There!
The height advantage of being on the upper section of the haul road let Juan see the oncoming pickups below. They weren’t going nearly as fast as he expected them to, and he wondered if they had a little trouble negotiating the last corner. The thought gave him a newfound respect for the men who drove up and down the mountain a dozen times a day.
Juan took the truck even closer to the edge. The front tires were digging ruts out of the very lip of the shoulder while the outside drive tires and the outside tires on the right side of the trailer hung in space. At a closing speed of sixty miles per hour, but separated by two hundred vertical feet, the three vehicles raced toward one another.
Without taking his eyes off the road, Juan felt for the door handle and made sure it hadn’t latched. It was all down to the timing. Too soon, they would stop. Too late, and he would miss.
Juan judged it as finely as he could. He cranked the wheel to the right and threw himself from the cab, landing hard on the road but tumbling across his shoulder like an acrobat, and came up on his feet.
The eighteen-wheeler teetered on the brink for another second before rolling off the road. It hit square on its side, its momentum plowing the grille though the churned-up ground until it smashed into the stump of a tree that must have stood for a hundred years before greed sealed its fate. Steam gushed from the ruptured radiator, and the windshield was punched out in two solid sheets that exploded into mounds of glittering glass chips.
At the violent impact, the trailer bucked and threw its load. There were thirty logs on it, most the width and length of telephone poles while others were monsters that weighed three tons apiece. They stayed in a tight bundle for the first few yards as they rolled down the hill, but once they started bouncing off stumps, all semblance of order vanished. Some bounced off stump after stump, changing directions as they fell. A few were upended by the impact and hurtled down the hillside like ballistic projectiles.
The driver of the lead pickup never saw the deliberate accident above his truck, and it wasn’t until he heard cries of alarm from the men in back that he knew something was wrong. He studied the dirt track ahead and saw nothing amiss. The steepness of the hill above them prevented him from having the proper angle to look up and see the avalanche moments away from sweeping the truck off the road.
“Hector!” screamed his passenger, staring wide-eyed up the hill. “Stop! For the love of the Virgin, stop!”
The driver, Hector, stood on the brakes, holding the wheel steady against the truck’s desire to fishtail. Then came a jarring impact as the second truck, driven by Raul Jimenez, slammed into their rear bumper. Hector had been wearing a seat belt, a habit drilled into him as a child, and no amount of macho grandstanding would get him to change.
The passenger—the team’s Sergeant—had never worn a seat belt in his life. He was catapulted through the windshield, leaving a man-sized hole ringed in blood from where the glass sliced his face and arms. He landed a good fifteen feet from the front of the truck. Hector had no idea if the Sarge was alive or dead when a log as thick around as a man’s chest rolled over him, crushing the man’s body into the hard earth.
That’s when Hector felt death touch his shoulder. Another log that had tipped end over end speared through the top of the cab and smashed into his leg. The huge piece of timber continued its journey, ripping off the pickup’s roof as easily as a can opener.
The men not hurt in the crash leapt from the truck and started running downhill, all thoughts of staying with their comrades forgotten in their panicked flight. The truck took a pair of broadsides from the two largest logs and was tossed bodily off the road. The men too stunned or too injured to flee were thrown from the vehicle and crushed as it started barreling down the mountain.
Most of the soldiers on foot had made the mistake of running straight away from the truck and were soon caught up as it tumbled. The lucky ones were knocked aside with broken limbs. The others were killed outright. One soldier had the wherewithal to run down the slope at an angle and avoided being killed by the cartwheeling vehicle. He even managed to leap up in time to have one of the logs roll under him. A second one slammed into his knees, breaking both joints. It bounced and flattened him before his nerves could send the pain signals to his brain.
