‘Fight to the end, Edward,’ added Castille.
‘Always do,’ Chase replied, nodding to his friend before dropping low and moving into the undergrowth. A brief look back; the two men were little more than shadows from a distance of just fifteen feet, the three higher up the slope practically invisible in the darkness and rain. Hiding from the bandits would not be a problem.
Nor would locating them. The man on patrol was making no attempt to conceal himself, the light of his torch standing out clearly, nor was he being all that attentive to his surroundings. The beam spent far more time aimed at the ground ahead of him than sweeping the jungle. Nevertheless, Chase froze once he got close to the approaching sentry’s route.
From his hiding place, lying beneath the drooping branches of a large plant, he watched the man as he passed twenty feet away. The bandit was wearing a long rain cape and a wide-brimmed khaki hat, water streaming off both. From the glimpse of his expression in the torchlight, he was not at all happy to have been assigned sentry duty.
The light also glinted off his shouldered weapon. A Kalashnikov, no surprise there…
But a surprise to Chase was the particular type of Kalashnikov. His SAS training had taught him to identify weapons at a glance, and this one’s short barrel revealed it as an AKS-74U, a cut-down version of the AKS-74 assault rifle. It was designed for mobility and easy concealment rather than range and stopping power, and was generally only issued to special forces units. Not the kind of thing normally found in the hands of a jungle bandit. He would have expected something like his own far older AK-47.
He put the thought to the back of his mind as he watched the sentry trudge away, waiting until he was out of sight behind the trees before moving. The man’s patrol route was clear to see, squishy footprints in the mud leading in both directions. Chase raised his head to confirm that the bandit was still retreating, then stood and hopped over the path, keeping his own telltale prints as far from the track as he could. Then he dropped low again and resumed his advance.
Moving slowly and silently, it took him almost five cautious minutes to reach the camp. He peered over a mouldering log. Six tents; five small, one large, two of the small ones unlit. Even over the drumming of raindrops on the canvas he could hear the low murmur of conversation. Shadows shifted in some of the shelters, their occupants rendered on the fabric as magic lantern displays.
Chase remained still, gathering intelligence. At least six men in the smaller tents, plus however many were inside the two without lights. The big tent was harder to judge, but he estimated no fewer than another six people within. Assuming that the aid workers were being held together under guard, that made a minimum of nine bandits: six in the small tents, one man watching the hostages, plus the two sentries.
There was still the mysterious cabin to consider, though. It was definitely not a wartime leftover. The structure was a block some fifteen feet to a side, standing clear of the ground on supports resembling a helicopter’s skids. The window he had seen earlier turned out to be set into a door, a slatted blind on the other side of the glass. On the roof was what looked like a satellite dish, and even over the rain and wind he could hear the flat rattle of a generator. The encampment was more than a mere hideout.
Movement caught his attention. The front flap of one of the small tents opened, a man emerging and jogging to the nearer of the two unlit shelters. He said something in Vietnamese. After a few seconds, a light came on inside, someone replying.
That now made at least ten enemies, but Chase had registered that this man was also armed with an AKS-74U. One uncommon weapon might have been happenstance, but two? He didn’t buy it. Either someone had issued them to the bandits…
Or they weren’t bandits at all.
The man finished his discussion, then hurried back to his tent. Chase remained still for a long moment before setting off again. Whatever was going on, he still had an objective: locate the prisoners. He crawled over the log towards the largest tent.
There were two small polythene windows in the side nearest to him. He crept up and peered through the transparent plastic.
Hooded figures, hands tied behind them, sat or lay upon blankets, unmoving. The aid workers. A Vietnamese man was on a small stool by the entrance, with a second guard at the other end of the tent. Both were armed with 74Us.
He took a headcount. Seven prisoners. So where was number eight?
The noise of the generator suggested a possibility.
Chase slunk back into the undergrowth, then started on a circuitous route around the camp towards the structure. He had covered about two thirds of the distance when movement prompted him to freeze. Three people came out of a tent, and headed for the cabin. All wore nylon ponchos and hats, though these were baseball caps rather than the round-brimmed cloth kind of the bandits. With their heads down and their backs to the lights, he couldn’t see their faces.
He could hear their voices, though. And they were not speaking in Vietnamese.
Russians? He only knew a few phrases of the language, but the accents and intonations sounded familiar. What the hell were they doing here?
The figures crossed to the hut and went inside. Chase caught a brief glimpse of the interior, but the flash of stark white paint and stainless steel told him nothing. He edged closer. After a few minutes, the door reopened and the three men emerged. This time, he saw their faces. Definitely not Vietnamese.
One was in his fifties with a reddish beard, another a stocky man in his late twenties with a thin and untidy attempt at a moustache. He was engaged in discussion with the third Russian. Chase didn’t know what they were saying, but one thing was clear from their attitudes alone: the last man was very much in charge. The tallest of the three, he looked to be around Chase’s age, in his early thirties, with angular features and a hard, pale-eyed gaze, which he turned dismissively on his younger companion at some unappreciated suggestion. Cowed, the man with the moustache fell into sullen silence.
The Englishman waited for them to return to the tents before moving again. Before long, he reached the cabin. He sidled along its wall and climbed the metal steps to the door.
He gently tried the handle. It turned. Readying his gun, Chase opened the door and quickly slipped inside.
He’d had no idea what to expect, but what he found still came as a shock.
A glass partition wall divided the cabin. The narrow section in which he stood had the feel of a viewing gallery, where people could observe what was happening on the other side.
Medical experiments.
He had found the last prisoner. He recognised the young blonde from the picture Lock had shown him as Natalia Pöltl, the American’s daughter. She was asleep — drugged, he saw, a number of intravenous drips running into her bare arms. There were bruises on her skin where more needles had been inserted. She was wearing only a white surgical gown, which appeared to have been made specifically for her; a flap over her abdomen was secured by a Velcro strip, the bulge of dressings beneath it. Stark blue-white light from a circular lamp cluster illuminated her from above, pinning her like an animal on a taxidermist’s table.
Filled with a growing sense of revulsion, Chase surveyed the rest of the chamber. A large stainless-steel cabinet in one corner resembled a fridge; for storing samples? Another corner was home to a small steel washbasin, glass-fronted cases alongside it containing glinting surgical equipment and flasks of chemicals. A laptop computer sat atop a small chest of drawers near the head of the operating table.
Whatever was going on, it was obvious that this was no random kidnapping by bandits. Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to get their hands on Natalia.