The Prisoner's Gold (The Hunters 3) (39 page)

‘Very good. Why?’

‘Good enough to take out that chopper?’

* * *

As a master of wing chun and a student of kung fu and tai chi, Maggie had learned how to move with stealth. She had showcased her ability on the day she had met the team in Florida – sneaking up on Sarah on more than one occasion – and she had used it again at the warehouse in Panyu. But those examples were child’s play compared to her task at hand.

She needed to sneak up the mountain without getting shot.

‘Joshua,’ she whispered from the Lion Gate, ‘I’m heading up the stairs right now. I’ll let you know when I reach the top.’

‘Be careful,’ he said as he charged across the plateau.

She smiled at his concern. ‘I always am.’

* * *

Piloting the RQ-7 was pretty simple for Garcia. After all, the hardest part had already been done for him: the Pakistanis had been kind enough to get the drone in the air before he had hijacked it. If all went according to plan, Garcia wouldn’t need to land it either. He planned to return it to its original test-flight course and then relinquish control over it. The Pakistan Air Force would land it … and then they’d probably tear it apart.

Garcia knew that the military would most likely spend months trying to figure out why their drone had flitted off to central Sri Lanka, performed a variety of maneuvers, discharged its arsenal, and then headed back to home base. He suspected that they would disassemble the entire aircraft piece by piece, checking every bit of hardware and every line of code in its operating system in their search for the problem.

But they’d never really know why.

Back at the hotel, Garcia had turned his command center into a flight simulator. His three monitors displayed the video feed from the drone’s nose and rear cameras, as well as providing him with up-to-the-second information on the aircraft’s speed, elevation, fuel supply, and ammunition count. Garcia had even found a slim-line controller in his bag of random peripherals. He used it to fly the drone as if he were playing a video game.

And Garcia was very good at video games.

The image on his left-hand screen showed him that the helicopter, a commercial cargo bird, hadn’t actually landed on the towering deck. Instead, it had pulled into a hover about twenty feet above the mountain. Four drop lines had been thrown from the stationary chopper, and the first two waves of unwelcome visitors had already deployed.

Four additional men appeared ready to join them below.

As the men stepped through the open bay doors, Garcia banked the drone and dive-bombed his target. With no missiles at his disposal, he activated the M134 minigun. The stream of bullets from the rotating barrels cut through the helicopter’s engine hatch but, remarkably, didn’t hit any vital components.

In response to the attack, the chopper’s pilot jerked the stick, spinning the aircraft wildly. Three of the men at its sides dropped quickly to the dirt beneath them, but the fourth inexplicably held fast to his rope. The force of the chopper’s sudden turn whipped him like a tetherball, causing him to lose his grip and fly helplessly over the edge.

The man plummeted several hundred feet to his death.

Feeling a surge of adrenaline from his first kill, Garcia pushed the drone’s speed past 100 miles per hour as the helicopter gave chase. When he swung out wide of the rock, he could see a dozen more men climbing the face. They had launched grappling hooks to the summit and were using electric ascender units to propel themselves up their respective ropes. With the help of the mechanical gear, the men moved up the plateau with a fluid, almost serene grace.

‘Nice try,’ Garcia said as he sized up his opponents.

He brought the drone in line for a strafing run, fully prepared for what he had to do. He fired the weapon and a stream of deadly 7.62 mm rounds blurred out of the nose of the vehicle, slicing through the men and their ropes like a samurai sword splitting tender bamboo. Puffs of red and pink erupted from the rock face as the climbers were turned to chunky pulp before gravity claimed its hold and yanked their shattered remains to the ground.

Garcia watched as the video feed relayed the scene in real time.

‘We need to get one of these for ourselves!’ he said excitedly.

‘A drone?’ Cobb asked in his ear.

‘No, a military-grade, hi-res camera,’ Garcia answered. ‘Gimbal-mounted. Digitally stabilized. Electro-optical infrared. This sucker is bad-ass.’

‘Wow,’ McNutt replied. ‘You really are a geek.’

* * *

Unfortunately, McNutt had more to worry about than Garcia’s seemingly odd fondness for hi-tech cameras over tactical weapon systems.

