Free Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) by Frank Gardner Page B

brown and sluggish. And then the jungle was before them, spreading far to the south, leaching across the border into Ecuador. The badlands, thought Luke, as the pilot levelled up to land. Nariño province, the most dangerous of all Colombia’s thirty-two
departamentos
, the place with the biggest per capita murder rate in the country, and they were heading for its epicentre, Tumaco port. The natural trouble-seeker in him said, Bring it on, I’m ready. But another, more measured, voice told him to watch his back, get the job done and extract himself in one piece. He had Elise to think of, and Friend to keep out of harm’s way.
    Their arrival in Tumaco was anything but discreet. They touched down with a bounce, briefly taking to the air again, then landed and rolled to a stop. Luke peered out of the small Perspex window and saw a reception committee lined up and waiting for them, a squad of police commandos in full combat gear, their faces tiger-striped in green and black camouflage paint. He recognized them as the Jungla, Colombia’s elite counter-narcotics Special Forces, set up by Britain’s SAS in 1989, later trained and mentored by America’s Green Berets. Luke remembered being told by someone on an earlier visit: ‘It’s pronounced
khoongla
.’ They had a certain macho reputation, fast-roping down from Blackhawk helicopters into heavily defended jungle labs ringed with Claymore mines and booby traps. But they were not cowboys: they had taken their share of life-changing injuries. A corporalwith a prosthetic leg had laughed off his injury and once told Luke: ‘You know the only thing we Jungla are scared of? It’s
el coralillo.
The coral snake. We have no anti-venom. All our stocks are used up.’
    Luke dropped his rucksack on to the tarmac, jumped down from the doorway of the Cessna then strode up to greet the troop commander, who welcomed him to Tumaco.
    Out on the edge of the airstrip, not far away, a garbage collector put down his broom and spoke into his mobile phone. There was a pause at the other end. Salsa music played softly in the background, then came a grunt of thanks and the line went dead. He went back to his broom as the convoy of police jeeps swept past him in a cloud of dust.
    Far away, up in the cool air of the hills, a message was whispered into the ear of a man they called El Pobrecito. It was an ironic sobriquet, meaning ‘poor little thing’, a nickname he had earned when he had wept tears of joy after beating his first victim to a pulp with a baseball bat. ‘
Han Ilegado
,’ they told him
.
‘They have arrived.’

Chapter 10
    ‘ I HATE TO be a bore,’ said Friend to Luke, ‘but what makes you so certain that this is the right hotel?’
    It was mid-morning in Tumaco and their convoy of police vehicles had rolled and jolted its way from the airstrip into town. Their escort had already dismounted and was now urging the two Englishmen to get off the street and inside the generously named Hotel Paradiso.
    ‘Because,’ replied Luke, helping the lawyer with his luggage yet again, ‘it was mentioned in the latest report from Bogotá station. This is where Benton spent his last day alive.’
    Once inside, Luke asked for the room, number 16, that Benton had slept in. He wanted to get right under his skin, to sense his movements and get a feel for what he had been on to. Luke wasn’t squeamish: washing his face in a dead man’s sink didn’t bother him. In his first year at university he had been told he was inheriting his bedsit from a boy who had hanged himself there the previous term. Luke looked up now into the cracked and blotchy mirror and briefly considered the reflection that met him. There were faint creases around his eyes from all those months of squinting into an Afghan sun. Like most of his mates, he had always been more interested in what he was looking out at than in how he appeared to other people, although Elise was definitelyworking on him in that department. Elise.