Hauer began to tremble, overwhelmed with a fear that all the training he’d endured couldn’t prepare him. The others in his detachment had faced combat before. He alone was the novice and cursed that he’d volunteered to follow Foch to the lake. He noted how Lauren listened to the sounds of the battle far away and maintained her surveillance of the camp, watching to see the moment the guards were alerted.
Her presence stabilized him. He remembered the incoming helicopter.
The only place the JetRanger could get close enough to pick them up was along the rim of the mountain, an exposed area that would draw a tremendous amount of fire as soon as the aircraft appeared. And then there was his lieutenant and the spy down below. They’d never make it out. Hauer hesitated, thinking, but not finding a solution. “Ah, where do we bring in the chopper?” he asked finally.
Mercer had been considering that question since Foch and Bruneseau had slipped into the camp. “Tell him we’ll be on the lake.”
It was a calculated gamble. Once the patrol reported their contact, he hoped the last place Hatcherly’s guards would search for other soldiers was within their own perimeter. It would have been smarter just to fade into the jungle and link up with the helo later, but Mercer couldn’t abandon Foch and Bruneseau. It was clear they’d held back a critical piece to this puzzle and he was determined to find out what it was.
With no plan of his own, and seeing the conviction in Mercer’s direct gaze, the trooper relayed their intentions to the pilot, praying that the American knew how to keep them alive until the chopper could reach them.
There was a lull in the distant gun battle—an eerie moment of silence that ended with the crump of an explosion. Mercer winced, certain that Levesque had just been taken out by a grenade.
There was no going back.
Even as Lauren and Hauer watched the camp, he kept his eyes on the jungle behind them.
Movement at the edge of the underbrush caught his attention. Without waiting to see what it was, Mercer cleared his pistol and fired three quick shots. He shoved Lauren over the crest of the hill and pulled the trigger again, laying down suppression fire for Hauer to get clear. The movement had resolved itself into a three-man patrol. He pitched himself over the summit as return fire from the jungle shredded the spot where they had lain a moment ago, tongues of flame from Chinese weapons flickering in the dark forest.
Lauren fired back with her Beretta. They were trapped within the caldera and had just a few seconds before they were spotted by a keen-eyed guard watching the workers on the beach. Hauer looked to Mercer.
“Into the gully. Come on.”
At a trot, Mercer led them off the escarpment and into the ravine Foch had used earlier. So far no one had heard the gunfire, but the patrol they’d just engaged would be on the radio at any moment. In seconds, the base was going to be a hive of confusion. They ran for the dormitory tent and slid inside. It took several seconds for Mercer’s eyes to adapt to the murk and for him to realize the rows of bunks were empty. They hadn’t been detected.
He put the radio to his lips. “Foch, this is Mercer. Levesque was discovered by a patrol and the chopper’s inbound. Get back to the first tent you went through. We are leaving!”
When Foch replied, anger thickened his accent. “What are you doing?”
“We’re blown. We have to get out of here.”
Lauren moved to the front of the structure and watched the camp through a flap in the tent’s side. “Mercer, I think the call just came in from the patrol. I see the guy from the warehouse yelling orders to some of the guards. Wait. Now he’s dialing a satellite phone.”
“Calling Liu for instructions.”
“That’s my guess.”
“Do you see Foch or Rene?”
“Yeah. I think they realize the jig is up. They’re behind a pile of sand about sixty yards away waiting for the compound to clear out a little. Here comes Rene.” Lauren stepped aside and a few seconds later the spy exploded through the gap, his face red with exertion, his barrel chest pumping like a bellows.
“What . . .” he wheezed at Mercer. “What have you . . . done? What happened to . . . Levesque and the raft?”
“We have to assume the Zodiac is so much rubber confetti by now,” Mercer answered grimly. “And I’m afraid so is your man.”
Foch raced into the tent, if anything even more angry than the spy. “I told you to wait up the hill.”
“We were just spotted by a patrol. We couldn’t wait and with Levesque dead we couldn’t go back.” Mercer wasn’t going to back down. “Chopper’s here in five minutes. I’ve ordered him to pick us up in the middle of the lake, the only clear area around us that’s out of range of the Chinese.”
Bruneseau sneered. “And the guards are going to let us swim out there?”
“The boats.” Mercer fought to keep his voice level. “There are two of them at the dock. We can grab one in the confusion and be out of range before they know we were even here.”
On the brink of losing control, the French spy took an aggressive step toward Mercer only to be stopped by Foch. “He’s right. We don’t have time for a different plan. The boats are the only way.”
The makeshift dock was a hundred yards from the dormitory tent and the Chinese guards appeared to be preparing for a frontal assault along the caldera’s rim. They were digging themselves in for an all-out battle against an army of commandos, never suspecting that their adversaries were already behind them. The few workers standing between the tent and the lake were a nonfactor.
Foch clicked on his radio. “Shepherd, this is Foch. What’s your ETA?”
“GPS says six minutes. Should be able to hear me in five.”
“Roger.” He was angry, frustrated, and feeling trapped by the Chinese and the circumstance.
No one saw the Chinese soldier slither under the back of the tent and didn’t know he was there until he opened fire. Corporal Hauer was the closest to him and he jerked under the hammer-blow onslaught of high-velocity rounds. Most were absorbed by his body armor but it took only one bullet to find its way through. He was dead when he hit the dusty ground. Lauren whirled at the sound and killed the prone guard with a double tap from her pistol.
“There’s going to be more,” Mercer shouted, hyped on adrenaline. He scooped up Hauer’s FAMAS. The barrel was cold, the clip full. The boy hadn’t fired a single shot in his one and only fight.
Unwilling to leave his dead comrade behind, but with no choice given the situation, Foch checked the compound. There was a cluster of guards far enough away that he thought they could make the dash for the dock. He motioned the others to the door. The four survivors met one another’s eyes with a fatalistic determination. Either they would make it or they wouldn’t.
Bursting into the sunlight, they ran for the lake in a tight group. A dark-skinned native worker gasped as they ran past but was too startled to raise any kind of alarm. The wall of bullets Mercer was sure they’d run into never came. The guards farther down the beach never turned and in fifteen seconds they reached the wooden jetty. Their weight made the structure bob on its barrel pontoons.
Lauren leapt straight into the largest aluminum skiff and began working on the engine while Foch knifed away the tie-down lines. Mercer and Bruneseau knelt near the skiff, eyeing the beach through the sights of the assault rifles. At the extreme edge of what he could see, Mercer detected a lot of movement around the Chinese helicopter. They were prepping it for flight, probably to support the patrol that had killed Levesque.
“I know. I know,” Rene said when Mercer pointed over with his chin. “If they get airborne while our chopper’s picking us up, we are finished.”
The twenty-horsepower outboard sputtered to life at the first pull on the cord. The three men jumped in just as a barrage of rounds pummeled the beach and the dock. The patrol that had first spied Mercer and Lauren had circled around the dormitory and targeted them at the boat. Mercer could see one of them screaming into a radio.
With its throttle twisted wide open, the flat-bottomed boat shot from the quay in a tight arc, Lauren guiding it out toward the middle of the lake. As their vantage shifted, Mercer could see that the Chinese helo’s blades were already turning. He could see five or six troopers in its cargo hold.
From around the island in the middle of the lake came an inflatable boat loaded with soldiers who must have been guarding a work party. Lauren saw them first and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”
The Chinese were well out of accurate range but fired anyway, hoping for a lucky hit. Tiny geysers erupted wherever a bullet struck the water. Because the Chinese controlled the middle of the lake, that one craft managed to box them in. Every passing second ate into Lauren’s maneuvering room. She turned away, steering the boat toward where the lake drained down the waterfall. The falls were a quarter mile away. Beyond was a yawning chasm backed by the tumult of the approaching storm.
The Legion pilot had kept his craft on the deck until reaching the caldera, so when he swooped over the lip of the mountain no one had heard his approach. He was just there, like an avenging angle. Without any offensive weapons, there was nothing he could do about the boat pursuing his team so he kept his concentration on his comrades. At an altitude of only fifty feet he could clearly see that if Lauren stopped to wait for extraction the Chinese in the Zodiac would overtake them. He would have to make the pick up on the fly.
