by JC Ryan
“Others?”
“Yes, JR Rossler, Dr. Rebecca Mendenhall and Cyndi Self. Paul LeClerc was killed by a fall in the cave. JR and the women went the opposite direction from Summers and me. We’re to meet by hugging the perimeter and report what we’ve found in the way of an exit. I guess this one leads to the outside?”
“We’re in the same cave system where you and the expedition went in. We blasted the fallen rock clear of the entry you used.”
“What? How? We only found one exit into the valley, and this wasn’t it.”
“There are three, and we did know about the valley, though we couldn’t see into it with the satellite. Do you know why?”
“Not unless the heavy clouds above interfere with the optics. Do you mean to say that we can now get out the way we came in?”
“YOU can. The rest of your colleagues are going to meet with unfortunate accidents.”
“Of course. By ‘we’, I meant you gentlemen and myself. How can I help?”
“Is any of your party armed?”
“Not that I know of.”
Pyotr ran his eyes over Carmen’s slender form in a familiar way, wondering where in the world she was concealing it. Shrugging, he said, “Go out and make some excuse to Summers to wait where he is, then proceed toward your meeting point. Lead the others back here. Meanwhile, we’ll take care of Summers. When you get here, suggest a search party. We’ll take care of the rest.”
Carmen hesitated. “There’s one I’d like to leave alive.” Robert would owe her his life; surely he’d be grateful.
“Which one?” Pyotr asked.
“The geologist. You’ll know which one he is. The other man in the party is freakishly tall. Don’t shoot the shorter man, for now. I want him for myself.” If Pyotr thought she meant to torture and kill, it would go better. He nodded.
“As you wish.”
Carmen turned and retraced her steps out of the opening, finding Summers seated exactly where he said he’d be. Carmen pasted a big smile on her face and bounded out of the cave, calling to Summers excitedly.
“Charles, I’ve found it! It’s a huge passageway, and it leads directly to the outside. Whoever cultivated this valley must have made an artificial opening.”
Summers started up from his seat, an expression of surprise and relief on his face. “You went all the way to the end?”
“Yes, it’s just a short way. I could see the Sno-Cat. Listen, let me run to get the others, while you go out and make sure Roosky and Bart don’t leave without us. It’s not a tight enclosure, I promise. More like a tunnel than a cave, and it’s light all the way.”
Summers opened his mouth to protest that it would be better if he went to get the others, while she once again traversed the tunnel and alerted Roosky and Bart that they were alive. However, Carmen was already sprinting away. He’d never catch her. Seeing her speed, he thought she’d had the correct idea after all. He stood for a moment, looking at the ground before him while gathering his courage to step inside the cleft.
Summers had just heaved a sigh of resignation and looked up. Instead of the mouth of the tunnel, what he saw at first stunned and confused him. Six large figures in military gear stood before him, and every one of them was pointing a gun at him. One of them gestured upwards with his rifle. Slowly, Summers raised his hands. Despite the mistakes he’d made on this mission, Summers wasn’t a stupid man. Instantly, he realized that Carmen must have met up with these men, and the fact that she hadn’t mentioned it implicated her in a betrayal. He had to find a way to signal the others that they were walking into a trap, but how?
As Summers’ mind worked furiously, the leader of the soldiers, as Summers thought of them, walked toward him and shoved him roughly back onto his seat. He gestured for Summers to put his hands behind his back. Summers complied, thinking that perhaps they were being taken prisoner for some unknown infraction. Could this be a remnant of the 9th Cyclers, guarding a place that was sacred to them? Or, was it a more sinister group? In any case, there was nothing to be gained by resisting. If he played his cards right, perhaps he’d be able to somehow warn the others before it was too late. He sat quietly as his hands were secured behind him by a nylon zip tie.
Once he was secure, he ventured a question. “Who are you?”
