The Orpheus Deception (50 page)

Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Orpheus Deception

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“Kill the lights on that Humvee, Mikey.”

Dalton ran across the gap, jerked open the door, and shut the Humvee down. When he came back, the lights were off on the taxi as well, and Fyke was leaning on the trunk, his arms crossed, his chest heaving.

“Another fine fix you’ve got me into, Stanley,” he said. “What was that all about?”

The sound of rolling thunder cut off Dalton’s reply. They looked up as a set of red lights appeared in the sky, riding a thudding, booming sound.

“A Blackhawk,” said Fyke. “What do you want to do?”

“What the hell do they want?”

“No idea, lad. But make up your mind, because I have the strong impression that KIPAM won’t give us much of a chance to explain.”

“Can you run?”

Fyke shook his head.

“I can stumble a few yards, throw up, and pass out. Will that help?”

“Not much,” he said, turning to the driver.

“Tangerine?”

She stuck her head out the driver’s window, her eyes very wide.

“Can you drive with your lights off?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then get the hell out of here!”

“Yes, sir.”

The tires churned up gravel and dust, and Tangerine’s pink Mercedes was a memory in a few seconds. About a half mile out, she braked to take a curve. In the distance, the chopper veered suddenly off course to follow her taillights. It boomed right over their heads, a big Blackhawk with a red skull face painted on the hull. Fyke had already dragged his MP into the tree line. He stopped, breathing heavily, watching the chopper as it thundered by at two hundred feet.

“KIPAM Marines, all right. Jesus, I hope they don’t shoot up Tangerine’s taxi. What
have
we done to irritate those boys?”

“No idea,” said Dalton. “How’d they miss the Humvee?”

“They won’t next time,” said Fyke, pointing to a second chopper, coming in from the same direction, a spotlight flickering around crazily as it skimmed the canopy.

“Things go to shit in a hurry in this corner of the world, don’t they?” said Dalton, shaking the sting out of his left hand. It had come into play during the fight, and now it felt as if he had driven a spike through the middle of his palm.

“That they do,” said Fyke. “The Humvee has one of those CIS .50s on the roof. You feel like a last stand, Mikey?”

The light from the Blackhawk lanced overhead and arced into the south, following the highway into Manado, tracking the receding lights of the first chopper.

“Maybe it has a radio too,” said Dalton.

“Let’s go see. What about these lads?”

“Cuff them to a palm trunk. Bring their pistols and their radios.”

“Done, Captain.”

Dalton dragged his man over to the nearest palm trunk, plucked his Streamlight out of the holster, jogged back over to the Humvee, tugged open the driver’s door, using the MP’s flashlight to check out the contents. The cramped interior held a suite of command-and-control electronics, most of which Dalton was pretty familiar with— the Indonesians got most of their gear from U.S. suppliers like Motorola and Microsoft—and there was a rear rack with two spotless M4s and a large box of ammunition. Behind the driver’s seat was an open hatch, with an ammo case right under it and a belt of big Browning .50 caliber MG rounds rising up through the hatch to feed the roof-mounted machine gun. The Humvee was armored and looked like it had been fitted with bulletproof glass. They could do some damage, if it had to come to a fight, and if the Blackhawks didn’t have anything other than the usual pintle-mounted light 7.62 MGs in the doorways. A few .50 caliber rounds in the right spot will take almost any chopper down, even an Apache gunship, which Dalton devoutly hoped the KIPAM did not have—please, God—because the problem with taking on a Hellfire-equipped Apache with a .50 caliber is roughly the same problem you encounter when you bring a butterfly net to a bear hunt.

Dalton did a quick battle-readiness assessment and concluded that if they made a stand right here, right out in the open, the best of all possible outcomes had them both chopped into Baco-Bits in two minutes or less. He needed to get some distance, lose that chopper, find them a place to go to ground, cool everybody out, lower the tempo, and get these lunatic KIPAM cowboys to please just
explain
themselves.

