Under Siege (25 page)

“I don’t have a clue.”

Murdock frowned. “Damn it, neither do I, which means I’ll be the one standing the second watch tonight at midnight at the hotel with the money.”

At midnight, Murdock went back to the hotel where the money was to relieve his three men.

“Who else is with you?” Lam asked.

“Just me, I couldn’t locate Gardner. He got lost in the hassle of following these guys.”

“Not a one man job here,” Lam said. “I’ll stay with you and we can take two-hour watches.”

“Thanks, buddy. I can use the help.”

They sent Jaybird and Howard back to the other hotel.

It was a long night. Nothing moved around the hotel after two
A.M.
Lam was on the four-to-six shift when he called Murdock on the Motorola.

“Hey, Cap. We’ve got some action. Side door. Civilian car with three people inside. One got out and went in the side door. Could be a pickup of the cash.”

“I’ve got them. Go get the car up this way so it’ll be close if we need it. Must be Badri picking up the money. Maybe he has the First Lady with him.”

“Too much to hope for.”

“Still, we can’t take them down yet. If she is in the car, we can’t shoot. Even if they shoot at us, we have to hold fire. We need a nice contained room we can work with.”

“Roger that, Cap. Uh-oh. Here comes somebody. Same guy who went inside. He’s packing something. Yep, the money, half of it at least.”

“I’ve got another body right behind the first with another
money bag. They put the cash in the trunk and locked it. Now what?”

“Half-block to the car, Cap,” Lam said. “I’m running. Watch which way they go.”

The black sedan that picked up the money and the man had left before Lam skidded the rental Chevy to a stop and Murdock climbed inside.

“Straight ahead, they’re a block up there. Don’t let them know we’re back here.”

“Right, I don’t have the headlights on. Should help us. Not much traffic, so it’ll be harder, though. Nobody to hide behind.”

They drove through the light downtown traffic for two or three miles, keeping close enough to tail the other car. Then it suddenly sped away, made a sharp turn, and tried to lose them.

“Now he knows we’re here, it’s a car chase,” Lam said. He switched on his lights and followed. He came up to within six car lengths of the other car as the night faded into dawn. Soon they were in a suburb, and then there were fewer and fewer houses and they were in the country.

The speed slowed down as the road worsened. Twice when Lam closed up the distance between them, came shots from the car ahead as someone leaned out the window and fired at them.

“Pistol,” Lam said. “Be a miracle if the rounds come within fifty feet of us.” A moment later one round hit the passenger’s side windshield but didn’t penetrate. It left a long jagged crack in the safety glass.

Just ahead, in a small hamlet, Lam held back as he saw a police car swing in and follow Badri’s car. Its lights flashed and the siren roared as the policeman pulled the black sedan over. Lam eased to the side of the road and waited. The cop went up to the car and said something. A second later someone inside the car shot the policeman twice in the chest and he jolted backwards and fell. The
people in the car rushed out of the sedan and jumped in the police vehicles.

“Land Rover,” Lam said. “Four-wheel drive. Thing can go anywhere. And there’s no way we can stop them from taking it.”

They saw the three men push the First Lady into the rig and throw in the bags of money, then it drove away. Lam was right behind it.

“Why didn’t we bring at least one long gun?” Murdock said. “We could have ended it right there and taken them out one by one.”

“Next time,” Lam said.

The route got tougher. Whoever drove the Land Rover now cut off the streets of the small town into the countryside and off road, rolling through a pasture that had few fences and lots of trees.

Twice Lam thought the Chevy was hung up on the rough ground, but each time he gunned the motor and worked out of it.

A mile later the four-wheel-drive rig splashed across a small creek and up a slope and vanished. Lam drove up to the creek and eyed it. He nodded.

“Yep, we can get across.” He eased the car into the foot-deep water, hit the accelerator just right, and surged across the water and up the slope on the far side. It was a sharp ridge and the front wheels went across then came down without any land under them. The rear wheels tried to drive the rig forward, but it hung there high, centered, and not able to move.

Lam watched the SUV in the distance break through a fence, gain a blacktopped road, and speed off to the south and back toward town.

