Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target
Mission One: Redeemer

Also by Chris Ryan

Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

Mission One: Redeemer

Mission Two: The Rock

Mission Three: Die Trying

Mission Four: Fallout

Non-fiction

The One That Got Away

Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book

Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide

Fight to Win

Fiction

Stand By, Stand By

Zero Option

The Kremlin Device

Tenth Man Down

Hit List

The Watchman

Land of Fire

Greed

The Increment

Blackout

Ultimate Weapon

Strike Back

Firefight

Who Dares Wins

The Kill Zone

Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target
Mission One: Redeemer

Chris Ryan

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Coronet

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

1

Copyright © Chris Ryan 2010

The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781444708530

Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

Contents

Also by Chris Ryan

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

‘There was never a good war, or a bad peace.’

Benjamin Franklin

1

Stevenage, UK. 17.00 hours.

His phone rang.

Joe Gardner’s phone never rang. When you lived off the grid, people soon forgot you even existed.

Not many people knew Gardner’s name any more. Few enough that he was curious to know who was reaching out to him. He looked at the screen.

+00551171674519.

It was a number he didn’t recognize.

And a voice he did.

‘Mate, you’ve gotta help me,’ someone shouted above a clatter of gunfire. The signal was weak. ‘They’re on my fucking case. Came out of nowhere. Millions of the fuckers. It’s like vintage Baghdad.’

‘John? Is that you, mate? You’re breaking up.’

‘We’ve called for backup but no one’s arrived yet. Thumbs up bloody arses. You remember the Afghan, don’t you? Now I’m in deep shit, Joe. You’ve gotta help me out.’

Gardner reached for his fake left hand with his good right. Afghanistan. The IED blowing up in his face. Smoke melting away, an exposed nub where his left hand was supposed to be, blood pumping out like oil from a burst pipe. John Bald it was who’d radioed in for a medevac under enemy fire. Saved Gardner’s life. He owed Bald. Big time.

‘Where the fuck are you?’

A pause for breath.

‘John?’

He remembered the kid next to him. Twenty-one years old, his legs ripped off at the thigh, femur bones jutting out like a couple of split baseball bats. And the pints of blood – as if he’d been washing in a forty-gallon drum topped up with the stuff.

‘Barbosa favela. Middle of fucking Rio de Janeiro. My location is my Troop times forty north, your Troop times twenty west from the Christ statue. Get here as soon as you can, Joe.’

‘Mate, what’s going—?’

The line died.

2

0722 hours.

The Cobra Hilton Plaza hotel stood tall over the rotten favelas. The room was located on the twelfth floor and looked out to the south, away from the beaches and towards a metropolis of filth and human shit laid bare.

‘I’m telling you, I don’t know shit,’ the guy chained to the radiator, Paulinho Nava, said.

‘As you already explained, my friend.’

‘Then why the fuck are you doing this?’

‘You’re beginning to piss me off.’

‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Nava snorted.

Nestor Weiss pulled back the plunger, allowing the last liquid in the vial to fill into the syringe. Removing the syringe, he expelled any trapped air and gave the needle a tap.

‘What’s that?’

Weiss did not reply.

‘When the other guys hear what you’ve done, you’ll pay in blood. Anyone who harms a BOPE officer, they’re marked for death, do you hear? Marked.’ Nava’s face was puffed up. He looked like he was suffering from a million bee stings.

Weiss was pleased with his earlier handiwork. He didn’t throw many punches these days, but when he did, he could still beat a man real bad.

He held out the 12.7mm hypodermic needle.

‘You’re looking at 100ccs of sulphuric acid. Sure you want to piss me off?’

‘Blind me then, you fuck.’

‘Oh, but this isn’t going in your eyes.’

The bravado was gone. Nava’s veins rippled on his neck like tense rope as he tried to inch further and further away from Weiss, pressing himself up against the wall. He kicked out as Weiss came a little nearer.

‘Stay away from me!’

‘Did they teach you how to survive this in training school, my friend?’

Nava spat on to the textured silk carpet.

‘Did they?’

Shifting to the left to sidestep Nava’s flailing legs, Weiss knelt down beside him. The man’s head was slumped forward. It was all he could do to fix his eyes on the needle.

‘No, I didn’t think so,’ Weiss continued. ‘When it comes to death, everyone’s a first-timer.’

‘If this is about money, I have… I can pay you—’

‘You know it’s not.’

‘Women, then. Or boys. Fucking whatever. Shit, just name it and I’ll get it for you, I swear.’

‘None of these things interest me, my friend. The only thing that could keep you alive, you say you do not have.’

Nava’s face dismantled. He would’ve cried, Weiss thought, if the BOPE commander hadn’t already wrung every tear from his body. Pleading for his miserable life. ‘I told you once – shit, a hundred times – I don’t know where he is.’

‘Then there’s nothing else to talk about.’

‘No, no. Please no.’

Weiss tested the syringe, squeezing a drop of acid on to the carpet. It made a sizzling noise on contact and burned its way through the fabric, all the way down to the floorboard.

Paulinho Nava, Lieutenant Colonel of the Special Operations Police Battalion, hero of the Siege of Reis favela, thrashed about wildly as he tried to yank the radiator off with his handcuffed arms.

All told, Weiss had killed more than six hundred men, women and children. Normally the victims seemed to accept death in their last moments, as if they were paralyzed, and Weiss was all-powerful, like a god. He got high off that feeling.

There’s no such thing as a guy who loves killing, but then there’s no such thing as a smoker who doesn’t want to give up. Weiss still experienced guilt after each kill, still carried in his pocket a five-inch carving of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe which he rubbed for forgiveness. But killing, he thought, is also more addictive than heroin. Many hitmen, himself included, became aggravated if they did not kill for a while.

He shanked the needle into Nava’s chest.

Depressing the plunger, Weiss flooded the heart muscle with corrosive acid. Nava’s head shook violently from side to side. His bronze skin glowed ruby red. He foamed at the mouth. Boiling blood oozed out of every orifice. His nose, eyes, mouth and ears. Nava clenched his jaw and grunted.

He did what everyone did before they died, and shat his pants.

Nava stilled. A stream of blood trickled down his ear and on to a heavily tattooed right arm. Grim Reaper on the bicep, Frank Sinatra at the elbow, a 1930s playgirl on the forearm. He seemed to laugh, did the Reaper, as the images coloured red.

Satisfied this was dead meat, Weiss extracted the syringe, placed the cap on the needle and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

The first time he’d employed this particular method, Weiss had been curious as to the extent of the damage caused. So he bribed a coroner to prise open the ribcage and reveal the insides. He discovered that there was nothing left. Heart, lungs, kidney, pectoral muscles, collarbone. As if someone had thrown a hand grenade inside the chest cavity.

Weiss glanced at his shitty digital watch, and remembered it didn’t work. The clock on the wall, however, told him it was eight on a clear-eyed morning. Normally he worked as a contractor, no questions asked, doing business with the Juárez and Los Zetas cartels. They paid well. But today he was on the trail of thirty million dollars. The kind of money that could allow him to retire to the Cocos Islands, off Costa Rica. Drinking tequila on Chatham Beach. Wearing a more expensive watch, perhaps a Cartier, and having the finest pussy in all of Latin America. Weiss was tired of killing.

You’ve a chase on your hands now, he thought, as he tore off the hygienic gloves and tucked them in the pockets of his single-breasted, mid-calf-length duster coat, black denim. Nodded at Nava’s corpse. Locked the room door and slipped the sign over the door knob. Por favor não incomodar. Do not disturb. Left the hotel and climbed into his rented BMW E90 sedan.

Have to find him today, Gardner figured. Otherwise it’s too late.

Well. Time to pay a visit to a man who can help.

3

0815 hours.

The Little Bird’s rotary blades cut up the sky. Sunrise kicking in over Rio and Joe Gardner’s hangover was along for the ride.

He had a beard that could strike a wet match and a nose that had more breaks in it than an American football game. Tied to a lanyard with his feet resting on the rail, he looked out at the favela two hundred metres below. Thousands of sprawling shanty huts built on top of each other, the huts fixed precariously on a rifle-green hillside, spitting distance from the financial district and high-rise apartments. To the west he could see the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Jesus didn’t seem to give a fuck about the slum next door.

‘Barbosa favela,’ said Leon, sitting next to him.

Sounds like a Brazilian footballer, thought Gardner.

‘Not much to look at, I know.’

‘I grew up in Moss Side, mate. I’ve seen worse.’

‘You think it looks bad from up here, wait till you hit the ground.’

The Little Bird began its rapid descent, diving sharply into the favela and ducking this way and that, turning on a sixpence. Gardner had ridden in Lynxes and Chinooks and Merlins, but the Navy crabs had no chopper as nippy as this. Now they were a hundred metres off the ground. Gardner clocked a gang of kids racing through the streets below. They were packing AK-47s and firing on an older group who fled east. BOPE had withdrawn from the favela, leaving the warring gangs to slog it out among themselves. Third World kids were getting ready for the Third World War.

Gardner, on the other hand, was going in half-cocked. Just him and a couple of scarred knuckles for company. His first task on landing at Galeão-Antônio Carlos Jobim International Airport had been to head away from the tourist hubs of the Leblon and Ipanema. Other people ventured south. Gardner had made his way west, to the poverty-ravaged district of Santa Cruz. A thirteen-year-old boy, a street hustler in a Brazil shirt with ‘Robinho’ on the back, said he could get anything for Gardner. For two hundred reals, he agreed to supply him with a black-market Sig Sauer P226. But the café the boy told Gardner to meet at was crawling with mean-looking cops, and anyway the kid never showed.

Inserting to a hostile environment without a gun, Gardner felt uneasy.

‘It’s all kicking off down there,’ he said. ‘Is this the best LZ you could find?’

‘You’d better believe it. The gangs are shooting at anyone who moves. There’s rumours that a couple of BOPE officers are cut off from the rest of their unit, and the kids smell blood. The surrounding streets are just too dangerous, amigo.’

‘Dangerous for who? You and Mr Pilot here?’

Leon didn’t answer. Fair play. The Bird was a favour from a mate of a mate, arranged at the last moment. Twenty-four hours earlier Gardner had been sleeping in a Hertfordshire bush. Since leaving 22 SAS he’d lived off the radar, as anonymous as a man could be in a Britain up to its eyeballs in CCTV. As a consequence, he allowed himself only two connections to the outside world, a Barclays cashcard and a mobile phone. The phone was to keep in touch with old Blades. Gardner wasn’t the kind of guy who rang up and talked about his feelings or how his day had been. That wasn’t his style. And so the phone never rang.

Until yesterday, when Bald had called him out of the blue.

He saved your life. The frayed nerve endings in his left hand reminded Gardner of the sacrifice Bald had made. So he had emptied his current account. Used the little bread he had to book a one-way ticket to Carnival City. Figured, if nothing else, the weather had to be better than Stevenage.

He checked his mobile. Two messages. One from his operator, welcoming him to their local network partners. The second from the Brazilian partners themselves. Some waffle in Portuguese. More messages in one day than he’d received in a year.

‘This Mr Bald, is he a friend of yours?’ Leon asked.

‘Why the fuck do you care?’

‘You know, those BOPE guys are fearless. They don’t give a shit. But if they get trapped by the gangs, it’s game over. The gangs skin them alive, amigo.’

Gardner said nothing, because nothing needed saying.

The Little Bird hovered fifty metres above the ground. The chopper had more moves than a Soho prossy, but the cramped nature of the favela made venturing any lower too risky. Before boarding his flight Gardner had visited an internet café and studied the Barbosa favela and the surrounding area on Google Earth so he wouldn’t be totally blind on the ground. But it was hard to absorb all the details, as the streets twisted and turned like a bowl of spaghetti. Barbosa favela crammed a quarter of a million people at the bottom of the food chain into an enclave the size of half a dozen Wembley stadiums. Having boned up on his history, Gardner knew that the chaotic assembly had been created when veteran soldiers from the war of independence rocked up in Rio but, instead of being treated like heroes, were banished to the slums.

Know the feeling, Gardner thought.

The area immediately below them was obscured by a blanket of arsenic-grey smoke. Gardner could see less than nothing, but he could guess that whatever lurked behind, it wasn’t a fucking tea party. His heart hammered against his breastbone.

Sweat treacled from Gardner’s brow on to his lips. He tasted salt, and last night’s booze from the hotel bar, where he had hooked up with his number-one drinking buddy: drink. Gardner wiped his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

Leon smiled. ‘Those caipirinhas taste nice, don’t they?’

‘Deadly.’

Gardner rested his feet on the side rail. He tossed a length of a coiled-up 44mm synthetic wire over the side. Then on to his right hand he slipped on a full-fingered abrasion-resistant abseiling glove. It took three attempts before he was able to do the same for his left. Mostly because the skin-tone carbon-fibre fingers didn’t want to flex.

‘Can you feel anything in that?’ Leon asked.

‘Nothing below the elbow, mate.’

‘That’s some real space-age shit.’

‘A century ago they used to give blokes like me a hook on a stick. Now I can pick up grapes with this thing.’

With his palms facing inwards, Gardner locked his elbows and began sliding down over the side of the chopper and directly into the smoke.

It was like plunging into a big fuck-off barbecue. Fumes flooded his lungs and nostrils. He smelled cordite and burned flesh, and tasted hot metal on his tongue. It was a million degrees in the middle.

Fuck it, keep roping down, he told himself.

The drop was just forty-four metres to the ground according to the Little Bird’s on-board altimeter. He wanted to scale down as quickly as possible – being suspended on the rope would leave you exposed to sniper attacks – but he had to use the friction on his gloves to control his descent. Fall too quick and you’re liable to break a leg on impact. He didn’t wrap his feet around the rope, because the leather on his Gore-Tex boots made the rope slippery.

Ten more metres and Gardner was clear of the smoke. Blinking tears and boozy sweat out of his eyes, he saw that the smoke was coming from a rooftop several metres to his right. Flames licked at a column of worn rubber tyres, toxic fumes disgorged into the air like from an old industrial chimney. Gardner looked at his feet.

Almost there. Just another couple of metres.

His feet hit the ground, but he couldn’t get a firm grip. His boots scraped against something slick, and when he shuffled his feet he slipped backwards, banging the back of his head against the concrete, and, fuck, it hurt.

Ignore the pain. Don’t give in to it, he told himself. Get up!

He released the rope and watched it withdraw through the smoke like a lightning bolt in reverse. The Little Bird was a noisy fucker for such a small chopper. As the bird pissed off, the whock-whock faded and the noise sank big time. Gardner scoped the LZ, glancing over his shoulders. He had landed in an L-shaped street at the base of the favela, two hundred metres from the Tutoia motorway. Might as well have been on the other side of the fucking world.

As he’d calculated, the gangs had swarmed on ahead and out of sight. Now the street was shabby and desolate. Two- and three-storey shanty huts and botched brick buildings lined the street. A lot of the homes seemed to get away with plastic or cardboard rigged up as roofs. Guess it rains less here than in Manchester, Gardner figured.

The sharp crack of rifle shots sounded off to the east. The direction the gang kids had scattered. The volley was furious, then silent.

As he picked himself up he noticed some kind of gunk beneath him, a big puddle, dark red, consistency of melted rubber. A single Timberland footprint marked the spot where Gardner had crashed. Right where his head had kissed concrete lay a pair of intestines, the large one brown and snake-like, the smaller one reddish and flattened by Gardner’s bonce. He couldn’t see a body. Whoever was stuck like a pig had fucked off to go and die in some alleyway.

First things first, he thought, rubbing his sticky hands down the sides of his sandstone combats. Bug out away from the rifle reports. Don’t want your trip to Barbosa to be your last. He took off west, in the opposite direction to the gunfire.

4

0822 hours.

It took Weiss an hour to worm his way through the traffic. He drove north, past the Maracana football stadium and, at the old Imperial Palace on Quinta da Boa Vista, he took a right, hit Avenue Osvaldo Aranha and edged along the gridlocked road for five kilometres. God himself could not make Brazilians hurry. Weiss thought some more about his next move.

All the way to Tardelli district.

Once off Aranha the traffic lightened. Weiss turned into Rua Pedro Cabral and followed it for two hundred metres until he reached the affluent Rua Buenos Aires. A row of houses reserved for rich people presented itself, each one opulent, whitewashed, gated. He made a beeline for the luxury villa at the end of the road, the biggest and grandest of the pile. The entry gate was painted gold and had a miniature video screen fixed above the comms panel. Someone had left it ajar. A gift.

Weiss parked out front and strode across the grounds, past a water feature big enough for a grand hotel and a column of palm trees green as the Amazon. Two men stood guard on the front steps. Armed with Uzi 9mm sub-machine-guns, weapon of choice for gangsters who watched too many Hollywood action movies, they were sharing a joint. Weiss walked unnoticed until he was thirty metres from them. He was a big guy, but light on his toes. One of the guys looked up, eyeballed Weiss and tossed the joint to the ground.

‘Holy shit! Motherfucking Weiss!’

