Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control

by Suzanne Brockmann

  They—whoever they were—were coming closer.

  Go past, go past, go past.

  But there were excited voices in a language she couldn’t comprehend, from over by the brush where she’d thrown the second stick of dynamite. More voices came toward the first voice, and then she could see them through the holes in the blind. There were at least five, maybe six men, all carrying guns, most hung by thick straps or ropes over their shoulders.

  She felt Kenny tense, and she knew this was it. They were either going to find the blind or go past it. Right here and right now. These next few seconds were going to decide their fate.

  A voice called out something, it was a command of some kind, and all the guns went up—aimed directly at their hiding place.

  Another voice rang out, and although she didn’t understand, she recognized it as being Russian. The language that the gun runners had spoken on the helicopter.

  And in flash, Savannah knew. They were going to die and it was entirely her fault.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Fourteen

  Whoever they were—this pack of men with the weapons—their Russian was nearly as bad as his.

  One thing was clear. They were asking something about the dynamite. That was one word Ken knew in just about every language.

  Whoever they were, he doubted they were part of Beret’s little army. They were too ragtag, too mismatched. There wasn’t a scrap of jungle print camouflage on any of them.

  Only three of Beret’s soldiers had been left behind, and as far as he could tell, they weren’t among this crowd.

  It was possible, of course, these guys were mercenaries, locals of some kind, hired by the Russian gun runners.

  As Ken scanned what he could see of their faces from the cover of the blind, he picked out the one who was the leader. An older man, with lines of experience on his leathery face, and a quiet watchfulness in his dark eyes. Someone said something in a different language—not Russian—and he answered, a brief, quiet command.

  Wait.

  Ken didn’t need to speak the language to recognize a wait when he heard one. The old guy gestured to someone else.

  And the question came again in Russian. Something something dynamite. Something something something American something.

  Huh?

  Paid for. That was what Ken thought it translated to. They’d paid for it in American money. It being the dynamite.

  Of course. These were the buyers—the people to whom that shipment of dynamite onboard that helo was intended to be delivered. Had to be.

  Their faces looked grim, but if Ken could somehow communicate with them, he could negotiate their way out of this mess—a way that would keep him and Savannah alive and unharmed.

  “Do you speak English?” he called out, and he could almost feel surprise radiating from Savannah.

  Leatherface himself answered. “English. Not good English. Parlez vous français?”

  French? Not a chance, pal. “Hablas español?” His Spanish wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing.

  Leather looked at his men for a translation. Obviously no one here spoke Spanish, either.

  “Okay,” Ken said, speaking slowly and clearly. “Let’s work with English here. I don’t want to hurt you, do you understand?” His hand was still over Savannah’s mouth, and he brought his mouth to her ear as the gang outside worked out a group translation.

  “Dig yourself into the dirt,” he ordered her as quietly as possible. “I’m going to stall until you get hidden. They don’t know you’re here, they don’t need to know. I’ll go out there, give ’em the dynamite, lead them away from you. If I’m not back here by daybreak tomorrow, start following the river. Do you understand?”

  She nodded, her eyes wide, and he took his hand from her mouth.

  “Je parle un peu le français,” she called out. In the stillness of the jungle, her voice rang clear and sweet and oh so very female. The double takes and reactions from the men outside the blind would have been comical if Ken didn’t know from experience what groups of lawless and angry men could do to a helpless and unprotected woman in the middle of nowhere.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Savannah!”

  “This is my mess,” she whispered fiercely. “I got us into it, I’m going to help get us out. I speak French, you don’t.”

  Blasting her for making a bad decision, for ignoring his direct order, was something that was going to have to wait until later. Right now he had to go to plan B—except he didn’t have a freaking plan B yet.

  Savannah said something in French, to which Leatherface quickly responded with a four paragraph speech.

  She replied.

  “What are you saying?” Ken asked. “What’s he saying?”

  “He’s talking too quickly. I asked him to slow down. I haven’t spoken French since college.”

  There was another exchange of indecipherable French that drove him fricking crazy.

  “I think he just asked if we worked for someone named Misha Zdanowicz,” Savannah reported. “I told him no. That we don’t work for anyone, that we didn’t want to come here, but were forced. I said made to. I don’t know how to say forced. I told him we were pretty unhappy about that and very mistrustful of everyone. I asked him to step back a bit, please—which obviously, he hasn’t taken too seriously.”

  Leather spoke again.

  Savannah listened hard, narrowing her eyes as she struggled to understand. “I think he said they’re from a nearby village. He keeps saying something I don’t understand—he’s going on and on about it—about the road to the coast. I think. Yes. La mer. The sea.

