Nash and the others just stared at their new companions.
A man and a woman.
Both were sopping wet, and both were completely covered in mud. They wore civilian clothes—blue jeans and white T-shirts—but with a twist: both wore black Gore-Tex holsters and compact Glock-18 pistols on their hips. They both also wore navy blue bulletproof vests. Their appearance screamed: undercover cops.
The man was burly, strong-looking and barrel-chested. The woman small but athletic, with short peroxide-blond hair.
The man didn’t waste any time. He walked straight over to the Americans and began unlocking their handcuffs.
“You’re not prisoners anymore,” he said in English. “We are all in this together now. Come, we must save as many of the others as we can.”
Race, Lauren and Lopez were standing—stranded—on the roof of the Humvee, as the whole Humvee-Huey combination drifted awkwardly downriver, caught in the current.
Just then Race saw the rickety wooden jetty about ten yards away from them, downstream. It looked like they would float right by it.
That was their chance.
The Humvee-Huey lurched again, sank lower in the water. At the moment, the Humvee’s roof was about a foot above the river’s surface, while the Huey’s was a little higher. But for every yard that the two vehicles moved downriver, they both seemed to drop a couple of inches.
It was going to be close.
Very close.
They edged another yard downstream.
The caimans began to circle.
Eight yards to the jetty and water began to seep onto the roof of the Humvee and under their feet. The three of them stepped up onto the rotor housing of the Huey.
Five yards away.
Sinking fast.
From atop the Huey, Race looked out over the floodlit village.
It was deserted now, the only movement the occasional feline shadow that darted across the main street. There was no sign of human life. None at all.
It was then that Race noticed it.
The all-terrain vehicle was gone.
The eight-wheeled tanklike ATV that had been holding Nash, Copeland and the Green Berets was nowhere to be seen.
Race spoke into his throat mike. “Van Lewen! Where are you?”
“I’m here, Professor.”
“Where?”
“Couple of the Germans opened up the ATV and unlocked our cuffs. We’re doing a circuit of the village now, picking up anybody we can find.”
“While you’re at it, why don’t you swing by the jetty in about thirty seconds?”
“Ten-four, Professor. We’ll be there.”
Three yards from the jetty, and the Humvee’s roof went completely under.
Race bit his Up.
Although they were now standing on the exposed rotor housing of the Huey, they were still going to have to step across the submerged Humvee’s roof to get to the jetty.
“Come on, baby, stay afloat,” he said.
Two yards.
The Humvee’s roof went six inches under.
One yard.
A whole foot under.
Lauren looped an arm underneath the dazed Gaby’s shoulders.
“Okay, kids,” the said. “Listen up. I’ll take Gaby first. Will, you bring up the rear. Got it?”
“Got it.”
The Humvee-Huey came alongside the jetty.
As it did so, Lauren and Gaby leapt off the rotor housing of the Huey and splashed down onto the submerged roof of the Humvee—their legs dropping knee-deep into the water.
They took two sloshing strides forward before Lauren threw Gaby up onto the jetty. Then she leapt up onto it herself, pulling her feet up just as two massive crocodilian shapes lunged through the water behind her, snapping their jaws ferociously.
“Will! Come on!” she called from the jetty.
Race readied himself to jump down onto the submerged roof of the Humvee. He couldn’t imagine how it must have looked—him, in his jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap standing atop a submerged Army helicopter in the middle of a caiman-infested Amazonian river.
How the hell did I get into this? he thought.
Then, without warning, the whole Humvee-Huey contraption lurched dramatically, dropped another foot in the water.
Race lost his balance, almost fell off, but recovered quickly. Then he looked up to see that things had just gotten seriously worse.
The Humvee’s roof was now at least three feet underwater.
Even if he could jump onto it, his mobility would be shot. The caimans would get him for sure.
The Huey’s situation wasn’t much better.
Even though he was standing on the chopper’s rotor housing, it, too, was now submerged underneath an inch of water.
Race looked frantically about himself—saw that the only part of the Huey still above the water were its two rotor blades.
He glanced quickly over at the jetty and saw the ATV skid to a stop at its base—saw the sliding door on the big eight-wheeler’s side whip open to reveal Van Lewen and Scott inside it—saw Lauren drag Gaby over toward it.
Lauren yelled over her shoulder. “Will! Come on! Jump!” The Huey lurched again and Race’s sneakers went fully under the surface.
He looked at the sinking chopper around him, looked at its rotor blades hovering above the surface.
The rotor blades . . . he thought.
Maybe he could . . .
No.
He’d be too heavy, they’d sag underneath his weight.
He spun back around to look at the jetty. Three large caimans now hovered, half-submerged, in the water between him and the old wooden wharf.
Maybe . . .
Race quickly reached out and grabbed hold of one of the rotor blades. Then he heaved on it as hard as he could, turning the thirty-foot blade around on its pivot.
The sunken Huey was still drifting slowly downstream with the current.
The rotor blade came around, its forward tip almost touching the jetty, so that it now looked like a narrow bridge stretched out low over the river, connecting the Huey to the wharf.
