by Tom Clancy
Maybe, Nimec thought, they would show him something in the next few minutes that would justify their expense and put his peculiar observations into an explainable context. Something out on the quays across the road, or in the open water beyond the inlet channel and lighthouse, where he’d seen the feeder barges and immense box boat converge. At any rate he hoped some sort of evidence would reveal itself to him, in complete defiance of all his presuppositions. Then his suspicions might quiet down for a time, and he could return to the villa, and slip into bed with Annie. Possibly they could even pick up where they had left off that afternoon, get back to the pleasureful exertions of trying to make the baby they’d decided to have. It could happen—why not? But instinct and prior experience told him that babymaking would have to wait.
Nimec drew his focus in from the vessels he’d been tracking to the nearby waterfront. He hadn’t had a whole lot to notice there since the last of the three feeders had been pulled away by tugs, and that continued to be the case. The crane operators and other shipyard workers who had lowered numerous forty-foot containers onto the barges had come down from the loading bridge. The heavy-load forklifts and straddle carriers that had hauled the containers to the bridge had mostly rolled back to a storage terminal across the yard, and then parked among the stacks of forty-footers still awaiting transport to off-island or interior destinations. A handful of longshoreman had remained on the quay to supervise the movement of trucks toward the terminal, but the occasional directions they were giving through their bullhorns had a perfunctory sound now that the shipment had departed.
Though Nimec’s knowledge of dockside transport practices was limited at best, he believed what he’d seen in the yard to this point was probably S.O.P. Had that been all he’d seen, in fact, he very well might have shot away on his scooter over an hour ago.
It was the deepwater rendezvous that had gotten him wondering. Or what happened during the rendezvous, to be entirely accurate.
Nimec decided it might be time to check on the freighters again, and was shifting his glasses with that in mind when he heard the unmistakable whap of helicopter blades slicing the air. The noise was coming from a moderate distance to his right, and seemed generated by more than a single chopper.
Eager for a look, he angled his binocs up at the sky just as a pair of birds appeared above the dark wall of trees marking the northern edge of the island’s wilderness area. They were clipping along in tandem at an altitude of less than five hundred feet, heading northward almost perpendicular to the shoreline. As they reached the harbor, their flight path took a sharp westerly turn away from shore, coincidentally or not toward the anchored box boat and its feeders.
Nimec studied them through his eyepieces moments before they angled seaward. Like the helicopter he had seen the day before, they were Aug 109’s . . . and now, staring at their magnified images in shades of green, he could definitively tell they were examples of the Stingray patrol variant he’d mentioned to Murthy, conforming to specs that had become thoroughly familiar to him when UpLink had outfitted an entire fleet for U.S. Coast Guard antiterrorism and drug interdiction units. Both had multiple-tube rocket pods under their flared “wings,” FLIR housings for heat-seeking search equipment above their noses, and open port and starboard gunner posts behind the pilot cabin. The pintle guns themselves, he noted, appeared to be Ma Deuces or some lighter weight .50-calibers. Formidable weaponry for safeguarding paradise.
Nimec sighed thoughtfully. What had Murthy said while driving from the airport? The goal at Los Rayos is to make our guests feel secure without their being conscious of security, if my meaning is clear.
It couldn’t have been clearer, Nimec reflected. But he didn’t have to reach further back in his memory than that afternoon and evening for instances on which the security net around the island had been evident to his trained eye. This was his third helicopter sighting, his last one having occurred as he’d piggybacked to shore on Blake the Bronze’s jet ski after his kiteboarding lesson. And later on, when he and Annie were at the beachfront café where they’d gone out for Creole food, he had paid close attention to a Land Rover with black-tinted glass windows that had gone cruising past the parking area, and discerned that it was not only armored but armed . . . or ready for armaments. There were well-camouflaged firing ports on its side, and the rooftop hatch had been set above its rear seat rather than in front, indicating to him that it was likely equipped with interior machine gun mounts.
