Skeleton Coast

His weapon cracked once as Juan continued to lose his balance, falling as if in slow motion. Juan triggered off two rounds as his backside connected with the dock. The first missed but the second impacted center mass. The guard’s gun flew from his lifeless fingers and the case clattered onto the floating pier.

He turned to look at Sloane.

She was on her knees, her hand pressed into her underarm. Her face was a mask of silent agony.

Juan slithered to her side.

“Hold on, Sloane, hold on,” he soothed. “Let me see.”

He gently raised her arm, causing her to suck air through her teeth. Tears leaked from her eyes. Her blood was hot and slick as Juan felt for the wound and when he accidentally touched the torn flesh Sloane cried out.

“Sorry.”

He pulled her blouse away from her skin, wedged his fingers into the rent torn by the bullet, and ripped the fabric apart so he could see the entry point. He used a flap of cloth to softly wipe away some of the blood. The light from the burning yacht was wavering and erratic but he could see that the bullet had gouged a two-inch trench along the rib cage under her arm.

He looked into her eyes. “You’re going to be okay. I don’t think it penetrated. It just grazed you.”

“It hurts, Juan, oh sweet God, it hurts.”

He held her awkwardly, mindful of her wound. “I know it does. I know.”

“I bet you do,” she said, stifling her pain. “I’m crying like baby over this when you had a leg shot off by the Chinese Navy.”

“According to Max, when the shock finally wore off I sounded like a whole nursery full of colicky infants. Wait here for a second.”

“Not like I’m going to go for a swim or anything.”

Juan went back to the yacht. The fire was too advanced for him to recover anything from the cabins but he managed to strip the guard he hadn’t expected of a sports coat. The fact that he was wearing a thousand-dollar Armani blazer told him this guy wasn’t a guard but was most likely the head of this operation. A suspicion confirmed when the briefcase turned out to be a laptop computer.

“If it was important enough to save,” Juan said, holding up the ThinkPad when he returned to Sloane’s side, “it’s important enough to retrieve. We have to put some distance between us and that boat. When its twin exploded against the side of theOregon she made one hell of a fireworks show.”

It was almost as if they needed each other to move, Juan with his damaged prosthesis and Sloan with her wounded chest, but somehow they managed to stagger back to where Juan had stashed the satellite phone. He laid Slone down onto the warm metal pipe and sat next to her so she could rest her head on his thigh. He covered her with the sports coat and stroked her hair until her body overcame the pain and she slipped into unconsciousness.

Cabrillo opened the laptop and began to scan the files. It took him an hour to figure out what the thousand-foot-long machine did and another to discover that there were thirty-nine more just like it nearby arranged in four long rows. Although he still had no idea as to its purpose, dawn was an hour away when he finally figured out how to shut it down by plugging the laptop into a service portal under the access hatch where he’d hidden the phone.

When the indicator light on the slim monitor showed that the machine was no longer generating electricity even though its mechanisms were still responding to the action of the waves passing down its length Juan checked his sat phone. He got a signal immediately.

It was the massive electrical field created by the wave-driven generator and its clones that had played havoc with the electronics on the lifeboat, knocked out the phone, and made the compass needle spin out of control. With the generators offline the field collapsed, and his telephone worked fine. He assumed the laptop had been hardened against the powerful EM pulses.

He dialed a number and the phone on the other end was picked up after the fourth ring.

“This is the front desk, Mr. Hanley. You wanted a four-thirty wakeup call.”

“Juan? Juan!”

“Hiya, Max.”

“Where the hell are you? We couldn’t reach you on the lifeboat. You wouldn’t pick up your phone.

Even your transdermal locator wasn’t broadcasting.”

“Would you believe we’re stuck in the middle of the ocean on the back of Papa Heinrick’s giant metal snake? And have we stumbled into something weird.”

“You don’t know the half of it, my friend. You don’t know the half of it.”

18

DR.Julia Huxley, theOregon ’s medical officer, had flown out to the wave generation station aboard the Robinson R44 so by the time the nimble little chopper touched down on the freighter’s deck Sloane Macintyre was already hooked up to an IV that was flooding her veins with painkillers, antibiotics, and saline solution for her dehydration. Julia had stripped away her sodden clothes and wrapped her in a thermal blanket. She’d cleaned and dressed the gunshot wound as best she could with the kit she’d brought, but was eager to tend her properly.

Two orderlies were waiting with a gurney when the retractable helipad was lowered into the hold and Sloane was whisked to sick bay, an infirmary that rivaled a metropolitan level-one trauma center.

Hux’s treatment of Juan had been a quick pronouncement that he was fine, a liter bottle of a vile-tasting sports drink, and a couple aspirin. At least Max was in the hangar with one of Cabrillo’s spare legs.

Juan dropped onto a work bench to unseat his mangled prosthesis. TheOregon had slowed her mad dash from Cape Town in order for George Adams to land the helicopter, and now, as he accepted the artificial limb from his second in command, he could feel the ship begin to accelerate again.

He angrily yanked down his pants cuff and started walking quickly, calling over his shoulder, “Senior staff in the boardroom in fifteen minutes.”

His team was assembled by the time he finished a quick shower and a shave that left his face raw from the straight razor he used. Maurice had prepared a coffee service and had a steaming cup at the head of the cherry conference table for him. The armored covers for the boardroom’s windows were opened so the room was brightly lit, contrasting sharply with the dark look of the men and women seated around him.

Juan took a sip of his coffee and bluntly said, “Okay, what the hell happened?”

As chief intelligence officer, Linda Ross took point. She hastily swallowed a mouthful of Danish.

“Yesterday morning members of the Kinshasa police raided a house outside the city, believing it was a drug distribution center. They made several arrests and found a cache of arms as well as a small amount of drugs. They also found a heap of documents linking the dealers to Samuel Makambo and his Congolese Army of Revolution.”

“The guy that bought our weapons,” Mark Murphy reminded unnecessarily. He didn’t look up from his work on the laptop Juan had taken from the wave-powered generator.

Linda continued. “It turns out that Makambo was using the proceeds from the drug sales to further finance his activities, which isn’t a big stretch. What caught the police off guard was how Makambo had managed to use bribery to infiltrate the upper echelons of the government. He had a ton of bureaucrats on his payroll, including Benjamin Isaka in the Defense Ministry. For fifty thousand Euros a year paid into a Swiss bank account, Isaka fed information to Makambo about the government’s attempts to locate his secret base of operations. He continually tipped off the rebel leader so Makambo’s army was always one step ahead of government troops.”

Max was seated at the opposite end of the burnished table, his bulldog face more dour than normal.

“Makambo knew from the moment we first made contact pretending to be arms merchants that he was being set up. Isaka told him about how the weapons had been fitted with radio direction tags. His first step after we made our escape was to dismantle the AKs and RPGs and toss the tags into the river.”

“Isaka has admitted to this?”

“Not publicly,” Max said. “But I’ve been on the phone with a couple of people in their government.

Once I explained who I am and all, they told me the team sent to track the arms reported they never left the dock before they simply stopped transmitting.”

“And when they reached the dock,” Juan said, coming to the same conclusion as the others, “there was no sign of the rebels or the guns.” He looked at Mark Murphy. “How about it, Murph, are our tags still working?”

“They should be for another twenty-four to thirty-six hours. If I can get up to the Congo in time I have a shot of finding them from a chopper or a plane.”

“Has Tiny reached Swakopmund with our Citation?” Juan asked, his mind calculating distances, speeds, and time.

“He should be there by about one.”

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. As soon as we’re in range Murph will chopper to the coast and Tiny’ll fly him up to Kinshasa. From there, Mark, it will be up to you to charter any aircraft you need because Tiny has to fly back for tonight’s parachute drop.”

“I’ll need a hand,” Murph said.

“Take Eric. Max can act as captain and helmsman when we make our rescue attempt.”

Eddie Seng spoke up for the first time. “Chairman, there’s no reason to believe those arms haven’t been spread all over the Congo by now.”

Cabrillo nodded. “I know, but we have to try. If the ten guns we put our tags on are bunched together it stands to reason all the other weapons are there, too.”

“Do you think Makambo’s planning an assault of some kind?” Linda asked.

“We won’t know until Mark and Eric locate them.”

“Gotcha!” Mark exclaimed, looking up from the ThinkPad.

“What have you got?”

“There were some encrypted files on this computer. I just cracked them.”

“What’s on them?”

“Give me a minute.”

Juan sipped his coffee while Linda demolished another piece of pastry. Doc Huxley suddenly appeared at the conference room door. She only stood five foot three but had the commanding presence endemic in the medical profession. Her dark hair was tied in its customary ponytail and under her lab coat she wore green scrubs that did little to flatter her curvaceous figure.

“How’s our patient?” Juan asked as soon as he spotted her.

“She’s going to be fine. She was a little dehydrated but she’s over that. The wound required twenty stitches and she also has two cracked ribs. I’ve got her sedated for now and she’ll be on painkillers for a while.”

“Great job.”

“Are you kidding? After patching up this group of pirates for a couple of years I could have tended her in my sleep.” Julia helped herself to coffee.

“Is she going to be okay until you get back, or should you stick with her?”

Hux gave the question a moment’s thought. “As long as she doesn’t show any signs of infection, like fever or an elevated white count, she won’t need me hovering around. But if the kidnappers have injured Geoffrey Merrick or any of you…well, you know. You’re going to want me on our Citation for immediate treatment. I’ll make my final determination just before I leave, but my gut’s telling me she’ll be okay.”

As always Juan left all medical decisions to Dr. Huxley. “That’s your call.”

“I will be damned,” Mark said in awe. Eric Stone was leaning over his best friend’s shoulder, the text from the laptop reflecting in his newly required glasses.

All heads turned to the young weapon’s specialist.

He continued to read unaware for a moment until Juan cleared his throat and he looked up. “Oh, sorry.

As you know, what you found out there is a wave-powered generator, but on a scale I can’t believe. As far as I knew this technology was in its infancy, with just a couple machines off the coasts of Portugal and Scotland undergoing sea trials.

“What it does is use the power of the waves bending its joints to push hydraulic rams. These rams, in turn, force oil through a motor using a smoothing accumulator to even the flow. The motor then turns a generator and you’ve got electricity.”

As an engineer Max Hanley was the most impressed. “Damned ingenious,” he said. “How much can these things produce?”

“Each one could power a town of two thousand people. And there are forty of them, so we’re talking some serious juice.”

“What are they for?” Juan asked. “Where’s all that electricity going?”

“That’s what was encrypted.” Mark told him. “Each generator is anchored to the seafloor with retractable cables, which is why George didn’t see them when he did his flyby a couple days ago. When the water’s calm or radar on the guard boats spots an approaching vessel they are lowered about thirty feet. A separate cable feeds the electricity to a series of heaters spaced along the length of the generators.”

“Did you say heaters?” Eddie asked.

“Yup. Someone thinks the water around here is a bit cool and decided to heat it up.”

Cabrillo took another sip of coffee and helped himself to a Danish before Linda polished off the plate.

“Can you tell how long they’ve been in operation?”

“They came online in early 2004.”

“And what’s been the effect?”

“That data isn’t on the computer,” Mark replied. “I’m no oceanographer or anything, but I can’t imagine even this much heat having much of an effect on the entire ocean. I know the waste heat from a nuclear reactor can warm a river a few degrees. But that’s pretty localized.”

Juan leaned back again, drumming his fingers against his jaw. His eyes swam in and out of focus. The senior staff continued to talk around him, throwing out ideas and conjecture, but he heard none of their chatter. In his mind he could see the huge generator stations sawing away on the crests of waves while below them radiant heaters glowed cherry red and warmed the waters flowing northward along the African coast.

“If it weren’t for the gun-toting goons cropping up left and right,” Mark was saying when Juan snapped back to the present, “I’d guess this was an art project by, what’s that guy? You know the one who wraps islands in fabric and built those gates in Central Park. Crisco?”

“Christo,” Max replied absently.

“Mark, you’re a genius.” Cabrillo said.

“What? You think this is some messed-up art project?”

“No. What you said about a river.” Juan glanced around the table. “This isn’t about warming the entire ocean, only one very specific part of it. We’re smack in the middle of the Benguela Current, one of the tightest currents in the world. It runs just like a river with clearly demarked boundaries. And right around here it splits in two. One branch continues northward along the coast while the other veers west to become part of the South Atlantic subtropical gyre. The gyre carries water along South America where it is heated several degrees higher than the current that stuck close to Africa.”

“With you so far,” Mark said.

“The two currents meet up again near the equator and as they mix they act as a buffer zone between Northern Hemisphere currents and those of the Southern.”

“I don’t see the big deal here, Chairman. Sorry.”

“If the two currents are closer in temperature when they come together their buffering ability is going to be diminished, possibly enough to overcome the Coriolis effect that drives the prevailing winds and thus these shallow currents.”

Eddie Seng paused from taking a sip of coffee to say, his face alight in comprehension, “This could alter the very direction of the ocean’s currents altogether.”

“Exactly. The earth’s rotation determines prevailing wind direction, which is why hurricanes in the north rotate counterclockwise and cyclones in the south move in a clockwise direction. It’s also the reason the warm gulfstream current that runs along the east coast of the United States moves north and then eastward so that Europe enjoys the weather it does. By rights most of Europe shouldn’t be habitable.

Scotland is more northerly than the Canadian Arctic, for God’s sake.”

“So what happens if southern water flows past the equator near Africa?” Linda asked.

“It’s going to enter the breeding grounds of Atlantic hurricanes,” Eric Stone, who acted as theOregon ’s unofficial meteorologist, replied. “The warmer waters mean more evaporation and more evaporation means stronger storms. A tropical depression needs a surface temperature above eighty degrees to gain enough strength to become a hurricane. Once it has that, it absorbs around two billion tons of water a day.”

“Two billiontons ?” Linda exclaimed.

“And when they hit land they drop anywhere between ten and twenty billion tons a day. What causes the variation between a category one storm and a massive category five is the amount of time they spend sucking up water off the African coast.”

Mark Murphy, usually the smartest person in the room, brightened as he finally understood. “With the Benguela being artificially heated and some of that water escaping north the storms can intensify much faster.”

“And there can be more of them,” Juan concluded. “Anyone thinking what I am?”

“That the severe storms the U.S. has experienced in the past couple of years have been given a little help.”

“Hurricane experts all agree that we’re entering a natural cycle of increased storm intensity,” Eric said, countering Murph’s point.

“That doesn’t mean the generators and heaters aren’t amplifying the cycle,” Mark shot back.

“Gentlemen,” Juan said soothingly, “it is up to better minds than ours to figure out the effects of those things. For now it’s enough they’re turned off. After this meeting I’ll call Overholt and lay out what we’ve found. He’ll more than likely turn it over to NUMA and it will be their problem. Murph, have the computer ready so I can send him all the files.”

“No prob.”

“For right now,” Juan continued, “I want us to concentrate on rescuing Geoffrey Merrick. Then we can think about going after whoever installed the generators in the first place.”

“Do you think there’s a connection?” Max asked from the opposite end of the long table.

“Not at first. But now I’m convinced. The guy Sloane and I chased with the lifeboat intentionally killed himself rather than risk me getting my hands on him. He wasn’t trying to avoid an African jail. He was a fanatic willing to martyr himself so we didn’t discover the heaters. And we know Merrick’s kidnapping isn’t about ransom, its political—i.e., he’s pissed off somebody bad enough to snatch him.”

“Environmentalists,” Linda stated flatly.

“Has to be,” Juan said. “We’ve stumbled into a two-pronged attack of some kind. On the one side they want Merrick, for some reason, and on the other they’re trying to disrupt ocean currents with those big generators.”

Eddie cleared his throat. “I don’t get it, Chairman. If these people care about the environment, why would they mess with the ocean like this?”

“We’re going to find out tonight when we rescue Merrick and grab us a couple of kidnappers.”

RIGGERS had laid out the insertion team’s parachutes in one of theOregon ’s empty holds. The shiny black nylon looked like spilled oil on the deck plates. When Juan entered after a twenty-minute conversation with Langston Overholt at the CIA, Mike Trono and Jerry Pulaski were already there, carefully folding their parachutes so when they deployed twenty-five thousand feet above the Namib Desert they wouldn’t foul. Mike was a former para-rescue jumper from the Air Force while Ski had come to the Corporation after fifteen years as a recon Marine. Max was chatting with Eddie and Linc as they checked equipment and weapons arranged on trestle tables set up along one wall of the hold.

Cabrillo knew that every member of the Corporation could work with anyone else without the slightest problem, but there were a few dream pairings among the crew. Linc and Eddie were one, and Mike and Ski were another. When together, each team was absolutely devastating under fire and could operate at an almost telepathic level.

Next to the tables were four rugged-looking motorcycles. These were what theOregon had gone to Cape Town to pick up. Designed for hard desert riding, they had fat balloon tires for crossing soft sand and extra-powerful shock absorbers. In the past few days a team of mechanics had stripped them down to bare essentials to save on weight and covered up their once garish colors with a desert camouflage paint job.

His ship’s cell phone rang as he walked across the cavernous space. “Cabrillo.”

“Chairman, it’s Eric. Just want to let you know that we’ll be in range of Swakopmund in twenty minutes.

I’ve already alerted George so he’ll have the chopper fueled and ready. Mark’s getting our gear together now. Tiny will be at the airport with the Citation by the time we reach him and I’ve even been able to charter a plane in Kinshasa.”

“Good work.”

“If everything goes as planned we’ll be on the hunt at dawn tomorrow.”

“That’ll give you, what, eighteen hours to search before the batteries die?”

“Give or take. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but we’ll find them.”

Everyone aboard was well aware how personally Juan took being used by Benjamin Isaka and his rebel partner, Samuel Makambo. That he had unleashed so many weapons into a brutal civil war was like a lead weight in his stomach and every second they were in the field increased the likelihood they would be turned on innocent civilians. Despite what he’d said earlier to Sloane about responsibility, he knew if people died because of this debacle part of him would die as well.

“Thank you, Eric,” he said softly.

“No problem, Bossman.”

“How are we looking?” Juan said as he approached the three men. On the table was a scale model of the Devil’s Oasis prison that Kevin Nixon in the Magic Shop had constructed using satellite images and the few grainy photographs they’d been able to find on the Internet.

“Kevin made us a nice toy,” Eddie said, “but without knowing the interior layout and Merrick’s exact location we’re going in blind.”

“So how do you want to make our play?”

As chief of shore operations it was Seng’s job to plan the assault. “Just like we discussed right from the beginning. High-altitude high opening jump from about sixty miles north of the facility so they won’t hear our plane or get suspicious if they have radar. We glide in, land on the roof, and follow the old axiom that plans get tossed out the window as soon as you make contact.”

Juan grinned.

“While Linc lowers the bikes to the ground we will find Merrick and Susan Donleavy,” Eddie continued.

“Once we have them, we hightail it out of there on the desert bikes and meet up with Tiny wherever George can find a passable place to land the jump plane.”

“Don’t forget we need to grab one of the kidnappers so we can have a little chat about those power generators.”

“I’ll personally truss one of them up like a Christmas goose,” Linc said.

“You have the schedule all figured out for ferrying everyone to shore on the chopper?”

