On the brink of losing control, the French spy took an aggressive step toward Mercer only to be stopped by Foch. “He’s right. We don’t have time for a different plan. The boats are the only way.”
The makeshift dock was a hundred yards from the dormitory tent and the Chinese guards appeared to be preparing for a frontal assault along the caldera’s rim. They were digging themselves in for an all-out battle against an army of commandos, never suspecting that their adversaries were already behind them. The few workers standing between the tent and the lake were a nonfactor.
Foch clicked on his radio. “Shepherd, this is Foch. What’s your ETA?”
“GPS says six minutes. Should be able to hear me in five.”
“Roger.” He was angry, frustrated, and feeling trapped by the Chinese and the circumstance.
No one saw the Chinese soldier slither under the back of the tent and didn’t know he was there until he opened fire. Corporal Hauer was the closest to him and he jerked under the hammer-blow onslaught of high-velocity rounds. Most were absorbed by his body armor but it took only one bullet to find its way through. He was dead when he hit the dusty ground. Lauren whirled at the sound and killed the prone guard with a double tap from her pistol.
“There’s going to be more,” Mercer shouted, hyped on adrenaline. He scooped up Hauer’s FAMAS. The barrel was cold, the clip full. The boy hadn’t fired a single shot in his one and only fight.
Unwilling to leave his dead comrade behind, but with no choice given the situation, Foch checked the compound. There was a cluster of guards far enough away that he thought they could make the dash for the dock. He motioned the others to the door. The four survivors met one another’s eyes with a fatalistic determination. Either they would make it or they wouldn’t.
Bursting into the sunlight, they ran for the lake in a tight group. A dark-skinned native worker gasped as they ran past but was too startled to raise any kind of alarm. The wall of bullets Mercer was sure they’d run into never came. The guards farther down the beach never turned and in fifteen seconds they reached the wooden jetty. Their weight made the structure bob on its barrel pontoons.
Lauren leapt straight into the largest aluminum skiff and began working on the engine while Foch knifed away the tie-down lines. Mercer and Bruneseau knelt near the skiff, eyeing the beach through the sights of the assault rifles. At the extreme edge of what he could see, Mercer detected a lot of movement around the Chinese helicopter. They were prepping it for flight, probably to support the patrol that had killed Levesque.
“I know. I know,” Rene said when Mercer pointed over with his chin. “If they get airborne while our chopper’s picking us up, we are finished.”
The twenty-horsepower outboard sputtered to life at the first pull on the cord. The three men jumped in just as a barrage of rounds pummeled the beach and the dock. The patrol that had first spied Mercer and Lauren had circled around the dormitory and targeted them at the boat. Mercer could see one of them screaming into a radio.
With its throttle twisted wide open, the flat-bottomed boat shot from the quay in a tight arc, Lauren guiding it out toward the middle of the lake. As their vantage shifted, Mercer could see that the Chinese helo’s blades were already turning. He could see five or six troopers in its cargo hold.
From around the island in the middle of the lake came an inflatable boat loaded with soldiers who must have been guarding a work party. Lauren saw them first and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”
The Chinese were well out of accurate range but fired anyway, hoping for a lucky hit. Tiny geysers erupted wherever a bullet struck the water. Because the Chinese controlled the middle of the lake, that one craft managed to box them in. Every passing second ate into Lauren’s maneuvering room. She turned away, steering the boat toward where the lake drained down the waterfall. The falls were a quarter mile away. Beyond was a yawning chasm backed by the tumult of the approaching storm.
The Legion pilot had kept his craft on the deck until reaching the caldera, so when he swooped over the lip of the mountain no one had heard his approach. He was just there, like an avenging angle. Without any offensive weapons, there was nothing he could do about the boat pursuing his team so he kept his concentration on his comrades. At an altitude of only fifty feet he could clearly see that if Lauren stopped to wait for extraction the Chinese in the Zodiac would overtake them. He would have to make the pick up on the fly.
He radioed Foch with instructions as he pressed the button that deployed the ropes from each side of the chopper.
“D’accord.” Foch nodded at the radio and addressed the others. “Prepare for a fast extraction.”
“Make it damn fast,” Mercer said. The falls were four hundred yards ahead. They’d be over them in thirty seconds. The storm continued to rush at them, a pulsing wall of black clouds discharging an unimaginable amount of rain.
The shrill whine of the outboard was drowned out by the deeper beat of the JetRanger as it thundered just above the hurtling boat, the pilot matching speed even as Lauren dared slow a bit. A pair of bullets plowed into the skiff’s engine. The two-cylinder faltered. The Chinese had halved the distance to their quarry.
The heavy nylon ropes dangled from the chopper like the tentacles of some enormous jellyfish, jerking and jumping in the rotor downblast. Foch managed to grab on to one, but the other swayed just out of reach. The pilot made a small adjustment and the line swept across the fleeing craft. A metal snaplink struck Mercer on the back of the head and would have pitched him overboard had Lauren not seen it happen. She flicked the motor over so the boat swayed sharply. He fell back in, a trickle of blood oozing from his torn scalp.
Foch snapped a hook from the rope onto Mercer’s combat harness and then snapped in Lauren. They were fifty yards from the falls. Bruneseau knelt at the stern, firing controlled three-round bursts that the Chinese all but ignored. They were coming on at full speed and pouring out a steady fusillade, mistakenly concentrating their fire on the boat.
The lake, smooth out in the open, became choppy as it was sucked through the cataract. A fine mist obscured the gap where the waters vanished down the side of the volcano. Mercer felt a few drops land on his skin.
Secured to the chopper, he stood again to add his FAMAS to Bruneseau’s weapon. He fired on full auto, brass and cordite smoke erupting from the gun like it was tearing itself apart. Foch finally got hold of the second line. With fifteen feet to go before the speeding boat launched itself off the mountain, he lunged over to lock Bruneseau to the line.
“Hold on!” Lauren screamed as the lake suddenly vanished below them.
They went airborne.
For the first fraction of a second, momentum kept the boat in a straight trajectory before gravity began to pull it out from under them. It started to fall away, tipping toward the bow like a diver off an Acapulco cliff. Because Lauren was secured to a hook higher up on the rappelling rope, she was the first to be plucked from the falling craft. One second she was riding in it with them and the next she was hovering in the sky as the men continued their descent.
Then Bruneseau’s harness came taut and he too was pulled from the boat. The pilot was fighting the added weight, flying the chopper down the falls with the skiff because he knew that at least one of his team hadn’t snapped on. There was maybe another second before the craft smashed into the first set of rocks in the ladderlike falls. He had no choice but to pull up.
Mercer sensed the decision made high above him and threw himself onto Foch, wrapping his arms and legs around the Frenchman in a tight embrace and waited to see what would happen first.
The skiff hit the first boulder an instant after Mercer felt the harness dig into his shoulders and groin. He and Foch had been lifted clear just as the aluminum boat disintegrated against the rocks. The motor tore free of its mounts and tumbled off into space, its tiny prop still spinning as if it could fly. The hull was turned into so much scrap that washed down the remainder of the falls like a battered soda can.