I’m telling you, I don’t know how to find El Dorado.”
“Maybe you don’t know … yet.” Stikes slipped the elastic band off the box. “But as I said, you’re an intelligent woman. And your past record speaks for itself. I’m sure that if you turn your mind to finding it, you will.” He lifted the lid. “Even if it takes a little, shall we say, encouragement?”
Stikes lowered his gloved thumb and forefinger into the box to grab its contents. That it took a couple of attempts suggested the contents did not want to be grabbed.
“Ah, shall we not say? We could …” Nina’s voice dried up in instinctive toe-curling fear as Stikes lifted the box’s occupant into view.
A scorpion.
Empire of Gold is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Bantam Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2011 by Andy McDermott
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Headline Publishing Group, London, in 2011, and is published in arrangement with Headline Publishing Group.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53032-5
Cover design: Daniel Rembert
Cover art: Blacksheep Design
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: Afghanistan
Chapter One: New York City
Chapter Two: England
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five: New York City
Chapter Six: Singapore
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight: Venezuela
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six: Colombia
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine: Bogotá
Chapter Thirty: Peru
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Epilogue: England
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
PROLOGUE
Afghanistan
The barren landscape was simultaneously alien yet oddly familiar to Eddie Chase. The young Englishman had grown up in the rugged hills of Yorkshire, the topography of the northern county in many ways similar to the gnarled ground below the helicopter. But even at night, one difference was obvious. The hills and moors around his hometown were green, a living countryside; beneath him now, everything was a parched and dusty brown. A dead land.
More death would be coming to it tonight.
Chase looked away from the window to the seven other men in the Black Hawk’s dimly lit cabin. Like him, all were special forces soldiers, faces striped with camouflage paint. Unusually, though, the participants in this mission were not all from the same unit, or even the same country. Five were from the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, one of the United Kingdom’s most admired—and feared—elite units. The remaining three, however, were from other nations, the team hurriedly pulled together by the Coalition for the urgent operation.
Despite this, Chase doubted they would have trouble working together. He already knew two of them, even if his previous dealings with Bob “Bluey” Jackson of the Australian SAS had only been brief. Jason Starkman of the United States Army Special Forces—the Green Berets—had, on the other hand, been a friend for years.
The third foreign soldier was the unknown quantity. Although he had been vouched for by the team’s commander, Major Jim “Mac” McCrimmon—and to Chase there were few higher recommendations—Chase still wanted to get a handle on the beaky-nosed Belgian’s personality before they hit the ground. So he had taken the seat beside him with the intention of teasing out information about the Special Forces Group’s Hugo Castille.
As it happened, no teasing was necessary. The genial Castille had volunteered so much that even a trained interrogator would have struggled to keep up. “So we found a little bar off Las Ramblas,” he was saying now, “and I met the most beautiful Spanish girl. Have you ever been to Barcelona?” Chase shook his head, wondering how the conversation—well, monologue—had moved from a military operation in Bosnia to chatting up women in Spain in the few seconds he had been looking out the window. “Its architecture matches its women! But as for what we did that night”—a broad smile—“I am a gentleman, so I shall not say.”
Chase grinned back. “So there actually is something that stops you talking?”
“Of course! I—” Castille stopped as he realized he was being ribbed, and sniffed before taking a polished red apple from a pocket and biting into it.
A Scottish voice came from across the cabin. “Eddie, you accusing somebody of talking too much is a definite case of the pot calling the kettle black.” The comment prompted laughter from most of the other men.
“Ah, sod off, Mac,” Chase told his commanding officer cheerily. The tightly knit, high-pressure nature of special forces units allowed for a degree of informality uncommon in the regular military—to a point. “At least I talk about more interesting things than bloody cricket and snooker.”
The stiff-backed man beside Mac had conspicuously not joined in with the laughter. “Your definition of interesting isn’t the same as everyone else’s, Sergeant.” Like Chase, Captain Alexander Stikes was in his late twenties, but the similarity ended there. Chase was fairly squat with a square, broken-nosed face that could at best be described as “characterful,” while the six-foot-tall, fair-haired officer had the high brow and straight nose of a throwback to Prussian nobility. “I think we’d all prefer a bit of quiet.”
“Quiet is the last thing we’ll get in this tub, Alexander,” said Mac, a hint of chiding audible even over the roar of the Black Hawk’s engines.
Amused by Stikes’s telling-off, Chase turned back to Castille. “That’s the third bit of fruit you’ve had since we left the base. Last I had was a banana for breakfast, and one end was all smushed.”
Castille took another bite. “I always bring lots of fruit on a mission. Much nicer than rations, no? And I have my ways to stop them getting bruised. My father taught me how to take care of them.”
