Pitt smiled at the two attractive women and raised his wineglass. “That would be a sight any lonely sailor would welcome.”
30
VIEWED FROM THE AIR, THE DENSE JUNGLE SPREAD across the horizon like a lumpy green carpet. Only the occasional wisp of smoke or a quick glimpse of a shack in a clearing gave any sign that human life existed beneath the foliage.
Though the helicopter had departed Panama City’s Tocumen International Airport just a few minutes earlier, the roar of its turbine was already grating on Pablo’s nerves. He gazed ahead and spotted the sprawling green waters of Gatun Lake, a massive body of water formed during the construction of the Panama Canal. Their destination was close.
The pilot banked the chopper and followed the eastern shore of the lake, passing several large islands known for their assortment of primates. A narrow peninsula rose up ahead, and he guided the helicopter back over the jungle, gradually reducing speed. As he reached the center of the landmass, the pilot put the craft into a hover.
Pablo gazed at the treetops below—and noticed them move. The trees weren’t swaying from the chopper’s rotor wash, but instead began to spread apart. A seam appeared in the foliage, and it grew into a large square opening with a helicopter landing pad marked with lights and a reflective white circle.
The pilot centered the helicopter and gently dropped onto the pad. The moment the pilot cut the power, Pablo tore off his headphones and climbed out.
Once beyond reach of the twirling rotor, he glanced up as the artificially landscaped roof closed overhead. The hydraulically powered cover was a stand-alone structure built on pilings in a jungle clearing. Two armed men in fatigues operated the controls from a panel box at the side.
As the sky disappeared, a golf cart emerged from the surrounding jungle and pulled to a stop in front of Pablo.
“El Jefe awaits,” the driver said with the hint of a Swedish accent. Out of place in the Panamanian jungle, he was a husky blond man with pale skin and ice blue eyes. He wore a nondescript Army officer’s uniform and a holstered Beretta.
The two men stared at each other with a mix of respect and disdain. Both employed as hired muscle, they observed a cold, formal truce. “Good day to you, too, Johansson,” Pablo said. “And, yes, I had a very enjoyable flight, thank you.”
Johansson stomped on the accelerator as Pablo climbed into the golf cart, not waiting until he was fully seated.
The two men rode in silence as Johansson followed a paved path through the jungle. They entered a shaded clearing dotted with more armed men in fatigues. To their right sat a pyramid-shaped pile of gray rocks. A group of ragged men, wearing dirty, sweat-stained clothes, were shoveling the rocks into small carts and pushing them down a carved path.
The golf cart bounded through another stretch of dense jungle, then stopped in front of a large, windowless concrete structure. Its flat reinforced roof, landscaped with vegetation, disguised it from the air even more realistically than the landing pad. Only a row of palm trees on either side of the entrance offered the structure any semblance of warmth.
Pablo jumped out of the cart. “Thanks for the lift. Don’t bother to keep the motor running.”
“I wouldn’t plan for a long visit, if I were you,” Johansson said, then drove away.
As Pablo climbed a short flight of steps to the doorway, a breeze from the lake helped stir the muggy air. A guard at the threshold opened the door and escorted him inside.
In marked contrast to the plain walls outside, the building’s interior was an exercise in opulence. Built as a personal residence, it was decorated in bright tropical colors, illuminated by a surplus of overhead lighting. As Pablo was led down a white-marbled corridor, he passed a sunken living room decorated with modern art on one side and an indoor, glass-enclosed lap pool on the other. The rear of the house ran along the rim of a low hillside that jutted above the water. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcased an expansive section of Gatun Lake.
Pablo was led to a large open office that overlooked the rocky shoreline below. In the distance, a containership could be seen heading south through the canal on its way to the Pacific.
He stood in the doorway a moment until he gained the attention of the man seated behind an antique mahogany desk. Edward Bolcke peered over a pair of reading glasses and nodded for Pablo to enter.
Beginning with his conservative suit and tie, every detail of Bolcke’s appearance testified to his exacting nature. His silver hair was perfectly coiffed, his fingernails precisely trimmed, and his shoes highly polished. His office was almost spartan in décor, his desktop devoid of clutter. Bolcke took off his glasses, leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and stared at Pablo through hawk-like brown eyes.
Pablo took a seat across the desk and waited for his employer to speak.
“So what went wrong in Tijuana?” Bolcke asked, the words tinged with a German accent.
“You know that Heiland destroyed his own boat during our initial operation,” Pablo said. “This, of course, upset our planned extraction. Before we could get an appropriate recovery vessel there, the Americans arrived and raised the test model. They were from their civilian group NUMA, though, so we had no trouble getting the device from them at sea. But two of their men managed to follow us to shore in Mexico. And there was also a female investigator involved.”
“Yes, so I hear.”
Surprised at Bolcke’s comment, Pablo cleared his throat. “There was a traffic incident in the streets of Tijuana as we were making our way to the airport. The device was destroyed, and Juan was killed in the collision. I lost my man Eduardo as we made our way out of the situation.”
“Quite the blown opportunity,” Bolcke said, his eyes narrowing. “At least there appear to be no repercussions.”