“Yeah. Because of weight limitations George is going to get a lot of stick time today. It’ll take four runs to get everything to the airport. George and I figured it out so on the last run he’ll be carrying the least amount of weight. This way we can strap on the empty drop tanks. He’ll fuel up onshore and have more than enough range to scout for Tiny’s landing zone.”

“Just make sure I’m on the last trip in,” Juan said. “I’d like to get some sleep today.”

“Already had that in my plan.”

“You’re now head of the list for employee of the month.”

“How’d it go with Lang?” Max asked.

“I’ll tell you while I pack my chute.”

Juan began his careful inspection of the mammoth parachute, one designed to allow a person along with two hundred pounds of gear to ride the prevailing winds up to seventy-five miles as he floated to earth. A favorite tool of Special Forces, the rig had extra padding along the straps and employed a two-tiered deployment system to ease the shock of transiting out of the brief free fall when exiting the plane. Even with these safety devices, pulling the cord was a test of nerves because the jumper knew he was in for a brutal assault to his body.

“Good news on both fronts,” Cabrillo said, running his fingers along the riser lines looking for any sign of fraying. “Lang said he’ll contact NUMA and they’ll probably send a ship to investigate the generators.

And because the CIA put the deal together with Isaka they will pay us to do what we were going to do anyway and get those weapons back.”

“How much?”

“Barely enough to cover costs, so don’t plan on early retirement.”

“Better than nothing.”

“That Benjamin Isaka turned out to be an agent of Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution has the CIA’s Africa desk in an uproar.” Cabrillo started arranging the risers so when he began to fold them he could bundle them together with rubber bands.

“They never saw it coming?”

“It came totally out of the blue. It’s got them rethinking every asset they have on the continent. Lang says the head of the Africa desk has already offered to resign.”

“Will he?”

“She, actually, and no. Provided we get those weapons back the CIA is going to wipe this whole fiasco under the rug.”

“Why do I have the feeling there isn’t a whole lot of room under that rug anymore?”

“Because there isn’t,” Cabrillo said bitterly. “No one wants to hear about how the CIA screwed up. It makes the U.S. look incompetent and, more important, unprepared. So when there is a problem—”

“Like how the Agency trusted a guy who turns out to work for the rebels trying to overthrow his government.”

“Like that. They go into CYA mode and nobody pays the piper for the mistake. That particular corporate culture is why no one saw 9/11 or Iraq’s initial invasion of Kuwait or the sophistication of India and Pakistan’s nuclear programs, and,” Juan concluded, “part of the reason I left.”

“Well, at least we’re going to be in position to set things right this time. Uh, Juan?”

The change in tone in Hanley’s voice made Cabrillo look up from his work.

“You going to be okay?” Max asked and nodded at the parachute.

Of every human emotion Cabrillo detested pity most of all. The looks of cheerless sympathy passersby had given him the day Julia Huxley had wheeled him out of a San Francisco hospital with one pants leg neatly pinned had enraged him. He vowed from that day onward no one would ever look at him like that again. So since losing his leg he had undergone three surgeries and literally thousands of hours of physical therapy so he could run without the slightest trace of a limp. He could ski and swim better than when he’d had both limbs and was able to balance himself on the prosthesis with ease.

He had a handicap, but he wasn’t handicapped.

However, there were still things he couldn’t do as well as when he had both legs and one of those was skydiving. Keeping your body arched and stable while falling through space required minute adjustments of your arms, but mostly it was the legs that kept a diver steady. Juan had made dozens of practice jumps in the past couple of years and no matter how he tried he couldn’t prevent himself from going into a slow rotation that quickly turned into a dangerous spiral.

Unable to feel the sensation of wind pressing against his ankle and foot he couldn’t correct the spin without a jump partner grabbing and steadying him. It was a rare defeat that Juan hated to admit and Max knew it.

“It’ll be fine,” Cabrillo said, and continued to fold his chute.

“You sure?”

Juan glanced up with a smile. “Max, you’re acting like an old woman. Once I’m out of the plane I just need to arch my back. We won’t be in free fall long enough for me to start my Dervish impersonation.

HAHO, old friend. High altitudehigh opening. If this was any other kind of jump I’d be in the op center watching the monitors with you.”

“All right.” Max nodded. “Just making sure.”

A half hour later Juan handed his chute and gear to one of the riggers to carry to the chopper hangar near theOregon ’s fantail. Before heading to his cabin for some long-overdue sleep he stopped by the medical bay to check up on Sloane. Doc Huxley wasn’t at her desk or in the adjoining operating theatre so he searched the three recovery rooms. He found Sloane in the third. The lights were turned down to a muted glow as she slept propped up on a hospital-style bed. She’d pushed aside her blankets and Juan could see the dressing covering the wound under her arm. There was no indication the gunshot was still bleeding.

Her copper hair was fanned against the white sheets and a wisp of it fell across her forehead. Her lips were slightly parted and as Juan brushed the cowlick aside her mouth pursed as if to receive a kiss and her eyelids fluttered for a moment before she slid deeper into unconsciousness.

He straightened her blankets and strode from the room. Ten minutes later, and despite the distraction of the upcoming rescue and the weight of the missing weapons preying on his mind Cabrillo was in a sleep as deep as Sloane’s.

His alarm sounded an hour before he was scheduled to fly to the Swakopmund airport to meet up with Tiny Gunderson. His eyes snapped open, clear and blue and ready to face anything. He rolled out of bed, contemplated another quick shower, and decided against it.

Juan turned on a couple of lights and hopped to his walk-in closet. Ranked like riding boots at the back of the closet were his artificial legs. Some were flesh-toned and hardly recognizable as prosthetics while others were industrial-looking affairs with titanium struts and visible actuators. He sat on a bench and fitted on what he called his combat leg, version 2.0. The original had been mangled a few months earlier at a shipbreakers yard in Indonesia.

Inside the round calf was a throwing knife and a .380-caliber Kel-Tec automatic pistol, one of the smallest handguns in the world. There was also enough room for a small survival kit and a diamond dusted garrote wire. Kevin Nixon, who’d modified the leg for Juan, had also placed a flat packet of C-4

explosives in the foot and hidden the timer/detonator in the ankle. Plus there were a few other tricks built into the limb.

He made sure the leg was snug and as an added precaution put on a belt with straps to tie so the prosthesis wouldn’t come off no matter what Cabrillo did. He dressed in desert camouflage fatigues and a pair of rugged boots. He retrieved another Glock and an H&K MP5 submachine gun from his gun safe. The armorer would have loaded magazines waiting for him at the helipad. He placed the weapons and a spare combat harness into a cheap nylon bag.

Maurice knocked gently on the cabin door and let himself in. As per Cabrillo’s earlier instructions he carried a breakfast tray that was heavy on fruit and carbohydrates. And while he would have loved some of his steward’s powerful coffee, Juan settled for several glasses of orange juice. They were going into the desert, and while everything had been well planned, he wanted to be as hydrated as possible just in case something did go wrong.

“You do the Royal Navy proud,” Juan said wiping his lips and tossing the napkin on the tray when he’d finished.

“Please, Captain Cabrillo,” Maurice said in that reserved voice of his. He was the only member of the Corporation to call Juan captain rather than chairman. “I oversaw the serving of high tea for twenty officers in a force seven storm off the Falkland Islands during that little flare-up. If you would permit me to be frank, sir, you have yet to tax my abilities.”

“All right then,” Juan said with a fiendish glint. “Next time we hit a hurricane I would like a Gruyère cheese and lobster soufflé with a baked Alaska for dessert.”

“Very well, Captain,” Maurice intoned and retreated from the room.

On his way to the hangar Juan ducked into the infirmary again. Julia Huxley was just closing up a pair of red plastic medical cases. She wore scrubs, but her ubiquitous lab coat was slung over the back of her chair.

“I take it by your packing that you’re coming with us and our patient is doing well?” he asked by way of greeting.

“She woke up about an hour ago,” Julia said. “Her vital signs are all stable and I see no sign of infection so she’ll be fine for as long as I’m away. Besides, my orderlies are better trained than most ER nurses.”

“All right then. Give me a minute to say hi and I’ll help you with your cases.”

Sloane was lying back against a bank of pillows. Her face was pale and her eyes were somewhat sunken, but when she saw Juan leaning against the doorjamb her mouth split into a radiant smile.

“Hello there, sunshine. How are you feeling?” Juan crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed.

“A little groggy from the meds but okay, I think.”

“Hux says you’re going to be fine.”

“I was surprised that your doctor is a woman.”

“There are eleven women on my crew,” Juan told her, “including my second officer, Linda Ross.”

“Have I been hearing a helicopter?”

“Yeah, just ferrying some men to shore.”

She eyed his fatigues and gave him a dubious look. “You said you’d tell me who and what you really are.”

“And I will,” he promised, “as soon as I get back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To do the job we came to Namibia for and hopefully find who was behind the attacks on you and who built the wave-powered generators.”

“Are you with the CIA or something?”

“No. But I used to be. And that’s all I’m going to tell you until tomorrow. How about I come by at eight and we can have breakfast together?”

“It’s a date.”

Juan bent and grazed her cheek with his lips. “Sleep well, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

She held on to his hand as he stood. “I want to apologize to you again for getting you mixed up in my problems.” Her voice was solemn.

“It turns out your problem is related to my own so there’s no need to apologize. And besides, I should be the one to say he’s sorry.”

“Why?”

“You didn’t find your ship full of diamonds.”

“Fool’s errand,” she said wanly.

“Hey, even fools win the lottery.” With that he left her bedside and, with a medical case in one hand and his bag of weapons in the other, headed for the hangar with Julia.

19

THEhold in the antique de Havilland C-7 Caribou was roomy enough for the men to sprawl on the bench seats with their gear set around them. The four small motorcycles sat aft in front of the loading ramp and were held in place with bungee cords. While at some point during the plane’s long career her interior had been modified so it could be pressurized, thus saving the men from dealing with the frigid temperatures at that altitude or having to breathe off a supplemental oxygen system, the drone of the two Pratt & Whitney radial engines made conversation next to impossible.

Cabrillo studied the faces of his men as he leaned against a bulkhead to take some of his parachute pack’s weight off his shoulders. Eddie Seng noted Juan’s scrutiny and shot him a cocky grin. Mike Trono and his teammate, Jerry Pulaski, sat side by side playing rock, paper, scissors. It was a ritual of theirs, but not a competition. They played until they each picked the same thing for five throws in a row. He’d seen them do it with the first five throws on more than one occasion.

Because of his size and the parachutes’ weight limits only Linc wouldn’t be burdened with one of the dirt bikes. He was crammed into a canvas seat, his head resting on his shoulder and his mouth slack, a sure sign he’d drifted to sleep.

“Hey, Chairman,” Tiny Gunderson shouted. Juan looked toward the front of the plane. The door to the cockpit was open and he could see the big, blond Swede strapped into his seat, a meaty hand resting on the yoke. Julia was in the copilot’s chair, her medical cases sitting between the two seats.

“Yeah, Tiny?”

“Just a heads-up. We’re fifteen minutes out.” He lowered the dim cabin lights even further and turned on a red battle lamp.

“Roger that,” Cabrillo replied. He then shouted over the din of the turboprops, “Fifteen minutes, gentlemen.”

Linc startled awake with an exaggerated yawn.

There was no need to recheck equipment for that had already been done a dozen times over and there was no need to tighten already taut straps and harnesses, but the men did it all again anyway. You had just one chance to get a parachute drop right. They readied the bikes, unsnapping the bungee hooks and getting them into jump positions.

Five minutes out Tiny turned on a yellow warning light that told the men to don their supplemental oxygen. The cylinders were strapped across their chests and fed air through heavy rubber tubes. Cabrillo and the others slipped the masks over their mouths and noses and adjusted the airflow, then donned large goggles. When everyone flashed him a thumbs-up Juan turned and nodded to Tiny, who was watching for his signal. The veteran Air Force pilot already had on his own mask.

Gunderson closed the cockpit door, and a moment later the motor that controlled the rear ramp began to whine. The noise was instantly overwhelmed by the roar of freezing air that scoured the cargo hold like a hurricane. A loose piece of paper whipped past Cabrillo and was sucked out into the night sky.

He could feel the subzero temperatures on his cheeks, the only ex posed part of his body. He adjusted the thick scarf he’d wrapped around his neck to protect his skin.

When the ramp was fully deployed the rear of the plane was an inky black hole with nothing to delineate the sky from the featureless desert except for the blaze of stars visible above the horizon. From this altitude Juan felt he could almost reach out and touch them.

“Comm check,” he called into his throat mike and one by one his men answered on the tactical net.

The yellow light began to blink. One minute to go.

For the hundredth time since getting onto the plane Juan mentally went through the steps he’d take exiting the aircraft, how he’d move forward and let himself fall and immediately arch his back, spreading his arms and legs to maximize his resistance through the air to lessen the jolt of the chute deploying. He could tell by the closed eyes and concentrated looks that the others were doing the same mental exercise.

The engines changed pitch as Tiny began a slight climb, and as the deck started to tilt, the yellow light winked off and was replaced by a green one.

Unlike any other type of commando drop, the men didn’t need to leap from the aircraft in a tight bunch.

With so little free fall, HAHO jumpers had ample time to regroup in the air and avoid becoming separated. One by one the men shuffled forward and disappeared out the stern ramp. The lightweight motorcycles dropped from under them as each arched his back before pulling his rip cords. When Juan got to the lip of the ramp he could see four tiny lights mounted on top of the chutes indicating their successful deployment. When they neared the Devil’s Oasis the lights would be switched to infrared globes they could discern through night vision goggles.

Cabrillo rolled his bike into the void like a rock star doing a stage dive, his arms outstretched and his back arching in a perfectly executed jump. The slipstream buffeted him but he was able to maintain his pose, and when he felt himself beginning to flip over he adjusted his body to flatten out once again. He reached across his chest to pull the rip cord just before the falling motorcycle hit the end of its long tether.

The drogue shoot sprang free and filled with air, its resistance drawing the main chute out of its bag.

Juan knew almost immediately there was a problem. The chute snagged for an instant coming out of its sack and the expected jolt of it blooming open didn’t come. Air resistance against the partially inflated chute snapped him vertical but he continued to plummet with the rippling of nylon over his head sounding like a sail luffing in a stiff breeze.

Looking up it was too dark to tell what had happened, but he’d made enough jumps to know that the riser lines had tangled.

While his next movements were unhurried, his mind was racing. He was silently cursing himself as he tried to jimmy the lines free by torquing his body and yanking on the cords. He’d packed the chute, so its failure was entirely his fault; if he couldn’t get the risers sorted out he’d put the entire mission in jeopardy.

He had plenty of altitude so he continued to struggle with the lines, but as he approached twenty thousand feet he had a decision to make. If he fell much further and managed to deploy the chute he’d never be able to glide all the way to the prison. Even with the built-in safety factor Eddie had determined using their glide to fall ratio he’d land well short of the Devil’s Oasis. On the other hand, if he had to cut it away and rely on his much smaller spare he’d be too low to paraglide close enough to the coast for George to pick him up in the chopper.

He glanced at the digital altimeter strapped to his wrist. He’d passed through nineteen thousand.

With a curse he cut away the motorcycle’s tether, hit the releases, and fell out of the fluttering main chute. Dropping free automatically popped the drogue for his auxiliary and for the first time since pulling the rip cord Cabrillo allowed himself to consider his circumstances. If the spare fouled he had roughly three minutes to contemplate what barreling into the desert floor at a hundred and twenty miles per hour would feel like. Whatever the feeling, he knew it would be brief.

With a whoosh his backup parachute blossomed like a black flower and the pain of the straps tightening between his legs and across his shoulders was the most sublime of Cabrillo’s life.

“Beau Geste to Death Valley Scotty,” he called over his mike. The call signs were Max’s idea of humor and had been his contribution to the mission.

“Either you are in one hell of a hurry to get on the ground,” Eddie replied, “or you had a problem.”

“Main chute fouled. I had to cut it away.”

“What’s your altitude, Beau?”

“Eighteen thousand five hundred.”

“Give me a second.”

“Standing by, Scotty.”

It was Eddie’s job to lead the team to their target so he carried a portable jump computer as well as their GPS.

“Okay, Beau, using maximum brake you’re falling about fourteen feet per second. That gives you twenty-two minutes aloft.” Even carrying the dirt bikes, the rest of the men would be airborne for twice that amount of time due to their large ram-air chutes. “Winds at your altitude are still hitting about fifty knots but that’ll slow as you get closer to the ground.”

“Roger that.”

“I estimate you’ll land about four hundred miles inland from the coast.” Because the prevailing winds ranged east to west the men had jumped when the plane was almost to the Botswanan border. Juan would land well beyond the Robinson helicopter’s ability to reach him and return to the ship, even with drop tanks.

“I’ll have to wait for a land recovery,” Juan said. “Scotty, with one of the bikes so much junk down below, your number one priority is Merrick and Donleavy. You won’t be able to carry one of the kidnappers so just forget it.”

It was losing the opportunity to interrogate one of the kidnappers that angered Cabrillo the most. That and the fact his men were going into harm’s way without him.

“Understood, Beau.” Already the distance between the main group of men and Juan was taxing their tactical radios’ range. Eddie’s voice sounded tinny and remote.

Juan tried to think of anything else he needed to say before he could no longer speak with the team, but they had gone over everything enough times so all he said was, “Good luck, Beau Geste out.”

“Same to you. Death Valley Scotty, over and out.”

Though he didn’t expect any more communications with his men Juan left on the radio just in case.

To maximize the amount of time in the air and thus distance over the ground Cabrillo had to fly the parafoil so it teetered on the edge of stalling. He had to force the toggles that controlled the chute’s aerodynamic shape to his waist. It took strength and coordination, but mostly it took will to ignore the bitter cold and the pain that began to build in his shoulders and quickly spread across his back and the rippled muscles of his stomach.

Drifting ever downward at the vagaries of the wind, Juan checked the empty desert below him. From this altitude he could see for what seemed like forever but no matter where he looked the barren wasteland remained dark. He could see no lit towns, no campfires, nothing but darkness as vast as the sea.

When he passed through ten thousand feet his left hand slipped off the toggle. The parachute immediately twisted into a sharp turn that accelerated his descent and spun his body out from under the canopy like a pendulum. He eased off the right toggle to negate the turn and grasped the left one once again. In those frantic seconds he thought he caught sight of something far to his left, but when he looked at the spot again he could see nothing.

Knowing it could be a mistake, he eased off the toggles again and reached across his chest for a pouch containing night vision goggles. He ripped off his safety glasses and the oxygen mask, which he no longer needed, and quickly settled the night vision rig over his eyes. Then he yanked down on the toggles to slow himself again.

The desert went from a dull khaki color to iridescent green with the aid of the light-amplifying goggles and the object that caught his eye was revealed as a small convoy of vehicles crossing the desert. They were moving away from Cabrillo and only the lead vehicle was using its headlights. Their weak beams reflected only intermittently off the dunes while the others followed in darkness. They were also too far for him to reach, given his current altitude, but he knew they would eventually stop.

He adjusted his glide path, arcing through the air like a bird of prey, and began following the caravan as it pulled further away. After just a couple of minutes he could no longer see the convoy and the only evidence the vehicles had existed at all were the tire tracks they had cut across the ground.