  Leather added something else in French. Freaking French. Why did it have to be French? Ken hated French. He hated France. Adele had dumped him for two months for some French exchange student named Pierre. Stupid people, stupid country, stupid language.

  “He wants us to come out,” Savannah reported.

  Yeah, right.

  They weren’t going anywhere, even though this blind was giving them only the illusion of safety. Ken knew they’d be hamburger the moment any one of those men opened fire whether they were inside the blind or out. Still, he wasn’t moving.

  “Tell him we have a semiautomatic weapon and we’re not surrendering it.”

  Savannah looked at him. “With college French?”

  “Yeah, isn’t, like, surrender the first verb they teach you, in case while you’re in France some other country attacks?” He was being an asshole. He knew it. He saw an echo of that sentiment in Savannah’s eyes.

  But he hated not knowing precisely what was being said. The fact that the conversation had gone on for so long was good. But he still didn’t know who Leather and his men were and what they wanted.

  Savannah said something to Leather, then told him, “I asked where their village is. If they had telephones or a two-way radio. I told them we would pay them well for a hot meal, a shower, and a hotel room. At least I hope that’s what I told them.”

  Leather answered.

  “No telephones, no radio,” Savannah translated. “Shoot. And no hotel. But there’s someone there—an American!—named Molly, I think, who speaks both English and . . . I don’t know what. Indonesian, I guess. Her Indonesian is apparently better than my French, so . . .”

  Leather spoke again.

  “He’s said he’s already sent for her,” Savannah told Ken. “She should be here any minute.”

  And just like that, he had a plan B—wait for the American named Molly to come and save their asses.

  It was hard to know whether the ache that drummed inside Molly’s head was from last night’s lack of sleep, or from the knowledge of leathery-faced village leader Tunggul’s foolhardy attempt to buy dynamite from the scum-sucking, hideously dangerous lowlife Zdanowicz brothers, or from the heartbreakingly tragic story Grady—Jones—had told her, or—best bet yet—from the fact that her attempt to slip silently and un
noticed back into her tent this morning had failed miserably.

  She’d been twenty minutes too late to slip anywhere unnoticed.

  Rifki Rias had come pounding on her door, and she, of course, had not been home.

  The entire village was in an uproar over her disappearance, about to send out a search party looking for her. Father Bob had taken one look at her, still wearing her brightly colored sarong—or rather, wearing it once again—and he knew if not exactly where she’d been, at least what she’d been up to.

  He wasn’t the type of man to judge, thank God, and he’d quickly pushed her into her tent to change into something a little less provocative, and sent out the word that she’d been safely found. He’d said nothing and would say nothing, but enough of the villagers had seen her. Word would spread—it no doubt already had—until everyone in the village knew that she’d spent the night with Jones.

  So much for keeping their relationship hush-hush.

  But right now that was the least of her problems.

  The reason Rifki had hammered on her door at the very crack of dawn was because there were two Americans hiding in the jungle. Tunggul and his friends had found them while searching for dynamite—dynamite?—and needed Molly to come quick and help translate to end the Mexican standoff they’d gotten themselves into.

  And so there she was. Sleep deprived, still shaken by all that Grady—Jones, damn it!—had told her, still shaken by the fact that he’d told her something so personal at all.

  And suddenly, she was in the middle of an episode of Gilligan’s Island.

  Two American strangers didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Not in this village, in this remote corner of Parwati Island. It was surreal.

  But there they were. Ken and Savannah. Looking battered and bruised and not smelling all too fresh, but definitely American.

  Molly had talked the safeties back onto the arsenal of weapons. She’d gotten Ken and Savannah to emerge from their hiding place, and they’d all trooped back to the village, where Father Bob had found some clothes for Ken to wear. Not that he needed them. He had the kind of hard male body that made clothing seem so unnecessary.

  Now they sat at a table under the tent that was their makeshift house of God because the wooden church building was undergoing repairs.

  Everyone was there. Tunggul and his two highest council officials, Molly, Ken, Savannah, and Father Bob. Billy Bolten lurked nearby, casting dark looks in her direction, which was probably just as good.

  Not that the dark looks were so good, but as long as Billy was in sight, Molly knew he wasn’t running off to Jones’s camp to challenge him to a duel. That was just what she needed.

  As the Americans ate what had to have been their first real meal in days, Ken told them he and Savannah had been brought to Parwati Island at gunpoint by a man who could only be Misha Zdanowicz. Zdanowicz intended to kill them but they managed to get the upper hand when the helicopter—filled with Tunggul’s order of dynamite—exploded.

  That had definitely been Zdanowicz’s chopper she and Jones had seen burning by the river. All but a single crate of dynamite—which Ken handed over to Tunggul—had been destroyed, and everyone but Ken and Savannah had been killed.

