‘Delirious. So what’s going down?’
‘We think Charles and Falco have been negotiating deals with Somali pirates. We’re here to get the proof.’
‘A deal to do what?’ I asked.
‘Weapons shipments.’
Her use of the word ‘shipments’ made me think of the
African
Spirit
. ‘What about Morrow, LeDuc and Dyson? What are they doing here?’
‘We’re not sure. Hence the tail.’
‘But everyone’s still convinced it has absolutely nothing to do with what we know to be missing.’
‘What’s missing?’ Ken asked.
‘Tell him,’ I said. ‘We need to talk and time’s running out.’
‘You tell him.’
‘A nuke, Ken, one of ours.’
‘Shit?!’
‘Yeah, lots of it.’
Petinski shook her head, not happy that I’d spilled the beans. ‘There have been arrests.’
‘What arrests?’ Being at thirty thousand feet in economy the last couple of days, I hadn’t heard dick.
‘OSI swooped the day before yesterday and detained a number of people: four NCOs who worked in Munitions Control at Area Two, along with six armorers and three weapons handlers. All but two of them had moved on from the 896th MUNS to other posts.’
‘There goes Colonel Challis’s perfect record,’ I said.
‘The colonel shot himself.’
He shot himself? ‘Was he under suspicion?’
‘No. He left a note.’
‘Why’d he do it?’
‘Shame, basically. Also, you remember the one-star general and the colonel I told you about, the two officers who were under suspicion? The FBI took them into custody. They were spirited away to a safe house somewhere in Maryland.’
‘What did they get out of them?’
‘A couple of corpses.’
‘
What?
’
‘Both were murdered. One was electrocuted in the bath, the other shot. Whoever did it then torched the house and burned it to the ground.’
That didn’t seem possible for a whole bunch of reasons. ‘What about surveillance cameras? They give up anything?’
‘Temporarily disabled.’
‘What the fuck is going on?’ I wondered aloud.
‘Good question,’ Ken echoed.
‘Stay out of this,’ Petinski warned him. ‘Loose ends, Cooper . . . Three NCOs who served with the 99th Security Forces at Area Two have died recently in various car and motorcycle accidents.’
‘And no one’s talked?’
Petinski shook her head. ‘No one’s saying a word. There’s a nuclear weapon involved. There aren’t going to be any deals cut.’
‘Anyone we know been taken into custody?’
‘Staff Sergeant Sailor. You remember him?’
I nodded. Sailor – the black guy the size of a plains buffalo who’d accompanied Petinski and me on the orientation tour.
‘More arrests are expected,’ she said.
‘How’d they figure who had their hands in the cookie jar?’
‘You remember your idea – the one about the psych tests where people learned the answers?’
I prepared myself for a pat on the back. ‘Yeah?’
‘Well, the people who
really
know about those things laughed at the suggestion.’
I shrugged. It was a long shot anyway.
‘But they reviewed
all
the background security checks. Irregularities were picked up. Turns out around half a dozen people who had clearance and access weren’t who they purported to be. They’re all now in custody and high on the suspect list. The whole system’s going under review. Again.’
Traffic was banking up. Ken doll swerved to avoid a pothole and then hit the brakes, the air full of brown dust choking the headlight beams. ‘What now?’ he muttered.
Folks in the vehicles stopped in front were leaving their cars. Some were running away, appearing and then vanishing in the murk. Petinski, Ken and I got out and went ahead, pushing through people fleeing past us. At the head of the traffic jam was the minibus with the Holiday Inn logo on the door. It was sitting on its rims, the tires shot out. The doors were full of bullet holes, all the windows smashed. Thin ribbons of smoke rose from several places. Blood spatter ran down the paintwork from the rear passenger windowsill. From ten feet or so, a mass of hair and blood was all I could see inside the car. Dust rose around the van, illuminated by headlight beams. Steam swirled from a puddle of fluid gathering on the ground between the front wheels. The attack had only concluded moments ago. I surveyed the area quickly but couldn’t see the shooters. Petinski, Ken and I jogged to the van. The Desert Eagle rubbed the skin in the small of my back. The throw-down was inside my sock, bumping up and down painfully against my ankle, the glue on the handgrip tugging at the hairs on my leg. I was tempted to pull one of the weapons, but decided to leave them where they were until absolutely necessary. The last thing I needed, in the vicinity of the shot-up minibus, was witnesses who said they saw a firearm in my hands.
