RACE AMAZON: Maelstrom (James Pace novels Book 2)

by Andy Lucas

  Neither man had any way of knowing for certain whether Pace, Sarah, Baker or the rest of the McEntire team were on board the doomed helicopter.

  As the machine cavorted wildly in its death throes, spinning and twisting, both men pictured the scene in their minds. Attia took his finger off of the button knowing he’d taken a gamble that might have just killed his own people.

  Shaking off the same thought, Hammond urged him to close on the remaining machine. Its pilot had seen their companion vanish from his own radar screen and was coaxing every last horsepower from the power-plant in a frantic bid to outrun a similar fate. The Lynx was fast and bolted away from the pursuing helicopter, revelling in the speed it could build as it was tested to the limit.

  Once upon a time, the fastest helicopter on earth, it started to pull away. Attia had to gun the Dauphin’s engines for all they were worth just to match the velocity. Going at full tilt, he could do nothing more than keep up with it. Cathera had had a few upgrades added when the Lynx was refurbished and slowly, painfully, it began pulling away towards safety.

  To make matters worse, a warning light began to blink red from the console to Attia’s left. Fuel was running out fast.

  Inside the Lynx, Cathera was a happier man than might have been expected. The situation wasn’t as bad as it felt. He just had to lose the attacking force and head back to the abandoned mine. Then the plan could be carried out as if nothing had happened to disturb it.

  Unfortunately, his pilot had already informed him of the loss of the transport helicopter and suggested that bullets or a missile might bring them down too, at any moment. Cathera assured him that this was not going to happen.

  With McEntire uncertain as to his daughter’s whereabouts, Cathera correctly guessed that their pursuer would be more careful with them. Any other man might have been given to panic but Cathera was no fool. Wolf looked more than a little worried but stared ahead into the gloom beyond the cockpit, trusting in the plans he had helped conjure to deal with this very eventuality.

  Sarah looked as terrified as she felt. Struggling to breathe calmly, she could do nothing but listen to her unwelcome companions talking about possible, imminent death and ways to avoid it. She felt sick and wanted to vomit but swallowed the bitter bile back down.

  Wolf dialled a number into his satellite phone and it was quickly answered. Cathera eyed him, hoping that their carefully laid trap would do the job.

  ‘Ground team, are you in position?’ he asked. The voice on the other end assured him that they were. ‘We are painting ourselves now,’ Wolf added. ‘Can you see the beacon?’ Again, an affirmative reply. ‘Over to you then. Just make sure you shoot at the right target. We will meet you at the rendezvous point tomorrow, at noon.’ Wolf finished the call and nodded to Cathera. ‘All is ready.’

  ‘Good,’ sighed Cathera. Then, to the pilot. ‘How far are we from the zone?’

  ‘Almost there,’ stammered the small, wiry man who had been bribed handsomely to betray his country. He paused to wipe a heavy sweat from his brow with the back of a gloved hand. ‘We will be over them in less than a minute.’

  ‘Excellent,’ smirked Cathera.

  ‘Only if our friends hold their fire for that long,’ countered Wolf conversationally.

  ‘They will. Predictably, they will.’

  Down in the bosom of the foggy canopy, two men braced themselves against the wavering upper fronds of the tree and checked their safety tethers. The heavy rain made moving treacherous on the slippery branches and night was also fast drawing in; thickening and darkening the eerie cloud in a way that added an almost supernatural malevolence to a scene more suited to an old Hammer horror.

  Ordered to this exact location a day earlier, they had climbed up into the upper canopy and set up a firing point. A lattice of safety lines penned them in and protected them from a lethal drop to the ground over eighty feet below their boots. Both men were experienced mercenaries and they did not complain about rain or heat; they were being extremely well paid for a simple little mission that didn’t even put them on a front line.

  They could not hear the helicopters approach over the suffocating density of the cloud blanket stretching above their heads for a depth of over six hundred feet.