Fyke reached the passenger door with the pistols and the radios just as Dalton got himself settled in behind the driver’s wheel. Fyke scrambled through the gap and stood up in the hatch, beside the .50. There were no keys in any U.S. military vehicle, and this was no different. He hit the START button, the diesel powered up, he tugged the wheel hard left, and powered the Humvee straight into the jungle, crashing through thickets of bougainvillea and scrub brush and swerving around tall, slender trunks of coconut palm. It was still dark under the canopy, but, in the breaks through the palm fronds, he could see a pale pink light spreading out across the sky.

He took the Humvee up a low hill, crested the hill, and roared down the other side. Fyke was up in the gunner’s hatch, shining the way with the dim beam of the MP’s halogen flash, hiding the light with the palm of his hand.

They had covered perhaps ten miles of mixed, open ground and sparse stands of coconut palms when the narrow cone of hard-white light flickered across a large metal shed, a smaller cluster of buildings—all dark and deserted-looking—and then settled on another low, shedlike structure made of bamboo and thatched in dry palms.

He leaned his head down into the cabin and shouted at Dalton.

“Shut her down, Mikey. Let me do a recce.”

Mikey shut her down. Fyke loped heavily off into the darkness. Dalton had no idea how much pain the man was in, and Fyke was pretending he was just fine, which was SOP for the SAS. Well, Dalton was doing pretty much the same thing. He’d been
shivved in the googlies,
as Mandy had so elegantly phrased it, and yet here he was flitting about the jungle in Southeast Asia just as if he were still a sprightly young lad with a stellar future and no serious communicable diseases. Fyke was back in a few minutes.

“Looks like a deserted copra farm. Stick it in the barn.”

Dalton drove the Humvee through a stand of overgrown copra plants, their leaves whipping at the windshield and leaving streaks of white sap across the glass, bounced twice, as the wheels jumped a low cinder-block fence, and slid across the threshold and into the darkness of the thatched barn. He shut the engine down again and leaned his forehead on the wheel, cradling his left hand in his right palm, his chest heaving. Fyke was lurching around in the dim, dappled interior of the barn, apparently looking for something. He stopped, staring, steadied the flash on something bulky, and stumbled into a shadow, emerging in a moment, dragging a long black hose. He stopped in front of the truck, aimed the hose at the windshield, and pressed the nozzle. A blast of water struck the Humvee, rocking it. Dalton sat inside the vehicle while Fyke hosed it down, from grille to tow bar.

He was cooling it off, lowering the heat signature, because those KIPAM Blackhawks would probably have infrared sensors fitted. He was quick, but, then, if recent experiences were anything to go by, Ray Fyke was harder to kill than herpes simplex. Fyke dropped the hose, came back to the driver’s door, popped it open, and flopped back inside. He put his head against the headrest, blew out some air and sucked it back in again. In the silence, above the ticking of the engine and the pounding of their own hearts, they could hear the faraway sound of chopper blades thudding in the steamy night air. The sound got fainter, and then it was gone, and all they could hear was the
chirrup-chirrup
of crickets and nightjars and the sighing of the wind in the rafters. Something slimy struck the windshield of the Humvee.

“Bat shit,” Fyke explained. “Barns are always full of them.”

“The technical term is
guano,”
said Dalton. “And shouldn’t they be out and about, not hanging around the rafters in the dead of night?”

“Oot and aboot,
don’t ye mean?” said Fyke, his teeth showing white in the dim light. He checked his watch, read the luminous dial. “Most of them are. But morning’s coming, and they’ll be done for the day. Hearth and home, and a jolly old bang at the missus. You got any smokes, by the way?”

Dalton pulled out a couple of Mandy’s Sobranies, gave Fyke the pink one—it was hard to tell in the dark—took a blue one himself, lit them up.

“What do you think got those lads all stirred up?” said Fyke, after a while. A soft-pink light was showing in the rips and cracks of the barn roof, and they could see more and more of the interior of the barn as the morning opened up around them.

“Well, why don’t we ask them?”

“If you turn on this comset, it’ll send out a GPS identifier.”

