He told them that he knew a woman, back in the States, who’d been in this network. Blood Orchid had used her up and discarded her when she became too old to work. She’d almost died from the drugs, but eventually had managed to pull herself together and become a nurse.
That woman had found the man with the knife bleeding in an alleyway and applied the tourniquet that had saved his life.
Once ambulatory, he’d tracked her down and given her a lot of money. In exchange, he heard her story.
Finally, he looked around the table, drained his glass of water in a dramatic gesture and said: “Which is why I hope you won’t mind that I’m going to cut those bastards into little pieces. It’s for her, and for every boy and girl like her that will come up.”
Mary had gone back to the niche she shared with Marco and started another round. She didn’t want to hear what was coming next.
Now, she listened to them and counted heads. Fifteen people left from the three groups whose lives had collided so strangely. Plus Ania, the woman they’d found in the cell. The one that had been half tortured to death. She shuddered to think about it. Except for Ania, who was staring off into the distance, they all seemed to be discussing what to do next.
To her surprise, Mary spoke. “What about this place? Is it part of the hotel? We already know they brought people in on the hotel boats, but didn’t anyone ever see them leaving?”
They all looked at her like she was a dumb bimbo, a look she’d learned to simply weather over the past couple of years, until Cora of all people, came to her aid.
“That’s a pretty good question. Did anyone see anything?”
The only hotel employee remaining, a tiny guy whose blue shirt was nearly shredded, replied: “I don’t think anyone knew. The boat leaving the island would be gone by five in the morning. We were either asleep or making ourselves scarce, because if they caught you out and about, you might get drafted into loading the thing.”
“So who did the loading?”
“The manager, mostly. And the ship’s crew.” He looked pensive for a moment. “Come to think of it, it was kind of weird. The resort’s cargo ship always seemed to have way too many sailors for such a little boat.”
The hacker who could shoot, the one who called himself Sked, looked up. “A more interesting question might be who they bribed to get this parcel of land? From what I read, North Sentinel Island was pretty much off limits to everyone. Off limits in the sense that the Indian Navy would send a cruiser after you if you so much as came within five nautical miles of it. And suddenly, here we have a little boutique resort. Sure, it’s a crappy one not worth much more than a couple of stars… but the fact that it’s here says something. And if I were anywhere near an internet connection, I’d find out exactly what.”
Lai waved his hands. “If anyone actually cares once we get off this island you can look into it to your heart’s content. Hell, I might give it a shot myself. But in the meantime, the question remains: does anyone have an idea about how we should leave?”
For some reason they all looked at Mary. What she wanted most was to fade into the background, but she had to say something. So she blurted the first thing that came into her head: “Whatever happened to the other lifeboat?”
Cora shook her head. “It’s on the other side of the island. We’d never make it.”
“All right.” She began to sit, but Lai spoke again.
“But it’s the only working boat we know about. Maybe we can send a crew to get it and drive it around the island to the resort. Someone who can do the jungle.”
“Aren’t you forgetting Godzilla?” Cora said. “I don’t want to look that thing in the teeth again.”
The doctor spoke. “It’s not Godzilla.”
“Who cares?”
“Actually, we all do. That thing isn’t some kind of monster from a movie. It looked like a very large aquatic reptile, but I noticed something about it that is pertinent. Like a lot of aquatic creatures, it doesn’t have earholes. Or at least none that I saw… and I saw it really, really close. I think it has enormous membranes, one on each side of the head, which act as ears.”
“So it can hear really well underwater. So what?”
“But that’s exactly the point. I think we can use a boat, as long as we don’t activate the engine. An engine must be like a beacon to something like that. And possibly a challenge.”
“So what? You want us to row?”
“If necessary. At least until we put some distance between ourselves and the island.”
Cora spoke up. “We may not need to go far. I saw a container ship out there. It wasn’t moving, maybe it’s still there.”
Lai didn’t look convinced. “Container ships need to earn by the hour. You can’t just leave one in the middle of the ocean. That costs the owners tens of thousands of dollars a day in missed profit and operation costs. Not a good way to earn your money back on the kind of investment a big ship entails.”
“Then we just need to row a little further. And then we activate the beacon.”
“Didn’t we do that last time?” Dr. Pendalai said.
“Yes,” Cora replied.
“So what if I’m wrong and it’s not the motor but the beacon that attracts the monster? Maybe we shouldn’t turn that on.”
“Good point.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this at all,” Lai said. “No matter what we do, it will be risky.”
“I know, but it’s the only real chance I see.”
“What about just sitting tight? An entire resort can’t just go off the grid. Someone has to come looking for it, right?”
“No dice,” Sked said. “This resort was never on the grid. It seemed weird to me at first, but now I understand why. No one can stumble over the island’s dirty little secret and transmit it to all the world. And even if someone did find this place, they could be captured, disappeared and then explained away. No one arrives and no one leaves without the owners of this lab allowing it.”
“So no one’s coming,” Cora concluded.
“Exactly.”
