War Lord (30 page)

Next in line, three hundred yards behind, was a compact container ship. It was painted off-white, rust breaking through the skin like a spreading cancer. I steered toward it, carving a white trench in the warm green harbor waters. Its name was
Sun Trader
, registered out of Liberia. Like the
Morning Star
,
Sun Trader
also seemed deserted, though lights were on in some of the small windows puncturing its superstructure. A third ship completed the queue, some kind of general bulk carrier. It was low in the water, suggesting its holds were full. A man was standing on the bow, smoking a cigarette. Fakim waved at him. No acknowledgment. I motored down the side of the ship painted dark blue and got a look at the stern –
African Spirit
, Liberia. It was an old-style bulk carrier, the type you didn’t see so much pulling into Western ports these days, a couple of cranes on it, presumably between the holds. Nothing more to see here; I steered toward the pier where there were other ships to inspect, the vehicle carrier from South Korea and so forth.

After checking them out, all seemed to be more or less ghost ships with virtually zero human activity on board. What was there to do on a modern ship when it was sitting on a mooring anyway? The harbor tour continued. I took us farther inland where the water turned black and individual rainbow slicks of oil merged into one continuous blanket that reflected the dying light. Over the city, the twilight sky was filling with the smoke of a hundred thousand cooking fires, all fuelled by trash if the smell was anything to go by.

I’d been wrong and there was nothing of any interest to see out on the water after all. Spinning the Mercedes wheel, we scribed a tight one-eighty and headed back to the beach. By now the sun was below the horizon. With daylight largely gone, the lights on the ships had some authority, burning bright to discourage the approach of unwelcome guests. It was the same out in the channel, where the ships were lit up like exercise yards. There was one exception to this, the
African Spirit
at the back of the line, which was no more than a vague gray shadow.

Keeping a hundred yards or so from the line of moored ships as we headed back, I glanced idly up at the darkened
African Spirit
as we motored by. And that’s when I caught sight of the thing I knew would be significant when I saw it. A surge of adrenalin punched my heart rate into triple figures. I turned away to avoid attracting suspicion and looked ahead to the steel cliff that was the next ship in the row rising out of the black water. What I’d seen up on the deck of the
African Spirit
was a guy with an assault rifle dangling carelessly in his hand, a light-enhancing device propped up on his forehead. Everyday garden-variety pirates would probably have assault weapons, but I doubted they’d be equipped with NVGs. No, the guys guarding this ship were
special
. All of which meant one thing – I was gonna need that handgun.

A few minutes later I drove the runabout up onto the sand. Fakim fetched the wheels and helped me beach it high and dry. We threw the tarp over it and I ducked back under to retrieve the ignition key. There were another twenty-three hours of ownership with my name on them and, given the security bond Fakim had put up, it was only fair not to make the thing too easy to steal. The boat owner materialized out of the night and I put the key in his gnarled hand.

‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’ he said when I told him thanks.

‘What if I need it sooner?’ I asked.

Fakim exchanged a few words with the guy and said, ‘You come back any time. He will be here. He guards the boat.’

‘Now let’s go get a gun,’ I told Fakim as we walked up the beach.

‘No. Later for gun.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘First we must eat.’

Food. Did I have time for that? The guard I saw on the
African Spirit
with the NVGs didn’t look particularly alert, but there’d be others. It’d be pointless and dangerous trying to get aboard before fatigue set in among the watch. I had a few hours to kill. And, now that Fakim mentioned it, I was hungry for the first time since my brush with snake venom, though the smells I was coming to associate with Dar weren’t exactly making me salivate for the local cuisine.

We passed by two men barbecuing the small carcass of some unidentified hairy animal over a smoking fire set in a cut-down fifty-five-gallon drum.

‘I don’t suppose you got Burger King in town?’ I asked.

‘Ha ha ha,’ he replied.

‘What makes you think I’m joking?’ I said.

