Then again, the stares from the hotel staff were probably worth twice that in sheer entertainment value. They looked at the kid as if she were a vampire child. They kept their distance, probably afraid of getting cooties if they got too close.
“Good work, U.S. Joe,” she said, biting into the candy bar. “This is good candy!”
“You can call me Dick.”
“You got it, U.S. Dick.”
“So tell me about this boat,” I said, leading her over to a couch at the far end of the lobby.
“Boat is train.”
“Boat is train? What language is that?”
“You speak English, right, U.S. Dick? Or I can speak Indian for you.”
She said something in Hindi.
“No, I speak English. Tell about this boat train.”
“Boat becomes train.”
She shrugged, and pushed the rest of the candy bar into her mouth. It cost me two more, but I finally got enough words out of her to realize what she was trying to tell me: the escaping prisoner had gotten onto a boat, which had then ridden down the train tracks to a hiding place not far from where she lived.
An absolutely brilliant piece of deduction on my part.
Which is not to say that it was anywhere near correct.
* * *
I had the desk call a taxi, which they were only too happy to do. Then, with the promise of more candy bars, Leya and I went for a ride.
She thought this was a fantastic idea; she’d never been in a cab before. The taxi driver gave us an odd look — God knows what he thought — but he didn’t object to the address, and about a half hour later he dropped us off on the outskirts of her slum.
“Now take me to the place where this boat train is,” I told Leya.
“Candy bar first, U.S. Dick.”
“No, first I see the boat. Then we get something to eat.”
She pouted, but took my hand and led me down a narrow alley not far from her hovel. I was beginning to smell a rat — among other things — when she suddenly let go and ran inside a squat yellow building.
Doom on Dickie.
I turned around, bracing myself for an ambush. But there was no one behind me. I backed against a nearby wall — gingerly; I didn’t want it to fall over. A minute or so later, Leya reappeared with two other kids, a boy and a girl about her age.
“U.S. Joe take us for candy!” she yelled.
“You have the wrong idea,” I said. “I’m not Santa Claus.”
“They will tell you about the boat and train.”
The others started talking really quickly.
“I want to see the boat,” I said. “If I don’t see the boat, no candy.”
“Boat went away. Took the train.”
“Who took the boat?”
“I rode the boat, U.S. Dick,” said the boy.
More jabbering and bickering. I finally decided the best way to sort this out was on a full stomach — mine as well as theirs — and with brood in tow headed for the nearest food stall. Four helpings of roti, murg, and dal (bread, chicken, and lentils) later, I pieced together what they had seen.
* * *
The boy’s name was Uma. His mother worked as a nanny in a house in the Abul Fazal enclave. He’d gone there to bring something to her, catching a ride on a city bus. He was supposed to go straight home, but, kids being kids, decided to go exploring instead. Apparently he had a habit of catching frogs or turtles in the swamp area there; he would sell them and use the money to buy candy or soda. He was by the water with a bag of critters when the car with the terrorists drove down.
Uma watched from the side of the swamp as they got out of the car and walked over toward the water. There were four men, and they were waiting for someone who hadn’t arrived. Being curious, the boy slipped back to the car and looked inside.
Had he opened one of the front doors, he would have been burnt to a crisp. But Uma looked inside first, and either because he saw the clothes in the back or he was lucky, that was the door he opened.
He was just climbing inside when he heard a shout. He grabbed the shirt near him — he wasn’t sure what it was at first — then slipped back into the shadows. Two of the men came running back to the car. Possibly they had seen the light inside the car go on, or heard something. In any event they searched around the area for a few minutes. Uma moved into the shadows, waiting for them to go. He’d left his bag with the critters by the water, and was working his way back toward it to retrieve it when he heard two boats approaching. One of the men by the water yelled to the others, and they all got into the boats and left, going south.
I must have arrived a minute or two later. By then, though, Uma had discovered that his bag of frogs was gone. He thought the men had stolen it, and started walking along the riverbank, determined to get it back.
“Were you crying?” asked his sister Bha.
“I never cry.”
“I know you,” insisted his sister. “You were bawling. Look — your eyes are even now still red.”
He gave her a good punch and continued the story.
Uma made his way home, eventually getting a ride on the back of a truck, presumably without the driver’s permission. Leya and his sister were friends; they’d been looking for him and scolded him severely when he returned. How Leya ended up with the shirt wasn’t clear; he seems to have given it to her either in payment for some sort of debt, or because he believed she was his girlfriend, though when I suggested that, both Leya and Bha made faces.
The shirt was a trophy, but Uma wanted the frogs he’d left behind. The next day, he went in search of them. He didn’t find them, but he did see the boats, tied to the edge of the river near some train tracks about a mile, he said, from where he had seen the men get in.
When he started looking around the embankment, a scary man with a submachine gun chased him away.
* * *
The boats turned out to be more like three miles from the Abul Fazal enclave. But the area the kid described was exactly as he said, a run-down industrial quarter downwind of one of the worst-smelling sewer plants you ever wanted to sniff.
