DEVIL’S KEEP

by PHILLIP FINCH

  Around noon, they pulled into a small marina. While an attendant fueled the boat, Arielle got out onto the dock and found a spot where she could set up the laptop and the satellite transceiver. She needed a stable platform for the uplink. That was impossible on the boat, so this was her first chance to check for the aerial photos online.

  The others watched from the boat. They needed those photos.

  Arielle sat cross-legged with the case in front of her. She unzipped the case, removed the computer and the flat, book-size antenna. At this location, just a few degrees north of the equator, the Inmarsat Broadband Global Area Network Asia-Pacific satellite was almost directly overhead; she aimed the antenna almost straight up.

  A weak electronic tone rose out of the laptop’s speakers. She began to adjust the antenna in increments, tilting it slightly toward the southern sky, and the tone grew louder and more high-pitched.

  It shrieked.

  Connected.

  She worked the keyboard for a few seconds, shielded her eyes against the sun, looked closer.

  She shook her head.

  No.

  While the boat refueled at the city dock in Zamboanga, the floatplane was doing the same at its base about twenty miles up the coast. It carried four: Andropov, Anatoly Markov, who was flying it, and two other members of the Manila crew. This left only one Russian at the Manila headquarters, but Andropov wasn’t concerned. He believed that Manila didn’t matter anymore, as far as the four Americans were concerned. The action would be on the island, and it would come soon. The most important transplant yet to be performed on the island—by far—was to take place in less than twenty-four hours. Its recipient would be landing in Kota Kinabalu around sunset, and Andropov believed that the Americans would do everything in their power to interfere.

  He knew that this was improbable, in realistic terms. But the very existence of the Americans was an improbable event, and here they were.

  Anything was possible.

  Andropov knew that they must be out there somewhere, somehow finding a way to the island, and he intended to be ready when they arrived.

  Thirty

  The sea grew restless after they left Zamboanga. At first it pushed up easy swells, so broad and gentle that they seemed to be incidental distortions in the bright green surface. The swells began to roll, more abrupt, the troughs steeper and deeper. Then the swells became waves, two and three feet high, a hard chop that pounded the hull.

  The sky was hazy now, and gray cloud tops were dimpling up on the far horizon to the east. The boat was alone, surrounded by open water.

  Banshee easily handled the waves, but it was pounding through the water now, not skimming anymore. Mendonza was at the wheel. He throttled back slightly. The navigation display showed sixty-three miles to Devil’s Keep, with at least three hours of daylight.

  Favor stayed down in the cabin, where an LCD screen showed the boat’s navigation panel. When the distance to Devil’s Keep reached sixty miles, he came up and spoke to Mendonza.

  “I want to stay at least ten miles off the island until the sun goes down,” Favor said. “Due south would keep us out of visual and take us into the archipelago. I don’t want to run into any habitation, but maybe we can find a quiet place to put in for a while. See if we can find somewhere for Ari to connect.”

  Mendonza turned the wheel slightly to the right, and immediately the boat’s sharp nose swung around by about fifteen degrees. Favor and Mendonza stood together in the cockpit, watching the nose tick up and down as the hull shot through the chop.

  After a few minutes, Mendonza said, “Ray, it’s almost crunch time. What’re we going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Favor said. “Let’s see if we can get those aerial photos. That’ll give us an idea.”

  “And without the pics? We don’t know fuck-all about what’s on the island. And it’s not like we can do a quiet little recon, cruise around it a few times to check it out. This is a sweet boat, but it’s not going to sneak up on anybody.”

  “We don’t back off now,” Favor said. “You decide this doesn’t work for you, that’s no problem. We can turn the boat around, I’ll take you back to Zambo. No questions asked, no hard feelings. Ari and Stick, same deal. But I’m going to do this.”

  “You know I don’t back off,” Mendonza said. “I’m just asking.”

  “Fair enough,” Favor said. “All else fails, I guess we wing it.”

  Mendonza looked over and saw that Favor was grinning. Grinning.

