Hanging by only one hand, he looked down in desperation. At first, the cliff appeared to be as smooth as a pane of glass and as perfectly vertical as the side of a skyscraper. But just a couple of inches below his feet was a shelf no wider than a paperback book.
The friable sandstone knuckle he was holding started to come apart in his grip.
Juan gathered a breath and let himself drop. There wasn’t enough room to absorb the shock by bending his knees, and he could feel the void sucking at his heels. The satellite phone, which had stayed with him for his wild plummet, was dislodged by the impact, snaking down one pant leg and emerging from the cuff. There was nothing he could do when it clattered off the shelf and disappeared into the valley below.
He couldn’t hear it land over the din of falling debris, but he knew it was a total loss. He clutched at the cliff face. The stone was warm on his cheek.
Next to him, curtains of dust rose from the rock and sand falling over the cliff, but already the landslide was slowing. With the steady wind swirling around the mountaintop, it wouldn’t be long before the dust blew away, exposing Cabrillo to anyone observing from above. The vertical drop to the next part of the mountain slope was at least thirty feet, with an additional hundred of steep terrain to the valley floor.
He looked to his right. The avalanche was almost over. The largest of the boulders now littered the ground below while only a thin trickle of sand poured over the edge of the cliff.
The second rule of climbing was never descend a rock face unless you know the route.
Juan had no idea what lay below him, what handholds and toe-holds he would find, but with twenty armed gunmen doubtless peering down the hill to see what had happened to their comrades the rules of safe climbing weren’t particularly relevant.
He bent down as far as he dared and lowered a leg off the shelf, feeling with his toes for some kind of hold. He also locked the ankle joint of his artificial leg. His foot found a slight depression, barely big enough for all his toes, but it was enough to take his weight. He lowered himself farther still, so that his elbows rested on the narrow shelf. He switched feet in the little niche and again poked blindly for another irregularity in the rock. There was nothing to be felt. The stone was featureless.
A thick tangle of rope suddenly shot past his face, uncoiling as it fell. Looking up, he saw that the cliff hid him from the terrorists above. They weren’t throwing him a lifeline, he realized, they were going to send someone down to check on survivors. It was just his good luck that they had chosen to send the climber exactly where he was clinging to the stone.
Juan quickly climbed back onto his shelf and carefully pulled off his boot. He yanked free some buttons of his uniform shirt and stuffed the boot against his chest. Then he wrapped the rope around the smooth molded foot of his prosthesis, looping it twice around, almost like the artificial limb was a pulley. He started to feel the rope dance and jerk in time with the movements of the man who had volunteered to check on his fallen teammates. Cabrillo grasped a handful of the line dangling over the void and stepped into empty space. With his back against the rock face, he slowly paid out rope through his hands. Because of the loops of rope around his foot and his locked ankle, he lowered himself down the cliff hand over hand, so smoothly that the guy above never felt him on the line.
It took less than a minute to reach the base of the cliff. If not for the artificial foot, a traditional descent would have alerted the terrorist of his presence or torn the flesh from his limb until all that remained was bone and gristle. He scrambled across the slope and hurled himself over a defile a moment before the climber reached the edge of the cliff and peered over.
His voice echoed across the valley. “I don’t see anything but a pile of rocks. I think they’re both dead.”
Juan chanced looking up at him. The soldier—or terrorist, depending on what Cabrillo discovered about this place—regarded the pile of rubble for a moment longer, then started climbing back up the rope. Juan collapsed, allowing the first waves of pain to wash over him. Nothing felt broken, but he knew his body was a sea of black-and-blue. He allowed himself only a ten-minute rest—any longer and he would have stiffened to the point of immobility.
Juan considered it a sign of good fortune when he found his kaffiyeh half buried in a mound of sand. He slipped it over his head and unlocked his prosthetic ankle. His plan was to find a safe place to hole up for the day and then make his way up over the mountain on the other side of the construction site that he’d spotted in the next valley. Given its proximity to the terrorist training camp, he had to assume the two facilities were connected.
Once there, he would have to trust on luck again to find out what it was, and hope that Secretary Katamora was being held in one camp or the other.
Deep in the pit of his stomach, he knew no one was that lucky.
SEVENTEEN
LINDA ROSS AND FRANKLIN LINCOLN APPROACHED THE archaeological camp on foot an hour before dawn. Both were operating on too much adrenaline and too little sleep. Murph had taken the Pig off into the deep desert to rendezvous with George Adams, who was flying in the bladder of fuel they would need to complete their mission.
No one liked the idea of splitting up. Finding only the one body near the drill truck and no sign of the other two Americans at the helicopter service area meant they had been taken elsewhere. The guess was, wherever the Libyan cargo chopper had taken the Chairman. If that were the case, their interrogation would be swift, brutal, and more than likely successful. Even now, a team of terrorists could be headed toward the archaeological dig in the Mi-8 helicopter.
But time was ticking down. The summit was fast approaching, and, more important, the longer the Secretary was held, the more likely she would be tortured as well.
With the sun climbing the horizon, the camp began to stir. Linda and Linc noted the archaeologists were mostly grad students spending a summer doing fieldwork. There were a few older expedition members who they assumed were full professors and faculty advisers. The camp also supported a staff of roughly ten native Tunisians, one of whom was dressed in an ill-fitting suit and looked agitated and did very little, so they assumed he was the government minder.
They had to watch for nearly an hour before Dr. Emile Bumford emerged from his tent. For a man who had lost three-quarters of his team, the prissy doctor didn’t appear overly upset. He yawned theatrically when he stepped into the sun, as if his sleep the night before had been untroubled. Wearing a ridiculous safari suit with a Panama hat, he ambled to the mess tent. Cooks worked over grills set behind the structure, and while the smell didn’t carry to Linda or Linc both imagined the scent of eggs and country-fried potatoes. Their breakfast had been cold MREs. The meal went long; no doubt there had been a staff meeting after everyone ate. The students left the mess first, returning to their tents briefly to grab packs and hand tools and heading over a low rise to the Roman ruins. The teachers were a bit more leisurely, but they, too, vanished over the hill separating the camp from the archaeological site.
Bumford returned to his quarters after all the others had gone to work. He was inside for only a minute before settling himself on a chair under a sunshade just outside his tent’s entrance. The book he cracked open was easily as thick as an encyclopedia volume. Linc wanted to sneak into the camp and grab Bumford now, but native workers were moving about, gathering laundry and tidying the students’ tents.
“I took an archaeology class my junior year in college,” Linda whispered. “We went on a dig for a long weekend. We never had servants like this.”