by Mack Maloney
Zeek’s bagmen were also late getting to the Skull. These were the people who actually distributed money to Zeek’s gang members and other people who worked for him. Heavy showers sweeping through the area were slowing travel by water in some parts. Where usually the paymasters would do their secret knock on the Skull’s back door sometime just after sundown, tonight they were actually arriving past 10 P.M. and later.
So when the money-counters heard a secret knock on the back door around eleven-thirty, they routinely hit the open buzzer to let the visitor in. But instead of the typical pair of scruffy pirates walking in to pick up their packs of money, three huge men in ski masks and carrying assault rifles burst in instead.
The money-counters thought it was a joke until the first gunman through the door hit the nearest counter with the butt of his rifle, sending him flying over the table of money and knocking him unconscious.
This was enough to wake up the two armed men who were supposed to be serving as guards for the money-counters, but who were usually the most inebriated patrons in the Skull. Both received the same treatment, the butt of an M4 assault rifle right on the temple, collapsing each to the floor. Oddly, the three masked gunmen were whistling throughout most of this, terrifying the bar’s innocent kitchen workers, as Indonesians consider it highly unlucky to whistle around food. When the gunmen intentionally started spilling boxes of salt on the floor, the kitchen staff fled to the walk-in freezer, locking the door behind them and leaving the two remaining money-counters to deal with the invaders alone.
One of the masked gunmen checked the door leading into the bar itself. But there was so much noise coming from the front of the Red Skull that none of the patrons realized anything unusual was going on in back.
“What do you want?” one of the money-counters finally asked in horror, reaching for a piece of hollowed-out wood he always kept nearby.
“What the fuck do you think we want?” one of the gunmen snarled back, knocking the lucky piece of wood out of his hand and crushing it with his boot. “We want the money. All of it.”
The gunman threw a box of garbage bags at them, but the two money-counters hesitated, even though they were looking down the barrels of three assault rifles.
“We can’t,” one blurted out. “Zeek will kill us…”
“Don’t worry about Zeek,” another masked man told them. “Zeek’s broke. He’s out of money. We’re only here because he can’t pay us what he owes us. Now start stuffing those fucking bags!”
That was it — that was all it took.
The money-counters quickly filled the bags with packets of cash and handed them over to the gunmen. Then they hit the floor and covered their heads with their hands.
“Now stay down there and count to five hundred slowly,” one gunman warned them. “Or we’ll blow your fucking heads off.”
The robbery complete, the gunmen turned to leave when they heard an ungodly screech behind them. They spun around to see the bar’s brass-colored monkey flying through the air, fangs bared, diaper in place, coming right at them.
There was no time to shoot it; instead, one of the gunmen swung his rifle like a baseball bat, hitting the creature dead on and sending it spinning into the kitchen wall.
Then the robbers went out the door.
* * *
They made a clean getaway.
Or at least it seemed that way at first. The three masked gunmen — Batman, Gunner and Crash — had left the work copter, engine running, in the weeds behind the Red Skull while they robbed Zeek’s bank. It took them not ten seconds to get back to the aircraft after the theft — but that’s when the problems began.
Batman jumped in behind the controls; he was the most accomplished flier of the team, having joined Delta right out of the Air Force. But Gunner and Crash had trouble stuffing the bags of money into the copter’s tiny open cockpit. There were six bags in all, containing nearly $60,000. But they were mostly filled with packets of small bills, and some of the bags were packed so tight the sides were ripping. They also had no way to tie off the tops of the bags once they had twisted them closed. The result was a comedy of errors trying to get all the loot on board.
In the mad rush, Gunner tried sitting on the moneybags to keep them from blowing out of the cabin during takeoff. But as soon as Batman lifted off, some packets burst and streams of stray bills found their way out of the bags and out of the helicopter altogether, raining down on lucky drunks stumbling the muddy roads of Skull Island below.
Batman was pissed. He’d planned this operation down to the last detail — or so he thought. He knew, like every enterprise, Zeek’s business ran not so much on his total worth but on cash flow. Take away the operating funds, people stop getting paid, and trouble usually results. Thus the idea to rob Zeek’s depository. But Batman was also intent on replacing the $12,000 the team had invested in Twitch’s undercover operation; Anything beyond that would be a happy profit. But now that profit was going out the window — literally — all because Batman didn’t bring any twist ties.
The trail of falling bills continued as they climbed out over the water and headed east. Finally, Gunner and Crash managed to hand-tie the bags and stow most of them under the seats. But by that time, more than half the loot had blown away.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have smacked that fucking monkey!” Crash yelled above the racket of the rotor, still trying to catch some stray bills swirling around them. “What’s it say in the book about that?”
“Screw the monkey!” Batman yelled back to him. “Just try to keep at least twelve grand of that for us!”
Then Batman forced himself to stop thinking about the money and concentrate on their next destination. He checked his watch.
Somehow, they were still on schedule.
* * *
Finding Skull Island hadn’t been a problem. Twitch had remembered its name from his night of involuntary debauchery, and it was on most of the maps they’d downloaded of the area.
