Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (21 page)

32

Roraima, Brazil

Gazing up at the night sky, it was easy to comprehend how the ancients had looked to the stars and seen their gods. Hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization, there was no light pollution to mute the starlight. High up on a plateau above the Amazon rain forest—the locals called it a
tepui
, the weathered remains of a sandstone table land that had once stretched across the northern reaches of the entire continent—the sky was not merely a dome but an all-encompassing sphere, with planets and stars and galaxies scattered like gold dust on black velvet.

I never knew there were so many of them
, Gallo thought.

They were not the stars she knew, at least not all of them, and yet they might very well have been the stars glimpsed by the ancient Greeks. Her enjoyment of this rare sight was dampened by the circumstances that had brought her here.

She had awakened on a plane already bound for Brazil, after having been sedated and blindfolded to preserve the secret location of Cerberus’s headquarters. Judging by the length of time they had spent in the air, she guessed it was somewhere in Europe, but there was no way to know for certain. Even Kenner was not privy to that information.

Now that she had given Kenner an exact destination, Gallo was uncertain about what he expected from her. She had been bundled onto the helicopter for the long flight to the tepui, but now that they were at the site, no one was paying attention to her. While the helicopter crew off-loaded supplies—food, gear, drums of fuel—Kenner, Rohn and the half-dozen Cerberus goons that were accompanying them had immediately gone to work rigging ropes for their descent into an enormous sinkhole, nearly two miles across, that corresponded with the coordinates Fiona had identified on the ancient map.

The sinkholes were a common feature of the tepuis, and some of the largest contained unique biospheres, with flora and fauna living and evolving in complete isolation for untold millennia. Because the tepuis were so remote, most of these unique biospheres remained pristine, untouched by all but a few bold explorers. There was no better place in the world to hide an Amazon city, and getting to it, or at least to the place where it had once stood, would require a rappel down several hundred feet of sheer cliff. Going in would be the easy part, since gravity would do all the work. Getting back out would require climbing those same ropes. There would be some risk involved, and while Gallo was undaunted by the physical challenge, she saw the impending descent as an opportunity to stand her ground.

She found Kenner at the edge of the sinkhole, peering down into the yawning void while the rest of the Cerberus team rigged the rappelling ropes under the glare of generator-powered work lights. His back was turned, and he was close enough to the brink that one good shove would have sent him over, but Gallo dismissed the idea as soon as it formed. It wasn’t the thought of taking a life or the psychological toll that action would have exacted that stopped her though. Killing Kenner simply wouldn’t help her situation one bit. Instead, it would make things worse, for her and for Fiona. But if he wanted her continued cooperation, Kenner was going to have to give her something in return.

“Wouldn’t it be wiser to wait for daylight?” she called out.

Kenner, smiling broadly, turned to face her. “I’m sure it would, but as they say, every second counts. Besides, the sun only reaches the bottom of this shaft for a few hours at midday. We’re going to need daylight to search for the Amazon city. That means we climb through the night.”

Gallo bit her lip and took a deep breath to gather her courage. “You need to let Fiona go.”

Kenner’s smile fell. “Augustina…”

“I won’t take another step, and I most certainly will not climb down into that hole, until I know she’s safe. Now, I suppose you could tie me up and lower me kicking and screaming. That’s up to you. But I will not help you unless you do this for me.”

He shook his head sadly. “If it were up to me, I would have already let her go. But it’s not. Mr. Tyndareus is running this show.”

“Then tell him—”

Kenner raised a hand to silence her. The gesture was so abrupt, and so out of character for him, that Gallo flinched. After a moment of tense silence, he spoke again in a low voice that was not completely unsympathetic. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Augustina, but the girl is probably already dead.”

Gallo felt the blood leave her face. A rushing sound filled her ears and she staggered back a step.

Kenner continued. “You must know that Mr. Tyndareus intended to kill you both as soon as you had told him what he needed to know. It’s nothing short of miraculous that I was able to convince him to spare you.”

Some primitive part of Gallo’s brain took control of her body. She launched herself at Kenner, arms extended to shove him off the precipice or perhaps carry him along in a suicidal plunge. Neither actually happened. Instead, he side-stepped, as if anticipating this reaction, and he swept her into a bear hug from behind, pinning her arms to her sides and lifting her off the ground. She squirmed, trying to wrench free. She kicked back at his shins, but he did not relent.

His voice hissed in her ear. “Your mistake was thinking that you still had anything left to bargain with. I don’t need your help anymore. I’m keeping you alive as a favor. Old times sake. You really ought to get down on your knees and thank me.”

He took her wrist in his hand and tugged up her sleeve, revealing the Herculean tattoo. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed this. Your allegiance is...regrettable. I might be able to overlook it, but others might not be so willing. Now, if you want to run, be my guest.” He twisted around, away from the edge, and then set her down, expelling her from his embrace with a shove that sent her lurching forward.

“I won’t stop you,” he continued, once more affecting a tone of commiseration. “Of course, there’s really nowhere to go. And I can’t promise that Vigor won’t hunt you down for sport. That’s rather his style, you know.”

Gallo propped herself up on hands and knees. The reptile brain was still in control, weighing the primal options: fight or flight? Both were equally futile, but the third choice—surrender—never entered into the equation. If Fiona was truly dead, then no matter what Kenner promised, that would be her fate as well.

As much as she wanted to tear the bastard’s face off, she did not want to meet her end on his terms.

Instead, she ran.

Kenner let out a dismayed shout, surprised that she had chosen to brave the treacherous landscape in the dark, but Gallo did not slow.

Although she had stood in the glow of the electrical lights for only a few minutes, her night vision was badly compromised. In her peripheral vision, she could see the distant horizon’s faint outline silhouetted against the starry sky, but the ground right in front of her was uniformly black. Millions of years of wind and weather had sculpted the summit into a bizarre landscape, with natural pillars and arches that looked like melting wax. There were craters and pools of rainwater that were incredibly pure and deceptively deep. It was a deadly obstacle course, made all the more perilous by the scrubby vegetation that clung to every crevice. Gallo stumbled and crashed through the maze, ignoring the branches and rocky protrusions that caught and tore at both the fabric of her jeans and at her skin.

A root snagged one foot, and she went sprawling again, smashing into a tangle of thin branches that scratched her face and snagged her hair. In the stunned instant that followed, she heard more shouts and the sound of footsteps, and she realized that Kenner did not intend to let her run away after all. Despite everything else, she felt a rush of satisfaction at having disappointed him, spoiling his twisted fantasy of her groveling. She knew it would be a short-lived satisfaction if she did not get moving again, so she scrambled up, half-crawling for the first few steps, and then she resumed running blindly.

With the exception of the two crewmen unloading the helicopter, all of the Cerberus men were on the ropes already, too far away to help Kenner run her down. But he had been right about the lack of escape routes. The tepui rose from the surrounding landscape like a five-hundred-foot-tall pillar. A world class rock climber might have been able to scale the nearly sheer vertical cliffs, but climbing down them, in the dark, without any kind of ropes or equipment, was unthinkable, and that was if she was able to find the cliff without falling over.

If Kenner goes, too, it might be worth it
.

The thought was yanked from her head when Kenner’s outstretched hand caught hold of her long black hair. Her feet flew out from under her, but this time she did not fall. Instead, she was pulled back, enfolded once more in his embrace.

“Bitch! I’m trying to—”

There was a loud thump and then another, as Gallo felt something smack the back of her head. Her vision flashed blue for a moment, but in that instant, Kenner’s arms fell away, and she was free again. She stumbled forward and would have done another face-plant, but a firm grip closed on her wrist, steadying her. A familiar voice reached out from the darkness. “Come with me.”

Gallo’s thoughts were still fuzzy from being struck in the head, but there was no mistaking the clipped manner of speech and the distinctive Portuguese-flavored Brazilian accent. “Cintia?”

