by Marc Cameron
When one did, Calliope would jump.
56
As if the concussion and broken wrist weren’t enough, Chavez and Adara ran afoul of Japanese giant hornets near the top of the mountain.
Completely absorbed with listening for anyone behind them, Adara grabbed the limb of a beech tree to haul herself upward, shaking it in the process. The gray paper nest was the size of a basketball and surely filled with hundreds of venomous insects. It didn’t move much, but it was enough to bring a half-dozen guard hornets out to investigate. They were huge, an inch in length, with angry yellow eyes—which Chavez had no time to see, but clearly imagined—and daggerlike stingers that injected a massive amount of a potent venom that attacked the nervous system of the victim.
Adara sidestepped away from the nest and sank to the ground in a ball, covering her head. Chavez, who hadn’t seen what was happening, thought they were under fire and wheeled to defend their six o’clock, earning himself a mind-numbing sting in the back of the neck. It felt as if someone had driven a red-hot nail into the base of his skull.
“Don’t move,” Adara hissed, stifling a scream as she, too, found herself on the receiving end of the quarter-inch stinger of the hornet that had names like “great sparrow bee,” “yak killer,” or “bee of the terrible stinging death.”
Chavez followed her example and made himself as small as possible, covering the spot on his neck where he’d been stung with the flat of his hand. He knew from experience with bees and more normal-sized wasps that they secreted a pheromone with each sting that signaled other wasps or bees to concentrate their attack on that same spot. Fewer than a dozen stings from these giant hornets could hospitalize a healthy man—and Chavez was far from healthy.
Adara was stung twice more before the hornets lost interest and returned to their nest. Chavez had personally seen her take a full-force kick to the groin without crying, but tears streamed down her cheeks when they were able to slink away. She had to work hard to keep from hyperventilating by the time they’d gone a hundred yards.
“If childbirth feels at all close to this,” she said, “then Mr. Caruso is shit outta luck . . .” Squinting, she used the back of her forearm to wipe the tears from her face. Chavez had been stung only once, but that was enough to understand how she felt. The venom had to be some kind of acid. If anything, the torturous pain was growing worse.
Chavez pointed upward with a none-too-steady hand. “We got an hour and a half to get to the rally point.”
“We’re going to need all of that,” Adara said, gasping. The hornets had tagged her twice under her right eye, and once in the V above her collarbone. More divots of missing flesh than sting welts, the angry red wounds looked remarkably like bullet holes. She’d taken a Benadryl from her pack, but her face and neck were swelling noticeably.
The jungle thinned some as they neared the top. Sunlight filtered through the canopy, dappling the ground. Chavez leaned against a sapling, checking it first for hornets’ nests. Sweat poured into his eyes. Bits of leaf and jungle litter flecked his face.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m counting on a hell of a lot of downhill on the other side.”
“Amen to that,” Adara said. She peered at him, swallowing hard, as if it was difficult to speak. “You think this is one of those times we’ll tell our kids about someday?”
“I do,” Chavez said, moving again, dragging himself toward the crest of the hill, less than a hundred feet away. “The little shits will love stories about how we got our ass kicked by bees.” He began to laugh, in spite of the situation. “Yeah, this is definitely one of those times. My head’s busted, I’ve got a break in my wing, and you look like somebody’s been stabbing you with a hot poker.”
Chavez fell silent. Who was he kidding? JP was busy with his own life. He wouldn’t be interested in the jungle tales of his old man.
Adara suddenly froze, her foot hovering in the air mid-step. Dread and terror washed over Chavez when he thought it might be another hornets’ nest. Then Adara drew the Smith & Wesson from her belt, pivoting slowly to her right.
The dark figure of a man came into focus, seeming to materialize out of the jungle duff. He carried what looked like a steel pipe. On closer examination, Chavez realized it was a homemade shotgun.
