Blackmail Earth

by Bill Evans

  “This hijacking has all the earmarks of a well-planned military operation. These men know what they are doing and are well armed. I ask officials of all concerned nations, especially the United States, to listen carefully to their demands…”

  Birk let his eyes drift to the wire cutters, knowing that in all likelihood he was focusing the attention of millions of viewers on the crimson sideshow. He glanced at the digital time display on the computer screen and knew that if he could yammer for just about one more minute, he’d go live as the lead story on Nightly News. As it was, he figured that right this second he was being carried by just about every broadcasting outlet in the world. What a great feeling, everything considered. And when the bewitching hour hit for Nightly News, he’d jack up the reporting to a whole new level to try to snag as many minutes of network airtime as possible.

  Birk had already noted that every time he made the slightest attempt to pull his thumb away from the wire cutters, Raggedy Ass squeezed a wee bit harder. And voilà! More blood. Birk planned on some serious bleeding as Nightly News came on because, as reporters knew the world over, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

  “The men holding me say that they will start releasing thousands of tons of iron oxide into the ocean if at least one of the ten biggest coal-fired power plants in the U.S. isn’t shut down immediately. They’re making this demand so that the U.S. can show good faith in the negotiations.”

  And they were making this demand in no small part because Rick Birk had advised the cracker jihadist to raise the ante incrementally. “Show that the U.S. won’t even budge the tiniest bit,” Birk said, knowing that if he could stretch out the negotiations, two important things would happen. It would give the newly arrived U.S. military, whose fighter jets and rocket-equipped helicopters were buzzing high above the tanker, more time to stop this terrorist act; and it would get Rick Birk more airtime. Not necessarily in that order.

  With all the lethal hardware in the air and on the water, Raggedy Ass had been surprisingly receptive to Birk’s counsel, leading the correspondent to conclude that most of the jihadist’s planning had gone into the hijacking of the supertanker, and not its actual occupation. Kind of like the U.S. in Iraq, Birk thought. As for Suicide Sam, he had a nervous habit of fiddling mindlessly with the different colored wires protruding from his vest, especially when he was staring at the TV screen on the other side of the wheelhouse. Watching the Shopping Network of all goddamn things.

  Ye gods, he’s doing it again.

  Birk forced his gaze back to the tiny computer camera, noting that right this second Nightly News was going on the air. He imagined the prissy-boy anchor, Brad Tettle, saying “Good evening” with the far more experienced visage of the great Rick Birk looming over his shoulder.

  Timing it as closely as he could from almost fifty years of experience, Birk said “Good evening,” and jerked his hand in the grasp of the wire cutters.

  Good God almighty. Raggedy Ass squeezed much harder than Birk had expected. The pain was excruciating and the septuagenarian had to fight to keep his composure. Blood washed down the base of his hand and wrist. Very visible. Very good.

  “I should start off by saying, Brad,” Birk said, assuming an intimacy he didn’t have with the young anchor, whom Birk was certain couldn’t find his way out of a shoe box, “that I’m sure that you and our viewers”—Yes, our viewers, not just yours, anchor rot—“have noticed this minor inconvenience.” Birk stared at his thumb. “I’ve been warned that each of my fingers, starting with this one, will be removed,” a nice understated way to allude to the gore, “by these wire cutters if the U.S. doesn’t shut down its coal-fired plants.”

  The best part of this performance—by far—was that Brad couldn’t interrupt him with his notoriously insipid questions. For the first time in years, the camera belonged only to the veteran, the one and only Rick Birk.

  “But I trust that this painful pressure”—Wry, Birk, keep it wry, he advised himself—“will not in any way cloud the clarity of my reporting, live from the heart of the hostage takeover of the Dick Cheney.”

  The whole time Birk talked, he affected an odd and emphatic blinking of his eyes. To any sentient observer, even to brain-fart Brad, it would appear that Birk, in the midst of torture and agony, was coolheaded enough to send coded messages.

