Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Be ready,” he told Asya, as the soldiers entered the cell, brandishing carbines. Two of their number came in to bind the prisoner’s hands with zip ties.

  There was no time to say more, and really nothing more to be said. King didn’t know when their chance would come. If they were lucky, the soldiers would do something very stupid—that wasn’t completely beyond the realm of possibility—but it was much more likely that they would have to make their own luck. Unfortunately, without the glasses, there was no way to coordinate with Asya. She would just have to follow his lead.

  Nothing that seemed like a good opportunity presented itself as they were hastened to a side exit and into the back of a waiting heavy transport truck, where Favreau’s mercenaries were joined by several Congolese army troops. He and Asya were forced to sit on the floor of the truck’s cargo bed, in between two rows of soldiers assembled on the inward facing troop seats.

  The canvas canopy had been rolled back, exposing the occupants of the truck to the elements, but King’s view of the roadside was mostly obscured by the wall of bodies. At first, he caught glimpses of tall buildings, but as the journey progressed, they were replaced by the tops of trees. There were other changes, too. The sudden stops, accompanied by squealing and hissing air brakes, and followed by lurching starts, became less frequent, replaced instead by the back and forth sway of the truck swerving through turns or jouncing over potholes. It was a punishing ride, and King knew from experience that the wooden benches where their captors sat were only marginally more comfortable.

  Something wet struck his cheek. At first, he thought one of the soldiers had spit on him, and he studied their blank faces to identify the culprit, but then another gob of moisture hit him, and he realized that it was rain.

  In the space of just a few seconds, the afternoon sky darkened and the scattering of droplets became a torrent. Water filled the bed of the truck faster than it could drain out through the gaps in the tailgate. The soldiers did their best to lift their boots up out the flood, but King and Asya were obligated to simply slosh about in the deepening puddle.

  A blinding flash seared across the sky and King’s retinas, followed about two seconds later by a peal of thunder that reverberated through the truck bed.

  Damn, that’s close.

  The basic rule for estimating the distance of a lightning strike was to count the number of seconds between the flash and the thunderclap—five seconds meant the lightning was a mile away. Two seconds meant only about seven hundred yards.

  There was another flare—not a quick flash, but a prolonged burst of light that seemed to come from all around, shifting through degrees of intensity. The thunder boom arrived even before the electrical discharge finished.

  They were driving right into the heart of the storm.

  The African soldiers took the weather in stride, but King noticed the steroid-twins looking around nervously. Lightning was unpredictable, and while the all-steel frame and roll-over cage construction of the truck could afford some protection against electrocution—acting as a sort of impromptu Faraday Cage—the open bed offered no shelter whatsoever from a direct strike.

  King realized this was the moment for which he’d been waiting. He doubted there was a psychic bond between siblings, but tried to project his intention into his sister’s brain. He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut tight so that the next flash wouldn’t blind him. When it came just a few seconds later, it wasn’t lightning that struck the back of the truck.

  “Now!”

  Even as he shouted it, he was moving, twisting around and aiming a kick up at the nearest of the steroid twins. His boot heel caught the unsuspecting man under the chin, snapping his head back with a crunch of vertebrae that King felt but could not hear over the thunderclap that followed.

  Still flash-blind from the lightning, the soldiers were slow to react, giving King time to roll over into a kneeling position. The remaining mercenary’s eyes widened in alarm, but before he could even twitch a muscle, King threw himself forward, smashing his forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. The injury had the desired effect of stunning the mercenary, but King’s primary goal had been to get closer to the man’s weapons, and he accomplished that task by spinning around and throwing himself bodily onto the man’s lap. As his fingers knotted around the nylon sling of the man’s MP5, King saw the soldiers on the opposite side start to raise their carbines.

  There were shouts, but the men couldn’t shoot King without hitting their fellow soldiers. The men on the bench to either side of King realized this, too, and almost in unison, they threw themselves flat onto the bed, leaving only the stunned mercenaries and King in the line of fire.

