Operation Southern Cross - 02 (9 page)

But the high-strung officer took it the wrong way. Instead of being mystified as to why the one-sided battle seemed to be going on much longer than it should, he began cursing his own troops.

“The idea is to take most of these monkeys alive!” he roared at the sergeants. “It sounds like those fools are shooting
everything
that moves. Go tell them to knock it off and start herding people out of there.”

But the sergeant standing before him did not move. Instead, his eyes had become fixed on a point directly behind Spano’s left shoulder. The man could not speak; all he could do was point toward something in the river.

Spano turned toward the river and saw what he knew was Zampata’s elaborate river boat. It had come around the nearby bend, engine sputtering, radio crackling, sitting very low in the water.

It was empty.

At first, Spano thought this was Zampata’s idea of a bad joke. But after his two sergeants braved the shallow water and pulled the boat to shore, they found much evidence to the contrary. The interior of the boat was slippery with blood. Pieces of rope still tied to several of the deck chairs indicated someone had been held captive aboard the vessel before disappearing. The boat itself was full of holes, possibly bullet holes. There were so many, it was a wonder it was still afloat.

As they were studying these baffling remains, the noise from the nearby village once again increased in volume. Finally it caught Spano’s attention. He closed his laptop and reached for his sidearm. His sergeants drew their AK-47s up and nervously checked their magazine loads. Even the copters’ pilots had gone into the village, just to have some fun, leaving Spano and his noncoms alone. If anything had happened to the pilots, the rest of them might be stuck out here for a very long time.

Spano’s first impulse was to make a call to headquarters up in Caracas. At the very least he had to report what seemed to be Zampata’s disappearance. But he stopped before his emotions got the better of him. A success in the village would erase whatever the hell had happened to Zampata—Spano suspected Zampata’s own men had for some reason turned against him. Getting warm bodies out of the village was the priority; everything else was a detail. Spano gave the signal to his men. The three of them began walking toward the village.

About halfway to the battle scene, all the firing inside the village suddenly stopped. The three men froze in their tracks. Only the sounds of the jungle were wafting over their heads now. And the rumble of distant thunder again. Was this a good thing? Normally, hearing the gunfire cease meant the natives had been subdued and the impressment process had begun. But now, the three officers suddenly developed a mutual case of the shakes. Something was wrong here in the land of the Acupa, and it wasn’t just Zampata’s empty boat.

Somehow, they pressed on. Weapons up and ready, the three men climbed the jungle rise carefully, trying not to make any noise. Reaching the crest, they went down to their knees and crawled forward. Pushing aside the last of the flora, they looked down into the village beyond.

Bodies…The streets were covered with them. Not natives, though. It was the three dozen men of the SBI shock squad and their pilots. They’d all been killed. But not by knives or spears. Nor was there a poison arrow in sight.

They’d been shot to pieces—by their own automatic weapons.

Spano immediately went for his cell phone. He
had
to call headquarters now. But before he could get the Nokia off his belt, he felt a hand from behind grab his wrist. He turned to see an Indian standing over him. He was small, dark, with red paint smeared on his cheeks and charcoal smudged under his eyes. He was holding a machete.

Spano screamed. The razor-sharp blade came down on his wrist a moment later.

WITHIN A HALF MINUTE, SPANO AND HIS SERGEANTS
were hacked to death by the villagers they’d come here to enslave.

Their bodies, along with the three dozen shock troops and pilots, were then tossed into the river where the killer fish swam. They disappeared beneath a swirl of blood and bone, along with their guns and hats and uniforms.

Only Spano’s laptop survived.

By agreement, this strange device was taken by the tribe’s fastest two runners to the top of the highest hill in the area, about a quarter mile away. Here, another flying machine waited. It was flown by the men who were now the best friends of the tribe, the ones who’d helped them defend their village, their home, their world—all in return for this strange beeping thing.

The exchange went well, there was much bowing and hugging with the two men who flew in the metal bird. Finally it was time for them to go. Using hand signals, the bird men promised the natives that nothing like this would even happen to their village again. They’d been blessed.

