by Jack Du Brul
Very carefully, he stepped off his bucket so the dangling conduit slid down to where he held the two wires. He made sure his insulated pads fit inside the pipe, then slowly drew the conduit over the wires. As delicately as a sommelier pulling the cork from a fine bottle of wine, Mercer eased the pipe away. If any of the insulating scraps came off, the hot feed would arc in the pipe, shock the hell out of him, and trip the breaker. He took five full minutes to slide the conduit from the wires, sucking in his first deep breath when the ends freed themselves and dropped to the floor. Mercer set down the heavy piece of steel, got on all fours, and located the wires by sweeping his hand along the concrete.
Once they were safely out of the way, he retrieved the heavy metal pipe. Moving like a blind man, he located the door. He measured where the knob was, hefted the pipe and brought it down with all the force in his body. His hands stung from the blow. He checked the handle. The direct force of the impact had loosened it.
Four more times he beat on the knob until the tortured metal simply fell away. A beam of light from the hallway shone in on the floor through the mangled lock mechanism, enough illumination for him to use his screwdriver to free the bolt from the door casing. A little hip check to the door and it swung open. He was free.
“Let’s see Houdini top this.”
Mercer had been left naked and armed with only a foot-long shiv and a piece of pipe. He had no idea what lay outside this building. For all he knew, the exit would dump him on a busy street in Panama City or Hatcherly’s terminal facility or some location he wasn’t even aware of. None of this mattered for a few seconds. He’d accomplished more than he had any right to expect.
Gripping his rudimentary knife and club like some post-modern Neanderthal, he set off down the hallway, ready for whatever came.
The scene around Roddy Herrara’s kitchen table couldn’t have been more morose. A gloom had settled over them that nothing seemed able to dispel. Roddy drank black coffee while Lauren sipped from a water bottle. Only Harry drank liquor, Jack Daniel’s from a shot glass he recharged from a bottle he’d bought. The other two adults looked like they wanted to join him but couldn’t make the effort to reach for the bottle. Miguel was the worst of the four.
The boy sat in his own chair but had moved it so he could be closer to Roddy. His face was desolate, inconsolable. His dark eyes, once bright, had dulled from the crying. Lauren would have given anything not to have told the boy that Mercer was gone.
He’d been so excited when they returned from the safe house, expecting that the object of his hero worship would be with her and Roddy and Mr. Harry. Even at twelve he was perceptive enough to read their drawn faces. It was a testament to his inner strength that he hadn’t started crying until Lauren stooped to enfold him in her arms and mutter apologies in Spanish.
His tears brought hers to the surface.
The pall of hopelessness that settled over them back at the safe house had come from a single phone call from the French embassy. When the call came through, Bruneseau, Foch, and the other Legionnaires were planning their operation to infiltrate the Twenty Devils Mine. Much of what they accomplished was based on speculation about the site, but they’d nailed down the details of reaching the facility and getting back out again.
And then the phone had rung. The communications officer at the French embassy located at the very end of Casco Viejo peninsula didn’t even know what the code phrase he related meant. Bruneseau did and told the assembled soldiers and civilians.
“Like I said earlier.” He had a twinge of superiority in his voice. “The missing uranium wasn’t missing after all. That call was the embassy. The team of regulators in Japan found that the fuel wasn’t put aboard the ship. In fact there was no fuel at all. A glitch in the computer that controlled their scales added extra weight to the containment cask in Rokkasho. The scales in France were perfectly calibrated, so it appeared that two hundred kilos were missing, when in fact they were never there.” He lit a celebratory cigarette. “Our mission in Panama is over. We’ve all been recalled. Me back to Paris and Foch and his team to their regular barracks at the Ariane spaceport.”
Lauren gaped. All her work convincing the agent to rescue Mercer, or at least look for him, had been nullified by the call. She could see that Rene Bruneseau would do nothing now except put the whole debacle behind him and hope it didn’t hurt his career. If Mercer had survived the car carrier, she knew he wouldn’t last long in Liu’s clutches. The French represented her only chance at mounting a credible rescue. Now it was gone.