  But, just as Attia had relied upon the marvels of technology to get a result a few minutes earlier, so too did the mercenaries.

  The Stinger, shoulder-launched anti-aircraft system, was sighted and its own tracking system detected two contacts. The contact at the front was emitting a slow, regular blip that flashed on the small LCD screen that one of the men had taped to the weapon’s side.

  ‘That’s the one we must not hit,’ laughed one man.

  ‘Not if we want to get paid,’ agreed the other. This was just too easy, he thought, as he targeted the contact at the back and locked on. A bright flash and the missile streaked up into the clouds, leaving the two men below to watch the show on their little screen. With both aircraft almost directly overhead at that point, and flying very low, the missile was only in flight for five seconds before impact.

  Unaware of the danger, at the same moment the mercenary was squeezing the trigger of the launcher, Attia decided they could not let the faster helicopter outpace him and escape. Grimly aware of the possible consequences, he targeted the tail section of the Lynx and sent another stream of cannon shells punching through the cloud.

  The Lynx shuddered under the painfully accurate onslaught and Cathera had the realisation that he was being shot down at exactly the same moment that the missile attack warning claxon sounded inside the Dauphin’s cockpit. There was no time to say anything, or try to outmanoeuvre the missile – they were too low and couldn’t see where it was coming from.

  Together, Hammond and Attia popped open their doors and threw themselves bodily out of the cockpit barely a second before the Stinger entered, announcing its arrival with a vicious explosion that tore the Dauphin to shreds, disintegrating it in mid-air and sprinkling the jungle treetops with ten thousand fiery slivers of metal, glass and molten plastic. A few hundred feet away the Lynx died too.

  22

  When Pace regained consciousness, he found himself in near total darkness, in a small room where only the thin outline of a closed door spilled a credit card thickness of yellow light inside. The room was some kind of storage area, he surmised. As his eyes adjusted and his head stopped swimming, he noticed several shelves of tins and some large plastic barrels stacked in one corner. The air was stale and musty. Worst of all, he was naked.

  There was no sound at all from the world outside the storage room as he shuffled slowly to the door and pressed his eyes against the top hinge, where a missing chip of wood about the size of a pea gave the most promising spy hole. The room outside was a kitchen, he could tell as much by the small area of counter and the stainless steel sink he could see.

  The sink was heavily stained and dented, as was the piece of counter; smothered with a thick layer of dust it had obviously not been used to prepare food for a long time. Nothing stirred and he strained his ears, holding his breath, to try and catch the sound of any guard or other unwelcome visitor outside. He heard nothing. Uncanny, total and utter silence was his one companion.

  ‘He won’t have just dumped you somewhere and disappeared,’ Pace told himself quietly. ‘He wants to kill you in spectacular fashion so he will be around here somewhere. Time you got going.’

  The walls were solid, leaving the door as his only escape route.

  Testing his weight against it gingerly, he was pleasantly surprised to find it little more than a standard plywood internal door, with a single lock at the handle and, possibly, some kind of bolt security on the outside. The door gave a little under the pressure and he was fairly confident he could smash it open with a heavy shoulder charge.

  The drawback was that this would create noise and attract any nearby bad guys immediately. He could try picking the lock but he was not a thief and had no experience there.

&n
bsp; The door gave way with a splintering crash on the first attempt. Managing to keep his feet, Pace found himself in the large kitchen. There were no windows and the whole place looked like it had been deserted for months. A small window, set high into the wall, lit the kitchen with a vague gloom, casting shadows into the corners. Dust coated everything, with only fresh footprints on the floor having disturbed it and gigantic cobwebs curtained the ceiling with a gorgeously intricate billow of silk.

  Not a single shred of cloth lay around and he silently cursed the thought of facing whatever lay on the other side of the door without the protection of clothing.

  Only one door broke the smoothness of the kitchen walls. Walking over to it, he pressed his ear against it and listened. Again, he heard nothing. There were no cracks of holes in this one, just a single knob in the centre. Hearing no sounds of alarm or action, he drew a deep breath and slowly turned it, being rewarded with a subtle click as the latch released.