He had scampered across the mountaintop and revisited the case of firearms that he had hidden near the entrance to the secret tunnel, but the addition of an M-4 rifle hadn’t made him completely at ease. Even the presence of Cobb – who had likewise armed himself with the compact assault rifle – didn’t extinguish McNutt’s anxiety.

It was still two against ten. Or more.

With an outer perimeter of free-falling death.

From a mile away, McNutt would have had a distinct advantage.

But close-quarters combat was a different story.

Cobb rolled to the ground behind a low wall of bricks, taking fire from one of the men the helicopter had ferried to the summit. They had scattered around the ruins, taking up cover around the corners of various terrace levels or diving behind small walls as Cobb had done.

McNutt had opened fire immediately, killing one of the men before return fire had forced him to flee and seek his own barricade. Cobb had no idea where he had gone, but he knew they needed to coordinate if they were going to survive.

‘Josh, take north. I’ll head south. Push them to the pond in the middle.’

The gunmen had arrived at the southeast corner of the pond on a small dirt trail that allowed passage around the rainwater-filled pool on that side. Cobb was already south of them, and two levels down, meaning the enemy had the high ground. He needed to make his way up the plateau before they converged on his position.

* * *

The helicopter was charging fast behind the drone.

Garcia started rocking the small craft back and forth, presenting a harder target, as he flew it out over the edge of the rock and away from the battle on the summit. The lone gunman still on board the pursuing chopper was leaning out the side door and trying to knock the drone from the sky with withering bursts of rifle fire.

Garcia had the advantage on maneuverability. He dropped the nose on the RQ-7, flying the drone nearly vertical in a dive along the edge of the massive rock. The helicopter pilot dipped in pursuit, though not nearly as steeply as Garcia.

Showing off, he corkscrewed the drone, closer to the mountain as it fell. Then he abruptly brought it up and buzzed past the helicopter, the minigun blazing. Most of the rounds missed the helicopter, with just a few peppering the tail before the drone raced past.

But that wasn’t the point of Garcia’s maneuver.

The drone was unmanned and presented no danger to Garcia, whereas the buzzing minigun presented plenty of danger to the Chinese men in the helicopter. The gunman dove back into the passenger compartment, and the pilot banked hard and away from the drone, narrowly avoiding impact. The burst of fire had emptied the rotary-barrel gun on the drone after just the first few shots, but the Chinese pilot didn’t know that. Garcia brought the UAV up in a steep climb, then twisted it in the air and dove down for the helicopter again.

The pilot reacted, banking away from the rock while trying to gain altitude. They were running scared, but they would soon realize the drone wasn’t firing at them anymore.

Then Garcia had a crazy idea …

Who said I have to return the drone to Pakistan?

They’re just going to tear it apart anyway.

The RQ-7 had a top speed of 127 mph, and Garcia cranked the accelerator, bringing the UAV toward the escaping helicopter as fast as it could go. A moment later, the pilot of the helicopter started to panic. Garcia could tell as he watched the craft zig and zag on his computer monitor. With every evasive maneuver the bird tried, Garcia’s drone was able to match it. The much smaller UAV could turn on a dime and there was no worry about G-forces on human operators.

The pilot dropped the helicopter into a steep dive and banked hard back toward the massive stone rock. The gunman reappeared in the open door, firing again on the drone, but Garcia was able to jerk and twitch the smaller craft out of the way of each burst. The helicopter was heading straight for the side of the rock, half way up the plateau.

Garcia realized this was his chance to finish the job.

He pushed the drone to its maximum speed and steered the UAV straight at the top of the helicopter’s rotor mount. Though he had no audio of the event, Garcia could’ve sworn that he heard the metallic
crunch
that it made when the drone impacted its target. He also imagined the scream that the gunman made when he fell out the cargo door and plummeted to his death.

His fall from the sky actually saved him from the massive fireball that consumed the interior of the cargo hold. The chopper’s blades ripped loose from their mount and the tail boom swung in a full 180-degree arc before it smacked into the side of the rock wall. The whole technological mess crumpled together in a twisted hunk of metal before following the path of least resistance.

In this case, straight down to the jungle below.

* * *

Despite her age, Maggie was faster than she looked. She charged up the main stairs of the plateau, ran past the frescoes, the Mirror Wall, and many other sights on her way to the top. She stopped occasionally to make sure that gunmen weren’t lurking nearby, but she quickly realized that the Brotherhood was focusing its assault on the other side of the plateau.

