by Mack Maloney
Despite the surreal circumstances, the two brigands were in awe of her. Her beauty, her grace, even in this repugnant place. It was remarkable.
The pirates briefly considered sexually assaulting her. When would they have this chance again? But Commander Kalish was positively obsessed with this goddess and he would have them painfully killed if he found out that they had touched her before he had. So they dismissed the idea quickly.
Instead they told her to put up her hands and continue walking slowly toward them. One pirate removed his belt, ready to tie her hands behind her. They both took a deep sniff and smelled her perfume.
Yes, they had seen her movies. The love stories, the serious Shakespeare role and the action flicks. But as beautiful and graceful as she seemed, Emma Simms had another thing going for her. While she rarely did her own stunts, she’d seen plenty of real stunt people in action. Plus she’d been training, taking jiujitsu, karate, sambu and even some kung fu, so that someday, she wouldn’t need any body doubles.
That’s why neither pirate knew what hit him. One moment they were about to make her their prisoner, the next they were being hit in the face, the stomach, the groin. She was suddenly not the graceful, helpless American blonde anymore. Instead she was a whirling dervish of fists, knees and feet.
Both men were immediately knocked to the deck, losing their weapons in the process. Emma stood over them, as surprised as they. Then two more kicks, one to each man’s temple, and they were out for good.
Emma retrieved their weapons. She gave one to the most able male in the group and told him to stay put, and protect the others if any more pirates came to the mess hall.
Then, she slipped out the open door, alone.
* * *
ALPHA SQUAD WAS almost out of ammunition.
The Senegals’ firing line had delivered twenty-two fusillades, killing and wounding so many pirates, their bodies were stacked like cordwood atop the raised cargo hatch.
Using Gunner’s Berretta, Nolan had added to the systematic barrage. But now, with each Senegal only having a few rounds left, they were all firing at will and making sure their last few bullets went where they counted.
As all this was happening, Nolan and Gunner spotted a third dhoni coming close to the freighter’s port side. No words were needed this time. Gunner immediately aimed his bloodstained weapon over the mass of pirates and fired his last shell. The dhoni was so close he couldn’t miss. The projectile passed through the boat’s exhaust pipe and into its power plant. Once again, there was a spectacular explosion. The engine split in two and the boat’s fuel tank caught fire. The dhoni was instantly engulfed in flames, sinking quickly under a massive cloud of steam.
It was hard for Nolan and Gunner to tell whether it was because they might have finally iced the Bom-Kats command ship or that the Bom-Cats were simply switching tactics, but as soon as the third dhoni went down, the number of pirates coming over the railing stopped.
The Bom-Kats’ plan now seemed to be to let their new recruits finish off the ship’s defenders and then let their gunmen, the majority of whom were still on the speedboats, take over the ship at their leisure.
The Senegals expended the last of their ammo when a large group of pirates charged the Alpha position. The advance was stopped in its tracks, but that was it—all of Alpha’s ammunition was gone. Gunner and the Senegals began battering the pirates with the butts of their assault weapons. The fight spilled off the cargo hatch and onto the deck just below the bridge on the starboard side. Here, the hand-to-hand combat quickly became vicious.
Nolan put the last bullet from the borrowed Beretta into the chest of a pirate who had climbed the stern cargo mast with ideas of swinging down on the firing line. Nolan then reached into the box of galley knives, pulling one out that looked like an old-fashioned cutlass. He cut a cargo rope and used it to swing down onto the deck, landing on top of the mass of Bom-Kats who were fighting Gunner and the Senegals. He knocked over the pirates like bowling pins.
While the attackers were temporarily sprawled on the deck, Nolan had time to push the Korean crewmen up onto the bridge. With their horribly burned hands and other wounds, they could not help any longer. Two of the Senegals were also badly wounded; they, too, were hoisted up onto the bridge.
That left just Nolan, Gunner and the three lesser-injured Senegals battling for their lives.
About two dozen pirates were still fighting. They were jammed on the starboard deck; Alpha Squad was holding their ground just to the left of the bridge ladder. The pirates’ goal was the bridge itself; everyone knew once they seized it, this little war would be over.
The pirates were charging the defenders in fits and starts, trying to slash at the squad members who beat them back with their rifle butts, or stabbed them with the galley knives. Particularly ghastly was the way those pirates unlucky enough to go down near Gunner were dispatched. The big man was still armed with his meat cleaver and he was slashing away at anything that came close to him.
It was brutal and barbaric and endless, and by far, the worst combat Nolan had ever been in. His hands were covered in blood; some of it was his, and some of it belonging to the pirates he’d stabbed. His muscles ached so much from swinging the heavy cutlasslike knife, he was reaching his breaking point. The big knife felt like it weighed a ton.
Making the situation even worse, while the Koreans had abandoned using the burning hydraulic fluid as a weapon, one last pail had been left over the fire barrel. It was sending out billows of acrid smoke, saturating the deck area, making it hard to see and even harder to breath.
Nolan actually thought: Maybe I shouldn’t have lit that fire on board. It had been nothing but bad luck ever since.