  Several carbines fired all at once, but none found a target. In the instant before a single trigger was pulled, Asya, who had scrambled to the front of the bed to avoid the tangle of bodies seeking cover, lashed out with a double-footed kick to the line of soldiers on the bench. The shove not only threw off their aim, but sent two of them spilling over the tailgate.

  “Jump!” King shouted.

  Asya didn’t hesitate. She got her feet under her, scrambled onto the bench and leaped over the side.

  Before he could follow, King felt the truck braking. The sudden deceleration threw him forward, but he kept his grip on the sling of the machine pistol. The mercenary, who was just starting to recover from King’s initial attack, was pulled off the bench, and fell atop King in the midst of the tangled bodies.

  With his hands still bound, King had to wriggle like a snake to get free of the squirming mass, but unlike the other men jumbled together, he knew exactly what he was trying to accomplish. He rolled out from under the mercenary, and without releasing his hold on the nylon sling, got to his feet and heaved himself over the side of the truck.

  The sling pulled taut against his grip and for a moment, he feared it might rip right through the flesh of his fingers. His arms were suddenly yanked up painfully, and for a moment, he hung from the side of the truck, a few feet above the glistening mud that covered the road. The still rolling dual wheels were close enough to kiss.

  Then, as abruptly as his fall had been arrested, it resumed, and he slammed onto the ground. The dazed mercenary slammed down atop him a moment later, driving the wind from his lungs.

  King fought to suppress the pain and rising panic of breathlessness. Everything that had occurred had been a result of action he had taken, and that gave him the edge, no matter what happened. He heard the truck’s brakes squealing as it slid to a stop perhaps fifty yards away, and he knew he had to keep moving, had to keep acting instead of reacting, if he was going to survive the next few seconds.

  Bending his body like a contortionist, King slipped his bound hands down past his hips and then threaded one leg at a time through the hoop formed by his arms. It took only about three seconds, but that was time enough for the soldiers to start piling out of the truck.

  He dropped to his knees beside the mercenary, delivering a double-fisted hammer blow that rendered the man unconscious, and then he brought the machine pistol up. He flicked a thumb across the fire selector, and then swept the muzzle toward the line of soldiers as he squeezed the trigger.

  The MP5 bucked in his hands and a long yellow tongue of flame erupted from the muzzle, along with a report to rival the thunder. King had fired thousands of rounds from MP5s, but never in all that time had he ever experienced so much recoil. The pistol bucked in his hands like one of Rook’s Desert Eagles. Yet that was nothing compared to the effect of the shots.

  Two of the soldiers simply burst, like enormous water balloons filled with blood. A third was only grazed. The bullet took his arm completely off below the shoulder in an eruption of gore.

  King let go of the trigger and stared, dumbstruck, at the weapon in his hands. Some part of him understood what had just happened, at least in respect to the matter of physics. The MP5 was loaded with some kind of special overpressure ammunition—probably hollow rounds filled with a dense
heavy metal like tungsten or depleted uranium. They would be fired by a larger than normal gunpowder charge or even some new experimental powder that yielded more explosive energy. That was the how and what, but it didn’t begin to explain the why.

  The surviving soldiers bolted for cover, but they didn’t flee. Instead, they brought their weapons around and took aim at him. He fired again, just a single shot this time, and at the noise of the bullet punching through the metal bed of the truck, he spun on his heel and ran.

  Another flash of lightning revealed Asya, a short distance away, crouching down near the edge of the road and attempting to wriggle her hands around to the front as he had done.

  The lightning also illuminated the surrounding environment: undulating hills covered with lush green fields and trees, pools of brown water in the hollows, fed by raging torrents of rainwater runoff, and in the distance, the blocky shapes of tall buildings. A line of headlights was visible on the glistening ribbon that was the graded gravel road leading back to the city.

  “Get off the road!”

