Humanity Unlimited 1: Liberty Station (8 page)

She came out, her eyes red, but her expression resolute. She shouldered her pack. “Ready.”

He gave her a sharp nod. Her steadiness was admirable. Most civilians, male or female, would’ve come to pieces under the strain of the last few hours. Jessica Cook was made of sterner stuff.

They hefted their borrowed gear and moved down the path at a steady pace. The workers were only about a mile away with Leann. He took the time to brief them on the general events and to break the news that their boss was dead.

The students took it hard, but he got them moving again in short order when he told them that some of the bad guys had probably gotten away. They made it to the river faster than he expected. No doubt, everyone was eager to be away from this place.

Harry called the Guatemalan National Civilian Police. He kept the details to a minimum and feigned a bad connection before terminating the call. All they needed to know was that there’d been an incident with a fatality. They’d come in enough force to get the workers to safety.

Next, he spoke with the young woman now in charge of the workers. “You need to keep word of the secret room under wraps,” he told her firmly. “The men that attacked you can’t know about it or you’ll all be in danger. You can’t tell the police about it, either. Does anyone else know?”

“About the art? Just the other graduate students. I can’t lie to the police.”

He hadn’t seen her standing there, but Miss Cook intervened. “Don’t lie. Just don’t mention it.”

Harry gave her a quelling glance. “Word will get out if you speak of it. Your boss found something unprecedented down there. Unless you want to see this whole area stripped bare, stick to the basics. These men attacked you, they killed your boss in the pyramid, and they blew it up. You don’t know why.”

“I don’t know why!” the woman almost shouted. “Those people almost killed us. Then you came in and saved us? Why? Who are you?”

Harry put on his least threatening expression. “We’re Miss Cook’s security team. Her boss should’ve sent us along with her, but there was a breakdown in communication. I’m certain that he’ll give the police a full statement about us and provide access for the police to question us.”

In a pig’s eye. The old man would shut them down quick.

Miss Cook took the woman by the shoulders. “Do you really want the police to think you might have had some part, no matter how small, in Doctor Valdez’s death? You’d be better off keeping quiet unless you like the idea of a few months in jail being questioned.”

The woman’s expression went from outrage to fearful.

Harry didn’t like the idea of lying to the woman, but they couldn’t tell her the truth. Miss Cook was surprisingly adept at managing the situation. She had hidden depths.

“Just keep things simple,” Harry said soothingly. “Tell them the truth, just not all of it.”

The woman nodded and walked over to her fellow graduate students. Time would tell if the scare kept them quiet.

“I’m a little surprised you told a whopper like that,” he said softly.

“I’d tell a bigger lie if it meant safeguarding this secret,” Miss Cook said. “I’m more concerned about what the prisoners will tell the police.”

He looked over at the bound men shuffling along under Rex’s guard. “They won’t say a word. I’m sure the penalty of ratting out Nathan and my mother would be fatal. There’s probably a financial sweetener to keep them quiet, too. And that reminds me, I need to send some money to the guy who was on the hook to pick us up. He still deserves to be paid.”

They made the rest of the trip to the river in relative peace. Once they arrived at the dock, Harry trussed the prisoners up like prized turkeys and hitched them to handy trees. No way they’d get loose without assistance.

Surprisingly, it only took an hour before Harry heard a boat on the water. It came around the bend and he recognized the uniform the men wore. The Guatemalan National Civilian Police had arrived.

He tugged on Jessica’s arm and the two of them backed into the lush vegetation. The rest of the team had spread out to keep watch for hostiles. They’d meet up at a predetermined rally point. Time to see what other secrets this jungle held.

Chapter Seven

Jess discovered that going through the jungle without a cleared path was significantly more difficult than walking down an open trail. Progress was slow and the insects were all over them. Time to give up that fantasy about exploring the wilds of Africa in a pith helmet.

The mosquitos were even move vicious in the deep jungle. The repellant seemed to be attracting them. She swatted them, but more came to take their place.

