Deep Fire Rising

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

Paul “Tiny” Gordon backed out of the ladies’ room brandishing a plunger and cursing the antique plumbing. He flipped the sign on the door so it read OUT OF ORDER. Not that it mattered. Sundays were notoriously slow and even on a busy night his bar catered to an almost exclusively male clientele. The few women who did venture in weren’t the type to be deterred by using the men’s lavatory.

Nursing a vodka gimlet at the bar, Mercer smiled good-naturedly. “The laundry joint again?”

Tiny’s was part of a run-down strip mall anchored by an industrial laundry facility. On a regular basis, the toilets belched thick curds of detergent foam.

Tiny tossed the plunger into the back room and stepped onto the platform behind the bar that allowed him to look his seated customers in the eye. “Damn landlord won’t do anything about it and the last time I talked to the owner of the laundry he told me that the detergent’s keeping the lines clear and I shouldn’t complain.”

“The joys of running a business.” Mercer checked his watch. It was past four in the afternoon. Lasko was running late.

The front door opened. In the reflection of the mirror behind the bar, Mercer saw Harry unclip Drag’s leash. The pooch and his master ambled into the bar, the basset making for a pile of blankets Tiny kept for him in a corner and Harry for the bar stool Tiny kept for him to Mercer’s right. Tiny had mixed a Jack Daniel’s and ginger ale by the time Harry eased into his seat.

“Where were you last night?” For the first time in a week, Harry hadn’t slept at Mercer’s. “You didn’t come by.”

Harry shot him a lecherous smirk. “I came someplace else.”

Mercer and Tiny groaned.

“What brings you here so early?” Harry asked.

“Ira wanted to meet and I needed to get out.”

“Think they found Tisa?”

“That’s my hope.”

“And you’re going to go get her.”

Mercer sipped at his drink. “That’s my plan.”

Harry looked to Tiny. “The charming prince storming the castle to rescue the fair damsel? Is his life a cliché or what?”

“You gotta wonder what that makes us.”

Mercer indicated his glass. “Obviously you’re the alchemist who concocts the healing potions that keep me going.”

“And Harry?”

Harry straightened. “I see myself as the sage providing insightful advice.”

“Sorry, Harry. Drag’s the insightful one. You’re more like the court jester.”

The door opened again. Ira paused to let his eyes adjust to the bar’s gloom and his nose adjust to the smell of old beer and stale cigarettes. He wore khakis and a golf shirt with boat shoes on his feet. The clothes appeared fresh. Mercer suspected he’d been in his office all weekend and had changed for the meeting, which coincided with his commute home.

“Whatchya drinking, Admiral?” Tiny asked.

“Dewar’s rocks.” Ira slapped Harry on the back. “How you doing, Harry?”

“Fair to partly cloudy. How about you?”

“About the same, maybe a chance of precipitation.”

The admiral turned to Mercer. “Let’s grab a table.”

They collected their drinks and moved to a booth. Ira set a briefcase on the floor after withdrawing a file folder.

“Is that what I think it is?” Mercer asked.

Ira opened the folder and slid it across. “The valley of Rinpoche-La.”

The folder contained dozens of satellite photographs. The top picture was a wide-angle shot encompassing hundreds of square miles of rugged snowcapped mountains. Smears of clouds obscured many of the peaks.

“You’re looking at the Himalayas from one of our polar orbiting birds,” Lasko explained, his voice raspy with exhaustion. “This is the satellite’s minimum resolution but about the same as you got from that commercial platform.”

“Looks about right,” Mercer admitted.

“Using the report you prepared about geothermal activity in the valley, the photo interpreters tasked an infrared bird to shoot the region.”

Mercer turned to the next picture in the stack. The photograph was of a black field shot through with white specks.

“Each white dot represents an appreciable heat source. Everything from factory smokestacks to cooking fires. They filtered out known sites, like towns and villages, and anything along established roads.” The next picture was the same image but more than three-quarters of the white flecks were gone. “These are the spots we focused on. To be on the safe side, we did this across the entire Himalayan range. In total there were eight hundred seventy-seven targeted sites.”

“And they checked them all?”

Ira simply nodded. “If something looked promising, they cranked the resolution and fed the image to the computers for further enhancement. We found a lot of military camps that the Pentagon hadn’t known about and” — he flipped to the second-to-last picture — “one lost valley.”

Mercer studied the image. The satellite camera was looking straight down at two barren mountain ridges. They were so close together, the valley between them was little more than a jagged line. To the north, where the mountains ended in a high plateau, a dense layer of clouds obscured what little of the valley could be discerned. A river cut across the mouth of the valley as it wended around the twin mountain ranges.

“Are you sure?” Mercer did little to hide his disappointment. He’d expected to see the monastery Tisa had described and the village where she’d grown up.

With a dramatic flourish Ira flipped the picture over to reveal the last in the series. “This what you’re looking for?”

Mercer couldn’t believe the clarity. It was as though the picture had been taken from a couple hundred feet, not hundreds of miles in space. He could see individual tiles in the monastery’s multitiered roof and make out sheep being herded along a nearby path. He could even see there was a rip on the left sleeve of the shepherd’s cloak. The compound was enormous, a square parcel fenced by a stone wall with the lamasery at its center. The building itself was easily the size of four city blocks.