Fakim drove through narrow backstreets for a while, the unsealed roads choked with people and street animals, and eventually pulled into an open square, folks milling around, some moving to the beat of blaring music, hawkers selling food out of portable stalls. I settled for Fakim’s recommendation – chicken à la newspaper. At least, I think it was chicken. I unwrapped the newsprint. The sinewy carcass was covered in hot spices and peppers, served with some boiled stringy vegetable matter, and was a little hard to positively identify. I was thinking squirrel. Somehow Fakim managed to get his hands on a couple of chilled Cokes.

The chicken tasted like something else that tasted like chicken. Like squirrel maybe. I left most of the greenery and the Coke was, well, Coke. We were done by nine forty-five and went back to his car.

‘Okay, now the gun,’ I told him as we got in.

‘Yes, Mr Vin, the time is good for gun,’ he replied.

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that – maybe it was just his English – but I let it go. We drove for another twenty minutes or so, into another part of town more decrepit than the last, if that were possible. Fakim eventually pulled over in a street that was part residential, part warehouse. No kids running about here, and there were no hawker stalls, no music, no dogs, and only a trickle of light from a window here and there. Fakim turned to me and said, ‘Gun is down there.’ He pointed to a nearby narrow pathway completely engulfed in shadow.

‘Down there,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Now, money please?’

‘What?’

‘You have paid two hundred dollar of the four hundred dollar for car, for driver, for guide. You now pay two hundred dollar you owe me for boat, and also a hundred dollar for gun.’

‘So what do I get for this hundred dollars?’

‘I show you where gun is.’

‘And it’s up to me to go and get it?’

‘Yes, yes.’

The guy had an interesting business model. ‘So the gun is down that darkened alley somewhere, and you want me to give you the money for it now.’

‘Yes, the gun is down there. You pay me. All three hundred dollar, please.’

This deal didn’t add up in all the ways that counted, but mostly because he wanted the balance of the cash now in case I didn’t make it back outta there alive.

‘Ha ha ha.’

‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars now and another two hundred when I return with the gun.’

He looked at me hard, no doubt weighing the odds of my return.

I told him my problem. ‘Once I pay you, what’s to stop you driving off the second I get out of the car?’

‘Oh no, no, no, Mr Vin!’ he said.

Yeah, right. ‘A hundred now, two hundred later. That’s the only deal on the table.’

He exchanged his look of injustice for a frown of surly defeat. ‘Okay . . . deal.’

There was a length of broom handle on the floorboards beside him. ‘I’m gonna borrow your nightstick.’ I motioned at it. ‘It’s in the fine print.’

‘You pay me first, please.’

On the whole, it was an interesting lesson in economics Dar-style. I counted out the hundred dollars, swatted them into his open hand and he passed me the broom handle.

Fakim wasn’t to know that I was cleaned out, cash-wise. I’d have to figure something out on that later. I left the car and walked across the road to the alley, the stick in my left hand held behind my leg. I stood at the entrance to the black hole that was the alleyway, off to one side so as not to be silhouetted, and waited a minute or two for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air stank of old ammonia – dog, cat and human piss. What the hell was I walking into? The faintest glimmer of mustard-colored light beckoned from down the far end of the black hole. I moved toward it, breathing hard, broken masonry and glass underfoot, along with plastic bags, plastic bottles and bottle tops, paper and stinking, sucking mud. The alley went through a kink and then another kink and broadened into a small square, an open sewer running through the middle of it. Ahead, against the far wall, three males and a female. Two of the males were chatting, smoking, leaning against a beat-up Toyota van with its parking lights on. The female had her skirt hitched up around her waist. She was presenting her huge dimply rear end to guy number three, a runt behind her whose sweat pants were around his skinny knees. He was jigging back and forth like a ferret in heat as he screwed her. The woman was grappling with a column of masonry to keep her balance while she looked back over her shoulder, smiling and murmuring encouragement.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to the two smokers, finger raised, lost tourist-style. ‘Can you fellas point me in the direction of the nearest automatic teller machine?’

