RW16 - Domino Theory

by Richard Marcinko

  From the stars, most of their eyes moved north to her face, where they briefly settled on her bindi, a sequined red star at the center of her forehead.

  * * *

  What the hell are those bindi things, anyway?

  Traditionally, married women wore a red powdered dot in the middle of their foreheads the way women in the West wore wedding rings, telling the world that they were taken. The dot also signified a third eye, and could be worn by men as well as women. These days, bindi are worn mostly as jewelry. They have sticky stuff on the back that keeps them in place.

  * * *

  Minister Dharma smiled in my direction. I smiled back, then drifted over to the table where the booze was.

  India has some interesting ideas on alcohol. The country’s constitution suggests prohibition.

  Really.

  Article 47: “The state shall regard the raising of the level of nutrition and standard of living of its people as among its primary duties and in particular, the state shall endeavor to bring about prohibition of the use except for medicinal purposes of intoxicating drinks and of drugs which are injurious to health.”

  Right.

  Prohibition has actually been tried in various areas and in various forms — Delhi has “dry” days, kind of like the Sunday Blue Laws in that stores can’t sell liquor or beer. On the other hand, restaurants can serve it — unless it’s a state holiday.

  Too confusing for me to follow. But fortunately the taps were running. I got a refill, then sidestepped a heated conversation about the finer points of badminton. Two members of the government sports ministry cut me off as I headed for the food.

  “Mr. Marcinko, yes?” said one. “Very good to meet you.”

  I nodded.

  “I read all your books. And I have two of your Strider knives.”

  “Always a pleasure to meet a fan,” I said. (Of course, if he was a true fan, he’d have all three of my knives.)

  “Can we have a picture?”

  “Why not?”

  I smiled and tried not to break the lens.

  “Your story should be in the movies,” said the other man, handing the camera back after taking the picture. “If not Hollywood — Bollywood. I have a cousin in the business.”

  Before I could find out whether his cousin was a producer or a ticket agent, someone grabbed hold of my arm.

  It was Minister Dharma. She had a hell of a grip.

  “Dick, we have to leave,” she told me. “Something very terrible has happened. Two of the prisoners have escaped.”

  ( III )

  If you’re wondering how in hell two men under heavy guard whose feet and hands were bound managed to escape from an army base, you’re in damn good company. I wondered that myself all the way over to the old airport. Expecting to see bomb craters and spent shells by the hundreds, I was surprised when I found the fence and the building still standing. If anything, the place looked a little neater than when I had left it; the spotlights that played around the exterior gave it the luster of a used car lot.

  I should have realized that the terrorists hadn’t blasted their way out. Instead, they’d taken a page from my book — from several of my books. They’d out-Rogued my Indian protégé, Captain Birla, who wore a chagrined frown when he met Minister Dharma and myself outside the building.

  “They had credentials from the Interior Ministry,” said Captain Birla. “The guards double-checked them.”

  “Which prisoners?” I asked, but I knew the answer. The important ones, of course. The kid was still downstairs, snoring in his cell.

  A pair of plainclothes officers had shown up shortly after a shift change, presented IDs, and asked for the prisoners. They had what looked like a legitimate copy of orders not only from the head of the Interior Ministry but from Minister Dharma as well. Even so, the guards had called both offices for verification.

  “They had some way of intercepting the calls,” said Captain Birla. “There was confirmation. They had no choice.”

  The men called Captain Birla, but he was on another call and the message bounced into his voice mail. By the time he heard it, it was too late.

  A classic op. As someone who stole a nuclear submarine with only a slightly more elaborate game plan, I almost admired the sons of bitches.

  * * *

  Two security cameras had gotten pictures of the fake Interior Ministry men. The license plate on their car had been recorded at the gate. I was sure the plate was going to come back to a little old sewing teacher in Gurgaon, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Captain Birla. He was alternating between fuming at his men and blaming himself. Every so often he would mumble something about India for Islam, complaining that the intelligence had indicated they were not nearly this well organized, let alone clever.

  Minister Dharma stared at him with a cold frown. Losing the prisoners was bad enough, but now she was going to have to find a way to look for them without making herself and her top-secret organization look like idiots.

  As for myself, I wanted to get Yusef and Arjun back in the fold as quickly as possible. Arjun had taken the Koran I gave him with him, and it had cost me twelve hundred rupees.

  Twenty-six bucks, not counting the gift wrap.

  “An alert must be put out immediately,” I told the minister. “You really can’t afford to wait.”

  “Very likely it’s already too late,” she said.

  “We can make the alert without mentioning how the men got here,” said Captain Birla. “We can leave out all details completely.”

  “That will not work very well, and you know it,” she told him. “We will have to tell everyone why we are so fixed on these men.”

  “You’re fixed on them because they’re plotting to disrupt the Games,” I told her. “You developed intelligence. You don’t have to mention that you brought them back.”

  “Some in the government know.”

  “But they don’t know that these were the men you brought back, do they?”

  Dharma’s eyes lit. It was as if the sun had come out after a week of rain.

