Hoffman ignored her as he turned to Cutler and Zamora.
‘Drop your weapons and get in that cave or we’ll blow you away right here and now.’
Half of the mercenaries whirled and trained their assault rifles on Cutler and Zamora. Cutler looked at them and then glanced across at Zamora.
‘Fancy going down in a blaze of glory?’
‘Not so much.’
Cutler slowly lowered his revolver as he called out to Hoffman.
‘Whatever Wolfe is paying you, it won’t be nearly enough to get you out of this.’
Hoffman appeared unimpressed. ‘I don’t really care,’ he said with a grim smile that conveyed an utter ruthlessness. ‘Because neither of you will be around to report anything, and we’ll be gone within minutes.’
Hoffman gestured to his men, and they disarmed Cutler and Zamora and shoved them down toward the depths of the cave. They stumbled in the darkness as they struggled to see their way. Saffron hurried down with them and took her grandfather’s arm. Oppenheimer struggled to his feet, steadied himself with his cane and turned to glare up at Hoffman.
‘I’ll pay you double,’ he shouted, ‘triple, whatever you want!’
Hoffman shook his head.
‘You’re a damned fool, old man,’ he shouted. ‘You think that you’re powerful because you’re rich, but you’re a small fish in a very big pond and I work for the sharks. You’re nothing, Oppenheimer, a nobody compared to who I work for!’
Hoffman turned away, and looked at one of the soldiers next to him.
‘Don’t shoot any of them. We need this to look like an accident. Get the explosives out and blow the cave. It’ll hide any evidence that they were here at all, and if we need anything in the future we can come back when they’ve all rotted to hell.’
69
Ethan, along with Lopez, Ellison Thorne and the remaining soldiers had watched the entire exchange in amazement, from Saffron’s unexpected wrecking of their plan to Oppenheimer being hurled toward them to land at the mouth of the cave.
‘What the hell?’ McQuire uttered in disbelief.
Ethan replied grimly, ‘Looks like Oppenheimer’s finally getting what he deserves.’
Beside them, Lillian Cruz scowled at the mercenaries.
‘They’ve got one of your men now,’ she said. ‘He’s still alive. Whatever you all planned hasn’t worked.’
Ethan looked across at Ellison Thorne. ‘You sure Kip’s not going to make it?’
Ellison Thorne shook his head.
‘Can’t see how, even with all of those clever sawbones and new-fangled contraptions they’ve got today in hospitals. He’ll have mustered out by noon.’
‘None of it matters a damn,’ Saffron snapped, and pointed at Lopez. ‘You were all doomed when she cut herself a deal with my grandfather.’
A silence descended within the cave, even the breeze from the depths seeming to hang listless as Ethan stared at Saffron for a long and disbelieving moment before he turned to look at Lopez. Everyone in the cave was staring at her, and Ethan watched her glaring back at them defiantly like a cornered wildcat.
‘What the hell, Nicola?’ Ethan asked, staring at her.
Lopez glared back at Saffron.
‘And we had a ticket out of here until you dropped in and screwed everything up saving that worthless old bastard,’ she shot back, pointing at Jeb. ‘Nice work.’
Ellison Thorne glowered at Lopez from the shadows.
‘What trickery has she gone an’ done on us?’ he growled. ‘We wondered how the old man found us so swiftly.’
‘She betrayed all of you,’ Saffron said, and looked at Jeb Oppenheimer. ‘How much did it cost you, Grandpa, for another traitor to join your ranks?’
Oppenheimer was not looking at them, staring instead with interest into the dark depths of the cave, but he answered her question.
‘A quarter million bucks,’ he muttered as he hobbled off into the darkness of the caves behind them. ‘Cheap at twice the price.’
Ethan stared at Lopez in horror. To his surprise, Lopez smirked as she leveled Saffron with a cold gaze.
‘Predictable, to the last,’ she said coldly. ‘You’re damned right I took his bribe, and you’re damned right he paid me to guide his mercenaries to this cave. Gave me a GPS tracker to reveal the location of Lechuguilla Cave. If you’d thought about it, you’d have also guessed that I’d tossed the GPS tracker long before we got here.’
‘Not long enough to avoid a bloodbath!’ Saffron shouted. ‘People are dying because of what you did!’
Nathaniel McQuire turned his rifle to point at Lopez. ‘Well if that don’t beat the Dutch! You sold out on us!’
Ethan leapt forward between Lopez and the weapon. He looked at her and saw a glimmer of shame in her dark eyes.
‘Why?’ he finally managed to ask.
‘We needed a way to get support here quickly,’ she snapped back at him. ‘I figured if I dropped the tracker somewhere close by, Jarvis would be able to locate it if he had the IP address of the device.’
Ethan eyed her uncertainly.
‘That’s a hell of a risk, Nicola,’ he said. ‘It could have backfired on us.’
‘You’re goddamned right there!’ Saffron hissed, reaching out for Lopez.
‘Cut it out!’ Ethan snapped, blocking Saffron’s way. ‘We can sort this another time, right now we need to get the hell out of here.’
‘There ain’t no way out,’ Ellison Thorne said. ‘We searched plenty.’
Ethan turned to Butch Cutler and Zamora.
‘Some rescue you’ve pulled off here. Any other great ideas?’
‘We were too late,’ Cutler said, ‘couldn’t get in front of them in time.’
‘Where’s the cavalry?’ Lopez asked them.
McQuire laughed at her. ‘You can’t get horses down here, ma’am.’
Cutler looked at McQuire oddly before replying to Lopez.
‘They can’t move unless your man, Jarvis, can prove Donald Wolfe’s involved. I haven’t heard from him and our damned cell phones won’t work down here, so now all we’ve got is the tracker you’ve supposedly dumped somewhere in the deserts.’
Lopez smiled coldly.
‘They got here real fast, so they almost certainly found it,’ she said. ‘Which means that Oppenheimer most likely picked it up, being the scrooge that he is.’ Lopez looked across at the old man. ‘He won’t have left it behind.’
Oppenheimer stared at Lopez in horror and then reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small black device that lay in the palm of his hand, his face twisted with rage at Lopez’s betrayal. The old man hurled the device into the darkness and turned away, hobbling deeper into the cave.
Ellison Thorne looked at Lopez for a long moment as he realized what she had done.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured, his eyes twinkling with suppressed admiration.
Saffron shook her head.
‘You’ve risked all of our lives on a gamble, and made a profit to boot!’
Ethan was about to reply when he saw movement at the mouth of the caves. Mercenaries were sneaking forward carrying boxes of what looked suspiciously like explosives, and were mounting them near the cave mouth.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘They’ve got Kip Wren, so now they’re going to blow the cave mouth in and seal it.’
Ellison Thorne nodded.
‘That’s what we did, more than a hundred years ago now,’ he said. ‘Blew the entrance so that nobody would find it. Was a bunch of goddamned scientists that decided to dig through the rubble and found these caves back in 1986.’
Ethan turned as he heard Oppenheimer arguing with Saffron as they backed into the cave. The old man hurried away from her with his awkward gait, his cane clicking in the darkness until they could no longer hear it.
‘Now where the hell is he goin’?’ asked John Cochrane.