River of Ruin

Panama City, Panama

Mercer had always carried a clichéd mental picture of the French Foreign Legion. In his mind, they were still lonely guardsmen in isolated sandstone forts blistered by the Saharan sun and doomed by overwhelming odds. Gary Cooper in a kepi and Berbers on camels wielding Saracen swords. What he’d seen the night before, his and Lauren’s rescue from Hatcherly, had helped dispel the image. He now realized he was in the company of an elite fighting force as well trained as the SEALs or Green Berets.

The two soldiers accompanying them to the lake were in the safe house living room when he and Lauren arrived, their FAMAS assault rifles disassembled and blindfolds over their eyes. With a sharp command from Lieutenant Foch, the men fitted the weapons back together, their hands a blur of rote action. Foch clicked off his stopwatch when the last man cocked his gun and held it out for inspection.

“Two seconds quicker than last. Do it again.”

While the men pulled the rifles apart again, Lauren Vanik frowned at Foch. “Do you think it’s a good idea running disassembly drills with weapons we may use in combat later on?”

Foch gave her a patronizing smile. “Of course not. Those rifles are with the men’s kit. These are just trainers. Don’t worry, Captain, we know what we’re doing.”

Rene Bruneseau came into the living room from the back of the house. Like his men, he wore civilian clothes. “Good morning, Captain Vanik, Mercer. May I offer you coffee.”

Because he and Lauren hadn’t gotten to sleep until three in the morning, Mercer quickly agreed to the offer. The coffee Lauren had made for him was watery instant and had done nothing to jump-start his body.

Over cups of rich French roast, Bruneseau laid out their plan. The Legionnaires had a helicopter stashed at a deserted plantation beyond the ruins of Veija Panama, the old city that the pirate Henry Morgan had sacked in 1671. They would carry an inflatable boat to a point above El Real. There they would transfer to the boat for the remainder of the trip up the Rio Tuira. Before reaching the River of Ruin, they would stash the Zodiac and flank around the volcanic mountain, climbing it from the opposite side from where its waters disgorged down the falls that Mercer and Lauren had climbed earlier with Miguel.

As Rene explained his strategy, Mercer loaded film into the camera he’d bought on the way to the safe house. He’d also purchased a four-hundred-millimeter telephoto lens, the largest the camera shop stocked. He hoped to get shots of Hatcherly’s plundering of an important archeological site. At Lauren’s suggestion, they would take that evidence to the curator of the Reina Torres de Aruez Anthropology Museum, where she felt they’d get a better response than from Omar Quintero’s shaky government. Quintero had only been in the Heron Palace, the presidential residence, for six months following his corruption-tainted election and had yet to solidify the congress or the bureaucracy.

Mercer doubted Liu Yousheng would show himself at the lake, but if he could photograph some other key Hatcherly people, he could put an end to the plunder as well as give Bruneseau his first break in peeling away the other levels protecting the shadowy company. The plan was simple, and relatively safe—a lot smarter than sneaking into a high-security container port. The power of the telephoto lens meant they could stay well back from any excavation Hatcherly had at the lake and still shoot rolls of damaging film.

The only danger came from the trek through the jungle. The driver who’d picked them up at Lauren’s apartment had told Mercer that the Legionnaires were members of the Third Regiment based in Kourou, Guyana, the Legion’s jungle warfare specialists. The fact that they were tasked with protecting the Ariane spaceport lent credence to what Bruneseau had told him last night, but Mercer couldn’t shake a suspicion. Something was said last night, a slip of some sort that had pushed his doubts into overdrive.

He’d hoped the answer would come in his sleep, as was often the case for him, but he’d been dead to the world from the moment Lauren went into the shower until she’d tapped his shoulder and admonished him about the volume of his snoring two hours ago. Talking with Bruneseau hadn’t jogged anything loose. Frustration at not naming what bothered him caused his shoulders to tense.

Lauren noticed him wince as he rolled his neck. “Are you okay?” she asked, wrongly assuming it was the first tinges of fear affecting him.

He returned his attention to her and Rene. “Yeah, sorry. My mind was somewhere else. When are we leaving?”

“Sundown is around seven tonight,” Bruneseau explained. “We’ll time it so we drop the Zodiac at dusk and run up the river under the cover of darkness. We have night-vision goggles to avoid any boat traffic, though I don’t expect any. We’ll spend the night with the craft then march to the caldera before first light.”

“Where’s the chopper going to be when we’re at the lake?” Lauren asked.

“At the airport at El Real with ‘engine trouble.’ It’s painted like a sightseeing helo so it won’t attract much attention.”

“That’s a twenty-minute flight if we need an emergency evac.”

“I know.” The Frenchman didn’t look any happier about this than Lauren. “There’s no other place to hide it up there.”

“All right. What kind of chopper?”

“JetRanger 222.”

Lauren nodded. Before she’d taken up intelligence work, she’d flown the Bell 205, known in the army as the UH-1 Huey. Although she hadn’t been behind the stick in four years, she felt confident that if anything happened to the pilot, she could handle the helicopter.

“Extended tanks?”

“Non. We will top off the fuel in La Palma, which gives us more than enough range to get back to Panama City. Once Mercer has his evidence we will backtrack to the inflatable and motor back to El Real where the chopper waits.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lauren opined.

Mercer considered the hundreds of things that could go wrong, saw no way around them, and agreed with Lauren. “Let’s do it.”

They spent the next two hours with Lieutenant Foch, since he would lead the raid, poring over maps and briefing the Frenchmen on the terrain around the lake. Like many in the Legion, Foch had claimed to be from Quebec to get around the rule that only foreigners could serve within the elite corps. Keeping with another Legion tradition, Mercer knew not to ask Foch’s Christian name. He found he liked the soldier, who was unpretentious and more than willing to listen to a civilian, probably because Mercer had already proven himself by breaking into Hatcherly.

The team rested in the safe house until the afternoon, when they loaded up one of Bruneseau’s vans for the drive to the helicopter. The forty-minute ride took them through Panama City and along the coast past the old city along the Pan-American highway toward the isolated town of Chepo. The village used to be the terminus of the highway, the last stop before the impenetrable jungles of the Darien Gap. Many Panamanians still considered anything beyond the dingy town as terra incognita.

Before reaching Chepo, the van swung off the road and traveled for another thirty minutes along a dirt track that was increasingly hemmed in by jungle. Rounding a last corner, they broke into a partial clearing where waist-high grass had been beaten flat under where a Bell helo sat on its struts. At the edge of the jungle lay the crumbled walls of a plantation house. Creeping vines seemed to be tugging the ruined structure back into the earth.

They had to strip out the chopper’s rear seats to manhandle in the deflated Zodiac. Bruneseau would fly up front with the pilot, leaving Mercer, Lauren, Foch, and two other Legionnaires to shoehorn themselves into the cargo area. The van’s driver would wait at the plantation for their return the following day and coordinate communications with the rest of the detachment in Panama City. They took off a half hour after their arrival. An hour later they refueled the JetRanger at the small airport in La Palma. Because no one had changed into fatigues yet, they maintained their cover as sightseers headed back into the Darien Gap. Only when they were airborne again did they change clothes. Though she didn’t seem fazed by the close proximity to the men, Lauren maintained her modesty by buttoning her camouflage shirt over the black T-shirt she’d been wearing. Waterproof bags containing weapons, combat harnesses, and other gear were secured to the Zodiac and would be retrieved once they were on the river.

Using a map clipped to his kneeboard, the Australian-born pilot cut across a number of the Rio Tuira’s twists, keeping the nimble chopper so close to the jungle canopy that Mercer could see monkeys howling at them from the tops of trees. Once, they startled a clutch of parrots that took off like a fleeing rainbow.

The constant whine of the helo’s turbine and the resonant thrum of the rotor blades made it impossible for Mercer to think beyond what his senses took in—the smell of sweat from so many people piled together, the feel of a metal bracket pressed against his spine, the aftertaste of a spicy lunch served at the safe house, the centrifugal sloshing of his body as the JetRanger swayed through the humid air.

He closed his eyes for what felt like a few seconds, and when he opened them again he could see that the day had gotten noticeably darker. It was always like this in the tropics, he knew. The sun did more than set; it raced for the horizon as if pursued by an eager night. He glanced at his TAG Heuer. 7:20. Bruneseau had timed their flight perfectly.

The forces on his body changed as the jet-powered helicopter began to slow. The river was off to their right about a quarter mile away, a darker wound in the dark jungle. Rene Bruneseau swept the stretch of water with an infrared monocular, looking for the telltale glow from a boat’s motor or a human body. Mercer could see him mouth something to the pilot over the helo’s comm system and the JetRanger crabbed sideways toward the Rio Tuira.

This was it. They were going in and suddenly Mercer’s mind filled again with all kinds of thoughts. His hands turned slick and his heart raged like a trapped animal. In a startling moment he realized it wasn’t fear infecting him. It was the anticipation he usually felt at the verge of answering some disturbing question. The reason Gary Barber’s corpse was mutilated and why he’d been attacked in Paris was waiting down in that jungle and he was eager to get it.

As soon as the helicopter scuttled out over the river and its blades whipped concentric circles into the calm black waters, the side door was thrown open and a Legionnaire yanked the lanyard that inflated the heavy raft at the same time it was shoved out the opening. The Zodiac expanded as it pinwheeled to the water, weighted so it landed bottom-side down with a wet smack. In the glow of a diffused landing light, the first trooper leaped the fifteen feet into the river next to the now fully inflated raft.

Bruneseau opened the copilot door and jumped, followed by a spill of the others, Lieutenant Foch taking the last slot in the deployment. As soon as Foch cleared the helicopter, the pilot doused his light, increased power, and banked the chopper back into the night. The entire maneuver had taken twenty seconds.

The fall from the JetRanger drove Mercer deep underwater. His boots sank into the silt bottom for a frantic moment until he kicked himself free. He broke the surface and cleared lukewarm water from his eyes. Two of the Legionnaires had already rolled themselves into the rubber boat and the others were clinging to its bulbous freeboard. He swam to them and was helped in by a powerful grip on his arm. Bruneseau grinned. “Piece of cake.”

Mercer guessed the French operative was relieved to be finally doing something after so many weeks of simply watching the Hatcherly container port. His plan to flush out Liu Yousheng by involving Mercer hadn’t worked the way he’d wanted, but at least this new avenue of investigation had been salvaged from that debacle. He seemed grateful.

“Piece of cake,” Mercer agreed. The jungle sang with insects, birds, and dozens of unnamed night creatures. The moon was a pale sliver glimpsed only at the right angle through the thick canopy.

The waterproof bags were hauled aboard and equipment was distributed. The combat harnesses the Legionnaires used incorporated rappelling rigs as well as a rescue harness in case they needed to be pulled out by fast-ropes from the helo. Mercer didn’t recall if the JetRanger was equipped with them or not.

Lauren noticed his interest in the rigs and answered his unspoken question. “I saw them when we loaded. If the pilot leaves off the cargo doors, two ropes can be dropped from a push button in the cockpit.”

“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” Mercer said as he made sure his borrowed Beretta was snug against his hip. The camera with its long lens went into a padded pack he swung onto his back.

Foch took up a position in the bow with night-vision goggles clamped over his eyes and the two enlisted soldiers began to paddle the Zodiac against the sluggish current. They couldn’t risk using an outboard motor because the sound would carry far beyond Foch’s vision. Bruneseau was at the transom, watching their wake for any craft that might overtake them. The last of the daylight had long since faded, leaving only a strip of stars above them in the otherwise infinite darkness. If not for the screech of animals and the chirps of insects, it was easy to imagine they were paddling through outer space.

Five miles into their trek, Lieutenant Foch made a quick hand gesture and the paddlers reacted instantly. He’d seen something through his goggles. They’d been traveling close to the right bank and at Foch’s signal they angled the raft closer to shore, holding their paddles inches from the river so that any water dripping from the blades wouldn’t make a sound. A ripple of tension washed through the team.

A minute later, a piragua, a native dugout canoe, glided out of the gloom upstream with two natives working the paddles as silently as ghosts. The Indians never paused from their steady rhythm and never saw the six armed people less than twenty feet from them. As quickly as they appeared, the natives vanished downstream again and the raiders let out their breaths. They waited several minutes before starting out again, just to make sure the canoe didn’t double back.

For four hours they moved against the current, each team member taking turns at the paddles. As a point of pride when their turn came up, Mercer and Lauren managed to eke out a faster pace than any of the others without compromising their stealth. An hour after taking the paddles, Foch placed a hand on Mercer’s arm to stop him from going on. Lauren paused as well. The lieutenant silently pointed to their right, where a tiny stream fed into the river. Mercer and Lauren obediently rowed them to the brook. Like Venetian gondoliers they used their paddles to pole them up the shallow stream. Five hundred yards into the jungle, a three-foot waterfall blocked any further progress.

“Good enough.” Foch spoke so quietly that even just a few feet away his words were more of an impression than a noise. “We’ll stash the boat here and head out on foot at dawn.”

“Where are we?” Lauren asked.

“According to my map and this”—he held up a GPS receiver—“we’re five miles below where the River of Ruin joins the Rio Tuira. I believe this stream is fed from water coming off the back side of the volcano.” He and Mercer had fixed the route during their earlier conversation.

In the few minutes it took to rig a mosquito netting all six people had become smorgasbords to countless stinging insects. Only the one soldier ordered to remain awake on guard duty seemed to care. The others were asleep in seconds.

Dawn was a half hour away when they were woken by their picket. They took ten minutes to take care of their bodies’ needs, refill their canteens with purified water, and give their weapons a final check before their march up the stream. The soldier who’d stayed awake all night would remain hidden with the Zodiac, his stomach filled with caffeine pills. Foch took point and the other soldier, a German named Hauer, had the drag slot. Keeping to the stream bank allowed them to move easier through the jungle and maintain a constant fifteen-yard separation without getting lost in the dense undergrowth.

They hoped to be back at the boat in four or five hours, yet everyone carried enough equipment and food to sustain them for a few days. Neither Mercer nor Lauren was armed with anything heavier than their pistols.

