Labyrinth (46 page)

What was his plan for escape?

The question hammered at Dogan's mind. He grabbed a set of binoculars from the jeep and scanned the perimeter of the town, moving from hillside to hillside, scanning all levels. He passed the area where the children's shack had been, where the direction of the wind had spared most of the flora from the flames weeks before, and froze on a plateau to the right of and above it.

He pulled his eyes from the lenses and wiped them. He had to be sure they weren't playing tricks on him. He refocused the binoculars, feeling his mouth go dry as the sight was confirmed.

Then he was back on his feet, forgetting about his pain as he searched for the bearded commander of the Rangers. He found him in the area reserved for the infirmary.

“I need four of your best men,” he said.

“Care to tell me why?”

“A hunch.”

The commander, a career combat soldier who had led the first unit into Grenada, had played many himself. He had orders from Washington to cooperate fully with this man, but even without those orders, Dogan's resolve impressed him and he would have done so anyway.

“You've got them. I'll need to know what you'll be doing, though.”

“Hunting,” Dogan replied.

“You're not in the best of condition, my friend.”

“We're not going very far.”

Dogan's battered body made him suffer all the way up the hillside. He was shot so full of painkillers that he could feel his motions were slow. Any fast ones that were required he would leave for the Rangers. Mandala he would leave for himself.

It would have been far simpler to have just told the Ranger commander what he had seen and turned the operation over to him. But Mandala
had
to be his. Otherwise he could take nothing out of all this personally. Too many people had died, too many lives had been ruined or marred. Mandala had to pay. Dogan had to make him pay.

The Novocaine had worn off by the time they reached the plateau and Dogan dry-swallowed two more painkillers. The Rangers' hands were tight on their rifles as the men watched out for a possible ambush. Dogan moved ahead of them.

The plateau looked different up close from what he had seen through the binoculars. He couldn't get his bearings. Might he have imagined the sight that had brought him here in the first place? The fatigue and throbbing pain made him question himself. It could have been an illusion, a trick of weary eyes. He tried to picture the plateau as the binoculars had shown it to him. Perhaps it had been a different one, a little higher up perhaps.

The wind picked up and a sudden brightness forced Dogan to squint. But the sun was behind him. Why, then, the glare? The sun must have bounced off something, something metallic.

Dogan moved slowly forward, the picture from the binoculars all at once clear again. There was a whole nest of thick bushes and branches concentrated right before him. He reached up into it and his hand touched steel. He yanked some of the bushes and vines away, revealing part of a helicopter's propeller—the metal the sun had reflected off and the sight he had glimpsed through the binoculars.

He stripped more of the camouflage away and the helicopter gained shape. It would have been hidden up there for Mandala's escape, weeks ago perhaps.

“Help me with this, will you?” he called back to the Rangers.

They had slung their rifles over their shoulders and started to approach when the rapid series of soft spits cut them down. Dogan was reaching for his machine gun.

“Don't, Grendel. I'll kill you just as I killed them. Turn slowly with your hands in the air and move to the side, out of sight from your friends below.”

Dogan moved as instructed and then faced Mandala. The madman was holding a silenced Uzi aimed straight for his stomach. Ten yards separated them. Dogan flirted briefly with the notion of launching into a quick dive and finding his trigger, but Mandala's advantage was too great to overcome, especially considering his own weakened condition.

“Very good, Grendel,” Mandala said, stepping closer. “Now drop the gun to the ground holding the barrel with both hands.”

His machine pistol clicked against the dirt.

“Now kick it aside.”

Dogan complied.

“Turnaround again, Grendel, and keep your hands in the air.”

Again Dogan did as he was told and felt Mandala creeping up behind him. The madman slammed him in the lower back with his rifle. Dogan went down like a felled tree, pain exploding over his kidneys and intensifying in his already wounded areas. Somehow he ended up on his back. Mandala hovered over him.

“Someone must have seen you from below,” Dogan squeezed through his grimace of pain. “You're finished.”

