Altar Of Eden

Chapter 43

Jack’s head pounded with each thrum of the chopper’s rotors. The bright sunlight reflecting off the Gulf below didn’t help. Even sunglasses did little to dull the stabbing brilliance.

Seated beside the pilot, he closed his eyes. Queasiness churned through him. He normally never experienced vertigo or motion sickness, but at the moment his stomach repeated every roll and lift of the helicopter. He pressed his damp palms against his knees. He swallowed back bile.

“Almost there,” the pilot reported through the headphones.

Jack opened his eyes and spotted the oil platform ahead. It looked like a rusted black dinosaur struggling out of a tar pit. The bull’s-eye was painted on the helipad. Drill crews scurried like ants below.

Lorna’s brother pushed forward from the backseat and leaned between Jack and the pilot. Jack twisted to face Kyle. The kid shared the passenger cabin with Randy and two of Jack’s men: Mack Higgins and Bruce Kim.

Mack looked like the brand of truck he’d been named after. He was massively framed with a shaved head and prominent forehead that looked like the hood of a semi. At the moment he chewed on the stub of a cigar, unlit, as he studied the oil rig below.

His partner was a wiry Korean-American with lanky black hair that shadowed his dark eyes. With his olive complexion and boyish appearance, he looked like Bruce Lee’s younger brother-and was just as good a fighter.

Jack had handpicked the pair and left his second-in-command, Scott Nester, to cover their asses back in New Orleans. Scott would also keep Jack abreast of any official response from Sector Chief Paxton. But otherwise, they were on their own out here.

Almost.

“Randy just heard from his friends,” Kyle said. “Their boat is already heading south.”

Jack nodded. That would be the Thibodeaux brothers. The pair had borrowed a private charter boat from one of their cousins, normally used for deep-sea fishing in the Gulf. Once at the oil rig, the team in the chopper would split up. Jack would head out in a seaplane with his men, while Randy and Kyle would take the helicopter and meet the Thibodeaux brothers’ boat.

The planned assault on the Lost Eden Cay would be a coordinated two-prong attack at dusk. Jack had studied nautical and satellite maps of the arc of islands. He had them both folded under his left thigh. He had planned on studying them again on the way out to the rig, but his pounding head and churning stomach discouraged it.

The plan was not a complicated one: get in, find Lorna, get out.

According to the satellite maps, the main villa lay on the western side of the island. As the sun set Jack and his men would lead an amphibious assault on the far side, where it would be darker, where eyes would be less likely to be watching. From a mile out, his team would do a sea-drop in scuba gear, their weapons in dry sacks. They would use personal tow scooters to swiftly propel themselves underwater to the island’s eastern shore and head overland from there.

To hide their beach landing, Randy and the others would limp their charter boat into the villa’s cove on the other side of the island, to draw attention away from Jack’s team. The Thibodeauxs had a cache of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenade launchers, loaded aboard the boat.

Jack hadn’t bothered to ask how the Thibodeauxs had acquired such a mass of weaponry. He knew better than to inquire. The Thibodeaux family claimed roots that reached back to the eighteenth century, to a bloodline of Caribbean pirates that plagued the islands. And according to some stories, the Thibodeaux clan hadn’t entirely shed their notorious past.

So Jack didn’t care how the brothers obtained this cache of firepower, but he was glad they had. The charter boat would stand by out in the cove, feigning a blown engine, smoke pouring from the engine compartment, ready to come in guns blazing to aid in Jack’s assault if necessary.

But one detail remained unknown.

Was Lorna still alive?

With all the flurry of preparations, Jack had kept himself distracted from his fears for her. But on the ride here, with nothing to divert his attention, a fire built in his gut. While it had only been a day since they first met at the trawler, she had found a place in his heart. Maybe it was their shared past, but it felt like more than that.

He pictured her sea blue eyes, her sandy blond hair, bleached white by the sun at the tips. He recalled the way she chewed her lower lip when concentrating. The rare smile that broke through her serious demeanor like a flash of sunlight on a cloudy day. These memories and others popped like flashbulbs in his head. But he also remembered her from another lifetime: across a dark parking lot, on her back, shadows falling on her amid harsh laughter.

He had saved her back then-but he’d also failed her just as much.

With that last memory, a sudden fierceness choked through him, blinding him and pushing back the nausea. It was a ferocity that he’d never felt before in his life. He’d experienced fierce firefights and bloody ambushes in Iraq, but as he pictured Lorna a deep and primal well of savagery burned through him. He wanted to gnash things with his teeth, to grind bone, to rip things with his bare hands.

All to protect her-not as a boy any longer, but as a man.

Blind to all else, he jumped as the skids of the chopper struck the rig’s helipad. He hadn’t even noted their descent. Doors popped open, and the others piled out.

Jack remained a moment in his seat. He let the blood flow through him, felt it crest, then recede. He finally shouldered open the door and joined the others.

He didn’t dismiss what he had felt, but he also would not let it rule him. He had a job to do. But a part of him also shied away from looking too intimately at the source behind that rage, to the tender emotion buried deep that had ignited it.

Now was not the time.

Not until she was safe.

Chapter 44

Lorna stood with Dr. Malik before one of the wall monitors. On the screen rotated a three-dimensional scan of a brain. It reminded her of the MRI done on Igor’s brain. After all the bloodshed and fire, that seemed a lifetime ago. She tried to concentrate on Malik’s explanation, but a pall of grief and defeat weighed her down. The doctor’s words sounded hollow and distant.

“Here is the best image we could muster of the brain anomaly found in the test subjects.”

Malik pointed a finger at the five nodes on the screen, colored a distinct blue to distinguish them from the surrounding gray cerebral tissue. The number and pattern of the nodes were identical to those discovered during Igor’s MRI back at her lab. But Malik’s scan had much better resolution. Not only did the nodes stand out crisply, but so did the fine branching of magnetite crystals that connected the nodes together.