by David Stone
“I will keep these for our official records.”
Tarc pretended to give a damn what he did with the papers, just for the effect, but, since Sia was already a dead man, he didn’t really put his heart into it. He had been watching the way the bodyguard was staring at Vigo Majiic, a hungry look on his face, a sideways smile of anticipation.
Tarc turned to Majiic and said:
“Hey, Vigo, I think Baboon Boy likes you.”
The guard, who understood English, stepped in with the AK raised, butt first, striking at Tarc’s head, which wasn’t there because Tarc had gone in under the man’s left arm and taken the stiletto out of the man’s belt and punched it with all his force deep into the man’s lower belly and then ripped up, the man’s mouth open but no sound coming out, now on the tips of his toes as Tarc repeatedly jerked the blade upward until he finally felt it grating against the man’s sternum. Arterial blood spattered wetly across Colonel Sia’s shirt as he clutched at the Colt in his holster, which caught on the holster’s buttoned strap and held there long enough for Tarc to jerk the AK out of the bodyguard’s hands, pivot on a heel, and drive the butt into Sia’s midsection. The bodyguard was staggering back, a look of blank disbelief on his face, as his bloody entrails spilled out over his boots like purple-and-green snakes escaping from a sack. Tarc reversed the AK and fired a single round into the bodyguard’s face, exploding it into a red ruin and spraying the deck behind with the contents of his skull.
Sia hit the deck and curled up, retching.
And then it was over, and silence came back in a rush, although Majiic’s ears were ringing from the sound of the shot. Tarc knelt down beside the crumpled form of Colonel Sia, tugged the Colt out and handed it up to Majiic, and waited politely for Sia to finish puking, mild disgust showing on Tarc’s blade-sharp features. Then he hooked his index finger into Sia’s open mouth and dragged him by the flesh of his left cheek into a kneeling position. Sia’s chin and most of his left arm was coated in vomit. He knelt in front of Tarc, weaving slightly, his mouth working silently and his bony chest heaving. Tarc stood over him, looking down, waiting.
After a while, Sia found some brave words.
“My . . . men . . . will . . . kill . . . you . . . all.”
Tarc grinned, leaned down, wiped his fingers off on Sia’s shirt, patted the man’s cheek, straightened up and pulled the radio out of his back pocket.
“Jakki? How many are still alive?”
“Eleven. Wait. What? Okay, thanks. We just lost one. So, ten.”
“Can they walk?”
“Not far.”
“Bring them up.”
Ten minutes later, the survivors of Colonel Sia’s little armada were standing naked on the foredeck of the tanker, in a tight, trembling crowd, while the crew of the tanker—Jakki’s Bulgarian mercenaries—stood around and watched them with blank indifference. Several of the captives had knife wounds, and all had been beaten into bloody submission. They stared out at the men who had taken them, unbelieving. What had happened belowdecks had been a nightmare in a steel maze. Most of them had been taken in grimly efficient hand-to-hand combat, their throats cut or their bellies opened or their backs sliced down the spine. The ones who had survived had survived only done so because they dropped their weapons and begged for their lives, tears streaming down, leaving black streaks on their dirty faces. And now, here they were, on the gently heaving deck of a huge tanker, under a sky of brass on a sea of hammered copper.
Tarc dragged Colonel Sia across the deck plates and stood him up in front of his men. Sia’s eyes were bloodred and he was gasping like a man who had run all through the night to escape the terrible thing chasing him only to find that it that had been waiting patiently for him in his room when he finally got back home. Majiic, watching the scene and knowing Emil Tarc as he did, felt a stirring of pity for the old man. Which was ridiculous. He made a face and spat the sentiment out on the deck.
“Colonel Sia?” said Tarc, speaking softly, but loud enough to be heard over the bass vibrato of the engines coming up through the deck. Sia tried to straighten his shoulders and then slumped into limp defeat again.
“Yes. What do you want?”
“Do you know what a black flag means?”
“Yes,” he said, after an effort. “It means no quarter.”
“So, by the pirate law of the black flag, we can kill you all?”
“We meant no harm. We only wanted a toll. To pass by our water.”
“Colonel Sia. What absolute bullshit. Colonel, my ass. Have you ever really been the Colonel of anything?”
