Then, the odor of jet fuel found its way into her nose and her demeanor completely changed. Her eyes found Harvath’s as he walked over to her.
“We’ll have good light in about ten more minutes,” he said. “You can still opt out of this. I’ll have them move the vehicles back and one of the guys will stay with you.”
Decker shook her head. “I want to do this. I have to.”
Harvath wasn’t going to fight with her. “Okay.”
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
“Jet fuel.”
“Did they use it to burn the bodies?”
“Probably.”
Closing her eyes, she leaned into him and placed her head against his shoulder. “Seeing death up close never gets any easier, does it?”
It was one of the first purely human glimpses he had seen of her. “No,” he replied. “It doesn’t.”
He knew the Brits were watching, and he didn’t care.
Like most pure moments, though, this one was fleeting. Decker straightened up, turned her back on him and walked around to the other side of the Land Cruiser to drink her coffee and watch the sunrise.
Harvath removed his Toughbook laptop, placed it on the backseat, and turned it on. He had already uploaded the video footage from the clinic and had composed a brief SITREP for the Old Man. Now that he had an unimpeded view of the sky, he wanted to transmit it back to the States.
Powering up his Iridium WiFi cube, he set it on the roof of the SUV and angled its antenna. While it searched for satellites, he also powered up his phone to see if he had received any texts.
Once the cube was connected, he watched for the message icon to light up on his phone. It didn’t. Turning it off, he focused his mind on business.
He had broken the video up into pieces to make it easier to transmit. Pulling up the string of encrypted emails, he hit send and then grabbed his video camera. The sun was strong enough now to begin seeing the pit.
Finished with her coffee, Decker pulled a box of high-end surgical masks out of her bag and offered them around. Everyone accepted one of the disposable respirators, even Jambo and the Brute Squad who would be staying with the vehicles and securing the road. There was no telling what was in the pit or suspended in the atmosphere around it.
Harvath doubted anything could have survived a jet fuel — assisted fire, but he knew that the remaining smoke and ash could present a whole host of health problems and so fitted his mask over his mouth and nose.
Turning the video camera on, he documented the tire tracks and tread marks leading to and from the pit. While a lot of it was nothing more than puddles of red mud, there was enough there to show what type of equipment had come through.
When he had what he needed, he joined Decker and they walked with Ash and Mick out toward the pit.
It was a solemn procession. No one spoke. With the sun up, they could see the occasional wisp of smoke rising into the air in front of them. But with all of the rain, how was that even possible? The horrific answer became clear soon enough.
Like most of the terrain they had been through, the area surrounding the clinic was mostly sloped. The same could be said for where the staff disposed of their trash. It was a narrow, level strip at the base of a steep, nearby hill. But it was what had been done with the hill that turned their stomachs.
Even through their masks, the smell of jet fuel was now overpowering. Harvath took one look at everything and knew why.
A bulldozer had definitely been brought in, but not to bury bodies. It had been brought in to engineer a grisly crematorium.
A huge chunk had been ripped out of the bottom of the hill to create the oven. With Decker following behind, Harvath climbed to the top and let his nose be his guide. It didn’t take long to find the empty fuel barrels hidden beneath a makeshift blind. Each one had been punctured with a small hole.
Several yards away he uncovered the air shaft and knew exactly what he was looking at. He also knew why the satellite image had looked off to him.
“What is all of this?” Decker asked as he recorded it.
“A giant rocket stove.”
“What’s a rocket stove?”
Harvath pointed to the shaft and then at the barrels. “Oxygen would have been sucked in from the base of the hill and drawn up through this shaft. Those punctured barrels of jet fuel would have continued to drip-feed the fire.
“The stronger the fire got, the more oxygen would have been sucked in. And the more oxygen that got sucked in, the hotter the fire would have raged. The temperature would have been amazing; total combustion of almost anything placed down there.”
“Including bodies?”
“If they stacked them right.”
Decker suddenly didn’t feel so well.
Harvath noticed that her color was off. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “It’s the jet fuel. Can we walk back down?”
“Of course,” he replied, offering her his arm.
Decker accepted it, but let go halfway when the trail became too narrow for them to walk side by side.
At the bottom, Ash and Mick were studying something at the edge of the pit.
As he saw the Americans approach, Ash raised his hand for them to stop.
“You don’t want to see this,” he warned.
“See what?” Decker replied, undeterred.
Mick turned and gently tried to block her, but she nudged him out of the way.
She took one look and came charging back past Harvath with her hand over her mask. Seconds later, she was in the brush vomiting.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but she waved him off.
He looked over at Ash who motioned for him to come see what they had found. Harvath knew it wasn’t going to be good.
The men stepped aside as he joined them. On the ground at their feet were the skulls of three small children. Beyond was a jumble of bones, also small.
While any loss of innocent life was lamentable, the loss of children was doubly so.
Though he didn’t want to, Harvath raised the video camera and recorded everything. There was one thing that still didn’t make sense — the size of the pit. If you were just going to murder the people at the clinic, why did this have to be so big? It didn’t make any sense.
He was taking close-up shots when Mick asked, “What happened to Dr. Decker?”
Harvath paused the camera and looked around. He didn’t see her either.
“Maybe she went to get a fresh mask,” said Ash. “Or a toothbrush.”
She probably just needed a break, thought Harvath. This was hard for anyone to handle.
“I’ll go look for her,” he said, handing the camera to Mick.
“Don’t go too far,” Ash warned.
Stepping away from the pit, Harvath looked uphill toward where the fuel barrels were. He doubted she had gone back up there, but he climbed the hill just to make sure. There was no trace of her.
She must have gone back to the vehicles. Walking back down the trail, he got to the bottom and headed back toward the Land Cruisers.
But as he got closer and could see everybody but Decker, his internal alarm system started to go off.
When Jambo, Simon, and Eddie all confirmed that they hadn’t seen her, he radioed Ash and Mick and made his concern official.
CHAPTER 18
Eddie and Simon were exceptional trackers. Starting from where Decker had last been seen, they worked the ground inch by inch until they had picked up her trail.
Decker appeared to have started back toward the vehicles, but then had diverted for some reason. They couldn’t figure out why. Then, they came across another set of tracks. She appeared to be following someone.