The Orpheus Deception (54 page)

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Authors: David Stone

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“Why did you kill Sergeant Ong?”

“Because, my dear Sam Bobby, he was going to get us all killed.”

“How do you know that?”

“Recently, I have been making something of a study of our Mr. Dalton, and I have learned a few lessons along the way, one of which is not to crawl into a long, narrow pipe when there’s a crocodile at the other end.”

“Okay. I can see that.”

“Did you know what this was all about?”

“No. All we knew was that when we got the call we were supposed to come to Pulau Maju and shoot the place up. Kill everybody on the island.”

“And did you?”

Sam Bobby gave him a large, wet-lipped leer.

“Rock and roll! Like killing bunnies with a ball-peen hammer.”

“Tell me, was there a ship here when you arrived?”

“Yeah. Big oil tanker. Five-hundred-foot at least. Brand-spanking-new.”

“Did Ong tell you anything about that?”

“No. I asked. He said to shut the fuck up. So I did.”

“What the story on the kid back there?”

“He’s my son.”

Lujac looked back. The boy had the minigun tarped and was sweeping up some stray shell casings. He had his iPod turned on, and was dancing a little two-step while he worked. Lujac figured the kid was a psycho, which was fine by him. The lovely thing about psychos was they were reliable, hardheaded people who were not easily panicked and did not get all gummed up with pointless emotions such as sympathy or guilt.

“How did you get this Osprey?”

“Ong requisitioned it. It belongs to the Home Ministry.”

“Ong said this was Chong’s plane. I didn’t believe him.”

“Ong’s a fucking Sergeant. Nobody hands you one of these Ospreys if you’re a Sergeant. You have to have some pull.”

“So you figure Ong was right. That Chong is in on . . . whatever it is?”

“Sure. Has to be. We were gonna be rich. Now I don’t know.”

“What was your cut?”

“Ong said we’d each get fifty thousand.”

“Fifty thousand is rich to you?”

“Damn right. We were going to get into the landscaping business.”

Lujac figured what Ong had planned for Sam Bobby Gurlami and his kid was a chance to get very deep into the landscape itself, and stay there.

“But you had no idea what, exactly, the . . . the game . . . was?”

“No. But there was a lot of money in it. Ong was going to buy a resort in Phuket with what he got. If it was enough to turn Minister Chong, then it has to be millions. In Singapore, you cheat or take a bribe, they kill you.”

“So I’ve heard. Tell me, Sam Bobby, do you like money?”

Sam Bobby showed his teeth, very white against his walnut hide.

“Yeah. Sure I do. It’s all about the money.”

“Then you are about to earn a whole lot of money.”

“More than Ong was going to give us?”

“Sergeant Ong was a fat, cheap prick. I mean, did you
see
that suit?”

Royal Air Force Lockheed P-3 Orion, nine hundred miles due west of Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean

They were on a routine shakedown flight, training up some new people cycling in from the Reserves. The newbies were all back in the main cabin, learning about the surveillance and listening gear that had just been installed. The Orion was a four-engine patrol plane, maybe twenty years old, and had spent most of its service life flying these SigInt operations out of the airfield at Diego Garcia. The pilot, W. O. “Bingo” Binnings, two years away from retirement, was wondering how he would adjust to a life far less vivid than this one, and his copilot, a young East Indian woman named Audrey Singh, with three years of flying, was staring out at the vast shimmering expanse of the Indian Ocean and thinking of her upcoming physical—she was pregnant and had told no one about it, especially not her husband, for reasons we need not pry into here—when she saw something like a small black speck, floating in the middle of a field of shifting light, two thousand feet below her wing.

“Bingo, do you see that?”

Binnings, an older man, wore glasses and did not like to admit, even to himself, that his eyes were beginning to fail him.

“Where are we looking, Audrey?”

Singh pointed down and to her right.

“Down there, bearing one-nine-one. Small black thing. Do you see it?”

Binnings could make out nothing in the sidelong glare of the setting sun, but he had faith in the girl’s young eyes.

“Shall we go down, take a look?”

“Yes. Please.”

He put the plane into a slow bank and went back along their route, bringing the plane down to five hundred feet off the chop. He banked again and retraced their route, slowing their airspeed as much as he dared. Singh was leaning forward in her seat, frowning out at the seascape, using a pair of binoculars to scan the sea, as they raced over it at three hundred and fifty miles an hour. Something black was bobbing on the horizon. They were on it, over it, and thundering past it in a few seconds.

“What was it?”

“It was a boat! An open boat.”

“We’re a thousand miles from anywhere, Audrey. Are you sure?”

“Go ’round again, Bingo. Please.”

“As you like it, my dear.”

He did the circuit again, and as they came back on the line he handed her a digital camera.

“Get a shot, if you can.”

“Okay.”

Once again, they were moving far too fast to get a good look. But it was definitely an open boat, some sort of twin-engine cigarette boat, adrift in the water, rolling madly in the swells. There was no one in the boat, but something black and vaguely manlike was lying on the bow. A gull was sitting on its chest. The gull fluttered heavily off when they flashed by again. Singh snapped a string of pictures, and then she flipped the display panel open and hit REPLAY. She stared down at the images for a few seconds, and then he heard her slow intake of breath.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s a man.”

She handed the camera to Bingo, who shaded the screen with his hand and held it up close. She was right. Spread-eagled on the bow of the speedboat was a tall, skinny black male—probably male—wearing what was left of some kind of tan uniform. He was shoeless, and it looked like the birds had been at him, because there were holes ripped in his shirt and pants and dried blood clots all over him. His face was a nightmare, most of the edible flesh already torn away by gulls, and his eyes had been thoroughly pecked out as well, nothing left but two gaping black sockets full of crusted blood.

