Authors: Chris Ryan
Sounds like a Brazilian footballer, thought Gardner.
‘Not much to look at, I know.’
‘I grew up in Moss Side, mate. I’ve seen worse.’
‘You think it looks bad from up here, wait till you hit the ground.’
The Little Bird began its rapid descent, diving sharply into the favela and ducking this way and that, turning on a sixpence. Gardner had ridden in Lynxes and Chinooks and Merlins, but the Navy crabs had no chopper as nippy as this. Now they were a hundred metres off the ground. Gardner clocked a gang of kids racing through the streets below. They were packing AK-47s and firing on an older group who fled east. BOPE had withdrawn from the favela, leaving the warring gangs to slog it out among themselves. Third World kids were getting ready for the Third World War.
Gardner, on the other hand, was going in half-cocked. Just him and a couple of scarred knuckles for company. His first task on landing at Galeão-Antônio Carlos Jobim International Airport had been to head away from the tourist hubs of the Leblon and Ipanema. Other people ventured south. Gardner had made his way west, to the poverty-ravaged district of Santa Cruz. A thirteen-year-old boy, a street hustler in a Brazil shirt with ‘Robinho’ on the back, said he could get anything for Gardner. For two hundred reals, he agreed to supply him with a black-market Sig Sauer P226. But the café the boy told Gardner to meet at was crawling with mean-looking cops, and anyway the kid never showed.
Inserting to a hostile environment without a gun, Gardner felt uneasy.
‘It’s all kicking off down there,’ he said. ‘Is this the best LZ you could find?’
‘You’d better believe it. The gangs are shooting at anyone who moves. There’s rumours that a couple of BOPE officers are cut off from the rest of their unit, and the kids smell blood. The surrounding streets are just too dangerous, amigo.’
‘Dangerous for who? You and Mr Pilot here?’
Leon didn’t answer. Fair play. The Bird was a favour from a mate of a mate, arranged at the last moment. Twenty-four hours earlier Gardner had been sleeping in a Hertfordshire bush. Since leaving 22 SAS he’d lived off the radar, as anonymous as a man could be in a Britain up to its eyeballs in CCTV. As a consequence, he allowed himself only two connections to the outside world, a Barclays cashcard and a mobile phone. The phone was to keep in touch with old Blades. Gardner wasn’t the kind of guy who rang up and talked about his feelings or how his day had been. That wasn’t his style. And so the phone never rang.
Until yesterday, when Bald had called him out of the blue.
He saved your life
. The frayed nerve endings in his left hand reminded Gardner of the sacrifice Bald had made. So he had emptied his current account. Used the little bread he had to book a one-way ticket to Carnival City. Figured, if nothing else, the weather had to be better than Stevenage.
He checked his mobile. Two messages. One from his operator, welcoming him to their local network partners. The second from the Brazilian partners themselves. Some waffle in Portuguese. More messages in one day than he’d received in a year.
‘This Mr Bald, is he a friend of yours?’ Leon asked.
‘Why the fuck do you care?’
‘You know, those BOPE guys are fearless. They don’t give a shit. But if they get trapped by the gangs, it’s game over. The gangs skin them alive, amigo.’
Gardner said nothing, because nothing needed saying.
The Little Bird hovered fifty metres above the ground. The chopper had more moves than a Soho prossy, but the cramped nature of the favela made venturing any lower too risky. Before boarding his flight Gardner had visited an internet café and studied the Barbosa favela and the surrounding area on Google Earth so he wouldn’t be totally blind on the ground. But it was hard to absorb all the details, as the streets twisted and turned like a bowl of spaghetti. Barbosa favela crammed a quarter of a million people at the bottom of the food chain into an enclave the size of half a dozen Wembley stadiums. Having boned up on his history, Gardner knew that the chaotic assembly had been created when veteran soldiers from the war of independence rocked up in Rio but, instead of being treated like heroes, were banished to the slums.
Know the feeling, Gardner thought.
The area immediately below them was obscured by a blanket of arsenic-grey smoke. Gardner could see less than nothing, but he could guess that whatever lurked behind, it wasn’t a fucking tea party. His heart hammered against his breastbone.
