Charon's Landing - v4

by Jack Du Brul

  The teenage Johnston had helped a friend cheat on an exam by giving away his answers. Of course, they were caught, and both boys were suspended from school. That night, waiting in the study of the mansion that had become their home after Keith Johnston, a hardscrabble wildcatter, had struck it rich, young Max had been afraid. Keith Johnston had made his fortune by hard work, determination, and a large dose of luck, pulling in two fields within six months and launching Petromax Oil, a company named for his only child. Max imagined disappointment from the man he saw as a god, and the shame he felt was unbearable. His dad was an hour late coming home that night, and Max waited as if he were a soldier facing death, ready to accept whatever fate had in store.

  Keith Johnston entered his study that night wearing a dusty suit, for success had not kept him out of the field. He still loved to visit the pumps, machinery, and men that made the oil flow from the south Texas plains. His wife had told him of Max’s suspension, and his mood was foul. Max, a large boy for his age, physically cowered.

  “Cheating!” the elder Johnston had screamed. “There is nothing worse than someone who cheats, except someone who cheats for another’s gain, except someone so weak that he grants permission for somebody to rob him. Listen to me, boy, because this is the only time you are ever going to hear this.

  “I built this company for you. I lied and cheated and stole to create all of this for you, so you could go on in my footsteps. And now I find my sole reason for working is nothing but a weak, impotent lackey, who gives away what he’s earned. Had you been cheating so you could get a better grade, I would have understood, but you knew the material for the test and gave it away so someone else could get as good a grade as you. You are a disgrace, a ready victim for anyone who comes along. I can’t believe that you are my son.

  “We came from nothing, and you goddamned better not drag us back down to nothing or so help me Christ, I’ll kill you myself.” The hatred in the old man’s voice was the worst thing Max had ever heard in his entire life. “You disgust me.”

  That was the last day they spoke to each other. Keith Johnston did not attend his son’s graduation from high school or from Texas A&M, where Max gave the valedictorian speech. He didn’t go to Max’s wedding, nor after his retirement did he offer congratulations when Max became CEO of the company named for him. The old man was still alive when, under Max’s guidance, Petromax topped one billion dollars in assets; however, he never said a word. The last lines of Keith Johnston’s will, read by an embarrassed family lawyer, cut Max so deeply that he actually fired the man who had been a friend for years.

  “Just because I’m gone doesn’t mean I can ever forgive you or forget what you really are. No accomplishment will ever erase the fact that you are weak. Someday it will destroy you and the company you never deserved.”

  The bitterness still burned the back of Max Johnston’s throat. He tried to wash it away with Scotch, but the respite was only temporary, for even as the liquor exploded in his belly, his jaw tensed and acrid saliva flooded his mouth.

  “You’ll respect me,” Johnston said softly, a defiant plea for the acceptance of a man who could never give it.

  Academics hadn’t impressed his father, himself a high school dropout who’d worked since he was twelve. Being at the top of his class in high school and college had not gained Max the praise he so desperately wanted; he should have known that such honors would mean nothing to his father. Max realized his father had been driven by the desire for wealth, not knowledge.

  Certainly turning Petromax into a global holding company with far-flung interests and billions of dollars would get to the old man, reclaim the love he needed. Surely a balance sheet of half a billion dollars would get his father’s attention. When the respect did not come, Max turned the company into a one-billion-dollar behemoth. Then two.

  When that failed, Max thought about what all that money represented. What was wealth’s purpose? It took him years to finally see what his old man had seen, to understand that the accumulation of wealth was nothing. It was the power that went along with it that was the reason for money’s existence. That was what the old man coveted, that was what the old man respected.

  Keith Johnston was a drooling invalid who couldn’t use a bathroom by himself when Max gained his first White House invitation, and the old man had been dead for six years when Max financed his first successful campaign, buying himself a junior congressman for a mere eight million dollars. Even with his father dead, Max single-mindedly pursued those things that he hoped would impress the elder Johnston, gain the credibility and character that his father believed he did not possess. Now the President of the United States regularly consulted with Max about the Middle East and on energy matters, yet still he knew the old man was not impressed.

  Power. The ability to control the lives of others with impunity.

  Max Johnston was about to gain more power than any human being had possessed since the days of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. It wasn’t the scholastic honors gained through late-night studies. It wasn’t the mountains of money made through shrewd financial dealings. Nor was it being courted by politicians more concerned with reelection than actually accepting the responsibility given to them. This is what Keith Johnston had always wanted, the accumulation of so much power that the entire world would take notice. Now is when Max would finally regain the old man’s respect. Everything in his life had been a prelude to this moment. All the learning and all the money boiled down to this ultimate prize, the one thing that would make his father love him again.

  It didn’t matter what was left in the wake of what he was about to do. The deaths were meaningless, no matter how many or who. Wars were about to start because of him, nations destroyed, possibly even his own, but when that moment came, when his father finally respected him and the voice late in the night finally fell silent, it would all be worth it.

