Hell's Corner (Camel Club 5)

bit of good news. As he stared down at his friend lying on the hospital bed with thick bandages wound round his head, Stone had gripped his hand and squeezed it. “Alex, if you can hear me, it’s going to be okay. I promise that everything will be okay.” He paused, drawing a long breath that seemed to take forever to leave his body. “You’re a hero, Alex. The president is okay. No one was hurt. You’re a hero.” Stone looked down at his hand. He thought he had felt the other man squeeze it. But when he looked back up at the unconscious agent he knew that was just wishful thinking. Stone let go and walked to the doorway. Something made him look back. As he stared at his friend lying in the bed and fighting for his life, he felt a measure of guilt so powerful his knees started to buckle.

He’s lying there because of me. And now Caleb and Annabelle are probably dead. Again, because of me.

Stone had made one other stop, at a rare book store in Old Town Alexandria. The owner had been helped by Stone and Caleb and in return had allowed Stone to keep certain items there in a secret room underneath the old building. Those items were now in the back of the Rover.

“Murder Mountain?” said Chapman. “You mentioned it but didn’t really explain it.”

Knox answered when it didn’t appear Stone was going to. “Old CIA training facility. Shut down before my time. Hell of a place, from what I’ve heard. The way the Agency used to do things during the Cold War. I thought they’d demolished it.”

“No, they haven’t,” said Stone.

Knox eyed him curiously. “Have you been back recently?”

“Yes. Pretty recently.”

“Why?” asked Chapman.

“Business,” Stone replied tersely.

“What’s the layout?” asked Finn, as he hunched forward in his rear seat.

In answer Stone pulled out a laminated piece of paper and handed it back to him. Finn clicked on the overhead light and he and Chapman studied it. There were annotations on the page in Stone’s handwriting.

“This place looks bloody awful,” exclaimed Chapman. “A laboratory with a torture cage? A holding tank where you square off with an opponent in the dark to see who can kill the other?”

Stone glanced back at her. “It was not for the fainthearted.” His look was searching. She quickly got it.

“I’m not fainthearted.”

“Good to know,” he replied.

She eyed the cargo hold of the Rover. “That’s a fine set of vintage equipment you’ve got back there.”

“Yes, it is.”

“How are we going to do this?” asked Knox as he turned off Route 29 and onto Highway 211. They entered the tiny town of Washington, Virginia, the seat of Rappahannock County at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Washington, Virginia, was world famous for one reason: It was the home of the Inn at Little Washington, a prestigious restaurant that had been serving world-class cuisine for over a quarter century.

As they left the town and rose higher into the mountains, Stone broke his silence. “There are a couple of entry points. One is obvious, the other is not.”

“How well do you think she knows this place?” asked Chapman.

“Like Knox, it was before her time. She never would have trained there. But I can’t answer your question. She obviously knew of its existence. She may have explored it thoroughly. In fact, from what I know of her now, she probably has gone over every inch of it.”

“So she’ll know about the secondary entrance?” said Knox.

“We have to assume she will.”

But she won’t know about the third way in and out, because I’m the only one who does.

Stone had discovered it in his fourth month at Murder Mountain, when he just needed to get outside the place for a few moments alone. Just to catch his breath, collect his wits. Just get out of what had become a hellhole. Worse than any prison ever could have been. That was the principal reason Stone had been able to weather the max prison he and Knox had ended up in.

Because I endured something far worse. A year at Murder Mountain.

Chapman said, “What I don’t get is why she would have set up shop at this place, kidnapped Caleb and Annabelle and then basically dared you to come get her. She’ll never be able to escape now.”

Stone looked grim. “I don’t think she intends on escaping. She’s conceded that she’s going to go down for this. But she’s choosing to exit on her own terms.”

“Meaning she’s willing to die,” said Knox.

“And take us with her,” replied Stone.

“Dangerous opponent,” said Finn. “Someone who doesn’t care if she dies. Like a suicide bomber.”

