Guardian Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  She was factual, dry, reporting instead of thinking, feeling, feeling all the helpless pain and anger in the world as she bought time for Brand’s name to come for her.

  The Prince applauded. He stood in the middle of his phalanx of bodyguards and applauded at her. The sound echoed in the endless confines of the underdecks.

  “Bravo, Miss Naik. Bravo. Most excellent. You have just encapsulated my hard work and sweat of the past two years into ten succinct sentences. It’s beautiful. You are so very good at your job.” He came towards her again, and smiled.

  She struggled to look impassively at him. The way Brand always looked at everybody.

  “It’s my job to bring things down to the lowest common denominator, so that the voting public can understand them. Process them. The world needs to know what’s going on,” she said wearily. There was no need to put those feelings in her words.

  ~~~~~

  “I suppose I do owe you an answer after all the trouble you’ve been through.” He was thoughtful.

  Akira did not respond.

  “Very well, Miss Naik. You want to know the lowest common denominator of my motives? You want to know why I have no conscience, how could I be so heinous etcetera?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s plain and simple, Akira. And you’ve had the answer in front of you all this while.”

  “The oil,” she whispered, while he pierced her with his falcon-sharp gaze.

  “Yes, the oil. My country has been fighting within itself and without, for many, many generations. With the global recession tumbling world markets into chaos, we thought finally we would be able to get some peace. Some prosperity. Since we hit a small lode of minerals and crude oil right at our borders in the early part of the new millennium. Of course, it didn’t pan out and things just went from bad to worse. My father,” Murad sighed here.

  “My father knew he did not have the strength or the power to stop our small sovereign from tearing itself apart, thus giving our more distinguished neighbors more territory to chew on. So he crowned me Prince Regent.”

  “I see,” Akira said.

  “Of course, it was now my responsibility to ensure my country did not die in on itself. It’s a huge responsibility, Miss Naik. It’s a terrible fate. And it’s one I’ve had my whole life to prepare for. Can you understand that?”

  She didn’t, of course she didn’t. But he didn’t expect her to agree with him. He continued talking.

  “I tried a lot of ways. Negotiations, compromises, with bigger, more powerful neighbors. Aid from their governments, from your governments. And they all did agree. On paper. But material help was a long way coming. I heard of an ingenious plan that a smaller tribe to my west had, of taking over the rigs at the Caspian Sea. Making her bigger brothers notice her. It worked too. Until the UN and her army blew the rig to a trillion bits.” Murad was understandably bitter.

  Akira remembered that story. She’d not covered it personally, having been on assignment in Africa then.

  But Matt had. The pictures were gruesome. Horrible. The fall-out from having an oil rig blown up at sea, catastrophic.

  And he’d told her that such decisions were responsible for Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect and that maybe humans were all better off dying then continuing in man-made hell.

  “Nobody blamed the West then, Miss Naik. Nobody asked these powerful nations how they could just take out an entire tribe on an oil-rig? How they could commit mass murder just like that. You couldn’t either, could you?”

  “Your Highness, it doesn’t work…”

  “Don’t tell me how it works.” He snapped at her. “I know how your system works. People who have the power will always be powerful, invincible. I never quested for power, just peace. But even I knew that to achieve one, I had to become the other. So I planned, and I waited and when I met Geraldo De La Hoya at a party three years ago, I knew I had found a weapon suited for me.”

  “You didn’t have to destroy a man and almost plunge his government into anarchy all so that Asharfil could get the oil and funding it so badly needs.” Akira tossed back.

  “No. I didn’t.” Kharaan smiled eerily. “But it was just so much…fun. All of the world, courting this small country filled with water and rocks just because it has oil. What a waste it would all be to have it all go to the hands of the men who already held the world’s economy hostage.”

  Akira could see the simple brilliance of his plan. With the controlling rights of the oil going to Kharaan, and with his company building the rig and pumping the oil, his country would get both the economic and the political benefit of the move. If he’d been able to carry it out.

  “San Magellan needs help too, Sheikh.” She tried to appeal to his sense of empathy. “It needs development. The situation of most of the world is like your country. Are you going to destroy most of the world to better you and yours?”

  The prince didn’t answer. Instead he asked her, “Did you know that I could have taken you out anytime this week that I chose to. Just because you were closer to the truth than you had ever been?”

  The thought had flitted through her mind, once she’d started thinking rationally again.

  If Kharaan had flagged them in once they’d reached his ship, what had stopped him from killing them any day of the last one week? He had the resources and the manpower.

  “I wanted you to know.” He answered her unspoken question. “You told my man Jacques Lefevre that you wanted to know the truth. That it was more important than your own life. So I gave you an opportunity to get to the truth before you exchanged your life for it. I think it’s a fair trade, isn’t it?”