Humidity rose with the sun. The air became so thick Mercer felt like he could drink it. Rather than refreshing his system, each breath seemed to suck away his strength. The stink of rotting vegetation clung to the back of his throat. And he had to discipline himself not to slap at the bugs that bit into his exposed hands and neck. The Legionnaires appeared immune to the discomfort, as did Lauren Vanik. Mercer suffered in silence.

Bruneseau was the oldest person on the patrol, carried twenty extra pounds in his gut and had a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, yet when Mercer looked behind to check on the spy, he was moving with the suppleness of a jungle cat. He wasn’t even sweating that hard. In contrast, Mercer’s skin felt slick with perspiration and he had to wipe a continuous stream of salt water from his eyes.

The rain forest was too tangled for them to see more than fifty paces in any direction and dripping leaves hovered just feet over their heads. Sunlight was filtered by the greenery, making shadows more murky and ominous. Everything had an indistinct quality, as if viewed from underwater, like they were swimming through a tidal pool rather than walking through a jungle. Only occasionally would a shaft of light penetrate the canopy and beam against the forest floor.

For an hour they hiked along the stream, contorting their bodies around obstacle courses of fallen trees and bushes to avoid making the tiniest sound. Foch finally came to a halt, hunkering down to await the others. He pointed up the hill that had slowly emerged from the jungle. It was the lower flank of the volcano. Above them was the lake. He allowed the team twenty minutes to rest, moving to each person to pantomime questions about their physical condition. No one spoke. Liu Yousheng could very well have guards stationed on the mountain’s rim looming hundreds of feet above them.

Foch went out first, slithering through the jungle on his stomach, his FAMAS assault rifle clamped in his hands. After moving only five feet away, it was as if he’d been swallowed. Ten minutes later he returned, sliding backward with exaggerated slowness. He didn’t rustle a single branch and barely moved the grasses growing along the slope of the mountain.

He pressed his mouth to Mercer’s ear. “There’s no one on top of the hill, but I could hear machinery from inside the caldera. I assume something’s happening on the shores of the lake.”

“Liu’s excavating equipment,” Mercer whispered back. Foch nodded.

“They sound like they are on the far side. I think it’s safe for all of us to go up.” Foch gave a thumbs-up to Bruneseau, Lauren, and Hauer.

Following in the path he’d blazed, the team crawled up the hill, moving out from the jungle cover for the last hundred feet below the summit. The grass growing along the slope was at least a meter tall, dense, and as stiff as aluminum. It sliced into skin like knife blades. More insects feasted on the shallow wounds. Once in the open, the sun beat down like a hammer, but when Mercer looked up he could see a wall of black clouds moving across the sky. Rain wouldn’t be far behind.

The storm would provide excellent cover, but would make the hike back to the Zodiac a miserable slog.

Elbows and knees aching from the crawling climb, Mercer reached the crest of the hill. Before he could take even a second to gather his bearings, Foch dragged him into the protection of a small fold in the earth and waited to haul the others behind cover when they reached the top. Only when he knew he couldn’t be observed from below did Mercer concentrate on the vista spread out below him.

The broad lake was fifty feet beneath their natural redoubt. He could clearly see the small island at its center. It looked undisturbed. Lauren moved next to him and they exchanged proud smirks, both thinking of how they’d cheated death that night. Only when he scanned along the shore could he see anything different about the isolated body of water.

From this distance, it looked like an entire army of laborers was tearing into the walls of dirt surrounding the lake. The shafts that Gary had dug over the past months were puny in comparison to these vast excavations. Hatcherly—and he assumed it was Hatcherly—had airlifted excavating machines to the lake, where they ripped huge furrows out of the mountain with their hydraulic arms. Waste dirt was bulldozed into the lake and brown stains of mud bloomed from the shore. Workers in hard hats helped guide the vehicles while others, natives it looked like at this extreme range, sifted through mounds of spoil with hand-held screens. Men with automatic weapons watched over their labors, vigilant for the gleam of gold in the overburden.

Long canvas tents had been erected for the workers, along with a field kitchen, and latrine pits and a garbage dump for the refuse generated by at least a hundred humans. There was a sleek helicopter resting on the beach, its rotor blades as limp as palm fronds, and several aluminum boats with outboard engines tied to a dock made of empty fuel barrels and sheets of plywood.

Mercer’s fears that the looting of archeological sites had turned high tech were dead-on. Hatcherly had erected a town for their robbers, brought in supplies from Panama City in the chopper, and, because of the remoteness, could operate with virtual impunity.

All the discomfort he’d endured getting to this point fell away as his anger grew. He wasn’t aware of the cuts on his hands or the raw insect bites on his neck. He felt nothing but horror at what was happening below him. His lips curled into a cruel smile. Once he had his evidence, at least this part of Hatcherly’s activities on the isthmus would be over. He pulled the pack from his shoulders and withdrew the camera. He snapped off half a role of film before turning to Bruneseau.