  But now Otto Zdanowicz—Misha’s brother—was after them, angry and grieving and intent upon revenge.

  Molly turned to Tunggul. “Why?” she said. “Why on earth would you contract to buy dynamite with the Zdanowiczs?”

  Doing business with the gun runners gave them a virtual invitation to enter the village’s airspace, so to speak. It had taken years to establish the village as a no-fly, no-enter zone for all the drug lords, gun runners, pirates, and political revolutionaries in this area.

  And, dear God, there were a lot of them in this part of Indonesia.

  It was especially important to keep Zdanowicz out because he was in the middle of a war with General Badaruddin, the most local revolutionary, who laid a claim to most of the mountains to the north on Parwati. If Badaruddin thought Otto Zdanowicz was taking over the village, he’d be here in a flash, and they’d find themselves smack in the middle of a territorial dispute. And wouldn’t that be fun.

  Tunggul was calm, as always. And he had a logical response, also as always. “The alternative was to buy the dynamite in the port and bring it to the village on the mule train. During which time the Zdanowiczs’ men would have robbed us. This way, we pay the Zdanowiczs a little more, perhaps, but we knew the dynamite would be safely delivered.”

  Shaking her head, Molly translated for the benefit of Ken and Savannah.

  “Ask him what the dynamite’s for.” Ken asked.

  He reminded Molly more than a little bit of Jones. He was younger by a few years, but there was something in his eyes—a quiet dangerousness, or maybe a self-assuredness—that was similar.

  “Are you special forces?” she asked him.

  He glanced at Tunggul who spoke enough English to recognize those two words. Then he laughed. “I was in the Army a few years, but . . . No. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Lying. But okay. If she were special forces, she wouldn’t want anyone to know either.

  Savannah, with her wispy blond curls and her sweet face, was suddenly focused completely on the food on her plate. Was she special forces, too? It didn’t seem possible, and yet . . . Why not? Charlie’s Angels had a similar look—big eyes, fragile faces, completely adorable—and they kicked major butt.

  “The dynamite’s to clear the road from the village to Port Parwati, on the coast,” she told the two of them, whoever they were. “There were a series of earthquakes about seven years ago, and the roadway was completely destroyed. What’s left—dozens of miles—is blocked with rockslides. The only way into and out of this village is a trail that takes four or five days by mule. This causes a problem when someone gets sick and needs to get to a hospital, as I’m sure you can imagine. But the amount of dynamite we’d need to clear that road . . . I can’t even imagine how much it would take.” She looked at Tunggul. “We’re working to get a grant. So that the blasting will be done professionally. So that the men in the village don’t blow off their hands by accident.”

  His English wasn’t great, but she knew he understood what she was saying. They’d had this conversation often enough.

  “There’s no radio here in the village?” Ken asked.

  “Every time we get one, it gets stolen. So, no. I’m sorry.”

  “How about the people who steal ’em?” he asked. “Where can we find them?”

  Molly laughed. “You don’t want to,” she said. “Trust me.”

  “What I want, ma’am, is to get to a radio as soon as possible.”

  Father Bob cleared his throat. “Doesn’t, ah, Jones have a radio?”

  Molly refused to let herself blush. “Not in his plane,” she said briskly.

  “A plane,” Ken said, his eyes actually lighting up. “A plane would be even better than a radio. Can you take me to this guy? Jones, right?” He looked at Bob. “Who is he?”

  “A local. Ex-pat. Yes, his name’s Jones. But his plane’s out of commission again,” Molly said, suddenly afraid she’d told them too much. “He’s waiting for a part to arrive.”

  “Can you take me to him anyway?”

  What if both Savannah and Ken—neither of whom had volunteered their last names—were both special forces, and had been sent here to find and arrest—or kill—Grady Morant? A chill went down Molly’s spine as all at once she truly understood the dark world in which Jones lived.

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Ken said. He turned to Tunggul. “Now, about that dynamite . . .”

  Jakarta was as hot as Alyssa had imagined.

  The FBI had been given an entire floor of an office building that had seen better days. It was a large area, but it was wide open—no walls, just a series of poles holding up the ceiling, stretching on and on and on.

  Laronda sat at an old metal desk that had been placed
near the door, with a fan blowing on her, full force, looking none too pleased.

  “Don’t you go putting your handbag on the floor,” she said to Alyssa in lieu of a greeting. “Not even for a second. There are bugs here, girl, that you don’t want to be taking home.” She pointed down at the end of the big room, where Alyssa could see Max. And Sam. Shit. Sam was already here. She hadn’t expected that. “They’re in the conference room. So to speak. Waiting for you. Max has asked for you only twenty thousand times in the past four hours. Like I had you hidden underneath this desk or something. The man needs to grow some patience.”