by Jack Du Brul
“Well thought out.”
“Thank you, General.” Liu was startled by the compliment. “It was an idea I had after first making this proposal to the minister of defense.”
“Who is crewing the Mario diCastorelli?”
“As the name implies she’s owned by a shell company in Italy with Liberian registration. Her crew is mostly Filipinos with Greek officers. They have no idea what’s in store for them. Gemini will detonate less than a hundred feet from their ship. Just before the explosion, the submersible will dock at Gamboa to unload the divers and the crew from Gemini. It will be scuttled there. All the men will be driven straight from Gamboa to Cristobal on the Atlantic coast, where a ship will spirit them away.”
“And it is the last piece of physical evidence?”
“That’s correct. The diving bell and mini-sub are the last links. At some point during the redredging operation, their remains will be quietly retrieved and disposed of.”
“You’ve thought this out well, Yousheng. I’m pleased. With the exception of finding the gold, everything has gone remarkably smoothly. Just for the sake of argument, could you maintain control of Panama after the canal is closed if you don’t find the treasure?”
Liu shook his head. “For the short term, perhaps, but it’s not sustainable. Panama’s economy depends on transit tariffs far and above what we can provide through taxes on using our railroad and pipeline. Without the money, the country will descend into chaos. Quintero would be overthrown and his likely replacement would invite American troops in to keep the peace and see that the canal is reopened.”
“But if we keep them afloat economically, they will resist when the Americans pressure them to allow them in?”
“That’s why we’ve paid Quintero and Silvera-Arias. It’s up to them to defy any U.S. pressure.”
“They’ll hold up?”
Liu looked at his superior. “As long as the money keeps flowing, they’ll do what we want. By the time we reveal the missiles to the American government, our position here will be unassailable.”
“A well-thought-out plan,” Yu repeated.
Knowing that if it succeeded the general would take all the credit, Liu was certain that if it failed, that failure would rest on his shoulders alone. Such was the way of Chinese politics. But success meant Liu would forever be attached to the general as he continued his rise in Beijing.
“Go tell our Panamanian friends about the change in schedule.” Yu stood. “I’m returning to the city. I have an early flight in the morning.”
Meaning you won’t be anywhere near the action when it comes, Liu thought bitterly. But this was the price he had to pay. A man like General Yu had already proven himself again and again. Now it was Liu’s turn. “Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what time you will detonate Gemini?” Yu asked as he led his subaltern toward the door without any thought to President Quintero or Director Silvera-Arias.
“My explosives experts tell me that when it is overcast, the pressure waves bounce back from the sky and amplify the detonative forces. So it will depend on the weather on the day after tomorrow, General.”
“Very well. I look forward to your call telling me it is done.”
Liu snapped another salute. “It will be my honor.”
The wily old general didn’t return the salute as he wandered over to the sedan he’d commandeered from Hatcherly for this visit. Liu waited until the vehicle’s taillights faded down the long drive, absently blowing on his fingers. Then he went in search of Captain Chen. He found the leader of the commando group just returning from one of the outbuildings.
“Tell Sun to get to work as soon as he gets here,” Liu barked. Yu had set a near-impossible task, made worse because of the situation Liu had intentionally kept from him-the Special Forces, or whoever they were, who’d been interfering at every turn. “Yu’s ordered the timetable pushed up. We have about thirty-six hours.”
The soldier couldn’t hide his shock. “Is that feasible?”
“It damned well better be,” Liu said. “And sometime tomorrow morning I want Maria picked up and disposed of.”
“You mean. .”
“You know damned well what I mean. Kill her.”
Liu could feel the pressure mounting: a lead weight in his gut and a burning ache behind his eyes. That was why he had no compulsion about ordering his lover’s murder. Even an hour ago, the thought had given him pause. No longer. Too much was at stake to care about his conscience or anything else. Same went with using Mr. Sun’s talents. Having Mercer tortured had bothered him on one level, surely not enough to stop him from ordering it, but the feelings were there. That too was gone now. He would use any assets open to him to see Red Island’s successful completion.
