ey selected one of the fuel cells, tested it, as Kurt had, and then switched it off.
The man in the boat grew impatient. “Vamanos.”
The men onshore got moving. They carried all four of the fuel cells to the small boat, loaded them inside and then climbed aboard and pushed off.
As soon as they were clear of the rocks, the outboard was lowered back into the water and started with a hard pull. It coughed out a fog of blue smoke as it came to life and the men eased out of sight, heading toward the mouth of the cave.
Kurt waited until he’d heard them speed away and then cautiously stepped from his hiding place. He didn’t speak much Spanish, but some of the words were obvious to him.
His mind went to the Semtex he’d found and the joke that had brought out a round of laughter.
“Los explosivos,” Kurt whispered. “Boom!”
48
Emma followed her guard as he walked across the beach, cut through the grass and traveled up into the clearing where the Nighthawk sat. On the far side, Urco stood among the containment units.
Two of the eight units had been removed. They now rested on the stony ground, each of them connected to a fuel cell.
“Check these over, please,” Urco said.
“What am I looking for?” she asked.
“I want to be sure everything is functioning properly and that they’re safe to move.”
It was a simple task. She crouched beside the units and did a quick diagnostic review, all the time wondering why he’d bothered to say please.
“The magnetic bottles are stable,” she said. “The cryogenic systems are operating within accepted parameters. The fuel cells are generating clean power.”
“Good,” Urco said.
She stood. “I assume you want me to remove the other units?”
“In time,” he said. “For now, we should discuss your role in things.”
“My role?”
He only smiled and said, “Walk with me.”
With little choice in the matter, she nodded. “Lead on.”
They left the guard behind, entering a path cut through the foliage that twisted toward higher ground. Machetes had done the work; freshly cut stalks and fallen blades of the long grass lay across the ground. They’d been trampled down by a fair amount of foot traffic already.
“Are we entering some kind of maze?” she asked.
“We’re already deep inside one,” he insisted. “Working together is the only way out.”
“We were working together,” she replied, “right up until the point where your men attacked us, killed Kurt and took the rest of us hostage.”
“Not hostages,” he said, “captives. Captured thieves, actually.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a thief,” he said. “A well-dressed, Stanford-educated thief. Your entire organization has larceny in its heart and, by extension, the nation you serve. But you’ve been caught—red-handed, as they say—in the middle of the greatest robbery the world has ever known.”
“You’re the one who took the—”
“No,” he said, turning on her and cutting her off. “I only relieved you of the stolen goods. It was you and your government that engaged in this theft. You chose to fly this craft up into the heavens and gather the mixed-state matter from the magnetic field. You chose to bring it home to your hidden bunkers at Vandenberg, where you and your people would hoard it for your own purposes.”