by Fritz Galt
Incredibly—several knives lay on a table. They were meant for scaling and gutting fish, but he could use one to break free! He could bust through his bonds and get on the road to Beijing.
He stood and took a few steps toward the table near the door. The bag still tilted away from his face, he charted out the rest of the path. He couldn’t afford to knock something over on his way.
As he shuffled toward the table, the drone of another boat reached his ears. As it grew louder, it seemed to be getting closer. Its engine chugged efficiently like a sort of pilot boat or launch.
He turned his back to the table and reached for the nearest knife. Its wooden handle was still wet from recent use. He turned the blade inward and began to saw at the rope.
Sailors from the newly arrived craft arrived on deck. They spoke briskly with strong accents using educated vocabulary.
He worked quietly and vigorously while trying to make out their conversation.
“We’ll give you one thousand. Top offer,” one of the newcomers said.
“He speaks English,” the grunter said. “Like a native. Five thousand.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I can get English speakers from anywhere.”
Sean sawed away with short, fast strokes.
“He’s educated in the West.”
“That only means he’s corrupted.”
Flexing his shoulders, he pulled the rope taut as he cut. One strand snapped in two.
“He’s rich. We picked him up at a five star tourist resort.”
“Does he have cash on him?”
He wasn’t getting through the rest of the rope very quickly, and his bonds remained strong.
“You can have his credit card.”
“What kind? I don’t take Diner’s Club.”
Sean couldn’t believe his ears. They were haggling over him like slave owners at an auction. What did they expect him to do once he was bought? Another strand broke.
“It’s a VISA.”
“Okay, that will give you another five hundred. What about a family?”
“We didn’t see a family, but he has a wedding band.”
“Okay, that’s good for another thousand, tops.”
A few more sawing motions and he would be through.
“He’s strong like a bull. You should see his shoulders.”
“Can he do manual labor?”
The grunter hesitated. “Maybe only in a gym.”
With an angry tug, he snapped the rest of the rope, and his hands broke free. For the first time in hours, he could flex his shoulder muscles and shake the kinks out.
“Okay,” the brisk voice said. “Al-Qaeda will authorize two thousand five hundred dollars maximum. That’s my final offer.”
Whoa. Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization, wanted him? What for, a suicide mission?
Then he heard their voices getting louder, closer. He gathered up the fragments of rope and tossed them out of sight.
He held the knife up in front of him. He would run them through.
A hand fell on the door latch.
God, he couldn’t kill anyone. He’d better hide the weapon and bide his time. He slipped the knife under his belt and hurried away from the table to the middle of the room, remembering to clasp his hands together behind his back.
The burlap bag! The door popped open, and he shrugged the bag quickly back over his face.
“Sit down,” the grunter ordered.
Sean decided to push back at them and see where that got him. “What’s going on here? What are you planning to do with me?” He flipped back his head to toss off the bag.
A hand caught the bag and pushed it roughly back in place. But that brief glimpse gave him enough time to take stock of his adversaries. The grunter had a broad, nasty face, pinched eyes and brawny arms. He would be difficult to overpower. But not the other guy. The newcomer was a hollow-chested skipper with a starched white uniform and a trim black beard. He stood between Sean and the door.
So that’s what a terrorist looked like. The type who would behead him on an al-Qaeda website.
The terrorist skipper took a moment to examine him. The guy lifted the burlap hood off of his head and looked him in the eyes.
Now here was a man he could bargain with. Intelligent eyes, good complexion, well groomed.
Maybe he could even sell the president down the river to these guys. After all, he would be a bonanza of blackmail material in any terrorist’s hands. Certainly worth more than $2,500. Maybe he could even get al-Qaeda to find his wife and kids!
But think where that left America. Suddenly he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. Did he want to be the fulcrum on which freedom and tyranny teetered, with America on one side and the terrorists weighing down heavily on the other?
The price was more than the president losing his office. Sean would be selling out America. The president would surely cave in and submit to the terrorists’ demands rather than commit political suicide. The strings that al-Qaeda could pull in the White House would be enormous, influencing military and economic decisions, bringing the free world to its knees.
He regarded the skipper with skepticism. Could the handsome stranger with seemingly so much going for him, be one of al-Qaeda’s brainwashed legions? Was he the kind who could hijack civilian airliners, bomb embassies to smithereens, slaughter schoolchildren and blow up commuters on their way to work? Probably.
He would rather be caught by the Chinese or the White House and silenced in some menacing way, or nabbed by the special prosecutor and have his ass hauled back to Washington than to hold the free world hostage.
But in the end, what he really wanted was his family back. And he didn’t have time to negotiate.
Instinctively, he grabbed the knife from under his belt and lurched forward. Seeing the knife brandished before him, the skipper stepped aside, clearing a path to the door.
But, not to lose his sale, the grunter lunged forward to slow him down. He caught Sean with a fist to the side of the torso. That sent Sean reeling sideways into the doorframe, but he held onto the knife. His forward momentum carried toward the open door. Doubled over from the sharp pain under his arm, he stumbled outside. Sunlight momentarily blinded him.
Where was he?
