River of Ruin (18 page)

It seemed logical that someone with the contacts and wealth to operate on a larger scale would eventually organize a more systematic pillage. That’s what Mercer thought he’d stumbled across. Beginning with the attack in Paris, he’d always assumed that Gary Barber’s rival for the Twice-Stolen Treasure was a corrupt businessman. Jean Derosier had said a Chinese executive snapped up all the other relevant documents at the auction. That idea was further solidified when Roddy Herrara told them the helicopter belonged to Hatcherly Consolidated, run by a director named Liu Yousheng. Lauren’s revelation that only government troops possessed these weapons threw his assumption on its head.

The intensity of her stare was enough for Mercer to believe her deduction and rethink his earlier conclusions. At the time, Roddy’s suggestion that Liu had influence in China’s government hadn’t made an impression. Now it took on new meaning. Since the dawn of civilization, government officials commonly looted their own nations of treasures. Mercer’s experiences in Africa made him think it was almost a prerequisite. On a vacation to Egypt earlier in the year he’d learned that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been sacked shortly after a pharaoh’s interment by a band of thieves headed by the mayor of Luxor, the closest city. History had proven that only King Tut had escaped their well-organized raids.

But if the Chinese government really was behind this, it was no different than the Nazis plucking artwork off museum walls during their occupation of Europe. International law concerning recovered archeological treasures was murky when the origin of the loot was in question. Mercer had no idea who owned title to the Twice-Stolen Treasure—Peru, where it originated, or Panama, where it had remained hidden for centuries? He was damned sure, though, it wasn’t China.

What he was witnessing sickened him. Far from the monetary considerations, he was most bothered by the destruction of the ancient relics that must have been found at the lake. They represented a window to the past that had been melted down to innocuous gold bars so some Chinese commissar could add them to a ledger sheet. Unconsciously his hand tightened on his pistol. Lauren put a hand over his to stop him from doing something stupid. “We have to get out of here.”

“How?”

Lauren surveyed the building once again. Mercer could feel her concentration, almost see her thoughts as she juggled stealth, speed, and odds of success. Her answer came in short seconds. “There’s a shallow trough on top of the gravel pile where it lays against the side of the building. It stretches almost all the way to the front door and will cover us if we stay low and silent.”

“What about the fence outside?”

She had a ready answer. “I didn’t see any insulators so it’s not electrified, and the razor wire on top angles out to prevent people entering, not leaving. We can climb over no problem.”

Mercer glanced over the edge again. The top of the long gravel mound was about six feet from the wall, leaving a gully more than adequate to shield them as they ran for the far doors. The problem was reaching it. Because of the crates, they couldn’t get close enough to the wall to jump over the crest of the pile and land in the trough. No matter how far they leaped, they’d still end up on the mound’s exposed flank in full view of the smugglers. It was a gamble, but he could see no other option.

“All right,” he agreed. “Wait until they’re looking the other way and go. I’ll be right behind you. But be careful, the gravel doesn’t look like it’s settled so you may sink in it like quicksand.”

“Gotcha.”

She waited for the right moment with preternatural calm, her whole body coiled. When she launched herself, her movements were as graceful as a gymnast’s. Her leap took her to within five feet of the hill’s summit, but the impact sank her up to her knees in the loose stones. Even as she began struggling up the mound, Mercer jumped after her. He absorbed a brutal blow by intentionally landing spread-eagle to disperse his weight. Chest aching, he hauled on Lauren’s arm and scrambled for the crest. Dust powdered his clothes and stuck to his greasepaint. A sheet of gravel slid to the concrete floor in a hissing wave.

Mercer rolled over the top and almost had Lauren to safety when he heard a shout over the sound of the idling trucks outside. They’d been spotted.

He expected a few seconds for the guards to organize. He didn’t get it. Two soldiers opened up with their assault rifles the instant the alarm was raised, their weapons echoing in the building’s confines. Lauren began to slither along the trough. The 5.8mm rounds kicked divots in the gravel and blew wedges from the hill’s sharp peak. A shower of pebbles pinged off the metal wall and peppered her back.