The mercenaries took turns hacking at the growth and politely declined her offers to assist. Instead, she followed Harry Rogers. She still knew virtually nothing about him, other than the rumors that she’d heard.

Those stories revolved around him and his father having a huge falling out when he was younger. Of him joining the US Army and becoming some kind of special operations officer. Him leaving the service to become a mercenary. Obviously, that last was true.

She still had no idea why someone that hated his father so deeply would get involved in rescuing her. It made no sense. Maybe she should ask.

“Hey,” she said.

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “You need a break?”

“No. Why did you come for me?”

He smiled. “Because you needed rescuing and my father is paying heavily for the operation.”

“You and he don’t get along so well.”

“That’s something of an understatement. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the client.”

“It seems like I’m missing something important. You’re a mercenary, right? Isn’t this kind of job a little off the beaten path for you?”

He looked around at the trackless jungle surrounding them. “We’re all a bit off the beaten path, but I get your meaning. No, I do this sort of thing for a living now. Rescuing people stuck in situations they have no way out of. We mainly recover kidnapped children held overseas by non-custodial parents.”

Jess blinked. That wasn’t what she’d expected at all. “So you’re not mercenaries?”

“That’s a matter of debate. Liberty SOG has people from the best US military units: SEALS, Delta Force, Marine Raiders, and others less well known. When the government decided to neuter the military, there were plenty of excellent candidates to choose from.

“We’ve done purely military operations, and honestly, we occasionally still do. But only if the moral reasons for doing so outweigh the trouble. Frankly, with all the problems in Europe, there’s plenty of business that we don’t need to hold our noses over.”

She understood that well enough. It used to be that only the Middle East had issues with violent groups espousing virulent forms of Islam. Now Western Europe was fighting a cancer in its body. It wasn’t politically correct to call them Islamic extremists, but honesty compelled her to say that was the right name.

The news organizations, with a few exceptions, and the government preferred to leave the religious part out. They said those people had nothing to do with Islam. That might even technically be true, but those people had no problem using Islam to justify terrible acts.

The European Union had opened their arms to an enormous number of refugees when the violence in the Middle East and Northern Africa spun out of control. War between Saudi Arabia and Iran quickly spread over the entire area around them.

Iran used nuclear weapons they weren’t supposed to have on their enemies. Armed with US made defenses, the Saudis and Israel fended them off. Israel, of course, nuked Tehran and several other military strongholds inside Iran.

Others were less able to defend themselves and millions died.

That fractured Iran, but didn’t stop the violence. It only shoved it underground. Groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS now openly recruited from, and infiltrated into, any country they could. With the general collapse of most governments in the Middle East, they saw their chance to create a Caliphate. Saudi Arabia and Israel were islands in a violent sea.

It wasn’t looking so good for Europe, either. France was the worst off. Paris was more like Beirut these days. Roving gangs of militants kept the police penned into certain neighborhoods. Sharia law was the rule, not the exception. The French government was helpless and she suspected the militants would finalize their takeover before too much longer. How much longer until the rest of Europe caught the cancer, too?

The situation made her sad.

Frankly, she believed in the US government’s viewpoint. Profiling was wrong. People should be judged by what they did, who they were, not what they looked like. You couldn’t just label everyone of a specific ethnicity as something and rob them of their rights.

Only that open-mindedness hadn’t worked out so well. Thankfully, she didn’t have to fix the world. She’d be leaving it soon enough for Liberty Station.

Huh. His company had the same name as the project she headed. That couldn’t be a coincidence. His father must’ve been making some point.

“Why call your company Liberty SOG? What does that mean?”

“Liberty is part of what we do. It plays into every aspect of our work. SOG stands for special operations group. Technically, we’re a private military company. We have a number of teams spread out around the globe.”

They arrived at a clearing. It looked like the team was setting up the tents for the evening. Good. Her legs felt like rubber.

