by S. A. Beck
That wouldn’t save them.
Salek gestured for him to climb into the back seat of the limousine and then joined him. The plush, air conditioned interior felt frigid after the heat of the day.
Two guards got in the front and the little convoy moved away. Salek turned and smiled to General Corbin.
“You are a brave man to get into a car with me after what you did.”
“If you wanted to hurt me, you could have told Owen everything. So what’s your game?”
“My game?” Salek laughed. “I am more interested in your game. You and General Meade are here with one of the People of the Sea, and your own government does not know why. That I find interesting. You wanted the genetic codes for the People of the Sea. At first I thought it was for an American government project. Now I see it is your own personal project. That is most interesting. What do you intend to do with such information?”
Corbin decided to answer Salek’s question with one of his own.
“What happened to the Russians?”
Salek looked troubled. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from the Russian embassy, which means either they were working on their own like you, or their government wants to deny any knowledge. This gets more and more interesting by the hour.”
Corbin looked out the tinted windows at the low buildings they passed. A few other vehicles were on the road, mostly trucks and motorcycles. He kept his eye out for any Land Rovers.
“Who blew up the laboratory?” Corbin asked, pretending he didn’t already know.
“I don’t know. Perhaps the Russians didn’t want anyone to get the information. Perhaps you blew it up yourself, eh? I see you shaking your head. Of course you deny it. Let us pretend that I believe you. Maybe you really are innocent. Luckily not too much data was lost. We keep backups here in the capital. We lost only ten day’s worth of data. We still have genetic samples for more than half of the prisoners, that’s a few hundred. What would that be worth to you?”
“I can give you a good price. A few million sent to you personally, plus I can arrange more military aid for your country.”
“After what happened I am sure that will come even without your help. America is always generous with weapons. It is one of your biggest exports. No, I want something else from you.”
Corbin studied him. “And what would that be?”
Salek leaned closer to him and spoke in a low, emphatic voice. “I want to be part of it.”
“Part of what?”
Salek frowned. “Don’t play with me. Part of whatever you’re planning. I have something you need. I don’t want to be bought off with a few million dollars—spare change for your government—and some outdated weapon systems your military doesn’t want anymore. No. I am tired of being treated like that. You powerful countries come to places like this and demand what you want and throw us some scraps like we are beggars. An American general is missing, possibly dead, and your government will have an investigation. They will find that you were working on your own.”
Corbin noticed that a Land Rover with the Doctors Without Borders logo had pulled up alongside and kept the same speed.
“So what are you proposing?” General Corbin asked.
Salek smiled. “That we join forces. We will make up a cover story together, one that will save your skin and save your project. I will vouch for you, and in return I get to be part of your project. You have something big planned, I can tell.”
General Corbin shook his head in amazement. This guy was really something else. He extended a hand. Salek shook it.
“Congratulations, Mr. Vice President, you just saved your skin as well as mine.”
“I am sure we will make quite an impact.”
The Land Rover swerved for them.
“Sooner than you think, hold on!”
Corbin grabbed the back of the seat with one hand and his new partner with the other an instant before the Land Rover slammed into the limousine.
Both men flew to the other side of the limo, Salek landing on top of General Corbin. The vehicle was surrounded by gunfire. Corbin and Salek kept their heads down. The limo driver tried to pull away but there were a flurry of shots and they heard a loud pair of bangs as two of the tires got taken out.
The driver hit the gas anyway, grinding the exposed rims along the pavement as he tried to get his boss to safety.
Another hit from the Land Rover took care of that plan.
“Don’t worry,” Salek said. “This limousine is bulletproof.”
Salek drew a gun from the inside of his suit. For the second time in their brief acquaintance, Corbin disarmed him.
“You won’t be hurt, Mr. Vice President,” Corbin said. “They’re here to save me. They’re making it look like a kidnapping—” Corbin stopped as several loud bangs drowned out his words “—so you just play along. I’ll be in touch.”
Salek grinned. “Knowing you is never dull, General Corbin.”
A loud grinding sound came from nearby. Corbin saw the tip of a drill punch through the limo not far from them. Salek saw it too and moved away.
The drill pulled out and for an instant they saw some feminine fingers poke through the hole, dropping a capsule. The capsule landed on the floor, where it burst with a soft pop. The interior of the limo began to fill with white smoke.
“Breath deeply, Mr. Vice President. It won’t hurt us.”
The world went out of focus. Before everything went black, Corbin heard Salek’s voice coming as if from a thousand miles away.
“This had better be worth it.”
General Corbin woke up to the sound of his phone ringing. He had trouble opening his eyes and his arms and legs didn’t want to obey him. For a brief moment he thought he was back at his first military posting in South Korea, where as an eighteen-year-old private he would use his one night off every other week to make a circuit of Seoul’s bars with his buddies, coming back to base nine-tenths unconscious.