  There was no answer she could give to that.

  “I believe that our business tonight is concluded. And since this yacht is about to blow up in a few minutes, I will have to, regrettably, take your leave now, Miss Naik. It’s truly been a pleasure knowing you.” He took her limp hand and kissed it once, twice while repulsion crawled through her blood.

  “Brandon?” It was a husky whisper. “Brandon Rice… What have you done with him?”

  “With any luck? He’s already in god’s arms.”

  The madman answered and then walked away with his guards. All of them.

  Akira crouched down and removed Brand’s knife from her garter, and while she was at it, cruelly slashed through half her dress so that she had moving room.

  She ran to Cobalt’s side and tried to shake him. He groaned and shook but didn’t open his eyes.

  Akira looked at the flickering TV monitors again.

  “Sorry, Mr. Bernhardt, I’ll try to save your Nigel for you,” she said softly, while she dashed a shaking hand over her tearing eyes.

  Then she took off in the direction of the entrance to the other decks.

  The watch, Brand’s watch, glinted gold in her path and she paused just long enough to pick it up and strap it to her wrist. Then she took off again, running as fast as her Murad Loubotins would carry her.

  Forty-Nine

  It was extremely dark, Akira surmised as she tried to sneak past a couple of waiters unloading a champagne crate. They were too busy getting soused and didn’t really hear her. So she ran past them, past a long stretch of carpeted corridor, which suddenly ended on a wooden staircase.

  Akira sprinted on it, and came to one of the lower decks. The main deck, where the party was, was one level up. And beyond that were the living quarters of the Sheikh. Both places had immense security which she had no hope of breaching.

  On a half-sob she slumped against the railing where she’d been standing.

  A hand came around her throat, and she slashed wildly at it with her knife.

  “Gosh, Akira. Stop hurting me. That thing is lethal,” Jared, the medic-mercenary, growled near her ear.

  With a wild cry, she turned into him and squeaked, “Oh, thank god. You’re here. Thank god you’re here. How are you here? How did you find me?” Her questions were on rapid-fire speed, her voice had dropped
down to a desperate whisper.

  He didn’t answer, looking like one of those military commandos with black paint on his face, a wicked Schmeisser under his arm and incongruously, tuxedo pants tucked in his combat boots. He just tapped the dial of Brand’s watch which she now wore, and then at the diamond clip which was still perched on the side of her ruined hair.

  She hugged him again and he murmured, “The others are gaining access to the last deck and I am supposed to retrieve you and join them. You up for it?”

  “Is my niece,” She swallowed. “Is the bomb there?”

  “We got the right heat signatures from the prince’s cabin, so I am thinking, yeah. Now come on, let’s haul ass. Yes?” Jared grinned, his teeth very white against the rest of his black face.

  “Sure. Why not?” Akira managed a watery laugh as he pulled her deeper into the shadows and they just barely managed to avoid two patrol guards detecting them.

  Then he put one finger to his lips, made her slip off her shoes and they ran around the prow of the ship, where all the lights were cut off, plunging that part of the ship into darkness. No doubt Luke’s work.

  Since the party had still not spilled out onto the outside deck, Brand’s men wouldn’t risk being caught.

  A long rope with a hook coiled alongside all of the others, and Jared expertly picked it up and started tying it around her waist and his own. Then he took aim, and lassoed it, hook-side up. It landed with a thud somewhere. He gave it a tug, two tugs. Got two tugs and one back.

  Jared pressed a button on his own watch, a chronograph similar to Brand’s. Although less expensive. “Incoming. Two seconds. Get in position now.”

  The answer came in the form of three tugs on the huge rope.

  Jared yanked Akira to him, and she grabbed him. There was no more time for talking as they were hoisted up slowly, quickly and carefully all at the same time.

  Her eyes rounded to saucers while they dangled in mid-air, seeing the bright lights of the ship all around them, and no one detecting their presence in the least.

  Akira could hear the noises of the party as they ascended the main level deck and she wondered if maybe she could shout out a warning to all the people trapped inside, unaware of their fates.

  “Where’s Brand?” She dared whisper.

  “We don’t know. He left his watch for us to find you.” Jared whispered back.

  Akira swallowed a huge ball of tears as she considered the implications of that statement.

  He was dead. He’d known he was going to die. That’s why he’d asked his men to save her. Damn him.

  “Brand is the best fighter I have ever known, Akira. If anybody can get out of cheating death, it’s him. We all believe that.” Jared assured her, while he tugged again at the rope and their ascent slowed by inches.

  But you don’t know, Jared. He doesn’t want to cheat death. He wants to die. It’s what he’s always wanted.

  She just nodded dully.

