by Graham Brown
He dipped the nose.
“Hawker!”
They caught the treetops, snapping a branch here and there and then crashing through a thicker strand.
Suddenly they were out over the water, dropping and hitting hard. The deceleration was sudden, whiplashing the passengers forward against their seat belts.
They came up off the water for a second and touched down again. The Renegade settled this time, cutting a white swath across the glassy surface of the lake.
“Hold on,” Hawker said.
“Why? We’re down,” Danielle said.
He looked over at her. How to explain it? “We don’t have any brakes.”
She looked up.
He did the same. The lake’s embankment was coming at them fast, at twenty or maybe thirty miles per hour. They were slowing marginally but they were not going to be able to stop.
Hawker braced himself and the Renegade slammed into the bank and skidded up onto it.
It stopped abruptly.
Leaning forward over her seat belt, Danielle looked over at him. Her thick brown hair had covered her face. With a puff of air she blew some of it back and then used her hands to pull the rest of it behind her ear.
“No brakes,” she said, looking anything but amused. “You got us a plane with no brakes.”
“It’s a float plane,” he said. “None of them have brakes. I guess maybe they have anchors or something. I don’t know. I never flew one before.”
“You took us up in a type of plane you never flew before, to a place you weren’t sure we would be able to land safely in?”
For some reason he found her anger amusing, endearing. “To be fair,” he said, “I actually was sure we’d be able to land safely, I just also happened to be wrong.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and popped the latch on her door, pushing it upward.
“Get me out of this contraption.” she said, grabbing the flashlight and climbing out onto the sloping embankment.
The seat popped forward and Yuri climbed through.
McCarter followed behind him. He clapped Hawker on the shoulder. “I hate to tell you, but this hasn’t done anything to assuage my fear of flying. Especially with you. But since I thought we were about to die, and we’re somehow still alive, I say ‘good landing.’”
Hawker stayed in his seat for a few minutes to shut the plane down. They weren’t going to be flying out of there, but the battery still had juice and the plane still had radios. Hawker guessed there was a chance they might need them.
He climbed out and shut the door.
The stars and moon were brilliant. They cast a fair amount of light around the edge of the lake. It was smaller than he thought, maybe seven hundred feet across, with fifty-foot trees around its edges. It had been like trying to land on a runway with walls at each end.
It was a hell of a landing, all but impossible to pull off safely, yet they’d done it. He didn’t know whether to pat himself on the back or be surprised by their good luck.
Then his eyes turned to the tree line up ahead of them. He saw a flicker of light, white light first, from the beams of flashlights and then several glimpses of orange flames. A group of people were marching through the trees toward them, carrying flashlights and torches and who knew what else. And all Hawker could think of was the angry villagers coming out to seize Frankenstein.
CHAPTER 47
Danielle noticed the smell of smoke even before she saw the torchlight flickering in the forest ahead of them.
A moment of apprehension gripped her, but she didn’t share Hawker’s overriding suspiciousness of everything and she thought there could be a chance that meeting other people out here would be helpful. Certainly the men and women of Oco’s village had been fundamental to their initial success.
Still, she shielded Yuri by stepping in front of him as she waited for the oncoming party to reach them.
“I’m telling you,” Hawker said, “we should get out of here.”
“It’ll be all right,” she replied. “I’m almost sure of it.”
McCarter stood by expectantly. He turned on a flashlight and waved.
The train of torches changed direction, heading straight for them.
“There must be a town around here,” McCarter said. “If we’re looking for another Mayan ruin, the locals might know about it. There are hundreds of structures hidden in the jungle, most never seen by outsiders. This could be a stroke of good luck.”
The torches grew closer, winding down a slight hill, until several men came through the brush and trained a series of powerful flashlights on the NRI group. The glare blinded Danielle and she put a hand up.
“Nos puede ayudar usted, por favor?” she said. Can you help us, please?
The lights continued to shine in her eyes.
“Necesitamos ayuda,” she said. We need help.
A rough voice answered her. “Ponga los manos,” the man said. Put up your hands.
And then she heard a sound that needed no translation: the pumping of a shotgun and the racking of the slides on several other guns.
Danielle raised her hands, trying hard not to look in Hawker’s direction.
In a minute they were surrounded by a group of eight men, several of whom had weapons. They were led by an older, shorter man with a full beard and mustache who carried a flashlight and a pistol.
While one of the men searched the plane, another took her backpack and McCarter’s. A third man patted them down and confiscated a black handgun from Hawker.
The man with the beard walked around them, making a wide, slow circle. He seemed to be studying them, at the moment focusing on Yuri. Finally he put his pistol away.
“What are you doing here, señorita?”
That, Danielle thought, she could not explain without sounding crazy.
“We crashed here,” she said. “My husband was trying to fly us over to Puerto Vallarta. But he forgot to check winds or to fill the tanks before we took off.”
The man came closer, looking into her face and then at her hands. “If he is your husband, then where is your ring?”
