Act of War

by Dale Brown

  “He’s coming with us,” Jason said. “Get some nylon ties to secure him.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Major,” Jefferson said.

  “Sorry, sir, but I don’t trust you to cooperate with us.”

  “Your mission has been authorized,” Jefferson said. “Apparently the name Kristen Skyy gets you instant credibility these days. The National Security Adviser authorizes us to proceed to São Paulo only to observe and assist in her investigation. We must be accompanied by local police or paramilitary forces at all times, and we are not authorized the use of force.”

  Jason immediately put Jefferson back on the ground, then dismounted from the CID unit…and as soon as he did, Jefferson had him by the collar and pulled the young Army officer nose to nose with him. “Now you listen to me, you sniveling chickenshit little worm,” Jefferson snapped. “If you ever touch me again, in or out of that machine, I will break your scrawny little neck like a twig. I won’t prefer charges; I won’t report you; I won’t write up one letter of reprimand or letter of counseling—I will simply kill you with my bare hands. Do you read me, Major Richter?”

  “Yes, Sergeant Major.”

  “You think you’re the big tough crusader riding off with your lady-love to thwart the evildoers and save the world? You are an officer in the United States Army, so start thinking and acting like one! You will follow my orders and behave like an officer, or you will find yourself cooling your jets in the stockade—after I finish kicking your damned ass.” He tossed him away from him, then turned to the others. “Let’s get this show on the road, people. Mount up.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Porto do Santos, State of São Paulo, Brazil

  Later that evening

  Jorge Ruiz was a farm boy, but Manuel Pereira was a wharf rat. Born and raised in the bustling port city of Santos, on the South Atlantic coast southeast of São Paulo, Pereira loved the sea and loved the hardworking, hard-playing, no-nonsense life on the docks. The rules were simple: you worked, you supported your family, and you gave thanks to Jesus at the end of the week…the rest was up to you. Drinking, smoking, whoring, fighting, whatever—as long as you took care of the first three first, just about everything else was boa vida—the good life.

  Although he joined the army and loved being a ground soldier, he would always be drawn to life on the docks. He loved the smell of the mountains of burlap bags of coffee or boxes of bananas on the wharf awaiting loading onto the rows and rows of ships from all over the world, the scent even overpowering the big diesel and oil engines; he loved the power and brutish efficiency of the cranes, tenders, tugs, and barges, all fighting for position and attention like bees in a hive; and he especially loved the grimy, gritty resolve of the men and women who worked the docks. Loading hundreds of tons of produce aboard a ship in just a couple hours might seem impossible for most men, but the workers did it day in and day out, in any kind of weather, for laughably low wages. They griped, groused, swore, fought, threatened, and complained every minute, but they got the job done because it was their way of life and they loved it.

  Sometimes Pereira wished he could go back to the hard but fulfilling life of his boyhood. The people of the docks taught him how to be a man. It was not an easy tutelage, nothing he would ever want to experience again, but something he could look back on and be proud of how he got through it, proud of how well he learned and adapted, and anxious to pass along his knowledge and experience to his children.

  “Manuel?” Pereira turned. His wife of two years, Lidia, stepped into the room, breastfeeding his son, Francisco. “Should you be sitting in the window like that?”

  “You’re right,” he said, and moved his chair back into the shadows. They lived in a little two-room fourth-floor tin and wood shanty over the Onassis Line Southeast Pier, one of the busiest and oldest sections of the Porto do Santos. Almost five thousand families lived in this roughly one-square-kilometer shantytown, the homemade wood and tin cottages stacked and jumbled atop one another like thousands of cockroaches in a box. He knew he should be more careful—it would be ridiculously easy for the Policia Militar do Estado to scan hundreds of windows in just a few seconds from the harbor, an aircraft, or a nearby wharf.

  But Pereira felt very safe here among the other shanties and thousands of people all around him. There was no question that one third of his neighbors would gladly turn him in for the reward he knew was on his head—but he also knew that the other two thirds of his neighbors would avenge him on the spot, and the next morning the informant’s body would be found floating in the harbor, minus his tongue and testículos. The people here were permitted to destroy themselves, not assist the government in destroying others; everyone survived by helping their neighbors, not ratting them out. Justice was swift and sure here on the docks—and justice belonged to the people, not the government, as it should.

