by Jack Soren
“Shut up,” the man said. Jonathan could see into the plane from his position. It looked like there was only one other person in there, a man sitting in the pilot seat busy at the console in front of him. “Where is it?”
Jonathan turned to Emily and whispered, “Stay where you are. Don’t give him any reason to do anything.”
Jonathan rose to his feet.
“What are you doing? Get down—” Jonathan waved his hand and two chunks of asphalt exploded in front of the Australian’s feet.
“The next shot goes through your heart,” Jonathan said. “Put your gun on the ground and kick it over here. And tell your pilot to get out here.”
This was always a tense moment for Jonathan. The subject would either comply or open fire. But the fact was the pilot was the only one they needed. If push came to shove, this guy was expendable—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get a few shots off before Lew took him down from his sniper position.
“Drop it!” Jonathan shouted. He felt ridiculous ordering an armed man to drop his gun when the only thing he was holding was air.
The man scoured the hills around the airstrip, clearly trying to find the source of the shots. Jonathan hoped he could do the math. The hills were several hundred yards away and he was holding an automatic handgun. Even if he spotted a muzzle flash, his situation was untenable.
Elongated seconds stretched out; the man massaged his weapon as he tried to decide what to do. Finally, he gave up on the hills and stared at Jonathan and Emily.
“Dieter! Get out here!” The man put his gun down on the tarmac with a flourish so whoever had him in their sights could tell what he was doing, then kicked the gun over to Jonathan. He picked it up and held it on the Australian and the pilot, who had joined his comrade, as they waited for Lew.
He came out of the forest on the hills, his rifle slung over his shoulder. When he arrived, they tied and gagged the pair and put them in the cargo hold. The pilot went willingly, but the big Australian was obstinate to the end, dragging his feet and continually hooking his legs around the plane’s seats as Lew walked him toward the back of the plane. When he’d apparently had enough, Lew grabbed him and slammed him hard against the bulkhead.
“Look, dickwad, don’t give me a fucking reason,” Lew snapped into the man’s ear. “We need your buddy, but you’re just dead weight.” The man grudgingly nodded and allowed himself to be put in the hold beside the pilot.
“Sorry about that,” Lew said to Emily.
Their captives secured, everyone sat around a table to make their plans. Jonathan could feel the time slipping away, tick by tick.
“Okay,” Jonathan said, drawing on a piece of paper to help him think. “I never saw the outside of the place, but I got a good tour of the inside.”
“Tour?” Lew said.
“Don’t ask,” Jonathan said. “Kring said there’s a runway on the north side of the island. We land there and head down a road to the main compound. There’s a courtyard outside the main building. Place looks like an old control tower. That’s where the exchange will take place.”
“You can’t give it to him!” Emily said. “It’s practically a national treasure.”
“Pretty gross treasure,” Lew said.
“I don’t care what it is,” Jonathan said. “If it gets Natalie back, he can have it. And I’m not going to risk trying to con him. This is a guy who has figured out all the angles. If either one of you have a problem with that, you better speak up now.”
No one said anything.
“All right, then.”
“Shouldn’t we contact the authorities? There are only three of us,” Emily said.
“Which authorities?” Lew said. “We don’t have any idea who has jurisdiction over Kring’s island. Hell, it might be a damn nation on paper.”
“Lew’s right,” Jonathan said. “Besides, there isn’t time. Kring knows we’re coming and how long it takes to get there. I’m not giving him any reason to pull a fast one.”
A banging noise reverberated from the cargo hold, along with muffled shouting.
“Shut up back there!” Lew said. The banging stopped.
“We need to hurry,” Jonathan said.
“Okay, so where am I in all this?” Lew asked.
“I figure no matter how aboveboard we play it, he’s going to try and get the upper hand. I don’t know how many guards he’s got working for him, but I saw at least three different ones. You got to figure there are shifts and some I didn’t see. We’re probably looking at ten.”
“At least,” Lew said.