He couldn’t run inside fast enough.

The second guy stuck to the spot, as if he had roots for feet.

‘I need to speak to Big Teeth.’

‘He’s inside.’

Weiss yanked open the heavy teak door and let himself in.

The villa was lavish. It also stank of piss. A Rottweiler licked at a ring of its own faeces. On the walls, between antique mirrors, there were posters of Scarface and The Godfather, and bullet holes pocked the high ceiling. He had to watch his step to avoid the used condoms and crack pipes littering the marble-tiled floor. It was true what they said. No matter which way you dressed it up, or how rich it got, shit was always shit.

Weiss entered the lounge. It was like walking into a shadow. He squinted, saw a girl of sixteen or seventeen, spread-eagled on a red leather sofa. She could have been asleep, but her wide-open eyes had rolled back into her head. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 played on a widescreen TV. The air was redolent with the smell of marijuana and fear. Weiss counted twelve goons in total around the dark room, and he didn’t need to look twice to realize that every one of them was busting a tool.

He relaxed. No goon dared point their weapon at him. Not unless they had a death wish.

Luis ‘Big Teeth’ Oliveira was sitting at a sofa in front of the TV. There was a coffee table in front of him with half of Colombia cut up on it, but it wasn’t the coke making him jumpy. It was Weiss. Big Teeth furiously chained on a cigarette.

‘Nestor,’ he said, opening his arms, like he was preparing to hug a bear. ‘What brings you down to Rio? Can’t get enough of Carioca pussy, eh? You know what they say – once a man’s tasted wine, he can’t go back to water.’

‘Your jokes bore me almost as much as your country,’ replied Weiss, running a hand along the mantelpiece above a baroque fireplace. Dust coated his fingers.

Big Teeth shifted in his seat. ‘Then… you’re here because of the Carlitos thing?’ His voice accelerated. ‘I promise, we didn’t have shit, not a shit, to do with Gonzales ripping him off. That boy is mad, amigo.’

‘Calm down,’ Weiss said, smiling, enjoying Big Teeth’s fear. ‘I’m not going to kill you. And this isn’t about Gonzales.’

Big Teeth laughed nervously. His goofy, golden front teeth jutted out, like some kind of grotesque bunny. All that money, Weiss wondered, so why didn’t the guy get his teeth fixed?

‘I’m looking for someone.’

‘We’re all looking for someone special, eh?’

‘Enough of your jokes, Luis.’ Big Teeth looked at his feet, the TV, the comatose girl. Anywhere but Weiss. ‘This man – he’s a foreigner working with BOPE. A unit you keep a close eye on, I’m sure.’

‘Forget it,’ Big Teeth said, stubbing out his cigarette in a Jesus ashtray. ‘We don’t live in Barbosa no more, as you can see. Nowadays we’re out of the drugs game. We’re trying to go legit, man. Recording rap music and shit.’ He blew out a last gust of smoke. ‘I can’t help you.’

Weiss angled his head, trying to lock his eyes on Big Teeth’s.

‘Luis, my friend, what’s the problem? You seem very nervous. Is it me?’

Big Teeth held in his breath.

‘Or maybe something else has you concerned.’ Weiss looked at the coffee table, lacerated with knife marks. ‘Is your gang in trouble, my friend?’

Big Teeth couldn’t take it any more. He stood up and shouted at Weiss. ‘What the fuck does this look like to you, man? We’re just local players. Local, brother. And now you come here asking me about some out-of-town guy? Shit, I don’t even have no fucking passport.’

Weiss sat on the edge of the opposite sofa, the one with the bitch. She didn’t flinch. Not even the twitch of an eyelid. He stroked her hair.

‘Luis. I know this man is with BOPE. There’s only four hundred men in the unit, and I’ll bet you know the names and address of each of them off by heart. And I know you’re aware of him. You might think you’re Mr Big Shot these days, with your swimming pool and nice car, but at heart you’re still a favelano. You keep your ear close to the ground. So don’t fuck me about.’

‘Nestor, I swear—’

‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way. I gave you my word I would not kill you today. And I will not. But tomorrow is a new day. Maybe I’ll come again…’ The threat lingered in the air.

Big Teeth watched out of the corner of his eyes as Weiss ran a hand down the girl’s cheek. He seemed to be weighing something up in his head. ‘OK, OK,’ he said, stubbing out his Marlboro. ‘What’s his name?’

‘John Bald. He’s Scottish.’

‘Shit. Fuck.’ Big Teeth took a scrap of paper and a ballpen and scribbled something. A barrel-chested goon pressed it into Weiss’s palm. He read a name and address, scrawled in appalling handwriting. Weiss was amazed Big Teeth could even write. He looked him square in his mismatched eyes, one brown, one green.

‘This is where I can find him?’

Big Teeth shook his head. ‘This is someone might know where your guy is. I can’t guarantee shit, though. You know how it plays in the favelas, all kinds of fucked-up stuff happening all the time.’

‘I’ll check it out. Pray this does not rebound on you, my friend.’

‘It won’t,’ Big Teeth replied, finally going eye to eye with Weiss. ‘But you need to worry about watching your fucking back in Barbosa. Those kids don’t know you like we do. Shit’s all different there.’

5

0930 hours.

His leg muscles throbbed from the intense vibration of the Little Bird. His olive-green T-shirt, drenched with sweat, clung to his back. Thirty minutes since his insertion into the favela, Gardner was breathing out of his arsehole.

He’d exited the LZ via a maze of walkways so narrow he couldn’t even stretch his arms. A wrong turn almost saw him slip into a crater in the road filled with excrement. Unguarded rectangular holes, the best part of a metre wide and half a metre high, were fixed to the sides of each home and along public walls. From the foul smell wafting out of them, he figured they led directly into the local sewage system.

Gardner tabbed at a fast pace. He was conscious of the fact that the sooner he got to Bald, the better the chance he had of finding his old mucker in one piece. Five-eight, angular and bony, Bald was tough as old leather and built from the same granite as the houses in his native Aberdeen. With his face locked in a permanent frown, Bald looked stern and cold. Get a few jars of McEwan’s down his neck, though, and he’d soon be scrapping civvies with the best of them. But in a place like Barbosa, Bald would need all of his evasion skills to survive, because he’d stand out like a fake tit.

Same for you too, mate, Gardner realized.

He emerged into a market square. Or what once counted as a market round these parts. It wasn’t exactly fucking Lakeside.

Sunlight razed an area fifty metres deep and thirty wide. In the middle of the street was an abandoned police car, next to a fountain with a stream of clothes floating in it. Flames hissed from the roof of the police car. Gardner counted three bodies on the ground. Two weren’t moving, their legs and arms contorted, red patches the size of coffee mugs on their chests. They were wearing the beige slacks of the state police. The third man coughed, shook his head and, spotting Gardner, began crawling towards him, digging his nails into the pockmarked concrete and dragging his rag-order legs behind him.

Gardner heard voices. Shouting. Single-burst shots.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

His instinct was to help the cop. But he was unarmed and knew he wouldn’t be able to get to him in time. The shots were close, and all Gardner would achieve by rushing to the guy’s aid would be to fuck both of them.

There were so many exits out from the street Gardner needed to take five just to get his bearings straight. Fucking hell, he thought, navigating here is tougher than the jungle.

Four exits from the market square. One to his six o’clock, the one he’d emerged from. Two open stairways to his left, twenty metres away. The fourth escape route was an alleyway opposite, partially obscured behind the torched car, where the tin-roofed buildings were so tightly bunched a man on a bike would have a hard time squeezing through. All he could make out was an endless warren of stairways, pavements and dirt tracks.

He looked for a reference point. The Jesus statue poked out above the shanty huts on the horizon, atop the Corcovado mountain to the north-east.

‘My Troop times forty north. Your Troop times twenty west,’ he remembered.

Gardner headed for a north-leading alleyway. He paused a few metres into the alley mouth, edged up to a grey wall with a half-washed portrait of Pablo Escobar along its length, hunkered down by the corner and peered back down the street. Though hidden, he was north-east from the van and saw a gang of six kids, none of them looking old enough to be on the Special Brew, springing out from the far alleyway. Red scarves covered the lower halves of their faces and they brandished their squaddie-proof AK-47s like they were water pistols, pointing them at each other when they spoke and waving them in the air. Careful to stay behind cover, Gardner looked on, wishing he had a juicy .50-cal heavy machine-gun to wallop these fuckers.

One of the kids shouted excitedly in Portuguese, pointing to the wounded cop. The brats laughed as they closed in on the poor sod. He moved on his hands and knees towards the car.

The tallest kid took out a fourteen-inch machete and slashed the guy’s back with it twice, crossways, in an ‘X’.

The cop screamed and reached down to his hip for a holstered pistol. Bad move. Two of the other kids pounced on him and pinned his arm down. The tall kid went to work. Using the rusted machete he began sawing through the wrist. Gardner shuddered as he heard the blade grind against bone. Blood spewed.

With a high-pitched scream the guy begged him to stop. He cursed. He cried.

But the kid kept on hacking away.

Halfway through, the guy gave up his squealing. When the kid was done playing surgeon for the day, he taunted the man by slapping his face with his own severed wank paddle. Another kid produced an old-school sawn-off and shot up the cops arms and legs. Each time a subsonic boom accompanied the blast and the body spasmed, as though 10,000 volts were surging through him. The kids cheered. Then one urinated on him.

The tallest kid put the cop out of his misery. Holding a sledgehammer, he instructed the others to turn the man over so he was lying on his back. The guy tried to protest. But the kid wasn’t interested. He raised the hammer with both hands.

And swung the black metal head down.

Gardner heard the shattering of the cranium from behind the steps, thirty metres away.

Staying behind the wall, he waited. The posse marched east, playing football with the dead cop’s hand.

Keep heading north.

Get to Bald’s location – before the kids do.

He U-turned. Went to climb the steps.

Found himself face to face with the business end of an assault rifle.

6

0959 hours.

The rifle was a Colt Commando. It was in crap nick, the paintwork chipped and brown masking tape wrapped around the mag to stop it from falling apart. The user wore a one-piece flame-retardant Nomex 3 assault suit, of the type used by the Regiment in Close-Quarter Battle ops.

He shouted something in Portuguese. Sounded more like a Brazilian football commentator.

‘Easy, mate.’ Gardner raised his hands. Fuck knows what the bloke is banging on about, he thought. But his face summed it up: trembling lips, knife-slit eyes darting left and right, the Colt Commando shaking in his hands. An edgy man with a gun more often than not led to an AD – accidental discharge.

‘I’m not looking for any trouble,’ said Gardner.

Someone else had already given this guy plenty of the stuff, by the looks of it. His face was mashed up, as if someone had discharged a shotgun beneath his chin. A deep cut was drawn above his right eye, and when he spoke rivulets of blood trickled between his teeth. His skin was white. Though he’d been in Rio for less than six hours, Gardner just assumed everyone was more tanned than his pasty English arse. Not this guy.

‘You’re English?’ the police officer asked in a perfect English accent that put Gardner’s Manc to shame.

He nodded.

‘Go back to the beaches. This isn’t a tourist area,’ the guy snapped.

‘Says who?’

‘BOPE,’ he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Captain Rafael Falcon, Second Squad. What’s your name?’

Gardner lowered his hands to his sides, eyes on the BOPE captain. First impressions, he didn’t rate the guy. He looked tense, jaws locked, like he was pushing out a massive fucking turd. Ruperts lacked the nerves of steel they demanded from their men.

‘Heard you boys got caught in a shitstorm yesterday?’ Gardner smiled.

Falcon’s face hardened like concrete. ‘You still didn’t answer my question.’

‘Say again, mate?’

‘I asked you what your name was.’

‘Joe Gardner.’

Falcon tilted his head back, revealing a thin neck smothered in blood. ‘Gardner? That name sounds familiar.’

‘I’m a mate of John Bald’s.’

Falcon’s facial muscles relaxed into a relieved smile, the kind a man paints when he sees a friendly face in a rotten place. He lowered the Colt Commando. Gardner was tempted to rush him and box the crap out of him, but decided against it.

‘John mentioned you,’ Falcon said. ‘You were in the SAS too, yes?’

Gardner gave it the air-force shrug. ‘He’s an old friend.’

‘He said you were a good warrior. One of the best.’

On a rooftop eighty metres to the north, two kids stacked worn car tyres one on top of the other. One of them produced a jerry can and started dousing the tyres in petrol.

‘I got a call from John yesterday. He said he was in trouble. That all sorts of shit was going down, and he was stuck in this favela.’

‘What time did he call?’

‘Around five o’clock my time, so that’s – what? – one o’clock local.’

Falcon chewed on it. ‘That sounds about right. John was helping us train in explosive entry techniques up in Florida. He was out on patrol with us yesterday to put our training into action. John wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, you know. He went out on missions to the favela whenever possible.’

‘What the fuck happened?’

‘I’ll explain later,’ Falcon said dismissively. ‘We have to get out of here first. The local gangs are going crazy. My unit retreated to wait for reinforcements.’ He laughed out of the corner of his mouth, shaking his head. ‘Can you believe, we have forty-nine caveirãos – Big Skulls – and we’ve only got twelve in working order. I swear, if we lose the drugs war, it’s because we didn’t have enough crank shafts and gearboxes.’

Flames gushed from the rooftop tyres. Pitch-black, toxic smoke belched into the sky. Gardner smelled burning rubber in the air. Heat shimmered across the horizon in waves.

‘I don’t give a fuck about your war,’ Gardner said. ‘I just want to find my mate.’

‘All of the officers from yesterday are missing. Nine men, including our commander, Paulinho Nava. I hate to say it, but they’re probably all dead, and that includes John.’

‘Someone else told me that. All the same, I’d like to go and check for myself. He’s an old mucker of mine, you see, and I owe him big time from back in the day. So how about you put your fucking piece down and let me go about my business.’

Falcon pointed the Colt Commando at the ground, and the knots in Gardner’s stomach began to unwind. ‘I’ve been separated from my unit,’ said the BOPE captain. ‘And John was part of my team.’ He tapped Gardner on the shoulder. ‘I’ll help you find your friend. We can stick together. That way, we have a better chance against the gangs.’

‘Ain’t happening,’ Gardner said. ‘I’m a solo operator, mate.’

Squinting, Falcon said, ‘You sound like you know where you’re going.’

‘I got a hunch,’ replied Gardner.

Falcon screwed up his swollen lips. ‘OK, and let’s assume your… hunch is correct. Just where exactly are you headed?’

‘North,’ Gardner said. He nodded vaguely in the direction of the peak of the favela, several hundred metres distant and high. He didn’t want to give too much away to some bloke he’d met only a few minutes ago.

‘OK. So let’s say you’re heading north. How do you think you’ll get there?’

Well, fuck. Falcon was right. Between Gardner and the statue stood a maze of alleys and criss-crossing roads, stairwells that seemed to lead nowhere, homes stacked on top of each other. Figuring out a route was impossible. He pictured himself bounding north, winding through the maze and losing his bearings.

‘I know this favela better than I know my wife,’ Falcon said. ‘She’ll tell you this herself, over pork and beans and a cold beer, after we escape from here.’

He removed his black assault vest and unzipped the top half of his assault suit. He was sweating like an Arab at customs. Underneath he wore a black T-shirt with ‘I Belong to Jesus’ on the front in big white letters. He tied the suit sleeves around his waist, then slipped the assault vest on top of his T-shirt.

‘What happened to your hand?’

‘Lawnmower accident,’ Gardner relied.

‘Huh.’ Falcon gave a slight, sceptical nod. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the quickest way.’

He led Gardner north, in the opposite direction from the corpses, yomping up a steep row of steps. The going was hard, each step caked in mud, the legacy of repeated mudslides. The passageways were claustrophobic, no more than a metre wide in places. Gardner saw a couple of dead civvies face down on the concrete, neat bullet holes in their backs. Running for cover, he thought.

Nothing in the favela was uniform. Metal walkways spliced the roofs. Washing lines obstructed every possible line of vision. Gardner had operated in Belfast, Baghdad and Kabul, but he had never seen anything like this.

Falcon glided up the steps. Clearly he’d had a bit of match practice. But Gardner matched him stride for stride. Unlike some ex-Blades, he kept himself in top shape. Being a drifter of no fixed abode meant that the everyday world was his gym. Daily runs, long walks, using park benches for push-ups and swing frames for wide-grip pull-ups. Gardner reckoned he was in better condition than some of the lads on active service. ‘Like a condom stuffed with walnuts,’ his last flame had described him.

He had Afghanistan on the mind again. At 0937 hours he’d been shooting the shit with the guy next to him, a cocky lad called Grant who wanted to win the war against the Taliban single-handed.

At 0938 hours Grant had femur bones instead of legs, his dick had been incinerated, his shredded ball-sack flapping in the hot wind. Shrapnel stitched across his belly and neck. Gardner was dazed by the explosion, to the point he looked at his own severed hand and felt no pain, and wondered only how long it’d take before he’d die of his wounds.

