by S. A. Beck
“So tell me about the cave paintings. I wish I could see them.”
Otto chose his words carefully. “Oh, they just showed a bunch of people gathered together and a city of some kind.”
He decided not to mention the triple walls of Atlantis or the ships sailing across the sea. Nadya was a friend, but Grunt had told him again and again not to talk about their mission. As he put it, even if someone you told could be trusted, the next person they talked to might be hostile.
“It was really faint, not much to see, actually,” he added, and took another sip to hide his discomfort.
“Were there ruins nearby? There usually are.”
“Um, yeah, there were some bits of old pottery and stuff. Not much. Dad was a bit disappointed. It didn’t look like an important site at all.”
“I bet he took a lot of pictures anyway.”
“Oh no, Dr. Yamazaki did,” he said.
Damn, you keep slipping up!
Relax, she’s a friend.
Nadya smiled and put a hand on his knee. “I sure would like to see those pictures, Otto. They are on her computer, yes? Which room is Dr. Yamazaki’s?”
“Um, why are you so interested?” Otto asked. This was getting weird.
As he turned to look at her, the room spun.
“Uh-oh, I think I’m still sick.”
“No, you are not sick. Perhaps you are just not used to the beer. Which room is Dr. Yamazaki’s?”
Nadya tightened her grip on his knee. The whole room rocked, and the beer bottle seemed to bend in his hand.
“What’s going on?” Otto said.
He fell back on the bed, the ceiling spinning above him. He heard Nadya’s voice. It echoed like it came from the end of a long tunnel.
“Never mind, Otto. You rest. I will find her computer. You said you had all the rooms on this wing, yes? That is not too many to break into.”
Otto felt himself sinking. A heavy darkness pressed down on top of him like being buried under a dozen quilts.
The darkness felt like it lasted a long, long time.
Gradually awareness returned. The first sensation he felt was a numbing cold.
The next sensation he felt was something digging into his wrists. His hands were behind his back, crossed over one another. He tried to separate them and found he couldn’t.
Had Nadya tied him up?
Otto opened his eyes, but everything looked blurry.
Blearily he raised his head and tried to focus.
He sat on the concrete floor of what looked like a cellar, with only a small, boarded-up window high on the wall. His back rested against the bare concrete wall. It was damp and chill. Timbuktu was so hot that even rooms like this always felt warm except in the middle of the night. How long had he been out?
About ten feet away on the other side of the room, Yuhle sat with his back against the other wall. His hands were behind his back too, and his ankles were bound with thin ropes to one another.
Otto looked down at his own legs and found they were tied too.
He looked back at Yuhle.
The scientist was glaring at him. He had a black eye, and his shirt was torn.
“Smooth move, Romeo,” Yuhle growled.
Chapter 11
AUGUST 15, 2016, MARRAKECH, MOROCCO
4:30 A.M.
* * *
Grunt had revised his earliest estimation. This was now officially, undeniably the number-one messed-up situation he’d ever been in.
Alone in a hostile environment? Check.
Dying? Check.
No medical care in sight? Check.
Being hunted by enemies? Check.
No way to communicate with his team? Check.
He’d never been able to check all the boxes before. Four out of five, sure, but not all five. That was a personal best.
Or worst.
Grunt staggered through the darkened streets of Marrakech. Few people were out at this hour except for cops, and he couldn’t afford to get caught by the cops. That would get him medical care but also a jail cell and too many questions. Plus with General Meade’s global connections, it wouldn’t take long before he ended up in that guy’s clutches.
So he kept to the back streets, more out of instinct than to keep out of sight. His vision had grown blurry, and he couldn’t trust his arms and legs much anymore. He’d lost his cell phone somewhere along the line too. At least he still clutched the pipe he had scrounged. Any weapon was better than no weapon. He’d dropped that, too, a few minutes back and had nearly fainted when he bent over to retrieve it.