Cabrillo remained aloft as long as he could, twenty minutes according to his watch, but eventually he had to make his landing. The ground below him was nothing but endless waves of sand, dunes that rose and fell with the regularity of ocean swells. He flared the chute just before touching down, intentionally stalling it so he landed at no more than a walking pace and managed to stay on his feet.

Dumping air from the canopy as quickly as he could, Juan gathered up the nylon in a tight bundle so the wind wouldn’t carry it away. He unhooked the straps and thankfully dropped the parachute pack and what little gear that had remained with him. His upper body smoldered with a deep burn that would take days to ease, though already he had an idea that would add further strain to his aching muscles.

He’d touched down just a couple of feet from the caravan’s tire tracks and taking a sip of water from his only canteen he noted they were widely spaced and that the tires that left them were heavily lugged—trucks specially fitted for the deep desert.

That meant there were three options, two of which were good. Either they belonged to Namibia’s military or a safari company and would gladly help a man stranded in the trackless wastes. Or they were smugglers and would likely kill him as soon as he approached.

Either way, it wasn’t in him to wait for a couple of days until Max could locate him through his subdermal transmitter and send a team to rescue him. Cabrillo would rather get himself out of this mess on his own because he’d never live down his best friend’s ridicule when he got back to theOregon .

Juan laid out all of the equipment that hadn’t been attached to the main chute. The pile was meager. He had his machine pistol, Glock automatic and plenty of nine millimeter ammunition, a knife, a medical kit, the canteen, and a small survival kit containing matches, water purification tables, some fishing line, and a few other odds and ends. He had his chute and its pack, which had a hard plastic plate that was molded in the shape of his back and helped alleviate some of the stress of deployment.

All in all there wasn’t much to help him catch the caravan, but Cabrillo had an ace up his sleeve. He patted his artificial leg, thinking,Ace up my cuff, actually .

FOR fifty minutes Eddie, Linc, Mike, and Ski glided gently across the night sky. Because he’d been a field agent for the CIA, Seng didn’t have the jump training of the former soldiers on his team but like nearly everything he did, Eddie was a natural. It was the decades of martial arts training, learned first from his grandfather in New York’s Chinatown, that allowed him to channel his focus into any new task.

He didn’t have the combat experience of the other Corporation gun dogs, either. He’d spent his career working deep undercover, always without backup, pretending to be someone he wasn’t in order to build a network of informants to gather intelligence. However, only a few months after joining Juan made him head of shore operations because Eddie simply wouldn’t let himself fail in any situation.

Using GPS he guided his team unerringly to the Devil’s Oasis, arriving above the forlorn desert prison with enough altitude so they could loiter for a few minutes to scan the featureless roof and enclosed courtyard. Infrared showed a trio of guards sitting just inside the closed gate and a vehicle with an engine that was still warm. Eddie guessed it had driven a perimeter screen at least an hour earlier. The other vehicles, both inside and outside the courtyard, were as cool as the night air.

He tapped his throat mike in the prearranged signal for Linc to go in first.

Franklin Lincoln eased up on his toggles to begin his approach, turning into the wind just as his feet cleared the crenellated parapets as far from the guards as possible. He touched down with the barest scuff of his boots and collapsed his canopy. He took a few seconds to shed most of his gear and weigh down the nylon so it wouldn’t flap. When he was set he tapped his own throat mike.

Like a wraith, Eddie came out of the darkness, his canopy spread wide like a hawk’s wing. He angled in so the dirt bike hanging from its tether would land right next to Linc. The big SEAL grabbed the handle bars as soon as the balloon tires hit and steadied the bike so it wouldn’t fall over. Eddie’s landing was perfect, and by the time he had his chute off and secured it was Mike Trono’s turn to touch down. Again Linc made sure the bike didn’t clatter against the thick wooden roof and alert the guards.

Jerry Pulaski was the last one in. As his bike settled onto the roof and he flared his chute a gust kicked up and suddenly yanked him backward. Linc had a firm hold on the bike, but the pressure of the wind against Ski’s parachute was like trying to push a billboard into a hurricane.

“Help me,” he whispered, the strain making his voice raw as Ski frantically tried to collapse the chute.

Linc’s boots skidded in the talcumlike grit that coated the flat roof so Pulaski now dangled over the edge of the building.

Mike wrapped his arms around Linc’s waist, digging in his heels while Eddie braced himself at the front of the bike and pushed with every ounce of strength. They checked Ski’s inexorable slide for a moment but the forces in play were too great. In just a few seconds, Eddie was only a foot from falling off the roof.

He made a snap decision. He whipped a knife that had hung inverted on his combat harness into the air, allowing Ski to see it and know what he was about to do, and then touched its edge to the tether. Under so much tension the cord separated with the slightest stroke.

Once more able to control his chute Ski dumped air and spiraled down the side of the prison, landing hard in the sand piled against the foundation. He lay stunned for a moment as the chute billowed and whipped across the desert floor, relieved that he hadn’t blown the mission. And then he saw the stake thrust into the ground thirty feet in front of him. On top of the wooden post was a piece of solid-state electronics, and he knew immediately it was a motion sensor pointing outward to warn the kidnappers of anyone approaching the prison. The nylon canopy was already under the sensor and a slight breeze would inflate it and trigger the alarm.

He grabbed at the riser lines and frantically pulled the chute toward him in a hand-over-hand motion that puddled nylon behind him. But it seemed no matter how much material he gathered he still couldn’t get the section under the sensor to withdraw.

The wind shifted, and like a child’s balloon, the parachute began to fill with air. Ski leapt to his feet and raced for the sensor, diving headlong so his body flattened the chute just before it blocked the motion sensor’s electronic eye. He slid on the slick nylon and would have crashed right into the pole if he hadn’t snapped his body over. He ended up on his back, his hip mere inches from the sensor.

Ski could see three dark silhouettes peering over the top of the fortress and, careful so as not to trigger the alarm, he gave them a thumbs-up.

He carefully retrieved his chute, bundling it in his arms like so much laundry. At the base of the prison he used the molded plastic insert from the pack to bury his entire rig in a shallow hole. He noticed that there were vent holes along the bottom of the foundation and recalled from the mission briefing that there were a series of tunnels under the prison designed so the prevailing wind would scour away waste from the latrines. When he finished with his chute he climbed the rope that Linc had unfurled.

“Well,that was fun,” he whispered when he reached the top and was helped over by Eddie and Mike.

“No harm, no foul,” Eddie replied.

For the next two hours they watched the prison from various points along its roof. The guards were dark-skinned, which surprised them. They’d expected the environmentally motivated kidnappers to be white Europeans or Americans, but they didn’t discount the idea that the kidnappers had hired African mercenaries. Two of the men stationed at the gate circled the perimeter every hour on the hour while the third guarded the open portal until their return.

The rigidity of their routine was a mark of unprofessionalism that boded well for the Corporation hostage rescue team. One of the men even smoked during his patrol, ruining his night vision when he lit the cigarette with a match and then giving away his location with the butt’s glowing ember.

Eddie made the decision to wait until after the guards performed their next patrol to make their move.

Linc would lower the bikes to the ground while he, Mike, and Ski scouted the interior of the prison. Their hope was to find Geoffrey Merrick and Susan Donleavy without alerting the kidnappers to their presence, but if they were discovered they were more than prepared.

CABRILLO would have preferred to wait until daylight to pursue the caravan, but the temperature would top out at well over a hundred and twenty degrees and the sun would leach every pint of sweat his body could produce. Delay simply wasn’t an option.

After checking in with Max Hanley using his sat phone, Juan made his preparations. He took off his boot and sock so he could retrieve the block of C-4 plastic explosive from the sole of his artificial leg. He then positioned the hard insert from his pack on the ground and stood on it, working the plate into the sand to find its center of gravity.

Satisfied he had the right position, he removed his leg and molded some of the plastic explosive to the bottom of the foot. He flicked a lighter against the soft explosive, holding the flame until it began to burn.

It was a trick Max had taught him. In Vietnam they would use C-4 from clay-more mines to cook their food.

He set the foot into the plate exactly where he wanted it and pushed down with all his weight. Quickly the two pieces of plastic turned waxen and then molten as they fused together, the seam between the two becoming indistinguishable. He dumped sand onto the plate to extinguish the last of the flames and waited ten minutes for it to cool. Juan grabbed the leading edge of the plate and slammed the attached leg into the ground as hard as he could. His makeshift solder held. To further reinforce the weld he shot four holes through the plastic plate with his Glock and bound the prosthesis with a length of riser line he’d cut from the parachute.

Juan gathered up his meager possessions, abandoning some of the ammunition to save on weight, and clambered to the top of the highest nearby dune. He laid the chute out on the ground and tied the riser to the shoulder straps of his combat harness, making sure that he’d adjusted the toggles so he could control the parachute. He sat and secured the leg onto his stump, checking his balance on the plate.

The wind continued to blow at his back, gusting up to thirty miles per hour at times and never dropping below twenty. From the top of the dune he could see the tracks left by the vehicles vanish into the darkness, but there was enough ambient light that he wouldn’t need his night vision gear.

He clumsily walked to the edge of the dune and, without a second thought, he launched himself down its face like a snowboarder racing for Olympic gold. The chute slithered after him as the plate glided over the soft sand. With his speed building, air was forced into the chute until it reached a tipping point and the canopy snapped open. The motion spun Juan around so that the parachute was in front of him, held taut by the wind. The power of the breeze overcame his gravity slide and Cabrillo was suddenly para-skiing.

He leaned back against the chute, tweaking his center of gravity as he hurtled down the dune. When he hit the bottom he flexed his knees to absorb the shock and continued to sail across the desert, borne along by the wind. And when the breeze shifted slightly and took him off the caravan’s trail he was able to tack like a schooner by pulling on the toggles, never getting more than a half mile from the ruts.

Created as an extreme sport in places like Vermont and Colorado, para-skiing involved a snowboard or skis and a chute much smaller than Cabrillo’s. The sand offered more resistance than snow; however, his large ram air reserve chute shot him across the desert at speeds adrenaline junkies could only dream of.

He fell a couple of times during the first fifteen minutes as he learned to control his rhythm, but after that he rocketed along, carving a serpentine course up and down the towering dunes while behind him he left a shallow furrow like the path of a sidewinder.

THE guards completed their circuit of the Devil’s Oasis ten minutes after midnight. The great door closed and the sound of a bar being lowered into place carried to the men huddled on the roof. They gave the guards ten more minutes to settle down before swinging into action.

Mike and Ski used a silent ratchet to screw large bolts into the stout wood above where they were going to lower the bikes. They also installed two more to either side of one of the windows. They attached climbing pullies to these bolts and readied their ropes, letting the dun-colored lines dangle down the prison’s façade.

Eddie slung his machine pistol over his back and fitted his night vision goggles. He eased himself off the parapet and shimmied down the knotted rope as quick as a monkey. When he was abreast the glassless window he unholstered a silenced automatic.

The cell block was actually three stories high and took up approximately a quarter of the building. Just below Seng’s precarious position were two tiers of iron cages that ringed the room, accessible by metal catwalks and curved stairs. The steps and balcony were narrow in order to prevent a phalanx of prisoners from rushing the guards that once worked here. Each cell contained a pair of empty bunk bed frames with the matériel that once supported the mattresses. Eddie assumed it had been leather that had long succumbed to the ravages of the desert.

The floor space was divided by long stone partitions that served as the rear walls for yet more cells. The cube-shaped cells weren’t more than ten feet square with iron bars securing their front walls and barricading their open tops. From his vantage at the window Eddie could see that the upper cells were empty, but didn’t have a clear view of the lower ones.

He peered overhead and nodded for Mike and then Ski to join him while Linc lowered the dirt bikes to the ground outside the fortresslike penitentiary. There was no cell directly below the window, so Eddie flicked the tail of his rope inside so he could lower himself to the catwalk encircling the upper tier of cells.

He landed on the metal deck without a sound and moments later his two teammates joined him.

He used hand gestures to deploy Mike and Ski so they could cover him as he made a slow circuit of the cell block. He switched his goggles from night vision to infrared to detect heat from someone lying in one of the lower cages.

There!

In the far corner there appeared to be two people in one of the cells, lying close enough to be touching.

He flipped the goggles back to NV mode. There was enough light filtering through the large window for him to discern two figures under a blanket. It was a man and a woman. He was on his back with his face turned away while she was turned away from him, her knees drawn tight to her chest.

He caught Mike’s and Ski’s attention, holding up two fingers and pointing to where the prisoners slept.

Ski stayed on the platform watching over Eddie and Mike with a laser-sighted machine pistol. They crept down the stairs, shifting their weight in infinitesimal increments to prevent the slightest sound.

When they reached the cell they saw that the door was ajar. Trono and Seng exchanged a surprised look. They had assumed Merrick and Donleavy would be locked in, but perhaps the main door leading out of the cell block was sufficient to keep them caged.

Eddie grabbed a small spray bottle from one of the pouches around his waist and squirted the door hinges with powdered graphite, a lubricant superior to oil in such a situation. When he pulled back on the bar the door gave a tiny chirp and Seng froze. The woman mewed softly and shifted her position but didn’t wake. Eddie moved the door another fraction of an inch but the graphite had already worked its way into the hinge and it swung silently.

The two commandos moved across the cell with their pistols drawn. Standard procedure for any hostage rescue was to verify your target before assuming anyone was friendly. When they reached the sleeping pair Eddie pointed to the woman for Mike while he positioned himself on the other side of the heap of blankets the couple was using as a bed.

As one, the two men clamped their hands over the mouths of the sleeping pair, jamming their heads flat against the ground. And almost immediately Eddie realized that the photographs they’d memorized from the Merrick/Singer website didn’t match the man coming awake in a dazed panic.

Eddie clipped him behind the ear with the butt of his pistol, and when his eyes didn’t flutter closed he hit him again until the man was out. Mike, on the other hand continued to hold the woman down until he recognized her as Susan Donleavy. He kept his hand clamped over her mouth, holding a finger to his lips to get her to calm down. She continued to struggle as Eddie taped the man’s mouth and bound his ankles and feet with plastic flex cuffs.

“We’re here to rescue you,” Mike kept repeating at a whisper until Susan finally calmed enough for him to take his hand away. Her eyes remained wary.

“Who are you?” she asked and Mike quickly clamped his hand over her mouth.

“Quietly,” he admonished. “We’re here to rescue you and Dr. Merrick. Who is this?” Mike pointed to the unconscious figure that Eddie had tied to the cell bars.

“He’s…he’s one of my kidnappers. He . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Mike didn’t need her to spell out the details of how one of her kidnappers had brought her up to this deserted cell to rape her. “Is he armed?”

“I found this under the pillow.” Eddie held up a pistol.

Trono gave Susan a reassuring look. “It’s all over now. He’ll never touch you again.”

“Is he dead?” she asked in a meek voice.

“Just knocked out.” Mike handed her a bundle of clothing that had been lying on the floor. “Get dressed.”

The clothes disappeared under the blankets and Susan contorted herself into them without getting out from under the covers.

“Do you know where they’re holding Dr. Merrick?” Eddie asked when she threw the blanket aside.

“Yes, in another cell block.”

“Tell us where.”

“I could show you,” she suggested.

Eddie shook his head. “Too dangerous.”

“Please. I want to.” She hesitated. “I need to get some control back. Besides, he was on guard outside the cell block. There’s no one on the upper floors. All of them sleep in the old administration wing.”

“How many of them are there?” Mike asked.

“I think eight or nine, but I’m not sure.”

The number seemed low considering they posted three men at the main gate, but Mike let it pass.

“Armed like this joker here?”

“A few carried machine guns when we first got here,” Susan told them. She began to weep softly.

“Please let me take you to Dr. Merrick. If I don’t feel I’ve helped I will never be able to live with what he did to me.” She flicked her chin toward her unconscious rapist.

Eddie was about to refuse again but he believed her when she said that she would never recover from her ordeal if she slinked off into the night. Lord knew his own sister had only found peace after her rape when she polished off a fifth of vodka and a bottle of sleeping pills. The beatific smile on her cold face still haunted him. And he saw no harm with Susan coming with them if the only guard on this floor of the prison was trussed up and gagged. “Okay,” he said. Mike shot him a disapproving look. Eddie waved off his concern. “You can come as far as the cell block door. I will stay with you there and then we’re all getting the hell out of here.”

“Thank you,” she said and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

After plucking a set of heavy brass keys from the rapist’s pants Eddie waved for Ski to join them. Ski came down the stairs and hooked up with them at the only door out of the cell block. The hinges were on the outside of the door so, to reduce the sound of it creaking open, Ski and Mike got on the ground and lifted it as Eddie swung it open just enough for them to scrape through.

The hallway outside the door was long and straight, the floor powdered with sand. There was absolutely no light for the goggles to amplify so Ski, Eddie, and Mike pushed them up on their heads. They groped their way blindly, keeping their fingertips brushing the rough stone wall until they reached a corner.

Around the bend stretched another long passageway.

“It’s halfway down on the right,” Susan whispered. “There’s usually a chair outside the door for the guard.”

Eddie chanced turning on a red-lensed flashlight, blocking half its ruddy beam with his palm. A metal folding chair was exactly where Susan said it would be, next to a door identical to the one from the first cell block. Eddie sprayed the ancient lock mechanism with the powdered graphite and handed the can to Ski to dust the hinges as he tried key after key until finding one that fit the lock.

Even with the graphite lubricant the lock turned grudgingly, but fortunately it was quiet. The men settled their night vision goggles again, and with Mike and Ski hovering just behind him with their machine pistols in position, Eddie gently pulled back on the door. The hinges made a soft grinding sound as it opened.

The barrels of Ski’s and Mike’s weapons were never still. With more and more of the cell block being revealed they swept every square inch they could see until the thick door was opened enough for them to slip through.

A shaft of light from the moon blazed across the floor through the large window and its milky glow made the iron bars shine like ivory.

Keeping low, the two gun dogs slid into the room and swept the space with their weapons. They stuck close to the walls, making sure their perimeter was clear and that no one was in the hallways separating the rows of cells. Ski mounted a set of circular stairs on one end of the room while Mike ascended from the opposite. They climbed just high enough so they could peer into the second-story cells with their goggles switched to infrared. They were all empty. Then they checked the third story cells and again found nothing.

Back on the floor they cautiously checked the rows of cages, starting from the rear of the room and moving toward the door so they wouldn’t have to backtrack once they were finished. It was a technique that saved a couple of seconds, but every one of them counted now. Eddie remained just outside with Susan at his side.

They found a sleeping figure near the front of the room. Mike sprayed the cell door’s hinges and lock while Ski found the correct key. They were inside a moment later. Ski knelt next to Geoffrey Merrick, recognizing him through the week-old stubble on his face. He gently placed his hand over Merrick’s mouth and shook him awake.

Merrick tried to lurch off the floor but Ski held him down easily.

“We’re here to rescue you,” the former Marine said. “Everything’s okay now.”

Merrick’s eyes went from startled and fearful to relieved, and he stopped struggling. When Ski asked him if he could take his hand away, Merrick nodded.

“Who are you?” Merrick asked in a stage whisper.

“A professional hostage rescue team. Are you hurt? Can you walk?”

“I can bloody well run,” Geoffrey said. “Did my company send you?”

“The details are still being worked out. For now let’s just get you and Miss Donleavy out of here.”

“You found Susan. How is she?”

