islands. A slip at this point, and even if the men survived the fall—highly unlikely—they wouldn’t last a minute in the raging cascade.
Countless little creeks trickled along the steep hillsides like silver veins feeding life into the body of the tropical island, and the air became redolent with the rich smells of wild orchids and rotting fruit. Thankfully, the parrots could no longer be seen or heard. Then both men jerked as a monkey dropped from the trees overhead to land on the hood of the truck. The little animal screeched at them angrily, then scampered away, leaving a foul mess on the polished metal.
“I hate those fucking things,” Julio snarled, lowering the barrel of his weapon.
“Then go live in Miami,” Esteban suggested, curling a lip around the cigarette. “Get a skinny blond girl, pierce your ear and pretend you’re from Cuba.”
His brother’s reply consisted entirely of four-letter words.
Chuckling in amusement, Esteban slowed the truck as he found the next turnoff, and thankfully put the dangerous river behind them. Now they only had to worry about the men they had been hired to kill. Probably DEA agents. Everybody hated those.
As they moved deeper into the mountains, the road became dirt, a path of crushed plants with a few rusting metal poles here and there to mark the trail. Eventually, the brothers had to consult a map, and finally use a GPS receiver to get their exact location and to locate the isolated valley they wanted.
The foolish American DEA agents had actually asked for directions to this valley from the local police. Idiots! The brothers didn’t have any of the law officers in their pocket, but their sister was the radio dispatcher, and cops liked to chat among themselves. Everything the police knew, the Miguel brothers soon learned. The arrangement was expensive—their sister charged a fortune for her services—but her flow of information had saved their lives and kept them out of prison many times in the past. A short burst of hot lead given to an eyewitness was much more economical than paying a million pesos to some San Juan law firm.
“This is as close as we can go,” Esteban said, easing the truck to a halt below a poinciana bush. The plant rose thirty feet tall, its twisted branches spreading outward to form a fiery umbrella of impossibly bright red flowers. As he turned off the engine, the eternal sound of the jungle could be heard, rustling leaves, the tiny coqui frogs singing their mating song, and dripping moisture. Endless dripping.
“We’re here, amigos!” Julio called, thumping a fist twice on the wooden wall separating the cab from the cargo area.
There came the clank of a bolt disengaging, and the rear doors swung open wide, exposing a group of armed men. While two stood guard, the rest jumped out, stretching their limbs and yawning after the long confinement. Then the guards closed the doors from inside and worked the bolts once more.
“How much are we getting paid for this?” one of the men asked, squinting at the dense greenery all around. His boots sank a good inch into the carpet of soft moss that covered the land.
The leaves of a banyon tree moved and a huge spider crawled into view with a wiggling lizard in its mandibles. The colossal insect crouched as it prepared to jump at the men, then scuttled away into the gloom.
“Not enough,” another man replied curtly, easing his grip on the AK-47 assault rifle. “I hate the fucking jungle!”
Several other men agreed with the sentiment, and one of them spit in disgust.
“Shut up,” Julio snapped, climbing down from the cab. “No more chatter until the job is done. And no smoking! That’s an order.”
The group of men grumbled softly, but complied. The bosses knew their stuff. The mercs had been in business for a long time and put a lot of people into the ground while the Miguel brothers were still alive and making steady money. It was hard to argue with that kind of success. Alive and rich was a winning combination.
“All right, let’s spread out and find these fools and their secret warehouse,” Esteban directed, loudly yanking back the bolt on an ungainly M-60 machine gun. The M-60 had been phased out of service by the U.S. military, replaced with the much lighter and faster M-249. But Esteban liked the big gun. The ventilated barrel and dangling ammo belt made it look as impressive as hell, and it threw down a thundering storm of .308 long AP rounds. The body armor of DEA agents stopped 9 mm rounds, and even .357-caliber bullets, but the oversize .306 armor-piercing rounds blew through the armor as if it were a banana leaf.
“Should be a couple of hundred yards to the north of here,” Julio added, slinging an M-2 satchel charge across his back. “If we find the mainlanders, do nothing. Let them go inside the warehouse, then we’ll blow it and do both jobs at the same time.”
“What’s the place look like?” a short man asked, thumbing a 40 mm round into the grenade launcher of the Russian assault rifle.
Tucking the sawed-off shotgun into a holster along his leg, Julio snorted. “What is this, downtown New York?” he snapped, picking up the Uzi machine gun. “We find a building, that’s the one we want. Let’s move out!”
Nodding agreement, the mercs checked their weapons and started along the crude path, their Kalashnikovs sweeping the lush greenery for targets.
Time passed slowly and the two hundred yards gradually became three, then four hundred. Suddenly the jungle broke and the group of men found themselves on a mossy escarpment overlooking a wide, swampy valley. Mist moved along the watery surface and bats hung from the banyon like grotesque fruit. There was no sign of any building, only dank muck and boiling swarms of buzzing insects.
“You sure we went in the right direction?” Julio demanded softly, scowling at the primordial morass in annoyance.
Resting the M-60 on a shoulder, Esteban pulled out the GPS receiver and checked the indicator again. “Yeah, this is it,” he said slowly. “But there’s nothing here, and never has been. So what the…oh shit.” He dropped the receiver and used both hands to swivel the M-60 at the dense jungle.
“It’s a trap!” Julio yelled, dropping to one knee and spraying the nearest greenery with a burst from the Uzi.
Snarling a curse, Esteban cut loose with the M-60, the big rounds chewing a path of destruction through the moist foliage. Instantly the rest of their crew hosed streams of copper-jacketed rounds in random directions, the spent brass from the chattering Kalashnikovs flying everywhere. The leaves violently shook in the dripping trees and birds erupted into the sky even as bloody monkeys tumbled dead to the mossy ground. Hot lead was poured into every bush and flowering tree, even the stagnant pools of water far below. But nobody fired back or shouted out in pain.
After a moment Julio called a halt and listened intently. The gunfire echoed along the swampy valley, but other than that, there was only silence. The jungle was momentarily still from the thundering barrage of military ordinance.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Esteban whispered nervously, digging into the nylon bag at his side to extract a spare belt of fresh rounds. With fumbling hands, he flipped open the breech and tossed away the last few remaining inches of linked cartridges, then laid in the new belt of fifty rounds.
Watching the greenery for anything suspicious, Julio licked dry lips. “Don’t know, don’t care,” he stated forcibly. “Everybody back to the truck!”
Dropping spent clips, the mercenaries reloaded on the run, charging through the strangely quiet jungle. As the VW truck came into view,
