But the Marines had taken the dinghy ashore anyway, continuing to play their given role as clueless tourists. It was the only cover they had, even if it didn’t fit the current situation very well.
Cassy yawned and shifted her legs in the lounge chair. “How’s your Jarhead-sense doing?”
Jon didn’t answer immediately. He’d more or less been asking himself the same question.
The town was certainly giving him a weird vibe, but that seemed to be a matter of long-standing economic issues, as if Playa De Suerte had fallen on hard times and never recovered. Now that he thought about it, this might have been one of the resort towns that catered to Soviet tourism during the Cold War, before the USSR went belly up. As far as he could see, there was nothing overtly hostile or dangerous here.
And last time, he’d gotten himself all keyed up for nothing. His sense of foreboding had been completely out of alignment with reality. The Marines had returned without a scratch, their mission successfully accomplished.
He shrugged. “My Jarhead-sense is quiet. I suppose that means everything is going fine.”
His instinct had been wrong the first time. Jon didn’t know it yet, but he was wrong this time too.
“We are well and truly fucked,” Webb muttered.
Liv plucked a long weed in passing and toyed with it as she walked. “Maybe not. We won’t really know that until we get a decent look at the place.”
The two Marines were acting out the happy couple routine again, strolling hand-in-hand one street north of their area of interest. Point Orange was an abandoned sugar mill just beyond the southern outskirts of town: a jumble of dilapidated metal buildings behind a wire fence that was more rust than barrier.
“That’s the problem,” said Webb, “we can’t get a decent look. There’s no way to get close without giving ourselves away.”
His assessment seemed to be accurate. From their current vantage, the site was only visible through occasional gaps between intervening houses. Even then, the Marines had to satisfy themselves with sideways looks at the derelict facility. It wouldn’t be smart to show anything more than a passing interest. But — limited as it was — their casual reconnoiter revealed the difficulty of the situation.
The sugar mill was set back from the road, and the surrounding terrain offered very little in the way of cover. Knee-high weeds dotted with a smattering of scrub plants, none of which were large enough to hide a person.
If this had been a movie, some Navy SEAL in uber-effective Hollywood camouflage would have belly-crawled through the weeds like a Ninja, silently dispatching six or eight guards along the way.
But this was real life, and the flat open ground surrounding the enclosure would support no such theatrics. It was a natural killing field for anyone foolhardy enough to cross it. One North Korean with an elevated observation post could keep every possible angle of approach under visual surveillance. And that wasn’t counting video cameras, infrared cameras, or other warning devices, any of which could be hidden around the sugar mill’s perimeter.
Inside the fence, the opportunities for concealment were greatly increased. The ground was littered with discarded machinery, rusted out sluice tanks, the ruins of collapsed outbuildings, and mounds of desiccated cane husks.
If the Marines could make it into the enclosure, they’d have a fairly good chance of remaining undetected, at least by eyeball. The problem was getting there.
“What if we circle around back?” Liv asked.
“I was thinking about that,” said Webb. “But the terrain behind the mill looks like more of the same. Weeds and scrub. Nothing to hide behind.”
He studied the house they were passing. Like most of the others on this street, it was deserted — the window frames bare of glass, the door sagging off its hinges.
“If we can’t move in,” he said, “we’ll have to try going up instead. Get some elevation. Maybe we can find a line of sight through the windows in the main building.”
“Those windows are pretty high,” said Liv. “I’d say ten or fifteen feet off the ground.”
“I’m thinking closer to ten or twelve feet,” Webb said. “And some of these roofs are eighteen or twenty. If we can get up there…”
Liv shook her head. “They all look like they’d fall over in a stiff breeze. I wouldn’t risk my neck on any of them.”
“You won’t have to,” said Webb. “I’ve got this.”
Liv stopped walking. “Are you serious?”
Webb stopped as well, looking upward toward the overhang of the nearest roof. “If you’ve got a better plan, now’s the time to share it.”
“No,” Liv admitted. “I don’t have a better plan. But that doesn’t make this a good one.”
“I agree,” said Webb. “I just can’t think of any better options.”
“Neither can I,” Liv said finally.
“That settles it,” said Webb. “We try to pick the sturdiest roof we can find, and hope for the best.”
Liv started walking again. “Not this one. It’s got ‘deathtrap’ written all over it.”
None of the next four houses seemed any more promising. The fifth one had no roof at all. The sixth and seventh houses were both vetoed by Webb, for reasons that seemed to be mostly instinctual.
The Marines stopped at the eighth house and gave the roof a hard look. It had the kind of barrel tiles commonly found in places with old world Spanish architectural influences. The half-curved terracotta slabs had kept a lot of their original orange-brown coloring, which might be a sign that the clay still maintained some of its structural strength.
Webb dug a pair of compact binoculars out of his backpack before laying the pack on the ground. “I think this is our best bet, and I want to be out of here before we run out of daylight.”
He looped the binocular strap over his head and began limbering up his arms and legs.
“What am I supposed to do if you break your fool neck?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On when it happens,” said Webb. As he spoke, he was sizing up the tumbledown house for possible handholds and footholds.
“If I find out what we need to know and then break my neck, you hide my body under the rubble and haul ass back to the boat to make your report. If I break my neck before I get a look into the site, then you’re back to figuring out how to get inside the fence. You should still hide my body, so the local cops don’t get bent out of shape about the dead gringo while you’re trying to carry out the mission.”
“That’s not funny,” Liv said.
Webb tested a handhold in the crumbling wall. “Wasn’t meant to be.”
He threw a wink at his fellow Marine. “I’d rather be back in the barracks drinking Bud Light and playing Call of Duty, but that’s not on the schedule for today.”
“You’re really gonna do this?”
“Unless you’d rather do it for me.”
“I’ll pass,” Liv said.
“Well then,” said Webb, “stand back and watch the human fly at work. Remember, don’t try this at home, folks.”
He dug the toe of his left running shoe into a crack, put some weight on his first handhold, and began the climb. His ascent was slow and cautious, with none of the mini-emergencies or false slips so beloved by writers of adventure fiction.
Getting past the overhang of the roof presented the expected challenge, but — with some experimentation — he managed to swing one leg up over the eave. After that, it was just a matter of keeping his weight distributed across as many tiles as possible.