  Johnston hated what he’d become, hated everything about himself, from the urbane sophisticate he presented to the world to the shame-faced sixteen-year-old boy who still lived within him. He’d become the same cold, hate-filled, intractable man who’d dominated his entire life. He’d broken ethical codes, skirted moral ideals, and ignored international laws on this quest, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do now. No boundary was too far for him to cross. Nothing else mattered.

  Somehow the glass he’d been gulping from had emptied and he got up to pour himself another, shying away from his mirrored reflection behind the minibar. When he finally did look at himself, staring deeply into his frantic eyes, he saw only shadowless clarity and single-minded purpose.

  Max Johnston’s chance to finally lay to rest his personal demons was about to change the face of the earth, lay waste to thousands of square miles of land, and cause the deaths of countless thousands of people. Staring at his reflection, he knew that the price was cheap. He would do anything, achieve any goal or destroy any obstacle, to finally gain the love of a long-dead monster.

  Knowing that his daughter was in Alaska, unintentionally in the middle of his personal crusade, Johnston knew even her death would be meaningless if his father finally left him alone.

  London

  After everything had returned to normal at the British Museum, the question would still linger as to who reacted first to the sound of gunfire echoing through the marble halls — the women who started to scream as soon as the shots erupted outside the building or the countless bodyguards, secret policemen, and other security professionals who’d been hired for the event. By the time the terrorist missile had destroyed Khalid’s Daimler limousine, the guards were herding their panicked charges toward one of the “Authorized Personnel Only” areas at the back of the building that afforded the easiest defensible exit.

  Most of the well-heeled guests, Arab and English alike, had lived under terrorist threats before, whether Islamic extremists or IRA separatists, and many found themselves behaving much more calmly than they had expected. With an orderliness born from acceptance,
they allowed the guards to take them to safety. They talked little as they moved in a large group down long marble corridors, passed glass-faced display cases groaning under the weight of precious artifacts and archaeological treasures. Surprisingly, the Arab couples displayed more affection for each other than their English counterparts, taking their spouse’s hands or muttering reassurances as they were hurried by the urgency of armed guards.

  Throughout the ordeal, not a single bullet was directed at the museum.

  IN the few thriller novels Khalid had ever finished, he’d read that bullets made a whining sound as they passed close by and that sometimes one could feel their passage disturb the air. However, no author had ever mentioned the intense heat as rounds sped by close enough to burn the skin of his face and neck.

  Chunks of concrete were gouged from the sidewalk around him as full-metal jackets tore into the cement, stinging his hands and face and eyes. He rolled as fast as he could, trying to minimize his body as a half dozen gunmen advanced on him, their rifles chattering.

  Automatic gunfire was now being returned by the police stationed at the barricade farther up Great Russell Street. A deadly cross fire arrowed just above Khalid’s prone form. There was no cover to be found; the burning wreck of the Daimler was too hot to approach, but the oily smoke rising from the twisted mass offered a thin veil in which to hide. A bullet raked across his back, a fiery furrow running from shoulder to hip, as he scrabbled into the smoke roiling from the limousine. Lunging, he managed to roll back into the street, the six-inch curb feeling like the armor of a battle tank compared to the openness of his earlier position.

  His suit began to smolder from the heat of the burning wreck and his left hand, the one closest to the car, started to blister. Khalid dared not move.

  Two of the gunmen were down, blown back by the scathing fire from an FN FAL rifle carried by a police sniper, and two others were wounded. The terrorists were about one hundred feet from Khalid, but the smoke and fire hid him enough for their bursts to be off by several yards. The gawkers assembled to watch the gala opening of the special exhibit had fled in panic, stumbling and tripping over one another, heedless of those few unfortunates who fell under the mob’s frantic escape.

  None of the journalists flinched when the attack began. Ever since Herb Morrison’s eyewitness account of the Hindenburg disaster made him a household name and forever changed journalism’s impact on the world, every reporter’s dream was a moment like this. All of them were making the most of it. As calmly as spectators watching a tennis volley, they collectively turned from a member of Parliament as he alighted from his car toward the carnage just a hundred yards down the road. And as one, their bovine expressions of boredom changed to sanguineous delight as the bullets started to fly. One journalist actually laughed when the Daimler exploded.

  Khalid saw none of this as bullets streaked around him, every moment expecting to feel nothing ever again. His eyes were so tightly closed that squiggles of phantom light danced against the darkness of his eyelids. Yet he remained completely still in the gutter of Great Russell Street. Nothing in his experience could have prepared him for this kind of terror, and even as death sought him out, he was amazed at his composure.

  Then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. The blistering fire from the police barricade took down the last two charging terrorists only forty feet from Khalid, one felled by a single bullet through his left eye and the other torn nearly in half by a ten-round burst fired by a young Special Branch agent. The whole scene was captured by motor-driven Nikons and Leicas.

  Enough rain had fallen so that a tiny stream poured along the gutter, eddying around leaves and bits of loose cement and the twist-off cap of a cola bottle, washing the grit and dirt from the side of Khalid’s face. Its coolness made him moan, not in fear or pain, which would come later, but in the blessed relief that he was still alive.