She dropped her pack and sat on a fallen log after making sure nothing was waiting to bite her.

They had the tents up before the light faded. The guy named Rex built a very small fire and cooked some of the food from the dig. It tasted good after a long, terrible day. She turned in early and fell asleep before her head touched the sleeping bag.

* * * * *

Harry took the last watch of the night while Sandra cooked breakfast. Frankly, he wished he could just declare Rex as the sole cook because he had the touch. Sandra made a much better sniper than a homemaker.

He let Jess sleep in. She’d insisted on him using her first name. Apparently, she thought saving her life entitled him to stop being so formal. That was fine with him.

Once the food was ready, he tapped her foot through the flap of the tent. She sat up abruptly and blinked at him. Her hair was poking out in every direction and she looked disoriented.

“What?” she asked. “Are we under attack?”

“Only if you consider Sandra’s cooking a war crime. Breakfast is ready. We have a latrine set up to the south. Leann will provide overwatch while you take care of business.”

He returned to the fire and did what he could to salvage breakfast. He handed Jess a plate when she came back. She’d brushed her hair and actually looked awake.

“Sorry I overslept. That’s two days in a row.” She took a bite of the food and made a face.

He almost smiled. Everyone did that. “Sorry about breakfast. It was Sandra’s turn. She’s says it builds character.”

“That’s okay. I’m happy to have it. How long do you figure it will take us to get to the site?”

Harry shrugged. “No telling. We’ll be in the general area by lunchtime. Finding whatever is there might take days. Or never happen. Look around. There could be a city a hundred feet away and we’d never know.”

She glanced around at the almost impenetrable jungle. “True. That would be very disappointing.”

“If we don’t find anything, I imagine my father will send someone else to look. So, all things being equal, I’d rather find it first.”

“Competitive much?”

He took a few bites of something that might once have been eggs. “I make it a habit to never let my family get one over on me. Nathan almost captured you, so I have to make up for it by screwing things up for my father. It’s complicated. Even if it takes a few days, I want to know what that site is before he does.”

They broke camp half an hour later and resumed their trek. In the end, they didn’t have to do a lot of searching. There was a big hill overlooking the general area. Sandra climbed a tree at the top to get a look.

“I have something to the northeast. A gap in the trees. It might indicate ruins.”

All Harry could see was undergrowth. He waited for Sandra to climb back down and sent Rex off in the indicated direction. Odds were that he wouldn’t find anything.

And, in fact, Rex didn’t find any ruins. He did find something strange about the clearing. The gap was a perfectly circular clearing about a hundred feet across.

Even the undergrowth was missing. The limbs from the surrounding trees hid the spooky symmetry from the air, breaking up the curve. Bare ground was all that greeted them. Only a few dead limbs lay in the open.

Harry stopped at the edge, his finely honed subconscious screaming at him to back up. It thought he was about to be ambushed. He wasn’t entirely certain it was wrong.

He glanced over at Jess. Her expression told him this wasn’t what she’d expected, either.

“Can you tell me why there aren’t any plants in there?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. I’ve never heard of anything like this.” She stepped out into the open before he could grab her and ran her hand over the ground. “It feels like regular dirt.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be out there. What if it’s some kind of poison?”

“One that works in a perfect circle? Doubtful. And even in poisoned areas, some plants are hardier than others. There’s no natural reason for a clearing like this.”

Harry couldn’t think of one, either. “Spread out, everyone. If there’s a group of people cleaning this spot, I don’t want to be surprised if they come calling.”

He stepped out beside Jess. “Why would someone clear a random spot in the jungle?”

“Because it isn’t random. It means something to them. Let’s give the ground in the middle a better look.”

She marched to the center of the clearing resolutely while he followed behind her, his weapon up and scanning for threats. It felt like the trees were staring at him.

Jess squatted and ran her hand across the ground. “This feels different. More compacted.” She opened her pack and dug inside, producing a small hand pick. “I grabbed this from the camp in case we needed to dig.”