He was getting clumsy. Sloppy. If someone got like that in the field, they generally wound up dead.
Pretty soon now, old buddy, he thought as he stumbled and hit his shoulder against a wall.
Hell with that. Keep going.
He came to a small square and looked around in the dim light of a single underpowered streetlamp. No one. Good.
Was he still going the right way? He knew the Marrakech medina like the back of his hand, knew lots of the old cities of North Africa. But he could barely stand, let alone think. He had to trust his instincts to get him where he needed to go.
He staggered across the square, not bothering to cling to the shadows but taking the quickest route right across the center. He didn’t have much time left.
A pair of shadows detached themselves from the greater darkness of a doorway.
Damn, I’m slipping. Making mistakes.
He heard them whispering to each other in Arabic.
“He’s a Westerner. Is he drunk?”
“He looks hurt.”
“Someone got to him before us.”
“Maybe not. Let’s check.”
Grunt rounded on them, raising his pipe. It was a miracle he didn’t fall over.
“Want to see what color your brains are?” he bellowed.
The two bolted.
Grunt continued on his way. That line always worked. He had gotten it from a Libyan street fighter. Scary guy but a good man to have at your side. Why think of him right now? His mind kept going back to the past. He needed to think of the present. In the brief time he had turned around, he’d seen in the harsh glare of the streetlamp a grisly trail of spots behind him. His blood. He’d patched himself up, but the walk across town had opened one or more wounds. That wasn’t as worrying as the internal bleeding. He could feel himself draining out. That was what would kill him before the sun rose.
Grunt shuddered. He hadn’t felt fear in a long time, not real fear. The adrenaline rush of battle was fear tempered by a lifetime of training and turned into survival instinct. But now he felt real fear. He had a wound he could not treat that would kill him before he ever got to see the sun again.
Sadness washed over him. The sunrises and sunsets in Africa were like nowhere else in the world. The haze of all the dust kicked up in this dry climate dissipated the sun’s slanting rays to make a brilliant display of a thousand different shades of red. It was no wonder the Muslims timed two of their five daily prayers for sunrise and sunset. Who wouldn’t want to bow down to such beauty?
He’d missed last night’s sunset, curled up in pain and stitching his own wounds with nothing more than a fistful of aspirin as an anesthetic. And now he wasn’t going to see another one.
He wouldn’t see another sunrise either. His last hour on earth would be spent in darkness.
No defeatism. Keep moving, soldier.
His goal was to get to Ahmad Chukri’s. He still had a long way to go, too long. But if he made it, he might just be saved. The guy had more underworld connections than anyone else he knew. If anyone could get a meatball surgeon to operate on a wounded foreigner in the middle of the night with no questions asked, it would be Ahmad Chukri.
The question was—could he afford the price?
He had to get there first, and at this rate, it would take at least another couple of hours. He didn’t have another couple of hours.
Despair threatened to d
rag him down. He’d never make it.
Otto needs you.
He forced himself to keep going.
And then a low, pulsing noise caught his attention. It sounded unusual for this part of town and this time of the night. It wasn’t the distant rumble of trucks on one of the bigger roads nearby or the almost silent scrabbling of stray cats through the trash heaped up in a corner. No, it was a low throbbing, rhythmic. Music?
That meant people, and that meant danger.
Most of the time. But at the moment, people offered an opportunity.
Grunt got an idea. It wasn’t a very good idea, in fact it was a long shot, but he didn’t have many options at this point. While he’d never been a gambling man, he knew that now was the time to roll the dice.
He followed the sound. In his dizziness and confusion, it took some time to find the source, but at last, he ended up against a blank metal door. A thudding beat of house music came from the others side, and the loud conversation of drunken youth. A rave in Marrakech? Not his first choice for recruiting some help, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
He tried the door. Locked, of course. This party was no doubt illegal. For a Muslim country, the Moroccan authorities were pretty lax about drinking and partying, but there were limits.