“So he’s some sort of … fruit vet?”
The Belgian smiled. “No, a grocer. Nobody wants to buy mushy fruit. What about your father?”
The question caught Chase off guard. “My dad?”
“Yes, what does he do?”
“He works for a logistics company. Shipping,” he clari
fied, seeing Castille’s uncertainty. “He transports stuff all over the world, gets things through customs. Oh, and he’s also an arsehole.”
“Like father, like son, eh, Yorkie?” said one of the other SAS men, Kevin Baine. Unlike Mac’s earlier remark, the estuary-accented comment was devoid of playfulness.
“Fuck off,” Chase replied in kind. Baine’s flat face twisted into a sneer.
“An arsehole,” echoed Castille, the word somehow comical in his Belgian French intonation. “You do not like him, then?”
“Haven’t spoken to him since I left home ten years ago. Not that I saw much of him even before then. He was always off traveling. And having affairs behind my mum’s back.” The admission took him somewhat by surprise, Castille’s affable questioning having drawn more out of him than he had intended. He gave his SAS comrades warning looks, daring anyone to make a joke. Stikes’s expression suggested that he had stored the fact away in his mental database, but nobody said anything.
“Ah, I am sorry,” said Castille.
Chase shrugged. “No problem.” He had exaggerated—as far as he knew, there had only been the one affair.
But that was enough.
Castille was about to add something when the pilot’s voice crackled over a loudspeaker: “Ten minutes!” The mood instantly changed, the eight men straightening sharply in their seats. The red interior lights went out entirely, the only remaining illumination the eerie green glow of the cockpit instruments. Combat lighting, letting the troops’ eyes adapt to nighttime conditions.
“Okay,” said Mac, now entirely serious, “since we were a little short on prep, let’s review the situation one last time. Alexander?”
Stikes leaned forward to address the other men. “Right, now listen. As you know, we’ve got eleven United Nations aid workers—and one undercover MI6 officer—being held hostage by the Taliban, and twelve spare seats in our choppers.” He glanced toward a window; flying a hundred yards from the US Army Black Hawk was a smaller MH-6 Little Bird gunship. “I want all of them occupied on the way back. And I want that seat”—he pointed at one in particular—“to have our spy friend in it, alive and well. He’s got information on al-Qaeda that we need—maybe even Osama’s hidey-hole.”
“Makes you wonder if we’d be going on a rescue mission if one of ’em wasn’t a spook,” said Bluey.
“I don’t wonder,” Chase told the shaven-headed Australian with dark humor.
Stikes was unamused. “Keep it closed, Chase. Now, the GPS trackers on the UN trucks showed they’d been taken to an abandoned farm, and as of thirty minutes ago they’re still there. A satellite pass earlier today showed one other vehicle and a couple of horses, so we estimate no more than ten to twelve of Terry Taliban. We go in, reduce that number to zero, and recover the hostages.”
“Just to clarify the rules of engagement here,” said Starkman in his Texan drawl, “we’re not only rescuing the good guys, but taking out the bad guys, am I right?”
Even in the green half-light from the cockpit, Stikes’s cold smile was clearly visible. “Anyone who isn’t a hostage is classified as hostile. And you know what we do to hostiles.” Grim chuckles from the team.
“Any more word on air support, sir?” asked the fifth SAS trooper, a chunky Welshman named Will Green.
“Nothing confirmed as yet,” said Stikes. “All our aircraft in the region are engaged on another operation—the ones that aren’t broken down, at least. If anything becomes available, it’ll almost certainly be American.”
“Fucking great,” muttered Baine. “Anyone got spare body armor? Nothing I like more than dodging friendly fire.”
“That’s enough of that,” said Mac sharply. “If it weren’t for our American friends, we wouldn’t even have these helicopters. Be glad we’re not driving out there in Pink Panthers.” The SAS Land Rovers, painted in pinkish shades for desert camouflage, had inevitably acquired the nickname.
“Sorry, sir.” Baine gave Starkman a halfhearted nod of apology.
“Any further questions?” Stikes asked. There were none.
“One last thing,” said Mac. He regarded his men, focusing particularly on Chase. “You’ve all been in combat before, but this might feel different from anything else you have experienced. No matter what happens, just stay calm, keep focused, and remember your training. I know you can get these people to safety, so stick together and fight to the end.”
“Fight to the end,” Chase echoed, along with Green and Castille.
The next few minutes passed in as near to silence as it was possible to get inside the Black Hawk’s industrial clamor. Then the pilot’s voice boomed again: “One minute!” Chase glanced out the window. His eyes had now fully adjusted to the darkness, revealing that the landscape was climbing toward ragged mountains to the north. There were still expanses of desert plain, but they were broken up by steep, knotted hills. Tough terrain.
