KNIGHT'S REPORTS: 3 Book Set

by Gordon Kessler

  Radio squawking “E Z ... can you ...?” Squawking “... Knight, Agent Dooley, ... hear me?”

  The Coasties. We had at least limited communication, now.

  “You’re breaking up,” I told him. “Go ahead, but you’re breaking up.”

  Poodoo watched me questioningly.

  Squawking. “...in lifeboat. I repeat: personnel preparing to leave ...”

  “It’s Perre!” I told Poodoo, then replied on the radio, “Stop them! Destroy the lifeboat immediately. They are the kidnappers. They have the detonator control and must be stopped before they sink this ship.”

  Squawking. “Say again?”

  “Destroy that lifeboat immediately!”

  “Roger ... lifeboat ... in ... water. Destroy.”

  The helicopter’s engines roared overhead as they moved to position to take out the lifeboat.

  But before they’d made it to the stern, the entire ship shuddered under our feet as large explosions encompassed the ship’s hull under the waterline.

  More squawking. “... blew up. They ... blew up when ship’s charges detonated.”

  I told Poodoo, “At least we got Perre. I left him a gift in the lifeboat.”

  “You think he took all his men with him?”

  “It shouldn’t matter, now. They’ll be too busy escaping to get in our way.”

  The ship began to list slowly to one side.

  Poodoo said, “We’re sinking?”

  “I’d guess we’ll slip below the surface within five minutes.”

  “What do we do?”

  We hurried up the stairs to get a good look of our situation.

  Again, squawking. “... armed man atop container. Take him ... sniper!”

  We looked out at the steel-container-covered main bay.

  Poodoo said, “It’s Billy!”

  On the most forward row of containers, Billy White Cloud waved to us, an AK-74 in one hand, bolt cutters in the other.

  “No!” I shouted over my mic, unsure if they’d hear. “He’s friendly!”

  In the next instant, Nergal appeared, climbing from the side of the top container. He looked toward the aiming sniper in the chopper.

  Then Nergal stepped in front of Billy.

  “No, no, no!” I said over the radio. “Friendly! I repeat, friendly!”

  In a cloud of red, the high velocity .50 caliber round went through our new friend and took Billy down, too.

  CHAPTER 26

  Legba’s Legacy

  My orders to the Coast Guard sniper just got two really wonderful people killed, and this realization shook me to my core.

  “Roger!” came the late reply from the Coastie crew chief. “Cease fire! Cease fire! Friendlies involved!”

  I had to close the door on my personal issues, for now.

  I called on the radio, again, “Coast Guard diver, recover box floating on starboard side. I repeat: Coast Guard diver, recover floating box on ship’s starboard side.”

  “Roger,” CPO Price said. His voice was coming over the radio clearly again. “Diver will recover floating box. Will do, E Z!”

  Poodoo stood, scanning the topside for a way to get to Billy and Negrad.

  I asked her, “You know how to operate a crane?”

  She frowned at me. “Worked three summers for my uncle’s construction company during high school. Drove a D-5 Cat, and operated two different mobile cranes and a tower crane.”

  “Perfect.”

  * * *

  In three minutes, Poodoo was in the cab of the sinking Mazu’s aft container crane and swinging it to a catwalk midway up on the ship’s bridge, where I stood. I stepped onto the below-the-hook container cradle. It was an old crane and old equipment, but for our needs it would serve us just as well as if it were brand new.

  I gave her the hand signal to lift and take me to Billy and Nergal. Evidently, she was confident in my ability to hold onto an airborne bucking bronco, because I found myself white-knuckled and in a jostling stop next to our wounded comrades within about two seconds.

  I gladly leapt off.

  I was relieved to find Billy’s wound less than fatal. He’d already torn a strip from his shirt and made a tourniquet on his thigh above where the large caliber round had grazed him.

  I called over the microphone to Poodoo, “Assist that Coast Guard diver. Get that box aboard.”

  “Roger,” she said. “What’s the status on the boys?”

  I quickly assessed the two of them. “Billy will make it.”

