Renoux shrugged plump shoulders. “You know how the locals can be about superstitions. All I know is people are yanked out of the forest, as if they were never there. Vanishing.”
“Not what I need to hear.”
“They are specific, ah, selective. Men only, the women are left alone.”
“Don’t make me come over there.” Mike didn’t have to take a threatening step closer. Renoux knew there was little to stop him. Mike liked the fast and accurate way to a source, none of this hunting for days. Go to the top and extricate the intel, move to the next resource, then check it against U.S. intel. If that wasn’t possible, wing it.
“Would you be interested to know that the last sighting was where your unmanned plane exploded?”
Mike hadn’t mentioned the plane, but he wasn’t surprised Renoux knew about the UAV. He probably had better intel than half of D.C. Even Mike didn’t have a decent location. “Now you’re talking. Where?”
“The foothills.”
Of the Andes? That stretched through three countries. “Be more specific.”
Renoux let out a long-suffering breath and looked around as if the police would jump from hiding. “East. Near San José de Lourdes.”
Another sixty miles or so. That was doable for drift. “Who’s got my Hellfires? And if you shrug that ‘I don’t know’ shit, I’ll make it physically impossible to do it again.”
Renoux pushed out of the chair, an effort, but Mike didn’t have to track the man. He was a big target. But his guards were another story. Loyal little bastards. The man who had hit him stirred on the floor, and Mike was tempted to put his lights out again, but the blood pooling near his mouth quelled the urge. Mercy.
“So when are you coming to join my operation?”
“Never, and quit asking. The Hellfires?”
“They exploded on impact. Ask anyone in the east, they will tell you the sky lit up. But then I ask myself, where is the debris? There’s none to be found. It was by chance I was traveling in the east. My sister’s husband, a fool of a man, he—”
Mike sighed, scrubbed his hand over his head, then fired at Renoux.
Mike almost laughed as the fat man danced back a step. He turned the gun toward the hallway when his men came rushing in. Renoux waved them back, insisting he was fine and, truthfully, he didn’t look the least bit ruffled.
Then he glared at Mike. “I told you! Things are being plucked out of the Andean Mountains like vultures to the dead.”
“Without being spotted when we were looking for them? Try again.”
“No, my friend, not the missiles. But the men.”
Something in Mike just froze. “Go on.” The chopper crashed too, days later. Near San José de Lourdes.
While Renoux fixed himself a drink, the mention of his men battered Mike with the sounds of their screams. It was constant, the tape recording playing in his head. He tried to block it, but too often it slipped past, and his imagination drew images of what made them scream in such terror. He’d seen enough to have a good comparison, but it made him more determined. Regardless of the outcome, payback was a sure thing.
Renoux peered over his glass. “Recon?”
Mike just stared.
“No matter. One explosion they might ignore, but two within days? People are curious, but no one is talking openly. They are scared.”
More likely because a squad of Peruvian soldiers was missing too. People disappearing wasn’t uncommon, but it was for a native, and most especially for a Peruvian soldier. To assume an entire squad was murdered by smugglers and do nothing told Mike there was more to the vanishing act than an exchange of gunfire. Leaving them to rot was a slap in the face to all who served.
While the CIA had a satellite watch on the area, they were the same people who told Jansen Scuds were in the mountains. Mike couldn’t wrap his brain around that still. Scuds weren’t exactly small. He’d seen the satellite photos. It was a slick black spot and could be a chunk of stone for all they knew. Yet there had been no contact, no beacon, no frequency spikes, nothing. Heavy-handed manipulation, but then, he liked a challenge.
“Someone’s talking if you’re getting all this. Who?”
“My trip, the reason I was there…it was a meeting. And might have nothing to do with anything particular.”
“Does it?”
“A man wants to purchase space on my transport planes. It was weapons or why come to me, eh?”
“But you said no because that’s illegal, isn’t it, Auggie?” Mike spoke as if he addressed a ten-year-old who’d eaten too many cookies and complained of a stomachache. Weapons transport not sanctioned by a particular government sent up red flags to the intelligence agencies.
“Of course, but one never turns his back on a potential customer.”
“A name, a location, give me something because you know how I feel about a bullet in the chamber and not firing.”
Inwardly, Mike rolled his eyes at his own drama. But it kept the “badass to badass” ratio in his favor. He knew he could be scary, remembering Ensign Durry at the hospital, yet an instant later he thought of Clancy. He liked her for more reasons than that she wasn’t intimidated by him. Though it was a rare occurrence lately. One reason he stayed alone.
“We never met. Something called him away.”
Mike didn’t bother to ask a name. Renoux preferred some anonymity with certain customers. Half the reason the ATF was up his ass.
“What I found so odd was anyone who inquires about the explosion, we find in the Amazon. Well, parts of them at least.”
Mike remembered the tape Jansen played for him. The screams of his friends. They were alive when they crashed, and if they weren’t now, then Mike was hunting a murderer.
Clancy was methodical, orderly, and was accustomed to testing many theories in computer-generated synthensization before moving on to another step. Start with the basics and build from there. The basics always worked. She smiled to herself. Probably why they were called that.