I didn’t see the boats when I visited there after dark. But I did see the scary guy with the submachine gun.
Two of them, in fact, standing outside a rusted steel warehouse.
The other two guys had AK47s. Even terrorists have to economize somewhere.
( III )
Convincing Captain Birla that we ought to raid the warehouse wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Fatty’s death had actually lifted his spirits — if the bad guys could get the better of NSG, well then Special Squadron Zero didn’t look quite so bad.
Minister Dharma, however, was an entirely different story. She told Captain Birla that the unit was to lie low for the foreseeable future. The political shit storms rocking the country would magnify any failure, no matter how slight, and the resulting fallout would effectively kill the group.
I’m all for success, but you can’t succeed by being afraid of failure. You have to be able to make mistakes. Canceling an operation because you’re afraid that something will go wrong — or worse, someone will think that something went wrong — is surrendering before you even play the game.
Captain Birla agreed, and invited me to make that argument with the minister. And I would have — if she’d taken my calls. But the woman who had been playing footsies with me a day or two before now refused to acknowledge my existence.
And people say I have a way with women.
* * *
If you can’t run an authorized op, then your only choice is to run an unauthorized one.
Which explains how I came to be crouching in the darkness near the train tracks that ran next to the warehouse at 0300 the following morning, holding my nose against the stench of the nearby river, waiting for a train.
A freight train that is. Not that I was planning on moving anything anytime soon, much less taking delivery of the garbage this particular train generally hauled.
We were planning on using its sound as a cover to move in on the warehouse.
“We” consisting of Shotgun, Mongoose, Junior, Yours Truly, and several strangers who may or may not have had some association at some point with Special Squadron Zero.
I didn’t ask who they were. They were wearing fleece masks, the sort a spec ops soldier would wear during cold weather to keep the snot from freezing in his nose. Everyone knows it can get awful cold in Delhi at night in the spring.
Wherever they came from, they certainly knew their business. Besides the cold-weather gear on their faces, they were also well equipped with submachine guns, armored vests, and even a shotgun or two. You gotta like strangers who come prepared.
“I hear a train a comin’,” said Shotgun over the team radio.
I won’t say he was singing, and I won’t say he was doing a Johnny Cash imitation. As I just said, everyone needs the freedom to fail.
“Somebody coming out of the building,” hissed Mongoose over the radio. “Heading in your direction, Dick.”
Wasn’t that special? We’d been watching the warehouse for almost two hours now, and no one had moved from inside. Now, just when the train was coming, someone came out and walked toward me.
Coincidence, probably. That and a straining bladder.
He assumed the position on the side of the building. The train, riding the rails about ten feet from the side of the building, gave a long wail.
“Go!” I said over the radio.
The diesel’s whine and ground-shaking rumble covered my footsteps as I sprinted toward my target. He was just buttoning up when I hit him across the back of the head, sending him flying against the wall, right into the work of art he’d left there.
War is cruel sometimes.
I gave him another shot to make sure he’d stay down, then put my knee in his back, pulled his arms together, and ziplocked him like a trash bag. Another set of ties took care of his legs. I spun him over, then checked for a weapon.
Avoid the dirty jokes, please.
He had an old Walther PI combat pistol in his belt. Under other circumstances, I might have waxed poetic about this simple but sturdy German gun. But I had some ass to kick. I grabbed the weapon, slipped it into my vest, then moved around to the side of the building, where the team was preparing a new doorway.
There’s nothing like some strategically placed plastic explosive to create a door in a hurry. It’s a great technique — spec ops units use it all the time — but there are certain precautions you should use when employing this method.
Such as not using too much explosive.
Of course, for some people, there is no such thing as too much explosive.
Mongoose, who handled this one, is one of those people. The charge he set not only blew a wide hole in the wall; it took out part of the roof.
“Inside, inside,” said one of the men14 who were with us. Several of the team members rushed in, working the room so precisely they looked like an advertisement for a Discovery Channel program. Mongoose, Junior, and Shotgun followed. I brought up the rear.
The interior of the building was one large open space, divided by piles of boxes and lit by two or three small oil lamps. The area where we’d gone in was a sleeping room, with mattresses and blankets spread around. There were two men, though there would have been space for at least a dozen more. Both men had apparently been dozing when the wall blew out, and to call them stunned would be to understate their confusion by a factor of ten. They were quickly corralled by two mask-wearing team members while the rest of us went through the building.
The boxes made things interesting, but the strangers I was working with went about things very expeditiously. We found two other tangos in the warehouse. One was hiding in the clutter at the far end of the building. He put up his hands as soon as he was spotted, offering to surrender.
The other cowered in the corner not far from the sleeping area. He was hunched over, looking like a scared rabbit when we saw him.
“Up!” commanded one of the mask-wearing strangers.
The man in the corner complied. It was then that I saw the grenade in his hand.
