Rain showers were coming in bursts now as the outer edges of Hidalgo approached Negros, so all three of them wore hooded windbreakers. Many of the workers wore no protective clothing and were getting soaked, while the shoppers carried umbrellas. The bustle of activity made it difficult to tell who their target was.
They stopped at the building, and Eddie turned to Hali. “Can’t the NSA get more precise than the signal is coming from the vicinity of this food supplier?”
Hali nodded. “A half-block radius is the best they could do.”
“Raven, keep your head down but let me know if you see anyone familiar.”
“If it’s Locsin himself,” Raven said, “he’ll recognize me immediately. Getting the tracker onto his vehicle will be tricky.”
“We’ll deal with that if we need to,” Eddie said. “Right now, we need to find out who owns that mobile phone.”
Eddie scanned the shoppers while Hali eyed the workers. Raven switched back and forth between the groups. Five minutes later, Hali tapped Eddie’s shoulder and nodded at two muscular men walking out of Visayan Foods, each pushing a handcart full of produce boxes. They began loading them into an unmarked white truck with surprisingly knobby tires.
“Those guys seem like the kind of meatheads we’re looking for,” Hali said.
“Do you recognize either of them?” Eddie asked Raven.
She shook her head. “Neither was in the Manila warehouse.”
“And I don’t remember them from the gunfight on Corregidor. Still, Hali’s right that they fit the profile of Typhoon users. Let’s find out if we’re right.”
He took out a burner phone he’d gotten from the Magic Shop. He’d asked Kevin Nixon to program it with a Negros Island number for this very possibility.
He dialed the number they were trying to find.
Seconds later, they heard a phone ringing in the pocket of one of the men loading boxes. He had a scar on his upper lip like someone who’d had a cleft palate repaired. The man answered the phone, and Eddie hung up without saying a word. The man shrugged and put the phone back in his pocket.
“Looks like we’ve got our man,” Eddie said.
“Now we just need to wait until they go back inside to plant the tracker,” Hali said.
“They may not go back inside before they leave,” Raven said. “Look how full the truck is. They may be getting ready to head out.”
“We may never get a chance like this again,” Hali said.
Eddie frowned at the men. Everyone else was giving the truck a wide berth, as if they knew not to approach it. Even if the two communist soldiers standing nearby didn’t notice him attaching the tracker, somebody else in the crowd might alert them. They wouldn’t have a second try. Eddie dismissed the clichéd idea of sending Raven in to use her feminine wiles to distract the two men. Besides, it probably wouldn’t work in this kind of weather.
But he had an idea that would work in any conditions.
He handed the tracker to Raven. “Get ready to put this under the truck by the rear wheels. Wait for the distraction.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What distraction?”
One of Locsin’s men was closing the rear door of the truck while the other wheeled the handcart back to the door and gave it to one of the employees. They were preparing to leave. It was now or never.
“You’ll know when,” Eddie said to Raven and put his arm around Hali’s shoulder, pulling him toward the rear of the truck.
“What are we doing now?” Hali asked in confusion.
“Get ready to hit me as hard as you can,” Eddie said in a low voice.
Hali looked at him like he was crazy. “What?”
Eddie staggered like a drunken idiot when they got close to the truck and loudly slurred his words into Hali’s face. “I said, your sister invited me over to her place. What was I supposed to do? I think we’ll have a storm party today.”
He glared at Hali, who finally got what he was going for. Hali reared back and sent a solid punch into Eddie’s gut. His tightened abs absorbed most of the blow, but he was impressed with Hali’s punch. The lessons Eddie had been giving him were paying off.
Eddie went down on his back, then sprung up and grabbed Hali by the neck and wrestled him to the pavement. A cheering crowd surrounded them, eager to have a good fight to distract them from the coming storm. While they exchanged softened blows, Eddie stole a glance at the people around them and saw that Locsin’s men were among the spectators, exactly as he had hoped.
Raven wouldn’t need long to snap the tracker’s magnet into place. Eddie put on a show with Hali for a few more seconds, just long enough to make it look respectable. Then he rolled away and acted like he was catching his breath. Hali didn’t pursue, much to the groaning dismay of the crowd.
They looked at each other as if they were grudgingly conceding the fight and got to their feet.
“Okay. I won’t go to her place if you don’t want me to,” Eddie said reluctantly. He extended a hand to Hali, who shook it. With that, the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had gathered.
Eddie watched the two men get in the truck and drive off.
Raven walked over to them and said, “You fight like girls, and I mean that in the best way.”
Hali rubbed his chin and smiled at Eddie. “You got me pretty good on one of those punches.”
“Sorry about that, but we had to make it look real,” Eddie said. He turned to Raven. “Is the tracker in place?”
“Exactly where you wanted it. Nobody saw a thing.”
“Then let’s return that farmer’s car and get back to the Oregon. If there weren’t such long lines at the gas stations I’d fill it up on the way back.”
He didn’t need to text Juan that the tracker was operational. It went active the moment the magnet connected to the truck. Seconds later, Eddie got confirmation on his phone. The Oregon was already receiving its signal.
