It took Linc and Eddie fifteen minutes of belly crawling to get in position around the corner just out of sight of the cement plant. They settled into a ditch thirty feet from the road, with the RPG now resting on Linc’s stomach.
“I’m ready,” he said to Eddie.
“Same here.” Eddie radioed to Linda. “Show them the sacrificial lamb.”
“Coming your way.”
The PIG accelerated from its hiding space until it passed them, providing a rich target for the Ratel and its cannon. As soon as the armored vehicle was in view, the PIG’s bumper-mounted machine gun chattered, but the rounds bounced off the Ratel’s outer hull as expected. The PIG made a spinning U-turn in the gravel as the 20mm cannon shells sizzled past. It passed Linc and Eddie again and had nearly reached the safety of the rock outcropping when smoke began to pour from the rear. The PIG veered wildly off the road and disappeared down the embankment toward the lake.
That was the cue for the Ratel to give chase and it didn’t disappoint. The vehicle’s commander was obviously confident that he’d scored a mortal shot and wanted to verify his kill.
The Ratel roared past Linc and Eddie’s ditch and came to a stop at the top of the embankment while smoke continued to rise from the wreckage of the PIG. The side doors popped open and four men in camo gear and helmets jumped out, aiming their assault rifles in the PIG’s direction.
Linc and Eddie leaped from their hiding spot and rushed at the men.
“Drop your weapons!” they both shouted in the crude Creole that MacD had taught them over the radio.
Bazin’s mercenaries were either brave or too stupid to realize when they were caught with their pants down. They crouched against the Ratel and raised their weapons to fire.
That was all the warning they’d get. Eddie expertly took down three of them while Linc got the fourth with his sidearm pistol. But the driver inside the Ratel didn’t know when he’d been beaten. He backed it up and swiveled the main cannon around to fire at them.
Linc shook his head at the idiocy. He holstered the pistol, shouldered the RPG, and pulled the trigger before the cannon was in position. The antitank round blew the armored vehicle apart.
He dropped the empty tube and kicked the gravel in frustration.
“There goes our Return of the Jedi plan,” Linc said.
“It was a good idea,” Eddie said. He called to Linda. “What’s the damage to the PIG?”
“Nothing at all,” she replied. “With Eric’s snappy driving, they completely missed. The smokescreen worked just like you thought it would.”
The PIG powered its way up the embankment, the smoke now dissipating.
The two of them walked over and checked the mercenaries. All of them were corpses.
Eddie looked at the largest of the bodies and then at Linc as if he were comparing them.
“What’s going on in that devious mind of yours?” Linc asked.
“You could pass for a Haitian from a distance.”
“I suppose so, but we don’t have the Ratel anymore.”
“We still have the PIG. What if the mercenaries captured it and drove it back? As long as they thought you were one of the them, we could get within visual range of the last Ratel. The PIG does have one rocket left.”
Linc thought about the plan and nodded. “I like the idea, but we need something to really sell it.”
“Like what?”
Linc picked up one of the mercenaries’s walkie-talkies and started pulling off the uniform of the least bloody soldier. “We’re going to require MacD’s language skills one more time.”
—
Bazin tried to raise the third Ratel on the radio and got only static in reply. He peered from his concealed window within the main building, but all he could make out was a plume of smoke over the hill.
If the Ratel had been taken out, it still didn’t change anything. For Cabrillo and his men to attack, they would be endangering the lives of sixty hostages. And a straight-on assault would be suicidal, with the Ratel he had left and the number of men still deployed outside.
A vehicle came around the hill, but it wasn’t the missing Ratel. It was the truck that the Corporation called the PIG. He was about to order the remaining Ratel to open fire when he saw one of his men standing in the PIG’s open roof, waving his gun and shouting with glee. He could see two more men inside the cab, driving their prize back to the cement plant.