He was on the deck of some commercial fishing vessel, with the second boat, a large, powerful launch, tied up far below.
Smartly dressed crewmembers from the launch, who were lounging around, jumped forward from the railings.
They blocked his way to the ladder that he had used to climb aboard. That avenue of escape blocked, he checked in the other direction. Barefoot deckhands spread out across the deck.
Sean’s brief hesitation cost him a critical few seconds as the grunter caught up with him, a clenched fist landing heavily on his back.
Damn this guy! His survival instincts took over. Sean fell to a crouch, spun around on the balls of his feet and jabbed the knife upward as he sprang upright.
The contact made a popping puncture sound, and he felt the tip slide easily into flesh and internal organs, followed by the flow of warm blood and mucus over his fist. The blade had penetrated one of the man’s lungs and perhaps a major artery. But that didn’t stop the guy. His heavy arms crashed down on Sean’s shoulders, causing the embedded knife to twist partially from his grip.
Sean couldn’t hold up the muscular beast, especially with the blood-lubricated knife tugging his wrist. He sank to his knees, a scarlet smear across one lapel of his sport coat.
The deckhands closed in nervously while the swarthy grunter’s head slumped heavily on Sean’s shoulder. Then the man’s body went limp and threatened to drag him completely to the deck.
He withdrew the knife and the grunter remained immobile. He had killed the guy.
Sean heaved the man off his shoulders and rose to his feet.
The clean-cut officers from the launch also fanned out, not about to lose the prize Westerner they had just purchased.
The o
nly escape route was behind him. And that required running fifteen yards across open deck. He wasn’t so sure he could make it to the railing with what felt like a broken rib.
He chose a nearer spot and ran toward it, angling away from the launch’s officers.
He reached the railing before the others could react. He would show them an American in action! As he swung a leg over the railing, he could see the deep blue water far below. He would crack open like an eggshell when he hit the water.
Standing on the far side of the railing, his feet together and his back to the water, he waved the bloody knife at the sailors.
“You get any closer, and I’ll use this again,” he said, his voice cold and clear.
Nobody moved.
Now what? Suddenly an image came to his mind of platform divers in the Olympics. How did they break the fall? For one thing, they didn’t wear glasses. With one hand, he carefully unhooked his spectacles from behind his ears, folded them and slid them into his pants pocket.
He looked around behind him. The skipper’s white boarding launch was some distance away. He had to jump clear of her.
With both parties edging in nervously, he tossed the knife onto the deck, released his grip on the railing and leaned back. He wasn’t about to attempt a swan dive. Anything would do.
Air whistled past his ears as he spun in the air and plummeted like a rock. His loose sport coat flew up over his eyes, and he couldn’t see a thing. The flat soles of his feet hit the water first, shattering his back with a jolt of pain. He raised his arms over is head to avoid another bashing, and the next thing he knew, water was shooting up both nostrils like a fire hose. Fighting the blinding pain from all corners of his body, he opened his eyes only to see murky sea green.
He shrugged his shoulders out of his waterlogged sport coat and let it float free. Then he planed horizontally and took a few strokes away from the freighter. Fortunately, he had taken a gulp of air before hitting the water, but it didn’t seem to last very long. His lungs were threatening to burst.
But his buoyancy pulled him upward.
In the darkness, it was difficult to judge how far he was from the surface. He willed his mouth closed, adding some frantic kicks to speed his way.
Suddenly the crown of his head struck something solid. He was directly under the launch.
Rubbing the sore spot on his scalp with one hand, he stroked desperately with the other, kicking his bare feet to make the far side of the boat. At last, he emerged with a splutter. Coughing water, he tried to take in a dry lungful of air.
A dizzy, throbbing mess, he was finally away from his captors, alone in the water. He fit his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and glanced around. Piers jutted into the harbor some fifty yards away. Nothing but stagnant water and oil slicks lay between him and escape. He could handle that. He had to.
His head hurt like hell, but somewhere in the future, he could dimly see his family cheering him on. He removed his glasses and dipped back below the surface. He propelled himself with even strokes despite his sore back and the body blow to his side. He had to reach the nearest pier before the terrorists climbed back down to their launch, gunned the boat to life and plowed across the harbor after him.
An ice storm rattled the windows of Harry Black’s downtown Atlanta office. But he couldn’t worry about the weather just then. He had to act quickly to track down Sean Cooper, the man that the Central Intelligence Agency wanted so desperately to hush up.
Who had gotten to Sean first and nabbed him? Several potential culprits came to mind.
Special independent prosecutors Stanley Polk, the Chinagate prosecutor, certainly wanted Sean as a witness. But such prosecutors operated outside the normal circles in Washington. In fact, Polk had set up his own office in a building separate from the Department of Justice, and had hired attorneys from the private sector. Polk wouldn’t have had the resources to track down and capture their star witness. But he could have sought the cooperation of the attorney general to aid in the investigation, and that meant the FBI.
So maybe the FBI had nabbed Sean Cooper for Polk before Harry’s men could get their mitts on him. But Harry’s job was to defend the president and keep Cooper out of Stanley Polk’s hot little hands. Would the FBI turn the witness over to Stanley Polk? Or, like Harry, would they try to bury the guy?