Normal protocol was to wait for a sweeping team and dogs to come in. The Talibs were cunning fuckers; they often planted secondary devices around the primary IED, nailing anyone who came to help. A sweep took time, something that neither man had. Bald raced across exposed ground to the crippled WMIK vehicle, flung open the door and dragged Grant across to safety, Gardner leaning against his shoulder. Stringy, purplish bowels gushed out of Grant as Bald tried to plug the gaping hole in his groin.

Gardner looked on as the lads grouped around Grant, the kid screaming for his mum, his fucking mum. As they shot him up with a morphine overdose, Gardner felt the blood loss from his hand. Blue and yellow blotches danced across his vision. A voice, Bald’s, said, ‘Don’t worry, mate. Medevac’s on the way.’

Falcon halted at the top of the steps, breaking Gardner out of his daydream.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘I see something.’

‘What is it?’ Gardner barely whispered.

No answer.

‘Rafa?’

Gardner moved down on to his belly and slid alongside Falcon. Up ahead the alley widened out into a rubble-strewn yard, the extra space created by a ream of collapsed buildings. The area was vacant, probably because the locals were expecting it all to turn into a bag of bollocks any minute. Gardner scanned the rooftops and windows. No movement, but he couldn’t help notice the bullet holes sprayed across the sides of most of the homes.

A bulky, black-painted van was parked thirty metres away, to their seven o’clock, on the lip of a winding road that zigzagged west from the edge of the favela. The thing barely qualified as a road, more of a slick of caked mud, jutting rocks and knee-deep puddles.

‘A caveirão,’ Falcon said. ‘From my unit.’

A foot-high slab of cement, with lengths of lead pipe jutting out, blockaded the Big Skull’s path. Atop the vehicle, a warped turret revealed the evidence of a grenade lobbed inside. Two bodies lay next to the vehicle and from the way they were positioned, lying on their stomachs with their hands tied behind their backs, Gardner figured they were executed with a bullet through the head.

Gardner walked towards the bodies for a closer look. The stench was powerful. Like a spit-roasted pig smeared in shit. He checked the name tags. ‘SGT. EDILSON ‘SGT. CAMPOS.’ Eight metres from the corpses, Gardner noticed something was missing.

Their heads.

He saw a pair of rugby-ball shaped objects speared to metal posts. If one of those heads is John’s, he thought, I’ll never forgive myself.

Gardner stopped in front of the severed heads. The eyeballs had been gouged out, the noses, ears and lips crudely sliced off. Their mouths had been forced wide open, and inside each one was a sawn-off cock and bollocks. The balls were greenish-brown and covered in glistening red crap. Flies buzzed. Maggots wriggled.

Returning his attention to the decapitated bodies, he spotted a pistol holder on one of them. Sinking to one knee, he hurriedly unhooked the strap. Browning Hi-Power. Fucking yes. He badly needed a tool and this was his chance to snare one.

The Browning Hi-Power was the classic semi-auto handgun. He pushed the release and ejected the clip to inspect the ammo. The Browning was loaded with 9mm rounds less penetrative than the larger 7.64x21mm or .40 S&W brass the Hi-Power also took. Gardner didn’t rate 9mm, reckoned that he pissed harder than nine-mils discharged.

He slapped the clip back in, stood up and tucked the Browning into the waistband of his combats just as Falcon swallowed his fear and approached the bodies.

A wooden placard was propped up by the posts.

‘Falta de Deus,’ Falcon read.

‘I’m guessing that’s not Portuguese for “Have a Nice Day”,’ Gardner said quietly.

‘It means, “Lack of God”. They are saying they are all against God.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘One of the gangs.’

Falcon bowed his head and made the sign of the cross.

Even the Taliban weren’t this evil, Gardner thought.

‘Your friend—’ the BOPE man began.

Gardner frowned. ‘They might have taken him hostage. For ransom. The done thing round these parts, right?’

‘Yes,’ Falcon said vacantly.

‘Focus, Rafa. This gang – they might have captured John?’

‘If they have Bald, he’s probably dead. And if they find us, they’ll kill us too.’

‘No they won’t, mate. Not on my fucking watch.’

‘You don’t understand who we’re dealing with. This is not an ordinary gang.’

Gardner wondered what a normal outfit constituted round these parts. Probably the little wankers who chopped up the officer.

‘Tell me more about this gang,’ he said.

‘This was the work of Big Teeth’s boys.’

‘Who the fuck is that?’

‘Luis Oliveira. People call him “Big Teeth”. He doesn’t operate in the favela personally, but he’s the head of the largest gang in Barbosa, the Messengers of God. They control most of the drugs and weapons coming in and out of the favela. His number two is a guy called Roulette, and I’d bet my house on this being the work of Roulette’s special murder crew.’

Gardner scanned north. Seems calm enough, he told himself. Still, he didn’t want to take any chances. ‘We should bug out, Rafa. Before we bump into them and they turn us into a soup of the day.’

He tugged at Falcon. The BOPE rupert’s eyes were fixed on a spot past his shoulder.

‘We’re too late,’ he said. ‘They’ve already found us.’

7

1018 hours.

Weiss breezed past the police. Four saloon cars were massed at the side of the road, a dozen pot-bellied cops scratching their stubble and kicking gravel, afraid to enter the favela without BOPE. They busied themselves with questioning people entering and leaving Barbosa, mostly white, middle-class kids looking to score weed. Weiss, on the other hand, went unnoticed. With his tattered Arizona Cardinals baseball cap and a Barcelona football shirt underneath the duster coat, the UNICEF logo smeared with old blood, he looked like the kind of guy who’d spent all his life in Barbosa.

The favelas were like prisons. They didn’t care so much about who went in as who tried to break out.

Weiss had ventured only a hundred metres into the favela but he felt like he’d pitched up in another world.

Cracked old pipes poked out of each house, pumping shit into large puddles in the streets. Plastic bags and Coke bottles tumbleweeded across the road. Twenty-five metres further on a rickety man foraged through a heap of garbage, picking out wrinkled sheets of metal and dumping them in a shopping trolley. Motors stripped of their parts lined the street; telephone and electricity lines straddled its width like Chinese lanterns.

A hundred metres ahead, Weiss could see three teenagers sitting on upturned banana crates. Two of them appeared twelve or thirteen years old, skeletal frames, the one in a loose-fitting Lakers basketball top and the other with his hair made up in corn-rows, stabbing the crate with a blade.

The leader, Weiss figured, was the older boy. He looked about eighteen and sported spotless black-and-white Converses, with a golden crucifix dangling from his neck, a diamond-studded Jesus on the end. He sucked on a joint. At ten metres, Weiss smelled the pungent aroma, and felt three pairs of eyes burn holes through him.

‘Stop right there,’ the leader said.

Weiss kept on walking.

‘Motherfucker, I said stop.’

The young guy took a final pull on the joint, jumped off his banana crate and stepped over to Weiss. He exhaled, blowing greenish-smoke into his face, eyefucking him.

‘When I talk, you listen, bitch,’ he growled, prodding a finger into Weiss’s duster. ‘You’re in Batista’s territory now. What I say, you do.’

Weiss slow-burned. He had places to be, people to grease, money to make. He didn’t view the kid opposite him as a threat. More like a rat nibbling at his toes.

‘Step aside, my friend, and I’ll spare you.’

Batista grinned and lifted up his Chicago Bulls basketball jersey to reveal a pistol grip sticking out of the waistband of his jeans.

‘Empty your pockets,’ he said.

‘You want it,’ Weiss raising his hands, ‘why don’t you come and get it?’

He stuffed his hand into his right pocket and pulled out a whole lot of nothing except the bloodied surgical gloves. He did the same on the left and gave his evil eye to the Basilica statue. Batista blazed up like a flame to petrol.

‘Some kind of a joke?’

‘I’m not laughing,’ Weiss replied. ‘Are you?’

‘Man, screw this goat-fucker. Gotta be a wallet somewhere.’

Weiss slowly peeled back his duster. Something held Batista’s attention. Behind him, the two other kids leaned in for a closer look. Sewn into the inside fold of the coat were fourteen holstered syringes.

‘Puta que pariu. This guy’s a doctor or—’

Weiss snatched a needle with his left hand and in an instant plunged it into the side of Batista’s neck.

White-eyed, wobbling on his feet, Batista stumbled backwards. He dropped like a pigeon in mid-flight, while the other kids looking on, bug-eyed.

The syringe was filled with a concentration of hydrocyanic acid. Weiss had a range of such syringes, the concentration of each one varied, depending on whether he wished the mark to suffer for ten minutes or sixty seconds. This Batista was an arrogant cunt, and in a perfect world he’d have stabbed him with the ten-minute needle. But Weiss was up against the clock, so he’d selected the one-minute syringe.

That was his idea of sympathy.

Batista jerked on the ground. His muscles flinched. He grimaced as they locked up, as if his body was shrinking in on itself, squeezing his guts. He drooled, his eyes were runny. After twenty seconds he voided his bowels. Thirty seconds and his breathing became short, raspy, rapid. Like a forty-a-day guy climbing a set of stairs. Cherry-red blood slid out of his eyes and ears. Funny how cyanide changed a man’s blood colour, Weiss noted, as he watched the other two kids. They looked on, horrified but curious, like they’d discovered their parents fucking.

As Batista gargled and shat his way to death, Weiss pulled out a second syringe and lurched forward, grabbing the boy with the corn-rows in a headlock, the needle point tickling his neck.

‘This one carries infected blood,’ he told Corn-Row Kid. ‘The homosexual disease. I push a little harder, and you will take many years to die. It will not be quick like your leader.’

The kid didn’t answer. There was a piss patch the size of Africa on his jeans.

‘I need to speak to the man called Xavier.’

Still nothing from the kid.

‘Tell the man, Shorty,’ Lakers Boy said.

‘You’re going to take me there, aren’t you?’

‘He’ll do it,’ Lakers Boy answered for him.

‘Good. Because if he doesn’t, I won’t just kill you, but your families too.’

Shorty knew all the shortcuts. Many favela kids earned a few reals escorting French tourists around the favelas, unaware that their cash was going straight into the gangs’ coffers.

They wove through the streets for twenty minutes until they were in the belly of the favela, where the police feared to tread. It was darker in these streets, the shacks ordered in a zigzag style, like going through sheet-metal trenches. He saw no one on the streets except gangsters decked out in shades and Mac-10s, and the occasional crack addict shuffling along.

‘This is the place,’ Shorty said. They were in front of a slum dwelling that looked smaller than a wardrobe in the Hilton. More like a lean-to with a brick front. The kid rapped his knuckles loudly twice on the door and shouted something.

Before Weiss could stop him, the kid was sprinting off.

No answer, so Weiss stepped inside.

He found himself in a square room. Thick dust blanketed the floor, and he seemed to crush a cockroach with every step he took. No windows and no furniture, just a wooden table at one end. Dead spiders hung from old cobwebs. Nobody had been living here for longer than a little while.

Weiss stopped.

About-turned.

Three figures blocked the doorway.

His eyes darted from one figure to the next. The man on the left was armed with a pair of brass knuckles. The second tapped a tyre iron against his leg. The guy on the right held a duo knife, both sides of the serrated blade extended.

‘I’m here for Xavier.’

‘He’s not home,’ said the guy with the brass.

They closed in on him.

Weiss met duo knife guy’s eyes. ‘Xavier’s not really a person, is he?’

‘Good fucking guess.’

8

1042 hours.

They ran as fast as their legs could carry them.

Sun in their faces and a dozen Messenger gang members a hundred and fifty metres to their rear, a ragtag army in Real Madrid shirts and Ray-Bans.

Looking for trouble.

Twenty minutes of scurrying through corkscrew alleys and rutted streets, and Gardner was so thirsty he could drink rat piss. Not a drop to drink since last night’s booze, his stomach cramped, stitch piercing his abs like a screwdriver. Shut out the pain.

He glanced over his shoulder. The Messengers were no longer in sight, but their hooting and hollering carried over the rooftops.

Falcon was fucking knackered. He’d sprinted out in front of Gardner when the gangsters started slugging rounds off at them, but the vertical streets and right-angle turns had taken the wind out of his sails. Now he was three or four metres behind him.

‘Which way takes us north?’ Gardner asked Falcon.

‘Keep going this way… the alley… it twists around,’ Falcon panted. His already slack pace was slowing Gardner down, and cutting the distance to the Messengers. Go on like this much further, Gardner told himself, and the gang will be on your arse.

Best give them something to think about, he decided.

As they reached the end of alley number five million, Gardner swung to the right. He leaned up against the corner and nabbed Falcon as he jogged past, pushing him behind cover.

‘Mate, soon as I start firing, get the fuck over the other side.’

Falcon didn’t reply.

‘You OK, Rafa?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just it’s—’ His voice trailed like dust. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘One—’ Gardner said.

Gardner eased out from the corner, gripping the Browning in a double-handed stance, his right hand on the trigger, the prosthetic providing balance. His legs were shoulder-width apart to provide a stable firing platform. A Hi-Power box-mag, Gardner knew, held just thirteen rounds. The headless corpse hadn’t been carrying any spare.

Thirteen precious rounds. Make every bullet count.

The alley was two metres wide and ran in a direct line for seventy. Gardner saw three Messengers rush into view, the advance party. They were kitted out with AK-47s. Seventy metres, but the Browning’s maximum effective range was more like fifty.

‘Two—’

The Messengers ran on. One of them unloaded a random two-round burst from the AK. He didn’t see where the shots impacted; all Gardner gave a solid shit about was that they missed. These twats were in pray-and-spray mode, not taking the time to properly adjust their aim. And that was fine by him.

Sixty metres now.

Just a little closer, and I’ll tell them what time of day it is.

Fifty-five.

With the 9mm rounds lacking the stopping power of a higher grade, full-metal-jacketed cartridge, Gardner would be relying on his shooting capabilities. Strike the guy in the right place, in the central region where his vital organs were contained, and he’d have a decent chance of dropping the fucker.

Get it wrong and they’d be close enough to spray 7.62mm madness in his face. At fifty metres or less, even a four-year-old could maim Gardner.

‘Three! Fucking move!’

His Browning was the standard cop-issue SFS (Safe-Fast-Shooting) model designed specifically for police forces who had about as much weapons training as a chef in the Senior Service. Gardner took aim at the nearest fucker. The guy was running like Usain Bolt on speed, and was now forty-five metres away from his position. Gardner pressed the safety down with his thumb, the hammer sprang back into the single-action position, and he discharged three rounds from the Browning.

Tap-tap-tap.

The motion was fluid and the bullets surgical.

The first struck the kid in his left knee. Gardner had been aiming for the chest, but a knee shot was a good score. The round smashed the guy’s cruciate ligaments to shit, opening up a hole that could house a plum. Singed muscle splattered his ankle and sparkling white trainers. If he’d dreamed of being the next Ronaldinho, he was fucked now. His leg folded.

The second shot embedded itself in his right shoulder. Impacted on the joint, his shoulder snapped loose, like a baguette broken in half. His arm bucked backwards with the force of the hit. Count the frazzled nerves and the chewed-up muscle ripped to shreds by the trajectory of the round, and he could forget about a career as Brazilian shot-put champion too.

Watching the kid stumble, Gardner figured he must be high on crack and impervious to the trauma of his bullet wounds. He discharged round number three into his midriff. A puff of red and he finally collapsed, twelve metres from their position, AK-47 rattling against the concrete. His two mates, twenty metres behind, let off a volley of gunfire before darting into a home. Somewhere inside a woman screamed.

Meanwhile Falcon had transitioned to the left corner of the alley and started putting down rounds with the Colt Commando. He fired in three-round bursts. The second bunch of Messengers tried to advance, saw their dead mate and changed their minds.

Gardner kept his Browning trained on the dropped gangster. He risked a sprint forward, snatched the AK-47, the guy’s right leg twitching, and retreated to cover.

‘Right, we’ve bought ourselves some time,’ Gardner said. ‘Let’s fucking leg it while we’ve got the opportunity to lose them.’

Falcon nodded vacantly.

‘Rafa, mate. Fucking now.’

The rupert pointed to five brightly coloured kites soaring above the cardboard and tin roofs.

‘Early-warning system,’ Falcon said. ‘The outer cordon of the gang is sending a message to the leaders that BOPE’s on its way.’ He turned to Gardner. ‘The unit’s coming back.’

He should be over the moon that his muckers are about to rock up, Gardner thought. So why does the hell does he sound about as excited as a bloke being dragged along to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon?

‘You want to head south and RV with your mates, go for it,’ Gardner said.

‘No, no,’ said Falcon, gazing north. ‘I’ll come with you. If John’s out there, I will help you find him.’

He couldn’t quite place why, but that line didn’t sit right with Gardner.

There was no time to argue. Three more figures appeared down the alley and Gardner and Falcon let them have it, two bursts sending the bastards scampering for cover.

They bugged out.

