The Devil on Chardonnay (34 page)

Boyd brought it quickly up toward the big Azorean’s head, and just as the periphery of his vision darkened, Constantine let go and grabbed the gun.  Boyd struggled as if to fire it, buying time, gasping in precious breath.  He glanced over Constantine’s shoulder and saw Mikki at the end of her chain, crouched, straining to get closer, to see him die.

“Argghh!”  The pistol was now the weapon, and Constantine let out a guttural roar as he raised it above his head with both hands to bash Boyd’s brains out on the tile floor.

Boyd flexed his knee, and his left hand grabbed a knife from an ankle sheath.  He’d learned one thing from Wolf: Always have a little something to fall back on in tough times.  His arm was still pinned to the floor, but as the pistol descended, he twisted just enough to take the blow on the side of his head and deflect it, and jab the knife into Constantine’s calf. 

“Yeoohh!”  Constantine cried out in pain and extended his leg, pulling his calf away from the knife. 

Boyd stabbed him in the thigh.

Constantine rolled off and pointed the pistol at Boyd, pulling the trigger. There was no round in the chamber.  Boyd flicked out a right cross, his best punch this close.  The gunshot from a month before had taken the strength and flexibility from the arm, and the punch was slow and ineffectual.  Constantine chambered a round.  Boyd rotated to the left and kicked Constantine in the chest. Constantine went down backward on his butt but bought up the gun, cocked and ready to fire.  Boyd kicked it out of his hands and across the room.

Several single shots rang out downstairs, then a long burst of automatic fire.  Bullets ricocheted off the tile of the stairs and into the plaster wall at the top. 

Constantine stood, grabbing for his big pistol, but the sheer size of it slowed him down long enough for Boyd to come up from the floor with a full force body punch.  A month before,  that is what had taken the steam out of Wolf, a smaller but more heavily muscled man.  This time, it was nothing.  The pain in Boyd’s shoulder returned as if he’d been shot again.  He stepped back and gave Constantine a left jab to the face.

Constantine staggered back.  The gun came up.  Boyd grabbed it with both hands and pushed forward. Constantine fell back on the bed, and Mikki was on Boyd’s back, arms around his neck.  No question now where her loyalties were.

The gun exploded and plaster fell from the ceiling.  Mikki’s arms slipped from around his neck, and she stepped back.  Constantine’s free left hand began to bash Boyd on the side of his face, while both of Boyd’s wrestled with the right hand, pushing the gun down into the pillows.  Two more shots thundered out, filling the room with smoke and feathers. 

“I’m shot,” Mikki moaned from behind.

Boyd found the trigger and squeezed off three more rounds, then let go of the gun and jumped back, he was gasping for breath and, in spite of the adrenalin, his limbs felt heavy.  Constantine jumped up, his eyes diverted to Mikki.  Boyd flicked another right. It turned Constantine's head but didn’t stop him.

Mikki moaned, clutching her side.  Blood ran down her thigh.

Boyd stepped back and ducked a roundhouse right but rose too late to counter and caught a following left.  It pushed him back to the door.

For the first time in his life, Boyd was whipped.  He was exhausted from the gunshot a month before, the climb up from Vila Nova da Corvo and now the fight.  It was worse than the dream.  If he’d had a sword, he wouldn’t have had the strength to drag it, much less swing it.  Constantine paused, catching his breath, circling.  Now Boyd noticed something else.

Constantine’s eyes were red, very red.  Mikki’s too.  She stood, looking at the wound on her left side.  It was just at the top of her hip, and appeared to be just a nick.  The bruises on her body weren’t from blows. They were blotches like he’d seen on Jacques, irregular at the edges and purplish in the center.  He wasn’t just up against a Portuguese pirate and his whore.  This was Ebola.

The breeze blew gauze curtains billowing into the room from French doors that opened to a small balcony overlooking the pristine desolation of the crater and the Atlantic beyond.  The swimming pool was off to the side.  Boyd took two steps to the window and vaulted over the balcony.  Sailing out over the back of the house, he scanned down, looking for a landing site.  He’d remembered the brush and the drop-off into the crater, and that’s where he was headed. 