“All the men I work with are trained mercenaries from Colombia with manufactured identities and no criminal records. There will be no connection to you.”
“A good thing, as the team you sent to Idaho was also killed.”
Pablo stiffened in his chair. “Alteban and Rivera are dead?”
“Yes. They were killed in a ‘traffic incident’ after departing Heiland’s cabin,” Bolcke said, his expression stern. “The female investigator, one Ann Bennett, and the Director of NUMA, whom you apparently met in Tijuana, were responsible. Fortunately, I was able to arrange the recovery of the research plans in Washington.”
Bolcke reached into a desk drawer, retrieved a thick envelope, and slid it across the desk. “You shall enjoy a fine payday, my friend. Your own wages, plus those of your four dead comrades.”
“I cannot accept this,” Pablo said as he reached over and grabbed the envelope.
“No, I pay for the job, not the results. In light of the events, however, I have decided to rescind the bonus I had intended to pay for your good work at the Mountain Pass Mine.”
Pablo nodded, grateful to get his hands on the envelope. “You have always been generous.”
“I will not be so generous should there be any more failings. I presume you are prepared for the next assignment?” He crossed his hands on the desk as he gave Pablo a fixed stare. Pablo avoided the gaze, instead looking at Bolcke’s hands. That’s what gave the man away, the hands. They were thick, gnarled, and blemished by the sun. They weren’t the hands of a man who had spent his life in corporate boardrooms, as Bolcke appeared to be. They were the hands of a man who had spent a lifetime digging rocks.
Born and raised in Austria, Edward Bolcke had spent his youth scouring the Alps for gold and rare minerals. It was his means of escape after his mother had run away with an American GI, leaving him in the care of an alcoholic father prone to violence. The young Bolcke’s mountain hikes fostered a love of geology, which led to a degree in mineral resources engineering from Austria’s University of Leoben.
He took a job at a copper min
e in Poland, and before long was hopscotching the globe, working tin mines in Malaysia, gold mines in Indonesia, and silver mines in South America. With an uncanny ability to locate the richest ore concentrations, he boosted recovery rates and profits everywhere he went.
But in Colombia, life threw him a twisted bone. Bolcke took an ownership interest in a small silver operation in the Tolima district. His astute analysis of the claim revealed a more valuable deposit of platinum alongside his property. He secured the rights and struck a major deposit, making him wealthy in a matter of months. While celebrating his good fortune in Bogotá, he met the vivacious daughter of a Brazilian industrialist and soon married.
He led a storybook life for several years, expanding his riches from the mine—until one day he returned to his home in Bogotá to find his wife in bed with an American consulate worker. With a fury he never knew he possessed, he shattered the man’s skull with a rock hammer. His wife came next, her throat crushed by his thick, burly hands.
A Colombian jury, well greased by his defense attorneys, acquitted him on the grounds of temporary insanity. He walked away a free man.
He was free physically, but not psychologically. The event reopened childhood scars of abandonment, while slashing new wounds. A bloodthirsty anger flooded his soul—and refused to recede. He sought revenge, turning to the easiest victims he could find: helpless young women. Cruising the slums of Bogotá at night, he would hire young prostitutes, then beat them unmercifully to vent his rage. Nearly gunned down one night by a watchful pimp, he finally abandoned that outlet for his rage and left Colombia, selling his remaining interest in the mine.
Bolcke had invested in an underperforming gold mine in Panama and he relocated there. Years earlier, he had studied the mine’s operations and knew it had been mismanaged. A privately held American firm with other holdings owned it, and to take control he was forced to purchase the entire company. But to enable the deal, he had to forfeit a portion of the mine’s equity to Panama’s corrupt government, headed at the time by Manuel Noriega. When the U.S. military ousted Noriega, the succeeding government laid claim to the mine and harassed Bolcke into amassing a mountain of legal bills before he reacquired ownership at a considerable cost. He blamed the Americans for his losses, inflaming an already deep-seated hatred against the country.
As part of the mining conglomerate, he found himself ironically owning a small enterprise in America: a trucking firm, several commercial freighters, and a small security business. What began as a minor annoyance turned into a major opportunity for revenge.
Every night the vision of his wife with the American officer haunted his dreams, replaying his childhood abandonment, and every morning he woke enraged. The perpetrators, though both long dead, remained targets of wrath, and, by association, their country of origin. The anger never left him. But rather than venting it through random violence, he turned down a new path of vengeance. Using the skills and knowledge from a lifetime of mining, he initiated his own economic war of retribution.
Bolcke’s joyless dark eyes, set in a lean, hardened face, probed his visitor while his hands flattened on the desk.
Pablo spoke uneasily. “I am not eager to return to America right away. My understanding was that I would remain in Panama City for several weeks before the next phase.”
“We had an outdated delivery schedule, and now the time line has been moved up. The shipment is being made in four days. You’ll need to return at once.”
Pablo didn’t balk. The ex–Colombian Special Forces commando never refused an order. He’d worked for the old Austrian for more than a dozen years, since first being hired to help quell a labor unrest at the mine. His unwavering loyalty had been well rewarded over the years, particularly as his boss drifted further over the line.
