Minutes to Burn Read online

  Diego flicked the joint on the floor and rose, grabbing the ammo.

  Ramoncito regarded Diego suspiciously. "What are you doing?"

  Diego unearthed a rifle from beneath a pane of crumbled Sheetrock and rested it against his shoulder. "Looks like I just added animal control officer to my list of jobs." He wedged the carton of bullets into his pocket and headed out. When he slammed the door behind him, it left the hinges and continued right into his office.

  Chapter 11

  The creature drew herself to her full nine feet, rearing up on her hind legs. Pigmented a leafy green and dappled with dusty brown high-lights, she picked up the hues of the Scalesia forest, blending with the crisscross shadows of the branches.

  She was segmented into three major parts: a head with antennae, a thorax, and a long, full abdomen heavy with eggs. Her brown forewings, the tegmina, were leathery, covering and protecting her delicate under-wings.

  The creature was for the most part slender. Her abdomen and wings, which made up most of the length of her body, ran parallel to the ground. When she raised her head, her thorax swooped upward from her abdomen like the torso of a centaur, giving her a remarkably human erectness and orientation. Her abdomen, normally the breadth of two oil drums, was swollen even wider with her eggs, striking a con-trast with her lean muscular thorax and four spindly rear limbs. A series of holes ran along her abdomen on each side, spiracles through which she drew air.

  Her enormous raptorial forelegs protruded from the top of her tho-rax, just beneath her head, and they were usually held close to her body. The insides of these legs were furnished with sharp spines, those on the femurs angled in the opposite direction from those on the tibias so that they'd snap shut on prey like a bear trap. At the end of both tibiae were two curved hooks that served to rake her prey to her.

  Rotating her head nearly 180 degrees to face behind her, she tried to detect something in the rustling bushes. She twisted her thorax and it bent easily, pivoting her jagged front legs. Her head was shaped like an inverted triangle, with her eyes forming the top corners and her mouth the apex. Two long, thin antennae protruded from her head between her eyes like wayward wisps of hair. She cocked her head to one side, her antennae straightening to pick up odors and subtle vibrations in the air.

  A male hesitantly emerged, following her through the thick brush. Because of her compound eyes, the female could see several directions at once, but she focused on the male's approach, watching him like a mosaic in the many facets of her eyes.

  Significantly smaller than the female, the male regarded her warily, his large eyes protruding like bulbous growths from the top of his obcor-date head. One of his hind legs was slightly smaller than the others, having regenerated after being lost in a molt. His antennae bobbed as his sharp mouthparts quivered with curiosity.

  He fixed the female in a gaze, but she broke eye contact and moved slowly away, weighed down with her unfertilized eggs. In a gait that was at once halting and graceful, the male stalked her, drawn by the sexual pheromone she excreted from two shiny protuberances near the tip of her abdomen. Occasionally, she turned her head on her elongated neck, taking note of his progress.

  After about an hour of this strange and delicate ritual, the male spread his wings and curled his abdomen to attract her attention, but she turned and kept moving away. He pursued her again, launching into an even more rigorous sequence of abdomen movements. His folded wings rubbed against his cuticle, the hard exoskeleton, producing a high-frequency courtship song.

  She slowed. Gathering his courage, the male approached her, drawing near as if to smell her before fading back. Extending her forelegs, the female responded with a few pumps of her abdomen. The male watched her against the backdrop of the trees, cutting back and forth before her with terse motions. She spread her raptorial legs in front of her, as if offering an embrace. He took a few tentative steps forward and she stroked his front legs. Finally, in a quick burst, he mounted her.

  His legs were a flurry of movement around her as he bent the end of his abdomen in a sinuous motion to explore her genital area. He lowered his head, distracting her by rattling her antennae with his own. Twisting his abdomen to one side, he joined the tips of their bodies and began to copulate. She stayed still for a few moments as he labored, then calmly turned and bit into the armor covering the back of his neck.

  As she chewed through his head, the male convulsed, continuing to pass sperm cells from his body to hers. With steady palpitations, she gnawed her way down through his neck and into his prothorax, contorting herself so that she could strip tissue from him as his genitalia contin-ued to pulse away.

