“I gave him a morphine stick about forty-five minutes ago,” Spencer said as the officer pulled the cabin door closed and took a seat facing them.
“You told us already,” the officer said.
“Right,” Spencer said. “Is there any point in asking where we’re going?”
The officer checked his watch, ignoring the question.
The helicopter lifted slowly into the air, and the officer turned away and muttered into his comm line, listened, and spoke again. The aircraft leveled off no more than five hundred feet above the terrain below and began moving forward, turning in a slow bank before accelerating away from the clearing, rising and dropping with the landscape, the only sound the throbbing pulse of the motor as the medics fought to save Reynolds’s life.
Chapter 57
Mehta’s face blanched as he listened to the frenzied reports on the communications channel. When Suri warned that helicopters were over the camp, he sprang into action, snatching the dagger from his desk and taking off through the passage that led to the processing area, where the uranium ore was milled and chemically synthesized into yellowcake before being shipped off for refinement.
He slid the dagger into his belt as he ran past the milling cave and made a left turn into an unlit recession. He stopped at an iron door mounted into the stone and fumbled for a key that hung from the gold chain around his neck. The lock opened with a pop, and he stepped into the darkness and felt for a flashlight in a holder mounted on the wall. His fingers found the cylinder, and he spun a small crank on the end, creating sufficient charge to power the LED bulb. Once he could see, he locked the bolt in place and knelt by a green canvas sack with a timer on top.
Mehta set the device for three minutes, and the blinking red clock began a reverse countdown. He nodded to himself and then ran to the end of the tunnel, where rungs leading up into gloom were sunk into the stone. Holding the light in one hand, he used the other to pull himself up, two stories, where the shaft intersected with another passage. He heaved himself onto the passageway floor and leaned over to close a steel hatch. Mehta latched it into place and got to his feet, cranked the flashlight again, and crept cautiously along the tunnel.
He was well away from the hatch when the charge by the door below blew. Part of the floor behind him collapsed, sending a cloud of dust billowing toward him. He held his breath and pushed himself to greater speed as he was enveloped by grit, and pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth as he felt his way along the stone walls.
Five minutes later he was in clear air, in a large cavern with a shimmering pool in its center. His light played along the walls, and he made for a gap at chest level on the far side — a natural chute through which water entered from the mountain above during cloudbursts. When he reached the opening, he dragged his ample frame into the narrow space and crawled thirty yards, where he could feel a slight draft of cool air from beyond the vegetation that covered the opening of his emergency escape outlet.
Once in the night air, he made his way down a steep ravine to a creek and hurried away from the camp on the other side of the mountain, toward one of the nearby hill villages, where he could arrange for transportation to a main road. He had no doubt that he’d been double-crossed, but there was little he could do about it at this point, other than to make it known to his supporters in the Indian government.
That the camp was finished didn’t trouble him greatly — its usefulness had long since faded as his fortune from other ventures had swelled. The revenues from providing the government with undocumented yellowcake paled in comparison to his legitimate income since the country had undergone a construction boom, and maintaining the camp was now more a nuisance than anything, one which he’d toyed with shutting down of his own accord.
He would send a trusted team to recover the euros that were hidden under the floor of the mobile building he used as his quarters when at the camp, assuming the attackers had missed the stash in the excitement of battle, and then move on to other things, his career as a slaver at an end.
Far below, on the approach to the dam, he saw lights twinkling in a tiny hamlet inhabited by dirt-poor farmers who would be overjoyed to have a prosperous stranger appear in their midst and bestow riches upon them in exchange for a ride. Even at the late hour, his pocket money would be a month’s earnings for the farmers, and he had no doubt that by daybreak he would be on his way to Delhi, no worse for wear, the entire unpleasant mess behind him except necessary cleanup he could count on both governments to assist him with — everyone had much to lose in creating an international incident, and their self-interests would bind them together with the strongest glue.
Chapter 58
The helicopter landed in the center of a barren field located in the center of a military base. They were met by a security detail, and Reynolds was off-loaded into a waiting ambulance, which roared away toward a row of buildings, their lights blazing at the edge of the expanse. The detail directed Drake, Allie, and Spencer to a personnel carrier, and after they’d climbed aboard with the heavily armed soldiers, the big vehicle lurched along a rutted strip of pavement toward a metal Quonset hut near the lit buildings.
When the conveyance had rolled to a halt, the grim-faced men instructed them to disembark, and more soldiers — these in U.S. Army uniforms with insignia rather than the black, anonymous garb of their escorts — led them into the structure, where an older man in fatigues was standing by a bank of monitors, studying the images with hawk-like concentration.
The officer on their right saluted the older man and spoke. “Sir. They’re here.”
The man looked up from the screen, obviously annoyed. “Put them in the conference room. I’ll be in shortly,” he said, his voice gruff.
The soldiers showed them to a Sheetrock enclosure on the opposite end of the hut and opened a door. Inside were a conference table and six chairs. “Have a seat,” the officer said. “There’s bottled water in the credenza.” He eyed them a final time and then closed and locked the door, leaving them alone.
“What’s going on, Spencer?” Allie whispered.
“We’re on a U.S. base. Probably in Pakistan. I know we have some here, and we weren’t flying all that long, so…”
“The DOD,” Drake spat. “I knew it. I told you Reynolds was going to screw us.”
The lock on the door clanked, and then the metal slab opened and the older man entered carrying a file folder. He sat down at the head of the table, opened the folder, and tossed a cheap ballpoint pen toward Drake. He appraised them all with cold gray eyes and then his frigid glare settled on Drake.
“Reynolds didn’t screw you, other than by being a damned fool,” he said, and removed three documents and slid them across the table. “These are security clearances. Everything you’ve seen falls under national security — top secret. Sign and date them.”
“And if we don’t?” Spencer snapped.
The man scowled. “Son, you’re testing my patience.”
“I’m not your son.”
“You want to go to jail for murder? Keep doubling down on a bad hand, and it’ll happen,” the man warned.
“So this is blackmail,” Drake said.
“This is national security. If I want to, I can hold you indefinitely with no trial, no charges, because you’re materially involved in a terrorist event. You want to play hardball with me? You’ll wish you’d never been born.”