“I did, and I thank you very much.” The driver tumbled out as well, and Mac returned their salutes. “My support staff had an errand headin’ the other way, and I have business at the airport.”
“We can drop you. Do you need us to drop you? We’ll drop you.”
“I appreciate it,” Mac said, as he shoved his bags ahead of him and climbed in back. “What’s goin’ on in Petra?”
“We got ’em, sir,” the driver said, turning up the radio. Mac rested his forehead in his hand as if trying to listen carefully. He prayed desperately for his comrades. “Smoked ’em all. There’ll be nothing left to bury.”
“Let me hear it, boys,” Mac said, and the two fell silent. Just before the connection was lost, Mac heard enough from the pilot to encourage him. “Well, that is good news, isn’t it?” he said.
The passenger turned. “Sure enough. I don’t know what to make of that last bit, but we got ’em; we sure did.”
At the airport Mac could hardly believe the disarray. What was left of the GC force there looked undisciplined and lackadaisical. That could work only to his advantage. “I need wheels,” he told the only Peacekeeper who rose and saluted him in the main hangar. “I need the key to those wheels, I want to store my stuff, and I want to see a Rooster Tail, if it’s here.”
“Oh, it’s here, sir, and we’ve been expecting you. I’ll take your stuff.”
“Did I say I wanted you to take my stuff?”
“No, sir, you plain as day said you wanted to store it yourself.” He ran to a desk where he dug keys out of a huge cardboard box. “The Rooster Tail’s in Hangar 6. The car’s the first one on the end. I can bring it to you.”
“You do that.”
“Oh, almost forgot. I’ve got to put your code into the computer and—”
“Not before you bring the car, you don’t.”
“Well, that’s true enough.” And he ran off.
Mac was aware of others staring at him, sitting straighter, looking busy. But nothing seemed to be going on, no planes coming or going.
“Gonna get us some help here, Commander?” someone called from across the room.
Mac glared at him. “Excuse me, officer?”
“I said, are you—”
“I heard what you said! Now get your seat out of that chair and address me properly!”
The man rose quickly and caught his foot on a wheel of the chair, stumbling before he righted himself and approached. Mac leveled his eyes at him. The man stopped and saluted. Mac ignored it. “You make it a practice to holler at your senior officers across the room?”
“I wasn’t thinking, sir.”
“You had a question.”
“Just wondering if we were going to get some support here, sir. You see how shorthanded we are.”
Mac looked from one side of the hangar to the other and out onto the runway. “You’re overstaffed and underworked, and you know it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No, sir. It’s just that, well, we used to—”
“As you were.”
The man saluted again and backed away. The younger officer skidded Mac’s car to a stop in front of the hangar and opened the trunk. “You want some assistance with that high-speed Transatlantic, sir?”
“I need nothing but a toolbox and to be left to it. What’d you people find in it?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“You’re not serious.”
“We were instructed to leave it for the brass. That would be you, I guess.”
Mac pressed his lips together. Was there nothing Chang Wong could not accomplish with a few keystrokes? “Give me a toolbox and tell me who’s handling the Judah-ite roundup.”
“Sir?”
Mac cocked his head and squinted at the kid. “You tellin’ me we had one of the most successful busts of the underground right under you people’s noses out here, and nobody knows a thing about it?”
“Oh, that, no. Yeah, we knew. We know. I just, I mean, what are you asking?”
“Who’s handling it? They took an operative alive and I want to see him. I’m under orders to see him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know where they were holding him, sir. I mean, I—”
“I didn’t expect you to know where they’re holding him! Did I ask you that?”
“No, sir. Sorry.”
“I expect whoever’s handling the operation for us locally will know that. You follow?”
“Of course.”
“So who is?”
“Guy with a funny name, sir. You’d have to check at headquarters in Ptolemaïs.”
“Happens to be Nelson Stefanich. You in touch with him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you make sure he’s expectin’ me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell ’im I expect all the cooperation and information I need as soon as I get there.”
“Yes, sir. Now could I get you to give me your six-digit security code for the—”
“Zero-nine-one-zero-zero-one,” Mac rattled off, then took the toolbox and drove to the hangar where George Sebastian’s plane had been quarantined. He knew where George hid his arsenal, and within seconds he had removed panels in the cargo hold and lifted a directed energy weapon and a fifty-caliber rifle with bipod into the trunk of the car. He could tell from the safety tab George had positioned on the cargo door that the GC had searched the hold. Clearly, they had not discovered the secret panels.
Mac rushed back to the main hangar. “Clean as a whistle,” he told the young man, handing the toolbox out the window. “Ptolemaïs know I’m comin’?”
“Expecting you, sir.”
George Sebastian pretended to still be asleep. For the last several minutes he had been awake, hearing urgent staticky messages coming to his captors and their earnest, desperate replies, so quiet he could not make out the details.
He lay on his right side, his huge frame pressing into the packed dirt floor. He was cold, stiff, and ravenous. His right arm was asleep from the elbow to the tips of his fingers. He was handcuffed behind his back. George’s head and face throbbed, and he tasted blood.