“I . . . I was in the . . . the fighting . . . at Mogadishu. I carried many reloads for the RPGs. Truly . . . Please. I ask you. Let us go to our boats. Let us go home. Be merciful. To the boys. Allah rewards the merciful.”
“Ah. So, it’s the boys you really care about, is it?”
“Truly. I love them. Me, I am nothing. They are like my own sons.”
“Are they? Okay. Tell you what. I’ll let you live if you do one thing.”
“What?”
He held up the stiletto he had taken from Sia’s dead dwarf.
“One by one, as I bring them to you, you cut their throats. You kill all of your sons with your own hands, then I’ll let you live.”
There was a murmur in the crowd of prisoners. It rose in volume until one of Jakki’s men chose a boy at random and shot him in the head. Then there was stillness. Tarc watched this and then looked back at Sia.
“See. Now only nine throats to cut. So . . . ? You or your sons?”
Tarc held the knife out in the open palm of his left hand. Sia looked at it for a long time and then he staggered forward and took the knife. Tarc turned him around and kicked him toward the first boy, who was on his knees beside one of Jakki’s men, his head down, sobbing. Sia came up to the boy, hesitated, looked back at Tarc, and then he grabbed the boy’s hair in his left hand and brought his knife hand around and cut the boy’s throat so deep he almost took the head off the neck. The boy pitched forward, convulsing, and died a long minute later in a lake of blood. Sia stepped back from the spreading pool, his right sleeve shiny with blood. He wiped the blade off on his shirttail and looked over to Tarc, waiting for the next boy to be chosen.
“That was a test,” Tarc said. “You failed.”
Sia’s face went slack, and he shook his head from side to side. A hot wind, carrying a scent of rotting fish, crawled over the railing and oiled out across the deck. Shadows lengthened across the steel plates. No one spoke.
“Nail him to the bow of his boat,” Tarc said, after a time. “Face up. Point the boat out to sea, lash down the wheel, and send it off.”
Sia fell to his knees and held his hands up in supplication. Everyoneignored him. His voice rose into a shriek as two of Jakki’s men threw him headlong and dragged him bodily to the gangway. In a few minutes, his shrieks changed to howls, and they heard the thump of mallets thudding into wood. The sound that Sia made then was literally inhuman. They heard the Mercs kick over. A few seconds later, the boat rose up on a white wake and powered out into the Indian Ocean, a skinny black spider splayed out on the bow decking. The roar of the Mercs almost hid the sound of Sia screaming. Then the sounds faded. The tanker’s engines muttered quietly. A faint breeze made the pennants flap. They all watched the boat until it was a brown smudge blurring into the yellow haze. Tarc turned to the remaining captives, considered them for a time with a blank face.
“Take them below; have them police up their dead and mop up the fucking mess they made. Then put them all in the boat—naked, no weapons—and send them on their way. After that, will somebody please hose down this deck? Looks like we gutted an ox here.”
“They’ll talk, sir,” said one of Jakki’s men.
“Yeah. They’ll tell everybody. And maybe then the fucking Somalis will stay the fuck out of the Indian Ocean for a while. You think so, Vigo?”
“Yes,” said Majiic, trudging slowly back to the wh
eel. “I think so.”
35
Inbound to Kuta City, Bali, the Indonesian Archipelago
Landing a plane at Ngurah Rai Airport in Kuta, on the southern tip of Bali, has a great deal in common with a carrier landing: you come in low out of the setting sun, across a churning sea, the landing strip starts at the shoreline and runs east for not nearly long enough, across a flat, narrow isthmus, and it ends at the edge of a huge swamp on the eastern side of the island. Overshoot it by twenty feet and you’re in the swamp.
Dalton did not overshoot it, although the silence in the cabin was telling, as he laid on the brakes, with the tires smoking, while the far end of the runway was coming up fast, like the takeoff end of a ski jump. He hadn’t flown a plane this size in a couple of years, and his skills had declined more than a bit. The plane came to a rocking halt—Dalton exchanged some terse words with the control tower— and he taxied the plane around to a circular parking spot some distance from the main building.