The Huey rocked again, sank another two inches, just as an enormous black shape exploded out of the water next to Race and on a reflex he spread his legs as far apart as he could and the caiman shot right through them—brushing against the insides of his calves—and off the other side of the Huey.
That was too close! his mind screamed. Move!
Race took a final look up at his passage to freedom—the rotor blade, a plank of steel ten inches wide, hanging a foot above the surface of the river.
Do it!
And so he did.
Race jumped up onto the rotor blade and ran out across its length.
Three steps forward and he saw the jetty twenty feet in front of him. The jetty, safety, salvation—
—halfway across and he felt the rotor blade sag beneath him, and lower itself toward the waterline and—
—come to rest on the backs of the three caimans in the water between the helicopter and the jetty!
Race danced across the narrow bridge, now supported by the bodies of the three caimans!
He reached the end of the rotor blade at a full stride and launched himself off it, diving through the air, slamming chest-first into the edge of the jetty.
Get your feet out of the water! his mind screamed as he felt his feet splash down into the inky black liquid beneath him.
He quickly yanked his feet up out of the water and rolled up onto the safety of the jetty.
He swallowed, breathless. He couldn’t believe it He was—
“Professor! Come on!” Van Lewen’s tinny voice yelled suddenly in his ear.
Race looked up immediately and saw the ATV parked at the end of the jetty, its sliding side door open.
Just then, however, some movement above the ATV caught his eye and he glanced up just in time to see one of the massive black cats leap clear over the all-terrain vehicle with its claws ext
ended and its jaws bared wide.
The giant animal landed on the jetty barely five feet in front of him. It just stood there before him, crouching low, its ears pinned back, its lips curling, its muscles tensing for the final pounce . . .
And then suddenly the rickety jetty fell away beneath it.
There was no creak. No warning sound.
The old wooden jetty just gave way beneath the cat and with a bewildered screech the big black creature dropped into the water beneath it.
“It’s about time I had some luck,” Race said.
The caimans moved in quickly.
Two big bulls charged in toward the fallen cat and soon the water around the big animal became a seething, frothing mess.
Race seized the opportunity and leapt across the newly created gap in the jetty and bolted for the ATV.
As he stepped inside the ATV and Van Lewen slid the heavy steel door shut behind him, he looked back out at the river through a narrow rectangular slit in the door.
What he saw was completely unexpected.
He saw the cat—the same black cat that had accosted him only moments before—climb slowly up out of the water and back up onto the jetty. Blood dripped from its claws, ragged chunks of flesh hung from its jaws, water dripped from its glistening flanks.
The animal’s chest heaved. It seemed absolutely exhausted from the battle it had just fought.
But it was alive.
It had won.
It had just survived an encounter with two bull caimans!
Race slumped down on the floor of the ATV, totally exhausted. He let his head fall against the cold metal wall behind him and allowed his eyes to close.
As he did so, however, he heard noises.
He heard the grunts and snorts of the cats outside—close, loud, large.
He heard their paws splashing in puddles. Heard the crunch of breaking bones as they feasted on the bodies of the dead German commandos. He even heard the sound of someone crying out in agony in the near distance.
Soon Race would fall asleep, but before he did he would have one final, terrifying thought.
How the hell am I going to get out of here alive?
FOURTH MACHINATION
Tuesday, January 5, 0930 hours
Special Agent John-Paul Demonaco walked slowly down the white-lit corridor, careful not to step on the body bags.
It was 9:30 in the morning, January 5, and Demonaco had just arrived at 3701 North Fairfax Drive in response to an order from the Director of the FBI himself.
Like the rest of the world, Demonaco knew nothing of the break-in at DARPA headquarters the day before. All he knew was that the Director had received a phone call at 3:30 that morning from a four-star admiral standing in the Oval Office asking for him to send his best domestic antiterrorist man down to Fairfax Drive as soon as humanly possible.
His best man was John-Paul Demonaco.
“J.P.” Demonaco was fifty-two years old, divorced, and a little loose around the waistline. He had thinning brown hair and wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. His rumpled gray polyester suit had been bought from J.C. Penney for a hundred dollars in 1994, while the Versace tie that he wore with it had been bought for three hundred dollars only last year. It had been a birthday gift from his youngest daughter—Apparently it was trendy.
Despite his dress sense, Demonaco was Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Anti-Terrorist Unit (Domestic), a position he had occupied for four years now, principally because he knew more about American terrorism than anybody else alive.
Walking down the white-lit hallway, Demonaco saw another body bag lying on the floor in front of him. A star of blood smeared the wall above it He added the bag to his tally. That made ten already.
What on earth had happened here?
He turned a corner and immediately saw a small crowd of people standing at the entrance to a laboratory at the end of the corridor.
Most of the members of the crowd, he saw, were dressed in perfectly starched, dark blue U.S. Navy uniforms.
A twenty-something lieutenant met him halfway, down the corridor.
“Special Agent Demonaco?”
Demonaco flashed his ID in response.
“This way, please. Commander Mitchell is expecting you.”
