The Greatest of These by Greg Wendleton (booksvooks txt) 📕

got to work cutting off some branches from the nearby trees and hid the car as best we could. Satisfied with our camo job, we began the hike to our set up locations, roughly one mile into the jungle.

We arrived at our respective sites, 1,000 yards from the compound, before the sun had made its way much over the eastern horizon. In the dense jungle it was still mostly dark and we were easily concealed. At this point, alone and scared, I settled into my cover with my camouflaged rifle and my surplus jungle camo fatigues. I sighted in the poolside lanai where the scumbags would be perched for the “party”. Satisfied that I was fully concealed and ready, all I could do was wait for the festivities to commence at six that evening. Their last evening.

The next eight hours were a mixture of topless ladies swimming, snorting and servicing these stronzos. Including the host, there were nine total men in attendance. Four of them would never forget what happened this night. Five of them would be forever cast into the fires of hell.

We had no communication with each other during this wait. Conrad and I planned to meet back at the spot we had concealed the vehicle to exfil to Valencia and our journey back to San Antonio. The other members of our team were once again on their own. At precisely 5:55pm I found my target sitting on the lanai, smoking a fat cigar, Cuban I’m sure. He was morbidly obese, balding, and his name was Boris. That’s all I needed to know. I began to slow my breathing to lower my heartrate and prepare to pull the trigger for the first time against another human. Except, this fuck was anything but human.

At exactly 6:00pm, I gently squeezed the trigger and watched as my bullet hit its target, entering his forehead and exiting with what little brain matter he had. Screaming erupted and all hell broke loose in the seconds following the deaths of five subhuman beings at 6:00pm on May 20, 2006.

By 6:23pm I was at our vehicle and Conrad arrived moments later. I had cleared the brush we had used to hide the vehicle. By 6:25pm we were on Highway 5 headed north leaving behind my first mission.

Shit had officially gotten real!

CHAPTER FIVE

Conrad and I traveled together to Miami but then parted ways. I took an American Airlines flight to DFW and then to San Antonio arriving home mid-afternoon on May 23. Fortunately, Fonda was busy with clients and not at home when I arrived. I was a haggard mess. I had showered, but hadn’t shaved since leaving San Antonio the previous Wednesday, supposedly on a business trip to a national retail food show. I had actually just used five days of the fifteen days annual vacation I received from my real employer to kill a man in the jungles of Venezuela.

Regardless of that, I knew I had to do something special to make things right with Fonda or I’d be looking for a new couch to sleep on. I immediately went to work making plans for a trip to Italy. This was something we had talked about for the past several years and now was the time. With a major deposit made into an off-shore bank account that Conrad had helped me set up, I was flush with cash. This was no time to scrimp. It was time to go big!

Thanks to the internet I began researching flights, hotels and things to do using a website called Booking.com. Wow, that was an amazing tool that saved my ass that day and many more times as it turned out.

Flights were booked from San Antonio to Newark, NJ, to Milan, Italy. We would travel for over thirteen hours and arrive at Malpensa International Airport around 9:00am on June 17 after leaving San Antonio on June 16. I had arranged for a rental car, a Mercedes 6-speed, we would have this sweet ride the entire time we were in Italy.

I had booked a luxury five-star hotel in the heart of Milan, The Grand et de Milan and it was spectacular. They call it a boutique hotel with only ninety-four rooms. I just know it was beautiful and very comfortable. We were able to walk to all the famous sites we had selected and never seemed to be more than twenty minutes away from our hotel. We visited the Milan Cathedral, the Duomo, ate and drank at numerous cafes on the Piazza del Duomo and shopped at the Galleria Vittorio Emanuel. Oh yeah, that set me back more than a few bucks! Best of all we relaxed, ate great food, drank fabulous wine and had the best sex we had ever had. When Fonda would try on some of her purchases, well never mind, you don’t need to know about that.

I had read about the ancient city of Bergamo, also in the Lombardy region of Northern Italy, and wanted to spend a day exploring the sites. So, we made a side trip before heading to Florence. I certainly wasn’t disappointed. We parked the car in the lower city and took the funicular up to the older, upper city. Citta Alta, what the locals call the upper city, dates back to 49 B.C. and is loaded with historic sites, cobblestone streets, narrow alleys, churches, like the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, fortresses and the Ristorante la Marianna. You can sit outside la Marianna, people watch and eat Stracciatella gelato, where it was invented to your heart’s content.

After a full day of sightseeing, we were able to find a hotel room in Bergamo where we slept like we had been awake for a week. I think the jet lag and frantic pace we had been keeping caught up to us. The next morning, we showered, ate a hearty breakfast and began the journey to Florence. Being a redneck at heart, I was somewhat confused by the signage