Ira retrieved another stack of pictures from his case. “These are everything we got. I guarantee these are the only shots ever taken of that place.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because we didn’t have them in our archive and no one else in the world has the technology to produce them. Besides, if the Chinese knew the valley existed, don’t you think they would have razed it by now?”

“How far into China is it?” Mercer was too rapt to look up from the photos as he asked. It was almost as if he was searching for Tisa’s upturned face, knowing that at that precise moment her picture was being taken, one that Mercer would shortly see.

“A hundred sixteen miles as the crow flies,” Ira answered. “But we’re talking about an area where you can’t get a crow to fly. The average elevation between there and Nepal is over ten thousand feet and the mountains themselves are impassable. A team sent in on foot would take weeks to reach Rinpoche-La.”

That got Mercer’s attention. “We don’t have weeks, Ira.”

“I know. I saw the latest from La Palma. The team there reports that the tremors are increasing in severity and duration. They also tell me that the westward side of the volcano is beginning to show displacement. I think that means the mountain’s starting to bulge.”

“That’s what it means, all right. The pressure in the magma chamber has reached a point where it can distort the outside of the volcano. If it keeps up, La Palma could explode like Mount St. Helens.”

“Those are the same words they used. What they won’t do is make predictions about when it’ll blow.”

“Like I explained to the president, they can’t do that. In a normal circumstance, they couldn’t even say that it will erupt. When most volcanoes rumble to life they stay active for a few months or even years and go dormant again without any kind of eruption. We’re only certain about La Palma because of Tisa and only she knows exactly when. Have you thought about how to get her out?”

“We can’t get her out, at least not in time.”

“What do you mean can’t?” Mercer stabbed a finger at one of the pictures. “She’s right here.”

The admiral held up a hand. “I said we can’t get her out. I didn’t say we can’t get you in.”

Mercer stared blankly. Ira climbed from his seat and peered out the bar’s plate-glass window. He gave it a rap with his knuckle and returned to the booth. A moment later a black man with a shaved head and massive shoulders pushed through the door. He was dressed all in black and sported dark glasses. One cheek bulged with a wad of tobacco.

He scanned the room from behind his shades, projecting menace that would have withered a normal bar crowd. Harry and Tiny merely gave him a passing glance and returned to their conversation. His gaze settled on Mercer.

“I hear you want to join the Monkey Bombers,” he said in a rich baritone.

Mercer blanched. He’d recognized Captain Booker Sykes the moment he made his entrance but hadn’t put the Delta Force commando together with Ira’s boast about getting him to Rinpoche-La. Once Mercer understood the nature of the weapons Sykes worked with, he’d agreed that the nickname, monkey bombs, was much more apt than the military designation, MMU-22. Manned Munition Utility 22.

Sykes grinned at Mercer’s pallor and slid into the booth next to Ira.

“I’ve had the best minds in the Pentagon on this operation and there’s no other way,” Lasko explained. “Obviously just asking the Chinese for permission is out. We can’t slip a team over the border because of the timing involved and the probability of them being picked up. We can forget an insertion via a regular parachute jump. The Chinese have unbroken radar coverage throughout the region. Even flying nap of the earth, a transport plane wouldn’t make it twenty miles into China before they scramble MiGs for an intercept. It’s the MMUs or nothing.”

Mercer kept his eyes on Sykes. “Do they really work?”

“For the past twenty drops the sensors in the pods indicate the passenger would have survived.”

“Sensors? You mean you haven’t made a manned jump yet?”

Sykes looked hesitant. “Well, the first forty or so drops weren’t survivable. Hell, the first couple were so bad we had to dig what was left of the pods out of the desert floor. The techs needed some time to work out the kinks. They think they have it now.”

“Jesus.” Mercer shook his head. “Well, I was the damned fool to insist on coming along. What about extraction after we reach Rinpoche-La?”

“That’s the other wrinkle,” Ira informed him. “As soon as you establish contact with Miss Nguyen you’ll have a secure satellite phone to relay any information she has about La Palma. Once we have that, the urgency is gone and you can take all the time you need to hike out to the Nepalese border.”

“A hundred sixteen miles?”

“More like two fifty,” Sykes corrected. “There’s a whole lot of mountains we have to walk around.”

“Better and better.” The thought of being reunited with Tisa kept the misery from Mercer’s voice, but not the sarcasm. “How does it play now?”

“Tomorrow morning an air force transport will take you to Area 51 for two days of orientation with Sykes and his team. From there you’ll be flown to a staging point on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. That’s where you load up the MMUs for the flight into Tibet.”

“How long’s the flight?”

“We’re estimating six hours but it could be longer,” Sykes replied. “It all depends on how far we have to detour around the heaviest of the Chinese radar coverage.”

“And no in-flight movie, I suppose.”

The commando laughed. “At least the MMUs have been modified to include a relief tube.”

There wasn’t any need for Mercer to think about the dangers. He would go no matter what scheme the Pentagon savants had concocted to get him to Tisa. “Hey, Harry,” he called across the quiet bar. “You have to modify your rescue story. I’m not charging the damsel’s castle on a horse. I’m dropping on it from out of a dragon’s stomach.”

Harry didn’t miss a beat. “Just as long as you make the moat of the situation.”