Sweat treacled from Gardner’s brow on to his lips. He tasted salt, and last night’s booze from the hotel bar, where he had hooked up with his number-one drinking buddy: drink. Gardner wiped his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.
Leon smiled. ‘Those caipirinhas taste nice, don’t they?’
‘Deadly.’
Gardner rested his feet on the side rail. He tossed a length of a coiled-up 44mm synthetic wire over the side. Then on to his right hand he slipped on a full-fingered abrasion-resistant abseiling glove. It took three attempts before he was able to do the same for his left. Mostly because the skin-tone carbon-fibre fingers didn’t want to flex.
‘Can you feel anything in that?’ Leon asked.
‘Nothing below the elbow, mate.’
‘That’s some real space-age shit.’
‘A century ago they used to give blokes like me a hook on a stick. Now I can pick up grapes with this thing.’
With his palms facing inwards, Gardner locked his elbows and began sliding down over the side of the chopper and directly into the smoke.
It was like plunging into a big fuck-off barbecue. Fumes flooded his lungs and nostrils. He smelled cordite and burned flesh, and tasted hot metal on his tongue. It was a million degrees in the middle.
Fuck it, keep roping down, he told himself.
The drop was just forty-four metres to the ground according to the Little Bird’s on-board altimeter. He wanted to scale down as quickly as possible – being suspended on the rope would leave you exposed to sniper attacks – but he had to use the friction on his gloves to control his descent. Fall too quick and you’re liable to break a leg on impact. He didn’t wrap his feet around the rope, because the leather on his Gore-Tex boots made the rope slippery.
Ten more metres and Gardner was clear of the smoke. Blinking tears and boozy sweat out of his eyes, he saw that the smoke was coming from a rooftop several metres to his right. Flames licked at a column of worn rubber tyres, toxic fumes disgorged into the air like from an old industrial chimney. Gardner looked at his feet.
Almost there. Just another couple of metres.
His feet hit the ground, but he couldn’t get a firm grip. His boots scraped against something slick, and when he shuffled his feet he slipped backwards, banging the back of his head against the concrete, and, fuck, it hurt.
Ignore the pain. Don’t give in to it, he told himself. Get up!
He released the rope and watched it withdraw through the smoke like a lightning bolt in reverse. The Little Bird was a noisy fucker for such a small chopper. As the bird pissed off, the
whock-whock
faded and the noise sank big time. Gardner scoped the LZ, glancing over his shoulders. He had landed in an L-shaped street at the base of the favela, two hundred metres from the Tutoia motorway. Might as well have been on the other side of the fucking world.
As he’d calculated, the gangs had swarmed on ahead and out of sight. Now the street was shabby and desolate. Two- and three-storey shanty huts and botched brick buildings lined the street. A lot of the homes seemed to get away with plastic or cardboard rigged up as roofs. Guess it rains less here than in Manchester, Gardner figured.
The sharp crack of rifle shots sounded off to the east. The direction the gang kids had scattered. The volley was furious, then silent.
As he picked himself up he noticed some kind of gunk beneath him, a big puddle, dark red, consistency of melted rubber. A single Timberland footprint marked the spot where Gardner had crashed. Right where his head had kissed concrete lay a pair of intestines, the large one brown and snake-like, the smaller one reddish and flattened by Gardner’s bonce. He couldn’t see a body. Whoever was stuck like a pig had fucked off to go and die in some alleyway.
First things first, he thought, rubbing his sticky hands down the sides of his sandstone combats. Bug out away from the rifle reports. Don’t want your trip to Barbosa to be your last. He took off west, in the opposite direction to the gunfire.
0822 hours.
It took Weiss an hour to worm his way through the traffic. He drove north, past the Maracana football stadium and, at the old Imperial Palace on Quinta da Boa Vista, he took a right, hit Avenue Osvaldo Aranha and edged along the gridlocked road for five kilometres. God himself could not make Brazilians hurry. Weiss thought some more about his next move.
All the way to Tardelli district.
