Typhoon Fury

47

Locsin had his men pull down the bricks of plastic explosive from the ceiling. He thought he had enough for what he was planning, assuming the RDX chemical still maintained its potency.

He knew Juan Cabrillo was coming. It had to be him out there who had killed his men. If it had been the Philippine National Police, he would have heard some idiot officer on a megaphone telling him to give up and come out.

Cabrillo was much more dangerous. He would know that Locsin would never willingly surrender and would come in after them.

And Locsin was sick of him. He wanted to finish Cabrillo once and for all, but that wasn’t possible here. Besides, killing him wasn’t enough. Locsin needed to destroy that ship of his as well.

He turned to his translator, who had gathered up all the files and papers, so many that another man had to help carry them.

“Where are the pages you showed me?”

The translator looked at him with a perplexed expression, then dug around in his armload and removed five sheets of paper. Locsin took them and tossed them on the ground. He even stepped on several of them, leaving dusty footprints. Now the scattered pages looked like they’d been dropped accidentally.

“But the Americans will find them,” the translator said.

Locsin grinned. “Exactly.”

When his men had the bricks of RDX in hand, Locsin took them and went to the end of the chamber. He pressed the plastique against the wall, shaping the charge so it would blast outward. Then he stabbed the wire ends of the detonation cord into the mass and backed up, unspooling it as he went.

The soldier at the hole said, “We’ve got movement outside.”

“Fire some warning shots,” Locsin said.

The soldier unleashed a volley through the hole.

At the same time, Locsin held the ends of the wire over the battery he’d taken from the Bobcat. He had his men flip the desk and lab tables over to use as shields.

“Get down,” he said and ducked as he touched the ends of the wire to the battery nodes.

Juan was peering around the corner, the sight of his assault rifle to his eye, when a massive explosion shook the tunnel. Everyone on his team instinctively flattened themselves to the floor and covered their heads.

Dust shot out of Locsin’s refuge. Everyone raised their balaclavas to protect themselves. The sharp tang of pulverized concrete and chlorine aroma of burnt plastic explosive mixed with the smell of diesel exhaust from the Bobcat.

“Those idiots actually did kill themselves!” Max sputtered.

Juan wasn’t so sure. It didn’t fit Locsin’s profile. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Juan got to his feet and crept around the corner, his rifle at the ready. He was still getting the feed from the Crawler and hadn’t seen anyone coming through the hole.

The six of them kept low as they made their way down the tunnel. When they reached the Bobcat, they used it and the trailer for cover.

Max readied one of the tear gas canisters, but Juan put up his hand.

“I want to get a look inside first. Hand me the Crawler.”

Max drove the Crawler to Juan, who picked it up. The area in front of the hole was too rough for the ROV to navigate, but if he could get close enough, he could place it on smoother ground near the opening.

He told the rest of them to cover him while he made his way forward. When he reached level ground, he put the Crawler down, and Max took over.

He maneuvered the Crawler to the hole, where the camera finally had a look inside the chamber.

The air was heavy with dust, and pitch-black except for a blurry trail of flashlights at the end of the chamber. One by one, they winked out as if they were being switched off.

“A trap?” he said, looking at Max.

Max furrowed his brow for a moment, then his eyes went wide.

“They’re getting away!”

“Where?”

“They must have been blowing another hole at the opposite end of the chamber. I remember the schematics now. That’s close to a lateral that leads to the main tourist tunnel.”

Juan took a flashbang grenade from his belt and chucked it through the hole just in case Locsin had left any of his men behind to set up his own ambush.

The grenade went off and Juan dived through the hole, sweeping the tunnel with the flashlight attached to his assault rifle.

Just as he had expected, two men had been crouching behind overturned tables. Now they were staggering around as they clawed at their eyes.

Juan followed Julia Huxley’s advice and didn’t take any chances. He shot each of them in the head. They both fell to the floor, their guns clattering on the concrete.

He checked the remainder of the chamber before yelling, “Clear!”

The rest of them hustled through. Max was last and focused his attention on papers that were strewn about the floor.

“These might be important.”

Juan said, “You collect what you can find and meet us at the Gator.” The lifeboat extraction was no longer possible.

He didn’t wait for an answer and waved for Eddie, Raven, Linc, and MacD to follow him as he raced toward the point where Locsin and his men had escaped.

