Viper had overlaid their satellite feed against a grainy black-and-white terrain survey pulled from a French naval archive dated 1986. It wasn’t public. Hell, it wasn’t even in digital format untilTrace bribed someone at Langley to run OCR on the scanned charts.
He was heading somewhere.
Or hiding something.
Viper moved up the ridge and swept the horizon through his monocular.
No lights.
No movement.
I hate this place as much as I do Al-Rami.
They pressed on. The incline bit at their knees, and every step took more effort than it should. Vines wrapped around their ankles, and insects swarmed every exposed inch of skin.
“Jeez, dude.” Reaper ripped a centipede the size of a cigar off Kaze’s thigh, and Trace ran his thumb down a row of leech bites trailing down Juice’s forearm. Still, they didn’t stop. They climbed higher, and the air thinned slightly as the canopy broke open to reveal fractured views of the island’s core. In the distance, Mount Abalos rose out of the trees like a black tooth.
Viper eyed the dormant volcano. He didn’t trust it. He never trusted anything he didn’t have control over, and natural disasters came close to topping that list, right behind terrorists who preyed on the innocent.
“You good?” Trace asked quietly, falling into step beside him.
“Yeah.”
“You look like you’re sizing up the mountain and wondering if you should cram it full of C4 and blow the bitch to hell.”
“If I thought it would block it and not make it blow, I would.” He wasn’t going to explain his irrational fear of volcanoes to the guys. Mount St. Helens had a hell of a lot to answer for. There was nothing like being stuck on the slopes of that bitch as she went boom for the first time in more than a century.
They dropped back into the shadow of the mountain about twenty minutes later, sliding down a muddy slope that ended at a shallow stream choked with vines. They drank in shifts, checked their boots, cleared leeches, and reset their gear. Viper took the chance to check his uplink. “Heat signature was stationary again. Still northeast. Still in range.” He squinted at the screen. Had something changed? “Zoom grid three-five,” he muttered, manipulating the tablet’s overlay.
“Got a problem?” Juice asked.
“No. Just a variable.”
There’s always a fucking variable.
Expect the unexpected.
Easy fucking day.
He tracked the two additional thermal blips on screen. They were smaller than what they’d been monitoring and moved in opposite directions to each other like perimeter runners.
Guards.
“We’ve got potential perimeter patrols.” He scanned the terrain ahead and went back to the map. “We break north, circle wide, come in high. Stay under the tree line. No contact unless fired on.”
“Roger.”
The team moved into the new formation—Viper at point, Reaper and Zero flanking, Juice and Trace rear, and Kaze center float. For the next hour, they climbed through twisted banyan roots, passed giant fern groves, and traversed the edge of a dried creek bed that smelled faintly of rot and rust. Something had died there recently, but they didn’t stop to find out what.
They broke into another rise, and suddenly, they could see a crude perimeter fence, camouflaged with local brush. A half-dozen tents were half hidden behind a jagged treeline. Viper spotted solar panel arrays and what looked like portable antennae.
The dig site.
He dropped to a prone position and scoped the scene. There were three figures visible. All unarmed. Two were working on the gear, and one was pacing while on a satellite phone. “Civilians,” he confirmed. “That’s the dig. We circle wide. Avoid contact.”
“Copy that,” Reaper said. “They look pretty oblivious.”
Viper nodded. “Let’s keep it that way.” He and his men vanished into the jungle again, leaving the archaeologists none the wiser. No one noticed the six-armed men who passed within forty meters of their tents. No one heard the whispered comms or the soft crunch of boots over damp ground.