Gardner let Falcon lead the way. They skated down a couple of tight alleyways, keeping their eyes firmly locked on the ground. The concrete was studded with potholes the size of hubcaps, and plastic water pipes that snaked along the ground, leading up to blue storage units on the top of each housing block. It would be all too easy to fall and bust an ankle.

They climbed five flights of uneven stairs with a sheer drop all the way to the bottom of the favela on one side. It was a hard slog. The old muscle memory was kicking in now, reminding him of the endurance levels he’d built up during his years in the Regiment.

‘Tell me,’ Gardner said, ‘what happened to Bald?’

Falcon stopped midway up the stairs to catch his breath. ‘It’s always the same when we enter the favelas. An outer cordon of gang members set off fireworks and fly kites. That’s the signal for the inner cordon of snipers to take up positions, while a third team hides their drug stashes and money trains, unplugs any illegal satellite feeds, and so on. We roll into the favela in the caveirãos. Like the one you saw earlier.’

They came past a road with piles of bricks stacked up outside each house. Spent cartridges around the brickwork told Gardner these were defensive positions. Whether for civilians or gang members, he wasn’t sure.

‘This time we made our approach and – no kites. No fireworks. This is strange, yes?’

‘Making you think you’ve caught them off guard,’ Gardner said. ‘Oldest trick in the book.’

‘Our mission was to snatch Roulette,’ Falcon continued, like he hadn’t heard Gardner. ‘The second-in-command of the Messengers of God. You know, the favela gangs, they kill people daily. OK, it’s part of life here. But Roulette, he was one sick fuck. The guy had his own little hit squad. They’d kill people, cut off their heads and sew a pig’s head to their neck. Or cut off their arms and legs, excavate the stomach and stick the limbs in there like a flower arrangement. I’ve seen stuff in my time, but these guys—’

His words trailed like surf.

‘The streets were empty. We went deeper and deeper into the belly of Barbosa.’

He snatched at his breath, then went on, ‘We arrived in the centre, and that’s when our trouble began. RPGs. Sniper fire. Nine- and ten-year-old boys and girls throwing Molotov cocktails at the Skulls. They’re big, you know, but you try being inside one when that happens. We went to fall back to safe ground, but they’d put up roadblocks everywhere.’

Gardner recalled the cement posts, the old cars.

‘They were expecting trouble this time,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said it yourself. The attack wasn’t the standard shit. Someone had told the Messengers they were on the way, ahead of their kite system, so they decided to change their tactics. It was an ambush, Rafa. That kind of thing takes time and planning. You can’t do it on the hoof.’

Falcon was quiet for several seconds. ‘This is a war zone,’ he said. ‘The favelas are not slums. They are battlegrounds. A disaster such as this, it was bound to happen one day. All I care about is that two of my men are dead and the rest are missing. I just want to find whoever did this. And make them pay.’

The stairwell coughed them up at the back of a series of homes with a spectrum of gang tags sprayed over the walls. Falcon manoeuvred down a short alley and rested at the lip, hands on his thighs. A rectangular street lay ahead, flanked by grey-brick homes stacked like Lego pieces one on top of the other.

Gardner led the way across the street. He noticed a cream-coloured structure two hundred metres to the north, not far from the peak of the favela. Big caroba trees and khaki bushes shadowed the two-storey breeze-block building, which had whitewashed casement windows and a clay-tiled roof. Painted gates and a two-feet-tall metal fence bordered it.

‘The school,’ Falcon said, noticing where Gardner was looking.

‘No shit, there’s a school in the favela?’

Sticking out his bottom lip, Falcon replied, ‘Government tries to integrate with the rest of the city. Schools, hospital, gyms. Even McDonald’s.’

The building was pissing distance from the jungle.

To Gardner’s south, Christ the Redeemer spread his soapstone arms and faced east across the Atlantic seaboard. Falcon sucked in greedy breaths beside him.

‘I think… we outran them,’ he said.

Gardner didn’t reply. He was focusing on the distances. A hilly expanse of land half a mile long and a mile wide, divided the favela summit from the statue.

‘My Troop times forty north.’ John was in 14 Troop, the Mobility unit of D Squadron, 22 SAS. So, 560 metres north of Christ. ‘Your Troop times twenty west.’ Gardner had been in 11 Troop, D Squadron’s four-man boat team. Although they were in different troops, D Squadron had deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and, in 2002, Sri Lanka, where they trained up the country’s elite security forces combating the Tamil Tigers.

His Troop by twenty – that put Bald at 220 metres west. The spot where the two measurements collided was a rough sequence of ridges canopied under secondary jungle.

‘This is as far north as the favela goes,’ Falcon said. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, mate.’

‘What? I don’t—’

A clack-clack of gunfire erupted at their six.

‘The Messengers.’

‘How they fuck did they gain on us so quick?’ said Gardner.

‘Shortcuts. There’s dozens of ways to get around the favela. On the rooftops, under the ground—’ Falcon paused, trying to control his tremulous voice. ‘They’re going to be here very soon. There’s hundreds of kids in the gang. If they find me, they’ll skin me alive, they’ll—’

‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. They don’t like visitors.’ Gardner flashed a devilish grin. ‘Come on, we’ve still got the run on them.’

‘But where to?’

‘The jungle.’

They dashed across the street. Corrugated-iron sheets, a metre wide, ran diagonally along the square, connecting stacks of second- and third-storey buildings. An Isuzu pickup lay rusting thirty metres from the school gates.

Halfway down the street, Gardner heard a crack, split down the middle with a dull thump.

The inner cordon.

Sniper.

9

1110 hours.

Gardner took immediate action, diving behind the pickup for cover. He’d removed himself and Falcon from the line of fire but, now they were pinned down and fucking bollocks on toast. The Isuzu took a volley of 7.62mm abuse from the sniper to the east. This was different, a well-organized attack.

His ears were shredded by the sound of metal tearing through metal. The sniper was shooting up the Isuzu in the hope that a stray bullet would ricochet off the chassis and strike one of them. There wasn’t much chance of that, but just to be sure Gardner pulled Falcon behind the rear wheel section and set himself against the front tyre. The front and back wheels on any vehicle were the best cover, as the engine parts provided a thick bulkhead.

‘What now?’ asked Falcon.

‘Your BOPE mates – where the fuck are they?’

Falcon got on his handheld radio. ‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Shit.’

‘Too long to hold off the Messengers,’ said Falcon, sounding panicky.

‘Have a little faith, Rafa.’

The sniper had to be within three hundred metres because the crack and the thump were on top of each other, like they shared the same fucking bed. From the angle of entry of the bullets pebbledashing the Isuzu, Gardner knew the sniper had to be east. And he knew he had to take control of the situation. They had two or three minutes, max, till the sniper’s Messenger mates rocked up to the party.

‘Keep your eyes trained on the alley,’ he instructed Falcon, grabbing the Colt Commando by the flat-top receiver and handing over the Bulgarian knock-off AK-47 in return. At medium range the AK was about as accurate as an Internet dating profile. The Colt, on the other hand, could clip the Queen’s nose on a ten-pence piece from three hundred metres.

‘Any Messenger tries it on, you give them the good news.’

‘No, no, no.’ Falcon shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. Roulette can call on hundreds of gangsters. I can’t stop them.’

‘How long now before your pals come to the rescue?’

‘Till BOPE arrives?’ Falcon checked his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes. We can’t hold out for that long.’

Again Gardner sensed that Falcon was in two minds about actually wanting to meet his BOPE mates. The urgency of the situation meant he had to park the thought.

‘Did John never tell you what they taught us in the Regiment?’

Falcon blinked his ignorance.

‘No such thing as can’t, mate. We don’t do failure. Now look sharp.’

A single shot crashed through the rear tyre. Air hissed out of the wheel.

One minute. Two more and you’ll be overrun.

Gardner checked his new toy. Metallic stock, MIL-STD 1913 Picatinny rail with a mounted 4x day optical scope on top. He switched the Commando to semi-automatic on the fire-control notch, clicked open the door on the Isuzu passenger side and crawled into the pickup.

The seats had been ripped out, along with the steering wheel, gearbox and any other removable shit. He slid up to the driver-side door, facing east across the street, keeping his profile low beneath the bodywork. Gardner poked the barrel two inches out the driver’s window, his prosthetic hand locked around the barrel and the stock tucked hard into his right shoulder.

In Baghdad, nailing snipers had been difficult. The wankers putting rounds down were armed irregulars with experience in the Republican Guard and the Iran-Iraq War, and had basic training: displacing after each shot, never using the same location twice. Guys like Juba the sniper, who claimed over a hundred American kills, proved elusive. You needed expert counter-sniper warfare to take them down.

Or if you were a Yank, you just lobbed about four tons of high explosive into the vicinity and let the grandma and kiddies fucking have it too.

Another report. No muzzle flash. He was using a suppressor, Gardner realized. Maybe the sniper wasn’t as dumb as he’d hoped. Probably he had experience of slotting BOPE officers and knew exactly what to do: no need to worry about getting a direct hit on him or Falcon – just isolate them until the Messengers arrived to take care of business.

Two minutes. Almost out of time.

The concrete sparked as a bullet struck the ground in front of the pickup. The shooter was getting dangerously close. He was wise to the fact that Gardner was trying to isolate him.

I see something, Gardner thought. At my three o’clock.

An object glinted on the rooftop of a building. The glimmer came from deep within a mesh of satellite dishes and wires.

Years of being targeted by rooftop shooters meant Gardner was able to recognize the flash instantly, the metal barrel of a long-range rifle. It broke rule number one they taught in sniper school: paint your bloody gun, so it ain’t reflecting the sun.

Gardner exhaled, relaxing his muscles, and gazed down the telescopic sights on the Commando. The magnified image of a gangster’s head. Shaven-headed guy, skin the colour of ground coffee, lying on his stomach, dressed in jeans and a white vest. Gardner could even make out gold rings on his fingers.

Messengers clamoured in his right ear.

‘They’re coming,’ Falcon said, urgent and trembling.

Gardner shut everything out. The gaggle of voices, the rupert’s bitching, the blanketing heat and the sweat drenching his balls. He focused, then unloaded a single round.

The sniper’s head exploded like a pumpkin, blood and chunks of skull and tissue splashing on to the rooftop. His body rolled onto its side, the exposed lower jaw facing the sky. The sniper’s gnashers were lacquered in blood. The sun drenched the rooftop, making the blood sparkle.

Fucking take it, Gardner thought, debussing from the Isuzu. His feet had barely touched the ground when, through his peripheral vision, he glimpsed five figures at the mouth of the street, a hundred metres away.

Four of them, he was certain, were Messengers, because they wielded guns: state-of-the-art PP-2000 sub-machine-guns. Where the hell did they acquire those weapons? he briefly wondered. The thought was cut in half by Falcon discharging a three-round burst from the AK-47. Two rounds smacked into a Messenger. His grey tracksuit bottoms reddened and his mates retreated, leaving him to try and plug the hole in his mangled cock.

The third struck a man several metres to the right of the Messenger. He was middle-aged and sported a tuft of hair white as the linen shirt he wore. The bullet entered the small of his back, and the guy flopped on to his belly, spilling the contents of a plastic bag he was carrying: pack of cigarettes, loaf of bread, lemons and parsley.

‘Holy shit, Rafa. You fucking whacked a civvie.’

‘Shit,’ Falcon said, the AK-47 limp in his hand. ‘I thought he was – it looked like he had a gun. I just thought—’ His voice suddenly hardened. ‘Fuck this cunt. It’s his stupid fault. What the fuck is he doing out in the street anyway? Doesn’t he know there’s a war on? Fuck him.’

Bottle rockets screeched overhead.

‘Fireworks. My unit’s nearly here.’

‘How long?’

‘Five minutes.’

Gardner made a beeline for the school, Falcon tailing. Shake this wave of Messengers, he told himself, and you’ll be free to reach Bald. He was more certain than ever that John had been able to escape the gang, and the last thing he wanted to do was lead a horde of the fuckers to his location. Once BOPE showed, he’d peel away and continue his mission.

A bullet struck to his left, and a voice squealed.

Falcon.

There was shit all over the concrete. His left ankle was doused in blood. The Messengers were trying their luck, braving the street. Gardner turned around, gave them four rounds from the Colt and, throwing an arm around Falcon’s shoulder, helped him to hop on his good foot the final fifty metres to the school. Gardner was running on fumes, drawing on every grain of energy.

They were upon the school. The building cast a soot-coloured shadow over them. The temperature sagged from flame-grilled to plain hot. Gardner butted the padlock with the Colt stock. The lock was crude and the chain came apart with one clean blow. They went on through, Falcon yelping with every step.

‘Hang on little longer.’

Gardner gave a boot to the middle section of the door. An internal locking mechanism held the door in place, but the frame shuddered.

‘Hurry, Jesus,’ Falcon moaned.

A second kick. This time the door swung open. Gardner withdrew his support arm from Falcon, the BOPE rupert flaking out two metres inside the school on the lino floor. Spinning around to put a final burst down on the Messengers, Gardner counted ten kids, five of them armed with PP-2000s, the others with older pistols and revolvers.

He flicked the selector anti-clockwise to fully automatic, arcing the Colt horizontally across the thin line of Messengers. Bullets grazed walls, shredded a band of telephone wires. The gangsters ducked behind metre-high piles of bricks at the edges of the street. Gardner discharged eleven rounds, and got a hollow click-click. Shit. Out of ammo. He slammed the door shut, just as the Messengers returned fire.

‘Elevate your leg,’ he told Falcon, ‘it’ll stem some of the blood loss.’

Bullets bored into the door. Gardner fished two spare Colt mags from Falcon’s utility belt, slapped one into the mag feed and stuffed the second in the leg pouch on his combats.

Forty rounds of ammo. Gardner shattered a window pane to the right of the door, raking the glass out with the Colt’s barrel and unleashing a burst into the street. Shielded by the bricks, the Messengers were popping off rounds without aiming.

‘Five minutes is up, Rafa. Where the fuck’s BOPE?’

‘Perhaps the smoke and the gunfire are too much.’

‘Sod it. We’ve got to hope they’re on their way.’

But all that stood between the two of them and getting walloped were thirty-six bullets.

10

1225 hours.

Weiss guessed they’d go easy on him at first and he was right. The guy with the knuckledusters fucked him up a bit with a right uppercut that sent him flying. Cold steel cracked his jawbone so bad it felt like someone had sewn razor blades into his face. Then it was the turn of the tyre-iron guy, who served up a whupping on both his legs, turning them red raw and swollen. All things considered, not so bad. He’d suffered worse. The big pain was saved for later. He expected nothing less.

They slipped a Hessian sack over his head and tore the duster off his back. Then they escorted him through a weave of streets. The sack was dense and Weiss couldn’t see where he was going. They carted him into another house and up a creaking flight of stairs. He listened out for noises, anything that placed him somewhere specific. A TV in the background played the theme tune to 24. He thought he heard boys shouting.

They dumped him on a chair and bound his hands behind his back with plastic cord. Someone lifted the sack off. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light, like opening his eyes underwater in a murky swamp. He found himself looking at a broad-shouldered, shredded figure sitting opposite in big round shades, Incredible Hulk T-shirt and sandals. He was sitting backwards on a metal chair and examining one of the syringes from Weiss’s coat.

‘So, you are the one they call the Needle Man.’

‘And since there’s no Xavier,’ Weiss said, ‘that makes you, let me see… Roulette. But fuck it. The name doesn’t matter. You’re still a dead man.’

Roulette laughed in his chest. ‘That’s fucking funny. You know, your name makes a lot of tough guys shit themselves. Me, I don’t give a fuck. When Luis said you were coming here, I could hardly believe my good fortune. Tell me, what’s in this one?’

Weiss screwed up his eyes.

‘Thallium.’

‘And what the fuck is that?’

‘A poison.’

Roulette held out the syringe in his palm. Then Weiss realized they were not alone in the room. He could see two other men, dull-eyed, lean as poles at a strip club and dressed in slack jeans and T-shirts that reached their knees. They were like twins, except one wore a fake gold Rolex and the other had a Los Angeles Lakers basketball shirt. Rolex grabbed the syringe and tossed it to the ground. He crushed it underfoot.

‘Tell me, is it true? What’s it up to now, six hundred victims?’

‘That depends,’ Weiss replied.

‘On what?’

‘Whether you’re counting yourself and your two fucking friends.’

Roulette shot to his feet.

‘Vai toma no cu!’ he barked, grabbing his crotch. ‘There’s only one more death the Needle Man takes part in – and that’s his own.’

‘You’re making a big mistake, my friend. I’m worth more alive than dead.’

Roulette stepped to Weiss, so close he could see the pockmarks on the gangster’s skin.

‘You’re wrong,’ Roulette whispered. ‘See, our leader, Luis, he’s been in touch with some people who would love to see you dead. The Sinaola and Los Negros cartels in Mexico are especially keen to have your head on a plate. They’ve already made a, how do you say, down payment to Luis. It’s over, big guy.’

Lakers removed Weiss’s shoes. He fetched something from a shelf: a cordless orange power drill with a 10mm tungsten bit in the chuck. Weiss gritted his teeth and tried to concentrate on his breathing pattern. It was the only way he was going to get through this. If he passed out from the pain, he might never wake up again. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the drill.

