“Pretty damned impressive,” Juan opined. He’d called Max as they were driving along the six-lane superhighway connecting the Khyber Pass to Islamabad and asked him to run a full background check on Marion MacDougal Lawless. “Two years at Tulane, but he left and joined the Army as a Nine-Twelve-er.” Meaning the day after the September 11th terrorist attacks he’d walked into an Army recruiting station and signed on as a common soldier, like thousands of other brave men and women.
“Got into the Rangers, excelled by all accounts. He racked up a couple of combat citations, and after eight years opted out to join up with Fortran Security as a private contractor.
“Same skill set as a Ranger,” Max said, “only ten times the pay.”
“I know Fortran,” Juan countered. “They’re a top-notch outfit, so they pay more like twenty times.”
“Whatever,” Max said in his normally irritated manner. “He’s got an ex-wife and a daughter. Nearly all his pay goes to an address in New Orleans that I can only assume is the ex.”
“Only one, huh,” Juan teased. Max had three, and alimony payments to all of them.
“We’re in the middle of a recession. There are thousands of out-of-work comedians out there, and you think you are funny? Talk about delusions of grandeur. Anyway. Like I said, that’s him on paper, what’s the real version like?”
“Max, I’ll tell you. He’s been beat six ways to Sunday, and while I’m rubbernecking a technical getting blown up he sees the Predator I know is out there fire its missile and moves like nothing I’ve ever seen before. He saved our lives. No two ways about it.”
“So?” Hanley prompted.
“Since we lost Jerry Pulaski in Argentina, we’ve been down one gundog. I want to talk it over with Eddie, as head of shore operations, and Linc, as our lead war fighter, but I think we might have our replacement. He was an Army Ranger for eight years and has spent a lot of time deep in the ugliness. Not to mention he managed to impress me in just over an hour of knowing him.”
“What about his contract with Fortran?” Max asked. “Also, I would like to verify the story of how he got captured. Just playing devil’s advocate, but maybe this guy’s lost his edge.”
“I’ll talk to him and follow up with you before I make any decision,” Cabrillo promised. “Any word from the Setiawan’s dad?”
“There’s an air-ambulance jet at Karachi Airport. The old man didn’t come, but he sent his wife and the kid’s grandparents. I let them know as soon as you hit the Islamabad road that you would be here soon. What’s your ETA?”
“Another forty minutes.”
“Okay. George is already on the tarmac in the chopper to ferry you guys out to the ship, and we’ve maybe got another job lined up.”
“Really? That was fast.”
“Came through from L’Enfant. Some Swiss financier’s daughter crossed the border from Bangladesh into Myanmar, and he now can’t raise her on her sat phone. He’s afraid something’s happened to her and wants us to get her out.”
“Two questions,” Juan said. “What’s she doing in that godforsaken area in the first place and, second, has he been in contact with the government?” The first was really rhetorical. It didn’t matter. But the second was critical.
“No. He’s a smart guy. He knew that if he reached out to the ruling junta, his daughter would be hunted down and either ransomed or imprisoned for life.”
“That’s good. Listen, we’ll talk about it when we get back to the ship. Meanwhile, start a background check on the financier and his daughter and anyone she was traveling with.”
“Eric and Mark are already on it.”
“Oh too, if MacD comes back with us, it’ll be on a limited access basis for now. Tell Hux to bring her medical bag to meet us. I want her to make sure the guy’s not worse off than he’s letting on.”
“Ranger tough, huh?”
“Macho 101 is the first class they teach at Benning.” Juan killed the connection.
In the main cabin of the executive jet, Linda was bent over Seti, checking on his condition. He asked how the boy was doing.
“The sedative’s starting to wear off. I don’t want to risk giving him any more, but I also don’t want him regaining consciousness before we transfer him.”
“They have an air ambulance waiting. If you juice him a little, they’ll be able to handle it.”
“Okay.”