It was inevitable, but the tide of this desperate battle finally turned in the pirates’ favor. Nolan could barely lift his arms. Gunner and the three Senegals were struggling just to stay on their feet. Out of the corner of his good eye, Nolan saw two pirates break off from the main group and disappear from sight. They were obviously sneaking around to attack the squad from the rear, but there was nothing Alpha could do to stop them.
Nolan summoned up one last burst of energy and slashed three pirates enough to push them back. Gunner joined in the thrust and the remaining dozen or so pirates were momentarily stopped from advancing.
But then Nolan heard cries from behind them. He looked over his shoulder to see that, sure enough, two pirates were coming at them from the other direction.
Two things went through his mind at that moment. He was sure the toxic fumes were making him delusional, because he found himself thinking back to when he’d brushed the tear from Emma’s cheek. It seemed like a million years ago. He could still smell her light perfume as well. And for some reason, these two things made him want to just lie down right there and go to sleep.
Then a voice in his head whispered: “You’ll sleep for a long time soon enough.”
So now he just waited for the blow. A knife to his back or to his chest. It didn’t make much of a difference. This was where it was all going to end—defending a bunch of dying refugees on the worst ship afloat, somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
But … that grim fate was not to be. Because, as it turned out, a guardian angel was watching over him.
Nolan turned to confront the pirates coming up in back of him—a last ditch attempt to simply face his killers—when he saw them stop in their tracks and look down at their chests. Bubbles of blood had appeared all over them.
The next thing Nolan knew, Gunner had slammed him to the deck. He hit hard, and the three Senegals fell on top of him; he felt like they were crushing every vertebra in his back. But in all the confusion, Nolan was still able to see the remaining pirates they’d been battling in front dropping to the deck as well. They, too, were bleeding. They’d all been shot dead. But who was doing the shooting?
Nolan’s head was spinning. His lungs were full of toxic smoke. His hands were splattered with blood and he felt half dead a
lready.
But he somehow mustered the strength to turn his head and look behind him again.
That’s when he saw Emma Simms standing up on the bridge, a smoking AK-47 in her hands.
17
THERE WAS A bad part of town in Monte Carlo.
It was tucked into a corner near the east end of the city; a single block lost in the shadows of the tallest luxury buildings.
The block was comprised of a few elderly apartment buildings, a handful of open-air cafés and what passed for a variety store in this part of the world. An alley snaked through the small neighborhood and down this alley, after a few twists and turns, was a tiny hostel.
It had seven minuscule rooms, stacked one on top of another. Batman and Twitch were now occupying the top floor.
They had no money and they’d exhausted every way they knew of to get any. Their debit card simply did not work. Nor could they figure out how to successfully make a phone call.
They were able to rent the room in the formerly sold-out boarding house only because they convinced the owner they were expecting funds to be wired to them soon and would pay him twice the going rate once they arrived. Because the proprietor was missing three fingers on his left hand, Batman and Twitch purposely exposed their prostheses while spinning him this tale. He rented them the room for nothing up front.
So they had a roof, albeit leaky, over their heads. And they had a place to sleep, though it was basically two rollouts on a cracked tile floor with folded towels as pillows.
They’d also eaten a little by walking through the Sun Casino, again prostheses in full view, and openly stealing bits of food from the buffets.
But there was no getting away from it.
They were the poorest two people in Monte Carlo.
* * *
THEY’D MOVED INTO the room shortly before midnight, five hours after being thrown out of the Grand Maison.
The next morning was the day before the start of the Grand Prix, and as bad and rundown as their hotel room was—its previous occupant had been arrested for counting cards, creating the vacancy—it actually had a fairly good view of Avenue des Beaux-Arts. Had they wanted it, they would have had an excellent seat for the race. But this had zero interest for Batman. He was still trying to figure a way out of their bizarre situation. Watching multimillion-dollar cars go flashing by their flophouse at 180 mph was the last thing he wanted to do.
The noise of these race cars revving their engines for practice laps roused him after only a few hours of restless sleep. In those first few uncertain moments upon waking, reality hit him like a ton of bricks. They’d arrived in Monte Carlo in first class, were given everything imaginable—the best booze, the best drugs, the best girls, ultraplatinum accommodations—and then suddenly, they’d been turned into nonpersons, virtual untouchables. Just when they should have been on top of their game trying to locate the Z-box, they’d been completely marginalized—and probably robbed.
Whoever was screwing with them was an expert at it.
* * *
FOR BETA SQUAD, the worm began to turn just after Batman woke up.
He was reheating some coffee they’d stolen from a casino the night before when he heard Twitch scream. He turned to see his colleague hanging halfway out of the room’s only window, yelling something.
But Batman couldn’t really hear him due to the racket of the Grand Prix cars zipping by.
So Twitch began yelling louder: “You gotta see this!”
“No thanks…” Batman replied, tasting the foul coffee. “No interest in race cars … Had enough of that last night.”
But then Twitch walked over, grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him halfway out the window
“I said ‘Look!’” Twitch commanded him. “Down there…”
But all Batman could see were the race cars screaming by, taking their practice laps.
“OK—fast fucking cars,” he yelled back at Twitch. “So what?”