The man in the roof had a walkie-talkie to his mouth. Bazin listened on his, but the voice was almost unintelligible with the wind and engine noise. He was shouting in Creole that they had captured the American’s truck and not to shoot.
“Stand down,” he radioed to the rest of the men.
Kensit had given him the intel on Linda Ross and her men, but he had been keeping an eye on them only in short spurts, when he could divert his attention away from the drone mission. Bazin didn’t object since he had the situation under control and the Haitian National Police on the way as backup.
As the captured PIG approached, Bazin confidently called Kensit back with the intention of telling him his services wouldn’t be needed anymore and to concentrate on destroying Air Force Two.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Kensit shouted when he answered, shocking Bazin, who’d never heard Kensit so out of control.
“What are you talking about? We’ve captured the Corporation’s vehicle. It’s over.”
“It’s not over! I can’t see anything. Something happened to Sentinel. My screen went blank and I can’t contact any of the techs. I’m trying to reconnect now. You get your butt in there and find out what’s going on. And don’t waste any more time. Set the self-destruct. I’ll need an hour to complete the mission. Go!”
He hung up.
Bazin was about to turn and head for the tunnel when he realized that Kensit hadn’t been able to watch what was happening in the battle between the Ratel and the PIG.
He looked out the window with dawning horror. The PIG was close enough now for him to make out the faces of the men and he noticed two things at once: the driver of the PIG had a bullet hole through his forehead and the man on top of the vehicle shouting in Creole was not one of his men. It had to be Franklin Lincoln.
He raised his radio to tell his forces to open fire, but it was too late. A rocket shot from the side of the PIG and hit the last Ratel, blowing it to pieces and his men around it to the ground.
Bazin heard Lincoln yelling for the hostages to get down. They dived to the ground as one and the machine gun behind the PIG’s fake bumper chewed through the mercenaries like a meat grinder. Eddie Seng joined Lincoln on the roof of the PIG and added his firepower to the assault. Two more of his men fell to sniper fire. The rest scattered for cover. It was only a matter of time before they were defeated.
Bazin was furious that Kensit couldn’t keep his precious machine running properly during the time when they needed it most. He knew a technical glitch in such a complicated device was inevitable. His only choice now was to get in to Sentinel, set the self-destruct, and escape in the speedboat he had stashed in one of the outbuildings along the water. Although he never expected the cement plant to fall, he always planned for the worst, so he also had a hidden SUV waiting for him on the other side of the lake.
As for his mercenaries, with the money he was pulling in from the drug lords, he could always hire more. And when Sentinel 2 was up and running, he could buy as many of them as he wanted. Haiti would still be his.
But he couldn’t let them capture Sentinel 1 intact. Kensit had been clever to build in a self-destruct that was more than simply an explosive to obliterate the equipment. Equipment was replaceable. It was the Oz cave, with its unique natural properties, that was the real treasure. Someone could eventually clear it out and build a replica of Sentinel.
Kensit had rigged Sentinel itself to prevent t
hat from happening. The device used a five-pound cobalt 60 core scavenged from used medical equipment to focus the neutrinos. The cave itself was slightly radioactive now, but nothing hazardous. However, detonating the core inside the cave would make the interior dangerously radioactive for generations. It would be impossible to build another neutrino telescope inside it.
As the battle raged outside, Bazin picked up an RPG from the weapons stockpile in case the Corporation helicopter tried to chase him across the lake. Armed with an Uzi submachine gun, he took off into the tunnel toward the Oz cave to start the sequence that would destroy Sentinel 1 forever.
The two techs had played dumb, responding to Juan’s questions in Russian, but he shocked them when he asked them fluently in their native tongue where Kensit was. He was also very eloquent about what would happen to them if they didn’t cooperate. Their bravery exhausted, the techs switched to English and told him that Kensit was on a yacht where he was monitoring the feed from the neutrino telescope that he had named Sentinel.
One of the screens on the control panel was slaved to the view that Kensit had from his remote location. Juan had been amazed to see it switch from a close-up of Linda to a shot of the PIG as it raced toward a Ratel armored vehicle.