  Then there was no more time to speak, as they half-banged, half-landed against a huge awning on the last deck. It didn’t look so much like sheetrock, as an umbrella.

  But Lucas waiting for them, his blond hair glinting in the lights behind him on the other side of the ship. He hauled Akira up with one hand, and untied her rope with the other.

  Murad pulled her into a small side-balcony, one of those that she’d noticed on her only ride to the Marina when she’d checked out the Sea Queen.

  When Brand was having his War Councils, she’d been deliberately excluded not because she hadn’t been trusted, but because she did not have the proper training required to execute their various plans.

  And because, he’d told her this the only time she’d sat in on one of his Councils, she’d distracted him too much.

  How much of it, she wondered, was smoke and lies, and how much had been the pure, unvarnished truth?

  She stumbled into what was obviously a stateroom, with its period furniture and sink-your-ankle carpeting. She found a silent Pierre probing the wall opposite to where she was standing, with what looked like a metal scanner, but which was currently emitting beeps. A Geiger counter.

  The beeps meant there was radiation leaking into the room somehow.

  Could C-4 leak out?

  Then she had no time to think, because Pierre nodded once. Jared who’d silently come down behind her, pulled her to the floor, pressing her down, while Pierre placed a tiny diamond-shaped device on the wall, before pressing a button.

  The wall exploded in fragments.

  Luke threw a couple of grenades, pins pulled out, into the other room and instantly smoke filled the room.

  The ship shook a little, but there had hardly been any noise from the explosion that took out the wall and so no reason for the Sheikh or his men to suspect anything was amiss in his Stateroom.

  “Guards outside. Three,” Jared whispered, pulling Akira behind him and they went into the now smoke-free room.

  Akira gasped as she saw her niece tied to a chair and surrounded by those crates full of explosive. Beside her on the floor was a small dark-haired boy, slumped on his shoulders, also tied and also having a grenade stuck in his mouth.

  The five guards who were in the room had fallen down like domino pins because of the smoke bombs.

  Murad came in now, from the front door of the stateroom dragging one more. Luke carried in one more and Pierre carried in the last guy. They propped all the guards at awkward angles opposite the blown-out wall and effectively tied and gagged them.

  Murad quickly ran to a small console kept on the dressing room and pressed a couple of buttons, and one of the buttons on the thing started blinking red.

  “Just as I thought,” he muttered, fiddling around some more.

  “I can get the bomb away from the girl. But it’s going to blow up anyway.” Pierre murmured in quiet French to Lucas who was trying to slowly untangle the sleeping Nigel away from the grenade stuck to his mouth.

  “Shanaya,” Akira whispered going forward. She was yanked back because they all heard footsteps thundering into the room.

  “Cover Pierre. He can't work if they kill him,” Luke ordered, going instantly into defense mode.

  Murad thrust a small Glock in Akira’s surprised hands and told her, “Use it. Cover Pierre, please.”

  She nodded numbly, while the door to the stateroom burst open and men, about a dozen of them poured in. Including Prince Kharaan.

  “I need three minutes.” Pierre yelled before Luke, Murad, Akira, and Jared surrounded him and looked into the barrels of guns held by thirteen very pissed-off men.

  Two of them supported a bleeding, barely conscious Cobalt who was just crying silently.

  “My God,” he whimpered.

  The prince turned and whipped him with the butt of his gun, a deadly Sig Sauer 9mm. And he snarled at the four of them.

  “You die. All of you die. How can you think any different?”

  “Not before we take you down with us,” Akira retorted calmly, the gun feeling like a thousand tons in her arms. She just gripped it tighter.

  “I have the detonator. I’ll blow this thing to hell if you touch me,” Kharaan screamed at Luke who was just calmly pointing his gun at him.

  No one had become trigger-happy yet, and Luke prayed to God, no one would.

  “We’ll let you go. Toss it to me,” Luke ordered him in Arabic.

  Akira looked at him in surprise. She thought only Brand was the multi-linguist of the group. Apparently, his second in command was tough too.

  Murad nodded cautiously, while his men stood at attention, pointing their guns at Akira, Luke, Murad and Jared. Akira was shaking, because this was the moment it all came down to.

  The prince reached into his coat pocket, and drew out a tiny cell phone. It was such an innocuous item.

  “Remote mechanism,” Luke guessed stepping forward to take it from Murad.

  Five guns pointed straight at him while he stepped away from his group. Instantly, the other th
ree closed ranks so that Pierre was still hidden by them. As best as they could.

  “So that you could be far away when tragedy struck. And claim sympathy and insurance money. Ingenious. Who were you going to blame?” Luke asked conversationally, taking another step.

  Murad’s face twisted. And the madness that was in him, the monster, leaped into his eyes. “You, you bastards. Liye Asharfil.”