Errand of Mercy: How far do you run, and where do you hide?

by William Walker

  ERRAND OF MERCY

  by

  WILLIAM C. WALKER

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used factiously. Any resemblance to current events or to living persons is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 William C. Walker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright holder.

  ISBN 978-0-9834349-3-1

  Book cover design by the Scarlett Rugers Design Agency

  www.scarlettrugers.com

  For Maureen

  PROLOGUE

  Samual Habib M’Bemba awoke in a driving rainstorm—one of the dozen or so in the past two days—and pulled the sticky, soggy sheet away from his bare skin. Shaking and fatigued from the night’s sleep, he exhaled a long breath, turned onto his back, and lay naked under mosquito netting disintegrating from rot and mildew. After a moment he cracked one eyelid, just enough to see dim, gray light through the veil of his lashes.

  Morning, and the thunderous discharge from the heavens again. Allah be Praised! Jesus, Our Savior!

  He reached for the water pitcher, took a long drink and was just as quickly violently sick. The malaria germ had taken over completely, coursing through his veins and capillaries, tearing into millions of cells. It would take a day or two, maybe longer before he’d have his strength back. Then he could leave this clinic in the hills of Liberia and travel back to the diamond mines on the Mano River.

  But for now he was alone. He’d brought the pouch again for the tall bearded one, given it to him yesterday or the day before; he couldn’t remember. The leather purse contained clear, glassy stones, some almost the size of the speckled guinea eggs that he and his momma used to gather. The pouch bulged slightly and had to be belted to his waist for the journey.

  His Christian momma and his Muslim papa could rest easy with their saviors this day. With what he’d been paid he could easily take care of his brothers and sisters and their sons and daughters. He’d kept the extraordinary secret to himself for six months, but the precious information finally leaked out. Hoarding the diamonds and the money was a selfish act. His family members and their wives told him so.

  The good news was that his brothers would be with him in a few days when he returned to the mines. They insisted sharing in his good fortune, and they were right.

  His eyes clouded as the fever set in again. He lay back, closed his lids, and felt rather than saw the doctor pull aside the mosquito netting and look down upon him.

  He smiled through his fever. The doctor would ease his pain and comfort him. After all, the tall one had for several years ministered to the sick and the feeble.

  The sharp sting of a needle in his arm made Samual M’Bemba flinch, but only for a moment. He could not know that the twenty-one gauge needle inside his cephalic vein was presently dispensing air and nothing more.

  Following the normal venous channel, the minute bubbles of emboli were carried into M’Bemba’s axillary vein, then with gathering speed into the superior vena cava and the right atrium of the heart muscle itself.

  Pain spiked in his chest and he furrowed his brow in puzzlement. He sat up, pounded on his breastbone, took a deep breath of air and coughed. Samual M’Bemba raised his hand and called out, but the doctor had disappeared.

  The bubbles gathered into his right ventricle where they were pushed a heartbeat later into the pulmonary arteries. From there they spread to the lungs and the coronary pathways blocking his blood flow and cutting off oxygen to the heart.

  In the sixty seconds remaining in Samual M’Bemba’s life he expelled air and blood from his lungs and gagged at a knife-edged pain so horrible it obliterated any coherent thought. He ripped the mosquito netting aside and managed to stand on his feet. Outside the bungalow it was becoming dark, and that was odd, because he had the impression that it was morning. He fell to his knees, barely conscious of the wet forest humus sticking to his bare legs.

  A thought entered his mind just then, one that seemed important. Then the blackness covered him completely.

  1

  Daniel O’Brien was a burn victim, a lucky burn victim. He had scars on his hands and his torso and one side of his face, but he was alive, so therefore he was lucky. The scored tissue on his right temple and jaw line gave his face a rough, craggy appearance that contrasted with the unblemished left side. But since he no longer cared so much about his looks this seemed a minor concern. Another matter entirely tore at his heart and his soul. He wondered if the corrosive acid from the memory of that terrible night might someday blister its way through his system and cauterize the guilt. He was not holding his breath, and he pushed the images to the back of his mind once again.

  The airplane demanded his attention, and O’Brien eased the control column of the older model Boeing 737 forward. The airplane responded with a slow descent into the hot sub-Saharan climate just as the morning sun shot into the cockpit. The searing rays of heat and white light assaulted his senses, especially after the darkness of the overnight flight. As he scanned the instruments O’Brien shook his head. Years of dirt and grime were caked between the gauges, the seats were torn, and gray insulation hung in places from the side panels. The front windscreens were badly scratched, and just now he noticed a chicken bone stuck way down in the throttle quadrant. He might compare the squalid cockpit to forty-year-old prostitutes he’d glimpsed on dark European streets. Both were well past their prime, and neither one could bear a close examination.

  He removed his aviator sunglasses from his flight bag. The airplane had been in a flyable condition when they took off from Fortaleza, Brazil over four hours ago. Since then the ship seemed to be coming apart system by system. The cockpit was hot, but that was not the worst problem. The greater concern was the fuel. The digital gauges indicating quantity were as blank as an electronic wristwatch with a dead battery. The amount of fuel remaining in the tanks was unknown.

