by Mack Maloney
Uni could barely hear his words. But the message the razor was sending was very clear.
“I’ll make it easy on you,” Marcos went on. “We only want one thing — the sharfa. Tell it to me now and I will kill you quickly. If not, I’ll cut your throat out, one piece at a time. I assure you, that is a very painful way to go.”
To prove his point, Marcos slid the blade across the soft skin just below Uni’s right ear and began to slice into it slowly. Uni was horrified — and very confused. He thought the brothel owner was his friend.
Another guy in a blue UN jumpsuit suddenly appeared. He was holding a Nokia cell phone.
“It’s him,” was all the man said to Marcos.
Even Uni knew what that meant. Palm Tree was on the phone. Marcos withdrew his blade and grabbed the cell. Uni gasped for breath as even more blood flowed down his neck
What followed was an intense conversation between Marcos and Palm Tree on how the weapons were to be packed and shipped. Marcos did all the talking at first. He explained to Palm Tree that he had followed his previous instructions to the letter. The crates had been clearly marked 1, 2, and 3 on their inside panels. The missiles and launchers were about to be packed in all three, using layers of Buddhas to surround them. This way, the crates could pass, at least by a cursory inspection, as nothing more than a shipment of chintzy religious statues heading for the United States.
But then Palm Tree started talking, and clearly there had been a change in plans. Marcos’s men were now to pack all the Buddhas into Crate 1, and all of the weapons into Crate 2. Crate 3 would be left empty. Furthermore, Crates 1 and 2 would be the only ones shipped. Crate 3 was to be dumped on a beach nearby.
Uni could tell Marcos was hearing all this for the first time. The Filipino hoodlum actually questioned Palm Tree as to why they went through all the trouble of getting the 2,000 Buddhas if they weren’t going to be used as camouflage for the weapons during shipment. “I thought the whole idea was to move the weapons disguised as a load of statues,” Uni heard Marcos say. It was impossible to hear Palm Tree’s reply, but it was short, curt, and Marcos got the point right away. Things had changed.
Palm Tree hung up and Marcos began shouting out the new orders. Just as mystified as their boss, the men in the blue UN jumpsuits got to work nevertheless. A flurry of activity ensued as the Buddhas were taken from their cardboard boxes and put into one crate, with the missiles and launchers put into another. The bubble wrap was unfurled, the bag of packing peanuts cut open. The sound of duct tape being torn and applied fill the air. The entire packing operation took less than five minutes.
Then Marcos turned back to Uni. Slamming him against the wall once more, Marcos began screaming at the shuka, telling him how stupid he was, how he’d been manipulated, how everyone from Palm Tree to Kazeel had used him as a dupe. Marcos even held the phone to Uni’s ear and let him hear a saved message from Palm Tree ordering Marcos to eliminate Uni whether he came across with the sharfa or not. Either way, the shuka had to go.
Uni’s eyes went wide. His jaw dropped open. Marcos saw this and started to laugh. But Uni was not reacting to what he’d just heard the judus say. The reason for his sudden amazement was that he saw something apparently no one else in the hangar could see. Straight up, past the suspended ceiling, on the dirty skylight directly above his head, a heavily armed masked man was looking right down at him.
The man had his finger to his lips, telling Uni, Don’t make a sound.
Uni’s mind began to move — albeit slowly. What should he do? Palm Tree had all but ordered him killed. The sadistic Marcos had his razor blade back out to do the job. Yet Uni was more fearful of the ghost looking down at him than what his former friends had in store for him.
Several things happened in the next two seconds. Marcos began to draw the blade across Uni’s throat again. But at the precise moment the razor touched the shuka’s skin, there was a mighty crash! above them. It startled Marcos so, he dropped the straight razor, grazing Uni’s ear and opening yet another cut. Suddenly four heavily armed people were rappelling from the ceiling, firing their guns wildly. All four were wearing masks and, incredibly, had American flags tied around their necks as capes.