Linc and MacD Lawless were swapping Afghanistan war stories. Linc’s had been one of the first pairs of boots on the ground while MacD hadn’t gotten into the country until a few years later. They didn’t know any of the same people, but the situations they’d faced were usually similar, especially when dealing with the locals.
“Pardon the interruption,” Juan said. “MacD, can I have a word with you?”
“Sure.” He set aside the bottled water he’d been sipping and limped after the Chairman to the rear of the aircraft. “What’s up?”
“How’d it happen?”
Lawless immediately grasped what he was being asked. “There were three of us guarding a Pakistani TV crew—myself and two locals we’d worked with before. We were about an hour out of Kabul when the cameraman asks to pull over. Ah tell him it’s a real bad idea, but he said it was an emergency. The terrain was clear, so Ah figure, what the hell. We pull over, and no sooner had the wheels stopped turning than about a dozen Taliban materialize out of the ground. They’d been hiding under blankets that they covered with sand. It was a perfect ambush. Ah didn’t even get a shot off.
“The camera crew was a plant. They killed the two Afghan guards on the spot and trussed me up like a Thanksgiving turkey. They stole our truck, and, well, you pretty much know the rest. At some point Ah was transferred to the trunk of a car, Ah think before we crossed into Pakistan, but there’s no way to be sure. Whenever they got the chance, they’d smack me around some, and brag about how Ah was going to be a hit on the al-Qaeda version of YouTube.”
He spoke as if he were reporting the events of someone else’s life. Cabrillo suspected that it was still too fresh in his mind. The one thing he could tell was that Lawless regretted what had happened to the two Afghans more than his own capture.
“By now,” Juan said, “you’ve figured out what we do, yes?”
“Private security, like Fortran.”
“It goes well beyond that. We’re also an intelligence gathering operation. We do some consultancy, and we take on some ops for Uncle Sam when he needs complete deniability, though for reasons that aren’t important right now that line of work has dried up for the time being. We thoroughly vet all our clients. We work only for the good guys, if you follow my meaning. And we work so far under the grid that only a handful of people in the world know who we are. Your bosses at Fortran, for example, have no idea. You won’t see us mentioned in the media because I run a tight outfit that leaves no room for error.”
“Sounds like a pretty good crew,” Lawless said neutrally.
“It’s the best at what it does. Each member has been handpicked, and when someone new comes aboard everyone gets a vote.”
“Are you offering me a job?”
“Provisionally. A couple months ago we lost a man. Jerry Pulaski was his name. He was what we called a gundog, a hardened combat veteran used mostly for when the fur starts flying. You’d fill his position.”
“Do you guys mostly operate in this area?”
“No. Actually, this is our first time here. This whole region’s lousy with outfits like yours and Blackwater, or whatever they call themselves these days. We’d just as soon leave it to them. This rescue was a one-time type of deal.”
“My contract with Fortran runs for another few months,” Lawless told him.
“Don’t you think after what happened to you that they would let you out of it?”
“Yeah, probably,” he drawled. “Um, listen, though, Ah’ve got a little girl to support.” He paused, swallowed, and went on. “My folks are raisin’ her, and they need the extra
money Ah make.”
“What were you being paid?” Juan asked bluntly. MacD gave him the number, which sounded reasonable.
“Okay, you’ll keep making that during your probationary period. After that, if things work out, you’ll become a full member of the Corporation and share in the profits.”
“Um, are y’all profitable?”
Cabrillo responded by asking, “What do you think this plane’s worth?”
Lawless looked around for just a second. “G-Five like this? About fifty million bucks.”
“Fifty-four, to be exact,” Juan told him. “We paid cash.”
* * *
THEY HANDED OVER a still-sleeping Setiawan to his tearful mother on the tarmac between the Corporation’s aircraft and a chartered Citation fitted out as a flying hospital. The grandmother too was weeping, while the grandfather watched the exchange stoically. Arrangements had already been made to have Customs and Immigration look the other way. They whisked the boy onto the idling jet, and as soon as the door was closed and sealed it began to roll.
Juan had planned to send their plane out of the country, but with the possibility of a new job soon he told the pilot to park it and find himself a hotel room in the city. They hefted their guns and equipment in nondescript nylon bags and made their way to where a row of helicopters was backed up to a Cyclone fence about fifty yards from the General Aviation terminal building. These were all civilian choppers. For the most part they were painted white with a stripe of color across their noses and along their flanks.
One, however, was a glossy black and looked as menacing as a gunship, though she carried no visible weapons. This was the Corporation’s MD 520N, a state-of-the-art helo that vented exhaust through its tail rather than relying on a secondary rotor. This NOTAR system made it the quietest jet-powered helicopter in the world.
The pilot saw the four men and one woman approaching and began hitting switches in the cockpit to fire the turbine.
It would be a tight squeeze, but the 520 had more than enough power to take them all out to the Oregon.
“Looks like it went well,” the pilot remarked when Juan opened the passenger door and shoved his equipment bag under his seat.
“Nothing to it,” Cabrillo said in typical fashion.
George “Gomez” Adams knew better. The veteran pilot could tell by their swagger when they were approaching that things had gotten dicey and that they’d handled it well. “Who’s the new guy?”
“MacD Lawless. He’s a Fortran operative who got nabbed outside of Kabul. Seemed a waste to let them behead him.”
“We keeping him?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t like guys who are better-looking than me,” Gomez said. With his gunslinger mustache and matinee idol looks, there weren’t many men in the world who qualified.
“Can’t handle a little competition,” Juan grinned.
“Exactly.” Adams looked over his shoulder and thrust out his hand to MacD. “So long as you never beat me out with the ladies, we’ll be fine.”
It was clear Lawless had no idea what to make of that statement, but he shook Adams’s hand anyway. “No problem. So long as you never crash with me aboard, we’ll be better than fine.”
“Deal.” Gomez turned his attention back to the chopper, radioing the control tower to get flight authorization.
Juan said to Lawless, “When we get to the ship, the first thing we’ll do is get you a secure link to your people. They must be going nuts, about now. Same thing with your folks, if they’ve been told.”
“I doubt Fortran would have contacted them yet. I was grabbed less than forty-eight hours ago.”
“Okay. One less thing to worry about.”
A minute later, the turbine shrieked as Adams fed in more power. The airframe shuddered, and then everything became smooth when the skids lifted from the concrete pad.
Gomez fought his instincts to hotdog it, so they rose at a sedate pace and started flying out over the mangroves and mudflats to the north of the sprawling city of fifteen million. A dense pall of smog cut visibility dramatically so that Karachi’s office towers and high-rise apartment buildings appeared indistinct in the distance. Everything looked like the color of rust, the buildings, the air, even the water in the enclosed inner harbor. It was only when one looked west, out toward the ocean, that there was any true color. The water was a deep sapphire blue. They flashed over the China Creek, where the main port was located, and Baba Channel, which led to the open sea. It was crowded with all manner of shipping awaiting its turn at the docks.
They flew beyond the barrier islands, and soon the smog gave way to clear air. The sun cast a dazzling silver strip across the waves as it rose higher into the sky behind them.
More ships were streaming toward the port or were outbound laden with goods. Their wakes were like white scars. One ship directly ahead of them showed no wake.
By modern standards, she was just midsized at over five hundred and sixty feet. The containership passing off her port side was over twice as long. Their target was also of an outdated design. Built prior to the industry switchover to standardized containers, she was designed to carry her cargo in five deep holds, each secured with a hatch and serviced by a quintet of spindly derricks. Her superstructure was placed just aft of amidships and was topped by a single funnel. Bridge wings and catwalks hung off it like wrought-iron fire escapes. She carried two lifeboats in davits above the main deck. Her bow was like an axhead while her fantail had a little of that champagne-glass elegance.
