Finally they reached an empty piece of land marked with pieces of San Sebastian. What was left of a church bell lay half embedded in the ground, the crude foundations of collapsed buildings were now graves. Dogan moved past the church bell into the center of town and stopped with Marna lagging several yards back. The authorities had already stripped the ground free of bones but it didn’t matter. The feeling was still present.
“It happened here,” he said absently. “The massacre happened here.”
“Massacre? What are you talking about?”
If Dogan heard her, he didn’t show it. He drifted about slowly, kicking at the dirt with his feet, occasionally lifting a charred piece of wood as if expecting a survivor to lie beneath it. He glanced around him.
“Lubeck must have been sitting on one of those hills, probably with his back to the sun so it would be in the eyes of anyone who looked up in his direction. He watched them all shot. He saw it all.”
“Shot?” Marna swallowed hard. “I wasn’t told anything about that. Christ, you’re talking about a town of two hundred and fifty people. I thought you said Division wasn’t interested in this.”
“They’re not.”
“Then why—”
Dogan swung toward her, the intensity of his stare making her break off her words. “Listen to me, Marna, this is part of something much bigger. All of South America might be at stake.”
She regarded him strangely. “You sound like Masvidal.”
“Who?”
“Masvidal. He’s the one-eyed leader of a bunch of terrorist Robin Hoods. They see themselves as the saviors of the continent.”
“Terrorists?” Dogan said softly, and suddenly everything fell into place. He had found the mysterious third party who had been trying so desperately to kill Christopher Locke. “Who are they?” he demanded. “What’s their name?”
“They call themselves SAS-Ultra. The SAS stands for South American Solidarity. They’re dedicated, or claim to be anyway, to freeing these countries from any foreign intervention whatsoever. The Carter Doctrine was prime fuel for their fire, but they’ve got a gut hatred for the Soviets and Cubans as well. I guess you could say they choose their enemies without prejudice.”
“But they’re not part of the international terror network?”
“No,” Marna acknowledged, “they’re the ultimate revolutionary isolationists. They even loathe publicity. I only know about them from some investigations I was pursuing on the destruction of oil fields in Paraguay. It turned up more questions than answers. I haven’t even got enough to file a report on them yet.”
“What about Interpol or the CIA data banks?”
Marna shook her head. “Nothing. Officially, SAS-Ultra doesn’t exist.”
No wonder Vaslov found no trace of them, Dogan realized. The wind swirled through the town, its howling sounding too much like the screams of a child. Dogan suppressed a shudder. Marna wrapped her arms about herself.
“But a group that wide in composition,” Dogan started, “would take one hell of a central organization.”
“Masvidal is mostly to blame for that.” Marna’s eyes swept the dead town. “But you can forget about his troops having anything to do with what happened here. The people who were killed in this … massacre are the kind SAS-Ultra’s been fighting for, not against, if I’ve got my signals straight.”
Dogan thought briefly. “But how do you suppose they’d react if a group as powerful as any nation moved in and started …” He grasped for a way of accurately describing the Committee’s methods. “… manipulating things? Displacing people and taking over huge acres of land for their own benefit?”
Marna didn’t hesitate. “I think they’d go at them with everything they had.”
It made sense, Dogan figured. SAS-Ultra was not part of San Sebastian but they were tied directly to the larger picture.
Kill me and another will replace me.
The threat the old hag in Schaan had shouted at Locke. Yes, SAS-Ultra possessed an inexhaustible supply of fanatical manpower, if not their own, then hired out from across the globe. The Committee had been using Locke all along to flush them out, and SAS-Ultra had responded by repeatedly trying to kill an innocent college professor made to look like their enemy. Sooner or later, the Committee would find and destroy them.
Dogan looked beyond the edge of town to huge patches of dust between a pair of hillsides, a graveyard for the crops that had burned along with the people who nurtured them. Wordlessly he started walking, and Marna followed. Dogan moved right into the center of the dust patches, squinting his eyes against the wind. The ground was hard and parched. He felt a softening in his stomach. Here lay the key to everything, the missing piece of the puzzle. If only the ground could tell him what horrible things had been done here before the massacre.
Suddenly Marna was at his side, grasping his elbow.
“Up there, high on that hillside.”
Dogan held a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. He made out what looked to be a small shack camouflaged among what remained of the flora.
“An old shack,” he noted. “Why the sudden concern?”
“Because it wasn’t there last week.”
Chapter 21
“This doesn’t have to be difficult,” Mandala said calmly as the giant Chinese lifted Locke onto a chair near a round table in the back of the room.
The balcony’s glass doors were slightly open and a cool breeze slid through, awakening him to the madness.
They‘ve got Greg! Oh, God, they‘ve got Greg!
Thoughts of the severed finger, ring and all, sent a shudder through him. He couldn’t stop shaking.
Mandala nodded to Shang and the giant started for the door, grabbing something from the dresser on the way. Mandala showed his gun. Locke noticed all lights in the room had been turned off except for a powerful pole lamp directly over him.
“You have turned into quite an inconvenience for us,” Mandala said evenly. “But you can make up for that now. Your son will be released. You as well. All you have to do is answer a few questions.”
Locke looked away from the dark man, flirted with the notion of jumping him while the giant was still gone, but dismissed it quickly after considering the gun. The man held it tightly, just out of range of a quick lunge. He was a professional and not about to be taken by a fool’s act.
“Come now, Mr. Locke, you don’t want to make things any more hard on yourself than they already are. Why bother resisting? It is too late for you to do us any harm. We are unstoppable now. Only a few holes remain to be filled and we need you to point them out for us.”
Locke remained silent.
“Do you want further reassurances that your son will be released? I can’t give them. All I can give you is the promise that his finger might be only the beginning. If you don’t cooperate with us, we will cut him apart piece by piece.”
The door opened and Shang returned with a white plastic bucket in his hand. Mandala returned the pistol to his belt. The giant’s presence was a better deterrent than bullets.
“You see, Mr. Locke,” Mandala proceeded, “your son is being held by a team of Shang’s persuasion — experts in torture. They can remove any limb without the subject even passing out. Amazing, isn’t it? Tricks of the dreaded Tong Society, which was Shang’s first employer.”
The giant lowered the plastic bucket to the table. It was filled with ice. Locke kept himself calm but left the fear plain on his face. He had to convince them he would give in. His chance would come, an opening to be taken advantage of. To create that opening, he had to make his captors underestimate him.