The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (313 page)

The boy closed his eyes and exhaled loudly. The woman slid down the wall to the floor. “He is risen indeed,” she managed.

“I almost killed you,” Costas said. He turned to the woman. “Are you all right, Mama?”

His mother had buried her face in her hands. “You come disguised as GC?” she said, her English labored. “What are you doing here?”

“I am Chloe Williams. This is my friend, Han—”

“You are not!” the woman said, wiping her face and struggling to her feet. She rushed to Chloe and embraced her fiercely. “I am Pappas. I go by Mrs. P.”

“This is my friend Hannah Palemoon.”

“You are in the Co-op too?” Mrs. P. said.

Hannah shook her head.

“You are from India?”

“No. America.”

“You disguised in disguise?”

Hannah smiled and nodded and looked to Costas. “Are we safe?”

“We should move,” he said, leading them through the curtain to a huge concrete-walled storeroom full of supplies from all over the world. “The Co-op works as well here as anywhere,” he said. “But we are suffering. Only a few of us are left.”

“The people upstairs don’t bother you?”

“We give them things. They ask no questions. They have their own secrets. Someday, when it serves them, they will turn us in.”

“Head of the Co-op in my place,” Mrs. P. whispered, her hand over her heart. “No one will ever believe.”

“You can’t stay long,” Costas said. “How can we help you?”

Two young GC Peacekeepers flashed an obscene gesture at Mac as they flew past in a small van; then Mac noticed the look on one’s face when the uniform must have registered in his mind. The vehicle skidded off the asphalt and threw gravel as it backed toward him. “We waved!” the passenger hollered as the van stopped. He jumped out. “We waved at you, sir! Did you see us?”

“I did, and I thank you very much.” The driver tumbled out as well, and Mac returned their salutes. “My support staff had an errand headin’ the other way, and I have business at the airport.”

“We can drop you. Do you need us to drop you? We’ll drop you.”

“I appreciate it,” Mac said, as he shoved his bags ahead of him and climbed in back. “What’s goin’ on in Petra?”

“We got ’em, sir,” the driver said, turning up the radio. Mac rested his forehead in his hand as if trying to listen carefully. He prayed desperately for his comrades. “Smoked ’em all. There’ll be nothing left to bury.”

“Let me hear it, boys,” Mac said, and the two fell silent. Just before the connection was lost, Mac heard enough from the pilot to encourage him. “Well, that is good news, isn’t it?” he said.

The passenger turned. “Sure enough. I don’t know what to make of that last bit, but we got ’em; we sure did.”

At the airport Mac could hardly believe the disarray. What was left of the GC force there looked undisciplined and lackadaisical. That could work only to his advantage. “I need wheels,” he told the only Peacekeeper who rose and saluted him in the main hangar. “I need the key to those wheels, I want to store my stuff, and I want to see a Rooster Tail, if it’s here.”

“Oh, it’s here, sir, and we’ve been expecting you. I’ll take your stuff.”

“Did I say I wanted you to take my stuff?”

“No, sir, you plain as day said you wanted to store it yourself.” He ran to a desk where he dug keys out of a huge cardboard box. “The Rooster Tail’s in Hangar 6. The car’s the first one on the end. I can bring it to you.”

“You do that.”

“Oh, almost forgot. I’ve got to put your code into the computer and—”

“Not before you bring the car, you don’t.”

“Well, that’s true enough.” And he ran off.

Mac was aware of others staring at him, sitting straighter, looking busy. But nothing seemed to be going on, no planes coming or going.

“Gonna get us some help here, Commander?” someone called from across the room.

Mac glared at him. “Excuse me, officer?”

“I said, are you—”

“I heard what you said! Now get your seat out of that chair and address me properly!”

The man rose quickly and caught his foot on a wheel of the chair, stumbling before he righted himself and approached. Mac leveled his eyes at him. The man stopped and saluted. Mac ignored it. “You make it a practice to holler at your senior officers across the room?”

“I wasn’t thinking, sir.”

“You had a question.”

“Just wondering if we were going to get some support here, sir. You see how shorthanded we are.”

Mac looked from one side of the hangar to the other and out onto the runway. “You’re overstaffed and underworked, and you know it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Am I wrong?”

“No, sir. It’s just that, well, we used to—”

“As you were.”

The man saluted again and backed away. The younger officer skidded Mac’s car to a stop in front of the hangar and opened the trunk. “You want some assistance with that high-speed Transatlantic, sir?”

“I need nothing but a toolbox and to be left to it. What’d you people find in it?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“You’re not serious.”

“We were instructed to leave it for the brass. That would be you, I guess.”

Mac pressed his lips together. Was there nothing Chang Wong could not accomplish with a few keystrokes? “Give me a toolbox and tell me who’s handling the Judah-ite roundup.”

“Sir?”

Mac cocked his head and squinted at the kid. “You tellin’ me we had one of the most successful busts of the underground right under you people’s noses out here, and nobody knows a thing about it?”

“Oh, that, no. Yeah, we knew. We know. I just, I mean, what are you asking?”

“Who’s handling it? They took an operative alive and I want to see him. I’m under orders to see him.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know where they were holding him, sir. I mean, I—”

“I didn’t expect you to know where they’re holding him! Did I ask you that?”

“No, sir. Sorry.”

“I expect whoever’s handling the operation for us locally will know that. You follow?”

“Of course.”

“So who is?”