‘If you do this,’ Weiss told Lakers, ‘I’ll find you and kill you and your whole family.’

A snakish smile broke out all over his face as he revved up the drill. As it whirred into life it reminded Weiss of trips to the dentist as a child.

‘You won’t get the chance,’ Roulette backing off, ‘my friend.’

With Rolex pressing down on Weiss’s foot, the third goon lowered the drill until the tungsten bit was touching the tip of his big toenail.

‘Wait,’ Roulette said. He dug out a clam-style mobile from his jeans pocket. Flicking it open, he pointed its camera directly at Weiss’s toe. ‘Big Teeth said he wants to see this.’

Lakers pressed the trigger. The chuck, rotating at 1100 rpm, began to pierce Weiss’s toe.

The pain was excruciating, like someone ripping off his toenail a million times over. He did everything to shake his foot free, but the other guy was holding it firmly in place and he couldn’t force any leeway. The toenail cracked down the middle as the drill pushed down into his flesh. His foot was covered in nail dust.

As the bit ate into his big toe, Weiss couldn’t fight it any more.

They kept on drilling.

The drill shuddered as it tunnelled into his flexor bone. Lakers revved again and forced the bit deeper into his toe. Weiss fought hard to ride the pain, absorbing each wave of nausea and taking big gulps of air. It was crucial not to vomit.

He felt as if an invisible hand was choking him to death. That he might pass out at any given moment. And he knew that if he fainted he wouldn’t escape with his life.

Dizziness overwhelmed him, like he was drowning in a bathtub. This is it, he thought, the moment of no return, and then a shrill, grinding sound stung his ears.

The bit had struck concrete.

He opened his eyes and peered down at the floor. Where his big toe once was, lay a splatter of blood and curls of torn flesh. Dirty-white bone fragments covered in gristle, everything hanging together by a few limp muscle strings. He tried twitching it, but nothing happened. Bile burned his throat.

‘Let’s give him a rest,’ Roulette said, flipping the mobile shut. ‘We don’t want him to miss the best part of the show.’

‘Yeah, fucking see you in a while, man,’ Rolex said. ‘We’re working on your teeth next.’ He made a pliers-wrenching motion.

The three men left, locking the door behind them. Weiss heard the stairs squeal like dying rabbits as they trampled down them, and a woman shouting, Roulette calling her a fucking ass-licker and a whore with a pussy the size of Argentina. Another door slammed, this one further away. The front one, he guessed.

Weiss spat on the ground. His mucous membranes were bright red. Somehow the pain and anger failed to register inside him. Ever since he was a child he had lacked basic empathy. A shrink would probably link it to his abusive upbringing, to the times he witnessed his alcoholic father rape his mum, or the day Padre swung his fists at his little sister, Maria, until she died of a brain haemorrhage. But the whys didn’t interest Weiss. He only knew that he felt no emotion towards anyone else – but, most of all, himself.

So it was that Weiss didn’t pity his situation, or rue his bad luck.

Instead, he focused on escaping.

11

1249 hours.

Gardner had slotted five Messengers but they’d kept on coming and their number had swelled to twenty. Each one decked out in the gang’s unofficial uniform of Ray-Bans, football shirts and PP-2000s. To conserve ammo, Gardner restricted himself to single shots whenever a Messenger slid his head above one of the four brick parapets strewn about the street.

Two guys, a few years older than the rest, yelled at each other. They suddenly leapt out from behind separate spots of cover. Mounted red-dot sights lasered the window. Gardner crouched, just as they pulled the triggers in tandem. Cooked air stroked the back of his head as the Luger rounds pelted the frame, slapping into a metre-high china statue of the Virgin Mary. Five seconds of fury, then Gardner detected a lull. Must be reloading, he thought, as the statue disintegrated into a dust cloud.

The lull was only two seconds, but that was all he needed. He shot to his feet and saw the two guys feeding fresh clips into the housing receivers. One of them was a fraction ahead of his mate, tugging the bolt lever into the closed position at the rear of the barrel. Poised to let Gardner have it. Gardner peered down the Colt’s iron sights and gave the bastard a .223 black eye.

The bullet entered the Messenger’s right socket, flinging brain matter and skull out the back of his head in a frenzied spurt, like uncorked champagne. His mate ditched his PP-2000 and scarpered.

With the other Messengers content to put down rounds from their concealed positions, Gardner pulled back from the window and tended to Falcon.

‘Wal-ah,’ Falcon said. Gardner could see his lips were dry as bread crust. He retrieved Falcon’s canteen and tipped a precious few drops into his open mouth. Falcon swallowed greedily. Gardner had a sip himself. Wished it contained something a little stronger.

Falcon was slipping in and out of consciousness now, his eyes glazed over. Gardner gave him a hard slap on both chops.

‘Wakey, wakey. We need to get arses into gear.’

‘Where am I?’

‘In Rio, mate.’

‘I’m dying.’

‘Bollocks. You’ll be fine.’

Falcon mumbled something that sounded like a prayer.

‘Do yourself a favour and look at the ceiling,’ Gardner said, as isolated bullets pinged against the front of the school. He rolled up Falcon’s left trouser leg, unlacing the combat boot to get a close-up view of the trauma wound.

‘How is it… bad?’

Gardner didn’t reply.

The lower portion of Falcon’s leg was totally fucked.

Beneath his knee the skin was singed and covered in burn marks, like his leg had been used as an ashtray. The bullet wound was a smooth, inch-wide circle bang in the centre of his shin, blowing out the bone and everything else with it – muscle, skin, a piece of his trousers. The lower half of his leg flopped like a rag doll.

‘Want the good news first, or the bad?’

‘I’ll take the good.’

‘It could have been worse,’ Gardner said. ‘You’ve been shot in a part of your body that’s mostly bone. If the fucker caught you higher up the leg, at the knee or thigh, they’d have burst your popliteal or femoral artery and caused you to bleed out.’

‘So I’m not going to—?’ asked Falcon, risking a sideways glance at his leg.

‘No, mate. You’ll live.’ Gardner smiled. ‘The bad news is, until we get you to a doctor, it’s gonna feel like you got an arrow stuck through your ankle, and there’s no morphine to numb the pain.’

The rate of gunfire suddenly increased. Dozens of bullets struck the door, like a hundred sets of hands rapping against the woodwork. Rounds whizzed through the exposed window. The noise lacerated Gardner’s ears.

I need a distraction, he thought. Something to give us a chance to bug out. He rummaged through the pouches on Falcon’s assault vest and located an M67 frag grenade. A little buzz of excitement rose inside him. Trailing back to the window, he tore the safety pin from the clip, maintaining a firm grasp on the spoon to stop the grenade igniting. He released the spoon, waited two seconds for the cook-off, and then raced past the window, lobbing the grenade thirty metres into the street. The M67 rolled.

Four metres short of a Messenger’s foot, it came to rest.

Gardner stepped away from the window as the Messenger moved to pick up the grenade. He was going to chuck it back to its sender, like they did in the movies. But the grenade had less than a second to detonate, and as he disappeared from view Gardner heard a powerful whump, accompanied by the sound of hot steel splintering flesh and concrete, like a million stones spilling. Someone screamed at the top of his voice and suddenly Gardner was back in Sangin, listening to the life bleed out of the delirious kid to his right.

‘What about a tourniquet?’ Falcon asked.

‘On that? Fat chance, mate. Cutting off the blood supply will do more harm than good. Leave it exposed for now, until we can get it properly seen to.’

‘Shit, my lungs. I – I can’t breathe.’ Falcon looked at Gardner’s outstretched hand, seized it. ‘Fuck. Those bastards keep coming. They won’t stop, not until we’re both hanging by our legs.’

‘We’ll pull back to the rear. The school’s not far from the jungle, right?’

‘A hundred metres, maybe less. Why?’

‘That’s where John Bald is.’

Gardner shouldered Falcon and led the way down the cool main corridor, joining the entrance to the rear of the building sixty metres away. Three classrooms flanked either side of the corridor, with lino floors, chicken wire over the classroom windows. The strong smell of disinfectant stung his nostrils.

They were thirty metres from the rear exit.

Twenty.

‘Shit! I forgot my rifle,’ Falcon shouted above the racket.

‘Can’t go back now, mate. You got a secondary?’

‘A what?’

‘A backup weapon – handgun, anything like that?’

Falcon nodded, opening his leg holster and removing a stainless-steel Taurus PT92 semi-automatic. Not bad for a secondary, Gardner reckoned.

A loud bang to his rear. He glanced over his shoulder. The front doors swung open. Gardner clocked the Isuzu in the street. And a guy’s torso, the body charred black as burned toast. He recognized the footwear on a pair of legs to the right. Same fucker who’d reached for the M67.

Three shadows sprinted into the corridor.

Ten metres from the rear exit and in the cool of the corridor, Gardner’s mag was empty. Hurrying, he ejected the mag and manually pulled the bolt lever, loading the final clip of Remington brass into the receiver. Twenty rounds – all you’ve fucking got, he thought. He tugged the bolt a second time, chambering the first .223 round.

He focused on the nearest target. Forty metres distant. Broad and with a distinctive Mohican. Gardner adjusted his aim, dead centre on the target’s chest area.

Crack!

Smoke fluted out of the Colt’s barrel. It was as if the target had swallowed a packet of C4. His chest cavity ruptured, a hole the size of an apple punched in his breastbone. Grey and black shit slopped out, like an uncoiling snake. The guy flopped forward. Blood spewed on to the lino floor.

‘What have you got?’ Falcon shouted, discharging his Taurus at the middle target. ‘Show me what you fucking got!’

His aim was wild, the rounds sparking off the brick walls, like a dozen firecrackers going off. Glass on the classroom windows cascaded. The air thickened with mortar dust.

The target was twenty metres away, fifteen now, and Gardner fought to maintain his composure. Some guys went batshit in the middle of a firefight. Others, like him, seemed to reach a new plane of calm.

Deep intake of breath, exhale, loosen your shoulder, he told himself.

The target’s face disappeared behind a carmine mist as the bullet erased his eyes, nose and mouth.

Falcon pumped four rounds in quick succession at the third target. The 9x19mm Parabellum chopped the guy in half, unzipping his guts. He stopped, dropped his PP-2000 and dumbly tried to shove his intestines back inside his stomach. Too late: Falcon dropped him with a neck shot, blood spraying across the kids’ drawings adorning the walls.

‘That’s what happens, bitches. That’s what fucking happens!’

‘Cool it, Rafa. Two more at the twelve.’

Gardner felt a pain sear the point between his neck and jaw. He raised a hand to the wound. Blood seeped from his ear; a bullet had grazed him, slicing off the lower tip of his ear, and dear God, it fucking stung.

In a frenzy now, Falcon pummelled bullets at the two Messengers. Five shots in each. He shot the second guy long after he’d dropped, rounds shredding his arms and legs, swearing at him in Portuguese.

‘Through the exit,’ Gardner shouted. ‘While we’ve got the chance.’

‘You see that asshole die?’ Falcon asked as they ventured out the back, into a playground of bleached grass, swings and roundabouts. ‘He took it real good, you know?’

‘Button it. I’m not interested. Just tell me the quickest way to the jungle.’

Falcon nodded left, like he was in a silent movie. To a small row of shacks to the left and up from the school. A low cattle fence separated the shacks from the flourishing undergrowth.

Almost there, Gardner thought.

Voices. Danger close. He peered around the corner. Four Messengers, forty metres away. Led by a guy with pecs the size of boxing gloves and biceps that looked as if he’d plugged his veins with cannonballs.

The sky bellowed a faint whup-whup.

‘What is it?’ Falcon said, seeing Gardner back-pedalling.

‘They’re outflanking us, mate. Head in the other direction.’

Gardner rushed to the opposite corner. Three Messengers appeared from that direction.

‘Pincer,’ he said, kneeling to unload a burst against the three targets. ‘Fuckers are coming at us around the sides. Rafa, take the left.’

The whup-whup grew louder. Incessant.

Gardner chopped down two of the Messengers, but the third had lined up his PP-2000. No time left to put down another burst. The guy released the catch.

Thwack!

Blood arced out of the Messenger’s chest, spraying Gardner in the face. Warm, salty fluid splattered his lips. His vision was dotted red. The Messenger sank to his knees, pawing at his throat. Gardner saw a Bell Ranger 206 helicopter, thirty metres off the ground, and a sniper tied to a lanyard, buzzing like an F1 car around a racetrack.

BOPE had arrived.

Gunshots to his six. He spun around. The Bell Ranger was chewing up the four Messengers attacking from the other flank. They fell like fucking skittles.

Gardner hauled Falcon to his feet.

‘Looks like your mates arrived in the nick of time. Let’s go and find a medic, get you patched up.’

‘I’ll be OK.’

‘Cheer up. They came back for you. Another few minutes and you – fuck it, we – would’ve been royally fucked. We owe them all a pint. Besides’ – he gestured to the ankle – ‘if you don’t tend to that, it’ll turn septic. Then you’ll be in a world of shit.’

Gardner scooped up his Colt Commando and escorted Falcon around the side of the building, the weapon aimed ahead in case any Messengers were desperate to get some.

The Bell Ranger circled the school building, sniper walloping Messengers in the back as they ran for cover. Three Big Skulls roared into the street, disgorging a dozen BOPE operators. They wasted no time putting rounds down, kicking in the doors of nearby houses. From inside each one Gardner heard the shriek of women and the crackle of gunshots. Across the street, two kids, thirteen or fourteen, unarmed, attempted to run into an alleyway. A BOPE operator unloaded his Heckler & Koch G3 sub-machine-gun, taking chunks out of the kids’ heads. When he approached them he kicked their bodies.

The Messengers moved back a hundred metres. A few stragglers sought cover behind bollards and on the rooftops.

Then Gardner looked on as a neat line of schoolchildren, dressed in pristine white shirts, pressed navy-blue shorts and polished shoes, brown satchels draped over their shoulders, walked through the street from sixty metres away.

‘Sponsored schoolchildren,’ Falcon said. ‘Their parents work as nannies or housekeepers for the rich people in Rio. Schooling is divided by address of residence, you see.’ He winced, trying to relieve pressure on his ankle. ‘These children are sponsored to go to school outside the favela.’

An eerie silence followed. Gardner realized that BOPE and the Messengers were participating in some sort of unspoken ceasefire. No one dared engage while the kids walked past, oblivious to the bloodshed and the Bell Ranger and the spent cartridges.

‘I need to sit down,’ Falcon said. He hobbled over to rest by the roadside. Gardner watched the surreal progress of schoolchildren along the street until it curved to the left ninety metres up, and they disappeared.

Once the kids had departed, the gunfire resumed.

Gardner spotted an ambulance bringing up the rear of the BOPE train. He turned to his left – and stopped in his tracks.

Falcon was gone.

12

1341 hours.

The pain was not so bad, Weiss thought. He had read somewhere that a man’s pain threshold was greater than a woman’s, despite the fact women had to experience childbirth. His ability to endure, he believed, was greater than most. As they pulled out his toenails one by one, he thought about how good it would feel to kill them.

He examined the tips of his nine surviving toes. Curly, hair-like matrixes remained, looking like the roots of upturned plants. They had rinsed him thoroughly: his toenails, the sliced left ear where his outer lobe had been sawn off, and the soft, moist ruptures in his mouth, which, an hour ago, housed four sets of perfectly good molars.

‘Not so tough now, huh, Mr Needle Man?’

Roulette sat on the metal chair, cupping a Swisher Sweet cigarillo between his hands. A spicy aroma wafted through the stale air.

‘Would you care for one?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Weiss replied.

Roulette turned to the two goons. Lakers clutched a box cutter, Rolex a pair of tempered steel snips. Weiss wondered which one was next, as Roulette’s phone sparked up. He read the message, grinned and nodded to Rolex.

‘I’ve got some business to take care of,’ Roulette said. ‘Go with the snips first. Big Teeth says use it on his testicles.’ He nodded to Lakers. ‘While I’m busy you can go fetch the saw. Big Teeth wants his head by sundown.’

He blew smoke out his nostrils, then stood up.

‘Enjoy it, Needle Man,’ he said, and left, Lakers in tow.

‘Just you and me,’ Rolex said. He practised with the snips. ‘I’ll give you a choice. Fingers or toes?’

‘Let me think about it,’ Weiss replied.

Twenty years ago, when he was a fresh-faced contract killer, Weiss had made an almost fatal error. A mark he was trailing hired a bunch of thugs to pounce on him, and he had found himself bound up in a basement. Only a friend’s quick thinking saved him that day. Ever since, Weiss had taken precautions against being captured. He carried a four-inch blade tucked into the buckle on his belt.

But it was out of reach.

‘So, what’s it gonna be?’

‘Your friend did my toe already,’ Weiss said. ‘How about a finger to match.’

Rolex did a head-shake smile. ‘You’re one crazy motherfucker.’