Nimec grunted to himself, lowered his binoculars. The Stingrays having tailed off over the water, he wanted to resume monitoring the cargo vessels. They were, he’d estimated, somewhere between a quarter and a third of a mile from his position, almost at the limit of his viewing range. The box boat’s enormous bulk was visible in silhouette to his naked eye—probably a thousand feet from stem to stern, with four towering jib booms lined along one side of the deck. It had dwarfed the three- or four-hundred-foot-long feeders as they’d approached it soon after leaving the quay.
Nimec had watched them begin the process of transferring their containers, a feeder barge pulling up under each boom, the larger vessel dropping its cables, the barge crews securing the containers to their lifting slings, the crane teams hoisting them from the feeders onto the box boat’s sizable payload areas. There again, he’d considered none of it exceptional. Even the late hour at which the job got started had seemed normal to him, since commercial harbors commonly operated round-the-clock and had longshoremen working in rotations.
It had been the running of what might have been fuel supply lines from the huge container vessel to the barges midway through their freight transfer that had perplexed Nimec. Hardly anything to make him cry out from the hilltops about demons and goblins spreading wickedness under the full moon, true, but it still struck him as a little conspicuous. Once the hoses were reeled out from hatches in the hull of the box boat and connected to their opposite numbers on the sides of the feeders, he’d heard a sort of dim, mechanical pumping sound echo over the water in the post-midnight silence. And though he couldn’t claim to know what it sounded like when boats fueled up, Nimec had been around enough airports and landing strips to immediately compare it to the rhythmic pulsations of a jet having its tanks refilled.
His problem with this was that feeder ships didn’t need fuel. Or shouldn’t need it. They didn’t have any means of onboard propulsion. Meaning no engines. Granted he was far from a maritime expert, but to his understanding it was why they were attached to tugboats. And say for argument’s sake he was mistaken . . . Nimec had never heard of a container vessel that could double as a tanker and carry fuel for ship-to-ship resupply.
He’d been anything but done pondering that apparent anomaly when a couple of closely related ones had started to crop up in a hurry minutes ago. As the unladen feeders disengaged from the box boat, they proceeded to move on past it rather than make a return trip to the harbor. And watching the water, carefully following their progress, Nimec had seen them go outside the effective range of his G4 lenses and disappear into the dark horizon.
But the tugboats hadn’t. To Nimec’s utter bafflement. On the contrary, they were growing larger in his binoculars at that very moment, plying through the channel, returning to port without the barges.
Try as he might, he couldn’t make sense of that. And the more he thought about it, the more it threw him.
Plain and simple, it defied logic.
Nimec frowned. Speaking of returning to port, he was sure Annie would be worried about him by now. He’d seen things here that had added all kinds of questions to those he’d had before, and knew it would absolutely pay to get some of them answered before he went ahead with his snooping.
Reluctant as he was to do so—or part of him was, anyway—he needed to call it a night.
Still frowning slightly, Nimec brought the binocs down from his eyes and climbed onto the Vespa, suspecting he’d have a great deal to occupy his thoughts on his way back to the villa.
Its bark-colored housing placed just below the crown of fanning leaves at treetop level, the thermal imaging camera that had picked up Nimec where he’d stood was one of a great many like it carefully hidden at outdoor and indoor locations throughout Rayos del Sol—under four ounces in weight and small enough to sit on a man’s palm, with a lens that could be covered by the fleshy part of his thumb. Its chip-based microbolometer sensor technology operated coolly, efficiently, and unnoticeably on an internal low-voltage power supply that required infrequent recharges and allowed it to transmit a continuous gray-scale digital feed across the island using a network of compact microwave amplifiers. From the central observation post where the video feed was initially received and processed, it could be relayed to both fixed and mobile secondary monitoring stations via secure wireless internet at a speed almost indistinguishable from real time—blink twice and it would measure the difference between a captured event and its detection by human observers.
