Toland had chosen this spot because it was where the trail ran straight, with a steep slope on the far side. Anyone on the trail would be caught between the weapons of Toland’s men and the slope, which was carefully laced with some of Faulkener’s “specials.” The trail ran through the only pass in a hundred miles where people could cross from the eastern, inland slope of the Andes in Bolivia to the western. The terrain was low enough on this eastern approach to be just below the tree line, steep and heavily vegetated. Farther up the pass there was snow on the ground.
The mercenaries had flown separately on commercial flights into La Paz the previous day and assembled at the airport. Toland had hired several trucks to take them as far as the roads would go into the Andes. From there Toland had led his men on foot through the pass.
Toland heard someone moving behind him. He assumed it was Faulkener, his senior NCO, and that was confirmed when Faulkener tapped him on the shoulder. “Andrews has a message on the SAT. He’s copying it down.”
Toland twisted his head and looked over his shoulder into the thick jungle. Andrews was back there with the satellite radio, their lifeline.
No time for it, Toland realized as he heard noise coming down the trail. He returned his attention to the matter at hand. There was the sound of loose equipment jangling on men as they walked; even some conversations were carried through the night air.
The point man came into view. Jesus, Toland swore to himself, the fool was using a flashlight to see the trail. And not even one with a red lens! It looked like a spotlight in the goggles. Toland adjust the control and looked for the rear of the column.
There were thirteen men and two women in this group. There were more shovels than weapons scattered among them. They were also carrying two of their number on makeshift litters — ponchos tied between two poles.
Toland pulled off the goggles, letting them dangle around his neck on a cord. He fit the stock of the Sterling submachine gun into his shoulder. His finger slid over the trigger. With his other hand he picked up a plastic clacker.
The man with the flashlight was just opposite when Toland pushed down on the handle of the clacker. A claymore mine seared the night sky, sending thousands of steel ball bearings into the marching party at waist level.
As the screams of those not killed by the initial blast rang out, Toland fired, his 9mm bullets joining those of his men. The rest of the marchers melted under the barrage. A few survivors followed their instincts instead of their training and ran away from the roar of the bullets, scrambling up the far slope, tearing their fingernails in the dirt in desperation.
“Now,” Toland said.
It wasn’t necessary. Faulkener knew his job. In the strobelike flashes from the muzzles of the weapons, the fleeing people were visible. Faulkener pressed the button on a small radio control he held in his hand and the hillside spouted flames. A series of claymore mines, which Faulkener had woven into the far slope at just the right angle to kill those fleeing and not hit the ambushers on the far side of the kill zone, wiped out the few survivors.
“Let’s police this up!” Toland called as he stood.
He pulled up his night-vision goggles and watched. Faulkener took up position at the other end of the kill zone. Toland’s mercenaries descended like ghouls upon the bodies, hands searching. A shot rang out as one of the bodies turned out to be not quite dead.
Toland checked the bodies with a red lens flashlight. Various faces appeared in the glow, frozen in the moment of their death. Some of the faces were no longer recognizable as human, the mines and bullets having done their job.
As he got to the one of the bodies that had been carried, he saw a female’s face caught in the light, the eyes staring straight up, the lips half parted. He could tell she had been beautiful, with an exotic half-Indian, half-Spanish look, but she was covered in blood now and there was a rash across her face — broad black welts. Toland walked over to the other makeshift stretcher. The body in there was in even worse shape. There was much more blood than the round through the forehead would have brought forth. The same black welts across the face. Toland reached down and ripped open the man’s shirt. His body was covered with them.
“Let’s get a move on!” Toland yelled out. After five minutes, the men began to file by, dropping whatever they’d found in front of him. A stack of plastic-wrapped packages soon covered the sheet.
Toland stabbed one of the packages with his knife. Coca paste poured out of the hole. “Shit,” he muttered. He looked up at Faulkener. “It isn’t here.”
Faulkener shrugged. “We were told to stop anyone coming out and find a metal case. What now?”
Toland pointed to the east, down the pass. “We do what else we were told to.” The patrol began moving toward the border with Brazil.
Turcotte headed back for the Osprey. He’d left Captain Miller in charge of Scorpion Base. Besides the bodies in the vats, there was little else to indicate anything about STAAR. There were several computers in an area that had obviously been a command-and-control center. Turcotte had the hard drives of those computers with him, and he would give them to Major Quinn at Area 51 for analysis.
Miller was also supposed to remove at least one of the bodies from its vat. That task was going to be harder than it appeared, given that the liquid inside the tank had frozen also. They were going to have to thaw the entire thing out. Turcotte gave the order for the plane he had come in on to head north.
As the Osprey took off, he looked at the hard drives he had with him. He doubted that STAAR had been stupid enough to leave anything of importance on them, but one never knew. He’d seen some very smart people do some very stupid things over the years when they were in a rush, and with the foo fighter bearing down on their location the STAAR personnel would have been in one hell of a rush.
The mystery of STAAR would remain a mystery. For a few days longer, at least.
“Major Quinn, this is security,” the voice came over the tiny receiver fitted into the Air Force officer’s left ear.
Quinn’s station was set on a dais that overlooked the Cube. Since the discovery that the two STAAR bodies weren’t quite human, the entire facility had been shut down, bringing outraged cries from the media that had descended on the place after the “outing” of the mothership and bouncers by Duncan and Turcotte.
Quinn was actually happy they were closed off to the outside world. His years of working for Majestic-12 had left him ill-prepared to deal with the reporters who had tried poking their noses into everything. UNAOC and Washington both felt the STAAR story needed to be kept under wraps for now, and for that Quinn was grateful.
“This is Quinn,” he replied into the small boom mike in front of his lips. “What is it?”
“We’ve got an intruder.”
“Location?”
“Well, sir, he just drove up to the main gate.”
“Turn him over to the local authorities,” Quinn said irritably.
“He’s asking for a Larry Kincaid and a Lisa Duncan, sir.”
Quinn pursed his lips. “What’s his name?”
“He refuses to give it, sir. But he’s not American. He says he’s from Russia. From something called Section Four.”
“Bring him in.”
CHAPTER 7
“Mike.” Lisa Duncan wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tight.
Turcotte returned the hug, half lifting the much smaller woman off the flight deck. They stayed that way for a few seconds, then Duncan was the first to let go, conscious of the eyes watching them.
“Come on.” Turcotte gestured toward a hatch in the island on the right side of the flight deck. The John C. Stennis was a sister ship to the carrier Duncan had left; a Nimitz-class carrier, the top of the line of the U.S. Navy. The class of carrier was not only the largest warship afloat, it was considered the most powerful weapon on the face of the planet, carrying over seventy war-planes capable of launching weapons up to and including nuclear warheads.