“Why don’t we ask them?” Emily said, looking at the door to the cargo hold.
“That would be nice, but anything they say would be suspect. Bad intel is worse than no intel,” Jonathan said.
“If that’s the case, how can we be sure they’ll even take us to the island at all?” she countered. Jonathan liked the way her mind worked.
“I’ll ride up in the cockpit and watch the compass. It’s the best we can do. Besides, Nathan wants our care package pretty bad,” he said, and then looked at Lew. “As for you, I figure we play it the same way we did here. Give you a head start so you can get into position. Hopefully we’ll get a look at the place on a flyover before we land.”
“Works for me,” Lew said.
They talked about a few more details and worked out the kinks in the plan. Jonathan offered Emily a gun, but she declined.
“Okay, let’s get this show on the road,” Jonathan said. “I’ll see if there’s any grub in the galley. I don’t know about you but I’m starving.”
Lew headed back to get the pilot. The plan was to just leave the big guy back there where he couldn’t do any harm.
Jonathan found some sandwiches and bottled water and was loading up a tray when he heard Emily scream. He came running, gun out.
Emily was sitting in the cabin, looking whiter than she had when she’d shot that guy back at the estate. Jonathan made a motion with his hands, asking what was wrong, then followed her eyes. She was looking through the restroom door out into the cargo hold.
“You better get in here, Jonny,” Lew called. Jonathan entered the cargo hold and saw what had made Emily scream.
His hands still tied, the Australian had worked his gag off. Blood covered his face. And it wasn’t his blood. The pilot’s corpse lay bleeding out on the floor.
“Jesus.”
“Do you need me now, mate?” the Australian said, spitting out blood. He’d leaned over and bitten through the pilot’s neck. Jonathan realized that’s what the banging had been.
“You piece of shit,” Lew said. “I ought to—”
“Easy, mate. Touch me and you’re not going anywhere.”
“We’ll just get another pilot. The delay will be worth it if it means I get to kill you,” Lew said, grabbing him by the lapel and cocking his fist back.
“Go ahead. But good luck finding a pilot. There are maybe fifty pilots in the world that can fly this baby. Well, forty-nine,” he said with a smile, his teeth still covered in blood.
“And you’re one of them?” Jonathan asked.
“That I am.”
“I still say we—”
“Lew!” Jonathan commanded more than shouted. Lew looked at him and hesitated, but eventually let go. He vented his frustration by pounding the bulkhead a few times.
“Fine. But if you so much as turn on a fucking light without checking with us first . . .” Lew said, pressing his gun to the Australian’s forehead.
“I get it,” he said.
“So you’ll fly us to Kring’s island?” Jonathan said.
“On one condition.”
“Condition? Are you fucking—”
“Lew, go see if Emily’s all right,” Jonathan said.
“This is a mistake,” Lew sai
d to Jonathan before he left, casting a final glare at the Australian.
“Boy’s got a temper,” the Australian said.
“He’s cheerful compared to what I’ll be if you fuck this up for me,” Jonathan said. “What’s the condition?”
“I want the girl. Lara, Kring’s daughter. I don’t know what you lot are planning once we get there, but I’m thinking there aren’t going to be any survivors.”
“That’s it?” Jonathan asked, finding it hard to believe anyone would want that sneering Hitler in a dress. Sophia, he could understand, but Lara?
“And a ride out of there.”
“Done,” Jonathan said, and knelt down to untie his hands.
“But take my advice, mate. Whatever you plan, make sure killing Kring is part of it. If he’s even got one breath left in him, you, your family, and everyone you’ve ever known are dead.”
“Right,” Jonathan said sarcastically.
“Don’t dismiss me. You see that explosion after you left Canton George’s place?”
Jonathan nodded, getting a bad feeling.
“George wasn’t useful to Kring anymore. That metal case of money was lined with C–4. There’s nothing left back there but a deep hole. And the same thing will happen to you once you’re no longer useful to him.”
