The door to the Broken Spur opened and a policeman came in. He nodded to the barman and leaned against the bar, and his eyes swept over the early afternoon drinkers. Edward Longstreet saw the policeman, and a chill wind touched the back of his neck. The two men at the table in front of him stopped talking. They had been going on about the Dallas Cowboys and that team’s chances of making the Super Bowl. Longstreet passed his hand over his eyes. When he looked again, the policeman was gone.
“Something wrong?” It was the woman sitting with him.
Longstreet looked up from his beer. He had forgotten the woman.
“Thinking,” he said. “Just thinking.”
“Ready to go now?” she asked.
He studied the face across the table. He wondered what he was doing in a place like this with someone like her. The red-painted lips peeled back and he saw the tobacco-stained teeth. She fluttered her lashes and tossed her head back and swung her heavy blonde hair from side to side. He felt sorry for her. He motioned to her across the table. She came and sat on his knee.
“Do something for me, Sweetheart,” he said.
She was smiling at him again. He reached down and drew the envelope out of the top of his boot. He placed it in her bag.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Post this for me,” he said. “Don’t worry about the stamp. Just drop it in the first mailbox you see.”
“What’s going on?” She raised an eyebrow and looked him in the eye. “Is everything o.k.?”
“This is important,” Longstreet said. “Don’t let me down. I’ll meet you at your place later.”
He gave her twenty dollars. She put the money in her purse and got up off his knee.
“All right,” she said. “But don’t be long.” She kissed him.
He gave her ten minutes, then got up and walked slowly towards the front door. He paused just before reaching the door, turned quickly and walked out the back way. Nobody followed him. He stepped out into the alley. He skirted a pile of garbage and roused a cloud of flies. He heard rats.
It had been a straight-forward assignment, a routine ‘observe and report’. He had got the information the agency wanted, but somewhere along the line his cover had been blown. They were hunting him. Nobody had told him, he just knew it. He had to get out fast.
The name of the town was Kingsville. Longstreet hated it. Under the noise and the neon, it was just another grubby Texas town caught in the grip of the economic downturn that seemed to be everywhere. It had been holding its breath for a long time. He grinned sourly. Five years as Eastern Caribbean Station Chief, three months on a desk in Langley, Virginia, and now this. I deserved a better assignment, he thought.
They were waiting for him around the corner. He had been right after all. The policeman had fingered him, and they had covered both exits. He wondered who had paid the policeman. He shook his head. It didn’t matter now.
The two men flicked their wrists and he saw the knives. Punks, he thought. I came all this way to die on some punk’s knife. He chopped down on a wrist causing the knife to drop. His boot smashed into a groin. A knife ripped him open from belt-buckle to breast-bone.
Shannon Edge lay on his stomach studying the sea through night glasses. Dressed in black with an automatic rifle by his side he scanned the sky, beach and surf around him. He put the glasses down beside the automatic rifle.
There were three of them in the little cove by the cliff. Meyers lay in the sand covering the other side of the beach. Greene waited among the rocks at the foot of the cliff. Edge had told him to keep his head down and call Hervey if anything went wrong.
A sudden cold wind whipped in off the water. Edge pulled the collar of his coat up around his ears. The rain that had been threatening all night started pelting down. He wiped the water from his face and took up the glasses.
The boat came in slowly, hugging the heavier darkness of the shoreline. Edge counted five men.
“Damn it,” Edge swore softly. He put down the glasses.
“There was only supposed to be one man,” whispered Meyers into his headset.
A man was kneeling in the bow of the boat studying the shore through glasses. Somebody cut the engine and the boat drifted silently towards the shore. The men got out and hauled the boat onto the sand. Edge waited until they were on the beach.
“Stay where you are and put your hands up,” he called quietly.
For about the space of four seconds the murmur of the sea was the only sound, then the inlet shook with the thunder of automatic weapons and a stream of fire poured into the rocks around Edge. The group broke into five separate shadows and raced for the shelter of the cliff. Meyers was firing into the darkness as bullets whizzed past him. Edge heard the snarling, trip hammer beat of his American M.16 above the chatter of the Czech-made guns. One of the shadows fell as another continued its quest for the cliff. Edge ran across the beach and dove behind a dune while firing his weapon. Two more shadows crumpled into the sand as gunfire continued to echo through the cove. One of the men raced to the cliff firing wildly behind him. A final burst of automatic fire cut across the beach striking the man in the back and knocking him off of his feet. Meyers knelt in the sand with his weapon still trained on the fallen figure.
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Edge searched the sea again. It was empty. He lowered his glasses and walked to where Meyers stood over one of the men. Meyers knelt and shone the torch down on him shielding the light with his hand. The man was dead. He had been cut almost in two. They approached the other bodies warily. Dead men had killed before. They need not have bothered. The five bodies were sprawled on the sand like puppets with broken strings.
And Hervey wanted them alive, Edge thought. But how do you shoot to wound with an automatic weapon when it’s the middle of the night, and you’re outnumbered and the other guys are shooting back and it’s raining and you’re scared as hell? He swore. Hervey had better like them dead, he thought wearily.