The hangar was instantly ablaze in gunfire. More figures crashed through the skylight. Some were dressed like the first four — in black combat suits. But others were wearing sailors’ uniforms, and still others were in very tattered Hawaiian shirts. All of them were firing M16s. The zing and sizzle of bullets became deafening. The electrical system was hit and all the lights went out. But the sudden darkness was quickly relit by the illuminating rounds of tracer fire. People were screaming, grunting, crying out in pain. There were 15 people inside the warehouse, including Uni and Marcos. Within 10 seconds, 13 of them were dead, riddled with bullets by the crazy men dropping from the night sky.
Uni was petrified, absolutely frozen with fear. So was Marcos, who was now standing straight up, his hands raised over his head, pleading with the masked soldiers not to kill him. One of the soldiers came out of the dark, pushed Marcos aside, and grabbed Uni around his throat. He slammed the shuka up against the wall again and jammed a small American flag in his mouth. Then he took off his mask.
It was Dave Hunn.
He growled at Uni: “Hey, Mr. Clean…remember me?”
* * *
Ozzi had lost his helmet on the way down into the hangar. His wrist felt broken on landing and the sudden descent had turned his stomach inside out.
He was the 5-Guy, as in the fifth guy down the rope. Hunn, Curry, Puglisi, and McMahon had been the Crashers. Ozzi and Bingo and two Spooks were the second team down. After that, Bingo’s guys just started jumping into the place. Though Ozzi had been with the rogue American team for what seemed like forever now, he was still trying to get the hang of this superhero stuff. He knew losing one’s helmet during a crash-and-smash was not considered good form.
It had all been a whirl for him these past few days. First the trip from Manila to the mysterious Ocean Voyager, by way of a stolen high-speed drug-running junk. Then the long flight to Pakistan (stealing aviation fuel along the way), getting on the trail of the real Dragos (an adventure in itself), icing them, fooling Kazeel with fake ambushes and bombing attacks until they knew every step he’d made, and then icing him. Bahzi, the Paki intelligence men, and Kazeel’s seven dwarves came next, all leading to the team finally picking up the shuka’s scent. The bright yellow Sing One TV chopper nearly crashed on its way back to Ocean Voyager. (They’d used too much fuel diverting to a suburb of Rangoon to mail the videotapes to the shuka.) The spy ship set sail just before the Vietnamese government finally got wise that it had been hiding in their waters for weeks. It met the copter at sea.
From there, the American team had been able to keep track of the shuka the same way they’d first got on Kazeel’s tail — because he’d stupidly kept using his cell phone. By remotely accessing his DSA computer back in Washington, Ozzi had tapped into the NSA’s top-secret ECHELON eavesdropping system and marked Uni’s phone for movement updates once every hour or so. All they had to do after that was follow the electronic footprints. At the same time, they’d dissected the phone used by Kazeel, and from this became privy to at least the basics of the supermook’s Big Plan. They knew Kazeel had somehow come upon the Stinger launchers and had paid Bahzi handsomely for the accompanying missiles. They knew the weapons were to be assembled somewhere in the Philippines and then shipped to the United States. They also knew once the missiles were en route, the shuka, having survived his boyfriend Kazeel, was supposed to activate the so-called sharfa, signaling the Al Qaeda sleeper cells inside the United States to spring into action. Just about the only piece of information the team hadn’t uncovered yet was the sharfa itself. Kazeel died because they couldn’t beat it out of him. It was only after they busted into Kazeel’s phone did they discover the shuka held the secret key too. That’s why they had to get back to the ’Peens chop-chop—and that’s why the
y were here, crashing through the ceiling.
The hangar was nearly pitch-black by the time Ozzi came flying in. He could see only gun flashes during his short ride down the Zorro rope. He’d hit the floor hard, hurting his wrist and separating himself from his helmet, which also contained his night-vision goggles. While reaching around for his flashlight, he unwittingly squeezed the trigger on his M16, unleashing a stream of tracers that further lit up the hangar with an intense blinding flash.
The glow from his bullets helped him spot the waylaid helmet though. He dived for it, shoving it back over his head as if it were an oxygen mask and he needed the air. He cranked the night goggles to full power and everything slowly coalesced into the reassuring green underworld of night vision.
Of course, by that time, the battle was over.
* * *
Someone got the lights back on and Ozzi thought he’d died and gone to special ops heaven. Everything they’d worked for in the last few hectic days was now before them: the Stingers, the launchers, the shuka, and a key bad guy who was already trying to plea bargain with Bingham and Curry. The only thing missing was a big bow to wrap it all up.
Ozzi fell to the seat of his pants, burning his hands on the muzzle of his still-hot M16. He was both exhausted and exuberant. Curry came up to him and delivered a low five so powerful, it almost broke Ozzi’s other wrist. There was much hooting and hollering among the Americans as they checked the bodies of the dead. None of the gunmen had ID or any kind of anything that might tell them who they were or who was paying them. No matter. The Americans were already using their switchblades to cut the letters UN out of the girly-blue uniforms. Every battle gives birth to trophies. This one was no different.
Both Puglisi and McMahon slid down next to Ozzi now and delivered simultaneous bear hugs to him, so glad were they that their long ordeal was finally over. He just laughed and pushed them away. They’re endured so much over the past week and a half: brutal heat, biting cold, long rides over water, and low-altitude dashes through perilous skies. Slippery mountain roads, raging Afghan blizzards, narrow escapes, gunfights, fistfights, bombings, stabbings — all on little food, no sleep, and lots of stress. Yet, in the end, they’d won somehow. They’d stopped Kazeel for good and had captured his weapons cache intact. Hundreds if not thousands of American lives had been saved. And Ozzi had been a small part of it.
All kinds of images began flashing through his head now. The triumphant trip home. A good meal. A few drinks. Maybe meet some girls…Maybe they’ll give me a bigger office, he thought. With a TV this time.
And then, strangely, a name popped into his head: Yogi Berra.
Why?
An instant later came a great crash — another one. Suddenly armed men were pouring through just about every orifice in the hangar. Ozzi’s first thought was: Hey, it’s the 82nd Airborne!
But he couldn’t have been more wrong. It was Ramosa’s secret police instead. Lots of them.
And Yogi Berra?
Of course…déjà vu all over again.
But this wasn’t an exact re-creation of the bust-up in the Impatient Parrot the week before. This time there was a gunfight. A big one.
The lights went out in the hangar a second time — a moment later everyone in the room who had a weapon opened up. The pyrotechnics when the American team first crashed in on Marcos were a sparkler compared to these fireworks. Stretched out flat on the floor now, Ozzi started firing wildly in the direction of the doors the secret police were streaming through. They all did. Ozzi was astonished that he could actually see the armed men, never mind hit some of them. That’s when he realized this time he was looking through his night goggles.
It got very weird, very quickly, from there. The big hangar was again awash in fluorescent gunfire, a single round of which could obliterate a heart or explode a skull. In the sudden murk of gunsmoke Ozzi could only see faces — just faces amid the bullet streaks — eyes wild, heading right for him, firing their weapons in his direction.
Then, just a few seconds into this thing, someone grabbed hold of Ozzi’s feet and started pulling him backward. He was dragged across the floor for 20 feet or more. He never stopped firing, though — he couldn’t. Not with a tidal wave of bad guys who wanted to kill him just a few meters away. His finger was melded to his trigger.
It was Puglisi who was pulling him along the oily floor. As soon as the first shot was fired, the American team had assembled into a defensive formation known as “Zulu 2.” Everyone but Ozzi, that is. Puglisi had yanked him back into the fold. Finally Ozzi took a half-second to look around him. The team was set up three deep. Some were lying on the floor next to him; some were on bent knee; the rest were standing up. Their weapons raised, they formed three ranks of continuous fire. It was a brilliant tactic, quick and ballsy, but it reminded Ozzi too much of Custer’s Last Stand.
The attackers were advancing with fanatical drive. The Americans were dropping them like flies, but they kept on coming anyway. The bad guys didn’t have night goggles, and for the first 30 seconds that made all the difference in the world. The Americans were mowing them down, like a grisly shooting gallery.
The fusillade coming from the three-deep formation was frightening — but it was also costly in ammunition, which is why the battle lasted barely a minute. The Americans had crashed the place with only enough ammo to take the hangar — not fight a small war. The team ran out of bullets all at once. Suddenly the firing stopped. The floor was littered with dead mooks and empty shell casings. Incredibly, no one on the American side had been killed or even wounded.