I checked the vehicle’s interior and confirmed that everyone in there was deceased. Six bodies, several of which smoked with all the hot lead buried inside them. I recognized Morrow and the Maasai woman. Morrow’s fly was undone and her head was in his lap. A tight bloody ball of US dollars was scrunched in her hand. In the seat in front were Dyson and the two other women. His head was back against the headrest, half his neck torn out. The women had holes drilled in their cheeks and foreheads and chests. I reached in through the driver’s window and turned off the ignition to reduce the risk of fire.
‘This can’t have been random,’ Petinski concluded as she looked in on the carnage.
Duh, I thought.
‘Anyone speak English?’ Ken shouted into the night. ‘Anyone see what happened here . . . ? Anyone?’
‘Hey, you want taxi?’ a man called out to us, seeing the opportunity to maybe pick up a little business. I waved him away.
And then three men burst through the dust and the traffic at a run, yelling and pointing down the road behind them. They were excited about something. As they flew past I broke into a run, heading in the direction they’d just come from.
A hundred yards farther on, round a corner, a square opened out. In the middle of it I could see that a pothole the size of a bomb crater had swallowed a pickup. The vehicle’s rear axle and diff were clearly visible poking up over the edge of the crater. Traffic had already built up around the accident, a multitude of headlight beams diffused by the raised dust washing the scene in dirty yellow light. Two men were lying sprawled on the road, moving slow. Rifles – assault weapons, FN FALs – were scattered around them. Several other men were staggering around in circles, recovering from the pickup’s nosedive. One of them wandered up drunkenly to a Toyota van at the head of a line of stalled traffic, pulled the door open and hoisted the driver out onto the road. He then pointed his weapon at the man and shouted some kind of warning at him before going back for his pals, who were now all getting up on their hands and knees.
Petinski and Ken appeared beside me. ‘Were they the shooters?’ Ken asked.
‘Don’t see anyone else running around with assault weapons, do you?’ I said.
‘What do you want to do about it?’ Ken inquired, ready for action, reaching around for the Smith & Wesson holstered in the small of his back.
Maybe I’d misjudged him.
‘E
asy, tiger,’ I said. ‘Not a good place for that.’ Ken took my advice and left his weapon where it was. It wouldn’t have been smart to engage these men in a firefight in the middle of this crowded square – too much potential collateral damage wandering around. And unless Ken had a bazooka nestled back there between his butt cheeks, we were seriously outgunned by these guys, as well as being outnumbered.
‘You were right from the beginning,’ I said in an aside to Petinski.
‘Right about what?’
‘It’s von Weiss. And what’s going on now only reconfirms it.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Von Weiss managed to get his hands on the W80 and he’s about to use it, just like Randy said in his note . . .’ I looked at the timer on my watch, ‘. . . within the next seventy-two hours. The one star and the colonel – the FBI’s prime suspects? They were decoys. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had nothing to do with this mess at all. But now it’s time for von Weiss to clean house. He’s whacking everyone connected to the scheme and now, obviously, it’s Morrow’s and Dyson’s turn. I don’t like LeDuc’s or the White brothers’ chances of making it to sunrise.’ And in regards to those guys, if I was right, I was genuinely disappointed that it wasn’t going to be me pulling the trigger on them. But then a hard reality suddenly dawned on me: we were going to have to try to keep them alive. ‘Shit,’ I muttered.
‘Eh?’ Petinski was only half listening, watching the last of the attackers peel himself up off the road. He was nursing a badly broken forearm as he lurched toward the Toyota.