* * *
Doom on Dickie. And everybody else in the damn building.
* * *
Four or five of the masked strangers fired simultaneously. They were good shots; the grenade-carrying rabbit fell straight back into the corner.
His grenade bounced out onto the floor.
Pinless.
Something flashed before my eyes.
It wasn’t my life. It was Junior. He dove down at the grenade.
Of all the stupid, idiotic, dumb things he’d ever done, that had to be the most moronic.
I could have kissed him.
Junior didn’t throw himself on the grenade, as heroic as that would have been. He did something much more practical — he scooped it with his hand and tossed it up through the space where the roof had been. The grenade flew up in the air and arced just outside the building, where it exploded.
Not entirely harmlessly, however. The force of the blast crumbled what was left of the front wall of the building. Those of us who weren’t already covering our private parts waiting for the grenade to blow covered our heads to keep the wall from shattering our skulls.
Fortunately, the wall was more loud than heavy. The pieces clattered down with a rumble that sounded like a thunderstorm, but aside from some bruises, they did little damage. I pushed my way out from under one of the panels, then helped Mongoose pull two of the strangers out.
“Shit,” grumbled Shotgun. He started to run.
It looked for a second as if he were chasing the train. Then I realized that the man who had surrendered earlier had taken advantage of the confusion to run off.
I joined the chase, as did Mongoose and Junior.
“Stay with the rest of the Squadron Zero boys,”15 I told Junior. “Make sure they round up the others. I left one in back.”
Junior probably said something in protest, very likely adding a few insults about my alleged lack of sprinting speed. But I didn’t hear it. I was too busy trying to catch my breath as I hustled after the others.
The train whose passing had initiated our attack was very long, with eight engines at the front and what had to be two hundred cars behind them. They were all what we used to call coal cars, but what my erstwhile copy editor claims are properly dubbed hoppers or gondolas, depending on whether they open at the bottom. I can’t say definitively which choice was right, though I will admit that they were not coal cars, since they weren’t carrying coal.
What they had in their large open bays was garbage. Lots of it.
It wasn’t bagged in nice big Heftys either.
I had known it was a garbage train from the research we’d done earlier setting up the operation. But for some reason, that information hadn’t really sunk in until, having grabbed the ladder at the side of one of the cars and climbed up, I sank into the contents.
I’ve been mired in worse swamps, but I don’t care to relive those memories. I climbed, pushed, and slid my way above the junk and pulled myself to the next car.
“He’s going toward the back,” yelled Shotgun over the radio.
My first instinct was to turn around. Then I realized that I’d jumped onto the train after the others, and that I was at the back. All I had to do was wait.
Better than swimming in more garbage, believe me.
“I’m about five cars from the caboose,” I told them over the radio. “Flush him back to me.”
A poor choice of words.
I managed to get my feet on top of something solid and waited. Finally I saw a shadow of something ahead on the train. We were going around a curve and the cars leaned slightly to the right. I ducked down, hoping to blend into the general darkness.
Whatever you want to say about the guy we were chasing, he had a strong stomach. He was literally swimming across each car, pushing his way through mounds of rotted food and the worst possible d
etritus of everyday life. Indians tend to be rather poor and get the most out of everything they have. That means that when they throw something out, it’s pretty far gone.
I was just about ready to hack my nose off when I saw my target emerging from the swill at the end of the next car. He pulled himself up on the lip of the compartment, steadied himself for a moment, then did a full gainer past me into the mound of rot at my right. I leaned and swatted my arm into the morass, hooking the back of his shirt. Hauling him up out of the debris, I grabbed the side of the car as leverage and I leaned over, intending to snap him against the metal and knock him out.
Murphy, who’d been teasing me all night, decided to take a more direct hand in the proceedings. The tango’s shirt gave way, and my arm smacked against the hard ridge of the train car so hard it went numb.
Murph wasn’t taking sides, though. Without my arm to hold him up, the terrorist dropped straight down into the swamp of garbage.
Another man might have leaned over and grabbed him. But I’m far too cruel for that — I leaned over and pushed the bastard down farther into the pile of crap he’d fallen into.
There was a flutter of garbage, then the surface calmed. I reached under, got a fistful of hair, then hauled him upward. He was gasping for air.
By that time, Mongoose and Shotgun had reached the car. I threw the tango over to them and leaned over the side, trying to clear my nasal passages.
“I don’t think I’ve ever smelled anything this bad,” said Mongoose, joining me after our prisoner had been hog-tied.
“I don’t know,” said Shotgun. “Kinda makes me hungry.”
Not a normal human being, that boy.
( IV )
We de-trained a mile and a half later, as the train went up a grade. With his arms tied behind his back and his legs manacled together, I’m afraid our friend didn’t take the fall from the car too well.
Life’s like that sometimes.
The strangers sent a truck to retrieve us. We smelled so bad that the two men who’d been riding in the rear walked rather than ride with us.
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