But surely, they were dead ducks now.
A surreal moment passed. More than half of Ramosa’s guys had been popped. But those that had survived quickly disarmed the Americans. Ramosa appeared from nowhere and made sure every prisoner was aggressively frisked.
When it came to Hunn’s turn, he just looked at Ramosa and said: “How?”
The police captain displayed his sinister 24K grin.
“Same way as last time,” he said. “We’ve had this place surrounded for hours, just waiting for you.” Ramosa was speaking in a surprisingly sophisticated manner.
“You would have known that had you chosen to come in through the front door this time,” he went on, looking up at the smashed skylights overhead. “And not by the roof. I’m afraid you’ve destroyed a lot of UN property, my friends. Too bad you won’t be around the pay the bill.”
Hunn tried to spit at him. “What do you think — you’re in a James Bond movie?”
Ramosa was clearly embarrassed. He knew his last comment had been a little too melodramatic.
“No matter,” he snapped right back again. “One way or the other, you’re all about to die.”
He directed his men to line up the Americans in a row. Each was made to kneel, facing the wall, hands behind his head. The classic position for a gangland execution….
Ozzi was on the end of this sad line. I’ll be either the first to go or the last, he thought grimly, knees starting to shake. Ramosa handed his pistol and extra ammunition to Marcos; the Filipino thug, saved in the nick of time, was practically drooling with anticipation now. There were 16 American team members in all, including the sailors and the Spooks. Marcos took Ramosa’s pistol but said to him: “I will use my razor on some of them, too. If you don’t mind?”
Ramosa wasn’t listening, though. He was bent over the shuka who’d collapsed back into a heap against the wall. Marcos joined him.
Ramosa said: “I’m here not so much to save your ass as I am to get the sharfa. It might very well be the most valuable thing in the world right now.”
Marcos lifted Uni’s bloody chin. He was a distant cousin of the people who used to run the Philippines. As such, he’d inherited their penchant for violence and violation.
“But how do we get it, my friend?” Marcos asked Ramosa. “This one’s too stupid to bleed it out of him. I was about to try — and so would have they, if you hadn’t arrived.”
<
br /> Ramosa studied the bloody pulp of Uni’s face. The shuka appeared to be clinging to life by the barest of threads, his eyes teary with confusion, horror.
“Yes, it seems strange that Kazeel would entrust something so important to such an imbecile,” Ramosa said. “But the sheikh wasn’t stupid. He must have imparted the sharfa to him in such a way that this clown could not take it with him to the grave. That means something about him should give us a clue to its whereabouts. But what could it be?”
Suddenly it was as if a lightbulb went off over Marcos’s head. He turned to Ramosa.
“Have you ever heard this dimwit speak?” Marcos asked him. “Beyond a few grunts, I mean?”
Ramosa had to think a moment. “No,” he answered. “I don’t think I have. Not really. Has anyone?”
Marcos smiled demonically. His razor was back in Uni’s face in a flash. He forced the shuka’s mouth open and pulled out his tongue.
“Well, look at this!” Marcos cried.
He turned Uni’s tongue upside down to reveal that a set of tiny numbers, 14 in all, had been tattooed there. Ramosa bent down and studied them. They seemed distorted and unreadable.
“But they are backward,” he said. “Why?”
Marcos thought another moment. Then, another lightbulb.
“So this idiot can see them in a mirror,” he declared. To make his point, he held his very shiny razor blade against Uni’s tongue. Sure enough, only in its reflection did the numbers make sense.
“Yes, I see it now,” Ramosa said. “It’s a phone number. Country code, area code, and the rest. That’s the sharfa. Call this number and let it ring — no one will ever pick it up probably. They won’t have to. The sleepers will know to go into action simply upon hearing it.”
Marcos laughed like a girl. “And the sheikh must have told this moron to keep his mouth shut — and he has. Until now.”
Ramosa looked at the numbers again and winced. “But the pain of putting them there must have been incredible.”
