One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  “He does,” Praxus said glumly.

  “Then why are you sad?” she asked.

  “The portents. They are not good for us. They augment doom. The gull was infested with pests, and there was a cancer on its heart.”

  “I say ‘so far, so good,’” Caroline said. It didn’t translate to Latin well. Praxus looked at her, perplexed.

  “Hactenus bene?” he asked with a wry smile, pleased to have corrected her in her “native” tongue.

  “Yes. That is what I meant, you petty little iuvenum. Ahinadab knows this course well enough to find our way in the dark. He would not lead us into a dead end or drive us onto the rocks.”

  “Only the gods know what lies ahead and they have revealed a portion of our fate to us. It is not good,” Praxus said, his gloom returned.

  The channel broadened. Strips of narrow beach lined either side. With the wider passage, the current slowed and eddied. Ahinadab stormed down the centerboards, shouting. The rowing boss leapt to his feet and twice drove his staff hard on the deck. Both tiers of oars trundled out through the locks and the rowing commenced once again. Ahinadab climbed to the tiller deck to rest his own hand to the iron-banded wood of the handle. He spied ahead, watching the stars above the black walls of the cliffs.

  Dwayne stood at a gunwale below the helm and followed the captain’s gaze. The gap was growing narrow again. The visible strip of stars grew thinner and thinner as they moved forward. They were coming to the end of the channel. The bastard led them into a trap. Leaning out to look past the stern, Dwayne could hear the relayed orders and the creaking oars of one of the triremes echoing off the rocks as it entered the channel to close behind them. They were in the part of the channel where the walls grew further apart. There was just enough sea room here for both Carthaginian warships to draw up alongside one another and block any hope of escape.

  The cliff wall rose ahead to block the light of the stars, but still the oars cut the water at a faster and faster pace following the cadence set by the rowing boss shouting the count. Dwayne looked for Caroline in the gloom but could not see her. He braced himself for the inevitable impact. Ahinadab roared and joined Yada to shove the tiller hard to port. The oars on the port side were drawn in as the starboard bank kept to their punishing pace.

  The Lion heeled to starboard and the deck canted. The fighting crew grabbed for handholds. Those who failed to do so tumbled to crash against the starboard gunwale. The prow was gliding from port in a dizzying turn. The cliff wall rushed past close enough that Dwayne thought he could reach out and touch it. The deck righted itself, and the oars to port rumbled out again. The rowers soon matched the rhythm of their brothers on the opposite benches.

  Dwayne looked up. A strip of stars shone above them. The narrow shores were so close on either side that he could hear the hiss of surf against the rocks. The canny Ahinadab had shifted the Lion around a turn in the channel by memory or a sailor’s sense or plain dumb luck. They powered now along a flow made strong by the natural funnel in the black walls rising on either side. The oars rose and fell, rose, and fell. The cool night air rushed over them.

  Ahinadab bawled and every available hand ran sternward. Dwayne was swept along with them and carried up to the helm deck past the tiller to a precarious perch against the raft piled with sacks. The rear of the Lion was crowded with men, and the aft section settled deeper into the water with the increase in weight. The prow lifted higher as the deck tilted sharply astern.

  The strait broadened again ahead. The walls of the cliffs dropped away like a curtain from the night sky. The glow of a waxing crescent moon shone over the ridgeline. The gibbous light revealed a dappled silver surface before them, a bay walled all around in a near perfect circle.

  It was the bowl of a long extinct volcano, Dwayne realized. The crazy skipper raced them into a cul-de-sac after all. The warships pursuing them would not even need to risk the narrow passage and that treacherous turn to reach them. All the Carthaginians had to do was wait them out. And that wouldn’t take long. They’d thrown most of their food and water overboard during the chase. Despite that, the hull would probably ground when the tide went out. They’d be scuttled and left to starve.

  Still, the Lion was gliding over the water with the oars going all out for the far wall of the crater lake. They were moments from driving the ram into the cliffs.

