by Blake Banner
His secretary said something in Arabic. Omar said something to his accountant in Arabic and his accountant replied. The three of them became agitated. Then Omar turned to the thug and said, “Cut off his fingers!”
Seventeen
It was a shock, and for a moment I felt something very close to panic. This was not the way it was supposed to have played out. I felt arms tighten on my own arms as the two guys restraining me squeezed to hold me still. The third guy took my right arm and started pulling the fingers open from my balled-up fist. The guy with the knife and the insolent blue eyes slipped the AK47 from his shoulder, took it by the barrel and stepped slightly to his right, to lean it against the cabin wall.
A forty-foot cutter is not a spacious boat. It is cramped, and the cockpit can only take so many people. We were eight, two sitting down, four cramped at the hatch, gripping on to each other, Omar watching, and the guy with the knife leaning over to put his rifle down, so he could start cutting my fingers off.
It had to be fast and it had to be explosive, and I had enough fear and adrenaline to make it both of those things and then some. I took a tiny step forward with my left foot, pulling the three guys with me, and with a roar of rage and hatred that came from the darkest parts of my soul I kicked savagely, bringing my instep up hard into his balls. His sneering face creased into the weeping face of a baby and he went down on his knees and his AK47 fell to the deck, just three feet from where I stood.
Long before it got there I brought my foot back and down and smashed the heel of my boot into the guy on my right’s instep and ankle. It was enough to make him pull his foot away and that destabilized him. So when I yanked my arm away he let go. I took a small step forward with my right foot and, with my left arm, pulled on the two guys who were pulling me. We came together and with the combined power of our pulls, I turned and smashed the heel of my open hand into the nearest one’s jaw. As he went down I pulled his piece from his holster, shoved it into his pal’s belly and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for him he had cocked it and I blew a hole through his breakfast. The guy whose foot I’d broken was scrambling to get his weapon from his holster while trying to ignore the agony in his shattered foot. I shot him in the head.
I turned to see three things and my mind went into slow motion. Omar, his secretary and his accountant were scrambling to get onto the launch. On that launch the skipper had an AK47 in his hands and was aiming it at me. The cannon jumped and spat, and I ran at the three scrambling men.
Scalding fire tore into my left shoulder and swelled through my left arm. I screamed in my mind for my body to ignore the pain. All I could see was the three men who could not get away. Still screaming, I grabbed Omar by his shirt collar and pulled him back toward me. I could see the skipper’s dark face in minute detail as he followed me with the cannon of the assault rifle. I could see his eyes turning from triumph to horror as he realized that to shoot me he had to shoot Omar.
And that I had his pal’s Glock trained on him.
His mouth opened and he stepped back. The rifle wavered. The secretary and the accountant dropped, covering their heads. And I pulled the trigger once, twice, three and four times, punching nine-millimeter holes through his chest. As he dropped I smashed the butt of the Glock into Omar’s head. The whole thing had taken less than six seconds.
My arm was throbbing with intense pain. I fought to ignore it a little longer, grabbed the secretary by his neck and the seat of his pants and threw him across the cockpit toward the hatch. He sprawled on his back and stared at me, his eyes bulging with fear. The accountant was on his knees with his hands raised. I yanked him to his feet.
“Never kneel, you piece of shit! If you’re going to die do it like a man, for Christ’s sake!”
I shoved him over with the secretary, picked up the attaché case and threw it at them. Then I went to the guy whose jaw I had broken and shot him in the back of the neck. Blue Eyes was still whimpering like a baby. I knelt beside him.
“I guess I got it wrong. You go last.” I shot him in the head.
I stood and walked to the gunwale where I took a bucket, threw it over the side and filled it with water. Then I poured it over Omar’s head. He spluttered and groaned and tried to crawl away from me, looking around wildly and muttering, “Oh dear god! Oh god…”
I said, “Take it easy,” walked over to Blue Eyes and took his bowie knife. Omar was watching me. “What are you doing? What are you going to do?”
