by J D Lasica
He turned his head, sensing something was amiss. “Where’s Vanderhorst?” But he already knew the answer.
Bundt dropped to his back, started to squeeze through the narrow opening, and grasped the edge of the glass to steady himself. The heat tore through his hand, a sharp welt of blistering pain. He swore to himself for forgetting to be careful, suppressing an urge to cry out. Then he steadied himself and eased out of the encased shrine. Stubblefield and Trang followed.
They hurried down the stairway and made it to the entrance of the Image House when Bundt heard Vanderhorst’s voice. “Do not shoot, brother!” Bundt peered through the doorway and saw a uniformed security guard training his pistol at Vanderhorst.
Vanderhorst crouched to set down the crystal Buddha, then plunged his hand into his monk’s robe. He aimed his automatic from his pocket, fired, but missed. The guard was ready. He pumped two shots into Vanderhorst, sending him flying back into the glass case.
Bundt drew his dart gun and felt the flare of pain from his mangled fingers, but he managed to squeeze off the shots. Thoot—thoot—thoot. His third try found its target.
The toad venom kicked in after fifteen seconds. Bundt stepped over the paralyzed guard, leaned down, and peered at Vanderhorst’s body. Bundt shook his head at the other two in the doorway.
“Leave him,” Stubblefield said.
Bundt pretended to feel for a pulse on the dead man’s neck. He grasped the jasper Buddha on the ground and slipped it into his pocket. Then he joined the others. They retraced their steps to the back entrance and hurried down the temple steps.
Bundt checked his robe pocket for the tooth pouch—and for his bonus. He folded his hands in prayer, bowed his head, and nodded to the two others. Then they split up, melting into the crowd that was still watching the perahera.
47
Dallas, August 29
K aden and Nico pounded on the steel door of the Cold Room inside the Lab. Their captors had disabled the emergency latch so the door wouldn’t open from the inside. Kaden buried her hands beneath the bottom of her military fatigues to ward off the blistering cold.
They’d been in this big metal container since early this morning and she wondered how long they could hold out at freezing temperatures without protective clothing. She slammed her fists against the door and shouted again.
“Somebody will come for us soon,” Nico said, a little hoarse. But she wasn’t sure if he believed that.
She tapped her head back against the steel door and then decided to check the far end of the room one more time. It was almost the size of a small warehouse in here, a large expanse of cork flooring with two ventilation fans set fifteen feet above them and out of reach. She groped at the right wall to steady herself in the dim light as she moved deeper into the bowels of the long refrigerated unit. There was no rear door back here, she and Nico had already checked.
She moved twenty, thirty feet down the frigid aisle, the shadows growing thick and black. Colder back here. She was almost at the back wall when her gaze returned to the neatly arranged racks of metal bins on the other side. She grabbed the ends of the first one and gasped at the pain. The flesh of her fingertips all but fused to the metal in the extreme cold.
She tried again, this time using the bottom of her shirt to open the bin. She managed to pry the top loose, but it was so dark she could barely see inside. Whatever it is, it’s damn heavy . She snapped the container closed and carried it to the front of the room where the lighting was a little better.
“What’s inside?” Nico asked.
Together they popped open the lid and saw … two enormous rats. Rats almost as big as house cats. Kaden resisted the impulse to draw back in revulsion.
She steadied herself. “I have an idea. Follow me.”
They headed to the rear and began removing the bins from the metal racks along the wall in the far corner. They began carrying the bins back to the front and placing them beneath the ventilation unit that was spewing refrigerant into the room through two giant fans fed by a copper pipe running along the wall.
Nico and Kaden stacked the steel bins on top of each other, forming a half pyramid. They decided not to remove whatever other crazy shit was in the containers to better support Nico’s weight. By the time they put the final bin in place and Nico climbed to the top, he was even with the fans, which were still blowing a small tempest of icy air.
“Toss me up a bin top,” he said.