  Police sirens punctuated the silence after the attack. Ambulances too were on their way, and more soldiers and more reporters and more of everybody. Khalid stayed in the gutter, letting the rain drum against his back and snake along his neck before trickling onto the roadway. It was only when he heard someone approach and say, “Jesus Christ,” that he finally tried to get up.

  He managed to lever himself only a few inches before choking waves of pain washed over him. He’d been wounded far worse than he realized.

  “He’s alive,” the voice shouted. “Get a bloody doctor here, now.”

  A steadying hand touched Khalid’s shoulder, and he gasped.

  “You’ll be all right, mate,” the voice said with as much reassurance as the sight of so much blood on one man would allow. “You may have more holes in you than the links at St. Andrews, but you’ll be fine.”

  “Any idea who he is?” a paramedic asked the soldier as he began his ministrations.

  “Yeah, the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen.”

  HASAAN bin-Rufti slapped the man before him as hard as he could. While the blow contained as much strength as he possessed, the fat hanging like slabs of suet under his arm prevented his hand from swinging naturally, and much of the force was absorbed by his own considerable bulk. The backhanded follow-through was much more effective, especially when a four-carat diamond pinkie ring flayed a strip of flesh from the other man’s cheek. Delighted with the bloody weal, Rufti slapped him again in much the same fashion. This time, the fat on his finger closed over the stone’s sharp table edge, and it was his own flesh that bled. Cursing, he greedily sucked the finger into his mouth as if afraid he’d lose sustenance with the drops of blood oozing from the cut.

  “I have always been surrounded by fools,” Rufti cried plaintively to the two men standing behind the man cowering before him. He pulled his finger from his mouth long enough to ingest a piece of caviar-smeared toast. Rufti replaced the bleeding finger with a loud slurp and continued to speak around it.

  “How hard is it to fire a missile at a stationary target? You were told to fire as soon as they stopped, but you decided to wait long enough to let Khuddari escape.”

  “But please, the driver, he was like my brother — surely you must know this?” the supine Kurdish freedom fighter wailed.

  “I’ve given your organization a million dollars in return for the death of one man, and you tell me you’re not willing to make some sort of sacrifice for your cause? The driver was supposed to die, you both knew that. He was supposed to shoot Khuddari and then die in the missile explosion. His martyrdom was the key to the entire operation. How in the name of Allah and his Prophet do you expect to further your cause if no one even knows who you are? For that you need martyrs.” Rage and frustration caused Rufti’s rubbery lips to flap obscenely. “Did you know in English, with only a slight change in spelling, Kurd is a formation of cheese? With a name like that your people are already a laughingstock. Kurdish homeland. It sounds like a home for dairy cows and cheese makers.”

  Rufti looked at his watch, one with a special band to encompass his twelve-inch wrist. “In ten minutes the BBC is going to get a letter stating that tonight’s attack was the work of your organization, Kurdistan United, and that the assaults will continue if your demands for an independent nation are not met. After this fiasco, the world will say, ‘Go ahead, keep attacking. Seven Kurds dead and only a little concrete shot up. In enough time you’ll have no fighters left to carry on, so please keep them coming.’

  “Our deal,” Rufti continued to rant, his multiple chins quivering, “was money in exchange for the assassination of Khalid Khuddari. I know that you are too stupid to understand how important his death is for me, but don’t grovel at my feet and whine to me about how you had second thoughts at the last moment.”

  In these precious moments, Rufti felt exactly as he saw himself. He had power right now, real power. His two aides would kill the Kurd if he said so, which he would, but the thrill of having the freedom fighter at his feet was too intoxicating to let it end quickly. He would stretch this out, savor
it, feel the power he felt he deserved, the power of right and wrong, of life and death. Caligula must have felt like this, he thought.

  From the huge Daulton serving platter that Rufti used as an appetizer plate, he selected a water cracker covered with goose liver pâté, cramming it into his mouth so quickly that the second one he brought to his lips disappeared in the same couple of chews. He considered keeping the third cracker in his hand as he pointed at the Kurd still on his knees, but temptation got the best of him, and it too disappeared. He drained a fluted glass of de-alcoholed Brut, so eagerly recharging the delicate crystal that much of the pale faux champagne splashed onto the low settee next to the armchair that cradled his bulk.

  When not in conferences with the Iranians and Iraqis, Rufti had spent much of the past several days preparing his speech for tomorrow’s opening ceremonies of the OPEC meeting. He’d carefully blended the right amounts of grief and admiration for Khalid Khuddari, outrage at the senseless attack that took his life, and weary acceptance at becoming the United Arab Emirates’ official representative at the meeting. While the plan for Khuddari’s assassination had been set for weeks, months really, he’d left the writing of his speech for the very end to give it just enough of an impromptu feel to lend credibility.

  He felt his bowels give an oily slide when he thought how he’d explain to the Iranians and Iraqis why Khuddari was still alive. The assassination was supposed to trigger so many events that Rufti had a hard time keeping track, and now none of them would transpire. The Iraqis especially would seek retribution. They had put up the lion’s share of the money for training the Kurdish freedom fighters, much of which had ended up in Hasaan Rufti’s personal account, and they were going to want an explanation.