by By Jon Land
Once released, free to spread and breed unchecked, the Black Death would be impossible to stop. The Dragon had not yet worked out the precise timetable for that release; it would be staggered over the course of several days, probably, depending on how long it took her to return to the ports where the insulated crates would be stored.
And she would have her redemption.
Jim Black hadn’t been back in the United States in nearly two years and it didn’t take him very long to figure out why he hadn’t missed home much. It was the language, everybody talking and listening in on what other people were saying. Jim Black was a lot happier when he didn’t understand what people were saying and they didn’t understand him. Made things lots simpler and kept conversation to an absolute minimum. You got your point across and that’s where it stopped. No small talk or bullshit.
Places like St. Louis were the worst, the people just too damn friendly. Everybody smiling and expecting you to smile back. It made Jim Black want to draw one of his Sigs and pop the assholes in the center of their foreheads. Teach them to keep to themselves and mind their own business.
He’d like to start with the waitress who ran the coffee shop outside the airport.
“Coffee,” he ordered.
“What kind?”
“Black.”
“I mean what kind of coffee.”
“Anything but the Arab kind,” Black told her.
All he wanted was a black coffee and she wouldn’t let him leave without a muffin to go with it. Flashing her cigarette-stained teeth as she stuck it in the bag free of charge. Jim Black left her a five-buck tip when he would have much preferred to leave a bullet in her face.
The strange particulars of this assignment made him even more ornery. He had to be on the move and he wasn’t even sure where he had to be on the move to. Everything was vague, when Jim Black thrived on clarity. Connect two points with a fucking straight line and get the hell out of Dodge.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. The last person in the world he wanted to meet up with again was Danielle Barnea. But that’s what it looked like this day was shaping up towards, as Jim Black dropped his coffee and muffin on the passenger seat of the rental car and headed for the Mississippi River.
* * * *
Chapter 96
I
t was just after 7:00 a.m.when Ben and Danielle reached the Port of St. Louis in the shadow of the famed Gateway Arch, glistening in the morning sun. These docks specialized in servicing the industrial barges that routinely traveled the Mississippi River. They’d had the cab stop for breakfast at a fast food restaurant and found themselves so famished from the journey that they devoured the salty egg-and-cheese combinations without tasting them. The coffee was hot and strong, though, reviving them.
The foreman was not expected to arrive for another hour. But a subordinate seemed more than willing to answer their queries, droning on proudly about how river barges remained the eighteen wheelers of the central U.S. Ben and Danielle pretended to be representatives of a foreign conglomerate dissatisfied with their current shipping service and looking to make a change.
The man sipped black coffee from a Thermos cup as he eagerly gave them a tour of the riverfront facilities. Ben and Danielle pretended to pay attention, all the time focusing on the barges they passed in search of the refrigerated one that might have held Latisse Matabu’s Black Death.
“We offer full freezer and refrigeration services,” he boasted proudly. “And all perishables are one hundred percent guaranteed.”
“Anything come in recently?” Ben asked.
“From overseas,” Danielle added. “A possible reference for us.”
The man drained his coffee and scratched his chin before shaking his head.
The next two barge facilities on the river yielded the same results. Their cab driver was quite happy to keep driving them around so long as they kept paying cash. Danielle and Ben got their act honed considerably better, for all the good it did them.
“Well,” said the driver, when they plopped back into their seats after the third facility turned up nothing, “just another dozen or so to go. Hey, could be whatever you’re looking for already shipped out.”
“Let’s hope not,” Ben said.
“Crates?” the requisitions clerk asked Danielle at the fourth stop on their list.
“Steel, insulated,” Ben elaborated, recalling Mikhail Belush’s description back in Dubna. “Maybe three or four feet by six. We’re supposed to meet the shipment.”
The clerk continued scanning his manifests. “Well, you just missed it.”
“Missed it?”
“Refrigerator barge shipped out maybe twenty minutes ago, heading south. Checked her out myself. Sorry.”
“Any way we can catch it?” Danielle asked, her heart beginning to pound.
The clerk frowned. “Not unless you can get yourselves a faster boat.”
Ben an Danielle found the River Patrol speedboat tied up to a dock attached to a small cabin with St. Louis River Authority markings.
“Untie us,” Danielle said to Ben, after jumping down onto the deck.
“I hope you know how to drive one of these things,” he responded, pulling the rope from the first mooring, “because I don’t.”
Danielle moved behind the controls, tore some wires free, and joined a pair of them together. “We’ll see.”
The engine roared to life.
