Chase Baker and the God Boy: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book No. 3)

by Vincent Zandri

  “Rudy,” Tony says, “you go down there now, you’ll be shot on the spot.”

  “Tony’s right,” I say. “The Thuggees are crawling all over the joint. You’ll never make it.”

  There must be three hundred slaves chopping away at the walls with hydraulic chisels and lightweight jackhammers. Some use old-fashioned picks and iron bars to free the little chunks of diamond. Working alongside them are the wheel barrel men who are forced to push the overloaded barrels up a ramp made of wood plank-topped scaffolding that winds its way around the entire mine perimeter.

  Out the corner of my eye, I catch a particularly thin and weak man who is pushing his wheel barrel up the incline. Problem is, his strength is running out. He’s barely half way up when his wheel barrel tips, dumping the contents out onto the rocky floor below. One of the black-robed bandits jogs up to the sick looking slave, shoulders his Kalashnikov and shoots him on the spot.

  The shot reverberates across the entire mine, causing everyone to stop what they’re doing, if only for a few brief seconds. That’s when the source of the gunshot is revealed. Some of the Thuggees remove their red sashes, spin them like you would a towel, and with the little metal pendant attached to the very tip, savagely whip the exposed backs of the slaves until the flesh opens up and bleeds.

  Maybe I don’t understand Nepalese or any of the Indian dialects. But I don’t have to know the language to realize they are shouting at the slaves to get back to work. Get back to work… or die.

  I turn back to the others.

  “You got a plan?” Tony says.

  “It’s not much,” I say, cocking the AK-47, “but at least we have the element of surprise.”

  “Chase,” Anjali says, worry painting her face, “perhaps we should rethink this. You can get killed going in there like a Wild West cowboy.”

  “You’d be surprised how effective an all-out frontal assault can be.”

  “You do what you have to,” says Rudy, setting down his rifle. “And I’m going to do what I have to do. All I ask is that you let me do my thing first.”

  “Rudy,” Tony says. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Utilizing stealth to my advantage,” the barkeep says, pulling off his shirt, then his boots and finally his pants so that he’s wearing nothing but baggy blue boxer shorts inscribed with little skulls and crossbones. “I’m going to slip in alongside one of those poor slaves, fill me a wheel barrel full of fortune and fame, and then I’m going to simply walk out of this creepy place, a very wealthy man.”

  “Way to help out with our cause of reuniting a mother with her son,” Tony says, acid in his tone and on his pursed lips.

  “One for Rudy,” says the bartender while rolling up his clothing in a ball, tucking it under his arm, “and all for Rudy. That’s what I say.”

  Anjali shakes her head in disbelief.

  “Do what you gotta do, Rudy,” I say, “But be quick about it.”

  “You’re going to let him try and get away with this, Chase?” Anjali says.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “Rudy is a survivor. Isn’t that right, Rudy?”

  He grins likes he’s already rich, the process of digging up a few gems merely a minor inconvenience.

  “You got that right, Mr. Chase. Sorry things didn’t work out the way you wanted them to. But then, them’s the breaks.”

  Climbing up the short wall over the three portholes, he then makes the descent on the other side and slowly shimmies his way along the angled side of the crevice and into the diamond pit. I have to give him credit, because he manages to do so quickly and without alarm so that within a few seconds, he’s blended in with the hundreds of half-naked slaves, filling up his own wheel barrel with chunks of rock he’s removing from the quarry with a pickaxe.

  A full minute goes by before one of the Thuggee bandits spots him.

  “Okay guys,” I say, “this is our cue. Maybe Rudy thinks he’s gone rogue, but he’s actually providing us with an invaluable service. He’s providing us with a distraction.”

  “Lock and load,” Tony says, cocking his AK47, then stuffing some chew inside his cheek.

  “May the good Lord watch over us,” Anjali says, pulling back the slide on her .9mm.

  “On three,” I say.

  I start counting. Before the sound of the number three has exited my lips, we’re over the wall.