The man placed the weapon on the ground before raising both hands. He had the dark mahogany skin and broad nose of the Melanesians who inhabited Papua farther to the east. Coarse hair, naturally black, but bleached by the sun, stuck out in all directions from beneath a faded Coca-Cola baseball cap. An iridescent blue feather, more than a foot long, curled from the bill of the cap. He wore cotton shorts, stained from living in them for weeks or even months, and a holey T-shirt that matched his hat. A large silver cross hung from a braided string around his neck and a wicked-looking bone dagger was tied to his waist.
“Englich?” he asked, eyes wide.
Adara nodded. “You speak English?”
A nervous half-smile perked the man’s face. He had scars there, lots of scars that looked to be ceremonial. He put the flat of his right hand on the center of his chest. “Me’s Konner. Konner Toba.” He pointed at Adara, and for the first time, Chavez saw he was missing the pinkie and ring fingers of his left hand.
The people of western Papua, especially these islands, were predominately Ambonese and Chavez was surprised to see someone of Melanesian descent alone at the top of this mountain.
Adara put her left hand to her chest. The pistol was still in the other, though she pointed it at the ground.
“Adara,” she said.
Chavez introduced himself as Ding.
“Bad men,” Konner Toba said. “They is after you.”
“Yes,” Adara said.
“Me help you,” Konner said, tapping the dagger on his side, which, he explained, he’d made from his grandfather’s thighbone.
Adara pointed up, toward the crest of the hill. “How long to the water?”
Konner smiled, showing a mouthful of teeth, happy to be able to communicate. “Small stream over the hill,” he said. “Good water.”
Adara shook her head, spreading her hands wide apart. “I mean the ocean. The sea.”
“Ah,” Konner said. “You wanna go to da beach.”
“Yes,” Adara said. “To the beach.”
The man’s chin fell to his chest. “You got some medicines? My wife sick. She gots the debil in her. That’s why we run here. People in my billage, they say she is witch. Try kill her ’cause she got debil in her. I say all womin got debil, you know. I going to village down there ’cause she need medicine.” He brightened. “You help me, me help you go to beach.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Adara asked. “How is she sick?”
Konner shrugged. “She not pass water too easy,” he said. “She need medicine.”
It would have been easy to write off this guy as slow-witted, given his use of pidgin, but he spoke more English than Chavez spoke of any Papuan tribal language.
“I’m not sure, but it sounds like she might have a urinary tract infection,” Adara said to Ding. “Might even be her kidneys.” She turned toward Konner, patting her medic bag. “I have medicine that might help her, depending on what’s wrong. I can’t promise, though.”
“She screams a lot,” Konner said. “Make me sad. I been prayin’ the debil every day to help her out.”
Chavez nodded toward the silver cross on the man’s neck. “You mean you pray to God.”
“No,” Konner said matter-of-factly. “God love me already. I don’t gotta convince Him to help. Me prays to the debil so him change his mind and stop makin’ my wife sick.”
“Okay . . .” Chavez said, thinking his head hurt so bad that this made more sense than it should have. “We need to move.”
Konner cast around the hillside until he found a shrubby tree that was covered with wh
ite flowers. Chavez recognized it from a recent trip to Hawaii as plumeria or frangipani. The man broke off two of the succulent magnolia-like leaves at the base and held them up for Chavez and Adara. A droplet of white sap formed at the base of the stem where the leaves had been pulled away.
“Make sting feel better,” Konner said. He picked up the homemade shotgun, which was essentially a piece of plumbing pipe and a spring set into a roughed-out two-by-four. “You follow. Me show you the short road to the beach, you give medicine make my wife not scream so much.”
Adara leaned in closer to Chavez as they fell in behind the lanky Papuan and began to climb again uphill.
“This is amazing,” she whispered. “Is it wrong to hope that someday my granddaughter makes a dagger out of my thighbone?”
Chavez stifled a laugh, unwilling to put up with the pain. A few paces ahead, Konner Toba stopped in his tracks and turned to stare at the foliage behind them.
“Bad men close by,” he whispered. “We go beach now. Go fast.”
