Catacombs (34 page)

"I haven't heard about an outbreak of fever. What mission?"

Oliver looked perplexed, strained to remember, and panicked. He was sweating profusely, anticipating the displeasure of his interrogator.

"Doesn't matter; it fits," Clarke said, half to himself. "So she made an escape. Government soldiers may be looking for her. That's worth knowing. Now listen carefully, boy-o, you're doing fine. Did Erika mention a place where there might be–hidden treasure of some kind?"

Oliver expressed his delight at the question. "In the big mountain. Kilimanjaro."

"Kilimanjaro, hey? But she was flying from the opposite direction when I encountered her. What kind of treasure, did she tell you?"

"Very big diamonds. Red diamonds."

Clarke laughed cynically. "Well, well. That's an impressive story, Oliver."

"True. Erika telling me."

"Perhaps I shouldn't doubt you. But I can't imagine the Russkies being anxious about a hoard of diamonds, no matter how valuable they may be. No doubt Erika will confirm everything you've said. In the meantime I'm of a mind to test your truthfulness." He looked back over one shoulder at Bulami. "That big locking spanner of mine in the Rover. Bring it."

Bulami was gone for nearly five minutes. Tiernan Clarke had several nips of whiskey from a stainless flask and talked earnestly to himself while he paced and ignored his prisoner. The sweat continued to pour from the tormented Oliver, whose limbs were cramping from the tightness of his wire bonds and a loss of vital salts from his system.

When he had the wrench, Clarke applied it to a finger pried from Oliver's fist by Bulami and the other black man. He tightened the grooved jaws until blood spurted from beneath the fingernail and bones snapped. Oliver screamed and hung limply against the wires that were cutting into his flesh.

"Red diamonds?"

"Red . . . diamonds, boss," Oliver panted.

"Kilimanjaro?"

"Telling me, big rooms in the mountain."

"Fascinating. But far-fetched. Let's just do another finger." He was watching Oliver's eyes, which were glazing. This time he selected the pinky on the same hand. Oliver screamed and sobbed. Blood dripped freely from the mutilated fingers.

"You have told me all the truth that's in you?" Clarke said softly, the heel of his palm under Oliver's chin.

"Yes, boss!"

"Tell me something else. While Erika was lying helpless in that bed upstairs, did you at any time have your way with her?"

"No, boss!"

Clarke snapped his fingers for a knife. He opened the five-inch stiletto blade and squatted in front of Oliver, placed the point against the inside of Oliver's thigh near the groin. He pushed the blade in an eighth of an inch. Oliver gasped. A red spot the size of a quarter appeared on the dirty khaki trousers.

As if he were carving a turkey, Clarke expertly slit the rotting material to rags, exposing the hard sacks of nuggets Oliver wore suspended below his own balls. Two snips and Clarke had the gold in his hands. He got slowly to his feet, pressed a hand against the small of his back, looked around the kitchen, and said, "Burn it."

Bulami went out again and came back with a plastic jerrycan partially filled with gasoline. Obviously they were concerned about their fuel supply, because Clarke ordered him to spread the gas around sparingly. The floorboards still had enough bug-proof pitch in them to burn briskly. A little of the gas slopped on Oliver's sandaled feet and wet the rags of his trouser cuffs. The fumes further irritated his eyes. He strained against the tight wires and got nowhere.

The fight went out of him, perhaps his will to live. His eyes rolled back in his head and he moaned softly.

Bulami fashioned a torch from rags and went around the kitchen, fifteen hundred square feet of it, setting fires. Some of them whooshed up brightly, dislodging bats from the dark beams overhead. They darted frantically through the oily, rising smoke. The heat, within a minute, was almost unbearable. Tiernan Clarke took a last disinterested look at Oliver, who seemed comatose, and left with his men.

Left Oliver with a pinch of hope, and virtually no time to take advantage of the one break Clarke inadvertently had given him.

