Juan fired a single shot that went through his target’s head, but not before he was able to squeeze off a fusillade of rounds in Linc and MacD’s direction, shredding leaves and branches. The man went down like a marionette cut from its strings.
“Everyone all right?” Juan said loudly. No need for quiet after the gunshots that would have been heard all over the island.
“Thanks for the cover fire,” Linc said. “No casualties here.”
“So much for our ambush,” Max said.
Juan sat up and shifted his sights to the tunnel entrance. “Where’s Locsin?”
“He’s coming back on the camera,” Max said. “He must have been just inside the tunnel when he saw his two goons killed.”
Locsin’s men started pouring out of the hole, but he was waving most of them back into the excavated chamber after they gathered their weapons. He kept two men behind to cover him while he took a screwdriver and opened the hood of the Bobcat. The Crawler’s view was blocked, so Juan couldn’t see what he was doing.
“Where are his men going?” Max asked, incredulous. “I checked the map, and that tunnel doesn’t have an outlet. Are they going to commit suicide?”
“Or they plan to make a last stand in there instead of out here,” Juan said. “You didn’t see any masks on them, did you?”
“Nope. And, luckily, I brought just the thing to get them to come to us.” Max removed one of the canisters of tear gas he’d brought with him. “A couple of these through that hole, and they’ll be shoving each other aside to get out.”
Locsin backed away from the Bobcat carrying the loader’s twelve-volt battery. He motioned for his men to come back and follow through the hole they’d opened.
“What’s he doing with that?” Max asked.
“Let’s find out,” Juan said. He stood and waved for the rest of the team to move forward toward the tunnel.
When they were all together, he said, “I don’t care about anyone else, but we want Locsin alive.” He looked at Raven. “It’s the only way we’re going to find Beth.”
She nodded at him, and they all went in.
47
Locsin had his men pull down the bricks of plastic explosive from the ceiling. He thought he had enough for what he was planning, assuming the RDX chemical still maintained its potency.
He knew Juan Cabrillo was coming. It had to be him out there who had killed his men. If it had been the Philippine National Police, he would have heard some idiot officer on a megaphone telling him to give up and come out.
Cabrillo was much more dangerous. He would know that Locsin would never willingly surrender and would come in after them.
And Locsin was sick of him. He wanted to finish Cabrillo once and for all, but that wasn’t possible here. Besides, killing him wasn’t enough. Locsin needed to destroy that ship of his as well.
He turned to his translator, who had gathered up all the files and papers, so many that another man had to help carry them.
“Where are the pages you showed me?”
The translator looked at him with a perplexed expression, then dug around in his armload and removed five sheets of paper. Locsin took them and tossed them on the ground. He even stepped on several of them, leaving dusty footprints. Now the scattered pages looked like they’d been dropped accidentally.
“But the Americans will find them,” the translator said.
Locsin grinned. “Exactly.”
When his men had the bricks of RDX in hand, Locsin took them and went to the end of the chamber. He pressed the plastique against the wall, shaping the charge so it would blast outward. Then he stabbed the wire ends of the detonation cord into the mass and backed up, unspooling it as he went.
The soldier at the hole said, “We’ve got movement outside.”
“Fire some warning shots,” Locsin said.
The soldier unleashed a volley through the hole.
At the same time, Locsin held the ends of the wire over the battery he’d taken from the Bobcat. He had his men flip the desk and lab tables over to use as shields.
“Get down,” he said and ducked as he touched the ends of the wire to the battery nodes.
• • •
JUAN WAS PEERING around the corner, the sight of his assault rifle to his eye, when a massive explosion shook the tunnel. Everyone on his team instinctively flattened themselves to the floor and covered their heads.
Dust shot out of Locsin’s refuge. Everyone raised their balaclavas to protect themselves. The sharp tang of pulverized concrete and chlorine aroma of burnt plastic explosive mixed with the smell of diesel exhaust from the Bobcat.
“Those idiots actually did kill themselves!” Max sputtered.
Juan wasn’t so sure. It didn’t fit Locsin’s profile. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Juan got to his feet and crept around the corner, his rifle at the ready. He was still getting the feed from the Crawler and hadn’t seen anyone coming through the hole.
The six of them kept low as they made their way down the tunnel. When they reached the Bobcat, they used it and the trailer for cover.
Max readied one of the tear gas canisters, but Juan put up his hand.
“I want to get a look inside first. Hand me the Crawler.”
Max drove the Crawler to Juan, who picked it up. The area in front of the hole was too rough for the ROV to navigate, but if he could get close enough, he could place it on smoother ground near the opening.
He told the rest of them to cover him while he made his way forward. When he reached level ground, he put the Crawler down, and Max took over.
He maneuvered the Crawler to the hole, where the camera finally had a look inside the chamber.
The air was heavy with dust, and pitch-black except for a blurry trail of flashlights at the end of the chamber. One by one, they winked out as if they were being switched off.
“A trap?” he said, looking at Max.