The men stared at me open-mouthed the way a prospector might regard a gold nugget that had just fallen out of the sky and landed at his feet.

‘Hey!’ one of them shouted at me after a protracted second or two, once they realized this gold nugget was no apparition. He reached into the front of his pants, pulled out a massive nickel-plated pistol that still managed to flash in the dimness, and skipped across the square toward me with his buddy a few steps behind, the weapon pointing in my general direction like an artillery piece. I was actually relieved to see this move on their part because it meant that the moment of maximum danger had passed. If I were them, I’d have dropped me first and asked questions later.

When the guy in front came within range, I swatted the weapon aside with the hidden broomstick, then followed through with an elbow to the side of his face, and finished off the ensemble move with the broomhandle, a smack down low that took his legs out from under him. One, two, three. He went down on his back with a thud, the mud settling under him with a farting sound. His buddy put the brakes on and pulled a knife, so I bent down and picked up the gun, which made him back up, spin around and run for the nearest exit. The hooker was also running, having reorganized her clothing. She vaulted the open sewer with the grace of a hippo and disappeared into a doorway. Ferret guy was following his buddy, trying to run with his pants still around his knees.

I regarded the man at my feet. He was in his early twenties, maybe a hundred and thirty underfed pounds that were a mixture of black and Arab. His clothes, if they weren’t Chinese rip-offs, were expensive – Everlast-branded sweat pants, Lonsdale t-shirt, Adidas high-tops. His mouth was opening and closing like a beached fish. He was winded, finding it difficult to fill his lungs. I crouched beside him, patted him down and found a wallet – empty – a switchblade, a handful of candies wrapped in plastic, seven hand-cut dum-dum bullets and a snub-nosed .38 revolver with a half dozen layers of duct tape wound around its handle. I checked the cylinder. No empty chambers. Up for inspection next, the nickel-plated job. It looked new. It was a heavy hitter, a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. A useful weapon as long as you didn’t have to hold it extended for any length of time, a real hand cannon. Removing the magazine revealed two rounds with a third in the chamber. I sniffed the barrel. It had been fired fairly recently. Being shot by a .44 slug was just a little worse than hitting the sidewalk after stepping off a twenty-story building. I relieved the guy of the handguns and ammo and left him with his other possessions.

‘Two guns for price of one. I should ask for double,’ said Fakim, shaking his head when I climbed into the passenger seat and showed him the weapons. ‘So, where you go now? Back to hotel?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Take me to the most expensive brothel in town.’

T
he frown on Fakim’s face was Sunday school-teacher stern.

‘A brothel. This is illegal in Tanzania, Mr Vin. You want to make with woman, we go to Uwanja wa Fisi. It is famous.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘It is also called Hyena Square.’

‘Still never heard of it.’

‘You buy woman there for five hundred shillings.’

I did the calculation. ‘That’s thirty cents American.’

‘You can bargain with them, make love for three hundred shillings.’

On the basis that you get what you pay for, what could you expect for thirty cents or less? In Dar es Salaam, I didn’t want to think about it. ‘Let me put it another way,’ I said. ‘If you had
a lot
of money in this town, and you wanted to meet a
nice
bad girl, where would you go?’

Fakim thought about that as we moved off and said, ‘Yes, I know good place.’

Twenty minutes later, and in a better part of town, we cruised slowly past a joint called the Q-Bar Restaurant and Nightclub, a bar open to the street where white guys mingled with black women, drank beer, played pool and, from the look of the comings and goings, took aforementioned black women back to their hotel rooms, wherever that happened to be.

‘This the best place to get laid?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Mr Vin, best place.’

‘Okay, well, go down the road a ways, do a U-turn and come back. Park where I tell you.’

