And good advice for Captain Mercer, who had apparently looked deep into the abyss and saw it was looking back at him. And good advice, too, for Scott Brodie, who had come too close to that abyss a few times. And this might become one of those times.
PART IV
CANAIMA NATIONAL PARK, VENEZUELA
AUGUST 2018
CHAPTER 36
The Marines hit the beach before dawn, and eleven-year-old Kyle Mercer was there to see it.
The sky was a deep purple, the water an inky black, and the sunlight was just beginning to bloom on the horizon. He saw the dark shapes breach the water, big, boxy amphibious assault vehicles on tank treads that rolled up the shore. Men with rifles and heavy gear poured out, sloshing through the breaking waves, running onto the beach, barking orders and fanning out along the shoreline, establishing a beachhead.
It was all a drill, but it was real to those men down on the beach, and so it was real to their small audience, too, watching from a distance through the chain-link fence at the freeway rest stop somewhere between Anaheim and San Diego.
Kyle Mercer remembered standing pressed against the fence, just off the I-5 freeway that ran along a stretch of off-limits coastline belonging to Camp Pendleton. It was by chance that he was there, on the way home from a family trip to Disneyland that was cut short by the sudden death of Kyle’s grandfather. Kyle barely knew the old man, who was estranged from the family, and he couldn’t even remember how the old bastard died.
But he did remember the fence, and the beach, and that they stopped because his mom had to use the restroom. His dad had bought him a Coke from the vending machine and they walked over to the fence where a group of mostly men and boys were hanging out watching.
A few of the spectators looked like they could have been Vietnam vets, maybe former Marines, who’d made a point of being there to see the Pendleton boys in action and be reminded of their own glory days. The rest of the observers were the kinds of guys you might expect at a rest stop at 6 A.M.—truckers headed down to Mexico, workers returning home from a graveyard shift, and a few burnouts who were doing whatever they do at rest stops.
Kyle Mercer remembered being in awe of what he was seeing. Those men on the other side of the fence were of another world and another breed. An elite warrior class. He wanted to be like them, and that day he promised himself he would.
He sat up in bed—a pungent foam mattress on a bamboo platform—in his jungle hut. He looked at the woman next to him. Rosalita. She was sleeping, naked, the bedsheet pushed down below her pubis. She had a boyish body, not much in the way of tits or ass. But she had a certain appeal. Perfect facial bone structure. Big brown eyes. Long, slender limbs and luxuriant black hair. She could have been a runway model in New York or LA in another life. But in this life she was a whore in Caracas.
She hadn’t been a very happy hooker in the Hen House. It’s hard to really enjoy it when you’re living in fear of your next client, or of your boss if you don’t get a next client.
Mercer had taken her out of that cesspool, out into the wild. He made her free, and it turned out she was a tiger. That’s the thing about freedom. It shows you who you are.
Someone knocked on the door of the hut. He picked up the Desert Eagle pistol from the crate that served as his nightstand and got out of bed. “Quién es?”
A voice from behind the door said, “Es Franco, señor. El hombre está aquí.”
“Un momento.” Mercer looped his belt and holster around his camo pants and slipped on a white tank top, then pulled the bedsheet over Rosalita’s naked body. He held the Desert Eagle at his side as he walked to the door and looked through a crack in the wood slats. Franco stood in front of the hut, alone.
Mercer holstered the pistol, then opened the door and stepped outside.
Franco flashed a gap-toothed smile. He was a weird-looking guy—short, head too big for his body. He was the kind of man other men underestimated, until they looked into his eyes. You don’t fight for the FARC in the Colombian jungle for ten years and live