portable and a non-commodity, something that had value merely by being possessed.
Hawker stood up straight, wiped the sweat from his eyes and conceded that the answer was beyond him. He couldn’t guess the
To Hawker and Polaski and everyone else at the NRI base camp, the flight had been an unscheduled one, a last-minute errand that had become necessary only upon learning of the tragedy in Washington. But to someone somewhere else, the flight had been more than expected. It had been planned with meticulous precision, designed to put Hawker and Polaski in exactly the right place at exactly the wrong time.
There was no other logical explanation. The NOTAR had to have come from a good distance away. To make the intercept, its pilot would need to know precisely when Hawker and Polaski would be transiting the area. A change of ten minutes in either direction would have blown it.
But of course there hadn’t been ten minutes to wait. In order to get Polaski to Washington in time they’d had to leave the jungle immediately. That was the setup; the accident involving Polaski’s daughter was only the trigger.
There was a chance that the accident involving Polaski’s daughter had been a hoax; it made the details of the situation and the message somewhat easier to control. Then again, such a bluff came with its own problems, problems of veracity or confirmation that might expose the truth and rule it out.
If there was one thing he’d learned over the past decade, it was how evil men could be to their fellow man. Not just violent or in conflict but utterly evil in the pursuit of their own goals. Such men might easily destroy a whole family just to move one piece on the chessboard.
Putting the shovel aside, Hawker ground his teeth. Whether the accident was real or not, Polaski had died thinking his only daughter was near death herself. A man destroyed or an entire family. And in ways both direct and indirect, Hawker had played a part.
Racked with guilt, Hawker laid Polaski gently in the shallow grave, folding the man’s arms neatly across his chest. As he began to cover Polaski’s body with earth, the weight of the man’s death pressed down on him. He recalled his gleeful bargain with Danielle. In fact, he remembered it was he who had suggested the deal, offering his silence and loyalty for her assistance, arrogantly believing he could protect those who had come along for the ride without apprising them of the danger. His silence had become part of the chain of events that had gotten Polaski killed, and perhaps Polaski’s daughter as well. It had helped convince the others that they were safe.
The others …
Hawker began to wonder what had become of them. If their enemy knew Hawker and Polaski’s route across the jungle, it meant they had to know where it originated: the closely guarded location of the temple. Surely they would not wait long before moving in on the clearing. In all likelihood the attacks had come simultaneously or nearly so.
“God help us,” he whispered, covering Polaski with more of the dark Amazonian soil. “God help us all.”
Hawker finished burying Polaski in complete silence, his mind growing numb as it churned in circles. He tamped the soil down and said a short prayer, concluding with a verse that he thought about often, one that seemed appropriate for both Polaski and himself. “And the Lord sayeth, Come to me all ye who labor and are heavy burdened. I will give you rest.”
He smoothed the dark earth of Polaski’s grave with his hand. “Rest well, Polaski,” he said.
Standing, Hawker was now forced to grapple with a larger decision. He had to get moving, had to try to get help to his friends.
The smart bet was to head for the river and take it east. Sooner or later a boat would pick him up and he could make a radio call. He could reach someone in the NRI. Moore or Gibbs or someone who knew of the operation and could coordinate a response, one with sufficient numbers and equipment to deal with whoever had done this thing. But even with the best of luck, it might be a week or so before someone picked him up and another week before help arrived.
By then their enemy would be gone and the rest of the NRI team missing or dead. They might be already. He thought of McCarter and Susan and the porters hired for a hundred bucks a day. He thought of Danielle and closed his eyes.
With a fire in his heart stoked by bunkers of anger and guilt, Hawker grabbed his survival pack, checked to be sure his gun was present and heaved the pack over his shoulder. He took a deep breath, set his jaw and turned to the west, heading back toward the clearing instead of away from it.
He would not abandon the others to a callous and murdering enemy, not when his own part in the deception weighed so heavily on his mind. He would make his way back to the clearing on foot, an action that would bring about another war and great shedding of blood—something he’d spent years trying desperately to avoid.
It had become unavoidable now. The darkness had made a home in his soul once again and it drove him on. He would return to the clearing and save his friends or he’d bury their killers, one by one.
CHAPTER 29
As Kaufman’s men turned the clearing into an armed camp, digging foxholes and bunkers, and unloading crates of weapons and ammunition from the helicopter, Norman Lang conducted his ultrasound tests, which confirmed a cavern beneath the temple and a tunnel linking the two. Not the vertical shaft of the well behind the altar, but a steep zigzagging passage that cut through the structure, like a switchback mountain road. It connected to a spot in the altar room, a spot that appeared to lie across the gaping mouth of the well.
Closer investigation revealed a fissure between two of the stones. Kaufman’s men forced the stone upward with a pair of crowbars, raising it an inch at a time, until it jammed against something and would budge no farther.
Lang wedged a two-by-four into the exposed space to brace the stone and then supervised the building of a makeshift bridge above the maw of the pit. He crawled across and peered into the tunnel, using a flashlight.
It was a narrow space, perhaps five feet high, but not much wider than a man’s shoulders. It fell away steeply, looking more like a slide than a walkway, and he saw evidence of a pulley and counterweight system for the stone, but whatever flaxen rope it might have once used had disintegrated long ago.
Minutes later, Lang was back in the tunnel, this time leading Susan Briggs and four of Kaufman’s hired guns. They moved cautiously, with each switchback seeming steeper than the last as the tunnel descended through the temple and into the ground below. Lang began to feel claustrophobic. In truth, he’d been feeling something similar since Kaufman had sucked him into this mess.
For several years he’d been Kaufman’s go-to man for risky projects, and in that time he’d come to realize that Kaufman sometimes used questionable methods to gather information, but he had never expected the events that he’d now become part of: shooting and killing and the taking of hostages. Lang was well aware that his own ego, greed and lack of discernable ethics had made him an easy mark, but this was far more than he’d bargained for.
Still, at this point, what choice did he have? No doubt any attempt to back out would result in an unpleasant end. No, he thought, crossing Kaufman outright would be foolish, especially out here in the jungle, surrounded by killers and thugs. Lang was a realist, at least in the sense of knowing what had to be done to survive, and for now that meant doing as he was ordered, trusting in the fact that Kaufman needed him to study and break down whatever items this project recovered. Once he made it back to the States, his approach might change, but for now he would do what was necessary—and if bodies were left behind, that would be okay as long as his wasn’t among them.
He turned to Susan. “How much farther?”
She stared at him blankly through the plastic of the gas mask. “How would I know?”
Of course she wouldn’t know. It was a stupid question. Why the hell was he even talking to her? He pushed on, sliding and crouching and feeling the burn in his legs—until he stepped out into an open space, a massive chamber where the ceiling pulled up and out of view and the edges ran away from them on either side. It was a deep and echoing place, like a darkened, empty stadium. Words of awe wafted through the air, echoing back at them while their lights skated dimly over distant walls.
