Angels of Vengeance ww-3

by John Birmingham

  ‘Rhino!’

  The voice was familiar, but far away. An English accent. Educated, privileged.

  He recognised Miss Julianne’s voice a split second before tumbling over the edge. And then the boat disintegrated in a violent explosion that flung him feet-first far across the water, turning and burning, torn by pain and rage and a bone-deep sense of violation that passed only as darkness welled up and claimed him.

  23

  DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY

  Nearly eight months since she’d escaped New York and her nerves were still scraped raw. She flinched and ducked when the motor yacht exploded, dropping to the rough, non-slip pontoon deck, closing her eyes and breathing out as the blast wave ripped over them.

  Rhino, no!

  Julianne was too late. She retained a shutter-speed flicker of memory, an image of the Rhino consumed in the explosion; of a woman sitting nearby, filleting fish, beheaded by a chunk of bright steel shrapnel. But no more. Nothing that might give her any hope that her friend had survived.

  She’d come such a long way to warn him, just to fail in the last moments. The thunder rolled on through the hot, muggy early afternoon and small pieces of fibreglass and twisted chrome rained down on the deck around her. A large cinder fell on her neck and burned the exposed skin. She yelped and swiped it away, the sudden pain jerking her back into the moment, after shock had threatened to numb and dull her responses.

  ‘Quick, we must hurry, Miss Julianne.’

  She heard Shah’s rough voice as though muffled by many layers of cotton wool. His grip on her upper arm was firm enough to be uncomfortable, as he dragged Jules to her feet and back to reality. Acrid smoke stung her eyes and she could taste diesel fumes at the back of her throat. Hundreds of birds screeched and swooped overhead. She coughed as she tried to take a deep breath. Her head swam and she was afraid she might lose her balance and tumble into the oily water.

  The Nepalese soldier urged her forward, pushing her past the grotesque scene of a man hugging a headless female corpse and wailing as if to call her back from the dead. Boats burned and the heat roiling off the inferno seemed to shrink the skin on Jules’s face. She squinted and raised a hand to her eyes. A useless gesture. She staggered on anyway, but Shah had left her behind - he was running into the conflagration now, leaping onto the deck of a blazing cruiser, bounding across and diving into the water. She heard the splash but nothing else, as a secondary explosion drove her back.

  Voices. Some shouting. Others screaming in pain or horror.

  She stumbled over the leg of the crying man. He had spooned himself into the back of the dead woman and they were lying as if in bed. He was moaning in a way she’d never heard before. It looked as though he was trying to bore his head into her back.

  She apologised for tripping over him, immediately struck by the banality of her mumbled ‘Sorry’ when measured against the bloody ruin of the crater where the woman’s head had been separated from her body.

  ‘Oh God …’

  She vomited, reaching for a hand-hold as the contractions doubled her over. Finding nothing to grab, Julianne hugged herself and set her feet to steady her balance while she grunted and heaved. She heard boots pounding towards her and men cursing. An outboard engine coughed and spluttered into life somewhere between her and the marina office, a small shed at the end of Gonzales Road. When she was certain she’d finished retching, she searched for the source of the noise.

  A small, unpainted motorboat - ‘tinnies’ they called them here - shot out into the bay with two would-be rescuers on board. One steered while the other pointed ahead. They were moving quickly enough to lift the front of the boat well clear of a small bow wave.

  Men and women appeared on the dock in small groups, most of them from within the cabins of their boats. There were a lot of Americans, she noted. A small refugee commune. Some ran off immediately, heading for shore. Others tried to prevent the fires from spreading, producing small hand-held extinguishers and battling the flames with whooshing plumes of white foam. A siren warbled very far away, then faded. Jules gathered her wits and moved back from the terrible scene of the man and his dead woman.

  An empty berth allowed her an unobstructed view of the bay, where she saw the two men in the runabout helping Mr Shah wrestle the Rhino’s body into the boat. The former sergeant of the Gurkhas was a strong man, but the channel was deep and the Rhino was no midget. The tinnie rocked so far one way then the other she thought it might be swamped, but they managed to drag him on board after a struggle.

  Jukes wondered about crocodiles - or were they alligators? She’d heard they were all over Darwin’s waterways. She peered into the mangroves on the far shore, imagining giant carnivores launching themselves into the murky water and speeding towards Shah.

  An invisible fist squeezed her heart as the old Coast Guard chief raised his hand to grip the forearm of one of his rescuers. He was alive … Bloodied and burnt and probably broken in parts, but alive for now.

  Julianne turned and ran for the marina office, dodging and elbowing past the gathering crowd. Some of them had mobile phones and she could hear the calls for emergency crews going out, but she had to do something herself. Perhaps irrationally, she figured that a call from the marina management might get fire crews and ambulances dispatched more quickly.

  The small shed was empty, the door open and the last of the cool air pouring out into the sultry afternoon. There wasn’t much to the set-up. A counter, a chair, a very old computer and three metal filing cabinets. A map of Darwin Harbour covered one wall, and pictures cut from fishing and hunting magazines had been taped up to most of the other surfaces. An old land-line phone was off the hook and beeping on the counter. Jules hung it up and dialled emergency, having to think for a second of the number they used here. She half expected to hit an engaged signal but the call went through to the dispatcher.

  ‘What service please?’

  ‘Fire. And ambulance!’

  ‘Location?’

  ‘Oh …’ For an infuriating second her mind went blank. ‘The marina. Gonzales Road Ma -‘

  ‘Units are en route,’ came the clipped reply. ‘Please clear the line.’

  The call cut off, leaving her with a dial tone.

  She heard choppers a few moments before any sirens, and shading her eyes against the glare, she picked them out, flying up from the south. They were grey and looked very much like the helicopter that had lifted them out of New York.

  Military then, she thought. Probably off that huge carrier in the port.

  Although it was possible that one of the private military companies was responding. She knew they had contracts for emergency response as well as border and city security. The fierce glare made it difficult to pick out details, though, until one of the helicopters flew across the sun and she spotted the US markings on the other.

  Fire trucks and a small fleet of ambulances arrived, horns blaring to clear a path down Gonzales Road. Behind them, she saw police cruisers and a couple of black SUVs she recognised as belonging to Sandline Security. The first responders shook themselves out, with the ambulances and fire engines pulling into two distinct laagers. Brown-shirted police officers in wide-brimmed cowboy hats threw open the doors of their vehicles as an amplified voice blared out of roof-mounted loudspeakers. Hundreds of spectators were now pouring in from New Town to watch the show, many of them holding drinks and food, taking shots with phone cameras.

  ‘Clear the area. Clear the area immediately. Go on - get out! This area is dangerous.’

  Firefighters in yellow coveralls and heavy flame-retardant gear leapt from their bright red trucks and hurried to unload equipment with fast, practised movements. Jules ran to the nearest ambulance and collared the two men who emerged. One of them carried an old-fashioned stretcher. His name tag read Dwyer.

  ‘This way. Follow me!’ the Englishwoman ordered, inflecting her voice with the same command imperative her father would use for running off debt collectors.
‘There are casualties down this way. I was just there.’

  ‘Go on, then, love. We’ll follow,’ said Dwyer.

  The brown-shirts and Sandliners were coordinating their efforts to clear the dock of gawking onlookers. The Sandline mercs, who stood out in their urban-grey camouflage coveralls, were no rougher than the cops, but Jules could see people moving out of their way with a far greater sense of urgency. She ignored them. She was safely associated with the paramedics now. For a moment she worried that she mightn’t be able to find the small motorboat that had gone out to get the Rhino, but as the crowds parted and began to move off the floating docks, she saw Sergeant Shah carefully manhandling the Rhino up on the decking. The American’s clothes were bloody and burnt and one arm was badly singed. Half of his hair seemed to be missing, but he was conscious and seemed to be trying to help his rescuers.

  She bade the stretcher-bearers to follow her and led them down, ignoring the cries of any of the other injured. They weren’t her concern.