“Screw the cars,” Twitch told him. “Look down on the sidewalk—in that café.”
Batman did as told and saw nothing unusual—for the first few seconds.
But then, he saw what Twitch saw.
Sitting at a table almost right below them was a familiar face.
Batman was stunned.
“Wow—is that who I think it is?” he gasped.
Twitch was sure. “It’s him…” he said.
It was Audette. The CIA agent who’d come aboard The Immaculate Perception to brief them in the first place.
But no sooner had Batman seen him than the agent stood up, threw some money on the table, then quickly hailed a cab on a side street and disappeared, almost as if he knew he’d been spotted.
“Freaking spook,” Batman said once he had gone. “I wonder what he’s doing here?”
* * *
THEY WERE SURPRISED to find a library in Monte Carlo.
It was part of a small culinary and hospitality college run by a consortium of local casinos. While it wasn’t exactly open to the public, Batman and Twitch, once again making sure their prostheses were on display, played the sympathy card to get past the head librarian and into the media room.
Twitch was Whiskey’s computer whiz, plus he could type faster than Batman. They found an unoccupied PC and he immediately went to work.
Their number one goal was to get a secure communication to Kilos Shipping headquarters in Aden. But though they had the right address and password, after ten minutes and as many attempts, Twitch couldn’t get the e-mail to go through.
This was all too familiar. Everything else on the computer worked: browsers, Web sites opened, even Skype popped on the screen. But, for whatever reason, the computer refused to send any kind of message Twitch created.
“I don’t get it,” he said to Batman. “Do they rig these things so once you’re in paradise, they don’t want you to talk to people who aren’t here?”
“It’s e-mail, man,” Batman replied, frustration boiling over. “They got e-mail in freaking Siberia. Why not here?”
Even when they switched to another computer, one that they’d seen the previous user sending e-mails from, it simply would not work for them. They even tried to send Kilos a fax on line, but like the e-mail it disappeared into the ethers.
It was just like the ATMs and the public phones the night before. It didn’t make sense. It was as if the technology itself was against them.
Then Batman got an idea. “Let’s forget the e-mail bullshit for a minute,” he said to Twitch. “Do you think you can get past the Grand Maison Casino’s computer security system?”
Twitch was already typing. Not twenty seconds later he said: “I’m in. What do we want to know?”
Batman thought a moment, then said: “How about this: Obviously we didn’t pay a dime for that penthouse. And we certainly didn’t reserve it and now there’s a good chance that it was all just an elaborate setup. But it must have cost someone something, right? At least for the food and booze?”
“Probably…” Twitch replied.
“So then,” Batman told him. “Let’s see who actually paid for all the Macallan and those Dolce & Gabbanas and Cohiba Behike cigars.”
Five more minutes of frenzied typing followed and Twitch was eventually able to get into the casino’s encrypted financial files. Then he began a search for who paid for all the accoutrements they’d enjoyed while in their luxurious suite.
It took a few more minutes, but finally Twitch was able to pull up a long list of items that had been “routed” to the Grand Maison’s royal penthouse. It was all there: the cigars, the liquor, the cotton robes and the eagle eggs.
Twitch read the total off the screen: “Twenty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-two dollars, including the meals and booze.”
He looked up at Batman.
“This for a room that was still being renovated? A place that wasn’t even supposed to be open?” he exclaimed.
“Had to be a bribe,” Batman replied. “Someone on
the inside got paid off for making it all look legit. The real question, though, is who paid the bill?”
More typing, but Twitch eventually found a name.
“It says some guy named Bobby Murphy paid the bill,” he reported. “In cash, no less.”
Batman had to read it for himself.
“‘Bobby Murphy?’” he said. “Who the hell is Bobby Murphy?”
* * *
IT WAS A slow morning at the Monte-Carlo Bay Casino.
The newest of the handful of gambling halls in the small principality, most of the patrons were out near the casino’s front entrance watching the Formula One cars take their practice laps in anticipation of the big race kickoff the next day.
One man was sitting at the Chemin de Fer table, though, counting his meager piles of chips.
It was CIA agent Mark Audette. He was killing time.
His breakfast that morning had been several cups of coffee at a nearby café and nothing else. He’d drank a soda with ice around 10:00 A.M. and another one a half hour later.
Finally, his bladder started calling for relief. It was time to visit the facility.
He left the card table and walked to the nearest men’s room. Two men dressed in maintenance worker clothes followed him in. Suddenly one of the men slammed the door shut and locked it from the inside.
The next thing Audette knew, he was looking down the barrel of a Glock 9.
“What the fuck…” was all he was able to say before he realized it was Batman on the other end of the gun.
“You?” he gasped. “The pirate guy?”
“And my trusty Boy Wonder, Robin,” Batman said, indicating Twitch, who was standing behind Audette.
“How did you know I would be here?” he asked them.
“A government employee—in a place like Monte Carlo?” Batman replied. “No surprise you’d be staying in the cheapest place in the city.”
Audette began squirming.
“Why the hardware?” he said. “We’re all on the same side here, remember?”
“Are we?” Batman asked, pressing the pistol a little closer to his nose. “Are you even with the Agency?”
