The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “Yes.”

  “What did he do? Just slide down a moonbeam and pop into your room?”

  “No. Porter wasn’t a moonbeam kind of guy. I was dreaming.”

  “So you never see him when you’re awake?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “But you used to?”

  “Yeah. I got a face full of some kind of powdered drug. Peyote and datura, they said. That’s when I started seeing Porter.”

  “Peyote and datura? That stuff will stay in your skull forever.”

  “Thanks. And on that cheerful note—”

  “So, Naumann, he really was just a hallucination? His ghost, I mean.”

  “The phrase just a hallucination doesn’t quite catch the impact of having one follow you around most of the American Southwest, does it? Anyway, he didn’t think he was a hallucination.”

  “You talked it over with him?”

  “Yeah. He was pretty convinced he was a real ghost.”

  “Were you?”

  “He made a great case for it. Jury’s still out.”

  “Have you seen him since you left Italy?”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “So he was telling you the truth? He is stuck in Cortona. At least, his ghost is. You gonna help him with that?”

  “How would I do that?”

  Fyke thumped the controls in front of him.

  “My point exactly. You see, I know what you’re thinking, Mikey.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’re thinking about the essential evil horrible awfulness of you.”

  Dalton said nothing, staring out at the lights of Manado.

  “See? I thought so. Some free advice, Mikey?”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “Every fooking penny.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not you.”

  “What’s not me?”

  “Something happens to everybody, Mikey. Even to ghosts. To take on the weight of every bad thing that happens is a mortal sin. The sin of pride.”

  “You took on the weight of Kuta.”

  Fyke sipped at his coffee, fumbled at a pocket, pulled out one of Mandy’s outrageous colored cigarettes, lit it up, exhaled softly, sending a plume across the instrument panel. He offered one to Dalton, lit it too.

  “Yes. I took on Kuta. And am I not setting it right even now? The great thing about being a Catholic, Mikey . . . you are a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “Nope. Not anymore. Episcopalian.”

  Fyke made the sign of the cross over Dalton.

  “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. You are now officially shriven of the crime of being an Episcopalian and have become an honorary Catholic. So, Mikey, lad, the great thing about you now being a Catholic is you get forgiveness.”

  “Forgiveness from whom? The people you hurt?”

  “Jesus no. Hardly ever. Most people are miserable, surly sods who wouldn’t forgive you for a lukewarm martini. Mainly, you get it from God.”

  “Yeah? How can you tell? He sends you an e-mail?”

  Fyke touched his chest.

  “You feel it in here. Not right away. After a while. It comes to you.”

  “You really believe that, Ray?”

  Fyke was quiet for a while, watching the smoke drifting in the cockpit. He tapped his ashes into his empty coffee cup.

  “I have come to believe it, Mikey. But I have come to it very slowly.”

  “And you think I can?”

  “What you’re doin’ now, how’s that workin’ for you?”

  There wasn’t much to say to that.

  They were on the ground at Sam Ratulangi forty minutes later, a single-strip airfield ten miles northeast of the mangy little coastal town of Manado, in the middle of low, rolling hills and fields of coconut palm and copra farms. The Immigration counter was closed. One sleepy guard blinked at their passports and waved them through to the taxi stand, staring fixedly at their backs as they walked away. He was on the phone a few seconds later.

  They hired a large old Mercedes, painted bright pink, and gave the young female driver—a very handsome Chinese girl with a six-hundred-watt smile who gave her name as Tangerine—instructions to take them to Tia Sally’s bar. She gave them a look but started up anyway. Within a few minutes, she had them cruising through the low, dark hills and narrow country roads lined with coconut palms, with the lights of Manado a pale glow on the southwest horizon line. Fyke was asleep in minutes, but Dalton sat there, awake, his left hand aching brutally, staring out at the passing scrub brush, the occasional village, closed up for the night, flitting by his window in a blur of shutters and cinder-block walls, his eyes heavy with fatigue.

  He closed his eyes.