  He spit on his glasses, grabbed a tissue from the box behind the center console, and rubbed the saliva onto the lenses.

  “That’s disgusting.” The comment came from his co-pilot.

  “So?” O’Brien looked over as Lucy Amudsen made a face. She pulled a Sony headset from her ears, shook her blond hair back and forth, and blew a puff of air upward into her bangs. The drama queen. With a strong punch of a magenta fingernail she ejected a CD from her portable player.

  “Dammit, would someone turn out this scorching, freaking sun!”

  “Lucy, I may be captain of this airplane, but I’m not God, so deal with it.”

  “If you were a stronger, more forceful captain you could probably do it.”

  “Here, put this up in the window. It’ll block most of the light.” He handed his co-pilot the aviation chart he’d been poring over. Like a roadmap gone wild the thing unfolded to a length of five feet, full of numbers, blue lines and warning notices. The chart was wadded and crumpled into a wrinkled mess, and there was no way he could fold the paper back into the thin packet he’d originally pulled from his flight bag.

  “Aren’t you using this?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Nah.”

  “You got all this stuff memorized?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great,” she mumbled, and mashed the chart into the front windshield—a made-to-order sun screen. She leaned back into a shaft of dark shade and
let out a long sigh.

  O’Brien noticed the black and gold graphics on the ejected CD. “Dire Straits?” he said. “Kind of fitting right now, don’t you think?”

  “What can I say? I’m a child of the eighties.” She reached into her case and flipped a plastic CD holder toward O’Brien. “You can have your Jackson Browne back. Look closely at the title.”

  A photo cover depicting a road in a dreamscape bounced into his lap, a highway to nowhere. Running on Empty was one of his favorites.

  She smirked. “Kind of fitting right now, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t be a smart ass, Lucy.”

  “Are we grumpy this morning?”

  “Yeah. We’re grumpy.” O’Brien pushed his sunglasses in place. The throbbing whine of worn Pratt and Whitney engines resonated through the dilapidated fuselage like a dentist’s drill on a deep cavity. Overlapping, and occasionally intensifying this discomfort was the continual, fuzzy radio static of an empty universe broadcast on the overhead speakers. They were still outside the range of the African coast, and O’Brien did not expect to hear from Monrovia’s airport control tower for another thirty minutes, assuming the Liberians would talk to them at all.

  The nightmare popped into his head again. The heat and flames of the explosion had left an odd pattern of transplanted skin on his body. Smooth scars ran in splotchy patches and tributaries down his leg, lower back and his right arm. A lick of flame that touched him on the right side of his face left a burn mark in the shape of a rose petal on his temple. He wicked a bead of sweat from his forehead with an index finger. If he’d been so lucky that night, how come he never felt that way?

  They approached the lower altitude and O’Brien decreased the rate of descent. He leveled the airplane and flipped on the lever for the autopilot. The servos caught with a sharp jerk as the system engaged its loose cables and worn gears. The airplane wobbled. They were more than an hour from the coastline, and he stared at the white foam wave tops. Ditching in the ocean was still a possibility.

  He grabbed a red and white tin of Altoids wedged between the trim wheel and the fire detection panel.

  Lucy held up the first two polished fingernails of her left hand.

  “And that means…what? You want two?”

  She nodded. “Please, master.”

  “You’re not getting two. Christ, Lu, we’re almost out.” In the space of four hours they had consumed most of the contents of the tin. He thumbed into the crinkly waxed paper. “You’re only getting one.”

  “Paleeze.”

  “Lucy, you don’t need—”

  “Don’t say it Daniel. I’ll cry.” She pouted. It was bullshit.

  He shook his head and jiggled two of the five remaining peppermint tablets into her hand. The last three he popped into his mouth with a flick of his palm. The icy blast on his tongue tricked his senses, gave him a triple hit of peppermint, and for a moment he forgot about the steady trickle of sweat running down the small of his back.

  Again he reached above his head for the switch that controlled the bleed-air valve from the engine. The shut-off was stuck somewhere along the line choking the flow to the air conditioning system. He clicked the small lever back and forth with firm pressure but received no indication that it was working. The valve would not open, thus resulting in a steadily increasing cockpit temperature.

  “Daniel, for God’s sake, let me give it a good slap with the heel of my shoe,” Lucy said.

  O’Brien crunched the peppermint into tiny bits and looked at her. Given her size and strength he suspected there was a good chance she’d knock the entire row of switches off the panel if she took a swat. Nevertheless, something had to be done.

  “You staring at me, Daniel?”

  “Yeah.” Her damp cheeks were flushed with millions of cells pushing into thousands of dilated capillaries, all rushing to exhaust the heat from her body. A goo of eyeliner smudged her brows. Their ridiculously simple pilot uniforms—white shirts, dark pants—were stained with sweat. Looking at her made him feel like an overheated coal stoker trapped in front of a blast furnace.

