Brute Force (16 page)

 

Y
aqub Feng sat in the rearmost seat of the windowless Chevrolet van at once terrified and thrilled by the proximity of the young woman crammed in beside him. Surely still in her teens, she wore a great deal of green eye makeup. She sucked on a mint that did little to hide the horrible breath that came with being dragged from her bed and put to work in the van. Forcing a pained smile, she shifted back and forth as if she had a stomachache.

A commercial flight from Kashgar to Dubrovnik took nearly twenty-four hours, but Jiàn Z
u had used his connections to get them aboard a direct cargo flight taking just over seven hours. They’d arrived in the wee hours of the morning, likely about the time the girls had fallen asleep from their duties the night before.

Ehmet sat at the far end of the seat, talking on a mobile phone while he terrorized the girl who was crammed between him and Yaqub’s redhead. He wore a hooked, claw-like blade fitted to a leather cuff that laced around his palm. Ehmet had a sense for all things deadly, and noticed it in the center console when they’d been picked up at the airport. He began to toy with it immediately, dropping veiled hints until Scuric, the Croatian driver, had gifted it to him. Called a
Srbosjek
or “Serb cutter,” the hooked blade was designed to harvest wheat, but during World War II it had earned a reputation as a weapon for cutting thousands of Serbian throats.

The bony child next to Ehmet knew exactly what it was and shrank from the evil blade as if it was on fire. Ehmet moved his eyebrows up and down, mocking her fear as he drew the dull backside of the tip across the pale flesh of her trembling shoulder. The pitiful redhead next to Yaqub watched in a sort of blank stupor, as if she could not comprehend where exactly she was or why she was there. Jiàn Z
u sat in the next seat forward, eyes watching the road. He’d declined the offer of a woman, earning him a string of derisive curses from Ehmet. Yaqub watched the sick thing rocking in pain beside him and wished he would have declined as well.

Anton Scuric, the Croat behind the wheel, glanced in the rearview mirror as he turned the van up a winding single-track into the scrubby limestone hills an hour northwest of Dubrovnik. A bald man with a crooked smile, he had a long and oddly misshapen skull—as if his head had been run sideways through the wringer on an old-time washing machine. A red-and-white checkerboard tattoo of the Croat flag covered the side of his neck, but he seemed far more gangster businessman than ardent nationalist. Scuric had made a small fortune during the Homeland War, smuggling the guns and drugs that were so plentiful when staples like food and heating fuel were in such short supply. He traded with fellow Croats, Serbians, and even Bosniak Muslims, but drew the line at working with Gypsies. Still, Jiàn Z
u had thought it best to keep secret the fact that the Fengs were Muslim, just to be on the safe side.

According to the snakehead, Scuric was the best in the business when it came to fraudulent passports—equal parts scientist and artist. Apparently, the two men had a long history and Scuric was more than happy to work on credit providing them with passports made from stolen Hong Kong SAR blank documents—for double his usual fee. Apparently, the Croat had found it lucrative to use his established smuggling routes to traffic in humans as well as drugs. The Serbian girls he’d thrown in out of the goodness of his heart. Yaqub did not see much added value.

It had been over a year since Yaqub had been so near a woman. It was hot outside the swaying van and though the air-conditioning was blowing at full force, the young Uyghur felt himself sweating through his shirt. He wasn’t sure if it was the cloud of dust that sifted up through the floor or the smell of cheap alcohol and perfume drifting up from the child beside him, but if they had to travel much longer, he knew he would be sick.

He patted the trembling young woman on the thigh, below the hem of her tight shorts where it dug into her pale skin. He’d hoped that the touch might convey some sort of understanding between them, perhaps let her know that he was not an animal, that he did not intend to hurt her. Maybe she might even enjoy her time with him. She winced at his touch, but turned her head to look at him, as if she’d been warned to be cooperative. Her green eyes were wide, overflowing with tears and terror. Saliva dried at the pinched corners of her heavily rouged lips.

“Where are you from?” Yaqub asked in halting English.

“Bosnia,” she whispered. “I find work . . . Italia.”

“Shut up, Amna,” Scuric barked from the behind the wheel. “You have found work here.” He launched into a stream of invective Yaqub did not understand. It did not matter. Her name alone put a pit in his stomach. Amna meant “safety” in Arabic. From Bosnia with an Arabic name, she was not Serbian after all but a Bosniak Muslim. Still, Yaqub thought, struggling for a way to console his nagging conscience, she must have done something very sinful to end up working as a prostitute in another country.

