The Silent Sea Page 7

  They were over the power cell’s impact crater.

  Cabrillo cursed. A team could fast rope down from the helo, grab the cell, and be back aboard by the time he and his men had covered half that distance.

  Without being spurred, the men put on a burst of speed, cutting through the jungle as if born to it. Juan ran with single-minded determination, starting to burn into the reserves of strength that had never let him down before. He knew that even after everything they’d been through to get to this point, he was capable of a six-minute mile. Mike Trono managed to keep pace, but Mark and Jerry were beginning to lag.

  The chopper inexplicably veered out of its hover and beat south, toward the logging camp. Cabrillo took this as a good omen and slowed, the turbines and rotor beat no longer masking the sound of his running. His chest heaved, but he forced his breathing under control by taking huge lungfuls of air to resaturate his tissues with oxygen. He could almost feel the lactic acid dissolving from his muscles. He and Mike dropped flat and began to crawl on their stomachs, making their final approach with serpentine stealth.

  The power cell had crashed into the earth at a shallow angle, tearing though the jungle and leaving in its wake a charred cone of foliage. The crater itself was a blacked ring of churned soil. Five Argentine soldiers had roped down to the site. Two of them were digging into the crater with shovels probably pilfered from the loggers while the others had set up a strong perimeter. All five wore distinctive maroon berets.

  Juan knew from studying the Ninth Brigade in order to impersonate them that they operated in squads of six. There was another man out here with them, someone he couldn’t see. He quickly triple-clicked his combat radio’s mike. It was a command for everyone to hold in place and find cover.

  He and Mike could take out the three sentries before they could radio a warning and then take out the shovelers, who had both stripped to the waists and piled their gear a few yards off. But the sixth man. The invisible man. He was a wild card that would have to be dealt with first.

  Cabrillo unslung his MP-5 machine pistol from around his neck. It would be nothing but a hindrance while he was stalking. The pistol, too, would remain in its holster. Even had he brought a silencer, the sound of a muffled shot would startle the local wild-life into panicked flight and alert the Argentines.

  He had known some men who preferred the intimacy of killing with a knife. He’d never liked or trusted any of them because of it, but he was familiar with the techniques and had employed them more than once. Killing with a knife was filthy work, and those that took to it, in his experience, did it more for the life they took than for furthering the goals of their mission.

  It was difficult to survey the scene. His view was obstructed starting inches from his face, so it was difficult to place himself in the sixth man’s mind and guess where he had positioned himself to secretly watch over his comrades digging to get the chunk of satellite.

  At the ten o’clock position from where Juan lay, the undergrowth was thinner because several trees towered over it and blocked sunlight from nourishing the ground cover. This would give a gunman a better field of vision. Cabrillo decided that was where his man was waiting. He was just about to start out. He knew he would circle around, come at the Ninth Brigader from the back, then he and Mike would take out the rest. Juan drew his knife, made a fractional move to his left, and froze.

  Voices.

  A dozen or more, shouting and laughing, as they charged through the jungle like a pack of wild boars. It was a mix of soldiers and loggers, the men who had slogged up the mountain. The satellite’s location had been radioed to them, and they had rushed to the scene.

  Cabrillo stayed still. Any action now would be suicide. Wary of the still-missing sixth squad mate, he resisted the urge to use the radio to call up Murph and Pulaski. Better they all remain as motionless as possible and wait to see what opportunity would present itself.

  For the hour it took the men to wrest the seventy-pound power cell from the earth, Juan watched silently while next to him Mike slept. Somewhere in the jungle behind them, he knew either Mark or Jerry was also catching some much-needed sleep.

  They were close enough to the impact crater for Juan to overhear a Lieutenant’s call down to the command post. “We have it, Jefe . . . I’m not sure. It’s about half a meter long, rectangular, and weighs maybe thirty kilos . . . What? . . . I don’t know, some sort of scientific apparatus if I had to guess. I have no idea what its function . . . No, sir. It will be easier if we carry it back to where they are loading logs. We saw that they have a couple of pickup trucks. We’ll use those to get back down to the camp. The pilot should have found the electrical short in the chopper by the time we get there, and we can get back to base in time for cocktails at the O club.”