“Shaken pretty badly. She was raped.”

“After what those bastards did to her they still raped her? So help me God, Dan Singer is going to pay.”

“So it’s your former partner behind this,” Ski said and helped Merrick to his feet.

With their charge between them, Ski and Mike worked their way back to the door. Geoffrey Merrick charged ahead when he saw Susan standing next to Eddie Seng, her face wan in the moonlight. He opened his arms to hug her but stopped, a look of confusion clouding his features.

“Your face,” he said, bewildered. You’re not—”

That was all he could get out. Susan shoved Eddie at the same time she yanked his pistol from its unsecured holster. Her eyes were wild, defiant, as she brought the weapon to bear, her thumb flicking off the Beretta’s safety.

“Die, you son of a bitch!” she screamed at the top of her lungs and pulled the trigger.

Eddie’s reactions were lightning fast despite the irrationality of the situation. But even as his body reacted he thought through what had happened. Susan Donleavy wasn’t a victim at all. She was in league with the kidnappers and that was no rape in the other cell block but two lovers who’d gone to find a place to be alone.

He swung his hand upward, hitting Susan’s wrist an instant before the Beretta discharged. The recoil and the strike sent the gun clattering into the dim hallway and left her throat unprotected. Eddie whipped his hand around and slashed the edge into her neck, pulling the blow at the last second so he didn’t crush her carotid artery and kill her. He turned quickly.

Geoffrey Merrick was on the floor, Ski and Trono hunched over him. The blood splattered on the wall behind them looked like a Rorschach test.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, but she got him high in the chest,” Ski said pulling a sterile dressing from a medical kit. Merrick’s face was bone white and he took choppy sips of air as he struggled against the pain. His chest was sodden and more blood leaked from the wound. “I don’t know if any major organs were hit, but for now you’ve saved his life.”

“Not yet I haven’t,” Eddie said as he plucked the dressing from Ski’s hand. “We don’t have time for that. She’s one of them and no doubt lied about the number of guards. This place is going to be crawling in about ten seconds. Pick him up and let’s go.”

“What’s happening?” Linc asked over the tactical radio.

“Donleavy shot Merrick. I think she’s working with the kidnappers.”

Ski hunched over so Mike and Eddie could drape Merrick over his broad shoulder. To his credit Merrick whimpered but didn’t cry out. The blood spreading down the back of Ski’s camouflage resembled ink and smelled like old pennies.

Linc asked, “What’s your play?”

“Stick with the plan and hope we don’t run out of time. Be prepared to lower Merrick down to the bikes. He’s hit pretty bad.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“What about her?” Mike asked, pointing to where Susan Donleavy lay unconscious against a wall, looking like a rag doll missing most of its stuffing.

“Leave her,” Eddie said with ill-suppressed anger. He should have seen this coming, but his own feeling about what had happened to his big sister all those years ago had clouded his thinking. For such a critical lapse of judgment he fully expected Juan to fire him if they got out of this mess alive.

They took off at a trot with Eddie at point and Mike covering their rear. Lights strung along the ceiling by wires suddenly flashed brightly then dimmed before settling to a naked glow as a generator someplace within the fortress was cranked to life. Around a distant bend came the crash of a door slamming open and the rush of feet against the gritty floor. It was a race to the cell where the ropes waited, and the men instinctively picked up their pace until they were running flat-out—all attempts at silence abandoned.

It didn’t matter that Merrick grunted each time his weight shifted and the torn flesh around the wound ripped a bit more.

The cell block door was fifteen feet away when a solid wall of men rounded the far corner. Many of them just wore boxer shorts, having been woken by the sound of the pistol, but every one of them had had the presence of mind to grab a weapon. The Corporation team faced at least ten armed African guards in a hallway that now resembled a shooting gallery.

Eddie had a fraction of a second before the guards realized they’d found their quarry and opened up with everything they had. He tossed aside his machine pistol and raised his hands, playing the longest odd he’d ever gambled. None of the guards lowered their weapons and one second became two with no shots fired. Behind him, Eddie could hear Ski’s and Mike’s guns clatter to the stone floor and then the sound of more men arriving behind them. He chanced looking over his shoulder. There were a dozen more soldiers, each glaring at them over the sites of their AK-47s.

“We’re blown,” he whispered into his mike for Linc’s benefit. “Call theOregon .”

Another man arrived a moment later and, although he wore just a pair of fatigue pants and unlaced boots, he had the carriage and bearing of an officer. His face was lean, with a beaky nose and hollow cheeks.

“I had reports that there was a small army coming to rescue Moses Ndebele,” he said in perfect English.

“Not a handful of white mercenaries. Still, your execution at dawn will be most gratifying.”

“How would you feel if I told you we were hired to rescue Dr. Merrick and have never heard of Moses Ndebele?” Mike Trono asked, just to be sarcastic.

“In that case your execution won’t be gratifying at all.”

20

JUANCabrillo had never known such pain. It wasn’t the sharp agony of having his leg shot off by a Chinese gunboat, but an overall ache that cramped all his muscles until he was certain he couldn’t go on.

His thighs and back took the brunt of the strain of para-skiing and they felt like they were burning from within. His hands were formed into claws that gripped the chute’s toggles and there was no way to rest them. There was no way to rest any part of his body unless he quit.

And that wasn’t an option.

So long as the wind continued to blow across the desert, Cabrillo grimly hung on to his chute and raced over the sand. His turns were no longer crisp, and when he fell it took him longer and longer to get to his feet. He hadn’t taken a single break since his sat phone had chimed and Max Hanley had told him Eddie, Mike, and Ski had been captured.

From what Linc could hear over the radio when his teammates had been discovered, there was a contingent of troops from Zimbabwe at the Devil’s Oasis guarding that country’s opposition leader, Moses Ndebele. Linda had done some quick research and learned that Ndebele was to be tried for crimes against the state in a couple of days and would most likely be executed. The UN’s formal complaint against Zimbabwe had done nothing except cause the government to further restrict freedoms within their borders. The entire country was under martial law and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was in effect in Harare, the capital.

Linda learned that Ndebele had a large following that crossed tribal lines. His was the first opposition movement that had the slightest chance of overthrowing Zimbabwe’s corrupt government and establishing a democracy in what had once been one of Africa’s wealthiest countries, but was now ravaged by famine and disease. Though once a fierce guerilla leader when Zimbabwe was known as Rhodesia and was governed with an apartheid-like system by its white minority government, Moses Ndebele advocated a nonviolent approach to toppling the current regime and Linda found numerous comparisons to Gandhi.

Max had already passed the information to Langston Overholt. Lang had said just finding Ndebele was an intelligence coup and added that if the Corporation could rescue him it would go a long way to shore up America’s position in southern Africa. It was too soon to mention a price, but Lang assured Max that the bounty to get Ndebele to safety would run into the millions.

Max had also reported that it appeared Susan Donleavy hadn’t been kidnapped at all. She was a willing accomplice to Geoffrey Merrick’s abduction and had put a bullet into the scientist’s chest when she had the chance. Linc didn’t know the severity of the injury.

With the rest of his men captured and being threatened with a dawn execution, Linc had asked what Max wanted him to do. The guards would sweep the entire prison and find him within minutes. He could try to fight it out or make his escape on one of the dirt bikes.

“What did you tell him?” Juan had asked.

“What do you think?”

“He must have hated leaving them, but it’s the right move.” Juan had known that was the only viable option.

“He’s one pissed hombre.”

“Are you tracking him?”

“He’s about twenty miles from where Tiny set down the plane and making about thirty miles per hour on one of the bikes. And for your information you’ve covered about forty miles so far.”

The idea was ludicrous, but Cabrillo had to ask. “How far am I from the plane?”

“Over a hundred and fifty,” Max had told him.

Dawn would hit long before he covered half that distance, and when it arrived Juan would have to hole up or risk dehydration. The other alternative was to find someplace where Tiny could land close by, but so far Cabrillo had seen nothing but soft dunes incapable of supporting even a light plane let alone the twin-engine cargo aircraft they had rented for the drop.

“If Linc wasn’t followed,” Juan said, “I want him to wait with Tiny and Hux.”

“You have a plan?”

“No, I’m just positioning assets for when I do come up with something.”

Neither man doubted Juan would.

That had been two hours ago, two of the longest of Cabrillo’s life.

He eased up on the right toggle when the wind shifted and flew over the top of a sand dune, catching air for nearly thirty seconds before returning to earth. He absorbed the impact with protesting knees and barreled down the far side of the dune. The tire tracks had been to his right but with the change in wind direction he was soon running along them and then slightly to their left. He prepared to tack as he was dragged up another towering mountain of sand, the tallest yet. His momentum dropped as the wind fought the friction of the plastic plate against the sand and he had to struggle to keep from being yanked off his feet.

He was more exhausted than he’d ever been in his life, a punch-drunk tired that dulled his reflexes and made his mind crave sleep above anything else.

The chute continued to slow, forcing him to lean back so far that his body was bent double and his butt was almost touching the ground. Just when it felt the wind would abandon him altogether and force him to slog the rest of the way up the hill a gust snatched the chute and lifted Cabrillo off his feet and over the dune’s summit.

To his horror, he saw four trucks arranged at the base of the dune so that their headlights shone on a fifth that had its long hood opened. Men were clustered around the disabled vehicle with two of them standing on the bumper and leaning into the engine compartment. Several of them cradled assault rifles. Juan had wanted to approach the vehicles carefully and determine who they were and what they were doing this far out in the desert, before making contact.

The gust that had mercifully carried him over the crest of the hill was going to drop him right in the middle of their laager. He hastily dumped the air from his chute and fell back to earth in the vain hope he could scramble back over the dune before he was spotted. He landed in the soft sand and immediately pitched forward, cartwheeling down the face of the hill in a tangle of nylon and riser lines.

He hit the base of the dune with the parachute wrapped around his body as tightly as a mummy’s bindings, his mouth and nostrils full of sand. Cabrillo spat and blew to clear his airways but no matter how he struggled he couldn’t free either arm to cut away the nylon. He watched helplessly as four of the men ran from their camp, their AK-47s held low and at the ready.

“Hiya, boys,” Juan called cheerfully when they were within earshot. “Any chance you could lend me a hand here?”

AFTER being stripped of their weapons, radios, and gear, Eddie, Mike, and Ski were dumped into adjoining cells in the block the Zimbabwean soldiers were using to guard Moses Ndebele. Geoffrey Merrick had been taken by a group of civilians who matched what Eddie thought a bunch of environmentalist fanatics would look like. You couldn’t discern their gender by judging hair length alone.

The stench of patchouli oil barely masked the odor of marijuana that permeated their clothes.

Eddie massaged his jaw where Susan Donleavy had sucker punched him after her friends had woken her. A guard who’d seen the blow walked by his cage at that moment, saw what he was doing, and smirked.

Eddie estimated there were about a hundred armed men in the prison, and now that the adrenaline had been flushed from his body and he’d had time to think through his situation he understood why there were so many. Moses Ndebele was seen by many as a potential savior of his country—the ruling regime would do anything to silence him. If they held him in a prison in Zimbabwe, it would become a rallying point for his followers. But out here nobody knew where to find him. They could hold him indefinitely.

He wondered about Merrick and Ndebele being here at the same time and assumed there was a connection but couldn’t see what it was. Daniel Singer must have made some sort of deal with the government of Zimbabwe to use the old prison or vice versa.

A couple of hours had passed since they’d been discovered. Because Linc hadn’t been brought to the cell block, that meant the former SEAL must have gotten away on one of the bikes. Eddie was relieved.

The officer in charge of the garrison had announced that the Corporation team would be executed at dawn. There was no sense in Linc sacrificing himself needlessly if he had a chance to escape.

But with the chairman stuck out in the desert, Lincoln on his own except for Tiny Gunderson and Doc Huxley, and theOregon more than two hundred miles away, Eddie conceded the chance of rescue was slim. They would need a fleet of helicopters to pull off an aerial assault and the only vehicle currently aboard ship was Linc’s Harley, so crossing the desert was out.

Eddie had gone into the CIA immediately after college and spent the majority of the next fifteen years flying into and out of China, cultivating a network of informants who in turn allowed the United States to maintain its uneasy relationship with the mainland. He’d been inserted via a submarine onto Hainan in the spring of 2001 when the Chinese were holding the crew of an EP-3 spy plane and passed on information that kept the crisis from becoming a war. He’d maneuvered around China’s secret police, one of the most efficient in the world, with near impunity because he was so good at what he did. The irony of being caught by a third-rate dictator’s Praetorian guards wasn’t lost on him.

Despite the odds, Eddie still had faith that Juan Cabrillo would find a way to save them. Though the two served in the CIA at the same time, they hadn’t met until after leaving government service. That didn’t mean Eddie hadn’t heard of Cabrillo. Juan had singlehandedly pulled off some of the most difficult assignments in the agency’s history. And because he was fluent in Spanish, Arabic, and Russian, his missions had been in some of the toughest countries on earth. He was a bit of a legend at Langley. His reputation, along with his white-blond hair, had earned him the nickname Mr. Phelps, the lead character from the oldMission: Impossible television show. Whether tracking drug smugglers from Colombia into Panama or infiltrating a terrorist group in Syria planning to blow up the Israeli Knesset with a hijacked airliner, Cabrillo had done it all.

So if anyone was able to spring them from this hellhole with only a couple of hours to go before dawn and limited resources, Eddie was sure Juan was the man.

A flashlight beam stabbed out of the darkness and blinded Cabrillo. Behind the glare he distinctly heard the sound of rifle bolts being cocked back. He held still. The next few seconds would determine if he lived or died. One of the men moved closer, covering Juan with a massive revolver, an old Webley if he wasn’t mistaken. The man was older than Juan, pushing fifty, with white shooting through the tight curls on his head and wrinkles lining his forehead.

“Who are you?” he asked suspiciously.

“My name is Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo.” Judging by the man’s age, the fact they were all armed, and that they were headed in the general direction of the Devil’s Oasis, Juan gambled his life by saying, “I want to help you rescue Moses Ndebele.”

The man’s fist tightened around the antique pistol, his dark eyes unreadable in the shifting light.

Juan plunged on, praying he was right about the identity of this group. “Three of my men are at the prison now, trying to rescue an American businessman, when they were captured by troops guarding Ndebele. One of my guys managed to escape and is waiting with an aircraft about forty miles from the prison. If I’m going to save my people I am willing to help you save your leader.”

The gun remained rock steady. “How did you find us?”

“My main parachute fouled and when I was drifting down on the reserve here I saw your headlights. I jury rigged a para-ski and have been following you.”

“Your story is just strange enough to be true.” The man lowered his pistol and said something in a native dialect. Another of the Africans stepped forward and withdrew a knife from his pocket.

“Just so you know, I have a Glock automatic in a holster and an MP-5 machine pistol strapped around my back.”

The man with the knife glanced at the group leader. He nodded and the second African cut a slit into the nylon, allowing Juan to take his first deep breath since tumbling down the dune. He stood slowly, keeping his arm well away from the holstered Glock.

“Thank you,” he said and extended his hand. “Please call me Juan.”

“Mafana,” the headman said, and clasped Cabrillo’s thumb in a traditional greeting. “What do you know of ourbaba , our father, Moses Ndebele?”

“I know that he is to be tried and executed very soon and if that happens any chance of you overthrowing your government is gone.”

“He is the first leader to unite both major tribes in Zimbabwe, the Matabele and the Mashona,” Mafana said. “During our war of independence he held the rank of general before the age of thirty. But after the war the ruling elite saw his popularity as a threat to their power. He has been imprisoned and tortured often. They have had him in custody this time for two years and will kill him if we do not rescue him.”

“How many men do you have?”

“Thirty. All of us served with Moses.”

Juan looked at the men’s faces. None of them were under forty, yet there was a lean hunger in their eyes, a measure of confidence of men who had tasted combat that made the years since irrelevant.

“Can you fix your vehicle?” he asked, taking a step forward, but forgetting he was still attached to the main chute’s plastic back plate. He promptly fell on his face. A couple of the men chuckled.

Chagrined, Cabrillo turned around so he was sitting and pulled up his pants leg. The chuckles died on their lips when they saw the gleaming artificial leg. He yanked it off, saying, “Just think of it as the biggest Swiss Army knife in the world.”

The laughter returned. Mafana helped Juan to stand and gave him an arm to steady him as he hopped across the soft sand toward the temporary camp.

“To answer your question, yes it can be fixed. Dirt has entered the fuel pump and stopped it from working. We should be ready to go in another few minutes but we have lost a great deal of time.”

Juan borrowed a hammer and chisel from a blanket strewn with tools laid out next to the disabled truck and got to work freeing his prosthesis from the plastic plate. “How are you going to free Ndebele?”

“We are going to lay an ambush outside the prison and wait for them to transfer Moses away. They may use trucks, but we suspect it will be an aircraft. Rumor in our capital is that the trial is in two days.”

Which would be too late to save my guys, Juan thought. He also thought Mafana’s ambush idea would guarantee a bullet to Ndebele’s head the moment they engaged the guards. He had to find a way to get Mafana to attack the Devil’s Oasis before dawn or Eddie, Mike, and Ski were dead men. “What if I had a plan to free Moses tonight and fly him to safety in South Africa?”

The former guerrilla regarded Cabrillo sagely. “I would like to know more about this plan.”

“So would I,” Juan muttered to himself, knowing he had just a few moments to come up with something.

“First let me ask you: Do you have any rocket-propelled grenades?”

“Old Russian RPG-7s left over from the war.”

Juan groaned. Zimbabwe’s revolutionary war had ended twenty-five years ago.

“Do not worry,” Mafana added quickly. “They’ve been tested.”

“What about rope? How much rope do you have?”

Mafana asked one of his men for the answer and translated for Juan. “A great deal, it seems. At least two thousand feet of nylon line.”

“And one final question,” Juan said, looking back at where his cut-up parachute fluttered in the wind as inspiration hit him like a thunderbolt. “Any of you guys know how to sew?”

21

THEconstant backdrop of insect noise almost made Daniel Singer miss the ring of his satellite phone. He groped blindly for the instrument amid the damp tangle of his sheets and mosquito netting. He’d slept with it close by, not trusting one of the mercenaries he’d hired not to steal it while he slept. Money could buy only so much loyalty.

“Hello,” he said thickly.

“Dan, it’s Nina. There’s been a problem. Someone tried to rescue Merrick.”

Singer came fully awake. “What? Tell me what happened.”

“There were four of them. Three of them were captured and a fourth escaped on a motorbike. Susan shot Merrick in the chest. That’s how we knew they were here. The guards watching over Moses Ndebele found parachutes on the roof.”

“Wait, Susan shot Geoff?”

“Yes, in the chest. She pretended to be a kidnap victim and when she had the opportunity she grabbed a gun and shot him. We’ve stopped the bleeding and dosed him with some heroin from Jan’s stash. And don’t worry, I confiscated the rest.”

Drug abuse among his people was the last thing Singer worried about. “Who are they, the men who came for Merrick?”

“They claim they were hired by the company to save him and Susan. They won’t tell us anything else.

The captain of the guards wants to execute them at dawn, Danny.” There was horror in her voice when she delivered this last piece of information. “Everything feels so out of control. I don’t know what to do.”