  Asya looked up just as King reached her. She doubled her efforts and slipped her bound wrists over her left foot, freeing her legs for the much more urgent task of running for her life. He grabbed her arm and hoisted her to her feet. He steered her toward the marshy ground to their right, as the tumult of lightning and gunfire filled the air. Mixed in with the bullwhip like crack of the Kalashnikov carbines, King heard the deeper, rhythmic report of a heavy machine gun. The sound echoed weirdly off the hills, but from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed muzzle flashes right above the headlights of the approaching vehicles.

  A three foot wide stream of water flowed between the road bed and the field beyond. A drainage ditch, King surmised. It was filled to capacity by the tropical downpour and on the verge of overflowing. He leaped across and saw Asya do the same, but when his feet touched down, the ground tried to swallow him whole. He pitched forward and felt vegetation and gritty mud close in around him.

  For a moment, the threat of death at the hands of the soldiers was diminished by the much more immediate danger of drowning. He tried to push himself up, but his hands found nothing solid to grasp. Fighting back a primal instinct, he stopped struggling and instead rolled over, curling his body to get his head out of the mud. His lower extremities sank deeper, the earth sucking him down, but he also felt a cascade of rain on his face, and as it sluiced the mud away from his mouth and nose, he risked a shallow breath and felt the damp air enter his lungs.

  It was the briefest of reprieves. Silhouetted on the road, less than twenty yards away, King saw three large vehicles that looked like oversized SUVs. The trucks weren’t moving, but while their headlights shone straight ahead, swiveling searchlights were probing the field where he and Asya now hid.

  Asya!

  Frantic, he looked to where he had last seen her. The grass had closed over the spot, but something was moving beneath the green shroud. He thrust his bound hands into the tangle and felt something solid.

  Asya thrashed violently, her desperation accomplishing nothing more than digging her grave deeper. King tried to pull her up but the soft earth beneath him confounded his efforts, and instead of freeing her, he found the mud once more closing over his head.

  Recalling his earlier success, he tried rolling again, first pulling away from Asya’s struggling form, and then rolling toward her. He felt the earth’s grip loosen, and then, like Jonah vomited from the belly of the whale, they were both disgorged out of the soft mud bank and into the rushing water in the drainage ditch.

  The current wasn’t quite strong enough to sweep them away, but every time King tried to plant his feet against the solid ground below, he was promptly bowled over and returned to the water’s embrace. He felt Asya’s arm slip away, and when he reached out to her, he found only handfuls of water.

  As exhaustion closed over him, he felt a strong arm close around him, drawing him out of the flood. He knew that it wasn’t Asya. He intuitively recognized that it could only be one of the soldiers, saving him from drowning to carry out Favreau’s death sentence later, but there was no fight left in him.

  He let himself be dragged up onto the road, where he was surrounded by a knot of men in camouflage fatigues. Another man pulled Asya, coughing and gasping for air, from the ditch and laid her beside him.

  A knife flashed, and before King could take any kind of defensive action, the blade moved close and sliced through the zip-tie that bound his wrists together. Surprised, he looked up into the smiling face of General Mabuki.

  “I am sorry I wasn’t able to stop them from taking you,” the general said. He turned to Asya and cut her bonds as well. “We must go. Things are happening very quickly. There isn’t much time.”

  21

  Kent, England

  Rook checked the rearview mirror again as they turned onto the M20 motorway and headed toward London. There had been no sign of pursuit since they’d lost sight of the truck, and while he wasn’t about to relax his guard, he reckoned they were safe for the moment.

  He turned his gaze to Mulamba. “Okay. One more time. Why Belgium? And this time maybe ease up a little on the messianic proclamations.”

  “I shall endeavor to restrain my enthusiasm,” Mulamba replied. “This story begins with David Livingstone, a Scotsman who spent many years in Africa, exploring and setting up missions throughout the interior, in the hopes of opening commercial routes and ending the slave trade. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Livingstone did not see the African natives as savages to be exploited without mercy, but rather, he believed that they were also God’s children. He was fiercely opposed to human trafficking, and he believed that the only way to bring Christianity and civilization to Africa was by establishing trade in natural resources.

