River of Ruin (22 page)

“Two seconds quicker than last. Do it again.”

While the men pulled the rifles apart again, Lauren Vanik frowned at Foch. “Do you think it’s a good idea running disassembly drills with weapons we may use in combat later on?”

Foch gave her a patronizing smile. “Of course not. Those rifles are with the men’s kit. These are just trainers. Don’t worry, Captain, we know what we’re doing.”

Rene Bruneseau came into the living room from the back of the house. Like his men, he wore civilian clothes. “Good morning, Captain Vanik, Mercer. May I offer you coffee.”

Because he and Lauren hadn’t gotten to sleep until three in the morning, Mercer quickly agreed to the offer. The coffee Lauren had made for him was watery instant and had done nothing to jump-start his body.

Over cups of rich French roast, Bruneseau laid out their plan. The Legionnaires had a helicopter stashed at a deserted plantation beyond the ruins of Veija Panama, the old city that the pirate Henry Morgan had sacked in 1671. They would carry an inflatable boat to a point above El Real. There they would transfer to the boat for the remainder of the trip up the Rio Tuira. Before reaching the River of Ruin, they would stash the Zodiac and flank around the volcanic mountain, climbing it from the opposite side from where its waters disgorged down the falls that Mercer and Lauren had climbed earlier with Miguel.

As Rene explained his strategy, Mercer loaded film into the camera he’d bought on the way to the safe house. He’d also purchased a four-hundred-millimeter telephoto lens, the largest the camera shop stocked. He hoped to get shots of Hatcherly’s plundering of an important archeological site. At Lauren’s suggestion, they would take that evidence to the curator of the Reina Torres de Aruez Anthropology Museum, where she felt they’d get a better response than from Omar Quintero’s shaky government. Quintero had only been in the Heron Palace, the presidential residence, for six months following his corruption-tainted election and had yet to solidify the congress or the bureaucracy.

Mercer doubted Liu Yousheng would show himself at the lake, but if he could photograph some other key Hatcherly people, he could put an end to the plunder as well as give Bruneseau his first break in peeling away the other levels protecting the shadowy company. The plan was simple, and relatively safe—a lot smarter than sneaking into a high-security container port. The power of the telephoto lens meant they could stay well back from any excavation Hatcherly had at the lake and still shoot rolls of damaging film.

The only danger came from the trek through the jungle. The driver who’d picked them up at Lauren’s apartment had told Mercer that the Legionnaires were members of the Third Regiment based in Kourou, Guyana, the Legion’s jungle warfare specialists. The fact that they were tasked with protecting the Ariane spaceport lent credence to what Bruneseau had told him last night, but Mercer couldn’t shake a suspicion. Something was said last night, a slip of some sort that had pushed his doubts into overdrive.

He’d hoped the answer would come in his sleep, as was often the case for him, but he’d been dead to the world from the moment Lauren went into the shower until she’d tapped his shoulder and admonished him about the volume of his snoring two hours ago. Talking with Bruneseau hadn’t jogged anything loose. Frustration at not naming what bothered him caused his shoulders to tense.

Lauren noticed him wince as he rolled his neck. “Are you okay?” she asked, wrongly assuming it was the first tinges of fear affecting him.

He returned his attention to her and Rene. “Yeah, sorry. My mind was somewhere else. When are we leaving?”

“Sundown is around seven tonight,” Bruneseau explained. “We’ll time it so we drop the Zodiac at dusk and run up the river under the cover of darkness. We have night-vision goggles to avoid any boat traffic, though I don’t expect any. We’ll spend the night with the craft then march to the caldera before first light.”

“Where’s the chopper going to be when we’re at the lake?” Lauren asked.

“At the airport at El Real with ‘engine trouble.’ It’s painted like a sightseeing helo so it won’t attract much attention.”

“That’s a twenty-minute flight if we need an emergency evac.”

“I know.” The Frenchman didn’t look any happier about this than Lauren. “There’s no other place to hide it up there.”

“All right. What kind of chopper?”

“JetRanger 222.”

