Occasionally, Karl would sneak a look back at Maya during a particularly difficult stretch of jungle, where they could have used a machete to cut away the vines that stuck to their clothes and cut into their skin, making them each bleed from multiple gashes in their hands. Gloves would have been good, Karl thought. Maya was having a rough time, but she was holding her own, keeping up with Karl’s pace.
He stopped to get directions from his phone. They had traveled less than a half a mile so far. Yet, it seemed like they had been traveling all day.
While he was looking at his phone, a text came in from Ruiz.
“What is it?” Maya asked as she caught her breath.
“Ruiz. He said he cruised past the gate to the compound. Although the forest was thick on both of the sides of the entry, he could see a high fence with razor wire on top. The gate itself was protected by armed guards. And he thought he could see cameras along the top of the fence.”
“My guess is they also have motion sensors,” she said.
“No doubt. And orders to shoot intruders. But I don’t plan to get that close.”
“Where is Ruiz now?” she asked.
“A couple of miles down the road. He didn’t want to head back to our drop point for a while or it would have looked suspicious.”
Maya shifted her head up the hill. “How much farther?”
Karl shrugged. “About a half mile more.”
“How long have we come so far?”
“About the same.”
“My God. This is killer.”
She wasn’t wrong, he thought. This was the most inhospitable forest he had ever tried to traverse.
“I could use a drink of water,” she said.
“Same here.” The last time he had been stuck in the forest was the taiga of Russia, where he had been forced to drink unsecure water — hoping like hell he didn’t get a water-born parasite. But he preferred Giardia to dehydration, which would kill him faster than any parasite. “We should find flowing water.”
Maya smile and pointed up. “There’s some flowing water.” She tried to catch the downpour in her mouth, and was somewhat successful.
Karl tried the same thing. Then he pushed forward, moving slowing up the hill. After about two hundred yards, he could hear a roaring flow of water. What had been a tiny stream was now a full waterfall down the side of the hill. They both went to their knees and took in as much water as they could.
Satisfied, and waterlogged in and out, they continued up the hill. In a quarter of a mile the jungle started to open up somewhat. Then they were in a clearing on the top of the hill, the place Karl had seen on his phone map. He pulled out his phone and checked on their location.
Karl pointed toward the southwest. “If we head over there, we should be able to overlook the compound.”
The rain seemed to give way to clearer skies, as if the clouds only wanted to feed the thick jungle and not the opening on the hill.
Karl brought them to a precipice of rocks, where they sat overlooking the tops of the trees in the jungle. He pulled up the camera with the zoom lens and took the cap off that had protected the lens from rain. His calculations had been correct. Through the lens, he could see most of the compound below. With the slight pause in the rain, Karl started shooting a number of images. Then he checked the back screen to verify his shots.
Meanwhile, Maya viewed the scene below through her binoculars. “That’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be,” she said.
“That’s what she said,” Karl quipped.
She smiled and said, “Yes, I did. What do you think?”
“You see that long building?”
“The one with the grass on top?”
“Yep. That’s a hardened nuclear facility.”
She turned to him. “Are you sure?”
He zoomed in and held the camera steady. Then he shot a series of pictures. “Positive. You don’t build a hardened structure like that out in the middle of the jungle unless you’re trying to hide something significant.”
“You think that’s where they’re bringing the missile?”
“What do you see closer to us?”
“The construction equipment?”
“Just to the side of that.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Tell me.”
“They’ve staked out the foundation for another hardened shelter,” he said. Then he took a few more shots.
“We need to get this back to the Agency,” she said.
He was way ahead of her. Karl turned over the camera and removed the memory card. Then he pulled the card from his SAT phone and replaced it with the camera card, transferring just a few vital shots to his phone memory. He encrypted the images into a folder and attached them to a secure text to Roddy at the Agency. Within a couple of minutes, the images were sent.
Roddy acknowledged receipt almost immediately.
A couple of minutes later, Karl’s phone buzzed. He saw that it was Roddy, so he answered it. “Yeah. You got them?”
“These are much better than our SAT images,” Roddy said. “How close are you?”
“Less than a quarter mile to the perimeter fence. Why?”
“Can you get any closer?”
“Doubtful,” Karl said. “It’s raining like a bitch here. And I’m guessing that fence is electrified.”
“Understand,” Roddy said. “That hardened shelter looks big enough to hold at least four transporter erector launchers like the one you saw in Murmansk.”
Karl was thinking the same thing. “Then we might have a bigger problem than we thought. What if this new missile is just the tip of the iceberg?”
“You think that shelter already houses missiles?” Roddy asked.
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “But it also looks like they’re constructing another hardened shelter. That would mean eight missiles.”
“Assuming this is the only location in Venezuela,” Roddy posited.
“This could be a power move by Russia,” Karl said.
“What if they wanted us to see the missile in Murmansk?” Roddy asked.
Glancing at Maya, Karl said, “How would that work?”
“We had intel that something might be going down at the harbor that night,” Roddy explained.
Karl had a feeling where this was going, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the reality of this. “From where?”
“Is Maya with you?” Roddy asked.
He tried not to look at her. “Yes,” Karl said.
“She’s the one who said something was going down at the shipyard.”
That made sense now, Karl thought. Maya had insisted they try to fly his drone at night, despite the harsh weather. And they could have simply flown the drone at the soccer stadium near their apartment building, but Maya had wanted a view of the city from the harbor, with the lights from the city reflecting off the water.
“Interesting,” Karl said. “What are my orders now?”
“Watch your ass and get the hell out of there.”
“And?” Karl hoped Roddy understood what he was asking.
“You don’t know for sure if she is working the other side to the detriment of our side,” Roddy said softly. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
“Roger that,” Karl said. Just then he heard a buzzing in the light rain somewhere above the forest canopy below. “Gotta run. We have company.”
“Karl,” Maya said, as she peered through the binoculars. “A drone.”
He knew.
She got up and was about to run, but Karl came to her and took her in his arms. Then he planted a passionate kiss on her lips. As their bodies meshed together, he hoped the drone would not see the camera or the binoculars. Perhaps they would assume they were simply a couple out for a hike.
Maya pulled away slightly and said, “That was unexpected.”
By now the drone was overhead and had stopped there, hovering at least a hundred feet above them.