War Lord

by David Rollins

  ‘No.’

  ‘Aren’t they keepin’ you overnight?’

  ‘I want to thank you for all your help,’ I said.

  ‘No problem. I’m sorry things got so fucked up.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re leavin’.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Petinski has already left.’

  ‘I know. She called me.’

  ‘Do me a favor?’

  ‘Sure, what do you need?’

  ‘Whatever you’ve got that’s recent on Dar es Salaam – pirate activity and so forth. Plus anything you can give me on Gamal Abdul-Jabbar and his current employer, Mohammed Ali-Bakr al Mohammed. Use my secured email address.’

  ‘No problems.’

  ‘What resources has the Company got on the ground in Dar?’

  ‘They have a nice building, but the people there are not chilled like me. Unless it’s official, take my advice and stay off their radar. Make waves for them and they’re likely to pull y’all in and you’ll wake up somewhere out of the way, like Auckland, New Zealand.’

  ‘I’ll keep it in mind. And thanks for everything.’

  ‘Come back next year for Carnival.’

  I said I would, along with a bunch of other things that added up to goodbye, and ended the call. Next, I fixed a Glenfiddich with rocks, took a sip and managed to stop myself throwing up, but only after a couple of dry retches. I cursed the doctor for putting a temporary hold on my hobby and called the concierge desk. I needed a travel agent and I figured a hotel like this would have a preferred supplier with proven reliability. An hour and a half spent patiently mucking around with airline schedules and the agent had me booked on the six a.m. to São Paulo with connections through to the only lead I had – Dar es Salaam. The trip would take thirty-six hours, and that was assuming all those connections lined up as planned. I didn’t think much of my chances but I didn’t see that I had another choice. The nuke was still out there somewhere and the clock was still ticking, but there were other agents on that. As far as I knew no other resources were looking for Randy Sweetwater, and he was still out there somewhere too. Emma Shilling was also on my mind. Who was going to avenge her?

  I called room service next, ordered a club sandwich, latched the front door as well as the doors onto the balcony, and took a bath, avoiding the shower. When I was done I threw on the robe and fiddled with the TV in an attempt to get it working. I gave up, opened up the minibar again and considered giving the Glenfiddich another try. The doorbell rang and I walked over and checked the peephole. Outside in the hall was Gracia from the front desk, the tall, striking woman with the big brown eyes and thick black hair who’d found my fiancée-to-be Petinski and me a room with a busted TV. Accompanying her was a guy pushing a trolley.

  I opened the door. ‘Room service, senhor,’ the room-service guy said as he wheeled in the cart, setting a silver-domed tray down on the coffee table. I checked under the dome, confirmed club sandwich, signed the docket, tipped him and off he went.

  ‘Senhor Cooper,’ Gracia said when he’d gone, concern on her features. She nodded at my hand. ‘You are okay now?’

  ‘The doc says I only got forty years left.’

  The concern remained on her face. She cleared her throat. ‘Please, I wanted to come and say in person, on behalf of the Copacabana Palace, how unhappy we feel about what has happened.’

  ‘That’s okay, Gracia, it was just one of those things,’ I said with an offhand wave, as if finding a black mamba on the bed was like discovering a hair in my soup.

  ‘The bill for your stay here has been – how do you say? – canceled.’

  That was a surprise. ‘Canceled?’

  ‘There is no charge, Senhor Cooper.’ She handed me the invoice with the balance showing zero reals.

  ‘Thank you. That’s very generous,’ I said. And now I wasn’t going to have to explain a bill to Air Force finance that ran to quite a few thousand bucks. I should’ve ordered lobster.

  ‘Also, I am sad that your woman and you, you are not . . .’ She muttered something to herself in Portuguese in frustration. ‘I do not know the word. Casar . . .’ She took a ring off her finger and put it back on.

  ‘She told you the engagement was off?’ I said. That was so Petinski – clearing the decks.

  ‘Sim.’ Gracia nodded. ‘She told me you are not get married. I am feel apologize for you.’

  ‘You feel sorry for me?’

  ‘No, no, I feel sad for you. My English is okay, but could be better. I speak some of many languages, but none so well as Portuguese.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know any useful Swahili?’ I asked her on the off chance.