Time to make a grand entrance. Grunt summoned up the last of his strength and gave the door a kick right next to the lock.
The lock and door frame shattered. The door whipped open with a bang to reveal a small, packed dance floor under a pulsing red light. The dance floor was surrounded by tables where men sat with bottles of beer and glasses of hard liquor.
The music pounded in his ears. God, how he hated this new electronic junk! No guitars, no singing, no one even composed this stuff. They just mixed up real musicians’ tunes and ruined them. No way in Hell he was going to die with this stuff torturing his ears.
“SHUT OFF THAT DAMN NOISE!” he bellowed.
The music stopped. Everyone stared at him in silence.
Grunt surveyed the crowd, trying to focus. All men. No Muslim woman would come to a place like this. Most of the guys looked young, in their teens or early twenties. They all wore the tight jeans and leather jackets that were the universal fashion among young Moroccan men. They studied him nervously. Grunt stumbled down the two steps leading inside, nearly falling, and ended up on the dance floor. The dancers moved back. He took a slow turn about the room, studying everyone. Besides cutting off the music, no one had made a move or said a thing, too astonished by the sudden appearance of a huge, bloodstained foreigner wielding a metal pipe.
“No, this ain’t a raid, although it should be,” Grunt said in Arabic. “Crap music and no girls. What kind of nightlife is this? Otto would probably love it, though. The loser. God, I miss him.”
Grunt spotted a likely prospect sitting alone at a table with a bottle of beer in front of him. Older, not as cocky as the youths but more confident. Also looked slightly better off. The club’s drug dealer? Grunt hated his kind, but it was just the kind he needed. He stumbled over to the table. The man rose, gripping the neck of his beer bottle, ready to use it as a weapon.
Grunt batted it aside. The bottle landed on the concrete floor with a crash. He grabbed the startled man by the collar and asked, “You know Ahmad Chukri?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Who wants to know?”
“He’ll give you a thousand euros if you get me there alive.”
The man studied him. He opened his mouth, and Grunt knew he was about to haggle for the price.
The guy never got the chance, because at that moment, Grunt pitched backward onto the nearest table, unconscious.
Grunt’s first reaction to waking up was surprise. He did not think that would happen. Living was a good start, though. It opened up all sorts of options.
A hazy glow slowly resolved itself into a light bulb on a ceiling. Grunt blinked, turned his head. A young Moroccan man sitting in a chair by the wall looked up from his phone and took notice. Grunt recognized him as one of Ahmad Chukri’s henchmen.
What was the guy’s name again? Mubarak? Mabruki? Mumbo jumbo?
Whatever his name was, he hurried out of the room. Grunt drifted off to sleep again. He felt no pain, just the sweet floating buzz of proper painkillers. He had made it. Whatever might happen to him in the next few hours or days, he’d gotten over the first hurdle. He was alive. Maybe he’d even see the sun again.
When he woke up a second time, it was to an older, professional-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair and wire glasses fixing a needle into his arm. A blood packet hung from a metal stand by his bed. Blearily he looked down and saw he was naked. All his wounds were freshly stitched up and professionally bandaged. From his side, where those maniac twins had gutted him, a tube led to another plastic packet half full of what looked like strawberry smoothie. More strawberry smoothie dripped through the tube into it.
“Drawing out the internal bleeding?” Grunt asked.
“Pardon?” the man asked in Arabic.
Grunt realized he had asked the question in English. He thought for a moment and translated the question.
“You taking out the blood from the cut?” he didn’t know how to say “internal bleeding” in Arabic. He’d have to learn that sometime. It might come up again.
“Yes. Try to stay still.”
“No problem. I can put off yoga class until tomorrow. What’s your name, doc?”
“No foolish questions, please.”
“Oh, right. The drugs, sorry. How am I?”
“In terrible condition. I have stopped the internal bleeding, and I am giving you blood, but you must not move for several days,” the doctor said as he shone a penlight into one eye and then the other.