His reward was not an answer, but a powerful backhanded blow to the side of his face and head. He reeled, blood beginning to trickle from a cut at the corner of his lip. Okay, they don’t want to tell me, he thought, with a touch of irony. He watched as the leader deployed his men here and there behind cover from anyone approaching from their right as they faced him. If they wanted to kill the expedition party, their superior weapons meant they could simply open fire as the group came into view.
But, perhaps one or two could escape by running into the jungle, away from the gunfire. Then the soldiers would have to waste valuable time hunting them down. After all, they were constrained by the Antarctic winter weather conditions as much as anyone else. Summers continued to think and analyze the situation, though his head was pounding from the blow he’d received. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Chapter 27 – Charles Injured
Robert happened to be in the lead when Carmen reached the group three hours later. She threw herself into his arms and sobbed. Alarmed, he took her by the arms and held her away from him so that he could see her face.
“What is it, love?” he asked. Carmen knew that the endearment was merely what he called any woman he happened to be talking to, but it still gave her a thrill to hear it directed at her.
“Charles…injured,” she sobbed.
“What? Where?” he shouted, bringing the others at a run. JR appeared from within the jungle ahead of the rest and quickly strode back to the group.
“What’s going on? Oh, hi Carmen, where’s Charles?” he said, watching her closely.
“She says he’s injured,” Robert said of the sobbing woman. Rebecca came forward and put her hand on Carmen’s shoulder.
“Carmen, sit down here,” she said, indicating a fallen log. “Take a deep breath. Now, please tell us what’s happened. Are you all right?”
Carmen took a deep breath as instructed. Then she began to speak in a shaky voice. “We found a way out,” she started.
Immediately, the others broke into shouts and relieved laughter, before she held up her hand. “Charles didn’t want to go in, you know how he is. Anyway, I was in the lead, and I heard a sound behind me. He had walked into something and hit his head. Somehow, I got him out, and he was bleeding from a gash on his head. I didn’t know what to do, or how far away you all were, so I made him sit down, put a bandage on his head and made him as comfortable as I could and then I ran to find you.”
“You left a man with a head injury?” Rebecca asked, outraged.
“I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have anything else to help him. Please, you have to come quickly.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been running for a long time, but I don’t have a good estimate of how long. The opening wasn’t all that far from where we started.” No one but JR noticed that Carmen’s story didn’t add up. There was no blood on her clothing from Summers’ wound, and she hadn’t even broken a sweat in this long run she described. Nevertheless, he’d have to go along with it until he knew more. She could be dangerous to the others if she knew he suspected her of an untruth. He hadn’t forgotten that LeClerc had disappeared while with her, too.
Robert and JR had a quick consult to calculate, and decided that they’d come more than halfway from their meeting point to where they had separated at the beginning. That meant there could be as much as four miles to go to reach Summers. JR looked over at the others to be sure he wasn’t overheard, then told Robert of his suspicions.
“Don’t let Carmen out of your sight. Something’s wrong here, and I’m beginning to suspect we brought half the damned OS with us.” Though he was shocked, Robert agreed that there’d be no
harm in being careful.
“I want to take Rebecca with me in case she can do something for Summers, though I suspect he may be dead already. You and the other women come more slowly. I want at least an hour between us.”
Their plan formed, JR stepped over to Rebecca.
“Becca, I think you and I can move more quickly if we go on ahead. Carmen’s exhausted, so we’ll leave her with the others here while we go ahead to help Summers. Are you up for moving fast?”
Neither of them noticed that Carmen started to object, but stopped protesting when they took no notice of her. She wanted to lead them into the ambush, but maybe this was better. Breaking them up would ensure that no mistakes were made. The OS would get them all in the end, anyway.
Rebecca, who ran for fun, gave JR a sardonic look. “Race you.”
JR grinned back at her. “You don’t want to challenge me like that.” Without another word, he broke into an awkward lope, knowing that if he ran full-out, he’d both leave her behind and run out of steam within a mile. Rebecca was beside him in seconds, her medical kit in its backpack slapping her back as she jogged.