He took off after her, feeling the jagged edges of the stone dig into his hands and knees. The air was full of shrapnel and cloying dust. The deafening fusillade suddenly ended. Lauren stopped moving and Mercer was about to prompt her on when a figure loomed to their right, a guard who’d climbed the sloping bank of gravel. Her silenced Beretta spat once and the man tumbled into the trough, prompting a fresh barrage. It sounded like a hundred guns were screaming to get at their rocky defile.

“There’ll be more,” she warned savagely.

Each foot they wriggled forward brought them no reprieve from the scathing attack. The Chinese raked the entire pile, holding their aim only where several of their comrades assaulted the hill to fire down the channel along the wall. Trusting Lauren to keep their front clear, Mercer concentrated on their flanks and rear.

A head appeared over the crest twenty yards behind him. He took a snap shot that plowed into the crest of the mountain and prepared for counterfire. Instead of a burst from his type 87, the Chinese soldier heaved a grenade in a long parabola. The bomb smacked the top of the hill and bounced back down its long face. It landed near the armored car. There was a scream followed by a sharp explosion that rocked the building to its foundation.

Without the need for stealth, Mercer and Lauren jumped to their feet, running hard for the exit. Another grenade sailed into view, a perfect toss that placed it only ten feet in front of them. Mercer rushed forward to grab Lauren around the waist and threw them both out of the ravine. He landed on his back with her clutched to his chest. As they slid down the pile, Lauren cycled through the remains of her magazine to provide cover fire. The second grenade detonated in a gush of gravel that blew across the warehouse like grapeshot from a cannon.

They hit the floor side by side and raced behind the Caterpillar bucket loader. The warehouse’s open doors were clear and they took off, Lauren changing out her magazine without losing stride. The twin grenade blasts were bound to bring reinforcements and they were still trapped inside two different perimeter fences.

“Now what?” she panted.

“This way!” Mercer said as soon as they were outside. Armed men stationed at the gate were just now coming to investigate. He threw himself under one of the idling dump trucks parked near the warehouse and sprang to his feet on the far side. Keeping low in case there was a driver in the cab, he crept forward until he could see the operator’s seat in the wing mirror. Empty. He opened the door and launched Lauren into the tall truck with a shove to the seat of her pants.

“Stay down,” he said and jammed the transmission into gear.

The dump truck snarled when he pressed the accelerator. The cab shuddered. Pulling out of line, the front fender clipped the dump body of the truck in front of them, the sheet metal tearing as easily as paper.

“You do know what you’re doing, right?” Lauren taunted, much more calm than Mercer.

“Hush.” He ground up through another two gears and raced the truck toward the gate.

By the time the soldiers in the warehouse realized their quarry was escaping, Mercer was almost abreast the break in the fence. The troops caught the fleeing dump truck in crossfire, but the vehicle’s thick hide turned away their bullets like the armor on a tank. In the wing mirror, Mercer glimpsed weapons spitting tongues of fire before a bullet disintegrated the glass. And then they were past the gate, careening across the main part of the Hatcherly terminal.

“We have to get to the fence that rings the entire port.” Lauren used the tail of her shirt to wipe camo paint and sweat from her face.

“Which way?” Mercer swerved around a row of containers, scattering the workmen who’d been helping a forklift driver. As yet, he didn’t think the regular workers knew there was a pair of fugitives running around the facility.

“Back through where Victor first let us out. It seemed more deserted than around here.”

Mercer cranked the wheel over. The tires barked in protest and for an instant the truck seemed light on one side before it settled back on its suspension. All around them, startled workers and guards gawked at his driving. One of the guards must have gotten a call over his walkie-talkie because rounds suddenly sprayed the side of the truck. “They’re on to us.”

They were going too fast for Lauren to accurately return fire, which left evasion as their only course. Mercer weaved the truck as best he could. Even empty the rig was top-heavy and tippy. More guards were alerted and it seemed that no matter where he steered, soldiers were waiting in ambush. The windshield had taken a dozen hits or more. He could feel that several tires had been shredded. He found cover by steering toward a parking area littered with ranks of shipping containers.