  31

  A pair of guards are about to pounce on Rudy when I line them up in my sights, shoot them dead. The Thuggee might appear terrifying and indestructible as all hell in their black robes, hoods, masked faces, revealing only black eyes filled with hate, but their skin and flesh are just as fragile as anyone else’s. And when they drop dead, they look very dead and the frightening exterior they once possessed only a few moments before now appear comic as their bodies and limbs contort spastically under their own weight.

  But they keep coming at us, which is what I want as Tony and I cut them down one by one. Anjali acts as a kind of Gunga Din, stealing weapons and ammo from the dead and feeding them to us as fast as we can shoot them. It takes me a moment to relocate him, but when I do, I see Rudy doing something that defies all logic. Still dressed in nothing but his boxer shorts, he is wheeling a wheel barrel full of gravel and diamonds up the ramp, the bullets whizzing past his head as if they were nothing more than harmless mosquitoes.

  “Rudy!” I scream. “Get down! Go back!”

  But all he sees are dollar signs dancing around his head. Nothing is going to prevent him from becoming a man rich beyond his wildest dreams. But when a Kalashnikov-armed Thuggee, who’s making his way down the ramp, spots the bartender trying to make off with the loot, he triggers a long burst that nearly splits Rudy in two at the waist. Despite the wounds, Rudy somehow manages to take a couple of more steps while pushing the wheel barrel, as if his brain has not yet registered the fact that not only is wealth beyond his wildest dreams going to elude him, so is living. His body, along with the contents of the wheel barrel, falls over the side of the ramp onto the pit floor below.

  Glancing at Tony, I can see his face go tight as a tick, his eyes wide. Rudy was his friend. Sure, Rudy wasn’t much of a team player, but you don’t shoot one of Tony’s friends and not pay for it. He grabs hold of a second AK47 and begins shooting two-fisted into the sea of Thuggees, firing from the hip, Rambo-style, screaming at the top of his lungs. It’s a massacre as the Thuggees drop dead, one after the other, some of them falling on top of one other.

  The slaves are quick to notice that their captures are losing not only the battle but the war. Slowly, they emerge from whatever cover they can find and begin to toss rocks at the Thuggees. Some of the slaves attack the bandits with their pickaxes and others use their shovels, letting loose with a rage and vengeance that’s been pent up for weeks and months. When the slaves are able to steal some weapons, they begin to shoot the Thuggees down with all the efficiency of mining diamonds from the diamond mine. The spontaneous slave revolt is so successful that Tony and I are able to cease fire.

  “Let’s go get the boy,” I say to Anjali, shouldering my weapon.

  Spotting one of the slaves who is firing upon the now retreating Thuggee, I pull him aside.

  “Speak English?” I say.

  He bears the sweat and dirt-covered concave-cheeked face of a man who is starving, but his eyes are filled with happiness and revenge. I ask him where they keep the God Boy…the boy with six arms. Surely he knows of the boy.

  He raises his right hand, points to a place at the top of the pit, not far from where the ramp meets the exit corridor.

  He says, “At the top of the ramp you will see a steel door embedded in the wall. They keep the child in there. But you will not be able to get inside without a key.” He pauses. Then, “But I know something that might help you.”

  He makes his way back down into the pit and, slipping both his hands under the robe of a dead Thuggee, comes back with three sticks of dynamite.

 
“Use these,” he says.

  “Old school,” I say.

  But he just shakes his head like he doesn’t understand my meaning.

  “Anjali, let’s go,” I say. Then, looking around for Tony, I finally locate him. He’s kneeling over Rudy, where the bartender landed beside the ramp.

  “Tony,” I say, “we’ve got to move.”

  But he raises his hand, waves me off, like he needs to make peace with his friend first. After a moment that seems like an hour, he sets the same hand onto Rudy’s eyes and closes them. Standing, he walks away from Rudy for the final time and without a word, begins the climb up the ramp.

