Piranha (Oregon Files 10)

Pasquet rolled to a stop in front of a large building closest to the hill behind the plant. Bazin took his duffel bag and entered the building.

Inside, he found sixty men, all Haitians, kneeling with their hands over their heads. His men circled them like wolves, their G36 assault rifles at the ready. Two bodies lay on the floor.

The phone call he’d received on the way from the airport had prepared Bazin, but he was enraged again by this further setback.

“What happened?” Bazin asked the senior officer he’d left in charge.

His officer nodded in the direction of a man kneeling in the front row. Blood dripped from a fresh wound on his forehead. He glared back at Bazin with grim determination.

“While they were digging, he and the other men jumped two of the guards and killed them,” the officer said. “We were able to subdue them before they got to the weapons.”

“The guards should have been more careful,” Bazin said. “I told them Jacques was clever.”

Jacques Duval turned his head and spat blood that had trickled into his mouth. “You can’t keep us here forever, Hector.”

Bazin cocked his head at his old housemate and until recently deputy commander in the Haitian National Police before he was abducted and brought here. “Who says I’m planning to?”

“We won’t keep digging for you.”

“You will if you want your families to live.”

Duval laughed ruefully. “Don’t you see the irony of all this, Hector? You’re keeping us as slaves in the first country that threw off the shackles of slavery and became an independent nation.”

“You’re not slaves, you’re traitors. I offered you a chance to join me and you tried to take me down.”

Duval looked at him with pity. “How did you grow up to be this way? You and I were restavecs in the same household. We both joined the French Foreign Legion. We were the same. And now you’re a monster.”

“We were not the same.” He addressed the rest of the kneeling group, many of whom had served in the Haitian government alongside Duval. “This man that you revere, that you worship, is nothing more than a sniveling dog who would let a boy younger than he suffer beatings every single day of his life.”

Duval sighed. “You’re right, Hector. I should have done more. But I was just a child. And now I’m trying to change all that, the whole system, to make Haiti a better place.”

“It won’t change. Never. That’s why I brought you here. You and the rest of these men are deranged to think it could ever change. The only thing that changes is who holds the power. Well, now I hold the power. Because of what we’re doing here, I will hold more power than you can possibly imagine.”

“Why don’t you just kill us? We’re both military men, so be honest. That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it? You can’t let us leave after what we’ve seen.”

“We still need you to install an emergency escape tunnel, so there’s more digging to be done. But you’re right, I don’t need all of you. There needs to be consequences for what you’ve done.”

Bazin took the assault rifle from the nearest mercenary. Duval straightened up and looked Bazin in the eyes as if he knew what was coming.

Bazin shook his head and grinned. “Such a noble gesture. But no. As a military man, you should know that your men always pay for your failures.”

Bazin shifted the rifle and fired shots through the foreheads of the men kneeling to either side of Duval.

Duval yelled, “No!” and jumped to his feet, ready to charge Bazin.

“Shall we make it three?” Bazin said.

Duval halted, sneered at him, and then knelt back down.

“Good,” Bazin said, and threw the rifle back to his man. “That was just a small preview. If you behave from now on, I might let you live long enough to see the kind of power that can control the world.”

Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland

Juan threaded the rental car past concrete barriers that could stop a semi from barreling onto the naval air station property. He and Eric Stone, who Juan brought along for his technical expertise, were approaching the gate to Pax River, as it was known to the base personnel, now entering during the morning rush hour.

When Juan reached the gate, the guard’s voice was drowned out by the thundering engines of a P-8 Poseidon submarine hunter coming in for a landing, but the intent was clear. He wanted to see their identification.

Juan wished they could have used the false IDs they normally traveled under, but to get into a Navy facility and access to a top secret project, at Langston Overholt’s insistence, Juan and Eric had to rely on the security clearances they’d obtained when they were in the employ of the U.S. government.