“First thing is to calm down, Nina.” Singer took a breath to steady his own nerves and think through how he wanted to handle the situation. Vapor rose from the mangrove swamp outside the open-sided shed where he slept. Nearby, one of the African mercenaries grunted in his sleep while in the distance flare stacks from the numerous oil facilities belched so much flame that it looked as though the whole world was burning. The sight of such environmental devastation sickened him.

“What do you want me to do?” Nina asked.

Singer studied the luminous dial of his watch until he could see it was four thirty in the morning. Before falling asleep he’d checked the latest meteorological reports. They showed that the storm building over the mid-Atlantic would likely become the tenth named storm of the year, and all indications pointed to it growing into a monstrous hurricane.

Using the Devil’s Oasis to lock up his former partner, and messing with his mind a little bit, had only been phase one. They were just biding their time until a big storm came along and Singer implemented the second part of his operation. With Mother Nature being so cooperative, albeit with a little help from the heaters he’d placed off the coast of Namibia back in ’04, he could have Merrick flown here to Cabinda first thing in the morning.

“I’m going to send the plane to get you tomorrow morning,” he said.

“Um,” Nina started then fell silent.

“What is it?”

“Dan, they are going to execute the three commandos at dawn. We’ve all talked about it and none of us want to be anywhere near here when it happens. The mood is really ugly. The guard commander still thinks there’s a group on their way here to rescue Ndebele and none of the women, myself included, feel comfortable around these men, if you know what I mean.”

Singer thought for a moment. “Okay, there’s a place about forty miles east of you. The pilot who first took me to the Devil’s Oasis told me about it. I can’t remember its name but you’ll see it on a map. It’s a ghost town now but there’s an airstrip. I’ll call the pilot in Kinshasa and have him take off at first light.

Take one of the trucks and wait for him there. He should arrive sometime before noon.”

“Thanks, Danny. That’ll be perfect.”

Singer cut the connection. He knew better than to try to fall back asleep. Years of careful planning were coming together. How much easier it would have been if he hadn’t given so much of his fortune away after forcing Merrick to buy him out. He could have simply paid for what he needed outright and negated the necessity of so many difficult steps.

But as he stood leaning against a pole watching the oil field’s hellish glow he knew that the difficulty of this operation also made its success that much sweeter. There was no substitute for hard work. And maybe that was why he had given away most of his billions. They had come too easily. He and Merrick were barely into their twenties when they patented their coal scrubbers. Sure, there had been a lot of long hours to perfect the system, but nothing like the lifetime needed to understand and appreciate that much wealth and success.

Because he had had to work so hard to put this operation together he could savor it that much more.

The sacrifices, hardship, and privation made his ultimate victory more precious than all the money he’d accumulated in his previous life. And that it was all for the good of mankind made it even better.

He wondered, and not for the first time, how many lives he would save once the world woke up to the reality of global warming. The number ran into the tens of millions, but sometimes he thought that maybe he was really saving all of humanity and that in the future historians would look back and define this year and this storm as the one that made people see the light and stop the wanton destruction of the planet.

He wondered what someone would call such a person. The only word that came to mind wasmessiah .

While he didn’t care for the religious overtones, believing all religions to be myths, he admitted it was the best fit.

“Messiah,” he whispered aloud. “They’ll never know I saved them but I am their messiah.”

THE convoy, minus one of the vehicles, stopped five miles from the Devil’s Oasis to make final preparations for the attack. They’d circled around the prison so the prevailing winds were at their backs.

Cabrillo had spent most of the journey in the lead truck with Mafana honing the plan and coordinating it with Max Hanley and Franklin Lincoln. The batteries on his sat phone were just about dead by the time they all felt they had every angle covered.

Mafana seemed relieved that Juan was with them. He admitted that during the war he was merely a sergeant and lacked Cabrillo’s mind for tactics. The plan Juan had devised was far more intricate than Mafana’s direct approach, but also had a far greater chance of success.

Stepping out of the truck, Cabrillo knuckled his lower spine, trying to work out kinks that would challenge a professional masseuse. His eyes were red-rimmed from the dust, and no matter how much water he drank he could feel the grit on his teeth. He promised himself the longest shower of his life when this night was over. The thought of warm water brought on a fresh wave of fatigue. If not for the caffeine pills he’d added to his medical kit some months earlier he would have dropped to the ground and curled up like a dog.

He sucked in a bunch of quick deep breaths and shook out his arms in an effort to get his blood flowing again and decided on a quick shower and the longest nap of his life instead. While a couple of Mafana’s men unfolded his parachute and laid it on the desert floor, Cabrillo went through his equipment and discarded anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, including his Glock and holster, a throwing knife, and his canteen and medical kit, plus half his ammunition for the H&K machine pistol. By doing this he was able to carry two additional rockets for the RPG-7 he was borrowing from Mafana.

He made certain that he kept his pocketknife. The original had been a gift from his grandfather for his tenth birthday. He’d lost that one decades ago and a dozen more just like it but every time he felt the buck knife in his pocket he was reminded of how he’d cut his finger the day he’d been given the gift and tearfully told his grandfather he wasn’t responsible enough for the blade. The old man had smiled and said, by thinking he wasn’t, proved that he was.

He called Max again. “We’re about five minutes from starting the attack.”

“Everything is set with Linc and Tiny,” Max told him. “George is standing by with the Robinson and we’re headed into position. Mark called. He and Eric are ready to start their sweep for the missing weapons at first light. Through his network of pilot cronies Tiny was able to get one of the best bush flyers in central Africa.”

“Okay, good.”

“How you doing, Hoss? You don’t sound so good.”

“I’m okay. Just being reminded that getting older sucks.”

“Wait until you have to drag your wrinkled butt out of bed after you hit sixty.”

Juan chuckled. “And with that lovely picture in my mind I’ve got to go.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. See you in a couple hours.”

“I’m putting some beer on ice for you.”

“There’s going to be four of us, so make it a case.” Juan cut the connection.

Mafana sidled up to him as Cabrillo sat and started to tie the molded plastic plate to his prosthetic foot.

The knots were tight, though not as strong as when he’d welded the two together, but for what he had in mind it didn’t need to be.

“Are you ready?” the former rebel asked. “Dawn is less than an hour away and we will need time to get into position.”

Juan stood. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

With Mafana’s help, Cabrillo made his way awkwardly to the parachute. As per his instructions, Mafana’s men had stretched the black nylon across the desert and piled sand along its edges to keep the wind from getting under it and blowing it away. Before securing himself in the rig Juan slung a backpack loaded with rockets for the RPG over his shoulders so it hung across his chest. The tube for the launcher and his MP-5 were tied off below it. He’d already inspected the area where one of the Africans had sewn closed the cuts they had made to get him out of the chute, so there was nothing left for him to do but ignore the knot of apprehension tightening in his gut and strap himself in.

“We will wait for your signal,” Mafana said and shook Cabrillo’s hand. “Tonight you will help save a nation.”

The African rebels jogged back to their vehicles a quarter mile distant. The sound of their engine’s firing came a few moments later. Juan double-checked the knots as he waited and leaned back slightly in preparation for the jolt.

To his credit, the driver of the tow vehicle went easy on the acceleration. The two thousand feet of nylon line they’d cobbled together came taut as the truck inched forward. Cabrillo leaned back even further when the rope tied around his chest began to pull. The plastic insert he’d used to para-ski across the desert started hissing over the sand as the tow truck picked up speed. The parachute pulled clear of the dirt that had been piled on it and when they reached ten miles per hour air began to fill the foil. It shot off the desert floor and yanked at Cabrillo’s risers but they weren’t going fast enough to generate the lift needed to get him airborne.

Because the line was so long, Juan knew if he fell now the driver would never see he was down. He’d be dragged across the ground until he could somehow untie the rope. To keep his balance he had to bend deeply as the truck continued to accelerate, the tension on his risers increasing by the second.

Juan juked left to avoid a rock, almost hit another, and nearly fell backward when the plate skidded out from under him. He lifted both legs from the ground to get the ski back under him, relying on the partially inflated chute to give him a second’s reprieve. His actions nearly collapsed it, but he managed to stay on his feet and find his center of balance once again.

The truck hit twenty miles per hour, then twenty-five. Juan’s legs and knees were burning and then suddenly he felt nothing. He was airborne.

Enough air was flowing across the air foil to overcome his weight and the weight of his gear. The truck continued to pick up speed and Juan sailed ever higher. Soon the altimeter strapped to his wrist read nineteen hundred feet. The ride was exhilarating.

“Parachuting, para-skiing, para-sailing.” He laughed. “All in a day’s work.”

He used his pocket knife to cut away the ropes binding the plate he’d used to ski on his artificial leg. He wished he could have kept the olive-drab piece of plastic as a souvenir but he had no choice if he wanted to make a safe landing.

There was enough slack and give to the rope that his ride was relatively smooth, although not as steady had he been behind a boat where the sport of para-sailing had become popular at resorts all over the globe. The truck down below him would occasionally dip into a valley, jerking Juan like a kite at the end of a string, but it wasn’t too bad.

It was up to Cabrillo to decide when he’d detach himself from the tow line. Behind him the first molten blush of the coming dawn spread like cobalt-hued ink. He knew from their combat briefing on theOregon that sunrise was in fifteen minutes. But as colors spread across the desert he could just make out the blockhouse design of the Devil’s Oasis about a mile away. Without another thought, he untied the rope connected to a D ring on his combat harness. The line whipped out of his hands as the chute rose another hundred or more feet, no longer tethered to the truck.

One of Mafana’s men would be watching for it to tumble out of the sky and the convoy would come to a halt before it could be spotted by a sentry at the prison. The men had scant minutes to get into position.

Juan heaved down on the toggles to give himself the maximum amount of time aloft as the wind carried him toward the old penitentiary. It wasn’t the first occasion tonight that luck remained on his side.

Provided the wind held, he had more than enough height to glide to the prison’s roof.

If anything, the breeze freshened, bearing him along like a leaf. He worked the toggles, changing direction slightly to keep the prison centered between his dangling boots. The sky was still a deep indigo when he crossed over the top of the Devil’s Oasis and no alarms had been sounded. He spilled air from the chute in a controlled descent and touched down so lightly that it felt as if he’d just taken the last step of a flight of stairs.

Turning, he quickly bundled the chute into his arms to keep it from blowing into the prison’s inner courtyard. He shucked off the harness and the backpack of rocket shells and temporarily used them as dead weight to keep the chute in check. He hefted the MP-5 and did a fast reconnoiter of the parapet.

He noted where his team had earlier secured lines to descend into the prison. The ropes had been cut away, but the eyebolts were still drilled into the thick wooden roof. Peering over the outside wall he saw that the sand had been scratched up and he recognized the trails where the bikes had been ridden off.

Two of them looped around toward the main gate while the third, Linc’s, vanished into the wasteland.

There was another set of tracks, a truck’s, judging by their size, that disappeared into the east.

After tying his parachute to one of the eyebolts, Cabrillo quickly designated his targets and found the best vantage point for his attack. He had seven rockets for the RPG-7 and four targets, but he figured that after so many years a couple of the projectiles would be duds. Still, he liked his odds.

He called theOregon . Though Hali Kasim was the ship’s communications director, Linda Ross was coordinating the assault. She answered the call before the first ring had ended. “Linda’s house of pleasure and pain,” she said by way of greeting.

“Put me down for some of the former,” Juan whispered. “I’m in.”

“We expected nothing less. Of course, I’ve seen seventy-year-old grandmothers para-sailing at Cabo, so I’m not all that impressed.” Her light tone vanished. “Tiny took off about fifteen minutes ago. He’ll stay out of range until fifteen minutes after sunup. After that you should be able to talk to Linc over your tactical net.”

There was no need for Cabrillo to further compromise his location by speaking so he said nothing.

“Just want to say good luck,” Linda added, “and get our boys out of there.Oregon out.”

Juan clicked off the phone and settled it in its hard case at his hip.

The three guards lazing by the front gate suddenly came, if not to attention, at least a bit more alert as a door opened directly under where Juan was perched. Ringed by stone crenellations like a medieval castle, Juan had ample cover as he watched a lone figure cross the courtyard, a flashlight clutched in his hand. He spoke to one of the guards for a moment, then retreated the way he’d come.

The full glare of the sun struck Juan’s back as it finally climbed over the horizon. Despite the long shadows he could see three wooden stakes had been driven into the ground against the wall to the left of the main gate. Before light could bathe the enclosed quad Juan plucked his little buck knife from his pocket and with an easy toss threw it toward the execution stakes. It landed and skidded right up against the middle post. It had been the grandfather who’d given him that first knife who’d also taught him horseshoes.

As Juan readied the rocket launcher, men began to trickle onto the parade ground, in ones and twos at first, but soon there were dozens streaming in. He could tell by body language and how they horsed around that the soldiers were eager for the execution. He estimated there were about a hundred. And unfortunately, more than half of them had kept their weapons with them. The buzz of conversation and rough laughter drifted up from below until another door was slammed open.

Juan had to crane his neck to see a pair of escorts leading Eddie, Mike, and Ski from within the prison.

He felt a squeeze of pride in his chest. His crew walked with their shoulders back and heads high, and had their hands not been bound behind their backs he knew their arms would be swinging in step. They were going to their deaths as men.

He clicked on his machine pistol’s laser sight.

EDDIE Seng had seen more than a few executions while under deep cover in China and while those had been carried out with quiet efficiency, the guard commander here was turning this into a show for his men, inspired no doubt by some movie he’d seen on how such things were done.

If he hadn’t been the one trussed up and about to face the firing squad he would have chuckled at the absurdity.

He was a brave man, braver than most, but he also didn’t want to die, not like this—powerless. His thoughts turned to his family. Although his parents had been dead for a couple of years, there were dozens of aunts and uncles in New York, and more cousins than he could count. None of them knew what he did for a living nor would any ask on his infrequent trips home. They simply welcomed him into the fold for as long as he stayed, plied him with more food than he could possibly eat, and made sure he met the children born since his last visit.

He would miss them more than he realized. But they wouldn’t know he was gone, not until Juan showed up with a seven-or eight-digit check, the value of Eddie’s share of the Corporation. No matter what the chairman said to explain how Eddie had amassed such a fortune, he knew they wouldn’t believe him.

They were simple, hardworking people and would assume Eddie had been into something illegal. The check would be thrown away and his name would never be mentioned again.

Eddie clenched his jaw a little tighter and blinked tears from his eyes for bringing his family shame.

He didn’t pay attention to the tiny speck of light flickering at the base of Ski’s neck until his subconscious mind realized the random pattern wasn’t random at all. It was Morse code.

“—au Geste has your back.” Eddie willed himself not to look around as they neared the execution ground. The chairman was here, using a laser, probably the sight from his gun, to send him a message.

The crafty son of a bitch was going to get them out.

“RPG B 4 U tied. Knife base centr pol.”

Eddie understood that Cabrillo was going to use a rocket-propelled-grenade attack to cover them and that there was a knife lying on the ground at the base of the center pole, the one they would likely tie him to since he was sandwiched between Mike and Ski. The plan was brilliant because with guards getting ready to tie them to the stakes their comrades would be less likely to open fire on them.

“Chairman’s here,” Seng told his comrades over the din of jeering soldiers flanking their route. There was no need to say more. They would react to whatever Cabrillo did and adapt to the changing circumstances accordingly. Ski’s only acknowledgment that he’d heard was a slight nod.

“About damn time,” Mike said and a guard slammed the heel of his hand into the back of his head.

A couple of soldiers spat at the prisoners as they passed or tried to trip them up. Eddie barely noticed.

He was focusing on how he would get the knife and mentally ran through the moves he would have to make in order to slice through Ski’s plastic ties.

The phalanx of soldiers opened up as they neared the wooden stakes. Three guards stood behind the poles with lengths of rope to tie them. One of the men leading the parade happened to be looking down when they reached the stakes. He spotted the knife and before anyone else could jump in and take it he snatched it from the ground and jammed it in the pocket of his fatigues.

When he turned to face the condemned he startled at the murderous look Eddie was giving him.

Biggest mistake of your life, pal, Eddie thought and modified his attack plan.

CABRILLO waited with only the corner of his face exposed to the men below, not that any of them were looking anywhere other than at the prisoners. His hand was on the RPG-7’s pistol grip and it would take only a second to swing the weapon onto his shoulder and fire.

The guard commandant stepped through the throng of cheering soldiers, waving and returning casual salutes. He had provided them with some unexpected entertainment and wanted to bask in the glow. He stood in front of his prisoners and held his arms aloft to silence the rowdy crowd.

Juan hoped he could personally take the man down, but in combat there were few guarantees.

The commander started speaking in an African language, his deep voice booming off the confining wall of the parade ground. The men listened and occasionally cheered when he said something particularly inciting.

Cabrillo could imagine what he was saying. Captured three CIA spies, blah, blah, blah. Long live the revolution, etc. etc. etc. Aren’t I the greatest officer you’ve ever had, yada, yada, yada.

Get on with it already.

The commandant finished his ten-minute speech, turned, and nodded to the three men positioned to tie the captives.

Juan twisted around the stone block he was hiding behind and brought the RPG up. As soon as he had one of the doors leading back inside the prison in the rocket launcher’s crude sight he squeezed the trigger and was in motion the instant the missile cleared the tube. The rocket ignited, singing the back of his hand as he raced to where he’d cached the next projectile.

Trailed by a line of white vapor, the five-pound warhead shot across the courtyard and exploded just above the door leading to the former prison’s barracks. The explosion of the shaped charge blew apart the lintel and caused the wall above to partially collapse. Loose rock tumbled across the opening until it was completely blocked.

THE instant Eddie heard the whoosh of the rocket motor igniting he spun around and kicked the guard set to tie him in the side of the head hard enough to send him flying back a half dozen feet. He then stepped to the soldier who’d found the pocketknife. Eddie got one foot behind the man’s legs and continued forward. Though the guard had him by a few inches, Eddie still had the element of surprise and had no trouble tripping him.

They crashed to the ground at the moment the missile detonated against the prison wall. With his hands bound behind him, Eddie used the momentum of the fall to slam his chin into the guard’s throat with enough force to crush his larynx. With his airway closed the soldier began to gag and thrash, clawing at his throat as if he could open it again.

Eddie rolled off him and reached for his pocket, but couldn’t get a hand inside because of the soldier’s spastic dance. He could feel the outline of Cabrillo’s little pocket knife through the fatigues and in a fit of concentration and strength he tore the knife free, coming away with a handful of cloth.

A second RPG arced across the open patch of sky above the courtyard and while Eddie wasn’t paying attention to where it hit, he suspected the chairman was systematically sealing off all entrances into the prison proper. He worked the knife open. Ski obviously figured what was up because he was on the ground less than a foot away with his back toward Eddie. Seng rolled over to him so they were back-to-back and cut the plastic tie binding the big Pole’s hands.

Ski took the knife and sliced through Eddie’s tie. So as not to waste even a fraction of a second Seng rolled away from Ski, knowing the ex-Marine would free Mike Trono. Now able to fight with his hands, Eddie procured an AK-47 from one of the confused guards with a strike to the back of his head. Unlike when he’d knocked Susan Donleavy unconscious, he didn’t hold back. The soldier was dead before his body crumpled into the dirt.