Fakim nodded, massaged the gas pedal and we drifted on past the bar. I couldn’t see anyone I recognized as we cruised by, but did I really expect to? I reminded myself this was a long shot. I was going to have to get lucky – a different kind of lucky to the lucky going on at the Q-Bar.

A short while later we were coming back down the street. Several parking spots were available. ‘There,’ I said, pointing to a gap thirty yards up the road from the bar and on the opposite side. Fakim squeezed us into the spot. There was no street lighting to speak of around us, so the bar punched out of the gloom. Bon Jovi was on the playlist, a pair of African women moving to the beat in long slinky sheaths accentuating their slender height.

After ten minutes of doing nothing but sit, Fakim asked, ‘What is happening?’

‘Not a lot so far,’ I said as I watched an old white guy with a paunch, gray hair and a bald spot lead a young African woman wearing a midriff-baring top to an old Toyota Tarago van.

‘When will there be something?’

The Tarago edged into the street and drove off.

‘Fakim, you watch television, you know what a stakeout is?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s what this is – a stakeout.’ That seemed to satisfy him for the moment. I killed ten minutes or so re-examining the confiscated firearms, glancing back at the Q-Bar every now and then. The .38 was an ancient weapon with its numbers crudely removed, a classic throw-down. You killed someone with a piece like this and left it at the scene – untraceable. The barrel was filthy and the grimy duct tape around the handle was sweating glue, leaving little balls of tacky black sludge in the palm of my hand. I wondered how many deaths it had been responsible for. I cleaned the metal with a scrap of rag scrounged from the backseat area, pushing it through the barrel with a pen from a holder on the dash. The gun could do with some oil, but I had none. Obviously the previous owner had never seen what happened when a dirty weapon blew up in your hand.

The Desert Eagle was a different story to the .38, though the barrel had flecks of powder caught in the rifling. Its action was, however, dirt-free and well oiled. After wiping it down with a fresh strip of rag, I ran the strip through the .38 to transfer a little lubrication, and then reloaded its cylinder with the dum-dum rounds. These nasty little fucks had a grooved cross cut in the tip so that the slugs expanded and broke up on impact with human flesh, the pieces tearing and gouging their way through.

During the clean-up, a couple of vehicles came while others went, the to and fro movement at the Q-Bar featuring some of the hottest women I’d ever seen, African or otherwise. Other than that, there was nothing of particular interest going on.

Three hours later, it became apparent which of the women were doing more of the coming and going than the others. Fakim had long since fallen asleep, snoring against his window.

‘Fakim.’

Nothing.

‘Fakim,’ I repeated.

He woke with a loud fart. ‘Yes? Yes?’

‘There another entrance to this bar?’

‘Yes, Mr Vin, there are others,’ he said.

‘Great,’ I muttered. It was now just after two a.m. The whole exercise had been a goddamn waste of time, the futility of it magnifying my exhaustion. The fault was mine. I’d failed to ask the question, fuck it all. I yawned. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Where now?’ he asked, turning the key in the ignition, the motor hiccuping into life.

I was thinking my bed back at the Southern Sun. I’d chosen this place to stake out in the belief that the pirates out on the
African Spirit
, being in the employment of von Weiss, would have more money than the average john and therefore would choose to come to the best little whorehouse in Dar when they were ashore – assuming any of them were ashore tonight. Maybe this assumption was flawed from the beginning. Maybe Hyena Square for a thirty-cent doink was more their speed. ‘Head to the docks,’ I said. ‘Wake me when we get there.’

I burrowed into the seat and thought about closing my eyes. But at that moment I saw two white guys leave the bar with three women, one of whom was well over six and a half feet tall. Sleep could wait.

‘Hey, will you look at that,’ I said, sitting up.

‘Yes, she is very tall. I think she is Maasai. They are warrior tribe – grow very tall, taller than her.’

She’d be a shoe-in for a job at Donn Arden’s Jubilee Showgirls.

The party got into a minibus with a Holiday Inn logo on the driver’s door.

‘Follow them,’ I said.