He radioed Foch with instructions as he pressed the button that deployed the ropes from each side of the chopper.
“
D’accord
.” Foch nodded at the radio and addressed the others. “Prepare for a fast extraction.”
“Make it damn fast,” Mercer said. The falls were four hundred yards ahead. They’d be over them in thirty seconds. The storm continued to rush at them, a pulsing wall of black clouds discharging an unimaginable amount of rain.
The shrill whine of the outboard was drowned out by the deeper beat of the JetRanger as it thundered just above the hurtling boat, the pilot matching speed even as Lauren dared slow a bit. A pair of bullets plowed into the skiff’s engine. The two-cylinder faltered. The Chinese had halved the distance to their quarry.
The heavy nylon ropes dangled from the chopper like the tentacles of some enormous jellyfish, jerking and jumping in the rotor downblast. Foch managed to grab on to one, but the other swayed just out of reach. The pilot made a small adjustment and the line swept across the fleeing craft. A metal snaplink struck Mercer on the back of the head and would have pitched him overboard had Lauren not seen it happen. She flicked the motor over so the boat swayed sharply. He fell back in, a trickle of blood oozing from his torn scalp.
Foch snapped a hook from the rope onto Mercer’s combat harness and then snapped in Lauren. They were fifty yards from the falls. Bruneseau knelt at the stern, firing controlled three-round bursts that the Chinese all but ignored. They were coming on at full speed and pouring out a steady fusillade, mistakenly concentrating their fire on the boat.
The lake, smooth out in the open, became choppy as it was sucked through the cataract. A fine mist obscured the gap where the waters vanished down the side of the volcano. Mercer felt a few drops land on his skin.
Secured to the chopper, he stood again to add his FAMAS to Bruneseau’s weapon. He fired on full auto, brass and cordite smoke erupting from the gun like it was tearing itself apart. Foch finally got hold of the second line. With fifteen feet to go before the speeding boat launched itself off the mountain, he lunged over to lock Bruneseau to the line.
“Hold on!” Lauren screamed as the lake suddenly vanished below them.
They went airborne.
For the first fraction of a second, momentum kept the boat in a straight trajectory before gravity began to pull it out from under them. It started to fall away, tipping toward the bow like a diver off an Acapulco cliff. Because Lauren was secured to a hook higher up on the rappelling rope, she was the first to be plucked from the falling craft. One second she was riding in it with them and the next she was hovering in the sky as the men continued their descent.
Then Bruneseau’s harness came taut and he too was pulled from the boat. The pilot was fighting the added weight, flying the chopper down the falls with the skiff because he knew that at least one of his team hadn’t snapped on. There was maybe another second before the craft smashed into the first set of rocks in the ladderlike falls. He had no choice but to pull up.
Mercer sensed the decision made high above him and threw himself onto Foch, wrapping his arms and legs around the Frenchman in a tight embrace and waited to see what would happen first.
The skiff hit the first boulder an instant after Mercer felt the harness dig into his shoulders and groin. He and Foch had been lifted clear just as the aluminum boat disintegrated against the rocks. The motor tore free of its mounts and tumbled off into space, its tiny prop still spinning as if it could fly. The hull was turned into so much scrap that washed down the remainder of the falls like a battered soda can.
The sharp pull of the rope sent them arcing through space before the line came tight again, a brutal repeat of the initial jerk. Their motion set the line spinning. When he could look back at the falls, Mercer saw the boatload of Chinese soldiers follow the skiff. They had misjudged their speed, the distance, and the relentless pull of the water. Two men managed to hold on to the inflatable until it bounced off the rocks. One of them even maintained his grip after that first impact before he was smeared against a boulder. The red stain that had been his life’s blood was washed away in an instant. Two of the guards were like limp dolls as they fell from pool to pool. The fourth had landed atop a pinnacle of rock so that his spine had folded backward on itself and his arms trailed in the water.
“Snap yourself in,” Mercer shouted to Foch over the rotor beat and the wind of their forty-knot speed. The first drops of rain pelted him like gravel. He slitted his eyes against the sting.