Jonathan wanted to ignore it as an empty threat, something just to throw him off, but he couldn’t. The Australian’s voice was edged with pure fear as he talked about Kring. He wasn’t scared for Jonathan.
He was scared for himself.
48
Tartaruga Island
6:30 A.M. Local Time
SOPHIA’S EYELIDS SLIPPED down again, her pupils rolling up as exhaustion and the oppressive heat of the tunnels tried once more to put her to sleep. Her head rocked forward and then snapped back up when she caught herself at the last possible moment. She opened her eyes wide and shook her head, taking a deep breath. If she gave in and went to sleep, she and Natalie might never wake up.
Deep in the bowels of the complex, they were in what Sophia used to call her happy place. It was a nook no bigger than a prison cell. At just four feet high, it was only accessible by squeezing through a tight stand of pipes. Though she had played with Lara in the tunnels as a child, even then Sophia had needed a safe place for when Lara went into one of her rages. She’d stumbled onto this nook one day, and had originally intended on telling Lara about it until she’d found her cutting the heads off of Sophia’s dolls again, so she’d kept the find to herself.
Whenever things got to be too much, this is where she’d come. Wriggling back into the nook—no small feat for her mature hips now—was like traveling back in time. A young hand’s crayon and marker drawings covered the walls. A pictograph representation of her early years. The pictures not all that dissimilar to the ones Natalie now drew, she noticed.
Natalie lay asleep on an old blanket while Sophia sat with her back to the wall. The air was wet and hot, but the concrete was cool on her back. This far from the generators, their throb was reduced to a soothing massage.
Sophia watched Natalie sleep, her back rising and falling. Gently, she brushed a few strands of hair out of her face. Sophia envied this little girl, even in the predicament they were in; both for her blissful childhood naïveté and for her loving father. For a moment, Sophia wondered what Nathan would have done if she’d been kidnapped as a child. She shook the idea away, depression serving no purpose in their current situation.
When Nathan and Lara were meeting with Jonathan in the courtyard, she’d take Natalie out through the data center. The exit let out behind the complex. There was a path that led through the jungle there, which ended several miles away at a helipad. They used the helicopter for hops to the mainland and while she’d hated taking the lessons at the time, she was grateful today.
Natalie coughed and opened her eyes, looking around in that way kids do when they first wake up, as if rebooting their memory takes a moment. She looked at Natalie and smiled.
“Is my dad here yet?”
“Not yet, sweetie,” Sophia said, rubbing Natalie’s back gently. “Go back to sleep.”
“M’kay,” Natalie said, her eyes closed before her head was back down on the blanket.
Sophia wondered what had happened in Natalie’s life to make her able to handle what she’d been through in the past few days with such aplomb. Kids by nature were resilient, but Sophia thought it was more than that. She wondered if Natalie knew her mother better than Sophia had known hers. Sophia couldn’t even picture her mother’s face anymore, it had been so long. She relied on a picture in her wallet, which was apparently the only picture of her mother in existence. Nathan had tried to take it from her, saying it wasn’t healthy to live in the past, but Sophia had stolen it out of the trash and kept it secretly all these years. She used to feel affection about that for Nathan, thinking he was trying to protect her, but now she wondered what she’d been told about her past, if anything, was true. How had she and Lara really ended up a “Kring”? Was her mother even really dead? Did Lara know any more about this than she did? These and a million other questions zipped through her mind, but before she could spiral further, sounds snapped her back to the here and now.
Voices echoed in the tunnel beyond the pipes again, the guards sweeping past, looking for them. She knew they were safe where they were, but her heart still pounded in her chest as they drew near.
“I tell ya, I did three tours in Iraq but this bitch scares the shit out of me,” one of the guards said.
“If we were smart we’d kill her and the old man and then get the fuck off this rock while we can.”
“Yeah, and have Thomas hunt us down? No thanks.” Sophia heard the squawk of a radio.
“Delta team, report.”
“Delta team. All clear. Heading back topside.”
