Chapter Sixteen

As soon as the helicopter’s clamshell doors opened and Juan’s eyes adjusted to the bright light streaming in from outside, he knew he was into it. Deep.

Avoiding detection at a Libyan air base should have been relatively easy. There would be a thousand men stationed there, dozens of buildings to hide in, and the anonymity that came with the transient nature of military personnel who were shuffled from duty assignment to duty assignment.

But the Mi–8 hadn’t landed at an Air Force facility. It had landed high in the mountains on a shielded plateau that still commanded views over several breathtaking valleys. Below the compacted–earth landing pad was a training camp. Exiting the rear of the helo with the others, he could see dozens of tents, a parade field, an obstacle course, and a shooting range.

Juan made sure not to jump to a conclusion. The fact that this appeared to be a terrorist camp didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t government backed. He was still in Libya after all.

Off to one side of the compound was the mock–up of a three–story building constructed of metal scaffolding draped in burlap. The building it represented was large, like an office block, with a perimeter wall, a cantilevered porte cochere extending out over the circular drive, and a side wing that somehow made Juan think of a solarium, except the structure was too big for a private residence. The back of the building was an enclosed space, and while the men here hadn’t landscaped it like the real place, they had erected burlap fences to represent hedges.

With the turbines winding down, Cabrillo heard generators chugging away below them and the cry of a muezzin calling the faithful to noontime prayers. Men were streaming across the camp, each carrying a prayer rug. They began assembling on the parade ground, orienting their mats to face east and the holy city of Mecca. He estimated there were at least two hundred men — a large number, to be sure, but not big enough for him to remain anonymous for long. Someone would eventually miss the real Mohammad, and a thorough search would be conducted.

As much as he needed to gather intelligence about this group, his only chance lay in ducking away early and hoping he could return for a nocturnal reconnaissance.

“Get moving,” he was ordered from behind, and he shuffled off the chopper’s rear ramp.

Off across the valley, Juan spied some sort of construction site or excavation. He tugged his headscarf tighter around his face and started for the footpath leading to the camp below. He stayed close to the man in front of him so no one could get a look at his eyes and made sure to walk in a slight stoop to hide the fact that he was taller than most of the others.

He didn’t know if the men sent out to sabotage the downed airliner were stationed in the same barracks, but it stood to reason. He had watched them work, and while not as disciplined as professional soldiers they had a cohesiveness that came from working and training together in a tight group. Once they reached their billet, Juan knew his life would be measured in seconds.

The path wound along the edge of a steep ravine, its flank crisscrossed with countless intersecting gullies and wadis and covered with loose rock and sand. There was a shelf halfway down that sat atop a vertical cliff at least thirty feet high. Juan was judging the odds of his making it to the bottom alive as slim to nil when the team leader at the head of the little column turned around and started collecting their kaffiyehs.

The majority of the men knew this was coming and had already unwound their kaffiyehs from around their heads. Juan glanced down again at the camp to his left. No one had his head covered. It was a bonding tool, he knew. Only to outsiders would they be anonymous. Safe here at their camp and among their brothers, they showed themselves openly.

The odds no longer mattered.

He rammed the heels of his hands into the back of the man in front of him and snarled, “Watch yourself.”

The man whirled, his eyes fierce. “What did you do that for?”

“You elbowed me in the stomach,” Juan retorted. “I should kill you for the insult.”

“What’s going on back there?”

“This son of a pig pushed me,” Juan shouted.

“Who is that?” the leader called. “Show yourself.”

“Only when he apologizes.”

“I will not. You hit me in the back first.”

Juan swung at the Arab’s face, a lazy roundhouse lacking a tenth of Juan’s strength. The man saw it coming a mile away, ducked instinctively inside Juan’s reach, and fired two quick punches into Juan’s stomach. It was the excuse Juan needed. He yanked off the other man’s headscarf, turning him so Juan’s back was toward the rest of the men and no one could see his face.

“I don’t know you!” Juan cried in mock surprise. “This man is an impostor, an infiltrator.”

“Are you mad? I’ve been here for seven months.”

“Liar,” Cabrillo seethed.

The man went to push Juan. Rather than resist, Cabrillo grabbed his wrists and stepped back off the trail. His feet immediately began to slide. The gradient was gradual at first but quickly steepened. They started gaining speed, and when they reached a tipping point Juan fell backward, flipping the hapless terrorist over his head without relinquishing his grip, so the momentum tumbled him onto the man’s chest like an acrobat. It was now the terrorist’s body grinding against the sharp rocks, as they slid down the ravine with Juan lying on top.