  Lidia sat on the arm of his chair, bent down, and kissed her husband deeply. “My sexy little chief of security,” he told her after their lips parted.

  “I am nothing of the kind,” she said. “But I will be your nagging bitching wife if that is what it will take to keep you alive.”

  Manuel smiled hungrily. Sniping at each other was how their love game usually started, and it delighted him. Lidia was barely one generation removed from her native Bororo Indian relatives from the interior, people who both lived off the land and worshiped it, people who were spiritually attuned to the forest, the wildlife, and the very vibrations of the interior regions. The Bororo, especially the women, were fiery, brash, and emotional—the three things that Pereira most desired in women. They lived for one thing: attracting a mate and having as many children as possible before age thirty. Most Bororo women were grandparents by age forty-five.

  Manuel had met her while he was in the army, in Mato Grosso state. Lidia’s nineteen-year-old husband was a drug smuggler; she had just turned twenty, mother of a seven-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. Manuel had never met the daughter…because he had accidentally killed her when the husband used her as a shield during a pursuit when they tried to serve a warrant on the husband.

  Manuel was devastated by the daughter’s death. He had, of course, seen many dead children in his military career—children were an inexpensive and highly disposable commodity in most of Brazil, especially the interior. Even so, Manuel would never have knowingly raised his weapon against a child. But he was also struck by the way Lidia handled her grief. She didn’t blame the military as he expected—she put the blame squarely where it belonged, on her husband and on herself for allowing her bastardo husband to have any contact at all with the children, especially with drugs, large amounts of cash, and wanted criminals around. She was a tough, strong, principled woman, yet she tore herself apart with grief.

  She also knew that no other man in her tribe would have her now: she’d lost a child, and as the only surviving family member was therefore responsible for the deaths of her husband and child and for outsiders coming into their village. Manuel could see the hatred building already in the villagers’ faces. If she didn’t commit suicide shortly after the funeral, she would either be gang-raped and turned into a lower-caste prostitute or servant, or driven out of the village. She would soon be nothing but a walking ghost.

  Manuel attended the child’s funeral, a half-Catholic, half-animistic ritual cremation, then stayed to question the widow. Bororo Indians usually don’t cooperate with outsiders, much less with the authorities, but Lidia was ready to break that code of silence in order to rid her village of the drug smugglers. She became his secret witness, then a confidential informant—then, rather unexpectedly, his lover. They had their first child secretly—having a bastard child by someone outside their tribe was strictly forbidden and would have resulted in death for the child and banishment for her—and then he sent for her shortly after he left the PME. They were married in the Roman Catholic Church just days after she received her first communion.

  Although native women were usual
ly scorned by the mixed-race Euro-Indians of modern Brazil, Lidia wisely adapted herself: she became a Catholic, learned modern Portuguese and even some English, and taught herself to mask her own native accent. But more important, she discovered how not to belittle herself in the eyes of other Brazilians. Life on the docks of Porto de Santos became just another jungle to her, and she quickly made it her home.

  While his son sucked hungrily on her right breast, Manuel opened Lidia’s white cotton shirt and began to suck her ample milk-swollen left breast. “Maybe I will be your baby now, Mama,” he said. “Go ahead and nag—I’m not listening anymore.”

  “Leave some for your son, you greedy pig,” she said in mock sternness, but she did not move out of his hungry reach. The sensation of both her son and her husband nursing her was one of the most sensual experiences she’d ever had, and she felt the wetness between her legs almost immediately. She reached down and felt him beneath his cutoff canvas trousers, stiff and throbbing already, and she gasped as his left hand slowly lifted the hem of her dress and inched its way up her thigh. “Ai, ai, mon Dios,” she moaned as she spread her legs invitingly. “Let me put Francisco down, and then you may have all you wish, you big baby.”

  “I think we are both happy right where we are, my love,” he said, reaching higher and finding her wet mound.