Weiss had no other get-out clause, no alternative exit plan. He wished he was in a James Bond movie, then he’d have some ridiculous gadget secreted on his body somewhere; maybe a poisonous spray screwed inside his watch.

But he had nothing. Just his statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She’d delivered him safely through six hundred murders. Weiss had evaded hundreds of cops, other contract killers, violent gangs and vengeful relatives. Now he’d got caught again. Perhaps he was getting too old for this line of work. Just as well that this was his last mission. He consoled himself with the thought that the pain was bad, but the reward – all thirty million of it – would more than make up for it.

Rolex stepped towards Weiss. ‘Shit, amigo. Looks like you puked up real bad. You’ve ruined your shirt.’ Acidic yellow and brown chunks were sprayed down Weiss’s shirt front. Rolex paraded around to the back of him and stopped. The plastic cord was fastened so tight around Weiss’s hands that the blood supply was constricted and his fingers were bloated.

‘Jeez, these fucking fingers… We tied you up tight,’ said Rolex. ‘Might take a couple of tries before I cut one off.’

‘This is your last chance,’ Weiss told him, trying to sound confident, in control of the situation. ‘If you let me go now, I’ll spare your family. I can’t promise your life, but your brothers and sisters and parents, they don’t have to suffer.’

Rolex laughed as he examined Weiss’s fingers.

‘I don’t got no family, man. How about this one?’ He isolated Weiss’s right index digit. ‘The trigger finger, amigo. Or in your case, needle.’

The touch of Rolex’s hand was replaced by something cold and metallic.

Weiss caught the sound of feet on the treads. The goons returning. He’d counted the stairs when they first dragged him up. There were twelve steps, he knew. They’d already cleared six.

‘Just a minute,’ Rolex shouted to the door, snips clamped loosely around Weiss’s finger.

‘I’m about to make a deal happen,’ Weiss said. ‘Thirty million. Work with me on it. Fifty-fifty split. Fifteen million dollars apiece.’ Pride prevented him from begging – he was always disgusted by those victims who broke down into a whimpering mess. But he thought that a gang kid low down the food chain, as Rolex undoubtedly was, might bite at such a big offer.

Rolex clicked his tongue. ‘Bullshit.’

‘It’s true, I swear. Why the fuck else would I be here?’

He paused.

The footsteps stopped.

‘Eighty-twenty, my favour.’

The door opened.

‘Fifty-fifty or nothing—’

Gun reports blasted Weiss’s ears. The snips fell away from his finger and he felt something warm and moist splash up against the nape of his neck, then trickle down his back. A distant clatter of gunfire, at the bottom of the stairs. Women, men, their voices cut short by the staccato bursts from automatic rifles.

BOPE operators flooded the room. Weiss counted four of them. Finding no one else inside the building, they turned to leave. Weiss’s hands suddenly sprang free and he let them flop by his sides. His arms were numb below the elbow. He felt the blood rushing through constricted veins, like a tunnel flooding. The operator who’d freed him knelt down beside him. He was wearing a handkerchief to disguise his identity; some BOPE operators, Weiss knew, also lived in the favelas.

‘Are you OK?’ The eyes were green, the forehead copper.

‘Yes, yes,’ Weiss replied in perfect Portuguese. He didn’t want to sound foreign, because an out-of-towner wandering around the favela would make the operator suspicious. Gang torture, though – that was common enough.

‘He’s dead, now. The others too.’

‘So… I’m free to go?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I fix cars, that’s all.’

‘Then I suggest you leave. You want my advice, stay clear of the school area. There’s a bunch of Messengers up there, and they’re not giving up without a fight.’

Weiss stood up. He was unsteady. He turned around to see Rolex holding his hands to his face. Melted eyeball seeped between his fingers, like fried egg white. Warm blood spewed out of a fist-sized puncture in his neck. The bullet had sliced the jugular vein. He was still alive, sucking in tiny breaths of air that flowed back out of the exposed wound.

‘Goodbye, my friend.’

Weiss picked up his coat and slipped on his boots. The right quickly became squidgy inside, as his big toe oozed blood.

He made for the stairs.

The living room had been turned into a shooting gallery. An obese women lay slumped on the armchair next to the TV. Both equally shot to shit. Weiss had to watch his step on the stairs, where Lakers sprawled face down. The BOPE operators seemed to ignore Weiss. And why wouldn’t they? As far as they were concerned, the Messengers were the only targets in town.

Weiss seized up as he made for the front door, raised a hand to his temple. An enormous pressure throbbed between his ears, as if a family of spiders was scuttling around his skull. He closed his eyes for a second and the spell seemed to clear.

His mind on the $30 million bounty, he said a prayer of thanks to the Virgin Mary. Once again, she’d come good for him. And he afforded himself a little smile, thinking how BOPE hadn’t just let a contract killer slip through their midst, but had actually helped him with his mission.

He followed the path to the school.

13

1405 hours.

Gardner cleared the low fence bordering the shacks, using its wooden posts as a lever to swing his body clear of the barbed wire. A smell of manure and ginger gagged him, watering his eyes.

The fence gave way to a thin line of caroba trees, piassava palms and khaki bushes. Gardner steered between their lone, prickly branches and pushed into the thicker vegetation. The buzzing of the Bell Ranger hushed, replaced by the squawks of macaws and parakeets. He felt the air swell with oxygen, prising open his lungs. Vine thickets shut out the light. His palms sweated, he could feel fear rising in him. The fear of a tight, dark space.

At last he emerged into a dome of secondary jungle. He wiped grime away from his eyes and, taking a look over his left shoulder, got his bearings. He’d entered the jungle at the north-west tip of Barbosa favela. When he’d inserted into the slum, he recalled, the jungle tapered north-west up a steep mountain to a summit several hundred metres above sea level. Six hundred metres to the south lay Corcovado mountain, its hunchback shape jutting against the skyline. If he adjusted his route westward and carried on for a couple of hundred metres, he’d be in line with the coded coordinates Bald had given him.

Fuck, Gardner thought. That phone call seemed like a year ago.

His stomach echoed like a cave. He hadn’t touched a morsel of grub since the previous night, but, juiced up with the knowledge he was nearly upon Bald, he got a second wind. He turned down the volume on the hunger, forgot about the aches and pains in his calves, and pounded on through the understory of the jungle.

He didn’t make as much progress as he would have liked, his pace hindered by the fact that the jungle floor was a dense mess of overgrown weeds, thorns, ferns, canes and shrubs. In primary jungle and deciduous forest, where tall canopies cut out much of the sunlight, the undergrowth is limited. But in this secondary jungle, where the canopies had been chopped down, sunlight had a clear run to the ground, and the vegetation flourished into a greasy tangle, as if the plants were knotted at the roots, forcing Gardner to concentrate on his every step. He wished he had a knife to hack through the overhanging vines and thickets. He just had to use the stock of his Colt to push aside spiky bushes.

In a way, Falcon had done Gardner a favour with his disappearing act. He’d served his purpose in leading him to the edge of the jungle. Still, something ate at him. Why the hell was Falcon so desperate to avoid his BOPE muckers?

Another thought scratched at the base of his skull: who kitted out the Messengers with hi-tech PP-2000s? The Russian-manufactured sub-machine-gun was the darling of elite forces and special police units, not the kind of firearm that was easy to buy on the black market – and he doubted they came cheap whatever the source.

Gardner stopped. He’d managed to get himself hooked up on the edges of a rattan bush, known in the Regiment as the ‘wait-a-while’ bush, on account of how long it took to free yourself from one. All I fucking need, he thought, as he began to work loose the needles from his clothing. Millions of the fuckers, it seemed.

No sooner had he untangled himself than his ears pricked. He paused.

A campfire crackled. Thirty metres ahead, the thick vegetation retreated, giving way to a small clearing. A sweet smell greeted him, fruity and toasted. He instantly recognized that smell as belonging to the Cohiba cigars Bald was so fond of smoking.

I’ve found him!

Gardner stared ahead at the camp, and saw that, although he’d come out to Rio to help the mucker who’d once saved his life, this had also been a personal mission. About proving a point to the pen-pushers in Whitehall: that he still had the skills and the balls to be a Blade. They’d given him the boot because of his injuries. Flying here, negotiating the favela, rescuing his mate: he could still cut it.

His bowels roiled. He approached the clearing, listening and looking out for any signs of human habitation. John might be there, he reasoned, but a Messenger might have trailed him and could be lying in wait.

Ten metres from the clearing, he planted a boot in front of him and felt something squelch underneath and hiss like a deflating car tyre. His eyes shot down – and he jumped back. Boa constrictor. The snake’s head shot forward, mouth wide open, teeth snapping at his ankle. Darting to the left to avoid its bite, he paced around the side of the vicious fucker, all seven feet of it. It hissed at him again, its blue tongue tasting the air, and slithered on.

Heart pounding, flies swarming around his face, Gardner entered the clearing.

The camp was empty. Signs left around the camp told him that whoever had been here recently bugged out. Damp smoke drifted off a doused fire. A makeshift A-frame, set up at the northern end of the clearing with split atap vines thickly layered across the roof, was also empty. A latrine had been dug up twenty metres to the east of the A-frame. It was brimming with shit and piss that flies feasted on. Gardner spotted a half-full bottle of water hanging from a tree by a rope, and, next to the fire, the stub of a Cohiba cigar. He kneeled and picked it up. The leaves were wet at the mouth end.

The cigar, the fresh shit, the water. John must’ve bugged out less than an hour ago. An uneasy feeling clawed at his guts. The camp didn’t feel right. Bald had the reputation of a vigilant Blade, the kind of bloke who was expert at covering his tracks, right down to bagging every last drop of piss. But the guy who’d lived here was lazy and hadn’t made any effort to cover up his tracks.

Gunfire shattered his thoughts.

To your six o’clock, he figured.

He turned. Silhouettes. Ten of them, forty metres away. They sliced through the rattan bushes with machetes, chopping vines and shouting. He saw a figure point a shotgun at the understory.

Boom!

Birds fluttered. The tail end of a boa constrictor was tossed into the air.

Messengers.

Gardner went into contact mode. He fell back to a caroba tree and knelt down behind the trunk, giving himself a clear line of sight, above the undergrowth, to the targets. Thirty metres to the Messengers. They were heading straight for the clearing. Bugging out was a non-starter; in this terrain he couldn’t pick up speed, and they’d soon be on his case. So, time to give them the good news.

Fifteen rounds left in the Colt. He waited until the first target was ten metres from the edge of the clearing, and opened fire, single-shot. The target dropped, and his mates went batshit, spraying rounds in every direction. Gardner was partially concealed between the A-frame and the caroba tree, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they spotted him. He unleashed four rounds, two into the torso of a tall, gangly target, the others for his friend beside him, his body jerking like some weird street dance.

He was winning the fight. The Messengers couldn’t get a fix on him. They were shitting themselves. Any minute now they’ll fucking do one, he thought.

Splinters showered his face, throwing him on to his back.

He looked at the shredded caroba trunk. The shots hadn’t come from the group to the east. Then another two rounds splashed into the soil around him, and Gardner was displacing to a shallow scrape behind the shit pit, cursing his bad luck.

A hundred metres north-east the jungle crested up into a ridgeline, where the undergrowth was stripped away, as if someone had given the ground a Brazilian. Rocky soil jutted out like a series of knuckle joints. And, exposed on the ridge, stood seven Messengers, taking pot shots at Gardner.

Bullets flung maggot-riddled shit into the air. Gardner kept his head down, desperately thinking of a plan B. The Messengers to the east burst into the clearing, twenty metres distant. He chopped the first two down with his Colt, ducking to avoid the gunfire from the guys on the ridge.

You’re pinned down and on your last eight rounds, he was thinking. Any second now you’ll be overrun.

Three more gangsters raced into the clearing, thirty metres ahead.

The light, rapid crack of a Colt Commando silenced their shouts.

‘Come to daddy,’ a voice called out. ‘You know you fucking want it.’

It was full-on cockney. Not Scottish, not John. Dry and hoarse, as if he’d necked a pint of sand. But unmistakable all the same.

Gardner peered out from the scrape. A rangy guy in a loose black T-shirt and grey combats, Bergen strapped to his back, raked gunfire down at the Messengers in the clearing. Their bodies formed a pile at the clearing mouth. He sliced up the final guy and slid over to Gardner’s position.

‘Well, say something, you silly cunt.’

Topped by Brylcreemed hair, the face had pockmarked cheeks and the rough horseshoe that was always the front-runner for the annual Credenhill shit tache competition.

‘Dave?’

‘Don’t act so surprised, lad. It’s me, not fucking Bono.’

‘But what the—?’

‘I’ll explain it all, mate, soon as we’ve sent these wankers over to the dark side.’

Dave Hands was right. No time for questions. Hands vittled a few rounds over the top of the scrape, at a couple of injured Messengers trying to take cover.

‘Reckon we need to pepper-pot back to a baseline.’

‘All well and good, mate, but I’m down to my last few rounds.’

Hands nodded, fishing out a fresh clip from his utility belt. ‘Don’t ask, don’t get. How many on the ridgeline?’

‘Seven, total.’ Gardner peered over the top, sighted a Messenger cross-graining the ridge on a downward slope towards the camp. Two taps on the trigger: slotted. ‘Six. See that ditch just short of the ridge? Make that the baseline.’

‘Bit of the old fire-and-move, yeah? Read my mind better than my ex-fucking-wife.’ Hands checked his Commando. ‘Right then. Thumbs out bloody arses.’

‘Covering fire!’

Hands displaced from the scrape while Gardner concentrated the last six rounds of the clip on the Messengers on the ridge. The distraction worked. The Messengers returned fire on Gardner, ignoring Hands as he railed the western edge of the clearing, lying up at the ditch twenty metres ahead of Gardner. Now he went into contact mode, and Gardner sprang out from the shit-splayed scrape, racing diagonally across the clearing as fast as his tired leg muscles could carry him. Rounds smacked into the soil around him, flinging dirt into the air like geysers. Gardner hit the ditch.

As soon as he reached the baseline he saw Hands, down on his knees, spraying the Messengers. Gardner slapped in a new clip. The Messengers sought cover, but there was none. They must have realized the mistake of attacking from the ridgeline too late, as Hands sprayed arcs of lead mayhem along their position. Gardner fixed his eyes on Hands. The moment he eased his trigger finger, indicating he needed to reload, Gardner stood up and picked off Messengers with his remaining rounds. One, two, three: they dropped like Lehman Brothers’ shares. Two final targets legged it.

‘Fucking showed them the time of day,’ said Hands, spitting.

‘Let’s break out of here before their mates get the scent. Millions of those bastards in the favela.’

But Hands didn’t move. He stood up, propped his rifle against a tree trunk and fetched a pouch of Cutter’s Choice baccy from his pocket. ‘Relax, Joe. They ain’t coming back. You know what they’re like?’ He lit the end of his Rizla paper. ‘Catholics practising safe sex. First sign of trouble, they pull out.’

Gardner surveyed the carnage. Smoke mist clung to their legs. The air tasted of hot metal, cordite so thick he could chew on it, like gum. I wouldn’t be so sure, he thought.

‘What the fuck are you doing here anyway?’ he said.

‘Nice to see you too, mate.’ Hands caned on his cigarette. ‘I could ask you the same question. Suppose the two of us could waffle on for fucking ages, but you know what? Be easier if you hear everything from the man himself.’

‘You mean—?’

‘John’s up the hill. He sent me to get you.’

14

1512 hours.

Weiss traipsed up the street. Towards the sound of gunfire. In the favela, if you wanted to find out the truth you followed the bullets.

But the cramps in his stomach and the convulsions in his legs had reduced his pace to a shuffle. He inched forward with one hand pressed against the bullet-flecked walls of the surrounding homes. It had taken forever to make his way from the torture house.

A hundred and fifty metres from the firefight now. Smoke clogged the air. The soft pulse of a helicopter. Hot ash parched his throat.

Son of Mary and Joseph, for a sip of water.

He stooped, and vomited. The fourth time in the past hour and his guts had no chunks left to hock up, just bitter yellowish liquid. He looked down. He’d puked on a chicken pen. The rainbow-coloured birds cawed their disgust.

As he drew near to the top of the favela the street inclined sharply. He wasn’t sure if his legs could carry him much further. He stopped to catch his breath. His temperature had rocketed. The corners of his lips had cracked open, like paper cuts. Something is badly wrong, he thought. Maybe I’ve contracted a fever.

His mind cleared for a second. Fifty metres away, a blurred face came into focus, and he realized he’d hit the jackpot.

Roulette faced west, giving his back to Weiss. He’d not yet seen the Mexican. Roulette was barking orders at three goons. His voice was rasping, frantic. Weiss hushed his rapid breathing and hunched up against the wall.

‘How many left?’ Roulette asked.

‘Alive, boss, or just the ones who can fight?’

‘If they’re alive, they’d better fight, or I’ll fucking kill them myself.’

