Dust Up: A Thriller

by Jon McGoran

  I didn’t like it. Not a bit. I didn’t even know if the Soyagene-X was still in there, although in that sense the armed guards were an encouraging sign.

  “Okay,” I whispered to Toma. “You need to go out front and cause a diversion while I break in.”

  “You kidding me?” He shook his head. “Those guys have guns. Why don’t we just shoot them?”

  To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind. The rifle was still in the Jeep. Shoot them both, then go in and take it.

  Of course, that would be cold-blooded murder.

  “No.” I shook my head. “Either you cause a diversion and I break in, or I cause a diversion and you break in.” There was always a chance it could come to shooting anyway.

  He let out a soft, exasperated growl. “What kind of diversion?”

  78

  I thought for a second. “Pretend you’re drunk and you want to fight them. They’re professionals, so they won’t shoot.” I hoped. “Walk up and taunt them, loud. Then give the fence a good long shake, make a lot of noise for a few seconds at least. While you’re making noise, I’ll pull open the back of the shed.”

  He thought about it for a moment, thinking about the steps, then nodding to himself. “That might work. Then what?”

  “Keep going, circle around the block and come back here. I’ll pass the bags of soy up to you, just like we planned. Then be sure you’re ready to get the hell out of here.”

  Standing on the back of the Jeep and keeping our heads down low, we gently unfurled the rug over the barbed wire at the top of the fence. The damp, mildewy smell immediately tickled my nose. I tied the rope to the bumper and draped it over the fence, across the rug.

  I gave Toma a nod, and he trotted off around the corner. A few seconds later, I heard him start to sing in a convincingly drunken voice. I smiled and shook my head. Making sure the crowbar and flashlight were secured in the back my waistband, I slowly climbed up onto the fence and used the rope to lower myself down on the other side. I wasn’t silent, but I was pretty damn quiet.

  The space behind the shed was a pool of depthless black. My foot came down on something soft that screeched and scurried away.

  I paused and listened. I could hear Toma, still singing as he rounded the corner, coming closer again.

  The guards were speaking to each other in hushed tones. One of them laughed.

  As Toma’s voice grew louder, I placed the tip of the crowbar under the edge of the newly repaired section of corrugated metal. As soon as I heard Toma yelling and the fence rattling, I popped out two nails across the top, then slid the crowbar down, popping the four nails down the side.

  It easily opened enough for me to slip inside. I put my hand over my flashlight and turned it on, letting just enough light filter through so I could see. There were three sets of shelves. Two of them were mostly filled with boxes. The third held a large bundle of five-pound white paper bags wrapped in heavy-duty plastic. I shone the flashlight on it from different angles until I found the stamps on the bottoms of the paper bags. GES-5322x. Soyagene-X.

  I wrestled the bundle off the shelf. It was a dozen five-pound bags. Sixty pounds. Manageable but unwieldy. I placed it on the floor and pushed it out through the hole in the back. Then I poked out my head and listened.

  I could hear Toma singing again, his voice fading as he continued on his way.

  One of the guards called out after him, “Yeah, go on! Get out of here, you crazy drunk voodoo devil!” He had a thick accent that sounded Australian at first. Then I pegged it as South African.

  The other one laughed weakly, then muttered, “This fucking place gives me the creeps.”

  I squeezed out and pulled the bundle of soy farther around the back. As I waited for Toma to return, I tore open the plastic outer wrap.

  I heard Toma’s footsteps approaching. A second later, he was standing on the back of the Jeep, looking over the top of the fence.

  I held up a bag of soyflour, and he nodded, wiggling his fingers like he was ready to catch. I heaved the bag into the air, a smooth arc that crested perfectly over the top of the fence. He caught it easily and put it down in the back of the Jeep. As soon as he straightened up, I threw another one, then another. The first six went quickly and flawlessly. We were working up a sweat, and the cool breeze felt nice coming off the water. But my arms were starting to feel it, and I guess Toma’s were too. Number seven had a slight wobble, and Toma bobbled it slightly before securing it.