While considerably more than a single pair of eyes had been watching Nimec watch the harbor, the key witness as he mounted his scooter now was seated over two miles north of him in the rear lounge of a Daimler stretch limousine parked outside the flamboyantly decorated and lighted Bonne Chance Casino. Here at the heart of the resort’s entertainment complex, this long-bodied vehicle was not ostentation but camouflage. The Bonne Chance’s wealthy amusement seekers could afford to toy with luck and saw no crime in putting their status and success on display. The Daimler, then, shone only like a diamond in cluster, blending into rather than standing out from the sparkling field of luxury cars in the valet lot.
Skilled at blending in under any and all conditions required of him, Tolland Eckers much preferred the comfortable back of a limo to hiding with his belly down in South American mud and weeds, or with his throat and eyes burned by the freezing cold in rocky Tora Bora, or with the Rhub’ al-Khali’s hot desert grit caking his nostrils. He had roughed it around the globe for almost two decades in service to the Agency; service to Jean Luc Morpaign was a less taxing and dangerous way to earn a living. And, really, it hadn’t compromised his patriotism. Eckers more or less accurately reported his income on his federal returns, paid state taxes on his two hundred-acre property in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, and voted Republican by absentee ballot in every election. To say he’d committed acts that were in betrayal of American interests would be to make naive assumptions about how business worked at the highest levels—Jean Luc was only pissing in a pond where other, bigger fish had already taken their turns.
“Alpha One, this is Gray Base,” a voice said in Eckers’s headset. “Do you want us to stay tight on our man?”
Eckers considered that a moment, studying the picture on his screen as the guest from San Jose mounted his Vespa.
“Let’s not ease up too much,” he said. “I want him covered till he’s returned to the nest.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the standing order.”
“I know the order, Gray Base.”
“Yes, sir . . .”
“I said make sure. Don’t get lazy about this or I’ll have your ass.”
“I’ll oversee the check myself, sir.”
“You do that,” Eckers said. “And report in to me afterward.”
“Yes, s—”
Eckers reached for his headset’s belt control and lowered the volume, needing to think without distraction. When Jean Luc had told him of Nimec’s impending visit weeks ago, he’d known he had a potentially serious problem on his hands. But he could strike the word “potentially” tonight. The situation had heated up sooner than expected—although so far as he was concerned, putting out flash fires was simply part of his job. The question for him was whether to contact Jean Luc right away or wait for the morning. Probably he’d hold off on a decision till it was confirmed that their Mr. Nimec had gone back to the villa and was finished poking around for now. Whatever he settled upon, however, Eckers knew it was six of one, half dozen of the other. Jean Luc’s options were narrow. Nimec was a top professional and would have access to a limitless variety of resources at UpLink. There was no telling how much he’d already added up, or who he could contact to help him figure it out. He wouldn’t waste time, though. He certainly hadn’t this far. And he’d seen enough of significance so Jean Luc would understand it was no use to just wait around hoping for the best.
Eckers sat there in silent contemplation, his face bathed in the IR monitor’s bluish-gray radiance, his eyes staring at the now-static image of the roadside opposite the harbor. He could call Jean Luc tonight, he could call him tomorrow morning, but either way was already planning beyond that. He’d dealt with fires before, doused every sort imaginable, and could tell this latest one would need to have water poured on it quickly if he was to keep it from spreading out of hand . . .
And if every last trace of it was going to be washed away, which was precisely what Eckers intended.
Jarvis Lenard cowered at the rear of the shallow cave, his head bent under the irregular furrows of its ceiling, his knees pulled up to his chest, his back flush against cold, damp stone. He scarcely dared move a muscle. The search team was close by; he could hear them through the screen of brush with which he’d covered his hideout’s entrance, their passage making a flurry of unaccustomed sounds in the forest. And minutes earlier, he had done more than hear them. Having left the cave to empty his bladder, Jarvis had caught a glimpse of them within a half dozen yards of where he’d stood watering the ground. It had cut off his flow midstream, but a small discomfort that had been compared to the unpitying hurts Jarvis was firmly convinced his hunters would dole out if he was captured. He’d been far more willing to tolerate the pressing fullness inside him—and if he couldn’t manage that, to foul himself from top to bottom, or suffer any other indignity his mind could conceive—than to have been cost dear by one extra moment out there.
