Remo threw the guide’s pack after him into the canyon and pulled the door closed.
“That should give you more room back there,” said Suarez with a smile.
The van filled with laughter as it continued towards La Paz.
Where the road divided at the base of the mountain, Suarez ordered the driver to stop the van. He stared glumly at the road sign that showed the two possible destinations: La Paz and Arica. He looked at the sign blankly, but didn’t say anything. His men knew better than to ask Rudy questions, so they sat silently and waited for orders.
Trevor, the heavyset driver, took off his glasses and wiped off the red dust that had kicked up from the steep mountain road. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window, then looked at the sky. “Shit, Remo, doesn’t it ever rain around this place?”
Remo waited a moment before answering; final y, seeing that Rudy was still lost in thought, he offered a response. “First time I heard a man complain about good weather.”
Suarez pointed to the road that led to the west.
“Trouble in La Paz,” he said softly. “Head west… to Arica.”
“Home base,” said Trevor. “I like that, Rudy.”
Suarez gazed at Trevor in silence, then cast his eyes to the front again. “Appreciate your opinion.”
He turned to look at the men sitting behind him. He studied Emmanuel’s smooth Incan features. Then his eyes moved to Remo, then to the rear seat of the large Ford van, where three men sat: Harry Kreiton, a mercenary hired in South Africa; King Francone, large, black and mysterious, almost never speaking, whom Suarez had hired in France; and finally Augusto Suave, Suarez’s half-brother.
“We’ll stop at your mother’s, Auggie. Maybe stay a day in Arica. I don’t know.”
None of the other men said anything.
Suarez turned back to the front and studied the scenery as the van rounded a steep barren curve that presented a magnificent view of the gorge they were following.
“I’m not one to explain myself,” he said, “but I know what you’re all thinking. You have a right to wonder if you’ll be shoved out of the van, like our friend Paco. Now that we’re done planting the last of the radio relays, your work is done. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to dispose of you, too. When this thing is over, each of you will be rich. You will have a lifetime’s supply of securities deposited in a bank of your choice. I am a man of my word, with my friends and certainly with my brothers. Paco had to go. He would have talked. You all know that, eh?”
He turned and studied the faces behind him. The men nodded in unison.
Putting his arm over the back of the seat and resting his bearded chin on it, Suarez continued to address his companions. “You are my inner circle, my trusted ones. The gods have made us brothers in flesh and in spirit. They have told me this. You feel this, no?”
Again the men nodded. By now each of them had had enough personal dealings with Suarez to know he kept his word and made good on his deals. They had watched him closely during the years it had taken him to concoct this outrageous mission. They had seen him through every step of the trip to the Ross Ice Shelf and watched him endure the hardships along with them. Rudolfo Suarez was a ruthless man, but he was also an excellent businessman who honoured his commitments. He had impressed them all when he’d taken it upon himself to shoot the stranger they’d encountered on the ice. Any other leader might have given orders and delegated the business of murder to others. Not Rudy. Suarez could feel the trust his men had for him; the reassurance he’d given them had been unnecessary. He’d chosen them carefully, and they knew by now the rewards for aiding him would be handsome indeed. Anyone else who’d figured into the plan along the way had been adequately misled. The pilot whose airstrip they’d used to land their helicopters in Tierra del Fuego had been assisting a group of Norwegians who wanted to study weather in the southern Andes. The captain of the icebreaker who’d helped them transport the helicopters and their equipment knew only of a mission to study icebergs in the Southern Pacific; he’d had no idea they were doing anything more than sample ice cores.
The hardest part of the entire project had been the return from the ice shelf and the landing in rough seas of the two oversized helicopters. But the captain had bought their story of the lost equipment because he knew how risky research in the Antarctic can be. And he had been paid well for his services.
No one had questioned the need for having extra fuel tanks built into the helicopters.
The hired hands who’d helped Suarez and his men plant the nuclear devices had had no idea what the mission was about. They’d been careful y chosen oil workers with few family ties, eager to find work of any kind. The explosion of their helicopter had been miles from the coastline of Tierra Del Fuego and at low altitude; no one knew of the incident; no questions would be asked that might link their disappearance to Suarez. Cover stories and false documentation were, after all, his speciality.
These men who now rode the rim of the gorge towards Arica, his inner circle, were the only ones who knew the master plan. The rest who’d been on the ice and waited for their chief in Santiago were mercenaries who knew the cardinal rule: never ask questions. They guarded his home in the Andean foothills and operated the communications links that kept him in touch with his enterprises all over the world.
He had made his fortune through speculative drilling for oil in many areas of the world, so the building of lightweight rigs had been nothing noteworthy. And all the equipment he had contracted had been obtained under the auspices of three legitimate oil-development companies in Argentina.
Suarez had known that, when the nukes detonated, he’d have to have all his tracks covered. Of course, the early explosion of the first helped with that aim. The oil rig and the tractor, buried not far from the place where Henry and Hayes had searched the ice, had been vaporized with all the other evidence.
Now all the convoluted plans and hard work were behind him. The three relay stations that kept him in touch with the world and with the two remaining nuclear devices had been set in place long before the mission began. This last radio relay, now installed, was his backup — his insurance that he could detonate the nukes from anywhere in South America.
As Suarez and his inner circle headed towards Arica, the men finally relaxed as much as was ever possible around the boss. Relaxing completely near Rudy was out of the question. They knew he had strange ideas about life, power and loyalty. They had heard him discourse more than once about the power of the sun and of the Incan gods, and about his conviction that he was a reborn Incan prince, sent to reclaim the glory taken from him so long ago by the invaders from the east. They had been with him to the ruins of Machu Pichu, to the plains of Nazca and the ruins of Tijuanaco, and had heard him lament the civilization ruined by the corruption of the European usurpers.
His men, especial y Remo, had gotten used to listening to stories of the old glories every time they visited the historical sites. Only Remo, however, had been allowed to walk the hall owed path at the ruins of Tijuanaco to the sacred stone once lined with gold. He’d listened mutely as Rudy muttered obscenities about the casual tourists who stomped all over “his” sacred site, and hadn’t ever complained when Rudy insisted he take off his shoes when they visited the place.
It wasn’t that Suarez felt Remo was especial y worthy. Rather, he thought that even the Prince of the Sun God and the rightful heir to the Inca gold needed protection. So he had extended his cloak of imagined holiness to embody Remo, as though he were some extended organ of the Sun God himself.