Strike Force Bravo

by Mack Maloney

  Kazeel couldn’t believe it. He was simply astonished that he was still alive. Praise Allah, his faith had not been misplaced.

  The Dragos had driven him through an air strike and not a single hair on his head had been harmed.

  Afternoon turned to night, night into morning.

  The three Range Rovers picked their way up and down many more scary, slippery mountains. The hours went agonizingly slowly throughout the stormy night, but as Kazeel was somewhat buoyed by their narrow, brilliant escape from the air strike, the rest of the ride was passable. Except for the loneliness; it became crushing about halfway through. He wasn’t sure why the Dragos had put him alone in this car for the ride back. His driver could barely speak, never mind converse with him in Arabic. Uni of course was with Bahzi. Even if he was not, he and Kazeel never traveled together on land. But at the moment, in that darkest hour before dawn, climbing over yet another slippery, icy mountain, Kazeel wished his shuka were here, if just to keep him company.

  He never did get to sleep. But as they finally ground into the last hour of their journey, Kazeel’s demeanor had settled down considerably. He’d cheated death twice just today: in the ambush at Sat Put and during the air attack. Maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about meeting his Maker again anytime soon.

  They came over the top of a mountain named the Meshpi. The Pushi finally lay before them. But the Dragos in the first truck apparently noticed something was wrong and screeched to a halt. They could see the center of the Pushi from here. Indeed, they could see Kazeel’s house.

  It was in flames.

  The second and third Drago trucks stopped with a screech as well. His driver stood on the brakes so abruptly, Kazeel nearly went through the windshield. Then he saw the flames for the first time and nearly threw up. Not until that moment did he realize how much his home meant to him.

  What had happened? Another air attack? His driver’s phone buzzed.

  “Your friends’ friends burn down your house,” the driver tried to tell him.

  Kazeel just shook his head. Who were his friends’ friends? And why would they want to destroy his home?

  “Your old bodyguards,” the driver crudely clarified. “These are their friends. They are mad at you. For terminating them.”

  Kazeel tried to sort out the man’s verbal puzzle. His old bodyguards, the four men he’d taken out. They’d been residents of Ubusk, the village nearby. Was it their “friends” who’d stormed his mountain fortress and were now destroying it?

  The driver came up with a pair of very powerful binoculars and handed them back to Kazeel. Once they were adjusted to his teary eyes, Kazeel could see dozens of armed men rampaging through his compound, burning and looting. They were carrying everything but torches and pitchforks. Kazeel was astonished. He couldn’t believe the villagers would want to harm him. Not because they loved him—quite the opposite, because they feared him.

  Or at least he thought they did.

  Suddenly there was a great crash against the passenger side door. Kazeel turned to see the face of a very bloody man pressed up against the window. He looked like something from a horror movie, screaming and bleeding from hundreds of wounds. But it was his eyes that were the most frightening. They were positively bugging out. The man began saying something—but he suddenly disappeared, only to be replaced by another face, this one bloodier.

  Now came the crash of explosions—not aerial bombs this time. Kazeel could hear sprays of shrapnel hitting the side of his vehicle; RPGs were landing all around them. Their sound was unmistakable. Then came the gunfire. Torrents of it. Again unmistakable, it was large-caliber and vicious.

  Only then did it dawn on Kazeel what was happening. Despite their best efforts, they’d driven right into an ambush.

  This is not a very good day, Kazeel thought. And quite possibly, his last. He knew these armed men on the outside of the car, knew whose dirty hands were trying to get him. They were also Ubusks, people from the village near his mountain. A trademark red cloth worn to keep their hoods on was a dead giveaway. Erasing his former bodyguards so close to home was going to be the end of him, Kazeel was sure. He should have carried his former guards up into the hills and disposed of them quietly. It would have avoided the catastrophe he found himself in now.

  Dozens of these people were swarming over his Range Rover. The vehicle ahead of him suddenly exploded in flames. The two Drago bodyguards tumbled out just a second before the truck was blown apart.