Mandala kicked him hard in the same side the bullet had grazed an hour before. The agony squeezed his features into a wrinkled mask. He felt sick.

“No, Grendel, it's you who's finished. You're going to die, and I'm going to escape.”

“They'll shoot you down before you get a mile.”

Mandala kicked him again. “Not under the cover of darkness they won't.” He stalked around Dogan, like a hawk ready to strike. “You really think my failure in Keysar Flats would have remained a secret from me? Hah! Calls had to be made from every checkpoint. When they didn't come I altered my strategy a bit.” Mandala's finger thrust viciously toward San Sebastian. “Those jets you destroyed down there would have carried their canisters back to the U.S. with only a few left to unleash here in South America. When I learned of Shang's error in Rome, I feared you'd be coming, prepared for it even, but I still hoped I'd be able to get the jets off before your arrival. If not”—Mandala turned his eyes toward the camouflaged helicopter—“I had another plan arranged. I still have five hundred canisters of the fungus gas well hidden, along with the formula to produce as much more as I want.” Mandala smiled. “And the research done at Sanii was not totally lost. When the time is right I will finish that part of the Committee's plan, but on my own terms, of course.”

Dogan's unfocused eyes caught a shape emerging from the area behind the helicopter. The figure moved lightly forward, a pair of knives gripped in its hands.
Kukhri
knives. It was Nikki! Dogan had to keep Mandala distracted long enough for Nikki to draw close. Tossing the sharply curved blades was too chancy, especially in this wind.

Dogan stared into Mandala's eyes. “You're full of shit,” he managed, the pain racking him with each syllable.

“You will not be around to see yourself proven wrong,” Mandala shot out furiously, “because today I am given the very great pleasure of killing you. If I had more time, I'd make it slow, Grendel, to make up for all the trouble you've caused me.”

Nikki was just ten yards away now.

Dogan shook his head, the motion sending bolts of agony through his body. “You won't make it, Mandala. You're alone, isolated. Kill me; it doesn't matter because there'll be a hundred nations coming after you with everything they've got.”

Just five yards away …

Mandala's eyes flashed eagerly, still locked on Dogan's. “Yes, Grendel, I think I will kill you.” He stepped back and tilted the Uzi's barrel down. “I think that—”

The sound of a branch cracking behind him made Mandala swing fast, Uzi coming up and ready. Nikki was already upon him,
Kukhri
knives slicing into his throat on twin diagonal angles.

Mandala lost the Uzi's trigger, lost everything as he started to crumble, blood pumping from the gashes across his windpipe. Through fading eyes, Dogan watched Nikki pounce on Mandala's writhing frame. The blades plunged into flesh. She withdrew them and plunged them in again. There was little left of Mandala's torso and head when she was finished, trembling as she rose, a look of grim gratification etched upon her features. She let her knives drop over Mandala's mutilated corpse and moved toward Dogan. He watched her lean over him and he tried to ask her how she had escaped from Switzerland. But he could form no words and it didn't matter anyway.

Then Nikki was speaking softly to him but he couldn't hear her and everything hurt too much, so he closed his eyes and let her disappear.

Dogan was conscious of being carried down the hillside on a stretcher, the Ranger commander at his side.

“I guess this finishes it,” the bearded man told him. “You did a helluva number back there on Mandala.”

“Wasn't … me,” Dogan muttered.

The commander turned to a doctor trailing just behind the stretcher holding an IV bottle. “What did he say?”

“Couldn't hear him.”

“The girl,” Dogan rasped, struggling for volume.

“What girl?” the commander asked. “We didn't find any girl.”

Dogan smiled and surrendered to oblivion.

Epilogue

“SORRY I CAN'T OFFER
you anything but orange juice, Mr. Roy.”

“Call me Cal, son. We been through enough together to be on a first-name basis.”

Dogan shifted tentatively in his chair on the patio outside the Bethesda Naval Hospital. His left leg was encased in a cast from the knee down and would be for another two weeks. Across the table Calvin Roy sipped his orange juice out of a paper cup.