Juan’s first instructed them to deactivate the view altogether. Without it, his crew had a fighting chance at whatever they were attempting. The screen abruptly went dark, surely causing Kensit to go apoplectic. A phone on the console rang insistently, but he told the Russians to ignore it.
Then Juan had a better idea.
“Do you know how this thing works?” he asked them. When they hesitated, he and Trono pointed the barrel of their MP-5s in the techs’ faces.
“We can operate it,” one of the techs said, “but that’s all.”
“Do you know Kensit’s location?”
He quickly nodded and pointed at a monitor showing the latitude and longitude. “That’s where the signal is being beamed to,” the tech said.
“Time for a demo,” Juan said. “Show me Kensit’s cozy little hideaway.”
The tech nodded and eased over to the console, where he nervously manipulated the controls until a new image came up on the screen. It was an overhead view of a white hundred-foot yacht lazily cruising an azure sea. The image zoomed down as if it were a kamikaze dive bomber. The virtual camera plunged through the deck until it stopped in a room with a console that looked identical to the one in the cave.
“Pan around,” Juan said. “Get a shot of this, Mike.”
Trono held up his phone to video what they were watching.
The place was a sty, with empty cans and plates of food littering the floor. On the wall there was a map of Mexico with a pin stuck into a spot on the Yucatán Peninsula marked “Phase 2” in a sloppy scrawl. Papers with jotted equations and notes were strewn across the desk. A journal lay on the end of it. Gunther Lutzen’s name was penned in neat letters on the cover.
The camera kept moving until it settled on Kensit himself. He stared wide-eyed directly at the screen as if he could see them.
But he couldn’t see them. Kensit was monitoring the view from Sentinel, so he was actually seeing himself on his own screen. His mouth began to move.
“Turn up the volume,” Juan said.
The tech adjusted the sound and they heard Kensit’s reedy voice: “. . . couldn’t have gotten in there. If it’s you, Cabrillo, I want you to know you’re too late. If you survive the rest of the day, which I doubt, you’ll see what little impact all of your efforts have made. Now it’s time to say good-bye.”
The screen went blank.
“What happened? Get it back!” Juan demanded.
“We can’t,” the tech said, backing away. “Kensit can control the software remotely from his location. He’s probably locked out our ability to operate Sentinel and switched off the real-time feed to this console. But from his remote site he can still watch and control what Sentinel sees.”
“What’s he planning today?”
They hesitated again, but Juan could see that they knew. They backed up some more as if trying to edge their way toward the exit to make a run for it.
“Tell me,” he growled. “Now!”
“Okay, okay,” one of the techs said, his hands raised in supplication. “He’s going to shoot down—”
A torrent of bullets tore into the chests of both techs. They came from the direction of the man-made tunnel leading to the cement plant. The only reason Juan and Trono were spared the same fate was because of the hulking mass of Sentinel machinery between them and the tunnel.
Juan and Trono scrambled behind one of the selenium pillars. Juan barely brushed against it and the razor edge ripped his fatigues. Diving for cover was not going to be an attractive option in this cave.
In the reflection of a huge crystal, Juan could see that it was Bazin who had killed the two techs. He was hunched over the console, typing with one hand while training his Uzi in their direction with the other. An RPG was propped against the console next to him.
Juan motioned for Trono to try to flank him at the tunnel’s entrance by circling around the immense telescope.
“I know what you’re doing, Cabrillo,” Bazin called out. “I’d try to flank me, too. It won’t work.”
“Why?” Juan replied. “Because Kensit is telling you where we are?”
“It’s an incredible advantage, isn’t it?”
“I know my people are outside. You can’t escape.”
“I’d be more worried about this bomb if I were you.”
Juan watched him typing and realized what he was enabling. “Have you got yourselves an old-fashioned self-destruct mechanism there?”