  The world that flooded in was as alien to him as anything he had ever seen before.

  The self-contained kitchen unit was actually a metal container, exactly the same as one hundred thousand others that crossed the oceans aboard huge ships every day of the year. Unlike their cargo-bearing cousins, this container did not have large double doors at one end; instead it had a single door set into its length. Designed to be dropped, ready-to-use, by helicopter to any destination, these types of containers were the backbone of mining exploration field equipment. Painted in matt brown, it looked as drab as its interior.

  Once, the jungle around it had been thick and lush. Now it stood, raped and ravaged of its natural resources; gold. Open-cast, the top layers of soil had been blasted away with jets of water, drawn from the meandering nearby river tributary, and channelled into sluices that emptied thousands of tonnes of precious dirt into the river, mixed with a healthy dose of arsenic that was used by the miners to separate gold from the background slurry.

  The mine stretched for as far as the eye could see. At some point, sensing no further financial benefit from surface washing, the miners had moved on and simply left their equipment behind.

  The kitchen unit was not the only unit on the site. Eight other units sat dotted around the kitchen, comprising the accommodation, showering and toileting facilities for the men that had once worked there.

  The mine was deserted. No sign of Cathera, Baker or the others could be seen as he scanned the horizon, sweeping his gaze from end to end several times.

  Apart from the units; all painted the same drab shade, old hoses, pumping units and hand tools lay scattered around a landscape that resembled the pitted, muddy trenches of Ypres. Massive, rusting runs of sluice-bed ran around the site like a maniacal giant’s marble run, only slowly beginning to be reclaimed by moss and low fern growth.

  Pace estimated that the mine had been abandoned for over a year. There was barely a covering of low scrub and most of the area remained brown and sullen.

  Why leave me here? It doesn’t make any sense, he thought to himself. Cathera would gain nothing by dumping him somewhere like this. Even though it was a deserted mine, he still had access to the river and would definitely be able to fashion some kind of boat, then make a damned good attempt at getting back to civilisation. Where was everyone?

  The light was failing fast, and a fine drizzle iced the scene with misery. He had been unconscious for many hours but a few breaths of the cooling air served to sharpen his senses and kick start his mind. Quickly, he set about exploring the units in the hope of finding something to wear.

  The other units had been stripped bare by the miners, leaving only empty shells. Even the showers and toilets had been removed.

  Small windows in one of the accommodation units still sported a set of green and grey, striped curtains and a bit of careful tearing soon allowed Pace to cover his modesty with a loincloth. In another, he found several pairs of old working boots discarded in one corner. The first pair he picked up disturbed a family of angry scorpions but he finally managed to find an uninhabited pair that matched his size. There were no laces so he tore more strips from the curtains to fashion some.

  The rest of the units yielded nothing of interest and by the time he finished, darkness had fallen. Fortunately, the sky had cleared and starlight flooded the mine with a silvery glow, so he was able to see.

  Wherever Cathera and his cronies were, they would soon be back to get him and he had no intention of waiting around for them. Despite the lure of settling into the relative safety of one of the units, he trudged down towards the river.

  He was so used to the animal sounds of a jungle night that he felt perfectly happy in a place that would have seemed terrifyingly alien to him a few months earlier. He sat a little back from the water’s edge so as not to invite attack by a lurking cayman or giant anaconda and forced himself to think more clearly. He could not really go traipsing through the thick jungle with no torch to guide the way and no clothing to protect him from potentially poisonous bites and stings, nor could he set up temporary home in one of the metal units.

  The thought of waiting until daylight to move was depressing because it gave time for Cathera to come back, but he saw no other sensible option. If he’d found some clothing, he would have risked walking out.

  ‘You are really good at landing yourself in it,’ he muttered to the empty darkness, focusing his gaze absently on the beautiful shimmer that the moon was casting over the gentle water.