“Thanks for stopping by to visit.”

“Least I could do, son. Doctors tell me you'll be up and around in a month tops and I ain't surprised. Back home they say you can kick a bull in the balls but don't expect him to flinch.”

“I guess I can take that as a compliment.”

“I don't pass them out lightly, son.”

Dogan folded his arms across his chest. “Tie up any of the loose ends?”

“Not many we could find. The girl who saved your life has dropped totally out of sight, and we received confirmation from our team in Austria that the body buried three days ago there
was
Audra St. Clair. No games this time. Let's hope Tantalus was buried with her.”

“Five hundred canisters are still out there somewhere,” Dogan said. “But it's my guess only Mandala knew where, and they're probably so well hidden we won't have to worry about anybody turning up with them.”

“That's a comfort.”

“What about the list of Committee members? Any luck finding it?”

Roy shook his head. “None at all, son. It's gotta be on some computer bank, and without the proper access code we can forget about it. That leaves lots of people, thousands even, out there still connected with all this—people in high positions everywhere. As long as they're out there, the Committee's still a threat, the way I see it.”

Dogan shook his head. “I don't think so. They've been cut off from a central command. There's no one left to direct them and without that direction they're helpless. They'll go about their jobs harmlessly until they're replaced or voted out. Audra St. Clair was the key. Without her, the Committee's finished.”

“There's still her daughter running around somewhere.”

Dogan's tone became defensive. “We have nothing to fear from Nikki. Her only connection to the Committee was her mother, and it was buried with the old woman three days ago.”

“Quite a resourceful girl from what I hear, though. Wouldn't mind havin' her on our side.”

“She's been playing sides since she was sixteen. I think she's finished with that.”

Roy eyed Dogan closely. “And what about you?”

“I doubt Division would have me back even if I wanted to go.”

“I wasn't talking about Division, son. Word is the President wants me to take over as Secretary of State. I don't fancy that much 'cause you can only see so much bullshit before everything turns brown. I need someone to shovel it aside for me, to be my direct link with what's
really
going on in the field.”

“Sounds like you're offering me a job, Cal.”

“I'm offering you anything you want. Make that Russian Vaslov your assistant even. I don't care. I just wanna keep you on my side, son, on any terms you dictate.”

“I'll give it some thought.” Dogan paused, sipped his own orange juice through a straw. “Have you spoken with Locke yet?”

“Not directly but the right people approached him and handled the resettlement matter and name change for his family as soon as we brought his son back from England. We sent 'em all out to sunny California. Locke's got a position at Berkeley, as I recall. Charney detailed all the arrangements of their deal in a memo to me. We offered to arrange for both his novels to be published. But Locke said he didn't want it that way anymore. Said he'd rather write another and get it into print on his own.”

“What about the old pilot who raided Keysar Flats with him?”

“Government offered to pick up where the insurance leaves off to rebuild his fleet, but he decided he'd rather start an aerial museum for relics like himself. Told my man he wanted to quit flyin' while he was on top.”

“Who can blame him? He went through hell.”

“So did you, son, running around the world with your own people trying to kill you. Wasn't hard to figure out what was going on even for a country asshole like me once we got an ID on the body in that Rome hotel room. Man named Keyes I hear you weren't too friendly with. Division's out of control, son, and word is somebody's doin' their level best to keep that restricted quarantine order in place … on you
and
Locke.” Roy's eyes narrowed. “Something's gotta be done,” he added, his meaning clear. “You had enough time to consider my offer yet?”

Dogan nodded. “I think so.”

Four weeks later Dogan met Christopher Locke for lunch at a small café near Berkeley. The noontime rush was over but the place was still crowded with students. Locke arrived first, secured a corner table, and stowed his crutches against the wall. One arm was still in a cast, and it would be another several months before he would be without pain. In all, Locke's spill from the Warhawk had broken four bones, tore a network of ligaments, and cut wide portions of his flesh to the bone. Nevertheless, his recovery was proceeding well ahead of schedule. He had been teaching at Berkeley for a week.