The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Fyke, staring up.

  The Osprey disappeared behind one of the hills, banking. Kang was on the radio, speaking urgently. They heard the sound of the Blackhawk’s engines starting to turn over. Then they heard a sound, like a silk curtain being ripped apart, but insanely loud and close. Kang and Dalton looked at each other. There was a popping sound, return fire—Kang’s two Marines had M4s—and the pilot had a Beretta—then the ripping sound returned, a terrible rising-and-falling sound, with a machinelike whirring chatter under that, like a chain saw cutting through lumber. It cut off abruptly.

  They heard the rotor pitch changing, getting louder. The Osprey was coming around again. The three men looked for cover. There was only the tangled wreckage at the far end of the gorge. Nothing had to be said. They ran for cover, stumbling along the rocky edge of the channel, Kang out front, Dalton staying close to Fyke, Fyke laboring, limping, breathing hard.

  They were almost there when a black shadow crossed the green hillside about a hundred yards down from their position, and a moment later the Osprey thundered ponderously across the roof of the gorge, coming to a stop midchannel, turning slowly as the pilot searched the ground.

  The ruins of the cannery were fifty feet, thirty feet—the Osprey was coming around slowly, sunlight glinting off the windshield, the rotors two disks of spinning light. Dalton, looking back as he ran, could make out the sharp brown face of a man sitting at the controls, and someone else, a round, flabby face, a face he knew, leaning into the window next to the pilot, also scanning the cut. Kang had stopped at the edge of the wreckage, staring up at the Osprey, his face hardening. He jerked out his Beretta just as Dalton reached him.

  “No, Major. He hasn’t seen us yet—”

  Kang paid no attention. He lifted the piece up, aimed. Fyke and Dalton stumbled past him and burrowed into the ruins behind him. It stank of gasoline and death. The beams of the old cannery had tumbled inward, tenting a space beneath them; hard, stony ground, littered with spent shell casings, slivers of bamboo, spilled oil, and bits of pulpy material that were probably decaying human flesh. This cave-like opening led back to a larger area, cut into the hillside, some kind of storage room.

  Dalton and Fyke, on their hands and knees, scrambled toward the area, with no thought other than to get as much solid matter as they could between them and that minigun. They heard the Major’s Beretta as he fired—single shots, carefully aimed, measured, one after the other, reaching to nine before the minigun opened up on him. Again that terrible zippering sizzle.

  A hard rain of rounds chattered across the ruins. They couldn’t see what had happened to Kang. They didn’t need to. Bits of Kang were splattering against their backs as they ran. Fyke fell hard, slamming his knee into a jutting stone. His face went white with pain. Dalton reached him, tugged him across the last ten feet into the little open area at the back. They came to a full stop up against what looked like the curved side of a huge steam boiler, set right up against the face of the cliff.

  They could go no farther. Fyke pulled himself up, set his back against the boiler, pulling out his Beretta, breathing in short, sharp gasps. The space was coal dark and smelled of burned flesh. Thin shafts of sunlight pierced through gaps in the ruins in front of them, blades of hard-yellow light, with motes of dust drifting inside them. They could hear the thrumming sound of the Osprey; the pounding of her rotors seemed to bounce off the rocks behind their heads. A huge black shadow cut off the thin beams of sunlight. The vibration of her rotors and the hurricane wind of her downdraft drove clouds of dust up into their eyes, choking them. The Osprey hovered overhead for a moment. Dalton and Fyke were holding their breaths, looking up; their pistols were useless. There was a moment of stillness inside the cascade of wind and the pounding beat of the rotors. They distinctly heard a metallic snap, the gunner pulling the lever, and then the fire rained down again, for a full minute, six thousand rounds, each round the size of a lipstick tube. The minigun was literally shredding the wreckage, the gunner methodically sweeping the muzzle back and forth, pouring rounds down on the ruins, brass shell casings tumbling out of the loading bay and falling down in a cascade, the casings tinkling as they fell like coins through the cracks and fissures, some of them dropping right in front of Dalton and Fyke. The firing seemed to go on forever, a terrible, drumming impact. Fyke had his hands over his ears; Dalton was staring out at the open ground, watching the rounds drilling in, stitching an exploding trench right across the stones and coming closer. Closer, stone chips flying, stinging their faces. Then the firing stopped.

