Текст книги "Skeleton Coast"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“Then give me ten minutes.”

“Chairman, I ain’t foolin’. You don’t have it. If we don’t come in now there won’t be enough of Mafana’s men left to count on one finger. This wasn’t a suicide operation. We owe it to them to cover their retreat.” Even as Linc spoke, the big cargo plane arrowed out of the sky. “I’ve also just gotten word from Max that our situation has changed somewhat.”

By landing now, Linc had forced Cabrillo’s hand. Moses would never make it to the airstrip unaided.

Juan would have to carry him. The plane was too vulnerable on the ground to wait for him to return to the prison and rescue Geoffrey Merrick. And as soon as Mafana and his men began their retreat from the prison, the guards would swarm after them in hot pursuit. Without aerial cover they would be slaughtered out on the open desert.

As for whatever change Max Hanley was talking about, Juan would have to trust that his second in command had a much better grasp of the overall operational picture.

The old de Havilland Caribou was an awkward-looking aircraft, with a rudder that was as tall as a three-story building and a cockpit hunched over a blunt nose. The high wings allowed for it to carry a large payload for its size and also to make incredibly short takeoff and landing runs. The particular aircraft Tiny Gunderson had rented was painted white, with a faded blue strip running the length of the fuselage.

Juan saw that his chief pilot had lined up on the runway for his final approach. It was time to go.

“Come on,” he said to Moses Ndebele and crept out from their position under the prison. The sound of gunfire in the courtyard was muted by the building’s thick walls, but it still sounded as though a thousand men were in a fight for their lives.

When both men were on their feet Juan transferred his H&K to his left hand and stooped to lift the African leader over his shoulder. Ndebele was a tall man, but years of imprisonment had shrunk him to little more than skin and bones. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds.

Normally Cabrillo wouldn’t have had a problem carrying such a burden, however, his body was exhausted by hours of unrelenting abuse.

Juan straightened his legs, his mouth a tight, grim line. Once he had Ndebele settled on his shoulder he took off in a loping gait. His boots sank into the sand as he jogged, taxing his quivering legs and aching back with every pace. He kept a wary eye on the side of the prison where the entrance doors were located but so far none of Mafana’s men had tried to flee. They remained engaged with the guards, knowing that the longer they gutted it out the better chance their leader had of escaping.

The seventy-foot-long twin-engine cargo plane touched down when Cabrillo was halfway to the landing strip. Tiny reversed the pitch of the propellers and gunned the motors, kicking up a veritable sandstorm with the prop wash that completely obscured the aircraft. The maneuver cut the distance he needed to land to less than six hundred feet, leaving more than enough room to take off into the wind without backtracking to the end of the runway. Gunderson feathered the props so they no longer bit into the air but barely cut power to the 1,500-horsepower engines. The airframe shuddered with unreleased energy.

Motion to Juan’s left caught his eye. He glanced over to see one of Mafana’s trucks emerge from the prison. Men in the back continued to fire into the courtyard, while the driver raced for the plane.

Moments later the other three trucks appeared. They weren’t going anywhere near as fast. The rescuers were trying to further delay the guards from breaking out.

Juan turned his attention back to the Caribou. The cargo ramp was coming down, Franklin Lincoln standing at its very tip with an assault carbine in his hands. He waved Juan on but kept his attention focused on the approaching truck. There was another black man with him, one of Mafana’s men whom Juan had sent to rendezvous with the plane the night before.

The ground under Cabrillo’s feet firmed as he reached the gravel runway and he put on a burst of speed, adrenaline allowing him to ignore the pain for a few minutes more.

Juan reached the plane and lurched drunkenly up the ramp a few seconds before the lead truck braked just beyond the edge of the ramp. Doc Huxley was waiting with her medical cases. She’d strung saline drip bags to a wire running along the ceiling, the cannulas ready to replace any blood the fighters had lost.

Juan laid Ndebele on one of the nylon mesh bench seats and turned to see what he could do to help.

Linc already had the truck’s rear gate open. There were a dozen wounded men strewn on the floor and over the sound of the roaring engines Juan could hear their agony. Blood drizzled from the tailgate.

Lincoln lifted the first man out and carried him into the aircraft’s hold. Ski was right behind him, lugging another of the wounded. Mike and Eddie carried a third between them, a great bear of a man with blood saturating his pants from the thighs down. Juan helped an ambulatory man step to the ground. He cradled his arm to his chest. It was Mafana, and his face was ashen, but when he saw Moses Ndebele sitting up against a bulkhead he cried out in joy. The two wounded men greeted each other as best they could.

