Authors: Russell Blake
After numerous toasts to Nahir’s continued good health and prosperity, the main musical attraction took the stage: a British pop legend whose career had spanned four decades, including marriages to supermodels and countless trips to rehab. A stir of excitement rose from the assembly, and Maya overheard one woman telling her husband that it had cost a million dollars to have him play a one-and-a-half hour set,
plus expenses
, the woman’s tone rising on the last word, as if the million wasn’t gratuitous but the expenses somehow were. Maya considered how many innocents had had to die at the working end of Nahir’s merchandise to pay for the party, and her disgust and resolve intensified as everyone stood and moved toward the stage.
Nahir led the terrorists into the house. Maya fought her way against the human tide, trailing them in, unwilling to let them out of her sight.
A steward stopped her on the veranda as they walked through the great room and out the front door. “Can I help you?” he asked, barring her way.
“I’m looking for the powder room.”
“Guests are being asked to use the pool facilities. I appreciate your understanding,” he said, a courtesy smile frozen in place, his tone firm.
Maya cursed silently and nodded. “All right. Thanks,” she said, and turned, the sequins on her dress glittering in the light from the crystal chandelier.
She’d need to work fast. There was no reason she could think of that Nahir would abandon his party when his favorite act was taking the stage except to coordinate a handoff. She skirted the crowd and worked her way to the bungalows after making a display of checking her slim clutch purse in front of the pool bathrooms and appearing not to find what she wanted.
Moments after entering the room, she stripped off her dress and donned her black pants and shirt. After confirming that there were no nearby guards, she hoisted herself out the back window and loped to the bamboo thicket where she’d buried the guard’s pistol in a plastic bag. She made quick work of disinterring it and chambered a round before creeping along the edge of the landscaping to the front of the villa.
Maya peered around a copse of trees in time to see Nahir returning to the house with only one of the terrorists. The rear gate was closing, and she waited as it shut before launching herself at the nearby perimeter wall and scrambling over. She landed softly, tucking and rolling to absorb the impact, and quickly made her way toward the rear gate, where three guards loitered outside, rifles in hand. She saw a dim light bouncing away down a trail eighty meters beyond – a golf cart or quad, she guessed.
She hastened into the brush and pushed her way through the high grass until she came to a footpath worn flat by the patrols. Once past the gate, Maya jogged along, her running shoes soundless on the powdery dirt, and when she rounded a bend that put jungle between herself and the villa, picked up her pace to a full sprint.
The eerie glow of the moon bathed her surroundings in a spectral light, and she could easily see tire tracks as she ran. She came over a slight rise and saw one of the suspect outbuildings on her right. Faint illumination seeped from a shuttered window. A lone guard at the door sat on a milk crate, his rifle in his lap as he lit a cigarette.
The sound of the band from the compound was faint, but sufficient to mask her footsteps as she crept around to the rear of the building. No windows there, but also no golf cart. She debated continuing down the path, but something tugged at her. There was a guard. That meant that even if this wasn’t where the nerve agent was being housed, there was something of value inside.
Or something that needed guarding for another reason.
The man shifted on his perch, listening to the distant music carried by a gentle wind that stirred the wash of elephant grass lining the cart trail. He stiffened when a thump issued from the brush across the path from him, and he stood, weapon in one hand, flashlight in the other, pointing both at the suspicious sound.
Maya was on him from behind before he had a chance to turn, her hand clamped over his mouth as she plunged the five-inch blade of the carbon-fiber knife from her luggage through the base of his skull, severing his spinal cord with the thrust. As he crumpled, his rifle and flashlight dropped onto the dirt next to him. Maya heaved his body toward the front entrance and propped the corpse in a sitting position on the milk crate, to a casual observer appearing to watch the trail with sightless eyes. She retrieved his weapon and flashlight and tried the door.
Locked.
She glanced at the dead guard and spotted a key ring dangling from his belt. The third one did the trick, and the door groaned inward as she pushed it open, leading with the rifle. A single overhead low-wattage bulb burned in a socket suspended by a ceiling wire, and the space smelled like urine, sweat, and the distinctive copper penny odor of blood.
