Salman ground his teeth together and watched the men in black uniforms trying to not to make it look as though they were watching him. But he knew. If there was one thing Salman knew about himself, it was that he could smell a rat.
And this stank.
He and Rita sat in the front office of a cinder block building just off the main entrance to Vivas underground. High above, the beacon shone from the villa, less than half a mile away.
Rita had been quiet since her return, pre-occupied and unwilling to talk. The loss of Elsa hung heavy in her mind, but there was something else, something she didn’t want to talk to him about. She had always been loyal to a fault, always followed his instructions without question. She sat in silence now, staring blankly at one of the gray walls, her expression unreadable.
Salman looked away from her and considered his own position instead. The attack had flattened half of the above ground outbuildings, but he had instructed his scouts to investigate. Most of the damage was from deep-penetrating bunker-busting bombs. Not ordinary bombs. Missiles. He’d spent time as a mercenary in Africa after serving out his first jail sentence as a teenager. Enough time to learn how a bomb would crater the ground, and the difference between a bomb thrown at a target and fired at a target from above.
He heard Roger tell Iain Radcliff, that English rat, that he had one of the terrorists that attacked Vivas. The Massarra woman. He was claiming that she was the one responsible for the attacks here. But no terrorists had attacked this place, at least not terrorists tossing Molotov cocktails from the backs of jeeps.
Someone had bombed it, from above, with sophisticated weaponry, and they had been intent on destroying what was underground. One way or the other, Roger was lying, and the Englishman knew it, but he’d smiled at Salman, telling him how useful this could be. Nothing made sense. Or rather, in another way, it did.
The Englishman was an idiot.
Salman was as good as dead if he stayed here, but he wouldn’t leave without his prize.
Too much blood had been shed, and he’d come too far to quit now.
He eyed the Englishman’s men around him and then Rita. They had been allowed to keep their weapons; been told they were going to be escorted underground, as Salman had requested. He wagered that they would be going underground, but not into Vivas. He was betting the Englishman intended to bury him.
Such a threat brought out the very best and the worst in Salman.
He’d sent his own boy out to chase the Englishman’s, said he was gone on an errand. They were waiting to find him, he was sure, before they did whatever it was they were going to do. His team was expendable, so it was time to go. But how? He needed a diversion. He slouched back, pretended to sleep, but kept one eye on Rita, who kept one eye on him, too.
They’d been together a long time, he and his daughter. They understood each other.
A buzzing whine like a giant mosquito began outside. Salman flinched, fearing another rain of death might be arriving from above, but the buzz grew louder, and slower. Louder still, as if a lawn mower was approaching through the sky. As it passed overhead, the sound deepened. He strained to see out through the windows, but the sky was black.
An airplane.
Who the hell could that be?
Then a smile crept across his face, a new respect creeping into the hardened Italian criminal’s heart. “Stai pronta,” he mouthed silently to Rita, making sure none of the guards saw him do it.
People ran into the icy streets below, their faces looking up. Jess saw them as murky figures, a few hundred feet below her, but she was sure they couldn’t see her. They could hear her though, a grinding noise somewhere in the black night.
Now they were the hunted, and she the hunter.
She buzzed over the top of the put-together town, trying to make sense of where she’d been before. Most of it had changed—flattened in the attack, and covered in snow. Two clear landmarks remained: the hilltop villa with its lights blazing, and the jailhouse she’d been trapped in. That was right next to the tunnel leading into the Vivas underground. If she was going to hide her father’s data, and Roger’s precious beacon, that’s where she’d hide it.
But she didn’t just need to guess.
The signet ring on her left index finger started tapping again, just when she saw the smudge of light appear from the blackness. Left, left, it had tapped in its simple code, and then forward, forward—warmer, warmer—a game of hide-and-seek. As she swept over the middle of the town, the ring’s tapping shifted from the top of her finger to the bottom. Back, it said, colder, cold.
Just like the game she used to play with her father when she was a child. Where is the Easter egg? Warmer, warmer, no, colder, yes! Warmer. You’re close! Marco. Polo!
And she was close.
Jess banked the aircraft, shooting straight over a clump of tents just past the periphery of the collection of huts and buildings. She kept an eye on the attitude indicator, making sure to keep her banking below ten degrees. That was another instruction scribbled onto her notes. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she did, but she only took chances she could understand.
The tapping on her finger shifted from behind to left.
Good enough.
Swinging the nose around, she picked a target. The easiest target. The villa on top of the hill. She set her crosshair—the nose of the plane—dead onto it, easing the yoke back a little to gain altitude. Easier to dive bomb than come straight at it, and she needed some clearance.
From the seat beside her, she grabbed a roll of duct tape and pulled off a strip, wrapped one end around the yoke and the other to the instrument panels. She pulled off more strips and secured it the best she could.
The villa grew from bright smudge in the distance to gain some definition. Now she could see its roof and walls. Maybe a mile away.
She pushed back in her chair and inspected the taped-up yoke. Her autopilot. She nudged it forward, feeling the aircraft nose down. Her stomach lurched at the change in gravity.
