Thief (29 page)

They rolled the barrel where Monarch wanted it, and stood it on end, pushed back into reeds. The thief cut down other reeds, laid them loosely across the front of the steel barrel, and then reached over and set the two location transmitters on the top of the barrel.

“Why are you leaving them there?” Santos muttered.

“Doctor, I will never question your decisions regarding research, if you don't question my decisions regarding your safety.”

Santos looked frustrated, but nodded.

Climbing back into the raft, Monarch murmured in Carson's ear, “I want you to take us at troll speed back across the river and beach us.”

They crossed the channel with the engine making a low purr, giving wide berth to the crocodiles sunning on the banks, and floating in the pools. The rafts slid up onto a low area covered in ferns and grasses.

Monarch told them to get whatever they needed out of the follow raft. It was staying until they picked it up on the way back. Then he dug in his dry bag, found the two Rhino handheld radios, and handed one to Santos.

“What do I need this for?” she asked.

Monarch motioned her to lower her voice, and then replied, “You're going on upriver without me.”

He held up his hand before she could reply. “I need to see who these people are, get a visual on them, so I know who we're dealing with, and then I'll come join you. In the meantime, you're going upriver to where Kiki says you pick up the path. You're going to strip down to essentials, carry only what you need, and hide everything else, including the rafts and the motors. I expect you to go immediately into the jungle once that's done, and get as far off the river as you can before making camp.

“The entire time you're walking, I want this Rhino on and in your hand,” Monarch went on, and then shook the radio he had. “Your position will show up on my radio, and my position on yours. When I reach you, we put the radios away. No GPS.”

Santos looked as if she was going to start arguing with him, but then held up her hands, said, “We'll do it your way.”

“Smart move,” the thief replied, and then retrieved the dry bag carrying the guns and ammunition.

He got out the IMBEL paratrooper rifle, and two twenty-five-shot clips, and then sealed the bag again.

“This is just a precaution,” he told them. “We're a long way from anyone helping us and I feel like being prepared for anything.”

“What do we do with the other guns?” Santos asked. “Hide them with the rafts?”

“No, you divide them up and you carry them,” he said. “You can always drop them later if I find out there's no threat behind us. But if there is a threat, you won't be able to go back.”

Carson and Rousseau appeared uncomfortable with that, but before either of them protested, Santos said, “You'll call me once you know?”

“When I'm on my way,” Monarch promised.

A few minutes later, they pushed the rafts back into the water, and trolled upstream. Monarch pulled the follow raft almost entirely up on the flat, so it couldn't be missed from the river. He put the dry bag carry straps over his shoulders and snapped them in place with sternum and belt clips.

Climbing down off the bank into eight inches of murky water, the thief walked upstream. He'd gone sixty-five yards and was swinging his left foot forward, when he felt something sharp cut into his leg.

Monarch winced and cursed. The spiny fins of several fish bumped and glided along his bare lower legs.

Something sharp again. Cutting again.

He freaked.

Piranha!

 

39

MONARCH EXPLODED INTO A
dance in the shallows, knowing that he was splashing enough to attract crocodiles, but driven forward by that one thought—
Piranha!

The thief leaped out and up onto the bank, and lay there, panting like a spooked dog, and staring back at the swirling murky water. Few things frightened him, but the idea of being chewed up one bite at a time by razor-teeth little fish sent him into panic.

Monarch jerked around and inspected the bites. Blood oozed from small and ragged chunks of skin that were gone from the back of his left calf. A bigger one on his right shin was dripping.

There was a redundant first-aid kit back there a hundred yards in the follow raft. But he couldn't afford to walk there. There was a chance he would leave a trail of some sort, a drop of blood here, a broken branch there, enough that a talented man, or a group of talented men could read it and follow. Instead, he cut off the sleeves of his shirt and tore them into strips that he used to bind the wounds.