He whirled and saw a guard aiming at where Ski was cutting through Mike’s flex cuffs. Eddie put him down with a double tap that sent him sprawling into several of his comrades. The sound of his shots had been overwhelmed by the volley of autofire now being directed along the prison ramparts. Twenty guns or more were blasting away at the jagged stone crenellations, wreathing the low wall with a cloud of stone chips and dust. Eddie raced toward his teammates, covering them with his assault rifle until they could find cover under one of the trucks parked in the courtyard.

WITH soldiers blasting away along the east and west walls, Cabrillo stayed low and circled the prison.

He loaded another round into the RPG as he ran. He came up hard against the wall opposite the last door that led into the prison. So far none of the guards had recognized his strategy of locking them inside the parade ground, but all it took was one sharp officer to understand what was happening and order men back inside. He knew their first job would be to execute Moses Ndebele. His whole plan hinged on every guard being outside to witness the execution and him being able to prevent them from retreating.

He popped up between two stone blocks and fired, ducking back as a dozen automatic weapons backtracked the RPG’s contrail and peppered his cover position. The air was alive with grit and shattered bullet fragments. The rocket motor didn’t burn evenly, causing the missile to shoot skyward in a complete misfire. He slithered out of the worst of the fusillade and crawled thirty feet, pausing to let the undisciplined fire die down. He slipped the MP-5 over the wall and triggered off half a clip, aiming across to the second floor so as not to accidentally hit his men down below.

In response, the guards redoubled their counterfire, raking the stone as if sheer volume of rounds would bore through the rock. Juan ignored the scream and whine of bullets passing inches over his head and calmly reloaded the RPG. He crawled farther along the roof, coming to the point where he would need to fire at the most oblique possible angle and still hit the last remaining door, but he was at least fifty feet from where the guards were still hammering with their AKs.

The distance he’d covered would buy him perhaps a second before he was spotted again. Then he thought of a better strategy and rolled away from the wall lining the courtyard. He backed from the edge until when he got to his knees he couldn’t see the men down on the ground. And more important, they couldn’t see him. He shuffled forward a couple of inches and could see a little farther into the prison, a little farther down the far wall. He took another couple of tentative steps on his knees. There! He could just make out the Roman-like arch above the distant door but couldn’t see any of the guards milling around.

Cabrillo brought the RPG to his shoulder, aimed carefully, and touched the trigger.

What he couldn’t see and couldn’t know was that a sergeant of the guards had recognized Juan’s tactic and was leading a small squad to the door when the rocket streaked across the courtyard. One of the soldiers was directly under the door’s arch when the shaped charge slammed into the wall. As the explosion blew chunks of rock across the parade ground and cut the squad apart, the concussion from the blast shattered every bone in the lead soldier’s body before he was crushed under an avalanche of debris.

Juan rushed forward so he could see the results of his attack. Though badly damaged, he could still see the dark confines of the prison through the ruined doorway. There were gaps in the rubble large enough for a man to crawl through. He spied a soldier making a break for the door. Cabrillo tripped his machine pistol’s laser sight and when the tiny speck of light appeared between the guard’s shoulders he fired one-handed, forgetting the weapon was on full auto. It didn’t matter that his second, third, and fourth rounds went wild. The first one drilled the guard exactly where he’d aimed. He crashed into the pile of loose stones and lay still.

Cabrillo reloaded the rocket launcher a fifth time, taking a new position to better center the door. A solid sheet of lead rose from the angered soldiers and seemed to fill the sky where he’d been standing moments earlier. He inched forward again so he could see the crown of the door opening and fired off his next round, ducking when he knew the shot to be true. He loaded the Russian antique yet again, hearing the sound of an avalanche over the frenzied fire. When he peeked over the wall he saw the doorway was now a mountain of jumbled stone blocks obscured by a cloud of dust.

The guards could no longer enter the prison proper. It was time to call in the cavalry.

DOWN in the courtyard the commanding officer screamed at the top of his lungs to get his men’s attention. The ambush had set them off like berserkers and, apart from the one sergeant who’d realized the attack was meant to trap them on the parade ground, the men seemed blithely unaware that they were standing in a potential killing field. At any moment he expected gunners on the roof to open up and cut down his command like lambs at the slaughter.

He singled out three of the smallest of his men, slender youths who had a chance to slither through the destroyed doorways and execute Moses Ndebele before the assault force could spirit him away. He also directed some men to open the prison’s main gate, but to do so carefully in case there were more troops waiting outside. With so many weapons firing it was impossible to hear if any of the perimeter alarms had been tripped.

He grunted in satisfaction when he saw one of his officers attempting to erect a long piece of pipe against the eaves so men could scale it and gain access to the roof. As soon as the top of the pipe touched in a notch between two of the stone crenellations, a soldier with an AK-47 slung across his back and no shoes on his feet shimmied up the rusted piece of steel with the agility of a spider.

EDDIE Seng saw the soldier climbing the length of pipe too late. He had scant seconds to aim before the man reached the top of the wall and vanished. With his vantage limited by the truck’s undercarriage, he flipped onto his back to get a better view, raising the assault rifle’s barrel so he had an approximate shot. He was within a hair’s breath of pulling the trigger when the man disappeared and angrily moved his finger away. There was no sense in firing and giving away their position. Juan would have to deal with this new threat on his own. Eddie slid deeper into the shadow cast by the truck. Mike laid a hand on his shoulder, a reassuring gesture meant to tell him there was nothing he could have done.

It did little good.

CABRILLO was hunched over the RPG, loading his second-to-last round. All he had to do was blow the main gates open and Mafana and his men would charge into the prison, freeing him to find Ndebele and Geoffrey Merrick. He clicked the round home and stood.

The sun was still low on the horizon and the shadows it cast were elongated to the point that it was impossible to tell what cast them. The shadow that suddenly emerged next to where he stood hadn’t been there a second ago. Juan whirled and just had time to see one of the guards standing with his back to the courtyard when the man’s AK opened up, its muzzle flash like a strobe light aimed into his eyes.

Juan dove left, hit the wooden roof with his shoulder, and before the guard could adjust to the fact his quarry had avoided the ambush, he had the RPG tucked against his flank. He pulled the trigger, aiming by instinct rather than sight.

The rocket leapt from the barrel in a cloud of stinging gas. The guard’s body didn’t provide enough resistance to set off the explosive head when it slammed into his chest, but the kinetic energy of a five-pound projectile traveling at a thousand feet per second did more than enough damage. With his ribs crushed back against his spine the guard was flung off the roof like a limp doll. He landed amid a throng of his comrades thirty feet from the wall where he’d been standing, and this time the force of the impact was enough to detonate the shaped charge. The explosion tore through flesh and bone, leaving a smoking crater rimmed with the dead and injured.

Juan had just one last round for the RPG and if it failed so would the assault. He fitted it hastily, rushed forward to get a bead on the thick slabs of wood that protected the main entrance into the prison, and fired, dimly aware that there were a cluster of men about to open the doors.

The rocket ran true and hit the gate dead center, but the projectile failed to detonate. The guards who’d dropped flat when the missile flashed over their heads got to their feet slowly, nervous laughter turning into cheers when they realized they’d been spared.

Seeing what happened, Cabrillo flipped his machine pistol off his back. As soon as the laser sight speared out in the area around the embedded rocket he opened fire. Splinters erupted from the door as the hot-loaded 9-mm rounds chewed into the wood. Just before the magazine ran dry a bullet struck the dormant projectile. The resulting explosion scythed down the men who’d been celebrating their good fortune moments earlier and blew the door apart in a shower of smoldering boards.

Just beyond the sensor range of the perimeter alarms, four trucks idled, their occupants all battle-hardened veterans of one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars and all ready to lay down their lives for the one man they thought could pull their nation back from the brink of ruin.

22

“LAWRENCEof Arabia calling Beau Geste. Come in, Beau.”

So exhausted by the past forty-eight hours—and especially the past twelve—Cabrillo had forgotten all about the tactical radio he was wearing and for a moment thought he was hearing voices. Then he remembered that Lawrence of Arabia was Linc’s call sign.

“Damn, Larry,” Juan radioed back. “Am I glad to hear you.”

“Just saw an explosion at the main gates and looks like our new allies are sweeping in.”

“Affirmative. What’s your position?”

“We’re about three miles out at five thousand feet. Eagle-eye Gunderson saw the blast. Are you ready for us to land yet?”

“That’s a negative,” Cabrillo replied. “I still have to secure our passengers and we need to make sure Mafana’s men can keep the guards bottled up long enough for you to come in.”

“No problem, we’ll keep circling,” Linc said, then added with humor in his deep baritone, “Danger pays by the hour, anyway.”

Juan slammed a fresh magazine into the receiver of his MP-5 and racked the bolt to chamber a round.

Before anyone else tried to outflank him by climbing onto the roof he dashed to where his parachute billowed over the outside wall of the prison, one end held fast by one of the eyebolts his men had installed earlier—when this was supposed to have been a simple clandestine hostage rescue from a bunch of long-haired ecoterrorists.

The battle in the courtyard now sounded like World War Three as the Zimbabweans fought each other in such close quarters that their assault rifles were used as clubs as much as guns.

Clutching the fabric of the chute, Juan slipped over the edge of the roof so his feet dangled three stories above the desert floor. He lowered himself slowly and carefully. The nylon was as slick as silk. When he reached the end of the writhing mass of parachute cloth he was still a good three feet above the window opening. He planted his boots against the wall, tucked his knees against his chest, and kicked off as hard as he could.

His body pendulumed away from the prison for nearly ten feet before gravity took hold of him and sent him careening back toward the building. It felt like his knees would explode when he slammed into the rough stone, but the experiment told him he could make the attempt, but his timing would have to be perfect.

Again he flexed his legs and launched himself into space, his grip on the chute like iron. When he reached the apex of his swing, he focused on nothing but the dark opening that gave entry into the prison. He started arcing down, building up speed, and more importantly angular momentum. Like a stone released from a sling, Juan let go when his feet were pointed at the window.

He flew through the window, clearing the bottom sill by inches and smashed onto the floor, rolling until he came up hard against the iron railing that overlooked the floors below. The sound of his body slamming into the loose railing echoed in the cavernous cell block.

He groaned as he got to his feet, knowing that in a couple of hours his back was going to be zebra-striped with evenly spaced purple bruises.

Feeling no need to be stealthy in this block of cells after such a loud entrance, Cabrillo rushed down the stairs. He already knew from Eddie’s reports to Linc that this particular section of the prison was empty.

On the ground floor he paused at the open door, checking the hallway in both directions, thankful that the generator was still powering the lights. When he started off to the right he took the precaution of smashing the exposed bulbs as he went. He had no intention of leaving the prison the way he had come in and he didn’t want to make it any easier for a guard who managed to enter through the blown-up doorways.

He peered around a corner, saw a chair outside a large door, exactly how Eddie had described the scene where they were holding Merrick. Although their original mission had been to rescue the scientist, Cabrillo’s first obligation now rested with getting Moses Ndebele to safety. He trotted past the door, imagining that Merrick’s kidnappers were holed up inside, not knowing how to react to the unfolding situation.

The prison never really shed the heat it absorbed during the torturous days, and now that the dawn had arrived the passageway was growing hotter. Sweat ran from Cabrillo’s pores as he jogged. He was halfway down the long hall when motion ahead caught his eye. Two slightly built guards ran toward him from the opposite direction. They were much closer to the entrance to the next cell block than Cabrillo, and their presence told him that this was where they were holding their prize prisoner.

Juan dove flat, his elbows scraping against the stone floor as he aimed his machine pistol. He fired a wild spray that forced the soldiers back the way they’d come and around another bend.

They must have climbed through the debris piled outside the doors, he thought absently and tried to ignore the fact he was too exposed and out-gunned. He slithered back to where the hallway was much darker and rolled to the opposite wall to confuse them. He fired every time one of the guards tried to check the hallway, filling the air with the stench of burned gunpowder. The area around the Chairman was littered with stumpy brass shell casings.

He slid across the hall again a moment before one of the soldiers laid down a blistering barrage of cover fire. Bits of stone and hot copper bullets seemed to fill the corridor. Juan tried to suppress the burst of autofire with a return volley, but the guard hung tough and continued to shoot.

His partner dashed from around the corner to add his gun. While neither of them could see Cabrillo in the darkened passage, the chance of a lucky shot doubled. The first guard broke from his position and raced for the entrance to the cell block. Either the door hadn’t been locked or he’d shot away the mechanism because he disappeared inside before Juan could take him down.

Cabrillo had seconds before the guard assassinated Moses Ndebele. In what must have seemed like reckless rage, he launched himself from the floor and out of the murky shadows. His gun spit flame as he ran, firing from the hip. The beam from his laser sight was a ruby line cutting through the smoke. It finally settled on the guard’s torso; the next three rounds hit center mass and tossed him off his feet.

Cabrillo kept sprinting. Rather than slow to enter through the open door to the cell block, he careened off the stout jamb, absorbing the blow on his shoulder with barely a check in speed.

A line of cells was directly in front of him, each enclosure fronted by iron bars. They all appeared empty.

For all he knew Ndebele could be on the second or third floor and the guard had too much of a head start to find him. Then, over the sounds of his ragged breathing and hammering heart, he heard voices coming from behind the cells. The voice was melodious, soothing, not the plaintive cries of the condemned, but rather the fatherly understanding of a priest granting absolution.

He raced around the corner. The guard was just outside of one of the cells while a man wearing a filthy prison uniform stood next to the bars, not two feet away from the soldier aiming at his head with an AK-47. Moses Ndebele stood calmly, with his arms at his side as if he weren’t facing his executioner but rather talking with a friend he hadn’t seen in while.

Juan raised his gun to his shoulder, the laser never wavering from the guard’s shiny forehead as the African turned at the sound of Cabrillo coming to a halt thirty feet away. The soldier started to draw down on his weapon in order to engage but wouldn’t have the time before Juan pulled the trigger. The bolt crashed against an empty chamber. The click of metal on metal was loud but at the same time nothing compared to what was supposed to happen.

The guard had his weapon aimed halfway between Juan and Moses Ndebele. He wasted a half second of thought between his sworn duty and the need to eliminate Cabrillo. He must have figured he could riddle the main rival of his nation’s dictator and still gun down Juan before Cabrillo could reload the machine pistol or draw a handgun because he started to turn back toward Ndebele.

Juan let the Heckler & Koch drop from his hands and kicked his artificial limb up into his chest so he could wrap his hands around his calf, his knee braced against his shoulder as though he were holding a gun.

The barrel of the soldier’s AK was just a couple of arc degrees from pointing at Ndebele when Juan’s fingers found a button recessed into the touch plastic exterior of his combat leg. It was a safety device that allowed him to depress another button on the opposite side of the limb.

Integrated within the prosthesis was one more trick Kevin Nixon in theOregon ’s Magic Shop had devised—an eighteen-inch-long, nickel-pipe in .44-caliber. The dual triggers guaranteed the weapon would never discharge accidentally. When Juan hit the second one the single-shot gun went off with an explosion that shook dirt from the rafters and blew a nearly half-inch hole through the bottom of his boot.

The recoil sent him tumbling. He picked himself up quickly, yanking at his pants cuff so he could draw the Kel-Tec .380 automatic pistol. He needn’t have bothered. The hollow-point .44-caliber slug had hit the guard in the right arm as he stood in profile to Cabrillo and transited his entire body through his chest cavity, shredding his internal organs. The exit wound in his opposite shoulder was the size of a dinner plate.

Moses Ndebele looked at Juan in stunned silence as the chairman rammed a fresh magazine into his machine pistol and returned the Kel-Tec to its hiding place inside his leg. There were blood splatters on his prison uniform and a trickle of crimson on one cheek. Juan noticed the burn marks on Ndebele’s bare arms, the swelling around his eyes and mouth, and how he stood with all his weight on one leg. Juan looked down at Ndebele’s bare feet. One was normal, the other was so swollen it resembled a football.

He guessed every bone from ankle to toe had been broken.

“Mr. Ndebele, I am here with an army of your followers headed by a man named Mafana. We’re getting you out of here.”

The African leader shook his head. “The damned fool. I told him when they first imprisoned me not to try something like this, but I should have known he wouldn’t listen. My old friend Mafana chooses the orders he wishes to obey.”

Juan motioned him away from the cell door so he could shoot the lock open. Ndebele had to hop to keep his damaged foot from touching the ground. “I’ve got a friend named Max who pulls the same thing on me.” Juan glanced up to catch Ndebele’s eye. “And more often than not he’s right about which ones to disregard.”

He popped two rounds into the old iron lock and gave the door a heave. It slid open on protesting hinges. Ndebele made to hobble out of the cell but Juan held up a hand.

“We’re going out another way.”

When researching the Devil’s Oasis, Linda Ross had come across the account of a prisoner who tried to widen the six-inch sewer holes inside the lower-tier cells. A prison trustee checked them every other day and when he found that the man had used a spoon or other implement to scrape away at the foot-thick stone in order to make the hole big enough to escape through he immediately reported it to the guards.

They systematically crammed the prisoner down the small opening, breaking whatever bones necessary until only his head remained inside the cell.

No one else ever tried to escape that way again.

Juan handed the MP-5 to Ndebele asking him to cover them and sat next to the hole. He hurriedly took off his boot and retrieved the remainder of his cache of plastic explosives. He molded the plastique into a long strand that he affixed in a ring at the bottom of the hole. He plucked the detonator from behind his leg’s ankle joint and set the timer for one minute, enough time to lead Ndebele safely away.

With his boot in hand he stuck the timer into the soft explosive and left the cell with Moses draped over his shoulder in order to protect the man’s foot. The bomb went off like a volcano, sending a geyser of flame, smoke, and chunks of stone high enough to ricochet off the ceiling. Cabrillo had his boot back on, but didn’t bother to lace it when he returned to the cell. As he’d anticipated, the charge had been more than enough for the job. The hole was now five feet wide, its jagged edges blackened by the blast.

He dropped through the opening, and helped Ndebele descend. The man sucked air through his teeth when his broken foot brushed against the ground under the prison.

“You okay?”

“I think maybe when the time comes I will ask you where you got your artificial leg. I don’t think I will have this foot much longer.”

“Don’t worry, I know a pretty good doctor.”

“He can’t be that good if you lost your leg.”

“Believe me, she is—she only started working for me after my original was blown off.”

Together they struggled through the tunnel that allowed the constant desert winds to desiccate the human waste that once fell from above and eliminate the need for emptying slop buckets.

The confines were tight and they had to crawl on elbows and knees in the dirt. Juan led them to the eastern side of the prison, closest to the airstrip. Fortunately, the wind was at their backs so the blowing sand didn’t scour their faces. It took five minutes to reach the perimeter of the building. The sunlight glaring through the opening was especially bright after the dim confines of the penitentiary. The two men lay side by side just short of the opening.

Cabrillo keyed his radio. “Beau Geste to Lawrence of Arabia. Can you hear me, Larry?”

“Five by five, Beau,” Linc answered back. “What’s your situation?”

“I have the native guest with me now. We’ve made it to the exterior wall. I’m looking at the airstrip.

Give me fifteen minutes to secure the primary target and come pick us up. Our boys will know to make a break for it when they see the plane.”

“Negative, Beau. From the looks of it our allies are taking a hell of a pounding in there. They won’t last fifteen minutes. I’m coming in now.”

“Then give me ten minutes.”

