The Silent Sea

The Silent Sea

Chapter SIX

BY THE TIME JUAN AND THE OTHERS REACHED THE EDGE of the upper logging site, the soldiers of the Ninth Brigade had loaded their prize into the back of a pickup and were hopping into the truck with it. Half of them took a second truck. The vehicles' owner knew not to protest.

From where they crouched at the edge of the jungle, the range to the Argentines wasn't extreme, four hundred yards or so. But the team carried machine pistols, which were devastating weapons in close-quarter combat but would be useless at this distance. Juan suspected the Ninth Brigade chose to issue the wicked-looking MP-5 to its men because of its intimidation factor more than its utility in combat situations.

Juan had a choice to make and he quickly ran through his options. A head-on charge would be suicide, and the idea of slinking back into the jungle without the power cell was equally unappealing. They had come too far to fail now, and quit wasn't a word Cabrillo allowed himself to contemplate too often. It was why the Corporation was the best in the world at what they did. And the truth was, much of their success had stemmed from Juan's ability to think on his feet, to find a third option no one else would consider.

Ideas ran through his brain but were quickly rejected as unworkable, and no matter how fast he came up with new ones, events continued to unfold. The Ninth Brigade soldiers had finished leaping into the beds of the two pickups, and exhaust bloomed from both tailpipes. Next to them smoke exploded from the twin stacks of a semitrailer loaded with logs so newly cut that the bark glistened with sap.

Chairman? Mark Murphy said in a whisper. He had never seen Cabrillo take so much time.

Juan held up a fist to stem the questions and crawled forward in the long grass that was growing like a curb between the jungle proper and the compacted-earth staging area cleared by the loggers. He reached the far side and looked down the mountain to the one-lane road that curled around its flank as sinuously as a snake. Shimmering above it, and as seemingly thin as gossamer, was the loop of steel wire for the cable yarder.

The two mud-splattered pickup trucks started pulling away while the big rig's cab shuddered when the driver put it in gear and started after them.

There it was, he thought. Not perfect, but it was better than nothing.

He broke cover, waving for his men to follow. They emerged from the jungle and sprinted after Cabrillo. It was like the final lap of a race, when the exhaustion falls away and the body responds to chemical signals that it is now or never. The dozen loggers left milling around the shed-sized cable yarder saw four more Ninth Brigade soldiers running out of the jungle, who had presumably gotten separated and were now chasing after their comrades in the just-departed pickups.

They didn't know anything was amiss until one of the new soldiers brought his rifle to his eye, shouting, Down! Everyone get down, and stay down.

Juan didn't wait to see if his orders were being followed. He trusted his men would see to it that they were. He raced for the yarder's cab, a modified excavator that had had its boom removed and the cable tower attached in its place. The driver was protected in the cab from flying debris by a mesh cage that had replaced the glass windows. The cab door was open, the driver sitting casually in his seat, a cigarette dangling between the first and second fingers of his left hand. He hadn't seen the Corporation team approach, and, with the diesel idling, hadn't heard the shouted commands, so when Juan reached into the cab and heaved the man out of his seat the surprise was total. He landed on the rutted ground, the impact forcing every molecule of air from his chest.

Murph, Juan called. Get over here and figure out the controls.

As a trained engineer, Mark had an intuitive sense of how things worked, stemming no doubt from his childhood hobby of taking things apart and putting them back together, a hobby his parents put a stop to when they came home one day to find his father's vintage Porsche in pieces.

Murph left Jerry and Mike to cover the loggers and jumped for the cab.

Mike, Juan shouted as he made his way to the edge of the clearing overlooking what had once been prime forest and was now a smoldering moonscape. Find the keys to that third pickup and get her started.

The choke line for the cable yarder was suspended from a block system that could raise or lower the thick loop of wire so when they were dragging a log clear it wouldn't snag on the stumps of already fallen trees.

Juan made sure his machine pistol was secure across his back and called Mark on the radio. He stepped onto the loop of the choke line and held on with one hand. Do you know what I have in mind?

You want me to haul you down the mountain and drop you into the pickup with the power cell.

Not quite, Cabrillo replied, and told Mark what he wanted done.

Man, you're crazy. Inspired, but crazy.

It took Murph just one false start to learn the controls of what was essentially a simple machine to operate. The trick was to operate it well. He eased back on the choker, feeding braided steel wire into the block hanging from the main yarder line.