61
Because the tracker was planted underneath the rear bumper of the truck, the big screen in the Oregon’s op center could only show lateral and rear views as Kevin Nixon’s camera panned around. Still, Juan thought it was much better than simply following the blinking dot on the map next to it.
After leaving the city, the truck took the northern highway. For most of the trip, fields of sugarcane on both sides waved in the steadily worsening weather. The highway ran right along the coast for two miles before the truck turned off and headed inland on a narrow paved road.
After another few miles, the truck turned again, this time onto a muddy road toward one of the island’s central mountains. Almost immediately, the farms were replaced by a thick jungle as it started going uphill. The truck bounced so much on the bumpy road that the broadcast from the camera looked like it was coming from the back of a hyperactive kangaroo.
“I play a lot of video games,” Murph said, “but even my stomach isn’t going to be able to take much more of watching this.”
“I’ll help Kevin build an image stabilizer into the next camera,” Eric said.
“That doesn’t look like a public road to me,” Linda said. “If it is, their tax dollars are going to waste.”
The truck stopped abruptly. They could hear a few voices over the burbling exhaust, as if the driver was speaking to someone at a gate. Seconds later, the truck started moving again and was engulfed by darkness as it entered a tunnel. Just before it went inside, Juan noted that the road continued on along the hillside.
Receding into the distance at the tunnel entrance were two guards closing two chain-link gates that were covered with vegetation to disguise the opening. As soon as the gates were closed, they returned to their posts at seats inside. The positioning would give them a clear field of fire at any vehicles that approached.
“Does this remind anyone of the Bat Cave?” Murph asked.
“Lo
csin is pretty much the opposite of Bruce Wayne,” Juan said.
After a hundred yards, the tunnel opened into a much larger cave. Locsin was apparently so sure that the cave entrance was undetectable that he hadn’t bothered to post any guards where the tunnel entered the cave.
“This must be the cavern Beth mentioned in her email to Raven,” Linda said.
The camera’s limited view didn’t show how high the cave’s ceiling went. But the cave floor around them, leveled and compacted with crushed rock, was well lit by arc lamps powered by a huge diesel power plant. A tanker semi-trailer was parked alongside feeding it fuel, indicating Locsin’s headquarters complex was much more than simply a few men huddled in a dank cave.
The delivery truck moved through a cluster of low-slung buildings. Right now, Juan was just trying to get a feel for the overall layout of the place, but the recording from the camera feed would give them detailed intel they could review when planning the mission to infiltrate the cave and rescue Beth.
The truck continued on through a central plaza with a stalagmite in the center. For a split second, Juan saw a strange sight beyond it, unexpected for the interior of a cavern.
Eric saw it, too, because he said, “Was that a helicopter?”
“Looked like it to me,” Juan said. “Linda, I want the highest-resolution satellite photos you can get of this area. There must be another opening that we haven’t seen yet.”
“On it,” she replied.
The truck kept driving and did a three-point turn almost like they were giving a three-hundred-sixty-degree tour of the place. Juan counted at least a dozen buildings and twice as many trucks and Humvees. Beth was right in saying the place was huge.
The men they saw were all muscle-bound. Definitely long-term Typhoon users. There were enough of them to populate a small town, which meant a full-on assault was out of the question. Juan was already formulating a plan for getting in and out without being seen.
At one point in the truck’s turn, he saw a large cart being wheeled from a large three-story-tall building to one just as big but only two stories high. The tarp covering the object on top slid aside briefly before it was put back into place. It was the exact same type of black drone that had damaged the Oregon.
“I guess we know where they’re manufacturing their Kuyogs,” Murph said. “Judging by the size of those buildings, they could have hundreds of them in there.”
Given that each of the Kuyogs was packed with high explosives, Juan noted that could come in handy if the need arose.
The truck backed up to a long one-story building where the largest number of the men were entering or leaving, which meant it was likely the barracks, mess hall, and kitchen.
The driver and his companion shut down the truck, came around the back, and began unloading it. For fifteen minutes, they shuttled food crates inside with dollies. While they did, Juan had Linda pan the camera as much as she could to focus in on whatever was in view so they could construct a map of the place.
Then a female voice made Juan sharply say, “Quiet!”
Everyone in the op center fell silent. The driver and his pal were noisily chatting while they removed boxes from the truck, masking the woman’s voice.
“Turn up the gain on the audio,” he said to Linda. “See if you can find the source of the voice.”
The camera turned until they saw Beth’s flaming red hair. Her clothes were filthy, but she was walking normally, and there was no apparent pain on her face even though she had a bandage on her left shoulder.
Salvador Locsin was walking next to her, yanking her by the arm so that she would keep up with him.
“I told you, I’m not going to help you anymore,” Beth said, her voice full of bluster.
“You will if you want any more Typhoon,” Locsin said.
“I don’t care what you do to me.”
“You’ll change your mind in a day or two without your dose.”
They entered the same building where the food was being taken and went out of range of the microphone.