The tapping on her finger stopped, but there was no time to figure what happened.
Time to get the hell out.
One problem with turning on the cabin heater was her foot had started to defrost. Needles of pain shot up her leg. Her foot was on fire, and she yelped in pain as she tried to move it for the first time in an hour.
The plane’s nose dipped further.
The villa swept into view.
Less than half a mile, but her autopilot wasn’t quite up to the task. The strips of duct tape ripped away from the instrument panel as Jess tried to extricate herself from the seat, wrenching open the passenger side door handle at the same time.
The plane pitched sickeningly forward.
Jet fuel spattered onto Jess from one of the containers. She gagged and pushed against the door, the pressure of the wind outside forcing it back closed. The aircraft gained speed as it dived, the air driving harder against the door. She jammed her foot against the yoke, using it to shove her shoulder against the door and push herself halfway out.
Pain exploded in her foot—and the plane tipped into a spin.
Wind rushed over her face. She was soaked in fuel, reeling from dizziness. The plane whipped around once. The g-force of its spin threw her outward. The lights of the villa swept by, then swept by again. She sensed the ground rushing up. With a desperate thrust, she ejected herself from the aircraft, releasing her drogue chute in the same motion.
The familiar, sweet rush of open air greeted her
She spread her arms and legs wide, thrust her stomach forward. The shuttlecock. The same position and motions that she’d taught to dozens of beginners on their first jump, and she’d jumped hundreds of times. She waited for the tug of the drogue chute to pull out her main.
But she got more than a tug.
Her body rocketed back. Her arms and legs snapped painfully in front.
The impact rushed all the blood into her head, almost knocking her unconscious. Wi
thout looking, she knew. The drogue’s lines must have tangled in the airframe of the Cessna. It wasn’t an aircraft designed for jumping out of. The wind rushing past her, at the edge of consciousness, just one thought—
Look, grab, pull.
It was the only other critical instruction she’d drilled into the heads of her hundreds of jump students. She grabbed the emergency handle and pulled and felt herself spin away into space.
A bright orange burst lit up everything around her, and a split second later the explosion’s concussion sent her tumbling, her reserve chute only half open, flames bursting across its silken surface.
A fiery ball of flame blossomed high into the dark sky over the buildings, the impact of the explosion juddering the ground and shaking the cinder block walls.
“We’re under attack again,” Salman yelled, getting to his feet.
Rita stood with him.
People ran by in the street outside. Bursts of automatic gunfire erupted in the distance, then close by. Two of the men guarding them stepped out through the swinging double doors to talk to the guards outside. The moment the doors swung closed, Salman pulled a knife from his sleeve, stepped toward one of the remaining guards, who was staring out the window, and plunged the blade into the side of the man’s neck. He slumped forward without a sound, blood spraying high up into the ceiling and across Salman’s face.
The other guard, staring out the opposite window and fixated on the explosion still reverberating across the valley, never noticed. Voices screamed. Rita swung her rifle around and shoved the muzzle under the guard’s chin. He tensed for a second, then went limp.
“Good decision,” Rita said in accented English.
She took away his weapon and tossed it down the stairs, forcing the man to his knees. In a swift motion, she brought the butt of her rifle down into his temple. The man splayed out on the floor.
Through the window, Salman saw his boy, his nephew, motioning toward the back of the building.
“Sul retro,” Salman said to Rita, who watched the guards outside on the front steps.
They quietly stole down the back stairs, Salman first, followed by Rita.
Iain Radcliff watched the fireball, twisting and rolling in on itself, roil high into the dark sky. Flames burst and spread across the ragtag of huts in the distance. The lights of the villa shone above it all. He looked at the flames, back at Massarra and Roger, then back at the fireball.
“What the hell is going on?” he sputtered.
The guards in black fatigues around him hesitated.
“Yes, go and find out!” he yelled at the one closest to him.
Two of them peeled off through the back tent flap.
He turned to Massarra. “Is this anything to do with you?”
One of the guards holding her ripped her hair back, and she grimaced but said nothing.
Beside her, Roger was busy unwrapping the mass of bandages from his left hand, pulling off strips of duct tape and bloody rag. He held a syringe of morphine, one that Radcliff had given him, in his right hand as he worked. The last strip pulled free, revealing his mangled hand, a red welt through the middle, but also a jagged wound where his thumb had been.
It had been cut off.
And something else was in his hand under the bandages.
A gray cylinder.
It thudded onto the wooden floor and rolled into the middle of the room.
Radcliff looked at Roger’s hand, at his missing thumb, then at the object rolling along the ground toward him. “What the—”
It was a grenade.
The pin had dropped to the floor between Roger and Massarra.
In a second everyone in the room understood. Except that Massarra and Roger understood the moment differently. He swung his right arm and jabbed the syringe needle into the neck of one of the guards holding Massarra, while she ducked down and delivered a knee straight into the testicles of the other. They all fell backward in a tangled heap.
Roger rolled to his feet and grabbed Massarra by the ropes binding her hands and shoved her through the front tent flap. The crunching detonation threw them into the air, over the top of a snowmobile parked outside, bits of flaming debris falling over and around them, hissing into the snow.