  “Billy White Cloud?” I asked as I went to the seriously wounded Nergal.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “My name’s Knight. Your friend Poodoo and I are here to help.”

  “Thank God!” he said. “I was going to help Nergal after I tied this off.”

  I knelt beside Nergal and lifted his head slightly. The poor man had been shot twice, both times by friendly fire. Such is war, I remembered.

  Nergal’s wound was a through-and-through in the chest. I could only imagine what the exit wound looked like in his back. Although semi-conscious, he would die very quickly.

  “Good work, Nergal,” I told him. “You saved Billy.”

  He gave me the same smile he did when I first saw him at Legba’s cabin. Then his face became determined.

  “Legba ... must ... die.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My ... father.”

  I gaped at him.

  “Mama ... die ... when ... me ... two. Me ... think ... him ... kill ... her. She ... prostitute ... him ... make ... regular. When … Mama ... die, him ... take ... me … with … him. Live ... in ... basement. Him ... caster ... me — cut ... nuts ... off.”

  I found myself shaking my head. Legba castrated his own two-year-old son?

  Nergal continued, “Him ... dress ... me ... like ... girl. Then ... rape ... me — do ... terrible ... things.” He coughed up blood. “Leave ... me ... at ... orphanage ... when ... me ... twelve. Me ... find ... him, gonna ... kill ... him ... two ... months ... ago. But ... him ... give ... job — say ... me ... help ... save ... orphans.”

  He coughed again. I didn’t want to be heartless, but he was going to die within the next minute.

  “Who exactly is Legba? What’s his real name?”

  “Don’t ... know ... other ... name. See ... on ... TV ... lot.” His body stiffened and his eyes bugged from pain. Then, he went limp. He passed.

  Poodoo’s voice came over my helmet headset. “Here’s the box, E Z!”

  I laid Nergal’s head down respectfully.

  “He’s gone, Billy,” I said. “Can you help?”

  “Damn it! But, yes. I’m okay. Anything!”

  “Poodoo, get that container rig over here. We’re going to take it off the hook.”

  * * *

  With the bad guys gone, both of the Coast Guard weapons operators, the rescue diver and the sniper all came aboard and helped us with another hastily devised plan. Billy was to hang onto the crane hook and cut open the top containers, and then unlock the inter box connectors holding the top level of boxes to the bottom level. In the meantime, the rest of us assisted the children to the top of the containers. Then I’d add the one thing that could possibly save over five hundred people on a sinking ship.

  We found a moveable steel stairway and assisted the remaining children from the lower level of containers onto the tops of the upper level. By that time, the ship was swamped, water level rising above the main bay deck.

  With nearly 500 bodies on twelve, twenty-by-eight-foot containers, we each had about four square feet all to ourselves. It made it cozy, to say the least. We took our forty-eight balloons, and used one on the inside of each individual container on that top row, fully inflated. The other thirty-six balloons, we connected around the perimeter of our forty-foot by forty-eight-foot raft.

  We loaded the youngest children one at a time onto the Coast Guard chopper with the rescue winch as it hovered about forty feet overhead. The rest of the Coastie
crew, Billy, Poodoo and I joined forces to attach the top level of twelve containers to one another. We used two hundred feet of quarter-inch cable we’d found in the ship’s mechanical room. After that, we hung on and kept the children back from the edge of our makeshift raft.

  But as the ship sank, we began to tip toward the stern, and I realized it would not go down perfectly level. Hoping the old vessel wouldn’t list to one side and capsize, I got the Coast Guard chopper to hover overhead again. They dropped a heavy tow line that we hooked to the middle of the most aft containers. As the ship submerged, the chopper raised the end of our container raft carefully. Safely atop the now floating steel boxes, the ship sank slowly out from underneath us.

  The children were very quiet at first. Some had parents to go home to, but I took it that the majority did not. They were unsure of what would happen to them. But I assured them they would be well cared for, much more so than the past few days, weeks, and in some cases months that they were treated like caged animals.

  The Coasties tried to brighten spirits some, firing an occasional flare from the helicopter for a firework-like display to impress the kids.

