Rising Phoenix (13 page)

Back in his rental car, Hobart ripped open the package
with his teeth and pulled out of his space and into traffic. He didn’t have much time if Corey had left right after their meeting.

He had driven the route between the bar district and Corey’s home a number of times during his exploration of Bogotá.

The late-night traffic was making it unnecessary to concentrate very hard on driving. He dumped the envelope out on the seat next to him and began sorting through the contents with his free hand, occasionally glancing up at the road.

They consisted of a .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol, twenty or so shells—which were now bouncing all over the passenger seat—a folded topographical map, and an empty envelope with handwriting on it. The envelope had the names of various chemicals used in the processing of cocaine, with company names and addresses next to them. The map had a small circle near the center with something scrawled next to it. The light in the car was too dim to read the blue pen against the blue-green of the map.

Hobart stuffed everything back in the envelope as he approached Corey’s neighborhood. Pulling over into an empty spot about three blocks away, he collected the remaining shells off the floor and threw the repacked envelope into the trunk of the car.

After double-checking that the trunk was locked, he walked briskly across the street and into the alley that Corey had led him through a week before.

Hobart found a comfortable spot between a Dumpster and some garbage cans, and settled in. From that position he could just see Corey’s front door around
the corner of the alley, but would be invisible to anyone walking by. He pulled a long thin knife out of the sheath taped to his calf, and laid it on his lap. The black blade didn’t reflect the light from the street.

Hobart checked his watch for the twentieth time—he could just make out the hands. They read four-thirty
A.M.
He had been sitting motionless, surrounded by garbage, for almost four and a half hours. In that time only three people had walked through the alley. None had seen him, or at least none had acknowledged his presence. People sleeping in alleys were hardly a novelty in that part of Bogotá. The only attention he got was from the rats, upon whose turf he seemed to be intruding. Every fifteen minutes or so another cat-sized rodent would stroll within five feet of him, stop, and stare. He stared back, occasionally he considered throwing something, but knew that the minute he did, Corey would come around the corner. Murphy’s Law.

His legs were starting to cramp from his partially crouched position, and that worried him. Corey might be a fat drug addict now, but his days as a killing machine were still fresh in Hobart’s mind. It had to be over in a few seconds. He didn’t want to give Corey’s body the chance to produce enough adrenaline to bring him out of his stupor. A fight with Corey, even at half of his former capacity, could prove lethal.

To the degree that Hobart felt emotional pain, this had been the most painful decision he had ever made. Seeing his old friend brought back memories that he thought were dead and buried. Memories of Corey on
point, gliding silently through the jungles of Asia. He had always taken the point and Hobart had always been a few feet behind him, following his footsteps through thick mud or tangled living carpet. Corey’s instincts and sharp eyes had kept him and his team from getting their asses shot off more times than he could remember.

Corporal Reed Corey was gone though, and in his place stood a drug-soaked impostor. An insult. To Hobart, Corey was already dead—he was just going to make it official. The regret wasn’t for the act of sliding the knife into the back of his head—it was for the memories of Corey that would be forever overshadowed by this last meeting.

There was no alternative, Hobart had decided, though he’d made little effort to find one. Corey was now completely unreliable. Should he put two and two together and figure out that it was Hobart behind the drug poisonings, he would undoubtedly sell that information to the highest bidder. The thought of dodging cartel enforcers as well as the FBI didn’t sit well with him. This was the most effective solution to the problem.

At about seven, Hobart noticed shadows beginning to appear. The light of the coming dawn was turning him from an invisible stalker to a derelict bum sleeping in an alley. It was time to move on. Corey was a no-show and he was bone tired.

It was difficult getting up initially, but the blood started flowing back into his legs as he walked up to the house that he had seen Corey go into a week before. As he passed by, he noticed an envelope taped
to the door. It was almost invisible against the peeling white paint. Hobart jogged casually up the steps and grabbed the envelope, hoping that it might give some indication as to Corey’s whereabouts. To his surprise, it was addressed to him. The letter inside was in the same precise lettering as the list of chemical wholesalers in his trunk.

It was unsigned.

Outsmarted by a coke addict. He tore the note up into small pieces as he walked back to his car, throwing the pieces on the ground with frustrated snaps of the wrist.

Pyon Te.

He vaguely remembered the name. Just another nothing village somewhere in southeast Vietnam. His
team had been sent there toward the end of the rainy season in what—1969? It had been a routine operation. Round up the occupants of the village and question them regarding reports of VC activity in the area. What had happened there that rated a mention twenty-odd years later?

It came to him as his key hit the lock of the rental car.

The rain had been coming down in sheets all day. It had slowed them down sufficiently to put Hobart and his team more than two hours late in arriving at the village. The light had been waning as they surrounded the small group of huts and began creeping through the mud toward them. Corey had taken the lead, as he always did, and by the time Hobart arrived in the center of the village, almost all of the twenty or so inhabitants were kneeling in a deep puddle at the edge of the swollen river that wound its way through the region.

Hobart had been questioning a particularly stubborn villager when he’d caught a hint of movement through the rain about fifteen meters south. The downpour had quieted enough for him to recognize the figure as a child of ten or eleven. He had calmly raised his pistol and squeezed off a single shot. The bullet hit the child squarely in the ear.

Inexplicably, Corey had been shaken by the incident. He had stood over the small body for some time. For a moment Hobart had thought he was going to cry. In Hobart’s mind there had been no choice. The girl could have made it to any number of adjoining villages in less than an hour, and if the village was indeed
VC-controlled, his team could have ended up with more than they could handle. Corey hadn’t seen it that way.

