The Twisted Cross (12 page)

Inside its hold sat a fortune in gold . . .

The engines for the gigantic helicopter were always just one click away from starting. At least one pilot was always strapped into one of its seats, ready to fire its turbos and lift-off. Whenever a gold object was retrieved from a deep cave, it Vas immediately carried to the aircraft. These instructions had come directly from the High Command. Should Krupp's encampment be attacked, they wanted to make sure that the so-called "blitz" helicopter -and its precious cargo of bullion -be off and away in the shortest amount of time.

Krupp threw away the rest of his coffee and climbed in-1 side the Hook's expansive cargo hold. It contained ten crates now -four were filled with gold coins, the others were packed with artifacts such as gold plates, goblets and necklaces. This was the final booty from this particular site -the eighteenth shipment of plunder from the secret cave the woman had indicated beneath the Chichen Itza pyramid. Within the hour, the Hook would lift off and meet the two escorting jet fighters that would shepherd it back to Panama.

"Shall we feed the prisoner, my" colonel?" Krupp heard a voice behind him say.

He turned to see one of his sergeants holding a small pot containing a disgusting, undercooked egg and beef fat remnants.

"This is all there is to feed her?" he asked the sergeant.

The man shrugged. "She's always given the leftovers," he said. "And our remaining food is packed away."

He dismissed the man with the wave of his hand. He wasn't about to worry what the woman was being fed. More important things were pressing on him, like preparing to get to the next site, some 60 miles away.

To this end, he walked back to the command truck and sent his personal guard to round up his staff officers.

"Who's there?" the woman cried out.

Her ears had detected the soft footsteps coming from the forward part of the cave. She also heard her voice echo between the walls of the pitch-black chamber.

"Is someone out there?" she called, her voice shaking.

"It's your food," came the gruff reply.

She could sense a faint light working its way down toward her. The shadows it cast frightened her. They always seemed to take on the shapes of large, terrible monsters. Quickly, she wrapped a soiled rag around her eyes, knowing that even a pinprick of direct light from a flashlight beam could damage her already frail, light-deprived retinas.

"I don't want any food," she called out wearily.

"But you must eat," came a snickered reply. "You are our guide. Without you, our work here would be meaningless."

The soldier carrying the small tin of food laughed, his sadistic tone echoing perversely around the cavern. She batted away the hand he put on her breast, but felt her own wrist squeezed hard as he forced her hand between his legs.

"I know you want to eat," he said, holding her hand tight against the fly of his uniform pants. "Now give Hans a rub and he'll leave your food."

"I don't want any food!" she screamed, struggling and momentarily succeeding in pulling her hand back from him.

He laughed again, roughly grabbed her breasts and then put his mouth to her neck.

"Eat now," he said in a heavy voice. "We move soon and you will not get fed until we get to the next camp, many miles away."

She felt tears coming on, and try as she might, she couldn't hold them in.

"Give it to me," she said, reaching out for the tin.

The soldier obliged her, then ran his hands all over her shapely young body while she forced down the runny yolk and small bits of fat.

"You get smarter every day," he said to her, finishing his liberties and taking the tin from her. "Just be sure you do not tell them of our little arrangement. If you do, I will be forced to slit your pretty throat . . ."

Tears were running down her face now, moistening the dirty rag she used to protect her eyes and causing it to smell awful.

"Please . . ." she sobbed, feeling dizzy and insane again. "Please tell me what color my hair is . . ."

The clouds had also covered the sunrise down in Panama, something Hunter took to be a lucky sign.

He was lying flat out in a clump of bushes no more than 25 feet from a control house for the "eastern" side locks of the Panama Canal. His face was covered with green paint and several different kinds of twigs and bushes were tied to his back, arms and legs. Even his M-16 was draped in green vines and twigs.

In his hands was the mini-video camera -a device that worked best when there was no direct sunshine. The cloud cover above the waterway allowed him to take long slow sweeps of the canal and the lockworks without worrying about the sun's glare screwing up the camera's cathode ray tube and possibly washing out an important shot.