“How long can you keep this up?” JR panted.
“Oh, ten miles or so,” she answered.
Jeez, she’ll do better than I will, he thought. It couldn’t have been more than four or five miles to get to Summers. At their current speed, they’d reach him in an hour or less, but it was hard to talk. And he needed to talk to Rebecca before they got there. He slowed his pace a bit and she dropped back to match it.
“Becca, were you looking at Carmen’s face when she told how Summers got injured?”
“No, she was turned away from me. Why?”
“Something’s off. I think she was lying.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Because she’s another one of them, maybe?”
“Who?”
“You know, like Misty. The OS,” he answered, his mouth twisted with bitterness.
Rebecca stopped running, and after a couple of steps JR managed to stop, too. He turned to face her.
“What would make you think that?” she demanded.
“For one thing, she never met anyone’s eyes when she was telling that story. Whenever she saw I was looking at her eyes, they’d slide away from me. There was no blood on her from Charles’ wound, and where would she get a bandage? She wasn’t sweating or even breathing hard from supposedly running all that way. The whole story was just, I don’t know. Weird. Incomplete.”
Rebecca was quick to understand. “You’re right, that’s weird. I didn’t notice any of it, I was so worried about Charles. Do you think he’s really injured, or…” Rebecca didn’t finish her sentence, not sure what the alternative might be.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think we should run headlong the whole distance. In fact, I’m not sure how far that distance is. She could have been lying about that, too.”
“Would she have lied about finding a way out? Why would she do that? What’s she up to?” Rebecca’s fearful questions burned JR to the heart. He took her hand.
“Becca, I’m going to level with you. You know Misty was a spy, and I’m almost certain she was OS. I think Roosky was, too. He brought that cave down on us deliberately. That was an explosion, not the rock giving way, I’d bet my last vital organ on it. I don’t know what Carmen is up to, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was an ambush waiting for us, based on the way she didn’t want us to go ahead without her. We need to go carefully, see what’s up there, before we run straight into it. If Charles can be helped, it won’t be until after we’ve taken care of that danger.
“But, don’t worry, sweetheart, we’ll get out, even if we have to go back into that cave and dig ourselves out. We need to be smart about this. I need to reconnoiter, and right now is as good a time as any. I want you to conceal yourself in the jungle while I climb that tall tree over there, so I can see what’s up ahead. All right?”
Rebecca nodded, distracted that he’d called her sweetheart, and now that she thought of it, he’d been using her family nickname ever since they got to the valley. She slipped into the dense tangle of vines and trees. When he could no longer see her, JR whistled to let her know that she had gone far enough. Then he scaled the tree as he’d been doing periodically around the entire valley. He could only see about half a mile ahead, by his reckoning, but there didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary there.
He whistled to Rebecca to come back out as he descended, and they resumed their jog, running for about ten minutes before he stopped again to repeat the lookout process. In this way, they continued for the next two miles or so. It was at the next repeat that JR found what he was looking for. Something was definitely wrong about the scene he beheld.
Chapter 28 - Take Them Out One By One
One hundred yards away, JR could see Summers sitting slumped with his hands behind his back. He quickly located Rebecca, hidden from the trail but visible to him from his vantage point. She was watching him. He put his forefinger to his mouth in a shushing gesture, and she instinctively ducked, then looked up at him again. He nodded, gave her a ‘stay’ gesture with his palm, and descended. He’d seen no one but Summers, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone. He needed to get closer, but for this mission, he’d make his way through the jungle.
Ten yards further toward Summers, he climbed another tree, careful not to rustle any leaves. Unfortunately, it was one of the jaboticaba trees, which meant he was going to climb down covered in purple juice, but it couldn’t be helped; this was the only tree of any height where he wanted to climb again. As he reached the highest branches, he wished for more cover. Below him, perhaps another ten yards away, was a figure dressed in black military gear and holding an automatic rifle. An AK-47, he thought. The man appeared to be asleep, which would probably result in his squad leader shooting him if JR didn’t take him out first.