The second truck fared little better. It was knocked perpendicular to the road by a titanic collision and then shot forward when a trio of logs slammed into the tailgate. The engine had stalled when Raul Jimenez had hit the first pickup, and without power steering he was incapable of controlling the vehicle as it accelerated downward. He mashed his foot to the brake pedal and yanked the emergency handle, but gravity and momentum were too much for a tired machine that had better than two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. It slammed into a stump just off-center enough to kick the rear end around. The tires hooked and the truck flipped. Men were scattered like rag dolls. Raul managed to stay in his seat as his view through the windshield rotated again and again. His side window was smashed, but whatever had punctured the glass had missed him. Impact after impact rattled the truck and threatened to loosen his sanity, but one massive hit and everything turned still. What remained of the pickup was hard against a stump, and the avalanche of logs had ended.
“Nice shootin’, Tex,” Juan heard over his radio.
He looked back to see the truck carrying his team racing for him. If he felt anything for the men he had just killed and injured, he need only think back to the burned-out village and knew he’d done the world a favor.
Mike Trono was behind the wheel with Mark Murphy. Jerry stood in the bed and, as the truck came close, held out an elbow to hook Cabrillo’s arm and lift him into the bed. Juan rapped on the roof of the cab, and Mike hit the gas.
It took two minutes to negotiate the hairpin and return to the site where the Ninth Brigade soldiers had been swept from the road. Moans of anguish rose from the wounded. The dead lay in such unnatural angles it was difficult to believe they had skeletons at all.
None of the real Argentine Special Forces questioned the presence of more unknown men dressed in their uniforms. They were simply relieved that help had arrived so quickly. Juan squatted next to one of them, laying a hand on the man’s uninjured shoulder. The other had been wrenched from its socket.
“What truck had the piece of satellite?” he asked in Spanish.
“It was in back of ours,” the soldier said through gritted teeth and lips so compressed they had gone white.
“The first one?”
“No. The second.”
Juan called out to his men,
“Numero dos,”
and held up two fingers in case Trono’s Spanish was as bad as he said.
It took ten minutes to find the plutonium power cell. It was a silver rectangular object, a foot and a half long and about as wide and thick as a dictionary. Its surface was made of some mysterious alloy that Murph might know about but was outside Juan’s purview or interest. All he cared about was that they had it and, for the moment, the Argentines didn’t. He marveled, though, that for all the abuse it had just endured there was only a minute dimple on one side. Murph ran the gamma detector over every square inch of it.
“It’s clean, Juan,” he pronounced. “No radiation above what it’s been giving off all along.”
“That’s a relief,” Pulaski said. “I might want to have more kids someday. Hate for the little buggers to have tentacles and flippers and such.” He turned to Cabrillo. “So now what?”
Juan scratched at the stubble covering his jaw. Down at the base camp, he could see pandemonium had erupted. The “accident” had been plain for everyone to see, and the reserve Ninth Brigade soldiers were scrambling to get up the mountain in order to help the wounded. Loggers, too, were racing for vehicles to lend a hand.
A sly smile crossed Cabrillo’s handsome face. The three greatest assets in combat—and it doesn’t matter if it’s two men squaring off or whole armies meeting on the field of battle—are numbers, surprise, and confusion. He didn’t have the first, the second had already been sprung, and now the third reigned over his adversaries. Jerry had wrestled the power cell into the carrying harness and stood with it strapped to his back. The others wore his same questioning expression.
“Mike, how many hours do you have with Gomez?” Juan asked. George “Gomez” Adams was the pilot of the MD-520N helicopter hangared below the
Oregon
’s aft hold.
“Hold on a minute,” Mike Trono protested. “We’ve only been working together a couple of months. I’ve only soloed twice. And they didn’t go so well. I bent a landing strut on one and nearly clipped the ship’s rail my second time.”
Juan looked at Jerry. “Do you really feel like lugging that thing all the way back to the RHIB?”
“Hell no.”
“What do you say, Mr. Trono?”
If Mike couldn’t fly them out of here in one of the Argentine’s helicopters, Juan knew he would admit it. He selected each member of the Corporation not only for what they could do but also because they were aware of what they could not.
Trono nodded. “Let’s hope my third solo’s the charm.”