The quilted packing material with which Oliver had sealed the cave-like pantry, his inner sanctum, was being flamelessly consumed, giving off noxious brown fumes as it melted into the already overburdened air. Oliver held his breath. At least they hadn't wired him to one of the great iron cook-stoves, which he wouldn't have been able to budge; he would have cooked to half his size and weight, a charred curling sliver of a man, while the iron at his side turned incandescent and glowed through the night.

The stout post he was wired to might not be so stout after all–in twisting and bracing against it he had felt a fine downsifting of sawdust in his face, a tremor of weakness. Borer-beetles and termites had honeycombed the bolted timbers during years of tenancy. If he could just break the post in two before the flames crawled as far as his feet . .

Oliver tensed the length of his body, forgetting for the moment the agony of his smashed fingers. His muscles bulged, the veins of his arms and neck stood out shockingly. He grunted and threw himself forward, straining against the wire and the post. He heard a distinct crack and felt another tremor.

Screaming now, he lunged again and broke the post in two just above his head. But it was too hot, too hot–the fire leaped all around him, in moments he would be ablaze himself.

He needed then to rock and twist the length of post to which he was still attached, pry up the long nails that held it to the floor. On his third desperate try, choking from the smoke and the wire at his throat, the base of the post yielded partway; Oliver pitched forward with the weight of it bearing him down. On his knees he wriggled frantically, his neck elongated as he tried to work the throat wire from the post without cutting his throat first. He was dizzy and fainting before the wire slipped from the jagged end of the post.

Rolling over, he worked his hands up inches at a time, freed them, sat up, and untwisted the wire that held him by the ankles.

Flame seared his skin; he hobbled and plunged heedlessly across the burning floor to the circular well covering, a sheet of hot iron with handles. He thrust it aside and dangled, feet down, in the cool cistern, found a narrow ledge of rock, reached up and pulled the cover back into place, cutting off the light, shutting out the heat.

Then he fell, half conscious, eight feet into black still water.

WARSHIELD RANCH

Silverpeak, Colorado

May 17

T
he parachute that had failed to open properly for Raun Hardie was recovered and, back at the field, examined carefully; but no good reason for the malfunction was discovered. A one-chance-in-ten-thousand mishap. The instructors responsible for Raun's training and safety were mortified. They opened the other chutes and repacked them meticulously. Shortly after noon the C-130 lifted off for the drop zone some sixty miles away and they did it all over again, this time with wind conditions marginal. Raun went in without a hitch but Jade wound up in the icy river, and decided to call it a day.

Lem explained to Raun that he'd made about thirty jumps in the past two years. His apparent anxiety had been planned from the beginning to help take Raun's mind off her own trauma. Lem was, like Jade, a helicopter pilot: They frequently leased copters for ranch work. He proved his ability by flying the two of them back to the Warshield in a JetRanger while Jade returned to Lowry Air Force Base for conferences with the support team that would be flying them halfway around the world.

"When do you think we’ll be going?" Raun asked Lem.

"Tonight, maybe. Early tomorrow morning for sure–Matt 's getting that old itch. Better sleep while you can."

Raun nodded; with half the day gone she was already exhausted. When she looked at Lem, she felt a twinge of guilt about what she was doing, leading them totally astray. But she'd made no promises; after a week or so of tramping up and down mountains looking for Catacombs that didn't exist there, probably Jade would be ready to call the whole thing off. Then she would be free to go her own way, that was the deal. How they would get out hadn't been explained to her, but she was sure Matthew Jade had a plan. He was every bit as meticulous as he was ruthless.

At the ranch they flew low over Red Cloud Mesa and some of the Vassals of the Immaculate Light looked up at their passing; a couple of the children shielded their eyes and waved tentatively. Lem circled the yard and set the JetRanger down near the big barn.

"I'll have Ken put a couple of steaks on," Lem said as they walked toward the house.

"You can look me up in the hot tub. And then if Lee will just come through with one of her great massages–“

Lem grinned; his step slowed almost imperceptibly for a few moments. His grin seemed to go on too long. His eyes had turned to slits. She felt his hand on her elbow.

He said quietly, "Keep walking and talking, Raunie. But stay shy of the house."

