He turned and began marching back toward the forest.
“Bring them,” he said.
CHAPTER 48
Led by the armed group and their bearded leader, Hawker, Danielle, McCarter, and Yuri hiked through the tropical foliage. The trees and ferns and brush had a junglelike feel to it, but more sparse and reduced in scale because of the altitude. As they neared the end of the two-mile hike the terrain became flatter and the foliage was replaced by tilled land, fields, and pastures.
Beyond the fields lay a small town made up of whitewashed stucco buildings. Children played in the unpaved streets while livestock, mostly chickens and goats, moved about in various gated yards.
It was not what Danielle had expected. Certainly it didn’t look like a hideout of some criminal gang. But they remained under armed guard, and as their captors walked them blatantly down the main street, activity in the town around them came to an abrupt halt. Onlookers gawked in their direction.
The man with the beard walked ahead of them and waved to a handsome woman of about thirty, dressed in plain, simple clothes. She came to greet him and, after a brief conversation, looked at Danielle and then Yuri, who walked beside her.
Danielle guessed what was about to occur and held Yuri’s hand tightly.
“Do not worry,” the bearded man said. “Maria will take care of him while we talk.”
The woman led Yuri to a small adobe house.
Danielle turned her gaze forward, ready to argue with the man, but he had stepped through a gate in front of a mission-style church. Writing beside the doorway dedicated the church to San Ignacio, the founder of the Jesuit order and the patron saint of Catholic soldiers.
They were forced inside and the doors closed behind them. Once the bearded man had genuflected and crossed himself with holy water, he pulled off his poncho, hung it on a peg, and turned to face them.
He wore a black cassock and the white collar of a Catholic priest. “Welcome to San Ignacio,” he said. “I’m Father Domingo.”
“You’re a priest,” Danielle said.
“Sí,” he said. “I’m sensing you feel differently about the lies you told now.”
He seemed amused with himself, but Danielle didn’t share the feeling. “Has the church taken on a new role that I’m unaware of? Beginning with kidnapping people at gunpoint?”
Beside her McCarter stumbled. Hawker moved to support him and then led him to a bench that sat against the church wall. Father Domingo watched Hawker sharply.
“Don’t worry,” Hawker said. “I’ve got enough going against me already.”
Father Domingo turned back to Danielle. “My actions are necessary to protect the citizens of this town.”
Danielle could feel her anger beginning to burn. Of all people to deny them help, a member of the clergy seemed to be the least appropriate. “I asked you to help us. Did that seem like a threat to you?”
“We did not exactly act the Good Samaritan,” he said. “But there are reasons for this.”
“And what might those be?”
“Drug smugglers.”
“Which we are not,” she explained.
“Yes,” he said. “It seems to be the case, but we needed to be sure. Several years ago, some men came here with money, trying to buy our silence, while they cut down trees for a dirt runway and took over good lands to grow their drugs.
“As soon as they were entrenched, the kind talk and the money ceased and they became tyrants. But the spirit of the people here is strong. We decided to run them off but it was not easy. Threats were made; some people were harmed,” he said, catching the look in her eye. “Blood was spilled on both sides. We vowed to never let them come back; it is always easier to keep the predator out than to deal with it once you’ve let it through the gate.”
He nodded toward a window, through which blue sky could be seen. “Your plane circling for an hour in the middle of the night and then landing on the lake was very suspicious to us. We had to be sure. Even Saint Ignacio was a soldier before he became a priest. Sometimes that is what we must be as well.”
Danielle relented. Now she felt the fool for judging too quickly. With a history like that, she could guess how their actions might have appeared.
“I understand what you’re saying,” she said.
“And knowing how things looked from your side,” he replied, “I can understand why you lied. But that doesn’t tell me what you’re really doing here. Would you like to explain?”
Danielle uncrossed her arms and sat down. “You probably wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me,” he said. “Belief is my business.”
“We’re looking for an ancient Mayan ruin called the Temple of the Jaguar. We believe it might be located nearby. And our suspicious”—she glanced at Hawker—“and somewhat foolhardy flight out here was part of that search process.”
“Why didn’t you go back?”
“By the time we’d figured out where we needed to be,” she said, “we were too low on fuel to get back, so we landed on the biggest lake we could find.”
“I see,” Father Domingo said. “And why would you feel it necessary to keep such a thing secret?”
She hesitated, not wanting to lie to the priest again, but not wanting to tell him, either.
It was Father Domingo who spoke first. “Perhaps,” he said, “because you’ve brought something with you that you don’t understand, and you fear both using it and failing to use it. But your greatest fear is what other forces might do if they found it first.”
CHAPTER 49
The Situation Room of the White House was more crowded than the president had ever seen. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, the secretaries of state and defense and their aides had filled the sitting areas. Other cabinet members stood in the space around the main table.
The world situation had deteriorated harshly in the past twenty-four hours. In response to the downing of their fighter plane, the Chinese had captured a pair of Russian spy boats in disputed waters and now troops were building up on the border between the two countries.
Because an American vessel had been approached in the same area but had managed to leave the vicinity and escape capture, the Russians were claiming U.S. duplicity. They were lashing out at both nations through every available channel.
The Chinese, on the other hand, wanted to know why U.S. and Russian spy boats were in its waters and operating together, as a second round of finger-pointing and paranoia got into full swing.
The president sat in his chair quietly. He glanced through a situation report while the head of the Joint Chiefs explained the particulars using a flat screen monitor.
“… and in addition to that the Chinese have deployed forty divisions on the Russian border; strategic aircraft have been dispersed or launched and parked in racetrack patterns a hundred miles from the borders.”
He clicked the screen and a new satellite photo appeared: a Russian ICBM silo. What looked like steam could be seen escaping from hoses attached to a large, odd-looking tanker truck. “The Russians are making serious preparations, but their activities are balanced, half in Asia, half on the European side.”
A new photo showed mobile SS-20 launchers being dispersed into the countryside. The following one showed the Russian port at Murmansk. The docks were empty, and the channel, normally frozen solid at this time of year, had been cleared by a flotilla of massive icebreakers.
“From our point of view this is the bigger problem,” the chief said. “In twenty-four hours, in some of the worst conditions of the season, their entire ballistic missile fleet has put to sea. Not only did we believe this could not be done so quickly, it hasn’t been done since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
He turned to look at Henderson. “This is a grave sign, Mr. President. The Russians are very serious about things. And I think we should be, too.”