Back at the prison, the remaining trucks from the original convoy took off into the desert, their wheels kicking up spiraling columns of dust. Moments later, two other vehicles emerged. One of them started after the fleeing four-wheel drives while the second turned for the airstrip.

“Chairman,” Linc shouted over the noise as he stepped onto the ramp carrying another of the injured.

“Last one. Tell Tiny to get us out of here.”

Juan waved in acknowledgment and threaded his way forward. Tiny was leaning out of his seat, and when he saw Cabrillo give him a thumbs-up he turned his attention back to the controls. He slowly changed the propellers’ angle of attack and the big aircraft began to roll.

Cabrillo headed aft again. Julia was cutting away one man’s bush jacket to expose a pair of bullet holes in his chest. The wounds bubbled. His lungs had been punctured. Undaunted by the unsanitary conditions or the bumpiness of the takeoff, she got to work on triage.

“Did you have to leave it to the last second?” Eddie asked when Juan approached. He was grinning.

Cabrillo shook his outstretched hand. “You know what a procrastinator I can be. You guys okay?”

“Couple more gray hairs, but none the worse. One of these days you’re going to have to tell me how you rustled up an army in the middle of nowhere.”

“Great magicians never divulge their secrets.”

The plane continued to pick up speed and was soon outpacing the guards’ truck. Through the open ramp Juan could see them fire off a few rounds in frustration before the driver braked hard and turned to give chase to the rest of Mafana’s men. A third and then fourth truck roared out of the prison gate after them.

Tiny hauled back on the yoke and the old Caribou lifted off the rough field. The vibrations that had built until Juan was sure he’d lose a filling finally evened out. Mindful that the ramp would have to remain open, the patients were moved to the front of the aircraft, leaving the area at the rear open. Linc stood on the ramp, a safety line stretching from a D ring on the floor to the rear of his combat vest. He wore a helmet with a microphone so he could talk with Tiny in the cockpit. There was a long crate at his feet.

Juan clipped himself in, too, and cautiously approached the big SEAL. Hot wind whipped through the cabin as Tiny banked the plane to come in behind the guards’ vehicles. With their newer trucks they had already eaten away half the lead Mafana’s troops had managed to gain on them.

The trucks were approaching a deep valley between towering dunes when the plane hurtled over the two sets of vehicles. There was less than a half mile separating them. Tiny kept them at a thousand feet as he flew along the length of the valley, but in an instant the valley came to a sudden end. Rather than opening up again onto open desert, the valley was only three miles long, a dead end. Its head was a sloping dune so steep that the trucks would have to slow to a walking pace to reach the summit.

“Bring us around again,” Linc shouted into his mike. “Come up behind them.”

He motioned for Mike and Eddie to join them. The two men quickly got themselves secured, leaning over to maintain their balance as the plane banked around. Linc opened the crate. Inside were four of Mafana’s RPGs. They were the reason Juan had sent one of Mafana’s men to hook up with Linc.

Linc handed one of the rocket-propelled grenade launchers to each of them.

“This is going to have to be some pretty fancy shooting,” Mike shouted dubiously. “Four trucks. Four RPGs. We’re doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour and they must be close to fifty.”

“Ye of little faith,” Linc yelled back.

The plane evened out again at the entrance to the valley. Tiny took them lower, fighting updrafts of hot air lofting off the desert floor. The dunes flashed by no more than a hundred feet from the wing tips. Linc was listening to the pilot as he counted down how long it would be before they shot over the guards’

convoy. When he lifted the RPG to his shoulder the other three did likewise.

He pointed at Juan and Ski. “Aim at the base of the dune to the left of the convoy. Mike and I will take the right. Drop the grenades about twenty yards in front of the lead vehicle.”

Tiny took them lower still, and then gained elevation quickly when the plane came under fire from below.

He steadied the Caribou just as they passed the last truck in line. For a fleeting second, Juan and the others were looking down at the convoy and it appeared that every gun the guards had was blazing away at them.

“Now!”