He'd been at it for nearly an hour, recording the routine comings and goings of the military men running the locks, as well as their many small attack craft cruising the waterway. The camera's short, but nevertheless effective, zoom lens allowed him to key in on a number of defensive positions on both sides of the Canal. He was especially interested in the numerous SAM batteries

- mounted Blowpipes and Rolands -in evidence on both shorelines and atop many of the lock's administration buildings. In addition to the SAMs, there were also many large gun emplacements. Some featured South African Armscor G5

155-mm howitzers; others had rare Soviet-built S-23 180-mm guns. Dozens of smaller gun sites also dotted the landscape.

All of it defense in depth against an airborne attack.

Everywhere he looked there were soldiers -all dressed in either the drab khaki uniforms or the smart, intense all-black outfit. To a man they were well-armed with either M-16s or AK-47s, plus more than a few guns Hunter recognized as Mausers and Enfields. Several soldiers drifted by carrying RPG launchers and even TOW anti-tank weapons.

He counted a half dozen different helicopters buzzing about -Soviet Mi-24

Hinds mostly, but he had also spotted a few ancient Soviet-built Mi-4 Hounds.

And higher up, he had tracked the vapor trails of twelve F-4 Phantoms, the venerable fighter-bomber that seemed to be the jet aircraft of choice for The Twisted Cross.

Phantoms had carried out the aborted attack on the chopper team's encampment and now the skies above the Canal were positively lousy with them. But what bothered Hunter most was the fact that he had tangled with Phantoms on his trip to New Orleans. Could the fighters that attacked the airliner over Louisiana have been flown by pilots of The Twisted Cross?

It was just one of many questions running through his mind.

The official name of the chopper team was the Central American Tactical Service -CATS for short. Hunter and Dantini, the overall commander of CATS as well as its corporation's president, had stayed up all night, discussing the movement which would bring them here to the very edge of the Canal.

It had been a simple plan that nevertheless required a lot of coordination.

Although they staved off the air strike, the CATS were forced to abandon their convenient, seaside encampment and look for a new, more secure forward base.

Being experts at relocation, the entire chopper force was packed and gone within 45 minutes of the F-4s' attempted napalm attack.

Eight of the big helicopters, as well as the rest of the smaller ones, immediately moved to a new base on one of the northernmost islands in the Mosquito Gulf, a spit of land called Bocas del Toro. Meanwhile, Hunter, Dantini, Burke and ten of Dantini's best troops took one of the Chinooks on a long, arcing journey out over the Caribbean and back into the more eastern part of Panama. Landing on yet another island, one of a chain called San Bias, they were ferried to the Panamanian mainland on rubber rafts.

Then they walked, reaching the Canal just at dawn. Hunter had been shooting footage with his small video camera ever since.

"The guys in the black uniforms are members of what they call The Party,"

Dantini, who was one bush over from Hunter, explained to him in a voice barely above a whisper. "It's almost like an organization within an organization.

Their guys call all the shots within The Twisted Cross. What they say, goes."

"Almost like an elite officer corps," Hunter said, training the camera on two black-uniformed officers who were standing just outside one of the canal locks station. "Or should I say, more like Hitler's SS."

"Now you're getting the picture," Dantini replied.

Hunter knew what the man meant. It had been unspoken even before he arrived in Panama. And the word never left the lips of Dantini or Burke of any of the soldiers in CATS. It was as if the word was too horrible, too repugnant even to speak. But there was no denying just what The Twisted Cross stood for, both in symbolism and in action. The uniforms the Cross soldiers wore, the way they marched, even the helmets on their heads were all flashbacks to another sinister time earlier in the century when men of their ilk tried to take over the world and destroy it at the same time.

It only took a few seconds, but Hunter closed his eyes and relived one of the most mystifying events of his life.

He was back in the Arabian desert. His arch-foe Viktor stood before him, Hunter having shot down the fiend's helicopter just before his own airplane crashed. Now they stood in contrast: Hunter, holding his M-16 on Viktor, trying with all his might to fight off the temptation of pulling the trigger and ridding the world of one of its

worst scourges; Victor mocking him, telling him that democracy and freedom were out-moded in the New Order world.