  Our eyes met, and we were more deliberate after that. I removed the rest of the bags from the plastic and started throwing them. Everything went fine until number eleven. The throw was wobbly, but I will forever insist it was catchable. Toma bobbled it badly between his hands, chasing it sideways, away from the rug. He got a grip on it, but only after it snagged on the barbed wire on top of the fence.

  Before I could say anything, he yanked it free. The bag tore completely open, releasing a cascade of white powder that coated me from head to toe and billowed out in a cloud around my feet.

  I exhaled sharply through my nose and spat in case any of it had gotten in my mouth. The breeze picked up, mercifully clearing the air before I inhaled any of it. I swallowed my annoyance and grabbed the last pack, but as the cloud of white powder slid away on the breeze, so did the plastic overwrap. It skidded along the pavement with a surprisingly loud scraping sound.

  Without thinking, I lunged after it, stepping out from behind the cover of the building. I grabbed the plastic and was just turning around when I heard a thick Afrikaner accent say, “Jesus Christ, what the hell are you?”

  I froze. Covered from head to toe in white powder, holding the last bag of Soyagene-X in one hand and the plastic wrap in the other.

  His rifle was pointed right at my midsection. In the darkness, his eyes looked afraid. I realized he was afraid of me.

  “Fuck sake, Jerry, get over here,” he said, panic in his voice. “We’ve got a fucking situation.”

  “Jesus, I hate this fucking place,” replied a different voice with the same accent from the other side of the warehouse. “What is it now?”

  I didn’t know how I was going to get out of this, but I knew it would be easier to escape one of them than two, and that window that was rapidly closing.

  I still couldn’t see Jerry, but over the first guy’s shoulder, I could see the street on the other side of the front gate. I heard engines roaring, two of them, and saw headlights approaching from the side.

  I knew it was Pearce’s men, coming for the same thing we were after. More than one window was closing.

  The guy in front of me turned his head just a bit and called out, “Just get the fuck over here.”

  I threw the Soyagene at him, straight at his head. It was a good throw too. I even managed to put a spiral on it. As soon as it left my hand, I dove back behind the warehouse.

  I heard a strangled cry and a burst of automatic fire.

  As my fingers wrapped around the rope dangling from the top of the fence, I looked back and saw a huge cloud of white powder right where I’d been standing.

  I started scrambling up the rope as Jerry’s voice said, “What the fuck, Simon?”

  Simon said, “He fucking vanished, like some kind of ghost.”

  And then vanish I did.

  There was a roar of engines and a loud crash behind me as Pearce’s men barreled through the front gates.

  Almost simultaneously, another engine roared in front of me.

  I was at the top of the fence—one hand grabbing the rug and the other wrapped around the rope—when the rope jerked forward, and so did I. Luckily, the rug came with us.

  Even as I flew through the air, not quite understanding what the hell was going on, part of me hoped Jerry and Simon could see me—white as a ghost, flying across the sky. Hell, I was riding a magic carpet. That would give them something to think about for quite some time.

  But then it was time to think about me.

  After the initial viole
nt jerk, there was a brief moment of tranquility at the top of my trajectory. Then I started coming down.

  The Jeep was tearing ass down the darkened street, pulling me along like a kite. The street was coming up fast, and so was the end of the block. Toma was going to have to turn, one way or the other. In a split second, I was trying to calculate if I would hit the ground first or go into the turn still airborne. Would I splatter against the street or against one of the buildings that crowded either side of it?

  I held on tight to the rug, knowing it was my only protection. Maybe in the back of my mind I hoped it actually would start to fly. If ever there was a time for a rug to reveal its powers, that would have been it.

  Then I saw twin flashes of red—the Jeep’s brake lights—and I said, “Oh shit.”

  I let go of the rope and tried to roll into the fall but got tangled in the rug. That’s probably what saved me.

  By the time I hit the pavement, the rug was wrapped around me like a foul-smelling cocoon. The impact still hurt. A lot. But I didn’t break anything, I didn’t lose all my skin, and I didn’t even bang my head.

