by Jack Du Brul
Impressed by the French agent’s thoroughness, Mercer still scoffed at this final pronouncement. “And how exactly do you know that? Do you have an engineering background? Geology? Hell, do you even know who Godin de Lepinay was?” Bruneseau’s silence was Mercer’s answer. “I didn’t think so.”
Foch tensed at Mercer’s tone while Bruneseau remained impassive. A silent minute passed before the spy cleared his throat and leaned forward. “You believe there may be something in the journal I missed?”
“I’m saying it’s possible.”
“Are you willing to share whatever you learn from it?”
“If you’re willing to back me up when I return to the lake.”
“When we return to the lake.” Lauren touched Mercer’s leg in a gesture of solidarity.
“I suppose I owe you,” Rene said with an undercurrent of resignation in his voice. His investigation into Hatcherly had gone nowhere and Mercer was offering a new way to restart it. “I can’t pull too many men away from Hatcherly’s container port so I will give you two plus Foch and myself.”
Mercer nodded. “Fair enough. When?”
“We can leave tomorrow afternoon. You two can spend the night here.”
Mercer whispered to Lauren if she had a cell phone on her. She said it was at home. “I’ve got some things to take care of first,” he said to Rene. “We’ll meet back here at noon.”
“You can’t return to the Caesar Park Hotel. Liu’s people may think you’ve left Panama but it’s an unnecessary risk returning to such a public place.”
“We’ll sleep at Lauren’s apartment.” It was the first she’d heard of this and her eyes widened.
“Okay. As far as we know, Liu isn’t aware of her involvement. It should be safe. One of my men will drive you over and pick you up at noon.”
“Until tomorrow, then.” Mercer stood. He was filled with an urgency that hadn’t been there only moments before, buoyed by a sudden inspiration that he needed to check out.
Forty minutes later, Lauren twisted the key into the lock of her apartment, located in a high-rise building that overlooked the Bay of Panama. Since the government paid the rent, her apartment was on a lower floor and the windows faced landward.
“Are you going to tell me why you needed a phone?” she asked.
“In a minute.” Mercer went straight to her telephone and dialed the Caesar Park, asking the operator to connect him to Harry’s room. As he waited, he studied Lauren’s living room. The furniture looked like it came with the place and Lauren had put out only a few personal items, family photos mostly, including one of her in scuba gear wearing a one-piece swimsuit that showed the muscular curves of her body. He turned from the picture before she saw his interest. Harry picked up on the fifth ring. “How’d it go?”
“You were supposed to wait by the phone for my call,” Mercer complained.
“I was in the crapper. Food down here is killing me, I think my assho-”
Mercer cut him off before Harry could get any more graphic. “I get the picture.”
“So how did it go?”
Sketching out the details, Mercer summed up by asking if Harry and Roddy were willing to do a little work.
“Whatcha got in mind?”
“The dump trucks. The armored car is long gone, I’m sure, but I want you and Roddy to follow one of the dump trucks. Their presence at the port doesn’t make any sense and I think they’re connected somehow.”
“Roddy’s here right now and his car’s down in the hotel garage. We’re on it.”
“Before you leave, check out of the Caesar Park and find another hotel.”
“Why? I like it here. This place is a palace and I must say it suits me.”
Mercer laughed. “Hate to tell you this, pal, but you’re even outclassed by a roach motel. It’s obvious that both the Frogs and Liu Yousheng have been watching me because my dinner with Gary’s wife turned into a spectator sport. Yet somehow neither group knows about you and Roddy and I want to keep it that way.”
“So I’m going to be the ace in the hole, huh?” Harry liked the idea.
“It’s a step up from your normal role of a drunk in the gutter.”
“Hey, I only passed out in the gutter that one time coming back from Tiny’s,” Harry protested. “Do you have to keep bringing it up?”
“Payback for the thing at the hospital.”
“Then we’re even?”
“Not even close,” Mercer said with a grin, hanging up after Harry said he’d move in with Roddy’s family for a few days. He’d keep the journal until after Mercer came back from the River of Ruin.