  “If I fall off this chair it will be your fault, bastard.”

  “If you fall off the chair I expect you to fall on me, lover,” he said, “and then I guarantee you will not be slipping off.”

  “You filthy horny pig, you are disgusting,” she said breathlessly as she grasped him tighter through his trousers. He chuckled as he suckled—they both knew that Indian women were a hundred times hornier than any normal Brazilian male, which said a whole lot for the men in Brazil. “How dare you touch me there when you know your son might walk in on us at any moment?”

  “I always thought Manuelo should learn from the best,” Manuel said.

  “Carajo,” she gasped as she thrust her hips forward, impatiently driving his fingers toward her and pressing her breast tightly into his face. “Filthy horny bastard. You would shamelessly put your fingers into your wife’s chumino and continue to suck her breasts while your son watched? You are a monster.”

  “I would do whatever I felt like to my wife and take great delight into pleasuring her any way I chose,” he said, roughly scraping his beard against her nipple.

  “Pig. Fucking whoring pig.” There was only one other place where his beard felt better on her body than on her breast, and she couldn’t wait until he rubbed it down there. Thankfully she knew that Manuelo would probably not be home until dinnertime—they had at least an hour of privacy before the baby would awaken and her oldest son would return home. Her fingers started fumbling for the buckle on his belt. “Let’s see if this is really yours or if you just had a banana in your pocket this whole time, you filthy whoremonger.”

  He moaned again as she worked on his belt…but then he heard steps on the wooden stairs outside, rapid-fire running steps, and his body froze. Lidia detected the change immediately, got to her feet, and wordlessly retreated to a curtained-off area of the second room with the baby. Manuel was on his feet, an automatic pistol that was hidden in the chair cushion behind his head in his hand. He quickly stepped over to the window and peeked outside. It was his son, Manuelo, running up the stairs past his shanty. Manuel lowered the gun and was about to call out to his son to ask him where he was going, but something—a tenseness in his nine-year-old son’s young body—made him stop. Something was wrong. Something…

  “I said stop!” he heard. Manuel ducked low. A PME officer ran up the stairs and grabbed Manuelo by the back of his neck. “Don’t you run away when I tell you to stop, asshole!”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were talking to me, sir,” Manuelo said. Pereira was proud of his son for staying cool and polite—the PME liked nothing better than to beat up on young orphans and street urchins to keep them in line. Politeness and showing respect went a long way toward survival in Brazil, especially if you were a kid.

  “Who else would I be talking to, the damned fish?” the officer yelled. Pereira didn’t recognize him—he must be from outside São Paulo state. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Carlos, sir.” Carlos was his Catholic confirmation name, a lie that he could easily pass off as an honest mistake if questioned later. It was an unwritten code word in the shantytowns that you used your middle or confirmation name when being questioned by police, so your neighbors could support your lie for you. “Carlos Cervada.” “Cervada” was his mother’s “Portuguesed” Bororo name—again, only a half-lie.

  “You’re lying. Your Indian name is Diai. You go by the name of Manuelo, in honor of your whore mother’s new husband.”

  “I’m not lying, sir. I was taught never to lie to the police.”

  “Shut up, bastard! You are lying, I say. Where do you live?”

  “Right up there, sir,” Manuelo said, pointing.

  “Where?”

  “Right up there, sir. I’ll show you. My mother is there—can you see her?”

  “I see a hundred women up there, boy,” the officer said. “Is your father at home?”

  “My father is working, sir.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “At the docks, sir, for the Maersk Line. ‘Constant Care.’ That’s what they say all the time. I don’t know what it means, but…”

  “You’re lying, boy. Your father is a deserter and a terrorist.”

  “I’m not lying, sir. I was taught never to lie to an officer. The PME is here to help us. We must all do as the PME officers tell us. The PME is our friend. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  “Where is your mother? Point her out to me.”

  “Direita lá, senhor. Right there, sir,” Manuelo said. “Mamai! It’s me!” As expected, at least six or seven women waved back. “See? There she is!”