Suddenly, a shot rang out. Viktor's throat exploded in a burst of blood and bones. Then another shot hit him, right in the center of the back, exiting through his breastbone. He fell face down in the sand at Hunter's feet - dead before he hit the ground . . .

Hunter spotted two uniformed men about a half mile away, holding a rifle with a telescopic sight. They quickly retreated in a desert vehicle. Retrieving his binoculars, he was able to catch a glimpse of the armbands both men wore . . .

Those armbands and the symbol pressed upon them -a red circle with a black twisted design inside - were identical to ones worn by the soldiers now guarding the canal locks.

It made Hunter's stomach turn just thinking about it, but he knew that certain facts had to be faced. Whether they called themselves The Twisted Cross or The Party or nothing at all, the hideous swastika design that each man wore told it all: the people in control of the Panama Canal were Nazis . . .

Hunter and the members of the CATS spent the next three hours moving up and down the bank of the waterway, avoiding Cross patrols and videotaping anything and everything.

The farther they went down the waterway, the more apparent it became that the Cross had lined both sides of the Canal with a startling array of weapons. It seemed as if there was either an antiaircraft emplacement - whether it be a SAM site or a radar-guided gun -every 50 yards. And the space in the middle was taken up by a grabbag of weapons ranging from the ever-plentiful

.50-caliber machine gun nests to the large, long-range howitzers.

"And I thought The Circle was heavy in equipment," Hunter said to Dantini at one point. "These guys seem to have more guns than they do people to operate them."

Dantini agreed. "We've heard that the members of The Party originally started out as arms dealers," he told Hunter.

"They apparently have a ton of money as well as access to a lot of weapons, both new and reconditioned."

"It's that 'ton of money' that worries me," Hunter said. "There are plenty of crackpots around who would love to rule the world but the only thing holding them back is lack of funds. But these guys seem to have a bottomless barrel of cash."

As illustration, he pointed out several gun emplacements that were just now nearing construction. Also, the Cross had heavy earth-moving equipment operating on both sides of the waterway, building roads, docking facilities, fuel stations and even more gun and missile emplacements.

"This is a work in progress," Hunter said to Dantini, capturing it all on video. "These guys are planning to stay awhile . . ."

"Well, we know the Cross has a thing about gold," Dantini whispered to him.

"We've both heard stories about their demanding gold for passage through the Canal, even taking gold fillings from people."

Hunter nodded and zoomed in on work being done on a new SAM site about 100

yards from their position.

"Yes, that's true," he said. "But it sure takes more than a bag full of gold fillings to pay for all this stuff. And I can't believe it's all coming from just the gold they extract from ships passing through. They have to be getting it from some other source."

They were about to move further down the waterway when a small boat caught Hunter's attention. There was no lack of Twisted Cross attack 'craft zipping up and down the Canal, but this particular vessel -a tugboat painted all white

-looked unusual. First of all, it wasn't armed to the teeth as was every other attack craft on the water. Secondly, just about everyone on board appeared to be wearing bulky white suits, almost of the style a beekeeper would wear. And those not dressed up in the bulky clothes were wearing even bulkier deep sea diving gear.

They watched as the white tugboat cast off from a dock near the lockworks and cruised to a point almost directly in front of them. The crew dropped anchor and soon there was

a lot of activity at the rear of the boat. Five minutes passed and then two men in the old-style deep sea diving gear - complete with large globe helmets

-were lowered over the side, several of the crewmen carefully playing out the air lines for the divers.

Another five minutes passed. Then the tug crew was seen lowering two long silver tubes into the water. All the work being done on the tug was slow and deliberate, especially the handling of the silver tubes. Meanwhile, every other craft on the waterway gave the tugboat the widest possible berth.

"They're certainly going through a lot of trouble for whatever the hell they are doing," Dantini observed. "Those suits they're wearing almost look like they're protective in nature, don't you think?"