by Ted Bell
“I think you let the little bugger go,” Ross said, wincing as he stretched his bad leg.
“Into a trap.”
“Aye, maybe so. Not from his point of view, however. Christ, Stoke. Rodrigo’s got to be the most wanted man in Cuba. Somebody delivers his head to Fidel on a platter? The lieutenant here sees this whole thing as a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity.”
“Got that part right.”
“Let him go, Stoke.”
Stoke nodded, yeah, that’s what he was thinking, too.
“Okay. One last time, jefe, listen up. This is as close as we going to get to that damn sea-going ghost town,” he told him, “Now, you and your compadres, you want to swim over there, I can’t stop you. I can, but I won’t. So, what I’m saying, go do what you got to do and vaya con dios, muchachos. Okay?”
Guy didn’t even say, hey, thanks a million.
“You get in trouble, jefe, you know who not to call.”
“Vaya en agua!” Pepe shouted to the young four commandos seated on the stern. Kids didn’t need a lot of encouragement. Each one executed a frogman backflip into the black water. Pepe stood up, not sure how he was supposed to go over the side and still be looking cool about it.
“You want your knife back, Lieutenant? Bad idea, you swim into the man’s trap empty-handed.”
“The knife, sí. And the gun,” Pepe demanded, hand out like he was some kind of authority figure. Stoke shook his head.
“The gun? Shit. You are crazy. You the one with the death wish, not me. I give you your Glock back, first one you shoot is me.”
The man took the knife, hocked a looey into the water. “Fucking gringo coward,” he spit out, and then he did a kind of half-dive, half-jump over the side and started swimming fast towards Stiltsville before Stoke had a chance to jump in on top of him and rip his pea-brained head off.
“Yeah!” Stoke called after him, “That’s right! I’m the chickenshit. Not you! Go get ’em, el tigre! Balls to the walls! Hoo-ah!”
The black silhouettes of the seven ramshackle houses stood maybe a thousand yards away. The hard rain had stopped. Rain-heavy clouds still covered most of the stars, but there was a sliver of orange on the eastern horizon. Dawn was maybe an hour away. The Cubano contingent would or would not be around for it, depending.
“Now you know why they call ’em ‘banana republics,’ ” Stoke said. “Damn commie guerillas down there all went bananas in the sixties and they ain’t got their shit back together yet.”
“Castro’s outlasted ten American presidents,” Ross pointed out.
“True. But old Fidel, he’s more movie star than Communist. He only shoots people to keep them from walking out of the theatre before his movie’s over.”
Ross was standing at his side now, both of them watching the Cubans. Stoke had dosed Ross up pretty good with morphine from the Cuban’s medical kit. Ross said the leg wasn’t broken anyway, just a torn tendon he got when the museum roof fell down on top of him. ’Course, Ross would say just a scratch even if there was a big white jagged thighbone poking out his skin.
The first of the three Cuban commando boats to arrive in Stiltsville ghosted up to the black-hulled Cigarette. When nobody killed them instantly, two men scrambled aboard the speedboat’s bow and sprayed the cockpit with automatic fire, blowing out the windshield and ripping up a whole lot of very expensive fiberglass. One guy jumped down into the cockpit and tossed a flash-bang grenade through the open companionway, on the off chance the guy Rodrigo was chillin’ down there, whipping up a pitcher of rum Cuba Libres or something.
No reaction from the shot-up speedboat with Diablo in blood red letters flaming down the sides, none from the stilt house where she was tied up, not a peep from any of the other six houses in the ghost town.
Nada.
Surprise, surprise. Nobody home, just like I told you, Pepe. So, where is the legendary Scissorhands? Split already for the Keys on another boat, the way Ross had it? Maybe. Man had put a lot of thinking into his exit strategy. Boy liked drama. Liked to stick around see how it all played out. Plus, he’s got to stay close enough to Stiltsville to pull the trigger when the time was right, at least the way Stoke saw the thing unfolding.
The squad split into three teams, each team going up the rickety wooden ladders to clear a different deserted house. Looked like Pepe and his boys would make it over there for the fireworks. Stoke saw the swimmers reach the ladder of the nearest stilt house. Pepe, the fearless leader himself, in the lead. With the night-vision binocs, Stoke could see he was swimming with his head above water, the assault knife clenched in his teeth, Rambo-style.