Red Island. He’d even picked the code name, as an allusion to what the Soviets had attempted in Cuba. Of course they had wanted their missiles discovered, otherwise they would have camouflaged them rather than leave them in the open for U-2 spy planes to find. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been a game of nuclear brinkmanship: remove yours and we’ll remove ours. What he had in mind was much subtler.
Nuclear blackmail-back off when we take Taiwan or eight American cities get carbonized.
The Radisson Royal Hotel Panama City, Panama
Mercer struggled awake shortly after dawn. He was far from refreshed. His back ached from the night spent on the couch and as soon as he remembered the events from the day before, his soul felt stripped. A shower and coffee from room service did little to revive him. He was standing at the picture window when Harry shuffled from the bedroom. The old man was naked save a pair of baggy boxers and his fake leg.
“Morning,” Mercer said.
“Bah,” Harry snorted, a cigarette already burning between his fingers. He grabbed the coffee cup from Mercer’s hand on his way to the bathroom and slurped noisily without a backward glance.
He emerged ten minutes later and grunted again as he moved to the bedroom. He returned to the main part of the suite only when he was dressed. “Morning, Mercer,” he said pleasantly, his transformation from hungover curmudgeon to moderately robust curmudgeon complete. “If I’m going to steal your coffee, for Christ’s sake put some sugar in it.”
Mercer couldn’t help but laugh no matter how badly he was hurting inside. Harry had that effect on him. “There’s more on the tray.”
Harry lit another cigarette.
“Second of the day already?”
“Third.” Harry drank from his own coffee and even recharged Mercer’s empty cup. “So what’s the plan?”
Mercer raked his fingers through his hair. “I’m giving Maria an hour or so to sleep off whatever excesses she might have indulged last night before going over. Right now I’m going to call General Vanik and tell him that his daughter’s dead.”
Harry looked away. “Guess that would be the right thing to do. I’ll leave you alone.” He grabbed the complimentary newspaper from the room service tray and went back to the bedroom.
Taking Lauren’s cell phone, Mercer punched in the code for her father’s private line. After two rings a gruff but gentle voice answered, “Morning, Angel.”
Vanik must have caller ID, Mercer thought. “Ah, General. This isn’t Lauren. My name is Philip Mercer.”
Ten seconds passed. Mercer could almost feel Vanik thinking through why someone was calling him this early and on his daughter’s phone. He knew to give the general time to put it together.
“She’s dead.” There was no question in his voice. It was almost as if he’d expected it.
“I’m sorry, sir.” Mercer didn’t know what else to say. He had to explain the circumstances if he was going to get help stopping Liu Yousheng, but now wasn’t the time. God, when was?
He heard Vanik whispering a prayer: “. . in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Amen,” Mercer echoed.
“Lauren told me who you are, Dr. Mercer, and what’s been going on,” Vanik spoke tonelessly. �
��We talked the night before she went with you to the lock. It happened there?”
“Yes, sir. The Chinese were waiting for her and her dive partner. Four frogmen emerged from the water a little over an hour after she and a French Legionnaire went in.”
“I see.” The grief was right under the surface. Mercer could sense it. Yet General Vanik managed to keep it in check. Somehow. “Since Lauren called me, I did some checking on you. You’re the geologist who went into Iraq as part of Operation Prospector to make sure Saddam hadn’t mined his own uranium?”
“That’s correct.” Mercer assumed in the years since the Gulf War that information had been partially declassified, at least to ranking army staffers. “I accompanied a Navy SEAL team.”
“And you’re about to start work at the White House?”
“Yes, sir. As a special science advisor.”
“John Kleinschmidt is a golfing partner.” Kleinschmidt was the president’s national security advisor. “His deputy, Ira Lasko, recommended you for the job?”
“Admiral Lasko and I were involved in a mission a few months ago in Greenland.”
