Survival Reflex

They sat together in a plain brown van, with three secret police types huddled in the back. Waiting. Jones had a MAC-10 submachine gun in his lap, fat sound suppressor extending its abbreviated muzzle, but the weapon still looked almost toylike in his black-gloved hands. Sutter had picked a micro-Uzi, likewise silenced, and was feeding it a magazine of Parabellum hollowpoint rounds.

“It needs to look good, though,” Sutter remarked.

“That’s why we brought the three amigos,” Jones reminded him.

The locals all spoke English, more or less, but Jones saw no reason to spare their feelings. He was an American, for God’s sake. Anywhere he set his feet was home, thanks to the megabillions spent on foreign aid and the new atmosphere of militancy prompted by the War on Terror.

It wasn’t the natives he worried about, sitting sweaty and tense in the van. He worried about Downey and the man they’d come to neutralize.

Jones still wasn’t sure how Downey had zeroed the target’s hotel in Cuiabá. Some kind of high-tech hocus-pocus, he supposed, or maybe an old-fashioned squeal from an informant. Either way, they had his crib on quarantine, nobody in or out, and in another five minutes or so they would be going in to smoke him out.

Or waste him, as the case might be.

Downey had given them some latitude, after the fuck-up in Belém. He wasn’t letting them forget it—likely never would, the bastard—but at least he hadn’t sent them out unarmed this time. They were prepared, complete with reinforcements duly authorized to make arrests.

Not that he planned on taking Mr. Hot Shit into custody.

Not even close.

There’d been a time when asshole bullies used to get their kicks by stuffing Clement Jones in lockers, trash cans and the like, but Jones had turned that trend around by pumping iron for two years straight, then kicking ass and taking names. To save himself from bullies, he’d become a bully, and his path was set for life.

Until the moment in Belém, when all his muscle got him was a headache and the stink of garbage in his hair.

Somebody had to pay for that insult, the damage it had done to him in Downey’s eyes, and one Matt Cooper was about to rue the day he ever fucked with Clement Jones.

But Jones was nervous, sweating through his lightweight suit despite the early morning chill. The three studs waiting on the van’s rear bench seat seemed immune to nerves, but Jones saw Sutter fidgeting behind the steering wheel. Jones wasn’t psychic, but he had a fair idea of what was going on in Sutter’s head.

He didn’t want to give this Cooper prick another chance to kick their asses, nothing hand-to-hand unless the guy surrendered and they got him handcuffed. Maybe tune him up a little then, to settle scores, but if he offered anything resembling physical resistance, they would put him down.

Case closed. No second chances.

“Room 228, you said?” he asked Sutter.

“You got it.”

“And the woman’s in 230?”

“Right next door,” Sutter replied. “Connecting rooms, for all I know. Maybe they’re playing house. Guy wants to change his luck.”

“It’s changed, all right,” Jones said.

Sutter glanced over at him from the driver’s seat. “Remember, now, the first move’s his. We’re playing by the rules.”

“No sweat.”

It wouldn’t have to be much of a move, Jones thought. The prick could blink his eyelids, maybe clear his throat, and that was all the physical resistance it would take to spark a storm of automatic fire.

Their cleanup gear included body bags.

Jones didn’t really care about the woman, one way or the other, though the trouble had begun with her. He wished someone had taken care of her in San Diego, maybe left her in the desert with the others who were robbed and killed crossing the line from Mexico. It would’ve been the easy way, but no one thought of it.

Dumb bastards.

Now Jones had to kill a man who’d kicked his ass and dropped him in a garbage Dumpster. Maybe kill the woman, too, though she’d done nothing to offend him yet.

“It’s time.”

Sutter was out and moving, even as he spoke, tucking the micro-Uzi underneath his jacket. Jones opened his door, half turning toward the goons in back, and said, “Let’s rock and roll, amigos.”

They breezed through the lobby without opposition, rode the elevator up two floors, and followed the wall-mounted arrows to their target. Jones and Sutter took the door to Cooper’s room. Their three companions, pistols drawn, staked out the entrance to the woman’s crib. On three they kicked both doors and rushed inside, shock troops of the apocalypse.

And found both rooms deserted.

“Shit! He isn’t gonna like this,” Sutter said.

Jones scanned the empty hotel room and muttered, “That makes two of us.”

THEY WERE MAKING fair time, but Bolan still wished the old riverboat could’ve gone faster. Its diesel motor labored, fouled the air around them, and propelled them at a steady four to five knots with the current, but he’d hoped for more.

Broad daylight now, and if the Company was looking for them in Cuiabá, then its spooks would soon know they were gone. The question would be where, and Bolan wished they could’ve gained a better lead before the hunters started tracking them afresh.

An airlift would’ve done the trick, but Marta didn’t skydive and she’d finally convinced him that trackers would waste more time questioning Cuiabá’s several thousand river rats than checking out a hundred-odd bush pilots. It made sense and gave the warrior time to think.

But he still wished for speed.

The Rio Cuiabá flowed southwestward from the city that shared its name, winding through primal forest toward the Bolivian border, where it met and fed the Rio Paraguai. Bolan and his companion didn’t plan to follow it that far, however. They were landing fifty miles downriver and would hike from there, through wilderness that one early explorer had described as “Hell on Earth and Eden, all rolled into one.”

So far, it wasn’t Bolan’s notion of a holiday.

It felt like coming home.

Bolan had grown up in a jungle, spilled his first blood there and earned the nickname that would follow him through life, even beyond his early grave. That jungle was located on the far side of the world, but all of them were more or less the same. The predators and prey varied by continent, but it was still survival of the fittest in a world where no quarter was asked or granted.

The one rule carved in stone was kill or be killed.

Bolan knew that rule by heart, and he was still alive.

The captain of their boat ignored them after he’d collected cash up front, which suited Bolan perfectly. He lingered at the rail and watched the forest pass, unscrolling like the background footage in a wildlife film. Bright-colored birds hovered or swooped among the trees, while monkeys swarmed and chattered. Caimans waited on the bank for fish or careless swimmers to present themselves.

Forest primeval. Given half a chance, he knew that it would eat him up alive.

And somewhere in the midst of it was Nathan Weiss.

Bad choice, Bones, Bolan thought. And once again, Why here?

Enriquez was suddenly beside him at the railing. She’d changed into khaki hiking clothes and sturdy boots, hair pulled back from her face and cinched with an elastic band. She wore no makeup, and she didn’t seem to miss it.

Both of us were going home, Bolan thought, but it didn’t warm the cockles of his heart.