  THE OSPREY HOVERED for a time, turning slowly in the sunlight, the gunner staring down at the smoking ruin below him and thinking that nothing could have survived that. Sergeant Ong came to the open bay, looked down. The boy watched him, his brown eyes wide and his hands slightly numb from the high-frequency vibration of the weapon.

  “If there’s anybody there, Mr. Ong, they have to be dead.” Ong looked down at the tangle of steel and wood for a while, and then turned and looked back into the darkness of the interior. Lujac was standing there, staring back out at him.

  “No,” said Ong. “We have to make sure. We put it down on beach. Come back on foot. If Dalton alive in there, we burn him out.”

  Lujac could barely hear what Ong was saying over the roar of the engines and the ringing in his ears. But he got the general idea. He came forward to the open bay and looked down at the smoldering ruins a hundred feet below him. Then he looked over at Ong, smiled brightly, and shot him in the middle of the forehead with Corporal Ahmed’s little popgun. Ong tumbled out of the open bay, falling awkwardly, arms flailing, and slammed into the wreckage, hard, splitting open like a mango. The boy at the gun station was staring back at Lujac, his mouth open, a shy, nervous smile playing around the corners of his lips.

  Lujac glanced back, saw the pilot craning around to look toward the back of the plane, unsure of what had just happened. Lujac patted the cute little gunner boy affectionately—perhaps more than affectionately—on the side of the face and then walked back through the interior to the cockpit. Lujac put his silver gun in his pocket, lifted his hands up to show he was harmless, and sat down in the copilot’s chair.

  “And what’s your name?” he asked, unfurling a broad warm smile.

  “Sam Bobby Gurlami.”

  “I suggest you get us the hell out of here, Sam Bobby Gurlami.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you just shot the shit out of a KIPAM Blackhawk and killed a whole lot of Marines, and I’m willing to bet at least one of them got to his radio before he died. They will resent this. Extremely. People will come.”

  Sam Bobby took this in, and then he powered the Osprey up and hit the button that closed the rear bay. They were at a thousand feet and climbing when he brought the nacelles forward and turned the chopper into an airplane. He had it up to three hundred miles an hour a few minutes after that. Sam Bobby got the Osprey settled down and then looked over at Lujac.

  “Why did you kill Sergeant Ong?”

  “Because, my dear Sam Bobby, he was going to get us all killed.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Recently, I have been making something of a study of our Mr. Dalton, and I have learned a few lessons along the way, one of which is not to crawl into a long, narrow pipe when there’s a crocodile at the other end.”

  “Okay. I can see that.”

  “Did you know what this was all about?”

  “No. All we knew was that when we got the call we were supposed to come to Pulau Maju and shoot the place up. Kill everybody on the island.”

  “And did you?”

  Sam Bobby gave him a large, wet-lipped leer.

  “Rock and roll! Like killing bunnies with a ball-peen hammer.”

  “Tell me, was there a ship here when you arrived?”

  “Yeah. Big oil tanker. Five-hundred-foot at least. Brand-spanking-new.”

  “Did Ong tell you anythi
ng about that?”

  “No. I asked. He said to shut the fuck up. So I did.”

  “What the story on the kid back there?”

  “He’s my son.”

  Lujac looked back. The boy had the minigun tarped and was sweeping up some stray shell casings. He had his iPod turned on, and was dancing a little two-step while he worked. Lujac figured the kid was a psycho, which was fine by him. The lovely thing about psychos was they were reliable, hardheaded people who were not easily panicked and did not get all gummed up with pointless emotions such as sympathy or guilt.

  “How did you get this Osprey?”

  “Ong requisitioned it. It belongs to the Home Ministry.”

  “Ong said this was Chong’s plane. I didn’t believe him.”