I met his eye as I stepped over to him, but I offered him no expression and I said nothing. I knelt on his wrist and place the knife point down on his belly. He screamed and froze at the same time. I looked over at the secretary and said, “You got the laptop in the attaché case?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Open it.”
He fumbled at the latches with trembling hands and the lid sprang open. I still had my eyes on the secretary.
“Do you need Omar alive to make the transfer?” He went rigid. His eyes darted to his boss and back to me. I turned to Omar. “Does he need you to be alive to make the transfer?”
He screamed, “Yes! It’s not legal if I am dead!”
I laughed and slipped the blade down to the knuckle of his baby finger. I leaned on it, felt the knuckle crunch and sliced back through the skin with the razor blade. He screamed three times, real loud, while his body thrashed and his feet kicked. Then he passed out.
I stood and drew another bucket of water from the sea and threw it over him. He spluttered and came round moaning and whimpering. I watched him.
“You made me real mad when you told Blue Eyes to cut off my fingers. How much were you prepared to pay me for the NPP?”
He gibbered with a slack mouth, looking with wild eyes down at his hand. I jerked my head at the secretary and the accountant. “Write it down.” They stared at me and I roared, “Write it down!”
They scrambled for their pens and bits of paper. As they wrote, I said, “I advise you both to be honest, because if you try to screw me this is going to turn from moderately bad to very, very bad.”
Each one of them scribbled down a number and showed it to me. They were the same. I smiled down at Omar and slapped him a couple of times. “How much, Omar, were you prepared to pay me today?”
His mouth worked and dribbled. “Two, two hundred and fifty…”
I nodded. “OK, that is going to be my compensation for the trouble you caused me today. But the price just went up. I am going to give you a week to find two billion dollars. We will meet at the Mandarin Oriental in one week, you will pay me the full sum and I will hand you the NPP. I will not be alone, I will be accompanied by old colleagues from the Regiment, and by a whole fleet of lawyers. So you’d better behave, because if you do anything stupid, what’s left of you will spend the rest of its life in jail.”
I almost burst out laughing at the expression of relief on his face. I pulled my cell from my pocket and looked over at the secretary. “Make the transfer.” Then I looked down at Omar. “Tell him.”
He screamed something in Arabic and the secretary started rattling at the keys. A couple of minutes later my phone pinged and I looked at the screen. What I saw there made me smile.
I looked down at Omar. “How many fingers were you going to have him remove?”
He swallowed several times, staring into my eyes, and gradually his face crumpled and he started to weep.
“How many fingers have you had your boys remove over the years, Omar?” He shook his head and tears and spittle mingled on his chin. “How many men, women and children have you had tortured and murdered over the years, working for Mohammed ben Amini?”
His eyes showed surprise, wariness, terror. I leaned down, close to his face. “Do you know who captured ben Amini in the Suleiman Mountains?” He shook his head. “I did. I watched him slaughter a whole village. I watched him rape and murder little children. I watched him earn his title, the Butcher of Al-Landy. And I captured him in his hideout in the caves
. And do you know, Omar, who followed him to Salton Sea, near Los Angeles, and killed the son of a bitch?” He just stared and swallowed. I said, “I did. And now I am going to send you to join him in hell.”
I cut deep into his throat with the bowie knife. I wanted to make him suffer the way all of his victims had suffered, his and Mohammed ben Amini’s victims had suffered. But I knew well from Budo, and from what Zamudio had taught me, that if you look too deeply into your enemy’s eyes, you become your enemy. So I made it merciful and I made it fast.
I stood and stepped toward the two spineless wonders.
“Hell is about to rise up out of the depths and engulf the world, and I am going to be leading the hosts of daemons as they emerge from the flames. Everything you have worked for is about to collapse and be engulfed. This is your last and only chance to save yourselves. Take the launch, go back to Cadiz, get the first flight to New York and hand yourselves over to the FBI. Tell them that you offer them all the evidence they need to bring down the Mohammed ben Amini Foundation, and Al-Nabiin Corporation, in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Then start new, useful lives helping people. If you don’t, if you do anything different to what I have told you, I will find you and I will kill you. Now go.”