Then their machine took off. The men inside both put their hands up to their foreheads in a signal of friendship and farewell.

The two Acupa natives returned the gesture, for the first time in the tribe’s centuries-old history, performing what their new friends called a
salute.

RAFAEL LUIS GRAZI LIVED IN THE TALLEST BUILDING IN
Caracas. The apartment house was forty-five stories high. Grazi resided at the top, in the penthouse.

He was a senior official in the SBI—the 2200-square-foot apartment was one of several perks he’d received in exchange for loyalty to the current president. But Grazi, nearly sixty years old, with brooding dark eyes and a distinctly Germanic manner, wasn’t a soldier. He was a scientist—a doctor, in fact. He’d learned his craft in some of the most notorious corners of the world: Serbia, Belarus, Iran. His expertise was in what the SBI called the study of extraordinary weapons. Grazi was an expert in blowing things up.

It was early evening now; the sun had just set on another humid day. Grazi was on his balcony, vodka in hand, gazing out on the dim lights of Caracas. From this height, the darkness usually did a good job of hiding the crap on the streets below. The capital of Venezuela had never been accused of being a beautiful place.

But things were different this hot night. There had been growing unrest in the sprawling city for the past two weeks. Food shortages, power blackouts and an ineffective sewage system had created unbearable conditions in the poorer parts of the capital. This had brought many people onto the streets for the past six days, where they’d clashed frequently with police, causing widespread riots from sunrise to sunset.

Looking down from his perch, Grazi could see hundreds of dark figures still roaming the sewage-filled streets. Unlike the last half dozen days, the mobs had not retreated to their homes after dark. They had remained on the avenues and in the alleyways and appeared to have grown in strength and number. No doubt a long night was ahead for the military police charged with controlling these crowds. Already Grazi could detect the smell of tear gas in the air.

He couldn’t be bothered with such things, though. He was much too important to be concerned with the politics of the rabble. He was in charge of all of the SBI’s top secret projects, Area 13 included. It was his job to make sure these classified programs attained certain technological milestones every day, day after day. For what the SBI and the president himself wanted to do had to be carried out on a precise timetable—always hard in Venezuela. It was up to Grazi to make sure that, for once, the clocks ran on time.

He sipped his drink again, checking his watch, a quiver of excitement growing in his stomach. Caracas had always been a dangerous place, day or night. Muggings. Gunfights. Stabbings. Assassinations. Even a few car bombs here and there. And now, the citizenry up in arms. They were no place to be, those dark streets.

Grazi felt safe, however. Though he essentially lived in a vertical, concrete island surrounded by a sea of mayhem, armed guards were stationed at all the doors leading into his skyscraper, 24/7. On the thirty-third floor, where the building’s only elevator had to stop, another platoon of SBI soldiers was always on duty too. No one made it past them without a thorough search and a good reason for being that high up in the building. Anyone who had an argument with Grazi’s security policy went back down the elevator shaft the hard way.

It was the sound of those elevator doors opening now that got his attention. Grazi walked back into his suite to find two heavily armed SBI men stepping off the lift. With them was a young teenage girl. She was as beautiful as she was frightened. Grazi checked his watch upon seeing her.

“Is it eight o’clock already?” he half joked.

One of the soldiers assured him it was.

Grazi refilled his drink and downed it as the guards brought the girl to his bedroom. Locking her inside, the soldiers headed back to the elevator. Grazi stopped one of them as they were leaving.

He whispered to him: “
Elle’s residuo
?” Loosely translated: “She is disposable?”

The guard nodded. “
Absolutemente.”

Grazi thanked them and the guards departed. He waited until he heard the elevator return to the thirty-third floor. Then he locked the lift’s control box from his end, insuring that no one would disturb him for the foreseeable future.