  The sperm cells safely deposited in the spermatheca in her abdomen, the female wriggled forward, shedding the male's body like an unwel-come piece of clothing. On the ground beside her lay his head, the antennae still twitching.

  Though his main nerve ganglia were severed, the headless male stum-bled forward, spreading his wings in a futile attempt to fly. With a lightning flash, she snapped her raptorial legs around him. The body trembled in her grasp.

  She bit into his choicest abdominal segment and pulled his body apart with a moist pop. His corpse, skewered on her spines from both sides, would serve to nourish the lives taking shape inside her. She tore off chunks of his abdomen, strips of tissue dangling from her mandibles. When she finished, she began the elaborate process of cleaning herself.

  Her body was functioning at a rate much quicker than that for which her instincts were programmed. Though she had just mated, her eggs would be ready to be laid by nightfall.

  The creature drew her front legs together, folding them like a jack-knife. They curved up under her chin, positioned in an attitude of prayer.

  She swayed, and she waited.

  Chapter 12

  As Cameron left the hotel with Rex and Tank, she noticed the man with gold chains who had harassed Szabla earlier. He seemed to rec-ognize her despite her civilian clothes. A sat phone raised to his ear, he blew her a kiss before ducking into an alleyway.

  Rex led the way north a few blocks on Calle Chile. Along the way, shoe shiners called out from the pavement, smiling through crooked teeth and pointing to Tank and Cameron's scuffed jungle boots. A man stepped out from a shop across the street and scooped water from a bucket onto the sidewalk, using a detergent bottle with the top cut off. Dust mingled with the water, running off the fractured curb into the street.

  "It's amazing, isn't it?" Rex said. "The resilience of these people. They're used to having no control over anything." He started to sit on a bench to get his shoes shined by an old man with no front teeth, but Cameron grabbed his sleeve and kept him moving.

  "Getting your shoes stroked isn't the mission today," Cameron said.

  A boy followed them with a shoe shine box, chattering away, tugging at Tank's pant leg and pointing to his boots. Cameron had a hard time keeping up with the Spanish; it was a more rustic form than she had studied, the consonants blurring together.

  "If you didn't want a shoe shine," Rex said, "you should've worn sneakers."

  On the corner, Otavalo Indians were still setting up for the day, stuffing T-shirts into metal racks bolted into the walls and scattering trinkets carved from Tagua nuts on blankets on the ground. Cameron found a street sign cemented into the wall of the corner building: Avenida 9 de Octubre. A number of American fast-food joints crowded the block. One franchise building had crumbled into the street, but the rubble had been bulldozed to one side to allow traffic to pass. Fragments of the red and white sign lay on top of the mound. One of Colonel Sanders's eyes was missing.

  They waited for a break in the traffic, then sprinted across the street. The banged-up cars driving by or broken down roadside were built of mixed and matched parts, some of them tricked out with familiar emblems and gold steering wheels. A bus shuddered to a stop in front of them and a scrawny driver hopped out, removed his shirt, and crawled underneath with a wrench. They cut one street over and kept heading
west. Rex bowed to a group of uniformed schoolgirls, removing his Panama hat, and they giggled and called out greetings in bad English.

  A wide band of sweat darkened the lower half of Tank's shirt. Stop-ping on a corner, he pulled a tube of sunblock from his back pocket and smeared lotion liberally across his wide cheeks, which were already beginning to redden. Cameron felt her pants clinging to her legs. An orange electronic billboard flashed nearby: Minutos para Quemarse-3:40. She took the tube from Tank.

  Cameron flashed ID at the UN cordon, and they headed into a dismal neighborhood. The street was bare and cracked, lined with deserted warehouses. Here the fallen buildings were left as they were, no con-struction crews in evidence. A man pissed against a wall, and a passing woman and child paid him no mind, stepping over the rivulet of urine on the sidewalk. Cameron kept in the lead.