Latisse Matabu clung to the shady side of the barge, the glare of the sun suddenly making the pounding of her head intensify. Timo and Dikembe, the soldiers who had accompanied her, both voiced their concern but she smiled and passed it off to simple fatigue.
Just let me finish this. Give me that much strength.
She thought of the Moor Woman as she formed that prayer, wondering if they had more in common than she ever considered. A pair of outcasts, banished from society as punishment for their sins. Her grandmother had never told Matabu what the Moor Woman had done that led to her exile. Perhaps she, too, had killed her own child.
The barge had already cleared the outskirts of the city of St. Louis, and Matabu tried to concentrate on checking her map for the first harbor at which she intended to dock, another fifty miles to the south in Ste. Genevieve. When that effort proved too much, she distracted herself from the painful throbbing of her head by picturing the release of the Black Death along the length of the Mississippi. The eggs thawing out and hatching within minutes, freeing her bugs to ravage the heartland of the United States.
The urban world slowly receded before her on the banks of the Mississippi. Except for other barge and boat traffic, the currents might well have swallowed up the years. On her right, the Missouri side, bluffs and hill formations shaped the landscape, while the Illinois side on her left was dominated by shallows.
Suddenly Matabu’s skull felt as if a needle had jabbed it, a flash exploding before her eyes that left her skin broiling on the inside and out. She squeezed her eyes closed in search of comfort and viewed quite the opposite through the darkness. Dikembe and Timo grasped her on either side, their faces taut with worry. But this was not the typical attack she had grown used to. It was different.
The hawk and the eagle. . .
She had glimpsed them again, which could mean only one thing: They had somehow escaped death back in Sierra Leone and they were here, close by now. Her trackers come to collect the debt she owed to God.
But she wasn’t ready to pay up quite yet, not with the victory she had so long sought this close at hand. America had to die, had to pay just as she did.
Standing astern, Latisse Matabu suddenly felt the barge slow and moved out from the cover of one of the refrigerated holds to see why.
* * * *
Chapter 97
B
en clung to the patrol boat’s handholds as Danielle fought the river for speed. From shore the waters had looked calm and easy. In the center, though, drawing away from the St. Louis city limits, the mud-colored river
seemed to thicken, battering the small boat with currents that seemed to go in every direction at once. The Mississippi became a creased swell of angry water, determined to fold over itself. Calm pockets, like boils on the water, behaved as whirlpools, forcing Danielle to spin the wheel wildly to compensate for being tossed about.
“I thought you said you knew how to drive this,” Ben shouted at her, feeling the boat being smacked around by the currents.
“You could have warned me.”
“I’ve never been on this river before in my life.”
Danielle had just swung toward him, about to say something else, when the patrol boat’s engine sputtered and died.
The oncoming tow barge stretched six across and as far as Latisse Matabu could see down the river. In the pilot house, her two-man crew had banked the barge sharply toward the shallows, slowing to allow the huge monster to pass while simultaneously angling to stop from being run aground by the powerful vortex of swells.
The barge rocked and swayed. Birds feeding off the Mississippi’s surface lurched into the air. Mosquitoes attacked from the swampy lowlands on the Illinois side of the river.
The Dragon gnashed her teeth and waited.
“We’re being pulled into the shallows!” Danielle blared, tossing Ben one of two paddles tucked against the patrol boat’s side. Her efforts to restart the patrol boat had failed and she began to wonder if it had been left tied up against the dock for a reason.
Together they tried to fight the river’s powerful flow, succeeding in only slowing the inevitable. Ben strained against the paddle and pushed as hard as he could. They were holding their ground but no more. Going nowhere.
Suddenly the patrol boat flopped upward, listing severely to port.
“What the hell,” Ben muttered just before a mighty horn blew and he turned to see a riverboat sliding up alongside them, slowing.
“You folks need a lift?” a man in a captain’s suit yelled down from inside a pilot house.
“I didn’t know the River Patrol wore plain clothes,” the captain of the Spirit of St. Louis greeted, when Ben and Danielle joined him up inside the pilot house. “Good thing I was taking her out for a routine test run. I’m Wayne Lockridge.”
Ben took the man’s extended hand, his own raw from swinging onto the riverboat’s rope ladder as it slowed past the disabled patrol boat.
“We need your help, Captain.”
“What’s on this barge you’re looking for that’s so important?” Lockridge asked, once Ben was finished.
Ben kept sweeping the area of the river ahead of them with the riverboat’s binoculars. “Just help us find it.”
Danielle gazed about the pilot house. “How fast can this thing go?”
“How fast do you need it to go?”