He poured himself a third drink, walked to his desk and opened the top drawer. Inside was a very small, very old, one-shot derringer. Grazi checked to see that it was loaded, and then put the gun into his back pocket. His knees were shaking with excitement now. He had other interests besides weapons and such—and his presidente knew of these interests. This particular perk tonight could be had by Grazi at any time, day or night. With just one phone call, he could release the inner tensions of his very high pressure job, at the expense only of a little time and a little life. It was a secret pleasure he’d learned from the oil princes of the Middle East.

He downed his third drink in one noisy gulp, this to provide a last burst of fortitude and lust and checked the gun again.

Then he went into the bedroom.

The girl was standing near the window, trembling. This did not lessen Grazi’s building arousal. The room was very dark. The curtains were pulled. A candle on the bed stand was providing the only illumination.

The bed itself was huge, filled with water and foam and covered with jet-black silk sheets. Grazi started to undo his belt buckle. The girl recoiled as he approached. She made her way across the room to the bed and scrambled across the sheets to the other side. While Grazi didn’t mind if his victims had a little fight in them, he didn’t want to chase this one around the room all night either. He had other things he had to do later this evening—dinner with his wife and seven children being one of them. He had to get this one over quick.

It was strange, because even though the girl was terrified, she was not crying or begging for mercy. This was usually how they were…Grazi followed her as she backed up into the bedroom’s hallway, a foyer that led out to another balcony. He was motioning to her, trying to get her to settle down, at least long enough for him to grab her arm. Then his fun would begin.

But she continued moving away from him. Down into the murk of the hallway, past the huge plate glass window that looked out on the city and the mountains beyond. It was at this moment, with Grazi welled up with raw desire and hoping that this one would not put up too much of a fight, that he saw two very strange things.

The girl had stepped into the shadows; she was just barely visible to him now. Staring up at him, she no longer looked frightened. And above her tiny body, even deeper in the darkness, Grazi saw, incredibly, another pair of eyes staring out at him.

He froze.
What was this?
The eyes were green, piercing, like some kind of monster from a horror movie. As his brain was processing this, another pair of the green eyes appeared. They were floating over the girl’s right shoulder. Then another pair, to her left. Then another to her right.

All this happened in just an instant, but for Grazi it seemed a lifetime. He tried to move but couldn’t. He wanted his feet to turn him around and get him out of there because clearly something was very wrong—but they just would not obey. The green beams had paralyzed him. The girl had led him into a trap.

He was able to turn his head, though, which allowed him to look out the big picture window—and it was here he saw the second strange thing.

It was a helicopter. A very
small
helicopter. It looked like a huge bug, all cockpit and glass. Even odder, it had two benches hanging off its sides and each of these seats contained three heavily armed men. The helicopter was floating not ten feet away from the side of the building and all of the armed men were staring through the window at him.

Grazi’s neck muscles somehow creaked his head forward again. Now there were many sets of green eyes hovering over the young girl. And she now had a look of comfort and relief on her dark face, along with a bit of a smile. This terrified Grazi more than anything else in these weird few moments. This girl, this victim, knew something he didn’t.

For a second or two anyway.

That’s when the eyes started moving toward him. Then hands shot out of the dark. Fingers poking him, grabbing him.
Slapping
him…

Then a fist came out of the shadows, off to his left, too quick for him to duck. He took it full force, just above his temple. He crumpled to the floor like a broken doll.

Then the stomping began. Boots, kicking him in the stomach, the head, the throat. He could hear his own bones cracking, his organs being crushed. Blood began gushing from his nose.

Then, more strangeness. These people who were in the act of killing him were soldiers. He could tell by the boots they were kicking him with. And they were in the same uniforms as the men who were incomprehensibly riding in the tiny helicopter just an arm’s length away outside the big picture window. But suddenly these men on the copter, looking in and witnessing his savage beating, began yelling at their colleagues.

“Don’t kill him!” they were screaming. “McCune! Don’t kill him!
We need him!”

And incredibly, the beating stopped. Not immediately. Grazi’s ghostly assailants continued kicking him for another few seconds. But then finally it was over.