They crashed into the first gully, and Cabrillo heard bones breaking against the hiss of gravel avalanching down the hill with them. The Libyan screamed in Juan’s ear as their speed careened them into the gully. They went down like bobsledders, only the terrorist was the sled. All around them, more and more rocks were loosened by the pair’s passage until, from above, the two must have been completely obscured by dust. Both of the man’s legs were broken below the knee and flopped sickeningly, as he and Juan whooshed down the defile, swaying up and down the sides according to the vagaries of the terrain.

Cabrillo used his artificial leg as a sort of rudder to keep them in the center of the gully as best he could. Each time he extended the limb, it was like a sledgehammer blow against his stump, but without Juan bracing them they would have started to tumble uncontrollably.

More gravel and sand was building up around them, and then suddenly they were on top of the avalanche they had created. The friction of the terrorist’s battered body scratching against the ground vanished without warning, and their speed seemed to double. Juan could no longer control their slide. When the gully began to twist to the left, the sheer volume of material rocketing down the hillside could no longer be contained and burst from its banks like a river in flood, bearing Juan and the Arab with it. They caught air as the ground dropped sharply away. When they came down, the terrorist was no longer screaming, and they had gained a few precious yards on the wall of gravel now in pursuit.

This new valley was wider and deeper than the first but twisted more often. Again, the avalanche caught up to them and again Juan rode the man as though he were straddling a tree trunk in a logging flume. Just ahead, he could see the debris cascading off the shelf he’d spotted from the top. He chanced a look up the slope. Behind the shifting thrust of gravel and sand, boulders tumbled in the avalanche, succumbing to the forces of gravity and the weight of dirt from above. It was like looking into the grinding mouth of an industrial wood chipper. The boulders banged and rattled against one another, pulverizing themselves as they fell.

He looked back downslope. The avalanche arced ten feet through space beyond the cliff before cascading to earth. Had it been water, Juan would have gone over the falls and had a good chance of swimming away at the bottom. But not here.

Cabrillo dug his prosthesis into the gravel, forcing it down into the avalanche until he felt solid ground beneath. Seconds before he and the Arab were carried over the precipice, he pushed off with everything he had, launching himself off the terrorist’s corpse in an awkward lurch that carried him right to the edge of the avalanche.

He scrambled onto all fours and started clawing his way upward, fighting the remorseless downward plummet of the gravel under him. It was like crawling against a treadmill set on maximum. There was no way he could gain any ground. The avalanche was much too fast. He only hoped to buy himself a few precious seconds as he angled himself farther up the side of the gully, driving himself to get out of the landslide’s grasp before it carried him over the cliff.

With ten feet to go, he was still mired in the fringes of avalanche. His bloodied fingers dug into it with machinelike tenacity, and his legs pistoned, kicking up dirt with each thrust. But it wasn’t enough. He was too far from the slide’s boundary to haul himself clear.

It wasn’t in him to give up, and he made one last supreme effort. The cascade of loose debris claimed the shattered remains of his companion at the same instant his fingers felt solid ground. Cabrillo groped to find purchase, and his hands clasped something hard and round. With no choice, he grasped it in his left hand and swung to find purchase with his right.

He knew the first rule of rock climbing was never to trust vegetation. It could let go without a moment’s notice. But with no other choice, he clung to the root of a gnarled tree left exposed to the sun.

Almost immediately, the root started to tear away from the earth as if he had yanked on the end of a rope that had been buried just beneath the surface. Though he had managed to drag all but his feet free of the landslide, he was relying entirely on the root, and the more its tangled subterranean connections snapped, the more he fell toward the edge of the cliff.

His legs went over the edge, and then his hips. He held on to the root with everything he had while less than a foot away a continuous torrent of sand and rock plummeted past his shoulder. His fall checked for an instant, he tried to pull himself upward, only to have more of the root break away. He slipped completely over the edge, dangling by his arms. Just before he went over, he saw that the wall of boulders and rocks was seconds away from cascading over the falls.

He forced himself to crab along the cliff face to his right, his head and shoulders pounded by the light rubble, lengthening the angle between himself and where the root was anchored on the side of the gulley. Then he raced back, running through the deluge seconds ahead of the boulders. He burst from the landslide, swinging like a pendulum. He reached out with his left hand and just managed to grasp a knuckle of rock in his fist.