  That Birk wouldn’t have known Morse code from the expiration date on a bottle of mai tai mix mattered not at all because it would appear to the millions watching that he was risking hellacious dismemberment on live TV to send critical messages to America’s intelligence agencies. And Birk would have bet a bottle of Bombay gin that the CIA, NSC, and military intelligence were, in fact, scrambling with all their computerized code breaking right this minute to try to decipher his “message,” which, as he knew better than anyone, could be reduced to “I’m fucked and so are you.”

  * * *

  Since Jenna had arrived more than an hour ago, Higgens had been glaring at the outsize Birk on the huge screen in her luxurious suite and saying very little. Hardly a hint of the outrageous, blustery performance Jenna had witnessed at the White House.

  The meteorologist looked at Birk’s thumb again; it was hard not to stare. It looked like shark chum, but she had to admire his coolness under fire; she didn’t think that she’d fare nearly as well if her fingers were about to be nipped on live TV.

  The video clarity from the Dick Cheney was surprisingly good, nothing like the crappy Skype experiences that she’d had. But then again, she figured a supertanker had high-end everything. This one sure had high-end drama.

  Senator Higgens stirred enough to point to Birk’s bloody appendage. “Should have been his dick,” she said before quaffing a dry martini like it was a Rodeo Daze Coors Light.

  “Excuse me?” Jenna said. She’d left the highly agitated Alicia Gant and Special Terrorism Correspondent Chris Randall lamenting the loss of “their” airtime on the Nightly News, only to spend most of her visit watching the senator drink, and then drink some more. Higgens had made one other cryptic remark about Birk—“He’s not that hard to tie up”—that Jenna had declined to dignify with a follow-up question, but “Should have been his dick” was just too bizarre to leave alone.

  “Did you say—”

  “I sure did,” Higgens interrupted, “and I speak from experience. His thing,” she might have been shooing a fly from the motion of her hand, “would be no great loss to the world.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew him.”

  The senator’s eyes rotated unsteadily to her guest. “Unfortunately, yes, but I suppose anyone who’s ever met him considers the experience unfortunate. He’s a colleague of yours, right?”

  “In a way.”

  “Count your blessings. He gave me a disease.”

  Jenna didn’t know what to say. Wincing visibly, she offered, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Penicillin did the trick. Long time ago,” Higgens added by way of explanation. “I ran into the old turd in the lobby of the presidential palace the other day. Must have been a few hours before they grabbed him.” The senator snorted. “Look at him, he’s eating it up. He loves this.”

  Jenna thought that Higgens might be right. Birk did appear to be enjoying himself. He’d already cracked a smile or two, and he sounded a lot more sober than her host.

  “Senator Higgens, I know seeing Birk like this is a bit distracting, but—”

  “Distracting? It’s pure pleasure. I just wish they’d get on with it and cut off the damn thing so he’d stop having such a good time.”

  “Okay, be that as it may, I wonder if you could tell me how concerned you are about the possible release of all the iron oxide?”

  “It’s no big deal. So we’ll put on an extra sweater or two.”

  Or three or four. Maybe skin a polar bear while we’re at it. But Jenna confined her comments to another question: “Has USEI considered the liability issues if the iron oxide gets released? The weather impacts alone are likely
to—”

  “You taking notes, girl?” the senator snapped. Her robust mood on the hotel phone had definitely soured.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Just so you know, we’re insured against ‘acts of God,’ and the last time I checked, these crazies,” she stabbed a stubby, heavily ringed finger at the TV, “were doing Allah’s bidding.”

  Birk now appeared to be reading from a prepared statement, recounting the horrors of five hundred thousand tons of iron oxide spilling into the sea. Then he listed the nations most likely to be inundated in the next one hundred years because of climate change. He finished by mentioning the disappearance of an island in the Bay of Bengal that had been claimed by both India and Bangladesh. New More Island, as it was called by the mostly Hindu Indians—or South Talpatti Island, as it was known to the mostly Muslim Bangladeshis—had vanished into the sea, peacefully resolving a potential hotspot through the miracle of immersion.

  Jenna felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, and discreetly checked to find that Dafoe had texted her: “cll. import. N. Korea.”