‘We’re gonna have to protect LeDuc, Charles and Falco White. If we don’t manage to keep someone connected to von Weiss breathing, he could walk away clean.’
‘He’s not the one, Cooper. Langley knows what it’s doing.’
‘Since when?’
The stolen Toyota van started to roll, the driver keeping his hand on the horn to clear a path. A police siren was still a long ways off, the world moving in slow motion. As the van crawled along, its rightful owner approached the driver’s window, his hands out in a beseeching gesture. The carjacker responded with his rifle, poking its muzzle in the guy’s face till he backed away.
‘I’m not getting into this fantasy with you now, Cooper.’
‘Listen – Emma Shilling told me von Weiss is hot for revenge against America.’
‘Why?’
‘For bitch-slapping the Nazis in the war, and for driving his old man, Mengele, into exile. And now, with Ali-Bakr al Mohammed and Gamal Abdul-Jabbar, he’s found people to help him do the deed.’
‘Cooper—’
‘This is von Weiss’s moment, Petinski. It’s the one he’s been working toward for a long time.’
‘Where is this going?’
‘I think our W80 is sitting on a ship out there in the harbor. Von Weiss has given the bomb to those two pirates to use against us.’
Petinski gave me her weary look. ‘And how’re they going to do that, exactly?’
‘Do I have to do
all
the work here, Petinski?’
‘
Hello
. . .’ Ken said impatiently breaking us apart. ‘We need to get back to our rental before it’s stolen.’ He turned to me. ‘You coming?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But that’s never stopped him before,’ said Petinski, sporting a look of triumph. ‘Right, Cooper?’ She turned and followed Ken back to the rental.
*
That shitty fudged ESTJ manner of hers aside, I knew I’d put some doubt in Petinski’s mind about the situation confronting us – just as her refusal to accept my theory put some doubt in mine that I was completely right. Nevertheless, I was struggling to find another that fit the facts – or the facts as I knew them, anyway.
I watched as the Toyota van carrying the gunmen slipped through a hole in the traffic, the van’s owner shouting and shaking his fists at its receding taillights as the dust and the night slowly engulfed them. It was a gutsy performance. I felt sorry for the guy. Maybe the car was all he had in the world.
An antique Nissan Pathfinder 4x4 pulled up beside me, the driver leaning across and winding down the window. ‘Hey, you want taxi?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
He’d read my mind, only unfortunately for him he hadn’t also peeked inside my wallet along the way because maybe then he’d have kept driving. The door was rusted on its hinges but I managed to open it and then pull it almost all the way closed. The driver reached across, grabbed a piece of thin cable dangling from the door, yanked it shut with practiced technique and hooked the cable around a bolt welded to the remains of the dashboard. ‘Where you want to go?’
I pointed down the road the gunmen had taken. ‘I have to catch up with my friends. They’re driving a Toyota van.’
‘Fifty US dollar, okay?’
‘Ten,’ I said, just to generate a little respect.
‘Okay, twenty-five is good price. No problem. We will catch your friend,’ he said, laying into the horn to clear the way as the Nissan shuddered into movement.
I wondered how we’d managed to settle on twenty-five dollars but went with it.
‘Where are they going?’ the driver asked.
‘I don’t know. Just driving, having a look around.’
‘Can you see this van ahead?’ he asked, peering forward, leaning against the steering wheel. ‘Toyota van is popular.’
I caught a glimpse of one several cars ahead caught in the headlights of the vehicles stopped at an intersection. Maybe that was it. But then, down a side street, I saw taillights of another van that could have been the gunmen’s. Passing us on the other side of the road, heading back the way we’d just come, was yet one more Toyota van. Hmm, yeah – popular. ‘Just keep going straight ahead,’ I told the driver.
I counted four more Toyota vans within the next ten seconds.
‘Where’s Wally?’ I said.
‘What?’ the driver asked.
‘Forget it.’ Maybe this was a lost cause. I considered another plan. ‘The port. Where is it from here?’