  “You think I’m too large, don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “I think you’re strong, Lucy. But if you’ll be gentle, and I mean gentle, then you can give it a try.” They were over two hundred miles from land, above the open Atlantic Ocean in an airplane that was coming apart. What could it hurt? The way things were going, ditching was beginning to have some appeal. At least the ocean water would be cool and refreshing.

  Lucy reached forward and attempted to slide what had to be a size nine shoe off her foot. She’d come down the pike from Middle-American Swedish stock. Her father briefly played pro football for the Green Bay Packers. That much he knew. Her mother might have been a pro wrestler. That much he guessed. For all of that, he considered her a striking woman and at times attractive, even though she’d never be able to wear a size seven or eight anything. Her face held solid, straight lines with high cheekbones and full lips, a blond California look with a twist of Midwestern beef.

  He compared his own build to Lucy’s. At six feet, two inches, he did not have a small frame, yet she might have as much muscle as he did for her size.

  Lucy held up a black, soft-grained, Bruno Magli pump. She tested the weight in her hands, slapped the heel side to side. “Daniel, do you know what these dainty things cost?”

  “No idea.”

  “If we end up in the water I’m taking these shoes with me.” She gave the heel one more solid slap against her palm and focused on the switches above her head.

  The overhead panel was laid out with precision by the engineers at Boeing who specialized in systems organization and planning. They were modern-day geeks who used expensive computers with CAD programs instead of slide rules to determine where and how to place instruments, switches, levers and buttons. Their planning, however, did not take into consideration the whack of a size nine Bruno Magli pump delivered from a first born descendant of a Green Bay Packer’s defensive tackle.

  “Careful now...” The switch was inches from his upturned face.

  Whack. Lucy slapped the lever with a force that knocked the entire assembly up into the overhead panel. She hit the switch a second time.

  “Stop! That’s enough. For crying out loud!” O’Brien grabbed the flapping heel of the pump. Lucy hung onto the toe. They both pulled.

  “Daniel, let go! You’ll stretch the leather.”

  “You let go.”

  “Okay,” she huffed. “I didn’t hit it that hard.” She faked a relaxed grip for an instant then jerked the shoe away from him. “Well, maybe I don’t know my own strength.”

  A valve twittered and popped somewhere, a hiss of air drummed along a duct making a banging, flapping sound. O’Brien cocked his head and caught Lucy’s smile as a surge of air pressure entered the cockpit. His ears popped. The air vents coughed up a cloud of dust followed by a blast of cool air.

  Lucy blinked and leaned forward past the yoke, shoe in hand, a finger hooked into the back of the heel. “I’ve just got to stop with these work-out sessions,” she said.

  A strong jolt came from nowhere. O’Brien was thrown against his shoulder straps. He tightened his harness as another shock rattled the ship. Lucy’s head bounced off the side windscreen.

  “Lucy?”

  The autopilot disconnected. The airplane abruptly banked right and slid into a shallow dive toward the ruffled whitecaps on the ocean surface. He grabbed the control wheel. “Dammit all,” he yelled. “This screwed up airplane!”

  Lucy winced as she put a helping hand on the yoke. Her head was bleeding.

  “Lu, you’re hurt.”

  “Yeah, I’m…can you control this beast? I’ve got some first aid stuff in my flight bag.”

  “I’ve got it.” He pulled on the control column but it barely moved, a stone post buried in concrete. The angle of the dive steepened. He tensed his shoulder muscles and put more force into the project. This time the colu
mn deflected a small amount.

  “Daniel?”

  “I’m trying!”

  Lucy hauled backward on her yoke. “This help?”

  “Speedbrakes! Get the lever.” O’Brien said.

  “Got it,” Lucy said. She yanked the lever backward extending panels on the top of the wing.

  The ship bucked in a vortex of turbulent air, but the nose began to rise and the resistance on the column eased. O’Brien felt the gravitational pressure as the airplane bottomed out of the dive and began a slow climb. He tried a turn back toward the original course. The controls were sluggish and barely responsive. The effort required bracing the yoke with his knee.

  He expelled a breath and retracted the speed brakes. “You can let go now. I think I’ve got it.”

  “Oh really? That’s what you said last time.” The words came out uneven. She pounded the yoke. “What’s wrong with this thing, anyway?”

  “We’ve lost one of the hydraulic systems,” he said. Orange and red lights in the overhead gauges told the story. A reservoir tank had ruptured. He turned off the pumps as she reached for the emergency checklist.

  “Why am I not surprised?” she said.

  “Lucy, I’ll run the procedures. Just take care of yourself.”

  “You sure? I could help.” She nodded toward the hydraulic gauges.

  “We’ve got those doctors in the back, for crying out loud. Have one of them look at that.”

  “Fuck’em, Daniel.” She reached into her flight bag, retrieved a gauze pad, and pressed it against her forehead. “I can do this myself.”

  He slanted a look at her. A woman was unreasonable after a point. “My, you’re hard-headed. As I recall, you used that same language the other day in Fortaleza, when we met each other for the first time.”

  “When I was talking to that little tiny Latin pimp in the airplane hangar?” She pulled out a tube of antibiotic from her bag.