Like all the houses in the deserted community, Pepe’s objective was a handyman special. The house was sitting on top of four stilts at a weird angle, like an old dog with one leg shorter than the others. No windows left, just lopsided holes with rotted pieces of fabric fluttering in the wind. No doors, just more black holes. This forgotten town had seen too many hard times, too many hurricanes. Tough to believe this many houses still standing.
Probably not a bad life out here at one time. Row over to your buddy’s house, drink beer and fish off his porch all day. Sun go down, you drink rum and play gin rummy by gas lantern light all night. No horns blowing, no TV going, no phone ringing. Little woman rags your ass, you come home late, just tell her to take a long walk on a short pier. Yeah. He could see the original Stiltsville attraction. A blind man could do that.
The littlest Rambo went up the rickety ladder first, and fearlessly signaled his squad to follow. What the hell Pepe planned to do next, if that guy del Rio actually happened to be up in the house, was unclear to Stoke. Attention! Operation Total Goatfuck is now about to commence! Shit. Warning! I have an assault knife! He saw Pepe dive through the open door, going in low, four more guys right behind him, rolling left and right. Least they got that part right.
Anyway, all five of them got safely inside and that’s exactly when the little tinderbox house blew sky high, nothing left but blackened and burning stilt poles poking up in the sky like four big Tiki torches.
Then the fancy black Cigarette blew, all that expensive gasoline and pricey plastic going up with an explosive whoosh so hot Stoke could feel the heat on his face and forearms at a thousand yards. He’d seen a Cuban commando in a window just before the explosion, one from the first wave of armed Cubans who’d sped away. Guy had fired an RPG grenade into the Cigarette’s stern, where the big gas tanks were, just for the pure hell of it. Last stupid thing he did, too, because a second later the house he and his comrades were standing in wasn’t there anymore, just a huge fireball climbing into the dark purple night like a little A-bomb mushroom.
Stoke hit the throttles, and opened up another two thousand yards between him and what was left of Stiltsville. Seconds later, the remaining five houses exploded almost simultaneously. Night was day.
“Pepe, goddamn your dumb ass,” Stoke said aloud. Even if Alvarez was a dickhead moron, he hated seeing all those young kids die for no good reason. The stupidity and arrogance of the Cuban commander made him sick. He looked at Ross and shook his head.
“Scissorhands wired up all the houses, Ross. Long time ago. Dynamite, probably packed up watertight under the floorboards of each house. Disguised so all the tourista tour boats who still bother to come out to look at these empty shacks couldn’t see nothing. You think he’s waitin’ around to see this? I guess yes. I guess he wouldn’t miss these fireworks for anything.”
Pretty good contingency plan, Stoke thought. Blow the hell out of whoever is chasing you. Blow your own boat up while you’re at it, too, although the Cubans had beat him to that part. Coast Guard or Customs guys, cops show up, think you’re dead and gone, and you’re gone all right, already running for your back-up mansion somewhere down in the islands. So, how’d he do it? Fuses? Blasting cap timers? No. Couldn’t be timers or fuses. Too time-critical. Had to be radio detonators. Cell phone. Had to make sure everybody was at the party before he pushe
d the pound key and lit the candles. Make sure he was clean, leaving the scene.
Which meant he had to be an eyewitness. Which meant Scissorhands was still close by.
Ross was looking aft, scanning the horizon with the glasses. Had his back turned to the action, concentrating, didn’t even bother to look around when the really big explosions started. Three more houses went up, boom, boom, boom, huge, about five seconds apart. Might as well have been high noon out on the bay the way the sky lit up. Ross didn’t even flinch. Man knew how to focus.
“Good Christ, there he is, Stoke!” Ross said, handing over the glasses. He’d picked out the silhouette of another Cigarette, identical length to the one that had just burned and gone to the bottom. Different paint job, Stoke figured. Different name on the registration. New passport, ID papers and a couple million bucks in Ziplocs stuffed somewhere behind a fake bulkhead.
“Where?”
