“My man is getting ready to go into the Angkor Gate,” Foreman said.
“Goddamnit!” the President exploded. “According to these readouts I’m getting, we’re going to have people dying around these Gates in less than twelve hours.”
“I have nothing further to tell you than I’ve already told you, sir,” Foreman said. “The minute I learn something from inside Angkor Gate I will immediately contact you.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I’ll get back to you, sir,” Foreman said. He didn’t add that he feared they were too late.
The phone went dead.
“It’s all set,” Carpenter said. She held up a small green plastic tube. “This is the fuse. We’ll have five minutes.” A length of blue cord ran from the fuse down into the floor panels where Carpenter had wired it to two pounds of C-4 explosive placed against the top bulkhead of the center fuel tank.
Ariana nodded. “OK.” She had the 9mm pistol in her hand and a small backpack slung over her shoulder. Ingram was holding on to Hudson’s right arm, helping him stand. They were all next to the emergency door over the right wing, or where the right wing had been, Ariana reminded herself.
“We pop the door,” Ariana instructed, “then go down the emergency slide which will inflate.” She looked at the faces that surrounded her. Carpenter’s was impassive. Ingram looked afraid but determined. Hudson’s was just afraid.
“Let’s do it.” Ariana grabbed the emergency level and shoved it. With a loud sucking noise the door swung open. There was a loud hiss, then the yellow emergency slide popped out and rapidly inflated.
Ariana took a quick look. It was daylight but only a feeble gray light penetrated the mist. She could see splintered tree trunks underneath the plane and the beginnings of thick jungle just ten feet from the side of the plane. Beyond twenty feet, she saw nothing.
“Go!” she yelled at Hudson and Ingram. The two men flopped onto the slide and disappeared out of sight. Ariana turned to Carpenter. “Do it.”
Carpenter pulled the fuse, checked it and gave a thumbs up. The black woman was by Ariana and down the slide. Ariana took one last look around the interior of the plane, at the bodies covered in sheets and jackets and at that moment she realized her father would have been more mindful of the expensive computers and other equipment she was about to destroy. She stepped onto the slide.
Dane felt the cold water flow around his legs and paused. The mist on the far bank was thicker than he remembered. His eyes could penetrate only a few feet in but it wasn’t his eyes that were warning him. Like the steady beat of a heart, a warning pulsed in his brain, telling him to be aware, to be afraid, but this time, unlike thirty years ago, it also drew him on, into the mist.
He glanced over his shoulder. Freed, Beasley and the four Canadians were right behind him. Dane waded forward. He reached the far bank and climbed up without a backward glance and was enveloped in the fog.
The helicopter settled gingerly onto the blasted foliage. Sin Fen stepped off as the engines began to power down. She walked to the edge of the clearing and faced the jungle, to the west, but her eyes were closed. Chelsea was next to her, tail wagging, tongue hanging out.
She reached out for Dane. She felt him, his essence, but it was flickering and she knew it was moving into the Gate. She sensed the water he had just passed through and could pick up images from his mind-he had talked to Flaherty on the radio.
She concentrated one message to send to him:
Listen to the voices of the Gods
Chelsea began barking, nose pointed to the east. Sin Fen turned in that direction. A Huey helicopter came in low and fast, flaring to a landing next to the chopper that they had come in.
Six men jumped off, weapons at the ready. They were white men, dressed in tiger stripe fatigues, with a hard look about them that spoke of much death and pain. She saw them walk up to Michelet, who pointed in her direction.
They came toward her, Michelet right behind. She picked up the threat from all of them, but it was hard to separate out individual thoughts.
“Do not do something foolish,” Sin Fen warned.
“You’re Foreman’s bitch,” Michelet said. “He set all this up.”
“He gave you enough information to back out,” Sin Fen said. “You are the one that put your daughter and her crew in harm’s way.”
Michelet shook his head. “He’s a manipulative liar.”
Sin Fen laughed. “Ah, that is ironic.”
She caught movement out of the corner of her eye. One of the tiger stripe men brought something up in his hand and a small piece of metal flashed toward her. Sin Fen looked down at the small metal dart caught on her vest. She focused at the man holding the stun gun. He staggered back, dropping the gun without triggering it, his hands going to his temples.
Another one of the men fired his stun gun, the dart hitting her in the back. He was quicker, pulling the trigger as she turned.
Sin Fen went rigid from the electric current coursing through her, then the world went black and she collapsed. Chelsea whined and ran into the jungle.
The leader of the men stood over Sin Fen’s body and looked at Michelet questionably. Michelet pointed to the ravine on the northern edge of the camp. “Tie her up and throw her in there. Let the animals finish her.”
The leader gestured to two of his men. They pulled a piece of nylon rope out and began tying Sin Fen up.
“Hie-Tech?” Michelet asked the leader of the men.
“Being taken care of, sir. I coordinated with the Cambod’s to take care of that problem.”
“How much did that coordination cost me?” Michelet asked.
“Two hundred thousand.”
Michelet walked to the center of the LZ, in between the two helicopters and looked to the west. He stood hands on hips. “No one screws with me and gets away with it. No one.”
The leader of the mercenaries stared at him without comment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Move!” Ariana yelled, grabbing Hudson’s arm and pulling him across the tangled vegetation. She glanced over her shoulder at the plane. The tail was lost in the fog but she could see the rotodome and the golden beam shooting from it into the sky.
Carpenter grabbed Hudson’s other arm. Together they hauled him across a large splintered tree trunk and then they were on the ground. Ariana turned and looked back over the wood. The plane had almost disappeared in the mist, about fifty meters away.
“Duck,” Carpenter said.
Ariana tucked her head down behind the cover of the tree trunk. There was the sharp crack of an explosion, followed by a thunderous secondary explosion. Ariana could hear shrapnel fly by overhead and slash into the vegetation. With a loud thump, a twenty foot section of fuselage landed less than forty feet away. Ariana stood and looked. The plane was gone. She checked her map and pointed into the mist shrouded jungle.
“That way.”
Dane paused as he heard the sound of an explosion. The mist muffled the sound as if it were occurring underwater, followed by a second, deeper explosion a second later.
“What was that?” Beasley demanded.
Freed and the Canadians were also turned in the direction the sound had come from.
“The plane’s gone,” Dane said.
“What!” Freed stepped in front of Dane. “How do you know?”
“I just know,” Dane said.
“But-”
“There are some survivors.”
“How do you know?”