  What’s that about? It was hard to imagine any subject less related to her present concerns than that starving, Stalinist boot camp.

  Seconds later Rafan texted, asking if they could meet.

  She glanced at Higgens and saw that the senator had fallen asleep. No, she passed out. Jenna was never comfortable in the presence of drunks, and now one lay collapsed on the couch, open-mouthed and snoring, while the other stared unseeing from the screen. To be fair to Birk, he did appear coldly sober.

  As Jenna crept toward the door, phone in hand to text Dafoe, one of Higgens’s young aides came racing up. He took one look at his boss and smacked his forehead. “Not again!” He wheeled on Jenna. “You didn’t take any pictures of her, did you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “What about that?” He pointed accusingly to her cell phone.

  “No! What do I look like?”

  “A reporter,” he sniped.

  “I didn’t,” she insisted, and walked out, recovering quickly enough to text Dafoe that she missed him, “cows 2,” and would call later. Nothing felt as urgent right now as attending to the fragile emotional state of her old friend, Rafan.

  Jenna met him at a tea shop several blocks from the hotel. He sat facing away from the door, hunched over a newspaper. If she hadn’t been looking for Rafan, she wouldn’t have recognized him. That was the idea, she discovered.

  “I’m worried about Senada’s brothers. They buried her today. They couldn’t put her in the ground fast enough, like she was an embarrassment to them because she was murdered. Big funerals for men, but for her or for my sister?” Rafan shook his head. “I need to get away.” Rafan’s eyes shifted furtively, taking in the nearby empty tables.

  “Can you do that?”

  “No, not now. There’s too much work. We’re in the middle of a big pilot project.” He told her about trying to save an important island by building it up with borrowed dirt.

  “Robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

  “Yes,” he smiled for the first time, “you always used to say that.”

  “About how we’re stealing from future generations. That sure hasn’t changed. Is your condo safe?” It wasn’t like he had building security, or even a doorman, as she did in the city.

  “I can’t go back there.” He shook his head. “I can’t even go to the mosque to talk to people about Islamists because her brothers are looking for me.”

  “Then stay with me at the hotel. I’ll have them bring up a portable bed.” She took his hand. “Come on, you’re staying with me.” She hurried him toward the door, but he pulled back, as if he’d seen someone. Jenna turned to look, but spotted only a passing pedicab, and a massive gathering of thunderheads. The cumulonimbus clouds she’d spotted earlier had turned especially nasty looking. She would have loved to have seen the temperature differentials for those clouds and the surface right above the sea. A powerful thunderstorm on the ocean could turn the water into quite a weapon.

  “This way,” Rafan said, drawing her down side streets to an alley behind the Golden Crescent Hotel. The sky rumbled and they saw lightning over the sea. Jenna remembered darting through the rain with Dafoe; like the sky overhead on that day, the dusky sky above Malé looked ready to burst another seam. It was the stormy season.

  “Why are we back here?” she asked Rafan. “We’re still going to have to go in the front way.” A swirling gust of wind hit them so hard she staggered, and looked up quickly to see the tops of palm trees shaking like raised, angry fists. “My key won’t work back here,” she added hurriedly. “Why don’t you just come with me?”

  “Because there are eyes everywhere. I can’t walk in the front door with you, go to your room, and then spend the night. It would look terrible for you and for me. But there’s a rear door by the pool. You go in the front, then come back through the hotel and open it, and I’ll meet you by the big slide and go in the back way.”

  “You’ve done this before?” she said to him.

  “With you. Don’t you remember?”

  She paused, then smiled and nodded, recalling their romantic rendezvous after she’d returned from doing research on an outer island.

  Jenna headed for a well-lit walkway around the building, smelling salty air as she neared the corner of the hotel. As she turned toward the ocean, the wind pounded her so hard her hair flew straight back behind her, and she realized that she’d been standing in the lee of the hotel.

  Hunching down, she bulled her way forward. The last time she’d slipped Rafan into the hotel, the twilight had been much calmer, and she’d been so eager to get him up to her room that she’d run through the lobby to the back door.