He heard soft snoring behind him. Oh, if only his hands were free. He would position himself to get blood flowing into that right arm again, would move silently into position. And if the sleeping guard was the only one with him, he could pounce, disarm the man, and silence him in a second. George turned painfully, his whole body aching and desperate for food and water. He rubbed his cheek against the soil enough to push the blindfold away from his eye—just enough to get a peek. Sure enough, the guard sat there asleep, one arm dangling, his high-powered weapon in his lap. Strange. Maybe he was wrong, but George thought he had figured out the hierarchy of this crew. The big man, who tried to cover a French accent, was not the leader. He talked a lot, but it was the other one—the Greek man George had not injured—who seemed to hold the cards. Yet, unless he was unusually cunning and was trying to fake George into trying something, he was the one who now slept just a few feet from his prisoner.
George’s right arm tingled, but with his left hand he maneuvered enough to feel the handcuffs. Tight and strong. He had broken out of conventional cuffs before, but not ones applied this securely. He heard the door open at the top of the stairs, and the young woman—he’d heard them call her Elena, though she had originally posed as Georgiana—said, “I say give him one last chance, then do what we have to do.”
The big man, George’s double, clomped down the stairs with his handgun out. Elena followed, unarmed, but called back up the stairs, “Come now, Socrates!”
They’ve got a dog?
Elena’s yell woke the leader, and he stood, clearing his throat and wiping his eyes.
“Anything?” the big man asked him.
“Nah. Hasn’t moved.”
“Still alive, isn’t he?”
“Breathing.”
The big man spoke into the ear of the just roused one.
/>
“Really?” the smaller man said. “What time?”
“Nobody knows yet, but today or tonight.”
The leader swore.
George hoped the moved blindfold didn’t show. The big man put a heavy boot on his left shoulder and rolled him roughly onto his back. “Wake up, big boy,” he said, and the leader added, “Last chance.”
George wanted to say, “For what? Uncuff me and take this blindfold off, you coward, and I’ll kill you unarmed.” But he was determined to remain silent. No satisfaction for these amateurs.
Heavy, awkward steps resounded from upstairs, and the guard with the injured knee slowly made his way down. The big man handed his sidearm to Elena and straddled George. He dug his hands under George’s arms, bent his knees, and lifted, grunting as he propped George up against the far wall. George let his chin drop to his chest.
“All right,” the leader said, “Plato, over there, and Socrates, over here.” George thought he was hearing things. He had been one of the few scholarship football players at San Diego State who’d read Greek history, but his mediocre performance on the exams had nudged him toward the military. His mind had to be playing tricks on him. So it was Plato and Socrates who stood six feet from him on each side, their weapons trained on his head? It was the hunger, he decided.
“He tries anything, kill him, but be careful of me.”
The leader—George could only imagine his name—knelt in front of him and yanked off the blindfold. George blinked and squinted but kept staring at the floor. Now the man pressed the barrel of his handgun into George’s forehead and lifted his face. “Look into my eyes and see how serious I am.” George was tempted to spit at him.
“You have been brave, a model prisoner of war. But you have lost. You are down to your last chance. I am willing to waste no more time or energy on you. The only way for you to leave here and see your wife and child again is to tell us what we need to know. Otherwise, I will kill you with a point-blank round through your brain. You have ten seconds to tell me where the Judah-ite safe house is.”
George could think of no reason to disbelieve the man. He was weak, wasted, at the end of himself, but he had succeeded. He had given away nothing, and he would not now. No way he would be allowed to go free even if he gave up Chicago. There was one option, but he didn’t trust himself to choose it. He could make up a story—a long, rambling, nuance-filled tale anyone might believe. It could include a poisonous gas in the cockpit of his plane that would be triggered by someone trying to fly it who didn’t first enter the proper code into the security system.
That might keep the GC from absconding with the Rooster Tail. It might even leave it available for the Trib Force if anyone came to try to spring him. But he was sure Captain Steele and the rest assumed him dead by now, and why not? And if he tried fashioning a story to delay his execution, in his present state he wouldn’t be able to keep it straight—and he couldn’t risk letting something slip that might be true.
George let his forehead rest on the muzzle of the gun and kept his mouth shut. He did not want to flinch, to grimace, to shudder. He merely clenched his teeth in anticipation of the shot that would deliver him to heaven.
CHAPTER 3
“We were with the group that had the leaders,” Costas Pappas explained. “The pastor and his wife. The Mikloses. Old man Kronos. His cousin is still with us. You know who all these people are?”
“We know everything,” Chloe said. “But how can you know so much and still survive?”
“Marcel told us the plan the night it happened,” Mrs. Pappas said. “The girl was supposed to have been seen by people in the underground who knew her, but it was just a rumor. Everything seemed to add up. Help from the Tribulation Force, a military man, an operative from America, on his way back from the operation in Israel.”