He closed his eyes so he didn’t have to look at her, and focused on his brother’s conversation.

“. . . Is that so? . . . Well, someone will have to kill them then.” Ehmet laughed maniacally as if he’d just made the world’s funniest joke. “It may as well be us. I am telling you it would be good practice.... Of course, I understand.” He handed the phone up to Jiàn Z
u. “Here,” Ehmet said. “He wants to discuss the details.”

Ehmet pulled the girl closer and nibbled on her cheek, biting hard enough to make her yelp. He shoved her away, brandishing the Serb cutter before leaning over the seat to look out the windshield for a moment and then falling back into the seat. He let his head fall sideways to peer at Yaqub. It was Ehmet’s way, always moving, unable to sit still for very long.

“Why so glum, my brother?” he said in English so the girls would be able to understand him. “We have our mission before us and a night with these acceptable if not overly beautiful whores.” He elbowed his girl in the ribs. “You are much too skinny, but at least you have good teeth. Smile a little more and maybe I can forget the rest of you.” He looked up at Yaqub. “Ranjhani tells me that a private aircraft filed a flight plan to Dubrovnik a few hours after we left Kashgar. It seems that the people following us are a determined lot.”

“Do we know who they are?” Yaqub said, wondering who could be after them so fast—surely not the Pakistanis.

“He gave me some name,” Ehmet said, “but it meant nothing to me. I told him to let us kill them but he assured me that he will take care of it. Evidently, he has some Albanians who owe him a favor.”

Ehmet turned to look directly at Yaqub, suddenly very serious. He switched to Chinese. “Why is your countenance so dark, my brother?”

Yaqub shot a glance at the quivering girl beside him. “You know that I am fully committed to our jihad. Our cause is just . . . but this . . . We are good Muslims. To lay with a woman when we would die as martyrs seems to me a grave sin.”

Ehmet leaned forward, nodding toward Scuric, the Croatian driver. “Many here hate Islam,” he said, still in Chinese. “Mohammed himself, peace be unto him, has said that it is better to play the sinner than to be discovered.”

Yaqub nodded.
Taqiyya,
or lying to deceive a nonbeliever like Scuric, was not only acceptable but just and honorable as well.

“Besides,” Ehmet said, as he pushed up his girl’s short skirt and gave her thigh a pinch. “As far as lies go, this is most pleasant.”

Jiàn Z
u ended the call and turned to pass the phone back to Ehmet. He opened his mouth to speak, but turned back around without a word.

“Go ahead and act like our eunuch friend if you want, brother.” Ehmet laughed, smiling at both girls. “But these whores have chosen their sinful lives. Allah will certainly punish them, so why not be the instrument of that punishment?”

Amna, surely feeling the intent if not the actual meaning of Ehmet’s words, scooted closer to Yaqub so her red hair trailed along his shoulder. She looked up at him and batted gaudy lashes. “You seem kind,” she whispered in halting English.

I am kind
, Yaqub thought, but that did not matter. The girls had already heard too much—and even if they hadn’t, he’d known the girls were as good as dead the moment his brother had first picked up the Serb cutter.

 

Q
uinn shifted in the deep leather seat and opened his eyes. He’d learned from commercial fishing with his father in Alaska, and then later at the United States Air Force Academy, that sleep was a fleeting commodity. It was imperative to grab whatever snippets came his way, even if it meant closing his eyes around a Chinese spy. He still did not trust Song, if that was even her real name, but if she wanted him dead, she’d already had ample opportunity to make that happen.

She’d made a point to remind him that much of the People’s Liberation Army would be hot on their trail now that they were working together, but she apparently still had enough connections to score them a ride to Dubrovnik on a Citation X. The smell of rich leather and new carpet made Quinn think the sleek business jet had just rolled off the assembly line. Song assured him it was privately owned, but the airplane smelled too much like government. It would be a rare private citizen who would loan their twenty-million-dollar aircraft to fugitive spies. More likely the Citation X was an MSS plane, registered to some dummy corporation or innocuous agency, like Winfield Palmer flagged the Challenger he used as an OGA for his OGAs—Other Governmental Aircraft for Other Governmental Agents. The Bombardier Challenger was a fine aircraft, but Quinn was certain Palmer would bristle when he found out the Chinese were jetting around near Mach speeds in the comfort of the world’s fastest business jet.