“Guy with a funny name, sir. You’d have to check at headquarters in Ptolemaïs.”

“Happens to be Nelson Stefanich. You in touch with him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you make sure he’s expectin’ me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell ’im I expect all the cooperation and information I need as soon as I get there.”

“Yes, sir. Now could I get you to give me your six-digit security code for the—”

“Zero-nine-one-zero-zero-one,” Mac rattled off, then took the toolbox and drove to the hangar where George Sebastian’s plane had been quarantined. He knew where George hid his arsenal, and within seconds he had removed panels in the cargo hold and lifted a directed energy weapon and a fifty-caliber rifle with bipod into the trunk of the car. He could tell from the safety tab George had positioned on the cargo door that the GC had searched the hold. Clearly, they had not discovered the secret panels.

Mac rushed back to the main hangar. “Clean as a whistle,” he told the young man, handing the toolbox out the window. “Ptolemaïs know I’m comin’?”

“Expecting you, sir.”

George Sebastian pretended to still be asleep. For the last several minutes he had been awake, hearing urgent staticky messages coming to his captors and their earnest, desperate replies, so quiet he could not make out the details.

He lay on his right side, his huge frame pressing into the packed dirt floor. He was cold, stiff, and ravenous. His right arm was asleep from the elbow to the tips of his fingers. He was handcuffed behind his back. George’s head and face throbbed, and he tasted blood.

He heard soft snoring behind him. Oh, if only his hands were free. He would position himself to get blood flowing into that right arm again, would move silently into position. And if the sleeping guard was the only one with him, he could pounce, disarm the man, and silence him in a second. George turned painfully, his whole body aching and desperate for food and water. He rubbed his cheek against the soil enough to push the blindfold away from his eye—just enough to get a peek. Sure enough, the guard sat there asleep, one arm dangling, his high-powered weapon in his lap. Strange. Maybe he was wrong, but George thought he had figured out the hierarchy of this crew. The big man, who tried to cover a French accent, was not the leader. He talked a lot, but it was the other one—the Greek man George had not injured—who seemed to hold the cards. Yet, unless he was unusually cunning and was trying to fake George into trying something, he was the one who now slept just a few feet from his prisoner.

George’s right arm tingled, but with his left hand he maneuvered enough to feel the handcuffs. Tight and strong. He had broken out of conventional cuffs before, but not ones applied this securely. He heard the door open at the top of the stairs, and the young woman—he’d heard them call her Elena, though she had originally posed as Georgiana—said, “I say give him one last chance, then do what we have to do.”

The big man, George’s double, clomped down the stairs with his handgun out. Elena followed, unarmed, but called back up the stairs, “Come now, Socrates!”

They’ve got a dog?

Elena’s yell woke the leader, and he stood, clearing his throat and wiping his eyes.

“Anything?” the big man asked him.

“Nah. Hasn’t moved.”

“Still alive, isn’t he?”

“Breathing.”

The big man spoke into the ear of the just roused one.

“Really?” the smaller man said. “What time?”

“Nobody knows yet, but today or tonight.”

The leader swore.

George hoped the moved blindfold didn’t show. The big man put a heavy boot on his left shoulder and rolled him roughly onto his back. “Wake up, big boy,” he said, and the leader added, “Last chance.”

George wanted to say, “For what? Uncuff me and take this blindfold off, you coward, and I’ll kill you unarmed.” But he was determined to remain silent. No satisfaction for these amateurs.

Heavy, awkward steps resounded from upstairs, and the guard with the injured knee slowly made his way down. The big man handed his sidearm to Elena and straddled George. He dug his hands under George’s arms, bent his knees, and lifted, grunting as he propped George up against the far wall. George let his chin drop to his chest.

“All right,” the leader said, “Plato, over there, and Socrates, over here.” George thought he was hearing things. He had been one of the few scholarship football players at San Diego State who’d read Greek history, but his mediocre performance on the exams had nudged him toward the military. His mind had to be playing tricks on him. So it was Plato and Socrates who stood six feet from him on each side, their weapons trained on his head? It was the hunger, he decided.

“He tries anything, kill him, but be careful of me.”

The leader—George could only imagine his name—knelt in front of him and yanked off the blindfold. George blinked and squinted but kept staring at the floor. Now the man pressed the barrel of his handgun into George’s forehead and lifted his face. “Look into my eyes and see how serious I am.” George was tempted to spit at him.

“You have been brave, a model prisoner of war. But you have lost. You are down to your last chance. I am willing to waste no more time or energy on you. The only way for you to leave here and see your wife and child again is to tell us what we need to know. Otherwise, I will kill you with a point-blank round through your brain. You have ten seconds to tell me where the Judah-ite safe house is.”

George could think of no reason to disbelieve the man. He was weak, wasted, at the end of himself, but he had succeeded. He had given away nothing, and he would not now. No way he would be allowed to go free even if he gave up Chicago. There was one option, but he didn’t trust himself to choose it. He could make up a story—a long, rambling, nuance-filled tale anyone might believe. It could include a poisonous gas in the cockpit of his plane that would be triggered by someone trying to fly it who didn’t first enter the proper code into the security system.

That might keep the GC from absconding with the Rooster Tail. It might even leave it available for the Trib Force if anyone came to try to spring him. But he was sure Captain Steele and the rest assumed him dead by now, and why not? And if he tried fashioning a story to delay his execution, in his present state he wouldn’t be able to keep it straight—and he couldn’t risk letting something slip that might be true.