“This one’s alive,” Meyers said.
The man lay alone near the rocks. He started dragging himself across the sand, groping with one outstretched hand for the gun he had dropped. He heard them. He sank down on his stomach. The sand under him turned black in the starlight. Edge knelt beside him and turned him over. He had caught a burst along the right side. The internal organs were visible in the beam of Meyers’ torch. He moved his lips. Edge bent closer to hear what he was saying.
“Rain,” he said. I’m getting wet inside me.”
Edge had forgotten the rain. He felt it again now. They squatted beside the man and waited for him to die.
“K-Koff. I came here once when I was a boy,” the man said.
“Why did you come back?” Edge asked him.
“Yeah, I could’ve stayed away,” the man said. “But I came back. For the cause.
“What cause?”
“Koff. Go to hell,” the man said. His mouth filled with blood and he died.
Edge stood up. The rain had stopped and the stars were back.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
“Greene,” Meyers said. “Where’s Greene?”
“Tell him to come out.”
Meyers spoke into his headset. “Hey, Greene. You can come out now.”
The cliff threw back a soft echo. Edge swore. Why the hell had Hervey sent along such a young kid on a job like this? He swore again.
“Let’s go find him,” he said.
Meyers found him first. He was leaning back against a boulder staring straight ahead. There was a hole in the middle of his forehead.
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” Meyers said.
“Stray bullet,” Edge said. “The poor kid must’ve stood up to see how things were going.”
“What do we do now?”
Edge took out a cell phone and made a call. “Bullfinch, this is Battle-axe.”
Hervey answered immediately. “This is Bullfinch. Go ahead.”
“There were five of them,” Edge said.
He heard Hervey exhale slowly. “Go on,” Hervey said.
“They came at us hard. They didn’t leave us any choice.”
“Damn it, we needed them alive,” Hervey said.
“I thought of surrounding them but it didn’t work,” Edge said. He took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his anger was under control. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was raining hard and it was dark as hell and there were only three of us.”
“I understand,” Hervey said. “I guess I’m a little jumpy. I know you did your best.” He was silent for a few moments. “Did you manage to get anything from any of them?”
“Nothing. And Greene’s dead.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hervey. “Get rid of everything, including the equipment. Put your friends in the truck and I’ll have someone pick it up. Then take the boat and go to GPS reference 1105. There will be transport waiting for you. Good job and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Edge put away the phone and turned toward Meyers.
“We got to take the bodies to the truck,” said Edge.
“Fantastic,” Meyers said. “I’d like to ram my foot up Hervey’s arse! That son-of-a-bitch is sitting in an air conditioned bedroom and we’re out here in the blasted rain shooting at people and lugging bodies up cliffs.”
Edge smiled in the darkness. “I know exactly how you feel,” he said. “Gimmie a hand here.”
They worked naked. The path up the cliff was steep, and they slipped often. They got the job finished eventually, then they sat down and drank a bottle of rum. Edge drew sand over the bloodstains.
“The morning tide will take care of anything we’ve missed,” Edge said.
Meyers nodded. They stood in the surf and scrubbed themselves with sand and seawater. They pushed the boat into the water and climbed in. Meyers started the motor and set course by the Harrison Point lighthouse. Edge lay in the stern with his hands behind this head looking at the stars and seeing five men dead in the sand and Greene leaning back against a rock with a hole in the centre of his forehead.
“That’s Speightstown coming up over there,” Meyers said as he cut the engine.
Meyers checked his phone as Edge held onto a couple of grenades.
“Our contact has buzzed me and is on the beach waiting for us. You’ll like her,” said Meyers smiling.
They put their phones into waterproof plastic bags and jumped into the ocean as the boat roared away through the darkness with two grenades in the bottom. A flash lit up the water. They heard the crump of the explosion and felt the passing of the shock wave.
Edge and Meyers came onto the beach and were greeted by a woman holding some towels. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, she was tall with a slender waist and strong, toned legs. Her large eyes shone like stars in the moonlight.
“Good morning, gentleman,” said the woman. “I was expecting a third.”
“He didn’t make it,” said Edge, as he took one of the towels and rubbed himself dry.
“Greene was with you,” she said. “He and I joined the Bureau at the same time. That’s too bad. He was a good guy.”
“Yes, yes. He was.”
Edge pulled on some dry clothes and turned towards the car that was parked on the side of the road. The wind rustled through the palm trees as the sound of the surf rolled along behind them.
Edge leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His mind drifted until the car stopped. He got out and said thanks to the woman who smiled back at him. Meyers was asleep in the back seat.
Edge went straight to the shower. He came out and mixed a rum and coconut water and drank it before he left the kitchen. He took the bottle and glass into the sitting room. He stopped in front of a watercolour of a river winding through lush, green jungle. He had paid ten dollars for it in a thrift shop. Every time he looked at it, he could almost hear the voices of the canoeists coming from up river, and the sound of fish splashing in the pools downstream.
He went to the stereo and selected the jazz playlist on the MP3 player. Ella Fitzgerald’s voice poured into the room like fine honey over hot cornbread. Edge poured himself another drink and sat down to wait for the dawn.