“I can’t see faces from this range,” he whispered. “We need to get closer.”

Foch had heard the request. “We can crawl back over the peak of the hill, circle around to just above the main part of the camp and take your shots from there.”

“Let’s go.”

They backtracked to the jungle edge and used its cover to flank the mountain, climbing back up only when they were exactly opposite the camp area. This time Mercer led them up the hill, making sure each movement was thought out before it was executed so that he made no noise, not that anyone inside the volcano could hear them over the diesel growl of the excavators. From the uneven crest of the mountain, he could distinguish faces. The guards and the men working the machinery were all Chinese. Only the lowliest laborers were dark-skinned Panamanians.

As he watched the work, he hoped to see at least one person who seemed to be in charge, but none of the men below distinguished themselves. They worked like drones, having direction, but no control. He had the camera focused on one promising man, a bit older than some of the others, who was talking with a bulldozer driver when Lauren tapped him on his shoulder. She was pointing toward one of the tents.

He saw who she was pointing out immediately. I know you, Mercer thought as he zeroed in on the figure in the lens. He wore khaki pants and a bush jacket here, but a few nights ago he’d been in the warehouse in a suit. He’d been with the other executive who’d peered at the gold. Mercer took ten pictures, the camera cycling film as if it had a motor drive. The Chinese executive appeared to be in walkie-talkie communications with a pair of surveyors working with a laser transit a quarter of the way around the lake.

That’s when Mercer realized the problem with what he was seeing below him. Hatcherly was still digging holes all over the place, working in a systematic approach that would eventually encompass the entire area. There wasn’t one spot where they were focusing all their attention, not one site that had proved to be the mother lode of the Twice-Stolen Treasure. Liu hadn’t found the gold yet. He was still searching.

Meaning the ingots Mercer had seen in the warehouse came from—where?

Rather than answering questions about Hatcherly, this trip was creating even more.

He felt a tug on his pant leg from Foch who lay a little farther down the mountain’s flank. The Legionnaire had been speaking to Bruneseau and had just slipped a piece of unidentified equipment into a large cargo pouch secured to his harness. He moved closer so he could whisper to Mercer.

“Monsieur Bruneseau and I have to get into the camp,” Foch breathed. “There is one tent they are using for administration. Bruneseau needs to get inside.”

This change in plans was a complete surprise, but Mercer’s initial shock gave way to anger and his jaw tightened. When laying out their strategy, they hadn’t talked about actually going into the camp, but now he saw it had been the Frenchman’s intention all along. “Are you out of your mind?”

Foch didn’t seem to care about Mercer’s reaction. “You will wait here with Hauer until we get back.”

“We have what we need,” Lauren protested. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

“I’m sorry, Captain.” Bruneseau was unapologetic. “I have to get down there.”

“You’re jeopardizing our entire mission!”

“Getting in there is our mission,” the agent replied sharply.

Without another word, the two men crawled into a gully scored on the inside of the caldera and began moving down toward the back of the camp. Once they reached the broad beach, they paused behind a collection of fuel drums until they could cover the open ground to the closest tent. Reaching it, they both vanished under its loose side. A minute later, they ran out the front of the dormitory tent and found more shelter near a pile of dirt twenty yards closer to the square administration tent. From there, they would need to cross another thirty yards of open ground to get to their target.

Mercer cursed. They’d never make it. He had no idea why they were taking this risk but knew it was a mistake. Feeling a strong premonition, he knew he had to act. Never having control over this sortie, he took it now.

“Corporal Hauer,” he said to the young Legionnaire. “Call the chopper and get it in here.”

“Why? What for? Foch will be back in a few minutes.”

“He’s going to be caught in a few minutes. Call the damned chopper.”

The soldier was about to protest again when his radio came to life. The volume was just high enough for Mercer to hear the whispered French.

“Foch, this is Levesque.” Levesque was the Legionnaire who had remained with the Zodiac. “I’m two hundred meters downstream from the boat. There’s an armed patrol approaching. I’m backtracking now, but if they stay along the stream bank they’re going to find the Zodiac. What do you want me to do?”

“Levesque. Hauer. Foch’s in the camp. He can’t respond.” The young Legionnaire hesitated, unsure what to do. He was a soldier, not an officer, trained to follow orders, not issue them. He was completely out of his element. “Um, ah, can you take them out?”

“Negative. There appear to be four of them maintaining good separation.”

“This is turning to shit,” Mercer said with suppressed fury. “Call in the damned chopper before it’s too late.”

“Don’t argue,” Lauren hissed when Hauer wavered. “Just do it.”

“Wait one, Levesque.” Corporal Hauer changed radio frequencies and used the helicopter’s code name. “Shepherd, Shepherd. This is Hauer. Come in. We need you. Over.”