“Several days? I have places to be.”
“The only place you need to be is here. Don’t talk, please.” The doctor placed a stethoscope on Grunt’s chest, listened for a time, then shook his head and put his instrument away.
“Is it bad?” Grunt asked.
“Very bad. But you will live if you do as I say.”
Grunt gave him a grin. “Usually when people say that to me, they have a gun to my head.”
The doctor didn’t look at all shocked.
“I have no doubt that is true,” he replied.
Ahmad Chukri’s cheerful voice rang through the room. “Ah, my friend! I have another surprise visit from you!”
The arms dealer spoke in English, obviously so the doctor wouldn’t understand. That was fine by Grunt. It seemed fine by the doctor too. The guy was looking at Grunt with obvious distaste.
“The man you commanded to take you here did his job well. Your money belt was untouched.”
“I bet it’s lighter now,” Grunt said.
“Well, there was a certain matter of the doctor’s fee, and the door of the nightclub you destroyed, and the thousand euros you offered the man who brought you here. It was a thousand, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“Ah, so he dealt with you honestly! I thought so. I had the feeling that he wanted to make a good impression on me. Perhaps we will do business sometime.”
“I thought you didn’t deal in drugs.”
“What? Oh no, he isn’t a drug dealer. Is that what you thought? No, he deals in stolen cars.”
“At an illegal rave?”
“Where better to have a conversation that won’t be overheard?”
“Whatever. Do I have any money left?”
The arms dealer shook his head with a smile. “Not much, no. But don’t worry about that now. You need to rest, and you are welcome to stay here until you are recovered. We have done much good business together, and I hope to do more.”
“Thanks, Ahmad, but I got to get going. Can you get me a computer, so I can reserve a flight?”
Ahmad raised his hands in the air.
“Ah, Malcolm,” he said, using one of Grunt’s old aliases, “take a look at yourself. You are not going anywhere. You are hors d
e combat, as the French say. Down for the count. Kaput.”
“Can’t be,” Grunt muttered. “I got things to do.”
The doctor checked the bandages. Ahmad looked at Grunt’s wounds, his face growing serious.
“Those cuts look like they were done with a razor.”
“A whole bunch of razors, actually. The bastards even threw them, and their accuracy was terrifying.”
“They were twins? Englishmen?”
Grunt stared. “How did you know that?”
Ahmad smiled. There was no humor in the expression. “It is my business to know these things. They are hired assassins. I do not know their names, but they are famous in the business.”
“Yeah, I guess you know lots of assassins. You have some nice sniper’s rifles.”
“I do, not that they would ever buy any. They are famous for attacking with straight razors. Some say they used to be barbers in London.”
“Good thing I shave my head myself. I wouldn’t want to go to their barbershop.”
“They mostly work in Europe, from what I hear, and sometimes in Africa. They’ve been to Morocco before, and Tunisia. Perhaps more places.”
Grunt shook his head, remembering. “One of them waited in my room with a gun. As soon as he didn’t hit me with his first shot, he switched to the razor. Weird. He had a better chance with the gun, especially because he had his brother as backup. It was like he’d been ordered to shoot me and decided to do it his way.”
“They are madmen to switch to an inferior weapon when faced with someone like you.”
“Yeah, well, they nearly got me anyway. I owe you one, and I owe that car thief one too. I guess the Bard was wrong about there being no honor among thieves.”
“The Bard?”
“Shakespeare. Haven’t you ever read him?”
“No. Have you ever read Ferdowsi?”
“Who’s that?”
“Our Shakespeare.”
“Whatever. Do you know anything else about these maniacs?”
“Only two things. I heard a strange story from one customer. He said he worked with those twins on a job. They had to sneak through a forest to get to the target, some man in a house they needed to kill. My customer had worked with those two before and said they had always been fearless. But this time as they went through the forest, they saw a bee, and you know what the twins did? They fled in terror! From just one little bee.”
