09.Deep Black: Death Wave Read online

  Her own pulse thundered in Lia’s ears as the nightmare monologue dragged on, louder, it seemed, even than the sounds of drilling from outside. She told herself that this was part of the actual torture, a psychological softening up that would leave her more vulnerable to drugs or to the actual touch of a scalpel when it finally came.

  Her training had emphasized going along with an interrogator, giving him what he wanted, if necessary. The important thing was to keep her wits about her, to resist going into shock, to keep alert for the possibility, any possibility, of escape …

  “Please …” she said. Her lips were dry and cracked, despite the sweat drenching her face. “Please don’t …”

  “You have something you wish to tell me?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Your name, for a start.” With precise, businesslike movements he replaced the lancet in the canvas carrier. “We’ve not been properly introduced, you see. I am Dr. Taysir al-Dahabi. Oh, yes! I am a medical doctor. The University of Cairo. It helps to be able to monitor my subject’s condition as I work. And you are?”

  “C-Cathy Chung,” she said. Her voice cracked with the effort.

  “Ah, yes. The name on your ID card we found in among your things. And you work for?”

  “The U.S. State Department.”

  “I see, I see.” He extracted a notebook and pen from the bag and wrote something with quick, flowing scribbles. “That matches the fact of the ID itself, of course. But why should I believe you? If, as my employers believe, you are CIA, that would all be part of an internally consistent story, a legend, as I believe spies call it.”

  “I … I told you I’d talk!”

  “Yes, but you are nowhere close to being broken yet. Broken to the point where you are begging me to be allowed to tell me everything you know. So we will need to test those statements.”

  An inarticulate whimper escaped Lia’s lips; she did it for effect, but she didn’t have to reach down far to find it.

  “I’ll tell you what, Cathy. I’ll call you Cathy for now, anyway, until we learn more about you … about the real you. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. How well you do this will tell me how willing you are to cooperate with me right now. Okay?”

  “Anything …”

  “Very well. I’m going to have one of the guards untie you and remove the handcuffs. You will then remove your hiking boots and place them under the chair. The other guard will have very specific orders. If you try to escape, if you so much as look as though you’re going to try to attack me or them, the other guard will shoot you in the knees. The wounds will leave you helplessly crippled and in a very great deal of pain. Do you understand me?”

  Lia nodded.

  “Say ‘Yes, Doctor.’ ”

  “Y-yes, Doctor.”

  “Very well.” Al-Dahabi turned and spoke rapidly to the guards in Arabic, too rapidly for her to understand most of it, though she caught the words for “shoot,” “knees,” and “be watchful.”

  Al-Dahabi stepped back from the chair and moved his black bag well out of reach. One guard leaned his AK against the tunnel wall and walked slowly toward her, keeping to one side so that he did not at any time block the other guard’s line of fire.

  The remaining man, smiling as broadly as al-Dahabi, raised his weapon and took aim at her legs.

  SAN MARTIN CALDERA

  MONDAY, 1537 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  It had taken Charlie Dean more than twenty minutes to work his way down the gully, a crawl of perhaps fifty yards, made with exacting, slow, and painstaking caution. His eventual objective, the mouth of the cave, was still over a hundred yards away—and that was a straight-line distance, not the length of the twists and turns he would need to make to stay behind boulders and within eroded gullies in the crater floor.

  There were those two sentries ahead as well, still perched on a rock. One faced the cave, his back toward Dean; the other, beside the first, was facing Dean. The two were chatting with one another, but every so often the guard on the right would look up and scan the ridgetop, the gully, and the bare slopes of the crater’s interior.

  Another guard, Dean noticed, was on top of the crater rim, over on the opposite side of the bowl. He was sitting on the ground, smoking a cigarette.

  So far, the tech-Ghillie had worked as advertised, its photo-reactive surface darkening to the same tone as the shadows in the gully and at the crater floor. Dean, his face only partially exposed beneath the blanket, watched the guard on the right carefully, timing his movements for those moments when the man was talking to his friend, freezing motionless when he began scanning the hillside.