57
I’m proud of you,” Ryan said to his wife. With the handset of his secure telephone pressed against his ear by the pillow, he lay flat on his back in the forward compartment of Air Force One. His slacks and white shirt were draped over the chair beside the bed.
They’d been married long enough that he clearly recognized the sound of his wife’s happy cry on the other end of the line. She’d already relayed General Song’s message. He’d asked her to repeat it twice. As a surgeon, she was accustomed to dictating medical notes, and Adam Yao had sat with her immediately afterward, acting as her scribe to get all the details down on paper. Yao had sent a copy of the report via secure e-mail directly to Mary Pat Foley, cc’ing his boss, the DCI.
Ryan still had two hours until touchdown in Jakarta, so he took the time to just listen to his brave wife, and let her bask a little in her accomplishment. She sounded exhausted and hyper at the same time. Ryan knew the feeling all too well.
“. . . I mean, I’m no stranger to pressure, Jack,” she said. “But this was so different. It was incredibly exhilarating. Not like surgery at all . . .”
Ryan listened attentively, letting her get the feelings off her chest, until there was a knock at the door. It was Mary Pat.
“Sorry, hon,” Ryan said. “I have to go. You did good. I mean really, really good. This is something tangible we can use to save Father Pat.”
“Thank you, Jack,” she said. “That means a lot. Let me know how it goes,” she added, personally invested now, more than ever.
Ryan ended the call and rolled off the bed, stepping into his slacks before he answered the door. He grabbed his shirt and shrugged it on as he followed Mary Pat out into the office.
“What do you think?” he asked, leaning against the edge of the desk while he buttoned the shirt.
“I think it’s good,” she said. “But it’s thin without actual proof. We can’t very well out General Song.”
“True,” Ryan said.
“You know,” Foley said. “Indonesia has a love-hate relationship with its Chinese population, especially the Chinese Christians. If Gumelar has virtually anything to go on, he should be able to turn the tables and show China for the bad actor it is in all this.”
“The last thing I want to do is stir up a bunch of racial unrest against Chinese Christians.”
“I get it,” Foley said. “But there will undoubtedly be a butterfly effect. There always is. Everything we do is going to have consequences, some of them unintended.”
Ryan felt his ears pop as Air Force One began its initial descent. “Gumelar is on the nose when he says his hands are tied by the will of the people. Indonesia is more of a direct democracy than we are—even if it says differently on paper. We have General Song’s information. That, coupled with our next meeting, will scare Gumelar bad enough that he’ll come around to our way of thinking just to save his own ass.”
“You are absolutely sure about this plan of yours, Mr. President?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ryan said. “Like my father used to say, ‘This won’t be pretty, but it’ll be right.’”
* * *
—
Air Force One approached Halim Perdanakusuma International Airport from the east, touching down, as they always did, with barely a bump. The pilots taxied to the Presidential Terminal. Across from the main terminal, the Presidential Terminal was used, as its named implied, for the Indonesian president and high-level visiting VIPs.
Marine One was parked on the concrete pad at the end of the taxiway, surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents and military personnel who’d arrived well before Ryan in the various C-17 Globemasters and C-5 Galaxys used to transport the presidential lift. A Marine Corps V-22 Osprey was at the east end of the pad, nacelles and rotors pointed skyward. The media who’d hitched a ride on Air Force One would travel to the first event on the Osprey.
Indonesian reporters and wire service reps stood at the rope line in front of the terminal. President Gumelar and his generals had conveniently moved a half-dozen Indonesian Air Force F-16s and sleek Russian-built Su-30MKK fighter jets to the edge of the runway. It would have been a fine display of power, but all the aircraft and vehicles that traveled with the President of the United States made the handful of jets look insignificant.
He stepped up to the cockpit to thank the Air Force One pilots and crew, and then, adjusting his deep azure tie, stepped out the door to the air stairs.
Ryan saluted the Air Force sergeant at the base of the stairs and then shook hands with President Gumelar. He was a decade younger than Ryan, with wiry hair that stuck straight out if it was cut too short, dark-framed glasses, and a neck that looked slightly too thin to hold up his head.
