There was, and always had been, an iron bond between Secret Service agents, trust beyond measure. That was until now, until all this had happened, and where he, like the president, had no idea how far this thing went or who in God's name he could trust. So as much as he wanted to, as much as he should have been able to do so under any circumstances, Bill Strait wasn't contacted, his message not replied to.
"Damn," Hap swore bitterly to himself. How he hated mistrust, especially when it was his own and he didn't know who or what to believe.
"Hap," Miguel said suddenly.
"What is it?"
"There," Miguel pointed at the sunlit crest of the mountains four or five miles in the distance.
At first Hap saw nothing, then he did. Four helicopters were coming in over the top of the ridge and then dropping down into the shadow on this side of the mountain.
"Who are they?"
"Not sure. Probably CNP, the federal police. Maybe Mossos d'Esquadra. Maybe both."
"Coming this way?"
"Hard to tell."
"Miguel!" Amado shouted and was pointing behind them.
Both men turned to see five more helicopters. They were still in the distance but coming toward them fast at just above ground level.
Hap looked to Miguel, "Get us out of sight! Amado, the other guys too!"
109
• 7:17 P.M.
Miguel signaled Amado and the others to follow, then gunned the engine and the motorcycle literally flew up the face of the steep rocky embankment. The machine roared and bucked and spit, kicking out loose stones for what seemed an eternity and then they reached the top and the terrain leveled off. Miguel drove another twenty yards, then saw the sharp, cavelike overhang of an enormous sandstone formation and pulled in. Seconds later the others joined them.
"Cut your engines," Miguel said in Spanish.
They did, holding their breath and looking back, waiting in silence. All they saw was the darkening rocky terrain of the high sprawling mesa where they were. For a full minute nothing happened, and they thought maybe the helicopters had flown off in another direction. Then suddenly and with a thundering, ground shaking roar they appeared. All five of them. Coming over the ridge-line toward them. In seconds they passed overhead, not twenty feet above the overhang where they were hidden.
The first four were Spanish CNP, the fifth, Hap knew only too well. The big U.S. Army Chinook they'd flown in from Madrid to Barcelona. It meant the Secret Service was here and that the detail would be under the command of Bill Strait.
Immediately he dug out his BlackBerry and switched it on hoping Strait had left a second text message that would give him information he did not have. The text was there: What he saw was not what he was hoping for but not wholly unexpected either.
Hap, tried to reach you again! We've been advised by U.S. Madrid that Crop Duster may have been at the monastery after all and is possibly trapped inside old mining tunnels by landslide. CNP units, CIA and USSS on route now.
More.
Informed it was you who exchanged hostile fire with ops at Montserrat and that you may have been hit. Where the hell are you? Please confirm location and condition.
More.
Ops were not CIA. U.S. Madrid was misinformed. Ops were S.A. Special Forces commandos under covert orders to repatriate Dr. Foxx to South Africa.
S.A. government has apologized to State Department and to U.S. Madrid.
More.
A lot of this doesn't make sense. As you know USSS info on Crop Duster's probable presence at Montserrat and CIA ops mission to retrieve him came from White House Chief of Staff at U.S. Embassy Madrid. How could COS and CIA station chief confuse CIA ops with S.A. Special Forces unit? Also how could original Crop Duster mission have become one to repatriate the S.A. doctor and then to finding Crop Duster at same site? Was he in the tunnels all the time then got caught in the landslide and nobody knew it? Is this something at executive level we don't know about? Maybe some kind of meeting between Crop Duster and the S.A. doctor? Have attempted to make contact with USSS assistant director Langway reported still in Madrid. So far unsuccessful.
More.
If you are able, you are directed to contact Jake Lowe or National Security Adviser Marshall immediately for debriefing. Maybe they'll tell you what's up.
This is a direct order from VPOTUS. Please acknowledge.
More.
Very concerned personally. Where the hell are you? Have you taken fire? Do you need help? Dammit, Hap, please acknowledge or have someone do it for you!
Bill Strait's confusion about the info from COS U.S. Madrid was wholly understandable. That was if any of it was true, which was highly unlikely. The ops he'd exchanged fire with at the monastery were sure as hell not South African commandos; they were as American as Kansas. They knew the president was there and it was him they had come to get. The Foxx thing had to have been a sidebar, part of something else.
As for Bill Strait, it was impossible to tell if he was caught in the middle and just trying to do his job or if he was on their side and involved with it. Did he want to find Hap as badly as he did because he was a Secret Service brother he genuinely cared about or because Hap was trouble and they wanted to make sure he was out of the picture?
Hap grimaced at the thought, then put the BlackBerry away and looked to others grouped under the overhang and now bathed in a harsh shaft of golden light as the setting sun found an opening between distant mountain peaks.
"Ask Amado how far it is to the first chimney or tunnel opening," he said to Miguel, "and if we can get there on foot without being seen."
