Harry was forty feet away when he saw the flashing blade in the air just as Paul, like a heat-seeking missile, hit Liquida from the side. Madriani drove his shoulder through the Mexican’s upper body, sending both of them skidding into the mud at the edge of the lake.
They lay crumpled in the muck, both dazed by the blow for several seconds before Liquida rose to his knees. When he stood, Harry could see that the knife was still in his hand.
Before Paul could get to his feet, Liquida was on him, the slashing tip of the blade searching for its target. The glistening point buried itself in Madriani’s right arm as Liquida drove him back to his knees. With his foot he kicked Paul in the stomach and pushed the lawyer over backward into the water. Liquida landed like a panther on Paul’s back and tried to drown him, all the while cutting and slashing with the blade.
Somehow under the water Madriani found the Mexican’s feet and pulled. Suddenly Liquida found himself upended, thrashing about on his back in the shallows. He slashed out with the knife and missed. Madriani backhanded him hard across the face, the bones of his knuckles ripping the flesh under the Mexican’s right eye. Before Liquida could recover, Paul’s hand came back the other way as a closed fist and caught him on the cheek on the other side.
The blow rattled Liquida’s brain but not before he sliced the front of Madriani’s shirt open, drawing a line of blood across his stomach and chest.
The two of them engaged in a death match as Joselyn reached Sarah lying in the dirt at the end of the trail. The speargun that Harry had clutched all afternoon, now that they needed it, was left in the car.
Paul and Liquida fought in a slow death spiral, dancing for position in the water. Madriani had come to a knife fight empty-handed, and Liquida intended to make the most of it. He smiled as he watched the rivulets of blood flowing from the shallow slash across the lawyer’s chest. What he didn’t see were the two hooded bumps on a log floating just at the surface of the lake as it drifted in behind him.
Madriani stood motionless, his back to the shore. Suddenly a flash of white water erupted behind Liquida. Before he could even flinch, the jaws of death bearing a hundred razor-sharp teeth slapped shut around the Mexican’s hips. The crocodile and his bloodied prey twisted and thrashed.
Liquida screamed and slashed out with his knife. The thin sharp point snapped as it struck the armor-hard scales on the back of the beast. The crocodile rose up and rolled over, taking Liquida beneath the waves. As the roiling surface settled, all that could be seen were bloody bubbles of air as they burst forth from the surface of the lake’s dark waters.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Four and a half hours after the final shots were fired in the jungle near Coba, a single errant asteroid somehow slipped undetected into the inner solar system. It had happened before, close calls with potential impactors, but this one was far nearer and more dangerous than most.
News accounts of the mysterious fire in the sky over the southern United States received sparse coverage in the world’s media. Less than two inches appeared on one of the inside pages of the only major daily in Phoenix, Arizona.
Scientists at NASA were still gathering data and analyzing the potential for disaster. A few members of Congress renewed their calls for more funding to scan the skies, the first step toward avoiding any future catastrophic event.
But most leaders, including those in the White House, assured the public that there was no real reason for concern. There was, after all, a far greater chance of winning the lottery than being killed by an asteroid.
Near disasters were always something that government leaders sought to downplay, especially if their own incompetence and possible corruption were contributing factors. It was one of the time-tested reasons for classifying otherwise public information. People in positions of power always had to survive; otherwise the world might turn upside down. Doctors merely buried their mistakes. Presidents shoveled them by the ton into the constantly sucking and massive dark hole of national security.
Fortunately the asteroid merely skimmed the earth’s upper atmosphere before skipping out into space, a close call, but no harm-colorful fireworks that illuminated the evening sky over the American Southwest.
What the newspapers and even the American government didn’t know was that Lawrence Leffort’s attempt to peddle secrets to a foreign power, and to test the deadly results in the desert of Arizona, was doomed from the inception.
Even without the failed rocket mounts, the iron asteroid that Leffort and his colleagues had so carefully harvested and sequestered behind the moon never had a chance of reaching Earth. The reason was that the final targeting software from the flash drive in Raji Fareed’s jacket had been intentionally scuttled by the man himself.
Fareed was an Israeli agent, a longtime sleeper in the space-age catacombs of the American empire. He had been sending information to Tel Aviv for years. It was how Israeli intelligence became aware of Project Thor. And they were not alone.
For decades America’s technologic crown jewels had been plundered by government and industrial spies and peddled by presidents who pocketed million-dollar speaking fees after they’d left office. The entire concept of a global economy embraced by both major parties was a naked excuse by political leaders and their Wall Street buddies to hollow out entire American industries and sell them abroad. American workers were left behind to squabble over the crumbs from diminishing social programs.
Of the few items of value in Fareed’s Paris hotel room, the only one that counted was the curious pair of spectacles with the wireless flash drive, the ones that Bruno’s men left on Raji’s body when they dumped him in the alley. Along with Raji’s notes, the glasses contained the accurate targeting software. It was the reason Fareed wanted so desperately to get online, so that he could transmit the data to his handlers in Tel Aviv.
As it turned out, the information never left America. The spectacles rested in the bottom of Joselyn’s purse and there they stayed until one afternoon when she crushed them under the wheel of her car. She smashed the flash drive with a hammer in the garage of the house she shared with Paul in Coronado, San Diego. It was bad enough knowing that NASA and the American Defense Department possessed the secret for bombing the earth with missiles from space. Joselyn had no intention of making it easy for the information to propagate.
And oh yes! Minutes after the croc tasted Liquida, while he was still deciding which parts were appetizers and which were entrees, the dog Bugsy crawled from the brush into Sarah’s lap. He had been shot in the side by the Mexicutioner but only grazed. He cried and whimpered but survived. Now he lives in the house with Sarah. This spring he sired three pups. Sarah kept the pick of the litter. She named him Adin.
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Trader of secrets pm-12 Page 35