“You won’t do anything to help him, will you?”
“I have my orders,” Rene replied in the classic dodging of personal obligation behind professional responsibility. She’d heard it countless times in her military career. Blindly following orders had doomed millions to senseless deaths and that list was about to include Philip Mercer.
Foch wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“This won’t end here.” She had no idea what that threat meant or how hollow it sounded but she needed to say something. She stormed from the safe house, unable to be around the Frenchmen any longer. A few seconds later, Harry and Roddy joined her and they drove in silence back to Roddy’s house.
For the first hours back at Roddy’s they’d talked about mounting their own rescue. Lauren explained that going to the embassy would be a wasted gesture and that it would take days, if not longer, to hire locals. Her main contacts in the mercenary underworld had all died when the Hatcherly helicopter had used depth charges to release the CO2 stored in the lake.
Now they sat with their thoughts, each feeling empty for the same reason.
Carmen Herrara was in the living room, knitting on the couch while her children played on the floor with coloring books. Framed behind her was an elaborate picture of Jesus, and only slightly smaller and a little lower on the wall was another of famed boxer and local hero Roberto Duran. She put down her knitting when the doorbell rang. Her eyes flew to her husband.
It was after eight P.M. Not knowing who would knock at this hour, he told her to take the children into the back of the three-bedroom home. Lauren moved next to the front door, her Beretta cocked and the safety off. Roddy swung it open and jumped aside.
“If Monsieur Bruneseau knew we were here, he’d kill us.” Behind Lieutenant Foch stood four of his troopers. Parked in the street was a rented moving van. “Mercer might not have taken the Legion oath,” Foch continued, “but he saved my life and Carlson’s. I. .” He looked back at the deadly expectation on his men’s faces. “We won’t leave him behind.”
The pause after his declaration lasted for many seconds as the emotions in the room swung one hundred and eighty degrees. Leave it to Harry to finally shatter it.
“ ’Bout time you sons a bitches showed up,” he called from the kitchen. “Foch, you’re even easier to read than Mercer. Knew you were coming the whole time.”
“If you knew they would help,” Lauren’s challenge was filled with delighted relief, “how come you’ve been sitting there as hangdog as the rest of us?”
Harry recharged his empty shot glass. “Needed an excuse to bend the elbow a few times. Now get your asses in here and let’s figure out how we’re going to get him back.”
The Twenty Devils Mine Cocle Province, Panama
For soldiers trained in the jungles of Guyana, the four-mile night march from where the Legionnaires had baled out of the rental truck wasn’t enough to raise their heartbeat, though they did sweat in the brutal humidity. A passing rain squall couldn’t soak their uniforms more than their perspiration already had. Determined to keep pace with the lean commandos, Lauren was glad they hadn’t asked her to take point. Trailblazing through the clinging vegetation was like struggling through a nightmare. That job had gone to a Serb named Tomanovic.
Because of her experiences in the Balkans, Lauren was leery around the big man. He had the look she’d seen countless times in Kosovo, the mix of pride and defiance and hidden rage. She could easi
ly imagine him torturing Albanians or massacring Muslims. Foch’s assurance that Tomanovic had been in the Legion long before the ethnic clashes didn’t alleviate her uneasiness. She couldn’t shake the fact that he looked like so many other mass murderers she’d seen. Still, Lauren was professional enough to place some trust in the French officer and followed the silent line of soldiers moving through the bush.
They had already verified that the mine’s main gate had heavy security, so flanking around it and approaching from a less-guarded quarter was their only option. Forced to cut across the grain of the land, daylight wouldn’t have made the hike much easier. Eroded by millions of years of rain, the terrain surrounding the mine was so wrinkled that every step was taken either uphill or down. Adding to the discomfort was the heat, humidity, and the insects that swarmed in dense clouds.
