Ryan pushed up slowly, peering under the edge at a pile of steaming donkey crap inches away. He knew very little about barnyard scatology, but the donkey that had manufactured the stuff happened to be standing right above it. A quick look around said he’d not been going east at all, but north. The dirt streets and broken block buildings could be nowhere else but Villa 31—the same place where the tall brunette had disappeared.
Frenzied Spanish voices, most male but at least one female, jerked Ryan’s attention to his left. His vantage point from under the donkey cart allowed him to see little but a set of scrambling feet. They were small and wet, and sliding under the donkey cart, directly for him.
Ryan barely had time to yank his head back into the tunnel before the Asian woman shoved the metal grating aside, pulling it shut behind her as she slid feet-first into the hole—landing squarely on Ryan’s knuckles where they curled around the pitted metal rung. Ryan was strong, but the impact of 120 pounds of fleeing woman knocked him off the ladder.
Customarily, Ryan would have tucked his head and rolled when falling from ten or twelve feet—but something told him he’d be better off with a broken leg than swimming in this slimy muck. The scant ten inches of water did little to break his fall, but he did his best to absorb much of the impact with bent knees. The floor of the tunnel was at a slight angle and he was just able to keep his feet, surfing on the snot-slick moss when he splashed down, wildly waving both arms in an effort to keep from falling face-first into the sewage. It was far from graceful, but it worked. He spun in time to see the shadow of the Asian woman slide to the bottom of the ladder behind him.
Floundering for just a moment, she wasted no time before sloshing off toward her original point of entry. Jack limped to go after her, but his right knee rebelled, slowing him down to a fast, hobbling limp. Lighter than Jack by nearly a hundred pounds—and a hell of a runner—the Asian woman looked over her shoulder, directly at Jack, her eyes wide.
“Nee-ge—rō!” she said. “Run!”
The way she spoke was full of urgency, and he felt certain it was Japanese. Ryan heard a splash behind him and turned to face a man with a machete who’d just come down the ladder.
The wiry man stood with his mouth hanging open and the machete raised above his head. He was alone and looked almost as surprised as Jack felt.
“Friend?” Ryan said, peering at the man in the scant light from above. “Amigo?”
The man shook his head and grinned, realizing he was the only one with a weapon in hand. Even in the shadows—hell, especially in the shadows—Ryan could see the vacantness in the man’s eyes.
“You can’t reason with evil,” Clark always said. So Jack didn’t try.
He could have tried to draw his pistol, but his hands were wet and slick. Even if he was able to get a shot off, the man would be on top of him in an instant with the heavy blade—making the odds too great that it would be a lose-lose endeavor. Instead, Ryan feinted right, causing the man to swing the blade across his own body. The slick footing made the man’s actions more exaggerated, allowing Ryan to shoot in and trap the arm against the other man’s chest and drive him backward into the ladder. The snotty moss worked both ways, making it all but impossible for Ryan to keep his opponent trapped. He followed up with a quick head-butt to the bridge of the man’s nose. The blow stunned him, but without proper grounding, there hadn’t been enough power in it to do much damage.
“?Boludo!” Machete Man grunted, struggling to escape and bring the blade back into play.
Jack wasted no effort on words, instead driving his knee into the man’s unprotected groin. It worked to dislodge the blade, but unfortunately it also dislodged Ryan, and both men fell, splashing into the flowing filthy water.
Ryan’s feet had grown used to the temperature, but the cold liquid hitting his knees took the breath out of him. The other man took the worst of it, landing on his back and slamming his head against the mossy stone floor. Fighting blind, Ryan straddled him, clawed for the face now, feeling and then losing a grip on his chin. Ryan heard him gurgle and then felt a sharp blow to his side. The son of a bitch had gotten a hand free and now proceeded to pummel him in the ribs. A shot went low and took him over the liver, sending waves of pain and nausea through Ryan’s gut. He redoubled his efforts, sinking a thumb into the man’s eye and forcing his face sideways and into the muck. The man bucked and thrashed, sputtering, trying anything to get his nose above the surface. Ryan braced himself against the slick moss with his free hand as best he could, coming up on his toes and pressing down with all the weight of his body on the other man’s chest. He heard a sickening gurgle as the man aspirated a lungful of fetid sewage, and then the struggling ceased. Ryan waited a few more seconds to be sure and then pushed himself upward, chancing a quick look with his flashlight once he got to his feet.
Panting, filth dripping from his nose, he stood with a hand on one knee and vomited. Jack wiped his mouth with the sleeve over his biceps—the only relatively clean portion of his shirt. He spat and opened and shut his eyes several times to clear them, knowing this image would stay with him for a very long time. The silhouette of the other man was barely visible in the shadows as the river of sewage carried him away. That, he thought, was a hell of a way to die.
? ? ?
The pain in Jack’s knee and ribs had subsided to a dull ache by the time he limped back to the stone building. A quick peek out the cracked door revealed only a young couple feeding some ducks and a uniformed groundskeeper on a riding lawn mower. Ryan knew he was likely to cause an international incident—or at the very least commit aggravated assault to the noses of every Argentine he passed—if he didn’t get out of his sewage-soaked clothing.
Chavez was grouchy about it, but he told Midas to break away from Foreign Minister Li’s hotel and grab Jack a pair of sweats and his Brooks runners from his room at the Panamericano, along with a half-dozen bottles of water and the biggest container of hand sanitizer Midas could find—which turned out to be not nearly as big as Jack had hoped for.