Survival Reflex by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Blaine Downey thought he’d known fatigue before, but nothing in his life prepared him for a forced march through the jungle in the middle of the night. He’d tripped and fallen half a dozen times, hearing Sutter and Jones behind him trying not to laugh.

Bastards’ll pay for that, he thought.

Oh, yes.

It was his own damned fault, though, thinking he could help by hopping on a plane, then on a helicopter, plummeting into the midst of a world so alien he didn’t recognize most of the plants, much less the rank fungi and creeping things that covered every tree trunk, every log and stone. It seemed to Downey that the whole damned place was rotting from the inside out.

He longed to ask if they were getting close, if they were getting anywhere at all, but talking seemed to be a mortal sin. The sergeant had already hissed at Downey twice, not caring who it was who paid the bills and was supposed to call the shots.

Damned insubordination, but there wasn’t much that he could do about it for the moment. If he braced the sergeant, tried to call him down in front of his troops, Downey might find himself in an Alamo-type situation where losing was a lead-pipe cinch. It was smarter to take the rude shit for a while, then complain to Herreira when they were safely out of the boonies, back in the real world of concrete, tinted glass and air-conditioning.

Blaine Downey’s world.

And he’d be moving up in that world, with Nathan Weiss’s scalp on his belt. If he could bust Matt Cooper in the process, trace him back to some outfit opposing the Company, so much the better.

But Downey would settle for Weiss, his head on a platter.

How much longer?

His feet and legs ached, his back hurt, and now Downey was getting a headache. A couple of stiff drinks would straighten him out, but liquor—like everything else worth a damn—was beyond his immediate reach, a chopper flight away in Cuiabá or hell-and-gone back in Belém.

What a country, he thought. What a world.

They’d been walking for hours, it felt like, with Downey’s boots and belt and pack straps chafing him despite the so-called “professional” fitting he’d gone through with Herreira’s people.

Damn Herreira, anyway. He had to have known it would turn out like this, the misery Downey was going through. One big laugh at the arrogant gringo’s expense he’d be having—that was, until Downey brought in the man who’d been ducking Herreira’s “elite” commandos for over a year.

My score, Downey reminded himself with each painful step, counting cadence. All mine.

But how much longer could it take to find the goddamned camp?

Same scout, same trail. What was the problem?

Downey was no trailblazer, granted, but if these were what passed for elite troops in Brazil, he understood why they couldn’t find a gringo in a haystack. It was like some kind of Keystone Kops routine.

Downey wasn’t impressed, and when he had the big man’s ear at Langley, after they had

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