They watched for nearly an hour as the men systematically trashed everything they could lay their hands on. They beat on the debris with sledgehammers, yanked out hundreds of yards of charred wiring, and moved chunks of the aircraft so nothing lay in proper relation to the rest. They got at the plane’s big tires by prying open the landing gear doors and shot them flat with pistols. They also hauled parts of the plane up to the helicopter. When the helicopter was full, it flew off with a couple of the men and then returned twenty minutes later. Juan assumed they had dumped the detritus farther into the desert.
What had been a confusing jumble of aluminum, plastic, and steel but would have been recognizable to crash experts was now completely ruined. They went so far as to dismember and then bury the bodies in several unmarked graves, and make a couple of cooking fires as though nomads had camped here for a few days. When they were finished with the camel, one of the men shot it between the eyes.
Finally, it looked as though they were about finished up. Several men scattered in different directions, presumably to find some privacy to relieve themselves before their return flight back to their base.
Juan turned to his team. “Here’s what I want you to do. Get back to the Pig and make for the Tunisian border, but don’t head for the coast right away. Wait for me to make contact through Max on the
All Corporation operatives had tracking chips surgically implanted in their legs. The chip used the body’s own energy as a power source, though it required an occasional transdermal recharge. Utilizing GPS technology, the chips could be localized to within a couple dozen yards.
“What are you doing?” Linda asked.
“I’m going with them.”
“We don’t even know who they are.”
“Exactly why I’m going.”
One of the masked men was coming to within a hundred yards of where they crouched. He was roughly the same height and build as Cabrillo, which had given him the idea. Juan’s normally blond hair had been dyed dark, and he wore brown contacts. With his fluency in Arabic and the kaffiyeh covering his features, he might just pull off the switch.
He tossed the Pig’s keys to Linc and had started to slide back from their concealed position when Linda grabbed his arm. “What do we do with the guy?”
“Leave him. I have a feeling the Libyan government is going to announce they’ve located the crash site within the next twenty-four hours. Pretty soon, this place will be crawling with people. Let him explain what the hell he’s doing here.”
With that, Cabrillo slipped away. Crawling on his elbows, he covered the distance to the unsuspecting man in under a minute. It helped that the distant helicopter’s turbines were beginning to turn over with a whine keen enough to set his teeth on edge.
Screened from the others behind a hillock, Juan waited for the man to finish his business before rushing the last few yards. The man’s back was turned, and just as he started to stand upright and reach to pull up his trousers Cabrillo struck him in the back of the head with a fist-sized stone. He’d recalled the Somali he’d struck in a similar fashion less than a week earlier and put enough behind the blow to collapse the Libyan in the dust.
Juan nodded to himself when he felt a pulse at the man’s throat and started stripping off his clothes. Fortunately, the man was one of the few wearing boots. They would hide the shining titanium struts of his artificial leg. Removing the kaffiyeh revealed an average-looking guy in his late twenties or early thirties. There was nothing about his features to make Juan think he wasn’t Libyan, though he couldn’t be positive. There was no wallet in his uniform pockets or any other means of identification. The clothes didn’t even have labels.
Cabrillo dragged the unconscious man farther from the crash site, and made certain his own satellite phone was secure behind his back. Without it, he never would have considered what he was doing. Then he waited, though not for long. Someone began shouting, bellowing over the roar of the chopper’s engines.
“Mohammad! Mohammad! Come on!”
Now Juan knew the name of the man he was to impersonate. He tucked his scarf a little tighter around his face and emerged from behind the hill. The soldier they earlier identified as the leader of the twenty-man team stood fifty feet from the chopper. He waved Juan in. Cabrillo acknowledged him and started jogging.
“Another minute and we would have left you out here with the scorpions,” Juan was told when they came abreast.
“Sorry, sir,” Cabrillo said. “Something I ate earlier.”
“Not to worry.” The team leader slapped him on the shoulder, and together they climbed up into the chopper. Inside its rear cargo compartment, fold-down seats lined both walls. Juan slouched into one a little ways off from the others, making sure his pant cuff covered his metal ankle. He was pleased to note that not everyone had lowered their kaffiyehs, so he laid his head against the warm aluminum hull and closed his eyes.
He had no idea if he was in the middle of a regular Army platoon or surrounded by fanatical terrorists. In the end, if they discovered him, he decided it probably wouldn’t matter. Dead was dead.
A moment later, they were airborne.
THIRTEEN
THE MUSIC CAME IN EVER-RISING WAVES AS IT NEARED ITS crescendo. The orchestra had never played better, never had more passion. The conductor’s face glistened with sweat, and his baton whirled and flared. The audience beyond the bright spotlights was held rapt by the performance, knowing they were experiencing something magical. The rhythmic pounding from the percussion section sounded like an artillery barrage, but even that couldn’t drown out the swelling notes from the violins and woodwinds.
Then came an off-key sound.
The musicians staggered in their play but somehow managed to find their place again.
The dull thud came again followed by a sharp click, and the music stopped entirely.