  Tonight felt very different, and it wasn’t just the storm. She had Dafoe in her life, and she felt much more settled, desirous of only him. She’d text him as soon as she got inside.

  A wall of rain drenched her.

  Startled, Jenna glanced up, horrified to see a waterspout ripping from the shore like a tornado. It tore a path in the sand, ripped smaller palms out by their roots, and headed straight at the hotel—at her!

  Get inside! she screeched at herself.

  She raced for the entrance, eyes still on the seaborne twister, and plowed into a young Maldivian man jumping from a white van, a look of unbridled panic on his face.

  The impact knocked Jenna down. The young, dark-skinned man staggered toward the hotel, oblivious to the fact that his key fob was skittering across the wet concrete. She understood his fear.

  A doorman raced over to help her, though Jenna was already on her feet. Together they fled to the lobby; Jenna kept running, anxious to open the rear door and get Rafan to safety. She glanced back to see the fifty-foot-tall spout smash into the hotel. The building shuddered but held; the waterspout had lost power when it moved onto land. The storm was still rocking, though, sending great flashes across the sky.

  She sprinted down a hallway, realizing that the young van driver was racing ahead of her. He fled out the rear door. Into the storm?

  Seconds later, she threw open the door. Rafan was close by and the guy from the van was barely forty feet away and looking back over his shoulder at her. The storm shook every leaf and palm frond in the area, raising a ruckus.

  “Get inside!” she shouted at Rafan.

  “What’s with him?” he asked, jerking his head at the other man. “He almost knocked me over.”

  “I don’t know,” Jenna said, ushering Rafan past her and closing the door. “We collided in front of the hotel. The wind sent me flying into him as he was getting out of a van. Then a waterspout almost hit us.”

  Rafan’s expression was curious and bewildered. “But what’s he doing?” Rafan asked. “Leaving a van by the entrance and running out the back of the hotel—”

  Without another word, Rafan raced toward the lobby, with Jenna close behind. She remembered the Times Square bomber, the naturalized U.S. citizen who’d l
eft an SUV loaded with a bomb in the famous district. By the time she reached the entrance, Rafan was running around the front of the white van. He threw open the sliding side door. When Jenna saw the cargo space, her heart pounded so hard she thought it would beat her to death.

  * * *

  Parvez had moved from the café to a car the two Mohammeds had secured for him. The vest, loaded with C-4, weighed heavily on his shoulders, but his cleric’s garb concealed it well. He’d dreaded the arrival of the van, and once it appeared, he waited for the huge explosion like a man facing his execution. No hope. No appeal. Not even from a higher power, for the higher power had sentenced him to death. He found brief promise in the waterspout and the electrical storm, but it had done nothing to stop or delay the bombing. Nothing. Parvez could have cried.

  Now he watched the traitor named Rafan throw open the van door, revealing sacks of fertilizer and containers of fuel.

  Yes, save me, Parvez pleaded involuntarily, realizing his only hope lay with the miserable man who stole dirt.

  Do something, traitor. Grab the fuse, you infidel.

  * * *

  Despite the storm, Jenna detected the smell of flammables. She saw a big stack of what looked like feed sacks in the back of the van, and realized in an instant that the whole cargo area was packed with explosives.

  “Run, Jenna!” Rafan shouted, though he wasn’t running.

  And as much as Jenna wanted to race away, she couldn’t, because she saw a barely visible wisp of smoke whipped by the wind. She stepped closer to the van and spied an inch of fuse burning on the carpet, which was marked by a long, dark, trailing scorch mark. Without hesitation, she reached for the fiercely sparking flame. Rafan tried to grab it, too. They jostled each other. Precious seconds lost.

  The fuse shrank to a nub, continuing to burn despite the lashing wind and rain. Jenna lunged, grabbed it, and despite the burning pain, she pulled the fuse away and dropped it on the wet pavement. It sizzled and died while she shook her burned index finger and thumb for several seconds. Then she realized that she was shaking and very, very cold.