LITMIR.BIZ

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couldn’t manage any of the fine work needed to reduce scarring.

      All wasted effort if the patient couldn’t be evacuated safely in the time that still remained to him. There’d be no mercy from the enemy when they arrived. They’d come in killing and be quick about it this time, trying to make sure no one escaped.

      Weiss glanced back toward the corner of his makeshift operating room that served as sleeping quarters when he wasn’t carving flesh. Jungle fatigues lay folded there, and resting on the bundle of his hiking clothes, an Uru submachine gun.

      Kill or cure.

      This day, perhaps, he’d do a bit of both.

      TEAM PANTHER’S leader listened to the terse report from his point man. The target lay five hundred yards ahead, though still invisible from where they stood, surrounded on all sides by looming trees and dangling vines like ropes in a gymnasium.

      “How many did you see?” the leader asked.

      His scout considered it, a moment dragging as he did the mental census. “Six or seven men with weapons, sir,” the point man said at last. “They carry others in and out of tents.”

      “And did you count the tents?”

      “One big, three small, sir. Also, they have an open space covered by tarp on poles, with men laid out on stretchers. And a generator near the big tent.”

      “Is that everything? No vehicles?”

      The point man stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “There is no road, sir.”

      “None on this side that we know about. Answer the question.”

      Sulking, the soldier said, “No, sir. No vehicles.”

      Team Panther’s leader did the calculations swiftly. Six or seven armed and able-bodied men against his twenty-five. The wounded would present no difficulty. They were enemies, presumed guilty of crimes against the state, condemned by their own treasonous behavior. He would leave them where he found them, after making sure they didn’t live to fight another day.

      And he would have the one who’d managed to elude him for so long, making a mockery of each attempt to capture him.

      This time, the leader told himself, I will succeed.

      He’d be a hero back at headquarters, or at the very least erase the black marks placed beside his name the last two times he’d led teams through the jungle, searching for the man his enemies referred to simply as O Médico.

      The Doctor.

      One who gave them hope when they should have none, who restored the broken bones and ravaged flesh of terrorists, enabling them to spread more carnage and imperil everything Team Panther’s men were dedicated to defend.

      This day it would end.

      They would eliminate O Médico once and for all. If he surrendered, they would take him back for trial and the inevitable prison cell. If he resisted…well, Team Panther would be forced to remedy the state’s misguided abolition of capital punishment.

      Either way, the doctor was finished. He’d already seen his last patient.

      He simply didn’t know it yet.

      Team Panther’s leader fired a rifle shot into the air above the smoking tent and shouted to his hidden troops, “Attack! Attack!”

      THE SPOOK SAT at his desk, chain-smoking while he studied maps and photographs, sitreps and transcripts of interrogations. He was looking for a bright spot, but it stubbornly eluded him.

      The telephone beside his elbow was an enemy, a traitor. For the past six months it had refused to transmit anything except bad news from sources in the field and criticism from his boss. Each time it rang, these days—as it was ringing now—the spook experienced the urge to rip its cord out of the wall and drop the damned thing in his wastebasket.

      Instead he lifted the receiver to his ear.

      “Downey.”

      “It’s me.”

      He recognized the caller’s voice. It was a gift that served him well, despite accents. The caller was a valued asset, though he hadn’t been performing well of late. In fact, he’d left a fair amount to be desired.

      “I need good news,” the spook advised. And from the silence on the far end of the line, he knew there would be none forthcoming. “All right, then. How bad?”

      “We missed again.”

      “When you say missed…”

      “My people found the place, all right. Just where you promised it would be. A scout saw people in the camp, guerrillas, some of them on stretchers.”

      “So?”

      “We still aren’t sure what happened. By the time he came back with the main force and they had the camp surrounded, there was no one there.”

      The spook reached for another cancer stick. “You tipped them off somehow,” he said accusingly.

      “We’re looking into it.”

      “Fat lot of good that does.” He smoked and fumed.

      “It’s worse,” the caller said.

      “Worse than another empty bag? All right, tell me.”

      “The team took casualties. One man dead, another six or seven injured.”

      “How the hell? You said there was nobody there.”

      “Some kind of booby trap, or maybe just an accident. We’re—”

      “Looking into it, I know. This isn’t what we talked about at all. You understand that, right? This doesn’t just reflect on you.”

      “Of course, you’ll blame me all the same,” the caller answered back, showing some attitude.

      “I call ’em like I see ’em,” the spook said. “You said yourself, the intel I provided led your hunters to the target. They saw people in the camp, for Christ’s sake! Now you see ’em, now you don’t. What kind of crazy shit is that? You want to say it’s my fault that your people can’t throw down on targets standing right in front of them?”

      “I will find out what happened.”

      “Beautiful. And what about the mark?”

      “We’ll have to try again.”

      “Just like that, is it? Let my fingers do the walking through the goddamned business pages, maybe. See what they’ve got listed under traitor comma dirty fucking.”

      “You have contacts,” the caller replied. “We have contacts.”

      “And they’ve told us where to look for him three times. How many strikes are you entitled to, I wonder?”

      “Strikes?” The caller was confused now.

      “Never mind. Forget about it. I’ll put on my thinking cap again and see if I can find another angle. In the meantime, it’s your job to make sure that the latest screwup does not go public under any circumstances. Are we clear?”

      “I hear you.”

      “Right. But are you listening?”

      “I’ll handle it.”

      “I hope so, for your own sake.”

      And for mine, the spook thought as he dropped the telephone receiver back into its cradle. Once again he felt the urge to rip, discard, destroy.

      Instead he lit a fresh smoke from the one he’d had clenched between his teeth and waited for the nicotine to work its magic on his jangling nerves.

      Spilled milk, he thought. No use crying about it.

      What he needed now, and goddamned soon, was some spilled blood to solve his problem.

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