His movements scraped the root against the razor–sharp edge of the cliff, like a length of string against a saw blade. Cabrillo had no time to gain a better purchase on the piece of sandstone in his hand when the root parted. His body crashed into the cliff. The tree root that had saved his life tumbled away, swallowed by the debris pouring down the mountainside.

Hanging by only one hand, he looked down in desperation. At first, the cliff appeared to be as smooth as a pane of glass and as perfectly vertical as the side of a skyscraper. But just a couple of inches below his feet was a shelf no wider than a paperback book.

The friable sandstone knuckle he was holding started to come apart in his grip.

Juan gathered a breath and let himself drop. There wasn’t enough room to absorb the shock by bending his knees, and he could feel the void sucking at his heels. The satellite phone, which had stayed with him for his wild plummet, was dislodged by the impact, snaking down one pant leg and emerging from the cuff. There was nothing he could do when it clattered off the shelf and disappeared into the valley below.

He couldn’t hear it land over the din of falling debris, but he knew it was a total loss. He clutched at the cliff face. The stone was warm on his cheek.

Next to him, curtains of dust rose from the rock and sand falling over the cliff, but already the landslide was slowing. With the steady wind swirling around the mountaintop, it wouldn’t be long before the dust blew away, exposing Cabrillo to anyone observing from above. The vertical drop to the next part of the mountain slope was at least thirty feet, with an additional hundred of steep terrain to the valley floor.

He looked to his right. The avalanche was almost over. The largest of the boulders now littered the ground below while only a thin trickle of sand poured over the edge of the cliff.

The second rule of climbing was never descend a rock face unless you know the route.

Juan had no idea what lay below him, what handholds and toe–holds he would find, but with twenty armed gunmen doubtless peering down the hill to see what had happened to their comrades the rules of safe climbing weren’t particularly relevant.

He bent down as far as he dared and lowered a leg off the shelf, feeling with his toes for some kind of hold. He also locked the ankle joint of his artificial leg. His foot found a slight depression, barely big enough for all his toes, but it was enough to take his weight. He lowered himself farther still, so that his elbows rested on the narrow shelf. He switched feet in the little niche and again poked blindly for another irregularity in the rock. There was nothing to be felt. The stone was featureless.

A thick tangle of rope suddenly shot past his face, uncoiling as it fell. Looking up, he saw that the cliff hid him from the terrorists above. They weren’t throwing him a lifeline, he realized, they were going to send someone down to check on survivors. It was just his good luck that they had chosen to send the climber exactly where he was clinging to the stone.

Juan quickly climbed back onto his shelf and carefully pulled off his boot. He yanked free some buttons of his uniform shirt and stuffed the boot against his chest. Then he wrapped the rope around the smooth molded foot of his prosthesis, looping it twice around, almost like the artificial limb was a pulley. He started to feel the rope dance and jerk in time with the movements of the man who had volunteered to check on his fallen teammates. Cabrillo grasped a handful of the line dangling over the void and stepped into empty space. With his back against the rock face, he slowly paid out rope through his hands. Because of the loops of rope around his foot and his locked ankle, he lowered himself down the cliff hand over hand, so smoothly that the guy above never felt him on the line.

It took less than a minute to reach the base of the cliff. If not for the artificial foot, a traditional descent would have alerted the terrorist of his presence or torn the flesh from his limb until all that remained was bone and gristle. He scrambled across the slope and hurled himself over a defile a moment before the climber reached the edge of the cliff and peered over.

His voice echoed across the valley. “I don’t see anything but a pile of rocks. I think they’re both dead.”

Juan chanced looking up at him. The soldier — or terrorist, depending on what Cabrillo discovered about this place — regarded the pile of rubble for a moment longer, then started climbing back up the rope. Juan collapsed, allowing the first waves of pain to wash over him. Nothing felt broken, but he knew his body was a sea of black–and–blue. He allowed himself only a ten–minute rest — any longer and he would have stiffened to the point of immobility.

Juan considered it a sign of good fortune when he found his kaffiyeh half buried in a mound of sand. He slipped it over his head and unlocked his prosthetic ankle. His plan was to find a safe place to hole up for the day and then make his way up over the mountain on the other side of the construction site that he’d spotted in the next valley. Given its proximity to the terrorist training camp, he had to assume the two facilities were connected.

Once there, he would have to trust on luck again to find out what it was, and hope that Secretary Katamora was being held in one camp or the other.

Deep in the pit of his stomach, he knew no one was that lucky.