‘We are going the wrong way. It is in the other direction.’
That came as a surprise. I believed the gunmen to be pirates, so naturally I’d assumed they’d head straight for the docks where they’d take a boat out to the
African Spirit.
Perhaps the van had pulled a one-eighty. This was looking hopeless, but I decided to give it another couple of minutes.
‘Please to put window up, sir,’ the driver said.
I wasn’t keen to, the temperature being somewhere in the low nineties, the humidity nudging a hundred percent. The .38 had gummed itself to my ankle and a free-flowing river of sweat had formed between my shirt and the seat back. But then I took a look at what we were driving through and saw why he wanted it closed. The homes hereabouts were shanties. Listless, glassy-eyed young males hung around smoking pot or openly dealing drugs while slack-jawed, barely clothed women sat on the earth with crying babies, which they ignored completely. Kids barely able to walk just stood like they didn’t know what to do or where to go. This was truly the end of the road. I glanced down a side street leading into the heart of the damned and saw the van crawling along.
‘There,’ I said, pointing it out.
‘No, not going down there. Your friends are lost, gonna be in a lot of trouble.’
‘I’ll pay you another ten dollars on top of your fee. I can’t just leave ’em here.’
‘Okay,’ he said reassessing the dangers.
Obviously, ten bucks was worth more than ten bucks in this part of the world.
‘We are near Uwanja wa Fisi,’ the driver said.
That sounded familiar. ‘Hyena Square?’
‘Yes. Everyone knows Hyena Square. Your friends have come for women.’
‘Maybe,’ I said as he turned into the muddy lane. As long as the guy kept on the tail, he could believe what he liked. Meanwhile, the van didn’t come to a stop but kept inching along seventy yards ahead.
‘Don’t get too close,’ I told the driver, not thinking.
‘You do not want to join them?’ he said, eyes darting to me, uncertain.
‘Actually, no. I’ve decided to surprise them. Let’s just see where they go.’
The streets became gradually wider, the mud and the ruts deeper, the smell of human excrement more powerful. We entered a square where the buildings were a little less temporary. The van pulled up outside a windowless cinderblock bunker that could have been a toilet facility, only they didn’t have those in Dar, at least not where you could crap right on the street. Two men loitered outside the bunker, smoking, and the smell of pot and shit hung heavily in the night air. Six men got slowly out of the van, carrying rifles. The guy with the broken forearm held it to his chest.
Two men appeared from nowhere. They ran past the Nissan drunkenly, weaving about, one chasing the other with a broken bottle. The one giving chase got close and threw it, but then lost his balance, fell and did a faceplant into an open sewer.
I glanced at the cab driver. He was nervous as hell, head swinging around, scoping out the scenery. ‘What we doing here, sir?’
‘I’ll give you another fifty dollars to relax,’ I said.
The look I got told me he was finally realizing that my story about catching up with friends stank as bad as the general area. I pulled the .38 out of my sock, the tacky handle giving my ankle a light wax job, and put it in my lap. Next I removed the Desert Eagle, confirmed that a round was chambered and that it was on safety before tucking it behind the belt in the front of my pants. It might only have three rounds in the bank, but iron like that made the right kind of statement. I checked over the .38, was reassured by those dum-dums and gave the cylinder a spin. The driver’s eyes were wide, staring at the ugly little killing machine in my hand.
‘Take a deep breath,’ I told him.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Nothing for the moment. Just gonna wait and see what develops.’ I said that to reassure myself as much as him, because now I was even more outgunned and outnumbered than I’d been with Ken and Barbie back at the bullet-riddled Holiday Inn minibus.
Fifteen minutes later the cab driver and I were still sitting in his Pathfinder, nothing going on at the bunker down the road. It was just past four a.m. I felt like I’d been up for forty-eight hours. Something that sounded like it wanted to be set free growled in my stomach and lack of sleep was making my eyeballs feel as dry as glass marbles rolled in sand. If not for those little adrenal glands pumping away deep inside, I’d be trying to dream something pleasant, like Petinski feeling frisky in an Olympics leotard.