Cabrillo braced for the impact of the choker coming taut and had to give his weapons specialist credit as he was gently lifted into the air. Like a skier who didn't get off the lift at the top and was now descending, Juan started sailing down the mountain, picking up speed as Mark surveyed the scene below, calculating tricky vectors in his head in order to get the Chairman to his target.

Juan soared fifty feet off the ground, zooming over a hillside made barren by the loggers. It was like a controlled zip line, and, had the scenery been better, he would have paid for the ride. Brush piles smoldered on either side of the yarder line, so he felt like he was flying over the very pit of hell itself. He crossed over the road in the wake of the three-vehicle convoy headed down to the base camp. The pickups had pulled far ahead of the fully laden eighteen-wheeler as he knew they would. The second time the line crossed over the road was two hundred yards ahead, directly over a hairpin corner the pickups were just about to clear.

If any of the soldiers clutching the bed's rail looked up, Juan was as exposed as he could be. He'd be nothing more than a human target. Mark must have changed his calculations because the choker block began to decelerate. Juan pendulumed forward, and the choker started to twist. He fought to keep facing forward. He could hear the semi's air brakes growl when the truck approached the sharp bend. Cabrillo accelerated again, swinging back and forth on the line as it twirled first one way, then the other. Moving through space on three axes was disorientating enough, and he still had to time his landing.

The truck drove deep into the curve before the driver started to crank the wheel. Juan was fifty feet up the hill and coming fast. Too fast, he realized, and even as he thought it the choker block slowed and the line began to reel out, lowering him closer and closer to the timber hauler. It was a remarkable feat of depth perception and control on Murph's part, as he dropped the Chairman toward the loaded trailer, timing it so that the turn hid the descending block from the soldiers at the last critical second.

The wire loop Juan was standing on twisted hard enough to squeeze his foot with a crushing pressure that would have shattered bone and pulped flesh had he not been standing on his prosthetic leg. Even without having to deal with pain, he had to kick with all his strength to free the limb as he soared over the back of the truck. The logs just a few tantalizing feet below him were three feet in diameter, with bark as thick and rough as alligator hide.

The driver began to straighten out as he guided his load through the hairpin. In seconds he would pull away from the arrow-straight yarder cable, leaving Cabrillo hanging in space. Juan kicked again to free his foot but could do nothing until the choker wire twisted back. He was less than five feet from the rear of the trailer. Then three. He felt himself rotating clockwise again. He heaved on his foot and it popped free. Holding on with one arm, Juan found his spot on the topmost log and let go.

He landed a bit awkwardly, not fully adjusting to the rig's steady acceleration, and started rolling off the log. He reached out to find a finger hold in the irregular bark and came away with a fistful of crumbling wood. He slid farther, and spreading his knees to clutch the log with his legs did no good. He went over.

And immediately slammed into one of the steel supports used to contain the trunks. It hit in the small of his back. Had it not been for the minimal cushioning of his pack, he felt certain he would have broken bone. It took him a few stunned moments to recover from both the pain and the fact he hadn't fallen off the truck, then he scrambled back to the top log and, in a crouch, started making his way toward the cab.

I'm on, he radioed Murph.

I can see that. You blew the landing, but I'll still give you seven-point-five.

Cabrillo had always found humor in the absurd, and replied, You gotta be kidding me. Didn't you see that half twist at the dismount? Degree of difficulty alone gives me an eight.

All right. Eight.

I want the three of you coming after me in the last pickup. What did you do with the loggers?

Jerry chained them to an old bucket-loader tire sitting up here.

Good. Now, get your asses down here. I'm going to need you to bail me out.

Juan reached the front of the trailer. The road ahead continued straight for nearly a mile before it twisted back on itself through another hairpin. The pickups were just a dust cloud halfway there. To Juan's right was a two-hundred-foot drop, at the bottom of which ran the next loop of the switchback road.

Looking down over the front of the trailer, he could see the tops of the semi's eight spinning drive wheels and, through the skeletal frame of the chassis, the graveled blur of the roadbed. A misstep would land him under twenty tons of exotic hardwoods.

Rather than leap, he climbed down the butt ends of the logs and stepped lightly onto the truck's chassis. He could see the driver's head through the cab's rear window, and if the man happened to glance at his rearview mirror he would see the Chairman. Juan stepped right onto a diamond-plate fuel tank as big around as a barrel. He clutched the handhold screwed into the cab directly behind the driver's door in his right hand and placed his other on the door handle. The driver's bearded face filled the big wing mirror in front of him.