It was like running a maze, he thought. The containers had been stacked in rows that intersected at right angles, creating canyonlike lanes that seemed to lead nowhere. He couldn’t see far enough to know if he was heading in the right direction. The track was too narrow to turn the vehicle, so he pressed deeper into the labyrinth of containers, hoping to spot an outlet down any one of the numerous side branches.

“Oh, my God!” Lauren pointed ahead with a trembling hand.

Slicing through the air as if by magic, a bright green container swooped down the chasm directly at the dump truck. Above it Mercer could barely see the grapple carriage of the cable crane. The container had been lowered to just a few feet from the ground on stiff hawsers. There was no way he could avoid the head-on collision. Although their arrival from an unexpected corner of the facility had escaped notice, Mercer realized bitterly that surveillance cameras had tracked their escape in the ten-wheeled truck.

Standing on the brakes so the smell of burned rubber became overpowering, Mercer intentionally crashed the truck into one wall of containers, making sure the rear end broke loose and completely blocked the road. The flying container was fifty feet away, silently speeding toward them.

“Out your door and run toward it.”

“Are you nuts?” she shrieked.

“Do it.” Mercer reached across her lap and threw open the passenger door. As roughly as he’d pushed her into the cab, he tossed her back out, jumping to the ground on her heels.

He took her hand and ran at the cargo box, now just ten feet from them. The gap between the container and the pavement was only a couple of feet, and if the unseen technician remotely operating the cable crane realized what they were doing he could drop the box on them with the force of a hydraulic car crusher. Mercer held his breath and dove for the ground, pulling Lauren after him.

The bottom of the box hurtled an inch over his face, its passage stirring dirt from the asphalt. The air became fouled with the smell of stale rust. And then it moved beyond them. Mercer jumped to his feet and didn’t look back at the collision about to take place.

The container was traveling at thirteen miles an hour when it hit the truck, but it was its forty tons of mass that did the damage. The box barely swayed at the first impact. It crushed through the corner of the big rig, tore the front wheel off its suspension and then ripped the sixteen-cylinder engine off its mounts. Fountains of diesel from severed fuel lines ignited like oil-well blazes. Inertia tossed the motor through the cab an instant before the huge crate sliced it from the chassis like an enormous blade. Only when the container struck the dump body did it begin to push the twenty-ton truck across the pavement, rolling it over and over once the back axle had snapped. A lake of burning fuel spread like a flickering veneer. Gravel drizzled from where the container’s skin had split.

By running at the container, Mercer had saved them from being caught up in the carnage.

They turned two corners and put a hundred yards between themselves and the collision before pausing. Mercer was more winded than Lauren, his body not as recovered from the dysentery as he’d believed. She recognized that his strength was flagging and immediately took point, leading them from the high walls of the container maze.

“Look.” She pointed ahead to where the port’s perimeter fence stretched across a field of waist-high grass.

“How are we going to get over it? It’s electrified.” Even as Mercer said this, bullets sparked against the trailer providing their cover.

They dashed to a maintenance shed, swinging around its far side. Lauren unscrewed her pistol’s silencer to get better accuracy and took a two-handed stance, her body hidden, her eyes expectant. A moment later, two guards ran from their cover position. She triggered her weapon twice. One dropped and remained still while the other managed to drag himself behind a pallet of roofing shingles.

“He’ll have a radio,” she panted. “We’ve got to go now.”

“The fence?”

Lauren took off without answering. Mercer struggled to keep up. He felt like he was wading through molasses, his legs were so rubbery. A fifty-foot strip had been mowed on each side of the chain-link fence, creating a killing lane patrolled by the Panamanian guards who once did Manuel Noriega’s dirtiest work. At the edge of the strip, Mercer and Lauren both saw four camouflaged men studying their patrol sector over the sights of their M-16s. Keeping to the tall grass, they tried to find an area not so well defended, their route taking them farther from the main part of the facility. After three hundred yards it was apparent that the ex- Dignity Brigade troopers were perfectly spaced and disciplined enough to remain at their posts despite the gunfire they must have heard.