“You are awake,” Song said, looking over a folded map of the Balkans. “Good. We are almost there.” She wore the thick black glasses again and a pair of white earbuds that led to her phone.

Quinn stretched, arms above his head, feeling the familiar tightness in the scars across his ribs, and the nagging pain from the recent injury to his shoulder. He wondered, as he often did lately when he moved, how long it would be before the broken parts just stayed broken. He’d already noticed a certain lag in healing that hadn’t been there when he was younger and racing motorcycles with his brother.

He covered a yawn, rubbing his eyes at the blinding light that streamed into the cabin. “That was quick,” he said, glancing out the Citation’s round window at the blue-green waters of the Adriatic below.

“The Citation X is fast,” she said, glancing down at her map again. “But I told the pilot to put the spurs to her.”

Quinn stifled a chuckle at the idiom.

“What is it?” Song said, cocking her head. “Did I say something wrong?” She pulled one of the buds from her ear and something that sounded suspiciously like the Zac Brown Band spilled out. A Chinese spy who listened to country music—that explained a lot and raised an entirely new set of questions.

“Not at all,” he said. “Not at all.”

She tapped the phone to pause her song and removed the other earbud, wrapping up the cord and shoving phone and all in the pocket of her vest. “Your friend will pick us up at the airport?”

“That’s the plan,” Quinn said.

“You trust this man?”

“My brother does.”

She took a deep breath, peering over her glasses. Quinn could imagine her scolding a small child about homework.

“And you trust your brother’s taste in friends?” she said.

“I do.” Quinn thought of the Denizens, Bo Quinn’s motorcycle club that operated on the rough edges of legality. “Most of them anyway.”

He’d met Mike “Buzz Saw” Bursaw many times, and though he knew little about the man’s background, Quinn was certain he was completely devoted to Bo—and he could fight, which might come in handy on this go-around. Quinn’s brother had actually introduced Bursaw to the Croatian woman who would later become his wife, when he’d hired her to waitress at the club’s bar outside Dallas. Buzz Saw had traveled home with his new bride and ingratiated himself with his father-in-law enough that the old man had offered to set him up in business in order to keep his daughter and any grandchildren that might come along nearby. Bursaw knew Quinn was a government agent and that he frequently worked outside the lines. None of that seemed to bother him.

Quinn hadn’t told him everything when he’d called that morning, just enough to let him know they were looking for a set of Chinese brothers who would arrive sometime before they did.

Song gazed out the window, obviously mulling this all over. “I hope he is as trustworthy as you believe him to be.”

“I trust him more than I trust the locals,” Quinn said.

“You know what they say,” Song said. “That where Italy is a state with a mafia, Croatia is a mafia with a state.”

What do you expect from a country that invented the necktie?
Quinn thought, though he kept it to himself.

Song stuffed the map in a small nylon messenger bag, rummaging around for a few seconds before pulling out Quinn’s Riot, still in its Kydex sheath.

“Here,” she said, sliding it across the oval teak table between them. “You seem to be more comfortable when you have a knife.”

Quinn took the blocky little knife and clipped it to his belt on the left side between three and four o’clock, pulling the tail of the rugby shirt over the green G10 handle. He was pretty sure she gave it to him so it wouldn’t be in her bag when they passed through customs and immigration. Quinn didn’t really care as long as he had his knife back. A body pat down was less likely than a bag search, and if it came to that, a knife on his belt would be the least of his worries.

“I don’t suppose you have an extra pistol in there, do you?” he asked, nodding at her open purse.

“I don’t even have one for myself,” Song said. “But, we are in the black market arms capital of Eastern Europe. I feel certain something will turn up.”

The Citation X banked west on final approach to
ilipi Airport. Dubrovnik’s dazzling umber rooftops came into view—the clay tiles new and bright since the Yugoslav bombardment of the recent war. Quinn looked out the window at the mazes and warrens of the old walled city and took a deep breath. Croatia was thriving, Dubrovnik was beautiful, the food was excellent, and the people were friendly. But Quinn had been to Croatia twice before—both times looking for war criminals, evil men, the thought of whom brought the same flood of adrenaline he felt prior to a fight. Song was right. Some kind of gun would turn up. He just hoped he was at the right end of it when it did.