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Peter’s reassurance freed Grace to breathe again. Even so, the pounding of her heart failed to subside as the footsteps crossed the mahogany floorboards overhead, coming ever closer until they stopped directly above them. Twelve feet beneath a trapdoor, Peter, Amanda, Grace, and Mateo sat in the dark wine cellar of the seventeenth-centuryCatedral de María Auxiliadora. Only a single candle flickered between them, its flame about to drown in wax.
Peter’s efforts to secure them a ride across the river had failed due to torrential rainfall that same day, making the Orinoco River too dangerous to cross that night. Then, that evening, Padre Tomás had warned that troops from the nearby army base were planning to swarm the town at dawn and arrest any Americans. He had offered to hide them in the cathedral’s wine cellar, just below the sacristy, covering the trapdoor with a rug and a table.
That was three days ago. Gripped with the fear of discovery, Grace hadn’t been able to eat, barely able to sleep, in all that time. Whenever she closed her eyes, she dreamed of a Venezuelan soldier, one of Maduro’s minions, arresting and torturing her.
Now it was dawn on the fourth day. Every morning before sunrise Father Tomás brought them food donated by his parishioners. His flock were of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent—lovely, selfless people who were all too happy to feed the priest’s anonymous recipients.
According to the priest, the army had just arrested two American youths who’d popped over from Colombia—poor planning on their part. Grace had overheard the priest whisper to Peter that people were being questioned about her whereabouts, to the point of torture. Even in the candlelight, she saw Peter pale at the news. He cast a worried glance at his wife, and Grace herself had nearly vomited.
How much longer would the loyal locals hold out against such terrifying pressure? And how many people knew of the existence of the wine cellar in the old cathedral? It seemed just a matter of time before they were betrayed. And then what? She would be imprisoned. Peter and Amanda would be punished for protecting her. And Mateo…her arm flexed around his frail form. He would be taken from her—perhaps forever.
She could sense the awful separation coming.
For even if, by some miracle, she evaded capture and managed to escape into Colombia, she still had to come back for Mateo’s dossier, which was due to arrive at the Puerto Ayacucho post office any day now. Without it and without an immigrant visa, his entrance into the United States would be illegal. What she needed—what they all needed—was a miracle.
Peter had been praying for one, hour after interminable hour. But Grace was getting a different message: God didn’t want her to have a child, natural or adopted. In that dark pit carved out of the humid earth of the Amazonas region, she gnawed on her resentment and shivered with fear.
* * *
Senior Chief Amos McLeod tabbed his inter-team radio to inform his four-man squad of what he had just guessed. Above the lush jungle that encircled the port town of Ayacucho, the stars pulsed like miniature lasers illuminating the adobe-covered buildings surrounding Plaza Bolívar and the whitewashed walls of the colonial-eraCatedral de María Auxiliadora.
“She’s hiding in the church,” he stated with certainty.
His sniper, Ben Harmony, whispered back from the church’s bell tower, where he and Theo had just witnessed the priest’s approach. “Roger that, Mako.”
Thank God Ben agreed with Amos. The hope that this search-and-rescue operation could end countered Amos’s exhaustion. For over forty-eight hours, ever since they’d gone to the residence where Grace Garrett was staying and found the door kicked in and the house ransacked, the rescue team had been in surveillance mode, watching the plaza, the church, and the adjacent school where Grace had been teaching.
Amos and Bambino had camped out on the flat roof of a family-owned grocery store while Ben and Theo were tucked into the church’s bell tower. Their perspective gave them a clear view of the busy port city on the edge of the Amazon jungle. Sleeping on concrete by day and huddling under netting by night while mosquitos the size of wasps hummed around him wasn’t Amos’s idea of fun anymore. At least it was the wet season in the equatorial region, making it cool enough to sleep, if only the concrete weren’t so unrelenting.
It didn’t seem to faze Bambino, who lounged comfortably on the low stone wall next to him—but then Bambino was only twenty-two years old, and Amos was thirty-seven.
At Amos’s revelation, Bambino flipped up the night vision goggles he’d been peering through and stared at Amos.
“What makes you so sure, Senior Chief?”
“Ask questions later.” Amos didn’t want to delay another second. Besides, he’d made his guess based merely on a hunch. The priest had also entered the church at zero-four-hundred hours the previous morning. He’d entered with a full bundle and come out with an empty one. Plus, according to their intel, Father Tomás Santos worked closely with the missionaries who’d hosted Grace Garrett. Ergo, they were all hiding in the church.
Amos tabbed his mike again. “Let’s roll. Rally up at the same door the priest just went in.”
As he clambered painstakingly to his feet, Bambino sprang up next to him and made short work of cleaning up their campsite. All four SEALs were dressed in night ops tactical gear, carrying backpacks stuffed with meals-ready-to eat and baby wipes. They bristled with weapons, from M4s, to pistols, to back-up blades.
In less than a minute, Amos and Bambino descended from the roof they’d squatted on for the past thirty-six hours. They went down the same way they’d gone up: on thick vines of bougainvillea that scarcely bowed beneath their weight. The shop owners who ran thebodegaby day had never known they were up there.
Slinking up an alley, Amos came to the front of the building and lowered his night vision goggles to sweep the quiet plaza for any sign of movement. They had about one hour before the Venezuelan soldiers started to stir. In the center of the plaza, two large trees flanked a statue of the Great Liberator, Simón Bolívar, on a rearing horse. Amos glimpsed two neon figures beyond the statue clambering out of the bell tower and down the cathedral’s sloping roof.
Apart from the insects leaving phosphorescent contrails across Amos’s field of sight, the SEALs were the only things moving.
Amos and Bambino crossed the plaza furtively. It was actually a good thing the Army had imposed a curfew, for the streetlamps that might normally be blazing remained unlit, quilting them in darkness. By the time they arrived at the left-most door on the church’s portico, Ben and Theo were waiting for them, pressed against the whitewashed walls. Amos flicked up his NVGs to see how they were holding up.
Ben Harmony had slathered his freckled face in camo paint. He wore a black knit cap over his bald head, but nothing could subdue the brightness of his blue eyes. Theo, a hulking black man with twenty-five-inch biceps, had an easier time blending into the shadows, unless he cracked a smile, in which case the brilliance of his white teeth gave him away. But neither man was smiling now. They both appeared as eager as Amos was to grab their target and get back to the work they’d been doing before the FBI called in a favor.
The first thing Amos did was to check whether the priest had left the door unlocked. Of course, not. He gestured for Theo, their explosives expert, to blow it open as quietly as possible.
Once Theo had packed the hinges and the lock with C-4, they all stepped away and covered their ears. The loud popping noise was bound to draw unwanted attention. At Amos’s signal, Bambino and Theo muscled the thick portal out of their way.
The SEALs had carried out numerous similar operations, only, this time, there weren’t any hostiles to lay out first—not yet, anyway. With his long-range sniper rifle slung over his back, Ben took point, pistol in hand. He swept his gaze over the narthex first and declared it clear. Amos and Bambino followed him into the building, leaving Theo to guard the door.
Amos entered the historic sanctuary with anticipation. This was the way he accomplished most of his sightseeing—in countries no tourist would ever think to visit. An avid reader, Amos identified this cathedral as a relic of the Spanish conquest, built in the colonial period. Its tall, intermittent windows admitted just enough starlight to illumine the thick white columns supporting a geodesic dome. There, an upper tier of windows illuminated the ornately paneled ceiling and, over the altar, a mosaic of Christ on the Cross. Amos gazed up at it, struck by the fact that, even in this unlikely corner of the world, God saw everything.