The young lieutenant led him into the laboratory. As he entered the lab, Demonaco silently took in the wall-mounted security cameras, the thick hydraulic doors, the alphanumeric locks.
Jesus, it was a goddamn vault.
“Special Agent Demonaco?” a voice said from behind him. Demonaco turned to see a handsome young officer standing before him. The man was about thirty-six years old, tall, with blue eyes and short sandy-blond hair—a Navy poster boy. And for some reason that Demonaco couldn’t quite pin down, he looked oddly familiar.
“Yeah, I’m Demonaco.”
“Commander Tom Mitchell. Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”
NCIS, Demonaco thought. Interesting.
When he had arrived at Fairfax Drive, Demonaco had barely even noticed the Navy servicemen guarding the entrance to the building. It wasn’t unusual in the D.C. area to have certain federal buildings guarded by specific branches of the armed forces. For example, Fort Meade, the headquarters of the NSA, was actually an Army compound. The White House, on the other hand, was formally guarded by members of the United States Marine Corps. It would have come as no surprise to Demonaco to learn that DARPA was protected by the U.S. Navy. Which would have explained all the Navy suits here now.
But no. If the NCIS was here, that meant something else entirely. Something that went beyond merely failing to protect a federal building. Something internal—
“I don’t know if you remember me,” Mitchell said, “but I took your seminar at Quantico about six months ago. “The Second Amendment and the Rise of the Militia Groups.’ “
So that was where he had seen Mitchell before.
Every three months, Demonaco gave a seminar at Quantico on domestic terrorist organizations in the United States. In his lectures, he basically outlined the make-up, methods and philosophies of the more organized militia groups in the country—groups like the Patriots, the White Aryan Resistance or the Republican Army of Texas.
After the Oklahoma City bombing and the bloody siege at the Coltex nuclear weapons facility in Amarillo, Texas, Demonaco’s seminars had been in high demand. Especially among the armed forces, since their bases—and the buildings they protected—were often the targets of domestic terrorist acts.
“What can I do for you, Commander Mitchell?” Demonaco said.
“Well, first of all, as you will no doubt appreciate, everything you see or hear in this room is strictly classifi—”
“What is it you want me to do?” Demonaco was famous for his inability to put up with bullshit
Mitchell took a deep breath. “As you can see, we had something of an . . . incident . . . here yesterday morning. Seventeen security staff killed and a weapon of immense importance stolen. We have reason to believe that a domestic terrorist organization was involved, which is why you were called in—”
“Is that him? Is that him?” a rough-sounding voice said from somewhere nearby.
Demonaco turned and saw a severe-looking captain with a gray mustache and a matching gray crew cut striding quickly toward him and Commander Mitchell.
The captain glared at Mitchell. “I told you this was a mistake, Tom. This is an internal matter. We don’t need to involve the FBI in this.”
“Special Agent Demonaco,” Mitchell said, “this is Captain Vernon Aaronson. Captain Aaronson has overall responsibility for this investigation—”
“But Commander Mitchell here, it seems, has the ear of those who would like to see this puzzle solved more slowly than it has to be,” Aaronson quipped.
Demonaco judged Vernon Aaronson to be a couple of years older—and at least a decade more bitter—than his subordinate, Commander Mitchell.
“I had no choice, sir,” Mitchell said. “
The President insisted—”
“The President insisted . . .” Aaronson snorted.
“He didn’t want to see a repeat of the Baltimore freeway incident”
Ah, Demonaco thought. So that was it.
On Christmas Day 1997, an unmarked DARPA transport truck traveling from New York to Virginia was hijacked as it traveled along the Baltimore beltway. Stolen from the truck were sixteen J-7 jet packs and forty-eight prototype explosive charges—small chrome-and-plastic tubes that looked like glass laboratory vials.
But these were no ordinary explosive charges. Officially, they were called M-22 isotopic charges, but around DARPA they were known as “Pocket Dynamos.”
Put simply, the Pocket Dynamo was an evolutionary step forward in high-temperature liquid chemical technology. The result of thirteen years’ concerted labor by the United States Army and DARPA’s Advanced Ordnance Division, the M-22 utilized laboratory-created isotopes of the element chlorine to deliver a concentrated blast wave of such savage intensity that it literally vaporized anything within a two-hundred-yard radius of the detonation point. It was designed for use by small incursionary units on sabotage or search-and-destroy missions—where the mission objective was to leave absolutely nothing behind. The isotopic explosion of an M-22 charge was second only in intensity to a thermo-nuclear blast, but without the attendant radioactive aftereffects.
What Demonaco also knew about the Baltimore freeway incident, however, was that the Army had handled the investigation into the theft themselves.
Two days after the daring robbery, the Army investigators received a tip-off regarding the location of the stolen weapons and without so much as consulting with the FBI or the CIA, a squad of Green Berets was ordered to storm the headquarters of an underground militia group in northern Idaho. Ten people were killed, twelve were wounded. It turned out to be the wrong group. In fact, more than that, it turned out to be one of the more benign paramilitary groups around, more like a gun club than a terrorist cell. No isotopic explosives were found on their premises. The ACLU and the NRA had had a field day.
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