“They’ve been making her take that stuff?” Linda said with disgust. “Didn’t Langston Overholt say it’s addictive?”
Juan nodded. “Very. According to the World War Two records, the addiction becomes permanent in just a few days, maybe a week at most. We need to get her out of there as soon as Hidalgo finishes passing or she might be irreversibly hooked on it.”
Then Juan heard one of the men inside the truck say Beth’s name and he held up his hand for quiet again, but the conversation was brief and in Tagalog. The men were silent as they went inside with more boxes.
“Play that back, Linda,” Juan said. “I want to hear them again.”
When the recording rewound to the point where Beth and Locsin entered the building, Linda began playing it forward, and Murph ran it through the computer interpreter to convert it to English. The translation wasn’t perfect, but they got the gist of it.
“He is right, Dolap,” one of the men said. “She tells him anything. Remember the thing that happened to that administrator, Alonzo? I wanted to throw up all the times I saw him chained to that rock out there.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dolap said. “Locsin and Tagaan tell me we kill her tomorrow. They already see the effects of the Typhoon they want to. I will ask them to allow me do it. Beth Anders is a big pain in my side since she arrived here.”
Linda gasped. “That’s long before Hidalgo will be gone. It’ll still be near full strength tomorrow. The eye is forecast to pass right over us at four in the morning.”
Everyone in the op center was quiet again, this time from the shock of the death sentence they’d just heard. Juan didn’t want to admit defeat, not when they were so close. But mounting a mission in the middle of a Category 3 typhoon seemed beyond even their capability. In fact, he was worried that Eddie, Raven, and Hali wouldn’t make it back before the brunt of the storm hit.
Then he sat forward in his chair as something Linda said resonated.
“Linda, put the predicted storm track up on the screen and lay it over the map of the truck’s route.”
She did so, and the center of Hidalgo was not only predicted to go over the Oregon but the cavern as well.
“How wide is the eye of the typhoon and what’s the speed?” he asked her.
“The eye is twenty-three miles across, and the wind speeds could be up to one hundred and twenty-five miles per hour when it makes landfall.”
Juan shook his head. “Not the wind speed. The forward speed of the entire typhoon.”
She furrowed her brow at the odd question. “About ten miles per hour.”
“Then that gives us a little more than two hours to work with.” The cavern was only seven miles from their present position.
Both Eric and Murph turned to him at the same time with incredulous looks on their faces.
“Are you seriously thinking of going out in the middle of a typhoon?” Eric asked.
“Technically, the middle of a typhoon is very calm,” Murph said. “There could even be blue sky inside the eye during daytime hours.”
“So, technically, we can do it,” Juan said.
Eric looked at Murph, who shrugged and then said, “I guess so. But if you get stuck out there when the eye finishes passing over, you won’t be able to get back to the Oregon for a long time.”
“Then we need to have a good plan. Have Eddie and Raven join me, Linc, MacD, and Gomez when they get back.” He checked the clock. It was nearly two in the afternoon. “We’ve got fourteen hours to put together the mission.”
Linda shook her head in amazement at the idea of venturing out of the Oregon during a major storm. “Max is going to have a heart attack when he hears this one.”
“Then you get to tell him,” Juan said. “And maybe have Hux with you when you do just in case she needs to revive h
im.”
62
Juan didn’t know if this was the craziest thing he’d ever done, but flying in a helicopter in the literal center of a typhoon had to be up there. Even though it was four in the morning, the towering eye wall of Hidalgo was brightly lit by a nearly full moon. The roiling clouds just a few miles in the distance were a stark contrast to the eerie calm around them.
Nobody aboard the Oregon had gotten much rest since the typhoon arrived. Max’s repairs to the ship’s engines had been completed in time to weather the storm, but the ride during the tidal surge in the bay was pretty rough.
Despite the menacing conditions, Gomez lazily chewed gum like he was piloting a routine recon mission. Behind Juan were Eddie, Linc, and Raven, who had taken the last seat in place of MacD. Julia had ruled him out for the op as soon as she saw his swollen ankle and diagnosed it as a severe sprain.
All of them were dressed in jungle camo gear and carried M4 assault rifles equipped with flash suppressors and 40mm grenade launchers under the barrels. If everything went according to plan, they wouldn’t need to use them. Their objective was to get in undetected, spring Beth, plant explosives to take out the Typhoon pills recovered from the Pearsall, and get back to the helicopter before anyone besides the guards on duty woke up. Though the helicopter had only five seats, the high payload capacity meant they could squeeze Beth in as well.
To aid their silent infiltration, all of them except Linc were carrying Smith & Wesson M&P 22 Compact pistols threaded with suppressors and loaded with subsonic rounds. MacD had entrusted his faithful crossbow to Linc.
The MD 520N, the Oregon’s onboard helicopter, was launched from an elevator platform that rose from the internal hangar near the ship’s stern. It had no tail rotor, steering instead with the turbine exhaust routed through the finned tail. This feature not only made it safer to be around because it didn’t have a vertical spinning blade of death, it also made the helicopter much quieter, which meant they could land relatively close to the cavern without betraying their presence.