The Argentine's eyes drifted left, and in the second it took his brain to register what he was seeing Juan threw open the door and grabbed the man by the collar. The door rebounded into Juan's arm but didn't have enough pressure to even slow the Chairman, as he yanked the hapless man from his seat and flung him far enough away from the semi that he wouldn't be caught under the wheels.

Juan pulled his machine pistol from around his back and leapt into the seat, noting that even with both windows wide open the cab smelled of stale sweat, spicy food, and a hint of cannabis. He had his foot on the gas before the rig had slowed more than a mile or two per hour. He checked his mirror to see the driver slowly getting to his feet. He was dazed, for sure, but didn't look permanently injured.

Now came the tough part, Cabrillo thought grimly. Glancing up at the road above, he could see a feathery plume that would be his men coming after him in hot pursuit. Down the slope, the road was still clear. The Ninth Brigade soldiers were probably just now entering the next hairpin on the long descent. Juan carefully steered the semi so its outside tires rode closer and closer to the edge of the road and the precipitous drop beyond. The ground was much less firm this far from the main ruts packed down over countless hundreds of passages. Gravel hissed from under the wheels and pattered down the stump-strewn slope.

There!

The height advantage of being on the upper section of the haul road let Juan see the oncoming pickups below. They weren't going nearly as fast as he expected them to, and he wondered if they had a little trouble negotiating the last corner. The thought gave him a newfound respect for the men who drove up and down the mountain a dozen times a day.

Juan took the truck even closer to the edge. The front tires were digging ruts out of the very lip of the shoulder while the outside drive tires and the outside tires on the right side of the trailer hung in space. At a closing speed of sixty miles per hour, but separated by two hundred vertical feet, the three vehicles raced toward one another.

Without taking his eyes off the road, Juan felt for the door handle and made sure it hadn't latched. It was all down to the timing. Too soon, they would stop. Too late, and he would miss.

Juan judged it as finely as he could. He cranked the wheel to the right and threw himself from the cab, landing hard on the road but tumbling across his shoulder like an acrobat, and came up on his feet.

The eighteen-wheeler teetered on the brink for another second before rolling off the road. It hit square on its side, its momentum plowing the grille though the churned-up ground until it smashed into the stump of a tree that must have stood for a hundred years before greed sealed its fate. Steam gushed from the ruptured radiator, and the windshield was punched out in two solid sheets that exploded into mounds of glittering glass chips.

At the violent impact, the trailer bucked and threw its load. There were thirty logs on it, most the width and length of telephone poles while others were monsters that weighed three tons apiece. They stayed in a tight bundle for the first few yards as they rolled down the hill, but once they started bouncing off stumps, all semblance of order vanished. Some bounced off stump after stump, changing directions as they fell. A few were upended by the impact and hurtled down the hillside like ballistic projectiles.

The driver of the lead pickup never saw the deliberate accident above his truck, and it wasn't until he heard cries of alarm from the men in back that he knew something was wrong. He studied the dirt track ahead and saw nothing amiss. The steepness of the hill above them prevented him from having the proper angle to look up and see the avalanche moments away from sweeping the truck off the road.

Hector! screamed his passenger, staring wide-eyed up the hill. Stop! For the love of the Virgin, stop!

The driver, Hector, stood on the brakes, holding the wheel steady against the truck's desire to fishtail. Then came a jarring impact as the second truck, driven by Raul Jimenez, slammed into their rear bumper. Hector had been wearing a seat belt, a habit drilled into him as a child, and no amount of macho grandstanding would get him to change.

The passenger the team's Sergeant had never worn a seat belt in his life. He was catapulted through the windshield, leaving a man-sized hole ringed in blood from where the glass sliced his face and arms. He landed a good fifteen feet from the front of the truck. Hector had no idea if the Sarge was alive or dead when a log as thick around as a man's chest rolled over him, crushing the man's body into the hard earth.

That's when Hector felt death touch his shoulder. Another log that had tipped end over end speared through the top of the cab and smashed into his leg. The huge piece of timber continued its journey, ripping off the pickup's roof as easily as a can opener.

The men not hurt in the crash leapt from the truck and started running downhill, all thoughts of staying with their comrades forgotten in their panicked flight. The truck took a pair of broadsides from the two largest logs and was tossed bodily off the road. The men too stunned or too injured to flee were thrown from the vehicle and crushed as it started barreling down the mountain.