“My God,” said Bingo Binnings. “Note the bearings and the GPS, and call the base. I’ll make one more run, and we’ll drop a beacon. They’ll have to scramble one of the Ospreys.”

WHICH THEY DID.
But night comes down like the lid on a coffin this near the equator, so it was the next day before they managed to find the boat again. The pilot hovered the Osprey over the drifting boat, and a rescue diver rappelled down to the deck; very hazardous duty, what with the wind, and the downdraft from the rotors, and the sea building so that the boat was leaping and bucking about like a hog in a gate. But the diver got himself safely down and knelt beside the half-eaten figure on the bow.

He keyed his helmet mike.

“Bloody hell,” he said, into his mike. “This man’s been nailed to the bow. Bloody nailed!”

“Say again,” came the voice of the crew chief, leaning out of the open bay, held in by a safety strap.

The diver looked up at him.

“He’s been nailed to the bow. Through his wrists and ankles.”

“Yow! Must have pissed somebody off,” said the crew chief. “See if he’s got any ID on him.”

The diver gritted his teeth, held his breath, and patted the man down. He felt something in his shirt pocket, tugged it out, a sheaf of papers, bloody, folded, and crumpled. He managed to get one open, held it flat against the body’s chest.

“It’s a bill of lading.”

“A what?”

“A bill of lading. A cargo manifest.”

“Does it say what ship?”

“Hard to read. The
Mingo . . .
something.
Mingo Dubai,
I think.”

“Well, stuff it in your vest. We’ll go through it. Can you un-nail him?”

“Not without doing some damage.”

“Well, he’s dead, isn’t he? He’s not going to care.”

“Look, Frank, why can’t we just leave him be?”

“What? Nailed to a boat? Left to drift? He’s an affront to the bloody senses, you manky Scots git, not to mention a hazard to fucking navigation. We can’t just leave him here.”

“Can’t we sink the boat? I mean, he’s . . . all nailed down.”

“Don’t be such a pantywaist. Pry him loose and strap him up. We’ll haul him back to Diego and give him a decent burial.”

The diver shrugged, cursed the crew chief silently, pulled out his pry knife, went to work on the body’s left ankle. He heard something like wood creaking against wood, looked up and saw, with a thrill of pure horror that stayed with him for the rest of his career, that the body was moving: the neck stretching out, growing rigid, corded sinews rising in the sun-scorched skin. The lipless mouth opened slowly, the fingers twitched weakly, and, from the gaping, toothless, and tongueless mouth, came a faint but terrible rasping moan. The diver jerked back, dropping his pry knife into the deep.

“Christ on a fucking crutch!”

“What?”

“This poor bastard is still alive.”

Airborne, inbound to the USA

No KIPAM Marine had gotten to a radio, and the M134 Minigun had chewed the Blackhawk to tiny ribbons of aluminum and chips of plastic. It had also shredded Major Kang into a kind of pulpy pink paste with boots on that was more or less located around the edge of the cannery wreck. His radio—at least, many of its constituent bits—was visible in this material. And there was, as predicted, no cell-phone signal. Dalton and Fyke—both stunned, dazed, in mild shock, but otherwise, amazingly, unhurt—walked away from the wreckage and looked around them, hearing nothing but the booming of the sea and the wind rustling through the palms. They were considering trying to make a raft out of bamboo when they heard the sound of incoming choppers. The KIPAM base air controller had heard the panicked cross talk, had listened to the buzz-saw sound of the minigun, a short warning yelp—and then a profound silence.

He had drawn the appropriate conclusions and scrambled every available air asset to hunt down whatever aircraft could have been near Pulau Maju, while dispatching a Blackhawk and two Apaches to the island to see what the hell had happened. Dalton and Fyke were airborne in their Lockheed JetStar two hours later. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, local time.

Fyke got on the radio to the Duty Desk at Langley and filled them in on the theoretical threat posed by the
Mingo Dubai.
Langley got everything they had to give in a few short exchanges, rang off, and contacted the Director, who got on to Homeland Security and the President, and the massive grinding machinery of the United States security system lurched into inexorable motion over the next forty minutes.

Dalton had the plane on the ground in Guam, sixteen hundred miles east of Manado, a little over three hours later. They refueled, took on some supplies and a change of clothes—this time U.S. Air Force Special Forces blues—and covered the 2,194 miles from Wake to Wheeler Air Force Base, on Honolulu, in a little under six hours. A two-hour overlay at Wheeler for a refit and an engine check, and then another twenty-six hundred miles to Fort Lewis, Washington, where an Agency Gulfstream was waiting on the tarmac.

It had been fitted out with cots and came equipped with a shower. Dalton and Fyke were shaved and shining and sound asleep by the time the Gulfstream was at twenty thousand feet over the Rockies and the Great Plains were opening up under its wings like a broad green carpet. It was a little before midday mountain time and they had covered eighty-three hundred miles, from Manado in the Celebes to the cold blue sky far above Butte, Montana, in a little less than eighteen hours. It was eighteen hundred miles from Butte to Washington, D.C. The jet was at thirty thousand feet over La Crosse, Wisconsin, when the pilot got a patch-through call from Langley. Deacon Cather was on the phone.

“They’re asleep, sir,” said the pilot.

“I know,” said Cather. “I’m afraid it will be necessary to wake them.”

“Certainly, sir. Captain Dalton or Sergeant Fyke?”

“Captain Dalton, if you would.”

In a few moments, Dalton was on the line.

“Mr. Cather?”

“Micah, I have a person on hold here. I think it would be useful if you were to talk to her yourself?”