The first bush snapped off and whipped by his face. He couldn’t see anything beyond that as he crashed down the steep hillside.  The slope was gradual enough that he hit the ground every few feet, eventually slowing down.  He kept his legs crossed and his arms across his face as he was whipped and jabbed and scraped down the hill.  Stopped, he slithered under a bush, exhausted, panting, terrified but alive.

Shots rang out from above as Constantine found his gun and emptied the clip at nothing in particular in the crater.  Moments later an explosion rocked the house.  Boyd was too tired to move.  From beneath his bush, he looked up the hill.  He heard the back door slam, and the red truck started up and roared down the back road into the crater.  Boyd didn’t have the steam to run, and his hiding place wasn’t that good.  He pulled himself up the hill to keep the bush between him and the truck, but Constantine had lost interest in Boyd.  He spun around the curves, traversed the crater and spun up the road on the other side.  In the truck bed were the two aluminum suitcases. 

CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

Malakal, South Sudan

“It’s got the turbine nozzle from a GE T700 turboshaft engine off that busted Blackhawk over there, and it’s run by a spare boost pump from a C-130.  Jury-rigged, I know, but it’ll pump 10 gallons a minute and spray it into a fine cloud.” 

Ace Digby wiped the grease off his hands onto his coveralls and threw a hose clamp into his tool kit. 

“Flip that switch over there, and it’ll pull out of your auxiliary fuel tank,” he added.  “So you don’t get confused and try to run the engines out of the auxiliary tank, I’ve disconnected it from your fuel system.  You’re gonna need some help mixing that stuff up in the cramped space here.  I should probably rig up another pump so you can just pump the bug spray out of the barrels.”

“You want to go along on the ride?”  Raybon Clive asked hopefully.  They stood in the back of the Grumman Albatross in the shade of a hangar in Malakal, South Sudan.

“Not me,” Digby replied.  “I fix 'em, not fly in 'em.”

“Your country is amazing,” Gen. Oyay Ajak said, stepping off the ramp at the back of the Albatross, agile for his size.  “Whenever something must be done, someone who can do it just appears.”

“I didn’t just appear, general.  I’ve been here repairing your Blackhawks for six months,” Digby said, following out of the stifling heat in the back of the Albatross. 

“My country appreciates you Americans and all you can do.  I didn’t understand why we needed helicopters, but now here they are, and our pilots have been having a fine time shooting Arabs along the river.”

“Yes, sir, a Blackhawk is a handy thing to have,” Digby said with a laugh, his gnarled hands holding to the side of the aircraft as he gingerly stepped down.  “I’ve been working on helicopters since Vietnam.  The army retired me 20 years ago and still, there’s always somebody needing a good mechanic to keep their rotors up.” 

“And we are grateful for Davann and Raybon, two fine American patriots who have decided to help us,” Ajak said, slapping Davann Goodman on the back. 

The four of them walked to the open hangar door and stood watching the activity at this once sleepy backwater airport. It was now transformed into the major front-line airfield for the South Sudan defense holding off the assault of hundreds of sick and dying jihadists from dozens of Arab countries trying to fight their way south, up the White Nile from Sudan.  Five Blackhawk helicopters were in various stages of refueling and re-arming, their Kenyan pilots lounging in the shade of the terminal.  Fifty laborers were busy unloading barrels of Malathion from the back of an unmarked C-130, which had just landed. 

At that moment, three large trucks pulled up towing 105 mm howitzers.  They were followed by a dozen trucks filled with men in uniform. 

“Ah, my artillery is here, I must go,”  Gen. Ajak said, stepping back into the hangar to a map on the wall.  “We will set up five miles from the river, here.  Just at dusk, we will lay down a brief barrage of artillery.  That will keep their heads down.  The mosquitoes will just be coming out.  You run down the river at 100 feet and spray the Malathion.”

“Sounds like a party,” Davann said, looking at the map. 

“We’ll have about 20 minutes of spray, and I’m hoping it will spread a quarter mile on either side of the plane.  Once up and once back, and we should cover five miles of river,” Rabon said, not feeling as confident as Davann. 

Flying down the Nile at a hundred feet with a hose hanging out the back of his aircraft and hundreds of crazed Arabs below with automatic weapons didn’t sound like a party to him.  Still, Uncle Sam owned the aircraft, and this new adventure had been an occasion for a contract renegotiation.  He and Davann were planning to open a Tiki bar and restaurant in Juba.  Mariam Ajak, Davann’s fiancé, was now part of the team. 