  ‘He got blown right off the boat that exploded,’ she said, as the paramedics moved swiftly to take over, thanking the civilians who’d pulled him out, but letting them know their work was done.

  Shah was soaked with both oil and water. He used a shirt sleeve to mop his face clean before positioning himself just behind the ambulance men, to help keep the dock clear. ‘Back, back,’ he ordered in a parade-ground voice, pushing the small crowd that had re-formed away from the stretcher. More stretcher-bearers ran by, heading towards the weeping man who still clung onto that headless corpse. Two Sandline troopers fought through the crush and began using batons to push the onlookers back towards dry land.

  ‘Miss Jules,’ croaked the Rhino. ‘This is a pleasant surprise.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Rhino,’ she said. ‘I should have stayed this morning until I’d warned you. But …’

  He reached out one trembling hand to still her as the paramedics settled him onto the stretcher.

  ‘S’okay. A coupla scratches. Horn’s still attached. I’ll live.’

  ‘Move!’ shouted Dwyer before taking a grip on the stretcher handles and nodding to his colleague. ‘One, two, three - lift.’

  They hoisted their giant patient with audible grunts. Shah moved quickly to take some of the weight himself and Jules took an awkward grip on the opposite side.

  ‘Cesky?’ asked the Rhino, looking into Jules’s eyes.

  ‘Who else?’ she answered. But he had already passed out.

  *

  She thought he’d be taken to Royal Darwin Hospital, which had developed an unenviable expertise in trauma surgery over the last few years. Hundreds of victims of the Bali Bombing in October ‘02 had been treated there, and later tens of thousands of evacuees from the fighting in Indonesia had fled to the city, many of them needing emergency care. The Rhino would have been well looked after up at Royal Darwin. Instead he was loaded onto one of the US Navy helicopters and lifted away.

  ‘They’ll take him out to the Bataan,’ Dwyer told her. ‘Got a great trauma centre on board. He’ll be fine. We send cases to the Yanks all the time.’

  ‘He is a Yank,’ she said, feeling useless.

  ‘There you go, then. He’ll be right at home.’

  But it wasn’t his treatment she was worried about. Both Jules and the Rhino had reason for putting thousands of miles between themselves and the US after getting out of New York. She watched the chopper haul itself into the sky and turn south, heading for the Combined Fleet anchorage. She assumed the ship’s doctors had also gained a lot of unwanted experience at treating burns and blast injuries over the last few years. But the Rhino wouldn’t want to linger in the sick bay.

  ‘Miss Julianne.’

  She was surprised to find Shah beside her again. He had a knack for appearing and disappearing at will.

  ‘Perhaps we should leave,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Before the police secure the docks and begin to search for witnesses. It would not be convenient.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Best not to get caught up with the wallopers.’

  They allowed themselves to be swept along in the tide of people flowing away from the docks, where some boats still burned. A small, secondary explosion boomed behind them, possibly a gas canister, panicking the crowd, who started to push and move with greater urgency. Jules and Shah cut across the flow, emerging onto clear ground, or at least less crowded, on the road that ran around the bay.

  The buildings here were all new, and very spare in their simplicity. Fibro-cement panelling and external metal joists, giant roller doors and huge rumbling air-con plants. The area was zoned for light industry, and unsurprisingly it had been colonised by marine engineering firms and suppliers servicing the trawler and naval fleets. A few weed-choked lots still stood empty, but even they had been marked off for development, and Jules could see earth-moving equipment in some.

  Shah’s vehicle, a Land Rover of battered but rugged appearance, stood in front of one such lot, partially blocking a sign that announced development approval had been granted to erect a battery manufacturing plant on the site. A young, fit-looking Nepalese man, another Gurkha, stood holding the rear door open for them. Jules wondered if Shah might want to change to avoid getting oil and sea sludge all over the seating, but he waved her in and followed without delay.

  Their driver - Shah introduced him as Ganesh - moved quickly and gracefully around the vehicle, into the driver’s seat. They pulled away before she was able to fit her belt.

  ‘If this was Cesky, it is best we not linger,’ said Shah. ‘He will have men watching the dock. They will not move openly with so many witnesses, but they will note our presence and Mr Ross’s survival. They will regroup and try again.’