  The two were perhaps a hundred yards away now, just ten yards in front of the cave mouth. The racket from the drilling rig, more or less muted up at the top of the hill, was in full voice down here, and the air was filled with a haze of minute particles of dust thrown up by the pounding.

  They certainly weren’t going to hear him with all that noise close by.

  He began moving forward once more. The ground here was still broken and offered decent cover. Drawing on his old Marine sniper’s training, he picked each new piece of cover before moving, then made his way toward it with slow, steady progress, stopping every few yards to check around him. He could see the drilling rig now off to his right. Two of the men he’d watched earlier were with them now—he thought they were Feng and al-Wawi, though he couldn’t be sure with all of the dust in the air.

  “Charlie?” Marie said over his implant. Even with her voice bone-conducted into his ear, it was hard to hear her over the pounding of the drill. “Charlie, do you copy?”

  “I’m here, Marie.”

  “The boss just called! Mountain Storm is on! Firestorm is en route, ETA ten minutes!”

  He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. He pressed his fingers into his ears, and said, “Art Room, say again, please!”

  “I said, Mountain Storm is on. Firestorm is en route, ETA ten minutes!”

  Dean almost laughed aloud. “Now that’s what I call good timing,” he said.

  LAVA TUBE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO, NORTH CRATER

  MONDAY, 1537 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Lia sat barefoot in front of al-Dahabi, rubbing life back into her sore wrists.

  “Very good, Cathy,” he told her. “Very good. Now, stand up.”

  Awkwardly, she did so. Terror still gibbered at the back of her mind, and she was trembling. She hated appearing weak like this, but the obscenely smiling interrogator, she realized, was having an almost overpowering, mesmerizing effect on her, on her will.

  The fact that she knew it was all part of the interrogation process didn’t help one bit.

  “Good,” al-Dahabi said. He was still standing well back from her, too far for her to kick, even if she’d had the strength. One of the guards, ten feet away, continued to aim his assault rifle at her legs. “Next, you will remove all of your clothing, fold it neatly, and place it on the chair.”

  “What?”

  Al-Dahabi sighed. “If you were a man, I would simply have my friends here rip the clothing from your body, a somewhat brutal demonstration that you are helpless. But working with a woman is different. You know you are weaker physically than a man, so the demonstration must prove that you are helpless psychologically. Vulnerable. Mine to command. You will do what I tell you, without argument, without hesitation. If you do not, I will find another and more unpleasant way to demonstrate your helplessness. Do you understand me?”

  At that moment, Lia couldn’t tell which emotion was stronger as it churned in stomach and chest and throat—fear or fury. Women, in this bastard’s world, were things to be manipulated, toys, objects for psychological manipulation.

  Several possible replies flashed through her thoughts, ranging from profanity to laughing in the little creep’s face. His prejudice was a weakness, she told himself. There had to be a way to use it to her advantage.

  Her eyes locked with his, she began pe
eling off her T-shirt.

  SAN MARTIN CALDERA

  MONDAY, 1537 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  The noise of the drill stopped, the silence startlingly sudden. Dean froze in place, lifting his head above the edge of the gully just enough to see what was happening. All the pumps and generators, a line of blue metal boxes to one side of the drill site, appeared to have been switched off at once.

  A moment later, a single diesel engine fired up again, and a heavy winch began grinding away as the workers started removing the drill stack section by section. Metal clashed on metal with clanks and shrill chirps, and he could hear the men shouting at one another in Arabic.

  Dean saw movement beyond and to the left of the drilling rig and pulled out his binoculars for a better look. Two of the paramilitary types were coming down the path from the upper crater. One carried an AK; the other lugged something very much like a large, heavy suitcase.

  Shit!

  “Green Amber, this is Amber Three,” Dean said, switching on his tactical radio.

