BLOOD GURKHA: Prophesy (James Pace novels Book 5) (10 page)

As he bent forward to activate the computer touchscreen, built into the desktop, he paused. Suddenly overcome with a wave of fatigue that washed over him with a strength that warned him against bothering to do any more work, Kwon listened to his body and headed across to his large, king-sized bed. Flopping down on his back, he closed his eyes, convincing himself that he would just have a few minutes rest. Sleep had other ideas and he was soon wrestling with dark entities; fighting for his life in the depths of the underworld.

It was a recurring nightmare that he'd experienced for over a decade and one, his own spirit told him, was a portent of his future. Kwon was engaged in very dangerous work, with an uncertain outcome. The only certainty at all was that many thousands of people, maybe even millions, would soon perish.

11

James Pace and Max Hammond were genuinely flummoxed. Their intelligence had indicated the ARC site in Uruguay was now under heavy military guard and remained in active use, despite the calamitous downfall of the company and its elusive leader.

Moving up the beach, they had traversed, crab-like; low and slow, taking every precaution against detection. There had been no lights showing but they'd already surmised that the majority of the action would be taking place underground, if this site was anything like the two previously discovered in Namibia and Antarctica.

After twenty minutes moving stealthily around the surface buildings, clad like an SAS hit team, the two friends had found nothing at all. The windows of the warehouses and a couple of brick sheds were not blacked out; they were simply empty. Nothing remained inside any of them, not even an abandoned crate or a dirty rag. Cleared out and with concrete floors swept clean, their silence mocked the intruders.

Not willing to throw caution to the wind yet, Pace and Hammond searched around for any sign of an access point underground. Eventually, after ten further minutes of scanning and pacing, Hammond spotted a small door set into the base of the cliff, just where it curved behind the largest warehouse. Unimpressive; built from heavily weathered oak, no crack of light or any sound leaked out from its ill-fitting edges.

'This is too damned quiet,' muttered Pace warily. Hammond nodded silent agreement in the darkness. 'Either they're damned good at camouflage or they've shipped out somewhere else already.'

'I can't hear anything,' said Hammond, 'but that doesn't mean there isn't a heavily armed welcome party waiting for us on the other side of that door.'

Pace regarded the door and realised they weren't going to find anything out standing around outside. Reaching a hand out to a small, circular doorknob, he turned it and pushed firmly. The handle was well maintained and heavily oiled, turning smoothly in his grip. The door swung inwards on silent hinges.

The passageway beyond also lay in total darkness.

'Age before beauty,' Hammond chuckled quietly. 'Don't forget, if that old antique gun of yours jams, just hit the deck and I will save the day with some good, old-fashioned Russian reliability.' In referring to the well-worn AK-47 in his hands, he was accurate. The iconic weapon had proven itself to be one of the most reliable firearms ever to grace a battlefield.

'You just don't like going first,' Pace shot back with a grin. 'Come on, let's see what's waiting for us.'

Moving cautiously, crouching low, he stepped inside purposefully. Although still hopeful that Josephine Roche might be hiding somewhere underground so that he could rid the world of her once and for all, the sheer silence everywhere suggested the two of them might be on a wild goose chase.

An hour later, exasperated, hot and thirsty, Pace and Hammond were sitting at an empty plastic table, in an abandoned mess hall, cursing their bad luck. Relying only on their torches to light the way, the third in the series of WWI British science bases turned out to be laid out very much like the one in Antarctica. Several large rooms had once housed scientific equipment, men and food stores. A single, hand-hewn passageway descended from the main floor, emerging into a huge underground cavern, complete with a rotting wooden pier that stretched out into the deep-water lapping at the stone ledge that passed for the lowest step. Here, many years before, the ill-fated British naval submarine, codename
K-19
, had been a regular visitor. If it was anything like Antarctica, Pace thought, U-Boats would also have been seen tied to the pier after the British team had been massacred.

The cavern, though impressive and with a vaulted ceiling reaching up impressively above their heads for over one hundred feet; was as empty as the rooms above and the buildings above them. Clearly, nobody was home.