All this could be seen from a distance. It wasn’t until the chopper was much closer that details emerged. The ship was a rust bucket, a scow that should have been chopped into scrap years ago. Paint peeled in patches all over her hull and decking as if she were infected with some sort of maritime eczema. The paint scheme itself was a patchwork of mismatched colors daubed over one another with no eye at all for aesthetics. Rust formed in pools on the deck, oozed from scuppers and the hawsehole, and streaked the sides of the superstructure like reddish brown guano.
The deck was a tangled jumble of broken machinery, oil drums, and various other junk, including, inexplicably, a washing machine and a massive tire from a tractor.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” MacD muttered when the true nature of the ship was revealed. “Is this some sort of con?”
“She may not be pretty,” Gomez Adams said, “but she sure is ugly.”
“Trust me when I tell you that it’s not what it seems,” Juan assured him. “For the time being we’re not going to let you in on any of her secrets, but secrets she has.”
“What, that she was Teddy Roosevelt’s troopship when he went to Cuba?”
Juan laughed.
Linc added, “No. The Oregon was Noah’s first attempt at the Ark.”
“I’d believe that one too.”
Gomez swooped around to the aft of the ship, where there was a helipad marked out on the rearmost cargo hatch. A crewman stood by in case the pilot needed help landing, but Adams didn’t need any directions. He flared the chopper directly over the big faded letter H and settled it in the exact center. He killed the engine, and its persistent whine died down to silence and the rotor blades emerged from their shimmering mirage of motion as they slowed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the MV Oregon,” Adams said. “The current temperature is sixty-eight degrees. The local time is eleven eighteen. Please be aware that items in the overhead may have shifted during our flight. Thank you for flying with us today, and we hope you will use us in the future.”
“Forget it,” Linda told him as she opened the rear door. “Your rewards program sucks, and my peanuts were stale.”
Juan once again marveled at the team he had assembled. Less than twelve hours earlier they had been rolling down the side of a mountain with a Hellfire missile boring in on them and now they were joking as if they didn’t have a care in the world. He reminded himself that he shouldn’t be too surprised. This wa
s the kind of life they had chosen for themselves. If they couldn’t joke about it afterward, they wouldn’t last five minutes.
Max Hanley approached from the safety of the superstructure. In deference to the sun, he had a battered Dodgers cap covering what little remained of his ginger hair. Hanley was a little above average in height and was starting to show his age around his middle and in the wrinkles spiderwebbing from the corners of his eyes, but he moved well, and with his anvil-sized hands he could take care of himself with no problem. He wore a pair of tan coveralls that showed a spot of grease on one elbow, meaning he had just come up from the Oregon’s revolutionary engine room. With him was Dr. Julia Huxley. A Navy-trained physician, Hux wore a customary white coat over her lush 1950s pinup curves, with her hair tied back in a ponytail. Brisk, almost brusque, when she was working on a patient, she was easygoing the rest of the time. She’d been Juan’s doctor when he had part of his leg blown off by a Chinese gunboat years earlier when the Corporation was on a mission for NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency.
She’d overseen his rehab, staying by him as he went from a man who couldn’t walk to one who could run for miles without a trace of a limp. She and Max were also the only two people in the world who knew that Cabrillo’s missing foot and ankle ached every minute of every day.
It was called phantom pain, a common experience for amputees. To Juan there was nothing phantom about it. Just because he couldn’t see his foot, or touch it, didn’t mean the damned thing didn’t hurt all the time.
“I confirmed the wire transfer from Bahar’s account to ours,” Max said by way of greeting.
“We’re all fine,” Juan countered. “Thanks for asking.”
“Don’t be such a wuss,” Max said flatly. “I talked to you an hour ago. I know you’re fine. Besides, money is more important to me than your health.”
“You’re all heart, buddy.” Juan waved MacD forward. “Max Hanley, Julia Huxley, this is MacD Lawless. MacD, this is my second-in-command and the ship’s sawbones. And I mean that literally.” They all shook hands. “Let’s get MacD up to my office so Hux can give him the once-over.”
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