“Two o’clock! The cut between those two islands. See his rooster-tail? He’s moving south—”
“Diablo II! Let’s go get him,” Stoke said, cranking the two big 250 Yamaha outboards to life. Good thing he’d gotten this thing gassed up. He leaned on the throttles and the RIB leapt forward, arcing a wide flat turn to the southeast. The wind was down and so was the chop out on the bay. No extra weight on the stern now, slowing him down. Hell, two guys in a three-hundred horsepower Frisbee, man, you are one screaming cat skimming over flat water.
“What about survivors?” Ross screamed over the roar of the twin engines.
“No such thing as a survivor back there.”
Ross craned his head around, looking over his shoulder at the flaming remains of Stiltsville. Nothing left but twenty or so of the wooden supports, all burning like torches, sparks and licks of fire against the night sky. Stoke was right. Instant incineration. No one could have survived it.
“Boy got one big advantage on us, Ross,” Stoke said, flipping the wheel hard over and missing a clanging steel channel marker by maybe two inches.
“Namely?”
“Horsepower. Got at least twice as much.”
“That’s a big one.”
“Yeah, but he’s got a big disadvantage, too.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Brainpower. See how bad he’s outrunning us now?”
“I was going to comment on that.”
“He’s gone outside the intracoastal channel markers, see, headed for open water where he can totally lose our ass.”
“Smart move.”
“Maybe. Boy’s headed for the sawgrass flats out there just north of Sands Key. Usually ain’t but about a foot of water where he’s headed now. That big boat’s got props, not jets. She draws at least three, maybe four feet of water. We draw two, max, another advantage on our side.” The boat flew off a wave top and landed, hard.
Ross, squinting his eyes with pain, said, “So he’s in the box, is he?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He’s smart, he’s probably got his depth-sounder alarm set to go off at maybe five, five and a half feet. He ain’t smart, we got him. You watch him. Boy hits a solid sandbank at sixty miles an hour, that’ll be something to see. Pitchpole city. Go cart-wheelin’ ’cross the water, yeah, ass over teakettle.”
But the Cigarette screamed ahead, trailing a deep roar in her wake, kept heading due east, racing across the flats for the open waters of the Atlantic.
Stoke couldn’t believe it. They must have, what, dredged out a new channel down here? Why do that? Nobody living round here but turtles and gators, lotsa skeets, sand fleas, and no-see-ums. He leaned harder on the throttles, even though there was nothing left. Seeing Vicky lying on the church steps, the memory of it like somebody kicking him in the back of his eyeballs. He could not lose this guy now, not this damn close.
He sucked it up, all his anxiety, and said to Ross, “Alarm on that big boat’s bound to go off any second now, beep, beep, beep. Then you see him turn, one way or the other, fast, ’else he runs hard aground, sticks his dick in the dirt, pitchpoles, and we snatch his ass right out of mid-air.”
Ross had the chart in his hand, studying lower Biscayne Bay. “Right. Well, at the moment it doesn’t look like he—”
The big Cigarette suddenly banked hard over to starboard, going on its side, throwing up a wall of white water as it carved a tight turn away from the mangrove swamp projecting from the northern end of the island.
Ross said, “Looks like we better pretend he’s smart.”
“Okay. Okay. We can deal with this. Next, he’s got to run southeast or southwest, inside or outside of what they call the Ragged Keys.”
“Which way is better for us?”
“The way he’s going right now, see? Boy turning inside. Yeah, going to try to shake us in all them mangroves. SEALs used to call that the ‘Deep Severe’ back in there.”
“Sounds like an ideal spot to lose us. Or, more likely, tuck in somewhere and wait. That’s the smart option,” Ross said.
“Maybe smart, maybe not. Mangrove swamp’s a lot like a marriage, Ross. Whole lot easier to stay out than get out.”
“We’re the last witnesses. He’s not going to let it go. All kinds of firepower undoubtedly prestashed aboard that thing, Stokely—he could be trying to set us up.”
“Of course he is, my brother! You right, as usual. One reason Alex Hawke holds you in such high esteem. Now. Look at him. See? What’d I tell you? He got to slow down in those shallows. Hold on to something Ross, we ’bout to make up a little time and distance on this nouveau cracker.”