Determining that Mirang Island was their next destination had been a little more difficult. Twitch had recalled lots of color, lots of activity, and a long white beach that “seemed to go on forever.” He’d estimated that it had taken a speedboat ride of about twenty minutes to get there from Skull Island — that is, if he had his sequence right.
The team was able to cop some color satellite maps from the Internet and found a long, thin, finger-shaped atoll off the northwest edge of Batam. From space it looked like a miniature version of downtown Las Vegas: one of those places that needed no streetlights because the honky-tonk provided all the illumination anyone would ever need. When some quick calculations told them it was conceivable that a sekoci fast boat could get from Skull Island to Mirang in twenty minutes or so, they felt they had their place.
The flight over from Skull to Mirang took just five minutes in the work copter. Batman was rated in fighters, big planes and helos; for him, flying the copter was like driving a small, slow economy car. He had to constantly remind himself not to exceed the chopper’s maximum speed, as this was rough on the hardware and hell on fuel consumption. Still, they made it to Mirang in record time.
They flew over the downtown first, confirmed it was an orgy of neon lights and waterfront saloons, then headed for the southern end of the island. Here was another well-known feature of Mirang: the vast, isolated, Piniti-Hatan graveyard.
The place was enormous. Nearly five square miles in area, it was an immense field of craggy trees, overgrown grass, weeds, boulders, and of course, graves and gravestones — hundreds of thousands of them.
Batman studied the cemetery from the air. “Maybe this is where we start to get lucky,” he yelled to his teammates.
He landed the copter in the darkest part of the sprawling graveyard and the three men climbed out.
“Fucking hey… look at this place,” Gunner said. “Is this where every person who drops dead in Indonesia gets planted? There’s like a million graves here.”
“It’s alread
y giving me the creeps,” Crash said. “Are we sure this is the right thing to do?”
Batman looked around, making certain no one was nearby. “It’s part of the plan because of what it says in the superstitions book,” he told them. “You want to reread the book now? After we’re already here?”
They began walking among the graves. They were here not to steal a body, but to steal funeral flowers. Trouble was, they’d landed in an area of older graves, and they could see only patches of covered-over ground and grave markers.
“Damn — no flowers anywhere?” Batman asked.
“I think the book said some Indonesians bury the funeral flowers with the body,” Crash said.
“Well, we don’t want to roam too far away from the copter,” Batman said. “So, I guess we start digging here.”
Retrieving some entrenching tools from the aircraft, they selected what looked to be a relatively fresh grave and commenced digging. But after five minutes of hard work, they still hadn’t found any flowers or plants. They kept at it, until they heard a bone-chilling clunk! Crash’s entrenching tool had hit the top of a coffin.
“Oh God,” he cried. “Is that what I think it was?”
Before anyone could answer, Gunner’s boot went through the top of the flimsy casket and he found himself implanted in a corpse.
“Jesuszz fuck!” he screamed. “Jesuszz!”
Crash pulled him out and they quickly threw dirt back onto the broken coffin and grave.
“I’m telling you,” Gunner said, trying to calm down, “we shouldn’t have smacked that monkey or spilled the salt or whistled during all that. This bad-luck shit must work both ways here.”
“Let’s just try somewhere else,” Batman told them.
They found a second relatively new grave and started digging again. But no sooner had their shovels hit this ground than they heard a dog start howling in the distance. It unnerved Gunner so much, he dropped his digging tool and unslung his M4.
“Goddamn,” Batman scolded him in an urgent whisper. “Can you calm down, please?”
“Do you remember what the book said about hearing a dog howl in a graveyard after midnight?” Gunner asked him, looking around nervously. “It says, ‘if a dog howls past midnight, it signifies a wandering earthbound spirit on the premises.’ Like in a ghost?”
“You memorized that?” Batman asked him.
“Hey, it was your book — you said to read it,” Gunner shot back at him.
And now Crash was getting caught up in it. “Well, what the fuck time is it?” he asked as the dog began wailing again.
“It’s five minutes to midnight,” Batman said. “Not that it makes a piss hole of difference. The Indonesians are the superstitious ones, guys, remember? Not us. Them.”
The dog howled again. It seemed closer this time.
“What did it say about howling before midnight?” Crash asked Gunner seriously.
Gunner tapped his forehead in an effort to remember. “I think if a dog howls at the stroke of midnight, it signifies death in the family,” he said. “What happens before, I don’t know.”
The two men began digging furiously. Batman didn’t know whether to laugh or chew them out. “You guys are unbelievable,” he said.
They finally found some dead flowers beneath the dirt and quickly did what they came here to do: rub them all over their hands and faces and battle suits.
“These are lilies, right?” Gunner kept asking. “And orchids? They’re the kind to use.”
“Two minutes to midnight,” Crash said, hearing the dog howl again.
They both turned to Batman. “Enough?” Gunner asked him.
Batman just shook his head. He grabbed some loose flowers. “Yeah — let’s go.”