  “Ong’s a fucking Sergeant. Nobody hands you one of these Ospreys if you’re a Sergeant. You have to have some pull.”

  “So you figure Ong was right. That Chong is in on . . . whatever it is?”

  “Sure. Has to be. We were gonna be rich. Now I don’t know.”

  “What was your cut?”

  “Ong said we’d each get fifty thousand.”

  “Fifty thousand is rich to you?”

  “Damn right. We were going to get into the landscaping business.”

  Lujac figured what Ong had planned for Sam Bobby Gurlami and his kid was a chance to get very deep into the landscape itself, and stay there.

  “But you had no idea what, exactly, the . . . the game . . . was?”

  “No. But there was a lot of money in it. Ong was going to buy a resort in Phuket with what he got. If it was enough to turn Minister Chong, then it has to be millions. In Singapore, you cheat or take a bribe, they kill you.”

  “So I’ve heard. Tell me, Sam Bobby, do you like money?”

  Sam Bobby showed his teeth, very white against his walnut hide.

  “Yeah. Sure I do. It’s all about the money.”

  “Then you are about to earn a whole lot of money.”

  “More than Ong was going to give us?”

  “Sergeant Ong was a fat, cheap prick. I mean, did you see that suit?”

  41

  Royal Air Force Lockheed P-3 Orion, nine hundred miles due west of Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean

  They were on a routine shakedown flight, training up some new people cycling in from the Reserves. The newbies were all back in the main cabin, learning about the surveillance and listening gear that had just been installed. The Orion was a four-engine patrol plane, maybe twenty years old, and had spent most of its service life flying these SigInt operations out of the airfield at Diego Garcia. The pilot, W. O. “Bingo” Binnings, two years away from retirement, was wondering how he would adjust to a life far less vivid than this one, and his copilot, a young East Indian woman named Audrey Singh, with three years of flying, was staring out at the vast shimmering expanse of the Indian Ocean and thinking of her upcoming physical—she was pregnant and had told no one about it, especially not her husband, for reasons we need not pry into here—when she saw something like a small black speck, floating in the middle of a field of shifting light, two thousand feet below her wing.

  “Bingo, do you see that?”

  Binnings, an older man, wore glasses and did not like to admit, even to himself, that his eyes were beginning to fail him.

  “Where are we looking, Audrey?”

  Singh pointed down and to her right.

  “Down there, bearing one-nine-one. Small black thing. Do you see it?”

  Binnings could make out nothing in the sidelong glare of the setting sun, but he had faith in the girl’s young eyes.

  “Shall we go down, take a look?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  He put the plane into a slow bank and went back along their route, bringing the plane down to five hundred feet off the chop. He banked again and retraced their route, slowing their airspeed as much as he dared. Singh was leaning forward in her seat, frowning out at the seascape, using a pair of binoculars to scan the sea, as they raced over it at three hundred and fifty miles an hour. Something black was bobbing on the horizon. They were on it, over it, and thundering past it in a few seconds.

  “What was it?”

  “It was a boat! An open boat.”

  “We’re a thousand miles from anywhere, Audrey. Are you sure?”

  “Go ’round again, Bingo. Please.”

  “As you like it, my dear.”

  He did the circuit again, and as they came back on the line he handed her a digital camera.

  “Get a shot, if you can.”

  “Okay.”

  Once again, they were moving far too fast to get a good look. But it was definitely an open boat, some sort of twin-engine cigarette boat, adrift in the water, rolling madly in the swells. There was no one in the boat, but something black and vaguely manlike was lying on the bow. A gull was sitting on its chest. The gull fluttered heavily off when they flashed by again. Singh snapped a string of pictures, and then she flipped the display panel open and hit REPLAY. She stared down at the images for a few seconds, and then he heard her slow intake of breath.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “It’s a man.”

  She handed the camera to Bingo, who shaded the screen with his hand and held it up close. She was right. Spread-eagled on the bow of the speedboat was a tall, skinny black male—probably male—wearing what was left of some kind of tan uniform. He was shoeless, and it looked like the birds had been at him, because there were holes ripped in his shirt and pants and dried blood clots all over him. His face was a nightmare, most of the edible flesh already torn away by gulls, and his eyes had been thoroughly pecked out as well, nothing left but two gaping black sockets full of crusted blood.