Lauren nodded. Before she’d taken up intelligence work, she’d flown the Bell 205, known in the army as the UH-1 Huey. Although she hadn’t been behind the stick in four years, she felt confident that if anything happened to the pilot, she could handle the helicopter.

“Extended tanks?”

“
Non
. We will top off the fuel in La Palma, which gives us more than enough range to get back to Panama City. Once Mercer has his evidence we will backtrack to the inflatable and motor back to El Real where the chopper waits.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lauren opined.

Mercer considered the hundreds of things that could go wrong, saw no way around them, and agreed with Lauren. “Let’s do it.”

They spent the next two hours with Lieutenant Foch, since he would lead the raid, poring over maps and briefing the Frenchmen on the terrain around the lake. Like many in the Legion, Foch had claimed to be from Quebec to get around the rule that only foreigners could serve within the elite corps. Keeping with another Legion tradition, Mercer knew not to ask Foch’s Christian name. He found he liked the soldier, who was unpretentious and more than willing to listen to a civilian, probably because Mercer had already proven himself by breaking into Hatcherly.

The team rested in the safe house until the afternoon, when they loaded up one of Bruneseau’s vans for the drive to the helicopter. The forty-minute ride took them through Panama City and along the coast past the old city along the Pan-American highway toward the isolated town of Chepo. The village used to be the terminus of the highway, the last stop before the impenetrable jungles of the Darien Gap. Many Panamanians still considered anything beyond the dingy town as terra incognita.

Before reaching Chepo, the van swung off the road and traveled for another thirty minutes along a dirt track that was increasingly hemmed in by jungle. Rounding a last corner, they broke into a partial clearing where waist-high grass had been beaten flat under where a Bell helo sat on its struts. At the edge of the jungle lay the crumbled walls of a plantation house. Creeping vines seemed to be tugging the ruined structure back into the earth.

They had to strip out the chopper’s rear seats to manhandle in the deflated Zodiac. Bruneseau would fly up front with the pilot, leaving Mercer, Lauren, Foch, and two other Legionnaires to shoehorn themselves into the cargo area. The van’s driver would wait at the plantation for their return the following day and coordinate communications with the rest of the detachment in Panama City. They took off a half hour after their arrival. An hour later they refueled the JetRanger at the small airport in La Palma. Because no one had changed into fatigues yet, they maintained their cover as sightseers headed back into the Darien Gap. Only when they were airborne again did they change clothes. Though she didn’t seem fazed by the close proximity to the men, Lauren maintained her modesty by buttoning her camouflage shirt over the black T-shirt she’d been wearing. Waterproof bags containing weapons, combat harnesses, and other gear were secured to the Zodiac and would be retrieved once they were on the river.

Using a map clipped to his kneeboard, the Australian-born pilot cut across a number of the Rio Tuira’s twists, keeping the nimble chopper so close to the jungle canopy that Mercer could see monkeys howling at them from the tops of trees. Once, they startled a clutch of parrots that took off like a fleeing rainbow.

The constant whine of the helo’s turbine and the resonant thrum of the rotor blades made it impossible for Mercer to think beyond what his senses took in—the smell of sweat from so many people piled together, the feel of a metal bracket pressed against his spine, the aftertaste of a spicy lunch served at the safe house, the centrifugal sloshing of his body as the JetRanger swayed through the humid air.

He closed his eyes for what felt like a few seconds, and when he opened them again he could see that the day had gotten noticeably darker. It was always like this in the tropics, he knew. The sun did more than set; it raced for the horizon as if pursued by an eager night. He glanced at his TAG Heuer. 7:20. Bruneseau had timed their flight perfectly.

The forces on his body changed as the jet-powered helicopter began to slow. The river was off to their right about a quarter mile away, a darker wound in the dark jungle. Rene Bruneseau swept the stretch of water with an infrared monocular, looking for the telltale glow from a boat’s motor or a human body. Mercer could see him mouth something to the pilot over the helo’s comm system and the JetRanger crabbed sideways toward the Rio Tuira.

This was it. They were going in and suddenly Mercer’s mind filled again with all kinds of thoughts. His hands turned slick and his heart raged like a trapped animal. In a startling moment he realized it wasn’t fear infecting him. It was the anticipation he usually felt at the verge of answering some disturbing question. The reason Gary Barber’s corpse was mutilated and why he’d been attacked in Paris was waiting down in that jungle and he was eager to get it.

