by Fritz Galt
A hearty breed of barrel-chested men with handsome physiques, they could take on all comers. But they also knew the hidden trails that allowed them to ambush their prey, then escape and hide so effectively. It was a grim life. His people wore drab, unbuttoned coats, shirts fastened at one shoulder, and long, unfitted trousers. And the women weren’t much better off, dressing much the same as the men allowing for the occasional jewelry.
The mountains had made his people strong and gave them their livelihood. Trees grew on the tops of the highest mountains, and the rest was grassy with occasional bushes. Only the few flat valleys were cultivatable. Food came from the accurate firing of a rifle at the unlucky hawk or mountain goat. Allah’s providence came mostly from the unsuspecting traveler whom they would accost and mercilessly strip of all their possessions.
It came as no surprise to him why the jihad movement had come there for refuge. They could hide and be defended well in the Waziri’s natural citadel.
So it struck him as odd that when he reached Osama’s cave, he found Osama and his handful of associates packing to leave.
“What news do you bring?” Osama said, his words rushed, as he was busy packing his clothing.
Hadi hastily scrambled up from his prone position to address the great leader of Allah’s holy war.
“Your cousin needs final approval. He is ready to stage his raid on Purang when you give him the word.”
“He should not be waiting for word from me. He should be going ahead with his plan.” Osama glared at Hadi. “I am tired of all these messages. I don’t need to know every detail. Allah preserve us, all these messages are dangerous!”
“I am most humbly sorry, sir,” Hadi said.
“We are leaving now,” Osama said. “We will go with you.”
“But it is midnight!” Hadi exclaimed. “The paths are treacherous.” He looked dubiously at Osama bin Laden’s frail form.
“We will survive the trip if Allah is willing,” was all that Osama said. “Now lead us down to Wana.”
Hadi saw that all the men were already prepared to leave. One man kicked dirt over the campfire, plunging the cave into darkness.
“Where are you moving to?” Hadi asked. “Wana is not safe. Pakistani troops come and go every few weeks.”
“I’m not moving to Wana,” Osama said. “I am only going to the airport there.”
Hadi knew better to ask any more questions. But he couldn’t refrain. “And where to from there?”
“Purang,” Osama said simply.
Kate Cooper felt herself waking up from a beautiful dream. She tried to chase after the fragments that remained in her memory…
The gushing waterfalls, the kids’ distant voices as they played in the shallow natural pool, Sean’s stout forearms lifting something from the water and handing it to her. Holding it close under her chin. The roaring water filled her ears and bounded down a nearby hill. The object felt warm and nuzzled under her.
There was a squeal and the waterfall suddenly stopped thundering.
“Here’s Sean,” she heard an old Chinese voice say to her. “Sean has arrived.”
Her eyelids were too heavy to lift open.
Sean was back?
“Sean,” she said thickly, sounding drugged.
If she couldn’t open her eyes, maybe she could lift her arms and embrace him, feel him, smell him close beside her.
Her arms weren’t moving, yet she felt warmth against her and heaviness on her chest.
“It’s Sean,” the old voice said.
She couldn’t move, but that didn’t matter. She felt happy, and tears rolled down the sides of her face.
The waterfall resumed its roar, and the dream returned in full color.
The next morning, the Lost Horizon looked nothing like its former self, the Ariana. And Sean barely recognized the man who stared at him in the mirror. Perhaps he should clean his glasses.
He ran a trickle of rusty water over his wire-rimmed spectacles, washing off the previous day’s sweat and salt spray. Then, using a clean spot on his formerly white shirt, he dried them off.
He took another look in the mirror. No, that was some other man, a crazed and desperate shadow of his former self.
In the tropical heat, he no longer needed his dress shirt. He ripped it off, losing several buttons in the process, and threw it on the floor. That left him in a tank top that was gray with sweat. His firm pectorals and deltoids bulged impressively below the fabric, but his face was a wreck.
He hadn’t shaved in days, and the dark beard was beginning to resemble those of the terrorists aboard ship. His eyes were hollow from sleep deprivation, and his cheekbones poked visibly against this skin due to a painful bout of dysentery.
His trousers had become filthy, and he had exchanged them for a pair of fatigues given to him by the terrorists. Aside from his wallet, the multiple pockets were empty.
His feet remained bare, his toes splayed out after several days without shoes. The skin on the tops of his feet was the first to burn, and he couldn’t fit the tender blistered skin into shoes even if he wanted to.
It was amazing how thick one’s hair became after several days without washing, and how stiff his clothes felt. If only the water pipe in the shower hadn’t broken, he might not even smell so bad.
But above everything else he missed, he regretted not having a toothbrush. His breath could stop a Sherman tank.
Okay, so he looked like a wreck, a kind of pirate Rambo. But his situation couldn’t be all that bad. After all, the skipper fed him and left him free to roam the ship.
And that was where the freedom ended. He had a big label tattooed to his file from the FBI to Interpol. “TERRORIST.” And wherever he went, they were sure to nab him and lock him away for the rest of his life, or worse, shoot him on sight.
