“Is Ruben leaving now?” Miguel piped.
“Not yet. The helicopter is flying across the lake again. They’re. . it looks like they’re dropping something.”
Hearing that, Mercer ordered Miguel to stay put and scrambled out of the tunnel. He caught a glimpse of the chopper just as what appeared to be a large barrel was rolled out the door opposite the gunner’s station. A moment later another barrel followed the first.
As soon as the barrels cleared the skids, the JetRanger heeled over in a steep turn and powered away from the volcano. In seconds, even the beat of its rotors was lost.
“What was that all about?” Lauren asked, but Mercer was already running to where their boat was hidden.
The first jury-rigged depth charge, containing seventy pounds of dynamite, exploded halfway to the bottom of the lake after sinking for a minute. Its detonative force reached the surface in a fraction of a second. The plume of water rose fifty feet in a writhing froth, cascading back down with a continuous slap that seemed to shake the very air. The second, even more powerful charge, went off a moment later and at an even greater depth. The island vibrated as if caught in an earthquake.
“Mercer, what are they doing?” she shouted when he came back from the rowboat dragging the heavy bundle of supplies Gary Barber had left in it.
“Get to the highest point on the island and you’ll see,” he answered without pausing from his work. “Keep Miguel close to you.”
Taking the boy’s hand and somehow trusting Mercer, Lauren climbed up the twenty-foot-high peak on the island’s southern point and looked out over the lake. Near where the first of the explosions occurred, the water seemed to be boiling like a cauldron and she heard a steady jet of sound like a distant aircraft engine. As she watched, the patch of boiling water grew like a spreading slick of acid. In just a few seconds it had doubled in size and doubled again. She had no idea what it meant until she looked to the beach, where Ruben’s cooking fire still burned.
As if a gas fireplace was starving for fuel, the flames began to shrink, dimming down until she could barely see a flicker of yellow before it was gone altogether. Then she knew. The fire hadn’t starved for fuel. It had starved for oxygen! The twin explosions had created a chain reaction to release the last of the deadly carbon dioxide from the lake. The heavy CO2 was forcing all the air from the mountain’s summit.
Odorless, tasteless, and invisible, a minute-long exposure was as deadly as any poison gas in military stockpiles and it was coming for them.
Not even when a faulty road map had led her HUMMV into a minefield in Bosnia had Lauren tasted the fear that slackened her muscles now. The trust she’d put in Mercer evaporated. Miguel sensed it and took her hand. Together they raced back to the cave.
“Mercer, what are you doing?” She hated that she couldn’t keep the panic from her voice. “The lake bed is going to be filled with CO2 in no time. We have to row back to shore and get out of here.”
He continued to unroll a sheet of clear plastic Gary used as a ground cloth. “We’d never make it,” Mercer answered, finally looking up at her. “We’d all be dead long before we reached land.”
“Don’t you understand what’s happening out there? The gas? We’ll suffocate. We can’t stay.”
“The problem is,” he replied with more calm than he had any reason to possess, “we can’t leave either.”
The Lake
The open doors helped whip the stench of cordite from the helicopter, while only time could diminish the palpable excitement from the three commandos in the rear cargo area. Years of training and the compulsory duty on a death squad in order to teach them what it was like to take another human life could not properly prepare them for the adrenaline rush of combat, although gunning down three Panamanians who barely had time to react wasn’t really combat. Still, the exercise had instilled in them something that putting a bullet into the brain of a dissident could not. Pride.
Cigarettes were passed back and forth. Pantomimes of their victims played out under the throb of the rotors. Laughter. These men hadn’t been part of the team that had earlier found the treasure hunter’s camp littered with corpses. They hadn’t taken part in the hasty attempt to make the mysterious deaths look like a kidnapping gone wrong. Those men were back in Panama City, unaware that their tales were about to be overshadowed by stories of a massacre at the lake. The oldest of the gunmen was twenty-three, a five-year veteran in the People’s Liberation Army. As the JetRanger skirted the top of the jungle on its return flight, he carefully scratched three notches into the stock of his black-market M-60 machine gun.
The two others tried to hide their jealousy.
In the right-hand seat next to the pilot sat Huai Luhong, the senior noncommissioned officer in the PLA’s newly formed Special Forces group called the Sword of South China. Huai thought the name sounded ridiculous, but loved the men he had trained since the group’s inception. The regiment-sized outfit had come into being as a response to the stunning successes shown by Western Special Forces during the Gulf War. At the time, Chinese military doctrine held that such small, highly trained teams went against the egalitarian ideals of the government. Yet the capabilities of Special Forces couldn’t be ignored, and the Sword was formed by copying the lessons, tactics and equipment of the SEALs, Army Rangers, and British SAS squadrons. Fearing that the highly trained regiment would feel superior to the rest of China’s conscripted army, the military kept Sword on a tight leash, and those who were recruited into it came from only the most loyal families.
If not for the trust placed in Liu Yousheng, the overall director of Chinese interests in Panama, the forty members of the Sword would never have been allowed outside China. As far as Huai knew, his team was the first Chinese troops to operate beyond their nation’s borders since the Korean War. But Liu was a senior executive in COSTIND, the Commission on Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, who had proven himself time and time again in a remarkable short career.
Unlike any other army in the world, China’s military had a dual nature, part defense force, the PLA, and part industrial conglomerate, COSTIND. They maintained control of a three-million-man combine of army, navy, and air force, as well as the thousands of companies that supplied their weapons and logistical equipment, including shipyards, electronics firms, and aircraft manufacturers. Through COSTIND, they had oversight of the China National Nuclear Corporation, the organization that produced nuclear materials for civilian and military use. COSTIND’s reach stretched far beyond China’s borders. Many of its companies had a strong presence in nations all over the world- port facilities, shipping lines, consumer goods and heavy construction. In this way, the PLA could help defray the costs of its own expansion even as the leaders in Beijing touted the demilitarization of their economy.
At thirty-eight, Liu was twelve years younger than Sergeant Huai, and yet the tough veteran of Tiananmen and countless undeclared wars against Muslim insurgents in China’s desolate western provinces had never met a more capable man. Liu had masterminded China’s initial involvement in Panama by waging a one-man crusade to convince the politburo that a lucrative power vacuum would be created by America’s withdrawal following the canal transfer in 2000. He’d worked tirelessly to get Chinese companies and interests to fill the void, beginning first with small-scale immigration and ending with virtual control of the ports that sprawled at each end of the fifty-mile canal.
The need to pay for the operation was what had prompted Liu’s interest in the rumors of the Twice-Stolen Treasure, and thus Sergeant Huai’s presence on the chopper. The earlier trip into Darien Province, when they found the American’s camp littered with bodies, had been the first active part in this phase of Liu’s overall plan and had not gone as intended. Liu had been hoping to gather intelligence from Barber and had been unsettled by Huai’s encrypted radio call about the bodies. Barber would have died anyway, but Liu had wanted information, and the deaths created a need for Huai to make sure that there would be no long-term official interest in the region.
Leaving the River of Ruin that first time, Huai had taken one body with him for an autopsy in Panama City that revealed what had killed the treasure hunters. The depth charges they’d brought today would ensure the last of the CO2 in the lake bubbled out before they committed their own resources to the search. Today’s sweep also verified that the Panamanian police had no interest in the region, just as Huai’s agent in El Real had said. The three men they’d just dumped in the lake were most likely scavengers looking to loot whatever Gary