Once off Aranha the traffic lightened. Weiss turned into Rua Pedro Cabral and followed it for two hundred metres until he reached the affluent Rua Buenos Aires. A row of houses reserved for rich people presented itself, each one opulent, whitewashed, gated. He made a beeline for the luxury villa at the end of the road, the biggest and grandest of the pile. The entry gate was painted gold and had a miniature video screen fixed above the comms panel. Someone had left it ajar. A gift.
Weiss parked out front and strode across the grounds, past a water feature big enough for a grand hotel and a column of palm trees green as the Amazon. Two men stood guard on the front steps. Armed with Uzi 9mm sub-machine-guns, weapon of choice for gangsters who watched too many Hollywood action movies, they were sharing a joint. Weiss walked unnoticed until he was thirty metres from them. He was a big guy, but light on his toes. One of the guys looked up, eyeballed Weiss and tossed the joint to the ground.
‘Holy shit! Motherfucking Weiss!’
He couldn’t run inside fast enough.
The second guy stuck to the spot, as if he had roots for feet.
‘I need to speak to Big Teeth.’
‘He’s inside.’
Weiss yanked open the heavy teak door and let himself in.
The villa was lavish. It also stank of piss. A Rottweiler licked at a ring of its own faeces. On the walls, between antique mirrors, there were posters of
Scarface
and
The Godfather
, and bullet holes pocked the high ceiling. He had to watch his step to avoid the used condoms and crack pipes littering the marble-tiled floor. It was true what they said. No matter which way you dressed it up, or how rich it got, shit was always shit.
Weiss entered the lounge. It was like walking into a shadow. He squinted, saw a girl of sixteen or seventeen, spread-eagled on a red leather sofa. She could have been asleep, but her wide-open eyes had rolled back into her head.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
played on a widescreen TV. The air was redolent with the smell of marijuana and fear. Weiss counted twelve goons in total around the dark room, and he didn’t need to look twice to realize that every one of them was busting a tool.
He relaxed. No goon dared point their weapon at him. Not unless they had a death wish.
Luis ‘Big Teeth’ Oliveira was sitting at a sofa in front of the TV. There was a coffee table in front of him with half of Colombia cut up on it, but it wasn’t the coke making him jumpy. It was Weiss. Big Teeth furiously chained on a cigarette.
‘Nestor,’ he said, opening his arms, like he was preparing to hug a bear. ‘What brings you down to Rio? Can’t get enough of
Carioca
pussy, eh? You know what they say – once a man’s tasted wine, he can’t go back to water.’
‘Your jokes bore me almost as much as your country,’ replied Weiss, running a hand along the mantelpiece above a baroque fireplace. Dust coated his fingers.
Big Teeth shifted in his seat. ‘Then… you’re here because of the Carlitos thing?’ His voice accelerated. ‘I promise, we didn’t have shit, not a shit, to do with Gonzales ripping him off. That boy is mad, amigo.’
‘Calm down,’ Weiss said, smiling, enjoying Big Teeth’s fear. ‘I’m not going to kill you. And this isn’t about Gonzales.’
Big Teeth laughed nervously. His goofy, golden front teeth jutted out, like some kind of grotesque bunny. All that money, Weiss wondered, so why didn’t the guy get his teeth fixed?
‘I’m looking for someone.’
‘We’re all looking for someone special, eh?’
‘
Enough
of your jokes, Luis.’ Big Teeth looked at his feet, the TV, the comatose girl. Anywhere but Weiss. ‘This man – he’s a foreigner working with BOPE. A unit you keep a close eye on, I’m sure.’
‘Forget it,’ Big Teeth said, stubbing out his cigarette in a Jesus ashtray. ‘We don’t live in Barbosa no more, as you can see. Nowadays we’re out of the drugs game. We’re trying to go legit, man. Recording rap music and shit.’ He blew out a last gust of smoke. ‘I can’t help you.’
Weiss angled his head, trying to lock his eyes on Big Teeth’s.
‘Luis, my friend, what’s the problem? You seem very nervous. Is it me?’
Big Teeth held in his breath.
‘Or maybe something else has you concerned.’ Weiss looked at the coffee table, lacerated with knife marks. ‘Is your gang in trouble, my friend?’