  Kazeel’s driver stood on the brakes again. He shifted the truck into neutral, but he was racing the engine madly. The way in front of them was now blocked. Kazeel frantically turned to see the vehicle behind them explode into flames as well. The crowd of furious villagers began swarming over it, even though many were catching their clothes on fire.

  Kazeel turned forward again.

  They were trapped.

  The next thing he knew, the door closest to him flew open. The sounds of the ambush flooded in. Gunfire, RPGs going off, louder, more intense explosions. Above it all, the screams of those attacking his convoy.

  Kazeel expected hundreds of hands to reach in, to grab him, to tear him limb from limb, then pull him in pieces into hell with them. He was surprised then when two black gloves reached in and clamped down on his shoulders and an instant later he was literally dragged out of the backseat. It was one of the Dragos. The biggest one of all. There was a tremendous explosion close by. The concussion was enormous. Yet Kazeel could feel himself being whisked away. Indeed, his feet never touched the ground. Bullets were zinging all around him. Explosions were going off everywhere. This was combat—madness and fire. It was the closest that Kazeel the superterrorist had ever come to it. Still the Dragos were carrying him through it.

  Another huge blast went off. Kazeel was unable to see, unable to breathe. He felt another pair of hands on him, and together two Dragos ran him off the road and threw him down the side of the mountain. Kazeel went tumbling head over heels. There were many boulders and trees on the way down; how he wasn’t killed by colliding with one of them he would never know. It seemed like he was falling forever.

  Finally he stopped tumbling and hit something soft, sparing him any broken bones. He’d landed in a pool of mud, moss, and snow hard by a raging mountain stream. Kazeel had lifted his head from the muck, amazed at the luck of his soft landing, when one of the Dragos slammed into him. He, too, had rolled down the hill. Then another Chechyan came down on top of them. Then another. And another.

  By the time Kazeel lifted his face from the muck a second time, the Dragos had formed a defensive perimeter around him. He was pummeled and bleeding and was now soaked to the skin. Yet somehow Kazeel was still alive.

  But for how long? Hundreds of armed men were rushing down the slope toward them. Many more were converging on them from the north and south. Apparently the entire village of Ubusk had turned out for this massacre. The Dragos were scanning the terrain immediately around them, looking for a way out. But there was none. They were surrounded.

  Kazeel collapsed back into the cold stream. The Dragos…Praise Allah, their bravery and fighting skills were beyond compare. But to what end? Their valor and courage were simply putting off the inevitable. Cruel death, for all of them, was just seconds away.

  “We will never get out of this, my brothers,” Kazeel told them in despair.

  But one replied gruffly: “We have a way….”

  Then this man slammed him to the cold mud again. “Just stay down!”

  Kazeel obeyed. The gunfire became more intense, the explosions closer and more frequent. But in among it all, he heard another sound. Mechanical. Whirring, blades turning. A helicopter! Its noise soon drowned out everything else. A great downwash splattered him with more crud in his face. Once again, he couldn’t see. He could hardly breathe. Suddenly a metal ladder was in front of him. Unseen hands hoisted him to it. He was sternly ordered to hang on.

  Kazeel could feel himself being lifted up, bullets passing so clo
se to him they singed his beard as they went by.

  He was quickly hauled into the open bay of the helicopter. The remaining Dragos piled in after him. The aircraft began moving away even as tracer fire was bouncing off it. Kazeel was simply astounded. He was close to going into shock again, but the exhilaration of still being alive was overwhelming. He just couldn’t believe what was happening. The ferocity displayed by the Dragos in protecting him was astonishing. But to have the foresight to have a helicopter near the site of the ambush? That went so above and beyond…The Chechyans had saved his life so many times over the past 24 hours, he’d lost count.

  But there was something strange here, at least to Kazeel’s battered mind. It was the helicopter itself. It wasn’t really a military aircraft. It was roomy inside, but he saw no weapons. And to his amazement, the Dragos knew how to fly it. Two of his sterling bodyguards were behind the controls. Or at least men that looked like them.

  But the really odd thing was the helicopter’s color. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow for a battle zone. Not green or black or a camouflage combination of both.