  I hit once, bounced, and then rolled to a stop under the Jeep.

  I lay there for a moment, unable to move and terrified that Toma was going to put the Jeep in reverse and back up to look for me. Instead, I felt hands grabbing my feet and dragging me out.

  Toma smiled down at me, then started to scoop me up as if he was going to put me in the back of the Jeep like a swaddled baby. I tried to fight him off, but my arms were bound to my sides by the rug.

  “No,” I barked. “Get me the fuck out of this.”

  He huffed and glanced back down the block, then found the edge of the rug and pulled violently, spinning me out onto the street. He tossed the rug into the back of the Jeep and grabbed my shirt, pulling me to my feet.

  We got into the Jeep and took off. We tore around the corner, then he looked at me and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  He laughed again and pointed at me. “Blan.”

  79

  When we got back to BBQ Central, Marcel was pacing in the alley out back. His face when he saw us was a mixture of relief and trepidation. I could understand if there was a part of him that had been hoping we couldn’t come back, or at least that we would come back empty-handed.

  When I got out, he looked away, almost afraid, muttering an angry stream of Kreyol.

  Toma walked up beside me, laughing. “He says you need to wash your face. You look like Baron Samedi, the voodou god.”

  I walked away from the others and dusted myself off as best I could, trying not to breath in any of the Soyagene-X coming off me, wondering if I’d already ingested, inhaled, or absorbed enough to cause a reaction.

  Elena came forward and led me through the back door, tutting and cooing as we passed through the small kitchen and into a tiny bathroom, where she got a damp cloth and wiped off my face and my arms, paying special attention to the scrapes that revealed themselves as she did. She left me in the bathroom to finish. I dunked my head under the faucet a few times, trying to rinse the stuff out of my sweaty hair before it turned to glue.

  When I went back outside, Toma was leaning against Marcel’s van, looking on while Marcel and Elena mixed the Soyagene-X into the large sacks of Stoma-Grow cornmeal. They had bandannas tied around their faces to keep the dust out of their noses and mouths.

  As they finished with each bag, they crumpled the top over, and Marcel put a strip of packing tape across it. I noticed that the rest of the bags were similarly taped and were already in the back of the van. The Soyagene-X bags were gone. Then I spotted them, empty, stuffed into a trash bag.

  Marcel looked up at me and nodded.

  Toma looked over as I approached. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Marcel hoisted the last sack of mixed cornmeal and put it in the back of the van with the others. He slammed the door shut and pulled the bandanna down from his face. “Time to go.”

  Elena’s face was drawn as she got into the van. I felt bad asking them to put themselves in this position.

  Toma turned to me. “Let’s go.”

  I grabbed him by the arm. “Ask them one more time—are they sure they want to do this?”

  He walked up to the van’s driver-side window. Marcel lowered the window, and Toma spoke to them in Kreyol, hooking his thumb back in my direction. Marcel turned to Elena, sitting in the passenger seat. I could see her nodding in the darkness. Marcel turned back to Toma, then looked over at me and nodded too.

  Toma turned to look at me. “Okay?”

  We got in the Jeep and waited for Marcel to pull out, then followed after him. Toma drove.

  The city was largely calm. The fires had mostly burned out, transformed into smoking piles of ash and rubble. The police were noticeably absent. Maybe they were already where we were going.

  We made our way southwest through the city, taking a two-lane highway across Plaine-du-Nord, the Northern Plain. The moonlight shone on the scrub brush and farm fields. After a half hour, we passed through the small town of Limbe. It was quiet, and the streets were deserted.

  Shortly after, we turned onto a much smaller road and started climbing into the low mountains. We passed a small dirt road that climbed steeply to our left, then we squeezed through a narrow, one-lane pass carved through the rocks.

  Just on the other side of it, Marcel pulled off to the side of the road and waved for us to come up next to him.