‘Oh, Mr Vin, you like tall women? You do not need to follow
her.
I know another place where—’

‘Just don’t lose them,’ I said, cutting him off. It wasn’t the Maasai woman I had an interest in but the two white guys with her. I’d met one of them before a couple of times back in Vegas. It was Ty Morrow, owner of Nevada Aircraft Brokers, suppliers of aircraft to drug cartels, arms traders and Benicio von Weiss. Running into Morrow all the way down here? Well, that was completely unexpected. And I’d have been more than happy to have had that opportunity on its own, but a big fat bonus came with him. It was his wing buddy. This guy I’d never been introduced to, though I now knew him well enough through his service record and recognized him from his photo: former lieutenant Ed Dyson, US Navy, discharged due to some obscure (and, for all I knew, bogus) medical disorder. Petinski’s weather professor. As I watched, Dyson closed the door behind the Maasai woman as she pulled in her long legs, then ran around the back of the minibus and climbed in the other side. Whadaya know, a gentleman. Emma Shilling had told me she’d overheard Dar es Salaam being mentioned in a conversation Dyson had with von Weiss. And now here he was in living, breathing, horny person. Motherfucking jackpot. If these guys were here, then surely O Magnifico himself wasn’t far away. Maybe Morrow and Dyson would lead us right to him.

‘Wait till they pull out,’ I told Fakim.

Whoever was driving the minibus took their time getting their shit together, enough time for the vehicle parked in front of it to depart and provide the minibus with an easy exit. The minibus driver took it and accelerated hard, taillights disappearing in a rolling ball of dust up the road.

I barked, ‘Move it!’

‘Yes, yes, Mr Vin.’ Fakim jack-knifed into the traffic. A horn blared and a headlight crashed into our overhanging fender with a dull crunch of metal and plastic.

‘Oh, oh . . .’ Fakim wailed.

‘Wonderful,’ I muttered. Fakim slumped his head against the steering wheel, his fists against his temples.

The vehicle that had hit us backed up a few feet and its front doors flew open. Seconds later a flashlight came on and swept over Fakim and me.

‘Is that you, Cooper?’

Petinski!

‘Jesus,’ she snapped. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Get out of the car,’ said a man accompanying her in a voice I didn’t recognize.

Several patrons from the Q-Bar were wandering over to watch the show. Fakim opened his door with difficulty, eventually pushing it out with his feet. I got out and leaned on the roof. ‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going, Petinski?’ I asked her. ‘Or was it your buddy here driving?’

‘You know this clown?’ inquired the guy with the flashlight.

‘Be nice, Ken,’ she told him.

Ken was neatly dressed and slightly built with a good hairline. He looked like a Ken. He shone the beam full in my face.

‘You wanna put that away, Ken?’ I told him, and then to Petinski I said, ‘Do I call you Barbie now?’

She snatched the Maglite from her partner’s hand, turned it off and tossed it into their car. ‘You were following Morrow and Dyson?’ she asked, short of patience.

‘About to,’ I said. ‘Until you and Ricky Bobby here arrived.’

The guy glanced at the ground and then over at the Q-Bar as if maybe we were talking about someone else.

‘We’ve been sitting twenty yards up the road for the last six hours,’ Petinski said.

I watched Fakim examine the damage to his vehicle. ‘Is it drivable?’ I asked him.

He tugged at the fender but couldn’t manage to pull it away from the tire. ‘No, but it’s not so bad.’

The Renault was a patchwork of different-colored panels anyway, evidence of numerous past accidents. Life was hard for a car in Dar. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told him. ‘The Company will pay to get it fixed.’ I turned to Ken. ‘Won’t it, Ken?’

‘Who is this joker?’ Ken asked.

‘Don’t push it, Cooper,’ said Petinski. ‘Can we get back to the business at hand? How long you been following Morrow and Dyson?’

‘I was going to ask you the same thing. Weren’t you being reassigned?’