  Mendonza couldn’t help it—he found himself laughing out loud.

  He said, “I guess it wouldn’t be the first time.”

  About an hour later they spotted the tops of palm trees in the southwest horizon. Mendonza steered toward them. The trees seemed to rise up out of the ocean, finally revealing a ragged line of low coral islands, most no larger than an acre or two, connected by shallow white flats that lay just below the surface. Mendonza cut the engines back and idled down the string of islets until he reached the largest of the group.

  He motored in close and anchored. The navigation display showed 14.2 miles to Devil’s Keep.

  The sea was calmer here in the shallows. Stickney jumped down into waist-high water. Arielle handed him the laptop case, then she climbed over the side and down into the water. She followed Stickney through the surf as he held the case high above his head, up onto a beach of powdered-sugar sand, over to a spot away from the trees.

  Favor and Mendonza watched from the boat as Arielle adjusted the angle of the antenna, tilting it slightly in the bed of sand.

  One last adjustment, and her hand left the antenna. Connected.

  She turned to the laptop. Her fingers worked at the keyboard.

  She looked up and spoke a word to Stickney.

  Stickney turned to the boat and showed a thumbs-up.

  The images were online.

  The file was large, almost half an hour’s download. Arielle sat beside the laptop the entire time, drinking from a bottle of water that Stickney carried out to her, watching the data counter flash on the screen. When it was done, she packed the machine in the case and gave it to Stickney, and he walked it back through the surf and handed it up to Mendonza.

  Favor pulled Stickney aboard, and they both helped lift Arielle aboard. She dried her hands on Favor’s shirt and said, “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  She took the laptop down into the cabin and opened it on one of the padded benches. The others followed her down, nearly filling the cramped space, and they gathered around the screen.

  She opened the file in an image viewer.

  The screen showed the island’s mottled half-moon shape, alone in a dark sea. At first it seemed identical to the Google Earth image that they had seen a few days earlier. But this image didn’t blur as Arielle began to enlarge it. Instead, new levels of detail emerged with each tap of the key. The island now filled the screen, yet the image was perfectly sharp. It showed a cluster of three buildings at the south end of the half-moon, and several other smaller structures scattered nearby, some half hidden among the trees. It showed a white outboard runabout tied up at a stubby dock at the curved eastern side of the island.

  She pressed another key combination and moved her index finger on the touch pad. The island seemed to tilt and spin. It showed elevation. This image was a composite of more than a dozen high-resolution photos taken at various angles during the aircraft’s single pass. The process was called photogrammetry, extracting elevation data from 2-D photos to produce a near 3-D rendering. From directly above, the island appeared flat. But as Arielle moved the point of view, they saw that the western side of the island—the straight side of the half-moon—was actually a cliff.

  The island didn’t look like a half-moon anymore. Instead, it was as if a plump cookie had been broken in two, with one half laid down in the sea, the broken edge dropping sheer to the water.

  Mendonza pointed at the screen and said, “There’s a chopper landing pa
d. Is that a fuel tank beside it? Can we get in closer?”

  Arielle zoomed in, close enough that they could make out the dark hose wound along one end of the tank.

  Stickney said, “A pipe coming out of the ocean up to this outbuilding, more pipes coming out to the structures. Can you get in tight here? They’re running a desalination setup. And this would be the generator, off by itself so the noise doesn’t drive them crazy. They’re in here for the long haul.”

  Favor was leaning in close to the screen, studying it, taking it in.

  Arielle said, ”Ray? Is there anything you want to see up close?”

  “Yeah,” he said. ”Here by the dock. And over here, beside this tree.”

  He was pointing to specks in the image. She zoomed in tight, and the speck near the dock resolved into the standing figure of a man. He was looking out to sea and holding a weapon. The long slim barrel was plainly visible. The second speck became a man seated partly in the shade of a tree, with the barrel of a long gun gleaming in the sunlight.

  Favor said, “What time was this shot, Ari?”