“Gugun!” Ryan said, clasping the man’s hand. “Thank you for hosting me.”
Gumelar smiled for the cameras a few dozen yards away. “I am glad to see you, old friend, but you did not leave me much choice.”
Ryan returned the tight smile. “I could say the same.” He shook hands with the three dour generals that formed the welcoming committee with Gumelar and then nodded to Marine One. Sergeant Scott stood at attention at the base of the steps.
“I was thinking you and I should ride together,” Ryan said. “It’s quicker than the motorcade.”
Gumelar held up an open hand, attempting to demure. “Mr. President, I—”
“Bring one of your security guys,” Ryan said. “There’s room.” He looked over his shoulder at Montgomery. “Right, Gary?”
“Of course, Mr. President,” Montgomery said.
This was where it got tricky. Gumelar didn’t have to come along. Things still would have worked, just more slowly. But who turned down a free ride in one of the most famous helicopters on earth?
Head swaying on his willowy neck, President Gumelar stammered, “I . . . I would be honored.”
Both men turned to wave to the crowds, which, Ryan noted, were polite but sedate. Police had kept any protesters at least two hundred meters away.
Ryan stopped a few steps back from the double doors on the VH-60N White Hawk that was about to become Marine One when he stepped aboard. He let President Gumelar get on first.
Admiral Bailey, Ryan’s physician, trotted up carrying his medical bag. “Special Agent Montgomery sent word that you wanted to see me, Mr. President.”
“I do, Doc,” Ryan said, waving an open hand at the helicopter doors. “We may be in need of your services in a few minutes.”
“Aye-aye, Mr. President,” Bailey said, and hurried up the steps.
After everyone else was on board, Ryan stepped forward to salute Sergeant Scott. He waited a beat, then took a moment to shake the young Marine’s hand.
“Rod,” Ryan said—sometimes a young man needed to know his commander in chief knew his first name. “I was so sorry to hear about your grandfather.”
>
Still ramrod straight, the Marine beamed. “Thank you, Mr. President.”
“I could have pulled some strings to let you go to the funeral.” Ryan grinned. “I know a couple of generals . . .”
“He would have rather I carried on here, Mr. President.”
“No doubt.” Ryan nodded. “Hell of a guy, your granddad.”
“You knew him, sir?”
“Not well,” Ryan said. “But he was a close friend of a very close friend of mine. I did have the opportunity to meet him once, years ago.” Ryan put a hand on the young Marine’s shoulder. “I’m sure he was proud of you.”
Sergeant Scott’s eye twitched like he might tear up. Ryan rescued him by changing the subject. “Did our special guest make it on board?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” the Marine said. “Rear bulkhead seat, directly behind you, beside Director Foley. President Gumelar will sit on the couch across the aisle from you, as instructed.”
“Very well,” Ryan said. “We’ll talk later. They’re secondhand, but I have a couple of kickass stories about your granddad that he probably never told you.”
Ryan stepped aboard the helicopter, noting immediately the cooler air as Sergeant Scott shut the doors. He felt the familiar flutter in his gut that plagued him every time he boarded any kind of aircraft. A fancy version of the ubiquitous Black Hawk, the VH-60Ns used by HMX-1 were decked out inside with carpet, soundproofing, and leather seats. They were maintained by some of the most professional people in the world, double- and triple-checked.
And yet . . .
Helicopters and Ryan had come to an uneasy truce over the years. There was a lot of truth to the adage that the definition of a helicopter was “a million parts rotating around an oil leak, waiting for metal fatigue to set in.” He had to fly on them, but he never truly enjoyed the experience.
“So, Gugun,” Ryan said, ready to get to work. “I understand new charges have been dreamed up against Father Pat.”
President Gumelar took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief he’d taken from his suit pocket. “Jack,” he said. “I am sure you know that even United States courts sometimes bring charges after the initial point of arrest.”