  Cabrillo had heard enough. He knew their plan, and that was the edge he needed. He tapped Mike on the shoulder. The former rescue jumper came awake instantly but silently. His combat awareness was acute even in sleep. Together, they backed away from near the impact crater, making sure not to disturb vegetation overhead and marking their position. They met up with Jerry and Murph a quarter mile back.

  “They’ve got the satellite,” Murph said. “I can tell it’s on the move.”

  Juan nodded, sipping from his canteen. He hadn’t dared take a drink since first coming across the Argentine Special Forces. “They’re hiking it back to the trailhead, and then they’ll drive it down to camp and fly out on the helos.”

  “And we’re . . . ?” Mark arched one Goth-plucked eyebrow.

  “Going to stop them.”

  Coming down the mountain in two parallel groups, the soldiers and the Corporation team were converging on a leveled-off section of hillside at least two acres across that the loggers had cleared to set up some equipment. There was an excavator with a grapple for loading logs onto the semis and a machine called a cable yarder. The tracked yarder had a tall mast supporting wires that ran two miles down the hillside to a mobile spar that was anchored by guylines at the base camp. From this long loop of cable dangled choker lines that the axmen could slip around the dressed trunks of felled trees. The logs were then hauled upslope to where they were placed on the tractor trailers, and the choker send down again for the next load.

  The men who worked at this upper site had arrived from the base in the pickup trucks Raul Jimenez planned on procuring.

  Juan was confident his four-man team could beat the larger Argentine group until they came across a cleft in the earth, the result of an earthquake that had split the land in two and caused part of the mountain to subside. Because of the jungle, it was impossible to know how far the fissure ran, so they had no choice but to treat it as an obstacle to be surmounted, not circumvented. In the geologic timescale, the tembler had struck just a short while ago—twelve thousand years, in fact. Enough time had elapsed that the sides of the fissure had eroded to a manageable slope, but they had to descend fifty feet and scramble up the other side using fingers and knees, brute strength, and muttered curses.

  They were all winded by the time they reached the top, and, by Juan’s watch, they had lost fifteen precious minutes. They ran on, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. Juan had known since accepting the assignment from Langston Overholt that he hadn’t had the time to put together an appropriate plan and that was now coming to haunt him. They were facing two squads of Argentina’s best-trained troops with nothing more than four machine pistols and the element of surprise. The odds of getting the power cell without engaging the soldiers were zero, and getting the cell and escaping back to Paraguay he put at no better than twenty/ eighty.

  SIX

  By the time Juan and the others reached the edge of the upper logging site, the soldiers of the Ninth Brigade had loaded their prize into the back of a pickup and were hopping into the truck with it. Half of them took a second truck. The vehicles’ owner knew not to protest.

  From where they crouched at the edge of the jungle, the range to the Argentin
es wasn’t extreme, four hundred yards or so. But the team carried machine pistols, which were devastating weapons in close-quarter combat but would be useless at this distance. Juan suspected the Ninth Brigade chose to issue the wicked-looking MP-5 to its men because of its intimidation factor more than its utility in combat situations.

  Juan had a choice to make and he quickly ran through his options. A head-on charge would be suicide, and the idea of slinking back into the jungle without the power cell was equally unappealing. They had come too far to fail now, and “quit” wasn’t a word Cabrillo allowed himself to contemplate too often. It was why the Corporation was the best in the world at what they did. And the truth was, much of their success had stemmed from Juan’s ability to think on his feet, to find a third option no one else would consider.

  Ideas ran through his brain but were quickly rejected as unworkable, and no matter how fast he came up with new ones, events continued to unfold. The Ninth Brigade soldiers had finished leaping into the beds of the two pickups, and exhaust bloomed from both tailpipes. Next to them smoke exploded from the twin stacks of a semitrailer loaded with logs so newly cut that the bark glistened with sap.

