Havoc - Softcover

[1] A SPOOK IN PARADISE
IF THERE’S ONE THING .tine work it’s how to spot field surveillance as naturally as picking the occasional Latino flea that insists on camping out in the southern hemisphere of yours truly while I enjoy an early-morning beer buzz in my hammock on this remote beach in El Salvador, Central America.
The yacht slowly cruises beyond the surf for the fourth time in the past hour, pretending to be just another tourist rig enjoying a beautiful day in paradise.
But I know better.
No one knows where I headed following my touchy-feely departure from Langley. At least no one is supposed to know. But there are ways, if one’s really hard-boiled about it.
And that, of course, leads me to another thing I got out of my joyful twenty-five years as a spy: a hell of a fan club—the long list of sleazeballs across three continents who would just love to go to work on me with a blowtorch, superglue, and a pair of gerbils.
The yacht continues on its merry way as if nothing is wrong, .ping my socks in spite of the two cervezas frias I had for breakfast.
Locating field surveillance is the bread and butter of my profession—or perhaps I should say of my former profession, though once a spook always a spook. No one who operated in the field for any length of time can ever forget the ins and outs of not just noticing a tail but also beating it, losing those following you so you can then meet safely with an informant or leave a package for an agent—something called a drop in my past life.
.veillance, you develop this sixth sense, the feeling that you’re being watched even though you physically can’t see the .ing you, waiting for you to make a mistake, trying to use you to find the informant that you’re running to gather intel on.
And that old familiar feeling is now rushing through my alcohol-thinned blood, uncurling the hairs of my ass.
No one should know where I am, but the possibility that someone did manage to track me down to this tiny republic now sticks in my mind like the barnacles on the hull of the piece-of-shit fishing boat I bought from the same Salvadoran peddler who sold me the rusting pickup truck and the flea-.front condo for the past eight months.
I perform another mental check of the extremes that I went through to cover my tracks, to prevent some bounty hunter from sniffing my scent as I headed south of the—
The sand explodes to my immediate left, and before my mind has a chance to catch up with that, a second silent round smacks the trunk of one of the two palm trees holding up my hammock.
Sudden terror suddenly grips my intestines tighter than cheap Salvadoran food, but before I know it the dormant operative in me wakes up and takes over, displacing the visceral fear, .ging my plumbing by super-gluing my pee hole and my ass, watching me explode through my mouth, nose, and ears after a couple of immensely painful days without draining the dew or making caca.
.quoise sea extending as far as the eye can see, surprising me after such a long period of inactivity. Before I know it I have dragged my half-drunk ass off the cushy hammock and am racing barefoot toward the tree line bordering this piece of paradise I leased from the Salvadoran government eight months ago.
My mouth going dry, my lungs and legs burning from the sudden sprint, my shoulder blades aching from tension, and my mind automatically guessing the direction of the shots, I race the other way, zigzagging while kicking up sand, also .retta 92FS, the 9mm semiautomatic my hard-to-break habits force me to always keep shoved in my shorts, pressed against my spine and covered by the T-shirt of the day. The rest of my extensive wardrobe—a dozen T-shirts of local origin and a handful of cheap shorts—is drying on the clothesline stretched between the side of my trailer and another palm tree next to the weathered Toyota truck from the seventies.
The colorful T-shirts, carefully selected to make sure no one knows where I’m from, flap in the sea breeze as I duck under them on my way to safety, wondering who in the hell is ..ready thought of as a has-been who doesn’t require a real hit man?
But as I continue dashing toward the thicket, kicking sand like a wounded bull from the nearby plaza de toros, I realize .sional.
As another round splinters chunks of wood from the trunk of a palm to my immediate left, I cut right, almost by the tree line, already sweating like a pig from the lack of exercise and excessive drinking. The film of neglect layering my once-flat abdomen bounces slightly with every step.
I enter the trees and ignore the sudden pain broadcast by my bare feet as I stomp over fallen branches, rocks, and other debris littering the ground, struggling to maintain my forward momentum in spite of the dense jungle. My arms and neck join the complaining choir as the vegetation scratches me, as the razor-sharp edges of yuccas and short palm trees have a field day with my exposed forearms. But the operative in me trades off such annoyances in exchange for the opportunity to fight back and perhaps see this through.
When my senses judge that I have waded through roughly a dozen feet of jungle, I swing left, continuing for another thirty or so feet, and then slowly return to the edge of the thicket, using the muzzle of the Beretta to part shrubbery.
I’m safe—at least temporarily—as the jungle surrounds me. But everything comes with a price. The mosquitoes that never venture down to the beach because of the breeze and the heat now buzz around me, settling on my neck, my face. One of the buggers even crawls up my left nostril.
.graph my position.
Feeling the bugs on me and in me, sensing their prickling stings as they start to suck my blood—and hoping the alcohol in my veins bites them back—I detach myself from it all and .ing totally immobile. Except for my eyes, which automatically survey the area, shifting from the trailer, to the truck, to the sea, to the line of flapping T-shirts, to the—
Two men with silenced pistols step out from behind large palm trees just to the right of my trailer, roughly in the same direction that I had guessed the bullets originated from. Slowly, .ace by the sea. They look like locals, short, dark-skinned, with loose trousers and long-sleeve shirts. Even on the beach the .ming, and then few can afford a swimsuit, which means they either strip naked or jump in in their underwear—men, women, and children.
.tino cats. The one leading the search and acting as the leader is quite old, probably in his late fifties, overweight and with thinning gray hair. His companion is roughly twenty years younger, with a military crew cut and athletically built. They’re both wearing dark sunglasses.
My mind is now going in a million directions.
Who are they?
Why are they here?
How did they find me?
Are they associated with the surveillance team on the yacht?
And if someone wishes to terminate me—at least based on the shots taken so far—why send a pair of thugs to do the job of a professional?
Or could they be just thieves? Perhaps they are a couple of porch climbers hoping to find themselves some dollars by killing this Gringo? And are there any more of them?
.brains, Manuel and Pancho.
Why?
Maybe just a gut feeling based on the way they move, on .ner in which they hold their weapons, muzzles often crossing each other’s bodies, index fingers on the triggers even though .tices that have amateur hour written all over them.
Professionals would point weapons skyward and rest their shooting fingers on the trigger casings, and they would never— ever—point the muzzle in their partner’s direction, even while doing a sweep. Muzzle control was taught in Spook 101 at...