Over the rise of the final hill in their march, artificial light clung to the ground and reflected off the low cloud cover. The mine was a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation and massive lamps had been erected around the pit to illuminate the work. It was like the glow of a sports stadium.
Lauren had no trouble interpreting Foch’s hand gestures as they neared the crest of the hill. Like the Legionnaires, she shifted away from the lieutenant and approached the summit on her stomach. She crawled forward through the underbrush, using the short barrel of her borrowed FAMAS assault rifle to move aside some dripping leaves that blocked her view. When she could look across the valley separating them from the next hill, she paused to sweep the facility with binoculars.
The mine looked like she’d expected, though she’d only seen pictures of similar installations on television. Directly below their position, a squad of bright yellow earthmovers worked along the bottom of the terraced mountain. On the valley floor behind the raw cut were administration buildings, open-sided maintenance sheds, and large industrial-looking structures she assumed had something to do with ore processing. She could see a parking area for employee vehicles and an empty chopper pad. The haul road out of the valley meandered to their left, where it eventually intersected the main highway about five miles away.
In a separate enclosure within the main compound, she saw the entrance to what looked like an underground bunker. It was little more than a trench dug into the ground, but she could see the outline of the subterranean structure and several ventilation shafts poking up through the compacted soil.
It wasn’t until she focused closer at the men near the heavy equipment that she realized the scale of the operation. The dump trucks were far larger than the ones she’d seen at the Hatcherly port. These rigs would never be allowed on a regular street. She realized they must have been assembled right here. Each truck was bigger than a house, supported on six twelve-foot-tall tires and had a dump bed that looked larger than a swimming pool. The drivers’ cabs were at least twenty feet off the ground and accessible via a staircase that rose diagonally across the billboard-sized grilles. The excavators and loaders that stripped material from the mountain were equally proportioned. Just the bucket on one front-end loader was as long and even taller than the pickup truck parked next to it. Another machine that she couldn’t identify was even larger than the rest. Standing on multiple crawler treads, this towering behemoth had a mechanical arm that gouged fifty-ton bites out of the mountain.
It looked like the mine was being worked by mechanical dinosaurs.
Dispelling her awe at the enormity of the mine, she put her attention on the security of the facility and realized immediately that this place was well fortified. Three-man patrols worked the fenced perimeter of the main compound, while others mingled with the workers and still more moved outside the fence. In just a few minutes she counted twenty-three armed men.
“Pssst,” Foch hissed and the soldiers retreated off the crest of the mountain and regrouped fifty feet down the backside of the partially excavated hill.
“Combien du soldats?” he asked.
“English, please.”
“How many soldiers?”
“I counted twenty-three,” Lauren offered.
“Thirty-eight,” the French soldiers chorused, having seen many that Lauren had missed.
She felt chagrined, but that was why soldiers backed each other up.
“Looks like our only way in is down the face of the excavation.” Foch waited for anyone to contradict him with a better idea. No one did. “There aren’t as many lights farther along our right flank. We’ll descend there. The ground looks brise, ah, broken up, but the terrace effect of the mining should make it easier.” He looked to Lauren. “Piece du gateau.”
“Piece of cake,” she mimicked.
Foch outlined his plan, which amounted to little more than getting down onto the valley floor, finding cover and waiting for an opportunity to search the mine. Of the structures they’d observed, they agreed that the underground bunker seemed the likely place for Mercer if he was indeed here.
The big Serb, Tomanovic, took point as the team hiked laterally along the backside of the mountain until they reached an area that wasn’t currently being worked and was therefore quiet. The move took them farther from the underground bunker, so they’d have to cross back once they reached the valley floor.
They were like shadows against the dark earth as they slid down the first of the giant steps that made up the terraced face of the excavation. The twenty-foot drop was rendered safe by the working face’s sixty-degree angle of repose and the churned-up soil at each level, which absorbed the shock. There were eight levels to descend and when they reached the valley floor, the soldiers had their backs stained red by the clinging soil.