  “Three, One,” Rodriguez’s voice said in his earpiece. “Go.”

  “You see the two gonzos with the suitcase, coming down the hill to the drill site?”

  “Negative. Not from this position.”

  Shit and more shit. The two bad guys had already moved around the bend in the descending path and were out of the line of sight of the two Marines on the hill above.

  Maybe the damned timing wasn’t so hot after all. Ahead was the cave where they had Lia. To his right, the bad guys were bringing down one of the nukes.

  Lia or the nuke?

  “Amber One, did you get the word on Mountain Storm?”

  “Three, that is affirmative. We are preparing to light up the target.”

  Okay … so Rodriguez and Dulaney were going to be busy for the next ten minutes. The options sucked. If he took out the two with the suitcase nuke, he would start a firefight, the bad guys would sound the alarm, and any nuclear weapons already armed and in place elsewhere on the island might be set off—and a firefight would pin him down here, unable to reach Lia.

  If he went after Lia, the bad guys would arm that weapon and put it down the hole, ready to fire. It was not exactly a comfortable prospect.

  “Art Room,” he said.

  “Go ahead, Charlie.”

  “I have one of the suitcase nukes in sight. Looks like they’re getting ready to put it down the borehole. If I engage, they may disappear with it, and they sure as hell will pass the word to every other Tango on La Palma. I’m going to go in after Lia.”

  “We concur, Charlie. Good luck.”

  “Ilya?”

  “I’m here, Charlie.”

  “Target is the two Tango sentries outside of the cave entrance. I’ve got the one on the right. You take the one on my left. Do you copy?”

  “I copy.”

  “Do you see another sentry at about two seven zero up on the crater rim?”

  “The goldbrick with the cigarette. I see him.”

  “He’s your number two target.”

  “Roger that.”

  Slowly, Dean eased his M4 out from under the tech-Ghillie and braced it in the prone firing position, left elbow supporting the muzzle, right hand closing about the grip. He checked to make sure the selector switch was on single-shot, then peered through the sight, adjusting the picture until the red dot was over the sentry’s chest. The range was less than a hundred yards now, but he wasn’t going to try for a fancy head shot and risk a miss. He would go for center of mass.

  “First target.”

  “Sighted in.”

  Both of the guards had turned now and were watching the activity at the drill head. With luck, everyone in the crater would be watching them hauling up the drill pipe and planting the bomb, and they wouldn’t notice the two sentries outside the cave getting capped.

  “Okay, Ilya,” Dean said. He held the target picture steady, took in a breath, released it partway. “On my mark … and three … and two … and one … and shoot!”

  His rifle kicked against his shoulder, the sound of the gunshot muffled by the suppressor to a harsh cough. Both of the sentries jerked together, collapsing into one another and then tumbling off of the boulder.

  Dean pulled the tech-Ghillie straps off his wrists and ankles, got to his feet, and started toward the cave at a fast trot. He was in full view of the people near the derrick now, but all of them were focused on the activity around the borehole.

  “Target two sees you,” Akulinin said. “Taking the shot …”

  Dean glanced up at the crater rim to the west in time to see the lone sentry silhouetted against the sky, saw him raising his rifle … then toppling backward and falling out of sight.

  “Good shot,” Dean told Akulinin under his breath. He ran faster, staying in deep shadow and moving from boulder to boulder to minimize his exposure, but no longer staying out of sight. Speed, now, was more important than stealth.

  “I’ve got the others covered, Charlie. Get Lia out of there!”

  Reaching the boulder in front of the cave entrance, Dean stopped, checked to make sure no one was looking in his direction, then dragged the two bodies and their weapons around behind another boulder resting close to the side of the cliff. That might buy a few more minutes, depending on how frequently the bad guys checked up on their sentries.

  Then, still in shadow, he started for the lava tube entrance.

  25

  LAVA TUBE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1538 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  I’m waiting, Cathy. If you prefer, the guard will put a bullet through your right knee. It will then hurt a great deal more when we put you on the table and forcibly undress you.”

