Diablo Mesa(77)

AS NORA SHIELDED herself from the hurricane, she heard commands barked from above. What seemed like a dozen soldiers leapt from the descending choppers. “Hands in sight!” somebody shouted. “Everyone out of the hole!”

“Who the hell are you?” Tappan cried.

There was sudden confusion amid the dust storm. Nora could barely open her eyes to see.

“Out of that hole and back away!” came the command. “Hands in the air—or we shoot!”

“Identify yourselves!” Tappan yelled. This was answered by a burst of automatic fire over their heads.

“You won’t be warned again!”

As Nora and the others scrambled out of the hole, a soldier spun her around and pulled her arms behind her back. She felt zip ties, heard the zing as they were pulled tight—too tight. Meanwhile, six of the soldiers who had leapt from the choppers ran to the two jeeps, started them up, and immediately began heading off into the gloom, three men per jeep.

“Get your hands off me,” Vigil shouted in the confusion.

Nora looked around, half-stunned. The helicopters, rotors still spinning, now had their spotlights on. She recognized them as Black Hawks—no numbers or insignia.

The four of them—Tappan, Vigil, Toth, and herself—were shoved into a line by the soldiers. A man with captain’s bars on his uniform strode out in front.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Vigil shouted, wrenching free of a soldier and advancing on the captain.

“Halt!” the captain said, pulling out his sidearm.

“I did two tours in Afghanistan!” Vigil shouted, taking another step forward. “Don’t you pull a gun on me, you bastard.”

The captain fired two quick shots and Vigil pitched back. Toth, behind him, screamed and fell to her knees, grabbing her leg.

“Son of a bitch!” yelled Tappan. “You just shot Emilio!”

The captain spun around and whipped his gun across Tappan’s face, then stepped back as two soldiers held the entrepreneur while he struggled. Vigil lay on the ground in a soaking pool of blood. Toth sobbed, on her knees, holding her calf, blood flowing through her fingers.

“Get them in the bird,” the captain said, gesturing with his gun. “Now. Next person who talks gets a bullet.”

Nora, numb with shock, was given a hard push toward the closest helicopter, with Tappan following, then Toth, two soldiers supporting her. In a moment they were shoved through the door and yanked over to the webbing frames.

The door slammed shut and the chopper rose into the night. Nora could see, on the dwindling landscape below, soldiers from the second chopper, cautiously approaching the fresh excavation.

She turned to Tappan, sitting next to her, blood streaming from a cut over his eye, and their eyes met. His were full of fury.





52



GREG BANKS STEPPED out of the thirty-foot Airstream “dining car” and looked around, taking in the Quonset huts, helipad, motor pool, and small neighborhood of trailers and motor homes that made up base camp. He refused to call it “home,” even temporarily: the landscape was simply too forbidding, too alien for someone raised in London. And, speaking of bloody aliens, the foul mood he’d been in all day hadn’t lifted. Nor did he much want it to. Bloody Cecilia. Why had she been allowed to go out to the advance site today? It was likely to prove historic, or at least bloody interesting, and he’d had as much right to go as she had. Probably more.

With the sat phones and even the internet down for some reason, he’d had little to do that afternoon. As a result, he’d had all the more time to brood.

He turned his gaze toward the new site. Or at least, in its general direction: everything was cloaked in the starlit mantle of night and there was little to see.

Tappan could be such a cipher. His easygoing manner was at least part fa?ade, concealing the imperiousness Banks assumed was characteristic of all billionaires. Had Tappan been upset because he hadn’t located Bitan? Banks had tried his best—they all had.

He decided it didn’t merit further consideration: he’d never know for sure, and Tappan wouldn’t tell him. One way or the other, the project would be over fairly soon, and then he could—money in his pocket—tell the billionaire to get stuffed.

As he’d relished this delightfully sour fantasy, Banks had stopped paying attention to his surroundings. But now, he realized that lights had appeared on the horizon. He peered at them closely through the dark. Two pairs of what were obviously headlights, bouncing up and down as the vehicles navigated the terrain of the alkali flats.

He glanced at his watch—eight twenty—then turned and hurried back into the dining car. The table was still mostly occupied by the first dinner shift: support staff, guards, flight-line workers. Everyone was taking their time, enjoying coffee and dessert, well aware that the forward team wasn’t yet on the way back. Banks ducked through the door leading to the large, well-equipped galley, where Antonetti, the chef, was juggling four copper saucepans simmering with different ingredients. Despite being a two-star chef, Antonetti had once worked the line on an aircraft carrier, and he hadn’t lost his obsession for running by the clock. If the second dinner shift—the scientists and bigwigs—wasn’t on hand and hungry by eight thirty, he began to get agitated.

“Hey, Tony, it’s cool,” Banks said, using the chef’s nickname. “They’re on their way back—I can see their lights. Twenty minutes.”