  “No,” she said. “And we have the other prisoner, if necessary. We can turn him over to the Interior Ministry — that would avoid any other suspicions.”

  In other words — everyone would put one and one together and figure he was the source of the information that had led them to look for Yusef and Arjun.

  Not exactly the way it should be done, but the minister wasn’t looking for advice on proper procedure at the moment. I left her and Captain Birla to figure out the politically correct way to deal with their government.

  “Where are you going?” asked Dharma.

  “Bed,” I told her. There was a look of disappointment when I added, “To catch up on my sleep.”

  * * *

  I was planning on getting some sleep, just not then.

  Shotgun had spent the evening doing important intelligence work — he hit the local bar scene. This didn’t involve too much travel: our hotel featured several, including a place called Dublin, which billed itself as the most popular nightclub in Delhi. Naturally, this was a claim that Shotgun had to investigate.

  There’s something about Irish bars that give them universal appeal, even when translated into another country and culture. Obviously, they work in the U.S., and it’s not much of a stretch to imagine them succeeding in India, which after all was part of the British Empire for quite some time. But even small towns in Italy have Irish pubs that are packed at the end of the week.

  As it should be. No problem is too thorny that it can’t be solved by sucking the foam off a good Irish stout.

  Shotgun had turned to local India beers by the time I arrived. I found him at the bar working on a Kalyani Black Label and ogling the tourists on the dance floor. The music would have drowned out an air raid siren.

  “Hey, skipper, how’s it hanging?” he said, spinning around on the bar stool.

  “Low at the moment. Come on. We got problems.”

 
I filled him in as we made our way across the street to the cab I’d hired. The minister had offered me her car, but I declined because I didn’t want her driver looking over my shoulder.

  That was also why we weren’t hanging around the hotel. The ministry had put us up at the ITC Maurya, a top class establishment favored by the diplomatic set. I highly recommend it if you’re going to Delhi and someone else is paying the tab.

  While incredible concierge service and fresh flowers in the room have their place, operating out of a high visibility hotel like the Maurya has definite downsides. It’s hard to slip too far under the radar, especially when the local version of paparazzi are known to stake out the lobby looking for celebs. It’s great when Lady Gaga is in town — she steals all the attention. But it’s all too easy for spies to infiltrate the press gangs,7 recording the comings and goings of lesser mortals.

  So we’d taken the precaution of reserving rooms in other places in the city in case we needed lower profiles. We’d also reserved a floor of rooms in a hotel I’ll call the Maharaja Express about a mile closer to the city center. It’s a small, family-run hotel, about as distant as you can get from the Maurya. The place is owned by a friend of mine named Bali. I’ve known him for years, having met him at a book signing in the States before he decided to go back home and take over the family business.

  Bali has a big family, with what seems like a never-ending supply of uncles and aunts. The cabdriver I was using was one of them. Urdu (like the language) drove an old black-and-yellow Ambassador taxicab that was probably old when the Beatles came to town. The interior was big — for India — and smelled like his dinner, which I take was some sort of vegetable stew with copious amounts of curry.

  Shotgun stayed with Urdu and the cab while I ran up to the room in the Maharaja and grabbed one of our gear bags. Among other things, it had a GPS locator in it.

  Shotgun fired it up and we went to work.

  Unknown to Captain Birla, I’d taken the precaution of planting GPS transmitting chips in the waistbands and collars of the prisoners’ clothes. The transmitters were operating — and they showed our two friends were headed toward the Abul Fazal enclave, an area of Delhi near the Yamuna River.

  I gave street-by-street directions to Urdu as he drove. Traffic in Delhi is among the worst in the world, but it was late and we were outside the city center, so it took only a few minutes to get down to Abul Fazal. The district, or enclave as they call it, includes river marshlands as well as very densely packed rows of small houses and apartment buildings.

  The area is named after a famous historian who was part of Emperor Akbar’s court during the sixteenth century. At the time, India was part of the Mughal Empire.

  No, I’m not foreshadowing there. At least not consciously.

  “Stopping by the river,” said Shotgun when we were about a mile away. “There’s like some sort of causeway through the swamp. Looks like a highway runs parallel to it, along the main bank of the river.”

  A mile can be a long way in Delhi. We snaked through some of the narrowest residential streets I’ve ever seen before reaching the wide road Shotgun had seen on the GPS unit. Urdu seemed to have no problem navigating the back alleys of the area, but he balked when we reached the causeway, which forked out between a man-made lagoon and a mixture of swamp and overgrown islands. There wasn’t an actual road there, and he worried about driving his ancient Ambassador over the high curb and onto the loose sand. He gave an explanation in Punjabi about why this was a problem — at least that’s what I think he said, since my Punjabi is limited to pickup lines.

  “You just wait here,” I told him finally. “We’ll be back.”

  “Wait, wait. Yes. I wait.”

  Shotgun and I got out of the cab and trotted up the dirt path. Along the way I unzipped the backpack, taking out my PK pistol and handing Shotgun his weapon du jour, a Heckler & Koch MP7A1.

