STAY ON HIM. I WILL BE CLOSE BY
‘Wait one,’ she said to Jarvis as she accessed the picture and showed it to Vaughn.
‘Who is he? Wilms?’
Lopez looked at the picture for a moment longer and then up at the hotel. Moments later she saw a smartly dressed man walk out of the foyer, his face identical to that of the image on her cell phone. She watched as the old man strode along the sidewalk toward a smart SUV parked on the opposite side of the street. He crossed toward it and a door opened to let him in.
‘Doug,’ she said into her cell, ‘I think we’ve got an eye on Wilms. He must have enough connections to get him out of trouble like this, the police are letting him go.’
‘Stay on him, don’t let him out of your sight.’
‘What about Mitchell?’ Vaughn snapped. ‘He’s nowhere to be seen.’
‘Leave him,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Wilms is the priority!’
‘Mitchell’s the key to everything! This could be a deception!’ Lopez shot back as she turned for their car.
‘Wilms can lead us to Majestic Twelve,’ Jarvis insisted. ‘If he does, Mitchell will no longer have any leverage over us! Get on Wilms and keep him in sight! I’ll have his identity checked out.’
Lopez cursed, and jumped into the car as Vaughn pulled out and followed the SUV at a discreet distance toward midtown.
XXVI
General Veer held onto the railings in the rear of the ATV as it slowed at the head of a convoy of eight vehicles, those that had survived the tactical descent onto the ice fields and the gunfight with the Navy SEAL team.
Before them was a long, low ridge that rose up off the glacier, churned ice and chunks of snow littering its banks. Veer could see as he jumped down off the ATV that the disturbance was recent and that the ski gliders had stopped nearby, their tracks in the snow clearly visible.
The other ATVs switched off their engines and his men dismounted, already down from their original hundred to about eighty five. Three had still been alive after the SEALs had dumped the C4 charges out on the ice fields, badly injured and in need of urgent medical attention. General Veer had ensured that they received the best possible care during a time of such urgency by personally executing them where they lay. Now his men stood and watched him in silence as he clambered up the ridge line and peered down into the shadowy blue depths of the chasm below him.
Rappel pins were still lodged in the rock hard ice, the lines descending down into the fissure and vanishing into the blackness far below. Several of Veer’s officers joined him on the edge of the ridge and peered down inside it.
‘No other way out,’ one of them observed. ‘They’ve taken a hell of a risk leaving us such a clear trail.’
Veer looked up across the plains.
‘They managed to conceal their vehicles though,’ he observed. ‘Send a few men out to find them. They won’t have gone around an obstacle this large, they wouldn’t have had enough time, so they must be under cover somewhere to the east of here.’
An officer immediately hurried down the ridge again and began giving orders as Veer crouched down on one knee and ran his gloved hand down his thick beard as another officer, a former Green Beret, spoke up.
‘Whatever the hell they’re looking for, it’s important enough for them to virtually guarantee their deaths here. They’re barely bothering to disguise what they’re up to.’
General Veer nodded thoughtfully. He had been contacted forty eight hours before by a man named Victor Wilms. Well connected and supremely wealthy, or at least his benefactors were, Wilms had made Veer an offer he simply could not refuse: raise a team of one hundred men, get them to Antarctica and recover an American satellite from rogue forces attempting to sabotage United States interests in the region. The price? Ten million dollars now to raise the group, a further ten million after successful completion of the mission. No taxes, no fuss and no questions asked.
It had taken all of Veer’s mental strength to demand fifteen million dollars or there would be no deal. He had got it without question and immediately wished he’d asked for twenty. Even at that early stage, he had wondered whether the mysterious object he was being asked to recover would not be worth more to him than the payment from Wilms.
‘They must have further support,’ Veer decided as he looked along the length of the ridge, which extended into the distance toward the south east. ‘The SEALs must be an advanced force, with maybe a Naval vessel or two on its way to back them up. We need to move fast or we’ll get boxed in and it’ll be us who are outnumbered.’
Veer stood and strode back down the ridge.
‘Bring me the prisoners!’ he boomed.
His officers hurried to the back of one of the ATV’s, in which lay huddled two hostages pulled from the wreckage of several ski gliders damaged in battle, both of them injured and bound hand and foot. The soldiers hauled them up onto their feet and dragged them out onto the ice.
General Veer could see at once that neither of the captives was a military soldier, which pleased him greatly. SEALs were notoriously tough and trained to be able to withstand interrogation techniques of all kinds, whereas the scientists that had evidently travelled with them were civilians, the weak link in the chain.
The man was middle-aged and virtually bald, the other a young girl with bobbed brown hair who stood shivering on the ice. Veer had ordered their Arctic jackets removed to expose them to the bitter chill, which according to the read-out on his digital watch was a fresh minus twelve in the wind. He moved to stand before them.
‘I’ll make this simple,’ he said. ‘If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will kill you both. It’s quite likely that your remains will still be here in a thousand years’ time, because I won’t shoot you — I’ll have you buried to your necks in the ice.’
Veer let that fact sink into their minds, let them dwell on how long they would spend being cold before hypothermia would finally lead to death. In truth it probably would not be long but Veer liked toying with the idea of prolonged agony.
‘Your names,’ he demanded.
‘Harrison,’ said the man.
‘Amy,’ the woman replied, her voice barely audible above the bitter winds.
‘Tell me why you are here with those soldiers.’
The balding man looked up at Veer with pleading eyes, his words stumbling from his blue lips as he tried to speak.
‘Please… I have two children…, don’t leave us out here.’
Veer gestured to his officers. ‘Bury him over there.’
The balding man’s eyes flew wide and he screamed as he was dragged away across the glacier by several soldiers, all of them chuckling grimly at his protests. Veer looked at the young girl.
‘Last chance,’ he said, ‘to save yourself and your friend over there.’
‘It’s called Black Knight,’ the scientist gabbled, struggling to get her words out fast enough amid the freezing cold and the desperate cries of her colleague from nearby. ‘It’s a satellite that came down.’
Veer took a pace closer to her. ‘Now tell me something I don’t know.’
‘It’s not ours,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not Russian, or anybody’s. It wasn’t built by humans.’
General Veer stared at the girl for a long moment and then looked at his officers. ‘That explains the rush to get down here.’
‘It’s been in orbit for thousands of years,’ the scientist went on, ‘and now it’s come down and we’re trying to retrieve it for the government.’