“I’ve seen his report,” Vanik said. “Why’d my daughter die?”
“Sir?” The first blush of emotion in the general’s voice startled Mercer.
“It’s a simple goddamned question. Why did my daughter die?”
“Because the Chinese are about to plant nuclear missiles in Panama. They killed her because she knew part of the story.”
“Come again?” Lauren hadn’t known about the nuclear angle so this was the first the general had heard of it.
“What we first thought was an attempt to destroy the canal has turned into something more. The CIA will be getting a call shortly from DGSE, the French intelligence agency. Lauren and I were working with one of their spies. They are going to confirm our findings. In a Chinese-controlled warehouse, Lauren and I stumbled across eight DF-31 strategic missile launchers.”
“Were they armed?”
“Not yet, but I’m sure they will be soon. Things are moving pretty fast down here.”
General Vanik blew out a long breath. “All right. You’d better start from the top.”
Keeping the briefing as concise as possible and avoiding mentioning Lauren’s name, Mercer laid out their findings, starting with the book auction in Paris and ending with the upcoming meeting with Maria Barber.
“You think she knows something?”
“I do, sir. I think she can provide enough proof to nail Liu.”
“Question is, who’s gonna do the nailing?” Vanik said, his Southern accent emerging more as the conversation went on. “There’s gotta be some higher-ups in Panama’s government involved. Don’t think they’re gonna want to hear your story.”
“Do you have any suggestions?” Mercer asked crisply. If the general could subvert his feelings of loss, at least temporarily, Mercer owed it to him to do the same.
“I need to check with the CIA and our own intelligence yahoos, see if they’ve detected anything going on with China’s rocket forces, like if a few of them were moved recently. For now just sit tight, talk with that woman, then call me back when you’ve found something.” Vanik paused. “She was a good girl, wasn’t she?”
“The best, General,” Mercer replied. What else could he say?
“I’ve lost hundreds of men. Vietnam, Kuwait, Bosnia, a dozen ops you never heard of. I’ve always understood my responsibility and I’ve always carried on. I don’t know. It’s all such a damned. .”
“Waste,” offered Mercer.
“There are a lot of people in this world who like nothing more than killing and there are precious few who are willing to stop them. I hear you’re one of ’em. So was Lauren. Don’t seem right.”
“It isn’t.”
“Shit,” Vanik drawled. “If I hadn’t been a soldier, she’d be alive right now.”
“With all due respect, that isn’t true. I knew her a short time, but I learned that your daughter was her own person. You didn’t pressure her into the military, nor did you pick her duty stations. Lauren chose her path.”
The line remained silent.
“Maybe, but it doesn’t make it easier. Call me when you have something,” the general said hastily. “I’ll do the same.”
The phone went dead. Mercer shut it off. “I’m done, Harry.”
“How’d it go?” Harry asked when he returned from the bedroom.
“As well as it could, I suppose.” Mercer noticed that his friend had filled in half of the crossword from the Spanish-language newspaper. “What the hell are you doing? You don’t speak Spanish.”
Harry held up the puzzle. “I’m putting in English words with the right number of letters and making sure they mesh.” He shrugged. “Better than nothing. In fact I’ve gotten myself in a bit of a jam. Know any six-letter words with the middle ones r and f?”
Despite his jumbled emotions, Mercer needed just a second. “Try barfly.”
Harry looked at him sharply, wrote it in, then with a malicious glint said, “That’ll work if I change eighteen across from donnybrook to”-he gave another significant glare-“douchebag.”
Mercer smiled, grateful for the repartee. “You don’t have enough letters. Has to be douchebags.”
“You’d think so,” Harry muttered, “but there’s only one of you.”
Fifteen minutes later, Foch arrived with Rene Bruneseau and a pair of Legion soldiers. All wore civilian clothes that hid the bulges of their handguns from untrained eyes. Mercer called Roddy Herrara up to the suite so he could phone Maria to make sure she was home. Roddy disguised his voice so she wouldn’t recognize him and hung up as soon as he’d woken her, apologizing for dialing the wrong number. He gave the men a thumbs-up.