  “The time stamp says just after nine this morning.”

  “Nine o’clock in the morning, they’re alone on a rock with fifteen miles of empty water in every direction, and they’ve got the guns out. These people are serious about keeping the world away. But I guess I’d be paranoid, too, if I had that much to hide.”

  They left the cabin without discussing plans. Mendonza said that it was dinnertime, so he went into the food stash and brought out the cans of beans and sardines. They ate it cold, straight out of the can, and Stickney got a laugh when he said how grateful he was that Favor went first-class on the amenities.

  When they were finished, they sat out on the deck. The sun was down now, leaving just a red smudge in the western sky. A breeze blew out of the north, and the boat rocked gently with swells slapping against the hull. Nobody had much to say. Arielle thought they were all aware of Devil’s Keep somewhere out in the darkness to the southeast, and of the reality in the images down on the laptop.

  She knew how this was going to play out; it was obvious in the photos, she thought. She knew that Stickney and Mendonza saw it, too, but were reluctant to mention it.

  The truth was that the risk in rescuing the two teenagers—or trying to rescue them—was not going to be equally shared. One of them alone was about to lay his ass on the line.

  That would be Ray Favor.

  Mendonza and Stickney weren’t going to mention it, Arielle thought. She didn’t want to talk about it, either, but she knew that somebody had to start. She supposed that this was her part in the script.

  She broke the silence. “I’d like to hear some ideas about how we approach this thing with the island. I mean, given what we saw in the images.”

  Mendonza jumped in right away.

  “The direct approach,” he said. “There’s the dock; here’s a boat and it’s fast as hell. We go in pedal to the metal, bail out of the boat as soon as we hit the dock, spread out.”

  Favor said, “No offense, Al, but I don’t think you’re seeing this clearly.” He was playing his part now: the relentless voice of reason. “This boat will be noticed. I don’t know how soon they’ll pick us up. A mile out, maybe two. That’s enough. They’ll be waiting for us, and we’ll be outgunned for sure. Come on. We’ll be lucky if any one of us gets out alive, much less bring back those kids.”

  Stickney said, “We go in the middle of the night, we may be able to get off the boat and into the buildings before they know what’s happening.”

  Favor said, “I don’t think so. They post guards during the day; we have to assume the guards are there at night too. Everything about this says that they’re hard-ass pros. They know what they’re doing. I don’t care what time of day or night, if we rumble straight in there, we’ll get cut to pieces.”

  Mendonza said, “You have a better idea?”

  “Yes I do,” Favor said. “They watch the front side of the island, the dock, because that’s where you’d expect somebody to come. But the back side? That cliff? They won’t expect that.”

  “I don’t climb cliffs,” Stickney said. “I don’t suppose Al climbs cliffs, either. Ari, I don’t know.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not a climber.”

  “I am,” Favor said. “Here’s how I see it. We move out when the moon goes down. That’s a little after two, according to the software. Bring the boat in slow and quiet, maybe within half a mile of the island. I swim the rest of the way. Climb the wall, up over the top. They won’t have a clue. Then, you know … then I do my thing.”

  “What about us?” Mendonza said.

  “Lay back a couple of miles and watch close,” Favor said. “I’ll let you know when to come.”

  “How will you do that?” Stickney said.

  “I’ll figure it out. You’ll know.”

  The others were silent.

  Favor said, “This makes sense. You all know it. This is how it has to be. I won’t do it any other way. This is it.”

  The script was almost finished now, Arielle thought. They had gotten to Favor insisting on his own sacrifice. Demanding it.

  “Ari hasn’t had anything to say about this,” Stickney said.

  “That’s right, Ari’s been quiet,” Favor said. He looked at her. “What do you think about all this?”

  Just one line remained now in the script, and she knew what it was.

  She just wasn’t ready to say it yet.

  Instead she said, “You’ll have to be perfect. Your margin for error will be zero. You slip off that wall, you’re fucked. One wrong step on the island, you’re fucked. There are no rat holes when you leave this boat.”