Natasha lay on the concrete floor behind a barred jailhouse door. The clotted blood around her nose and mouth and bruises on her arms and legs were visible even in the dim light, as were cigarette burns that marred her once-beautiful face. She turned her one good eye to Maya and hacked a wet cough.
Maya fumbled through the keys until she found one that opened the door.
“Don’t try to talk,” she whispered as Natasha tried to speak, her ruined mouth obviously impeding her ability to form words. She moved next to her and knelt by her side.
“No…I…they have…it’s at…the next…building…”
“The gas?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Let’s get you out of here. Can you walk?”
“I…I…maybe…”
Maya helped her to her feet, supporting her weight as she shuffled through the door. Once outside, Natasha paused and eyed the dead guard. “You…go. Leave me…”
Maya recognized the wisdom in Natasha’s order. She was in no condition to travel far, much less with any speed. Maya helped her a few meters, but it was clear that Natasha was out of the fight.
“Fine. I’ll come back for you.” Maya looked around. “We’ll get you into the underbrush. Hide, and if you hear anything, shoot. I’ll leave you my pistol.”
“No. You…may…need…”
“If an AK isn’t enough firepower, a lousy .40 caliber Browning isn’t going to help. Come on.”
They made it to the jungle. Natasha seemed to improve with every step of distance they put between her and the building, but she was still too frail to be much good. When Maya eased her into a sitting position at the base of a tree and placed the pistol in her hand, Natasha nodded her thanks.
“What…what’s happening?” she asked softly.
Maya explained about the terrorists with Nahir. When she finished, Maya asked the question that was burning her tongue. “Did you…tell them anything?”
Natasha shook her head with a wince. “No.”
Maya straightened and hefted the rifle. “Just sit tight. We’ll get out of this. You’ll see.”
“Be…careful…”
Maya disappeared into the night, the only sound the pounding of her running shoes and the far off wail of a guitar. A cold rage powered her as she raced down the dirt trail, the vision of Natasha’s brutalized form seared into her visual cortex as she prepared to inflict as much damage as possible on the men responsible for the atrocity that was now Natasha’s face.
Chapter 34
Three minutes later Maya rounded a twist in the track and found herself facing a long concrete building nearly reclaimed by the surrounding jungle. Three guards stood by a golf cart, weapons at the ready, while two more loaded a wooden crate onto the back as the terrorist watched.
Maya fingered the trigger guard of the Kalashnikov and considered the best way to take the men. She could easily cut them down with one long, sustained burst from the rifle, but then what? The gunfire would draw every guard on the island. If there was more of the nerve agent in the building, she would be forced to run before she could destroy it.
She was favoring killing everyone as her only option when the terrorist said something in a guttural tongue and hopped onto the passenger seat. One of the guards rounded the front and slipped behind the wheel, and she watched as the cart bounced down another trail leading toward the water. Maya swore as her quarry pulled out of range and disappeared. The guards returned to the card game the loading had interrupted.
Laughter and good-natured swearing echoed off the building as she skirted it soundlessly, and once she was out of sight of the guards, she resumed a flat-out run in pursuit of the cart. The dirt underfoot transitioned into pale sand in the moonlight, and suddenly she found herself moving parallel with the shore, looping back toward the villa, the sound of the concert increasing as she neared.
When she reached the point where the trail met the beach, the cart sat empty. She squinted and could make out the terrorist in a fiberglass dinghy, its little outboard putting as he reversed from the shore. She ducked into the brush as the driver trudged back to the cart and swung it around, returning up the track. Maya remained hidden as the little boat motored far out into the bay and pulled alongside an anchored fishing boat, a light faintly glowing in its ancient pilothouse.
Applause exploded from the compound as the singer’s distinctive rasp brought one of his signature ballads to a close. Maya stashed her rifle along the trail and ran to the shoreline, where a wooden skiff was half beached, its bow resting on the sand. She unfastened the line that secured it to a palm tree and pushed it into the water, then hopped aboard and used the oars to move it farther from land. When she was a minute off the beach, four pulls on the outboard started it with a roar, and she pointed it on a course thirty meters off the fishing boat’s darkened stern.
