Blackmail Earth

by Bill Evans

  Rafan’s eyes grew huge. He stared at the bomb. Jenna knew he was looking for smoke. Her own stomach was gripped by the fear that a single spark had escaped and that the world would explode.

  But there was no more smoke. They’d stopped the bomb.

  * * *

  There would be no one-two punch, Parvez realized. Infidels! Infidels had denied him paradise, for surely a man of his deep insight, understanding, and courage would be welcomed there with open arms by seventy-two virgins. But he could not go through with the next part of the plan now that the first punch had been foiled.

  True, he could walk over and set off the C-4 in the vest—and that would trigger the bomb in the van. But that was not the plan; a plan that had been devised by wiser men than he. And who was he, a humble cleric from a poor island nation, to question them? That the plan had failed—surely that was Allah’s will.

  Oh, how Parvez rued the loss of his martyrdom as he rushed to slip off the vest. To have been the first martyr of the Maldives. There, it’s off. Ah, but he would have to leave that honor to Adnan.

  He almost dropped the vest on the console next to him. Be careful. What do you want to do, kill yourself?

  Parvez rested the bomb gently on the passenger seat and drove away quietly, knowing he would live to fight another day. Allah had spared him in the end. Allah the wise. Allah the all-knowing. Why, Allah probably already had His eyes on a poor Paki, a hungry, unclothed boy who needed paradise so much more than Parvez. The cleric, with his deeper spiritual knowledge, could find a way to satisfy himself with so much less here on earth. Parvez’s unselfishness flowed to his very fingertips. Yes, it would be only fair to give such a child the keys to paradise.

  * * *

  The wheelhouse stopped shaking as the power of the storm lessened. Birk sat like a supplicant on the floor by Raggedy Ass’s smelly fucking feet. His lordship was perched with his AK-47 in the captain’s chair, while a few feet away the man who should have been in that seat was bound head to toe and lying on the deck.

  The chair looked like heaven to Birk, whose hands, shoulders, back, butt, and sliced-up thumb throbbed, but the chair’s occupant, no doubt about it, was the devil incarnate. Raggedy Ass had ended Birk’s broadcast after twenty measly minutes. What’s with that? Birk had wanted the entire half hour. Rare as hen’s teeth to have a whole show’s worth of face time, but it wasn’t every day—hell, it wasn’t even every decade—that you had a talent of Birk’s magnitude reporting from the heart of a Mother Earth smackdown.

  “You got diarrhea of the mouth,” Raggedy Ass told him in his thick Southern accent. “I could have said all that in five minutes flat.”—flea-a-a-at—“But no, you got to go on and on. What? You think if you talk-talk-talk it’s going to save those fingers of yours?”

  The wire cutters were still attached to Birk’s thumb, the blunt edges of the blades Flex-Cuffed together, like Birk’s hands, behind his back. Christ, those fucking blades hurt.

  “Next time you’re in front of that thing,” Raggedy Ass nodded amiably at the teensy camera, “I’m going to make you hold up your thumb—and it’s not going to be attached to your hand.”

  “You’re not going to do it live?” The indignity burst out of Birk before he gave himself time to think. Don’t encourage the bastard. But even after a moment’s reflection, he knew that video of his dismemberment would be fucking priceless. How could Raggedy Ass even think of doing it off camera? An insult to injury in every possible way. What is wrong with these people?

  “That disappoint you?” Raggedy Ass asked.

  “No, not at all,” Birk lied. He regained his senses enough to think that maybe he could yak his way out of an on-air amputation. “Look, if you start cutting me apart like a roast chicken, I’m going to be useless to you. I’ll be in so much pain, you might as well throw me to the sharks.”

  “Inshallah, I will.”

  “But don’t you want me making your case for you? You start cutting through bone, man, I’m done.”

  Raggedy Ass stared at him so coldly that Birk could almost feel the sharp blades bearing down.

  “I can’t make idle threats,” Raggedy Ass replied matter-of-factly. “I said we’d do it if they didn’t start shutting down the plants immediately. That was hours ago, and all we’re hearing is how they’re not going to shut down a thing, so we have do to it.” He shrugged.

  Oh, God. The savage climbed down from the chair, reached around Birk, and grabbed the wire cutters. “Please, I beg of you, don’t do this,” Birk shouted. The pressure only increased. “Give me a drink for God’s sake.”

  His last words before he blacked out.

  * * *

  A doctor finished bandaging Jenna’s thumb and index finger in the emergency room at Malé’s big public hospital. The care had been first rate, the female Indian doctor kind, but Jenna still found herself shaking every time she remembered how close the fuse came to setting off a bomb that would have taken down the entire hotel, according to the fast assessment of a Maldivian police team.

  “You will be okay,” the Indian doctor told her. “It is not such a bad burn. But you must keep it clean. You are very lucky.”

  “I know.”

  “There are some people in the waiting area who want to see you.”

  Jenna figured on Nicci, and she was there, but the doctor apparently meant a contingent of U.S. intelligence agents and more Maldivian police. She and Nicci were whisked to a conference room at police headquarters, several blocks away. A Maldivian gentleman in a dark suit told Nicci she would have to wait outside, then asked Jenna if she wanted anything to eat or drink.

  “Just coffee,” Jenna said, now that her hands no longer shook. “And some water.”

  The police, and two men from the National Defense Force, had her look through more than a hundred photos, mostly mug shots plus a number of surveillance photos. She did not see the young man from the van. She was asked to describe the man in detail to a young female sketch artist. Alas, none of Jenna and the artist’s attempts bore much resemblance to the runaway driver.

  Jenna felt herself growing tired, and perhaps the Maldivian in the dark suit noticed, because he had his people step aside so the U.S. intelligence agents could debrief her. That didn’t take long. Then a tight-lipped American in his thirties and an older white man of considerable girth led Jenna and Nicci to an SUV. As they drove back to the hotel, the senior of the two told them the bomb had been made from the same materials that Timothy McVeigh had used to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building.

  Members of the Maldives National Defense Force, dressed in camouflage uniforms, now ringed the Golden Crescent, which probably made it the safest place in the city.

  After thanking Nicci for sticking around, Jenna rushed to her room, flopped on the bed, and speed-dialed Dafoe.

  “What a nightmare,” Jenna said. “This isn’t the country I left ten years ago.” She lay back against a cushiony headboard and told Dafoe what she and Rafan had been through.

  “You pulled a fuse out of a bomb that filled the back of a van?”

  When Dafoe spoke with such astonishment, it hit Jenna for the first time that what she’d done might have been amazing. She’d been in such a pell-mell mode since the attempted bombing, she hadn’t slowed to think about it much.

  “Yeah, I did,” she said, “but Rafan was the one who realized something was up.” She added that her old boyfriend had also been taken for debriefing, but since she was done, she expected him back momentarily. “He’ll be staying the night, just for safety’s sake. I just want you to know that there’s nothing romantic going on,” she added. “I just don’t want him going back to his condo with a mad bomber on the loose, and with Senada’s brothers out to get him. At least there are soldiers all around this place.”

  “I appreciate your telling me, but I always try to trust someone until I can’t.”

  “Me, too, and sometimes it actually works—if they don’t work in TV.” Jenna laughed. Despite
everything that had happened tonight, it felt great to hear Dafoe’s voice. It would have been wonderful to have had him by her side. “So what’s going on with North Korea? That’s the last place I expected to hear about all the way out here.”

  Dafoe laid out Sang-mi’s revelation about the North Korean arsenal of rockets loaded with sulfates.

  “I’m sorry to say that what Sang-mi told you makes a lot of sense.”

  “I take it that that means something to you.”

  “You bet it does.” Jenna jumped up and looked through the big glass doors that led to the balcony. Stars blazed in the tropical night like mica chips splashed across the galaxy. “Blowing up sulfates in the stratosphere in a carefully controlled way is one of the main options that the task force was going to look at. That can block just enough sunlight to cool things down. But what Sang-mi’s saying is really scary. Is she sure about what she’s hearing from her father?”

  “She seems to be.”