“ ‘A drunk in the gutter,’ what is it with you two? Are you ever nice to each other?”
“That was being nice.” Mercer sank onto Lauren’s couch with an exhausted sigh. “Now you know why I wanted to make the call away from the safe house?”
“You didn’t want Bruneseau overhearing. You don’t trust him?”
“There aren’t too many spies I do trust. Present company excluded. Once we reach the lake and I’ve got evidence that Hatcherly is plundering a Panamanian archeological site I don’t want anything to do with him. And as far as China taking the canal? It was a mistake years ago for the U.S. to give it away so I couldn’t care less what happens to it now.”
“Bullshit!” Lauren spat, not letting his lie hang in the air for even a second. Mercer cocked an eyebrow, secretly pleased that she had seen through him. “I’ve been watching you for the past few days,” she went on, “and I think I know what makes you tick. Bruneseau has dangled another challenge in front of us and you can’t wait to take it up.”
“Am I that obvious?” Mercer smiled at her fury.
“Why else would you have sent Harry after those dump trucks? You’ve already guessed Hatcherly is up to something beyond gold smuggling. You said that crap about not caring what happens to the canal because you want to drop me the same way you’re going to drop Bruneseau.”
“This isn’t your fight,” Mercer said seriously.
“Don’t try to push me aside because I’m a woman,” she returned hotly. Unlike many women who mask their sexuality by defensively crossing their arms over their breasts, Lauren stood with her hands on her hips, her chest out proudly. “This is as much my fight as yours.”
“I want to keep you out because you are a commissioned officer in the United States Army who could lose everything by helping me.” Mercer raised his own voice to match hers. “Not because you’re a woman. I’m trying to protect your career, not your gender.”
Lauren glowered then suddenly backed down because she saw that he wasn’t lying. Mercer wasn’t the type to step over the line between chivalry and chauvinism. Her voice softened. “Thank you for that, but it’s my career. Besides, I have a secret weapon to get me out of hot water with the army.” She paused, a little embarrassed. “My father is a general.”
The admission came as a surprise, as were the implications. He couldn’t resist teasing her. “And you’re not above crying, Daaaddyyyy!”
She bristled, having spent her career dodging rumors that her father had paved the way for her promotions. Knowing it wasn’t true and with nothing to prove, she had still taken tough postings to stifle her detractors, deliberately staying away from duties that would have fast-tracked promotion. It rankled that she’d been forced to sabotage her own career because her father happened to be a general.
Then she saw that Mercer wasn’t serious, and couldn’t possibly know what was said behind her back. Her expression turned sheepish. “I’ve never needed to but the option’s always open. And if you repeat that to anyone you’ll be digesting your teeth.”
Mercer realized he’d hit a sore spot. He could imagine the hell she’d gone through being the daughter of a general, like being a student in a school where a parent was the principal. Only this wasn’t school. This was her entire life. He wished he’d held his tongue. “Deal.”
Lauren nodded and something silent pass
ed between them. She knew one of his deepest secrets and now he knew the root of her pain. It was more than either expected to share and yet they had. She turned away before she blushed. “Give me fifteen minutes in the shower and the bathroom’s yours. I think I’ve got a couple beers in the fridge if you want one.”
The sting of the shower slowly washed away the exhaustion that cramped her muscles and caused her joints to stiffen. She luxuriated under the spray, soaping and rinsing her entire body twice and digging her fingers through her hair until her scalp went numb. Even as her entire being craved sleep, she thought about the man in the other room. He was unlike anyone she’d met before. Handsome, yes, but that wasn’t what she found so compelling. It was the way others listened to him. People sensed his confidence and responded automatically. Bruneseau was a trained spy but by the end of their talk he was taking orders from Mercer, a geologist. Her father was a little like that.
Where’d that thought come from? Stop it, Lauren, she chided herself, thinking a Freudian would be having a field day with that idea.
