It looked like the mine was being worked by mechanical dinosaurs.
Dispelling her awe at the enormity of the mine, she put her attention on the security of the facility and realized immediately that this place was well fortified. Three-man patrols worked the fenced perimeter of the main compound, while others mingled with the workers and still more moved outside the fence. In just a few minutes she counted twenty-three armed men.
“Pssst,” Foch hissed and the soldiers retreated off the crest of the mountain and regrouped fifty feet down the backside of the partially excavated hill.
“Combien du soldats?” he asked.
“English, please.”
“How many soldiers?”
“I counted twenty-three,” Lauren offered.
“Thirty-eight,” the French soldiers chorused, having seen many that Lauren had missed.
She felt chagrined, but that was why soldiers backed each other up.
“Looks like our only way in is down the face of the excavation.” Foch waited for anyone to contradict him with a better idea. No one did. “There aren’t as many lights farther along our right flank. We’ll descend there. The ground looks brisé, ah, broken up, but the terrace effect of the mining should make it easier.” He looked to Lauren. “Pièce du gâteau.”
“Piece of cake,” she mimicked.
Foch outlined his plan, which amounted to little more than getting down onto the valley floor, finding cover and waiting for an opportunity to search the mine. Of the structures they’d observed, they agreed that the underground bunker seemed the likely place for Mercer if he was indeed here.
The big Serb, Tomanovic, took point as the team hiked laterally along the backside of the mountain until they reached an area that wasn’t currently being worked and was therefore quiet. The move took them farther from the underground bunker, so they’d have to cross back once they reached the valley floor.
They were like shadows against the dark earth as they slid down the first of the giant steps that made up the terraced face of the excavation. The twenty-foot drop was rendered safe by the working face’s sixty-degree angle of repose and the churned-up soil at each level, which absorbed the shock. There were eight levels to descend and when they reached the valley floor, the soldiers had their backs stained red by the clinging soil.
Their infiltration had gone unseen.
The bunker was two hundred yards away across a no-man’s-land littered with mounds of dirt, gravel, and an army of construction equipment. In the blaze cast by high-intensity lights, the vehicles looked like enormous insects, yellow army ants mindlessly bent on their task of leveling the landscape. From where they crouched behind a pile of overburden waiting to be trucked away, they could just see the bunker and the five men approaching it. Four were uniformed guards, while the fifth man, much smaller than the others, appeared to be a civilian.
They weren’t sure who he was, only that he wasn’t Liu Yousheng or any of his COSTIND cronies who ran Hatcherly.
No more than fifteen seconds after the group disappeared into the hole, one of the soldiers reappeared blowing a whistle whose shrill cry was lost to distance and the rumbling din of the trucks. Yet the call must have been heard because the alarm seemed to carry across the compound in a wave. Very quickly additional guards began pouring from a block of dormitories. More dangerously, additional lights snapped on that bathed every square foot of the mine, including the mound of dirt shielding the French team.
“Vic, get to the top of the hill,” Foch ordered the big Serb.
Tomanovic moved upward without a word.
“What do you think happened?” Lauren asked while they waited behind cover.
“Seemed they were headed down to a secure area and didn’t like what they found,” a Legionnaire said.
“Or what they didn’t find,” she corrected. “That’s got to be where they were keeping Mercer. Maybe he escaped.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
They waited in silence until Vic came back to report. “High alert now, sir.” His English was better than his French, though both were heavily accented. “They sweep outer fence with searchlight. As you hear, mining equipment still runs. More men are at the underground bunker. Civilian looks pissed.” He pronounced it peeced.
“We need to get out of here.” Foch’s face was grim.
“Whatever just happened has made this place très dangereux .”
Three hundred yards behind them was the road out of the mine. A wire security fence manned by four Chinese barred unauthorized vehicles from gaining entry. Because the gate was so distant and the hour so late, none of the commandos gave it any thought until the sound of an approaching truck grew louder than the racket of the excavators in front of them. As one, they turned and saw that a 6x6 military truck had passed through the gate and was headed straight for them. As the team scrambled to the far side of the hill, the truck stopped less than thirty yards away. Two waves of soldiers peeled from the back of the soft-topped truck.
Unlike the other guards stationed at the mine, these men were Panamanian. Lauren could tell by the cut of their uniforms and the M-16s they carried.
Two unforeseen events, the alarm raised at the bunker and the arrival of reinforcements, had rendered the rescue operation a disaster and made their retreat questionable. The Panamanian soldiers quickly assembled in a sweep line, with each man no more than twenty feet from two comrades. At a command that didn’t carry to the French, the troopers began a steady march across the graded valley floor.
“Merde!”
The commandos had just a couple minutes before the sweep line reached them. If they ran in the opposite direction, they would run into a sweep line being formed by the Chinese soldiers. They were trapped. The mound shielding them was like a blister on the hard-packed ground a hundred feet from the base of the terraced cliff. Maybe one of them could cover that distance without being detected, but not all six.
“Oui,” Lauren said, her throat tight, “merde.”
“Top of the hill,” Foch ordered. The team scrambled up the loose mound of mine waste, giving them a twenty-foot height advantage and an open field of fire. From a clandestine rescue, their mission was about to become a desperate last stand.
“Pick your targets. Officers, NCOs.” The lieutenant’s words were unnecessary. Those under him, and Lauren, knew what was expected. The Panamanian sweep line was twenty yards off, the Chinese a bit farther.
In a hopeful inspiration, Lauren said, “Concentrate your fire on the locals. They won’t have the level of training as the Chinese. If we can punch a hole through their ranks, we might be able to steal their truck.”
“Bon idée.”
There was a precious second when it appeared that the skirmish line would walk right past the hill, but then a Panamanian sergeant shouted at one of his troopers and the man angled toward the mound. Lauren couldn’t believe this was happening. In another thirty seconds she was about to enter a fight for her life. Even Kosovo hadn’t been this bad. She bit into her lower lip and watched the Panamanians approach over the sights of her machine pistol.
“Camerone Hacienda,” Tomanovic whispered. It was a rallying cry for the Legion, the site of a battle in which three officers and sixty-two regular troops held off an army of two thousand Mexicans during a war of imperial expansion under Napoleon III. In the end, like so many battles in Legion lore, the French were defeated, but only after the last five surviving Legionnaires fixed bayonets and actually charged the approaching Mexicans. The anniversary of the 1863 battle is still celebrated by Legionnaires each April 30.