'So, where have they all gone? And why didn't our people know they'd already left?' Hammond was thinking aloud, rocking on an orange, plastic chair that had clearly been used fairly recently, like a bored child trying to survive a dull grammar lesson. 'The McEntire Corporation has its finger on every pulse. I've never known them to be wrong about crucial intelligence before.' In the flickering light thrown out by both of their torches, the shadows of his puzzled expression were plain for Pace to see.

'They didn't get it wrong,' said Pace, suddenly releasing a pent up breath, carried on a bitter laugh. 'They knew exactly what we'd find before we even stepped on the bloody plane.' Of course, it was Baker's way of letting him blow off some steam without putting either of them in any real danger.'

'Baker? Really?'

'It's his job to protect the Corporation, and its people, while Doyle is incapacitated,' explained Pace ruefully. Why hadn't he seen it? Damn. 'Not only did it give us something to do, it got us away from London for a bit.'

'Time he needed to track down the real location of Josephine?' wondered Hammond.

'I'm betting so,' replied Pace. 'I understand but I don't like being played. I need to find her. Sarah might be dying and her father definitely has more chance of checking out than recovering. I need to know why.'

'Revenge,' said Hammond. 'You know why she targeted Sarah. To hurt you. Come on, James. The work we did, and you especially, brought down her entire shady company. The few legitimate directors threw her out of the business she inherited from her uncle. Our team destroyed her life and killed some of her key people. It's only natural she'd want to hit back at us; at you.'

'I don't buy it,' argued Pace. The whole idea had seemed absurd. It was true that Josephine Roche was a sadistic murderer, who had zero scruples, but she was on the ropes and setting up a hit against Doyle McEntire's daughter would have taken some doing. 'It was too risky to be a knee-jerk decision. There has to be something more going on.'

'Maybe,' Hammond conceded, pausing to balance expertly on the two back legs of his chair momentarily. 'If you're right, and I'm not saying you are,' he added hastily, 'then what reason could she have?'

'There is only one,' Pace decided, his voice suddenly edged with clarity.

'Care to enlighten me?'

'She needs to keep the McEntire Corporation's attention focused elsewhere for a while. What better method than assassinating the boss's daughter? She couldn't have known that Doyle himself would then keel over with a coronary. His death, if it happens, will just be a bonus for her.'

Hammond had lived and breathed espionage and the dangerous life of a covert McEntire operative for over a decade. Comparatively, James Pace was a novice but he had performed so well in the Amazon and African operations that Doyle McEntire had welcomed him to the fold with open arms. A skilled military helicopter pilot; kicked out of the RAF after one too many bouts of insubordination, Pace was a shrewd, intelligent man and one Hammond had quickly grown to call a friend. Despite the difference of time served, Hammond trusted his friend's insight, and his courage.

'Let's say you're right. Where does it leave us? We can't access the intelligence here. We have nothing to go on. No leads. This place is cleaner than a nun's habit.'

Pace considered the statement for a moment, casting an eye outside the pool of their own light into the solid wall of blackness around them. The silence remained total. 'There is one way of finding out where they went,' he started slowly. 'It's risky but I'm not sure Baker would give us any information he has at the moment.'

'I'd agree with that. If he's trying to save us from ourselves, anything else we get from him could end up leading us astray all over again. So,' Hammond asked seriously, 'where are you going to magic up the destination information for a group of people that we've never seen, who have vanished at some point but we don't actually know when?'

'The military are still guarding this site, right?'

'According to Baker. That may have been a lie though.'

Pace shook his head. 'No, I don't think so. He would not have bothered allowing us to draw out all the kit if he didn't think we needed it, especially the boat and water-approach equipment.'

'If you remember,' Hammond reminded him swiftly, 'we didn't ask permission to take the stuff, or grab the plane.'

'He would have known what we took and where we were headed. Maybe,' Pace wondered, 'he even counted on it. My guess is that he let us go, knowing we would avoid the Uruguayan military and focus on the old science base. I mean, why would we tangle ourselves up in a firefight for no reason?'

Hammond saw where this was going now. He smiled inwardly. The night was definitely not about to finish early just because the other party guests had not turned up.

'Ah, so we're going to walk up to the first soldier we can find and politely ask him to tell us where everyone has gone? Simple and clean.'

'I thought so,' agreed Pace evenly. 'Although it might mean having to be a little persuasive.'

'Don't forget, the guys guarding this place are unlikely to be standard infantry. The Uruguayan government wants to keep snoopers like us at bay while they sort out the mess of their own part in the ARC nightmare.'

'And try to find any of the remaining gold that rightfully belongs to Her Majesty,' Pace added smugly.

'That goes without saying. If they're lucky enough to turn up some of the gold that we know is still missing, it will help them out enormously.'

'And I wouldn't begrudge them a penny of it either, ' agreed Pace. His voice was softer now. 'You know me well enough by now, Max, to realise that I take no pleasure in hurting people. My plan is to get the information and then get out the same way we came in before anyone notices.'

'What if they don't want to tell us, or maybe they don't even know? What then, James?'

'Then, we go home and take our chances with Baker. Convince him to let us get involved and make sure he tells us the truth this time.'

Hammond knew his companion was correct. It was likely that someone knew something. Either high above them in the clifftop barracks or guarding the head of the single road that wound its way up the steep incline in a series of sharp cuts. They had come too far to slink back into the sea with their tails between their legs. They had to try and get some information.

As it turned out, the local military were no slouches when it came to security. As Hammond had correctly suggested, they were also far from ordinary infantry.

Stepping out of the exterior door, this time with Hammond in the lead, all need for stealth evaporated at the simultaneous clicking of several semi-automatic rifles, sending a shiver of dread coursing through both of the McEntire men.

''Do not move,' came the barked order, in crisp Spanish. 'My men will shoot you if you try.' Then a pause, followed by a nastier addition. 'Please, feel free to try. It is far easier to deal with dead intruders than living ones.'

The door was surrounded by a small group of hard-eyed, professional soldiers. About a dozen men now stood with weapons levelled on Hammond while Pace remained hidden inside the doorway, shielded by his friend's body. Clad in green uniforms, with soft caps and standard-issue military boots, each man also sported a thin grey waterproof poncho, tucked neatly into their gun belt.

Quickly, Pace slipped back inside the passageway, turned on his heels and moved as fast as he could, back the way they'd just come, without making any noise. He could not help Hammond at that moment and neither of them wanted to get into a shooting war with innocent soldiers. This was not their fight after all. When he was twenty metres inside, he dropped to his knees and brought the Sten up to his shoulder, aiming back up towards the door; just in case.

Killing his torch beam served to plunge him into total darkness. The passage had curved slightly so he could not see the doorway directly, not that it mattered. It was dark outside and Hammond was in the doorway anyway. But he could still hear, very faintly, the murmur of the exchanges between Max and whoever had just caught him. Pace assumed that it was most likely to be a patrol of military guards. He was too far now to identify the language being spoken.

'Where's the other one?' asked the same voice; Hammond had not yet zeroed in on who was doing the talking. 'Come out from there. Do it now!' At receiving no response, he repeated his question to Hammond.

'He stayed down in the mess hall,' lied Hammond, replying in perfect Spanish himself; very glad that Pace had been behind him and hoping that he wasn't planning anything foolish. 'I left him setting some charges.'

'Charges?' This time the voice wavered a little. 'How much? How long before they blow?'

'I'm not going to tell you that, sorry. But,' Hammond added with a conspiratorial wink, 'I think we should all move away from this cliff pretty quickly.

Stepping forwards smartly, the owner of the voice turned out to be a small man, in his early thirties. As bald as Hammond, but possessing eyebrows and an untidy sprout of nasal hair unlike his captive, Captain Jorges was in no mood to play games. He had been a soldier for a decade and risen to command a small troop of crack guardsmen in record time. Typically assigned to protection duties and anti-terrorism roles, although nowhere near the skill level of Special Forces operatives, his men were all tough fighters and loyal to a fault. He would not take any unnecessary risks with their lives.