“I will need to assemble a new support team,” Pablo said.
“There is no time. You will be assisted by two American contractors.”
“Outside help cannot be trusted.”
“We will have to take that chance,” Bolcke snapped. “You lost your entire team. I can give you some of Johansson’s men, but they are untrained in your line of work. My Washington representative assures me these contractors are reliable. And besides,” he said, looking Pablo in the eye, “they accomplished what your team could not. They recovered the supercavitation data.”
Bolcke slid Pablo a smaller envelope.
“The phone number of our man in Washington. Contact him when you get in and he will arrange a meeting with the contractors. All other arrangements are in place, so you simply need to make the acquisition and delivery.”
“It will be done.”
“The company jet will be standing by tomorrow to take you into the country. Any questions?”
“This female investigator and the people from NUMA—are they a problem?”
“The woman is of no concern.” Bolcke sat back in his chair and further contemplated the question. “I don’t know about the NUMA personnel. Perhaps they are worth monitoring.” He gazed back at Pablo. “I will take care of it. Proceed with the plan. I will be in Beijing waiting for your confirmation.”
His eyes grew darker as he leaned forward. “I have been working toward this moment for many years. Everything is in place. Do not fail me, Pablo.”
Pablo puffed out his chest. “Do not worry, Jefe. It will be like taking sweets from a baby.”
31
ANN HIT THE OFFICE RUNNING AT SEVEN IN THE morning, inspired to investigate Pitt’s potential link with the ship hijacking. Her first stop was Joe Eberson’s replacement as the DARPA director of Sea Platforms Technology, Dr. Roald Oswald. She had met the scientist a few days earlier and wasn’t surprised to find him already at his desk, working on a status report.
She poked her head through the doorway. “May I intrude on your morning silence?”
“Of course, Miss Bennett. I could use a diversion from the depressing state of our new submarine’s delivery schedule.”
“Please, call me Ann. Will there be a launch without the supercavitation device?”
“That’s our dilemma. The collective loss of Eberson and Heiland has put us back months—if not years. The vessel’s capabilities are cut to the bone without the device. There will still be merit in testing the propulsion system, I suppose, if we can ever complete the final assembly.”
“What’s holding you up?”
“Critical material delays, I’m told.”
“Would any of those materials include rare earth elements?”
Oswald took a draw from his coffee and probed Ann with his pale blue eyes. “I don’t have enough information here to answer that. But, yes, certain rare earth elements play a significant part in the Sea Arrow’s design—especially in the propulsion system and some of the sonar and electronic systems. Why do you ask?”
“I’m exploring a possible link between Dr. Heiland’s death and a hijacked shipment of monazite ore containing high concentrations of neodymium and lanthanum. How important are those elements to the Sea Arrow?”
“Very. Our propulsion system relies upon a pair of highly advanced electric motors, which in turn power two external jet pumps, as well as the rest of the vessel’s operating systems. Both components contain rare earth elements, but especially the motors.” Oswald took another sip of coffee. “They utilize permanent high-intensity magnets to achieve a multigenerational leap in efficiency and output. These magnets are produced under exacting standards at the Ames National Laboratory, and they contain a mixture of several rare earths, most certainly including neodymium.” He hesitated a moment. “We believe that Heiland’s supercavitation system relies on some rare earth components as well. I suspect you may be onto something.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The Sea Arrow’s motors have yet to be installed. The first motor was just completed at the Naval Re
search Lab at Chesapeake Bay and is ready for shipment to Groton. The second has been delayed due to a disruption in the materials’ supply chain. I haven’t caught up with all the information, but I understand that a shortage of rare earth elements is holding us up.”
“Could you find out exactly which materials are involved?”
“I’ll make some calls and let you know.” He sat back in his chair with a look of introspection. “Joe Eberson was a friend of mine. We used to go fishing in Canada every summer. He was a good man. Make sure you find his killers.”
Ann nodded solemnly. “I intend to.”
She had been back at her desk for only a few minutes when Oswald called with an alphabet soup list of elements whose short supplies were delaying the Sea Arrow: gadolinium, praseodymium, samarium, and dysprosium. At the top of the list was neodymium, the very element in Pitt’s monazite sample from Chile.
A quick online search revealed the market prices for those elements had recently skyrocketed. Commodity analysts cited two factors for the increase. One was a fire that had devastated the facilities at Mountain Pass, California, the site of the only active rare earth mine in the U.S. The second was something Ann already knew, an announcement by the owners of Australia’s Mount Weld Mine that they would temporarily cease production to modernize and expand the mine.
As she digested all this, Ann picked up the sheet Fowler had left on her desk. It was the file of biographies for all the nonmilitary personnel who had toured the Sea Arrow. Skipping those who worked at DARPA and ONR, she studied the remaining names. Her eyes widened when she scanned the bio of White House aide Tom Cerny. She reviewed it a second time, jotted down some notes, and printed the entire file.
Fowler appeared at the door and stepped into her office with a donut and coffee. “You’re rustling the leaves early. Where is the hunt taking you today?”