  Ahinadab called from the tiller, and the men around Dwayne put hands to the stacked bags of sand atop the raft. They shouldered past the Ranger and heaved hard against the pile. Dwayne turned and joined them. He braced his feet and pushed away using the power of his legs. The men grunted and wheezed. The captain repeated the same command again and again in a stentorian bellow.

  “Ee-pah! Ee-pah! Ee-pah!”

  Dwayne and the mass of sweating men ee-pahed their asses off. The timbers of the weighted raft ground an inch across the deck. Another inch. Another.

  The mass broke free and surrendered to gravity, sending it sliding across the boards tilted aft by the weight of sand and force of men toward the white wake churning below. It fell clear with a splash that raised a tower of water forty feet in the air.

  A hand shoved Dwayne back and away from the thick hemp line that looped over the decking with a hissing sound. If he’d caught a leg in one of those loops, Dwayne would have been carried under the water in seconds.

  The voice of Ahinadab roared loud enough to rebound from the surrounded walls of the bowl that enclosed them. The oars leapt from the water on either side. The improvised anchor line thrummed taut as the full weight of the sand-packed raft took hold.

  The Lion shuddered violently as it jerked to a sudden stop. The timbers popped and cracked like rifle shots. The iron ring securing the anchor line to the deck rang like a bell against the hasp. The truss line sounded a long wavering bass note as it strained to hold the keel true.

  Men fell hard to the deck. Dwayne crashed against the backs of the captain and helmsman who were fighting to hold the tiller braced to starboard. The Ranger joined them with his hands covering theirs and pressing hard enough to feel the iron-banded tiller bend under their weight. Burdened with the sudden downward pull of two tons of sand, the ship spun about with force enough to create a wave that washed over the port side.

  Xin leapt forward between hands and swung his ax down on the shuddering anchor line. Three blows and the hemp parted with a snap, and the sudden slack raced over the stern like a serpent and was gone.

  Ahinadab elbowed Dwayne away with a snarl, and he and Yadaba’al pulled the tiller in the opposite direction to slow the turn of the ship. It came to rest on a course directly opposite to the one they had used to enter the inlet. Xin waved the ax above his head with a growl and men tumbled and leapt from the tiller deck to regain their weapons and shields.

  Dwayne climbed down to the stern deck with the other hands. All took up arms again. Dwayne found his sword where he’d left it against a gunwale. He found Caroline making her way toward him. She had a spear with a long leaf-shaped blade held in her fists. Praxus was at her back with eyes huge in terror and clutching a pathetic little dagger in a white fist.

  “A bootleg turn,” Dwayne said with a grin. “Praxus was right. Ahinadab knows his shit. He brought us about in a one-eighty.”

  “What now? Those warships will be waiting. And why the hell are you smiling?” she said.

  “I guess because, for the first time since we got on this boat, I understand what’s going on.” The Ranger looked to see every hand not at an oar rushing to the bow with arms and shields.

  “What? Tell me what?” she said.

  “This shit is about to get real and real fast. Whatever’s else going to happen, the wait time is over.”

  THE TIDE WAS reversing and drawing the Lion back toward the channel opening as the crater lake drained back to the sea. The oars were run out and both banks working to build speed for the sharp turn in the channel that lay ahead. Freed of the dragging weight at the stern, the ship gained
momentum swiftly.

  Dwayne gripped the spear shaft and tugged, but Caroline maintained her grip.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Stay aft of the mast. I don’t know what these guys have planned, but the ram is the business end of this ride. The action will be up there. If we’re boarded, I’ll come back to you, and we’ll see what our options are then.”

  “All bad,” she said, eyes locked on his.

  “It’s a plan. In my experience, a bad plan is better than no plan.” He went to move past her, but Caroline gripped his arm. She opened her mouth to say something but had no words.