As soon as the helicopter scuttled out over the river and its blades whipped concentric circles into the calm black waters, the side door was thrown open and a Legionnaire yanked the lanyard that inflated the heavy raft at the same time it was shoved out the opening. The Zodiac expanded as it pinwheeled to the water, weighted so it landed bottom-side down with a wet smack. In the glow of a diffused landing light, the first trooper leaped the fifteen feet into the river next to the now fully inflated raft.

Bruneseau opened the copilot door and jumped, followed by a spill of the others, Lieutenant Foch taking the last slot in the deployment. As soon as Foch cleared the helicopter, the pilot doused his light, increased power, and banked the chopper back into the night. The entire maneuver had taken twenty seconds.

The fall from the JetRanger drove Mercer deep underwater. His boots sank into the silt bottom for a frantic moment until he kicked himself free. He broke the surface and cleared lukewarm water from his eyes. Two of the Legionnaires had already rolled themselves into the rubber boat and the others were clinging to its bulbous freeboard. He swam to them and was helped in by a powerful grip on his arm. Bruneseau grinned. “Piece of cake.”

Mercer guessed the French operative was relieved to be finally doing something after so many weeks of simply watching the Hatcherly container port. His plan to flush out Liu Yousheng by involving Mercer hadn’t worked the way he’d wanted, but at least this new avenue of investigation had been salvaged from that debacle. He seemed grateful.

“Piece of cake,” Mercer agreed. The jungle sang with insects, birds, and dozens of unnamed night creatures. The moon was a pale sliver glimpsed only at the right angle through the thick canopy.

The waterproof bags were hauled aboard and equipment was distributed. The combat harnesses the Legionnaires used incorporated rappelling rigs as well as a rescue harness in case they needed to be pulled out by fast-ropes from the helo. Mercer didn’t recall if the JetRanger was equipped with them or not.

Lauren noticed his interest in the rigs and answered his unspoken question. “I saw them when we loaded. If the pilot leaves off the cargo doors, two ropes can be dropped from a push button in the cockpit.”

“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” Mercer said as he made sure his borrowed Beretta was snug against his hip. The camera with its long lens went into a padded pack he swung onto his back.

Foch took up a position in the bow with night-vision goggles clamped over his eyes and the two enlisted soldiers began to paddle the Zodiac against the sluggish current. They couldn’t risk using an outboard motor because the sound would carry far beyond Foch’s vision. Bruneseau was at the transom, watching their wake for any craft that might overtake them. The last of the daylight had long since faded, leaving only a strip of stars above them in the otherwise infinite darkness. If not for the screech of animals and the chirps of insects, it was easy to imagine they were paddling through outer space.

Five miles into their trek, Lieutenant Foch made a quick hand gesture and the paddlers reacted instantly. He’d seen something through his goggles. They’d been traveling close to the right bank and at Foch’s signal they angled the raft closer to shore, holding their paddles inches from the river so that any water dripping from the blades wouldn’t make a sound. A ripple of tension washed through the team.

A minute later, a
piragua
, a native dugout canoe, glided out of the gloom upstream with two natives working the paddles as silently as ghosts. The Indians never paused from their steady rhythm and never saw the six armed people less than twenty feet from them. As quickly as they appeared, the natives vanished downstream again and the raiders let out their breaths. They waited several minutes before starting out again, just to make sure the canoe didn’t double back.

For four hours they moved against the current, each team member taking turns at the paddles. As a point of pride when their turn came up, Mercer and Lauren managed to eke out a faster pace than any of the others without compromising their stealth. An hour after taking the paddles, Foch placed a hand on Mercer’s arm to stop him from going on. Lauren paused as well. The lieutenant silently pointed to their right, where a tiny stream fed into the river. Mercer and Lauren obediently rowed them to the brook. Like Venetian gondoliers they used their paddles to pole them up the shallow stream. Five hundred yards into the jungle, a three-foot waterfall blocked any further progress.