River of Ruin (25 page)

The soldier struggled for just a moment before he clipped his harness into one of the closed hooks. Mercer relaxed his grip. “Thank you,” Foch said simply as he sagged against the line, drained.

“Don’t thank me yet. Liu’s chopper’s going to be after us in a minute.” Mercer caught Lauren’s eye and smiled up at her. Her hair whipped around her head like electric discharges as she dangled below the chopper. She gave him a thumbs-up. Bruneseau was on his own line, high enough above Mercer and Foch that they wouldn’t slam into each other as the helo turned toward Panama City.

“We can’t stay here,” Foch shouted the obvious. “If we’re chased, the pilot can’t maneuver with us dangling like this.”

Mercer and he began to climb together, a difficult trick because both were tired and the wind was a constant buffet. Lauren saw them coming closer, understood what they were doing and began to haul herself hand over hand. Bruneseau too started up. It took a few minutes to scramble into the rear of the chopper, and in that time all of them saw the dark speck lift away from the volcanic peak. The chase was on again.

Sergeant Huai watched the four commandos climb into their helicopter through a pair of binoculars he held steady against the door frame of the company chopper. He was impressed. Most people couldn’t maintain enough balance to keep from spinning on a rappel line and these four managed to climb against the wind. Not an easy feat.

On a purely professional level, he had to give them credit for the entire operation, even if they had lost two people. He had no idea how many were still out in the jungle, but it seemed that even if there were only the six he could account for, they’d done a good job. This time there were no Panamanian troops that could be blamed for the security breach. These six had gone up against some of the best in the Chinese military and had not only made it in, but two-thirds of their force had made it out again.

He wasn’t worried that they would actually evade him. Two choppers armed with heavy machine guns would be taking off from the Hatcherly facility within a few minutes. The JetRanger would be trapped between them, allowing him to respect what they’d accomplished without worrying about long-term damage if they did escape to tell their tale.

At the warehouse a few nights earlier, Captain Chen had suggested that the force who’d infiltrated the port was a local gang of thieves or gunrunners. Watching as the JetRanger was pulled deeper into the storm, Huai knew that he was facing something else entirely. These people fought like trained commandos. His first instinct was American Special Forces, SEALs, or maybe Marine Recon—a chilling thought because it meant their security was blown. Liu Yousheng had kept Operation Red Island well compartmentalized and yet Huai knew that if the Americans were onto even this part of it, the entire mission might be finished. Destroying the chopper and its occupants was of primary concern, but equally important to Huai was identifying the commandos. While he knew they wouldn’t be carrying any identification, he was familiar with other, subtler signs that would give away their nationality. Types of uniforms, equipment and weaponry could be false flags, while a corpse couldn’t hide its skin color, tattoos or dentistry.

With his helo closing the gap to the fleeing JetRanger, Huai thought about his report to Captain Chen. Chen had turned into a real bastard since his screwup at the warehouse. He was looking to shed some of the blame onto his men and he’d like nothing more than tearing Huai apart for this latest lapse if only to regain Liu Yousheng’s favor. Not that Huai believed the Hatcherly executive would be impressed that Chen could yell at one of his own men. Huai thought he understood Liu. The official wanted results and didn’t care how he got them. So long as the JetRanger was destroyed, he wouldn’t be bothered with the details.

And taking down the enemy chopper was only a matter of time.

 

Gasping to regain his breath, Mercer finally rolled out from under the others in the cramped hold of the JetRanger. His uniform was soaked after only a few minutes in the deluge and more rain continued to whip through the open door frames. An occasional burst of lightning seared his vision. His first concern was Lauren.

“Are you all right?” he yelled over the engine noise and the steady pounding of rain. He helped her into a sitting position.

She looked miserable with her hair plastered against her head yet threw him a saucy smile. “Never better. How about you?”

“I owe you one for the boat. If not for your fancy driving, I would have gone overboard.”

Lauren disregarded the praise. “Your head okay?”

Mercer fingered the knot at the back of his skull. His hands came away bloody but he knew the wound wasn’t bad. “It will be after a stitch or three.” He looked to where Bruneseau sat with his back against the rear bulkhead. A burst of anger made him forget the minor cut in his scalp. “You gonna tell me what the hell you were playing at back there?”