She grabbed a container, ripped off the metal top, and flung it up to Nico .
He took it and slipped the sturdy metal into the space between the wall and the copper pipe. He began working it against the pipe, prying it away from the wall and crimping the copper. After a minute of this, Nico snapped off a section of the pipe with one emphatic heave. The fans were still blowing, so he smashed the thin protective metal grate covering the blades and then jammed the end of the pipe into the first fan. A loud clangggg reverberated through the room. Then he did the same with the second fan.
Both fans stopped dead, quieting the room. The fan units looked like they connected to the larger room that contained the Cold Room in the center.
“Maybe someone can hear us now,” she said.
They both began yelling with a fierce intensity while they still could.
48
Amboise, France, August 29
P hantom guided the superyacht onto the banks of the Loire River in Amboise, France. He slipped below deck to the aft control room and entered the commands to lower the retractable water sports platform. Phantom thought he’d seen everything, but this was the first time he’d seen a luxury ship, built for speed, ferry heavy earth-moving equipment to shore in the dead of night.
Hours earlier the team had reconfigured the Bitch Box—the ship’s sound system—to add satellite communications with Command. Phantom figured Conrad, his old son-of-a-bitch drill instructor at Lost Camp, would have his hands full with all the other operations happening at the same time, so when he picked up the mic and switched over to satellite, he kept his update short and sweet.
“Supervixen has made landfall at GT21. Proceeding to target. Over.”
“Roger that. Over,” Conrad came back.
He signaled for the advance team to lower the long steel ramp and move out. Hardcore, Magneto, Serpent, HoneyBadger, and Sunshine, his lieutenant, spanned out along the banks and proceeded into the empty parking lot, wearing their modified Eyewear that doubled as night vision goggles. The parking lot would be the rally point if things went south.
Next, he signaled for the equipment operators to roll out. Phantom listened as the machines glided silently down the metal ramp onto the banks with nearly the same elegant stealth he used behind enemy lines working for Blackwater all those years ago. He congratulated himself for insisting on quiet, electric-powered motors to power the ditch witch trencher—with its alloy blades that slice through stone like a knife through ribs—and the modified miniature crawler loader backhoe with a diamond core drill.
The boys came up with nicknames for the ditch witch and the backhoe—the Witch and the Ho. He watched as they rolled off the ramp and made it without a problem through the final few feet of shallow water before climbing the gently sloping embankment. It was bitching hot out along the riverbank, even this late at night, thanks to the never-ending heat wave, and the cigales were screaming up a storm in the trees.
Phantom, Russian 5.66mm semi-automatic assault rifle in hand, followed the six equipment operators out. Two patrol guards brought up the rear. No forty-mile ruck march for this operation—from ship to target was all of 200 yards.
They crossed the Quai Charles Guinot, made their way down the Rue Louis XII for one block, and took a quick right at Rue de La Concorde. Along the way, the advance team set out detour signs on the two main roadways to make sure no one would catch sight of the odd-looking late-night procession of heavy machinery and alert the authorities. It took only ten minutes before they reached the park of Chateau d’Amboi
se. Phantom instructed the guards at the rear of the unit to remove the detour signs.
“This is it,” Phantom said in a low voice to his squad of twelve men. They stood before the Chapel of Saint-Hubert, with its gothic spire bathed in moonlight and the front façade washed by two gold-colored floodlights.
He signaled for the advance team to fan out to all four corners of the park while two incursion specialists went around back to break into the rear of the chapel. The rear door, they knew, was too small for the equipment to get through. Three minutes later the boys were inside and heaved open the two heavy wooden doors at the front. The chapel lacked a stairway, so the Witch and the Ho proceeded straight through the doorway with an inch to spare on either side, thanks to the precise measurements by the advance team and the custom work downsizing the machines’ girth. The crew chief overseeing the equipment operators closed the doors behind them.
