The Prometheus Deception (18 page)

They were speeding toward the shore, but there was no certainty that they would win any contest. Now the pursuing patrol boat was almost within firing range, its guns blazing all the while. It was a matter of seconds before it overtook them. The sea was flecked, churned, by the hailstorm of bullets from the machine guns.

And the huge rocket launchers on board the
Spanish Armada
were clearly about to fire; the missiles were within range.

“Fire it!” the woman shouted. “Before they blow
us
up!”

But Bryson had already raised the Stinger to his shoulder, the gripstock in his right hand, launch tube in his left, canvas strap around his chest. He peered through the sight, squinting his other eye. The Stinger's super-advanced software made for extreme accuracy, using a passive infrared seeker. They were well beyond the recommended minimum distance of two hundred meters.

Bryson aligned the target in the optical sight, hit the override on the Identification Friend or Foe interrogation function, then actuated the missile function.

The audible tone signaled that the missile had locked on the target.

He fired.

There was an explosion of astonishing force, a recoil that knocked him backward as the dual-thrust rocket motor ignited, propelling the missile forward. The disposable missile launch tube dropped into the water.

And the heat-guided missile soared into the air, tracing a long arc toward the patrol boat, trailing a long plume of smoke like a hasty scrawl in the night sky.

A second later the patrol boat exploded into a fireball, a sulphurous cloud of smoke spewing upward. The ocean was roiled, huge waves rushing toward them even as they raced on ahead.

The air was pierced by a long, loud blast of the
Spanish Armada'
s emergency whistle, followed by a series of short blasts and then one long one.

The woman had turned around, staring in horrified fascination. Bryson could feel a wave of intense heat on his face. He lifted the second missile—the only remaining one, which had been bundled with the first—and shoved it into the firing apparatus. Then he turned the missile-launcher to his left and fixed in the infrared sights the superstructure of the
Spanish Armada
itself. It began to beep, indicating that it had locked onto the target.

Heart pounding, holding his breath, he fired.

The missile streaked toward the enormous container ship, swerving as it corrected its own path, headed right for the very heart of the ship.

An instant later came the explosion, which seemed to begin within the bowels of the ship and expand outward. Pieces of the ship flew upward amid the black smoke and thrusting flame, and then, in some sort of peculiar sequence, there came another blast, even louder.

And then another. And another.

One by one the containers had superheated, detonating their highly flammable contents.

The sky was filled with fire, an immense rippling sphere of flame and smoke and detritus. The noise hurt their ears. A black oil slick spread into the water, and that, too, immediately burst into flames, and everything was smoke and fire and crashing waves.

Calacanis's huge vessel, now a ruined hulk, listed to one side, the wreckage all but hidden in an acrid black cloud, and it began to sink deep into the ocean.

The
Spanish Armada
was no more.

PART

II

EIGHT

They came ashore at a narrow, rocky spit of land, buffeted by violent waves crashing against the steep cliffs. This was the
Costa da Morte
, the Coast of Death, so named for the uncounted legions of ships wrecked upon the perilous, harsh coastline.

Wordlessly, they pulled the rescue boat as far up the sandbar as they could, stashing it in a hidden cove, away from the searchlights of the coast guard and the avaricious eyes of smugglers; at least the boat would not be washed away by the next big wave. He unstrapped the two large weapons from around his chest, the AK-47 and the Uzi, and hid them beside the boat, concealing them with sand, rocks, pebbles, and an arrangement of smaller boulders so that they could not be seen even from close up. It would not do to be observed walking around like a couple of mercenaries, and besides, they had plenty of other, smaller weapons stuffed in their vests.

The two maneuvered awkwardly among the rocks, weighed down by the artillery that filled every pocket, was slung around their shoulders and their backs. Their clothes were drenched, of course—her white uniform, his Italian suit—and they shivered from the cold of the icy water.