They triggered the RPGs simultaneously. The four rockets popped from their tubes and ignited, their white contrails corkscrewing through the clear air. The plane had overshot Mafana’s trucks by the time the warheads slammed into the base of the dunes. The shaped charges went off in blinding eruptions of sand. And while they seemed puny compared to the massive scale of the dunes, the explosions had their desired effect.

The equilibrium of angle and height that held the dunes in place was thrown off by the blasts. A trickle of sand began to slide down each face, accelerating and growing until it looked like both sides of the canyon were racing for each other. And caught in the middle was the guards’ convoy.

The twin landslides crashed onto the valley floor. The right-side avalanche had been going a bit faster than its partner so when it slammed into the convoy, the four vehicles were blown onto their sides. Men and weapons were tossed from the beds of the trucks only to be struck by the second wall of sand as it careened into them, burying everything under thirty or more feet of earth.

A cloud of dust was all that marked their grave.

Linc hit the button to close the ramp and all four men stepped back.

“What did I tell you?” Linc grinned at Mike. “Piece of cake.”

“Lucky thing this valley was here,” Mike retorted.

“Lucky, my butt. I saw it when I hightailed it out last night. Juan had Mafana’s men drive here specifically so we could take out all the guards in one fell swoop.”

“Pretty slick, Chairman,” Trono conceded.

Juan didn’t try to hide his self-satisfied smile. “That it was. That it was.” He turned his attention back to Lincoln. “Does Max have everything set?”

“TheOregon ’s tied to the dock in Swakopmund. Max will meet us at the airport with a flatbed truck carrying an empty shipping container. We load the wounded in and hop aboard ourselves. Max will then drive down to the wharf, where a Customs inspector with a pocket bulging with baksheesh will sign off on the bill of lading and we get hoisted onto the ship.”

“And Mafana’s men are going to drive through to Windhoek,” Juan concluded, “where they can fly out to wherever we can find Ndebele a safe haven.” His tone soured. “All well and good, except we didn’t rescue Geoffrey Merrick and have lost any chance to find him again. I’m sure his kidnappers left the Devil’s Oasis five seconds after the guards.”

“Ye of so little faith,” Linc said for the second time with a sad shake of his head.

NINA Visser was sitting in the shade of a tarp anchored to the bed of their truck when she heard a buzzing sound. She had been writing in her journal, a habit she’d kept up since her early teens. She’d filled volumes of notebooks over the years, knowing someday it would be an important resource for her biographer. That she would be important enough to need a book written about her life was something she’d never doubted. She was going to be one of the great champions of the environmental movement, like Robert Hunter and Paul Watson, Greenpeace’s cofounders.

Of course the current operation wouldn’t be included. This was one blow she would strike from the shadows. She was only writing out of habit and knew she would have to destroy this journal and any others that mentioned her involvement with Dan Singer’s scheme.

She closed the notebook and slid her pen into the spiral binding. Crawling out from under the tarp was like opening the door of an oven. The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly. She stood, dusted off the seat of her pants, and shielded her eyes from the sun, searching the sky for the plane Danny had promised. Even with dark sunglasses it took her a few seconds to spot the little jewel glinting in the sky.

A couple of her friends crawled out from the tarp to join her, including Susan. They were all tired from the drive, and thirsty because they hadn’t packed enough water.

Merrick was faring the worst since he was bound and gagged and left leaning against the side of the truck, where there was only a sliver of shadow. He hadn’t gained consciousness since being injected with the heroin and his sunburned face was rimmed with dried sweat. Flies buzzed around his wound.

The plane made a pass of the dirt runway and everyone waved as it overshot them. The pilot wagged the aircraft’s wings and circled back. It floated along the runway for a hundred feet before the pilot could finally get it down. He quickly throttled back and taxied to where the truck was parked on the edge of the field. The deserted town was a few hundred yards behind them, a clutch of crumbling buildings that the desert was slowly consuming.

A ramp at the rear of the aircraft slowly lowered, reminding Nina of a medieval drawbridge. A man she didn’t recognize emerged and approached the group. “Nina?” he asked, yelling over the engines noise.

Nina stepped toward him. “I’m Nina Visser.”

“Hi,” he said in a friendly tone. “Dan Singer wanted me to tell you that the United States’ government has a program called Echelon. With it they can listen to just about any electronic conversation in the world.”

“So?”