Just as she was wondering why Lai was being the stumbling block, that worthy spoke again. “All right then. I think we should go with Cora’s plan. It seems to be the only workable solution.” Then he winked and smiled at her.
“Except,” one of the Chinese guys from Philadelphia said, “you don’t call the shots here.”
“Of course not,” Lai replied softly. “We should take a vote.”
Everyone voted for Cora’s plan, including, sheepishly, the Triad guy who’d objected. Even Mary raised her hand; it was better to do something, even something dangerous, than just to die of hunger in a tunnel. The only abstention was, predictably, Ania. She didn’t seem aware of anything around her.
“All right,” the man said. “I guess we do this. But how? Are you proposing we just walk back out there and climb the fence?”
Akane laughed. “No wonder no one’s ever heard of the Philadelphia Triad,” she said. “Not only do you not think like humans, you don’t even think like criminals.” She gestured to the large room around them. “Do you really believe anyone would build this James Bond villain lair and not provide it with an escape tunnel? Hell, I’ll bet you that not only is there a tunnel, but that the far end will drop us on the other side of that fence.”
The man gave her a long look and grinned. “And now I see why you’re on everyone’s kill list. But I guess you’re right.”
They split into groups and searched the place. Unsurprisingly, the group containing Sked and Akane hit paydirt before the rest: they found not one but two separate escape tunnels.
“We need to see where each of these goes,” Cora said.
“All right. I’ll take this one. Sked, you take the other one,” Akane said.
Mary wondered if Sked, obviously competent in his own right, would bristle at taking orders from his girl. But he didn’t seem to mind—he just adopted an amused expression and disappeared into the hole exp
osed by the false panel on the wall.
Ten minutes later, he returned, shaking his head. “This one opens in the resort, in the false back of one of the ovens.”
“Let me guess,” the resort employee said. “The one that never worked and they never got around to repairing.”
Sked grinned. “I have no idea, but that sounds like the right way to manage this. After all, escaping into a tunnel with the cops hot on your heels just to be broiled in the oven could ruin your whole day.”
Akane reappeared moments later with a smile on her face. “Harold, you owe me five bucks,” she called to the room at large.
“I never said I’d take the bet,” came the response from the break room area.
“Pussy,” she called out.
Harold responded with an obscene gesture, but by that time, no one was paying attention. They all crowded around Akane.
She smirked. “This one goes straight on for about a couple of hundred yards and appears under a dirt path in the woods. It had a bunch of loose rubble on it, which is why it took me so long to get back, but it’s definitely on the other side of the fence. I could see it just behind me.”
“Could you see the beach?” Cora asked.
Akane shook her head. “No way. Looks like dense jungle, except for the path through the trees.”
“All right. Who’s on the recovery team to get the boat?”
“All of us,” Sked said.
“That’s insane. It’s dangerous as hell.”
“I know. That’s why we need to do this in one shot. If we start crossing the jungle just so we can sail around to retrieve people, the natives are going to turn us into appetizers. We need to use the element of surprise while we still have it. And that means one strike, as fast as we can make it out there, and get everyone on the boat. Then we run for open water.”
“How long do you think the surprise will last?”
“Longer than if we try to do it your way,” Sked replied.
“Colonel?” Cora asked.
The older man stepped forward and held up a hand. A look of intense concentration crossed his features before he finally sighed. “I think Sked’s right this time. I just don’t think we can run a complex operation, not even at night. I think we move after nightfall—that will give us ten more hours to lick our wounds—and do it all at once. Either we all make it or we all die trying. I know you disagree with this plan, but you’re critical to its success. Can I count on you?”
Cora straightened. “Yessir!” she said.
“Thank you. Now, the castrati over there,” he gestured in the general direction of where they’d left the IT guy, “mentioned there was a cache of weapons. If the one he had is any indication, they will be badly-maintained and as dangerous to us as to anything we might encounter out there… but it’s better than nothing. Let’s see if we can find them. Once we do, I want everyone to get plenty of food, plenty of liquid and plenty of rest. Get it all now, because I don’t know how long this will take and I don’t want anyone carrying food in their pockets. Remember that the natives are only half of our problems. Those dinosaurs can probably smell food a mile off.”
He left them to try to locate the cache of weapons. Mary, who’d never fired a gun, didn’t join the search. She just sat there, thinking that the Colonel was probably right that the dinosaurs could smell food from a long distance.
What he hadn’t mentioned to the group at large was that they were the dinosaurs’ food.
Chapter 15
Sked had drawn the rearguard position, so he waited patiently while everyone else filed into the tunnel. In theory it was the safest spot because you could see if everyone else was getting massacred before stepping out into the open. Of course, that situation reversed itself immediately as soon as you got out of the tunnel. If you got hit from behind, you’d have to run over everyone else in order to get the hell away.
And if you did, they’d probably be mad at you for running from the rearguard spot. You were supposed to die a hero.
Cora led the group into the little door, with two of the Triad guys and a sailor—looking much more confident now that they had guns again—following. Behind them came the noncombatants, which was to say everyone who hadn’t been issued a gun. They included the rest of the sailors, the Colonel’s wife, the cook from the yacht and his girlfriend.
