Payback

75

“I have great difficulty believing you told him to go, Mr. Karr.”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Karr told Rubens. He was zigzagging around the edge of the Inca ruins, walking through an area probably used as a cemetery five hundred years before. If there were any ghosts — and if any civilization was going to have ghosts, it would be the Incas — Karr hoped they would be friendly.

“This was completely unnecessary,” continued Rubens. “We are quite capable of dealing with the situation here. Your assignment is more important.”

“Yeah, well, I really didn’t need him. This is routine, you know?”

Rubens clicked off the line. A few yards later, Karr caught sight of the sentry post on the road thirty yards away. Two Peruvian privates were standing near the road, guns dangling from their hands. He watched them for a moment, gauging their boredom. As soon as one of the men walked off to the left, Karr scrambled down the embankment of stones, trotting down a short hill and continuing on for a few hundred paces. The thin air made even the short run a strain, and he finally had to stop and take a rest.

“You shouldn’t have lied for him, Tommy,” said Chafetz.

“Who’s lying?” Karr got to his feet. “You don’t really think I need help here, do you?”

“That’s not the point. We have other assets, and the mission set is determined—”

“Keep an eye on the road for me, all right?”

“You’re clear.”

A half hour later, Karr came to the edge of the small compound where the satellite phone calls had been made from. There were two large buildings, both made of stone and dating to the colonial period. One was a large barn, the other a three-story house. The infrared sensors on the Global Hawk, which was orbiting above him at sixty thousand feet, had not seen anyone outside. Karr took his binoculars from his rucksack and scanned both buildings before going closer.

“Tracks from a heavy truck,” he said, looking at the dirt in front of the barn. “Can’t tell how old they are. When was the last time it rained?”

“Tuesday night,” said Chafetz. “Can you get a close-up?”

“Anything for you, darlin’” Karr took out his handheld computer and slid a camera attachment on the end. Then he walked over and took three pictures. “Biggest tourist attraction in Peru.”

The large side-by-side doors at the front of the barn were secured with a chain that ran through the handles and was held in place by a combination lock. The steel shop door next to them had a padlock. Either could be easily picked, but if he went in that way he had to leave the locks off and it would be obvious someone was inside. Looking for a less conspicuous way to get in, Karr walked around the side of the building away from the house. The windows were relatively new aluminum replacements for whatever had originally been there. He scanned one for burglar alarms; when he found none he tried to open it but found it locked. The same was true on the other.

Karr took out his night-vision glasses and held them up to the glass to peer inside. The interior of the barn had been stripped of stalls or whatever dividers it had once had. It had a poured concrete floor and steel beams across the ceiling. Thick electric conduit and industrial-style outlets ran along part of the wall and crisscrossed the ceiling. There were tools and a workbench on the far side.

“I think I’ll break the window and go in,” he told Chafetz. “This side can’t be seen from the house, or the road up front.”

“Go for it.”

Karr broke the window with his elbow, then reached inside and undid the lock. The window was a surprisingly tight fit, but he got in smoothly, pulled it shut behind him, and crouched near the thick wall, surveying the wide space.

A metal door covered an opening in the floor at the northwest comer, and a few pieces of wood were stacked near the large doors; otherwise the barn was empty.

“Got a trapdoor in the comer here.”

“Interesting.”

“Could be a bunker or something. How deep can the Global Hawk see?”

“It has infrared and optical, no radar,” said Chafetz. “Radar” would have been a ground penetrating device specially designed to look for bunkers and other underground facilities. “The Air Force has a U-2 with radar en route to Peru. We’ll check with its mission tasking and see if we can have it fly overhead.”

“OK,” said Karr, examining the locked door. He pulled at it gently; when it didn’t budge, he decided to save it for later. He walked through the rest of the building.

“Brought a truck inside,” said Karr, kneeling near the tire tracks. “Probably the one that made the tracks.”

A large truck had backed in through the double doors; dirt and grit were caked in little mounds from the treads. He saw black skid marks just beyond them.

“Check these out,” he told Chafetz, taking out his PDA with its camera. “Maybe they’re from a forklift.”

“Why don’t you run the interrogator on the area near the door?” she suggested. “That will give us an image. The U-2 is at least an hour away.”

“Good idea.”

“Are you going to try it?”

“Hold your horses,” said Karr. “I’m getting some images of the work area for you first. You’re getting as bad as Rockman.”

“I’m sorry, Tommy.”

“Rubens is breathing down your neck, right?”

“That’s not it.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

The work area had the makings of a decent metal shop, with a multi-tester and an old, large oscilloscope. Karr walked around the large room, occasionally dropping to his hands and knees to look more closely at the floor or wall. The floor was rather clean; it looked like it was regularly swept.

Not that he was a real expert on barns.

Satisfied that there were no hidden rooms anywhere or trick panels in the concrete, Karr went back to his rucksack for the radiation detector and the interrogator. He started with the detector in the work area; it was clean. Then he made a series of slow passes across the floor, holding the detector below his waist. When he was done, he went back and turned on the other machine. As LEDs at the side began blinking, he reached into the ruck and took out the wire to connect it with his communications gear. He slipped it into the socket at the side of his belt, then attached an ear set directly to the device; a tone would sound if the machine’s rays encountered anything thick enough to be interesting.

The techies who had first checked him out on the machine about a year before had warned him that it was really an oversexed X-ray machine; standing in front of it for any length of time was extremely hazardous for his short- as well as long-term health. They had also told him that there was a distant but theoretical possibility that the radiation in the device could trip a fail-safe circuit in a cleverly constructed bomb, causing the weapon to explode. He tried not to think about that possibility as he slowly worked the beam over the walls and floor.

It didn’t help that he had recognized a mistake in the formula they showed him about the amount of radiation exposure from a ten-second blast by the machine. If they had made a mistake of the same magnitude on the probability of setting off a nuke, he might soon be a permanent part of the Peruvian hillside.

“Here we go,” he told Chafetz. “If you hear a boom, you’ll know I found something.”

Karr laughed, but he felt sweat running down the side of his neck. He worked his way slowly around the concrete floor, once more reserving the area around the steel door for last. Finally, he went over to the door and pointed the interrogator downward.

No beep.

“It’s a tunnel,” said Chafetz. “Goes in the direction of the house.”

“All right. I’ll check that next.”

Karr switched the interrogator off and started to whistle. He walked back to the rucksack, bending to put his gear back.

As he did, the lights in the barn switched on.