  “The holes always run out eventually,” Favor said.

  His eyes said, Come on now. Don’t you dare let me down.

  She said, “I don’t like it, but I don’t see any better way.”

  And that was it, the final line, bringing them to where they all knew it had to go.

  “Good,” Favor said. “We have a plan.”

  “Tomorrow is a special day,” Andropov said. “And this is the most important shift you’ll ever spend on the island. Very soon we may have intruders who’ll try to bring down everything we’ve worked for, and I expect you to find them and stop them.”

  He was speaking to eleven men: six regular members of the island’s security team, the two orderlies who usually dealt with the prisoners, plus Markov and the two others from Manila.

  They were seated on the floor, in the hallway outside the operations room, in the main building. At the end of the corridor was the surgical suite, with the operations room and the pharmacy and the armory and the surgeons’ ready room in between.

  Two of the six-man island security crew exchanged a disbelieving glance. Yuri Malkin and Kostya Gorsky had been on the island since the start, and nobody had come close to threatening the operation.

  Literally, nobody even had come within sight, except the two local fishermen, and Yuri had dealt with them easily enough.

  Yuri raised a hand.

  ”Sir, will they be coming in great force?” he said. “Will it be by plane or by sea? Can we expect airborne?”

  He was twitting Andropov, but Andropov took it seriously.

  “There should be no more than four,” he said. “Three men and a woman. I don’t know how they’ll arrive. They’re clever as hell.”

  All of the men seated on the floor were combat veterans, specialists. Even the two orderlies were warriors—former commando medics with Spetsnaz, the fearsome Russian special forces.

  That made a force of eleven. Three men and a woman taking them on—they wanted to see this.

  “Are you sure we don’t need reinforcements?” said Kostya Gorsky. Someone snickered behind him.

  “Just do your jobs, stay alert,” Andropov said. “The perimeter posts all have night-vision binoculars. Use them. Draw some greenies from the pharmacy if you think you’ll have trouble
staying awake. We’ll go back to a reduced crew after daybreak. I’m not concerned about the daylight hours. It’s tonight that worries me.”

  Markov read off a list of post assignments. He had originally designed the island’s security arrangement: four watch posts at the edges of the island, looking out in four directions, plus two posts in the interior that were rarely used. Tonight all six would be manned, with a seventh sentry outside the main building.

  Markov stood at the door of the armory, handing out weapons as he called the assignments. As each man took the weapon, he also pulled a miniature radio transceiver from a box on a table. They fit into the ear. All shared the same frequency, a communications net, so that anyone on duty could speak to anyone else.

  “Surin, post one. Karlamov, three. Gorsky, five.”

  Most of the weapons in the armory were AK-47 rifles. But two stood out from the others. They were Dragunov sniper rifles, more accurate than the assault rifles, and fitted with infrared telescopic sights, thermal imaging, that let the scopes cut through darkness and fog.

  Markov was down to the last two assignments. He said, “Vladimir Raznar will handle the radio in the ops room.” Markov handed the first Dragunov to Raznar, a former Red Army sniper.

  And Markov said, “Yuri Malkin, post two.”

  Post two sat alone at the top of the cliff at the west side of the island. It looked out in the direction of the Sulu archipelago and had the widest field of view of any post on the island.

  Markov said, “On your toes tonight, Malkin,” and handed Yuri the second Dragunov. It was the rifle that Yuri had used to kill the two fishermen. He was the best shot on the island—better even than Raznar, the ex-sniper—so the rifle and the post were his by logic.

  They all dispersed.

  The door of the ops room opened.

  Karel Lazovic stood inside the door. He was a tall man in his fifties. His facial features were classically European aristocratic, and his voice was deep, commanding. Lazovic was the island’s primary surgeon, and since surgery was the island’s sole purpose, he was in charge most of the time. But the lines of authority shifted subtly with Andropov present, and Lazovic’s tone was respectful as he spoke: “Can we have a word?”