  ‘What is Swahili?’

  ‘It’s what they speak in Dar es Salaam.’

  ‘Oh, you are leaving us?’

  ‘Tomorrow – early.’

  She gave me another brief smile and took a step toward the door. ‘Well, I must go. It has been a big day for you, I think. You rest.’

  Gracia had soft brown eyes with long lashes, and as I’d already noted she was tall at maybe five eleven. Tall enough to be a topless tall. An open blouse revealed a hint of a purple and pink lace pushup bra. Looked to me like maybe Carnival was already going on under there.

  ‘Hey, here’s a thought,’ I said, spider-to-the-fly-like. ‘Why don’t you have a drink with me before I leave?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I must go.’

  ‘You’d be doing me a favor. As you said, it’s been a big day: I’ve been attacked by a killer snake, spent most of the day in an ice bath, and my fiancée has walked out on me.’

  Gracia hesitated.

  I spun out a little more web. ‘Never mind. Look, I understand: you’re on duty and I don’t want to get you into trouble. Thanks so much for everything.’ I held out my good hand to shake.

  ‘Why did your fiancée leave?’ Gracia asked, taking my hand.

  ‘I really don’t know.’ I looked at the floor and shook my head, the image of pathetic jilted blubber. ‘She just . . . left.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  Gracia glanced at the clock on the DVD player, the fly not even realizing that it was caught. ‘I am not on duty now. Perhaps one drink. You have cachaça?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said, making a move in the direction of the minibar.

  ‘Please, I will do it. You must eat your dinner. You want cachaça also?’

  ‘Sure, I love the stuff,’ I said with every intention of leaving the drink untouched. I took the dome off my sandwich, removed the toothpicks and took a bite. It tasted good.

  ‘Did you love her?’ Gracia asked, setting a glass tinkling with ice down on the table.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I knew this lie was going to get difficult if I didn’t change the subject. I looked for her engagement ring. From memory it was a freshly cut diamond set in white gold, or maybe platinum, but it wasn’t on her finger. Hmm, this was tricky. Ignore it, or mention it? ‘Your ring,’ I said, rolling the dice. ‘You’re not wearing it.’

  Gracia pushed the ice down into her glass with a long pink manicured fingernail. ‘My engagement. It is also . . .’ She made a gesture with her hand like whatever was in it had gone poof, into the air, and she couldn’t care less about it.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘My girlfriend. She went on his Facebook. She told me there were photos.’ Gracia took a long drink, her throat moving, the ice making music in the glass. She rolled the glass between her palms. ‘I looked too. The woman he was with . . . it was my mother step.’

  ‘He was doing your stepmother?’

  She nodded. ‘Sim.’

  *

  Gracia sat upright, threw her head back and held her thick hair off her neck. Then she rested her hands on my ribs and blew air upward across her face to cool down. My turn next. She blew on my chest, her lips forming a perfect O. I reached up and ran the tips of my fingers along the top of a breast, the gentle curve reaching toward a
dark nipple, the sheen of perspiration on her skin. Damn, this woman had control.

  ‘Where’d you learn to move like that?’ I asked her.

  ‘Samba,’ she said, lifting her ass off my hips and rolling it in a circular motion a couple of times while keeping me inside her, demonstrating the motion. Little Coop was still hypersensitive and his jangled nerves made me catch my breath.

  She stopped moving and went all serious. ‘Why don’t you stay another day, maybe two?’

  ‘I’d like to, but I can’t.’

  Gracia got off me, kneeled on the bed and held her breasts like she was lifting fruit, presenting them to me, an offering. ‘You like these?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You have them again if you stay.’

  ‘That would usually be an unbeatable offer, but I have to go back to work.’

  ‘What is your work?’

  ‘I chase bad guys.’

  ‘Then you are a good guy?’ She shook her head. ‘No, I think you are a bad guy too. Especially with women.’

  The comment made me think of Shilling. The memory of how we found her – what von Weiss had done to her – made me shudder.

  ‘So now you are cold?’ she asked, running her hand along the gooseflesh on my good arm. ‘This, I can fix.’