“Excellent point. How’s your cell phone?”

“They can triangulate on a cell phone too.”

“Not as easily. Only to the nearest tower. They already know our general area.”

Fyke fumbled it out, flipped it open.

“Deader than Di and Dodi. Yours?”

Dalton flipped his open.

“Got a bit.”

“Did you bring Mandy’s? The one your pal Kiki is tracking?”

“Yes.”

“You still got the GPS turned on?”

“Yes.”

“So Kiki can sneak up on us and murder us all in our beds, is it?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Well, bringing that darling lad into our sea of troubles strikes me as kind of redundant now, don’t it? I mean, we got an entire regiment of Komando Intai Para Amfibi hunting us down, and, if I recall correctly, you had a glass knife shoved into your gizzard only awhile ago and now you’ve got a spider bite on your hand that’s probably, even as we speak, sending a horrible, incurable poison into your brain, so, any second now, you’re gonna go into agonized convulsions and die screaming out Sassenach gibberish while peeing all over yourself, and I’ve got scorch marks on my balls and broken ribs and a bunch a teeth missing, and Delia says I have a bad ticker and am like to fall down dead at any moment, if the syphilis don’t kill me first. What would you call us, Mikey, giving us all that?”

“Reminds me of the ad for the lost dog: ‘Missing, one white-and-brown Jack Russell terrier. Three legs. Blind in one eye. Neutered. Got the mange. Right ear bitten off—’ ”

“ ‘Answers to Lucky’?” said Fyke. “I heard that one.”

They had a good laugh at that, but Dalton turned the GPS off anyway. On a computer screen in Kotor, Montenegro, Branco Gospic saw the icon blip off and picked up his phone. Larissa answered. She had a short conversation with her father, and then called Kiki Lujac’s cell phone. There was no answer. She left a message. On a screen at Crypto City, in Annapolis Junction, a Monitor picked up the signal and hit RECORD/NOTIFY. Three floors above him, the AD of RA was staring out the window at a grim November evening, thinking about Nikki Turrin and waiting for a phone call from a Major Alessio Brancati in Venice. In Washington, Deacon Cather was out to dinner with an old family friend, one of the Georgetown Harrimans, who had served with Allen Dulles. They were having osso buco—made with cream and not tomato sauce—and a very dry pinot grigio. His beeper went off. He glanced at the screen, saw the notification, and put the machine back in his pocket. The pinot was suspect. Cather thought that it might be corked. He raised his skeletal hand and called for the sommelier. In Kuta, Mandy Pownall was sleeping, sedated, dreaming of Cortona. The night nurse, who believed it was a help against spider bites, brought in a candle scented with eucalyptus oil, lit it, and set it on the bedside table. Delia Lopez thanked her, and went back to watching Mandy’s chest rise and fall and silently chanting the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary. In Cortona, where it was raining hard, the ghost of Porter Naumann was sitting at a table in a medieval square near the Via Janelli, watching plumes of black smoke that stank of the grave rise up, hissing, from the ancient cobblestones. A strong wind, carrying the scent of crushed eucalyptus leaves, came rushing over the jagged stone walls and poured down into the square, shredding the plumes into wisps, and in a moment they were gone. In Florence, Cora Vasari opened her eyes and gasped softly. A nurse came into the dim room and put a cool hand on Cora’s forehead, speaking gently, smiling down.
“Eucalypto,”
said Cora,
“fior del finocchio?”
The nurse said something soothing and pressed a button on the wall behind Cora’s bed. In the coconut palm jungle six miles northwest of Manado, in the cockpit of a stolen Humvee, Micah Dalton was staring down at Mandy’s cell phone and frowning:

“You wouldn’t happen to know a phone number for KIPAM?”

Fyke blew some smoke out and shook his head.

“Try Information.”

“You’re kidding. You worked this region for years and you’re telling me to call Information?”

“Have you got a better idea?”

“You know, I could have left you in Changi.”

“Fine with me. I rather liked it there. Three squares. Lots of exercise.”