  32

  At the top of the ramp, we come to the long corridor that leads out through the still open steel doors. To our left is a small alcove. Planted in the center of the far wall is a solid metal door that’s been padlocked. There’s no window embedded in the door so it’s impossible to make a visual on the God Boy.

  “Anjali,” I say, “we have to blow the door and do it now.”

  “What if he is injured in the blast?” she says, ever the concerned mother.

  “Chance we gotta take,” I say. “But maybe you can speak to him through the door, warn him of what’s coming.”

  Anjali approaches the door, presses her ear to it, as if listening for a sign of life. The look on her face is both desperation and joy. The emotions fight one another. On one hand, she is convinced her son is being held against his will on the opposite side of this steel door, and on the other, there’s the chance of him either being hurt or ill or both. Perhaps he is even dead. The only way to know what to expect is to get him out of there as quickly and safely as possible.

  “Rajesh,” she says sternly. “This is your mother. I have come for you. If you can hear me, I need you to get away from the door. There is going to be a loud explosion and then the door is going to fall off. Do you understand me?” She then repeats the same words in her native tongue, as though speaking to her child in two different languages will make him understand without question, the importance of his being nowhere near the door when it blows.

  Pulling one of the sticks of dynamite from my waistband, I fit it into the U-shaped clasp on the padlock. Then, reaching into the left chest pocket on my bush jacket, I retrieve my Bic lighter.

  “Stand back,” I say, lighting the fuse.

  The three of us exit the alcove out into the hall, where we step away from the opening, pressing our backs against the stone wall. The explosion is loud, fiery, and powerful. It seems as if the entire diamond quarry is shaken loose.

  Spinning around, we head back through the opening and see that the door has been blown open to reveal a simple room not much bigger than a jail cell. I get my first look at the boy then. The God Boy. He is seated on the stone floor of the windowless room, lotus style. His many arms are open wide, his hands positioned palms upward. He is bare-chested and bare-legged, with only a loin cloth for clothing, and he is sickly thin. His hair is richly black, parted in the center, and so long it drapes his smooth, round face like a silk veil.

  Despite the force and suddenness of the explosion, he seems to be caught up in a kind of trance. He might be only five years old and in terrible health, but the energy that he gives off is something I’ve never before experienced. It is as physical as it is emotional. Maybe there really is something to his being considered a God. Perhaps his physical condition is not just a birth defect, but, in fact, something more. Nepal and India are the lands of reincarnation. Places where death is not an end, but the natural beginning to a new life. Is it possible Rajesh is the reincarnation of one of these Gods? Or am I letting my imagination run away with itself?

  …You didn’t imagine that stone Kali peeling itself away from the wall, or the giant face of Kali appearing in the quaking earth, or the vaporous image of Kali being summoned when Elizabeth’s heart was cut out… You didn’t imagine any of it… This isn’t fiction like one of your books, Chase…

  Anjali goes to her son, drops to her knees before the boy, embraces him by kissing both his cheeks. Tears run down her face as she takes the small boy in her arms, cradles him like he’s a newborn. Fact is, he can’t weigh more than twenty-five or thirty pounds. Maybe less. She lifts him up off the floor and he smiles at his mother, wrapping his hands around her neck.

  “You are safe, Rajesh,” she says. “Nothing can happen to you now.”

  “These men,” Rajesh whispers. “These bad men stick needles in me. They make me very, very sleepy, mother.”

  Tony and I lock eyes.

  “They’ve been drugging him,” he says. “Sedating him. Bastards.”

  “Let’s just get the hell out of here while we have the chance,” I insist.

  Pulling the Kalashnikov off my shoulder, I grip it with both hands at the ready. Tony does the same. I step out into the hall to the intermittent sounds of gunfire coming from down in the pit combined with screaming, dying men—most of them Thuggees—I proceed towards the open steel doors.

  “Double-time everyone,” I say, picking up the pace.

