The Mamba, knowing that a single, sharp pull would kill him, panicked; he dropped the knife and clutched at the strap around his neck with both hands. Veil released the strap and drove a fist into the man's broken ribs. The man screamed in agony and dropped to his knees. Veil darted around to the front, his fist raised for another blow. But the Mamba was finished, his glazed green eyes clearly reflecting defeat by the pain in his body and fear of Veil's overwhelming mastery of the martial arts.
"Now I hope you'll listen to me," Veil said, cupping the man's chin with his right hand and lifting his head. "Parker didn't, and it cost him his life. I am not a fucking agent for anyone; I'm a painter. If I don't get out of here alive, you remember this conversation—but don't repeat it to anyone here in the compound. Wait until the investigators come in. If I'm killed, it's going to be up to you to clean house—or see that someone else cleans it. You may not know who Parker's superior is around here, but the Pentagon certainly does. There may be other doubles, so watch your ass. I'm sorry I had to bust you up, but you didn't give me a whole hell of a lot of choice. If you're ever in New York, look me up; I owe you a drink."
Then Veil knocked the man unconscious with a simple, hard right cross.
Chapter 24
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Veil, his long hair tied up beneath the Mamba's camouflage cap with his leather strap, began making his way back across the width of the valley, heading for the river. He chafed at the slowness of his pace, but knew that he could not go faster without risking detection; he had to mimic the tracking maneuvers of the Mambas and hope that he was not identified by someone on high ground with powerful binoculars.
He paused to eat the last of the beef jerky; he forced himself to eat all of it; he would now need all of his dwindling reserves of energy for an unknown period of time. Although he was still free of symptoms, and even though he knew he could be risking convulsions from an overdose, he took three of the brown pills—as much for the strength they would give him as to prevent withdrawal symptoms. Then he went on.
The sound of soft chimes was with him constantly now. However, this music of peril was not clear and close behind his eyes, but muffled and welling from somewhere deep in his soul. The chimes were not for him.
Veil feared he was already too late.
It was dusk by the time he reached the riverbank, the rising moon obscured by clouds scudding across a dull copper sky. He walked upstream until he found what he was looking for— a log jammed between two boulders. Using the Mamba's machine pistol like a crowbar, Veil freed the log, then wrapped his arms around it from the side and let the log carry him out into the swift-moving current as he clasped the machine pistol between his knees.
If there were any Mambas tracking along the riverbank, Veil did not see them; more important, they did not see him, for in what seemed a very short time, he was closing on the brightly floodlit area that extended thirty yards beyond the concrete wall spanning the valley and marking the boundary of the Army compound. Peering over the top of the log, Veil could see two uniformed soldiers on top of the wall, each armed with a machine gun and scanning the river on both sides of the wall.
He was operating on three key assumptions, Veil thought as he sucked in a deep breath, released his grip on the log, and let the churning current carry him under. One, the Army was far more concerned with keeping intruders out than keeping them in; two, the fast flow of the river at the end of its journey to the sea was, in itself, a deterrent to covert movement upstream; therefore, three, the barrier extending below the surface—and there had to be one—would not be heavy-duty.
He would either be proved right, Veil thought, or disproved dead. There was no going back.
Gripping the machine pistol in his left hand, he pulled with his right and kicked, angling toward the bottom. He could see nothing in the icy darkness and had to rely on touch alone. Rested, relaxed, and after hyperventilation, Veil could hold his breath under water for almost two and a half minutes. In his present situation he guessed that he had close to two minutes before he would be forced to return to the surface— probably to be machine-gunned on sight. Or he could choose to drown, a notion he considered not without some irony in view of how desperately he had craved a drink only the day before. Except that this drink would kill him.
His fingers touched heavy netting, the most suitable choice for a barrier since it could be lowered to release heavy debris. Veil had the Mamba's Bowie knife but made an instant decision not to waste time and air trying to use it to cut through the netting, which would almost certainly be wire-reinforced and very difficult to cut through with anything but wire clippers. Instead he pulled himself along the bottom of the relatively shallow river until he touched what he had been hoping to find—a strip of concrete that served as a footing in which to anchor the net with wire grommets set in steel rings.
The pressure in his lungs was building.
With the current pressing him into the net, Veil planted his feet on the concrete on either side of the grommet. Using touch to guide him, he threaded the barrel of the machine pistol through the grommet. With the end of the barrel firmly set on the concrete, he grabbed the stock with both hands and exerted a steady, backward pull.
Nothing happened. The grommet held firm.
Veil relaxed his grip, then tried again, pushing with his legs and pulling with all his might, afraid that at any moment he would feel metal bend, or snap at a weld. After a few seconds he detected slight movement. He pushed the barrel through the grommet even further, then yanked with all his strength.
The grommet gave, and a ten-yard section of netting suddenly billowed downstream, carrying Veil with it.
Veil let go of the machine pistol, turned in the water, and pushed off the bottom, knifing upward at an angle that he hoped would bring him to the surface beyond the floodlit area on the other side of the wall.
He came up in cool night, near the bank. He half expected to hear shouts of alarm and warning, or automatic-weapons fire; but the only sounds that came to his ears were his own hoarse gasps and the rushing water. He sucked in air, rolled on his back, and let the current carry him downstream.
Exhausted, his mind and body drained by his continuing ordeal, Veil was almost swept down the channel that branched off from the waterfall and emptied into the sea. At the last moment Veil recognized the danger, rolled over, and knifed under water to reduce the drag of the water. He pulled, kicked, corkscrewed to his left, and surfaced in the somewhat calmer channel that ran past the waterfall. Gasping for breath, light-headed and knowing that he was dangerously close to losing consciousness, Veil dragged himself up on a rock shelf at the foot of the towering cliff he had dived off to begin his journey into the Army compound.
Above him was the hospice, and the steel cords supporting the cable car cut across the night sky to link the hospice to the main Institute complex on top of the mountain across the valley. Like an umbilical cord linking mother to child, Veil thought—except that in Jonathan Pilgrim's mind the hospice, a base camp for a desperate search, had always been the mother; the Institute was just an excuse for Pilgrim to probe the nature of the place where his soul had journeyed at the time of his death.
Veil sprawled out on the rock shelf and rested until his breathing became normal. Then he took a series of deep, measured breaths and tried to relax and marshal his energy. When he began to shiver with cold, he rose and ran in place in an attempt to generate body heat. He considered stripping off the wet jumpsuit, but decided that, even wet, the cotton provided needed insulation against the chill night air.