Miguel turned to his nephew and spoke Spanish, then turned back. "It's only one air shaft of many, and we have to start somewhere. They chose this one because they think that this is about how far they might have come inside the tunnel since the landslide."
"Where is it?"
"About a half mile. We can go the minute the sun sets."
Hap stared at Miguel, then motioned him closer. "If the president and Marten are in there," he said, trying not to have Amado and his friends overhear, especially if they understood English, "we have to find them and get them out before the Spanish police do."
"I know."
"What you don't know is that there are CIA and U.S. Secret Service agents with them. Most, if not all, both Spanish and American, think they are on our side. That their mission is to rescue the president and bring him to safety."
"You mean they might try to kill us."
"No, I mean they will kill anyone who gets in the way. We're talking about the president of the United States. You saw those helicopters. There will be more, a lot more. We're up against an army of people who think they're doing the right thing."
"One man, a thousand. To me that is my family in there. It is the same with you. Yes?"
Hap took a breath. "Yes," he said finally. Standing up against covert ops was one thing, but having to exchange fire with a legion of innocently involved Spanish police, CIA, and his own Secret Service agents, some of whom might be covert themselves, was something else. Still, they had no choice. "What about the boys?" he said.
"I will take care of the boys."
"You have the first-aid kit from the limo?"
"Yes."
"Take out the survival blankets. You take three and give me four."
"Alright," Miguel nodded, then watched Hap a half second longer. "How is your shoulder?"
"It hurts like hell."
"The pain pills."
"This is no time or place to be drugged up."
"Any more bleeding?"
"Not that I know. Your doctor did a good job."
"Can you walk?"
"Yes, I can walk, dammit!"
"Then let's go," Miguel stood abruptly and went to the motorcycle. He snapped open its storage compartment and took seven of the small folded, Mylar-coated survival blankets from the first-aid kit and a half dozen health bars. Next came a water-filled camel-pack, two large f
lashlights, and the Steyr machine pistol. He gave four of the survival blankets and half the health bars to Hap, handed him a flashlight and stuck the other in his belt, then slipped the camel pack over his shoulders and slung the machine pistol across his chest. As he did, the shaft of sunlight abruptly dimmed to the deep purple of twilight as the sun passed behind the mountain peaks. Immediately he signaled to the others. A half beat later the five started off across the rock and scrub mesa.
110
• 7:32 P.M.
Twice Marten and the president had picked their way over and through enormous piles of dirt and rock, the result of underground landslides. It would have been difficult under any circumstances, but in the pitch black it had been impossible to know how far the slide reached and if what they were doing was nothing more than removing stones from a mountain, all the while eating up precious time. Still, they'd done it, then broken through and kept on.
Somehow we will find a way out. Somehow you will address those people.
Marten's emotional promise to the president had concentrated their efforts on a search for an air current that would lead them to a passage large enough to squeeze through, break through, or climb out of. To do that they needed an open flame that would burn far longer than a match, and to that end Marten dedicated his cotton undershirt, rolled up tight, with one end torn loose and hanging down to serve as a wick. It took two of the precious few matches left to get it going. When it did it burned long enough to get them several hundred yards farther down the tunnel, where they stumbled on a pile of long-abandoned tools. Most were rusted through or rotted away, but among them they found three they could use. One was a sledgehammer with its handle still secured to its head. The other two were picks, or rather a pick and a pick handle that held angled down served as a kind of torch and replaced Marten's undershirt, which had burned to little more than a rag and had to be abandoned. The pick handle's light was merely a glow compared to the burning shirt but in the unbearable darkness it enabled them to illuminate the tunnel a good fifteen feet in front of them.
By now they no longer walked single file but side by side in the center of the rails with Marten carrying the pick and sledgehammer, President Harris the torch. Both were hungry and nearing exhaustion but those were words never mentioned. Instead their focus was on the torch, with each man silent, waiting, praying, for the flare up that would indicate an air current.
"I have no proof," the president said suddenly. "None at all."
"Of what?"
"Of anything," he looked to Marten, his expression grave. It became all the more so as he put his thoughts into words. "As you know, the original plan was for me to take the information we got from Foxx and call the secretaries general of the United Nations and NATO and the editors-in-chief of the Washington Post and New York Times and tell them all the truth. Instead we find ourselves trying to find a way out of these godforsaken tunnels so that I can address the congregation at Aragon. But why? To tell them what? That there is a massive conspiracy under way and that Dr. Foxx had full knowledge of its particulars?
"What good is that? Foxx is dead, the details for the genocide dead with him. His secret lab and everything in it we can assume is wholly destroyed because he planned it that way. We can say what we saw, but it's not there. My 'friends' will say I am 'ill,' that I have suffered a breakdown. That fleeing from my hotel room in Madrid in the manner I did and then running away and hiding are confirmation of it.
"You can stand up for me but it will do no good. President or not, it simply becomes my word against all of theirs. If I accuse them of planning the Warsaw assassinations they will smile compassionately as if that is proof of my illness and then simply postpone them. If I accuse them of plotting genocide against the Muslim states, I become even crazier, a ranting fool." In the dim flickering light, Marten saw the president's eyes fixed on his, and they were filled with utter despair. "I have no proof, Mr. Marten, of anything."