Monarch got himself in position one hundred and fifteen yards upriver of the follow raft, and one hundred and thirty-four yards from the drum of gasoline sitting out in the reeds and baking in the equatorial sun. From the base of a rubber tree growing on the bank, he used a machete to hack a path away into the jungle heading west-southwest for nearly a hundred yards. He dropped the dry bag there, and returned to the river.

At the base of the rubber tree, he built himself a low blind of branches and vegetation and a rest for the rifle, and then sat in the shade among the roots, his back to the trunk, looking downstream. The thief settled in to wait. Knowing he had several hours at least before he'd have visitors, he closed his eyes and slept dreamlessly.

*   *   *

Three and a half hours later, he awoke with a start, shocked he had slept so long. He heard Santos's voice. “Monarch? Are you there?”

Monarch scanned the scene downriver, and saw nothing, listened, and heard nothing before triggering the radio transmit button.

“I'm here, Dr. Santos.”

“Have you seen anything?”

“Not yet.”

“We're going into the forest now.”

“Keep your radio on, but don't call me again until at least two hours after dark.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

He turned off his radio, clipped it to his waist belt, and waited.

They came, as predators do, in the waning light.

Monarch heard the outboard engine first from downriver. Ten minutes after sundown, a smaller Zodiac raft than the ones they were using rounded the bend, and trolled across the larger of the crocodile pools.

Monarch had binoculars on the men in the raft, three hard guys, ex-military, wearing jungle camouflage, combat harnesses, and floppy hats. And there was Kiki's boyfriend, Nolomé. Nice guy.

The thief saw no weapons, but knew they were there. He took his attention off the men in the raft, and again looked downstream. Twenty seconds later, the second raft appeared. Even in the lowlight there was no mistaking that these guys were not bass fishermen and that the big, black dude riding up front was without a doubt Jason Dokken.

“Okay,” Monarch said, exhaling deeply. “Game on.”

The thief had expected whoever was following to come looking five or six hours after the tracking devices stopped moving. He had also expected that the predators would come by water.

What he didn't foresee was that they would also come by air.

As the first raft came cruising into the upper pool, almost between the follow raft and the gasoline drum, he heard the chug of an approaching helicopter, which swung in just off the treetops, circling the pool overhead.

Monarch reached forward, pulled the branches of his blind right onto him, and ducked his head. The chopper flew on in a lazy arc. He pushed the brush away slightly, and got the binoculars on the bird.

It was a small construction helicopter with a bay door wide open. The logo on the side said
SJB MINING
. He saw a man hanging out the side. He carried an AK-47 and the thief thought he recognized him.

Then he spotted the black, swollen eye, and knew for certain that he was one of the three men who'd tried to grab Santos back in Rio.

Swinging the binoculars back to the river, Monarch saw Dokken and his troop of five aiming rifles at the helicopter.

More armed men appeared in the helicopter hold as it swung about. One was the same big slab who'd tried to knife him on the ferry. The bird hovered forty-five feet above the pool facing Dokken's rafts, the tail rotor almost directly above the gasoline drum out on the island.

The thief dropped the binoculars, got in behind the gun, and took steady aim. He fired a full metal jacket round through the drum about three quarters of the way up. Sparks thrown from the bullet's penetration ignited vapors that had filled the upper barrel. The gas drum erupted in a thunderclap and a fireball that threw shrapnel. It billowed around the helicopter's tail and rotor.

Monarch touched off a short burst, strafing the water forward of Dokken's lead raft, and then sending a second short burst at the helicopter. He didn't fire another shot after that. He didn't need to.

Shocked by the explosion, Dokken's men thought the guys in the mining helicopter had shot at them and returned fire. The guys in the chopper thought the opposite and started shooting at the rafts.

Three guys in the forward raft were hit, including Nolomé, who slumped on the gunnel. The other two fell in the water. Dokken and his men in the rear raft were hammering the helicopter. Bullets smacked the fuselage, rotors, and blades. Two men tumbled out of the chopper hold, including the one with the black eye.