  Someone was flashing a red light in his eyes. He opened them up and saw that the interior of the taxi was full of flickering red light. Tangerine’s face was reflected in the rearview mirror, her eyes glittering with the red flaring lights that were pouring in through the back window. Then they heard the short, sharp klaxon sound of a police siren. Fyke snapped upright, blinking into the glare, straining around to look out the back window.

  “Who the fook are they?”

  “KIPAM,” said Tangerine. “I know the truck.”

  “The commandos? What do they want with us?”

  “I don’t know, sir, but I have to stop.”

  She pulled the big Benz over to the side of the road and rolled her window down. Steamy scented air poured inside the car; frangipani and car exhaust and the earthy smell from a nearby stand of copra. Black shadows flicked across the rear window. A cone of hard-white light pierced the side windows, and someone smacked the glass beside Dalton’s head with the tip of a baton, hard enough to make him jump, and waking up his temper.

  Dalton rolled down the window and squinted into the beam of a halogen flashlight, seeing a vaguely military figure behind the light. The man had a steel ASP baton in his other hand. He leaned down into the window and put the light on Ray Fyke, who blinked back steadily.

  “You come in plane?” barked a high, Chinese-sounding voice.

  “Take that light out of my face,” said Fyke.

  “You come in plane?” the soldier barked at him, smacking the roof of the taxi with his baton and sending a sharp lance of pain through Dalton’s skull, which, in turn, woke up the green scaly thing that lived deep down inside Dalton’s brain. Then he did it again.

  “You betta answer, boy! Get you outta car!”

  Dalton glanced across at Fyke, who was now grinning back at him.

  “Why are these kids so pissed off at us?”

  “No idea. Let’s find out,” said Fyke, an edge in his voice.

  Dalton sighed as the kid banged the roof a third time—he looked forward and saw Tangerine flinch every time the stupid kid dented her roof; the scaly thing that lived in his lizard brain now had a migraine—Daltonpopped the door open, forcing the young soldier to give ground as he got out onto the roadway. They were now standing in the headlight glare of a vehicle that, from what Dalton could make out, looked like an armored Humvee with a big CIS .50 MG on a roof-mounted swivel. The soldier, an extremely muscular and apparently neckless young man with a military high-and-tight, wearing a starched and pressed Indonesian Marine Corps uniform with MP markings, backed away a little more and held the halogen light up in Dalton’s face, effectively blinding him. Fyke was out of the car and on his feet on the other side, a second soldier in front of him, almost nose to nose if the kid had been a foot taller. The soldier facing Dalton had his ASP raised, the tip near Dalton’s face, since he was using it to point at Dalton. Which was stupid, since Dalton could rip it out of his hand in less than a second if he wanted to. Which he didn’t. Yet.

  “What plane are you talking about?” said Dalton, trying for a placatory tone, trying to cool the situation down.

  “Night Officer at Sam Ratulangi call. Say plane just land. No markings. You fly that plane? Come in at night. No pap
ers!”

  “Yes. I fly that plane. It has no markings because it’s being repainted. And I showed the guard our papers. What the hell business is it of—”

  “Unmarked plane? Why no markings?”

  “It’s being repainted. What are you so goddam angry about?”

  “No angry me,” screamed the kid, waving the ASP around in Dalton’s face and tugging his pistol out with his left hand. “You big trouble! You under arrest! Get on knees now!”

  He heard the other cop yelping at Fyke in Chinese and Fyke’s calm, measured answer, also in Chinese, which Dalton did not speak. At least the kid in his face could speak English. Dalton tried one last time.

  “How about you put the sidearm away and just tell me what the trouble is?”

  The kid’s eyes were huge in the headlight glare. He looked like he could be stoned on something. Probably adrenaline. And steroids, judging from his build. He put the pistol on Dalton, his finger inside the trigger guard: “You under arrest. You kneel down! Kneel down!”

  Dalton lifted his hands up in front of him, palms out.

  “Look, Corporal, if we can just—”

  The soldier tensed, and, in a sharp, quick move with a lot of force in it, swung the ASP at Dalton’s temple, a killing blow if it had landed. It didn’t. Dalton caught the strike with his left hand—the spider-bitten hand—and a bolt of blue fire ran right up his arm all the way to his shoulder.