Max furrowed his brow for a moment, then his eyes went wide.
“They’re getting away!”
“Where?”
“They must have been blowing another hole at the opposite end of the chamber. I remember the schematics now. That’s close to a lateral that leads to the main tourist tunnel.”
Juan took a flashbang grenade from his belt and chucked it through the hole just in case Locsin had left any of his men behind to set up his own ambush.
The grenade went off and Juan dived through the hole, sweeping the tunnel with the flashlight attached to his assault rifle.
Just as he had expected, two men had been crouching behind overturned tables. Now they were staggering around as they clawed at their eyes.
Juan followed Julia Huxley’s advice and didn’t take any chances. He shot each of them in the head. They both fell to the floor, their guns clattering on the concrete.
He checked the remainder of the chamber before yelling, “Clear!”
The rest of them hustled through. Max was last and focused his attention on papers that were strewn about the floor.
“These might be important.”
Juan said, “You collect what you can find and meet us at the Gator.” The lifeboat extraction was no longer possible.
He didn’t wait for an answer and waved for Eddie, Raven, Linc, and MacD to follow him as he raced toward the point where Locsin and his men had escaped.
Juan poked his head briefly through the fresh hole in the wall and didn’t draw any fire, so he jumped through and ran toward a dim light he could see a hundred feet ahead.
He emerged in the main twenty-four-foot-wide Malinta Tunnel. People were running in both directions to the exits at either end of the tunnel while clusters of terrified tourists cowered on the ground, some of them nonetheless taking videos with their phones. When they saw Juan and the others dressed in police uniforms, s
everal of them pointed toward the tunnel entrance that led to the tail end of the island and shouted.
“Men with guns!”
“Terrorists!”
“They went that way!”
Juan sprinted after them. He could see Locsin and the remainder of his men exit the tunnel into sunlight. Locsin leapt on a tranvía that had just delivered a load of tourists and threw the driver to the pavement. He took the wheel of the tram, as his men climbed aboard, then sped off down the road.
When Juan got outside, he saw another tranvía backed into a parking spot, its driver watching the fleeing tram with a stunned look.
Before Juan could order the driver to get out, Raven yanked his arm and pulled him off. She got into the driver’s seat and, as if to ward off any questions, said, “I drove a fire truck last night. This is nothing. Get on.”
She hit the gas, and Juan had to grab one of the handholds before she drove off without him. Eddie, MacD, and Linc all barely made it aboard.
The tranvía’s top speed wasn’t impressive, but Raven did her best to keep Locsin in sight as they careened around the curves leading to Corregidor’s tail. Whenever the Locsin’s tram came into view, two hundred yards ahead, gunfire would rip into theirs, and Juan and his team would return fire. The windshield lasted about five seconds, then shattered in a hail of bullets, showering Raven with safety glass.
She averted her eyes for a moment to avoid the pellets but never took her foot off the gas.
After three more turns, Juan could see Locsin’s tranvía through the trees as it reached the old airfield at the same time as a de Havilland Twin Otter touched down on the dirt strip. The propeller-driven plane was a favorite of bush pilots for its ability to land on short, unpaved runways. Locsin must have stepped outside the tunnel to call the pilot for retrieval.
It rolled to a stop and turned just as Locsin’s tranvía pulled up to it.
“Come on, you stupid thing!” Raven yelled at the tram, vainly coaxing it to go faster.
The door to the plane popped open long enough for Locsin and his three surviving men to jump on. The trees prevented Juan from taking an effective shot. None of his bullets made it through the thicket of branches.
The Twin Otter’s engines revved to full power, and the plane tore down the runway. Raven tried to give chase, but their tram was literally left in the dust.
Juan disgustedly pulled his balaclava down, knowing they’d just lost their best chance at capturing Locsin. He looked at Eddie, Linc, and MacD, in turn, and saw the frustration on their faces.
Raven stood on the brake and faced Juan, irate that their quarry had escaped.
“Can’t you shoot it down?” she demanded. “I saw launch controls for surface-to-air missiles in your op center.”
Juan was impressed. Not many people would have been that observant.
“We can,” he said, “but we won’t. Not in broad daylight, at the entrance to one of the busiest harbors in the world. The area around Manila Bay is home to eighteen million people. Thousands of witnesses would see the Oregon fire a missile.”
“Then what can we do?”
“We can try to track the plane,” Eddie said, “although I doubt it has a transponder. And the Filipino radar isn’t sophisticated enough to follow it if they fly low, which that plane can do.”
Raven beat on the steering wheel but said nothing.
“Come on,” Juan said. “Let’s get back to the Gator before the real police show up, wanting to find out why we just shot up a national monument.”
They left the tranvía where it was on the runway and started marching back to the point where the Gator had dropped them off not far from there.
“Hey, guys,” Max said over the radio. By the way he was huffing, Juan could tell he was retracing their hike through the trees on his way back. “I’ve been listening in on your conversation. I might have an idea where they’re going.”