"No, you don't," Marten said forcefully, "but you can't forget the bodies, the body parts, the faces of those people floating in the tanks."
"Forget them? Their images are branded into me as if they were molten steel. But without some kind of proof . . . they never existed."
"But they did exist."
The president looked back to the torch and walked on in silence, his shoulders hunched forward, almost as if he had given up. For the first time Marten realized that while it was personal courage and sheer determination that had brought him this far, the president was not the kind of man who was most comfortable alone and in his own company. He wanted others around him. He wanted the give-and-take of it, even to the point of disagreement. Perhaps to help him clarify his own thoughts or get another perspective on things, or to find some level of inspiration he had either lost or never had.
"Mr. President," Marten said firmly, "you must address the convention at Aragon. Speak of the Warsaw assassinations. Tell them what has happened. Tell them how and where and when and by whom the idea and then the ultimatum was presented to you. Do that and what you said will be correct. Your 'friends' will have no choice but to call off the killings, at least for now. If they don't they will prove you were right. In the meantime antennas will go up everywhere. You are still the president of the United States. The public will listen. The media will listen. You can order an investigation into everything Foxx was involved with, the same way you can order an investigation of your 'friends.' Yes, you will be putting yourself on the spot, but no more than you already have. Just the act of making it all public, whatever the reaction, will slow, maybe even stop, what they are planning to do.
"No, you don't have the evidence you would like, but it's something. You don't always need the deed to be done to kill its intent. If nothing else, you will have saved the lives of the president of France and the chancellor of Germany."
The president looked over as they walked. In the faint light of the torch Marten could see the extreme weariness in him. The burden that was his, the toll it had taken, was taking still. He wished there were some way to ease it. He wished to hell that they could just sit down for a steak and a beer or a dozen beers and talk about baseball or the weather and forget everything else.
"Would you like to stop and rest for a few minutes?" he asked quietly.
For the briefest moment there was no response. Then, almost as if he had shifted into some other gear, the president's eyes sharpened, his shoulders came back, and he stood upright once again.
"No, Mr. Marten, we'll keep going."
111
• 7:40 P.M.
Bill Strait watched the darkening landscape below as they circled the area one last time and then came in across the flat of a rocky mesa. Seconds later the big Chinook helicopter touched down in a storm of flying dust and dry vegetation and the pilot cut the engines. Strait glanced across at Jake Lowe and National Security Adviser James Marshall, then unbuckled his harness and was the first out the door as the crewman pulled it open. Lowe, Marshall, and then seventeen Secret Service agents followed. Lowe and Marshall were dressed in hastily put together wardrobes of khaki pants, hiking shoes, and ski parkas. The agents, like Bill Strait, were armed, and wore jeans, windbreakers, and hiking boots. All carried night-vision goggles.
"This way," Strait said, then ducked under the still-churning rotors and walked rapidly toward a Spanish CNP helicopter that had touched down on a rocky shelf fifty yards away and where CNP Captain Belinda Diaz waited with her twenty-man team.
Strait, in the absence of Hap Daniels, had become the SAIC, the special agent in charge of the entire mission. The situation—as the USSS, the CIA, and the CNP understood—was that the president was assumed to be somewhere in the tunnels, trapped there after what was officially being called "an earth movement." Although he was thought to be in the company of a man named Nicholas Marten it was necessarily assumed there could be others and that the president was now, and had been all along, a victim of foul play and therefore in grave danger. The mission, the
refore, was a "live rescue" and was to be treated that way until they knew otherwise.
In all, nine helicopters had come in to land at exterior coordinates of a circular ten-mile perimeter. Aside from the Chinook, the other eight helos were CNP. Five carried twenty-man squads of heavily armed CNP mountain-trained police. The remaining three had eighteen-man CIA teams. All nine carried a two-man sound unit, audio experts equipped with hi-tech listening devices. In addition three more eighteen-man CIA teams were en route from Madrid and one hundred Secret Service agents were coming in from the USSS controlling field office in Paris to land at Costa Brava Airport in Gerona to then be ferried to the site here by CNP helicopters. ETA here for the CIA/Madrid teams was 8:20 P.M. For the USSS/Paris, 9:30 P.M.
• 7:44 P.M.
Captain Diaz glanced at Lowe and Marshall, then looked to Bill Strait. "We are here," she said in English, her right index finger touching a terrain map open on the ground as a radio clipped to her belt crackled in Spanish with the give-and-take of CNP communication between other units. Diaz was probably thirty-five, attractive, confident and very fit, and, like all the CNP, heavily armed and dressed in a camouflage jumpsuit.
"We are looking at a large mountainous area covering approximately one hundred square miles." Diaz put the terrain map aside and opened another. It was a copy of a 1922 ore company map showing the location of its shafts. Diaz pointed to it.