Piranha

As they got closer to the ghostly green light spilling from the main cavern, Juan and Trono split up to opposite sides of the passageway and kept their backs to the walls to stay out of sight as long as they could. It wasn’t going to be possible to sneak into the cavern when it was so well lit. They had to depend on total surprise and the expectation that most of the armed men would be outside at the cement plant.

Juan set aside the Geiger counter and held out three fingers to Trono, who had his MP-5 against his shoulder. Juan counted down silently with his fingers. When his fist closed, he and Trono rushed into the cavern.

At first, Juan focused on nothing but the men inside. Two Caucasians were seated in chairs at an equipment console, dressed in short-sleeved shirts and khaki pants. He immediately dismissed them as non-threats. His eyes then shifted to movement more than a hundred feet away at the opposite side of the cavern, which he was just begi

Two men stood guard at a man-made tu

Juan and Trono’s appearance happened so quickly and unexpectedly that the pair of mercenaries had no time to react. Juan put a three-round burst into the one on the right and Trono took care of the man on the left. The muffled blasts echoed around the cavern but likely wouldn’t travel all the way to the cave exit.

Juan sca

The center was packed with electronic equipment, stainless steel conduits, and scientific gadgetry that reminded him of the inside of a nuclear reactor. The entire apparatus stretched from floor to ceiling and was the size of a semi-trailer truck. The machine was surrounded by a metal grating that served as a floor to access the equipment from a level surface. Several large crates marked “Fragile: Scientific Equipment” were stacked near the tu

It had to be the neutrino telescope. The design was both complicated and elegant.

But as amazing as the telescope looked, it wasn’t even the most awe-inspiring part of the cave.

The rest of the cathedral-sized space was crisscrossed with translucent green crystals. If Eric was correct, they would be selenium infused with copper impurities. It suddenly hit Juan that this was what Lutzen had photographed. It wasn’t a geode that he’d documented. It was a picture of the cavern itself.

The reason they’d been misled was because none of them imagined the sheer immensity of the crystals themselves. Many of these crystals, beautiful and jagged diagonal pillars with edges as sharp as butcher knives, were the size of redwoods. Some of them hung from the ceiling, some went all the way to the floor, and scattered between them were huge piles of crystals jumbled like rock candy. Juan spun around, gaping at the splendor of a billion facets.

Gunther Lutzen had been absolutely right. It really was as if Juan had stepped into the Emerald City of Oz.

It took Linc and Eddie fifteen minutes of belly crawling to get in position around the corner just out of sight of the cement plant. They settled into a ditch thirty feet from the road, with the RPG now resting on Linc’s stomach.

“I’m ready,” he said to Eddie.

“Same here.” Eddie radioed to Linda. “Show them the sacrificial lamb.”

“Coming your way.”

The PIG accelerated from its hiding space until it passed them, providing a rich target for the Ratel and its ca

That was the cue for the Ratel to give chase and it didn’t disappoint. The vehicle’s commander was obviously confident that he’d scored a mortal shot and wanted to verify his kill.

The Ratel roared past Linc and Eddie’s ditch and came to a stop at the top of the embankment while smoke continued to rise from the wreckage of the PIG. The side doors popped open and four men in camo gear and helmets jumped out, aiming their assault rifles in the PIG’s direction.

Linc and Eddie leaped from their hiding spot and rushed at the men.

“Drop your weapons!” they both shouted in the crude Creole that MacD had taught them over the radio.

Bazin’s mercenaries were either brave or too stupid to realize when they were caught with their pants down. They crouched against the Ratel and raised their weapons to fire.

That was all the warning they’d get. Eddie expertly took down three of them while Linc got the fourth with his sidearm pistol. But the driver inside the Ratel didn’t know when he’d been beaten. He backed it up and swiveled the main ca

Linc shook his head at the idiocy. He holstered the pistol, shouldered the RPG, and pulled the trigger before the ca

He dropped the empty tube and kicked the gravel in frustration.

“There goes our Return of the Jedi plan,” Linc said.

“It was a good idea,” Eddie said. He called to Linda. “What’s the damage to the PIG?”

“Nothing at all,” she replied. “With Eric’s snappy driving, they completely missed. The smokescreen worked just like you thought it would.”

The PIG powered its way up the embankment, the smoke now dissipating.

The two of them walked over and checked the mercenaries. All of them were corpses.

Eddie looked at the largest of the bodies and then at Linc as if he were comparing them.

“What’s going on in that devious mind of yours?” Linc asked.

“You could pass for a Haitian from a distance.”

“I suppose so, but we don’t have the Ratel anymore.”

“We still have the PIG. What if the mercenaries captured it and drove it back? As long as they thought you were one of the them, we could get within visual range of the last Ratel. The PIG does have one rocket left.”

Linc thought about the plan and nodded. “I like the idea, but we need something to really sell it.”

“Like what?”

Linc picked up one of the mercenaries’s walkie-talkies and started pulling off the uniform of the least bloody soldier. “We’re going to require MacD’s language skills one more time.”

—

Bazin tried to raise the third Ratel on the radio and got only static in reply. He peered from his concealed window within the main building, but all he could make out was a plume of smoke over the hill.

If the Ratel had been taken out, it still didn’t change anything. For Cabrillo and his men to attack, they would be endangering the lives of sixty hostages. And a straight-on assault would be suicidal, with the Ratel he had left and the number of men still deployed outside.

A vehicle came around the hill, but it wasn’t the missing Ratel. It was the truck that the Corporation called the PIG. He was about to order the remaining Ratel to open fire when he saw one of his men standing in the PIG’s open roof, waving his gun and shouting with glee. He could see two more men inside the cab, driving their prize back to the cement plant.