With that, both men sprinted to the copter. Batman climbed in after them.
“One minute to go,” Crash said.
Batman again just shook his head. He hit the throttles and pulled up on the collective.
“I really made the right choice hooking up with you two.”
* * *
The flight to the other end of the island took just two minutes.
They easily relocated the white beach that “went on forever.” Batman put the copter down behind a jetty that was partially hidden by jungle. Gazing over the jetty with their night-vision goggles, the three men spotted a building washed in green neon among the many bars and dance clubs along the waterfront. But this place was not some wooden box on stilts. It was a huge, ornate old building of mixed Asian and Western design, with many floors and windows. It looked more like some groovy apartment building than a whorehouse. The sign above the front door read Kucing Jantan Rumah — Home of the Tomcat.
“Gentlemen,” Batman said. “Behold the brothel at Brothel Beach.”
* * *
The hookers smelled them coming.
Even before Gunner kicked in the back door, some of the prostitutes inside the brothel had detected the scent of dead lilies and overripe orchids blowing in the hot night air. That’s why the six women taking a tea break in the back room were already freaking out when Team Whiskey burst in.
The sight of their M4s, their black camos or their otherworldly night-vision-equipped helmets didn’t faze the hookers one bit. It was scent of the dead flowers on them, and even worse, the mud on their boots.
“Is that dirt from a graveyard?” one girl asked frantically after the trio exploded through the door.
Batman was stumped for a moment; they all were.
He finally replied: “Yes, it is.”
The hookers lost it at that point. “God help us!” one screamed.
They started to push past them, trying to get to the back door.
“Wait — how many people are here?” Batman shouted at them. “Where’s the madam? Where are all the radios?”
But the six prostitutes, all scantily clad, gorgeous and Asian, weren’t listening to him. They were manhandling him out of the way now. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” one told him, rushing by.
With that, the hookers fled out the back door.
Batman slammed the already-splintered door behind them in frustration. Then he signaled Crash and Gunner to check out the hallway leading into the main part of the cathouse.
What an odd beginning, he thought.
According to Twitch’s debriefing, the brothel doubled as Zeek’s intelligence-gathering center, so Whiskey was here to destroy it. Their moyens d’entrée was the smell of funeral flowers because, according to the superstitions book, any house in Indonesia that smelled of flowers placed on a grave would be considered unlucky forever and would have to be abandoned by those who lived there. Having dirt from a cemetery on one’s shoes apparently brought even more bad luck.
But as it turned out, the team had arrived bearing too much misfortune. As word quickly spread throughout the brothel about the sudden appearance of the flower-scented, muddy-booted visitors, the result was a virtual stampede of call girls going out the front door of the cathouse, with an equally frantic mad dash of clients going out the back. The problem was, Twitch hadn’t been able to remember exactly where the spy center was located within the huge whorehouse, and that’s something Whiskey had to know if they were going to grease it. But weapons cocked or not, no one would stop long enough to talk to them.
It was total chaos by the time the team members found their way to the front parlor, the center of the whorehouse’s universe. It was as if someone had planted a bomb in the place. Call girls were practically knocking the team members to the floor in their rush to escape.
Batman caught an elderly, extremely made-up woman rushing by. He correctly identified her as the house madam.
He held her by the arm. “Zeek is running out of money,” he told her, hurriedly reciting his prepared lines. “And we’re here to collect what he owes us.”
“He owes us money, too!” she barked back at him. “But I’m not staying around to collect. Not in this place.”
“So, where�
�s all his radio equipment?” he asked her. “His spy gear?”
But she had already broken away from him and was halfway out the door. She called over her shoulder: “I don’t know who you are, but I wouldn’t stay around too long. When more people find out about the bad luck in this place, it won’t be pretty.”
With that, she and the remaining call girls were out the door. Just like that, the place was empty.
Batman, Crash and Gunner just stood there and looked at each other.
“Jesuszz, now what?” Gunner asked.
Batman shrugged. “We gotta toss the joint, I guess.”
Crash and Gunner shrank back. The whorehouse was enormous; just judging by the number of call girls taking flight, there had to be more than a hundred rooms in the place.
“Can I go on record as saying: ‘Ee www?’ ” Crash asked.
They climbed the stairs and began their search. They found just empty bedrooms on the first and second floors, but the higher they got in the building, the stranger things became. On the third floor, many of the rooms had chains and restraining equipment attached to the walls. Whips — and whipped cream — seemed to be the most prominent features on the fourth floor. On the fifth floor, they found rooms filled with large rolls of plastic and bubble wrap. On the sixth floor, many rooms had adult-size diapers scattered about, some used, some not.
“There’s not enough booze in the world to get that image out of my head,” Crash had said on this discovery.
But still, they could find no communications equipment or anything connected to what they’d envisioned Zeek’s spy center to look like.
And yet Twitch had said he’d momentarily glimpsed the inside of the place. “What did we miss?” Gunner wondered.
Batman thought a moment, then asked: “Where’s the last place you’d want to go in a place like this?”