  Finally, during a lull of quiet, Billy got the kids’ attention with a magic act. He made a coin disappear. One of the Coasties had a deck of playing cards and Billy used them to do some other slight-of-hand tricks. I inhaled some of the left-over helium and talked like Donald Duck. Billy and Poodoo joined in and we did our impersonation of an argument between Donald, Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

  Afterward, I could see Poodoo in a thoughtful pause, and I knew she was thinking about her own good friend Goofy and hoping he was recovering okay back in New Orleans.

  Myself? I was trying to figure out who Papa Legba really was. He couldn’t have been just some obscure Voodoo priest. He had to have a day job, legit or not. But whatever it was, it likely didn’t pay as well as the child-slavery gig he was into.

  With all of Legba’s known accomplices dead, we didn’t have much of a way to track him. Although my primary mission of saving Lance Corporal Billy White Cloud was over, I wasn’t about to rest until I brought Legba down, and down hard.

  Before the Coasties took their load of the youngest kids back to the mainland, I radioed to CPO Price on the chopper. Over the headset, I asked him if he happened to have any musical instruments aboard. Amazingly enough, he produced a ukulele and a harmonica, and they dropped each into my hands from forty feet above.

  “What else you guys got on that whirlybird?” I asked.

  He replied, “Let’s just say, if you don’t find it at Walmart, you might find it here.”

  With no more need for the short-range radio, I finally removed my helmet and headset and took charge of the ukulele. Poodoo was great on the harmonica, and I imagined she’d be dynamite on the saxophone — as in the photo I’d seen of her with Zack and Billy.

  We finished the night singing campfire songs — every campfire song we could think of. We had the children sing in rounds, and follow the beat with their hands against the steel containers we rode.

  Poodoo, Billy and I made sure each and every one of the nearly five hundred children on our barge broke out into a full and hardy chuckle at least a dozen times. It was great to hear their laughter.

  About four in the morning, the children were getting pretty droopy-eyed. Billy brought a little blonde-haired girl over to meet me. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. I immediately thought of my own daughter and son, near her age, and a dark, deep pit of anguish and regret opened up in my soul. I missed them so much.

  “This is Tallie,” Billy said. “She was the last one they brought aboard. They kidnapped her a couple of days ago from a hotel she was vacationing at with her parents. She’s really scared someone will take her again.” He shook his head and then scanned the crowd of mostly sleeping children. Then he coaxed Tallie toward me. “She wants to thank you.”

  I smiled, bent down and took her hand.

  She wanted more than a handshake, grabbing ahold of me with both arms, and she began sobbing.

  “Thank you!” she exclaimed between gasps. “Thank you so much! I miss my momma and daddy! Thank you for saving us!”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re safe now.” I held her back so that I could assure her face-to-face. “And you’ll always be safe as long as I’m alive.”

  I noticed she held the little Voodoo doll Legba had been tormenting me with back at the cabin. It must have been hanging out of my back pocket when she grabbed around me, and she’d pulled it out.

  “Here,” I said, “you can have the little dolly, and I’ll write a phone number on it where you’ll always be able to get in touch with me.”

  I found a marker in an emergency bag the Coasties had given us and carefully printed my phone number. Then I handed the Voodoo gris-gris back to her. I was confident the worst of our turmoil was over, including any Voodoo spells that had been cast my way. Besides, the minimal risk of a hoodoo-induced kidney-stone attack or two was worth seeing this little girl’s smile.

  She held the little limp rag and hair doll to her cheek and laid down on one of the many blankets we’d spread out for the children.

  “Be careful of the pins,” I said. “Believe me, they can hurt you.”

  After a couple of grinning glances, she soon fell asleep.

  Finally, just before the first rays of sunlight, and hours into our wait to be rescued, the full moon sunk to the horizon. I was reminded of “The Cowboy Song” by John Patrick Shanley from the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movie Joe Versus the Volcano. Poodoo and I sang it softly as all the children, and even Billy and the Coasties fell off to a surprisingly peaceful slumber aboard the newly Christened USS Billy n‘ Kids.