But he wasn’t in South Korea, he realized, he was in North Africa, and he was a general now. He wasn’t hung over either, he was recovering from the effects of some nerve agent he had willingly inhaled after his best assassin faked his kidnapping so he could hide the fact that he planned to overthrow the U.S. government.
“Life comes at you fast,” he mumbled, finally making it to a sitting position.
He saw he was in some dumpy back room—bare concrete walls, creaky old bed, dead cockroaches on the floor. A neatly clad Englishman he recognized as one of the McKay twins sat in an old wooden chair by the door, watching him with eyes that reminded him of a shark’s. They had that same sort of soulless, dead look.
He ignored his surroundings and the psychotic killer and fumbled for his phone. It stopped ringing.
Cursing, he checked the number. Orion. Corbin had had the foresight to give him a local phone in case they got split up.
He called him back. Orion picked up on the first ring.
“I got her,” he said.
“And General Meade?” Corbin asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you?”
“A village a few miles east of Nouakchott.”
Corbin blinked. “So close? How did you make it all the way here?”
“I ran.”
Orion went on to give him directions on where to find them, in an abandoned house at the edge of the village. Shaking his head in wonder, Corbin told him they’d be there soon and hung up.
He turned to the Englishman, who was combing back his oily black hair.
“Which one are you, Ronnie or Reggie?”
“Reggie.”
“You still have that Land Rover?”
“Got too banged up in the ruck to spin, mate. Had to scarper and pinch another.”
Corbin wasn’t sure what he just said. The working class London English was hard enough to pick apart, and then the words made no sense anyway. But the guy had a vehicle, and that was all that mattered.
“We need to get g
oing. Gather your gear and we’re moving out.”
“The bobbies are as thick as fleas on a Limehouse mutt, governor.”
“Whatever that means, I don’t care. Get a move on.”
Reggie McKay shrugged and led him out to a front room. It was a living room and kitchen all in one, obviously lived in although he didn’t see the legal residents. Corbin didn’t ask, he could imagine what had happened to those poor people.
If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs, he thought, and thought of them no more.
Isadore and Ronnie McKay sat on a sofa, obviously bored and waiting for him to wake up.
“No time for reunions,” Corbin said. “Orion is half an hour’s drive away. We need to go get him.”
Isadore and the McKay twins were good soldiers, although certainly not his first choice of company. They got into an old car. The windows were all rolled down. Some broken glass on the driver’s side told him why. He wondered what had happened to the driver and decided it didn’t matter.
Half an hour and a roadblock full of dead cops later, they made it to the abandoned house by the edge of the village Orion was hiding out in.
The hypnotized Atlantean greeted him at the doorless entrance to the crumbling old concrete building. No other houses stood nearby and it was set back from the road by more than a hundred yards. Orion had picked his hideout well.
Orion greeted General Corbin in his usual expressionless way.
Corbin cocked his head and stared at him. “You really ran all the way here? I had to drive all night.”
“Your tests are inadequate to measure my abilities.”
“I see.”
“I have more abilities than I realized. I can sense artifacts of power from the Atlantean times.”
“Oh, you’ve learned your history, have you?”
“Jaxon taught me.”
“She’s here?”
Orion motioned to the back room and led them there.
Corbin smiled as he entered. At last he had her again.
Jaxon lay on her back, unconscious. One side of her face was swollen, and a trickle of dried blood was caked on her chin. She did not move.
“Is she dead?” General Corbin asked.
“No,” Orion replied. “But I think I hit her too hard. It’s been a few hours and she hasn’t woken up.”
Corbin knelt down. He had some basic medical training thanks to the army.
“Looks like a concussion. We have to get her to a hospital. Damn it, Orion, it might already be too late!”
Chapter 16
AUGUST 30, THE SAHARA DESERT, MAURITANIA
5:30 PM
* * *
Otto Heike couldn’t stand it anymore.
After Vivian had been found knocked out and Jaxon abducted, the entire team had scoured the desert for more than a day, finding no trace of Jaxon or her captor. Elaine had sent up her drone, the Tuaregs had spread out across the land they knew so well, and Otto himself had joined the search, driving until he nodded off at the wheel.
All for nothing.
“They couldn’t have left in a vehicle,” Agerzam said. “All my vehicles are accounted for and there were no tracks leading away from camp.”
It was obvious how Jaxon’s abductor had gotten into and out of camp—a guard had been found knocked out—but not what had happened after he had left with Jaxon. They had vanished without a trace.
“They must have left on foot, but they couldn’t have gotten far,” Otto said. Night had fallen, and they had reluctantly called off the search until dawn. Now they sat in a circle with only starlight to see each other. They had been playing cat and mouse with the Mauritanian army all afternoon, and didn’t dare light a campfire.
Grunt rubbed his jaw. He was in bad need of a shave and his face looked haggard with fatigue and worry. “If it was that Orion guy, they could have gotten pretty far. There was a light wind last night, not enough to erase vehicle tracks but certainly enough to erase footprints. Even if he got ten miles away, it would be hard to find him in all this desert.”