After them, surprisingly, came Akane. She’d foregone her role as part of the combat team—but still kept her gun—in order to take Ania under her wing. The woman they’d rescued still looked dazed, but was slowly coming to understand that this actually wasn’t some new form of torture, that the people around her were trying to help.
But the only one she responded to was Akane. He didn’t know if it was the fact that she’d shown the woman her tattoo, or whether she’d told her that she’d shot one of the doctors, but for some reason, the woman understood that Akane was her fiercest ally. And Akane had taken the responsibility to heart. Sked suspected that, if it came down to saving his life or the woman’s, Akane would choose the woman.
That hurt like hell, but he would think about it later.
Crazy Eddie followed Akane in, watermelon chopper at the ready. Then, just ahead of Sked, the Colonel. Before going in, the bluff Englishman squeezed Sked’s shoulder. “One way or another, we’re nearing the end of this,” he said. “Good man.” Then he disappeared into the tunnel.
Sked looked behind him one last time to check that they weren’t forgetting anything. He had his gun, and he had his laptop and other electronics stuffed into a backpack. There was nothing else he really needed.
They’d abandoned the castrati IT guy tied loosely to one of the hospital beds. He should be able to work loose after a few hours, and if he didn’t, Sked really wasn’t going to lose much sleep over it. They were pretty much in the same line of work—freelance experts in the tech field—but you chose which assignments you took. For this one, you had to be a real creep, no matter what the money was like. He played the innocent, but there was no way he didn’t know what had been going on, what he’d been supporting.
If he got out, he deserved to be monster food.
Satisfied that nothing of value had been forgotten, he entered the passageway and almost immediately bumped into the Colonel.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Think nothing of it. Looks like traffic control up there hasn’t had their morning tea yet. Still sluggish.”
The Colonel seemed completely calm, which contrasted with Sked’s thumping heart. Of course, this guy probably went into quite a few of his missions by jumping out of an airplane at night into enemy territory. That had to be sheer terror. Sked, on the other hand, got a jolt of adrenaline from walking through a darkened tunnel—quite a few of his bloodier incursions had started out exactly this way.
Finally, the group ahead managed to get itself moving and, within minutes, word was passed down the line that Cora was about to open the door.
He tensed and waited, but other than the line advancing slowly towards a slightly lighter patch up ahead, nothing indicated they’d entered a new phase in the operation. Another few moments later, his turn to leave the relative safety of the enclosure arrived.
The night was warm and silent, with wind rustling through the trees. For a single second, he felt a sense of cognitive dissonance. Fragrant nights like this one should have been dedicated to drinking caipiroskas and dancing in a tropical sweat, without the sense of imminent death.
The group came to a halt and Cora circled back to talk to him and the Colonel. “It’s a pretty long line. If we get separated, take whoever is with you to the lifeboat. I calculate you need to head to the northern tip of the island and once there, walk on the western coast. You shouldn’t need to go too far.”
Sked patted his pocket, where they’d put one of the three compasses the team had liberated from the Blood Orchid base. Evidently, without access to cell towers or satellite phones, the white slavers had reverted to archaic means of finding their way
through the woods.
He nodded. “Are we taking the path?”
“Yeah. I would actually prefer not to, because I assume it’s for the use of the natives, but we’ll never get everyone through this tangle if we try to go through the trees. Try to keep them as close as you can.”
“I’ll try,” Sked replied. The truth, however, was that he was concerned about the survival of exactly one person: Akane. That probably meant he was going to have to take care of the woman they’d pulled out of the cell, but that was it. He’d help get the group to the lifeboat exactly as long as Akane was part of it.
He smirked. She would be proud of him, thinking he was returning to his old personality, becoming the bastard she knew and loved again, but it was more a question of prioritizing. He didn’t know these people; he wouldn’t risk Akane to save them.
They advanced over the path in a hushed silence that still managed to seem noisy. Though the march had been uneventful, he still wasn’t relaxed five minutes after exiting the tunnel.
For good reason.
His position in the rear allowed him to hear the attack coming up on them seconds before it arrived. But that was too late.
Small figures darted out of the woods at high speed. By the time he realized it was the dinosaurs, several had already shot past him.
One of them bounced off the Colonel and fell to the ground. The only sign the enormous man gave that he’d felt anything was a muted “oof.”
Up ahead, screaming began as the group realized what was happening.
Sked ignored everything else and rushed to get to Akane. He pushed her against a tree, helped Ania into position beside her and tried to see where the creatures had gone.
It was too dark to spot anything, and the sudden panicked trampling from the front of the line made it impossible to hear. It sounded like a troop of elephants stampeding, trumpets and all.
Then there was a lull, a few seconds of relative quiet as the people making noise moved farther away. It was broken by a high-pitched screech that echoed to their right, just before Crazy Eddie emerged from the darkness. He carried his phone in one hand for light, and the head of one of the creatures in the other. His watermelon chopper hung from his belt, black where it was stained with blood. He grinned maniacally when he spotted them. “One down,” he said. “A lot to go.”
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