The seat belt did its job keeping Mercer secure, so all he suffered was a moment of disorientation and a crack on the head from the door pillar. Gravity pulled him out of the seat and he crawled from the overturned vehicle. Before the two SUVs braked in front of him, he had his fingers laced on his head.
Three soldiers jumped from the trucks, two with assault rifles, the other covering him with an automatic pistol. Mercer saw he was older than the others and guessed he was in charge. Taking heart that they hadn’t already shot him, and not knowing what was coming next, he gave the man a tired smile. “Tell your sales manager that this car just wasn’t up to my standards. Maybe I’ll take the Rolls-Royce instead.”
The soldier’s glacial expression didn’t change as he motioned Mercer to his feet. Mercer stood, a little shakily, and waited. The Chinese leader was shorter than him, but with a heavier build. He looked nearly fifty, but that in no way detracted from his physical presence. Mercer could tell he was a professional, a veteran in his country’s service, and about the toughest looking son of a bitch he’d ever seen.
The vet moved past Mercer and peered into the overturned car. His expression was grim when he looked back at his captive. The two men sized each other up for what felt like a long time.
“Sorry, pal,” Mercer said. “One of us is as good as you’re going to get.”
“Where?” Sergeant Huai barked. He didn’t understand Mercer’s exact words but got the meaning—gone.
Mercer never saw the blow coming. Sweeping a leg between Mercer’s, the old soldier pounded the heel of his hand into his sternum and dropped him to the deck. By the time Mercer realized what had happened, Huai was kneeling by his side with his pistol jammed against his throat hard enough to make Mercer gag.
“Where?” Huai asked. He showed no trace of exertion.
It didn’t matter anymore. Lauren had to have realized Mercer wasn’t coming and by now she was safely at Gamboa. Bruneseau would be securing ground transportation even if they waited around to see if somehow he did escape. His reason for resisting was gone, but he hoped there’d be more to come.
Angering his captors any further would gain him nothing and would likely make any follow-up interrogation that much worse. Not that he believed there was such a thing as mild torture. Mercer studied the dark eyes boring into his. The soldier seemed to be searching for a reason to pull the trigger. Mercer wouldn’t give him the excuse.
“Lifeboat,” he croaked. “They took the lifeboat as soon as we landed. I stayed behind to distract you.”
The soldiers engaged in a quick conversation in Chinese, refining the translation of the answer. Huai turned back to Mercer without easing the pressure on his pistol. “Where they go?”
“Cruise ship,” Mercer replied without hesitation, feigning total defeat. “Unless you’re willing to slaughter three thousand people, they’re gone.”
Huai didn’t need to hear the rest of the explanation. He heard the words cruise ship and understood the others were beyond his reach. Equal measures of anger and fear coursed through his body. Liu Yousheng was going to kill him. There was no alternative, and for a moment the old sergeant considered not going back. But thirty years in the military had all but erased thoughts of personal safety. He’d taken an oath those many years ago and his decades of service had strengthened it, built it up, made it into an armor that excluded all other considerations. He had to go back and face his superior. That was what he’d been trained to do. He could only trust that learning what his prisoner knew would be enough to save him from Liu’s wrath.
That took care of his fear. His anger he took out on the man lying beneath him. Without warning, Huai threw a punch to the point of Mercer’s chin that contained only half his strength yet was more than enough to knock him unconscious.
Without handcuffs, it was easier to guard a comatose prisoner than a motive one.
“Throw him in the back of the truck,” he ordered his men. “Just in case, we’ll check the lifeboat station then get to the chopper.” He plucked a walkie-talkie from his belt and called to the other driver he’d sent out to corral the Bentley, ordering him to police the ship for the body of their one comrade and the other who’d been critically injured. He then called the pilot waiting in the Gazelle to get ready to clear out.
Ten minutes later they took off. The Gazelle flew west, where Liu had another secret project under way, thirty minutes behind the gunship he’d ordered away from the canal when he’d landed. In his wake he left a JetRanger helicopter crashed onto the car carrier’s roof, about two hundred spent shell casings, and a million dollars’ worth of luxury automobiles that looked like they’d all lost a demolition derby. Huai had confidence that when the vessel’s master reported the incident to the authorities, Liu’s government contacts would deflect any investigation toward drug smugglers or modern-day pirates.
That would explain away what had happened here, but what about what had occurred at the lake? Three other people had seen the excavation. They probably knew what it meant and would report it straightaway. It was a costly failure, to be sure, but again Liu might be able to save the operation. He had so many on his payroll that the nature of the excavation could be disguised. In order to do that, Liu would need to know exactly who the American trussed up in the hold worked for.
As a professional soldier, Huai knew the importance of interrogation even if he found the methods barbaric. He had no problem engaging an enemy in a fight and using any means necessary to accomplish his goal. It was a soldier’s calling. But torturing a captive to extract information was the work of another breed of men altogether—men without any sense of honor or the sacrifice of combat. They were like vultures who descended on battlefields to pick apart the bits of useful offal. They would crow over a piece of information, carry it back to their shadowy masters still covered with the blood of their victims as if it were a badge of courage.
A political officer had been sent with Huai’s detachment to Panama. It would be his job to handle the questioning sessions. Sun was his name, and no one was willing to spend enough time in his presence to learn his first name or his proper rank or title. He was simply called Mr. Sun, an irony not lost on the few soldiers who knew the English word. Sun was the darkest man any had ever met.
With a cadaverous skull sucked in at the cheeks and temples, he appeared to have no flesh at all. His skin was so dry that flecks often fell away when he moved, like a lizard caught halfway through a molt. Whatever his skin affliction, it also affected his hair, so his scalp was covered by a patchwork of graying follicles he combed over to hide the bald spots. His head was too large for his slender body, as if a burden to his thin neck. Huai guessed that Sun was in his sixties but the man’s odd appearance could hide an age swing of ten years either way.
In an unguarded moment on the flight from China, Captain Chen had confided in Huai that Sun had headed the Chinese program to interrogate American pilots shot down during the Vietnam War. Because of advances in technology and tactics, the prisoners China had kept following the Korean War had long since outlived their usefulness. The last of them had been put to death in 1959. Needing a new source of intelligence concerning Western military doctrine, the PLA saw an opportunity in the jungle conflict and paid the North Vietnamese with arms and training for hundreds of pilots. The first, an A-6 Intruder pilot, had arrived at a facility in central China in 1966 and lasted until 1971. During the course of the program, Chen had heard that Sun had overseen the torture of more than two hundred men, and had only lost funding when the last of the aviators died in 1983. Since then he’d been “working” with dissidents and most recently with suspected leaders of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement.