Once more she made it a statement, not a question.
"Yes. Remember, this organization wants what we have in these tunnels. They've wanted it for sixty years."
"That is why you've never used any of it before," Fatima said. Abayon nodded.
"Not only do they want it, but I think they put it here, if the meeting between Lansale and Chichibu is true. Golden Lily was designed from the very beginning by this group. They used the cover of the war to gather their riches."
Fatima mulled that over.
"But…"
"Go ahead," Abayon prompted.
"Why now?"
"Two reasons. One is that I will not be here much longer."
"You look fine – " Fatima began to protest, but Abayon held up a hand, silencing her.
"You have been very observant and wise up until now. Please do not change. I have less than a year to live. So, perhaps it is selfish of me, but I want to find out who I've been shadow-boxing with all these years."
"And the second reason?"
"It's time," Abayon said simply.
"Since 9/11 the gloves have come off. We are entering an age of a new type of conflict, and this group is probably quite aware of that. The Americans came after us the other night and many people died. We can sit and let them come to us or we can go after them. I prefer action over reaction."
Fatima nodded.
"All right. What happened to this Lansale?"
"He managed to make his way back to the United States via diplomatic channels. He then became a career spook, as near as I have been able to find out. Strangely, though, he was photographed in Dallas on the twenty-second of November, 1963, but he always claimed he was never there."
"What is so important about that?"
"Something very significant happened that day."
"What?"
"President Kennedy was assassinated."
CHAPTER 13
Vaughn lay on his back staring up at the stars, savoring the cool night breeze blowing across his soaked clothes and the feel of sand beneath him. They were on the shore of a small, deserted cove on the north side of Jolo Island. As soon as they made landfall, they conducted a quick box reconnaissance of the immediate area, and both were confident they were on an isolated part of the island.
"That was fucked," Tai said.
Vaughn turned his head and looked at her in the moonlight. She was lying next to him, still breathing hard from the long swim to shore. In her hand she had the GPS, which she'd just pulled out of a waterproof bag in her rucksack.
"We're alive," Vaughn noted.
Tai looked up from the GPS screen at the sky.
"It will be dawn soon. We're over ten kilometers from where we're supposed to be."
She pointed.
"Hono Mountain is there."
Vaughn could see a large dark mass in the moonlight towering up into the sky.
"We're way behind schedule," Tai added.
"Is that what bothers you?" Vaughn asked.
"Hell, no," she said angrily.
"Three malfunctions in a row. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit."
They'd hit the water hard, then had to scramble out from underneath the reserve canopy that draped over them. Unspoken between them was the fact that they hadn't worn life vests. They'd been so confident they could make the flight to the island, it was never brought up. For Vaughn, that mistake brought echoes of the designator battery. What saved them was that they followed standing operating procedure and waterproofed the contents of their rucksacks before the jump, which served as flotation devices in the pinch. They'd cut away from the reserve, Vaughn got rid of the harness, and then they tied themselves together using a short length of rope, put their elbows on their floating rucks, and started swimming toward the silhouette of Jolo island. It took them almost an hour to make it.
Tai had explained all the failures to him. Vaughn had to agree with her succinct assessment of what happened to her, but he wanted to wait and let her lay out the obvious.
"Someone was trying to kill me," she finally said.
"You think?"
That earned him a slight smile that momentarily wiped away the tension and anger on Tai's face. Vaughn checked his watch.
"We're overdue on the initial entry report."
He sat up, grabbed his rucksack, and began to open it to get to the satellite radio inside.
Tai put out a hand and stopped him.
"What?" Vaughn asked.
"Someone was trying to kill me," she repeated.
"I know, and – " Vaughn stopped and slowly nodded.
"I see."
He let go of the ruck.
"Why? And who?"
"I don't know."
"The Abu Sayef?"
"I think getting to my chute and disabling it would have been a little hard for them to do."
"Someone tried to kill you," Vaughn said.
"I already said that twice," Tai responded.
"Yes. So, you're dead."
Tai stared at him. Their eyes locked in the moonlight, and she slowly nodded and smiled.
"Very good."
Her smile was not of the pleasant variety.
General Slocum was none too pleased, and he was letting his staff know it. The initial entry report from the recon team was overdue. This raised a lot of questions, none of which anyone knew the answer to. Had the team been compromised, which meant that the entire mission was compromised? Was it equipment failure? Had both jumpers died on infiltration? Or were they too severely injured to make commo?
From behind the one-way glass in the observation room, Royce watched the general lash questions at his staff, none of which could be answered by any of them. It was a fruitless exercise, but one Royce had seen far too many times in his dealings with the military. Von Clausewitz, the great Prussian general, who many military men liked to quote, had once said, "In war, everything is simple, but even the simple is difficult." Royce always remembered that saying when he dealt with the military.
There was another element that began to enter into the discourse in the operations room: someone dared ask the question whether this was simply a twist thrown into the simulation to see how they reacted. That earned the speaker an even fiercer tongue-lashing by Slocum, who got them back on track by pretending this was a real exercise.
For Royce, there was another issue bothering him. One that had nothing to do with the recon team or even the mission. He'd used one of his connections to the National Security Agency to check on the progress of the jet David was on. The NSA was wired into Space Command out in Cheyenne Mountain, which controlled a ring of satellites that tracked every single object that flew.
The reports had been fine up until a little while ago. Then the jet disappeared.
At first Royce had assumed that it landed on some island. But when he checked the last confirmed satellite spotting, projected out speed and time, and drew a circle, all he was left with was ocean. There was no place it could have landed.
It had vanished.
Royce did not believe in the Bermuda Triangle, or the Devil's Sea, the Pacific's version of that famed locale. Planes didn't vanish. They crashed, they blew up, or they landed somewhere. Instinctively, he knew that David – and everyone else on board that plane – was dead. The Organization had retired them. Permanently.
He shook his head. It wasn't his instincts, it was reality. He'd sensed David's fatalism the last time they met. And he had to assume that David had not made the decision to retire, despite what he'd told him. He'd been forced out.
Royce held his emotions at bay and considered that. True, David was old. But he was still an effective agent. A man with loads of experience. So why "retire" him?
There was only one reason Royce could come up with: David had fucked up.
And David had been working this op.
Royce's jaw clenched. Tai. The bitch. She – His thought abruptly ended as a red light flickered in the operations center. An incoming message. It began to scroll across the screen in front of the room. The overdue initial entry report: