Hot Intent (Hqn) (14 page)

The electronic sensor he’d gotten in return was of Russian make. It took him a minute to decipher the various buttons and the readout, but once he understood it, he started down the hill with the device activated.

As they neared the factory, the sensor indicated trace amounts of ammonia in the air, but not in enough quantity to pose any kind of threat. The high hurricane fence around the plant had turned out not to be so hurricane-proof, and its tangled ruins were easy to step through.

Deep silence enveloped the facility. Up close, more damage was apparent and they were able to duck into the main building through a ten-foot-tall hole in a wall. Some sort of bottling-and-labeling assembly line was trashed inside. It looked like the hull of a giant centipede.

“Sheesh, this place is creepy. I half expect a zombie to pop out of the shadows,” Katie muttered.

He was too busy watching for possible threats to register such things. Something skittered in a corner, and he nearly shot a rat. He was grateful to see the rodent. It was tantamount to a canary in a mineshaft. The rat’s presence meant the air was probably safe to breathe throughout the factory.

What intrigued him most was how abandoned this place looked. Had the hurricane done all this damage? Or had the factory been decaying for a while before Giselle hit?

“This is the place with the dock, right?” he asked over his shoulder.

“That’s what our driver said. He said ships come in here regularly.”

Alex made his way to the ocean side of the building, and he and Katie shoved opened a big sliding door facing this supposed dock. Unlike the decrepit facility behind them, this area looked relatively well cared for. The damage from the hurricane was severe, but there was very little rust or corrosion, and the mangled equipment looked reasonably modern and maintained.

A paved road and a torn-up rail line must have been the main points of debarkation for cargo. One of each curved into the cluster of buildings behind them. But a second, smaller road seemed to pass beyond the fenced Zacara buildings. Frowning, he started to walk down it.

“Should we go ninja and be more sneaky now?” Katie breathed.

“Anyone else in the area won’t expect us to be here. They won’t try to mask the noise of their presence.”

“So we’re just going to march down that road into the unknown?”

“Pretty much.” Funny how he wasn’t worried about what would come around the corner. He’d been trained to handle just about any eventuality on the fly.

The chemical sensor beeped a general warning, and he stopped to run a specific analysis. The electronic face identified the airborne chemical it sensed as “Unknown.” The parts per million displayed on the gauge were still very low, though, so he continued walking forward.

“Should we have gas masks or something?” Katie asked nervously.

“If the levels of unidentified gasses climb too much, we’ll go back. Wind’s at our backs, though, so we should be okay to proceed.” In fact, a stiff breeze was picking up, blowing in to shore. Given the time of day, there must be a front of some kind moving into the area. Rain was a pain in the ass, but it did make stealthy movement easy. Not to mention it tended to keep possible pursuers indoors.

He spied a dark lump on the side of the road ahead. Intuition and many hours in emergency rooms made him murmur to Katie, “Wait here.”

He moved ahead and knelt beside the dead soldier. The body looked like it had been here a few days. It was bloated and flies crawled on the exposed skin. But the signs of how this man died were still visible. Dried blood stained the corner of his mouth and had run from his nose, and the soldier’s hands clutched at his own throat as if he’d choked in some way.

Alex photographed the soldier dispassionately with his cell phone before pulling out a scalpel and removing tissue samples from the inside of the man’s nasal cavity, his lungs and his stomach lining. He finished by scraping dirt stained dark with blood from under the corpse into a plastic bag.

He waved Katie forward. As she drew near, averting her face, he moved on down the road with her. And he paid very close attention to the face of the gauge in his hand. The road led inland a few hundred yards uphill into thick undergrowth. It stopped in front of a low mound of weeds.

“This is it?” Katie asked, looking around in confusion.

“Bunker,” he muttered, walking around to the side of the mound. Sure enough, a heavy-duty steel door was recessed into the side of the hill.

“Is this where they store the explosive furniture polish?” she asked dryly.

He smiled slightly. His gauge beeped, urgently this time. “I think we may have found the source of our chemical leak.”

“And we would be leaving now, right?” Katie said, backing up already.

“Wind’s blowing steadily. As long as we stay upwind of this place, we should be okay.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“How are you at holding your breath?” he asked, studying the steel door, which, at a closer look, appeared heavily damaged.

“Not bad. I can go around two minutes.”

“I can do three. I’ll go in,” he announced. He started stripping off his clothes in a pile beside her.

“As much as I love sex with you, now’s not exactly the time—”

He cut her off. “I don’t want my clothes getting contaminated.”

She threw him an alarmed look.

“Count two minutes in your head and then yell out,” he directed her. “If I’m not out in four minutes, hold your breath, and come drag me out.”

“Are you sure we should be doing this? It seems really dangerous.”

“That would be the point, now, wouldn’t it?” he commented as he moved forward, eyeing the door.

It looked like some sort of mudslide had come through this steep area, for the door was badly dented like boulders had slammed into it. If the mudslide had happened early in the hurricane, the later rain could have washed the evidence of it away. A big, horizontal bar that looked like part of the locking mechanism was twisted and broken. It was this he focused his attention on. He took one last deep breath and moved forward to try lifting it. It moved a little but was too heavy for him.

He backed up to her side. “I need your help, Katie.”

She took a deep breath and moved forward with him. By both of them planting their shoulders under the bar and lifting with their legs, they were able to prize the bar free of a broken bracket. It thudded onto the dirt at their feet. The door behind them gapped open a little. A black abyss yawned beyond.

They both backed up and breathed again.

Alex grabbed handfuls of plastic bags and test tubes, nodded at her to begin counting and moved forward gingerly.

Katie positioned herself outside so she could point their flashlight—a high-powered, directed beam affair—into the darkness. It was enough for him to see stacks of barrels mostly filling the space. Labels in Arabic script, which he couldn’t read, were visible. Next trip in here, he’d bring his phone and take pictures of those.

Careful to avoid any puddles at the bases of the barrels, he took air samples near the barrels with his plastic bags and sealed them. Katie called a two-minute warning, and he filled a couple of test tubes from the puddles on the floor before he started to see spots before his eyes. He backed out carefully and when well clear and facing into the wind, took a bunch of deep breaths.

He passed Katie the test tubes and bags. “Cover these completely with duct tape, and label them with the time, date and GPS location.”

She worked on that while he pulled out his cell phone and got ready to go in again. Three more times he went inside the bunker to pull samples. The last time, he actually pried barrels open and very carefully dipped samples of the liquid contents. Modern chemical poisons were generally most lethal in an aerosolized form and inhaled. Blistering agents that relied on skin contact were harder to disseminate and less effective on a large scale, hence had gone out of fashion.

The rational part of his brain informed him in no uncertain terms that taking these samples was madness. But it was also his job. Better that he risk his life and potentially save thousands of other people from harm or death, right?

But at the cost of Katie’s and Dawn’s lives? He should get the hell out of here, pretend they’d never found the bunker and get on with his life like his father had told him to. He didn’t for a minute doubt that Peter would follow through on his veiled threat to kill Katie and Dawn if proof of the existence of this bunker’s contents got out.

But the United States really did need to know these chemicals were here. No way would America tolerate chemical weapons in the control of a hostile foreign government so close to its own soil. God knew, there were enough chemicals in this bunker to wipe out several major metropolitan areas in their entirety.

He was deeply undecided as to how to proceed. For now, he would collect the damned samples. There was still time to destroy the evidence. If there was a way to both give the United States the evidence and to protect his family, he had yet to figure it out. He’d threaded some tricky needles in his day, but this might be the one that was too much for him.

He passed the last test tubes to Katie to seal up and label with an admonition to be careful with these ones.

When she finished, he said, “If you could pick up my clothes, I’m heading back to the beach for a bath.”

“You do realize how silly you look prancing around out here buck naked, yes?”

He made a face at her. “That’s me. The stark-naked spy.”

She laughed and followed him down the road. He picked his way down the rocks to the water, which was brutally cold. He hoped the salt water would help neutralize any chemical residue on his skin. Katie tossed him their bar of soap, and he scrubbed his skin until he felt raw all over. After washing his hair and rinsing it out with salt water, he climbed out of the water shivering. He was just making his way up the jumble of man-size boulders when a man-made sound rose over the surf. He swore under his breath as he leaped from rock to rock.

“Run,” he ordered Katie low and urgent. “Into the brush. Hide.” Crap. He’d been afraid there might be some sort of alarm system in or around the bunker. He’d hoped the storm had disabled it, but apparently not. If nothing else, someone might have been watching the bunker from a satellite.

Katie dived across the road and into the scrub with him hard on her heels. A pickup truck with two soldiers in the cab and three heavily armed men in the back rumbled past.

And they didn’t look like just any soldiers. These men were big, physical and carrying their weapons—AK-47s—like extensions of their arms. If they weren’t special forces, he was losing his mind.

As soon as the truck rounded the bend, he turned to Katie and breathed, “When they see the bunker’s been broken into, all hell’s going to break loose. We need to make our way back to the moped and head south.”

“To Baracoa?” she whispered.

“No! To Guantánamo. We’re going to need help to get off this island, now.”

“But Gitmo’s on the south side of the island.”

“It’s under a hundred miles from here. If we can make it onto the base, it’s U.S. territory. We’ll be safe. If we get separated, head there on your own.” He pressed the second pistol into her hand and passed her the bag of taped samples. Still naked, he shouldered the pack. “Let’s go.”

“You’re going to get all scratched up,” she protested.

He started moving, murmuring over his shoulder, “That’s the least of our problems right now.”

Sure enough, about three minutes into their egress, shouting became audible behind them. In another five minutes, the sound of several more trucks floated to them on the cool evening air.

He’d set a course due south over whatever terrain that offered. He modified their travel to avoid open pastures and bare mountaintops, but that was it. The moped lay to the south, and they needed a motorized escape if they were going to make it seventy or eighty miles overland across the interior of Cuba.

If he was getting scratched up by the branches and brambles, he didn’t allow himself to notice it. He was too busy pushing Katie to her limits without actually killing her. It was a fine line to walk.

After maybe an hour of hard going, he paused under a giant fern and dug a bottle of water out of his pack. She drank while he, at long last, dressed. He noted vaguely that he was covered in bug bites and thin lines of blood from various scratches and small contusions. If he got out of this night without a serious infection he was going to be impressed.

He tossed down a bottle of water and a couple stim pills left over from his training. He passed Katie one of the pills as well, and she swallowed it dry.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

She nodded gamely and they rose slowly to their feet in time to hear a thwocking sound in the distance.

“Helicopter,” she bit out.

He swore under his breath. If that bird had heat-seeking technology on board, they were screwed. “Find water,” he ordered. “A stream or puddle. Anything.”

He moved out from under the big fern and she went the other direction.

“Over here,” she called out low.

A small rivulet, maybe two feet wide and no more than a foot deep, trickled past her. He raced down the hill, following the trickle as the helicopter got louder, fast. She crashed along behind him, panting.

“What are we doing, Alex?”

“Hurry.” There. Below them. The trickle widened into a shallow, oblong pool. It was maybe six feet wide and twice that long, where the trickle backed up behind a cluster of small boulders that formed a natural dam.

“Into the water,” he bit out.

She reached for her shirt buttons and he grabbed her hands to stop her. “Now. Just get in.”

Eyes wide, she followed him as he waded into the pool and sat down in it. “Omigod, it’s freezing,” she squeaked under her breath.

“When I tell you, take a deep breath and lay down. All the way under the water. The pool will camouflage our heat signatures. And keep your eyes closed. There could be nasty microbes in here.” She had precious little time to process that explanation, for the helicopter topped the ridge behind them just then. “Now.”