The pilot responded instantly. “Roger, Hauer, this is Shepherd. I heard Levesque’s call and have already started engines. ETA is twenty minutes. Where’s the rest of the flock?”

“Um, all over the place. Just get airborne, we’ll figure an evac point in a minute.” He switched back to Levesque. “Helo’s inbound. Give me a sit rep.”

“They’re on me in about four minutes. I can get away but they’ll find the boat.”

Mercer grabbed the radio from the soldier. “Levesque, no matter what happens you can’t let them alert their base. If you do we’re all dead. Take out the radioman, keep them pinned for ten minutes then get the hell out of there. Head toward El Real and we’ll pick you up from the river.”

The radio clicked once in acknowledgment. The patrol must have been too close to risk his voice giving him away.

Even at a distance of a mile or more the crack of a single pistol shot was distinctive. It was answered by a rip of gunfire from an automatic weapon, and then came the smoother buzzsaw sound of a FAMAS. Levesque had engaged.

Down at the lakeshore the sound of the firefight was muffled by the trucks, but it would be only minutes before Levesque disengaged and the patrol recovered their radio and contacted the base. Foch and Bruneseau were trapped but didn’t know it yet.

Hauer began to tremble, overwhelmed with a fear that all the training he’d endured couldn’t prepare him. The others in his detachment had faced combat before. He alone was the novice and cursed that he’d volunteered to follow Foch to the lake. He noted how Lauren listened to the sounds of the battle far away and maintained her surveillance of the camp, watching to see the moment the guards were alerted.

Her presence stabilized him. He remembered the incoming helicopter.

The only place the JetRanger could get close enough to pick them up was along the rim of the mountain, an exposed area that would draw a tremendous amount of fire as soon as the aircraft appeared. And then there was his lieutenant and the spy down below. They’d never make it out. Hauer hesitated, thinking, but not finding a solution. “Ah, where do we bring in the chopper?” he asked finally.

Mercer had been considering that question since Foch and Bruneseau had slipped into the camp. “Tell him we’ll be on the lake.”

It was a calculated gamble. Once the patrol reported their contact, he hoped the last place Hatcherly’s guards would search for other soldiers was within their own perimeter. It would have been smarter just to fade into the jungle and link up with the helo later, but Mercer couldn’t abandon Foch and Bruneseau. It was clear they’d held back a critical piece to this puzzle and he was determined to find out what it was.

With no plan of his own, and seeing the conviction in Mercer’s direct gaze, the trooper relayed their intentions to the pilot, praying that the American knew how to keep them alive until the chopper could reach them.

There was a lull in the distant gun battle—an eerie moment of silence that ended with the crump of an explosion. Mercer winced, certain that Levesque had just been taken out by a grenade.

There was no going back.

Even as Lauren and Hauer watched the camp, he kept his eyes on the jungle behind them.

Movement at the edge of the underbrush caught his attention. Without waiting to see what it was, Mercer cleared his pistol and fired three quick shots. He shoved Lauren over the crest of the hill and pulled the trigger again, laying down suppression fire for Hauer to get clear. The movement had resolved itself into a three-man patrol. He pitched himself over the summit as return fire from the jungle shredded the spot where they had lain a moment ago, tongues of flame from Chinese weapons flickering in the dark forest.

Lauren fired back with her Beretta. They were trapped within the caldera and had just a few seconds before they were spotted by a keen-eyed guard watching the workers on the beach. Hauer looked to Mercer.

“Into the gully. Come on.”

At a trot, Mercer led them off the escarpment and into the ravine Foch had used earlier. So far no one had heard the gunfire, but the patrol they’d just engaged would be on the radio at any moment. In seconds, the base was going to be a hive of confusion. They ran for the dormitory tent and slid inside. It took several seconds for Mercer’s eyes to adapt to the murk and for him to realize the rows of bunks were empty. They hadn’t been detected.

He put the radio to his lips. “Foch, this is Mercer. Levesque was discovered by a patrol and the chopper’s inbound. Get back to the first tent you went through. We are leaving!”

When Foch replied, anger thickened his accent. “What are you doing?”

“We’re blown. We have to get out of here.”

Lauren moved to the front of the structure and watched the camp through a flap in the tent’s side. “Mercer, I think the call just came in from the patrol. I see the guy from the warehouse yelling orders to some of the guards. Wait. Now he’s dialing a satellite phone.”

“Calling Liu for instructions.”

“That’s my guess.”

“Do you see Foch or Rene?”

“Yeah. I think they realize the jig is up. They’re behind a pile of sand about sixty yards away waiting for the compound to clear out a little. Here comes Rene.” Lauren stepped aside and a few seconds later the spy exploded through the gap, his face red with exertion, his barrel chest pumping like a bellows.

“What ...” he wheezed at Mercer. “What have you ... done? What happened to ... Levesque and the raft?”