32
“SBRIGATEVI, VENITE,” SALMAN’S boy urged, waving to them from the shadows at the back of the jail block.
Salman grabbed him by the nape of his coat. “Dove? Did you find it?”
“Sì, sì.” The boy doubled over and ran into a jagged opening in a cement wall behind them.
They followed him into the inky blackness.
Behind them, in the sky, a loud whirring noise. Not like the small airplane, not slow and unsteady, but fast and deadly. Another explosion rocked the ground. More staccato bursts of automatic weapons.
He could hide it, burrow it away until they forgot that it existed.
This was Salman’s plan. Whatever it was that someone wanted from that laptop and those tapes, it would remain valuable, but he would make it disappear, at least for now. Go to ground. Make them think it was lost or destroyed. Then, unlike the mad Englishman, discreetly make inquiries. No frontal assaults. No singing to the world. The idiot was probably already dead.
His boy whispered, this way, that way, leading them through a maze of corrugated sheet metal and stinking piles of refuse, up the hill toward the central villa. He paused at a vee-shaped tumble of brick and snow, darting his head out and back before telling Salman it was safe, but urging him to go first. He pointed at an entrance carved into the earth, leading underground.
That had to be the Vivas entrance. A single guard stood nervously by the entrance.
“Lì dentro?” Salman asked his boy. “Is it in there?” The boy nodded, so he straightened up and walked at the uniformed solider.
“Hey, have you seen Iain? Goddamn it, he was supposed to meet me here.”
The soldier’s attention alternated from Salman to the whirring in the sky. “Have not seen him, sir.”
“Open the door.”
“I need your pass, sir.”
“Goddamn it, we’re under attack.”
The door behind the soldier slid open by itself, and four more like him came out at a full run.
Salman strode forward to the still open door.
“Sir, I cannot—”
He grabbed the young man by the throat and pressed his knife into the jugular. “I mean you no harm, I just need my property.”
Rita and the boy scrambled across the street and through the door.
His knife still at his throat, Salman guided the solider through the door and into the curved marble floor that angled downward. Glowing picture frames lined the walls and a door-panel hissed open. He shoved the young man in ahead.
Rita had a length of rope ready, and she tied the guard to a white chair by a brushed metal table in the middle of the room. He didn’t resist. The kid was scared, didn’t understand what was going on. Boots clattered in the hallway outside. A thundering detonation shook the walls.
“A blond boy, Iain’s boy, did he come in here?”
The guard nodded.
“He had a pack with him?”
“He came a minute before you.”
“Don’t move, you understand?”
Rita brandished her rifle, made sure he understood. He nodded.
Backing out into the hallway, they followed it down. Salman knew they had cameras, that they’d seen him at the entrance, in the room, everywhere here, but it didn’t matter. Speed was all that mattered in this confusion. More uniformed soldiers ran past them to the surface. They rounded a corner and found themselves in a huge, brightly lit dome, filled with trees and walkways and flowers.
“Madonna Merde,” Salman muttered, amazed by the opulence, but there were cracks in the smooth concrete ceiling. Water glistened and leaked from one.
And there, staring at them, was the blond boy.
“Hey!” Salman waved. “Iain told me to come and
get the bag.”
The boy almost bolted, but froze. In his hand was Salman’s prize.
“Stay there, it’s okay.” He ran to the boy at a jog, not too fast, didn’t want to scare him. He grabbed the bag and opened it. There it was. The laptop, the tapes and CDs, the beacon. “Go and hide,” he told the boy. “And stay the hell away from Iain, he’s a bad man, you understand?”
He didn’t wait to see if the boy understood.
Another concussion rocked the ground, bringing down a shower of plaster and debris. Salman took off at a sprint, back the way they came, up the smooth marble hallway that curved around and around. He expected someone to stop them, but in an instant he was back outside and shot straight into the warren of huts across the street. He didn’t look back, didn’t turn to gawk at the fireballs or the chatter of machine guns, but headed deep into the maze of shacks before stopping.
“Aspettiamo,” he said to Rita, motioning for them to get low, to be quiet.
Near pitch black, but Salman had good eyes. Now they would wait, move slowly, melt away into the night. By now the Englishman would know, but he was sure Iain had other more pressing issues.
The crack of gunfire faded.
Something whirred past overhead
An uneasy silence descended.
“I believe that is mine,” said a voice in the darkness.
A red light clicked on.
Rita raised her rifle, but Salman held the muzzle down to peer at the ragged figure standing in front of them. He’d know that voice anywhere.
Jess knew who it was right away. The curved cleft lip on the man’s face was the last thing she saw before she slipped under the ice. “Salman, what’s in the bag is mine.”
“I thought you were dead,” the man replied. “Morta. I saw you die.”
“I was.”
Even in the dim red light of her headlamp, she saw their eyes and mouths open at the sight of her.
“Strega,” Rita whispered.
She crouched beside Salman, the boy between them. Their faces looked like they saw a ghost.
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 23