Before she could answer, he added. “And if you had not circled overhead for an hour, you could have easily made it to the coast. So I think maybe you have a different story to tell. No?”
Danielle felt a sense of fury at getting caught in the lie. It was a stupid lie, easy to see through. She wondered why she’d even thought it would work.
Hawker leaned over to her. “I told you we should have run.”
“Now is really not the time,” she said.
“I’m just pointing it out.”
“Point it out later,” she shot back.
The bearded man turned to the others. “Hmm … maybe they are married after all.”
The men laughed. And the leader stepped over to McCarter. He shone the light in McCarter’s face, studying him for a long time.
“Could you please lower the light?” McCarter said. “It’s hurting my eyes.”
The man turned the beam away, aiming it at Hawker’s face in a similar manner. Hawker squinted into the light as if it were some kind of challenge. He said nothing.
The man who’d gone to search the plane popped out of the cabin. “Nada aquí,” he said. Nothing here.
Another man had been going through their backpacks. He handed the satellite phone and the spherical, glasslike stone to the bearded man.
As it passed in front of them, Yuri tried to pull free from Danielle; he wanted to touch it. She held him back, but the bearded man had seen his reaction.
“Is this your child?” he asked.
“He’s adopted,” she said. “And he has special needs, so if you don’t mind …”
The bearded man handed the stone back to the underling who’d found it. Yuri tracked it as it went, relaxing only when it had been placed in the sand-filled, lead-lined container.
“So many lies,” their captor said. “I think you might need to see a priest.”
He turned and began marching back toward the forest.
“Bring them,” he said.
CHAPTER 48
Led by the armed group and their bearded leader, Hawker, Danielle, McCarter, and Yuri hiked through the tropical foliage. The trees and ferns and brush had a junglelike feel to it, but more sparse and reduced in scale because of the altitude. As they neared the end of the two-mile hike the terrain became flatter and the foliage was replaced by tilled land, fields, and pastures.
Beyond the fields lay a small town made up of whitewashed stucco buildings. Children played in the unpaved streets while livestock, mostly chickens and goats, moved about in various gated yards.
It was not what Danielle had expected. Certainly it didn’t look like a hideout of some criminal gang. But they remained under armed guard, and as their captors walked them blatantly down the main street, activity in the town around them came to an abrupt halt. Onlookers gawked in their direction.
The man with the beard walked ahead of them and waved to a handsome woman of about thirty, dressed in plain, simple clothes. She came to greet him and, after a brief conversation, looked at Danielle and then Yuri, who walked beside her.
Danielle guessed what was about to occur and held Yuri’s hand tightly.
“Do not worry,” the bearded man said. “Maria will take care of him while we talk.”
The woman led Yuri to a small adobe house.
Danielle turned her gaze forward, ready to argue with the man, but he had stepped through a gate in front of a mission-style church. Writing beside the doorway dedicated the church to San Ignacio, the founder of the Jesuit order and the patron saint of Catholic soldiers.
They were forced inside and the doors closed behind them. Once the bearded man had genuflected and crossed himself with holy water, he pulled off his poncho, hung it on a peg, and turned to face them.
He wore a black cassock and the white collar of a Catholic priest. “Welcome to San Ignacio,” he said. “I’m Father Domingo.”
“You’re a priest,” Danielle said.
“Sí,” he said. “I’m sensing you feel differently about the lies you told now.”
He seemed amused with himself, but Danielle didn’t share the feeling. “Has the church taken on a new role that I’m unaware of? Beginning with kidnapping people at gunpoint?”
Beside her McCarter stumbled. Hawker moved to support him and then led him to a bench that sat against the church wall. Father Domingo watched Hawker sharply.
“Don’t worry,” Hawker said. “I’ve got enough going against me already.”
Father Domingo turned back to Danielle. “My actions are necessary to protect the citizens of this town.”
Danielle could feel her anger beginning to burn. Of all people to deny them help, a member of the clergy seemed to be the least appropriate. “I asked you to help us. Did that seem like a threat to you?”
“We did not exactly act the Good Samaritan,” he said. “But there are reasons for this.”
“And what might those be?”
“Drug smugglers.”
“Which we are not,” she explained.
“Yes,” he said. “It seems to be the case, but we needed to be sure. Several years ago, some men came here with money, trying to buy our silence, while they cut down trees for a dirt runway and took over good lands to grow their drugs.
“As soon as they were entrenched, the kind talk and the money ceased and they became tyrants. But the spirit of the people here is strong. We decided to run them off but it was not easy. Threats were made; some people were harmed,” he said, catching the look in her eye. “Blood was spilled on both sides. We vowed to never let them come back; it is always easier to keep the predator out than to deal with it once you’ve let it through the gate.”
He nodded toward a window, through which blue sky could be seen. “Your plane circling for an hour in the middle of the night and then landing on the lake was very suspicious to us. We had to be sure. Even Saint Ignacio was a soldier before he became a priest. Sometimes that is what we must be as well.”