“He got further away than that,” Vivian said. She sat stiffly with the others, her head swathed in bandages. “I heard him when he unzipped the tent. Before I could draw my gun he hit me.”
“I’ve seen how fast you draw,” Otto said.
“Hit me hard too. I was out like a light.”
“But how far could they have gotten?” Otto asked. “There isn’t a settlement around for miles. You said so.”
Grunt left the circle and came back a minute later with General Meade. He had been sitting quietly at the edge of camp under guard, not that he really needed a guard. He was like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“What can you tell us about Orion?” Grunt asked him.
“He was our first test subject, an American of Atlantean descent who we kidnapped. We used a treatment of mind altering drugs and hypnotism to make him a loyal slave.”
Otto shuddered. To hear an American general say this so matter of factly made him realize just how much evil they were up against.
“So what are his capabilities?” Grunt asked.
“Strength and speed well above that of an ordinary human. We don’t have much data to compare him to other Atlanteans, but he is probably better than most of them too.”
“How far could he have gotten in the desert carrying Jaxon?” Otto asked. He still held out the hope that Jaxon had been abducted, although he had been fighting a rising fear that Orion had killed her and dumped her somewhere in the desert. When they had been searching that day, every shadow of a rock made him see dead bodies.
General Meade thought for a moment.
“He can run up to fifty miles and hour, and keep it up for hours, although we’re not sure exactly how long. He can also tap reserves of energy, not having to eat or drink for long periods of time. We never fully tested that aspect of his abilities.”
“So he could have taken her anywhere,” Otto groaned.
“Yes,” General Meade replied.
They all went to bed, knowing they’d have an early start and a long search the next day.
Two hours after dawn, they did find two people in the desert, although they weren’t the two people they were looking for.
Otto was driving one of the Land Rovers with Grunt in the passenger seat scanning the landscape with a pair of binoculars. The mercenary gave a shout and pointed to their right. Otto turned the Land Rover in that direction and after a minute spotted two distant figures on the horizon.
Otto slammed on the gas and they shot over the flat desert. He leaned forward, gripping the wheel, focused on the two figures as they turned and waved their hands in the air.
He tried to ignore the fact that Orion wouldn’t have done that. He tried to ignore the fact that under their hats the man and woman looked like they had white skin. He so wanted it to be Jaxon and Orion that he ignored the evidence before his eyes.
Dimitri and Nadya looked half dead, their skin red and blistered, their mouths swollen with dehydration. As Otto brought the Land Rover sped to a stop in front of them, the two Russians held their hands above their heads.
Grunt got out, pointing his assault rifle at them. Otto aimed a pistol at Nadya through the open window. He figured she was the more dangerous of the two.
“You seen Jaxon?” he called to them.
They shook their heads.
Grunt patted them down and didn’t find any weapons.
“You ran off from the fight and got lost in the desert?” the mercenary asked.
They nodded. Their mouths looked too swollen to speak.
Despite all these two had put him through, Otto couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. Grunt put them in the back of the land Rover and gave them some water. After a few minutes they were able to talk.
“It is as you say,” Nadya croaked. “We cut through the wire at the back of the camp and run away. Too much fighting to get a vehicle, although we did get water before we fled. We
thought we would find a road, a truck, anything. We found nothing. Just sand.”
Those last words came out as mournful whisper. She rested her head back on the seat and closed her eyes.
Otto continued the search pattern they had been conducting before finding the Russians. After an hour, when Nadya and Dimitri had drunk a little more and eaten some food, they had revived enough for Grunt to question them.
“So what are you two up to? Where is the rest of your team?”
Dimitri gave him a grave look. “You killed the rest of our team.”
“One less problem,” Grunt said. “Now answer my other question, what are the Russians doing here?”
Dimitri and Nadya remained silent.
“Otto, stop the car.”
Otto did as Grunt told him. Grunt got out, opened the back door, and dragged Nadya and Dimitri out. He locked and slammed the back door and then got back in the front.
“Go,” Grunt said.
“What?”
“Go!”
Otto put the Land Rover in gear and drove off, his heart beating fast. Grunt couldn’t really mean to ditch them, did he?
Dimitri ran after them, waving his hands in the air and shouting. Nadya just stood there, her head bowed.
“Let’s get back to searching for Jaxon,” Grunt said, scowling out the window.
“Wait. You’re not really going to leave them to die, are you?”
“They’re no help to us and they’re only slowing down the search. Forget them.”
“No, that’s not right, we have to—”
“I said forget them!” Grunt bellowed.
Otto drove for another minute, his mind in turmoil, then he cursed and did a 180, kicking up a big plume of sand.
“Where are you going?” Grunt demanded.
“Back to get them.”
He didn’t have the guts to look at Grunt for a moment, but when he did he found him smiling.
“Huh?” Otto said. It wasn’t the most intelligent thing to say. It just came out.