The goon hesitated. ‘Twenty. They had the helicopter, we had nowhere to hide—’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Roulette cut in. ‘And BOPE got the Russian guns from the bodies too. Which means that we’re fucked, because they’re going to understand where we got them from. Forget it. We can kill two birds with one stone. The guy who sold us the guns, he’s the one who was going to rob us. We find him, it’s done.’

‘But, boss, the chopper—’

‘The chopper can suck my dick. There’s an RPG stash on the other side of the favela, in the safe house next to the hospital. The boys can take them. We’ll shoot that fucking thing down. And Carlos’ – Roulette clamped his fingers around the goon’s neck – ‘make it quick. I don’t want this bitch to escape.’

‘Sure, whatever. What about you, boss?’ asked the other goon.

‘I’m going to finish off that Mexicano cunt.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘By now Alberto should have finished on his hands and dick. See you in an hour.’

The goons departed.

From his position behind the wall, Weiss spied Roulette pounding the street. Heading in his direction. Weiss reached into his duster. His left hand was shaking. He gripped the wrist with his right hand to control it, and produced a syringe. A thought picked at his frontal lobe, vanished before he could seize it.

Roulette was twenty-five metres off. With his left hand uncontrollable, Weiss chomped the syringe between his teeth and ripped off the cap. His guts made a squelching noise, as if his stomach was seeping acid into his bowels.

Ten metres.

Weiss steeled his hand. The needle glinted.

Five metres.

Roulette’s shadow skated past.

Now.

Weiss swung around the corner and found Roulette almost on top of him. The Messenger leader collided with Weiss, who had to fight hard to stop himself toppling backwards. Roulette’s eyes, a couple of black poker chips, blinked their surprise at him, then lowered and inspected the needle as it punched his stomach.

Roulette took two steps back and tugged the syringe out. Foaming at the mouth and swaying on his feet, he seized up.

‘How does it feel?’ Weiss asked, as Big Teeth’s number two struggled for breath. ‘Really, I’m curious. Do you know what’s in your bloodstream?’

Roulette’s eyes ballooned. He sweated feverishly, making a supreme effort to shake his head.

‘I’ve injected you with Batrachotoxin. The name means nothing to you, naturally.’ Roulette grunted his agreement. ‘But perhaps you are familiar with the poison dart frog. The poison is the most deadly toxin known to man. It will attack your central nervous system first, paralyzing your muscles one by one. You’ll be in a state of helplessness as you lose control of your body. Your chest will feel like… like it’s crushed underneath a cattle stampede. Breathing will become impossible. And you’ve shit yourself, I see. This… this is what you get for trying to fuck with—’

Weiss spewed blood, spraying Roulette’s neck and shirt. He rested a hand on Roulette’s shoulder to stop himself from falling over and dear God, his kidney was on fire.

He looked at Roulette and forgot about his pain. The Messenger’s skin shifted pale blue. Many people panicked or cried in their last moments of life, and some even accepted death without complaint. But Roulette laughed. Weiss wasn’t sure why. His eyes narrowed to dead matchsticks, his face screwing up in amusement.

It was the laugh of a man who intended his to be the last.

Weiss left Roulette on his knees, floundering in a pool of his own shit, and dragged himself up the street. The street peaked. He saw the bodies first, spread-eagled and deformed. Messy deaths, the kind Weiss disapproved of. It seemed strange when he considered it, but Weiss hated the sight of blood. That’s why he used syringes.

The school. Nobody about. Decorated with bullet holes and cartridges, as if God had placed a storm cloud over Barbosa favela and made it hail brass.

He saw a Messenger fleeing from the north, running so fast his feet seemed not to touch the ground, and he knew instantly his destination.

The jungle.

That’s where he’d hit pay dirt.

15

1600 hours.

Gardner and Hands moved low amid the undergrowth. They stuck to the most impenetrable route through the jungle – Gardner’s idea, in case the Messengers picked up the chase again.

‘This is pointless,’ Hands moaned. ‘I’m telling you, we’re safe as bloody houses. You remember the crap insurgents in Basra? Shooting from the hip like they think they’re in fucking Hollywood. These guys are ten times worse, mate.’

‘I remember,’ Gardner said, ‘more than a hundred good soldiers died in Basra.’

‘Yeah, but you always get one or two.’

Gardner took no notice of Hands and his spiel. He had spent fifteen years of his life hyper-alert and sticking to the cardinal rule – never underestimate your enemy – and he wasn’t about to give up now. The jungle air was damp and moist, his clothes drenched, sticky. A trickling noise reached his ears, like coins jangling in his pocket. It came from the north-west. Energy coursed through him. He could hear the blood rushing through his head.

All the while he was keeping one eye on Hands. The man wasn’t moving with care, snagging his Bergen against branches, trampling on tall grass and generally leaving the kind of sign that would make David Stirling roll in his grave.

‘Been what, four, five years?’ said Gardner.

‘Five years, eight months and twelve days. Not that I’m counting.’

‘So what’s the buzz?’

Hands was quiet for a beat.

‘Down here helping John. What’s it fucking look like?’

Gardner raised an eyebrow. ‘With BOPE?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘I didn’t know you and John kept in touch.’

Hands was silent again, as if they were talking over a bad phone line. ‘Well, you know, we didn’t for a while. He was doing this, I was tied up in a bit of that… You want the truth, Joe? No one fucking talked to me after, after – it. Not one fucking Blade. Not Pitman, not Grant, not even fucking you.’

He had turned on Gardner like a Rottweiler, eyeballing him ferociously. Gardner returned the compliment. Backing down wasn’t in his DNA.

‘Spare me the self-pity act, Dave. You fucked up the moment you tried to sell the drugs. Ten thousand ecstasy tablets, for fuck’s sake. Once you made that choice, you deserved everything that came your way. And here’s another thing. I don’t give two shits whether you think it was me or any of the other lads who set you up with that undercover copper. Because, you know what? You made your bed. You fucking lie in it. There’s no one to blame for what happened but yourself.’

‘You can be a real dick sometimes, Joe,’ said Hands, stepping into Gardner’s face. ‘Just because not everyone goes around licking Regiment arse, you think you got a right to fucking judge me.’

Gardner was suddenly conscious of the Colt by Hands’ side. His finger paused on the trigger.

All alone, middle of nowhere, it would be so easy…

‘And yeah, I got caught.’ Hands’ voice was becoming scratchy. ‘No argument there. But I paid a heavy fucking price. Years after that, I couldn’t get work wiping the shit off someone’s arse. You don’t know what I went through. No fucking idea. We all make mistakes, mate, but some of us take a harder fall. Know what I mean?’

Hands lifted his finger off the trigger. Then he smiled and extended his left hand. ‘But I always say, past is past. I ain’t got no grievance with you no more.’

Gardner shook hands with his prosthetic.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Everyone deserves a second chance. If John’s willing to trust you, that’s good enough for me.’

He said it to put Hands at ease, not because he truly meant it. Hands, he knew, was prone to losing his cool. He’d once stuck his gun in the face of a guy who tried to overtake him on the A3. Threatened to shoot the driver and his bird on the spot. The CO of D Squadron, 22 SAS, Major Neil Buckie, severely reprimanded him, but Hands didn’t shape up.

Then the drugs bust left Buckie with no choice but to give him the boot. And, in the years since, Regiment gossip had reached Gardner’s ears of the dodgy dealings Hands was involved in. Pornography distribution, including kiddie porn and bestiality; counterfeit passports and credit card scams; drug dealing.

So why’s John working with him? Gardner wondered, but he backburned the question.

They burrowed on through the jungle, Gardner’s arms and legs in pain, his body cannibalizing its muscle for energy. Adrenalin supercharged his veins.

Two hundred metres further on, Gardner realized the origin of the jangling sound: up ahead, a fast-flowing creek running downhill along the basin of a pocked ridge.

‘Home sweet home,’ Hands said.

Everything clicked. The tracks at the camp. The fire. It wasn’t laziness. ‘The campsite,’ Gardner said. ‘No self-respecting Blade would leave such a mess. It was deliberate, wasn’t it?’

Hands nodded. ‘A decoy. John’s idea. Put any nosy fuckers off the scent, know what I mean? He reckoned you’d figure it out for yourself.’

Thirty metres from the edge of the creek, which was tucked in behind a thick web of vines and ferns, Hands stopped. Gardner spotted a figure. The man was shaded by a nearby kopak tree that towered over the land, fifty metres high and half a metre thick. The trunk was crowded with buttresses.

Gardner paced ahead of Hands. The guy was sitting on a toppled tree trunk. He had a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife in one hand, slicing the double-edged blade along a length of bark in his other hand, tucking the dry shavings into a small pouch on his lap. Four Bergens were propped up against the trunk, coloured in digital camouflage.

The man’s hands were black as soot, covered in welts and bruises. He was barefoot. A pair of brown socks hung from a long branch nearby. Gardner noticed that his right foot was swollen and purple, probably from where he’d been bitten by a spider or snake.

Gardner knew who he was, even before he stepped closer to him, when the jungle gloom eased and the face took on definition. His pale skin was masked by camo paint, eyes beaming like spotlights. He was bulkier than Gardner recalled, but still had the frown grooved into his forehead.

John Bald.

16

1633 hours.

He was close.

Weiss stumbled across the clearing and licked the air. It tasted zingy and heavy with topsoil. Like a bomb had gone off in his mouth. The battle that had raged in the clearing had occurred very recently, he figured. Smoke clung to his ankles, and the wounded had not yet died.

Make that ‘one of the wounded’, he thought as he approached the last survivor. The kid was not long for this earth. He was early twenties, a golden dollar-sign chain hanging from his neck, and a hole in his chest large enough to sink an orange.

Weiss squatted down beside him.

‘If you want, I can make it quick,’ he said, reaching a hand into his duster. ‘Tell me which way he went.’

The kid shuddered. It was a bitch of a choice for any human being to make: die now, or live longer and suffer. The kid chose death. He pointed a finger west.

‘Was he alone?’ asked Weiss, now feeling for the syringe.

The kid curled his thumb and index finger into a ball, leaving two fingers in the air. So, the target had company. He had all the information he needed. Time to honour his end of the bargain.

Weiss frowned. He couldn’t find what he was looking for. Pulling his coat wide open, he ran his peepers down the row of needles. He was missing a syringe, one loaded with a toxic alkaloid called aconitine. That’s too bad, he said to himself. You probably dropped it when you escaped from Rolex and Lakers. Aconitine was one of his favourite compounds, and he made a mental note to touch base with his chemist on his return to Ciudad Juárez.

The kid wanted a quick death, and Weiss obliged. He administered a high dosage of succinylcholine to the neck. Within seconds the kid’s muscles shrivelled up and he couldn’t breathe. Something flopped in his chest. He went over to the dark side.

Weiss moved on. He got about halfway across the clearing before he doubled over in agony and his guts contracted, as if someone was yanking at him with a bungee cord. He coughed up black goo; shivered in spite of the jungle heat. The tips of his toes were numb, his fingers likewise.

You’ve got a fever, he reasoned. After what Roulette and his goons did to you earlier, are you surprised? But don’t let it stop you. I won’t, but Christ, it hurts. He steadied himself, fearing he’d faint.

One glance west and he was on his feet.

He noticed the snapped branches and the crushed twigs. The footprints and the damaged undergrowth. Someone had beaten a path through the foliage and left evidence of their route. It was God’s will, he was sure of it. Thirty million dollars. So close now, he could almost smell the greenbacks.

Weiss ignored the fever and pushed on.

17

1701 hours.

John Bald looked at Gardner briefly, then went back to carving firewood from the wet bark. Crunching twigs sounded to his six o’clock. Hands drew near to him, and Bald put the bark to one side, knife dangling between his legs.

‘Took your time, man,’ Bald said.

Thinking the question was directed at him, Gardner made to answer. But Hands replied, ‘We got held up. Messengers had a little welcome party for us, yeah? Nothing to get your knickers in a twist about. Me and Jason Statham here gave them what for.’

Bald ran his tongue around his mouth. ‘Sure no one followed you?’

‘Gimme a break,’ Hands replied. ‘Those gang pricks couldn’t follow their own fucking shadows.’

Bald gave no indication of whether he agreed with Hands. Holding it up to the light, he examined the Fairbairn-Sykes. ‘Well, you got here just in time. I think our mutual friend is about to pass out from the pain. I need you to clean his wound and get some fresh dressing on it. And a shot of morphine too, keep him quiet.’

Hands strode past Gardner to a figure at his peripheral vision. He noticed the foot first. The boot had been cut off, a grey blanket tied around it and a long forked branch that stretched from his armpit to below his foot, tied with vines around the ankle.

The foot belonged to Falcon.

Gardner did a double-take. Couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He looked back towards Bald, who made no effort to explain anything to him, much less make eye contact. He seemed obsessed by the fighting knife.

‘What, what’s going—?’

‘You must be exhausted, man. Here,’ Bald said, tossing a canteen towards Gardner. ‘It’s from the stream. It’s got a wee kick to it from the purification tablets.’

This isn’t the John I know, Gardner thought. Bald never used two words when one would do the trick. But he was also warm and loyal. Now it seemed he was treating Gardner like a stranger. No ‘thank you’ for travelling halfway around the world.

Gardner unscrewed the cap on the canteen. Dark, filmy water sloshed about inside. He didn’t raise it to his lips. Instead, he looked at the stuffed Bergens beside Bald – calm, relaxed Bald – and wondered.

He laughed.

‘Something funny, Joe?’

‘You tell me,’ Gardner replied. ‘The tablets, the fake camp, the Bergens. You don’t mean to tell me you had all this kit with you for a patrol with BOPE. This took planning. Preparation. When you got jumped, all this shit was already in place.’

‘Aye, man. You’ve a fair point,’ Bald answered, his bottom lip weighing it up. ‘The truth of the matter is, we had to take some precautions.’

‘Who the fuck’s “we”?’

Bald extended an arm towards Hands and Falcon. Hands rinsed out Falcon’s wound with water, wiping it down with a gauze swab and wrapping a roll of sterile dressing around the open wound. The BOPE captain was feverish, fucking out of it like a pillhead in a rave club.

‘Why, my business partners, of course.’

Gardner lit up like an oil field. He felt duped, had the urge to punch someone in revenge, but he wasn’t sure who deserved a socking the most: Bald for his cry of help, Falcon for keeping shtum about his link to John, or Hands just for being, well, fucking Dave Hands.

‘You reached out to me,’ he said, pointing to Bald. ‘You said you were in the shit, John. Knee-deep in the stuff. That’s why I rushed out here at a fucking moment’s notice. Because you were in trouble.’

Bald slipped on his dried socks and boots.

‘But I am, Joe. I am. That’s why I asked you here. Listen, I’ll answer all your questions in a minute. First, I’ve got a question for you.’

He stabbed the Fairbairn-Sykes into the felled tree.

‘Can you still drive a boat?’

18

1720 hours.

Gardner didn’t reply. He noticed Hands and Falcon edging towards Bald, hanging at his four o’clock. His brain tried to make sense of everything. The connection with dodgy Dave Hands. The need for a boat. The fake camp. Falcon’s unease about his BOPE comrades. Each question only led to more questions.

‘This is important,’ Bald continued. ‘Life or death. I need to know if you can help me.’

‘Help with what?’

‘Getting out, man. The airport’s a no-go, there’s checkpoints at the state borders, and it’s a long haul to Santos by road anyway. Boat’s the only option we have.’

‘You’re gonna have to be straight with me here, John. Either you’ve lost your passport, or there’s something a lot darker that you’re not telling me. I’ve come a long way – too far to be fucked about. So how about you cut to the chase?’

Bald chuckled and wagged a finger at Gardner. ‘That’s what I always liked about you, Joe. You call a spade a spade.’

He nodded to Hands. The skinny ex-Blade paced towards the Bergens and fiddled with the straps on the leftmost one, while Bald took from his pocket a tennis-ball-sized fruit, reddish and leathery, sliced it down the centre with his knife and popped one half into his mouth.

Then Hands tipped out the contents of the Bergen.

‘This,’ Bald said, ‘is your spade.’

A stack of five packages spilled on to the floor, each the size of a paperback book, wrapped in white paper, with the image of a scorpion stamped on the top of the package. Gardner had conducted anti-drug smuggling operations in Colombia and could identify a brick blindfolded. Each brick, he knew, was a solid kilo of pure cocaine.

Silence between the four men. Hands tucked the Bolivian marching powder back into the Bergen, and a single thought lodged at the front of Gardner’s brain. What the fuck?

‘The world is about opportunity,’ Bald said, Gardner not even meeting his eyes. ‘The winners seize it. The losers let it pass them by. You remember how it was in the Regiment, don’t you, Joe? Strike when you have the chance.’

Gardner’s eyes flitted between Bald and Hands. He didn’t like the fact Hands was clutching his Colt Commando at waist height, barrel pointed at the ground. A quick swing of the carbine and he’d be aiming directly at Gardner’s head. His own carbine dangled by his side, out of ammo and fucking useless.

