Gabriel threaded himself into the vertical harness he’d left waiting the last time he’d been here, anticipating the possibility of a return under less than sanguine circumstances. He grabbed a short-handled dagger out of the scabbard at the waist of the nearest impaled skeleton, used it to saw through the anchor rope, and hauled himself toward the ceiling on his three-to-one pulley setup, which towed him at about fifteen feet per second.
Careening bats swept by him as he reached the cavern ceiling and began to corkscrew his way through the funnel. His ascent was designed to leave no dangling rope behind.
Gabriel had left himself a weapon on the eastern slope the first time he’d made this ascent, one of Qi’s LMT shortie rifles. He grabbed it now, before quickly scrambling down to the nearest of the shrine rooms.
But when he reached the room, there was no one to shoot. The sentries posted outside the idol were all facedown in pools of their own blood, sniped off by throat hits.
Gabriel hustled past two more deceased guards to the other shrine room, where he dived into the iron tub to wash away some of the foul, clotted wastes clinging to him.
When he rose, dripping, he saw a man walking toward him from the shrine room’s entrance…a man with a gun in his hand, and the gun was pointed at Gabriel.
“Hello, Mr. Hunt,” said Ivory.
Chapter 22
While the engines were spinning up, Mitch noticed the helicopter was not outfitted with any exterior firepower. Kamovs were workhorses adaptable to a number of applications, including air ambulance and search-and-rescue over land or water, but they were originally developed by the Russians as antitank choppers. Not this one. Fully stocked with armament, the machine could chew up and spit out a Cobra gunship, but this one was fangless, with not a gun or bomb in sight. At least its defensive features were still in place: the energy-absorbing seats, the beefed up landing struts, the nonfragmenting fuselage. The rotor blades were made of a composite material that could withstand a hit by a 23mm projectile and keep functioning.
“This thing is a taxi,” Mitch said as the rotors reached takeoff speed. “Stripped down for fast insertion and extraction.”
“Good,” Qi said. “We should try some fast extraction now.”
Running from their abandoned cover to the chopper, both Qi and Mitch had scanned the area for any sign—any glint of metal in the distance, any sound—that might portend imminent gunfire, but they’d reached the vehicle and the two dead bodies before it without attracting anyone’s attention. The two men had been neatly shot—but by whom? They’d put the question to one side much as they did the bodies themselves, then climbed up into the cockpit and began preparations to leave. As Mitch worked the controls, desperately forcing her hands to remain as steady as she could get them, Qi held their small arsenal of guns at the ready and watched for trouble.
But none had surfaced, and now, after readjusting her seat several times and getting the feel of the throttle, Mitch was able to float their craft into the night air. They hovered at about ten feet while she triplechecked her board. Then she seemed confident enough to loft them into the sky.
The helo accident for which Mitch had been cashiered out had occurred during a soft landing on an aircraft carrier, strictly a milk run. She was an Air Force loan-out for Naval pilot trainees, occupying the Number Two slot on the MH-60S Knighthawk when wind shear and a rolling carrier made tacking on the landing platform more difficult than her superior, the pilot, had been prepared for. They counter-rolled as the ship surged upward on the tide, and the rotor blades snapped off like popsicle sticks against the deck, gravely wounding two runway rats and scratching one chopper at a cost of about $28 million. No time was wasted in assigning a scapegoat, especially since it would boil down to a Navy versus Air Force beef.
But Mitch could jockey these beasts. She knew it, and the brass knew it too, even if they’d never admit it. She’d longed for a gunship and the chance to deploy its devastating firepower in combat, just once. This might have been that chance, but Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, wily devil that he was, had provided no bangbang aboard this eggbeater.
They had their rifles, and the guns taken off the dead pilot and his companion. Mitch had spotted a few racked grenades. And they had the helo.
“This puts us into the center of things,” said Qi.
“Meaning?” Mitch concentrated on the rudder, which was a little slushy-feeling. She wiped sweat off her forehead.
“Cheung’s helipad directly accesses his headquarters. No infiltration, no disguises. No strategy. All that is left to us is the lightning raid.”
“You mean barge in, guns blazing, and hope for the best?” Mitch sucked air between her teeth. “Sorry, but that sounds a lot like your other plans, based as they were on the idea of a one-way mission. I’m no kamikaze.”
“We have the Killers of Men as a bargaining chip. Cheung may hate us. He may want us dead on sight. But he is not so foolish as to risk this prize.”
“So we fly right in like we own the place?”
“Exactly. Without Ivory or Dinanath, Cheung’s subordinates will stand down.”
“You hope.”
Qi almost smiled. “Always. But I also prepare for the worst.” She went to work stripping and cleaning the guns.
Ivory had a layer of bandage pads taped to his forehead and his eyes seemed to glitter unnaturally in the dim light of the shrine room, candlefire making them appear too starkly white.
He sat with his lethal OTs-33 held loosely, dangling between his knees as he perched on the canvas-tarped pile of one of Qi’s caches.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” Gabriel said, even though it was obvious, standing as he was in an elevated metal cauldron.
Ivory said nothing.
“It appears we may have the same enemies now,” Gabriel added, waving in the direction of the neighboring shrine room, where Cheung’s men lay dead. He pointed at Ivory’s gun. “Quite a weapon. Russian, isn’t it?”
“It is adequate to my needs.”
“Yeah, I heard you weren’t too fond of Glocks.”
One of Ivory’s eyebrows arched. “That, too, served its purpose. Mr. Hunt, is it your intention to waste time with banter? I have never understood that about Americans; their reluctance to address a point directly.”
“‘Warfare is the tao of deceit,’” said Gabriel, quoting Sun Tzu. He thought he saw Ivory roll his eyes. No doubt sick of Westerners quoting The Art of War.
Gabriel considered climbing out, then thought better of it. Any abrupt movement might get him killed.
“These two women,” said Ivory without prelude. “Your dedication to them is unusual. My experience of most Westerners is that they are little more than infants incapable of seeing beyond their little personal dramas, attitudes, whims or appetites. What binds you to them?”
“Nothing,” said Gabriel. “I used them to help me find the Killers of Men, nothing more.”
“Ah, now you are being less than honest. Believe me, I know. I, too, have been less than forthcoming, with Cheung. My covenant was to lead him to this place. Instead I came alone, and found you. And as you have said, we seem to be on the same path, now. But I must understand how you got here.”
“All right, I’ll be honest,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want to see either Qi or Mitch hurt. That’s what I’m here for. The rest is incidental. There’s also my brother—I need to get him free. The quickest and surest way to accomplish these things is to eliminate your boss. I’m sorry, Ivory, but the man is a Grade-A certified lunatic, and I think you know it. If you didn’t, I’d be dead already.”
“I cannot—”