“It’s state-of-the-art,” Bazin said. “I suggest you go back the same way you came in here if you don’t want to self-destruct as well.” He made one last press with a flourish and said, “There. Au revoir, mon capitaine.”
Bazin picked up the RPG and backed away slowly, but Juan had no intention of letting him get away. He didn’t have a direct shot at Bazin, but he wouldn’t have taken it anyway. He needed Bazin alive to tell him what Kensit’s target was.
He waited until Bazin was under a crystal stalactite dangling above like a chandelier. He unloaded his entire thirty-round magazine into it, showering Bazin with shards that cut him in a hundred places.
Bazin dropped the RPG to shield himself from further mutilation, but he kept hold of the submachine gun, shooting wildly in Juan’s direction. Blood gushed over his eyes. When the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, Juan rushed him.
He expected Trono to do the same, but more gunshots came from the tunnel. Some of Bazin’s soldiers must have come to his rescue and Trono returned fire to keep them at bay, causing Juan to be one-on-one with Bazin.
Juan slammed into Bazin, throwing him to the metal flooring. Bazin leaned over and Juan gave him a solid punch to the kidneys.
What he forgot was that Bazin knew more about Juan than most any other opponent ever had.
While Bazin was absorbing Juan’s punches, he grabbed for Juan’s prosthetic leg. Bazin knew exactly how the combat version was strapped on and yanked at the buckles holding it to Juan’s calf. It came free, sending Juan tumbling over. He was able to grab it away from Bazin, but giving chase would be impossible now.
Bazin wiped his eyes clear, scrabbled over to the Uzi, and popped the magazine out. Before Juan could snap the combat leg open to retrieve his Colt Defender, Bazin sprinted across the cave to find cover where he could reload and then finish Juan off.
Juan fired as Bazin retreated to keep him from ducking behind the closest crystal column. He thought he nicked Bazin in the leg just as he ran into the passageway where Juan and Trono had entered from the underwater cavern.
Juan heard the distinctive click of a magazine being rammed home and noticed that now he was the one under t
he chandelier of doom. If Bazin tried the same trick of firing into the cave ceiling, Juan would be a sitting duck.
Even though he wanted Bazin alive, Juan didn’t have a choice. He rolled over and snatched up the RPG. Balancing himself on his stump, he aimed at the passageway and pulled the trigger.
The RPG lanced out on a tongue of fire and struck the ceiling, sending a rain of limestone down and collapsing the entire opening. When the haze cleared, there was no doubt that the passageway to the underwater entrance had been completely sealed. Bazin was gone.
Even as he was pulling the trigger, Juan thought that firing the RPG might set off a chain reaction of ceiling collapses. He held his breath as many of the huge crystals trembled and cracked. A few fragments fell harmlessly, then all was quiet.
Juan rushed to reattach his leg and help Trono fend off the remaining mercenaries, but as soon as he had it back on and was standing, he realized that the gunfire had ceased.
Trono cautiously emerged from behind the pillar.
“Special delivery for Juan Cabrillo!” yelled Linc’s baritone from inside the tunnel to the cement plant. “We’ve got a box of chocolates for you if you don’t shoot us.”
“Come on in!” Juan yelled back. “We’re starving.”
Linc strode forward into the light and his jaw dropped to his chest as his gaze quickly took in the spectacle of Sentinel and the giant crystals of the Oz cave.
“That must have been what we looked like when we got here,” Juan said to Trono.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him speechless before,” Trono replied.
“Is everything buttoned-up out there?” Juan asked Linc.
“Five remaining men gave up after seeing the rest of their buddies go down. It’s a mess. Bazin had sixty men digging tunnels down here. They were nearly starved to death. Linda is scrounging up what food she can find for them.” He waved behind him. “I’ve got someone you should meet.”
A disheveled but proud Haitian was escorted in by Eddie. After gawking at the cave, he shook hands with a firm grip when he was introduced to Juan.