“You should be more careful what you say over a satellite phone, ’cause someone was listening last night.” Even as his words were sinking in, Cabrillo dropped his easy demeanor and whipped a pistol from behind his back, aiming it at Nina Visser’s tall forehead. Three more men charged down the Caribou’s ramp, led by Linc. Each was armed with an MP-5 machine pistol and they swept their guns from person to person. “Hope you guys like it out here,” Juan continued. “We’re on a rather tight schedule and don’t have time to haul you in to the police.”

One of the environmentalist fanatics shifted his weight to lean closer to their truck. Juan fired a bullet close enough to his foot to gouge the edge of his rubber-soled boot. “Think again.”

Linc kept the environmentalists covered, clearing the way for Juan to cut Geoff Merrick free while the other two Corporation men bound each of the kidnappers with plastic flex cuffs. Merrick was unconscious and his shirt was caked with dried blood. Julia was aboard theOregon tending to the wounded freedom fighters from Zimbabwe, but one of her orderlies had made the flight. Juan turned Merrick over to the medico and stepped back out into the sunlight carrying two jerry cans of water.

“If you ration this it should last a week or so.” He tossed the cans into the back of the truck.

He searched the vehicle and found Nina’s satellite phone in the glove compartment. He also came away with a couple of assault rifles and a pistol.

“Kids shouldn’t play with guns,” he said over his shoulder as he returned to the plane. Then he paused and came back to the group. “I almost forgot something.”

He scanned their faces and spotted the person he wanted trying to hide behind a large bearded kid. Juan walked over and yanked Susan Donleavy’s arm. The guy protecting her made to swing at Cabrillo’s head. The effort was clumsy, and Juan easily ducked the blow, coming up with his nine millimeter pressed firmly between the collegian’s startled eyes. “Care to try that again?”

The kid stepped back. Juan cinched Susan Donleavy’s cuffs tight enough to let her know there was going to be worse to come, and frog-marched her to the plane. At the ramp he paused and addressed the two team members who were going to remain behind. They had manhandled a rubber bladder of fuel for the truck off the plane. “You know the drill?”

“We’ll drive about thirty miles deeper into the desert and dump them.”

“That way the plane Singer sent will never find them,” Juan said. “Just don’t forget to get the GPS

coordinates so we can get them later.”

“Then we drive back to Windhoek, stash the truck someplace, and get a hotel room.”

“Check in with the ship as soon as you arrive,” Juan said and shook their hands. “Maybe we can get you out before we go after the guns up north in the Congo.”

Just as Cabrillo was about to disappear inside the Caribou with his prisoner, he shouted at the environmentalists, “See you in a week.”

Linc trotted after him, and as soon as he was aboard Tiny gunned the engines. Ninety seconds after touching down they were aloft again, leaving behind eight slack-jawed, would-be ecoterrorists who never knew what hit them.

23

“WELCOMEback, Chairman,” Max Hanley said when Juan reached the top of theOregon ’s boarding ladder.

The two shook hands. “Good to be back,” Cabrillo said, fighting to keep his eyes open. “The past twelve hours have been about the worst of my life.” He turned to wave down at Justus Ulenga, the Namibian captain of thePinguin , the boat Sloane Macintyre and Tony Reardon had been aboard when they had been chased. Juan had contracted the fisherman at Terrace Bay, where he’d been lying low following the attack on his boat.

The affable captain tipped his baseball cap back at Cabrillo, grinning broadly because of the thick sheaf of money he’d been paid for the simple job of ferrying Juan’s party to where the freighter loitered just outside Namibia’s twelve-mile limit. As soon as his boat had motored a good distance from theOregon , the massive freighter began accelerating northward, ersatz smoke pouring from her single funnel.

Geoffrey Merrick had been hoisted onto the deck in a medical basket. Julia Huxley was already hunched over him, her lab coat dragging in a hardened pool of oil. Under it she wore blood-smeared scrubs. She’d been patching together wounded men since the first moment the container Max had used to transfer the soldiers to the ship had been opened. With her were two orderlies standing by to bring Merrick down to surgery, but she wanted to do an assessment as quickly as possible.

A blindfolded Susan Donleavy had been escorted to the ship’s brig by Mike, Ski, and Eddie as soon as she’d set foot on theOregon . It was plain to see that the fact that no one had said a word to her since Juan had nabbed her in the desert was wearing on her mind. Though not yet defeated, her façade was cracking.

“What do you think, Doc?” Juan asked when Julia pulled her stethoscope from Merrick’s bare chest.