Bryson had some idea of where they had landed, having studied detailed Agency maps of the Galician coast of Spain, the stretch of land nearest the point at which the
Spanish Armada
, according to surveillance satellite reports, had dropped anchor. He believed they had come ashore at, or near, the village of Finisterre, or Fisterra, as the Galegos call it. Finisterre: the end of the world, just about Spain's most westerly point. Once the westernmost limit of the known world to the Spaniards, the place where untold numbers of smugglers met their gruesome, but mercifully sudden, end on the barnacle-encrusted rocks.

The woman was the first to speak. Sinking down on the edge of a boulder, visibly shivering, she placed her hands on her head, inserted her fingers into her hair, and tugged off a blond wig, revealing short auburn hair. She took out a sealed plastic pouch and removed from it a small, white plastic case, a holder for contact lenses. Swiftly, she touched her fingers against her eyes and removed the colored contact lenses, placing first the right, then the left, into the case. Her dazzling green eyes had become a deep brown. Bryson watched in fascination but said nothing. Then she took from the plastic pouch a compass, a waterproof map, and a tiny pinpoint flashlight. “We can't stay here, of course. The coast guard will be combing every inch of shoreline. My
God
, what a
nightmare!
” She switched on the penlight, cupping a hand around it as she examined the map.

“Why do I have the feeling you've been through nightmares like this before?”

She looked up from the map, regarded him sharply. “Do I really owe you an explanation?”

“You owe me nothing. But you risked your life to save me, and I'd like to understand. Also, I think I like you better as a brunette than as a blonde. Earlier you said you were ‘following arms transfers,' presumably for Israel. Mossad?”

“In a sense,” she said cryptically. “And you—CIA?”

“In a sense.” He had always adhered to the principle of need-to-know and saw no need to divulge more.

“Your target—your area of interest?” she persisted.

He hesitated for a moment before he spoke. “Let's just say that I'm up against an organization that's vastly more far-reaching than anything you might have in your sights. But let me ask you this: Why? Why did you do it? Scrap the entire infiltration, then put your own life on the line?”

“Believe me, it wasn't my choice.”

“Then whose choice was it?”

“It was the circumstances. The way things worked out. I made the foolish mistake of warning you, failing to take into account the surveillance cameras Calacanis has everywhere.”

“How do you know you were observed?”

“Because after the madness began I was pulled away from my duties and told that a Mr. Boghosian wanted to see me. Boghosian is—
was
—Calacanis's head thug. When he asks to see you, well, I knew what that meant. They had checked the surveillance tape. At that point I knew I had to escape.”

“But that begs the question of why you warned me in the first place.”

She shook her head. “I saw no reason to let them claim more victims. Especially since my ultimate purpose was to prevent the spilling of innocent blood by the terrorists and fanatics. And I didn't think it would place my own operational security at stake. Obviously I miscalculated.” She resumed studying the map, all the while shielding the penlight with a cupped hand.

Touched by the woman's candor, Bryson said gently, “Do you have a name?”

She looked up again, gave a half-smile. “I'm Layla. And I know you're not Coleridge.”

“Jonas Barrett,” he said. He let the question of what he was doing here hang in the air. Let her probe, he thought. Information will be exchanged when,
if,
the time was right. Lies, legends, cover names all came so easily to his tongue now, as they once had.
Who am I really?
he wondered mutely: the melodramatic question of the adolescent, strangely transposed to the maddened consciousness of an ex-field operative who'd found himself very lost. Waves crashed noisily around them. There was the mournful sounding of a foghorn from a lighthouse perched high above the sea. The famous lighthouse at Cabo Finisterre, Bryson knew. “It's not clear you miscalculated,” he said, appreciatively, almost under his breath.

She gave him a quick, sad smile as she switched off her penlight. “I need to charter a helicopter or private plane, something that will get me—us—out of here, and quickly.”

“The most likely place to do that is Santiago de Compostela. About sixty kilometers east-southeast of here. It's a major tourist destination—a pilgrimage town, a holy city. I believe there's a small airport outside the city that has some direct international flights. We may be able to charter a plane or a helicopter there. Certainly worth a try.”