No loose ends.

Back at the hotel, Hobart spread the contents of the envelope onto the bed. He picked up the .22, loaded the magazine, and stuck the rest of the shells in his pocket. The gun looked like it had been well maintained, but he regretted forgetting to ask for a holster. Next he smoothed the map out on the bedspread. A small blue circle was drawn on a mountainous area about fifty miles from Bogotá. Next to it was printed an exact latitude and longitude that ought to get him within a hundred feet of the refinery. He smiled. Where Corey had found precise coordinates escaped him. Still a miracle worker.

He put the gun and map under his mattress and focused his attention on a small white envelope. Running a finger down the list written on the back of it, he saw what he was looking for.

KEROSENE: GARCIA QUÍMICO: 12 ROHO

H
obart spent almost the entire next day looking for a Global Positioning System. These units were relatively new on the American market, having become more reliable following the recent launch of additional navigational satellites. The concept was simple: The small handheld unit tracked as many synchronous satellites as possible and triangulated its position to within a few feet. Hobart had assumed that Corey would give him a general area on a map and that he would have to search that general area for the plant—necessitating the use of his rusty orienteering skills. He had to admit that Corey had come through. That is, if the refinery was at the coordinates scribbled onto the map.

He finally located a GPS at a high-end electronics store in one of Bogotá’s ritzier sections. He paid probably double what it was worth and started the long drive into the mountains.

It was almost ten
P.M.
when he reached the outskirts of Bogotá. Another thirty miles of highway driving
brought him to a gravel road that wound its way into the mountains. The night was clear, though the moon was only a sliver. The waning moon, in combination with the thickening jungle canopy and narrowing road, gave the illusion that the world ended at the edge of his headlights.

Almost an hour into the mountains, he was forced to reduce his speed to a slow crawl. He cursed himself for opting for an economy car instead of a more sturdy four-wheel drive. Pressing a button on the front of his GPS, he watched it light up and read out his coordinates. He punched another series of buttons and the unit calculated the direction and distance to his preprogrammed objective. It read just over six miles and the directional arrow pointed northeast. He had been heading roughly north for the last hour, and hoped he could cover the rest of distance in another hour.

In the end, it took him almost ninety minutes to cover four miles. The road never seemed to go straight for more than ten feet and in many places deep ruts had been carved by the heavy Andean rains. When the GPS read out two miles to his objective and the arrow had moved to point more of less west, Hobart eased into a small clearing in the jungle. He could get the car only about five feet from the edge of the road—any farther and he would risk getting stuck.

The smell was somehow different from Asia, he noted as he jumped out of the car and retrieved his bag from the trunk, but the sights and sounds were enough to cause an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. Pushing it away, he laid his bag on the ground and pulled out a pair of night vision goggles, which he strapped to his
face and turned on. The jungle around him was bathed in an eerie green light. Despite the goggles’ ability to amplify existing light ten thousand times, his vision was still murky. The weak mix of moon- and starlight was being diffused by the thick canopy of the jungle.

He quickly changed into fatigues and military boots and stuffed the bag under a dense bush. He rose, walking quickly to the car, and let the air out of the driver’s side front tire. Anyone noticing it would assume that the driver was out looking for help. A necessary trade-off. The flat would slow his getaway if things got hairy.

Hobart stuffed the .22 into the thigh pocket of his pants, took one last reading on the GPS, and started out at a slow pace. The foliage was dense, impassable in places, and he made poor time. He used the GPS sparingly, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to correct his direction. The unit was having some difficulty tracking satellite through the trees and mountainous terrain, but in the end he was able to get the fixes he needed.

Hobart had been in the jungle for a little over two hours when he checked his position for the last time. He was sweating profusely despite the cool temperatures—every step had been an adventure of bogs, tangled vines, and jagged rocks.

He was pushing the GPS back into his pocket when he heard the unmistakable sound of a human voice—startlingly out of place amidst the white noise of rustling trees and a billion insects. The jungle seemed to change instantly with the presence of another human being. Hobart slowed his pace to a crawl,
working his way toward the voice. In less than a minute, the sensitive photo cells of his goggles began to pick up a green glow through the trees. In another minute, the world began to look like an overexposed photograph, and he pulled the goggles off. Dropping to his belly, he crawled toward the light and activity. His progress was slow, every motion setting off a chain reaction of rustling foliage. He was forced to match his speed to that of the weak breeze. Another one hundred yards and he could see his objective. Corey hadn’t let him down.

It was less impressive than he had expected—just an old shack. Constructed out of native trees and woven with large leaves, it could easily be mistaken for the residence of a poor farmer. The tip-off was the four dirty-looking men with rifles, sitting with their backs pressed against the hut, warming their hands around a small fire.

Next to the structure was a grouping of metal barrels, each about three feet high and two feet across—he counted six. While he could see them clearly from his position in the dirt, they would be completely invisible from the air. The tops had been covered with a thin layer of leaves and vines. The barrels were what he was looking for. The only chemical needed in quantity to process coke was kerosene.

He watched the four men pass a bottle between them, laughing loudly. He was close enough to see the rotting teeth of the one on the right before the man hid them with the bottle.

Hobart lay there quietly watching for nearly two hours. Two things struck him. The first was the incompetence
of the guards leaning against the hut. He guessed that not one of them could hit the broad side of a barn with their rifles dead sober—which they certainly were not. He also doubted that they had a combined IQ over ninety. Their conversation seemed limited to the sizes of women’s breasts and the sizes of their respective penises. Their laughter came on cue just before the punch line, suggesting that the dialogue was the same every night.