The French agent began to slide over to where he could climb into the cockpit. “Later,” he said brusquely. “We’re not clear yet.”

“Hold it.” Lauren shifted her position to block the spy. “Do you know how to fly a chopper?”

“No.”

“Let me up front. These missing doors are killing our aerodynamics and speed. The Chinese helo’s gonna be on us soon. Your pilot will need the extra set of hands.”

“You fly?” Mercer asked.

She nodded, pleased that this skill seemed to impress him. “My rotary ticket hasn’t been punched in a few years, but . . .”

“Okay,” Rene said after a moment’s thought. While Lauren crawled into the cockpit, Bruneseau pulled two pairs of headphones from a rack and handed one to Mercer. With his face a blank mask, Foch worked on the weapons, filling magazines from those that were half depleted. Mercer wasn’t surprised by how hard he was taking the deaths of his two men. The Legion prided itself on its esprit de corps and its unwavering dedication to its own. The loss was devastating.

Once on the comm loop Bruneseau asked the pilot, an Aussie named Carlson, about their situation.

“We have maybe five minutes on the other chopper, sir,” he replied in French with an Australian twang. “Looked like a Gazelle to me. She’s faster than us and we can’t hide in this storm forever.”

“Options.”

The JetRanger shuddered and lost fifty feet in a sudden downdraft. The winds whipped predominantly from their left but gusts came from every direction. The storm had turned the leaden sky into a riot. Lauren sat in the right seat with her hands hovering over the controls, ready to assist Carlson at any moment. She asked that they speak in English.

“We are talking about our options, Captain Vanik,” Carlson said. “The Chinese Gazelle is closing and this storm won’t cover us all the way to our base at Chepo.”

“Don’t forget,” Mercer interrupted, “they’ll probably have choppers at the port. If Liu’s smart, he’ll have them airborne and on an intercept course.”

“Proverbial rock and hard place,” the pilot said.

Lauren was the first to develop a plan. “Forget Chepo. It’s too isolated. We’ll fly the ridge of the continental divide. If we’re lucky we can lose the Gazelle and head to Panama City from the west after crossing the canal. If Liu’s other choppers manage to catch us they’ll have to disengage once we’re within radar coverage of Tocumen Airport.”

“You mean to outflank the inbound helos from the port?” Mercer pictured a map of Panama in his head and followed Lauren’s course.

“If they find us over open ground, we’re dead. We need to reach an area where they won’t be so anxious to shoot us down.”

“Do it,” Bruneseau ordered.

Carlson banked northward and tentatively dumped altitude, he and Lauren both straining to peer around the curtains of rain for the mountains that ran like a spine through Panama. Foch had shortened the rappelling ropes to create safety belts for himself, Mercer, and Bruneseau and now sat facing backward with his FAMAS on his lap. Trusting the pilot, but Lauren more so, Mercer joined him on the floor and covered the other open door, watching their tail for the first sign of Hatcherly’s Gazelle. They could see perhaps a half mile into the storm, and occasionally one would tense as they thought they spied something solid emerge from the towering clouds, only to relax again as the phantom merged back into the tempest.

With their circuitous route, it would take more than an hour to reach the canal and another few minutes to reach the shelter of Panama City.

Once they found an altitude where they could judge the topography, the pilot took them into the valleys that twisted through the continental divide, maintaining a dangerous proximity to the jungled hills. With each steep bank, Mercer felt his straps dig into his flesh, forcing him to grab a handhold to maintain his balance. It was like riding backward on a roller coaster only there were no tracks. One moment he was thrust halfway through the yawning door frame and the next he was lifted bodily toward the hold’s ceiling or dumped into Bruneseau, who hunched between the pilots’ seats. Not a roller coaster, he thought. A turbine-powered rodeo bull.