And they had six miles of it to cross.
The Black Hawk’s engine note changed, the aircraft tilting back sharply to slow itself before landing. Chase tensed. Any moment—
A harsh thump. Green slid open the cabin door on one side, Bluey the other, and the team scrambled out. Chase already had a weapon ready—a Diemaco C8SFW carbine, a Canadian-built variant of the American M4 assault rifle—as he ran clear of the swirling dust and dived flat to the ground, the others doing the same around him.
The Black Hawk heaved itself upward, hitting Chase with a gritty downblast as it wheeled back the way it had come. The Little Bird followed. With surprising speed, the chop of the two helicopters’ rotors faded.
The dust settled. Chase stayed down, scanning the landscape for any hint that they were not alone.
Nothing. They were in the clear.
A quiet whistle. He looked around, and saw Mac’s shadowy figure standing up. The other men rose in response. Still wary, they assembled before the bearded Scot as he switched on a red-lensed flashlight to check first a map, then his compass. “That way,” he said, pointing toward the mountains.
Chase regarded the black mass rising against the starscape with a grumbling sigh. “Buggeration and fuckery. Might have bloody known we’d be going the steepest possible route.”
“Enough complaining,” snapped Stikes. “Chase, you and Green take the lead. All right, let’s move!”
For most people, traversing six miles of hilly, rock-strewn terrain—in the dark—would be a slow, arduous, and even painful task. For the multinational special forces team, however, it was little more than an inconvenient slog. They had night-vision goggles, but nobody used them—the stars and the sliver of crescent moon, shining brilliantly in a pollution-free sky, gave the eight men more than enough light. After covering five miles in just over an hour and forty minutes, the only ill effect felt by Chase was a sore toe, and even Mac, oldest of the group by more than fifteen years, was still in strong enough shape to be suffering only a slight shortness of breath.
Not that Chase was going to cut him any slack, dropping back from Green to speak to him as they ascended a dusty hillside. “You okay, Mac?” he asked jovially. “Sounds like you’re wheezing a bit. Need some oxygen?”
“Cheeky sod,” Mac replied. “You know, when I joined the Regiment the entrance exercises were much harder than they are now. A smoker like you would have dropped dead before finishing the first one.”
“I only smoke off duty. And I didn’t know the SAS even existed in the nineteenth century!”
“Keep your mouth shut, Chase,” growled Stikes from behind them. “They’ll be able to hear you half a mile away, bellowing like that.”
Chase’s voice had been barely above a conversational level, but he lowered it still further to mutter, “See if you can hear this, you fucking bell-end.”
“What was that, Sergeant?”
“Nothing, Alexander,” Mac called back to Stikes, suppressing a laugh. “That’s enough of that, Eddie. Catch up with Will before he reaches the top of the hill. We’re getti
ng close.”
“On it, sir,” said Chase, giving Mac a grin before increasing his pace up the slope. By the time he drew level with Green, his levity had been replaced by caution, senses now on full alert. Both men dropped and crawled the last few feet to peer over the summit.
Ahead was a rough plain about half a mile across, a great humped sandstone ridge rising steeply at the far side. A narrow pass split the ridge from the mountains, a large rock near its entrance poking from the ground like a spearhead. The obvious route to the isolated farm was by traveling up the pass.
So obvious that it had to be a trap.
Unless the Taliban were complete idiots, which whatever his other opinions about them Chase thought was unlikely, there would almost certainly be guards watching the ravine’s far end. It was a natural choke point, easy for a few men to cover, and almost impossible to pass through undetected. And if the team were detected, that would be the end for the hostages. One gunshot, even one shout, would warn that a rescue was being attempted.
Which meant the guards had to be removed. But first … they had to be found.
Chase shrugged off his pack and extracted his night-vision goggles. He switched them on, waited for the display’s initial flare to fade, then donned them. The vista ahead became several times brighter, picked out in ghostly shades of green. He searched for any sign of movement. Nothing.
“See anything, Eddie?” Green asked quietly.
“Nothing on the ground … just checking that ridge.” Chase raised his head. The top of the rise would be a good place to station a lookout, giving a clear view of the plain, but it would also be a lot of effort to scale.
Too much effort, apparently. There was nobody there. He closed his eyes to ease the transition back to normal sight, then removed the goggles and waved to the waiting soldiers. By the time Mac joined him, his vision had mostly recovered. “Anything?” his commanding officer asked.
“Nope. Thought they might have put someone on the ridge, but it’s empty.”
Mac surveyed the scene, then took out the map. “We’ll go over the ridge, come at anybody watching the pass from the southeast. It’s a closed canyon; they won’t be expecting anyone from that direction.”
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