“Fast enough to catch a barge that’s got a half-hour head start on us, moving south down the river,” Ben told him.
Lockridge looked almost hurt. “Mister, this baby’s got two Caterpillar 3412 diesel engines that turn 350-kilowatt generator sets. A couple traction motors powered electrically by those generators turn two twelve-inch belt chains, each forty feet in length. My point is theSpirit may look like an antique, but don’t let that fool you. Full out we can cover fifteen miles per hour and empty, well, let’s just say give me a half-hour and I’ll have you right along that barge’s side.”
Latisse Matabu waited anxiously, as her barge came to a near complete halt. The heat built up inside her, boiling her blood and leaving her no choice but to seek refuge in one of the refrigerated holds. She unlatched the rearmost container and stepped inside, the spray of frosty air against her instantly cooling her skin.
She gazed at the dozens of insulated crates stacked within, focusing on the task before her when footsteps sounded against the deck. Matabu turned to find Dikembe and Timo standing in the darkened doorway, holding long hunting knives in their hands.
“I see the barge!” Ben said.
They had just rounded a narrow bend in the river when he found the barge with its refrigerated containers idling to one side. He extended the binoculars to Danielle.
She pulled them against her eyes. “Matabu has the door to one of the compartments open. I can see the two RUF soldiers she brought with her.” She lowered the binoculars and looked at Ben. “The rest of the Black Death must be inside those holds.”
“Black Death?” posed Lockridge.
“Ever serve in the military, Captain Lockridge?” Danielle asked him.
“Damn right, I did. Navy through and through.”
“So you know all about fighting for your country. Believe me when I tell you that’s what you’re doing now.”
Lockridge looked at them and nodded. “What is it you want me to do?”
The two soldiers Latisse Matabu trusted as much as any under her command remained stiff and motionless, knives extended toward the deck.
“We are very sorry, General,” Timo said.
“We don’t have any choice,” Dikembe added.
“I understand,” Latisse Matabu said with a strange calm. And it was true: She did. Betrayal was the ultimate payment for the terrible sins she had committed. It would end here, just as it should. What right did she have to hope for redemption?
“Just as there was no choice with your parents,” Timo finished.
Matabu felt the chilly air press from the hold against her back, as she stared at Timo. She swallowed hard, her throat suddenly so dry it felt like glass sliding down. “My parents?”
“You blamed the government and the Americans for their deaths. You were supposed to: That is what it was supposed to look like.”
“There were too many who did not agree with the plans of your father,” Dikembe added. “He was willing to give up too much. And once he lost Tongo and failed to retake Freetown ...”
“Which of the chiefs, which of my generals is behind this? Which one?Talk!”
“All of them,” answered Timo, starting to raise his knife. “The battle the other night was viewed as your last chance.”
Dikembe’s knife flashed in the sun. “We must do this for our country, before you make us a pariah to the world.”
“But General Lananga was the only who knows I’m here,” Matabu said softly.
“That’s right,” returned Timo. “He was.”
He and Dikembe moved forward together, ready to pounce.
Latisse Matabu sprang before they could. In that instant she was not diseased or dying, nor was she a guilt-riddled sinner who deserved to be punished. In that instant the rage over this betrayal, and the one against her father, filled her with the strength and power that had nearly brought a government to its knees.
Fear filled her soldiers’ eyes. Then their long-observed deference to her made them hesitate when she lunged, forgetting the warrior training that had dominated their lives. They slashed with their knives, but missed badly. And, before they could lash out again, Latisse Matabu had control of both their wrists.
Both tried to pull away, but it was too late. Matabu had already twisted the blades toward them. She stared into their eyes and thrust both her hands savagely forward.
Their screams were like sandpaper against her ears. She felt their blood drench her, felt them die.
Traitors!
Her father had been murdered by those he sought to serve, the ultimate betrayal!
And if she didn’t complete her work here now, her parents would have sacrificed themselves for nothing. Her son would have died for nothing. Treest had infected her with the disease that was killing her, but God had granted her just enough time to complete this one final task.
The huge tow barge finally lumbered past and the Dragon felt her barge start sliding from the shallows.
“It’s moving again! “ Danielle realized, as the Spirit of St. Louis drew to within a hundred yards of the barge. “Turning back into the river!”
Ben grabbed the binoculars from her grasp, trying to find Latisse Matabu on deck. “Two bodies in t
he stern. Her soldiers, I think.”
“What?”
“The pilot house! I can see Matabu in the pilot house!”
The riverboat rocked mightily in the water.
“Better have a look at that tow barge coming straight for us, too,” Lockridge advised grimly.