Only Lauren and Carlson spoke as they continued toward the canal, short sentences of arcane aviation language that Mercer didn’t bother to follow. He kept all his concentration on their tail. After thirty minutes his vigilance hadn’t flagged. Until they were safely on the ground again, he wouldn’t let himself believe they’d lost the Gazelle. So he continued to scan the sky, waiting, hoping he didn’t—

“There!” he shouted as the pursuing Gazelle burst from a wall of clouds into a small clearing in the storm. For a moment its wet paint gleamed before it plunged into a bank of fog.

“How far back?” Lauren’s tone was composed, a sharp contrast to Mercer’s frantic yell.

“Hard to tell. Maybe a quarter mile.” Mercer felt the JetRanger fall lower into a valley, its whirling blades less than a hundred feet from the overgrown flanks of a nameless mountain.

“Hold on,” Carlson said after he’d already thrown the chopper into aerobatic maneuvers its builders never intended. His control over the JetRanger was masterful.

So was that of the Chinese pilot of the Gazelle chasing after him.

The surreal game of cat and mouse was played amid the folds of the earth and the rain-laden clouds of the tropical storm, two areas any sane pilot would avoid. Instead Carlson flew deeper into both, dogged by the Gazelle. Fifteen minutes further into the chase, with the canal another ten minutes away, submachine-gun fire was added to the equation.

Foch was the one who saw the fire coming from the other helicopter. With the extreme range, he was unconcerned and only motioned to Mercer about it without disturbing the two pilots. For the moment there was nothing they could do. Both watched the sleek Gazelle follow their trail like a bloodhound on a scent, a perfect mirror of every movement Carlson made and every turn Lauren pointed out.

Neither noticed the two other shapes flying in a loose formation that appeared through the storm until they opened up with door-mounted .30 calibers. Two streams of tracer fire cut directly behind the JetRanger, laserlike streaks of light that Carlson recognized. He threw the helicopter over so quickly that Foch was left dangling in space before the floor of the cargo hold pivoted back underneath him. The next spray of fire sliced the air where the JetRanger had been a second earlier.

The lead chopper, the Bell that had dropped the depth charges at the lake, swung in between the Gazelle and the Legionnaires’ helo while the other slid behind Sergeant Huai’s aircraft in a line astern formation. The door gunner could only get a bead on his target when they made sharp turns and even then he had only scant seconds before his own craft followed the other around and his angle was lost.

Foch fired off a few rounds. At five hundred yards, he had no hope of hitting his target; he just wanted the pursuing pilot to know his quarry had fangs.

“Now what?” Bruneseau spoke for the first time in half an hour.

“How about we pray they get struck by lightning,” Lauren said tightly. For a while she’d been helping Carlson with the controls, compensating for the storm’s turbulence while he kept them on course. “Or they strike it!”

Cutting across the valley was a high-tension electrical line, a power feed from the Madden Dam only three miles to the south. From this distance the transmission cable was as slender as a thread and Lauren would have missed it if not for the large rubber balls spaced across its length as a warning to low-flying aircraft. Intuitively, Carlson knew what she meant and kept the JetRanger on course and at an altitude to crash into the power line. If the pilot behind them was following normal procedures he’d be searching the sky for such obstacles but Lauren prayed he was too intent on the hunt.

At ninety knots, and in uneven wind conditions, Carlson got as close as he dared before lifting the JetRanger up and over the cable. The chopper’s skids cleared the line by eleven feet and he immediately dropped them back to his original altitude in hopes of tricking his pursuer that his maneuver had been the result of wind sheer.

Carlson had had fifteen seconds to prepare for the maneuver. The pilot behind him had four. Nowhere near enough time.

Only when the chopper he was chasing rose suddenly did the Chinese pilot see the red-colored sphere its bulk had hidden. He had an instant to notice the others strung across the valley like beads. Training told him to dive, to allow gravity to assist him as he tried to avoid the obstacle, but instinct overrode this and he heaved back on the cyclic and stomped the rudder to compensate. The chopper’s skids hit the line. In a light-speed blink, a finger of electricity jumped into the gunship, opening the path for tens of thousands of volts seeking ground. There was no place for it to discharge so the power continued to pour into the crippled craft that dangled from the sagging cable. Delicate electronics were fried first, and that included the electrical impulses in the brains of its occupants, the synaptic bursts that created thought.