SEVEN
F
OOLING THE INJURED ARGENTINE SOLDIERS HAD BEEN easy. Those men saw what they wanted to see. It was going to be something altogether different getting past the reserve troops below and making their way to one of the helicopters.
Juan thought for a second and found inspiration amid the moans of the wounded. “Okay,” he said. “Back to the truck, but move like you’re injured. Murph, lean against Jerry. Mike, pretend I’m helping you.”
They crawled up the hill as though they were victims of the accident, moving stiffly but surprisingly quickly. Cabrillo had the three men crawl into the old pickup’s bed while he got behind the wheel. Before engaging the manual transmission, he pulled a clasp knife from his pocket. The blade’s edge was honed as sharp as a scalpel, so when he drew it across his forehead at his hairline he felt no pain, only the liquid rush of blood, which quickly began dripping into his eyes and cutting runnels through the dirt and grime that caked his face.
He glanced back through the rear window so his men could see what he’d done. They caught on immediately, and by the time he’d gotten the truck up to speed the three men in back looked like they’d just walked out of a slaughterhouse. They met a ragtag convoy of vehicles coming up the mountainside—pickups, mostly, but also ATVs, and a fire engine that had first been put into service in the 1950s. Juan slowed as he approached the lead truck. The driver was a civilian, but next to him was a man in uniform, a man who would be considered handsome in other circumstances but whose features were drawn by what he’d seen.
“What happened?” he shouted across the cab to Juan.
“A log truck overturned, sir,” Juan replied. He wiped blood from his eyes, smearing it over his face to better disguise his features. “The men in back are the most seriously injured.”
On cue, Jerry, Mike, and Mark moaned pitiably.
“The others have only minor injuries,” Juan continued. “These should be flown out immediately.”
“What about Lieutenant Jimenez and the recovered part of the satellite?” Major Espinoza asked.
“He has it up where the trucks overturned,” Juan replied.
“And you, how bad are your injuries?”
“I’m okay to drive.”
Espinoza made a quick decision. “All right, get these troops down to the chopper and tell my pilot to fly you back to our forward operations base. Make sure he radios ahead so medical staff are standing by.”
“Yes, Major,” Juan said, recognizing the insignia on the other man’s collar. He took his foot off the brake and slowly passed the convoy on the narrow road. It took all his self-control to keep a grin off his face.
A few minutes later, they pulled into the base camp. Down here where the brush piles burned, the smoke haze was so thick they couldn’t see more than thirty yards, and each breath was like inhaling razor blades. Juan knew they only had a tiny window to make their escape. As soon as the Argentine Major figured out he’d been tricked, his entire reserve force would come down the mountain like the hammers of hell. He drove toward where the choppers were parked.
They were Eurocopter EC-135s, a medium utility chopper with a ten-year history of some of the most rugged flying in the world. These were stripped-down troop transports with the doors modified so they could mount .30 caliber door guns. One of the choppers had a rear access panel open and the pilot half buried in the machine’s innards. Juan assumed he was working on the fault he had overheard Lieutenant Jimenez mention.
He pulled closer to the second chopper. The pilot of this bird, sporting a bandanna around his nose and mouth to filter out the worst of the smoke, was asleep in his seat. Cabrillo got an idea; better to use a well-trained enemy than an amateur ally. He sounded the truck’s horn, which turned out to be the only part of the old vehicle that still showed signs of life.
The man startled awake and lifted his sunglasses. His dark eyes widened when he saw the bloody apparitions stepping from the old pickup.
“We need an immediate evac,” Juan called to the pilot, pausing to help Mike Trono and his Quasimodo-like gait.
“Not without the Major’s permission,” the pilot replied.
“Radio him,” Juan said sharply. “He was the one who said to take off immediately. But fire the turbines first so we don’t waste any time.”
The pilot made no move to turn on the Eurocopter’s engines. Instead, he reached for his helmet, with its integrated communication’s system. Cabrillo glanced up the mountain. Through the smoke, it was difficult to make out details. It didn’t appear the lead vehicles of the rescue convoy had made it to the crash scene, but he decided they’d wasted enough time.