  “I’m coming back,” he said and touched her hair. “I always come back no matter what.”

  She nodded, and he was gone in the rush of men moving to the head of the ship.

  The fighting men were crushed into a mob at the prow. The truss line was undone and rolled up to make for more open fighting room on the deck. The front ranks formed a shield wall along the freeboard rail either side of the bow. Spears were thrust through the gaps to create a bristling hedge of deadly points. Men with swords and clubs pressed their shoulders against the backs of the spearmen in the rear rank. This floating phalanx was the first line of defense against boarders. Arrayed behind them, the boys aboard the ship unraveled the lines of their slings and filled their free hands with round stones from bags slung at their waists. Xin climbed the breastwork to scan the dark before them. He tapped the lion’s head with his ax blade either in a nervous gesture or for luck.

  He called out and pointed his ax forward. The company of the Lion moaned as one and Xin barked at them in rage.

  Dwayne forced himself to the forefront of the fighting men. The tallest was shoulder height to him and less than half his weight. They parted for him, and he pressed forward to stand behind the front row of shields and peer over the top of them.

  Before the Lion, a hundred yards distant, a warship entered the crater from the shadows of the gap with all oars working to fight the backing current and bring their quarry within reach. The snarling wolf at its head bobbed up and down as if in hungry pursuit. An obscenely phallic ram rose and fell from the foaming water with the crashing rhythm of the triple tier of oars.

  A spearman turned with sad eyes to Dwayne and spoke bitterly.

  “That’s right, brother. It’s asshole-puckering time,” Dwayne said in reply.

  45

  Miami

  ALEX DAVIDSON COULDN’T sleep for thoughts of gold.

  Alexei Dresvyanin, as he was called before he Americanized his name, lay back on the king-sized bed, channel surfing between Japanese porno and a mixed martial arts fight from Java. The sound of the surf reached him through the windows of his Star Island condo. It was late, and the music and laughter of beach parties attended by South Beach hipsters and pharmacists from Quebec had finally died away. Still, he wished for sleep, but it would not come.

  Vodka did not help. A massage earlier in the evening relaxed him but did not make him drowsy. He hated the way pills made him feel the next day. Even the whore Leonid brought for him provided him only a few moments of post-coital slumber. She was gone when he came back around, and he was left with a feeling of sadness at the youth of the young redhead. It was not what he did with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. It was that her smooth, lithe body and lineless face reminded him of his own age.

  Now he could only lie here and run over and over in his mind the questions about the gold. These men, these American amateurs, had come from nowhere with a king’s fortune in crudely refined gold, taken his money and vanished from sight once again. None of his efforts to discover who they were and where they came across so much precious metal came to anything. The deal was struck, and it was a good one for Alexei. He would more than double his money once the gold was rendered to twenty-four-karat quality and placed on the market as bullion and jewelry.

  What concerned Alexei, consumed him, was the thought that he did not know these men though they now had a connection with him. The man Brinkley gave them a name that led nowhere before he died. The men he sent to find this Lee Hammond never came back. None of the marked money had appeared anywhere yet. Tens of millions of dollars and they spent none of it?

  Alexei came up in the mafiya while the Soviet Union was still a thing. He was part of an active and successful criminal organization run inside of a police state. The first rule was always: know who you are dealing with. You must know more than your rivals and more than the police. You must see all and know all and yet remain invisible. Moving to the West after the fall of the communists was like coming to a thief’s paradise. For an old school gangster from Odessa like Alexei, this world of ready money and open greed was a field of sheep waiting to be fleeced and quartered. For a man who could operate without discovery by the KGB, it was child’s play to establish layer after layer of legitimate business identities to hide his true interests in smuggling, investment fraud, and money laundering. It was not like him to break the surface to take a deal like this gold buy. But it was so available and so profitable that he overreached. It was greed.

  Was he becoming as American as his new name?