  We’re not fifty feet from freedom when the doors slam closed, and the electric light in the corridor goes black.

  33

  I pull out my mini-Maglite, shine it on the opposite end of the corridor near the alcove and the entrance to the main diamond pit ramp. The pair of steel doors protecting that end of the corridor have also been automatically closed. I shine the light up one end of the corridor and down the other.

  “What shall we do, Chase?” Anjali pleads.

  “Just stay still,” Tony says. “For certain, Kashmiri is listening in. Aren’t you Kashmiri, you terrorist bastard?”

  Tony’s words echo inside the stone and concrete corridor like the Mayday warning on a crashing jetliner.

  “I don’t like this,” he adds, pointing the barrel of his rifle at one set of doors, then pointing it at the other and back again, as if at any second they might open up and release an army of Thuggees to descend upon us. Maybe that’s exactly what’s about to happen.

  But the doors don’t open and no bandits pour into the long, narrow space. Instead, something begins to float down from the ceiling like a heavy cloud. Raising the MagLite I can see that a gas is being sprayed into the corridor via a series of spouts mounted to the concrete ceiling.

  “They’re gassing us,” I say while recalling the two additional dynamite sticks shoved into my pant waist. “Head for the doors. We’ll blast our way out.”

  We run as the floor splits down the center and opens up onto a deep, dark, bottomless, black hole.

  34

  Opening my eyes, I pull myself back up onto my feet. I see that I have entered into a second concrete corridor that is dimly illuminated not from electric light, but from something that’s positioned at the very end of the corridor. I’m alone. I have no idea where the others have gone. If they are alive or dead. I only know that I’m standing in this long corridor and that I am not afraid.

  Soon the light shifts and the silhouette of a body takes shape. The body comes closer, its footsteps echo on the concrete floor. The closer the person comes, the more I can tell she is a woman. When she is closer still, I can see that she is not just any woman.

  She is Elizabeth.

  Eyes fill. Heart beats.

  “Elizabeth,” I say. “I saw you…”

  She raises her hand, smiles, brings her fingers as close as she can to my lips without actually touching them.

  “I know what you saw,” she says. “I felt your presence when it happened. I knew you were close.”

  “But not close enough.”

  “That’s my fault. I left you, remember? At the train station.”

  I look her up and down. Her hair is clean and long, parted neatly on the side. She’s wearing a clean, black, T-shirt and a pair of green cargo pants, leather Cleopatra sandals on her feet. She looks like she’s never been healthier. Even her toenails are painted a light shade of red.

  “But I never
stopped loving you,” I say. “I never stopped thinking about you.”

  “I never stopped loving you either, Chase. But I knew I would never be happy until I located the statue. And finally, I did.”

  “Are you happy now?”

  She cocks her head over her shoulder.

  “That’s a very good question,” she says bright eyed. “You know, this state I am in…It’s all new to me.”

  Raising my hand slowly, I attempt to touch her. But she backs away.

  “Unh uh, pal,” she says from the corner of her mouth. “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m in transition.”

  “What’s that mean exactly?”

  “It means I’m not of the earth anymore, but I’m also not of heaven. I’m transitioning.”

  “Where to?”

  “To another life, duh.”

  “You’re going to be born again,” I say like a question.

  “Here’s what I know so far about being…well…not alive,” she says. “It’s all true. We live again. Until we get it right.”

  “Does that mean we have the chance to try again? As in you and me?”

  Her expression softens.

  “You never know.” Then, “But before that, you must do something.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Do you still have the key?”

  I pull it out of my shirt, holding the leather necklace it’s attached to.

  “You must find a way to unlock the Golden Kali Statue. Only when you unlock it and open its doors will Kali return to where she belongs in the belly of the statue. For inside the belly of the statue is a portal that leads to a universe unto itself. I know it sounds like something out of ‘Close Encounters,’ but it really is something you cannot possibly comprehend in your present state.”

  “My alive flesh-and-blood state here on little old earth.”