They scrambled and ran, and I went to get Diana. I opened the bedroom door and looked at her. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed staring at me with sullen, terrified eyes.
“I thought it wasn’t you,” she said. “I kept telling myself you wouldn’t scream.”
“Omar is dead.” I shrugged. “I sent his secretary and his accountant scampering and told them to buddy up with the Feds to bring down the Mohammed ben Amini Foundation and the Al-Nabiin Corporation. I don’t know if they’ll do it, but I think if they give it some thought, they’ll come up with the right horse to back.”
“And the money?”
“I am now a very rich man.”
“How much?”
“Mind your own business much. Less than you’ll make when you get home to DC.” I waited, watching her face as she stared at her feet and thought about what I had said. After a moment I said, “Help me get these bodies overboard and scrub down the deck. We get moving in a hurry.”
She nodded and followed me silently out to the cockpit.
Between us we dragged the bodies onto the remaining launch, where the dead skipper lay. We put all six bodies below, tied them to the furniture so they would not surface when they bloated with gas from decomposition. Then we returned to the sailing yacht and I took two of the AK47s and at point-blank range, blasted a big hole in the bow just below the waterline. You have to be careful when shooting high velocity rounds into water because most will disintegrate on contact. But I kept the shots to no more than an inch below the surface, and to a long, gaping hole in the front side of the boat. Then I threw the rifles in and we sat and watched Omar and his thugs sink below the waves forever.
I wondered briefly what his hopes had been, if he had ever dreamed, if he had ever loved. I doubted a man like that was capable of love, but then I remembered that we are all, like Heisenberg’s particles, just potential, and the right incentive or provocation can turn a saint into a monster.
I wasn’t concerned with saints, only with monsters.
“What now?”
It was Diana, sitting next to me, watching the dark shadow of the launch fade into darkness beneath the sparkling eddies.
“Frank Mendez is neutralized. Omar is neutralized and, I hope, the Al-Nabiin Corporation and the Mohammed ben Amini Foundation are holed beneath the waterline. I think now it is more or less safe for us to return to the USA.”
“So we fly from Cadiz?”
“We would have to fly from Jerez, or from Malaga. I don’t like either. There is a chance Omar’s men could be looking for us. There is also a chance the cops could be looking for us.”
“So?”
“So we sail to Sao Miguel in the Azores and charter a plane from there.”
“That’s insane. How long will that take? You’d have to be an experienced skipper! We could drown. Are you an experienced skipper?”
“Of course.”
“Of course you are. You’re James Bond cleverly disguised as an inbred redneck.”
“Thanks, I love you too. Actually, in my experience, most rednecks I have met were very fine people with solid values. And the worst inbreds I’ve met were among the European aristocracies and the Boston Brahmins.”
“You’re a piece of work. How long will it take us to get to the Azores?”
“Less than a week.”
“What are we supposed to eat during that week?”
“We’re about five or six hours from the coast of Portugal, sailing under a Spanish flag. We should get there about seven this evening. We go ashore in the dinghy, buy some supplies and dine out like we are tourists enjoying a day out. And at two o’clock tonight, we set sail for the Azores. They are part of the European Union, so as long as we are flying under a Spanish flag, we should not encounter any trouble.”
There was a vague expression of disgust on her face. “Do things ever go wrong for you?”
“Yeah, they went very badly wrong for me today.”
“That’s going wrong for you, walking away from a fight with eight men several hundred million dollars in the clear.”
I shrugged. “You should see me on a good day.”
Ten minutes later we hoisted the sails, turned the prow a little west of northwest and the small craft gave a couple of small jumps and next thing she was skipping across the small, sparkling waves casting great sheets of spray into the air, and we were on our way back across the vast darkness of the North Atlantic.