  As we did, we could see a massive encampment stretched out below us—hundreds of tents, dozens of trucks, even a helicopter—all illuminated by the pale moonlight.

  Marcel leaned his head out the window. “That’s it. We’ll be okay. You should turn back.”

  Toma leaned forward and looked around me at him, shaking his head, speaking in Kreyol. When he was done, he looked up at me and pointed over his shoulder at the hillside to our left. “I know this place. I told them we’ll be up on that hill, watching, in case something happens.”

  I nodded. If something happened, we wouldn’t be in much of a position to do anything to help. But we’d try.

  Elena leaned forward, talking around Marcel the way Toma had talked around me. She shook her head.

  Toma sighed, then got out of the Jeep and ran around to her side of the van. They had a rapid back and forth, a lot of her shaking her head and him nodding. He kissed her on the cheek and ran back and got in the Jeep.

  “I told her we’d be watching the entire time, and when they were done, we would follow them back to Cap-Haïtien.”

  I barely knew the guy, but I felt somehow proud of him. He might have been an outlaw, but he had stepped up, and he was a good nephew. “Sounds good.”

  Marcel eased forward, and the van disappeared over the rise.

  Toma turned the Jeep around and doubled back through the narrow pass, then turned onto the steep dirt road that climbed the hill on the other side of it.

  We wound our way up for a half mile or so. Toma killed the headlights and slowed to a crawl, driving by moonlight as the road curved onto a small plateau overlooking the valley below.

  Below us, we could see the van’s headlights lighting up the road as Marcel and Elena headed toward the camp.

  80

  Toma raised the binoculars, following the van as it approached the camp. A spotlight lit up the night, and the van stopped in its tracks. I grabbed the binoculars as two soldiers with rifles approached them, one on either side.

  Toma grabbed them back, and after a few tense seconds, he let out a loud breath and lowered them. The soldiers waved the van through.

  I could kind of see what was going on, but Toma gave me a play-by-play as he watched through the binoculars. Marcel and Elena pulled up behind the tents, next to a clearing with some kind of green tanker trailer. As they unloaded the pots and other supplies from the truck, two sets of construction lights mounted on poles came on, drenching the area in a blue-white glare. Marce
l lit a fire and started filling pots with steaming hot water from the tanker trailer. Elena set up the ingredients.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost two A.M. I was relieved that I didn’t seem to be experiencing any respiratory symptoms from being coated in the Soyagene-X.

  “We should each try to get some rest,” I said. “Why don’t you go first. I’ll keep an eye on things and wake you up in an hour.”

  I wasn’t disappointed when he shook his head and said, “You go first. I’ll keep watch.” I didn’t argue, either.

  I was exhausted, and I figured an hour of shut-eye would do me good. He gave me two, which was nice of him, but he looked like hell when he woke me up with an elbow and said, “Breakfast time,” shoving the binoculars into my hands.

  Still half-asleep, I put them to my eyes. It was still dark, and my eyes were a little bleary, but I could see the soldiers lining up. In front of the line, Marcel and Elena stood next to two massive pots. An identical pair of pots sat over wood fires behind them.

  Everyone stood motionless, waiting. Then Dominique Ducroix appeared, leading a small group of officers past the waiting soldiers to the front of the line. Marcel and Elena served them bowls of mayi moulin porridge.

  Ducroix made a big deal of tasting his porridge, nodding and clapping Marcel on the shoulder. Apparently, it had passed the taste test. The officers turned and brought their breakfast back to a large tent in the middle of the camp, probably their command tent. Marcel and Elena began to serve the soldiers waiting in line.

  The line of soldiers never seemed to go down. As the ones in front got their breakfast and moved off to eat it, more would appear out of the tent city. Every few minutes, Marcel stirred the pots on the fire behind them. After ten minutes, the first two pots were empty, and together Marcel and Elena switched them for the two that had been over the fires. As Elena started serving up again, Marcel filled the two empty pots with hot water from the tank, stirred in the ingredients, and placed them on the fire. Then he went back to helping Elena serve.