Then the thief heard the screech of steel sheering and knew one or more of the rounds fired from Dokken's raft had blown through the rear rotor housing and into the gears and bearings. The nose of the helicopter swung wildly left and right as the pilot fought for control, and then rose and dipped fast, like a horse throwing its head down before it starts to buck.

There was another harsh metallic noise and the stench of alloys braising before the helicopter veered off sharply, spun into the gathering darkness, and crashed into the jungle four or five hundred yards away.

Monarch became aware of men yelling and crying, and swung the binoculars back at the pool, seeing a strong flashlight beam playing across the water, finding two of Dokken's men and one of the guys who'd fallen from the helicopter, all of them screaming for help in a blind panic as the piranhas and the crocodiles came to the scent of blood. Dokken got one of his men out and into the rear raft. He was missing part of his leg. The others were pulled under.

The light went out. Monarch could no longer see the second raft, but there was no mistaking its location by the hysterical voice of the dying man. The thief gently pushed the branches of his blind forward and away from him.

He quietly got to his feet. The cries of the dying man cut off in a choke, and then there was no noise except the scorched reeds popping and cracking out there on the island. Monarch eased onto that path he'd cut, and started to creep down it, rolling the soles of his canvas jungle boots from the outer edges of the soles inward.

He got thirty yards before he heard Dokken scream, and then rant: “Fucking Monarch! I will find you and rip your throat out with my bare fucking hands!”

“Good luck with that,” Monarch muttered, and went on.

*   *   *

He could still hear Dokken roaring insanely when he reached the dry bag and hoisted it onto his back. He turned his headlamp on to the red light, and then powered up the Rhino radio.

Monarch waited until he got a fix on Santos's radio, which was roughly four-point-eight miles away on a west-northwest bearing. He fought his way through vines and tight growing saplings for the next half hour, analyzing what he'd seen amid the chaos.

The way they'd all fired on each other confirmed that there were two parties after Santos's secrets: whoever was controlling Dokken and Vargas, and the guys in the SJB helicopter. Who were they? Either miners or an unknown third party that got use of the chopper. He thought the latter choice was unlikely, which left the mining company.

But why? There was no mention of valuable ore in Santos's research paper, no mention of minerals at all.

Monarch stopped clawing through the jungle. The thief stood there a long moment, listening for noise on his back trail, and heard none. He'd come at least a mile from the river.

In an open space, he'd have waited another two miles before using the machete.

But here, deep in the jungle, with tons upon tons of vegetation to absorb the sound, he pulled the machete from his waist belt, turned the headlamp beam on high, and started to chop his way forward toward Santos and her camp.

He could already tell it was going to be a long, long sweltering night.

 

40

LAKE ZUG, SWITZERLAND

5:59
A.M.

SIXTEEN BELOW CELSIUS OUTSIDE
,
three-point-two degrees Fahrenheit, and Tristan Hormel could not have been happier.

For the past several weeks the Swiss banker had felt like he was being squeezed from so many directions he thought he might pop. Conditions had been horrible for his normal outlet in times of great stress, but then yesterday afternoon the wind had turned blustery out of the northeast, pushing a bank of cold air down from Russia and across the central Alps. A bitter wind had scoured the lake all night, blown onto land whatever snow had been left on the ice. Hormel's personal weather station was showing that the wind had stopped gusting, and was now blowing at a steady twenty-two knots. Humidity? Seventy-four percent.

“You sure you want to go out there?” asked Pieter Brooks, a security specialist Hormel had brought in. “Wind chill has to be twenty-five below.”

“In other words, ideal conditions,” Hormel said cheerily as he pulled an oiled wool fisherman's sweater over his merino wool long underwear top. “Want to come?”

“Uh, I'll pass,” Brooks said.

“Your loss,” the banker said, getting into black insulated bibs. “As skiers say, this is going to be epic.”

A foam collar to protect his neck came next followed by snow mobile boots fitted with cleats, and a thermal hood, a long, heavy parka, and insulated leather gloves with wrist straps. A motorcycle helmet with a clear visor completed an outfit that made him largely impervious to the cold.