  Lia evaluated her chances. If she dove for al-Dahabi and tried to grapple with him, she might catch the two gunmen by surprise. If she could get close enough to the interrogator, they might not be able to shoot for fear of hitting him.

  But then what? She was bigger than al-Dahabi, and younger … but she’d spent the past twenty-some hours tied to a chair, and both the adrenaline surge of the past few minutes and the beating had left her shaking and weak. Even if she did take him down, she would be no match, then, for the two armed Tangos on the other side of the chamber.

  Besides, she now noticed that al-Dahabi also had a gun, a holstered pistol on his right hip. Jumping him would be suicide.

  She decided to keep stalling. If she could keep him talking …

  The danger lay in the possibility that he would become impatient and move on to the next level of force in this psychological game.

  “No!” she cried. “Why should I make it easy for you, you bastard? You’re just going to torture me anyway!”

  “I will need to ascertain that you are telling me the truth. The process can be relatively brief, a matter of an hour or so as I ask you questions, then apply, shall we say, a certain measured amount of pain as I test your truthfulness. But if you force me to rip the truth from you, the process will be long and agonizing no matter what you tell me.”

  “You’re still going to kill me!”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps. But … cooperate, and I might see if I can intercede with Major Feng. He’s not a monster, after all. I think he likes you. He might let you live.”

  The lie was so transparent she very nearly laughed in his face.

  She battled to keep her face frozen, empty of expression. She’d just seen … was that Charlie slipping in through the tunnel entrance?

  The two guards were watching her with wide, hungry eyes, their backs to the entrance.

  “Okay!” she cried. “Please, please just don’t hurt me!” She started fumbling at her belt.

  LAVA TUBE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1538 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Dean eased into the widening of the lava tube, all of his senses at a heightened pitch. He saw Lia in the pool of light ahead, facing him, and felt a surge of relief. Her face was bruised and bloody, bu
t she appeared to be standing on her own, at least. To the left was the Palestinian, an old man standing with arms folded beside a steel table. Directly in front of Dean were two guards, their backs to the entrance, watching Lia undress.

  If he shot them, a convulsive muscle contraction might close a trigger finger and kill Lia.

  “Hey!” Dean shouted, his voice echoing down the tunnel. “Allahu akbar!”

  The two guards and the old man turned to face him.

  LAVA TUBE

  SAN MARTIN VOLCANO

  MONDAY, 1538 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Lia heard Charlie’s shrill yell, an echoing battle cry, and saw the startled guards spin to face him. Immediately, she launched herself at al-Dahabi, who’d also turned to face Dean and was groping at his hip for his holstered sidearm. Dean’s rifle fired, a sharp chuff of sound, and the back of a guard’s head exploded in a scarlet spray.

  She struck al-Dahabi from the side just as he started to pull his sidearm clear, slamming him back into the portable table, upending it with a clattering crash, then continuing on until Lia, al-Dahabi, and the table all smashed into the light stand.

  The light toppled, flared, and went dark with a loud pop.

  There was neither room nor time for subtlety. Lia raised her arm, then slammed her elbow down against the side of al-Dahabi’s head. The man beneath her screamed, dragging his pistol up, twisting beneath her. She elbowed his temple again, then again, but he turned his head and her last blow caught him squarely in the nose with a gush of blood.

  She kept hitting him, kicking and kneeing him, slamming his head and face with her elbows and knees as the pistol hit the stone floor and clattered away into the near-darkness.

  She felt a hand close on her shoulder and spun, still fighting.

  “Easy, Lia! It’s me!”

  Her breath coming in savage, rapid gasps, she stared up into Dean’s face for a moment, still ready to kill—

  “Charlie?”

  “It’s okay, Lia. It’s me.”

  She let him pull her back from al-Dahabi. Dean knelt and probed the interrogator’s throat with two fingers. “He’s dead. Nice hand-to-hand technique.”