  The MP7A1 is a small submachine gun specifically designed to defeat body armor. It’s billed as a replacement for the MP5, with its main advantage being the velocity of the 4.6mm round. It’s relatively small and light — four pounds with twenty rounds — and in Shotgun’s hand, it practically disappeared.

  The path to the main body of the river ran maybe three hundred yards. Two hundred of those were flanked by heavy vegetation — low brush at first, then bigger bushes and trees as we moved out.

  What? Do I see a hand in the back of the room? Go ahead. Ask your question.

  You’re wondering why we’re doing this without backup? Why I didn’t just call Minister Dharma or Captain Birla and have a squad of men accompany me to the water?

  Think about it. A supposedly elite commando unit, handpicked with volunteers from every military service in the country, loses two highly important prisoners from its grasp.

  It’s not beyond the realm of possibility; elite units screw up all the time, as I delighted in proving during my original Red Cell days.

  But …

  It also seemed possible, more than possible actually, that there were loose lips inside the organization. Maybe even a traitor. So I had to assume that anything I did that the squad was aware of would get right back, maybe instantly, to the terrorists.

  If that happened, yours truly would be singing out of a new airhole. So assuming I wanted to be involved at all, I had to work on my own.

  And why be involved?

  That actually is a good question. I have only halfway good answers.

  Aside from not wanting to see all my hard work go to waste, it personally pisses me off when people I trust turn out to be scumbags. And there was the thought that these assholes might turn out to be a very serious problem down the road.

  The moon was bright enough that we didn’t need night-vision gear. We moved up along the southern side of the path in the direction of the river, working through the brush as quietly as possible in case there was a lookout posted.

  The locator sensors hadn’t moved since before we’d gotten out of the cab. Now they started shuffling around.

  “Their ride must be here,” whispered Shotgun.

  “Come on.”

  I bolted over to the path and started to run. Shotgun caught up to me within a few paces, then sprinted ahead. Light glinted off the surface of the water, and I thought I heard someone moving around, maybe splashing.

  I had my pistol ready.

  A car sat at the edge of the path ahead, on the right. I slowed down, scanning the area nearby, ready to fire.

  “Movement, right,” said Shotgun, pulling to a stop and ducking down.

  I slid to my knee, ready to fire. But damned if I couldn’t see anything except the hulk of the car in front of me.

  “Right! Right!” hissed Shotgun. “I think it’s a tiger.”

  I stared for a few seconds before finally picking out what he saw.

  “You’re in the right animal family, at least,” I told him, rising.

  It was a cat — a domestic cat. Or maybe not so domestic, since there were no houses nearby. Cats are generally considered poor pets in India, and often thought to be bad omens or witches. This one was probably on its own, and no doubt was an accomplished hunter, preying on the birds and small mammals that lived at the swamp’s edge.

  We walked over to the car. It was a Maruti Wagon R — a compact Suzuki that’s among the more popular local vehicles. It was about the shape and size of a bread box, though it was meant to seat four.

  There was a small beach a few yards away. We could see footprints and the crease where a small boat had come in. The odd thing was that the footprints were on one side of the landing, and the crease for the boat was a few yards away.

  “What do you make of that?” Shotgun asked.

  “Two boats. At least.” I knelt down next to the markings. There were some smudges in the mud nearby — possibly other footprints, but they were too small and faint to really make out.

  Lengthwise, the Yamuna River is an impressive body of water, coursing through the Lower
Himalayas all the way down to the Ganges in Allahabad. It also stinks to high heaven. The stench almost knocked me over, and even Shotgun covered his face with his arm as the wind changed. It’s so polluted near Delhi that there are hardly any fish in it, which is probably a good thing, since you’d die from eating them.

  The area we were in bordered a navigable canal, but I couldn’t see any large boats, let alone the little skiffs that looked to have come ashore here. I stared for more than a minute, thinking that whoever had been here couldn’t have gotten very far. But if they were nearby, the shadows hid them too well for me to see.

  Shotgun went back to the car to check it out. One of the back doors had been left ajar. He pulled it open gingerly.

  “Pants. Shirt on the floor,” he said.

  “Take them out, but don’t touch anything else,” I told him. “Maybe the Indians can get some fingerprints or DNA off the car.”

  I know. DNA? This ain’t America, Dick.

  Shotgun pulled out the clothes, holding them as if he was afraid of catching a venereal disease.

  “Whatever they have wasn’t catching,” I told him. “And they deloused them in the tank.”

  “Says you.”

  He dropped them on the ground, then poked them with his gun, as if they might be alive.

  “Missing one of the tops,” he said.

  “Where’s the GPS?”

  Shotgun pulled it from his pocket. Sure enough, one of the sensors was moving again.

  “Maybe we should take the car to follow them,” Shotgun suggested.

  Before I could stop him, he grabbed the driver’s side door.

  There was a loud pooof, and suddenly we were flying into the nearby swamp, the car on fire behind us.

  ( IV )

  I’ll say one thing for the mud along the Yamuna River. It’s soft.

  I’ll say another thing. It truly, truly stinks.