  Jenna walked onto the balcony, looking at the inky ocean that eventually wound its way to the shores of North Korea. “The iron oxide in that tanker is dangerous, but we honestly don’t know how dangerous. But there’s no question that blowing up millions of tons of sulfates is a doomsday scenario. Volcanoes have done it, so we know that sulfates definitely bring down temperatures. And they do it fast. Huge quantities, like the amounts Sang-mi is talking about, would create winter conditions for years, and that would cripple food production and probably kill billions of people before the sulfates finally dispersed. You can imagine how countries are going to react if their people are starving to death. There would be wars everywhere.”

  “What kind of mind even comes up with this stuff?”

  “The Supreme Leader,” Jenna said sardonically, “is a real sicko. But what bothers me most,” she went on, “is that the North Koreans are really good at exploiting the worst kinds of fears. They love to wait until world attention is totally fixed on something, and then they up the ante by doing things like launching test missiles or declaring themselves a nuclear power. Or if they suspect that the U.S. is even thinking of any kind of move against them, they remind everybody that they have thousands of rockets trained on Seoul,” the capital of South Korea, “and that they’ll burn down the city. For an incredibly poor country, they’re incredibly good at stirring things up. And you never know when they’re bluffing.”

  “Sang-mi says they’re not bluffing,” Dafoe said,

  “If she’s right, and they really do have thousands of rockets packed with sulfates, their timing is perfect because nobody would even want to think about five hundred thousand tons of iron oxide going into the ocean at the same time that millions of tons of sulfates are exploding into the stratosphere. I can say categorically that that would be the end of the world as we know it.”

  “Well, if that isn’t bizarre enough, now I have to take you into the land of the really weird,” Dafoe said. “Sang-mi claims that GreenSpirit spoke to her this morning and that she, meaning GreenSpirit, wants you to tell the world about the North Korean rockets.”

  “Really? They’ve got the wrong hero, if they think it’s me. I’ll be talking post haste with the vice president’s office about the sulfates, and let the honchos handle this.”

  “Sorry to even bring it up, but Forensia begged me to ask you to put the message out there. I’ll tell her no.”

  “I think you should.” Then: “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s nuts, you going on the air with something like that.”

  Whew. “Does Forensia really believe that Sang-mi was talking to GreenSpirit’s … spirit?”

  “She sure does,” Dafoe answered.

  “She seemed so normal to me.”

  “Forensia? Normal? Look, Forensia’s great, and I love her like a sister, but normal? I’d never say that, and she wouldn’t want me to.”

  “Point taken. If Sang-mi’s father is getting debriefed by the CIA, then our side already knows about the rockets. If they’re keeping it secret, they might have a good reason.”

  “‘Might’ is the operative word,” Dafoe said. “They also might be keeping it secret because they don’t want it to look like the president’s been asleep at the wheel. The election’s in just a few days.”

  “Or maybe the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. We saw plenty of that with the FBI and CIA in 2001, and then we had 9/11.”

  * * *

  Rafan gazed at the headstones and monuments from behind the twin palms on the south side of the cemetery. The starlight revealed very little, but he knew Senada lay in a freshly dug grave not far from his sister; few spaces remained in the cemetery, so the two friends would be almost as close in death as they had been in life.

  He could feel Senada’s presence in such a tangible way that he thought perhaps some believers were correct in claiming that the dead guide the living in times of peril. Then he reminded himself that he probably felt that Senada was near because she had stood by these same trees the night she came to say good-bye to Basheera. He ached for both women so acutely that he reached out and touched the air where Senada had stood, willing to accept even a hint of the love that he’d known. But he felt nothing of her. Only the ache. And he would have to enter the cemetery to offer his final farewell without knowing if Senada’s brothers were hiding among the graves.

  Don’t do this, he warned himself. This is close enough.

  But he had to see her grave, to kneel beside it, to somehow let her know that he would never forget her.

  This time he did not pass under the cemetery arch. He moved quietly along the periphery, knowing he would have to scurry in from the shadows on the far side. He had a flashlight, but would use it only if necessary. And he’d brought flowers, which he would lay gently on her grave.