JR was trained in hand-to-hand combat, but he had to get down from the tree without waking the man, and without Becca calling out to him. He turned around and caught her eye again, repeating the shush and stay gestures. Then he began backing carefully down the tree, squashing more fruit as he went. An idea occurred to him and he deliberately squashed some with his hands, smearing the juice over his face. Not for camouflage at the moment, it wouldn’t do that, but for the startle effect. If the man woke while he was approaching, an extra second or two while he processed what he was seeing could mean the difference between life and death for JR and his party.
JR crept back to where Rebecca was waiting, anxiety written on her face. He whispered, barely making a sound, that they had been right in their suspicions. There was an armed guard not far from their current position, but he didn’t know yet how many in all. He’d have to determine the force they were up against before forming a plan. Fear gripped Rebecca, but her medical training to never show it helped keep her calm. Before JR could leave to carry out his mission, she put her arms around him.
“Please be careful, Josh, I want you back in one piece.” JR’s heart skipped a beat. She’d called him Josh, something only his mom and sometimes Sarah did any more. Her arms around him became his total world for a second, before he gave her a confidant smile and started to camouflage himself as best he could.
Moist earth from beneath a tangle of vines joined the purple juice on his face, making it almost black. Then he wove vines and leaves into his clothing and hair, until he was satisfied it was the best he could do. Even if they saw him coming, maybe they’d think he was some sort of swamp monster, instead of a lethal ex-Marine, bent on destruction. Rebecca smiled when he expressed the thought, and told him he would certainly scare most people out of their wits, a giant moving bush being a very scary thing. Hurriedly, he put his backpack down next to her and turned to go.
Within ten minutes, he’d located three of them out of the six or eight he reckoned were in the vicinity. One was the sleeping guard he’d seen at first. The others were a
rrayed in a pattern that appeared to expect their party coming in from the left as he faced the canyon wall. If he could take these out without any noise, the odds would be a lot better, and he’d be able to get closer to Summers and find out if he knew where the others were. JR checked his back trail often as he crept into position, a silent and deadly soldier again. It wouldn’t do to have one of them sneak up on him while he was sneaking up on them.
He crept silently through the jungle until he was behind the sleeping sentry. Shaking his head, JR hoped that the others, if there were others, were as sloppy as this man. He moved forward stealthily. He wasn’t quite within reach when the man woke with a start. JR froze. Had he made a noise? If the man turned, he’d have to lunge; he was in plain sight.
JR waited, his breath held. The man in front of him seemed to relax, though his head remained upright. He was awake now, and this would be harder. But, not too hard for a Marine. JR leapt forward, his right arm sweeping around to pull the man’s arm off his rifle, his left circling the neck. As soon as he’d wrenched the man’s arm from the rifle, his right hand covered the guy’s mouth, and, with a quick jerk, JR broke his neck. The slight sounds of the scuffle might have been heard; JR wasn’t sure the next sentry wasn’t within hearing distance. With as little noise as possible, he dragged the man several yards into the jungle and then went back to retrieve his rifle. One down, two to go and how many more?
JR made his way back to Becca, whose eyes widened when she saw the rifle.
“Where? What?”
“Shh,” JR whispered. “I have to go back up the tree. Take this.” Showing her how to use the rifle if she needed to, JR melted back into the jungle. He knew that two more of the black-clad figures were between his location and Summers, who appeared to be unconscious. He marked their locations in his mental map of the area crept toward his objective again. Without knowing precisely how many he was up against, or where the others might be, the better part of valor would be to take these two out silently, one at a time, rather than to go in blazing with the Kalashnikov. He went back to the first man and searched his body for a knife, finding one slid down into the soldier’s boot.