She gave him a hard stare. “You know this area.”

“Barely. I've studied the map.”

A sudden, powerful beam of light lit up the beach just yards away, propelling them both to the ground, their instincts honed by field experience. Bryson threw himself behind a large boulder and froze; the woman who called herself Layla flattened herself beneath a ledge. Bryson felt the sand on his face, cold and wet; he could hear her steady breathing a few feet away. Bryson had not worked with many female operatives in the course of his career, and it was his belief, rarely vocalized, that the few women who actually made it over the obstacles placed there by the spymasters, almost all of whom were men, had to be exceptional. About this mysterious Layla he knew virtually nothing except that she was one of the exceptional ones, highly skilled and calm under pressure.

He could see the searchlight sweep down the beach, its beam pausing for a moment at just about the point where he had concealed the boat in the hidden cove, providing additional cover with rocks gathered from the sand. Perhaps experienced eyes could discern the disruption he had caused in the natural pattern of the rocks, seaweed, and other jetsam and flotsam. From behind the boulder that shielded him from the searchers, Bryson was able to peer around. The search craft was moving parallel to the coastline, a pair of high-powered beams moving back and forth along the jagged cliffs. No doubt powerful magnifying binoculars were being employed by the searchers as well. At such a distance, night-vision scopes were useless, but he did not want to take a chance by getting up prematurely, simply because the searchlights had moved on. Often the extinguishing of the search beams was merely the prelude to the
real
search: only when the lights went out did the creatures scuttle forth from under their rocks. So he remained in place for five minutes after the beach had gone dark again; he was impressed that he did not have to urge Layla to do the same.

When they finally emerged from their hiding places, shaking the cramps from their limbs, they began scrambling up the rock-strewn hillside, dense with scraggly pines, until they came to a narrow gravel road on the ridge of the cliff. Along the road was a succession of high, massive granite walls enclosing tiny plots of land and dominated by ancient stone houses covered with moss. Each had the same granary built high on pillars, the same conical hayrack, the same trellis overgrown with green grapes, the same collection of gnarled trees heavy with fruit. This was a territory, Bryson realized, whose denizens lived and worked the land as they had always done, for generations upon generations. It was a place where the intruder was not welcome. A man on the run would be regarded with the utmost suspicion, strangers sighted and reported.

There was a sudden scuff of feet on the gravel not more than a hundred feet behind them. He spun around, a pistol in his right hand, but saw nothing in the darkness and fog. Visibility was extremely limited, and the road bent around so that whoever was approaching could not be seen. He noticed that Layla, too, was aiming a weapon, a pistol with a long perforated silencer screwed onto the barrel. Her two-handed marksman's stance was perfect, almost stylized. The two of them froze in place, listening.

Then there was a shout from the sandbar below. There were at least two of them; there had to be more. But where had they come from? What were their precise intentions?

Another sudden noise: a gruff voice nearby, speaking a language Bryson did not immediately understand, then another scuff of feet on gravel. The language, he quickly realized, was Galego, the ancient language of Galicia that combined elements of Portuguese and Castilian Spanish. He could make out only isolated phrases.

“Veña! Axiña! Que carallo fas aí? Que é o que che leva tanto tempo? Móvete!”

With a quick glance at each other, they each silently advanced along a stone wall toward the source of the noise. Low voices, thuds, a metallic clatter. When they rounded a bend in the wall, Bryson could see two silhouetted figures loading crates into an ancient panel truck. One was in the cargo bay of the truck, the other lifting crates from a stack and handing them to him. Bryson glanced at his watch: a little after three o'clock in the morning. What were these men doing here? They had to be fishermen, that was it. Peasant fishermen gathering the local crop,
percebes
, barnacles scooped from the waterline, or perhaps harvesting mussels from the
mejillonieras,
the rafts floating in the water just offshore.