“Roger. Relieve Alpha team at the helipad.”
“Roger. Out,” the guard said. “Let’s go. At least we’ll get some fresh air. Smells like ass down here.”
The guards moved away, and Sophia slumped against the wall. They were guarding the chopper. Plan A just went out the window, no doubt Lara’s doing. The problem was, there was no Plan B.
Sophia reached in her pocket and took out the USB hard drive with all the kuru research on it. Could she buy their freedom with this? Her life’s work for a little girl she barely knew. Sophia dropped the drive into her bag and rubbed her eyes hard. She was so tired it was difficult to think.
Maybe if she shut . . . her eyes . . . just . . . for . . . a . . .
49
Somewhere over the Indian Ocean
“HOW MUCH FARTHER?” Jonathan asked from the copilot’s seat. Lew and Emily were back in the cabin trying to get some sleep. Jonathan was tired, but he’d had enough pistol-whipped sleep in the past week to last him the rest of his life.
“About ninety minutes, give or take,” Thomas said. Jonathan’s gun, along with the one he took from Thomas, were in his jacket pockets. He still didn’t trust Thomas, but it would take the killer longer to unfasten his seat belt and get out of his chair than it would for Jonathan to draw down on him.
Before takeoff, Thomas had helped them draw a rudimentary map of the complex. Once Lew knew how to get in and where they were holding Natalie on the third level, that was all he’d needed. Jonathan, on the other hand, wanted more. He wanted to know what kind of man could do the things Kring had done, simply for a chance to survive. Not only to him and Natalie, but to his own children. In the coming hours, he was pretty sure information was going to be just as powerful as, if not more so than, bullets.
“How long have you known Kring?” Jonathan asked.
“I’ve known Mr. Kring for almost twenty-five years,” Thomas said. It was obvious he didn’t like the disrespect Jonathan felt toward his boss.
“Long time,” Jonathan said. “Then
you knew him before he was sick. Physically, I mean.”
“Yeah, well, not really. He’d already contracted kuru when I joined up with him. He just hadn’t started to show any symptoms until a few years ago. That’s when everything changed.”
“You must really love her. To turn on Kring like this, that is. Without our little gift package, he’ll probably die. I suppose, in a strange way, you’ll be killing him.”
“No, no, it’s not like that,” Thomas said.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for it. It’s probably the only chance my daughter has, I just don’t know if I’d be able to do it if I were you. All those years and the things you’ve done for him. That’s loyalty. Except for now, of course,” Jonathan said. He couldn’t push any harder if he wanted to land safely. He sat quietly and let the silence between them work on Thomas; the drone of the engines and the hiss of the conditioned air pumping into the plane were the only sounds.
“There was a time when I’d gladly point this plane at the sea and throttle up for him. I could tell you stories all the way to Tartaruga and you still wouldn’t be able to understand the kind of man he was. How he singularly and completely defined the word power. That man could kill your daughter in front of your eyes and have you thank him for the act,” Thomas said, his eyes far away and glistening with emotion.
“That man?” Jonathan said.
“That man is dead. He died just about the time his Frankenstein daughter started experimenting on him. I’m betraying no one by helping you. In fact, I’m rectifying something close to betrayal that’s been going on for years. I’m not helping you at all,” Thomas said, turning slowly until he looked Jonathan dead in the eyes. “You’re helping me.”
The phone Jonathan had taken from Thomas rang.
“Easy,” Jonathan said, picking up the phone and seeing Thomas twitch like he wanted to grab it. He read the display. “Who’s Blane?” Thomas seemed to pale.
“You better let me answer that, mate,” Thomas said.
He explained that Blane was his man in the U.S. military, stationed at the naval base on the Diego Garcia archipelago. He used him mostly for personnel intel, but every now and then Blane would call him. And whenever that happened, some serious shit was about to go down, and Blane wanted a big payment to cough up the details. Considering the current situation, Jonathan let him answer it, but on speakerphone.