  “You had better not be lying to me, boy, or I’ll beat you so badly you’ll wish you were dead. Now take me to her, imediatamente!”

  “Yes, sir, right away, sir.” Manuelo scrambled up the steep steps, and the PME officer had to hustle to keep up with him. “Not much farther, sir.” He was leading him away from his father, giving him the precious seconds he needed to get away. “We’re almost there…”

  “Slow down, bastardo!” the officer said. But that was Manuelo’s cue to bolt. He actually accelerated up the last flight of stairs, ran down a catwalk, and reached a ladder leading up to a roof of the lower tier of shanties. “Stop! I order you to stop!” the officer shouted. Pereira was proud of his boy for reacting so fast…but out of nowhere, another PME officer grabbed Manuelo just as he started climbing up the ladder.

  “Nao!” Pereira shouted, and he raced up the stairs toward his son. The first PME officer, turned and pulled out a walkie-talkie to report making contact with his quarry. The second PME officer had grabbed Manuelo by the ankle, pulled him off the ladder, and was holding him with his arms pinned behind his back, making the boy cry out in pain. Like an angry lion, Pereira went up the stairs after him.

  “Stop, Pereira!” the first PME officer shouted. He had drawn his sidearm and was pointing it at him. The second PME officer started dragging Manuelo toward the first officer, making Pereira freeze. “We just want you for questioning, that’s all,” the first officer shouted. “No need for…”

  At that moment there was a loud “BOOOM!” from below. Lidia Pereira had appeared in the doorway of her shanty with a sawed-off shotgun and had aimed it at the second PME officer holding her son. The second officer cried out and let go of Manuelo, who immediately ran toward his father.

  “Puta!” the first officer shouted, and he turned, aimed, and fired four shots. Lidia Pereira ducked behind a wall but the flimsy and half-rotted plywood could not stop a bullet. She screamed and slumped to the floor.

  Clutching his son and momentarily forgetting all about the PME officers moving in fro
m all directions, Manuel Pereira headed back to check on his wife. She had been hit in the left thigh and grazed in the left rib cage. “Lidia!” he shouted. “Hold on. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “I’m all right, Manuel,” she gasped. There was a large bloody hole in her leg, but thankfully the bullet that had hit her chest had not pierced her lung. “Take Manuelo and go.”

  “Sergeant Pereira is coming with us, Mrs. Pereira,” the first PME officer said. Two other PME officers grabbed Manuel and handcuffed him behind his back. “I think we’ll take his son too, to ensure his cooperation.”

  “Cowardly bastards…!”

  “It is you who is the coward, Pereira, hiding behind your son and making your wife fight your battles for you. Get them out of here.” As neighbor women came to help Lidia, Manuel and his son were taken away by the PME. Several neighbors came out of their homes and looked on, and for a moment it looked as if they might try to take the Pereiras away from the PME, but more armed officers showed up and kept the crowd from getting out of control.

  They were loaded into a PME van, but instead of being driven out of the harbor area to PME headquarters in São Paulo or Santos, the van detoured into an older, more isolated section of the waterfront. Garbage trucks were unloading onto huge piles of trash, while bulldozers were pushing the piles onto conveyor belts, which led up to garbage barges ready to be taken to nearby island landfills. When the PME van came inside, the entry lane was closed off; within a half hour, all of the trucks and the bulldozer operators had gone.

  Manuel Pereira and his son were finally taken out of the van and over to one of the garbage piles, both still in handcuffs. Manuel didn’t need to ask why they were taken there—he knew all too well. Moments later, he saw Yegor Zakharov’s aide, Pavel Khalimov, and then he was certain. “So, the colonel didn’t have the guts to do this himself, eh?” he asked. “I knew he was a coward.”

  “The colonel doesn’t have time to take out the trash,” Khalimov said idly. The big Russian looked at Pereira’s son, smiled, put away the silenced pistol he was holding, reached down to an ankle sheath, and flicked open a switchblade knife. “I had planned this to be quick, but now I think we’ll have a little fun first. Let’s see how the big tough Brazilian soldier boy does when he sees his son die before his eyes.”