“But how did you learn what had happened? What did you do when Mr. Miklos and Mr. Kronos did not check back in?”
“We went looking,” Costas said, his lips quivering. Chloe had thought him a bumbling lookout, then an angry young man. But he had to be brave, she decided, to live as he did. This softness touched her. “We knew the plan. We never found the stones at the side of the road. They had either been run over or brushed away. But those animals left that car right where it stopped, not far from there, in plain sight.”
“But surely they were watching it,” Hannah said, “lying in wait for you.”
“We were sure of that,” the boy said. “We drove past quickly, trying to appear as if we were not even looking. But we know K’s car. It was just a few meters off the road—the lights gone dim, the engine off, a door open. We were desperate to search it, to find out what happened, but we didn’t want to be stupid.”
“And so . . . ?”
“We waited. We had to. There was no way to know when they would tire of waiting for someone to come, but after a few days, we could not stand not knowing anymore. Kronos’s cousin lent us a four-wheel-drive truck, and from topography maps we plotted a way to get to the car from the fields rather than the road. We did it after midnight, slowly making our way from tiny trails through thick woods to the open, rocky plain. Cousin Kronos drove, and two others and I walked ahead in dark clothes to be sure no one saw or heard. It had to be three in the morning before we had brought the truck as close as we dared. We could not see Kronos’s car yet, but we knew where it was. When we crawled over a rise where we thought it would come into view, we saw nothing.
“There is no longer money for streetlights, and the battery in the car had long since died. There was no moon and we didn’t dare use our flashlights, so nothing illuminated the car. If the GC were waiting to ambush us, they would not have thought of our coming the hard way, especially that far. We were almost upon the car when we finally saw it in the darkness. We listened and watched and even fanned out to see if we could hear any GC. Then we felt in the car and found the bodies. Maybe we were foolish, but we dared shine our lights, just seconds at a time, our bodies hiding most of the light.”
Costas quivered at the memory and broke down. He struggled to be understood. “All three of them,” he managed. “Shot. Marcel in the face. Back of his head gone. We had to work to pull him from under the dashboard. K took one in the neck from behind. Probably cut his spinal cord. Laslos in the forehead.”
“No sign of the American?”
Costas shook his head. “We dragged the bodies, one by one, all the way back to the truck. They stank and were stiff. It was awful. My friend, who was studying criminology before all of this, determined that whoever shot them was probably in the car with them. We also found Marcel’s bag, one we had given him. It was under Laslos’s body, covered with his blood. It still had a change of clothes and food in it. We do not know what happened to the American.”
Chloe told him and his mother what Steve Plank had reported, that the GC boasted the successful thwart of an escape attempt. “There was an impostor for the girl and for our man. Something went wrong and all this resulted.”
“The American is alive?” Mrs. P. said.
Chloe nodded. “Being held somewhere. They’re probably trying to break him for information, but he’s well trained. We’re more worried he will get himself killed for not cooperating.”
“You must think the GC is stupid,” Costas said.
“Sorry?” Chloe said.
“You come here disguised as GC and you think they will just take you to him.”
“It’s risky, we know.”
“It’s suicide,” Costas said.
“What would you do, son?” Chloe said, realizing that if Costas was younger than she, it wasn’t by much.
He shrugged. “The same, I suppose, but I can’t imagine it working.”
“We have a man inside the palace in New Babylon, or we wouldn’t dream of trying this,” Chloe said. She began to outline the preparations and Mac’s plans.
“Ah, excuse me,” Hannah said. “A minute, please?”
Chloe glanced at her,
then followed Hannah to a corner.
“Chloe, do they need to know this?”
“We can trust them! They’re Co-op.”
“But what if they are caught and forced to talk? Don’t burden them with all this.”
“Think of what they’ve been through, Hannah. They’ll never cave.”
“Well, if they do, it’s more than just your funeral, you know.”
They returned to Mrs. Pappas and her son.
“This works?” Costas said. “The GC falls for this?”
“Not for long,” Chloe admitted, sneaking a peek at Hannah. “But with the right setup on the main database in New Babylon, we have bluffed ourselves into some remarkable places.”
“We just met you,” Mrs. Pappas said. “And we will bury you soon.”
“We are people of faith,” Hannah said, dropping her accent. “And we know you are too. We must also be people of action. We know the odds and we accept them. We don’t know what else to do. Would you leave a comrade to a certain death?”
Costas was still emotional. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t see that you have a choice, but you have a better chance going in with artillery than with disguises. I just can’t see it working.”
“But we don’t know where our man is!” Chloe said. “How do we find that out without infiltrating?”
“What about your man in Colorado? He seems to know so much.”
“He can tell us only what he overhears. If he asks for more details than seem appropriate, he’ll soon be found out too.”
“How does he get along in the GC without the mark?”
Chloe explained Steve’s new identity and facial reconstruction, aware of Hannah’s loud sigh and slight shaking of her head. “His forehead is plastic. The mark of loyalty would have to be applied under that, and no one can stand looking at him with his skull exposed.”