Читать книгу Toxic Terrain - Don Pendleton - Страница 10

Killdeer Mountains, North Dakota

Chen’s driver pulled off the highway and headed for the Ag Con facility on Gap Road. This facility operated on a much smaller scale than their main complex. It was really more of a family ranch than a large-scale cattle operation. Chen and his associates had selected it because of its isolation and inaccessibility—it was located so far back in the Badlands that they could land helicopters without alerting neighbors. It didn’t afford much room for their research and development operations, but it was the perfect place to store a couple of prisoners.

Not that their presence hadn’t raised suspicion among the locals. Chen and the other Chinese nationals working for Ag Con stuck out like the proverbial raisins in the oatmeal. That’s why Ag Con relied on the mercenaries from Build & Berg Associates—they at least looked like the locals, and in fact even sounded like them. Many of the B&B mercs came from Eastern Europe, and western North Dakota had been settled by Ukrainians, Germans, Russians, Poles and Hungarians; Eastern European accents were still commonplace.

The locals were self-sufficient, and they valued their freedom. They didn’t want to be bothered, and by the same token, they didn’t bother anyone else. The locals didn’t like confrontation and they kept to themselves. It was the perfect social climate for Ag Con’s plans.

When Liang’s troops lost the intruder’s trail, Liang guessed that the man might try to contact the veterinarian. Since Cooper was wounded, Liang predicted he’d need medical attention, and where better to get that than in a clinic—even an animal clinic. He’d sent a six-man team to ambush the pair, but had lost contact with the men soon after they’d identified Cooper and Kemp inside the clinic. That could only mean that the ambush had failed. So he sent a second team to cleanse the scene of all evidence of Ag Con involvement.

The clinic was two miles north of town. Gunfire was a fairly normal occurrence in the area—target shooting was one of the few recreational activities the region offered—but a fusillade of automatic rifle fire at three o’clock in the morning would raise some eyebrows, even among the stoic locals. So after he’d sent the cleanup crew to the clinic, Chen called Gordon Gould and had him order Sheriff Buck to the scene. Buck was to report the shooting as an act of vandalism, but he was to report that there had not been any injuries. Chen wasn’t as confident in Gould’s ability to control the sheriff as was Gould himself. Forcing Buck to help dispose of bodies would certainly put Gould’s claim of subservience on the sheriff’s part to the test.

Chen was on his way to interrogate Pam Bowman, the second half of the pair of veterinarians. He needed to find Kemp and Cooper, and he needed to find them quickly. He hadn’t harmed his prisoners thus far simply because there had been no reason to do so, but on this visit he brought along a special toolkit. A civilized and fastidious man, Chen didn’t look forward to the unhygienic act of torturing a woman, but expediency required him to do whatever was necessary to gain the information he needed.

Chen’s driver turned off the road and stopped the vehicle. One of the two PLA regulars Chen had brought to assist him got out of the car, opened the gate and closed it again after the SUV had passed through the entrance. Chen would have preferred to install a modern electronic gate, but that would have attracted unwanted attention. Most people in the area used either a cattle grate dug into the road or else they used a primitive type of homemade gate. Though the gate may have been rustic, there was nothing antiquated about the electronic surveillance equipment that was hidden around the entire perimeter of the property. The main complex was too vast and sprawling to effectively monitor the perimeter using electronic methods, but that was not the case with the smaller ranch they’d purchased in the Killdeer Mountains. This facility was much more secure than the other operation.

They drove down the winding, seven-mile driveway that wound around the base of a massive butte and down into a deep ravine. The ravine opened up into a small triangular meadow surrounded on two sides by steep cliffs, and bordered on the third by a small creek. He couldn’t see them, but he knew Liang’s sharpshooters had every possible entrance and exit covered at all times.

His driver punched a button on a box clipped to his sun visor and an overhead door built into the side of an old barn rose open. When the driver had parked the SUV inside the barn, Chen got out and opened a creaky wooden door that apparently led into a storage area beneath the stairway that led up to the haymow. But instead of a storage area, he stepped into a metal lift that would take him down to the basement they had excavated deep beneath the barn. The basement contained the laboratory where much of Ag Con’s real work took place. It was also where they held the veterinarian and the extension agent.

Chen opened the cell door and woke the occupants, who both appeared to have been asleep on the cots that Chen’s men had provided. “I apologize for waking you,” he said, “but I need some information from Ms. Bowman.”

Grevoy started to rise from his cot, but Liang’s soldiers restrained him. “Please secure Mr. Grevoy,” Chen ordered. Liang’s soldiers produced plastic zip ties and bound Grevoy’s hands behind his back with brutal efficiency, then secured his feet to steel rings embedded in the concrete floor. The men then grabbed Pam Bowman and lifted her to her feet.

“Ms. Bowman, let me be perfectly clear. I need some information, and you will provide me with it. You will most likely resist, and I will be forced to extract it from you in a most uncivilized manner.” Chen put on a lab coat, placed a mask over his face and put on a pair of latex gloves. One of Liang’s soldiers handed a tool roll to Chen, who spread it out on the table and picked up what looked like a stainless-steel dental cleaning tool. “I assure you that I would prefer not to go to such lengths,” Chen said from behind his mask, “but make no mistake, I will go to any length if you force my hand. Now please tell me, if Ms. Kemp had fled your clinic and was seeking sanctuary, where would she go?”

“I have no idea where she’d go,” Bowman said.

“Of course, we both know you have some idea,” Chen said. “And of course you won’t betray her unless you are forced to do so. So you are going to make me work to ex tract that information.” He pulled out a pair of needle-nose pliers from the toolkit, along with a medical scalpel. “Since this might take a while, we might as well get started.”