“From the papers you found?” Juan asked. “I didn’t know you read Japanese.”
“They weren’t in Japanese. They were in English. One of the pages says that the last known shipment of Typhoon developed during the war left on a destroyer called the USS Pearsall.”
“An American destroyer? How is that possible?”
“Because we’ve had the wrong assumption all along,” Max said. “The Typhoon drug wasn’t created by some top secret Japanese research group. It was invented by the United States Army.”
48
NEGROS ISLAND
By the time Beth finished her next meal, it was nighttime in the communist rebel headquarters. She could make out a few stars through the open roof, even though the cavern was illuminated from below by enough lights for a small town.
She sat down on the bed and pulled aside the crude bandage that had been wrapped around her injured shoulder. She was prepared for the worst, possibly an infection that she couldn’t feel because of nerve damage.
Instead, the wound was scabbed over as if she had merely suffered a scrape. The puckered skin around the bullet hole looked pink and healthy, not the angry red welt of septic bacteria eating away at her. The pain was completely gone, and she could move her arm normally, which seemed impossible given that she was shot twenty-four hours before. She felt her forehead, and it didn’t seem like she had a fever.
The door to her room opened. It was Tagaan and the guard who had been watching her. Both were wearing holstered pistols.
“You will go with Dolap,” Tagaan said, nodding at his comrade, who had a wisp of a goatee and a scar in the center of his lip.
Beth stood. “Why?”
“You have work to do.”
Tagaan walked over to her and roughly looked under the bandage.
“Excellent,” he said. “It’s almost morning. You’ll get another dose of Typhoon when you come back.” He pushed her to the door. “Go.”
Dolap took her by the arm and guided her through a large building, where they passed at least a dozen rooms with bunk beds, meaning this had to be the main barracks.
When she got outside, her earlier assessment that there were enough lights for a small town seemed right on. Scores of men, all Filipino and obvious Typhoon users, based on their musculature, moved about in a purposeful way. She counted more than fifteen buildings arranged around a central plaza dominated by a huge stalagmite stretching halfway to the roof. The buildings were separated into quadrants. Most of them were prefab structures like the ones she’d seen at the chemistry lab north of Manila.
The biggest building was three stories tall and fronted by several loading docks with trucks backed up to them. She could hear sounds of machinery coming from inside as if it were a factory. Next to it was another building, almost as large, with ten more trucks parked outside. Two men were wheeling a huge powered cart from the factory to the second building, its cargo covered by a tarp. She got a quick look inside the building when they briefly raised the overhead doors and she saw rows of sleek, black, bullet-shaped objects lined up inside.
A truck pulled away from the factory and drove down a road leading from the plaza to the far end of the cave. It disappeared inside a tunnel that must have been the entrance to the cavern. Then she saw a helicopter parked on a pad big enough for two and realized that the opening in the roof above was wide enough to fly through. So, two ways out, not that it helped her in the slightest.
Tagaan said to Dolap, “Radio me when you are done.” Then he walked toward the factory and disappeared inside.
“This way,” Dolap said and guided her past the central stalagmite. She shuddered when she saw a set of manacles bolted to the rock. Blood stained the ground and the shackles as if someone had flayed themselves trying to get free.
At the opposite side of the central plaza, he took Beth into a smaller building the size of a mobile home. When she went in, she was surprised to find it air-conditioned, m
uch different from her sweltering accommodations. He locked the door with a key, sat her at a long table, and went to the back of the building.
Beth wiped her sweat-stained brow on her shirt as she waited for him. The one window was shuttered and covered with iron bars, and the door looked solid enough, so escape seemed impossible. Besides, she had nowhere to go.
Dolap returned, holding six hard plastic tubes, and Beth’s heart rate skyrocketed as she understood what they were.
He set them on the table and said, “You are to appraise these for sale. If you damage them, you die.” He seemed bored and considered her no threat, which was probably true since he was built like a professional wrestler.
He went to the restroom, leaving Beth alone. She picked up the first tube and uncapped the end. Inside was a rolled-up canvas. Her heart fluttered with excitement as she carefully pulled it from the tube.
When she unrolled it on the table, she gasped, nearly fainting, when she recognized the three-foot-by-three-foot painting. It was the exquisite image of a girl sitting at a harpsichord with a man seated next to her. Another girl was standing and holding a sheet of music while she sang.
If authentic, it was The Concert by Vermeer, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and one of only thirty-four Vermeer works known to exist. On the open market it would be worth more than two hundred million dollars, the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world.
She could barely restrain herself from ripping open the other tubes and laying eyes on the bounty before her. But she had to safeguard the Vermeer. It seemed to be in good condition for having been in less than ideal conditions for all these years.
Dolap flushed the toilet and returned from the back of the building, holding a steaming cup of coffee. He pulled out his phone and sat in the other chair, idly playing with something on the screen. He set the full mug on the table, and Beth nearly knocked it away, afraid that a spill would damage the work of art.