~ ~ ~
Putra waited amidships as two of the boat crewmen winched the crate over the railing and onto the corroded deck. The biohazard logo glowed in the moonlight. Enduring the arms merchant’s debauched circus had proved worth it – the weapon was now theirs. All else was preordained, and after being transported to the Philippines, it would bring the cursed Israelis to their knees. He grinned at the thought of the video they would upload on the web, taking credit for the attack and promising more to follow. A life’s ambition coming true, with only a few days at sea standing between him and the embassy’s destruction.
“Careful. Set it down easy. We don’t want to jar it any more than necessary,” he warned. The winch operator nodded as the other crewman guided the crate gently to the deck. Now all that remained was to get it into the hold, buried in fish so that in the unlikely event of a routine search it wouldn’t be discovered.
Putra heard an approaching motor over the noise of the concert and frowned. He removed a pistol from his waistband and peered into the darkness.
There. A boat, moving fast.
He pointed at the craft, and the two crewmen stopped, all eyes on the skiff as it cruised past the stern and continued further out to sea. The winch operator thumped the other on the chest as he leaned in and muttered a comment, and they both laughed.
Putra pocketed the Walther PPK and snapped at them. “All right. Let’s get it down into the hold. Open the hatch. Come on, we don’t have all night.”
The crewmen moved to the center of the aft deck and raised the panel above the hold. The stink of fish rot drifted up from the vessel’s bowels, and Putra turned away, sour bile rising in his throat at the stench. He breathed through his mouth as the winch operator raised the crate several inches off the deck and his partner swung the boom over the opening.
“Do you want to go down and clear a space?” the second man asked Putra, sniggering.
Putra shook his head and moved toward the pilothouse. Just outside the open door, he stopped and felt in his pocket for a small two-way radio. The speaker crackled, and he raised it to his lips.
“We have it onboard and are stowing it. We can leave as soon as you get to the boat. Over.”
A burst of static shrieked from the radio as Wira’s voice cut over the caterwauling of the band.
“Good work. I will bid goodnight to our host and be out shortly.”
Putra turned the radio off and returned it to his pocket. The apprehension that had been twisting in his gut all day seeped slowly away now that the most difficult part of the job was done.
~ ~ ~
Maya clutched the fishing boat’s hull near the transom, her hair dripping from the swim, waiting for the sound of the men working on deck to abate. She’d lashed the outboard throttle arm to the bench seat with a length of cord and dropped into the sea fifty meters from the boat. Her hope was the terrorist would see a skiff going for some night fishing and dismiss it as a threat, as would most when they saw that it never got close.
She’d swum under the surface for most of the distance, her lungs burning from the exertion, fighting the instinct to burst from the water and gasp cool air. The few times she’d risked drawing breath she’d flipped onto her back just before breaching, and had poked only her nose and mouth out of the water.
A loud clank echoed through the hull as the deck hatch slammed home. The whine of the winch motor preceded a squeak as the boom swung back into place, and then three sets of footsteps trudged to the pilothouse. Maya listened for anything more and, after several minutes of quiet, pulled herself from the water.
She poked her head above the railing and surveyed the deck area, which as she’d expected was empty. She crawled onto the flat metal surface and steadied herself as the big boat rocked with the swell. During her swim, Maya had improvised a way to destroy the nerve agent without the thermite grenades, and now all that was left was to put her scheme into motion. Of course, the fact that she was unarmed and alone on a ship with an armed terrorist and an unknown number of crew made it more convoluted than she’d have liked, but no plan was ever perfect.
Maya crept forward until she was near the pilothouse, but was startled by the terrorist stepping through the doorway. She flattened herself into a two-foot depression along the cabin wall and held her breath, praying that her wet footprints weren’t noticeable to eyes adjusting to the dark after emerging from the illumination of the pilothouse.