They got out and tried to push the Chevy forward, but it was stuck.

Lam shrugged and looked toward the road. “Wonder if
they know about hitchhiking in South Africa?” he asked.

As it twined out, the locals understood about asking or a ride, but it still took the SEALs almost three hours to set back to where they could hire a taxi to take them to their hotel. There they found the rest of the SEALs, including Stroh, waiting for them.

“So what’s our boy Badri going to do now?” Stroh asked.

Everyone had gathered in Murdock’s room and they looked at him.

“With the money he has, he can go wherever he wants to and do whatever he wants to do,” Murdock said. “If he’s smart he’ll drop the First Lady off at some street corner, give her coins for the phone to call the police, and fade away into the night never to be heard from again.”

“But you don’t think he will, do you?” Gardner asked.

“Nope. He’s greedy. He’ll look for another pay day with the First Lady again as the bait.”

“The president is furious. I’ve seen him mad before. They have to hold him down sometimes, but this is really putting him over the edge. He did raise the reward for the return of the First Lady to ten million. The local press and TV will have it on today.”

“That might scare some action out of the woodwork, but we can’t count on it,” Gardner said.

Stroh used the phone and talked to the police. He came away with a grin.

“Could be something. A report from an airline saying that they just sold tickets to an Arab man and a white woman who had a scarf over her face and looked like a “reluctant” passenger. They boarded a flight to Maputo, Mozambique.”

“Easy enough to check,” Lam said.

“I’ll call our embassy in Maputo and get them on it. Flight should take about two hours. We’ll see what shows up then.”

“In the meantime …” Murdock said.

“We watch and wait,” Stroh said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and that disguised white woman is actually the First Lady with Badri and we snag them both at the same time.”

“Fat chance of that happening,” Dexter Tate said. “Great big fat chance.”

Badri had driven the police car on the chase. He kept looking for a hazard that would stop the Chevy. Then the creek came into play and the sharp ridge behind it. He had to struggle to get the four-wheel-drive Land Rover over it and figured the Chevy wouldn’t have a chance. It didn’t

“Now you see the superior planning of the Arab World over that of the Great Evil Western World,” Badri said, looking quickly at the First Lady in the back seat. “Superior planning and execution does it every time for the Arab nations.”

“Execution is the right word,” Eleanor Hardesty said. She held her left hand in her right as she had been doing since she woke up.

“Murderer is a better word. How many men have you killed so far on this little escapade of yours, Badri? Two, four, are you up to six or eight by now? How can you live with yourself? You’re nothing but a killer with the morals of a rattlesnake.”

Badri smiled. “Go ahead, try to get me angry. How can I be unhappy? I have ten million dollars, and a key hostage who should be worth even more.

“Ten million dollars should be plenty for a cheap crook like you. You wouldn’t know how to live with ten million. What would you do, buy a house and servants and a big car and fly to Monte Carlo to gamble away your loot? What an asshole you are, Badri. You’re the bottom of the food chain. You’ll eat anything and anyone to get what you want. Men like you should be locked up and starved to
death to prevent any contamination of the honest people in the world.”

“Okay, stop. That’s too much. I told you I’m in a good mood, but I can change. You saw me kill two men, that’s all. Now shut up your face before I do you a favor and put a bullet in your thick skull and dump you along the roadside so the wolves and jackals and other assorted wild animals can tear your body apart as they have a square meal.”

They drove in silence then. Shortly they returned to the large town, and Badri parked the marked police car and the four walked away from it for two blocks to a highly traveled street. The first taxi they saw stopped and picked them up. The money went in the trunk and the four people filled up the cab.

Back at the hotel, Badri ordered steak dinners and two bottles of wine for all of them from room service. He cut open one of the bags of money and took out a square package sealed in plastic wrap. Inside were neat stacks of wrapped bundles of $100 bills. He slit the plastic and stacked the Federal Reserve wrapped bundles of bills on the small desk. There were eight of the bundles in each package.