“We have to assume the Zodiac is so much rubber confetti by now,” Mercer answered grimly. “And I’m afraid so is your man.”

Foch raced into the tent, if anything even more angry than the spy. “I told you to wait up the hill.”

“We were just spotted by a patrol. We couldn’t wait and with Levesque dead we couldn’t go back.” Mercer wasn’t going to back down. “Chopper’s here in five minutes. I’ve ordered him to pick us up in the middle of the lake, the only clear area around us that’s out of range of the Chinese.”

Bruneseau sneered. “And the guards are going to let us swim out there?”

“The boats.” Mercer fought to keep his voice level. “There are two of them at the dock. We can grab one in the confusion and be out of range before they know we were even here.”

On the brink of losing control, the French spy took an aggressive step toward Mercer only to be stopped by Foch. “He’s right. We don’t have time for a different plan. The boats are the only way.”

The makeshift dock was a hundred yards from the dormitory tent and the Chinese guards appeared to be preparing for a frontal assault along the caldera’s rim. They were digging themselves in for an all-out battle against an army of commandos, never suspecting that their adversaries were already behind them. The few workers standing between the tent and the lake were a nonfactor.

Foch clicked on his radio. “Shepherd, this is Foch. What’s your ETA?”

“GPS says six minutes. Should be able to hear me in five.”

“Roger.” He was angry, frustrated, and feeling trapped by the Chinese and the circumstance.

No one saw the Chinese soldier slither under the back of the tent and didn’t know he was there until he opened fire. Corporal Hauer was the closest to him and he jerked under the hammer-blow onslaught of high-velocity rounds. Most were absorbed by his body armor but it took only one bullet to find its way through. He was dead when he hit the dusty ground. Lauren whirled at the sound and killed the prone guard with a double tap from her pistol.

“There’s going to be more,” Mercer shouted, hyped on adrenaline. He scooped up Hauer’s FAMAS. The barrel was cold, the clip full. The boy hadn’t fired a single shot in his one and only fight.

Unwilling to leave his dead comrade behind, but with no choice given the situation, Foch checked the compound. There was a cluster of guards far enough away that he thought they could make the dash for the dock. He motioned the others to the door. The four survivors met one another’s eyes with a fatalistic determination. Either they would make it or they wouldn’t.

Bursting into the sunlight, they ran for the lake in a tight group. A dark-skinned native worker gasped as they ran past but was too startled to raise any kind of alarm. The wall of bullets Mercer was sure they’d run into never came. The guards farther down the beach never turned and in fifteen seconds they reached the wooden jetty. Their weight made the structure bob on its barrel pontoons.

Lauren leapt straight into the largest aluminum skiff and began working on the engine while Foch knifed away the tie-down lines. Mercer and Bruneseau knelt near the skiff, eyeing the beach through the sights of the assault rifles. At the extreme edge of what he could see, Mercer detected a lot of movement around the Chinese helicopter. They were prepping it for flight, probably to support the patrol that had killed Levesque.

“I know. I know,” Rene said when Mercer pointed over with his chin. “If they get airborne while our chopper’s picking us up, we are finished.”

The twenty-horsepower outboard sputtered to life at the first pull on the cord. The three men jumped in just as a barrage of rounds pummeled the beach and the dock. The patrol that had first spied Mercer and Lauren had circled around the dormitory and targeted them at the boat. Mercer could see one of them screaming into a radio.

With its throttle twisted wide open, the flat-bottomed boat shot from the quay in a tight arc, Lauren guiding it out toward the middle of the lake. As their vantage shifted, Mercer could see that the Chinese helo’s blades were already turning. He could see five or six troopers in its cargo hold.

From around the island in the middle of the lake came an inflatable boat loaded with soldiers who must have been guarding a work party. Lauren saw them first and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”

The Chinese were well out of accurate range but fired anyway, hoping for a lucky hit. Tiny geysers erupted wherever a bullet struck the water. Because the Chinese controlled the middle of the lake, that one craft managed to box them in. Every passing second ate into Lauren’s maneuvering room. She turned away, steering the boat toward where the lake drained down the waterfall. The falls were a quarter mile away. Beyond was a yawning chasm backed by the tumult of the approaching storm.

The Legion pilot had kept his craft on the deck until reaching the caldera, so when he swooped over the lip of the mountain no one had heard his approach. He was just there, like an avenging angle. Without any offensive weapons, there was nothing he could do about the boat pursuing his team so he kept his concentration on his comrades. At an altitude of only fifty feet he could clearly see that if Lauren stopped to wait for extraction the Chinese in the Zodiac would overtake them. He would have to make the pick up on the fly.

He radioed Foch with instructions as he pressed the button that deployed the ropes from each side of the chopper.

“D’accord.” Foch nodded at the radio and addressed the others. “Prepare for a fast extraction.”

