a pickup truck, its warm engine cooling quickly, coming down to the temperature of the warm night. In another twenty minutes or so it wouldn’t have even registered in his infrared scope.
But it wasn’thispickup, and there was no one around it.
A thought occurred to him, so he panned all the way to his right, back up the washed-out dirt road and up the hill. Caprice stirred next to him, but he put a hand on her arm to silence her, because he sensed immediate danger.
He stopped his pan when he found what he was looking for.
The heat signatures of two figures moving in the brush on the other side of the dirt track, struggling down the steep hill. They were picking their way along, not taking the road itself, presumably because they knew, or at least suspected, that squirters had made it out of the restaurant and might still be somewhere in the woods.
But Court noticed something off about the two of them, and for this reason he didn’t feel the fear he would normally feel encountering a sniper team in the darkness.
Both figures appeared to be injured.
They were both male, and the man in front had a long rifle on his back and a pistol in his right hand, but the weapon was down at his waist, and his left hand clutched his right elbow. He wasn’t exactly stumbling through the thick woods, but he seemed a lot more focused on the injury to his arm than on the way forward, and he leaned against trees from time to time as he passed them.
Just a few meters behind him, a second man had a short-barreled rifle of some sort, and it swung in his right hand, but the man limped, nearly dragging his left leg behind him.
Either Court or JC had hit both of these men while firing up the hill in the initial engagement. They were wounded, the spotter worse than the sniper, apparently.
It was clear to Court that this sniper team was not part of the drunk gangsters who’d arrived in trucks. Obviously both units were coordinating in some fashion, but Court suspected he was looking at Nicaraguan military or intelligence officers.
He didn’t give a shit who they were; he was going to kill them.
It would take another thirty seconds for the pair to make it to the other side of the track from Court’s position, and by then he knew he’d be able to see them, their silhouettes anyway, without the FLIR. He stowed the scope in his bag, then lifted his rifle and brought it to his shoulder.
Caprice leaned into his right ear. “What…what are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m dropping these two motherfuckers.”
“No,” she whispered, her voice tight and tense. “It will make noise. Those other men will know we’re here. Just let them leave.”
Court began aiming at the rear target. “We need their vehicle. It will save us another fifteen minutes of moving through the jungle.”
“But these men…they are not Renazca. They are soldiers. Or else they are DDI. Either way, they are with the Nicaraguan government.”
Court spoke as he sighted in on the first man. “Theywere, anyway.”
“No,” she whispered again. “Let them go. It will be easier that way.”
Court ignored her and fixed his sights on the man in the back. He was the most badly injured, but his rifle could get up into the fight faster and cause more stress for Court than the sniper’s handgun, so Court decided to drop him first.
Just as Caprice whispered “No” yet again, Court flipped the selector switch on the rifle from safe to semiauto and fired a single round, hitting the silhouette of the man fifteen meters away in the left temple. He rocketed sideways; gear flew out of his pack as he spun, then he slammed into the ground in the thick brush, but Court had moved his sight off him before the body stilled.
The second man spun towards the sound of the gunfire and swung his pistol up, held in the hand at the end of his injured arm, but Court had him dead to rights in an instant.
His rifle boomed again, one shot, and this man took it in the chest and dropped down into a sitting position, his back against a tree.
The American shot him again through the skull, rose, and ran out onto the dirt track. He covered the distance to the two men quickly and arrived to find the spotter lying still on his left side, facing away. The sniper, in contrast, was faceup, somehow still alive, struggling to pull his pistol from the ground on his right side with his left hand.
Court shot the man through the forehead, ending the man’s struggle.
One more shot into the back of the spotter’s neck as an insurance round, and then Court pulled out his tactical light.