Their infiltration had gone unseen.
The bunker was two hundred yards away across a no-man’s-land littered with mounds of dirt, gravel, and an army of construction equipment. In the blaze cast by high-intensity lights, the vehicles looked like enormous insects, yellow army ants mindlessly bent on their task of leveling the landscape. From where they crouched behind a pile of overburden waiting to be trucked away, they could just see the bunker and the five men approaching it. Four were uniformed guards, while the fifth man, much smaller than the others, appeared to be a civilian.
They weren’t sure who he was, only that he wasn’t Liu Yousheng or any of his COSTIND cronies who ran Hatcherly.
No more than fifteen seconds after the group disappeared into the hole, one of the soldiers reappeared blowing a whistle whose shrill cry was lost to distance and the rumbling din of the trucks. Yet the call must have been heard because the alarm seemed to carry across the compound in a wave. Very quickly additional guards began pouring from a block of dormitories. More dangerously, additional lights snapped on that bathed every square foot of the mine, including the mound of dirt shielding the French team.
“Vic, get to the top of the hill,” Foch ordered the big Serb.
Tomanovic moved upward without a word.
“What do you think happened?” Lauren asked while they waited behind cover.
“Seemed they were headed down to a secure area and didn’t like what they found,” a Legionnaire said.
“Or what they didn’t find,” she corrected. “That’s got to be where they were keeping Mercer. Maybe he escaped.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
They waited in silence until Vic came back to report. “High alert now, sir.” His English was better than his French, though both were heavily accented. “They sweep outer fence with searchlight. As you hear, mining equipment still runs. More men are at the underground bunker. Civilian looks pissed.” He pronounced it peeced.
“We need to get out of here.” Foch’s face was grim.
“Whatever just happened has made this place tres dangereux.”
Three hundred yards behind them was the road out of the mine. A wire security fence manned by four Chinese barred unauthorized vehicles from gaining entry. Because the gate was so distant and the hour so late, none of the commandos gave it any thought until the sound of an approa
ching truck grew louder than the racket of the excavators in front of them. As one, they turned and saw that a 6x6 military truck had passed through the gate and was headed straight for them. As the team scrambled to the far side of the hill, the truck stopped less than thirty yards away. Two waves of soldiers peeled from the back of the soft-topped truck.
Unlike the other guards stationed at the mine, these men were Panamanian. Lauren could tell by the cut of their uniforms and the M-16s they carried.
Two unforeseen events, the alarm raised at the bunker and the arrival of reinforcements, had rendered the rescue operation a disaster and made their retreat questionable. The Panamanian soldiers quickly assembled in a sweep line, with each man no more than twenty feet from two comrades. At a command that didn’t carry to the French, the troopers began a steady march across the graded valley floor.
“Merde!”
The commandos had just a couple minutes before the sweep line reached them. If they ran in the opposite direction, they would run into a sweep line being formed by the Chinese soldiers. They were trapped. The mound shielding them was like a blister on the hard-packed ground a hundred feet from the base of the terraced cliff. Maybe one of them could cover that distance without being detected, but not all six.
“Oui,” Lauren said, her throat tight, “merde.”
“Top of the hill,” Foch ordered. The team scrambled up the loose mound of mine waste, giving them a twenty-foot height advantage and an open field of fire. From a clandestine rescue, their mission was about to become a desperate last stand.
“Pick your targets. Officers, NCOs.” The lieutenant’s words were unnecessary. Those under him, and Lauren, knew what was expected. The Panamanian sweep line was twenty yards off, the Chinese a bit farther.
In a hopeful inspiration, Lauren said, “Concentrate your fire on the locals. They won’t have the level of training as the Chinese. If we can punch a hole through their ranks, we might be able to steal their truck.”