The only way to know for certain who had Cooper was to call up the attorney general, who led the entire Department of Justice that included the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Harry wasn’t on a first-name basis with Attorney General Caleb Perkins. In fact, he had never met the man, an aloof politician.
So how could he get Caleb Perkins to tell him if he had Cooper? As he was a member of the Cabinet, Perkins would be tightly connected with Chuck Romer, the White House Chief of Staff. He reached for his phone to call Perkins, ready to invoke Romer’s name. Perhaps a white lie would get the busy attorney general’s attention.
He caught Perkins by cell phone, being chauffeured from his home in Arlington, Virginia, to the Academy Award Ball held at the White House by his party’s national committee.
“This is Harry Black speaking for Chuck Romer at the White House.”
“Who are you?” Perkins said above the sound of slushy tires and the hum of his car.
“Harry Black of Piedmont Personnel. We’re an Agency contractor.”
“Make it snappy. I’ve got a party to attend,” Perkins said, seemingly in good humor over the upcoming bash.
“Chuck needs information on Sean Cooper. Do you know his whereabouts? Word has it that your men made a snatch off a beach in China.”
“I’m not aware of that.”
Was Attorney General Caleb Perkins stonewalling him?
“C’mon, Caleb,” Harry said. “If you don’t give us Sean first, the independent prosecutor will fry us all. We won’t have any political party left come Election Day this November.”
“I am profoundly aware of that fact.”
Harry sighed with relief. They were on the same team after all. “Well, I’m just calling to say that I’m here when the time comes and you’re ready to hand him over. I assure you, Piedmont Personnel can handle this affair with all due discretion.”
“Thank you for your call, Mr. Black. We will be in touch.”
Harry hung up the phone both reassured and disappointed. The attorney general would cooperate with him if he had any information on Cooper. But it certainly didn’t sound like Caleb Perkins had captured Cooper. Had the FBI even sent a team to China?
So how was he going to find Cooper?
His only other option was to run Badger’s computer check on financial transactions, from airline tickets sold to credit card activity. Perhaps Sean would try to access his VISA account once again.
Ten minutes later, he had his answer.
“Bingo!” The power of the computer to access any tidbit of information from around the world seemed miraculous to him.
The line on the screen read “Haikou, PRC, 2:34 a.m., GMT Account Display Failure, Cause: Hold.”
Harry glanced at the row of clocks hanging across the office wall. The time was 3 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. The transaction must have taken place within the past half hour. Either Sean was free and trying to access money, or someone had taken his card and was doing it in his place. Either way, the credit card was in Haikou.
He checked his detailed Asian atlas. Haikou was a capital city that lay on the northern tip of the island of Hainan in the South China Sea. Sean had made it from the southern shore of the island to the northern shore in less than three hours.
Could he get his men up there in time?
He reached once more for his phone and placed a call to his operatives on the southern tip of Hainan Island. Their beach party was over.
Hiram and Tiffany had to transfer to a connecting flight at Los Angeles International Airport.
It was the first time that Hiram had ever flown internationally, and it surprised him that
in transferring between flights, he didn’t need to pass through Immigration.
“Americans must not mind if terrorists leave the country,” he mused aloud.
Tiffany gave an empathetic grunt.
Hiram looked around him at LAX. Every other person was Asian. They were walking through the gateway to the Orient. The air traffic control tower seemed inspired by the Jetsons.
“Wasn’t there some attack planned on this airport?” he asked.
“During the Millennium crisis,” she said. “They caught the guy entering the country from Canada.”
“Yeah. I remembah now.” He had some vague recollection of the incident.
The thought that one terrorist could carry enough explosives to blow up the entire terminal made him shudder.
They walked across the squeaky floor under the watchful eye of security guards, not too subtly scanning the hordes that streamed past.
It seemed like they were looking for a needle in a haystack.
His chills passed quickly when they reached the gate for their Purang flight.
The gate attendants had already poured guava juice into paper cups for the waiting passengers. Island music floated softly over the intercom.
And the warm Southern California climate, along with the jovial tourists milling around in their Hawaiian shirts, set Hiram instantly at ease. Suddenly, all he could think of was palm trees on a tropical beach with a soft breeze in his hair and a cold drink in his hand.
“Rumba!” he said, turning to Tiffany with a grin.
She returned his enthusiasm with a sloppy smile of her own.
He knew at once: they had made the right decision.
Heading toward the restricted backstage area at the Academy Awards ceremony, Captain Brett Fulham allowed himself a moment of contentment for a job well done.
He flashed his security badge at the watchful armed guard, who threw a salute and let him pass.
Extensive security preparations for the past month were paying off, and thus far the event had gone without a hitch.
It was his third year managing security for the enormously popular televised event, and they had passed the critical phases. The electrical system hadn’t blown, the audience hadn’t died from gas poisoning, the Kodak Theater hadn’t burnt to the ground, no heart attacks had occurred so far, and if any sniper was going to take a potshot at a celebrity, he would have done so by then, But, he reminded himself, just when he felt he was letting down his guard, he had to be most alert.