  He heard a blow, and a strangled yelp, from the other side of the car. Fyke was not a yelper. He and the MP both turned to look. But they were committed now. Dalton caught the muzzle of the MP’s pistol in his right hand, forcing the barrel up. The MP triggered a round, but the slug went zipping away into the night—he heard Tangerine screaming something in Chinese—and Dalton ripped the pistol out of the Marine’s hand and slammed him across the cheekbone with the muzzle. The kid’s head snapped back, and a ribbon of blood flared out in the glare of the headlights. The kid went down. Dalton booted him in the belly, just to make his point. From the huffing sound on the other side of the taxi, Fyke was doing roughly the same thing to the other MP. Fyke straightened up, panting a bit, laid his left hand on the roof, and looked across the car at Dalton.

  “Kill the lights on that Humvee, Mikey.”

  Dalton ran across the gap, jerked open the door, and shut the Humvee down. When he came back, the lights were off on the taxi as well, and Fyke was leaning on the trunk, his arms crossed, his chest heaving.

  “Another fine fix you’ve got me into, Stanley,” he said. “What was that all about?”

  The sound of rolling thunder cut off Dalton’s reply. They looked up as a set of red lights appeared in the sky, riding a thudding, booming sound.

  “A Blackhawk,” said Fyke. “What do you want to do?”

  “What the hell do they want?”

  “No idea, lad. But make up your mind, because I have the strong impression that KIPAM won’t give us much of a chance to explain.”

  “Can you run?”

  Fyke shook his head.

  “I can stumble a few yards, throw up, and pass out. Will that help?”

  “Not much,” he said, turning to the driver.

  “Tangerine?”

  She stuck her head out the driver’s window, her eyes very wide.

  “Can you drive with your lights off?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then get the hell out of here!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The tires churned up gravel and dust, and Tangerine’s pink Mercedes was a memory in a few seconds. About a half mile out, she braked to take a curve. In the distance, the chopper veered suddenly off course to follow her taillights. It boomed right over their heads, a big Blackhawk with a red skull face painted on the hull. Fyke had already dragged his MP into the tree line. He stopped, breathing heavily, watching the chopper as it thundered by at two hundred feet.

  “KIPAM Marines, all right. Jesus, I hope they don’t shoot up Tangerine’s taxi. What have we done to irritate those boys?”

  “No idea,” said Dalton. “How’d they miss the Humvee?”

  “They won’t next time,” said Fyke, pointing to a second chopper, coming in from the same direction, a spotlight flickering around crazily as it skimmed the canopy.

  “Things go to shit in a hurry in this corner of the world, don’t they?” said Dalton, shaking the sting out of his left hand. It had come into play during the fight, and now it felt as if he had driven a spike through the middle of his palm.

  “That they do,” said Fyke. “The Humvee has one of those CIS .50s on the roof. You feel like a last stand, Mikey?”

  The light from the Blackhawk lanced overhead and arced into the south, following the highway into Manado, tracking the receding lights of the first chopper.

  “Maybe it has a radio too,” said Dalton.

  “Let’s go see. What about these lads?”

  “Cuff them to a palm trunk. Bring their pistols and their radios.”

  “Done, Captain.”

  Dalton dragged his man over to the nearest palm trunk, plucked his Streamlight out of the holster, jogged back over to the Humvee, tugged open the driver’s door, using the MP’s flashlight to check out the contents. The cramped interior held a suite of command-and-control electronics, most of which Dalton was pretty familiar with— the Indonesians got most of their gear from U.S. suppliers like Motorola and Microsoft—and there was a rear rack with two spotless M4s and a large box of ammunition. Behind the driver’s seat was an open hatch, with an ammo case right under it and a belt of big Browning .50 caliber MG rounds rising up through the hatch to feed the roof-mounted machine gun. The Humvee was armored and looked like it had been fitted with bulletproof glass. They could do some damage, if it had to come to a fight, and if the Blackhawks didn’t have anything other than the usual pintle-mounted light 7.62 MGs in the doorways. A few .50 caliber rounds in the right spot will take almost any chopper down, even an Apache gunship, which Dalton devoutly hoped the KIPAM did not have—please, God—because the problem with taking on a Hellfire-equipped Apache with a .50 caliber is roughly the same problem you encounter when you bring a butterfly net to a bear hunt.