  Instead, it was painted very bright yellow.

  And on its tail were the words: Sing-One TV.

  Part Three

  The 2000 Buddhas

  Chapter 13

  Manila

  Three days later

  Her name was Tiffany, and she was quite possibly the only Tiffany in all of Manila.

  She was the assistant day manager of the Xagat Pacific Hotel, by far the most expensive place to stay in the Philippine capital. Tiffany was an American, but on duty she spoke English with a vague European accent. She was just 22, attractive, and stranded in the Philippines by a failed romance. She hated her job. Hated her boss. Hated the hotel’s well-heeled customers. She was also in charge of the Xagat’s public relations.

  She arrived at her office this Saturday morning, 20 minutes late to begin her shift. No sooner had she sat down with her first coffee of the day than she got a call from the front desk. There was a strange man in the lobby. He was claiming he had to pick up a very important message from his boss, yet no message had come in for anyone under his name. He was causing a bit of a ruckus and would not leave.

  “Is his boss a guest here?” Tiffany asked the front desk. “He was about a couple weeks ago,” came the reply, or at least that’s what the strange man was saying. But he refused to give his boss’s name, so there was no way to check. Hotel security had the man under surveillance, but no one working the floor knew what to do. Tiffany gulped the rest of her coffee and charged down to the lobby. This was not the way to start her day.

  Her elevator arrived, and she marched past the front desk to a cluster of couches near the main door. The disruptive individual was now sitting here quietly. Tiffany approached the lobby matron, the person who’d first flagged the problem. She was standing about ten feet away from the strange man, giving him his space.

  He wasn’t really being difficult, the matron explained to Tiffany in a whisper. He was just slow on the uptake. If the message from his boss hadn’t arrived yet, he would just wait here until it did. That sort of thing.

  Tiffany walked around the couch and finally got a look at him. Bald head. Big muscles. Gold hoop ring in left earlobe. He was odd-looking. And his scowl was frightening. But Tiffany noticed he had the eyes, and the eyelashes, of a woman. Six security men were watching him from afar, but Tiffany could tell the guy was making them nervous. She couldn’t blame them; he looked like he ate children for breakfast.

  He reeked, though, and was dirty and was wearing filthy Middle Eastern–type clothes. He would have to go.

  It took all the security people, two bellhops, plus the concierge to finally get the man out. He was half-dragged, half-pushed through the huge revolving door and deposited, butt-first, on the sidewalk outside. Yet no sooner was he on his feet than he was up against the plate-glass window looking back in. He was crying.

  Tiffany went over to shoo him away. He pressed an index card up against the window for her to read. It contained just one sentence, written in several different languages. She recognized only two of them: Arabic, which she couldn’t read, and English, which she could.

  The card said: My name is Abdul Abu Uni. Can you direct me to the nearest bathroom or airport?

  He was lost.

  In a strange country, filled with strange people, with no money, no luggage. Nowhere to go. Uni, the shuka, was lost.

  What went wrong? The plan had been so simple up to this point. By Kazeel’s wishes, he’d accompanied Bahzi and his men down from Sat Put to see the stash of missiles, which turned out to be stored in the basement of Bahzi’s house in Karachi. Uni counted them, which was all Kazeel ever wanted him to do. Eventually reaching the correct number of 36, he okayed the missiles’ shipping to their next destination, somewhere in the Philippines. They would make the trip, by cargo air, in crates marked: UNITED NATIONS—DECONTAMINATED HAZARDOUS WASTE.

  This done, Bahzi’s men put Uni himself on an airplane and essentially pointed him east. He was in Manila just a few hours later, again all according to plan. But stepping off the plane at Manila Airport this time was like stepping into another world. Although it was his second trip here in little more than a week, he’d never traveled this far alone before. Through the eyes of someone no brighter than an eight-year-old child, the airport and its chaotic environs were frightening for him.

  From there, the plan called for Uni to go to the Xagat Pacific, the same place Kazeel had stayed earlier that month. Here a message from Kazeel would be waiting for him. It would tell Uni what to do next, most probably to wait in place until Kazeel himself returned to Manila, something he’d intended to do all along. But even though it should have arrived more than 48 hours before, Kazeel’s message was not there.