Phantom stayed with the workers inside the chapel while monitoring the unit’s external activities through his Eyewear. There, on the left side of the chapel, was the tomb with the engraved letters in the stone flooring: LEONARDO DA VINCI.
The team removed the black wrought-iron railing and set up noise-dampening mats. The two men who were carrying the large portable noise shield barriers set them around the tomb as sound-absorbing divider walls. Then all six men, stout and buff, put on their helmets and eye protectors. They were ready.
First the Witch went to work, carving into the stone tiling around the edges of the grave that hadn’t been disturbed since Leonardo’s remains were transferred here in 1863—long after his death in 1519. Sparks flew off the lightweight magnesium-based alloy blades as they sliced into the tiles. Anyone within a few hundred yards could see the portable lights they’d set up through the stained glass windows. But a more immediate concern was the noise. Phantom positioned himself outside the noise barriers to communicate with his patrol unit outside, but the Witch was making an ungodly racket. He decided to step outside into the sticky night .
Through his Eyewear he could see all seven of his weapons team members in their positions as well as the countdown timer in the corner of his field of vision. Everything was on schedule, just as they’d practiced in the dry runs.
“Commander, we got company,” Sunshine reported. Phantom enlarged the visual in his Eyewear and he saw a police car, blue light flashing, parked at the western perimeter of the park. “Permission to engage?”
“Granted.” Phantom didn’t want any suspicious activity reported back to police headquarters.
He entered Virtual Mode and watched what happened next through Sunshine’s headset. Sunshine squeezed off a quick burst of tranquilizer-tipped steel flechettes from his semi-automatic rifle. Pomp pa-pa-pa. He saw two French policemen react by reaching down to grab their legs where they’d been hit, then drop to the ground after fifteen seconds or so.
“Targets down,” Sunshine confirmed.
With that silencer, Phantom figured the sound traveled maybe fifty yards, tops. And with that dosage, they’d be unconscious until he and his men were long gone. But the fact that the police had stopped at all, and would no longer check in with dispatch, was a problem. A big problem.
Phantom went back inside the chapel and pushed through an opening in the noise shields.
“How much longer?”
He looked down and saw a neatly cut hole in the floor above the tomb. The smooth stone top, with its inscription and stone portrait of Leonardo, was fractured in half and leaning up against the far wall. The workers were directing the driver of the Ho as he moved back and forth on the vehicle’s synthetic rubber caterpillar track.
“Twenty minutes?” the crew chief guessed.
“Make it five!”
The workers started digging around the edges of the grave as the mini-backhoe dug deeper and reached the wooden coffin with an emphatic thump . One of the men prepared for the body’s removal by laying the custom-made fabric on the ground a few feet from the edge of the grave next to the dolly. They were done with the machines and used their shovels to clear away the last bit of dirt before they could break open the casket.
“Move these machines back to the ship!” Phantom ordered.
Two of the machine operators jumped on the Witch and the Ho, and Phantom opened the front doors and watched them churn across the cobblestone courtyard. He spoke into his Eyewear, “Sunshine, Serpent, redeploy for phase two.” They knew what to do.
He returned to the tomb. One of the workers was folding up the noise barriers while the remaining two had broken into the coffin.
“This is goddam creepy,” one of the workers in the pit said, standing astride the open coffin—right on top of poor old Leo—before handing the skull up to the crew chief. Then he and a second worker grabbed hold of the corpse and jerked the body above their heads, like a tandem weightlifting team. The body was still outfitted in the dark formal clothing Leonardo was buried in five centuries ago. The outfit, dusky and decayed, was barely holding the skeleton together, but the workers managed to heave it up and out of the grave.
The three of them wrapped the corpse in the blanket, sealed it, and placed it on top of the carbon-body dolly. Then they placed the noise barriers on top of the body.
“Let’s get out of here,” Phantom ordered.