  “My God,” said Bingo Binnings. “Note the bearings and the GPS, and call the base. I’ll make one more run, and we’ll drop a beacon. They’ll have to scramble one of the Ospreys.”

  WHICH THEY DID. But night comes down like the lid on a coffin this near the equator, so it was the next day before they managed to find the boat again. The pilot hovered the Osprey over the drifting boat, and a rescue diver rappelled down to the deck; very hazardous duty, what with the wind, and the downdraft from the rotors, and the sea building so that the boat was leaping and bucking about like a hog in a gate. But the diver got himself safely down and knelt beside the half-eaten figure on the bow.

  He keyed his helmet mike.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, into his mike. “This man’s been nailed to the bow. Bloody nailed!”

  “Say again,” came the voice of the crew chief, leaning out of the open bay, held in by a safety strap.

  The diver looked up at him.

  “He’s been nailed to the bow. Through his wrists and ankles.”

  “Yow! Must have pissed somebody off,” said the crew chief. “See if he’s got any ID on him.”

  The diver gritted his teeth, held his breath, and patted the man down. He felt something in his shirt pocket, tugged it out, a sheaf of papers, bloody, folded, and crumpled. He managed to get one open, held it flat against the body’s chest.

  “It’s a bill of lading.”

  “A what?”

  “A bill of lading. A cargo manifest.”

  “Does it say what ship?”

  “Hard to read. The Mingo . . . something. Mingo Dubai, I think.”

  “Well, stuff it in your vest. We’ll go through it. Can you un-nail him?”

  “Not without doing some damage.”

  “Well, he’s dead, isn’t he? He’s not going to care.”

  “Look, Frank, why can’t we just leave him be?”

  “What? Nailed to a boat? Left to drift? He’s an affront to the bloody senses, you manky Scots git, not to mention a hazard to fucking navigation. We can’t just leave him here.”

  “Can’t we sink the boat? I mean, he’s . . . all nailed down.”

  “Don’t be such a pantywaist. Pry him loose and strap him up. We’ll haul him back to Diego and give him a decent burial.�
��

  The diver shrugged, cursed the crew chief silently, pulled out his pry knife, went to work on the body’s left ankle. He heard something like wood creaking against wood, looked up and saw, with a thrill of pure horror that stayed with him for the rest of his career, that the body was moving: the neck stretching out, growing rigid, corded sinews rising in the sun-scorched skin. The lipless mouth opened slowly, the fingers twitched weakly, and, from the gaping, toothless, and tongueless mouth, came a faint but terrible rasping moan. The diver jerked back, dropping his pry knife into the deep.

  “Christ on a fucking crutch!”

  “What?”

  “This poor bastard is still alive.”

  42

  Airborne, inbound to the USA

  No KIPAM Marine had gotten to a radio, and the M134 Minigun had chewed the Blackhawk to tiny ribbons of aluminum and chips of plastic. It had also shredded Major Kang into a kind of pulpy pink paste with boots on that was more or less located around the edge of the cannery wreck. His radio—at least, many of its constituent bits—was visible in this material. And there was, as predicted, no cell-phone signal. Dalton and Fyke—both stunned, dazed, in mild shock, but otherwise, amazingly, unhurt—walked away from the wreckage and looked around them, hearing nothing but the booming of the sea and the wind rustling through the palms. They were considering trying to make a raft out of bamboo when they heard the sound of incoming choppers. The KIPAM base air controller had heard the panicked cross talk, had listened to the buzz-saw sound of the minigun, a short warning yelp—and then a profound silence.

  He had drawn the appropriate conclusions and scrambled every available air asset to hunt down whatever aircraft could have been near Pulau Maju, while dispatching a Blackhawk and two Apaches to the island to see what the hell had happened. Dalton and Fyke were airborne in their Lockheed JetStar two hours later. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, local time.