A door suddenly burst open. Men surged out of the toilet block – I counted twenty. Some of them had faces that were pale in the darkness, which meant they weren’t African. Interesting. From this distance and in this light, making a call on their nationality wasn’t possible. They dispersed and piled into the carjacked van and three other vehicles. Pretty much everyone seemed to be carrying an assault rifle and a bag of some description. The convoy moved off quickly, the vehicles low on their springs, tires churning through mud and shit.
I unhooked the door and kicked it open before I realized what I was doing. Apparently I was going to check out that bunker whether I wanted to or not. To the driver, I said, ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Eighty-five dollar.’ The concern on his face told me he was not confident about collecting.
‘I’ll make it an even hundred.’ I made the offer to counter his desire to split as soon as he hooked the door shut. ‘Just don’t leave this spot.’
‘One hundred twenty-five,’ he said.
‘One hundred ten.’ That just came out.
‘Okay, but we must go soon. This is very bad place.’
That last observation was like saying water is wet because, aside from the gunmen and the glass-wielding sewer divers, I’d stepped calf deep into the foulest smelling mud in the history of foul-smelling mud. As I lifted my feet it sucked, clawed and gurgled at my boots like it was trying to dissolve them. I picked my way across the roadway to the side shared with the toilet bunker and moved toward it slow and stealthy. Before I got there I could see that the armed guards that had been seated out front earlier were gone. The place looked and felt deserted. Both sides of the block supported mean little shanties built from stuff most folks threw out. If at all possible, I didn’t want to disturb the people who lived in them, or damage these homes in any way.
My sweating palm kneaded the .38 gummy bear. The door was clearly a wafer-thin sheet of veneer, and gaps all round leaked a yellow glow from within. I could also hear the local R&B playing somewhere inside. Pressing my ear against the door, I heard the music a little louder and clearer, but no other sound that suggested habitation. Twenty guys with bags and guns had piled out; I hoped that was everyone. My heart rate was up. There was only one way in. I thumbed back the .38’s hammer, pulled out the Desert Eagle, cocked it and thumbed off the safety.
I put my bodyweight behind a front kick that blasted the door clean off its hinges, and moved in quickly, stepping over it. The hall was low and narrow and stank like the place had been washed down with urine, bong water and charcoal. A room off to the right. No door. A dark rectangle. I went in, staying low. Empty. Rubbish littered the floor – food packaging, plastic bottles. Kicking the trash aside I found two bottles of water, unopened, seals still intact, but nothing else of note. From the smell and the state of the blackened floors, cooking fires had been lit in this room. No windows, or other doors, though there was plenty of ventilation with the roof raised several inches above the walls. No people, either – clear. I turned and went out, keeping low. Another room like the last was off to the right of the passageway. Nothing but trash and old bedding in there also. I backed out. Not much hallway left, a heavily padlocked door sealing the end. One last doorway remained; dim light came from within. That’s where the music was coming from. A flash bang would’ve been a handy thing to throw in there before my body filled the doorway.
I counted to three, moved to the other side of the opening, stopped. No reaction from within. I put the .38 around the corner, followed by my head, briefly. In, out. A table, an automobile battery on it, wires leading to a car headlight bulb burning dully. Nothing had moved. I put my head around a second time, saw the battery on the table again. A tub was bolted to the wall along with a workbench. Two mattresses were on the floor. A man lay on one of them, overnight bag on the floor beside him. I went in. He was plainly dead, staring open-eyed at nothing on the soot-stained ceiling. A neat bullet wound like a squashed raspberry colored the center of his forehead. His forearm was broken, a red and white bone end breaking the skin like the bow of a sinking ship. I was pretty sure he was the man injured in the car crash. I figured his buddies had fixed it so that it wouldn’t bother him anymore, or slow them down. Not much of a healthcare plan.