  After a few more blocks, Rex halted outside a brown box of a two-story building dotted with graying, cracked windows. A large section of asphalt had tilted up, leaving a two-foot lip in the middle of the sidewalk, and the building had settled unevenly across the hump. Rex rang the doorbell beneath a placard that read: Dr. Juan Ramirez.

  Above their heads, a security camera rotated down so it was pointed at them. Then the door swung open, revealing a man with a hoop dan-gling from his nose, like a bull's ring. What was supposed to be a dragon peered out from his biceps, but it looked more like an obese lizard. He regarded Tank suspiciously, then spoke in rough-accented English. "What do you want?"

  "Dr. Ramirez?" Cameron asked.

  "That's not him," Rex said.

  "No, I'm not el doctor. I just come to shut off la electricidad. He leave to wander around." He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, indicating the surrounding neighborhood.

  "Well, it's extremely important that we find him tod-" The door slammed shut in Rex's face. He turned to Cameron. "O-kay. Now what?"

  "What are our choices? We search for him. You know what he looks like, right?"

  "Yes," Rex said, regarding the shady neighborhood around them ten-tatively.

  "We'll sweep the area block by block, checking the bars and parks."

  They tediously searched the neighborhood, sticking together, walking up and down the decrepit streets, peering at the faces of passing men. Cameron called in to Derek on her transmitter, updating him on the situ-ation and obtaining clearance to return late.

  They passed a junk heap and a burning car. Up ahead, three shirtless men, their skin baked dark brown, were sitting on an overturned bathtub, throwing beer bottles at a wounded street dog. The dog lay on its side across the street, bleeding from a gash in its neck. Cameron noticed the dog's broken back leg, bent at a ninety-degree angle midway up the femur. She quickly fought away her anger.

  "Here's where you earn your keep," Rex said, stepping between Cameron and Tank as they headed toward the men. The men, busy tor-menting the dog, ignored them.

  "! Oye, perro callegero!" one of the men cried, hurling a brick at it. The brick shattered on the ground near the dog's head, sending splinters across its face. The dog struggled to move away, whimpering.

  Tank clenched his jaw, his hands tightening into fists. Noticing the change in his demeanor, Cameron placed a hand on his back, moving him forward. "Not now," she said. "This isn't on our list of concerns."

  The men were digging in the rubble for more bricks to throw. Cameron glanced nervously at Tank. She could see his arms were flexed even through his shirt. Rex had also taken note of Tank's growing anger. He fiddled nervously with his Panama, rubbing the rim with his thumbs.

  As they passed the three men, Tank turned in time to see another brick flying at the dog. It struck the dog in its stomach, and it let loose with a series of pained yelps, unable to crawl away. Tank broke from Cameron and Rex and faced the men. Cameron grabbed his shoulder, but he shook her loose.

  "What are you doing?" Rex yelled after him.

  The men turned to face Tank, smacking their hands together to rid them of dust. One of them pulled a makeshift blade from the back of his trousers. When Tank was about fifteen yards away from the men, Cameron caught up to him, blocking him with her body.

  The men howled with laughter, doubling over, clearly amused by the sight of an enormous man being restrained by a woman. One of the men imitated Cameron, standing with his hands on his hips and adding in high-pitched nagging for good measure.

  Tank glared at Cameron, the first time he'd ever looked at her angrily. Anyone else he might have struck. "You're not gonna let this go, are you?" she said, her voice eerily calm.

  Tank moved to step around her. Cameron pulled her Sig Sauer from the band of her pants and he stopped dead in his tracks.

  She raised the pistol at the dog, took careful aim, and delivered a bul-let to its skull. The crack of the gunshot echoed up the empty street. The dog stopped whimpering. The men were silent.

  "This is not our objective," Cameron said, her voice tight. She turned, grabbed Rex around one biceps, and proceeded up the street.

  "Someone's gotta shut that baby up," Savage muttered. He lay on his back on the bed, playing with his knife, the hefty Death Wind. With a formidable six-inch blade of D2 steel and three-sixteenths-inch stock, it was an impressive killing tool. But it was also beautiful, at least to him. Eight ounces, an eleven-inch stretch from butt to tip. Black Micarta han-dle, tapered tang, no teeth to detract from the line of its edge. It was smooth on the way in, sliding through flesh like water. Of all his weapons, the Death Wind was his favorite. There was a rawness to killing with a knife, something lost in the pull of a trigger. The ultimate stealth tool. He'd even anodized the blade so it wouldn't glint.