“Look at this. Eight of these stacks and hundreds in each one. That’s ten thousand dollars in each of these inch-high bunches. In this one package, that’s eighty thousand dollars.”

“Enjoy it while you can, Badri,” the First Lady said. “You’ll never live to spend much of it. My prediction.”

The big .45 caliber pistol came out of his belt in one swift motion, and Badri pushed the cold muzzle hard in the soft tissue under the First Lady’s chin, jamming her head upward to relive the pressure.

“I could blow your fucking brains out right now, Mrs. President. You know that? Why are you so nasty all the time?”

“I’ve learned a great deal from you lately, Badri. Nasty is just one of those attributes.”

Badri snorted, and then laughed. “I have to give it to you, Mrs. President, you never stop. You’re a fighter.” He pulled the pistol down and slapped her sharply on the face. “If you give me any more trouble, I’m going to tape your mouth shut, so I don’t have to listen to your caterwauling. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

She nodded.

“Good.” He walked up and down in the room, waving a stack of ten thousand dollars. “Now, what’s next? I might just call off any more moves and fade into the distance, never to be heard from again.” He did a little dance and looked out the hotel window. Then he checked his watch.

“Where’s the big radio?” One of his men brought the SATCOM to him. He set it up with the small dish antenna aimed out the window. He had left it set to the correct frequency and pushed the send button on the hand mike.

“President Hardesty. You better get on this radio. You have five minutes to get here. I don’t want some lackey; I will speak only with you. Get back to me quickly.”

He let up on the send button and listened. Less than a minute later the set came on.

“Badri, that must be you. It’s five
A.M.
here in Washington. The president is sleeping. I’ll get him up. It will take ten minutes. Then he’ll talk.”

Badri smiled. At least he was messing up the old man’s sleep. That amused him. He worked over his plan as he waited. When the set came on he was ready.

“Mr. Badri. This is President Hardesty.”

“My next demand is going to have a consequence. If you do not comply with my demand, the next package that goes to the police here in Durban will be Eleanor Hardesty’s right hand. Do I make myself clear?”

“Absolutely clear, Mr. Badri.”

“Good. Now listen carefully. I assume you’re recording this message. You can play it over a dozen times, it will still say the same thing. You will put fifty million dollars in one hundred dollar bills in a business jet aircraft that can fly five hundred miles an hour, and send it to the airport here at Durban. There will be no armed guards, no military personnel, no police or CIA members on the plane. Just the fifty million and the two pilots and a crew chief if required. These may be military pilots. You will tell me the flight plan of the plane, when it takes off from Washington, where it lands to refuel, what countries it flies to, and when it is due to arrive in Durban. There will be no advance notice to the Durban police or to any South African army, or its air force. It will be a secret flight. Once on the ground, the plane will remain with me as part of the demands. The pilots and crew will be free to take commercial air home after staying incognito for three days in a hotel of my choosing. At that time the First Lady will be freed unharmed.

“If you don’t follow these instructions to the letter, the First Lady loses her right hand. There are only so many body parts that I can deliver to you without endangering the lady’s health.

“Have you heard my demands?”

“I have heard them, Mr. Badri. I’ll consult with my advisors to see how they can be implemented. It will take at least twenty four hours for us to evaluate and prepare for a flight like this. Goodbye.”

The transmission stopped and Badri turned off the set.

In the hotel where Murdock was quartered, he had his SATCOM tuned to the CIA channel that Badri had been using, as usual. Don Stroh, who had gone to his room after they had lunch, came hurtling through the door into Murdock’s room.

He looked at the SATCOM set.

“You heard?” Stroh asked.

Murdock nodded. “We’ve got to stop this bastard and do it within twenty-four hours.”

Murdock scowled at Stroh and then wiped his face with both hands. “It’s just after fourteen hundred, that’s two
P.M.
to you, Stroh. We have to get done before two
A.M.
What? How? When? Where? Why can’t we locate this guy?”

“Over two hundred hotels, big and small, in this town. We can’t check them all.”

“Maybe we should try. We have seventeen men. If each one took ten hotels, we might just find him.”

“Might? I can’t risk the First Lady’s life on a maybe.”