  As his eyes adjusted more accurately to the low light level, he noticed a section of rusty steel piping off to one side. He scooped it up. It was heavy and would make a good enough weapon to fight off any of the local predators. Against a gun it was as good as useless but it made him feel a little better about his chances of making it through the night. Camouflaging his exposed skin with handfuls of stinking, sticky mud from the river’s edge, including his face and neck, he sat hunched by the river, watching and waiting; looking as if he’d just stepped out of a page from Lord of the Flies.

  He half expected Cathera to appear at any moment and was genuinely surprised to see the first streaks of pink massage the pre-dawn sky without his nemesis putting in an appearance.

  Leaving the river’s edge, he decided to check out all the containers again in the strengthening daylight. It was as he was checking the last of them again, having still found nothing useful, that he noticed a narrow trail that ran off between two of them and disappeared behind a stand of tall ferns.

  Curious, he made his way along the muddy track. It didn’t go far, ending in a small clearing edged on all sides by jungle. In the clearing sat another container. This one was red and streaked with rust, yet the hinges glistened with grease and two new, heavy-duty padlocks secured the door tightly closed. There had been a lot of recent foot traffic in and around the doors, as testified by the numerous boot prints.

  Pace knew there were no tools around that he could use to overcome the padlocks but he also knew he had to get inside the container somehow. Something interesting must be inside, he reasoned.

  He didn’t care if it held half the national wealth of Brazil in gold ingots, he just hoped for some clothing, some food and maybe a radio of some kind. The only problem was the padlocks, and it was a serious problem. Toughened steel, specially tempered, would not give way under the pounding of a rock or a heavy branch.

  ‘Think, James, think,’ he muttered under his breath, smiling to himself grimly.

  He sat for the best part of ten minutes, wracking his brains for a way to break open the padlocks. Getting nowhere, he decided to have a closer look at them. Amazingly enough, upon close inspection, the padlocks were not actually locked.

  Both had just been hooked through and closed but they were of a type that sported an opening latch, so just closing them did not lock them. Just out of hopeless interest, Pace tested one latch and the lock had sprung open. Hardly daring to believe that the other would also be unlocked, he repeated the action and was rewarded with a second open p
adlock.

  Sucking down a calming breath of the moist morning air, he carefully removed the locks and placed them down on the ground. Half thinking that they had not been locked because the container was going to be as empty as all the others, he pulled open one of the heavy steel doors and peered inside the gloomy, windowless interior.

  Immediately he reeled backwards, gagging on the evil stench of putrefying flesh that leapt out of the dark interior to attack his nose, burning his throat and making his eyes sting. After a few seconds, he turned back to the open doors and allowed himself to adjust to the foul presence within. Determined to see what was inside, he took a deliberate step forward.

  There were multiple wooden crates, each about the size of a large suitcase, stacked up in the far right-hand corner. In the middle sat six large boxes, this time made of heavy-duty plastic. They were not stacked, but pushed together to form a neat rectangle; each box was similar in size to a large refrigerator. Next to them, a clear plastic five-gallon barrel half filled with white powder of some description sported a skull and crossed bones.

  Pace’s blood ran cold. Sitting on top of the barrel was a compact steel container, no larger than a sports bag. Although small, the triple key locks and stark warning sticker drove despair deep into his heart. The sticker on the case glowed yellow with visions of unspeakable disaster; internationally understood and immediately recognisable. Yellow and black, with a circular and segmented centre, the warning sign for radiation stared back at him coldly.

  Once secreted within the lead-lined nose of a doomed fighter jet, it had until recently held several kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium removed from the ex-Soviet missile arsenal.

  Now freely available to terrorists with deep pockets, mainly via the Russian mafia, McEntire’s policy of negotiating with criminals and paying top dollar to remove the material from international circulation had, in this instance, been derailed. It was never an ideal solution but the McEntire Corporation had already purchased and permanently recycled enough radioactive and biological material to save the planet from destruction a hundred times over.