“Hurry,” Dourado urged, offering no explanation, but tugging her along.

The woman’s appearance, here at one of the remotest places on Earth, was about as unlikely as divine intervention, and it triggered an explosion of questions that threatened to trip Gallo up like the roots hidden in the darkness. Even with Kenner on her heels, she felt paralyzed by the impossibility of Dourado’s intervention.

Only Kenner wasn’t chasing her anymore. In the dim starlight, Gallo could make out the silhouette of her savior. Dourado was holding something, a club or a tree limb. That answered one question at least. She had struck Kenner from behind, and Kenner’s cranium had cue-balled into hers.

The realization that Dourado had bought them a narrow window of escape helped her put aside the more difficult questions. She followed blindly, trusting that Dourado’s night vision had to be better than her own. But there was one question that demanded an answer. “Where are we going?”

“We have to hide.”

“Hide?” Gallo said, incredulous. “That’s your plan?”

“No, I—”

Dourado’s answer was cut off by the harsh report of a pistol. Gallo felt something sizzle past her head, and then the world in front of her was revealed in the harsh brilliance of a high-intensity spotlight.

“The next one will not be a warning.” It was Rohn. He did not shout, but somehow his low gravelly voice seemed as loud as the gunshot.

33

A blast of frigid air swirled through the hold of the aged Lockheed L100 as the cargo ramp began lowering. Cabin pressure had already been equalized to match the conditions outside, so there was no sudden suction. Still, Pierce held on tight to a hanging cargo strap as the tail end of the aircraft opened up, revealing the black emptiness of the sky above the Amazon rain forest.

Earlier, when Lazarus had suggested the plan, Pierce had been able to depersonalize the risk, put aside his fear. Lazarus had done this dozens of times. He knew what he was doing, and Pierce knew it was the best chance they had of finding Gallo and Dourado. But now, literally standing on the brink of executing that plan, he was having second thoughts. He took several deep breaths, filling his lungs and saturating his blood with pure oxygen from the mountaineering-style respirator.
Don’t think about it
, he told himself.

Lazarus lowered his ATN PVS-7 night vision goggles—‘NODs,’ short for ‘night optical devices’—into place and tapped them with a fingertip, signaling Pierce and Carter to do the same. Pierce switched his on, and the dark interior of the plane was revealed in startling clarity, albeit bathed in a creepy green glow. With their goggles, respirators and bulky thermal suits, Carter and Lazarus looked like alien hunters from a science fiction movie. The guns and knives strapped and holstered to their bodies intensified the effect.

Lazarus had made all the arrangements while they were still over the Atlantic. His past experience as a Special Forces soldier had left him with a long list of contacts who could provide anything he needed on short notice, and a knowledge of how to procure those items without arousing the interest of the local authorities.

Pierce was astonished, and more than a little dismayed, by the realization that there were people out there, in every city he supposed, standing ready to provide specialized military hardware at a moment’s notice. He was having difficulty believing that it was really possible for an ordinary person who knew the right people to simply make a phone call and outfit an army. Then Lazarus told him how much it would all cost. The final bill made the money Pierce had spent on the genetic sequencing equipment for Carter seem like a petty cash expenditure by comparison.

“When I told you money was no object,” he had confessed to Lazarus, “I didn’t realize how much money that would mean. I mean, I’ll pay it, but…wow.”

“It’s only money,” Lazarus said. “People are going to die tonight. With a little luck it will be them, not us. This equipment might mean the difference between life and death, but no amount of money is going to make it easier to pull the trigger when the time comes.”

“Helluva pep talk,” Pierce said, but he knew the big man was right. He had faced death before, but he had never been confronted with the prospect of having to take a life.

“Don’t personalize the enemy,” Lazarus went on. “Think of it like a game. Like one of those video games Fiona was always playing...” He trailed off, the memory evidently more painful than expected.