‘This here,’ Bald said, waving his hand at the Bergens, ‘this is what opportunity looks like.’

‘You stole it from the Messengers of God.’

‘Well, I prefer “liberated”. Spoils of war and all that. It was actually Captain Falcon’s idea.’

Gardner thought back to his first encounter with Falcon. ‘The explosive entry course.’

‘All I can say is, Florida’s a good place to do business. There’s fifty keys of cocaine in total, with a street value of thirty million dollars, American. We brought young David on board because of his contacts. He knows people who are desperate for premium-grade snow in Europe. Care for some?’

Bald held out the other half of the fruit. Gardner shook his head.

‘Please yourself. The plan’s worked out well so far. Rafael arranged to meet with some of the Messengers and make a weapons swap. A common enough exchange with BOPE and some of the army units. Corruption here, you see, it’s part and parcel of daily life.’

‘Some of the gang had PP-2000s,’ said Gardner. ‘Top-end firearms. You sold them to the Messengers.’

‘The weapons exchange was just a front. After the deal went down we took the Messengers hostage and tortured them until they gave up the drug stash. They did – and quickly, too. Threaten to kill a man, he won’t say a word. Shove a broom handle up his arsehole, you can’t keep him quiet. But bugging out of the favela has proved more difficult.’ Bald gestured at Gardner with the knife tip. ‘Which is where you come in.’

Hands helped Falcon to his feet. The rupert tottered on his makeshift crutch to the side of Gardner, until he was at the fringes of his line of sight. Hands, Falcon and Bald were now spread out in a semicircle in front of him, the Scot playing it cool as Gardner slowly backed up on his heels.

‘To return to my problem. I didn’t sell you a bum steer, Joe. I really am in trouble. The Messengers know for sure we ripped them off, and Captain Falcon thinks his BOPE friends have their suspicions. Somehow we need to get this shipment down to the port of Santos, where David’s contact will rendezvous with us. The only way we’ll get there without being arrested is by boat. Rafael’s got a contact who can rig us a Hacker-Craft at the port, topped up with diesel and ready to roll.’

Gardner met Bald’s eyes. They were wide and shiny, like a man who’d just landed a prize catch.

‘So, the question is: are you with us?’

Gardner felt three sets of eyes burning holes in him.

‘Why the fuck would I want in?’

‘I’m offering you a share of the profits,’ Bald said, raising his palms. ‘A three-way split becomes four. Just think. Seven and a half million big ones. It’s yours. All you’ve got to do is pilot a boat two hundred and fifty kilometres down the coastline.’ He paused, trying to gauge Gardner’s reaction. ‘And this is only the start of business together. Rafa here says there are literally hundreds of drug trains coming out of the favelas. We can clean up, Joe. You and me.’

‘I don’t know—’

‘Life’s not easy for an old Blade,’ Bald cut in. He shook his head sadly. ‘In the Roman Empire, soldiers were like gods. Today we’re the shit on the heel of someone’s boot. Look at the way the head shed treated you, fobbing you off with a pension that barely stretches to a chip buttie and a tin of beans. You, me – deserve better.’

‘I don’t know,’ Gardner said, ‘who you are any more.’

Bald shifted on his feet.

‘We used to see drug smugglers as the scum of the earth.’

‘The world’s changed,’ Bald replied.

‘No. Just you,’ said Gardner, clocking Hands’ face as it morphed from grin to scowl.

‘Don’t get all moral on me. This is snow, for fuck’s sake. No one dies. If we didn’t have it, the Messengers would sell it on themselves. What’s the big deal?’

‘Coke here, heroin in the Afghan. Drugs helped kill some of our mates. If the Taliban didn’t get their profits from the poppies, maybe they’d never had the resources to plant all those IEDs. Maybe good lads – guys we fought alongside – would still be alive. Sorry, John. I’m not perfect, but I’m better than a lowlife like Hands. I’m not getting my hands dirty.’

Bald crimsoned. Spit gathered at the corners of his mouth.

‘You bloody well owe me. I risked my life to save you in the Afghan.’

‘Yeah, I remember all right. But the Afghan was then; this is now. And my answer’s still no.’

‘Fuck you, then.’

The voice cut like a spear across Bald’s shoulder. Hands had his Colt Commando raised level with Gardner’s head. Falcon’s right hand rested on his holstered Taurus, his other on the crutch.

‘I told you bringing this cunt into the fold was a bad move.’

‘Drop it, David,’ Bald said.

‘Nah, screw that shit. I don’t know why you were so desperate to have him on the team in the first place. He’s straighter than a fucking go-faster stripe, and he’s supposed to get an equal share when we’ve done all the legwork?’

‘We need him if we’re to reach Santos.’

‘I’ll fucking walk it there myself. Better than letting this prick in on the action.’

‘Another one of your bright ideas, Dave? Maybe you should offload a brick to a copper,’ Gardner said. Wish I had a round in my rifle, he was thinking. Just a single bullet would do the trick. Put one right between Dave’s eyes.

‘Think you’re funny, mate? You won’t be laughing in a minute. And know what? Killing you will be the best decision I ever make.’

Hands peered down the sights of the Colt.

‘Put the gun down,’ Bald urged.

‘Enjoy the ride, mate.’

Hands depressed the trigger.

His finger pulled halfway before it happened. Before Bald thrust at him. Before Bald, stocky with legs like tree trunks, but fleet of foot and agile, leapt the three metres to Hands, socked him on the jaw and knocked him backwards, the chambered round in the Colt kicking up into the sky, panicking a flock of macaws.

Falcon clumsily pulled out his Taurus. Gardner broke right, trying to put some ground between himself and Falcon’s line of fire. A double crack split the air as he moved behind the kopak tree. He peered back towards the camp. Falcon’s corpse on the floor, Bald shadowing him, cursing under his breath. Hands unconscious by his side. Bald turned to the tree. To Gardner.

‘I make that twice, Joe. Christ, if I save your bacon again someone’s gonna have to keep score. Tell you what, pilot the boat and we’ll call it even-stevens. The good news is, I can offer you a three-way split, now that Rafael’s… indisposed. And who knows, David might have to accept a pay cut. More for me and you.’

Gardner crouched behind the trunk. Unarmed. How the fuck do you get out of this one?

The answer came in the form of a gunshot. Bald unloading a round at the tree. Bark sprayed Gardner’s face. Splinters nicked his hands.

‘Sometimes I think about how different things would’ve been, you know? If we’d waited for the sweeping team to come in and scan the area. I mean, those sand monkeys had worked out the tolerance of landmine detectors and there could easily have been another device waiting to kick off in my face. But if I followed protocol, you’d have bled out.’

Gardner couldn’t stand and fight. Not without a gun. He scanned the jungle.

‘Remember the kid, Joe?’

‘Connors. Pretty Boy Connors.’

Gardner kept him talking. Buying himself time. He looked towards the far side of the creek, where the land dropped off. Impossible to see how deep, or where it led to, but if he managed to get across there…

‘Reckoned he had a Page Three stunner for a bird. Speak to him for more than a minute, out came the wallet and the picture of his missus. Then we found out she was actually from Page Three. Kid had just cut her picture out of the paper and scanned it into a photograph. Bloody joker.’

Bald’s voice grew closer. Ten, maybe twelve metres away.

‘Hard to watch a kid like that die. And it could so easily have been you, Joe. Do me a favour and—What the fuck?’

The clatter of a gunshot. Gardner heard Bald grunt, a separate set of footsteps rustling the dry leaves and a voice cussing in Portuguese. He ducked away from the kopak tree and saw a burly guy in a black duster coat, using his weight to pin Bald to the ground. Bald kicked and flailed at him, but the guy was immovable as a rock. His face was pale as the coke packets and his shaking hand held a needle ten inches from Bald’s face.

‘Son of a fucking bitch. Help me, Joe!’

For a split second Gardner’s Regiment instincts kicked in, and he made towards Bald, fists clenched, ready to kick seven shades of shit out of the attacker. John’s lied to me, he told himself. But he’s still an ex-Blade, and I can’t stand back and let him die.

A rush of air above. Whirl of blades, whip of an engine. Gardner arched his head up and saw the Bell Ranger overhead. Low, seventy feet, rails almost touching the canopy below. So low he could see the pilot’s face, and the pattern on the sniper’s sneakers.

The sniper was aiming directly at him.

He broke left just as the sniper pulled the trigger. The bullet thwacked into the butt of a tree. Then the chopper lifted and circled around the creek, the sniper indicating to his pilot that he needed a clearer shot.

Gardner’s eyes followed it as it hovered to the east. Below, shadows moved along the ridgeline. They shouted and pointed towards Gardner. Bald still struggled with the guy in the duster. The shadows stopped seventy metres away. Two of them kneeled and aimed their weapons at Gardner.

Shit! Fucking surrounded.

He shot a final glance back towards Bald.

A needle suspended above his eyes.

‘Joe, I’m fucked! Help!’

I can’t, mate, Gardner thought as a crackle of gunfire erupted to his right. He ducked behind the eastern side of the kopak tree. He heard the furious splitting of bark as rounds smacked into the trunk.

Get out of here. You can’t save Bald, but you can still save yourself.

His survival instincts kicked in. He darted towards the creek. Once there he stared at the drop. The decline was practically vertical, all the way down into another area of the Barbosa favela. He had a widescreen view of Rio, from the clutter of rooftops and electricity cables to the Hilton, to Copacabana beach.

He cross-grained diagonally along the drop. Ten metres down, he caught a scream at his rear, like someone strangling a dog. Bald. He pictured the needle plunging through John’s eye socket, piercing his lizard brain. He didn’t know who the attacker was, didn’t give a crap.

Shake hands with the devil, expect him to stab you in the back.

The creek flowed directly past the favela, where it grew into impassable jungle. Half a dozen women were washing their clothes in the water. They stopped and stared at Gardner as he ran parallel to the creek. Twenty metres on, past a dead goat, he found a small fence, bounded over it and crossed the street. The Bell Ranger circled the air above. A Big Skull accelerated past, almost running over his foot. Slammed on the brakes. The passenger door swung open. An officer shouted at him.

You need to bug out, and quick, Gardner decided. The last thing he wanted was to be detained by BOPE. From what Bald said, Falcon wasn’t the only corrupt guy in the unit, and the other dodgy officers wouldn’t hesitate to execute a foreigner who knew too much.

Then he smelled shit and clocked a sewage hole on the side of an adjacent home. He had his escape plan.

19

1811 hours.

Gardner crawled into a tunnel tight as a coffin.

His body slithered into hot, foul waste the consistency of mud. The shit-and-piss brew touched his chin, and he clamped his mouth tightly shut, fighting his gag reflex. The space was so narrow he had to tuck in his elbows; they scraped along the walls of the tunnel, scouring the skin.

He rowed with his arms, his fists acting as flat blades that pushed beneath the surface and splashed sewage against his face. He was forced to breathe in through his nose, and the smell was wet and vicious, like burned skunk. Shards of light from the sewage holes lighted up the crap he ploughed through. He saw used condoms, bloodied tampons, nappies, tissues and even a foetus. But most of all, he saw shit: a mass of brown, as if he was squirming behind a donkey with a bad case of Montezuma’s revenge.

God, how long will it take to wade through this shit? Keep going until you’re out of the favela, he told himself. But the favela’s a mile long. A whole fucking mile. It’s two miles to the beach. You have to get out of the area. It’s not safe. Not with BOPE on your case. Fuck it, then.

He struggled on. The sewer flowed downward at an angle from the creek – three hundred metres above sea level – towards the beach. Occasionally a powerful surge of excrement rushed past him, pushing his head fully under the surface. Globs of shit filled his ears, his nostrils, prised at his clamped lips.

The holes in the street finished abruptly.

When the dark arrived, the fear rode its back.

And suddenly Gardner was back in the torpedo tubes during waterborne insertions training in Boat Troop. He watched the hatch batten shut, the darkness so complete he couldn’t see his hands. The tube flooding with water, and the agonizing wait for the chamber to open, releasing him into the sea.

The fear burrowed into his spine, paralyzing him. With every passing second it required greater effort to move forward. Every muscle in his body seemed to resist. The irrational part of his mind urged him to crawl backwards and exit the nearest street hole, but he fought hard against it. No, you have to push on. Like exploring caves, the darker and deeper you foraged into a mountain’s guts, the closer you came to the other side.

He lost count of time. There was no way of judging how far he had slithered or how much further he had to go. It felt as if he was sinking into a bottomless pit. The sewage level rose, reaching his bottom lip. He thought he might choke and drown.

Squeaks pierced his ears. He saw a light, white and irresistible, like an onrushing train. The exit. The light energized him. He picked up the pace. Then the squeaks grew louder, and he spotted a pack of rats at the exit hole, swarms of the fuckers picking at the build-up of sewage. He came close to the exit. The rats were excited. They scuttled around the hole, jumping on to his hands. One landed on his head, and he shook wildly from side to side, screaming, the rat in his hair clawing at his scalp, but all he wanted was to escape the tunnel, to breath fresh air, and he climbed through the hole and blinked in the sunlight.

He was out.

The rats scattered like pool balls at a break, and Gardner checked his surroundings.

He’d been coughed up in a backstreet of a residential neighbourhood. Split bin bags in a rubbish dump attracted the rats. He followed the street to a main road. Pleasant whitewashed villas, tan apartment buildings and colonial architecture. In the background he made out Corcovado mountain. You’ve crawled through more than a mile of shit, he thought.

A street sign told Gardner he was on Rua Alfredo Chaves. From his memorized Google map of Rio, that placed him in Humaitá district, east of the statue and outside the cluster of favelas to the north: Barbosa, Santiago and the rest. A clock outside a shop told him it was seven-thirteen in the evening. The work crowd had retired for the night. There weren’t many people about.

Not many, but a few. Across the street a fair-skinned girl in her twenties shot him a disgusted look and quickly moved on. Gardner glanced down at himself, and understood why. He was caked in shit from his toes to his neck. Some of the sewage was beginning to harden and fester in the heat.

Time for a wash, he told himself. He crossed Rua Humaitá, headed down a maze of tight roads and blue- and green-doored bungalows, drawing stares from the locals, and hit Rua Real Grandeza. Passing the São João Batista cemetery, its winged angel looking over the graves, he continued south for several hundred metres until he finally reached Avenida Atlantica and Copacabana beach.

He staggered across baking sand the colour of flax seeds. The beach wasn’t so busy at this time of day; the tourists were wining and dining and heading out to town. Topless girls covered up their breasts and blokes in brightly coloured beach shorts stopped playing football, and stared. A group of teenagers shared a joint and pointed at him. Gardner didn’t care. He looked ahead to the water, turquoise and foamy like cappuccino froth. The tide licked his feet. He shuffled into the Atlantic Ocean and swam out a hundred metres to a spot where no one could bother him. He let the cool water clean his body.

When he was done washing, he collapsed midway up the beach and let the fading sun dry his soaked, dirty clothes. Fuck me, he thought. Shaves don’t come any closer. He’d come to Rio to rescue his mate and found himself tricked and ambushed by a man he’d once been proud to call his best friend. And he’d escaped. Now he was lying on a paradise beach surrounded by topless women with arses that would make a grown man cry. One girl, dark-haired and topaz-eyed and wearing just a black thong, grabbed his attention. That size, her tits have got to be fake, he reckoned. Either way, he admired the view.

Gardner laughed. Then closed his eyes. Sand grains blew across his face, clinging to his eyebrows and nose. For the longest time, his world was dark.

Then he felt the sun cool. He opened his eyes and saw a shadow standing over him.

Faster, Grittier, Darker, Deadlier… Chris Ryan Extreme

Mission 1: REDEEMER

When an old friend makes a desperate call for help, former SAS Warrant Officer Joe Gardner is thrust back into the line of fire. His journey leads him into the deadliest favela in Brazil, where violent gangs, crazed hitmen and trigger-happy paramilitaries lurk. Gardner’s only hope of staying alive is through his supreme survival skills and warrior’s instinct.

Mission 2: THE ROCK

A chance encounter with an agent from MI6 leads Joe Gardner into a perilous mission in Gibraltar. His objective: bust a major cocaine-smuggling ring involving former a Regiment operator and the Royal Navy. But Gardner isn’t alone. A mysterious killer with expert martial arts skills is shadowing his every move. And it’s about to get noisy.

Mission 3: DIE TRYING

Dispatched to a postwar Belgrade crawling with criminals and bad memories, Joe Gardner is on a collision course with his one-time Regiment friend John Bald. Gardner plans to put a stop to Bald once and for all. But with the Russian mafya and Italian mob closing in, is Gardner too late? If he fails, tens of thousands will die.

Mission 4: FALLOUT

In the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack, Joe Gardner discovers a terrifying secret. In order to protect the truth, he must escort special agent Aimee Milana to safety, all the while hunted by government agents and a former Navy SEAL operator equipped with a lethal weapon. The race is on to reach Parliament Square before the clock runs out – and the world descends into all-out war.

All available in exclusive ebook edition.
For more information go to www.hodder.co.uk