to elephantine proportions; a fourth was chock-full of tarantulas, black and hairy eight-leggers with bodies the size of silver dollars.
A set of two-legged venomous creatures stood grouped around the chair where Jack sat. Two were known to him: Major Marc Vollard and Rex de Groot, one of Vollard's lieutenants.
The third was the blue-eyed, bronze-tanned shooter who'd killed Pete Malo.
De Groot held the bucket, which he'd just emptied into Jack's face to bring him around.
Vollard was of medium height, compactly made, well-knit. His spade-shaped face showed long green eyes, a snub nose, and a pointy chin. His upper lip was so thin as to be almost nonexistent; above it he wore a neatly trimmed pencil mustache, iron-gray.
He was outfitted in a safari jacket, light blue T-shirt, khaki pants worn tucked into the tops of a pair of combat boots. A thin, lightweight red scarf knotted around his neck added a flash of color. A black patent leather Sam Browne belt was fitted around his torso, holding a holstered sidearm at his hip.
De Groot was big, fleshy, built like an old-time wrestler from pre-steroid days, with sloping shoulders and thick arms, a barrel chest and a big gut. A mop of unruly, silver-gray hair covered his ears and the back of his collar, framing a ruddy, jowly, thick-featured face. He was outfitted in hunter's camouflage-style fatigues; a gun belt worn below his sagging gut held a holstered, long-barreled.44 magnum revolver.
The third member of the trio, the ace gunman, was slim, straight, and athletic, with a swimmer's build; long- limbed and lean-torsoed. He wore a shoulder holster; the gun holstered under his arm was the weapon that had killed Pete Malo.
Vollard's eyes turned up at the corners, giving them a merry aspect; he smiled thinly with his lips. He said, 'Of all the people in the world, it had to be you who found me, Jack. Truly, it is a small world after all.'
Jack remained silent, eyes in motion, scanning the room, looking for something, anything he could turn to his advantage. Nothing suggested itself on that score.
Vollard went on, 'I'm sure you're wondering where you slipped up, so allow me to enlighten you on that score. Every door and window in the place is covered by electric eye beams. When you and your associate entered, you triggered a silent alarm.
'By the way, I didn't recognize your partner. Ex-partner, I should say. No familiar face from the good old days in the Balkans, not like you and me. Who was he?'
Jack said nothing. Vollard's smile widened, showing his teeth. White, gleaming, they were beautifully capped and bleached.
He said, 'Standard doctrine: say nothing to your captors. The slightest word or reply holds the danger of loosening the tongue; once you start talking, it's hard to stop.'
The ace gunman said, 'The other was a brave man; at least he died fighting. Not like this coward.'
Vollard shook his head. 'No, Arno, make no mistake. Jack doesn't lack for bravery; he's smart enough to know the futility of throwing away his life to no purpose. Stay alive as long as you can; there's always the chance that circumstances will change in your favor, or that fate will take a hand and deliver a last-minute reprieve from the gallows. Where there's life, there's hope. That's the cruel hoax of it all.'
The left side of Jack's face, where Arno had pistol-whipped him with the flat of the gun, was swollen and numb. Jack worked his jaws around, trying to estimate the damage. He switched tactics, abandoning the silent treatment. He said, 'What's the plan, Vollard? Where do you figure in all this… '
De Groot stepped forward, delivering a vicious backhand to Jack's face that sent him rocking backward, nearly knocking him out of the chair. The impact caused the roller-mounted chair to glide backward for several feet before bouncing up against a wall.
De Groot said, 'That's
Vollard tsk-tsked. 'Control yourself, Lieutenant, there's no need for that now. At least, not yet. No need to stand on formality; Jack and I go way back, as you may recall.'
De Groot said, 'Bah! We should have killed him back in the Balkans!'
Vollard said, 'Here he is now, so it's all worked out for the best after all. What's the plan? I don't mind telling you, Jack; you're a dead man, and dead men tell no tales. Besides, frankly, it's rare that I get the chance to converse with someone who has the mentality to appreciate my genius.'
Jack spat some blood out of his mouth. 'Like that botched hit on Paz?'
De Groot raised a heavy hand to deliver another blow, but a sharp look from Vollard was enough to freeze him in his tracks.
Indicating with a tilt of his head the glass boxes full of spiders, snakes, and centipedes, Jack said, 'I see you've brought your relatives along for the mission, Major.'
That was enough to set off de Groot again; forestalling him, Vollard said, 'He's just trying to bait you, Rex. Anger you so that you forget yourself and give him a quick death.'
De Groot said, 'No chance of that.' The thought seemed to cheer him. His face was red and swollen, as though he wore a collar several sizes too small; he was wearing an open-neck shirt.
Vollard gestured toward the glass boxes and said,' How do you like my little menagerie, Jack? Nature itself has always been my school. One can only admire the purity and perfection of these single-purpose predators, evolved over the ages into a murderous symmetry of form and function. I find inspiration in such creatures of destruction.'
Arno, perhaps not liking that crack about Vollard's lack of opportunity to converse with someone with the mentality to appreciate him, scowled. 'He's stalling for time, to keep himself alive a little longer,' he said.
Vollard said, 'Can you blame him? Let him go to hell knowing the full extent of the disaster that's about to befall the 'good old U.S.A.'; his last thoughts will be devoted to contemplating the catastrophe and regretting his inability to prevent it.'
He turned to Jack. 'As for the failure of the assassination attempt on Colonel Paz, that was Beltran's responsibility. I assure you that if I had been handling it, the results would have been quite different.'
Jack shrugged, the movement sent renewed agony shooting through his bound hands. He fought to keep his face expressionless, but there was nothing he could do about the cold sweat beading up on his pale face. Fighting to keep his tone casual, he said, 'So what's the master plan, genius?'
Vollard warmed to the subject. 'You'll appreciate this, Jack. Within a few short hours, New Orleans is about to go out of business as America's primary locale for receiving imported oil. Operation Petro Surge — of which you've no doubt heard, with your high level of security clearance — will be over before it's begun.
'Simply put, we are going to smash New Orleans. The Petroleum Receiving Point will be turned into an inferno, and the Mississippi River Bridge will be sunk at the same time, ensuring that the port will be closed to all traffic for months to come — years, considering how you Yanks seem to have lost the ability to repair your crumbling infrastructure, or even keep it from falling apart of its own accord.
'We're just going to give it a good, hard push in that direction.'
Imported oil doesn't unload itself; it has to be unloaded. The petro-laden supertankers come to port in the United States, completing their long transoceanic trips from the Persian Gulf — or for that matter, Venezuela's Maracaibo Bay. Their leviathan dimensions, as long as several football fields put together, require specialized receiving facilities.
The Port of New Orleans is the nation's number one destination for such massive shipments of imported oil. Its primary facility is the Petroleum Receiving Point.
Located several miles downriver from the Mississippi River Bridge, the PRP, or Point, is located on a spit of land that thrusts out for a fifth of a mile from the mainland into the harbor.
It holds an intricate maritime infrastructure designed to handle the docking of supertankers and the emptying of their vast stocks of oil, through a network of pumps and pipelines extending along the point to the mainland, where a sprawling field of titanic oil storage tanks and petroleum processing plants and refineries awaits.
Scattered in different places in the harbor and upriver are a handful of similar sites, though of far lesser magnitude, but the PRP was the Big One, the league leader, handling the most traffic and processing the greatest volume of imported crude, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of barrels of oil per year.
Making it a big, fat target for destruction by Major Marc Vollard and his mercenary squad. Unlike his Saudi backers, Vollard was apolitical, a true mercenary. He went where the money was.