Inhaling the refreshing breeze of a new day, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to turn himself in. In truth, he neither wanted to keep one step ahead of the White House goon squad, be locked away in a federal penitentiary, or spend the rest of his life in complete frustration aboard a creaking ship. None of the options was a good one. Pitiful as it was, he had a life. He was guilty of nothing.
And who was this Sandi DiMartino, breathlessly seeking him out across oceans, across time? What was her gig?
Surely he wasn’t enough of a hunk to distort her radar and drive her off course. Was he?
One more look in the mirror told him otherwise. He was no steal, no bargain. Just damaged goods.
It was amazing to think that a competing oil company would send out an industrial spy to expose him, get his story and sink his company. Surely Sandi wasn’t involved in something that depraved.
So, if she wasn’t a sneak or a snitch, then why was she hiding behind that international corporation cover? Worse yet, maybe she wasn’t even a lawyer!
Okay, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t created a few disasters along the way. So he went along with the Chinagate kickback scheme. He could have blown the whistle then, but he was desperate to get his family out of the SARS epidemic.
While living in Shanghai, he shouldn’t have siphoned off the president’s personal funds from his company either. That was a little ballsy, he had to admit.
But he was an angry man. And those were mere white-collar crimes.
Far worse than that, he had become a catalyst for evil. He had become the terrorist’s ticket to blackmailing the most powerful man on earth. If anything, America wanted him destroyed, Chinagate notwithstanding. Hell, if he cared enough, and put himself in the average American’s mindset, he’d want himself destroyed, too.
Then the shocking thought struck him.
Every breath he took was only further destroying civilization, the very civilization that his family yearned for. Why even live?
Maybe he was just a caged animal trying to escape. What a stupid, egotistical thing to do as he brought the world down with him.
And say he did escape, unlikely as that seemed under the circumstanc
es. Who would he turn to? Whom could he trust? Who would even trust him?
The message! He had almost thrown it away. He reached down and pulled the torn message from the shirt he had just discarded. Water had blurred the handwriting, but he could still make out the words, “Your family lives.”
Due to the dampness of the paper, for the first time he noticed a watermark printed in the paper. It was only the corner of a larger emblem that had the letters “…R A L I N T…”
Who could have written that note? It drove him crazy. Who was playing with his mind? Finding his family was the only reason he needed to escape.
He closed his eyes and took careful stock of the information he had gained about the ship. The bridge was locked, but contained a ship-to-shore radio. The skipper’s quarters, also locked, held a computer with a modem, a radiophone and a fax machine. He had found the arms cache on the second deck, but that was locked as well, and the men whose berths were adjacent to the arms didn’t like him poking around. Until he could steal a key or sneak into an unopened room, he was barred from making his whereabouts known or shooting his way to freedom.
Beside the mirror was a porthole. The constant presence of water and sky had a dulling effect on his senses. He rarely looked out to sea anymore.
But this time he did, because an island was just appearing on the horizon, the first sign of civilization that he had seen since leaving China.
“Okay,” Lieutenant Terry Whitcomb said, leaning over to study the multiple blips on the radar screen. “We’re going to have to use the process of elimination here.”
“What,” Anthony said. “Sink all of them?”
“I would classify that as a dumb f— answer. I want you to radio each and every ship on that scope and determine which ones are not the Ariana. Then we can assume that ship is our target.”
“What if they’re lying?”
“Then we’ll check their names against public registries and the International Maritime Organization.”
“What if they don’t recognize my authority?”
“Put on a Filipino accent and say you’re the port authority.”
“Why not ask the port authority to do it?”
“I already asked them once. They won’t do it again. We’ll be lucky if they keep silent and let us do it. Now, on the double. I’m getting on the horn to the Stuart.”
Anthony pulled his trackball close and set the crosshairs on the first ship in the GPS area laid out by Sean Cooper. Calculating the exact latitude and longitude reading, he pulled on his microphone headset and dialed the frequency to the civilian maritime channel.
He had heard many accents over the radio in the past half year, and mimicking the local pronunciation came naturally to him.
“Calling on the ship at 15º 56' North, 125º 26' East bearing north by northeast. Please identify yourself.”
A minute later, a Japanese accent came over the radio. “This is the Golden Wave at 15º 56' North, 125º 26' East bearing north by northeast.”
“Calling on the ship at 15º 45' North, 125º 41' East bearing northeast. Please identify yourself.”
Within an hour, he had identified half the ships in the target area. He was gradually working his way south and east, away from land and into an area of sparsely scattered islands. The radio signals originated from farther away and were more difficult to hear.
Sometimes he didn’t get the ship’s name quite right, but wrote down a close approximation. The Albuflub. The Hole in One. The Kanagaratnam.
The process went more quickly as time went on. Once radiomen realized that he was zeroing in on their coordinates, they were ready with an answer.