  Reaching down, Gracia pulled up the sheet from the bottom of the bed and it billowed over us like a parachute canopy. As it settled, descending slowly, full of her scent and perfume, she wriggled down and I felt the warm wetness of her mouth close around me.

  Twenty-six

  I arrived in Dar es Salaam a little after three p.m. two and a half days later, a delay in Rio plus the various flights and long layovers, especially in Jo’burg, chewing through more than the expected thirty-six hours. In fact, if I’d still been listening to the ticking clock mentioned in the ransom note that arrived with the amputated hand, there’d be only around four and a half days left on it before kaboom time, and maybe a lot less depending on which time-zone calculations Randy had used.

  The arrivals hall at Julius Nyerere International Airport was new, but the AC was down and it was hot, airless, bustling and smelled of dust and sweaty armpit. I joined the impatient queue for a visa and paid the required hundred and fifty bucks to get it. Out in the hall I chose a hotel called the Southern Sun off an ad on the back of a luggage trolley, then walked through a gauntlet of people who were keen to sell me their local knowledge, like where to find a cabstand. This turned out to be the front entrance, where a motley collection of vehicles were lined up. The drivers sitting in them flashed their lights to attract attention. I strolled over.

  ‘Taxi?’ asked a driver, leaning across the front seat of an old Renault. He was at the head of the queue, but I pulled the rusting rear door open and got in anyway.

  The driver was a tall thin man of black and Indian descent, aged in his mid-twenties. He wore sandals, loose black cotton pants and an off-white shirt. Thick, round-rimmed glasses magnified his dark eyes. There wasn’t a lot of room in the vehicle, front or back, and his legs were up around his armpits, reminding me of all the time I’d just spent in economy. Music blared from the radio, a kind of African hip-hop I wasn’t familiar with. ‘You know the Southern Sun?’ I asked him.

  He pulled into the departing traffic on the wrong side of the road, until I realized that’s the side they drive on here, like they do in Britain and Australia.

  ‘The Southern Sun. Yes, yes, that will be fifty dollar.’

  ‘Turn your meter on.’

  ‘No meter. No meter in Dar es Salaam. Taxi from airport to city is fifty dollar. Special fare.’

  Specially steep. The city was barely eight klicks from the airport.

  ‘How long you staying? You need a car? You must hire me, ha ha. You are Westerner. If you don’t take taxi, other taxi will follow you until you take one.’

  Interesting sales pitch. He laughed as he talked, either the nervous type or he found the fact that I seemed prepared to even consider paying his price hugely amusing.

  ‘Five hours is one hundred fifty US dollars,’ he continued and again followed it with a laugh. ‘This very good price.’

  ‘Sounds like highway robbery to me,’ I said even though compared to the run to my hotel it seemed reasonable enough.

  ‘Okay. I make it one hundred. We have a deal, ha ha?’

  ‘I’m here for the sights.’ In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what I expected to see in Dar es Salaam, let alone where to start looking for it. Gamal Abdul-Jabbar caught a plane here. A von Weiss G5 possibly piloted by LeDuc had lodged a flight plan to this city. And Shilling had said that Dar had been spoken about by von Weiss. Was there something of specific interest here? Or was it just a stop-off to somewhere else – Somalia, perhaps, to meet up with pirate boss Mohammed Ali-Bakr al Mohammed?

  ‘You want to see the sights?’ he asked. ‘Then you need a guide also. I am driver and guide, two people in one. For two people you must pay one hundred fifty dollar. Ha ha ha. Plus fare from airport to hotel is two hundred dollar. Okay? Deal? What you like to see? We have many wonderful things in Dar. Beautiful beaches, beautiful churches. If you like, I take you to—’

  ‘I’ll make it an even five hundred bucks if you get me a boat – something small, quiet and fast.’ Both Abdul-Jabbar and Ali-Bakr al Mohammed were pirates. Pirates were interested in ships, and Dar es Salaam, according to the information emailed to me by Delaney, was the last stop for seaborne cargo bound for Mogadishu, Somalia’s friendly capital seven hundred or so miles up the African coast.

  He mulled over my offer for a few seconds. ‘Taxi with driver and guide and boat for five hundred dollar. Yes, I can do.’

  ‘Included in the deal is a handgun and spare rounds of ammo. I’m not fussy – Glock, Tokarev, Makarov – whatever you can get.’

  ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’ The driver’s eyes darted from the road to the rear-view mirror to the road to the mirror. Fair to say I had the guy’s full attention.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him. Those eyes of his continued to dart. ‘Your name,’ I repeated. ‘You got one?’

  ‘Fakim,’ he said. ‘It is Fakim.’

  After that, the conversation pretty much dried up, so I did a little of that sightseeing out the window to get some idea of the lay of the land. We were moving through a light industrial slum, the kind that gloms onto most airport access roads. On the left, the buildings were built low and cheap and mostly of the warehouse type; on the right, homes and shops. Every home had a shop out front, and every shop a home behind or on top of it. There seemed to be kids roaming around all over the place. Listless dogs were everywhere, the air hot and steamy. And as the road was unsealed, it was dusty, too – the exposed earth rusty orange in color. So far, Dar reminded me of Kigali, which reminded me of the Congo, a place I was keen to forget.

  Things became more strictly residential once we turned off the main road, the homes gray and slapped together and tightly packed like they were bundled for recycling. Ahead, a car had driven nose-first into a pothole the size of a bomb crater and steam gushed from under its hood, the dazed driver wandering around with a hand to his bloody forehead.

  ‘How far is the Southern Sun from the port?’ I asked.

  ‘Not far. Two, three kilometer.’

  After passing the oil refinery and the railway sidings, I caught a glimpse of the docks. Ships of various sizes were tied up to a long pier running the length of the near shoreline: a container ship, a vehicle transporter, a grain ship and a couple of tankers. More merchant vessels were moored out in the middle of the harbor. Several beat-up fishing boats chugged back and forth. They didn’t seem particularly seaworthy, though seaworthiness was something I didn’t know much about. For all I knew they fished as far up as the Gulf of Aden and out to the east toward the Seychelles and Maldives. Small outrigger-style canoes also drifted along, limp triangular sails attempting to catch the exhausted breeze.

  Fakim hooked into a turn away from the wat
er, taking us toward the ritzy end of town where, it seemed, the folks could afford some greenery. Not long after, he pulled into the forecourt of the Southern Sun and stopped at the front stairs. A guy in hotel uniform approached the car but I waved him away.

  ‘So what do you say, Fakim?’ I said, flattening a ball of notes extracted from my pocket. Two hundred dollars was all the US cash I had on me. ‘Two hundred now, another two hundred when you pick me up later and take me to the boat, and the balance when I get the gun.’ I held the greenbacks toward him. He stared at the wad, wanting it but reluctant, seeing the strings attached. ‘I know what you’re thinking – that you could always just take this two hundred and drive away, but there’s more where this comes from, so much more.’

  ‘Money for gun – extra.’

  ‘How much extra?’

  ‘Not much.’

  We were getting beyond my cash reserves and my preparedness to haggle. ‘Okay – my final offer: four hundred for you, a hundred for the boat and a hundred for the gun. Six hundred in total. If you can get the gun and boat for less, you make more profit. If the boat and the gun are no good, you get nothing. Take it or leave it.’

  Fakim glanced out the window at the surroundings, considering the deal. ‘Okay,’ he said finally, taking the two hundred and putting it in his top pocket. ‘I do this and you still owe me four hundred.’

  ‘And you still owe me a boat and a handgun with spare ammo.’

  ‘Yes, okay. We go to Magogoni Street.’

  ‘What’s Magogoni Street?’

  ‘Where boat lives. It’s near. I will come back at four o’clock. That is good time, ha ha?’

  Suited me. ‘See you then,’ I said. The risk was that laughing boy here would keep on driving, but I had a feeling he’d be back. Money didn’t look like it was all that easy to come by in this town. Tourists were walking wallets, even the seemingly violent ones like me.

  ‘What is your name, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Vin.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Vin. Ha ha.’

  Right.

  Though I hadn’t booked, I got a room at the Sun easy enough, the occupancy low if the empty reception area was anything to go by. The four-star hotel was furnished in a great-white-hunter-swaps-elephant-gun-for-Nikon kind of way, with pictures of the big game found in Tanzania replacing the stuffed trophies that would’ve graced the walls of a place like this not so long ago.