She recalled the way he’d looked at the picture of her in a bathing suit and how she’d liked how it made her feel. With a quick gesture, she twisted the tap to cold, and the thermal shock on her skin scattered any further thoughts in that direction.
By the time she had toweled off and stepped from the bathroom to tell Mercer the shower was his, he was asleep on the couch, still smelling of sweat and combat. Lauren pulled a spare blanket from a linen closet and draped it over him. Even in sleep his jaw was firm. She resisted the urge to touch his face, to feel the rasp of his thirty-hour beard. She killed the lights and went to her own bed.
Panama City, Panama
Mercer had always carried a cliched mental picture of the French Foreign Legion. In his mind, they were still lonely guardsmen in isolated sandstone forts blistered by the Saharan sun and doomed by overwhelming odds. Gary Cooper in a kepi and Berbers on camels wielding Saracen swords. What he’d seen the night before, his and Lauren’s rescue from Hatcherly, had helped dispel the image. He now realized he was in the company of an elite fighting force as well trained as the SEALs or Green Berets.
The two soldiers accompanying them to the lake were in the safe house living room when he and Lauren arrived, their FAMAS assault rifles disassembled and blindfolds over their eyes. With a sharp command from Lieutenant Foch, the men fitted the weapons back together, their hands a blur of rote action. Foch clicked off his stopwatch when the last man cocked his gun and held it out for inspection.
“Two seconds quicker than last. Do it again.”
While the men pulled the rifles apart again, Lauren Vanik frowned at Foch. “Do you think it’s a good idea running disassembly drills with weapons we may use in combat later on?”
Foch gave her a patronizing smile. “Of course not. Those rifles are with the men’s kit. These are just trainers. Don’t worry, Captain, we know what we’re doing.”
Rene Bruneseau came into the living room from the back of the house. Like his men, he wore civilian clothes. “Good morning, Captain Vanik, Mercer. May I offer you coffee.”
Because he and Lauren hadn’t gotten to sleep until three in the morning, Mercer quickly agreed to the offer. The coffee Lauren had made for him was watery instant and had done nothing to jump-start his body.
Over cups of rich French roast, Bruneseau laid out their plan. The Legionnaires had a helicopter stashed at a deserted plantation beyond the ruins of Veija Panama, the old city that the pirate Henry Morgan had sacked in 1671. They would carry an inflatable boat to a point above El Real. There they would transfer to the boat for the remainder of the trip up the Rio Tuira. Before reaching the River of Ruin, they would stash the Zodiac and flank around the volcanic mountain, climbing it from the opposite side from where its waters disgorged down the falls that Mercer and Lauren had climbed earlier with Miguel.
As Rene explained his strategy, Mercer loaded film into the camera he’d bought on the way to the safe house. He’d also purchased a four-hundred-millimeter telephoto lens, the largest the camera shop stocked. He hoped to get shots of Hatcherly’s plundering of an important archeological site. At Lauren’s suggestion, they would take that evidence to the curator of the Reina Torres de Aruez Anthropology Museum, where she felt they’d get a better response than from Omar Quintero’s shaky government. Quintero had only been in the Heron Palace, the presidential residence, for six months following his corruption-tainted election and had yet to solidify the congress or the bureaucracy.
Mercer doubted Liu Yousheng would show himself at the lake, but if he could photograph some other key Hatcherly people, he could put an end to the plunder as well as give Bruneseau his first break in peeling away the other levels protecting the shadowy company. The plan was simple, and relatively safe-a lot smarter than sneaking into a high-security container port. The power of the telephoto lens meant they could stay well back from any excavation Hatcherly had at the lake and still shoot rolls of damaging film.
The only danger came from the trek through the jungle. The driver who’d picked them up at Lauren’s apartment had told Mercer that the Legionnaires were members of the Third Regiment based in Kourou, Guyana, the Legion’s jungle warfare specialists. The fact that they were tasked with protecting the Ariane spaceport lent credence to what Bruneseau had told him last night, but Mercer couldn’t shake a suspicion. Something was said last night, a slip of some sort that had pushed his doubts into overdrive.