It was the hack of machetes that had alerted him to their approach—and none too soon. Barefoot over the meager puddle he’d created, Jarvis had peered toward the noise and distinguished their outlines in the soft film of moonlight that had sifted its way down through the jungle’s leafy roof. He’d counted five of them in single file, black-clad, rifles at their hips, their curved blades slicing a path through the tangled, twisted masses of vines and branches hindering their progress. They wore goggles Jarvis knew would allow their eyes to see in pitch darkness, and the lead man had been holding what almost looked like a video camera in front of him—but camcorder Jarvis didn’t believe it was, oh no, at least not the type that someone would bring on a vacation to capture the smiling faces of his wife and children. Its handle was like the grip of a pistol, and its enormous lens about equaled the size of its entire body, and there was a wide viewing screen in back that cast a strange bluish-gray light upon the features of the spotter who carried it, giving him the look of a ghostly apparition. Jarvis had noticed these things—the glow especially—and come to realize that the device was a heat-reader akin to those aboard the helicopters scouring the island for him. The friend who had told him of the nightbirds, an aircraft cleaner he’d linked up with at Los Rayos’s employee compound, had described this machinery one night when rum had turned his mouth to chattering, and Jarvis hadn’t forgotten his words: Their picture’s all gray an’ not green, an’ the lenses can do more’n pierce the black’a night. They can see the natural aura’a heat that come off the skin’a everyt’ing alive, see the vapor that leave yah mout’ when ya breath, even see the shape’a yer ass on a chair yah been warmin’ a full quarter hour after yah ’ave lifted yerself off it.
Jarvis Lenard had stood with his heart pounding against his ribs as the spotter paused ahead of the others in line behind him, and swept the heat-reader first from side to side, and then up toward the treetops. Last, he’d bent and aimed its lens toward the ground . . . and that was when Jarvis had taken the opportunity to flee, scampering back to the cave entrance before the man could straighten, or resume moving forward with his team. St
ill hanging out of his pants, he’d dropped onto his stomach, wriggled in under his brush cover, hurried to replace whatever foliage he’d disturbed, and scampered through the claustrophobic, rough-walled tube of rock, which narrowed like a periwinkle shell toward the back to end in a tight, angling notch where he’d finally hunkered down in dread.
Squatted on his heels in that little sideways cut now, Jarvis took a deep breath, another, and then a third, making an effort to slow his racing heartbeat. But his throat had tightened with fear, and only thin snatches of air seemed to reach his lungs, and the hard throbbing in his rib cage did not ease up. He continued to pull in breath after breath, regardless, understanding he must try to be calm . . . must try mightily to remain still and silent if he was to have any chance of avoiding capture, however easier it might be said than done. From what he could hear, his stalkers had gotten to within a few paces of the cave entrance and stopped again. To its left, as it seemed to him. Had they come this far into the woods because they had picked up his trail? Or was it plain, fickle chance that had brought them here?
Jarvis Lenard could not know. Yet he did know that the side of the cave where they had now made their second halt was the same side he’d chosen for taking care of his business, and that the spot of a puddle he’d left there could madly enough do him in. For it had struck him that a device able to read a man’s lingering body heat on a seat cushion would also detect the warmth of his freshly released urine. And if it were to meet the notice of those who sought him, acting like to a beacon, glowing on the face of that viewscreen as though the pecker that had peed it had been flooded with radioactivity . . .
Jarvis had a moment when he was gripped by a suicidal urge to laugh aloud at that thought—or rather cough out an anxiety-fraught mockery of laughter. But he managed to suppress it, refusing to yield to crazed hysteria. The Sunglasses might take him, yes, they might. He was determined not to serve himself up to them on a platter, though.