There was an odd craft parked in the next circle, a Boeing V-22 Osprey, a chopper-fixed-wing mix that flew a little like a Harrier. It could take off straight up like a chopper and then redirect its turboprops to pick up serious forward speed. It looked like an oversized Huey with wings attached to the roof and a tail bar with two upright fins. This one, olive-drab and unmarked except for a registration number on her squat, stubby fuselage, looked official, some lucky bureaucrat’s government ride. The Osprey was a fairly common plane in the South China Sea, since it provided a lot of the advantages of a chopper but it could carry a lot more troops a lot farther—two thousand miles—and twice as fast as any Huey or Blackhawk could. It wasn’t a major weapons platform—the usual armament was a .50 caliber mounted in the rear loading bay—but a .50 could do a fair amount of damage, if push came to shove it up your nose.
Beyond the Osprey, he could see a green Toyota truck heading their way, Indonesian Customs and Immigration. He figured they’d be okay. Doc Holliday said he’d have the Embassy call ahead and say they were just doing a routine flight check before they presented the JetStar to the Minister Mentor. Fyke, still in the copilot chair, was already on the cell phone, speaking an Indonesian dialect and then, after a moment, switching to Vietnamese. Mandy and Miss Lopez were in the rear of the plane, talking amiably to each other while they tried to sort out what Mandy owned in the way of tropical dress that Miss Lopez could borrow without having to go to confession the next time she saw a priest.
The green Toyota came to a stop at the nose of the plane. Two skinny brown men in ODs and lots of enameled brass stepped out and waited while Dalton lowered the gangway. Then they clattered up the steps, heavy boots making the metal ring, and stopped in the doorway, obviously impressed. The aura of mystery money does that in the Far East.
They were gone in ten minutes, with a promise to send along the Cadillac Dalton had reserved. Dalton hadn’t reserved a Cadillac, but he didn’t say so. Kuta town itself was low and sprawling and ragtag and every bit the palm-fringed, sea-swept, steaming-hot, grease-reeking slacker haven that Singapore was, except there were no sky-scrapers, and obviously no dress code in the downtown area, judging by the even more hideous fashion crimes being committed by the local version of the traveling backpacker.
Miss Lopez, who during the flight had announced with some force that her first name was Delia and it was okay to use it, was staring out at the streetscape with a homesick expression—Kuta looked a lot like Iligan City in Mindanao, where she had been born what seemed like a hundred years ago. The street kids looked threadbare and wild and she understood how you could get that way if you spent enough time living in the tropics.
Mandy gave the backpackers a sardonic appraisal as the big black Cadillac rolled through downtown Kuta. It was evening now and the lights were coming on, the usual blue-white fluorescent tubes that cast a deathly glow on every face, making the streets look like they were crowded with the living dead, which didn’t help the impression the backpackers were making on Mandy. She had an expression of acid disapproval on her fine-boned, English face that could have etched glass.
“God, remind me to have some children so I can drown them,” she said, in her best Sloane Ranger drawl, sounding like Helen Mirren after six vodka gimlets. “How long are we going to be stuck in this hellhole, Ray?”
Fyke took the cell phone away from his ear.
“We’re a block away from finding out, ma’am.”
“Please don’t call me ma’am, Ray. I’m not your bloody mummy.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”
Mandy had already moved on. She was looking at her cell phone, a slight frown showing through her Botox.
“Micah, what’s this thingy here?”
She handed him her cell phone. He glanced at it and handed it back.
“It’s a GPS indicator.”
“I thought so. I did not turn that on.”
She made a move to shut the indicator down.
“Leave it on, Mandy, if you would.”
“How long has it been on?”
“It’s been on at least since we left Singapore. And, no, I didn’t turn it on. I think it was turned on by Kiki Lujac.”
Everyone in the car, including Fyke at the wheel, went quiet. Dalton had filled them all in on Kiki Lujac. Mandy had remembered him from the portico at the Intercontinental, and had taken the news that this wildly attractive young man had been sent to Singapore to assassinate them as a bitter disappointment. What a crying shame. He’d have been such a treat.
“How the hell would he get to my phone? It’s been with me all the time—”
She stopped, remembering.
“No. Wait. I left it at the hotel. It needed a charge.”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “That’s what I thought. He got in somehow and turned the GPS indicator on. I noticed the icon at Sembawang, while I was talking to Cather.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you turn it off?” asked Fyke, with an edge.
