The rock-domed cave appeared to be a storage area. It was strewn with overturned cargo boxes and empty pallets — the remnants of a soon-to-be abandoned operation. The only light came from miners’ lamps mounted on their captors’ headgear.
The light beams occasionally flashed on the priest, who had barely spoken a word since they joined him in his prison. The man’s shoulders lifted heavily with each breath, and his sunken eyes and parched mouth made clear that he’d been without food or water for some time.
Their wrists, torsos, and ankles were cinched tight with quarter-inch nylon rope, their hands wrapped in duct tape to deny them the use of their fingers. Every few minutes Luke tightened and relaxed his hand muscles to keep his fingertips from going numb.
“My mother — she died in a tornado,” Calderon said. “She was buried alive.”
There was a reason Calderon hadn’t killed him at the hotel in Río Dulce, and it seemed he was about to find out what that was.
“She died like a rat under a pile of rubble,” Calderon said. “Never been able to get that outta my mind, that she spent her final hours in total darkness, terrified.”
Calderon’s plan was beginning to take shape in Luke’s mind. After dragging them from the dock and throwing them onto a pushcart, Calderon and his men had hauled them several hundred yards into the mountain’s interior, then through a honeycomb maze of intersecting tunnels.
Eventually, they’d reached a long passageway leading into the cavern where they were now being held. There were old scorch marks on the tunnel’s walls where explosives had been used to widen it, and the roof was supported by timber posts and crossbeams.
When they had passed through the tunnel’s entrance, two of Calderon’s men were rigging it with explosives. One man was wrapping strings of white putty — C-4 explosive — around joints where the structural members came together. The other was drilling a borehole into the rock ceiling, creating a pocket for another explosive charge.
A box with a roll of detonation cord and small pencil-thin blasting caps sat on the ground next to them.
“You’re going to seal the tunnel closed, bury us alive,” Luke said. “That the plan?”
Calderon stooped next to him and checked his ankle bindings. He slowly untied the knot, and then suddenly yanked the rope tighter.
Luke winced when the nylon cord cut into his skin.
“If you hadn’t busted up my knee, my mother wouldn’t’ve been in that building when it collapsed.” The skin near the corner of Calderon’s mouth twitched. “She would’ve been at home, sleeping in her bed, instead of cleaning up other people’s filth.”
Luke remained silent. He saw no purpose in asking Calderon to explain his warped logic.
Father Joe lifted his head, choked out the words, “This…this won’t help your mother.”
“Let the priest go,” Megan shouted. “He hasn’t done anything to you.”
Calderon’s lamp swung around and framed Father Joe’s sagging head.
“She’s right,” Calderon said. “He probably deserves better. Too bad he’s gotta die with you, cockroach.”
“Killing Megan and the priest isn’t going to bring your mother back,” Luke said. “Let ’em go.”
The fist came across Luke’s jaw like an iron mallet.
Luke turned his head and spit out a slug of blood, holding the man’s stare as he did so.
Calderon leaned into Luke’s ear and whispered, “If you speak of my mother again, you’ll be dead before you finish the words.” He slowly backed away and stood, then whistled at his men. “Vámonos.”
Calderon started toward the passageway, then turned and said, “Remember how your mother used to drive out to Santa Monica and walk along those bluffs above the ocean?”
Luke felt a tightness in his throat, recalling the fall that had killed his mother. After recovering her body from an outcrop on the cliffs, the police had called it an accident.
“You remember that, don’t you?” Calderon said. “Every Wednesday afternoon at four o’clock. You could set your watch by her schedule.”
Luke thrashed, his body a convulsing mass of contorted muscles.
“I knew you’d figure out what I’m saying. You college boys are good at that,” Calderon said as he disappeared into the tunnel.
Even after their stony tomb went black, Calderon’s laugh was still echoing in Luke’s ears.
Calderon stood on the dock and looked up at the starlit sky. He sucked in a chestful of night air.
A crane in the center of the barge swung another pallet over and onto the deck as its crew members secured cargo. The last of the equipment had come through the tunnel, and in another few minutes the flatbed vessel would return to the Chinese freighter with its payload.
For the past five years the docking facilities and tunnel — several kilometers from the nearest settlement along the river — had provided an elegantly simple means of supplying CHEGAN’s inland compound without bringing attention to their operation. Supply ships navigated upriver from the Caribbean coastline at night and were back out at sea before the sun rose the next morning.
Now, CHEGAN was abandoning the site, pulling up its stakes and moving the mosquito project to a permanent facility in China. The fact was, Calderon didn’t care where they were going. He just wanted them to leave. This project had become stale.
A gaggle of birds took flight from the limestone cliffs just as the rumble of a diesel engine reached his ears. Calderon’s boat was returning from delivering Kaczynski to the freighter. Mr. Kong was at the helm.
The Asian throttled back, making a large wake on his approach to the dock.
He’d miss working with Kong, who was going to China to babysit Kaczynski and his team. At the beginning of the project, CHEGAN’s Chinese contingent had thrust the man upon him. Calderon had bristled at first, but Kong turned out to be a good operative.
Calderon jumped onto the boat as it neared the dock. “Tell the workers on the barge to hurry it up,” he said to Kong. “I want that thing loaded and on its way out to the freighter in ten minutes.”
While the Asian was shouting in Chinese at the barge’s crew, Calderon pulled a bulky device from his jacket pocket. It was an ultra low frequency transmitter, a blast initiation device whose signal could penetrate up to a thousand feet of solid rock. He ran his fingers across a pair of toggle switches.
Enrique and Juan, his explosives team, hadn’t finished rigging the charge when Calderon and his sentries left the cavern to return to the dock.
Calderon couldn’t contact them. Unlike the detonation transmitter, their radio signals would not penetrate the thick rock strata.
But he didn’t have to speak to them. When the light at the top of his transmitter changed from green to yellow, he would know that the detonator was armed. Once armed, Enrique and Juan knew they had just three minutes to clear the blast area.
Kong put the boat’s engines into reverse and eased away from the dock. After the Asian disembarked onto the freighter, Calderon would return to the cove one more time.
He’d make one last trip into the tunnel, to see for himself the pile of rock in front of McKenna’s tomb.
“You’re not going to pull free, Megan. Save your strength.”
Megan hadn’t stopped struggling against her bindings.
“Save my strength? For what?” Her voice cracked on the last word.
Luke stared into the pitch-blackness. He didn’t have an answer for her.
Calderon wouldn’t leave them alone long enough to cobble together any sort of escape plan. The blast that would seal them inside the cavern was coming at any moment.