  “Chairman?” Mark Murphy said in a whisper. He had never seen Cabrillo take so much time.

  Juan held up a fist to stem the questions and crawled forward in the long grass that was growing like a curb between the jungle proper and the compacted-earth staging area cleared by the loggers. He reached the far side and looked down the mountain to the one-lane road that curled around its flank as sinuously as a snake. Shimmering above it, and as seemingly thin as gossamer, was the loop of steel wire for the cable yarder.

  The two mud-splattered pickup trucks started pulling away while the big rig’s cab shuddered when the driver put it in gear and started after them.

  There it was, he thought. Not perfect, but it was better than nothing.

  He broke cover, waving for his men to follow. They emerged from the jungle and sprinted after Cabrillo. It was like the final lap of a race, when the exhaustion falls away and the body responds to chemical signals that it is “now or never.” The dozen loggers left milling around the shed-sized cable yarder saw four more Ninth Brigade soldiers running out of the jungle, who had presumably gotten separated and were now chasing after their comrades in the just-departed pickups.

  They didn’t know anything was amiss until one of the new soldiers brought his rifle to his eye, shouting, “Down! Everyone get down, and stay down.”

  Juan didn’t wait to see if his orders were being followed. He trusted his men would see to it that they were. He raced for the yarder’s cab, a modified excavator that had had its boom removed and the cable tower attached in its place. The driver was protected in the cab from flying debris by a mesh cage that had replaced the glass windows. The cab door was open, the driver sitting casually in his seat, a cigarette dangling between the first and second fingers of his left hand. He hadn’t seen the Corporation team approach, and, with the diesel idling, hadn’t heard the shouted commands, so when Juan reached into the cab and heaved the man out of his seat the surprise was total. He landed on the rutted ground, the impact forcing every molecule of air from his chest.

  “Murph,” Juan called. “Get over here and figure out the controls.”

  As a trained engineer, Mark had an intuitive sense of how things worked, stemming no doubt from his childhood hobby of taking things apart and putting them back together, a hobby his parents put a stop to when they came home one day to find his father’s vintage Porsche in pieces.

  Murph left Jerry and Mike to cover the loggers and jumped for the cab.

  “Mike,” Juan shouted as he made his way to the edge of the clearing overlooking what had once been prime forest and was now a smoldering moonscape. “Find the keys to that third pickup and get her started.

  The choke line for the cable yarder was suspended from a block system that could raise or lower the thick loop of wire so when they were dragging a log clear it wouldn’t snag on the stumps of already fallen trees.

  Juan made sure his machine pistol was secure across his back and called Mark on the radio. He stepped onto the loop of the choke line and held on with one hand. “Do you know what I have in mind?”

  “You want me to haul you down the mountain and drop you into the pickup with the power cell.”

  “Not quite,” Cabrillo replied, and told Mark what he wanted done.

  “Man, you’re crazy. Inspired, but crazy.”

  It took Murph just one false start to learn the controls of what was essentially a simple machine to operate. The trick was to operate it well. He eased back on the choker, feeding braided steel wire into the block hanging from the main yarder line.

  Cabrillo braced for the impact of the choker coming taut and had to give his weapons specialist credit as he was gently lifted into the air. Like a skier who didn’t get off the lift at the top and was now descending, Juan started sailing down the mountain, picking up speed as Mark surveyed the scene below, calculating tricky vectors in his head in order to get the Chairman to his target.

  Juan soared fifty feet off the ground, zooming over a hillside made barren by the loggers. It was like a controlled zip line, and, had the scenery been better, he would have paid for the ride. Brush piles smoldered on either side of the yarder line, so he felt like he was flying over the very pit of hell itself. He crossed over the road in the wake of the three-vehicle convoy headed down to the base camp. The pickups had pulled far ahead of the fully laden eighteen-wheeler as he knew they would. The second time the line crossed over the road was two hundred yards ahead, directly over a hairpin corner the pickups were just about to clear.