Unlike most geeks who were never far from their computer, Clancy left her job at the lab, refusing to travel with a laptop. A good thing since Richora and his merry men would have her state-of-the-art Alienware laptop if she had.
With a plan in mind, she left her hotel, freshly showered and in a new outfit, her only bag slung across her body as she went on a search for a network connection. If she got a hold of a decent computer, she could do more than the average person because they weren’t aware of some accesses available on the Web and the codes for them. But she had to know if the men were here or back in the U.S. already, and she pulled out her cell phone, debating using it. It could be tracked, and so would a credit card, but Cook would have to be pulling a lot of strings while trying to keep the reasons why quiet. She wouldn’t put it past him.
The American public would not like the idea of injecting their heroes with anything so dangerous. Especially something untested.
But she had skills and planned on using even the dirty ones to get what she needed, yet her brisk steps faltered when she approached a black iron gate. Flowers were jammed in every curl of iron, and candles crowded the ground below it. Her heart tripped when she saw the picture was of a young man in a uniform. Peruvian Army. He couldn’t be more than eighteen. Was he the man she shot? She strode past, pushing that young face from her mind, when she came upon another. Twisting a look around the area, she found another across the street littering the church steps.
Her first thought was earthquake, but there wasn’t any destruction in the town. From her position, she counted seven memorials. She thought of Richora, the man with him, and felt a terrible pull of guilt. He was shooting at me, she reasoned. She hadn’t meant to kill him and turned her blame on Richora.
Traffic slowed and she darted between cars, crossing to the only Net café within a hundred miles. A few minutes later, she was sitting on the edge of a bistro with a laptop connected to the Net.
“Ain’t technology grand?” she mumbled. Sh
e connected the cell to the computer and worked the keyboard, her magic, jumping off the cable line in Peru to a satellite-linked network in Venezuela. From there it was the freedom of the cyberwaves. She created an onion path, which would bounce from country to country through a wireless network. If Cook were monitoring her mail, then he’d think she was in Tanzania before he realized what she’d done.
She fished in her bag for the files, flipped through the worn, crumpled pages to the unit information, then dialed the phone. On a small window on the screen off to the side, she saw the connection jump. She used Francine’s name, figuring they were accustomed to hearing Major Yates, if only once, and one by one she asked for the Marines. And she got the same answer.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s not available either.”
“This is unsatisfactory.” She tried to sound crisp like Francine. “They were scheduled to report for some tests.” Francine had to check her results constantly, and that she wasn’t said there was more to this implantation than the scientific.
The man hesitated and when he spoke again his voice held the lilt of confusion. “I don’t know about that, ma’am. Would you like to speak to the colonel?”
Oh, jeez. “No, no, if they’re not there, there’s nothing to be done now. Thank you, Sergeant.”
She hung up and quickly severed the phone connection, then turned off the phone. With her luck, there was a GPS embedded in it. At least she knew they were not in the U.S. Sorta. It was all she had to go on and was folding the papers to put them back in the baggie when she paused, staring at the stoic military photo. By now she knew all the men by name, where they were born, when they joined. None of them were married, most without much family. She smoothed her finger over the outline of the Marine’s face, promising to make this right.
Then swiftly she put it all neatly away and focused on the computer. Yet because of the cable to satellite link, downloading on this end would be a bit slow. In the States, she’d already have downloaded and studied the schematics for the drone, the UAV Falcon. Long and narrow, under its wingspan Hellfire rockets. Bet that’s why they sent the Marines in so quickly. WMDs on the loose was everyone’s worst nightmare, someone with the potential to hit you in your hometown. Be more afraid of the fanatic guy who wants one, she thought, than the country with a thousand. She’d searched Google Earth too, but hadn’t found anything substantial. Loads from the site weren’t exactly fresh but days, even weeks old. She had to check the date of each one.
It was worth another try and she pulled up the town for a base to start. The picture appeared as if taken from a plane. She peered close, her gaze picking out the main avenue, the church steeples; then she passed the cursor to pinpoint northeast into Ecuador. If the UAV crashed where the mission orders said, there would be something like skid marks on the treetops. It had been only days. Trees wouldn’t have healed and she’d see some damage. She scanned for several minutes, certain she was looking in the area where she and Mike had been. She recognized the thick wall surrounding the police station.
But there was nothing to indicate a crash. Of any kind.
She switched directions, and it took time to reload and resize itself to narrow the picture and bring in a clear shot of the jungle. It all looked just…green. She sat back and sipped incredibly good coffee and watched the picture download. She was starving, but café rules; she had to give up the computer to order food. For nearly an hour, she studied the terrain near the border, but found nothing that looked like a crash site or even a path from scavengers. The Falcon had a twenty-nine-hour fly time and was seven hundred pounds of lightweight, high-strength composite materials, including its wings. It could fly over forty thousand feet, and there was no evidence of the crash? Satellite imagery didn’t show anything?
She knew satellites couldn’t hover and any pictures were conducive to the timing of the target and the satellite’s position. You’d think we’d have some overlapping up there, she thought.