  Dalton did a quick battle-readiness assessment and concluded that if they made a stand right here, right out in the open, the best of all possible outcomes had them both chopped into Baco-Bits in two minutes or less. He needed to get some distance, lose that chopper, find them a place to go to ground, cool everybody out, lower the tempo, and get these lunatic KIPAM cowboys to please just explain themselves.

  Fyke reached the passenger door with the pistols and the radios just as Dalton got himself settled in behind the driver’s wheel. Fyke scrambled through the gap and stood up in the hatch, beside the .50. There were no keys in any U.S. military vehicle, and this was no different. He hit the START button, the diesel powered up, he tugged the wheel hard left, and powered the Humvee straight into the jungle, crashing through thickets of bougainvillea and scrub brush and swerving around tall, slender trunks of coconut palm. It was still dark under the canopy, but, in the breaks through the palm fronds, he could see a pale pink light spreading out across the sky.

  He took the Humvee up a low hill, crested the hill, and roared down the other side. Fyke was up in the gunner’s hatch, shining the way with the dim beam of the MP’s halogen flash, hiding the light with the palm of his hand.

  They had covered perhaps ten miles of mixed, open ground and sparse stands of coconut palms when the narrow cone of hard-white light flickered across a large metal shed, a smaller cluster of buildings—all dark and deserted-looking—and then settled on another low, shedlike structure made of bamboo and thatched in dry palms.

  He leaned his head down into the cabin and shouted at Dalton.

  “Shut her down, Mikey. Let me do a recce.”

  Mikey shut her down. Fyke loped heavily off into the darkness. Dalton had no idea how much pain the man was in, and Fyke was pretending he was just fine, which was SOP for th
e SAS. Well, Dalton was doing pretty much the same thing. He’d been shivved in the googlies, as Mandy had so elegantly phrased it, and yet here he was flitting about the jungle in Southeast Asia just as if he were still a sprightly young lad with a stellar future and no serious communicable diseases. Fyke was back in a few minutes.

  “Looks like a deserted copra farm. Stick it in the barn.”

  Dalton drove the Humvee through a stand of overgrown copra plants, their leaves whipping at the windshield and leaving streaks of white sap across the glass, bounced twice, as the wheels jumped a low cinder-block fence, and slid across the threshold and into the darkness of the thatched barn. He shut the engine down again and leaned his forehead on the wheel, cradling his left hand in his right palm, his chest heaving. Fyke was lurching around in the dim, dappled interior of the barn, apparently looking for something. He stopped, staring, steadied the flash on something bulky, and stumbled into a shadow, emerging in a moment, dragging a long black hose. He stopped in front of the truck, aimed the hose at the windshield, and pressed the nozzle. A blast of water struck the Humvee, rocking it. Dalton sat inside the vehicle while Fyke hosed it down, from grille to tow bar.

  He was cooling it off, lowering the heat signature, because those KIPAM Blackhawks would probably have infrared sensors fitted. He was quick, but, then, if recent experiences were anything to go by, Ray Fyke was harder to kill than herpes simplex. Fyke dropped the hose, came back to the driver’s door, popped it open, and flopped back inside. He put his head against the headrest, blew out some air and sucked it back in again. In the silence, above the ticking of the engine and the pounding of their own hearts, they could hear the faraway sound of chopper blades thudding in the steamy night air. The sound got fainter, and then it was gone, and all they could hear was the chirrup-chirrup of crickets and nightjars and the sighing of the wind in the rafters. Something slimy struck the windshield of the Humvee.

  “Bat shit,” Fyke explained. “Barns are always full of them.”

  “The technical term is guano,” said Dalton. “And shouldn’t they be out and about, not hanging around the rafters in the dead of night?”