Juan poked his head briefly through the fresh hole in the wall and didn’t draw any fire, so he jumped through and ran toward a dim light he could see a hundred feet ahead.

He emerged in the main twenty-four-foot-wide Malinta Tunnel. People were running in both directions to the exits at either end of the tunnel while clusters of terrified tourists cowered on the ground, some of them nonetheless taking videos with their phones. When they saw Juan and the others dressed in police uniforms, several of them pointed toward the tunnel entrance that led to the tail end of the island and shouted.

“Men with guns!”

“Terrorists!”

“They went that way!”

Juan sprinted after them. He could see Locsin and the remainder of his men exit the tunnel into sunlight. Locsin leapt on a tranvía that had just delivered a load of tourists and threw the driver to the pavement. He took the wheel of the tram, as his men climbed aboard, then sped off down the road.

When Juan got outside, he saw another tranvía backed into a parking spot, its driver watching the fleeing tram with a stunned look.

Before Juan could order the driver to get out, Raven yanked his arm and pulled him off. She got into the driver’s seat and, as if to ward off any questions, said, “I drove a fire truck last night. This is nothing. Get on.”

She hit the gas, and Juan had to grab one of the handholds before she drove off without him. Eddie, MacD, and Linc all barely made it aboard.

The tranvía’s top speed wasn’t impressive, but Raven did her best to keep Locsin in sight as they careened around the curves leading to Corregidor’s tail. Whenever the Locsin’s tram came into view, two hundred yards ahead, gunfire would rip into theirs, and Juan and his team would return fire. The windshield lasted about five seconds, then shattered in a hail of bullets, showering Raven with safety glass.

She averted her eyes for a moment to avoid the pellets but never took her foot off the gas.

After three more turns, Juan could see Locsin’s tranvía through the trees as it reached the old airfield at the same time as a de Havilland Twin Otter touched down on the dirt strip. The propeller-driven plane was a favorite of bush pilots for its ability to land on short, unpaved runways. Locsin must have stepped outside the tunnel to call the pilot for retrieval.

It rolled to a stop and turned just as Locsin’s tranvía pulled up to it.

“Come on, you stupid thing!” Raven yelled at the tram, vainly coaxing it to go faster.

The door to the plane popped open long enough for Locsin and his three surviving men to jump on. The trees prevented Juan from taking an effective shot. None of his bullets made it through the thicket of branches.

The Twin Otter’s engines revved to full power, and the plane tore down the runway. Raven tried to give chase, but their tram was literally left in the dust.

Juan disgustedly pulled his balaclava down, knowing they’d just lost their best chance at capturing Locsin. He looked at Eddie, Linc, and MacD, in turn, and saw the frustration on their faces.

Raven stood on the brake and faced Juan, irate that their quarry had escaped.

“Can’t you shoot it down?” she demanded. “I saw launch controls for surface-to-air missiles in your op center.”

Juan was impressed. Not many people would have been that observant.

“We can,” he said, “but we won’t. Not in broad daylight, at the entrance to one of the busiest harbors in the world. The area around Manila Bay is home to eighteen million people. Thousands of witnesses would see the Oregon fire a missile.”

“Then what can we do?”

“We can try to track the plane,” Eddie said, “although I doubt it has a transponder. And the Filipino radar isn’t sophisticated enough to follow it if they fly low, which that plane can do.”

Raven beat on the steering wheel but said nothing.

“Come on,” Juan said. “Let’s get back to the Gator before the real police show up, wanting to find out why we just shot up a national monument.”

They left the tranvía where it was on the runway and started marching back to the point where the Gator had dropped them off not far from there.

“Hey, guys,” Max said over the radio. By the way he was huffing, Juan could tell he was retracing their hike through the trees on his way back. “I’ve been listening in on your conversation. I might have an idea where they’re going.”

“From the papers you found?” Juan asked. “I didn’t know you read Japanese.”

“They weren’t in Japanese. They were in English. One of the pages says that the last known shipment of Typhoon developed during the war left on a destroyer called the USS Pearsall.”

“An American destroyer? How is that possible?”

“Because we’ve had the wrong assumption all along,” Max said. “The Typhoon drug wasn’t created by some top secret Japanese research group. It was invented by the United States Army.”