Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 1-6 by Tom Clancy

Author:Tom Clancy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction:Thriller
ISBN: 9781101010365
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1984-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The truck driver appeared at the proper time to collect the men and the paste processed from the coca leaves, but they weren’t there as expected. He waited an hour, and still they weren’t there. There were two men with him, of course, and these he sent up to the processing site. The driver was the “senior” man of the group and didn’t want to be bothered climbing those cursed mountains anymore. So while he smoked his cigarettes, they climbed. He waited another hour. There was quite a bit of traffic on the highway, especially big diesel trucks whose mufflers and pollution controls were less well attended to than was the case in other, more prosperous regions—besides, their removal made for improved fuel economy in addition to the greater noise and smoke. Many of the big tractor-trailer combinations roared past, vibrating the roadbed and rocking his own truck in the rush of air. That was why he missed the sound. After waiting a total of ninety minutes, it was clear that he’d have to go up himself. He locked the truck, lit yet another cigarette, and began his way up the path.

The driver found it hard going. Though he’d grown up in these hills, and could remember a boyhood in which a thousand-foot climb was just another footrace with his playmates, he’d been driving the truck for some time, and his leg muscles were more accustomed to pushing down pedals than this sort of thing. What would once have taken forty minutes now took over an hour, and with the place almost in sight he was venomously angry, too angry and too tired to pay attention to things that ought to have been obvious by now. He could still hear the traffic sounds on the road below, could hear the birds twittering in the trees around him, but nothing else when he should have been hearing something. He paused, bending over to catch his breath when he got his first warning. It was a dark spot on the trail. Something had turned the brown earth to black, but that could have been anything, and he was in a hurry to see what the problem was up the hill and didn’t ponder it. After all, there hadn’t been any problem lately with the army or the police, and he wondered why the refining work was done so far up the mountainside in any case. It was no longer necessary.

Five minutes more and he could see the little clearing, and only now he noticed that there were no sounds coming from it, though there was an odd, acrid smell. Doubtless the acid used in the prerefining process, he was sure. Then he made the last turn and saw.

The truck driver was not a man unaccustomed to violence. He’d been involved in the pre-Cartel fighting and had also killed a few M-19 sympathizers in the wars because of which the Cartel had actually been formed. He’d seen blood, therefore, and had spilled some himself.

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