“I know why,” said Mandy, smiling at Dalton.
“Why?” asked Delia Lopez. “If this guy is as dangerous as you say?”
“You want him to know where we are,” said Mandy, “because you’re reeling him in, aren’t you? You intend to take him. Alive?”
“That’s my hope,” said Dalton.
“What if he’s cloned the phone and monitoring all the calls?” said Delia. “Or he could have put a tiny explosive charge inside it and set it off by calling the phone and then pressing a code!”
Everyone turned to look at her.
She blushed and then hardened up.
“Well, I’m not just the Filipina nursemaid here, you know. I freelance for you Intelligence types all the time. Anyway, I saw it on CSI.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dalton. “I’ve checked the battery pack. There’s no explosive and there’s no bug. And the phone’s encrypted, so, even if he cloned it, without the algorithm he’d never be able to decipher a call. All he’d hear would be a kind of high-pitched squealing, like a fax.”
“But I’m right,” said Mandy. “You left it on so he’d know where we are and come after us.”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “We haven’t got time to go look for him, so let him come to us.”
“What will you do to him?” asked Delia Lopez. Spending the last six years dealing with the physical and spiritual consequences of torture had radicalized her POV on the subject; she considered it a moral crime on a level with rape. The punishment for rape, where she came from, was death. The look she gave Dalton was a hard one, full of censure. Dalton was about to mount some sort of quibbling defense when Fyke pulled the Caddy to a hard stop outside a run-down, clapboard shop with a long, corrugated-iron roof that extended out over the front of the building. The interior was dim, lit only with a few low-watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. A hand-painted sign on the glass said, in six languages:
LUCKY HAPPY STAR CLEANER PALACE
Don’t let people ruin your clothes by hand.
&
nbsp; We do it here by machine.
“We’re here,” said Fyke. “Why don’t you folks get us something to eat while I go talk to my friend.”
“Eat?” said Mandy, pulling her sunglasses down a bit as she took in the ragtag hawker stalls, garish under the fluorescents, the stalls loaded with overripe fruit and crawling with flies. The streets smelled of rotting fish, durians, and sewage, all of it steaming and stinking in the brutal heat.
“Ray. I’m not even breathing deeply. I’m certainly not eating.”
“I see a place where we can get some scarves,” said Delia.
“Do you,” said Mandy, glancing across the street at a pushcart layered with brilliant silks in emerald greens and indigo blues. “I’d love to, and I do believe that’s a nice little bar next to it. I trust you drink, Lopez?”
“I do. Shall we?”
“We shall,” said Mandy, taking her arm and plunging into the crowds, Mandy giving them a languid, backward wave, as the two of them vectored in on the vendor’s cart full of Thai silks and Balinese batik.
“You want me to come in with you?” asked Dalton.
Fyke shook his head, as he extricated himself from the wheel and hobbled across the boardwalk toward the door. Halfway there, he turned his injured knee and went down like a shot bull. He looked up from the pavement at Dalton, wearing the expression of a strong man coming to painful terms with new limitations. Dalton gave him a hand and pulled him to his feet, watching the pain in Fyke’s eyes and seeing his own future there.
“Maybe you should come along, Mikey.”
“Yeah. Just until you get your legs back.”
The shop was hotter than the street, floored in peeling linoleum that might once have been gray, smelling of sweat and cleaning fluid and moldy wood. It was a wide, low-roofed space, with a pressed-tin ceiling and wooden walls. A rickety counter up front separated the entrance from a larger factory space in the rear, where brown-eyed girls in jeans and T-shirts worked at the presses. Along the rear wall, a row of huge, rust-streaked machines churned and rocked, filling the place with the smell of overheated cotton and soap-scented steam. None of the women working the pressing boards looked up as Dalton and Fyke came in, but somebody must have hit a button somewhere because, in a moment, a small, wiry man with a face like a cracked walnut brushed aside a rack of hanging shirts and shuffled toward them, his rubber flip-flops flapping, his damp shirt unbuttoned, showing a torso marked by bony ribs and burn scars and a sunken belly. His black eyes showed nothing, as he reached the counter and stood there, a skeletal dwarf who seemed to be made of old bamboo and dried leather. He stared up at Fyke with a frowning scowl, quite devoid of welcome.