“Good, we’ll do it again at dawn,” Ajak said. “We’ll start the barrage when you take off.”

Ajak strode out into the sun and climbed into his Humvee and pointed up the road to the north.  The trucks rumbled after him, stirring up a great cloud of dust.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Corvo, Azores

            “Chailland!  Chailland!”  Ferreira’s face appeared at the top of the hill.

            “Here,” Boyd said weakly and struggled to stand.  He emerged from beneath the bush and brushed himself off, conscious of every scrape and bruise on a thoroughly scraped and bruised body.  He pulled at the bush above and began to work toward the top. 

            “I thought you were dead,” Boyd said, accepting Ferreira’s hand for the last pull over the ledge. “What was that explosion?”

            “He threw a hand grenade down the stairs, just to clear out the first floor.  Didn’t matter to him if one of his men or I was still standing,”  Ferreira said with a grin.

            “It must have been you still standing.” 

            Boyd felt around his back to see if something was sticking out of him there.  It felt like it.

            “Yes, in the front yard.  I know that trick well.  I have used it myself.”  

            Ferreira was obviously very happy.

            “Did you get 'em all?”  Boyd asked, looking up at the window he’d just leaped out of.

            “There were three.”

            “Been upstairs?”

            “No.”

            “Don’t go.”  Boyd felt nothing protruding from his body and started toward the kitchen.  “I need some water.”

            “I hear her crying.”

            “Don’t go up there.”  They re-entered the kitchen, and Boyd found a liter bottle of water, draining it as fast as it would flow.  Ferreira did the same.  He opened another and took a drink, carrying it into the living room.

            “Grenades are hard on houses,” Boyd said, surveying the damage.

            The wall across the foyer from where the grenade had detonated was splattered with shrapnel, the front window was blown out and the walls near the foyer were blackened from smoke.  He took another drink of water as he walked to the window. 

            “Our navy,” Ferreira said proudly.  The frigate was still at flank speed circling to the west of the island to cut off an escape into the North Atlantic.

            Boyd stepped out into the front yard through the window, stepped over the bodies of two Azorean sailors and walked to the edge of the yard.  He looked to the east.

            “And there’s Constantine.”

            The tuna boat, throwing spray 30 feet out from its bow, was booking around the east side of the island headed back into the archipelago.

            “Call Lajes on the radio,” Boyd said. “Tell them to load up some police or whatever they have and get over to Pico.  Even at 35 knots, it’ll take him three and a half hours to get there.  At least now we know where he’s going.”

            Ferreira hurried inside through the door, which was hanging from one hinge, and retrieved his radio.  They stood together on the hill watching Constantine’s boat crash through the 4-foot swells while Ferreira made the call.

            “We’ll get that son of a bitch,” Boyd said, turning back to the two dead sailors in the front yard. 

            He walked over and turned one over.  It was a man in his late teens or early 20s.  His shirttail was out and, without bending down, Boyd hooked his boot under it and ripped open the front.  There were three bullet holes in the chest and two more in the abdomen.  There was also a fine red rash, visible even in death, and several blotches.

            “See that?”  He pointed with his boot.  “That’s Ebola.  I saw it on the guy who first captured this beast, and it’s gotten everyone who’s touched it so far, including Mikki up there,” he said, nodded toward the second floor. 

            “That’s what we want to keep here, on this island till we can kill it,” Boyd said, the emotion rising in his voice as he got mad.

            Ferreira looked somberly down, then made another call on his radio.  He talked for several minutes and got heated himself. 

            “They understand now,” he said. “We will have men with guns on the shore at Pico in two hours.  Your Special Operations C-130 is in radio range, three hours out.”

            “Not close enough,” Boyd replied, disinterested as he watched Constantine’s boat. 

            The breeze was pleasant, and they stood looking at the view, then walked over to the back and watched the frigate finally get the message and turn back toward the islands. 

            “Look, the sheep are out,” Ferreira said, pointing to the ocean.

            “Sheep?”

            “The waves are capped with the wind.  Azoreans say the sheep are out when they see that, because it looks like sheep grazing in the sea.”