He stopped firing and I came to a halt on the backside of a big ponderosa pine tree about fifty yards from him, close enough to hear the action on his rifle clank open when he ran out of bullets.
Footsteps! He’s coming to the trees to reload!
I saw him slip off the ledge, still moving, head down, fumbling to eject and load a new clip. With his attention there and my shotgun still shouldered, I managed to close another fifteen yards on the narco. I stopped and whistled softly his way.
The gunman glanced and saw me with the shotgun aimed at him from thirty-five yards. No way I could miss.
“Drop it or you’re a dead man,” I said in Spanish.
He hesitated, then dropped the AR and the clip.
“Back out on the ledge,” I said, waving the shotgun’s muzzle that way.
He hesitated for a moment before trudging back onto the ledge with me paralleling him, the shotgun’s bead never leaving his center of mass. After taking two steps out into the open, he halted and looked at me.
“On your belly,” I said. “Hands behind your head.”
He lay down and complied. I took my first step onto the ledge, glanced left about forty yards, and saw that the fifteen-foot-wide ledge met a vertical rock wall there, eight feet at the top and maybe six feet wide.
The wall was shielding me and the narco from that weapon far downriver. I went quickly to the cartel man, put my boot on his back, and used extra zip ties Sampson had brought on the trip to bind his wrists.
Done, I peered across the river through the rain, trying to spot Sampson. But I wasn’t seeing him or any movement whatsoever despite the machine-gun fire that had to have echoed through the entire canyon.
“Don’t move,” I told the gunman and turned toward the woods, meaning to retrieve his AR rifle and clip.
Raphael Durango was coming through the trees, not twenty yards away, and aiming a rifle at me.
“Drop the gun, Cross,” he said. “It’s over.”
Chapter 97
We had seen Emmanuella Alejandro’s half brother the day before at a distance. But now, up close, I could see that Durango was a far different man than the one who’d appeared on a bench next to me in Mexico City a few weeks ago.
Back then, his lively eyes had roamed all over me, his expression a study in confidence and mild amusement. Now, Durango’s eyes had gone dark and flat, the telltale sign of a man who’s flipped the off switch to his humanity and gone asocial.
Going asocial is what stone-cold killers do before they strike. They lose compassion, dehumanize themselves and their prey. There’s little reasoning with them once it happens.
I set down the shotgun. He came to the edge of the trees, not ten feet from me, one eye behind the rifle scope, the other wide open and blank.
“Back up,” he said. “Let’s see if Emmanuella is right about you.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “Right about what?”
“She thinks you’re allied with Maestro.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the edge of the ledge about fifteen feet behind me. It looked like a long fall beyond it. “What would backing up prove?” I asked.
Durango’s expression never changed. “If M’s sniper knows you, he won’t shoot you when you appear in his sights.”
“You think M is here?”
“I think his men are,” he said in a monotone, taking another step. “Maestro guns below us on the river, you above us on the river, working a squeeze play with your dummies in the raft, getting us to expose ourselves. How many men does M have there?”
“I have no idea who is or is not downriver.”
“Back up, Dr. Cross,” Durango said. “Let’s see.”
“And if the sniper doesn’t shoot me?”
He smiled coldly. “I’ll shoot you myself. It’s what my sister wants. Now, back up.”
I glanced to my right, saw that wall of stone at the far end of the ledge, knew it would cover me only a few more feet. I took one step back, then two.
Durango followed me, staying in point-blank range. His smile disappeared and he went reptilian once more.
“Almost there,” he said. “Two more steps, Dr. Cross, and we’ll know your fate.”
I stared at him, swallowed, and shakily reached my right foot back six inches, sure now that I would be in view of the shooter downriver.
I stepped back again with my left foot and heard a tremendous kaboom! along with the sonic whoosh of the three-hundred-grain Alaskan bullet that ripped past my left ear and smashed into the forehead of the half brother of Emmanuella and Marcus Alejandro.
The top of Durango’s head erupted. Blood spattered with the wind and fell with the rain. He collapsed lifeless on the ledge, a bloody groove dug so deeply into his skull that it looked like the hull of a small canoe had blasted through it.
Shaking head to toe and knowing I was still exposed, a target, I moved fast around him and over his man, who was whimpering at the blood and gore all over him.
Once I knew I was behind that wall of rock and safe from the sniper downstream, I looked back across the river and saw Sampson standing just inside the tree line opposite me with his bear gun thrown overhead in victory.
Chapter 98
Alex pumped his fist at Sampson.
Big John’s heart slammed in his chest, and he grinned wildly as he started to lower the Ruger. A bullet smacked into the tree right next to him. It threw bark and splinters into the air before the report of the big-bore rifle came again from far downriver.
They’re onto me now!
Sampson spun around and ran deeper into the trees and shadows until he was sure he could not be seen. When he finally stopped and looked back with his binoculars, he could make out Durango’s corpse and the other narco struggling to sit up with his hands zip-tied behind his back.
Alex was nowhere in sight. He had to be moving north, hunting the sniper.
It’s a good thing, Sampson decided before starting north himself. We’re not hanging back. We’re taking the fight to them on our terms.
But that didn’t mean acting foolhardy. Sampson forced himself to move at a much slower pace, stopping constantly to scan the way ahead and peer downriver at the west flank of the canyon, trying to spot the sniper attempting to kill him.
As he walked on, he did simple subtraction and geometry.
The day before, there’d been five men with Durango. One died in the S below Big Salmon Lake, shot from the air by one of M’s men.
Another had died just a few minutes ago on Sampson’s side of the river, killed by the sniper. Alex had left one of them subdued on the ledge on the east bank. And Durango was dead. That meant there were at least two more narcos to deal with.
It also meant Maestro had sent men up here as well, the sniper, certainly, and probably more. There’d been three men in that helicopter both times they’d seen it.
Is one of them the sniper? Or is this a new player?
As Sampson kept pushing north, he realized he had to act as if there were two cartel gunmen and three or even four of M’s men in the six miles of rugged terrain between him and the trailhead and civilization.
When he was forced to cross open ground, Sampson hung back in the shadows until he could see exactly where the bridle trail met the far woods. Then he ducked down and sprinted in a straight line to that spot, getting back in the trees as quick as he could.
The first time he did it, he knew not even the best sniper in the world could hit a running man at that long a distance. But with every step he was getting closer, closing the gap on the shooter’s limits, making himself more and more a viable target.