  Something was not right, and even a half-wit like Uni knew it. He wasn’t totally cut off. He did have a cell phone with him. It was a clean Nokia, given to him by Kazeel at Sat Put, to be used only if something went wrong once the two had parted. But only one number was programmed into it: that of Kazeel’s cell phone. Uni had been pushing that button madly since discovering there was no message for him at the hotel. But his boss never picked up. Instead, the shuka kept getting Kazeel’s answering service, a French-speaking woman who was so cold and emotionless, she could even infuriate a dolt like him.

  Once tossed from the Xagat, Uni was at a loss as to what to do. Although he’d stayed in a very seedy hostel around the corner from the grand hotel during his first trip here, he’d accompanied Kazeel everywhere he went in those few days. They’d toured the Bangtang Channel together on a private yacht. They’d met the judus’s contact. They’d seen the mud fight in the brothel.

  Desperate, Uni began searching for familiar places now, just as a child would do. He wandered the streets of Manila, a big ugly stranger in a strange and frequently ugly land. The slums were horrific; they overwhelmed Uni, who’d grown up in the isolated high desert of northwest Pakistan. Somehow he found the waterfront and from there the marina from which they’d embarked on their yacht trip. The yacht itself would be easy to find, even for him. It was painted in blue, white, and red, and it was so clean, so smooth, so sleek, it seemed to glisten. But though he searched the marina several times, all he saw were fishing boats and junks. The yacht, which in his mind was the size of a battleship, was no longer there. He was crushed. He’d loved riding on the expensive vessel. It was big and fast and protected him from falling into the water. He’d actually dreamed of riding on it again someday.

  He drifted for several more hours, going back through the shantytowns, stumbling his way through the crowds, pushing away the beggars who seemed to be everywhere. By dumb luck he found the fancy restaurant where Kazeel and Marcos had had lunch. It was called the Luzon Cricket Club. Uni stationed himself outside its front door, closely examining anyone going in or out, hoping to see a familiar face, but scaring many. A small army of security men showed up, and just like
at the Xagat, he was told to move on.

  More hours of confused meandering followed. Night fell, and it began to rain. By the glow alone Uni found the section of downtown Manila called the War Zone, the neighborhood where young girls fought in the mud. He stumbled from saloon to dance hall to strip club, looking for the one sign he thought he would recognize in the neon watercolors of the night.

  But though he searched for it until way past midnight, he couldn’t find the place called the Impatient Parrot.

  Cold, wet, tired, and not knowing what else to do, Uni returned to the Xagat.

  It was now two in the morning and the rain had turned into a monsoon. The streets around the hotel were empty. Uni avoided passing directly in the front of the place; instead, he crawled up under a low-hanging palm tree next to the hotel’s entrance.

  He lay there crying, pounding his head on the ground, wondering why Allah was doing this to him. He prayed for forgiveness, prayed for advice. Prayed for good luck. Eyes closed tight, he asked God to send him a sign. When he opened them again, he saw a woman’s face staring in at him under the palm fronds. It was Tiffany, the nasty woman who’d ejected him from the hotel earlier. She was leaving work after a long day and had spotted his huge bare feet sticking out from under the branches.

  “You…” she was saying, an odd inflection in her voice.

  Uni stayed frozen. He was sure the woman would call her friends and have him removed again.

  But she had a surprise for him. “You…your message,” she began stuttering. “It came. I mean, it didn’t come. But something came for you.”

  Uni didn’t understand her. But she motioned for him to come out from under the tree. The rain had stopped and the sky above was filled with stars. She led him back into the hotel, not through the front door but via the service entrance. They walked through the empty kitchen, where she passed him some dish towels to help dry off. She brought him to a small employee break room near the food storage bin. The tiny room had vending machines, a coffeemaker, a pot of tea on a warmer, some couches, a TV, and a VCR. She left Uni here, sniffing around the teapot, but returned shortly with a small package.