Mercer doubted Liu Yousheng would show himself at the lake, but if he could photograph some other key Hatcherly people, he could put an end to the plunder as well as give Bruneseau his first break in peeling away the other levels protecting the shadowy company. The plan was simple, and relatively safe—a lot smarter than sneaking into a high-security container port. The power of the telephoto lens meant they could stay well back from any excavation Hatcherly had at the lake and still shoot rolls of damaging film.
The only danger came from the trek through the jungle. The driver who’d picked them up at Lauren’s apartment had told Mercer that the Legionnaires were members of the Third Regiment based in Kourou, Guyana, the Legion’s jungle warfare specialists. The fact that they were tasked with protecting the Ariane spaceport lent credence to what Bruneseau had told him last night, but Mercer couldn’t shake a suspicion. Something was said last night, a slip of some sort that had pushed his doubts into overdrive.
He’d hoped the answer would come in his sleep, as was often the case for him, but he’d been dead to the world from the moment Lauren went into the shower until she’d tapped his shoulder and admonished him about the volume of his snoring two hours ago. Talking with Bruneseau hadn’t jogged anything loose. Frustration at not naming what bothered him caused his shoulders to tense.
Lauren noticed him wince as he rolled his neck. “Are you okay?” she asked, wrongly assuming it was the first tinges of fear affecting him.
He returned his attention to her and Rene. “Yeah, sorry. My mind was somewhere else. When are we leaving?”
“Sundown is around seven tonight,” Bruneseau explained. “We’ll time it so we drop the Zodiac at dusk and run up the river under the cover of darkness. We have night-vision goggles to avoid any boat traffic, though I don’t expect any. We’ll spend the night with the craft then march to the caldera before first light.”
“Where’s the chopper going to be when we’re at the lake?” Lauren asked.
“At the airport at El Real with ‘engine trouble.’ It’s painted like a sightseeing helo so it won’t attract much attention.”
“That’s a twenty-minute flight if we need an emergency evac.”
“I know.” The Frenchman didn’t look any happier about this than Lauren. “There’s no other place to hide it up there.”
“All right. What kind of chopper?”
“JetRanger 222.”
Lauren nodded. Before she’d taken up intelligence work, she’d flown the Bell 205, known in the army as the UH-1 Huey. Although she hadn’t been behind the stick in four years, she felt confident that if anything happened to the pilot, she could handle the helicopter.
“Extended tanks?”
“Non. We will top off the fuel in La Palma, which gives us more than enough range to get back to Panama City. Once Mercer has his evidence we will backtrack to the inflatable and motor back to El Real where the chopper waits.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lauren opined.
Mercer considered the hundreds of things that could go wrong, saw no way around them, and agreed with Lauren. “Let’s do it.”
They spent the next two hours with Lieutenant Foch, since he would lead the raid, poring over maps and briefing the Frenchmen on the terrain around the lake. Like many in the Legion, Foch had claimed to be from Quebec to get around the rule that only foreigners could serve within the elite corps. Keeping with another Legion tradition, Mercer knew not to ask Foch’s Christian name. He found he liked the soldier, who was unpretentious and more than willing to listen to a civilian, probably because Mercer had already proven himself by breaking into Hatcherly.
The team rested in the safe house until the afternoon, when they loaded up one of Bruneseau’s vans for the drive to the helicopter. The forty-minute ride took them through Panama City and along the coast past the old city along the Pan-American highway toward the isolated town of Chepo. The village used to be the terminus of the highway, the last stop before the impenetrable jungles of the Darien Gap. Many Panamanians still considered anything beyond the dingy town as terra incognita.
Before reaching Chepo, the van swung off the road and traveled for another thirty minutes along a dirt track that was increasingly hemmed in by jungle. Rounding a last corner, they broke into a partial clearing where waist-high grass had been beaten flat under where a Bell helo sat on its struts. At the edge of the jungle lay the crumbled walls of a plantation house. Creeping vines seemed to be tugging the ruined structure back into the earth.
They had to strip out the chopper’s rear seats to manhandle in the deflated Zodiac. Bruneseau would fly up front with the pilot, leaving Mercer, Lauren, Foch, and two other Legionnaires to shoehorn themselves into the cargo area. The van’s driver would wait at the plantation for their return the following day and coordinate communications with the rest of the detachment in Panama City. They took off a half hour after their arrival. An hour later they refueled the JetRanger at the small airport in La Palma. Because no one had changed into fatigues yet, they maintained their cover as sightseers headed back into the Darien Gap. Only when they were airborne again did they change clothes. Though she didn’t seem fazed by the close proximity to the men, Lauren maintained her modesty by buttoning her camouflage shirt over the black T-shirt she’d been wearing. Waterproof bags containing weapons, combat harnesses, and other gear were secured to the Zodiac and would be retrieved once they were on the river.
Using a map clipped to his kneeboard, the Australian-born pilot cut across a number of the Rio Tuira’s twists, keeping the nimble chopper so close to the jungle canopy that Mercer could see monkeys howling at them from the tops of trees. Once, they startled a clutch of parrots that took off like a fleeing rainbow.
The constant whine of the helo’s turbine and the resonant thrum of the rotor blades made it impossible for Mercer to think beyond what his senses took in—the smell of sweat from so many people piled together, the feel of a metal bracket pressed against his spine, the aftertaste of a spicy lunch served at the safe house, the centrifugal sloshing of his body as the JetRanger swayed through the humid air.
He closed his eyes for what felt like a few seconds, and when he opened them again he could see that the day had gotten noticeably darker. It was always like this in the tropics, he knew. The sun did more than set; it raced for the horizon as if pursued by an eager night. He glanced at his TAG Heuer. 7:20. Bruneseau had timed their flight perfectly.
The forces on his body changed as the jet-powered helicopter began to slow. The river was off to their right about a quarter mile away, a darker wound in the dark jungle. Rene Bruneseau swept the stretch of water with an infrared monocular, looking for the telltale glow from a boat’s motor or a human body. Mercer could see him mouth something to the pilot over the helo’s comm system and the JetRanger crabbed sideways toward the Rio Tuira.
This was it. They were going in and suddenly Mercer’s mind filled again with all kinds of thoughts. His hands turned slick and his heart raged like a trapped animal. In a startling moment he realized it wasn’t fear infecting him. It was the anticipation he usually felt at the verge of answering some disturbing question. The reason Gary Barber’s corpse was mutilated and why he’d been attacked in Paris was waiting down in that jungle and he was eager to get it.
As soon as the helicopter scuttled out over the river and its blades whipped concentric circles into the calm black waters, the side door was thrown open and a Legionnaire yanked the lanyard that inflated the heavy raft at the same time it was shoved out the opening. The Zodiac expanded as it pinwheeled to the water, weighted so it landed bottom-side down with a wet smack. In the glow of a diffused landing light, the first trooper leaped the fifteen feet into the river next to the now fully inflated raft.