"Why? What's the matter?"

"Something's wrong here. I don't know what Smile. I think we're being watched. You just remembered something in the helicopter. Let's go back for it. Make it sound good."

Raun saw nothing, except a piebald horse drifting by itself at the perimeter of the ranch yard. It looked like Andy von Boecklin's cutting horse, Shoo-Bob, but it had no saddle or bridle. Odd to see Shoo-Bob there, in the middle of a working afternoon.

Raun raised her voice. "Lem, we'd better get the trout fillets. Give me a hand with the cooler?"

Lem nodded and they started back to the helicopter. They had a hundred feet to go. His hands were in the pockets of his fringed suede jacket. He had the ignition key ready.

"Not too fast now. Easy. We'll–"

Lem stopped suddenly, arching his back slightly. Raun looked at him in astonishment. She heard nothing but the sound of the wind. He staggered for a couple of steps, lost his balance.

"Shit," he said breathlessly, and sagged to his knees. "In the back! Run, Raunie, get the hell out of–"

Raun saw the stubby frosted dart fastened like a leech to Lem's jacket, pinning it high between his shoulder blades. Lem tried to get at it with a couple of half-hearted swipes of his big hands. Then he fell over in the grass. His lips moved, but his eyes were fading out of sight behind drooping lids.

"Run," he whispered.

She turned in terror and felt the sting of another dart fired into her thigh; the impact was like being kicked with a sharp-pointed shoe. She stared down at the dart, a half-inch projection, tried to pluck it like a strange obscene flower. Suddenly she was reaching down from a remote height with fingers clumsy as bananas. She couldn't keep her balance. She fell, it seemed to her, very slowly, absorbed by the sight of her long shadow swelling, blotting out the lawn. There was no sensation of flesh meeting the ground, she could feel nothing from her toes to the root of her tongue. Her brain still worked, but blandly. Her shadow thickened and enfolded her, crushing her gently to sleep.

M
atthew Jade arrived by helicopter outside the town of Silverpeak, twenty miles from his ranch, a little after four o'clock. He walked half a dozen blocks from the fairgrounds and took a corner table in the restaurant of the Prospect Park Hotel, which featured blue-and-white-checkered tablecloths, lazy Susans on the tables, and a color photo of the president of the United States over the door, taken when Boomer had more hair.

There were only a half dozen other customers, a few idlers in the bar next door, the sounds of electronic game machines. Jade ordered Jack Daniel's and water and a steak sandwich. A couple of local ranchers dropped by to say hello. At four thirty, as he was eating his sandwich, a husky man in his thirties wearing cowboy clothes that were too new stumped across the pegged hardwood floor, in his stiff pointy boots and drew up a chair. His name was Duke Wooters; he was Jade's direct liaison with John Guy Gibson in Operations.

"Food any good here?" he asked Jade. "Place I ate last night had Kaopectate on the wine list."

Jade laughed. Duke ordered a Coors from the waitress and sat forward, hands folded on the tablecloth.

"You're going to break something, jumping out of airplanes at your age."

"Linblad didn't have enough time to put together the deluxe tour. What's happening?"

"Cobra Dance is heavily involved in the Tanzania caper. They have a man there now. Someone they think a lot of. He's in deep cover, and coded. There may be three men in the KGB who know his identity. Unfortunately none of them finks for us."

"What about our three fishermen?"

"Sawyer, Roper, Clemons. Sawyer's wife died a few years ago. He has a little place up on Bull Shoals Lake in the Ozarks. Used to work for the power company in Fort Smith. Twenty years. Retired now. The other two are from the Denver area. Littleton. They have wives, kids, mortgages, insurance programs, the kinds of jobs that allow them to take three or four days off when the mood grips them and enjoy the beauties of the wilderness. We can only check so close without tipping off their wives, and they could be agents in deep cover too, alert for any kind of negative vibrations. The only thing that doesn't look quite right to me is the fact that three days ago Roper was laid up with the flu. He got out of a sickbed to go fishing."