  Savage sheathed the knife and glanced over at the others. Derek traced the lines of discoloration on the glass, his forehead pressed to the window. Justin looked at Derek, then shot Szabla a look, his eyebrows drawn together in concern. She leaned back against one of the twin beds, kicking her legs out in front of her, and shrugged. Tucker sat Indian-style on the carpet, pretending he wasn't eyeing the minibar.

  Savage tuned out the baby next door, who squealed on like a stuck pig. Five high-demand shooters holed up in a hotel on a field trip-the room reeked of bad mood. Boredom and restlessness usually led to trouble when there were Navy SEALs involved.

  The baby finally quieted, and Savage could make out the mother's cooing voice.

  Tucker grabbed the ashtray from the night stand and arranged two books of matches in it to form a miniature pyre. He moved back to his former position, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, and using his thumb, flicked matches at the ashtray. The first two missed and burned out on the cheap carpet, but the third hit and the ashtray ignited, sending up a three-inch flame that flared briefly before dying. Justin cleared the ash-tray unceremoniously, like a father taking an unsafe toy away from his child.

  "Explosives," Szabla said. "The game the whole family can play."

  "I thought that was incest," Justin said.

  Tucker pulled another matchbook out of his sleeve. With a snap of his fingers, he spun the book around and laid a single match across the friction strip. Flicking his thumb, he lit the match, holding the flame before his eyes. He watched its familiar dance. Probably lost in thoughts of spoons and needles, C4 and trip wires.

  Savage knew the type well-loved having their hands in the plastics, being able to assemble what they could from wires and det cord and boosters. It was like assembling death. Like opening up Pandora's box and tinkering around inside. They got off on it all-the rigging, the det-onating, the blasts so bright you'd think you saw the eyes of God.

  "You always been a breacher?" Savage asked.

  Tucker nodded slightly, his eyes on the small flame. "Started when I was twelve, you could say. Firecrackers in mailboxes, bottle rockets in pipes, cherry bombs down toilets. Useful skills growing up in and out of boys' homes." He whisked a finger through the flame and back, then licked the black residue. "First night in my third home, an 'older brother' beat me unconscious wit
h a sockful of quarters. Next day, I rigged his shoe, blew off half his big toe." His smile sprang up quick and goofy. "No one fucked with me after."

  Derek slid his fingers down the pane to the sill, streaking the glass. Still spaced out.

  "You all a remnant of a platoon?" Savage asked.

  Szabla nodded. "Mostly. Me, Cam, Derek, and Tucker were platoon buddies in THREE off and on for four, five years. Justin and I have bud-died before, but he and Tank came up mostly on Team EIGHT. Dick for action, but pretty Danish girls." She jerked her head in Justin's direction. "Ain't that right, sunshine?"

  "Beats desert and diaperheads."

  "What does? Shit detail teaching Norwegians how to rig C4?" She snorted. "At least we got world ops, not endless scrimmaging."

  The match burned down to Tucker's fingers, and Tucker threw it on the floor. He stuck a finger in his mouth, then pressed it on the glowing match head. It sizzled out, sticking to his finger when he raised it.

  Savage pulled out a pack of cigarettes from one of his front pockets.

  "You mind?" Tucker asked, gesturing to the pack with his eyes.

  "No," Savage replied. "Not at all." He lit the cigarette and enjoyed a long drag, shooting the smoke out the side of his mouth. "Why don't you go back to watching that minibar, son? You're outta matches."

  "Fuckin' prick," Tucker muttered, bending over to tighten the laces on his boots.

  Savage leaned up a bit from his recline on the bed. "What did you say?"

  "I said, 'Fucking prick,'" Tucker answered, enunciating clearly. "Park your attitude somewhere else. Things have changed just a touch since Vietnam."