  When he stepped from the shadows onto the hallowed ground, he walked slowly, placing his feet as quietly as possible. Row upon row of graves greeted him. He grew numb to their presence, and that, more than anything, explained why Bilal caught him unawares.

  “What are you doing here?” Senada’s youngest brother demanded, seizing his arm.

  Rafan smelled the must of the graveyard, glimpsed crescents and a single cross engraved in stone, and thought that he would soon join the dead who surrounded him. Bilal was a big man in the prime of his youth; a “bruiser,” Jenna would have said.

  “I have come to pay my respects.”

  “Don’t you know that coming here could get you killed?” Bilal held Rafan in a powerful grip. “I was looking for you.”

  “That’s her grave?” Rafan looked past his accoster at the simple marker with a white crescent.

  Bilal nodded. “Yes, and you could—”

  “I loved her,” Rafan interrupted. “I loved her dearly.” His words sounded hollow, eternally empty in the graveyard.

  “That was your mistake,” Bilal said.

  “No, that’s not true,” Rafan said evenly, as a man might when he feels that all is lost. “Her mistake was him.”

  They both knew whom Rafan meant: the fisherman who’d beaten Senada, and whose jihadist beliefs had led to her murder.

  Bilal began to cry, and he released Rafan. The young man sank to his knees and hung his head. Rafan stared at him before crouching and putting his hand on Bilal’s back.

  “She raised me,” Bilal said. “She was like a mother to me. I wanted to kill him so many times. I should have. I should have killed him,” he yelled, jumping to his feet.

  Rafan looked around. Only the darkest shadows stared back.

  “You were her favorite,” Rafan said, only because it was true. Senada had spoken kindly of Bilal, unlike his older brothers.

  “You may pray for her,” Bilal said. “You’re safe with me. I’ll be back in two days to stand guard. You can come again then. And I’m so sorry about Basheera. Senada loved her so much.”

  The two men stood together at the grave of a woman they had both loved. Rafan laid his flowers on the fre
shly turned earth. Both men prayed. And beneath the black night and bright stars, both men wept.

  CHAPTER 20

  Gruesome. The most sickening thing that Forensia had ever seen. Rick Birk, the old reporter taken hostage, was on TV all the time, and you couldn’t miss his thumb. Only it wasn’t attached to his hand. It was pinned to his shirt. A thumb, just hanging there like a bloody brooch, right below his collar. Forensia almost threw up the first time she saw it.

  Birk looked like he was in seven kinds of agony, propping up his bandaged hand with his good one while he spoke, yet he was so brave. Somehow he’d managed to keep talking all day. Even though he sounded weary and hoarse, he still joked about his fingers: “One down, nine to go.” But it wasn’t funny, and he was shaking so badly that his thumb looked like it had come back to life.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. Oh, God no. She could barely bring herself to look at the worst part. But how could she not? Only one thing poked out of the blood-soaked gauze hiding Birk’s hand—his index finger! The terrorists had clamped those awful wire cutters on it; any second he might clip it off. Any second. The tension was unbearable.

  All regular programming had been canceled. Every channel was showing Birk, with lots of close-ups of his bloody thumb and those horrid wire cutters. The shows were calling it “The World Held Hostage” and “Doomsday and Dismemberment,” crap like that, and they were playing special music and running flashy graphics. You’d think people would get tired of it, but not with the gut-wrenching suspense over whether a terrorist would slip into the picture and snip his pointer right off.

  But it wasn’t just Birk’s suffering. Those terrorists were hell-bent on pouring enough iron oxide into the ocean to freeze the planet. And if people thought that was seriously scary—and Forensia knew they did because there had been huge runs on winter clothing all over the world—wait till they got wind of the North Korean rockets.

  Her eyes were drawn quickly back to Birk. It was like she could see all of the world’s pain and fear in the face of that poor old guy on the tanker, talking about those awful coal-fired power plants and how they should be shut down or the whole Earth was going to get “colder than a witch’s titty.” That was another of his bad jokes, which he probably shouldn’t have said, and which Forensia couldn’t help but find personally offensive. But he really did look and sound kind of delirious. And who couldn’t forgive such a brave old-timer with his thumb hanging from his shirt like a piece of rotten—