Just as Sean spotted the island through the porthole, one of the terrorist crewmembers burst into the head and tossed an assault rifle at him. He caught it by the barrel before it hit the metal deck and discharged automatically.
“What’s this for?”
A second man reached into the small room and tossed him a gun belt.
“Are we under attack?”
At that moment, the skipper was racing down the passageway. “Get into your gear,” he said. “We’re making a land assault.”
“We are?”
“This is jihad,” the skipper said simply. “It is our duty.”
One of the men hauled Sean onto the sunny deck. In the presence of so many loaded guns, it was probably wise to play along and loop the gun belt over one shoulder. He pointed the muzzle of his gun down and away from the others, aware that he knew nothing about using the awkwardly heavy chunk of metal.
He counted heads. There was a total of fifteen men. The entire crew was on deck, including the galley boy. What were they going to attack?
Several men were preparing to launch the pair of motorized lifeboats and the inflatable raft over the sides of the ship. Beyond them lay a stretch of white sand, the sound of piped-in steel drums floating across the water.
A tourist resort? They were going to kidnap some poor Westerner off the beach?
He set down his gun and began to heft off the load of bullets. Not him. No thank you. Suddenly, he felt a vice-like grip on his shoulder, stopping him cold.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the skipper asked.
“What are you doing? Those are innocent people out there.”
“We’re not going ashore to hurt people.”
“You’re going to kidnap them, just like you kidnapped me.”
“Wrong again.”
Sean stared dumbly at the man. “Then why all this ammunition? We’re not going grocery shopping.”
“Just stick close to me and you’ll see what we have in mind.”
Sean thought of shooting off a gun to warn the poor souls on the beach. But, he tended to believe the skipper. They weren’t there to take more captives. He was a big enough catch.
Seaman Anthony Carlson tried several times to wake up the radioman at the ship located to the far east of his target zone. He had been talking with the ships for over two hours, and still no names checked out. Each had answered promptly, and his fellow seamen helped him scan the registry databases of the various countries.
In some cases they called the ship back to clarify her name and home country. In each case, the ships responded and their names checked out.
Until now.
“Calling on the vessel at 11º 51' North, 145º 32' East,” Anthony repeated for the second time, his voice raspy. “Please identify yourself.”
Again no response.
He looked up at the men around him. “Someone tell the lieutenant. We might have found our target.”
As the seaman departed, he studied the farthest east blip on his radar screen. It was far south of a main shipping route, and the Doppler reported no movement. Against the blank blue field, it looked dead in the water.
He pressed a few keys on his computer keyboard and brought up an overlay of landmasses. Sure enough, the blip seemed to be just off the shore of a tiny island labeled “Purang.”
“Maybe it’s anchored there,” one radioman speculated.
“Sure is a damned small island,” another said. “It didn’t even show up on the radar.”
Lieutenant Whitcomb came jumping down the stairs into the radio room.
“What did you find?”
Anthony wiped his bloodshot eyes, trying to focus on the screen one last time. “This ship,” he said, pointing to the small white blip. “It doesn’t respond. All the others check out.”
“We’ll need a visual ID,” Terry said. “And it’s too far away for us to reach.”
Anthony considered the distance involved. It would take the USS Endorse another twenty hours to reach the spot, and the destroyer USS Stuart could only reach it in ten.
“The Stuart has a helipad,” Terry informed them. “And she’s expecting a troop of Marines to land on her shortly. I’ll have them redirect to that island.”
“Purang,” Anthony said.
“What?”
“It’s the nam
e of the island. Purang.”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t you think we should establish whose sovereignty the island falls under?” Anthony asked.
Terry seemed annoyed by the seeming irrelevance of the question. He stared at the screen and spelled the name out loud. Then he turned and disappeared up the ladder.
“Where’s he going?” one radioman wondered aloud.
“Off to call his buddy, the Secretary of Defense.”
Anthony closed his eyes and smiled. “I only meant that we could call up the island by telephone and have someone there tell us the name of the ship.”
“Cool. You have a phone. Do it.”
Anthony accepted the challenge.
He leaned forward in his seat and pulled up a program that looked just like a cell phone on the screen. He clicked on a directory assistance button and waited. After a few seconds, the phone rang on the other end and an automated voice recognition system kicked in.
“You have dialed a pay service,” the computer said. “If you wish to continue, your call will be charged to your account depending on the distance called. Please state whether you would like to reach a person, place or company.”
“Place,” Anthony said.
“Thank you. What is the name of the place?”
“Purang.”
“Thank you. Can you be more specific?”
“The United States Embassy in Purang.”
“Thank you. Here is the number…”
So it wasn’t a territory of the United States, but it was big enough to merit an embassy. Anthony typed the number into an onscreen notepad.
“I will now connect to the United States Embassy in Purang,” the computerized voice said. “The total charge for this directory assisted call is $24.55.”
Anthony rolled his eyes and waited for the phone to ring on the other end. After several connection delays, the phone began to ring in Purang.
There was no answer.
