Corsair (Oregon Files 6)

“Sweetie,” Max soothed, “this is Juan Cabrillo we’re talking about. With his luck that chopper’s headed to some five-star seaside resort, and ten minutes after they land he’ll have a drink in one hand and a woman in the other.”

It took THE BETTER part of eight hard hours to cross the desert to where Eric and Mark had spotted the abandoned drill truck on the satellite pictures. The landscape was a fractured plane of endless hillocks and riverbeds that rattled their organs until they felt their bodies were nothing more than liquid held in check by their skin.

Mark and Linda had switched places so she rode shotgun next to Linc. He drove in a loose-armed, relaxed pose, as if the rough terrain were no more bothersome than an occasional pothole on an interstate highway. As the sun hovered over the distant horizon, they were approaching the GPS coordinates Eric Stone had provided. The Pig was still performing as advertised, and their remaining fuel was just enough to get them across the border into Tunisia. There they would need to find diesel. Linc was hoping they could buy a supply at the archaeological site, but most likely it would need to be choppered in from the Oregon. He would have to call Max about making the arrangements so they could sling a bladder of diesel under the Corporation’s new McDonnell Douglas MD-520N. With its hook-lifting capacity of a ton, George Adams, their pilot, could more than handle the fuel needed to fill the Pig’s many tanks.

Something sticking up from the otherwise barren desert caught Linc’s attention. It was less than a quarter mile off to their left. He wasn’t sure what it was. From a distance and in the uncertain light, it appeared to be pulsating. He pointed it out to Linda and Mark. Neither knew what to make of it. They were a mile from the abandoned truck, but Linc felt it was worth a look, so he parked the Pig behind a low dune and killed the engine.

“Mark, grab me my REC7, will you?” Linc asked. Next to him, Linda drew a Glock 19, the compact version of the 17, one of the most popular combat pistols in the world.

Mark opened the door to the rear compartment and handed Linc his assault rifle. Not as proficient with small arms as he was with the Oregon’s state-of-the-art arsenal, Murph tucked an antique Model 1911 .45 caliber pistol into the small of his back when he unlimbered his lanky frame from the truck.

The three of them kept in a crouch and used natural cover to approach the unknown object thrust up from the ground. When they were fifty yards off, they heard an obscene crying sound, something that wasn’t human but still reminded them all of an infant’s scream.

“What the hell is that thing?” Mark asked with superstitious dread.

Linc was just ahead of the other two, his rifle tucked high against his shoulder, as he peered intently, trying to understand what he was seeing. The object looked like an inverted cross, but there were two dark shapes moving on either side of the cross, shuffling around in an ungainly motion.

Then one of the shapes spread a pair of wide black wings, and Linc knew immediately what he was seeing. A man had been crucified with his head pointed toward the ground, and a pair of bald-necked vultures was sitting on the crux of his underarms. The feathers around their heads were matted with gore, as they feasted upon the corpse. One had torn off a strip of flesh that now hung in its beak. It jerked its head back and forth to force the meat down its gullet.

Linc knew from an experience in central Africa when he was with the SEALs that no warning shot in the world would chase the repugnant birds from their favored carrion. He fired for effect, putting two rounds downrange, and the vultures were blown off their unholy perch. A couple of feathers drifted lazily on the slight breeze and settled a few feet away from their bodies.

“Oh, God . . . Oh, God . . . Oh, God,” Mark Murphy kept repeating, but, to his credit, he stayed with Linc and Linda as they drew nearer.

The birds had inflicted unspeakable wounds to the body. They’d had days to tear and rip into the man’s flesh, but there was enough recognizable to see he was Caucasian and he’d died from a single bullet to the head. Because of the blood that had soaked into the ground below the crucifix, it was impossible to tell if he’d been shot before or after he’d been strung up. Being only a mile from the drill truck, it wasn’t a leap in logic to assume that this was what remained of one of the State Department people.

In Linc’s mind he could concede that the terrorists might have felt that killing the man had been an operational necessity. But the desecration of his body in an intentional perversion of Christ’s death had been done merely for the fun of it.

Without a word, Linc started back to the Pig to get a shovel.

The grisly task took twenty minutes in the soft soil, and when he was finished only a thin sheen of sweat greased his torso and shaved head. While he worked, Linda and Mark cast ahead for the truck only to discover it had been moved since the satellite flyby. They found clearly defined tire tracks leading off to the west. They also saw a second set of tracks from a vehicle lighter than the drill truck. Between the two sets of tracks was a single brass shell casing that still smelled of gunpowder, and a red-black stain in the earth that was being painstakingly cleared away one sand grain at a time by columns of ants.

When they told Linc what they’d seen, all agreed that the State Department team had inadvertently crossed the border into Libya, where they had been discovered by a patrol. For some reason, one of their party had been shot in the head and the others taken prisoner. The body had been driven a short distance and crucified.

“It’s possible they saw Katamora’s plane fly overhead,” Mark suggested. “Realizing it was in trouble, they might have decided to investigate.”

“And they just happened to run into a border patrol?” Linda’s comment was more a dubious statement than a question.

“Not a border patrol,” Linc countered, sensing where Linda was heading. “The terrorists sent out teams along the projected flight path to eliminate anyone who saw the plane.”

“Judging from where the ambush took place, the State people were well south of their own base camp,” Mark pointed out. “They were in the right place only it was the wrong time.”

“What do you want us to do?” Linc asked Linda Ross.

As the Corporation’s vice president of operations, she was the ranking member on the team. She considered calling Max and leaving the decision up to him, but Hanley hadn’t seen the condition of the body, couldn’t feel what she’d felt at that moment when she realized what it was. When it came to tactical matters, Linda rarely allowed her emotions to interfere with her decisions. No good commander does. However, this time, looking at her companions, she knew the right call was to go after the butchers who did this. With luck, they would take one alive. It was doubtful a foot soldier would know the overall plans these people had for the Secretary of State, but any intelligence was better than nothing.

“They’ve got a hell of a head start,” she said, her jaw barely moving because of her anger.

“Don’t matter to me,” Linc said.

“If it makes it easier,” Mark said, “there’s a fifty-fifty chance the two other Americans were taken prisoner when the Libyans took their truck.”

Linda hadn’t thought of that, and it was the last piece of information to cement her decision. “Mount up.”

Tracking the drill truck’s tire tracks across the desert was as easy as following the dotted lines on a country road. The vehicle was heavy enough that the marks hadn’t yet succumbed to the constant scouring of the wind. And when the sun sank over some distant mountains, Mark activated the Pig’s FLIR system. Designed for attack helicopters, the Forward Looking Infrared system could detect ambient heat sources and would give them a warning many miles off if they approached the warm engine of the truck.

Linc strapped a pair of night vision goggles over his head. Using both passive and active near-infrared illuminators, he could drive comfortably in total darkness if necessary. However, the quarter moon rising behind them gave the third-generation system more than enough light.

No one spoke as they drove across the wasteland. There was no need. All three of them shared the same thoughts, the same concerns, and also the same desire to avenge the dead man. None of them cared about the bumps and ruts that the powerful truck bulled through. What the massive shock absorbers couldn’t take, their bodies would.