He’d hoped the answer would come in his sleep, as was often the case for him, but he’d been dead to the world from the moment Lauren went into the shower until she’d tapped his shoulder and admonished him about the volume of his snoring two hours ago. Talking with Bruneseau hadn’t jogged anything loose. Frustration at not naming what bothered him caused his shoulders to tense.
Lauren noticed him wince as he rolled his neck. “Are you okay?” she asked, wrongly assuming it was the first tinges of fear affecting him.
He returned his attention to her and Rene. “Yeah, sorry. My mind was somewhere else. When are we leaving?”
“Sundown is around seven tonight,” Bruneseau explained. “We’ll time it so we drop the Zodiac at dusk and run up the river under the cover of darkness. We have night-vision goggles to avoid any boat traffic, though I don’t expect any. We’ll spend the night with the craft then march to the caldera before first light.”
“Where’s the chopper going to be when we’re at the lake?” Lauren asked.
“At the airport at El Real with ‘engine trouble.’ It’s painted like a sightseeing helo so it won’t attract much attention.”
“That’s a twenty-minute flight if we need an emergency evac.”
“I know.” The Frenchman didn’t look any happier about this than Lauren. “There’s no other place to hide it up there.”
“All right. What kind of chopper?”
“JetRanger 222.”
Lauren nodded. Before she’d taken up intelligence work, she’d flown the Bell 205, known in the army as the UH-1 Huey. Although she hadn’t been behind the stick in four years, she felt confident that if anything happened to the pilot, she could handle the helicopter.
“Extended tanks?”
“Non. We will top off the fuel in La Palma, which gives us more than enough range to get back to Panama City. Once Mercer has his evidence we will backtrack to the inflatable and motor back to El Real where the chopper waits.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lauren opined.
Mercer considered the hundreds of things that could go wrong, saw no way around them, and agreed with Lauren. “Let’s do it.”
They spent the next two hours with Lieutenant Foch, since he would lead the raid, poring over maps and briefing the Frenchmen on the terrain around the lake. Like many in the Legion, Foch had claimed to be from Quebec to get around the rule that only foreigners could serve within the elite corps. Keeping with another Legion tradition, Mercer knew not to ask Foch’s Christian name. He found he
liked the soldier, who was unpretentious and more than willing to listen to a civilian, probably because Mercer had already proven himself by breaking into Hatcherly.
The team rested in the safe house until the afternoon, when they loaded up one of Bruneseau’s vans for the drive to the helicopter. The forty-minute ride took them through Panama City and along the coast past the old city along the Pan-American highway toward the isolated town of Chepo. The village used to be the terminus of the highway, the last stop before the impenetrable jungles of the Darien Gap. Many Panamanians still considered anything beyond the dingy town as terra incognita.
Before reaching Chepo, the van swung off the road and traveled for another thirty minutes along a dirt track that was increasingly hemmed in by jungle. Rounding a last corner, they broke into a partial clearing where waist-high grass had been beaten flat under where a Bell helo sat on its struts. At the edge of the jungle lay the crumbled walls of a plantation house. Creeping vines seemed to be tugging the ruined structure back into the earth.
They had to strip out the chopper’s rear seats to manhandle in the deflated Zodiac. Bruneseau would fly up front with the pilot, leaving Mercer, Lauren, Foch, and two other Legionnaires to shoehorn themselves into the cargo area. The van’s driver would wait at the plantation for their return the following day and coordinate communications with the rest of the detachment in Panama City. They took off a half hour after their arrival. An hour later they refueled the JetRanger at the small airport in La Palma. Because no one had changed into fatigues yet, they maintained their cover as sightseers headed back into the Darien Gap. Only when they were airborne again did they change clothes. Though she didn’t seem fazed by the close proximity to the men, Lauren maintained her modesty by buttoning her camouflage shirt over the black T-shirt she’d been wearing. Waterproof bags containing weapons, combat harnesses, and other gear were secured to the Zodiac and would be retrieved once they were on the river.