Piranha (Oregon Files 10)

“What’s the matter?” Max asked. “Is it a false lead?”

“No, it’s a match. But you’re not gonna believe where the cave is.” He took over the main view screen from Linda and put up the map from his tablet.

A yellow dot was superimposed on a satellite image of the area, with the ridge outline in red. Instead of the dot appearing in a green valley, it was planted inside the blue water of a lake.

“Your comparison model must be wrong,” Eddie said. “How could the cave be at the bottom of a lake?”

“Because that is Lake Péligre on the Artibonite River in central Haiti,” Murph said with a dejected sigh as he read from his screen. “It was formed by the construction of the Péligre Hydroelectric Dam in 1956, more than fifty years after Gunther Lutzen visited it. The cave entrance is now under forty feet of water.”

By midday the Oregon had reached the Dominican Republic’s largest northern port, Puerto Plata. Lake Péligre was situated almost directly in the center of Haiti and would require travel over twisting and rutted roads; it would take Linda and her team seven hours to make the two-hundred-and-seventy-five-mile journey. The easier part was getting their transportation into the country.

Normally, prior approval from the customs office was required to off-load cargo, but greasing palms of the DR’s low-paid civil servants took care of the “misunderstanding” that the clearance hadn’t been preauthorized. Then after the thirty minutes needed to unload the PIG, the Oregon put back to sea. Crossing the border by land into Haiti unhindered would require another generous bribe.

Linda checked, but no one was following. Eric, who was riding shotgun in the truck’s four-person cab, confirmed that they weren’t being tracked electronically. If Kensit were watching them with the neutrino telescope, they’d never know. MacD and Hali sat in the backseat, rechecking their gear.

Since Max was the one who’d designed the vehicle, he was given the honor of naming it and he dubbed it Powered Investigator Ground, but, much to his chagrin, everyone else in the crew simply referred to it as the PIG. It was the Corporation’s land-based version of the Oregon herself. To an outside observer, the PIG seemed to be nothing more than a beat-up cargo truck carrying fuel drums, down to the logo of the fictitious oil company on the side. The rear could even be opened by dockside inspectors, who could remove the six full drums that served as the vehicle’s spare fuel and that could extend its range to eight hundred miles. Removing the first row of drums revealed a second row that was merely a façade hiding the rest of the PIG’s interior. They took the calculated risk that no one would ever go to the trouble of completely emptying the cargo bed.

In reality, the PIG was an all-terrain platform built on a Mercedes Unimog chassis and featuring an 800-horsepower turbodiesel engine with a nitrous oxide boost that could push it over 1000. The four-person cab and cargo area that could transport ten fully equipped soldiers were armored to deflect high-powered rifle rounds, and the self-sealing tires and fully articulated suspension with two feet of ground clearance meant it could conquer any terrain short of a cliff face.

The PIG could be configured to serve any mission required, from search and rescue to mobile command station to ground assault. Much of Max’s attention had focused on its offensive and defensive capabilities. The front bumper concealed a .30 caliber machine gun, and hidden racks on either side of the truck swung down to launch guided rockets. A seamless roof hatch allowed the PIG to fire mortar barrages, while a smoke generator at the rear could belch out thick plumes.

The newest modification had been the addition of remote operation capability. The drive-by-wire system could be maneuvered by a handheld control with a range of five miles. The operator used cameras mounted on the front and rear that had both daylight and night vision settings.

Linda took several sharp turns through the city. If Kensit didn’t have the neutrino telescope trained on them, there was no way he’d be able to find them now. Although she didn’t often get the chance, Linda always liked driving the PIG the good old-fashioned manual way. There was nothing more macho than motoring along on its ultra-large tires, perched higher than any other vehicle, fully encased in a truck that could take on anything else on four wheels.

“You think Kensit’s got his eyes on us?” Hali asked, the same question everyone else was thinking.

“Let’s hope he’s too focused on the Chairman,” Linda replied as she steered the PIG onto the coastal highway.

That was the primary reason it was just the four of them and not a full assault team. The goal was to make Kensit think they were simply on a recon mission so that his attention would be elsewhere.

“Ready for the briefing?” Eric asked.

“Go for it,” Linda said, not letting her apprehension show. She didn’t like talking about this openly, but it had to be done eventually.

“Okay, the cave opening is underwater, but there is an old cement factory less than a mile away situated between the mountains and the lake, with just a dirt road leading to the highway. Limestone is the one thing Haiti has a lot of, and the cement made from it was used to build the Lake Péligre dam. Once the dam was completed, the cement plant went bust and was abandoned until it started operating two years ago under the ownership of an untraceable shell company.”

“Too coincidental, if you ask me,” MacD said.

“You’d be right,” Eric said. “The factory is producing cement, but barely. According to CIA sources, the output isn’t enough to profitably support a factory that size. And it’s low-grade stuff. You wouldn’t want your house built out of it.”

Hali leaned on Eric’s seatback. “So you think this is a cover for digging tunnels into the cave?”

“Right. Since the original entrance is now inaccessible, Kensit needed another way in. If Gunther Lutzen provided him with some kind of map of the cave system, Kensit could have drilled holes into the mountain until he found a way in and then bored a tunnel big enough to move his equipment. A cement factory would be the perfect cover to transport the waste material from the dig away without anyone noticing.”

“Ah may not be the sharpest tool in the shed,” MacD said, “but if the cave is underwater, how did Kensit build this telescope inside it?”

“Either he built a barrier to keep the lake water out and pumped it dry,” Eric said, “or the cave he’s using is above the level of the lake. Remember, cave systems can ascend and descend drastically.”

“What about intel on the cement factory defenses?” Linda asked.

“Nothing. We have to assume Bazin has his forces ready for any incursions.”

The scope of the “recon” mission was agreed to back on the Oregon. The planning had been extremely awkward because of the precautions they had to take. Without naming it, Juan referred to the sunken ship on their coldest-weather mission. Everyone on the team immediately knew that meant the Silent Sea, a Chinese junk that had gone down off the coast of Antarctica. Their mission go time tomorrow would be 1600 hours minus the number of letters in the ship’s name. Nine letters meant that they all understood the mission start time to be seven a.m. Sunrise.

As for the role of their recon mission, Juan told them that they would be his Aggie Johnston. The Aggie Johnston was a supertanker that had served as a screen for the Oregon so that it could sneak up on an enemy frigate off the coast of Libya. Linda’s mission was to provide cover for the Chairman. She and her team were the distraction for what he was planning.

Juan proposed sneaking past the guards in the cement plant using the same method he did at Karamita, which Kensit would not know was a now defunct ship-breaker yard in Indonesia. Juan asked Linda and her team to place two sets of the equipment so that they would be ready for use when the mission started. They couldn’t requisition the equipment from the ship’s stores without Kensit seeing what they were acquiring, so they planned to buy it locally in the hope that Kensit would still have his eye on the Oregon by then. Linda didn’t like using off-the-shelf equipment, but she would go over it with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it was all working properly.