Chapter Forty-One
London
“THIS DEVICE WAS DEVELOPED ON A CRASH BASIS BY THE Iraqis in the waning Saddam years,” Consuelo de los Reyes continued. All eyes in the room at No. 10 Downing were on her. She asked for another slide. A group of low buildings in the rocky desert.
“Designed and built right here, at the former Tikrit al-Fahd laboratories northwest of Baghdad. Slide. A brilliant former Cal Tech scientist born in Bombay named Dr. I.V. Soong is the prerequisite evil genius behind this and many other little nightmares. The poison gas formulas used against the Kurds in northern Iraq, for example—”
“Poison Ivy, himself,” the home secretary said, “In cahoots with Chemical Ali.”
Conch smiled grimly. “Yes. Poison Ivy. Soong is also the scientific mastermind behind the miniature smart bomb which killed Ambassador Stanfield in Venice. He’s behind the recent revival of the ancient Indian sect known as Thuggee, by the way. Practioners of ritual murder who view the wholesale taking of human life as a pious act. CIA and NSA sources have linked this group to al-Qaeda. So far, Soong has successfully eluded extreme prejudice.”
“This bloody Thug renaissance,” a mustachioed officer said. “I thought we’d seen the last of them at the end of the Raj, and now they are in league with these bloody terrorists—”
“Afraid you’re correct, General,” Conch interrupted, “Dr. Soong’s Pigskin is one of the primary weapons of mass destruction our troops went looking for but never found. The perfect little Doomsday machine. Hard evidence at State indicates unknown numbers of these small bombs were smuggled into Syria. The labs were long gone, but I saw troops playing touch football with mock-ups just like the general’s holding.”
“Sorry, Madame Secretary,” Sir Anthony Hayden, the home secretary said. “This football design. Just to put us all in the picture. Is it meant to be some kind of inside joke? Like the president’s ‘nuclear football?’ ” Is this Dr. Soong some kind of homicidal practical joker? Or, does the design have some actual basis in science?”
“Let’s ask Dr. Bissinger.”
“The latter,” he said. “In plain English, the weapon’s football form is purely coincidental. A function of physics. Pinch the ends of a tube and you exponentially increase the destructive power of what were formerly known as suitcase nukes. Soong’s football nukes were flown out of Iraq by Saddam’s son Uday six days before the fall of Baghdad.”
“Christ in a goddamn
wheelbarrow,” a shiny domed American Air Force general said. “How many of those bastards got out?”
“Over a hundred of them, General. Flown out of Saddam International on a Russian Antonov cargo plane. Landed here. Emirate of Sharjah. That’s the bad news. The good news is they were all purchased by one particular individual. In the last month, that individual got careless. All it took was one time. NSA zeroed in on digital cellphone intercepts, matched voiceprints, and we got close. Now, the work of a lone MI6 agent has confirmed who that individual is. Jack?”
Patterson looked over at Hawke, then got to his feet and took the laser pointer. “Thanks, Madame Secretary. Slide?”
On all three monitors, a photograph of a rugged looking middle-aged man in khakis, shielding his eyes from the glaring sun.
“This is Owen Nash,” Texas Patterson said, moving the laser point across the screen. “Or was. British MI6 operative working western Indonesia. Covered as a nature photographer for National Geographic out of Sydney. Australian national. Missing, presumed dead. His last transmission was forty-eight hours ago. He was on the remote Indonesian island of Suva, slide please, located just here, due west of Timor. These recons were shot by U-2 and dedicated birds in the last twenty-four hours. Questions?”
There weren’t any.
“Nash’s recent signals had him checked into a Hotel Bambah, the sole structure on the island. Slide. Sorry, there is another structure here on the island, as the next slide will show. Thank you. Airstrip here. Ten thousand feet, believe it or not. Used by jumbos ferrying Arab tourists in the eighties. And, here, a very large airplane hangar, newly built, with an older adjoining corrugated tin structure. An equipment shed; barracks possibly. According to Nash’s last transmission, travel agents from throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, numbering approximately 400, were due to start arriving at the Bambah the next day.”