“I count nine,” Lazarus said. “No way to know if any of them are friendly.”
Pierce strained to see if he could pick out Gallo, but they were still too far away. “Will they see us? Or hear us?”
“They’re using flashlights, so they won’t be able to see much of anything.” Lazarus was silent for a moment, then added. “Stay ready though, just in case.”
Pierce let a hand fall to the Heckler & Koch MP5K that hung from a sling across his chest. Pierce had never fired this particular weapon before, but Lazarus had assured him that it was as simple as point-and-shoot. It was even equipped with an infrared laser sight that would show him, with a fairly high degree of certainty, where the bullet would go.
Killing someone has never been so easy, he thought darkly. But the men they were going up against weren’t innocents. Kenner and Rohn had already tried to kill him once, and they had kidnapped Gallo and Fiona. He intended to remember that when the time came to pull the trigger.
“Let’s take it in,” Lazarus said. “I’ll go first. Corkscrew down and watch for a safe drop zone.”
Pierce held back until both Carter and Lazarus were at least a hundred feet below him before pulling on his right-hand toggle to begin a clockwise spiraling descent into the sinkhole. When Lazarus had told him they would be parachuting into a sinkhole, Pierce had imagined something like diving into a swimming pool from four miles up. It was only now, as he turned lazy circles in the sky above the tepui, that he understood just how big the sinkhole was. It would be more like diving into the East River.
He could not distinguish the ground. Although the walls positively radiated infrared light, the bottom of the sinkhole—which was rushing up—looked like a Jackson Pollock painting in hues of green and black. There was no way to know what awaited them down there.
As the remaining distance closed to almost nothing, he was able to make out the landscape in relief. There were irregular patches that might have been vegetation or uneven terrain, perhaps even trees, and in-between them an unnaturally smooth black surface. He steered toward the latter, realizing too late that it was not flat ground at all, but water.
Almost directly below, Lazarus’s chute seemed to curl in on itself as he pulled his control toggles hard. Then, the canopy settled gently into an amorphous heap, marking the spot where the big man had touched down. Carter flared her chute a moment later, and landed about thirty yards from Lazarus. Pierce guessed he had about ten seconds to do the same.
He hauled down on the toggles a couple of seconds later and his descent came to what felt like a screeching halt. Then he dropped another fifteen feet into chilly, waist-deep water. The thick muck that rose halfway to his knees absorbed most of the impact of landing, but it also wrapped around his legs. He wobbled for a moment and then heaved himself out of the mud and onto the shore. He quickly removed his respirator, unbuckled his harness, reeled in the water-logged parachute, bundled it up and shoved it beneath some tall ferns.
He crouched next to Lazarus beside a stand of trees that stood up out of the water on thick conical trunks with partially exposed roots. Pierce thought they might be cypress trees, which were found in wetlands along the Eastern seaboard of the United States.
Lazarus clapped him on the shoulder. “Not bad for an archeologist. I can see why Jack picked you.”
“Maybe I missed my calling as a Special Forces operator,” Pierce said, managing to get a smile out of the big man.
Carter clung to the stringy bark of one of the boughs, evidently trying to stay out of the water. Pierce wondered why for a moment, then remembered that Brazil was the land of piranhas and anacondas. He decided that maybe she had the right idea, and scrambled onto the nearest exposed root.
The trees obscured their view of the sandstone walls, but even through the forest canopy, Pierce could see the glow of the Cerberus group’s flashlights, amplified by the night vision goggles, a stark contrast to the near total darkness at the bottom of the pit.
He watched the lights for a few moments then turned to Lazarus and Carter. “They’ll be down soon. We need to get moving.”
Then the distinctive crack of a gunshot echoed across the treetops.
34
Cerberus Headquarters
At the first touch of the aerosol mist, Fiona leapt off the examination table and dove under it. The abruptness of her reaction sent two of the mice scurrying away, but for several seconds, that was the most dramatic thing that happened.
“Excellent,” Tyndareus crooned. “Tell me, are you feeling anything yet?”
Fiona ignored the question, but the mere suggestion was enough to make her skin crawl. What was in the mist? Tyndareus had called it a plant-based organic bio-weapon, but what did that even mean? Some kind of nerve agent?