  Meanwhile, during the eight hours adrift on our nighttime float, the Coast Guard and the National Guard flew several helicopters to assist us and they evacuated some of the children. But we still had over two hundred of the older kids aboard our huge improvised raft at sunup.

  What a sight we must have been when the sun rose above the ocean and the passenger cruise ship Maya Queen II found us.

  CHAPTER 27

  Senator or Serpent?

  The cruise ship Maya Queen II got everyone boarded by breakfast time and the children were treated to warm food and cool drinks, fruit and rest in donated cabins. It proceeded to New Orleans, a bit off its original course set for Orlando. CPO Price and our Coasties on the MH-65C got refueled, and they returned for us. We rode back, eager to track down Legba, give him his comeuppance and to nail down this craziness once and for all.

  “He could be anyone,” I told Poodoo. “He has money and influence.”

  “Lots of folks like that down here,” she said. “As many rich and influential folks as there are poverty stricken. Most of the middle-class left town after Hurricane Katrina.”

  “So what do we know about him?” I asked.

  “I’ve never seen him. You’re the only one living that we know of who has.”

  I sighed. “He’s black, likes to wear tons of makeup, a top hat with feathers and an ace of spades, chicken bones around his neck and a leopard skirt.”

  “Leopard skirt?” Poodoo asked. “What color of high heels?”

  We both chuckled. We needed a little comedy relief.

  I related to her what Nergal had told me about being Legba’s illegitimate child and his father castrating him, then using him as a sex slave.

  “Oh my God! The poor man. What an awful life.”

  “People, especially children, mean nothing to this prick. Just something to wipe his blade off on once he’s stuck it in them.”

  Poodoo shook her head, sorrowfully. She asked, “What’s his height and build?”

  “He’s maybe five-foot-eleven, one ninety and muscular. Sharp features as near as I can tell. Probably considered a very handsome man.”

  Poodoo raised her eyebrows. “You were checking him out, were you?”

  “No. After Big Bad John in your closet, I have
eyes for no other.”

  “Well, you did act like —”

  “Wait!” I told her

  “Okay, I’m sorry —”

  “No, stop!”

  She said, “I didn’t realize you were so sensitive all of a sudden.”

  “Your TV!”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t film our escapades. You won’t see it on YouTube tomorrow.” She smiled. “Wish I had borrowed a video camera, though —”

  “Poodoo!”

  “What?”

  I told her, “Nergal said he saw his father, Papa Legba, on TV a lot.”

  “Yeah, so we’ve narrowed it down to only a couple thousand people.”

  “Who have you seen more on TV lately than anyone else?”

  “Lots of folks; news people, weathermen, sports casters…”

  “Think Mardi Gras,” I said.

  “Paraders and partiers. City officials. Politicians — it is an election year.”

  “Bingo!”

  “Politicians?”

  “Not just any politician. Papa Legba is like the Voodoo King, right?”

  Poodoo thought for a moment. “Yeah, I guess.” She frowned.

  “What about the Carnival King? The King of Mardi Gras?”

  “Senator James Bourdieu?”

  “Remember Goofy saying he threw that beer bottle at the Caddy limo Marie got into after she stabbed him?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I saw Bourdieu’s limo on television. It clearly had a dimple in the trunk lid and a small crack on the rear window. That’s something a senator would have fixed pretty damn quickly, right? So it was recent damage.”

  “You’re adding up the circumstantial evidence, but still not enough for an arrest.”

  “How about identifying a tattoo on his neck? I didn’t see the entire thing, but he’s got the same serpent head tattooed on the back of his neck as Legba.”

  “That’s one more very circumstantial piece of evidence.”

  Frustrated, I asked, “What more can I give you?”

  “A confession would be nice, but I’d even take an eye witness.”

  * * *

  The CPO Price radioed ahead to the proper authorities. But not law enforcement. I asked him to have the New Orleans Coast Guard Command Center’s public information officer to get ahold of every television and radio news station they could to inform them of an impromptu news conference Senator James Bourdieu was having.