It was time to snatch Maria Barber.
When she first realized she was still alive, she didn’t even remember what had happened at the last second. She remembered sinking. She seemed to recall seeing a light, but that was it. Everything else was blank.
No, that’s not true. The more she regained consciousness, the more the memories returned. The light came from a wrist lamp strapped to the body of the second Chinese commando who’d entered the intake tunnels with her. She remembered falling toward the dead diver and pulling his regulator to her mouth. She’d just filled her lungs when the divers who’d earlier avoided the sucking torrent entered the lock from the open doors. She had been in no condition to put up a fight.
They took her someplace. Where?
“A diving chamber,” Lauren Vanik whispered through chapped lips.
The Chinese had a diving bell near the lock that the frogmen used while they worked underwater. While the four men who’d survived the fight returned to the surface, she’d been guarded by another two for a few hours. Back on the surface she was gagged and blindfolded and then tossed into the back of a van.
Now she was awake, tired but alert. She levered her eyes open. They were about all she could move. She was strapped to some sort of frame, a bed maybe. Her legs were splayed and her arms were secured over her head. She could tell she was naked. The air was stifling and the absolute darkness was cut by a sliver of light leaking from under a door she could see if she tilted her head.
When she tried to speak she managed just a hoarse croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Come on, you bastards,” she yelled. “Get it over with.”
A minute later she heard footsteps outside the door and a key being inserted into a lock. When the door swung open, she could tell by the angle of the sun it was just past dawn and that she hadn’t been taken to the Twenty Devils Mine. The landscape outside her cell didn’t look familiar. She also saw that her prison must have been a garden shed. There were racks for tools bolted to the wall and from somewhere close she recognized the taint of fertilizer.
The man who entered was Chinese, a soldier in a uniform without insignia. He was old enough to be an officer, but had the hard look of a drill instructor. She guessed he
was an NCO. When the sergeant turned on the overhead lights he made sure his gaze didn’t wander from her face.
“Very gallant of you,” Lauren sneered.
“Your strength,” the soldier said not unkindly. “Keep it.”
Lauren knew what she was in for. She’d known as soon as she realized she’d been tied up. The terror of Mercer’s stories about the acupuncturist filled her mind. Strangely, this veteran soldier seemed bothered by her fate. Why else would he have warned her just now? She wondered if she could use that concern.
“You can help me,” she pleaded. “Don’t let them touch me.”
The soldier’s eyes dropped.
He felt shame. Was it enough? Would he let her go?
“You know what he’ll do to me. You’re a soldier. Like me. Where is your honor?” Her cry was met by silence. “Please. You can’t let him do this to me. The other man. The American. He’s in a hospital. He hasn’t spoken since his escape. He’s a vegetable.”
Sergeant Huai was unable to hide his revulsion.
“It’s true,” Lauren continued. “Mercer is his name, but he can’t even remember it. Listen. I don’t care anymore about what you’re doing in Panama. My country doesn’t care. Please, let me go.”
“I cannot.” Huai answered.
“Then kill me.” Lauren’s eyes blazed, not knowing she echoed Mercer’s exact words when he was first faced with torture. “If that’s what it takes to prevent that sadist from raping and torturing me then do it. Kill me now!”
“Sun no rape.”
“Bull! It’s a proven method of torture. He’ll do it.”
“Sun, ah. .” Huai pointed at his crotch. “No longer a man.”
“But he’s man enough to stick needles in my body that will destroy my mind. Is that how you people fight? Is that your way?”
“Not my way. Sun’s way.”
“You’re the same. If you let him do it you’re just as bad as he is.”
That concept made Huai pause again. Lauren was sure she was on the right track. The NCO had the look of a man who fought his nation’s enemies on battlefields, not in horror chambers. If only she could get through to him, weaken him.