the hell is going on?”
“Internal coup for command?” James offered in a whisper. “Could be a blood feud, I guess. Everything is tribal politics this far up in the mountains.”
McCarter nodded. “Let’s try to use the chaos to our advantage.”
They were about fifty yards from the edge of the settlement where thatch and mud hovels surrounded the more built-up areas in a loose ring broken by animal pens. McCarter wiped rain water out of his eyes and looked toward the irrigation ditch that had been his original infiltration route.
He scowled. He wasn’t bursting with anticipation to slide into the muddy, waist-deep water of the ditch. Another burst of submachine gun fire came from the compound’s second story and was answered by two controlled single shots.
He rose from behind the headstone and began moving toward the village proper. Behind him his teammates rose and followed, keeping their formation loose and broken but still maintaining overlapping fields of fire.
The team dodged the open graves, artillery craters and headstones like runners navigating hurdles on the quarter-mile track. The soaked ground swallowed up the impact of their footsteps, spraying water with every step they took.
McCarter reached the round wall of a mud hovel and went around one side of it. He peeked out and saw an unpaved alley running deeper into the village. Bullet holes riddled the wall of one long, low, mud-brick building. A mongrel lay, shot dead, in the weeds beside it.
“I’m going to move forward then wave you up once it’s clear,” he instructed James. The ex-SEAL nodded as Encizo and Manning took up defensive positions to secure the Briton’s infiltration.
McCarter pushed forward. The alley ran past the back of the compound several blocks up. Trash bins lay overturned in the muddy street and rubbish was heaped everywhere. McCarter stayed close to one side of the building and edged his way carefully into the street. His eyes squinted against the rain, searching windows and doorways for any sign of movement.
There was no more gunfire. The rain was even louder adjacent to the structures of the village. It hammered onto shanty roofs of corrugated tin and ran off into makeshift gutters, forming rushing waterfalls that splashed out into the street every few yards. McCarter wiped water from his eyes and stalked farther into the tangle of dank and twisting streets.
He crossed an open area between two one-story buildings and sensed motion. He spun, bringing up his carbine. A black-and-white goat on the end of a frayed rope looked up and bleated at him. The little animal’s fur was matted down with exposure to the rain. There was a little hutch built behind the staked goat. From the doorway of the hutch a slender arm and hand sprawled in the mud. There was a bracelet of hammered metal around the delicate wrist and the fingers had frozen in rigor mortis.
McCarter looked up the street in both directions but saw nothing. He crouched and reached across with his left hand to his right boot and pulled a Gerber Guardian straight blade from his boot sheath. He stepped into the pen, ignoring the squish of mud and shit in the straw under his feet.
The animal bleated again and McCarter shushed it reflexively. He reached down and slid the double-edged blade into the loop of twine around the animal’s neck. He flicked his wrist and severed the rope. The goat walked to the edge of the pen and began munching on the straw that had been out of its reach before.
McCarter slowly sank to one knee. He slid the Gerber back into its boot sheath and bent forward, looking into the hutch. The shadows were deep in the tiny space. He saw the arm running back into the dark. McCarter blinked and the shadow resolved into the shape of a woman.
She was young and dead, with opaque eyes staring out at him. There was a bloody open gash in her forehead where a bullet had punched in. He looked away.
McCarter rose slowly out of his crouch. He heard a man call out several streets over and he froze. The language was French. Someone farther out from that answered him in the same language. Anger made McCarter grit his teeth. He swallowed a lump of bile that had formed like a rock in his throat.
Despite his anger he was more concerned by the mystery of the European voice. He had to keep his mind on the operation, focus his thoughts.
The men who had murdered this woman were human, just like him. They were killers, just like him. But they were nothing like him, nor he anything like them. To reduce violence to an evil unto itself, without regard to the circumstances that spawned it, was a philosophical arrogance McCarter could not stomach.
Securing his grip on the butt of his pistol, he walked over to the edge of the animal pen between the two houses and looked out into the narrow street. The incessant rain dimpled the puddles with the weight of its falling drops. He opened a little gate and stepped out into the street, leaving it open behind him.
He crouched, turned and made eye contact with James, who nodded. As his Phoenix Force colleagues shuffled forward behind him he hunted the darkness for unfamiliar shapes. The team had stumbled onto the middle of something, he knew, and he needed to get a handle on it and fast.
Once Phoenix Force was in position he began to move toward the compound, walking quickly with his weapon ready. He reached the edge of a round, one-story silo and looked carefully around it. A short passageway between buildings linked the main street with the secondary alley McCarter now navigated.
About twenty yards down a man stood with his back to McCarter. The ex–SAS commando narrowed his eyes in suspicion. The man wasn’t dressed like a rough mountain tribesman. He wore a night suit bristling with all the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the modern special-operations soldier. For some reason only night-vision goggles were missing.
McCarter lifted his carbine in a slow, smooth gesture. He straightened his arm and placed the sights squarely on the occipital lobe of the terrorist soldier’s skull. His finger curled around the trigger of the carbine and took up the slack.
The combatant looked to his left and lifted a fist above his head in some prearranged signal. McCarter shuffled sideways across the narrow mouth of the alley, his weapon tracking the man’s back with every step as he moved.
Once on the other side of the alleyway, McCarter slid around a corner and put his back against the wall and turned his face back toward the dirt lane he had just crossed. He drew the Beretta 92-F in an even, deliberate motion. He held the pistol up so that the muzzle was poised beside the hard plane of his cheek bone. He bent slightly at the knee and crouched before risking a glance around the edge of the building.
He looked over to where James was crouched motionless behind cover. He put a finger to his lips in a pantomime for quiet then pointed at his own eyes and at the European operative. James nodded once.
McCarter prepared for his kill.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dominican Republic
The sawmill squatted on the banks of the Ozama River. Silent as a mausoleum, the building stood surrounded by warehouses and industrial structures now fallen dark, or burned to rubble in the wake of successive riots and civil unrest. Rain fell, dirty gray from the sky.
Rosario Blancanales drew his mouth into a tight line. He scanned the building and the area around it through his night-vision goggles, searching for telltale smeary silhouettes in the monochromatic green of the high-tech device. He saw nothing. The sounds of traffic came to him from the other areas of the city, muted across the distance. Close