“Make it damn fast,” Mercer said. The falls were four hundred yards ahead. They’d be over them in thirty seconds. The storm continued to rush at them, a pulsing wall of black clouds discharging an unimaginable amount of rain.

The shrill whine of the outboard was drowned out by the deeper beat of the JetRanger as it thundered just above the hurtling boat, the pilot matching speed even as Lauren dared slow a bit. A pair of bullets plowed into the skiff’s engine. The two-cylinder faltered. The Chinese had halved the distance to their quarry.

The heavy nylon ropes dangled from the chopper like the tentacles of some enormous jellyfish, jerking and jumping in the rotor downblast. Foch managed to grab on to one, but the other swayed just out of reach. The pilot made a small adjustment and the line swept across the fleeing craft. A metal snaplink struck Mercer on the back of the head and would have pitched him overboard had Lauren not seen it happen. She flicked the motor over so the boat swayed sharply. He fell back in, a trickle of blood oozing from his torn scalp.

Foch snapped a hook from the rope onto Mercer’s combat harness and then snapped in Lauren. They were fifty yards from the falls. Bruneseau knelt at the stern, firing controlled three-round bursts that the Chinese all but ignored. They were coming on at full speed and pouring out a steady fusillade, mistakenly concentrating their fire on the boat.

The lake, smooth out in the open, became choppy as it was sucked through the cataract. A fine mist obscured the gap where the waters vanished down the side of the volcano. Mercer felt a few drops land on his skin.

Secured to the chopper, he stood again to add his FAMAS to Bruneseau’s weapon. He fired on full auto, brass and cordite smoke erupting from the gun like it was tearing itself apart. Foch finally got hold of the second line. With fifteen feet to go before the speeding boat launched itself off the mountain, he lunged over to lock Bruneseau to the line.

“Hold on!” Lauren screamed as the lake suddenly vanished below them.

They went airborne.

For the first fraction of a second, momentum kept the boat in a straight trajectory before gravity began to pull it out from under them. It started to fall away, tipping toward the bow like a diver off an Acapulco cliff. Because Lauren was secured to a hook higher up on the rappelling rope, she was the first to be plucked from the falling craft. One second she was riding in it with them and the next she was hovering in the sky as the men continued their descent.

Then Bruneseau’s harness came taut and he too was pulled from the boat. The pilot was fighting the added weight, flying the chopper down the falls with the skiff because he knew that at least one of his team hadn’t snapped on. There was maybe another second before the craft smashed into the first set of rocks in the ladderlike falls. He had no choice but to pull up.

Mercer sensed the decision made high above him and threw himself onto Foch, wrapping his arms and legs around the Frenchman in a tight embrace and waited to see what would happen first.

The skiff hit the first boulder an instant after Mercer felt the harness dig into his shoulders and groin. He and Foch had been lifted clear just as the aluminum boat disintegrated against the rocks. The motor tore free of its mounts and tumbled off into space, its tiny prop still spinning as if it could fly. The hull was turned into so much scrap that washed down the remainder of the falls like a battered soda can.

The sharp pull of the rope sent them arcing through space before the line came tight again, a brutal repeat of the initial jerk. Their motion set the line spinning. When he could look back at the falls, Mercer saw the boatload of Chinese soldiers follow the skiff. They had misjudged their speed, the distance, and the relentless pull of the water. Two men managed to hold on to the inflatable until it bounced off the rocks. One of them even maintained his grip after that first impact before he was smeared against a boulder. The red stain that had been his life’s blood was washed away in an instant. Two of the guards were like limp dolls as they fell from pool to pool. The fourth had landed atop a pinnacle of rock so that his spine had folded backward on itself and his arms trailed in the water.

“Snap yourself in,” Mercer shouted to Foch over the rotor beat and the wind of their forty-knot speed. The first drops of rain pelted him like gravel. He slitted his eyes against the sting.

The soldier struggled for just a moment before he clipped his harness into one of the closed hooks. Mercer relaxed his grip. “Thank you,” Foch said simply as he sagged against the line, drained.

“Don’t thank me yet. Liu’s chopper’s going to be after us in a minute.” Mercer caught Lauren’s eye and smiled up at her. Her hair whipped around her head like electric discharges as she dangled below the chopper. She gave him a thumbs-up. Bruneseau was on his own line, high enough above Mercer and Foch that they wouldn’t slam into each other as the helo turned toward Panama City.

“We can’t stay here,” Foch shouted the obvious. “If we’re chased, the pilot can’t maneuver with us dangling like this.”

Mercer and he began to climb together, a difficult trick because both were tired and the wind was a constant buffet. Lauren saw them coming closer, understood what they were doing and began to haul herself hand over hand. Bruneseau too started up. It took a few minutes to scramble into the rear of the chopper, and in that time all of them saw the dark speck lift away from the volcanic peak. The chase was on again.