As much as she wanted to tear the bastard’s face off, she did not want to meet her end on his terms.
Instead, she ran.
Kenner let out a dismayed shout, surprised that she had chosen to brave the treacherous landscape in the dark, but Gallo did not slow.
Although she had stood in the glow of the electrical lights for only a few minutes, her night vision was badly compromised. In her peripheral vision, she could see the distant horizon’s faint outline silhouetted against the starry sky, but the ground right in front of her was uniformly black. Millions of years of wind and weather had sculpted the summit into a bizarre landscape, with natural pillars and arches that looked like melting wax. There were craters and pools of rainwater that were incredibly pure and deceptively deep. It was a deadly obstacle course, made all the more perilous by the scrubby vegetation that clung to every crevice. Gallo stumbled and crashed through the maze, ignoring the branches and rocky protrusions that caught and tore at both the fabric of her jeans and at her skin.
A root snagged one foot, and she went sprawling again, smashing into a tangle of thin branches that scratched her face and snagged her hair. In the stunned instant that followed, she heard more shouts and the sound of footsteps, and she realized that Kenner did not intend to let her run away after all. Despite everything else, she felt a rush of satisfaction at having disappointed him, spoiling his twisted fantasy of her groveling. She knew it would be a short-lived satisfaction if she did not get moving again, so she scrambled up, half-crawling for the first few steps, and then she resumed running blindly.
With the exception of the two crewmen unloading the helicopter, all of the Cerberus men were on the ropes already, too far away to help Kenner run her down. But he had been right about the lack of escape routes. The tepui rose from the surrounding landscape like a five-hundred-foot-tall pillar. A world class rock climber might have been able to scale the nearly sheer vertical cliffs, but climbing down them, in the dark, without any kind of ropes or equipment, was unthinkable, and that was if she was able to find the cliff without falling over.
If Kenner goes, too, it might be worth it.
The thought was yanked from her head when Kenner’s outstretched hand caught hold of her long black hair. Her feet flew out from under her, but this time she did not fall. Instead, she was pulled back, enfolded once more in his embrace.
“Bitch! I’m trying to—”
There was a loud thump and then another, as Gallo felt something smack the back of her head. Her vision flashed blue for a moment, but in that instant, Kenner’s arms fell away, and she was free again. She stumbled forward and would have done another face-plant, but a firm grip closed on her wrist, steadying her. A familiar voice reached out from the darkness. “Come with me.”
Gallo’s thoughts were still fuzzy from being struck in the head, but there was no mistaking the clipped manner of speech and the distinctive Portuguese-flavored Brazilian accent. “Cintia?”
“Hurry,” Dourado urged, offering no explanation, but tugging her along.
The woman’s appearance, here at one of the remotest places on Earth, was about as unlikely as divine intervention, and it triggered an explosion of questions that threatened to trip Gallo up like the roots hidden in the darkness. Even with Kenner on her heels, she felt paralyzed by the impossibility of Dourado’s intervention.
Only Kenner wasn’t chasing her anymore. In the dim starlight, Gallo could make out the silhouette of her savior. Dourado was holding something, a club or a tree limb. That answered one question at least. She had struck Kenner from behind, and Kenner’s cranium had cue-balled into hers.
The realization that Dourado had bought them a narrow window of escape helped her put aside the more difficult questions. She followed blindly, trusting that Dourado’s night vision had to be better than her own. But there was one question that demanded an answer. “Where are we going?”
“We have to hide.”
“Hide?” Gallo said, incredulous. “That’s your plan?”
“No, I—”
Dourado’s answer was cut off by the harsh report of a pistol. Gallo felt something sizzle past her head, and then the world in front of her was revealed in the harsh brilliance of a high-intensity spotlight.
“The next one will not be a warning.” It was Rohn. He did not shout, but somehow his low gravelly voice seemed as loud as the gunshot.
33
A blast of frigid air swirled through the hold of the aged Lockheed L100 as the cargo ramp began lowering. Cabin pressure had already been equalized to match the conditions outside, so there was no sudden suction. Still, Pierce held on tight to a hanging cargo strap as the tail end of the aircraft opened up, revealing the black emptiness of the sky above the Amazon rain forest.
Earlier, when Lazarus had suggested the plan, Pierce had been able to depersonalize the risk, put aside his fear. Lazarus had done this dozens of times. He knew what he was doing, and Pierce knew it was the best chance they had of finding Gallo and Dourado. But now, literally standing on the brink of executing that plan, he was having second thoughts. He took several deep breaths, filling his lungs and saturating his blood with pure oxygen from the mountaineering-style respirator. Don’t think about it, he told himself.
Lazarus lowered his ATN PVS-7 night vision goggles—‘NODs,’ short for ‘night optical devices’—into place and tapped them with a fingertip, signaling Pierce and Carter to do the same. Pierce switched his on, and the dark interior of the plane was revealed in startling clarity, albeit bathed in a creepy green glow. With their goggles, respirators and bulky thermal suits, Carter and Lazarus looked like alien hunters from a science fiction movie. The guns and knives strapped and holstered to their bodies intensified the effect.
Lazarus had made all the arrangements while they were still over the Atlantic. His past experience as a Special Forces soldier had left him with a long list of contacts who could provide anything he needed on short notice, and a knowledge of how to procure those items without arousing the interest of the local authorities.
Pierce was astonished, and more than a little dismayed, by the realization that there were people out there, in every city he supposed, standing ready to provide specialized military hardware at a moment’s notice. He was having difficulty believing that it was really possible for an ordinary person who knew the right people to simply make a phone call and outfit an army. Then Lazarus told him how much it would all cost. The final bill made the money Pierce had spent on the genetic sequencing equipment for Carter seem like a petty cash expenditure by comparison.
“When I told you money was no object,” he had confessed to Lazarus, “I didn’t realize how much money that would mean. I mean, I’ll pay it, but…wow.”
“It’s only money,” Lazarus said. “People are going to die tonight. With a little luck it will be them, not us. This equipment might mean the difference between life and death, but no amount of money is going to make it easier to pull the trigger when the time comes.”
“Helluva pep talk,” Pierce said, but he knew the big man was right. He had faced death before, but he had never been confronted with the prospect of having to take a life.
“Don’t personalize the enemy,” Lazarus went on. “Think of it like a game. Like one of those video games Fiona was always playing…” He trailed off, the memory evidently more painful than expected.
Pierce knew exactly what Lazarus meant. He had watched Fiona and some of Lazarus’s former teammates spend endless hours fighting aliens and enemies — and sometimes each other — in Xbox games. Treat it like a game, treat the Cerberus men like video game villains. Don’t get psyched out.