“Chairman, I ain’t foolin’. You don’t have it. If we don’t come in now there won’t be enough of Mafana’s men left to count on one finger. This wasn’t a suicide operation. We owe it to them to cover their retreat.” Even as Linc spoke, the big cargo plane arrowed out of the sky. “I’ve also just gotten word from Max that our situation has changed somewhat.”

By landing now, Linc had forced Cabrillo’s hand. Moses would never make it to the airstrip unaided.

Juan would have to carry him. The plane was too vulnerable on the ground to wait for him to return to the prison and rescue Geoffrey Merrick. And as soon as Mafana and his men began their retreat from the prison, the guards would swarm after them in hot pursuit. Without aerial cover they would be slaughtered out on the open desert.

As for whatever change Max Hanley was talking about, Juan would have to trust that his second in command had a much better grasp of the overall operational picture.

The old de Havilland Caribou was an awkward-looking aircraft, with a rudder that was as tall as a three-story building and a cockpit hunched over a blunt nose. The high wings allowed for it to carry a large payload for its size and also to make incredibly short takeoff and landing runs. The particular aircraft Tiny Gunderson had rented was painted white, with a faded blue strip running the length of the fuselage.

Juan saw that his chief pilot had lined up on the runway for his final approach. It was time to go.

“Come on,” he said to Moses Ndebele and crept out from their position under the prison. The sound of gunfire in the courtyard was muted by the building’s thick walls, but it still sounded as though a thousand men were in a fight for their lives.

When both men were on their feet Juan transferred his H&K to his left hand and stooped to lift the African leader over his shoulder. Ndebele was a tall man, but years of imprisonment had shrunk him to little more than skin and bones. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds.

Normally Cabrillo wouldn’t have had a problem carrying such a burden, however, his body was exhausted by hours of unrelenting abuse.

Juan straightened his legs, his mouth a tight, grim line. Once he had Ndebele settled on his shoulder he took off in a loping gait. His boots sank into the sand as he jogged, taxing his quivering legs and aching back with every pace. He kept a wary eye on the side of the prison where the entrance doors were located but so far none of Mafana’s men had tried to flee. They remained engaged with the guards, knowing that the longer they gutted it out the better chance their leader had of escaping.

The seventy-foot-long twin-engine cargo plane touched down when Cabrillo was halfway to the landing strip. Tiny reversed the pitch of the propellers and gunned the motors, kicking up a veritable sandstorm with the prop wash that completely obscured the aircraft. The maneuver cut the distance he needed to land to less than six hundred feet, leaving more than enough room to take off into the wind without backtracking to the end of the runway. Gunderson feathered the props so they no longer bit into the air but barely cut power to the 1,500-horsepower engines. The airframe shuddered with unreleased energy.

Motion to Juan’s left caught his eye. He glanced over to see one of Mafana’s trucks emerge from the prison. Men in the back continued to fire into the courtyard, while the driver raced for the plane.

Moments later the other three trucks appeared. They weren’t going anywhere near as fast. The rescuers were trying to further delay the guards from breaking out.

Juan turned his attention back to the Caribou. The cargo ramp was coming down, Franklin Lincoln standing at its very tip with an assault carbine in his hands. He waved Juan on but kept his attention focused on the approaching truck. There was another black man with him, one of Mafana’s men whom Juan had sent to rendezvous with the plane the night before.

The ground under Cabrillo’s feet firmed as he reached the gravel runway and he put on a burst of speed, adrenaline allowing him to ignore the pain for a few minutes more.

Juan reached the plane and lurched drunkenly up the ramp a few seconds before the lead truck braked just beyond the edge of the ramp. Doc Huxley was waiting with her medical cases. She’d strung saline drip bags to a wire running along the ceiling, the cannulas ready to replace any blood the fighters had lost.

Juan laid Ndebele on one of the nylon mesh bench seats and turned to see what he could do to help.

Linc already had the truck’s rear gate open. There were a dozen wounded men strewn on the floor and over the sound of the roaring engines Juan could hear their agony. Blood drizzled from the tailgate.

Lincoln lifted the first man out and carried him into the aircraft’s hold. Ski was right behind him, lugging another of the wounded. Mike and Eddie carried a third between them, a great bear of a man with blood saturating his pants from the thighs down. Juan helped an ambulatory man step to the ground. He cradled his arm to his chest. It was Mafana, and his face was ashen, but when he saw Moses Ndebele sitting up against a bulkhead he cried out in joy. The two wounded men greeted each other as best they could.

Back at the prison, the remaining trucks from the original convoy took off into the desert, their wheels kicking up spiraling columns of dust. Moments later, two other vehicles emerged. One of them started after the fleeing four-wheel drives while the second turned for the airstrip.

“Chairman,” Linc shouted over the noise as he stepped onto the ramp carrying another of the injured.

“Last one. Tell Tiny to get us out of here.”

Juan waved in acknowledgment and threaded his way forward. Tiny was leaning out of his seat, and when he saw Cabrillo give him a thumbs-up he turned his attention back to the controls. He slowly changed the propellers’ angle of attack and the big aircraft began to roll.

Cabrillo headed aft again. Julia was cutting away one man’s bush jacket to expose a pair of bullet holes in his chest. The wounds bubbled. His lungs had been punctured. Undaunted by the unsanitary conditions or the bumpiness of the takeoff, she got to work on triage.

“Did you have to leave it to the last second?” Eddie asked when Juan approached. He was grinning.

Cabrillo shook his outstretched hand. “You know what a procrastinator I can be. You guys okay?”

“Couple more gray hairs, but none the worse. One of these days you’re going to have to tell me how you rustled up an army in the middle of nowhere.”

“Great magicians never divulge their secrets.”

The plane continued to pick up speed and was soon outpacing the guards’ truck. Through the open ramp Juan could see them fire off a few rounds in frustration before the driver braked hard and turned to give chase to the rest of Mafana’s men. A third and then fourth truck roared out of the prison gate after them.

Tiny hauled back on the yoke and the old Caribou lifted off the rough field. The vibrations that had built until Juan was sure he’d lose a filling finally evened out. Mindful that the ramp would have to remain open, the patients were moved to the front of the aircraft, leaving the area at the rear open. Linc stood on the ramp, a safety line stretching from a D ring on the floor to the rear of his combat vest. He wore a helmet with a microphone so he could talk with Tiny in the cockpit. There was a long crate at his feet.

Juan clipped himself in, too, and cautiously approached the big SEAL. Hot wind whipped through the cabin as Tiny banked the plane to come in behind the guards’ vehicles. With their newer trucks they had already eaten away half the lead Mafana’s troops had managed to gain on them.

The trucks were approaching a deep valley between towering dunes when the plane hurtled over the two sets of vehicles. There was less than a half mile separating them. Tiny kept them at a thousand feet as he flew along the length of the valley, but in an instant the valley came to a sudden end. Rather than opening up again onto open desert, the valley was only three miles long, a dead end. Its head was a sloping dune so steep that the trucks would have to slow to a walking pace to reach the summit.

“Bring us around again,” Linc shouted into his mike. “Come up behind them.”

He motioned for Mike and Eddie to join them. The two men quickly got themselves secured, leaning over to maintain their balance as the plane banked around. Linc opened the crate. Inside were four of Mafana’s RPGs. They were the reason Juan had sent one of Mafana’s men to hook up with Linc.

Linc handed one of the rocket-propelled grenade launchers to each of them.

“This is going to have to be some pretty fancy shooting,” Mike shouted dubiously. “Four trucks. Four RPGs. We’re doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour and they must be close to fifty.”

“Ye of little faith,” Linc yelled back.

The plane evened out again at the entrance to the valley. Tiny took them lower, fighting updrafts of hot air lofting off the desert floor. The dunes flashed by no more than a hundred feet from the wing tips. Linc was listening to the pilot as he counted down how long it would be before they shot over the guards’

convoy. When he lifted the RPG to his shoulder the other three did likewise.

He pointed at Juan and Ski. “Aim at the base of the dune to the left of the convoy. Mike and I will take the right. Drop the grenades about twenty yards in front of the lead vehicle.”

Tiny took them lower still, and then gained elevation quickly when the plane came under fire from below.

He steadied the Caribou just as they passed the last truck in line. For a fleeting second, Juan and the others were looking down at the convoy and it appeared that every gun the guards had was blazing away at them.

“Now!”

They triggered the RPGs simultaneously. The four rockets popped from their tubes and ignited, their white contrails corkscrewing through the clear air. The plane had overshot Mafana’s trucks by the time the warheads slammed into the base of the dunes. The shaped charges went off in blinding eruptions of sand. And while they seemed puny compared to the massive scale of the dunes, the explosions had their desired effect.

The equilibrium of angle and height that held the dunes in place was thrown off by the blasts. A trickle of sand began to slide down each face, accelerating and growing until it looked like both sides of the canyon were racing for each other. And caught in the middle was the guards’ convoy.

The twin landslides crashed onto the valley floor. The right-side avalanche had been going a bit faster than its partner so when it slammed into the convoy, the four vehicles were blown onto their sides. Men and weapons were tossed from the beds of the trucks only to be struck by the second wall of sand as it careened into them, burying everything under thirty or more feet of earth.

A cloud of dust was all that marked their grave.

Linc hit the button to close the ramp and all four men stepped back.

“What did I tell you?” Linc grinned at Mike. “Piece of cake.”

“Lucky thing this valley was here,” Mike retorted.

“Lucky, my butt. I saw it when I hightailed it out last night. Juan had Mafana’s men drive here specifically so we could take out all the guards in one fell swoop.”

“Pretty slick, Chairman,” Trono conceded.

Juan didn’t try to hide his self-satisfied smile. “That it was. That it was.” He turned his attention back to Lincoln. “Does Max have everything set?”

“TheOregon ’s tied to the dock in Swakopmund. Max will meet us at the airport with a flatbed truck carrying an empty shipping container. We load the wounded in and hop aboard ourselves. Max will then drive down to the wharf, where a Customs inspector with a pocket bulging with baksheesh will sign off on the bill of lading and we get hoisted onto the ship.”

“And Mafana’s men are going to drive through to Windhoek,” Juan concluded, “where they can fly out to wherever we can find Ndebele a safe haven.” His tone soured. “All well and good, except we didn’t rescue Geoffrey Merrick and have lost any chance to find him again. I’m sure his kidnappers left the Devil’s Oasis five seconds after the guards.”

“Ye of so little faith,” Linc said for the second time with a sad shake of his head.

NINA Visser was sitting in the shade of a tarp anchored to the bed of their truck when she heard a buzzing sound. She had been writing in her journal, a habit she’d kept up since her early teens. She’d filled volumes of notebooks over the years, knowing someday it would be an important resource for her biographer. That she would be important enough to need a book written about her life was something she’d never doubted. She was going to be one of the great champions of the environmental movement, like Robert Hunter and Paul Watson, Greenpeace’s cofounders.

Of course the current operation wouldn’t be included. This was one blow she would strike from the shadows. She was only writing out of habit and knew she would have to destroy this journal and any others that mentioned her involvement with Dan Singer’s scheme.

She closed the notebook and slid her pen into the spiral binding. Crawling out from under the tarp was like opening the door of an oven. The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly. She stood, dusted off the seat of her pants, and shielded her eyes from the sun, searching the sky for the plane Danny had promised. Even with dark sunglasses it took her a few seconds to spot the little jewel glinting in the sky.

A couple of her friends crawled out from the tarp to join her, including Susan. They were all tired from the drive, and thirsty because they hadn’t packed enough water.

Merrick was faring the worst since he was bound and gagged and left leaning against the side of the truck, where there was only a sliver of shadow. He hadn’t gained consciousness since being injected with the heroin and his sunburned face was rimmed with dried sweat. Flies buzzed around his wound.

The plane made a pass of the dirt runway and everyone waved as it overshot them. The pilot wagged the aircraft’s wings and circled back. It floated along the runway for a hundred feet before the pilot could finally get it down. He quickly throttled back and taxied to where the truck was parked on the edge of the field. The deserted town was a few hundred yards behind them, a clutch of crumbling buildings that the desert was slowly consuming.

A ramp at the rear of the aircraft slowly lowered, reminding Nina of a medieval drawbridge. A man she didn’t recognize emerged and approached the group. “Nina?” he asked, yelling over the engines noise.

Nina stepped toward him. “I’m Nina Visser.”

“Hi,” he said in a friendly tone. “Dan Singer wanted me to tell you that the United States’ government has a program called Echelon. With it they can listen to just about any electronic conversation in the world.”

“So?”

“You should be more careful what you say over a satellite phone, ’cause someone was listening last night.” Even as his words were sinking in, Cabrillo dropped his easy demeanor and whipped a pistol from behind his back, aiming it at Nina Visser’s tall forehead. Three more men charged down the Caribou’s ramp, led by Linc. Each was armed with an MP-5 machine pistol and they swept their guns from person to person. “Hope you guys like it out here,” Juan continued. “We’re on a rather tight schedule and don’t have time to haul you in to the police.”

One of the environmentalist fanatics shifted his weight to lean closer to their truck. Juan fired a bullet close enough to his foot to gouge the edge of his rubber-soled boot. “Think again.”

Linc kept the environmentalists covered, clearing the way for Juan to cut Geoff Merrick free while the other two Corporation men bound each of the kidnappers with plastic flex cuffs. Merrick was unconscious and his shirt was caked with dried blood. Julia was aboard theOregon tending to the wounded freedom fighters from Zimbabwe, but one of her orderlies had made the flight. Juan turned Merrick over to the medico and stepped back out into the sunlight carrying two jerry cans of water.

“If you ration this it should last a week or so.” He tossed the cans into the back of the truck.

He searched the vehicle and found Nina’s satellite phone in the glove compartment. He also came away with a couple of assault rifles and a pistol.

“Kids shouldn’t play with guns,” he said over his shoulder as he returned to the plane. Then he paused and came back to the group. “I almost forgot something.”

He scanned their faces and spotted the person he wanted trying to hide behind a large bearded kid. Juan walked over and yanked Susan Donleavy’s arm. The guy protecting her made to swing at Cabrillo’s head. The effort was clumsy, and Juan easily ducked the blow, coming up with his nine millimeter pressed firmly between the collegian’s startled eyes. “Care to try that again?”

The kid stepped back. Juan cinched Susan Donleavy’s cuffs tight enough to let her know there was going to be worse to come, and frog-marched her to the plane. At the ramp he paused and addressed the two team members who were going to remain behind. They had manhandled a rubber bladder of fuel for the truck off the plane. “You know the drill?”

“We’ll drive about thirty miles deeper into the desert and dump them.”

“That way the plane Singer sent will never find them,” Juan said. “Just don’t forget to get the GPS

coordinates so we can get them later.”

“Then we drive back to Windhoek, stash the truck someplace, and get a hotel room.”

“Check in with the ship as soon as you arrive,” Juan said and shook their hands. “Maybe we can get you out before we go after the guns up north in the Congo.”

Just as Cabrillo was about to disappear inside the Caribou with his prisoner, he shouted at the environmentalists, “See you in a week.”

Linc trotted after him, and as soon as he was aboard Tiny gunned the engines. Ninety seconds after touching down they were aloft again, leaving behind eight slack-jawed, would-be ecoterrorists who never knew what hit them.

23

“WELCOMEback, Chairman,” Max Hanley said when Juan reached the top of theOregon ’s boarding ladder.

The two shook hands. “Good to be back,” Cabrillo said, fighting to keep his eyes open. “The past twelve hours have been about the worst of my life.” He turned to wave down at Justus Ulenga, the Namibian captain of thePinguin , the boat Sloane Macintyre and Tony Reardon had been aboard when they had been chased. Juan had contracted the fisherman at Terrace Bay, where he’d been lying low following the attack on his boat.

The affable captain tipped his baseball cap back at Cabrillo, grinning broadly because of the thick sheaf of money he’d been paid for the simple job of ferrying Juan’s party to where the freighter loitered just outside Namibia’s twelve-mile limit. As soon as his boat had motored a good distance from theOregon , the massive freighter began accelerating northward, ersatz smoke pouring from her single funnel.

Geoffrey Merrick had been hoisted onto the deck in a medical basket. Julia Huxley was already hunched over him, her lab coat dragging in a hardened pool of oil. Under it she wore blood-smeared scrubs. She’d been patching together wounded men since the first moment the container Max had used to transfer the soldiers to the ship had been opened. With her were two orderlies standing by to bring Merrick down to surgery, but she wanted to do an assessment as quickly as possible.

A blindfolded Susan Donleavy had been escorted to the ship’s brig by Mike, Ski, and Eddie as soon as she’d set foot on theOregon . It was plain to see that the fact that no one had said a word to her since Juan had nabbed her in the desert was wearing on her mind. Though not yet defeated, her façade was cracking.

“What do you think, Doc?” Juan asked when Julia pulled her stethoscope from Merrick’s bare chest.

“Lungs are clear but his heartbeat’s weak.” She glanced at the saline drip bag one of her people was holding above Merrick’s prone form. “That’s the third unit of saline he’s taken. I want to get some blood in him to get his pressure up before I go after the bullet that’s still in the wound. I don’t like that he’s unconscious.”

“Could it be the heroin they gave him back at the Devil’s Oasis?”

“It should be out of his system by now. It’s something else. He’s also spiking a fever and the wound looks infected. I need to get him on antibiotics.”

“What about the others? Moses Ndebele?”

Her eyes clouded over. “I lost two of them. I’ve got one more that’s touch-and-go. The others were mainly flesh wounds. So long as no one shows an infection they should be fine. Moses is a bloody mess.

The human foot has twenty-six bones. I counted fifty-eight separate pieces of bone on his X-ray before I gave up. If he’s going to keep it we need to get him to an orthopedic specialist within a couple of days.”

Cabrillo nodded, but said nothing.

“How are you doing?” Hux asked him.

“I feel worse than I look,” Juan said with a tired smile.

“Then you must feel like crap, because you look like hell.”

“Is that your official medical diagnosis?”

Julia pressed her palm to his forehead like a mother checking a child for a fever. “Yup.” She motioned for her people to lift Merrick’s stretcher and started for the nearest hatch. “I’ll be below if you need me.”

Cabrillo suddenly called out to her, having remembered something he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten.

“Julia, how’s Sloane doing?”

“She’s great. I kicked her out of medical, and then out of the guest cabin because I needed it as a recovery room. I even put her to work as a candy striper. She’s bunking with Linda. She wanted to be up here to meet you but I ordered her to bed. We’ve had a busy few hours and she’s still weak.”

“Thanks,” Juan said with relief as Julia and her team vanished into the ship.

Max sidled up next to him, his pipe emitting a fragrant blend of apple and cedar. “That was a hell of a premonition, getting me to contact Langston and tapping into Echelon.”

One of Juan’s first acts when he learned that Geoffrey Merrick’s rescue had fallen apart was to get Max to lean on Overholt in order to utilize the NSA’s Echelon program. At any given second there were hundreds of millions of electronic data transfers taking place over the globe: cell phones, regular phones, faxes, sat phones, radios, e-mails, and Web postings. There were acres of linked computers at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that trawled the bandwidths looking for specific phrases or words that might be of interest to American intelligence. Though not designed to be a real-time eavesdropping tool, with the right parameters programmed into the system—like a call originating at the Devil’s Oasis’

geographic location and containing such terms asMerrick ,Singer ,hostage ,rescue ,Donleavy —Echelon could find that needle in the cyber haystack. A transcript of Nina Visser’s conversation to Daniel Singer was e-mailed to Max aboard theOregon three minutes after the call had ended.