Eighteen
It was a crossing of about eight hundred and seventy nautical miles. We were fortunate, and the winds favored us out of the northeast. We sailed nonstop and along the way I showed Diana how the small yacht worked, which allowed me to sleep for four-hour stretches. She fed me with strong, sweet coffee and after four days we sighted Sao Miguel.
I had called the brigadier from Manta Rota in Portugal while Diana was buying supplies for the crossing. He had picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Where are you?”
“I’m sitting on a beach in the Algarve, sipping a crisp, cold white wine while my wife shops for supplies.”
“You’re being facetious.”
“I am also being truthful, and just as soon as I get hold of a dictionary I will tell you whether I am offended or not.”
There was a sigh. I sipped the cold, slightly green wine. He asked, “What happened in Cadiz?”
“I killed Frank Mendez.”
“Oh. What about housekeeping. Will it point to us?”
“No. But I got him to lead me to a big shot called Omar Arian, who runs the Mohammed ben Amini Foundation. He was putting foundation money into research by the University of Malaga, the Junta of Andalucia, the Centro Andaluz de Nanomedicina and the Al-Nabiin Corporation. And it was that money and that research that led to the development of the NPP. Our girl was the head of project.”
“So this thing actually exists? I am skeptical. So what happened?”
“I killed Omar. He had a secretary and an accountant with him, Salim Masih and Abdul Kouri. I told them both to go to New York and offer their testimony to the Feds in exchange for immunity. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.”
“What does that mean?”
“I was in possession of three boats on the high seas with six dead bodies and Diana hiding in the cabin. The best I could do was try to terrify them into cooperating.”
“I’m quite sure you did a standup job. I shall have a word with friends and see if they can be picked up. So you are now in the Algarve and Diana is buying supplies for what, exactly?”
“We sail tonight, at two AM, for Sao Miguel. My idea is to charter a flight from there to DC, though I am hoping you will come and pick us up so that I can hand her over to you.”
&nb
sp; He was quiet for a bit, then said, “Yes, all right. Book in at the Pestana Bahia Praya in Villa Franca do Campo. I’ll be booked in there as Mr. John Smith. We’ll meet and talk things over. Give me a call when you arrive.”
As evening fell on the fourth day we followed the coast for about fourteen miles and finally sighted Vila Franca do Campo, a small port town surrounded by green fields that might have been somewhere in New England. Two miles farther on we came to a shallow bay with dark gray volcanic sand and, on the eastern end of the bay, a tall, modern hotel with a sparkling pool.
We dropped anchor, dropped the Zodiac and motored ashore through the early evening light with the small waves kicking up small clouds of spray ahead of us. We pulled the Zodiac up on the dark sand, and waded up toward the road and the hotel parking lot.
Reception was a strange mix of Old World and early ’70s tongue and groove and polished marble. We checked in and Diana told the pretty girl at the desk that we wanted to see Mr. Smith, in Portuguese, and the pretty girl at the desk listened politely and told me in English that Mr. Smith was expecting us in the Presidential Suite on the top floor, all the way at the end on the left, with magnificent views of the sea.
We thanked her and crossed the lobby with marble echoes and rode the creaking vinyl and mirrored elevator to the sixth floor. There we followed a long passage all the way to the end, on the left, but before we got there a door opened and the familiar silhouette of Colonel Jane Harris appeared framed in the doorway. She spoke as we approached.
“Couldn’t quite make it from Calgary to DC, but I suppose a small island halfway across the Atlantic is a fair effort.”
“Hello Colonel, I have missed your inspiring words over the last weeks.” We arrived at the door and she held my eye. She looked mad. I went on. “I am so looking forward to going into the field together one day, so you can show me how it’s done. This is Diana, aka Helen Johansdota, from Iceland, Norway and Iowa. Helen, this is…” I paused, looking at the colonel, and made a question with my face. She gave a microscopic nod accompanied by a slow blink, which I took to be, “Go ahead,” so I said, “This is Colonel Jane Harris, a fine soldier and a constant source of inspiration.”