Danielle relented. Now she felt the fool for judging too quickly. With a history like that, she could guess how their actions might have appeared.
“I understand what you’re saying,” she said.
“And knowing how things looked from your side,” he replied, “I can understand why you lied. But that doesn’t tell me what you’re really doing here. Would you like to explain?”
Danielle uncrossed her arms and sat down. “You probably wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me,” he said. “Belief is my business.”
“We’re looking for an ancient Mayan ruin called the Temple of the Jaguar. We believe it might be located nearby. And our suspicious”—she glanced at Hawker—“and somewhat foolhardy flight out here was part of that search process.”
“Why didn’t you go back?”
“By the time we’d figured out where we needed to be,” she said, “we were too low on fuel to get back, so we landed on the biggest lake we could find.”
“I see,” Father Domingo said. “And why would you feel it necessary to keep such a thing secret?”
She hesitated, not wanting to lie to the priest again, but not wanting to tell him, either.
It was Father Domingo who spoke first. “Perhaps,” he said, “because you’ve brought something with you that you don’t understand, and you fear both using it and failing to use it. But your greatest fear is what other forces might do if they found it first.”
CHAPTER 49
The Situation Room of the White House was more crowded than the president had ever seen. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, the secretaries of state and defense and their aides had filled the sitting areas. Other cabinet members stood in the space around the main table.
The world situation had deteriorated harshly in the past twenty-four hours. In response to the downing of their fighter plane, the Chinese had captured a pair of Russian spy boats in disputed waters and now troops were building up on the border between the two countries.
Because an American vessel had been approached in the same area but had managed to leave the vicinity and escape capture, the Russians were claiming U.S. duplicity. They were lashing out at both nations through every available channel.
The Chinese, on the other hand, wanted to know why U.S. and Russian spy boats were in its waters and operating together, as a second round of finger-pointing and paranoia got into full swing.
The president sat in his chair quietly. He glanced through a situation report while the head of the Joint Chiefs explained the particulars using a flat screen monitor.
“… and in addition to that the Chinese have deployed forty divisions on the Russian border; strategic aircraft have been dispersed or launched and parked in racetrack patterns a hundred miles from the borders.”
He clicked the screen and a new satellite photo appeared: a Russian ICBM silo. What looked like steam could be seen escaping from hoses attached to a large, odd-looking tanker truck. “The Russians are making serious preparations, but their activities are balanced, half in Asia, half on the European side.”
A new photo showed mobile SS-20 launchers being dispersed into the countryside. The following one showed the Russian port at Murmansk. The docks were empty, and the channel, normally frozen solid at this time of year, had been cleared by a flotilla of massive icebreakers.
“From our point of view this is the bigger problem,” the chief said. “In twenty-four hours, in some of the worst conditions of the season, their entire ballistic missile fleet has put to sea. Not only did we believe this could not be done so quickly, it hasn’t been done since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
He turned to look at Henderson. “This is a grave sign, Mr. President. The Russians are very serious about things. And I think we should be, too.”
These latest actions were highly unwelcome. And they left the president with a growing dilemma. He believed the Brazil stone was
secure and no longer an immediate threat as long as it remained in the Yucca Mountain depository. Sensors placed on and around the mountain had detected no emissions of electromagnetic energy escaping the complex. But neither the NRI staff, the CIA’s newly involved experts, nor Nathanial Ahiga could say for sure what would happen if another super-spike occurred.
Another event like that, in the current state of heightened readiness, might be more than they could afford.
In that sense the incident had been terrible luck. It had led directly to the current predicament — spy satellites destroyed, tensions flaring. One more hour and the stone would have been safely ensconced in the depths of Yucca Mountain and nothing would have occurred.
But in a different sense, he felt it might have been good luck. Had the stone sent forth this burst while still housed at the NRI headquarters in Virginia, or, worse yet, at the beginning of the journey, on the road to Andrews Air Force Base, all of D.C. and most of the eastern seaboard would have gone dark — including the Pentagon, the White House, and Congress, not to mention CIA headquarters in Langley and Andrews itself.
The pulse had fried almost every circuit and backup system at Groom Lake, and even the backup systems at Nellis Air Force Base, eighty miles away, had been inoperable for almost five hours.
The president had served in the military and he believed in their professionalism and training. But he feared what the reaction would have been if Washington and most of the East Coast had gone suddenly, utterly dark. It would not have been like the blackout in 2003, where the grid went down but phones still operated, with places with backup power remaining functional and military communications online. It would have been complete darkness, complete silence.
To the western command, five hours without communication would have been incomprehensible. All public television, radio, and Internet feeds gone, nothing but static on the box, no response to calls, no word from either military or civilian personnel, no flights arriving from eastern airports. To any rational person, and especially those charged with the task of protecting America, the sudden loss of contact with anything and everything from New York to Washington — all without any warning — could have only seemed like a nuclear strike of some kind.