“I had a feeling that after our boys were caught whoever Singer had left in charge at the prison would want to let him know what was going on and get some new marching orders.” Juan ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to try to relieve some of the fatigue. “They’re a bunch of amateurs. They wouldn’t have contingency plans in place.”

“What did you do with the rest of the kidnappers?” Max asked. His pipe had gone out and there was too much of a breeze to relight it.

Juan started walking toward a hatchway, his mind already in his glass-enclosed shower with the heat cranked as high as he could stand it. Max kept pace. “Left them out there with enough water to last a week. I’ll have Lang contact Interpol. They can coordinate with Namibian authorities to pick them up and return them to Switzerland to face kidnap charges, with a charge of attempted murder for Susan Donleavy.”

“Why bring her back here? Why not let her rot with the rest of them?”

Cabrillo stopped walking and turned to his old friend. “Because the NSA couldn’t pinpoint Singer’s location and I know she has it and because this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. Kidnapping Merrick was only the opening gambit to whatever his former partner has planned. She and I are going to have a nice long talk.”

A moment later they reached Juan’s cabin and kept talking as Juan stripped out of his filthy uniform and tossed the clothes in a hamper. He threw his boots into the trash but first poured out a quarter cup of sand that had entered the shoe through the .44 caliber bullet hole. “Good thing I couldn’t feel that,” he remarked casually. He unhooked his combat leg and set it aside, planning on giving it to the Magic Shop staff so they could reload the gun and clean the grit out of the mechanicals.

“Mark and Eric checked in about an hour ago,” Max said. He sat on the edge of the copper Jacuzzi tub while Juan climbed though the banks of steam erupting from the shower. “They’ve covered about a thousand square miles, but there’s still no sign of the guns or Samuel Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution.”

“What about the CIA?” Juan called over the sound of water beating against his skin. “Any of their assets in the Congo have a bead on Makambo?”

“Nothing. It’s like the guy vanishes into thin air whenever he wants to.”

“One guy can vanish. Not five or six hundred of his followers. How did Murph set up his search?”

“They started from the dock and have been flying wider and wider circles, overlapping the radio tag’s range by about twenty miles just to be safe.”

“The river is the border between the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Juan said. “Are they staying south of it?”

“Similarities to their names aside, relations between the two countries are a mess. They couldn’t get permission to cross into the R of C, so yeah, they’re staying south of the border.”

“What do you bet Makambo took the weapons north?”

“It’s possible,” Max agreed. “If Congo’s northern neighbors are shielding his army it could explain why he’s never been caught.”

“We’ve only got a few more hours until the tags run out of their batteries.” Juan shut off the water and opened the door. He was clean but scantly refreshed. Max handed him a thick Brazilian cotton towel.

“Call Mark and have him do whatever he has to in order to get across that border and take a listen.

Those guns aren’t more than a hundred and fifty miles from the river. I’m sure of it.”

“I’ll call him now,” Max said and levered himself from his perch.

Juan kept his hair short enough so he didn’t need to brush it. He put on deodorant and decided he looked more dangerous with thirty hours of beard so he left his straight razor on the bathroom counter.

The dark circles under his eyes and their red rims gave him a demonic cast. He dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt. He called down to the Magic Shop for a tech to get his combat leg and on the way to the ship’s hold he stopped in to grab a sandwich from the galley.

Linda Ross was waiting outside the hold. She was holding a BlackBerry that was receiving signals from the shipboard Wi-Fi network.

“How’s our guest?” Juan asked as he approached.

“Take a look yourself.” She tilted the small device so he could see the screen. “Oh, and I want to congratulate you on pulling off the rescue.”

“I had a lot of help.”

Susan Donleavy was strapped to a stainless-steel embalmer’s table in the center of the cavernous hold where Juan had packed his parachute the day before. The only light came from a single high-intensity halogen lamp that formed a focused cone around the table so she could see nothing beyond. The feed to the BlackBerry came from a camera placed just above the lamp.

Susan’s hair was lank from so long in the desert without enough water for personal hygiene, and the skin on her arms was blotchy from insect bites. Blood had drained from her face, leaving her washed out, and her lower lip quivered. She was covered in sweat.

“If she wasn’t tied down she would have bitten her fingernails to the quick,” Linda said.

“You ready?” Juan asked her.

“Just going over some notes. I haven’t done an interrogation in a while.”

“Like Max always says, it’s like falling off a bike. Do it once and you never forget.”

“I hope to God he didn’t put a sense of humor down on his job application.” Linda thumbed off the BlackBerry. “Let’s go.”

Juan opened the door into the hold. A wall of heat blasted him. They’d set the thermostat for a hundred degrees. Like the lighting, the temperature was part of the interrogation technique Linda had settled on to crack Susan Donleavy. They stepped silently into the room, but remained just beyond the circle of light.

He had to give Susan high marks because she didn’t call out for nearly a minute. “Who’s there?” she asked, a manic edge in her voice.

Cabrillo and Ross remained silent.

“Who’s there?” Susan repeated a bit more stridently. “You can’t hold me like this. I have rights.”

There was a fine line between panic and anger—the trick was to never cross it during an interrogation.

Never let your subject turn their fear into rage. Linda timed it perfectly. She could see the fury building in Susan’s face, the way the muscles in her neck tensed. She stepped into the light a moment before Donleavy started to scream. Her eyes went wide when she saw that it was another woman with her in the hold.

“Miss Donleavy, right from the outset I want you to understand you have no rights. You are aboard an Iranian-flagged ship in international waters. There is no one here to represent you in any way. You have two choices and two choices only. You can tell me what I want to know or I will turn you over to a professional interrogator.”

“Who are you people? You were hired to rescue Geoffrey Merrick, right? Well, you’ve got him so turn me over to the police or whatever.”

“We are taking the ‘whatever’ route,” Linda said. “That includes you telling me where Daniel Singer is at this moment and what his plans are.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Susan said quickly.

Too quickly, Linda noticed. She shook her head as though she were disappointed. “I had hoped you would be more cooperative. Mr. Smith, would you please join us?” Juan came forward. “This is Mr.

Smith. Up until recently he was employed by the United States government to extract information from terrorists. You might have heard rumors about how the U.S. moved prisoners to countries with, how shall I say it, more lenient laws concerning torture. He was the man they used to get intelligence through any means necessary.”

Susan Donleavy’s lip started trembling again as she stared at Juan.

“He got anything he wanted from some of the most hardened men in the world, men who fought the Russians in Afghanistan for a decade and then our forces for years, men who swore an oath to die rather than submit to an infidel.”

Juan lightly traced the outside of Susan’s arm. It was an intimate gesture, the caress of a lover rather than a torturer, and it made her stiffen and try to shy away, but the ties holding her down prevented her from moving more than a couple inches. The threat of pain was far more effective than inflicting it. Already Susan’s mind was conjuring images that were far worse than Linda or Cabrillo could conceive. They were letting her torture herself.

Again Linda’s timing was spot on. Susan was struggling to rein in her imagination, to banish whatever she’d envisioned. She was finding within herself the courage to face whatever would come. It was Linda’s job to keep her offguard.

“What he will do to a woman I have no idea,” Linda said softly, “but I know I won’t be around to watch it.” She leaned down so her face was inches from Susan’s, making sure that Juan was still in her field of view. “Tell me what I want to know and nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

Juan had to fight not to smile because suddenly Susan Donleavy looked at Linda with such trust that he knew they’d get everything they wanted and more.

“Where is Daniel Singer, Susan?” Linda whispered. “Tell me where he is.”

Susan’s mouth worked as she fought the sense of betrayal she must be feeling toward divulging what she knew. Then she spit a glob of saliva into Linda’s face. “Screw you, bitch. I’ll never tell you.”

Linda’s only reaction was to wipe her cheek. She stayed close to Susan and continued to whisper. “You must understand that I don’t want to have to do this. I really don’t. I know that saving the environment is important to you. Perhaps you’re even willing to die for your cause. But you have no idea what’s coming.

You can’t comprehend the pain you are about to endure.”

Straightening, Linda motioned to Juan. “Mr. Smith, I apologize for asking you to leave your tools behind.

I thought she would be more cooperative. I’ll give you a hand with the drills and the other equipment you need and then I’ll leave you two alone.” She looked back at Susan. “You realize that after today you will recoil in horror every time you look in a mirror.”

“There is nothing I won’t sacrifice for Dan Singer,” Susan said defiantly.

“Ask yourself this question—what is he willing to sacrifice for you?”

“This isn’t about me. This is about protecting the planet.”

Linda looked around the darkened hold as if searching for something. “I don’t see anyone else with us, Susan, so this is most definitely about you. Singer is off someplace safe while you are strapped to a table.

Think about that for a moment. And then think about how long you will live with the consequences of your choice today. You are facing years in prison. You can serve them in a Namibian jail or a nice cushy cell in Europe with running water and a bunk that isn’t infested with fleas. We haven’t decided who to turn you over to.”

“If you hurt me I will make sure you pay,” Susan spat.

Linda arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me? Make us pay?” She chuckled. “You have no idea who we are, so how are you going to make us pay? You don’t get it yet. We own you, body and soul. We can do anything we want with total impunity. You no longer have free will. We took that from you the moment we picked you up, and the sooner you understand that the quicker all this is going to end.”

Susan Donleavy had no reply to that.

“How’s this? Tell me what Dan Singer has planned and I will make sure you are turned over to Swiss authorities on accessory to kidnapping charges. I will convince Geoffrey Merrick to forgo an attempted murder rap.” Linda had been hitting her with the stick, now it was time to show her the carrot. “You don’t even need to tell me where he is, all right? Just lay out the bare outline of what he intends to do and your life is going to be unimaginably easier.”

Linda made a hand gesture like an out-of-balance scale and said, “Two or three years in a Swiss prison or decades rotting in a Third World jail. Come on, Susan, make it easier on yourself. Tell me what he’s planning.”

As part of her technique Linda kept hammering home the point about how easy it would be, how Susan had everything to gain and nothing to lose by telling her. Had Juan not wanted the information so quickly Linda would have chosen a different question, one that really had no consequences, just to get the dialogue open. Still, she was making progress. The defiance that had hardened Susan Donleavy’s features moments before was giving way to uncertainty.

“No one will ever know,” Linda persisted. “Tell me what he wants to do. I assume it’s going to be a demonstration of some kind, something he wants Merrick to witness. Is that it, Susan? Just nod your head if I’m right.”

Susan’s head remained immobile but her eyes dipped slightly.

“See, that wasn’t so hard,” Linda cooed, as if to a child who’d just swallowed her medicine. “What kind of demonstration? We know it has something to do with warming the Benguela Current.”

A look of shock ran across Susan’s face and her mouth gaped.

“That’s right. We found the wave-powered generators and the undersea heaters. They were shut down some time ago. Part of Singer’s plan has already unraveled but that isn’t important right now. All that’s important is you tell me the rest.”

When Susan didn’t say anything, Linda threw up her hands. “This is a waste of my time! I’m trying to do you a favor and you won’t help yourself. Fine. If that’s the way you want it then that’s the way it’s going to be. Mr. Smith.” With that Linda strode from the hold with Juan right behind. He closed the hold’s door and spun the lock.

“Jesus, you can be scary,” Juan said.

Linda was checking the camera feed on her BlackBerry and didn’t look up when she said, “Apparently not scary enough. I thought she’d crack.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Trying not to wet herself.”

“So now we wait her out?”

“I’ll go back in a half hour,” Linda said. “That’ll give her enough time to think about what’s coming.”

“And if she still won’t talk?”

“Without enough time to properly soften her up I have no choice but to use drugs, which I hate by the way. It’s too easy to get the subject to tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth.” Linda looked back at the little screen. “On second thought…” She held up a hand with her fingers splayed and ticked them off silently. When the last digit curled into her palm Susan Donleavy began screaming from the other side of the closed hatch.

“Come back! Please! I’ll tell you what he’s going to try to do!”

A shadow crossed Linda’s eyes. Rather than satisfied with her work she appeared sad.

“What is it?” Juan asked.

“Nothing.”

“Talk to me. What’s the matter?”

She looked up at him. “I hate doing this. Breaking people, I mean. Lying to them to get what I want. It leaves me, I don’t know, dead inside. I climb into someone else’s mind to ferret out information and in the end I end up knowing everything about them—how they think, what their hopes and dreams are, every secret they thought they’d never tell. In a couple of hours I will know more about Susan Donleavy than anyone else in the world. But it’s not like having a friend confide in you. It’s like I’m stealing that information. I hate doing it, Juan.”

“I had no idea,” he said softly. “If I did I wouldn’t have asked you to do this.”

“That’s why I’ve never told you. You hired me because I have a certain background, and skills that no one in the crew possesses. Just because I hate part of my job doesn’t mean I don’t have to do it.”

Juan gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah. I’m going to let her scream for a few more minutes and then go back in. I’ll find you when I’m done. Then I’m going to have a glass of wine too many and try to get Susan Donleavy out of my head.

Go get some rest. You look terrible.”

“Best suggestion I’ve heard all day.”

He turned to go, wondering how much each of them was sacrificing of themselves to the Corporation.

They were always mindful of the physical dangers they faced when they accepted a mission, but there was a hidden cost, too. To fight from the shadows meant the justifications for their actions had to come from within each person. They weren’t soldiers who could merely say they were taking orders. They’d chosen to be here and do the things necessary to guarantee a free society even if they themselves operated outside of societal boundaries.

Juan himself had felt that burden on more than one occasion. And while the Corporation regularly flouted international law in order to achieve their perfect record of success, there were gray areas that they had skirted that made him more than a little uncomfortable.

As he walked back toward his cabin, he knew there were no alternatives. The enemies he’d faced when he’d been with the CIA played by the rules for the most part. But the rulebook went out the window when slamming airplanes into skyscrapers became a legitimate form of attack. Wars were no longer fought between armies in the field. They were being fought in subways and mosques, nightclubs and market squares. It seemed that in today’s world anyone and anything was fair game.

He reached his suite of rooms and pulled the curtains over his cabin portholes. Now, with his bed no more than a couple of feet away, the wave of fatigue that hit Cabrillo made him stagger. He undressed and slid between a set of cool sheets.

Despite his exhaustion sleep was a long time coming.

24

JUANknew by how the diffused sunlight seeping around the drapes was the color of blood that he’d been asleep for only a couple of hours when the phone rang. He shimmied up against the headboard, feeling as if he’d just gone fifteen rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world. And lost.

“Hello,” he said, working his tongue around his mouth to loosen the gummy saliva.

“Sorry to disturb your beauty sleep.” It was Max. If anything, he sounded as though he was enjoying waking the chairman. “We’ve got some major developments. I’ve called a meeting in the boardroom.

Fifteen minutes.”

“Whet my appetite.” Juan threw aside his sheets. The skin around his stump was red and swollen. One of Julia’s orderlies was a professional masseuse, and he knew he’d need the leg tended to if he was going to function.

“Daniel Singer plans to cause the biggest oil slick in history and helping him is a mercenary army that we provided the weapons to.”

The news shocked any vestiges of sleep from Cabrillo’s brain.

He reached the boardroom in fourteen minutes, his hair still wet from the shower. Maurice had coffee waiting for him and an omelet bursting with sausage and onions. His first thought was for Linda Ross. The diminutive intelligence officer was at her customary seat with a laptop opened in front of her. Her face had the pale brittle look of a porcelain doll, and her normally bright eyes were as dull as old coins.

Though only a few hours had passed since she began interrogating Susan Donleavy, Linda seemed to have aged a decade. She tried to smile at Juan but it died on her lips. He gave her a nod of understanding.

Franklin Lincoln and Mike Trono were also present, to make up for Eric Stone’s and Mark Murphy’s absence.

Max was the last to arrive and he was talking on a phone when he entered the room. “That’s right. A coastal oil facility. I don’t know exactly where, but your pilot must have some ideas.” He paused a beat while he listened. “I know some of the radio tags must have failed by now. I also know that you overbuilt them enough so a couple are still transmitting. You’ll just have to get closer to find them.”

“Murph?” Juan asked after hastily swallowing a bite of his omelet.

“I want him focusing on the coast. I did a little research and found there’s a long string of offshore oil production platforms at the mouth of the Congo River that arc north to Angola’s Cabinda province.”

“Angola’s to the south of the Congo,” Eddie said.

“That’s what I thought, too.” Max eased himself into his chair. “But there is an enclave north of the river and it’s sitting on a couple billion barrels of oil. For what it’s worth, I actually found out the U.S. gets more crude from Angola than it does from Kuwait, which pretty much negates the war for oil rant of a couple years ago.”

Juan turned to Linda. “Want to fill us in?”

She straightened her shoulders. “As you all know, Daniel Singer forced Geoffrey Merrick to buy him out of the company. Since then Singer’s used his money to fund environmental groups—rain-forest preservation in South America, antipoaching efforts in Africa, and a lot of the best lobbyists money could buy in capitals all over the world. Then he began to realize that all the money he’d spent had done very little to change people’s attitudes. Yes, he was saving a couple of animals and some tracts of land, but he hadn’t made an impact on the fundamental problem. That problem being that while people say they care about the environment, when it comes down to dollars and cents no one is willing to sacrifice their lifestyle in order to effect change.”

“So Singer decided to get more radical?” Juan asked.

“Fanatical is more like it.” Linda checked her computer for a second. “According to Susan he became active with groups that burned down luxury homes under construction in Colorado, Utah, and Vermont, as well as destroying SUVs sitting on dealers’ lots. She claims he used to put golf balls in the fuel tanks of logging trucks as well as sand in the oil filler tubes.”

“Golf balls?” Linc asked.

“Apparently the diesel will dissolve them, allowing the rubber strings inside to unravel. Does more damage than sugar or salt. Singer bragged that he’d caused at least fifty million dollars’ worth of damage, but that still wasn’t enough. He thought about sending bombs through the mail to top executives in the oil industry but knew they would just end up killing some poor mailroom clerk. He also knew that it wouldn’t change anyone’s life.

“That’s when he heard how the hurricane seasons over the next couple of years are going to be particularly brutal. While it’s part of a natural cycle, he figured the media would try to link it with global warming and he wondered if he could make the storms even worse.”

“So we were right about the undersea heaters installed off the coast of Namibia.” It was more a question than a statement from Cabrillo.

“He cut off all ties with the environmental movement and set his plan in motion. He hired some top-flight climatologists and oceanographers to lay out the heaters’ size and location, though Susan says they were led to believe it was purely a research question and not something that would actually be built. They are designed to shift the Benguela Current just enough so the temperature of the waters off West Africa rises a couple of degrees. And as we talked about before, more heat means more evaporation and a bigger and more powerful storm.

“It’s impossible to change a hurricane once it’s formed,” Linda went on. “Even a nuclear detonation wouldn’t alter the eye structure, wind speed, or the storm’s direction. However, by affecting what causes the storms in the first place, Singer believes he can create what he calls hypercanes, storms that register above Category Five on the Saffir-Simpson Scale.”

“What’s this have to do with blowing up oil facilities?” Eddie asked, helping himself to a cup of coffee from Juan’s service.