Pierce knew exactly what Lazarus meant. He had watched Fiona and some of Lazarus’s former teammates spend endless hours fighting aliens and enemies—and sometimes each other—in Xbox games.
Treat it like a game, treat the Cerberus men like video game villains. Don’t get psyched out
.

“We’ll jump from twenty-thousand feet,” Lazarus said. “We’ll be using static-line deployed ram-air canopies. That means they’ll open as soon as you jump. No free fall, no counting to fifty. The chutes will function like glider wings. The control toggles are intuitive. Pull left to go left, right to go right. Just before touchdown, pull both hard to flare…brake. I’ll talk you through all that on the way down.

“Hook in,” Lazarus directed. Despite the wind rushing through the cabin and the throaty roar of the engines, Pierce heard him clearly, courtesy of the earbud connected to a digitally encrypted walkie-talkie clipped to the combat vest under his coveralls.

Carter snapped a D-ring, connected to the ripcord on her parachute pack, to the cable that ran the length of their chartered plane. Lazarus checked the connection and then moved to do the same for Pierce.

Pierce hooked in, then gave the carabiner a tug. Lazarus checked the D-ring and gave Pierce a thumbs-up before hooking his own chute to the line.

The pilot’s voice came over their comm system. “Forty miles out.”

“Roger,” Lazarus replied. He turned to Pierce and Carter. “Ready?”

Pierce nodded. Despite the fact that he was about to jump out of a plane for the first time in his life, nothing short of a missile would keep him from helping the people he loved.

They would be leaving the aircraft thirty miles out, distant enough that the Cerberus men would not hear the sound of the plane’s engines, much less suspect that an incursion was underway, but close enough for them to glide to the objective. With their ram-air chutes and about four miles of air between them and the ground, there would be plenty of time to find a good landing spot.

Lazarus had acquired Landsat imagery of the target zone, a high plateau in the Roraima region, surrounding what appeared to be a deep sinkhole. The imagery revealed nothing about what lay at the bottom of that chasm, but Pierce felt certain it was Kenner’s true objective, which presented yet another challenge. The Cerberus force had already been in place for several hours, which meant that they were probably already inside the sinkhole. The only way to get ahead of them was to bypass the summit and drop directly into the unknown abyss. While that course was fraught with risk, the biggest concern was getting back out again.

That, Pierce decided, was something to worry about once Gallo and Dourado were safe.

At their current speed, he guessed it would take less than three minutes to cover the ten miles to the drop zone. It turned out to be the shortest three minutes of his life. After what seemed like only a few seconds, the pilot began counting down. When he got to zero, Lazarus shouted, “Go!”

Carter immediately trundled to the edge of the cargo ramp and stepped out into the void.

Pierce felt fear tugging at him, but squelched it down and followed Carter, leaping into the abyss. He expected the fear to surge as the fall began, but instead he felt something unexpected. Exhilaration.

His parachute harness went rigid—painfully so—as the chute deployed above his head.

The initial discomfort passed after a moment, as his body began to compensate for the abrupt change in inertia. He experienced yet another wave of excitement and euphoria, as he processed the new sensation. He was still falling, but he could feel the resistance from the chute, holding him back.

He saw the control lines hanging down in front of him and took hold, one in each hand. Off to his left, he saw Carter and Lazarus, both of them angling back and forth across the sky like skiers slaloming down a black-diamond slope.

Pierce tugged the controls, getting a feel for the system. When he pulled, he could feel increased resistance on the respective sides of the chute, comparable to dragging an oar in the water while rowing a canoe. Once he figured out the right amount of pressure to exert, he lined up behind the others and let gravity and aerodynamics do most of the work.

Further out, the dark silhouette of their destination rose above the forest, and gleaming at its tip, like an enchanted emerald, was a dot of artificial light marking the presence of humans atop the remote tepui.

The light of the Cerberus camp drew them onward, like a beacon. When they got closer, Pierce could see the bulky outline of a helicopter. A few seconds later, they passed over the parked aircraft, still several hundred feet from touchdown, but there was no sign of human activity around it or anywhere else on the mountaintop.