“Lungs are clear but his heartbeat’s weak.” She glanced at the saline drip bag one of her people was holding above Merrick’s prone form. “That’s the third unit of saline he’s taken. I want to get some blood in him to get his pressure up before I go after the bullet that’s still in the wound. I don’t like that he’s unconscious.”

“Could it be the heroin they gave him back at the Devil’s Oasis?”

“It should be out of his system by now. It’s something else. He’s also spiking a fever and the wound looks infected. I need to get him on antibiotics.”

“What about the others? Moses Ndebele?”

Her eyes clouded over. “I lost two of them. I’ve got one more that’s touch-and-go. The others were mainly flesh wounds. So long as no one shows an infection they should be fine. Moses is a bloody mess.

The human foot has twenty-six bones. I counted fifty-eight separate pieces of bone on his X-ray before I gave up. If he’s going to keep it we need to get him to an orthopedic specialist within a couple of days.”

Cabrillo nodded, but said nothing.

“How are you doing?” Hux asked him.

“I feel worse than I look,” Juan said with a tired smile.

“Then you must feel like crap, because you look like hell.”

“Is that your official medical diagnosis?”

Julia pressed her palm to his forehead like a mother checking a child for a fever. “Yup.” She motioned for her people to lift Merrick’s stretcher and started for the nearest hatch. “I’ll be below if you need me.”

Cabrillo suddenly called out to her, having remembered something he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten.

“Julia, how’s Sloane doing?”

“She’s great. I kicked her out of medical, and then out of the guest cabin because I needed it as a recovery room. I even put her to work as a candy striper. She’s bunking with Linda. She wanted to be up here to meet you but I ordered her to bed. We’ve had a busy few hours and she’s still weak.”

“Thanks,” Juan said with relief as Julia and her team vanished into the ship.

Max sidled up next to him, his pipe emitting a fragrant blend of apple and cedar. “That was a hell of a premonition, getting me to contact Langston and tapping into Echelon.”

One of Juan’s first acts when he learned that Geoffrey Merrick’s rescue had fallen apart was to get Max to lean on Overholt in order to utilize the NSA’s Echelon program. At any given second there were hundreds of millions of electronic data transfers taking place over the globe: cell phones, regular phones, faxes, sat phones, radios, e-mails, and Web postings. There were acres of linked computers at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that trawled the bandwidths looking for specific phrases or words that might be of interest to American intelligence. Though not designed to be a real-time eavesdropping tool, with the right parameters programmed into the system—like a call originating at the Devil’s Oasis’

geographic location and containing such terms asMerrick ,Singer ,hostage ,rescue ,Donleavy —Echelon could find that needle in the cyber haystack. A transcript of Nina Visser’s conversation to Daniel Singer was e-mailed to Max aboard theOregon three minutes after the call had ended.

“I had a feeling that after our boys were caught whoever Singer had left in charge at the prison would want to let him know what was going on and get some new marching orders.” Juan ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to try to relieve some of the fatigue. “They’re a bunch of amateurs. They wouldn’t have contingency plans in place.”

“What did you do with the rest of the kidnappers?” Max asked. His pipe had gone out and there was too much of a breeze to relight it.

Juan started walking toward a hatchway, his mind already in his glass-enclosed shower with the heat cranked as high as he could stand it. Max kept pace. “Left them out there with enough water to last a week. I’ll have Lang contact Interpol. They can coordinate with Namibian authorities to pick them up and return them to Switzerland to face kidnap charges, with a charge of attempted murder for Susan Donleavy.”

“Why bring her back here? Why not let her rot with the rest of them?”

Cabrillo stopped walking and turned to his old friend. “Because the NSA couldn’t pinpoint Singer’s location and I know she has it and because this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. Kidnapping Merrick was only the opening gambit to whatever his former partner has planned. She and I are going to have a nice long talk.”

A moment later they reached Juan’s cabin and kept talking as Juan stripped out of his filthy uniform and tossed the clothes in a hamper. He threw his boots into the trash but first poured out a quarter cup of sand that had entered the shoe through the .44 caliber bullet hole. “Good thing I couldn’t feel that,” he remarked casually. He unhooked his combat leg and set it aside, planning on giving it to the Magic Shop staff so they could reload the gun and clean the grit out of the mechanicals.