  If any of the soldiers clutching the bed’s rail looked up, Juan was as exposed as he could be. He’d be nothing more than a human target. Mark must have changed his calculations because the choker block began to decelerate. Juan pendulumed forward, and the choker started to twist. He fought to keep facing forward. He could hear the semi’s air brakes growl when the truck approached the sharp bend. Cabrillo accelerated again, swinging back and forth on the line as it twirled first one way, then the other. Moving through space on three axes was disorientating enough, and he still had to time his landing.

  The truck drove deep into the curve before the driver started to crank the wheel. Juan was fifty feet up the hill and coming fast. Too fast, he realized, and even as he thought it the choker block slowed and the line began to reel out, lowering him closer and closer to the timber hauler. It was a remarkable feat of depth perception and control on Murph’s part, as he dropped the Chairman toward the loaded trailer, timing it so that the turn hid the descending block from the soldiers at the last critical second.

  The wire loop Juan was standing on twisted hard enough to squeeze his foot with a crushing pressure that would have shattered bone and pulped flesh had he not been standing on his prosthetic leg. Even without having to deal with pain, he had to kick with all his strength to free the limb as he soared over the back of the truck. The logs just a few tantalizing feet below him were three feet in diameter, with bark as thick and rough as alligator hide.

  The driver began to straighten out as he guided his load through the hairpin. In seconds he would pull away from the arrow-straight yarder cable, leaving Cabrillo hanging in space. Juan kicked again to free his foot but could do nothing until the choker wire twisted back. He was less than five feet from the rear of the trailer. Then three. He felt himself rotating clockwise again. He heaved on his foot and it popped free. Holding on with one arm, Juan found his spot on the topmost log and let go.

  He landed a bit awkwardly, not fully adjusting to the rig’s steady acceleration, and started rolling off the log. He reached out to find a finger hold in the irregular bark and came away with a fistful of crumbling wood. He slid farther, and spreading his knees to clutch the log with his legs did no good. He went over.

  And immediately slammed into one of the steel supports used to contain the trunks.
It hit in the small of his back. Had it not been for the minimal cushioning of his pack, he felt certain he would have broken bone. It took him a few stunned moments to recover from both the pain and the fact he hadn’t fallen off the truck, then he scrambled back to the top log and, in a crouch, started making his way toward the cab.

  “I’m on,” he radioed Murph.

  “I can see that. You blew the landing, but I’ll still give you seven-point-five.”

  Cabrillo had always found humor in the absurd, and replied, “You gotta be kidding me. Didn’t you see that half twist at the dismount? Degree of difficulty alone gives me an eight.”

  “All right. Eight.”

  “I want the three of you coming after me in the last pickup. What did you do with the loggers?”

  “Jerry chained them to an old bucket-loader tire sitting up here.”

  “Good. Now, get your asses down here. I’m going to need you to bail me out.”

  Juan reached the front of the trailer. The road ahead continued straight for nearly a mile before it twisted back on itself through another hairpin. The pickups were just a dust cloud halfway there. To Juan’s right was a two-hundred-foot drop, at the bottom of which ran the next loop of the switchback road.

  Looking down over the front of the trailer, he could see the tops of the semi’s eight spinning drive wheels and, through the skeletal frame of the chassis, the graveled blur of the roadbed. A misstep would land him under twenty tons of exotic hardwoods.

  Rather than leap, he climbed down the butt ends of the logs and stepped lightly onto the truck’s chassis. He could see the driver’s head through the cab’s rear window, and if the man happened to glance at his rearview mirror he would see the Chairman. Juan stepped right onto a diamond-plate fuel tank as big around as a barrel. He clutched the handhold screwed into the cab directly behind the driver’s door in his right hand and placed his other on the door handle. The driver’s bearded face filled the big wing mirror in front of him.