‘This
is
my reassignment.’

‘Which is?’

‘None of your business.’

I looked at her flatly.

She sighed. ‘Okay . . . Chasing the weapons obtained illegally in the United States from military bases.’

It annoyed me to hear that. That was the case
I
wanted. Fakim had finished checking over his car and he wasn’t happy either. ‘Give him your card,’ I said to Ken before Fakim could arc up at me.

‘But it wasn’t my fault,’ Ken whined.

‘There’s an independent witness who says otherwise,’ I said.

‘And who’s that?’

‘You’re looking at him.’

Ken stared at me a moment or two and wisely decided I was serious. He reached for his wallet and removed his card. It read:
Lieutenant Ken Bushell, US Navy, Assistant to the US Military Attaché, Kenya. US Embassy, Mombasa
. A weight of fancy non-standard gold embossing on the lettering told me Bushell had had them printed up himself. These Navy types . . .

‘Nice card,’ I told him. ‘When’ll you be back in the office?’

‘I don’t know. Next Monday or Tuesday. Who knows.’

‘Petinski, can you loan me three hundred bucks?’

She hesitated.

‘C’mon, you know I’m good for it.’

She put her hand in her pocket, removed a money clip and pulled most of the bills off it.

‘Two-fifty’s all I got.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I owe you.’

‘You do.’

I handed Ken’s card to Fakim along with one of my own. I also gave him the two hundred and fifty dollars and told him it was the balance of what I owed him, plus fifty bucks for a cab. ‘Contact Mr Bushell here. If you can’t get through, give my office a call.’

‘Yes, yes, Mr Vin. I will. Ha ha. If you want to use boat, your friend at Magogoni Street will be waiting. But please to bring back, okay?’

‘Relax,’ I said.

He passed me a card, a photo on it of his Renault with him standing beside the vehicle, his hand raised, and the words
Fakim’s Luxury Taxi
. ‘For next time you come to Dar,’ he said.

‘Thanks for your help, Fakim,’ I said, shaking his hand.

‘
Asante sana
– thank you, Mr Vin, ha ha.’

‘You going somewhere?’ Ken asked.

‘Yeah, with you and Petinski.’ I gave Fakim a final wave and then climbed in the back of their light-green Ford before Ken could get his tongue around an objection. ‘The Holiday Inn, right?’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

Petinski shrugged and got in. Ken didn’t have much choice. He turned and opened the driver’s door.

‘So you’re from the Mombasa station,’ I said to Ken, leaning forward between them. ‘A little out of area, aren’t you?’

Petinski answered for him. ‘I told you we’ve got problems in Dar. The station chief has been relieved for taking bribes. Langley thought it best to use out-of-towners.’

‘What about von Weiss?’ I asked as we moved off. ‘Where’s he?’

‘Couldn’t tell you. We’re after your two pals Charles and Falco White.’

‘They’re here?’

‘At the Holiday Inn with Morrow and Dyson.’

‘And this has nothing at all to do with the other things you and I were investigating?’

‘No.’

Ken eyeballed Petinski beside him, whispered something to her.

‘Relax, Cooper’s one of us,’ I heard her say.

‘Hey, I resent that,’ I said.

‘You always got a smart mouth, Agent Cooper?’ Ken asked.

‘Only when there’s good material to work with.’

‘Anything turn up on Randy?’ Petinski said over her shoulder.

‘No, nothing.’

‘In a way that’s something, I guess.’ She meant that as a body hadn’t turned up there was still a chance he was alive.

‘How’d you track down Morrow and Dyson?’ I asked her.

‘Morrow piloted von Weiss’s G5 from Buenos Aires to Dar. Laurent Duval was his co-pilot. Ken here had the airport staked out and picked up the tail when they landed.’

I was more familiar with ‘Duval’ by his real name. ‘André LeDuc,’ I said, this time unable to suppress the grin. ‘He’s here too?’

‘I thought that would make you happy,’ she said.