Grazi rolled on to his back and found himself looking up at six soldiers, their gun muzzles aimed at his throat. In the background, he saw another soldier hustling the young girl out of the now bloody hallway.

The helicopter moved away. Then many hands came down and hauled Grazi to his trembling feet. He could barely stand. They dragged him back into the bedroom and threw him on the bed. Two men kept their guns on him while the others started searching the room.

At that moment, Grazi was actually thinking that a very large mistake might have been made. That these soldiers might be members of his own SBI and were on some kind of training mission gone wrong. Or, more chilling, that there had been another coup in Caracas. And these were anti-government troops and he was now being arrested.

But both theories quickly went poof, as through swollen eyes Grazi saw a small patch on the shoulder of each of his captors. Red, white and blue…

Damn…

These ghosts were U.S. soldiers.

His worst nightmare come true.

BOBBY AUTRY SLAMMED HIS KILLER EGG ONTO THE
roof of Grazi’s apartment building five seconds later.

He was wired, full of caffeine and pep pills, chewing a huge wad of gum, moving in a hundred directions at once. Once down, the first thing he did was check his watch. The readout on the left told him the local time was now 2010 hours. The readout on the right was counting down through 3 days, 12 hours, and 55 minutes. He spit out his gum in disgust. He felt like his entire life was just ticking away.

They’d been in Venezuela for little more than a day, and already he detested the place. Autry had been to many of the world’s shit holes: Pakistan, North Korea, the Congo—and he’d seen some very nasty things. But he’d never seen anything like what was happening down here.

They’d found their way to Los Tripos with no problems twenty-four hours earlier. They’d set down unseen and staked it out, just as they’d done during the drug king Pablo operation in Colombia, one country over, not a week before. At first they couldn’t believe what they saw. Slave laborers? Working until they dropped? Disposed of like garbage in the bloody river of fish? The people who sent XBat on this mission suspected the Venezuelans were building a bomber base in the middle of the rain forest. But what they found instead looked like something from a bad Indiana Jones movie.

Zampata’s boat had barely rounded the bend when XBat went into Los Tripos, guns blazing. They freed the enslaved workers and allowed them to exact their revenge on the SBI guards. Though not exactly included in the mission statement, there was no way Autry was going to allow what was going on at the hidden work site to continue.

The trouble was, the mystery of Area 13 only deepened at that point. A search of Zampata’s quarters revealed nothing. Either he kept it all in his head or he had brought everything sensitive with him on his river journey; there was nothing of any value in his construction-trailer home. All the guards were dead, so there was nothing they could get from them. And certainly the Indian slaves didn’t know anything. Obviously something was being built in the jungle clearing. But what?

Walking under the thick camouflage netting, Autry and the others saw lots of evidence of cement pours: foundations, footings, hardened rivers of surplus concrete, with a white dust blowing over everything. But the actual cement pours themselves were scattered over a wide area of the swath cleared by the SBI’s slave labor force. They seemed laid out in very haphazard fashion. When Weir mentioned that the CIA would just as soon find a hole in the ground at Los Tripos, Autry didn’t think this was what they had in mind.

Even if the camouflaged netting wasn’t in place, it would have been hard to say exactly what the builders there were up to. The site might have been made big enough to handle large military aircraft like a Bear bomber—that is, if the SBI expected their slave laborers to tear down another several hundred acres of rain forest. But even if this were the case, were runways poured in sections like this? Were they made of hand-mixed cement or something more durable? And weren’t some made entirely of asphalt?

There was just no way to tell. As crazy as it seemed, for all they knew, the SBI could have been laying out the footprint for some kind of religious site at Los Tripos, a recreation of the ancient South American temples of Ziccala and Tizalan. It was as good an explanation as any.

Autry had tried calling Special Operations Command at Hurlbert Field in Florida to report all this to their CIA handlers, but he never got through. His S2S phone went on the blink again. They tried using the radios on their copters and even attempted to send a message through the updated AWACs gear found on one of their new Chinooks. But nothing worked, because it was all tied into the Galaxy Net system and at that moment, the system was down.