  “He was correct in recognizing the vast untapped wealth of Africa, but naïve in his belief that this wealth would change the way his fellow Europeans looked at Africa. Instead of recognizing the humanity of Africans, most saw only a new opportunity to increase their wealth.”

  “Human nature is a bitch,” Rook said.

  Mulamba gave a sad look. “Oui. King Leopold II of Belgium was perhaps the most notorious of these adventurers. In 1885, he established the Congo Free State, in what is now my country. It was not to be a territory of Belgium, but rather an entirely commercial venture dedicated to exploiting the natural resources of the region. Elephants were hunted for ivory, native forests were cleared for rubber plantations, and of course, there were diamonds and other minerals to be taken. And although they were not slaves in name, the people of the Congo—my ancestors—were just one more resource to be exploited. The conditions on the plantations were brutal. Failure to meet a quota was punishable by death, and the mutilated bodies of men, women and children would be publicly displayed as a warning to others. The right hands of the victims were collected as proof of death, and the soldiers who enforced the quotas were rewarded for the number of hands they collected. Those bounty hunters soon realized it was easier to cut hands off without killing, and hundreds of thousands were mutilated, but still forced to keep working.”

  Queen, who had been calmly stitching the gash in her thigh with a suture needle from her first aid kit, shuddered. “That’s someone’s idea of civilized behavior?”

  “Is that what you’re looking for in Belgium?” Rook said, regretting the tone of his earlier statement. “Proof of these atrocities?”

  “No. The abuses of the Congo Free State were widely reported, even then. Men such as Joseph Conrad and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote books exposing the brutal treatment of the native population. Please, pardon my digression. I will try to explain.

  “In the year 1866, Livingstone embarked on an expedition to discover the source of the Nile River. At the time, this was an ambition on the order of...say, going to Mars. For years, no one heard from Livingstone. No one knew if he was alive or dead. In 1869, a New York newspaper sent Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone, and his searc
h took nearly three years. Stanley eventually found Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in November of 1871.”

  Rook remembered that historic nugget. “‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume.’”

  “Exactly. Though Stanley probably did not actually speak those words. It is more likely that he fabricated the account of the meeting, to add an element of drama to his newspaper dispatches.”

  “A goddamned sound bite.” Rook sighed. “Just goes to show, you can’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

  “We do not know for certain what Stanley said, or what else transpired during that meeting, because Stanley removed several pages from his diary, which were the only records of his meeting with Livingstone.”

  “Why would he do that?” Queen asked. “That’s like erasing the videotapes of the moon landing.”

  “Some historians have speculated that the actual account in Stanley’s diary would have contradicted what he reported, making him look foolish. Stanley himself claimed that he was embarrassed, because he did not embrace Livingstone, fearing that he might contract malaria or sleeping sickness.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time someone destroyed evidence to cover their ass.”

  “I believe he might have been trying to cover something else. Recall that Livingstone had been missing for nearly six years. In that time, he explored parts of Africa that had never been seen by Europeans, and perhaps not even by the natives living nearby. Imagine the stories he had to tell, and now, at long last, he had a chance to share what he had learned with another white man.”

  “Makes sense. So why the cover-up?”

  Mulamba pursed his lips, reminding Rook of the look that Bishop sometimes got during their poker games, when he was trying to decide whether to fold or go all in. “Scientists believe that the first humans originated in Africa, probably in the Great Rift Valley. Yet, throughout all of recorded history, Africa has always been the land of the savages. There is no record of any great civilization in sub-Saharan Africa, in ancient times. The oldest known advanced culture in the interior is the Great Zimbabwe society, which dates back no further than the eleventh century. The birthplace of humanity, and yet no significant advancement for thousands of years. Does that seem likely to you?”