“She better be thinking the same thing about me,” muttered Stone.

The other three glanced at each other but said nothing.

Chapman finally broke the silence. “So front or hidden entrance? We have to get in some way.”

“She’ll have six guys with her. All Russian, all hard as nails. They’ll kill anybody she tells them to.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

“It’s a big place and they’ll have to have at least one man guarding Caleb and Annabelle. Friedman will be back in a protected space. That leaves five men for perimeter duty. They can’t deploy them all at the entrances. They have to hold at least three back for interior protection. That leaves one at each entrance. That’s thin.”

“What do you think they expect us to do?”

“Hit both entrances, and whichever team gets through, so be it. If we did that we’d split up, making it two against one. If we hit one entrance together, it’s four against one.”

“I like those odds better,” said Knox.

“So do I,” said Stone. “But we’re not going to do it that way.”

“Why?” said Chapman.

“You’ll see why.”

CHAPTER 96

STONE WAS ALONE. He slipped among bulky rocks and narrow crevices as he made his way toward the secondary entrance into Murder Mountain. As a raw recruit to the CIA’s fabled Triple Six Division, Stone had spent a full year of his life here learning new ways to hunt, new ways to kill and new ways to be something both more and less than human. He had become a magnificently skilled predator with all ordinary emotions such as compassion and empathy burned out of him. Murder Mountain had turned out the best killers ever to walk the planet. And John Carr was universally acknowledged as the best of the best.

The training became so intense that Stone and some of his fellow trainees had looked for and discovered a way out of the facility. They had done so not to run to the rural town about twenty miles distant to get drunk or bed a few farmers’ daughters, but simply to sit under the stars, look at the moon, feel the breeze, see the green of the trees, feel the earth under their feet.

Stone had just wanted assurance that there was still a world going on outside Murder Mountain. Assignment to Triple Six was technically voluntary, but in all the important ways it was not. Stone still remembered clearly the day the man from the CIA had visited him in his military barracks. Stone and his company had just returned from Vietnam. Stone had performed so heroically in one firefight that there was talk of his being awarded the Medal of Honor. But that had not happened, largely because of a jealous superior officer who fudged the paperwork. If Stone had been awarded the medal his life might have turned out differently. Medal of Honor winners were rare. The army might have sent him on a publicity tour, even though by then the war was waning nearly as fast as the country’s interest in waging it.

So the man in the suit had come. He had made a proposal. Come join another agency. Another unit dedicated to fighting your country’s enemies. That was how he had phrased it: “Your country’s enemies.” Stone had been told little else. He looked to his commander for advice, but it was clear that the decision had already been made. Stone, barely twenty years old and covered in medals and commendations for his exemplary service in Vietnam, was mustered out of the army with breathtaking speed and soon fo

und himself here, at Murder Mountain.

The light was poor along this trail, but he had no trouble traversing it. It was all mental memory at this point. When he’d come back to this place not all that long ago, it had been the same way. He had remembered it all, as if he had never been away. As if the memory of it had been lurking in a set of brain cells, sequestered from the rest and not degraded in any way, like a cancerous tumor lying dormant until it started its fatal spread. Then nothing else was safe. Every part of him was vulnerable. That could sum up his life in Triple Six quite adequately.

He slipped the pair of old NVGs over his eyes when the light became too poor to make anything out. The crevices grew smaller. It was a good thing he had remained lean all these years or he never would have fit. Although, he recalled, big Reuben Rhodes had managed to squeeze himself through the rocks when he came here with Stone to save a man’s life. To save President Brennan’s life.

All the men in Triple Six had been lean, nothing but gristle and muscle. They could run all day, shoot all night without missing. They could change plans on the fly, ferret out targets no matter how deeply they had dug in. Stone could not deny that it had been exhilarating, challenging and even memorable.

“But I never wanted to come back here,” he said to himself.