“Mark and Eric checked in about an hour ago,” Max said. He sat on the edge of the copper Jacuzzi tub while Juan climbed though the banks of steam erupting from the shower. “They’ve covered about a thousand square miles, but there’s still no sign of the guns or Samuel Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution.”

“What about the CIA?” Juan called over the sound of water beating against his skin. “Any of their assets in the Congo have a bead on Makambo?”

“Nothing. It’s like the guy vanishes into thin air whenever he wants to.”

“One guy can vanish. Not five or six hundred of his followers. How did Murph set up his search?”

“They started from the dock and have been flying wider and wider circles, overlapping the radio tag’s range by about twenty miles just to be safe.”

“The river is the border between the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Juan said. “Are they staying south of it?”

“Similarities to their names aside, relations between the two countries are a mess. They couldn’t get permission to cross into the R of C, so yeah, they’re staying south of the border.”

“What do you bet Makambo took the weapons north?”

“It’s possible,” Max agreed. “If Congo’s northern neighbors are shielding his army it could explain why he’s never been caught.”

“We’ve only got a few more hours until the tags run out of their batteries.” Juan shut off the water and opened the door. He was clean but scantly refreshed. Max handed him a thick Brazilian cotton towel.

“Call Mark and have him do whatever he has to in order to get across that border and take a listen.

Those guns aren’t more than a hundred and fifty miles from the river. I’m sure of it.”

“I’ll call him now,” Max said and levered himself from his perch.

Juan kept his hair short enough so he didn’t need to brush it. He put on deodorant and decided he looked more dangerous with thirty hours of beard so he left his straight razor on the bathroom counter.

The dark circles under his eyes and their red rims gave him a demonic cast. He dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt. He called down to the Magic Shop for a tech to get his combat leg and on the way to the ship’s hold he stopped in to grab a sandwich from the galley.

Linda Ross was waiting outside the hold. She was holding a BlackBerry that was receiving signals from the shipboard Wi-Fi network.

“How’s our guest?” Juan asked as he approached.

“Take a look yourself.” She tilted the small device so he could see the screen. “Oh, and I want to congratulate you on pulling off the rescue.”

“I had a lot of help.”

Susan Donleavy was strapped to a stainless-steel embalmer’s table in the center of the cavernous hold where Juan had packed his parachute the day before. The only light came from a single high-intensity halogen lamp that formed a focused cone around the table so she could see nothing beyond. The feed to the BlackBerry came from a camera placed just above the lamp.

Susan’s hair was lank from so long in the desert without enough water for personal hygiene, and the skin on her arms was blotchy from insect bites. Blood had drained from her face, leaving her washed out, and her lower lip quivered. She was covered in sweat.

“If she wasn’t tied down she would have bitten her fingernails to the quick,” Linda said.

“You ready?” Juan asked her.

“Just going over some notes. I haven’t done an interrogation in a while.”

“Like Max always says, it’s like falling off a bike. Do it once and you never forget.”

“I hope to God he didn’t put a sense of humor down on his job application.” Linda thumbed off the BlackBerry. “Let’s go.”

Juan opened the door into the hold. A wall of heat blasted him. They’d set the thermostat for a hundred degrees. Like the lighting, the temperature was part of the interrogation technique Linda had settled on to crack Susan Donleavy. They stepped silently into the room, but remained just beyond the circle of light.

He had to give Susan high marks because she didn’t call out for nearly a minute. “Who’s there?” she asked, a manic edge in her voice.

Cabrillo and Ross remained silent.

“Who’s there?” Susan repeated a bit more stridently. “You can’t hold me like this. I have rights.”

There was a fine line between panic and anger—the trick was to never cross it during an interrogation.

Never let your subject turn their fear into rage. Linda timed it perfectly. She could see the fury building in Susan’s face, the way the muscles in her neck tensed. She stepped into the light a moment before Donleavy started to scream. Her eyes went wide when she saw that it was another woman with her in the hold.

“Miss Donleavy, right from the outset I want you to understand you have no rights. You are aboard an Iranian-flagged ship in international waters. There is no one here to represent you in any way. You have two choices and two choices only. You can tell me what I want to know or I will turn you over to a professional interrogator.”

“Who are you people? You were hired to rescue Geoffrey Merrick, right? Well, you’ve got him so turn me over to the police or whatever.”

“We are taking the ‘whatever’ route,” Linda said. “That includes you telling me where Daniel Singer is at this moment and what his plans are.”