This allowed her to run without concern.

Before she knew it, she was cresting the top of the stairs, ducking behind ramparts, and eventually making her way inside the mouth of the tunnel.

* * *

Cobb rolled to the end of his terrace and dropped one level lower before moving back toward the west and the slightly higher ground. He assumed McNutt would already have gone that way, seeking the raised terraces and platforms that the western side of the summit provided. If McNutt could get back to the northern edge of the rock, he could cover all of it from the high ground there, which was easily thirty feet above the rest of the summit.

Garcia chimed in. ‘I killed the drone, but I’ve got real-time satellite now.’

‘Do you see me?’ Cobb whispered.

‘I do, and so does the gunman at your eleven o’clock. He’s trying to belly-crawl his way west, just under the pond.’

Cobb sprang to his feet with the M-4 leveled, and sighted on the man. He fired a single round that hit the crawling man and sprayed his blood on the adjacent wall. Before return fire could come his way, Cobb dropped back down.

‘Holy shit,’ Garcia said. ‘That was fast.’

A moment later, the wall in front of Cobb started to disintegrate under heavy fire from three directions. Cobb had no choice but to hunker down and ride out the storm.

‘Josh!’ Cobb called. ‘They have me pinned.’

In response, he heard the sniper’s rifle crack twice.

Each shot was punctuated with pink mist.

‘Damn,’ Garcia said, stunned by McNutt’s efficiency. ‘Two more down. And on the second guy, that was waaaaay down.’

McNutt grinned at the commentary. He wondered how many bodies had already plunged off the plateau. ‘I’ve got eyes on the pond. As soon as they pop up, I’ll take them out.’

‘Hold up,’ Garcia said as he watched the satellite feed on his screen. ‘One of them is already north of your position. He’s crawling behind a rampart along the eastern edge.’

‘Where?’ McNutt said. ‘Describe the landmarks to me. I can punch right through his cover with this rifle if I know where he is.’

‘Umm, let me see. Go north of the pond by about fifteen feet. Maybe five feet out from the end of that terrace. There’s a low wall running parallel to the edge.’

‘I see it. Where’s his head?’ McNutt asked.

‘His head? Umm, maybe six or seven feet from the corner. He’s on his knees.’

McNutt processed the information instantly, then pulled the trigger. The round blasted a hole through the wall just a few inches in front of the crawling man, who immediately reversed direction and scrambled backward.

‘South one meter,’ Garcia said.

He corrected and fired again. This time the shot found its mark.

‘I’ll be damned. You got him right through the wall.’

McNutt grinned. ‘Never had a satellite spotter before … Not bad, Manuel.’

* * *

Cobb stayed in position, waiting for a target to show or another update.

Before Garcia could warn him, one of the gunmen bolted toward Cobb’s side of the plateau. He followed the same path the crawler had taken before him. Meanwhile, another two men broke cover and ran toward McNutt’s most recent kill behind the rampart.

McNutt opened fire on his duo with his M-4, spraying a single continuous wave at the weaving men. He killed one and clipped the other in the shoulder. Cobb fired as well, just as Garcia started shouting in their ears.

‘It’s a diversion,’ Garcia yelled. ‘The others are running south under the cover of trees. They must’ve figured out that we have sat coverage.’

‘Where are they heading?’ Cobb demanded as he emptied his magazine into the gunman rushing toward him. The man fell dead as Cobb scrabbled up the path behind him.

‘Hang on,’ Garcia said. ‘Switching to infrared now. With all this running, their bodies are gonna be glowing bright red.’

‘Hurry up, Hector. I’m kind of—’

‘Jack,’ Garcia said, cutting him off. ‘Time to move to the western high ground. Your guys are going all the way south. They’re going to try to outflank you.’

* * *

McNutt fired his assault rifle until the magazine ran dry. He casually tossed it aside and pulled out his pistol. The Beretta M-9 was one of a handful of available models easily found in Sri Lanka. The armed forces used a hodgepodge of weapons from different countries, so there were a lot floating around. He’d had his choice of Austrian, British, and German pistols, but McNutt opted for Italian since Polo – and their mission – had started in Italy.