  He propped pillows behind him and snapped through more channels on the eighty -inch screen mounted on the wall. It was the only light in the room.

  The condo was dark, the heavy curtains drawn. Thousands of LED lights created a shifting kaleidoscope over his naked body.

  The gold itself was an answer, he thought. Find where it came from and find the men. But even that was a dead end. There were no reported robberies in any media or within any law enforcement agency anywhere. The underworld was silent as well. No one knew anything.

  Tests of the gold by a geologist in his employ only informed Alexei that the metal was of very pure quality, but loaded with debris and other metals. But gold was gold, and this gold could be separated and refined to a saleable purity.

  Some of the metal was fashioned into crude objects. Plates, cups, and small idols. The largest pieces, his man told him, formed a larger idol or icon that had been hand fashioned to represent a human figure of some kind. So, it was old stuff? Looted from a temple or museum or dug up somewhere?

  The geologist found bits of shell and bone among the debris he separated from the gold. He suggested that these could be carbon dated as they were organic material. Alexei paid for these tests, and the results only told him that the gold was not ancient or even medieval. These ugly artifacts that looked as though they might have been fashioned by a backward child were no older than Alexei himself.

  He had all the gold sent to a metallurgical lab in Tennessee. The lab was one of a set of properties he owned under the guise of an investment group whose only member was himself. It would be sold off through other holdings and dispersed throughout the world, sinking into the global pool of available gold without a ripple to make Alexei even richer than he was before.

  But still, the not knowing was making him restless. Unanswered questions were dangerous things. Someone was out there with tens of millions of his money, and he wanted to know who they were and what they were about.

  His view of a writhing Japanese girl who could not be of legal age was obscured by a black blotch across the screen. He stabbed a button on the remote and a hockey game popped onto the screen, but the black blotch remained.

  The black blotch was not on the screen. It was in the shape of a man. A man standing at the foot of his bed.

  “Leonid?” Alexei said. But Leonid was supposed to be in the main room of the house where he monitored the security cameras set about the condo and grounds.

  The shape grew larger. Alexei sat up but a hand, a strong hand with a grip of stone, clutched his throat and forced him to recline back on the pillows. Alexei grabbed the wrist of the hand to pull it away. The wrist felt as if it had been carved of oak. The hands were gloved in smooth leather. The grip of the fingers on his neck tightened until Alexei’s vision tinged red and he released the oaken wrist.

  The hand relaxe
d, and Alexei sucked in a lungful of air. The man hovered over him. In the light reflected from the mirrored headboard, Alexei could see the man’s eyes regarding him unblinking. The eyes were the color of a clock that sat upon the mantle of his grandfather’s dacha in Yalta. Green eyes the color of malachite. Eyes that betrayed nothing but cold inspection.

  “Where is Leonid?” Alexei said.

  “The man in the living room is dead.”

  Alexei began to rise, hands fisted. The iron grip pressed him back.

  “You will stop looking for the men who sold you the gold,” the man with the malachite eyes said.

  “Why should I?” Alexei spat. “It was not a question.”

  “There will be others who will find them. Find you.”

  “No, there won’t.” The malachite eyes grew darker and darker until they finally joined the greater blackness.

  Miami businessman Alex Davidson was found murdered in his Star Island residence. Early police statements claimed that he was a victim of a murder-suicide perpetrated by an employee named Leonard Stansfield, who was found in the residence, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot. Both Davidson and Stansfield were found naked with evidence of recent physical contact between the two suggesting a sexual relationship gone wrong according to a final report issued by Miami-Dade police officials.

  46

  Ramming Speed

  AHINADAB DROPPED TO the main deck and strode down the boards to the rowing boss. He tore the staff from the man’s hands and hammered the deck with it while shrieking orders. The Lion surged forward with a jerk as the oars bit deeper and lifted faster in response to the captain’s bellows. The oarsmen were on their feet now and pulling with all the leverage their weight and strength could bring to bear.