Most of the soldiers on foot had made the mistake of running straight away from the truck and were soon caught up as it tumbled. The lucky ones were knocked aside with broken limbs. The others were killed outright. One soldier had the wherewithal to run down the slope at an angle and avoided being killed by the cartwheeling vehicle. He even managed to leap up in time to have one of the logs roll under him. A second one slammed into his knees, breaking both joints. It bounced and flattened him before his nerves could send the pain signals to his brain.

The second truck fared little better. It was knocked perpendicular to the road by a titanic collision and then shot forward when a trio of logs slammed into the tailgate. The engine had stalled when Raul Jimenez had hit the first pickup, and without power steering he was incapable of controlling the vehicle as it accelerated downward. He mashed his foot to the brake pedal and yanked the emergency handle, but gravity and momentum were too much for a tired machine that had better than two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. It slammed into a stump just off-center enough to kick the rear end around. The tires hooked and the truck flipped. Men were scattered like rag dolls. Raul managed to stay in his seat as his view through the windshield rotated again and again. His side window was smashed, but whatever had punctured the glass had missed him. Impact after impact rattled the truck and threatened to loosen his sanity, but one massive hit and everything turned still. What remained of the pickup was hard against a stump, and the avalanche of logs had ended.

Nice shootin', Tex, Juan heard over his radio.

He looked back to see the truck carrying his team racing for him. If he felt anything for the men he had just killed and injured, he need only think back to the burned-out village and knew he'd done the world a favor.

Mike Trono was behind the wheel with Mark Murphy. Jerry stood in the bed and, as the truck came close, held out an elbow to hook Cabrillo's arm and lift him into the bed. Juan rapped on the roof of the cab, and Mike hit the gas.

It took two minutes to negotiate the hairpin and return to the site where the Ninth Brigade soldiers had been swept from the road. Moans of anguish rose from the wounded. The dead lay in such unnatural angles it was difficult to believe they had skeletons at all.

None of the real Argentine Special Forces questioned the presence of more unknown men dressed in their uniforms. They were simply relieved that help had arrived so quickly. Juan squatted next to one of them, laying a hand on the man's uninjured shoulder. The other had been wrenched from its socket.

What truck had the piece of satellite? he asked in Spanish.

It was in back of ours, the soldier said through gritted teeth and lips so compressed they had gone white.

The first one?

No. The second.

Juan called out to his men, Numero dos, and held up two fingers in case Trono's Spanish was as bad as he said.

It took ten minutes to find the plutonium power cell. It was a silver rectangular object, a foot and a half long and about as wide and thick as a dictionary. Its surface was made of some mysterious alloy that Murph might know about but was outside Juan's purview or interest. All he cared about was that they had it and, for the moment, the Argentines didn't. He marveled, though, that for all the abuse it had just endured there was only a minute dimple on one side. Murph ran the gamma detector over every square inch of it.

It's clean, Juan, he pronounced. No radiation above what it's been giving off all along.

That's a relief, Pulaski said. I might want to have more kids someday. Hate for the little buggers to have tentacles and flippers and such. He turned to Cabrillo. So now what?

Juan scratched at the stubble covering his jaw. Down at the base camp, he could see pandemonium had erupted. The accident had been plain for everyone to see, and the reserve Ninth Brigade soldiers were scrambling to get up the mountain in order to help the wounded. Loggers, too, were racing for vehicles to lend a hand.

A sly smile crossed Cabrillo's handsome face. The three greatest assets in combat and it doesn't matter if it's two men squaring off or whole armies meeting on the field of battle are numbers, surprise, and confusion. He didn't have the first, the second had already been sprung, and now the third reigned over his adversaries. Jerry had wrestled the power cell into the carrying harness and stood with it strapped to his back. The others wore his same questioning expression.

Mike, how many hours do you have with Gomez? Juan asked. George Gomez Adams was the pilot of the MD-520N helicopter hangared below the Oregon's aft hold.

Hold on a minute, Mike Trono protested. We've only been working together a couple of months. I've only soloed twice. And they didn't go so well. I bent a landing strut on one and nearly clipped the ship's rail my second time.

Juan looked at Jerry. Do you really feel like lugging that thing all the way back to the RHIB?

Hell no.

What do you say, Mr. Trono?

If Mike couldn't fly them out of here in one of the Argentine's helicopters, Juan knew he would admit it. He selected each member of the Corporation not only for what they could do but also because they were aware of what they could not.

Trono nodded. Let's hope my third solo's the charm.