“I see them,” Lazarus said. “They’re rappelling down into the sinkhole.”

Pierce craned his head around and spotted the network of ropes that extended from the top of the tepui, down into the chasm where they were lost from view. Tiny shapes moved down the ropes, like spiders on a web.

“I count nine,” Lazarus said. “No way to know if any of them are friendly.”

Pierce strained to see if he could pick out Gallo, but they were still too far away. “Will they see us? Or hear us?”

“They’re using flashlights, so they won’t be able to see much of anything.” Lazarus was silent for a moment, then added. “Stay ready though, just in case.”

Pierce let a hand fall to the Heckler & Koch MP5K that hung from a sling across his chest. Pierce had never fired this particular weapon before, but Lazarus had assured him that it was as simple as point-and-shoot. It was even equipped with an infrared laser sight that would show him, with a fairly high degree of certainty, where the bullet would go.

Killing someone has never been so easy
, he thought darkly. But the men they were going up against weren’t innocents. Kenner and Rohn had already tried to kill him once, and they had kidnapped Gallo and Fiona. He intended to remember that when the time came to pull the trigger.

“Let’s take it in,” Lazarus said. “I’ll go first. Corkscrew down and watch for a safe drop zone.”

Pierce held back until both Carter and Lazarus were at least a hundred feet below him before pulling on his right-hand toggle to begin a clockwise spiraling descent into the sinkhole. When Lazarus had told him they would be parachuting into a sinkhole, Pierce had imagined something like diving into a swimming pool from four miles up. It was only now, as he turned lazy circles in the sky above the tepui, that he understood just how big the sinkhole was. It would be more like diving into the East River.

He could not distinguish the ground. Although the walls positively radiated infrared light, the bottom of the sinkhole—which was rushing up—looked like a Jackson Pollock painting in hues of green and black. There was no way to know what awaited them down there.

As the remaining distance closed to almost nothing, he was able to make out the landscape in relief. There were irregular patches that might have been vegetation or uneven terrain, perhaps even trees, and in-between them an unnaturally smooth black surface. He steered toward the latter, realizing too late that it was not flat ground at all, but water.

Almost directly below, Lazarus’s chute seemed to curl in on itself as he pulled his control toggles hard. Then, the canopy settled gently into an amorphous heap, marking the spot where the big man had touched down. Carter flared her chute a moment later, and landed about thirty yards from Lazarus. Pierce guessed he had about ten seconds to do the same.

He hauled down on the toggles a couple of seconds later and his descent came to what felt like a screeching halt. Then he dropped another fifteen feet into chilly, waist-deep water. The thick muck that rose halfway to his knees absorbed most of the impact of landing, but it also wrapped around his legs. He wobbled for a moment and then heaved himself out of the mud and onto the shore. He quickly removed his respirator, unbuckled his harness, reeled in the water-logged parachute, bundled it up and shoved it beneath some tall ferns.

He crouched next to Lazarus beside a stand of trees that stood up out of the water on thick conical trunks with partially exposed roots. Pierce thought they might be cypress trees, which were found in wetlands along the Eastern seaboard of the United States.

Lazarus clapped him on the shoulder. “Not bad for an archeologist. I can see why Jack picked you.”

“Maybe I missed my calling as a Special Forces operator,” Pierce said, managing to get a smile out of the big man.

Carter clung to the stringy bark of one of the boughs, evidently trying to stay out of the water. Pierce wondered why for a moment, then remembered that Brazil was the land of piranhas and anacondas. He decided that maybe she had the right idea, and scrambled onto the nearest exposed root.

The trees obscured their view of the sandstone walls, but even through the forest canopy, Pierce could see the glow of the Cerberus group’s flashlights, amplified by the night vision goggles, a stark contrast to the near total darkness at the bottom of the pit.

He watched the lights for a few moments then turned to Lazarus and Carter. “They’ll be down soon. We need to get moving.”

Then the distinctive crack of a gunshot echoed across the treetops.