Clancy wasn’t buying any of this, and with the local soldiers coming up missing, she knew they were somehow connected. She kept surfing, and waited, watching cars speed past, yet in the dusky stillness beyond she saw the German talking to a couple of local girls. He didn’t look much different from when he was on the bus, kind of grungy, but whatever he said made the girls giggle. Gustave looked up, saw her, and waved, smiling, then walked on.
Clancy focused on the screen again, moving in increments east from the border. Nothing. The lack of speed made her carefully inspect each part of the jungle and the villages beyond. While she waited for it to finish, she logged onto her e-mail account. There were several from her mother asking where she was, why didn’t she call. Lord, teach the woman to use a computer and she was all over it. She answered, giving little information. “Deep in the project” was usually good enough for Mom. She checked the map and saw the high-peaked terrain of the Andes where it sloped to the rain forest valley and the Amazon.
Then she saw something.
Not anything glaring, but there was a definite mark on the valley floor. The only reason it stood out was because the surrounding area was untouched. The spread was wide, yet faint, almost like wind brushing grasses flat. It could very well be, she thought, thinking of crop circles or animals. The shadow on the screen disappeared under the trees, and a closer look showed the ground torn. That could be a couple of things, the shadow of the Andes or the angle of the satellite for Google. U.S. intelligence would have scoured several versions and angles, if they had satellite coverage at the time, but she didn’t have anything close to that luxury.
A good and bad thing was the Marines were still unreachable. That meant still on assignment. Maybe. If they were back, the reports on the project would have contained some results. Talk about by the seat of your pants, McRae, she thought, yet a small part of her, one she refused to let take hold, reminded her she wasn’t skilled enough for this, that it was hopeless to hunt for men trained to be invisible.
Doubt was erased by her gut instinct, her need to correct this. She had to get it out of them before it killed them. She’d created it. She’d developed it to its present state, and while initial trials proved excellent, she blamed herself for giving Cook a deadline, a possible moment of human implantation they could see on a calendar.
Cook had taken it and ran.
She wasn’t going to allow Yates, and Cook with his hurry-up attitude, destroy something with the potential to help millions. Clancy had a personal stake in this, in more than her career, yet from the first moment she’d learned of the human implantations, the candidates, she wondered, why? They risked their lives for their countrymen, but for experimental nanotechnology that hadn’t been fully tested, one that they couldn’t even see? The scales were tipped too deeply for her to grasp that.
It made her wonder; did they really volunteer?
Richora waited for a half hour before he was escorted inside. This would not be pleasant, he thought, or he wouldn’t be kept waiting. When his escort finally came, the man said nothing, stopping in the foyer and waiting till he noticed him and stood. Then the escort turned, walking briskly through the hacienda that was modern with a shell of the old world.
He passed through a wide courtyard with brightly colored tiles, and an elaborate fountain spilling clear water from basin to basin, then under the portico and through wide French doors.
With his back to him, Salache stood at the grand window, a twelve-foot length of glass separating him from the humidity and heat. The Andean Mountains loomed close, the frosted peaks hidden in the clouds.
Then he turned. Richora tried to school his shocked features and failed.
“Comments? Make them now please.”
The voice was the same, his manner the same as he sat carefully and drew a magazine close. But the face matched nothing of Richora’s memory.
“You look healthy,” he said, knowing Salache wanted a compliment. What was left to do to his face and, mostly, why? Why did he cut up his face and change
himself all the time? To avoid capture perhaps, but then, his wife and children were not altered and they would be recognizable. Richora counted four surgeries since he’d met Salache, and that had been less than two years. How many did he have before he met him?
His gaze slid to the far left, to the open door leading to the pool, a private one for his family. The staff used another on the other side of the property. Yet through the opening, he saw Salache’s wife and his two children. What strangeness did they see working in the man? A man who kept changing his appearance, always for the better, that was certain. Salache was forty years old, yet looked no more than twenty-five. What did his beautiful wife think? She’d married a man with a different face and Richora accepted his desire for Marianna, one he would never approach. She was exotic and delicate, yet there was nothing fragile in her dark eyes. He turned his gaze back to Salache and found him scowling.
“You want my wife.”
The edge in his voice gripped Richora. “No.”
“Then why do you stare?”
“She is beautiful, you’re a lucky man.”
“Apparently not or my business wouldn’t be interrupted with these mishaps.”
“I have taken care of it.”
“All of it?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll do my job.”
“Then clean it up!” Salache snapped.
“Have I failed you yet? Not my men, but me?”
Richora moved closer, and noticed that Salache was flipping through a gay men’s magazine, ripping out pages and circling body parts.
“We are on schedule. Taking the woman wasn’t a planned action, simply a greedy one,” Richora said. “Fuad was not smart, and an intelligent man would not have hired him.”
Salache’s gaze flicked up. “A smarter one would not have killed him before we knew for certain.”
“I didn’t. He was shot from a distance.”
Salache frowned, the muscles in his face barely moving. Richora thought, Does he feel anything after all the operations? He was barely accustomed to the last face; now a new one? “One of yours?”
Intimate Danger Page 10