  She didn’t need telling. After blundering into the ambush Henry Cesky had set for them in Manhattan, they’d narrowly avoided another in Galveston, Texas, where they’d holed up to count their losses and plot the next move. Jules had hoped Cesky’s influence would be marginal in Texas, what with him being such a buttboy of the Kipper administration. But she’d been wrong. He didn’t need influence. He just needed reach.

  ‘I have a compound out near the airport,’ said Shah. ‘It is secure. We should go there. Ganesh, call ahead to Birendra. Have him send men to meet us as soon as possible.’

  The driver acknowledged the direction with a very military ‘Yes sir’ and fitted a hands-free earpiece to his mobile phone.

  ‘Birendra is still with you?’ asked Jules. ‘The same Birendra?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. He is my second here. A good man. Now, do you have any idea who Cesky is using? Does he have his own men or just contractors?’

  ‘Cut-outs, I’m sure,’ she replied as they swept onto the ring road that encircled New Town. The crowd on the edge of the red-light district was heaving now, spilling out on the road. ‘The guys who tried to take us in New York were hired out of Mexico. Or, you know, what was left of Mexico. That freakish Commando Barbie chick who saved our arses said they were hitters from one of the old cartels. In Galveston it was a couple of cashiered army guys, and the chap who tried to shiv me in Sydney last week was a Romanian. A nobody, really. Just some hard man providing muscle for the Russian maf down there.’

  ‘Not so hard now, however?’

  ‘No. Not so much. Dumb, and dead mostly. What about the guys who tried to hit you, Mr Shah? Any luck tracing them?’

  He frowned. ‘I am afraid the men who planted the bomb at my home did not survive their incompetence. One died on the spot, the other in hospital. Not by my hand, I assure you. I wished very much to talk with them, but they were under guard. I assumed a business rival hired them, perhaps even a PMC - Sandline or one of Blackwater’s franchise operators. They have been pressuring smaller security firms like myself to fold our business into theirs. There has been violence, but nothing on this scale. I do not think the police would stand for it, even as powerful as the private contractors are. Until you contacted me, Miss Julianne, I would never have c
onsidered this Cesky character. To be truthful. I had forgotten him. After all, he did not make the voyage with us from Acapulco.’

  ‘And that’s his issue,’ said Jules. ‘Hard to believe a bloke who’s done so well out of the last few years would faff around like this just to settle an old score. But that’s his nature as I understand it and …’ She paused, wondering how best to put this.

  ‘Yes?’

  The Land Rover grunted as Ganesh took them onto the Stuart Highway, heading north, and picked up speed as they passed the headquarters of the Free Port Development Authority, the real power in the city. A huge, soaring structure of blue and gold glass that was somehow narrower at the base than up on its top floors, it reminded Jules of a rolled-up newspaper.

  ‘He lost a daughter,’ Jules began. ‘She didn’t make it to Seattle.’

  ‘I see,’ said Shah, his face unreadable. ‘Did she die in Acapulco, in the collapse?’

  ‘No. They were on a refugee boat with about a hundred or so other Americans. It wasn’t much of a boat. Not like the Aussie Rules, I’m afraid. It foundered off the coast south of Washington state. A lot of people drowned, apparently. Cesky was lucky to get most of his family ashore, but his smallest girl didn’t make it.’

  ‘I see,’ Shah said again.

  ‘Oh God, Shah,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘You remember what it was like. We couldn’t have taken Cesky. He would have led a mutiny within a few days. That’s what -‘

  The former NCO held up one, huge brown hand.

  ‘You are not to blame for the death of the child, Miss Julianne. I remember discussing this Cesky with Mr Pieraro after we had escaped Acapulco. He told me he faced down Cesky because he knew the man would have brought us all to grief.’

  ‘Yeah - Miguel,’ sighed Jules. ‘He was a good bloke … Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’ve been so fucking selfish. Cesky will have Miguel at the top of his list. Unless he’s saving him until last. Shah, I have to warn him.’