The Prisoner's Gold

64

McNutt scrambled along the edge of the plateau, looking for the best position to return fire. He was determined to defend the Lion Gate against the enemy’s advancement … or at least make them think twice about their assault. Adrenaline eased the pain of his superficial injuries as he rushed back up the stairs and onto the plateau’s grassy surface.

He slowed his charge as he neared the six-hundred-foot drop to the base of the rock, diving onto his stomach then crawling the remaining few yards to the edge. Hidden in the tall grass, he raised his rifle and scanned the area from where the rocket had been launched. He could see several armed men, all Chinese, racing through the trees toward the stairs between the gate’s stone paws.

‘Sorry, folks. Park’s closed,’ he mumbled as he leveled the crosshairs on the nearest intruder. ‘The moose out front should’ve told you.’

McNutt squeezed the trigger and unleashed the kind of fury that Clark Griswold couldn’t have handled in National Lampoon’s Vacation. The 7.62 mm round easily penetrated the foliage and sliced through his target’s sternum like a laser beam, killing him instantly. The semi-automatic weapon readied itself for round two as McNutt adjusted his aim half a meter to the right. He fired again, and another man fell.

The remaining assailants took cover as they peppered the mountainside with spray from their assault rifles. These were pot shots, and McNutt knew it. They had no idea where he was hidden, and their only response to his aggression was to aimlessly fire in all directions. He knew he had been exposed in the tree — he had given up protection to find the best possible angle — but he wouldn’t make that mistake again. Now he was nearly invisible in the overgrown grass near the edge.

He watched as the heads of his enemy randomly popped up from behind rocks, fallen trees, and bulbous shrubs. The men would peek for a few moments before diving back to the earth in fear. He chuckled as he thought back to the Whack-A-Mole game at the carnival that would visit his hometown every summer.

He was good then. He was better now.

Boom! A mole slumped over, dead.

Boom! A cloud of crimson mist erupted in his scope.

He picked them off one by one, until there was nothing left but bodies.

‘The front door is officially closed,’ McNutt informed his team.

‘Great,’ Garcia replied, ‘but there’s a party coming in the back door!’

McNutt grinned at the description. ‘How many times have we told you not to watch porn when we’re in the field?’

Garcia ignored the joke. ‘Better check your six, Josh. You’ve got multiple hostiles inbound. There’s a chopper landing on the opposite edge of the plateau. And you’ve got at least a dozen men trying to summit the southern face of the mountain.’

‘How the hell are they doing that?’ McNutt asked.

‘They’ve got grappling hooks and some sort of reverse zip lines. They’re literally running up the side of the rock!’

‘Sneaky bastards,’ McNutt said, impressed. ‘I’m headed that way.’

‘I’ll meet you there,’ Cobb said. He had been listening to their chatter and realized McNutt needed him more than Sarah. ‘Hector, how good are you with the drone?’

‘Very good. Why?’

‘Good enough to take out that chopper?’

As a master of wing chun and a student of kung fu and tai chi, Maggie had learned how to move with stealth. She had showcased her ability on the day she had met the team in Florida — sneaking up on Sarah on more than one occasion — and she had used it again at the warehouse in Panyu. But those examples were child’s play compared to her task at hand.

She needed to sneak up the mountain without getting shot.

‘Joshua,’ she whispered from the Lion Gate, ‘I’m heading up the stairs right now. I’ll let you know when I reach the top.’

‘Be careful,’ he said as he charged across the plateau.

She smiled at his concern. ‘I always am.’

Piloting the RQ-7 was pretty simple for Garcia. After all, the hardest part had already been done for him: the Pakistanis had been kind enough to get the drone in the air before he had hijacked it. If all went according to plan, Garcia wouldn’t need to land it either. He planned to return it to its original test-flight course and then relinquish control over it. The Pakistan Air Force would land it … and then they’d probably tear it apart.

Garcia knew that the military would most likely spend months trying to figure out why their drone had flitted off to central Sri Lanka, performed a variety of maneuvers, discharged its arsenal, and then headed back to home base. He suspected that they would disassemble the entire aircraft piece by piece, checking every bit of hardware and every line of code in its operating system in their search for the problem.

But they’d never really know why.

Back at the hotel, Garcia had turned his command center into a flight simulator. His three monitors displayed the video feed from the drone’s nose and rear cameras, as well as providing him with up-to-the-second information on the aircraft’s speed, elevation, fuel supply, and ammunition count. Garcia had even found a slim-line controller in his bag of random peripherals. He used it to fly the drone as if he were playing a video game.

And Garcia was very good at video games.

The image on his left-hand screen showed him that the helicopter, a commercial cargo bird, hadn’t actually landed on the towering deck. Instead, it had pulled into a hover about twenty feet above the mountain. Four drop lines had been thrown from the stationary chopper, and the first two waves of unwelcome visitors had already deployed.

Four additional men appeared ready to join them below.

As the men stepped through the open bay doors, Garcia banked the drone and dive-bombed his target. With no missiles at his disposal, he activated the M134 minigun. The stream of bullets from the rotating barrels cut through the helicopter’s engine hatch but, remarkably, didn’t hit any vital components.

In response to the attack, the chopper’s pilot jerked the stick, spinning the aircraft wildly. Three of the men at its sides dropped quickly to the dirt beneath them, but the fourth inexplicably held fast to his rope. The force of the chopper’s sudden turn whipped him like a tetherball, causing him to lose his grip and fly helplessly over the edge.

The man plummeted several hundred feet to his death.

Feeling a surge of adrenaline from his first kill, Garcia pushed the drone’s speed past 100 miles per hour as the helicopter gave chase. When he swung out wide of the rock, he could see a dozen more men climbing the face. They had launched grappling hooks to the summit and were using electric ascender units to propel themselves up their respective ropes. With the help of the mechanical gear, the men moved up the plateau with a fluid, almost serene grace.

‘Nice try,’ Garcia said as he sized up his opponents.

He brought the drone in line for a strafing run, fully prepared for what he had to do. He fired the weapon and a stream of deadly 7.62 mm rounds blurred out of the nose of the vehicle, slicing through the men and their ropes like a samurai sword splitting tender bamboo. Puffs of red and pink erupted from the rock face as the climbers were turned to chunky pulp before gravity claimed its hold and yanked their shattered remains to the ground.

Garcia watched as the video feed relayed the scene in real time.

‘We need to get one of these for ourselves!’ he said excitedly.

‘A drone?’ Cobb asked in his ear.

‘No, a military-grade, hi-res camera,’ Garcia answered. ‘Gimbal-mounted. Digitally stabilized. Electro-optical infrared. This sucker is bad-ass.’

‘Wow,’ McNutt replied. ‘You really are a geek.’

Unfortunately, McNutt had more to worry about than Garcia’s seemingly odd fondness for hi-tech cameras over tactical weapon systems.

He had scampered across the mountaintop and revisited the case of firearms that he had hidden near the entrance to the secret tunnel, but the addition of an M-4 rifle hadn’t made him completely at ease. Even the presence of Cobb — who had likewise armed himself with the compact assault rifle — didn’t extinguish McNutt’s anxiety.

It was still two against ten. Or more.

With an outer perimeter of free-falling death.

From a mile away, McNutt would have had a distinct advantage.

But close-quarters combat was a different story.