Two of them wheeled out the dolly while the third carried the last of the equipment. Phantom made a final check. All clear. He directed the remaining team members to fan out at the perimeter as they made their way back to the ship. From the rally point in the parking lot, he spotted the yacht and was relieved that the retractable platform was lowered and the Witch and Ho were already on board.
At that moment, sirens began to blare. He turned around and saw blue lights reflecting in the leafy trees along the Quai Charles Guinot.
“Hurry!” he ordered. The shooters remained in position around the perimeter as the workers rolled the dolly down the riverbank. He motioned for the machine team to wade through the ankle-deep water before they could reach the ramp.
“It’s not moving,” the crew chief called out. The dolly was stuck in the mud.
“Leave the dolly—tell your men to get inside!” Phantom shouted. Then he turned back to the riverbank and called out to his weapons team, “Defensive posture!”
Distant shots began to ring out, and he heard the sound of bullets hitting the hull of the ship.
Phantom whirled and sprinted to the dolly. He grabbed the noise barriers covering the body and flung them aside. He nodded to the crew chief and together they lifted the body in the sealed blanket.
“Careful!” He knew this was no ordinary body.
They splashed their way up onto the ramp, across from each other but holding tight onto the package, and into the marina of the Supervixen’s water sports platform.
“Permission to use live ammo!” Hardcore yelled into his headset.
“Denied!” Phantom said. “Fall back!”
One by one, they retreated up the ramp and into the marina opening, firing the last of their precision darts as they retreated. Phantom re-established his line of communication with Command back in Dallas on the Bitch Box.
“What’s your status?” Conrad barked.
Phantom checked the circle of men gathered around him. The six members of the machine team were all there. Serpent and Sunshine, who’d provided them a weapons escort, were here. Magneto, and HoneyBadger stood next to him, still breathing hard.
“Where’s Hardcore?” Phantom snapped as the intensity of the gunfire increased just outside the ship’s stern.
“Looks like he’s wounded, sir,” Sunshine reported, peering into his Eyewear.
Phantom grabbed the comms microphone to report to mother. “Package has been secured. One man wounded, under heavy gunfire. Going back for him.”
Static on the line and then Conrad’s voice came back: “Negative, GT21. You are ordered to proceed to extraction point. The mission comes first.”
Phantom hesitated. H
e looked at the faces of the men around him, special ops veterans all. They waited to see what he would do.
With one powerful jerk, Phantom yanked the Bitch Box out of the wall. “You two men, with me!” he ordered and barreled out of the ship first, racing down the incline with Sunshine and Serpent on his heels.
They spotted Hardcore twenty yards up the banks, pinned down by gunfire. They all had bulletproof vests on beneath their fatigues, but Phantom saw a stream of blood coming from the back of Hardcore’s right thigh.
“Proceed to Scenario Three—live ammo!” Phantom declared.
Phantom and Sunshine lifted Hardcore, draping his arms around their shoulders while Serpent covered their retreat, spraying semi-automatic fire toward the police cars. It was no longer a game of darts—this was the part of the contingency plan that Phantom had hoped they wouldn’t need.
The two men, with Hardcore in tow, splashed up the ramp and into the ship. Serpent followed seconds later, still spraying fire from his assault rifle.
“Skip, go! go! go! ” Phantom shouted to the bridge through his headset. The ship’s engines were already running, and the men nearly toppled over as the ship throttled away from the bank. Phantom went to the control unit and entered the commands for the rear door to close. The hydraulics groaned under the weight of the water pressing down on the submerged ramp and preventing it from retracting.
“Lose the ramp!” Phantom shouted. Sunshine and Magneto pressed the release latch on the left side and he managed to kick it free on the right side. The ramp snapped off and disappeared into the dark throat of the Loire. Phantom entered the final command and the platform’s rear panel rose up, closing off the stern of the ship from the fusillade of gunfire.
It took another twelve minutes before they were in position to transfer the package and all the team members to the helicopter waiting for them at the rendezvous point up the river.
49