Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy (20 page)

Bourne turned. At the same moment he recognized the Asian features of the face inside the hood; Khan shot a burst of aviation fuel into his face. Bourne's hands came up and he choked, completely blinded.

Khan rushed him, pushing him back against the slick metal skin of the fuselage. He delivered two vicious blows, one to Bourne's solar plexus, one to the side of his head. As Bourne's knees collapsed, Khan shoved him into the cargo hold.

Turning, Khan saw a cargo handler heading toward him. He lifted an arm. "It's okay, I'll lock up," he said. Luck was with him, as the rain made it difficult for anyone to see his face or his uniform. The cargo handler, grateful to get out of the rain and wind, returned a salute of thanks. Khan slammed the cargo door shut, locked it. Then he sprinted to the fuel truck, drove it far enough away from the plane so that it would not look suspicious.

The security police that Bourne had spotted before were making their way down the row of jets. They signaled to the pilot. Khan put the jet between himself and the oncoming police. He reached up, unlocked the cargo bay door, swung himself inside. Bourne was on his hands and knees, his head hanging down. Khan, surprised at his recuperative powers, kicked him hard in the ribs. With a grunt, Bourne fell over on his side, his arms wrapped around his waist.

Khan took out a length of cord. He pressed Bourne face-first onto the cargo bay deck, took his arms behind his back and wrapped the wire around his crossed wrists. Over the sound of the rain, he could hear the security police shouting to the pilot and co-pilot for their IDs. Leaving Bourne incapacitated, Khan walked over and quietly pulled the bay door closed.

For a few minutes Khan sat cross-legged in the darkness of the cargo bay. The pinging of the rain on the skin of the fuselage set up an arrhythmic percussion that reminded him of the drums in the jungle. He had been quite ill when he had heard those drums. To his fever-stricken mind, they had sounded like the roaring of aircraft engines, the frantic beating of the air about the outflow vents just before it begins a steep dive. The sound had frightened him because of the memories it brought up, memories he had fought long and hard to keep at the very bottom of his consciousness. Because of the fever, all his senses were heightened to an almost painful pitch. He was aware that the jungle had come alive, that shapes were coming warily toward him in an ominous wedgelike formation. His one conscious action was to bury the small carved stone Buddha he wore around his neck under leaves in a shallow hurriedly dug grave beneath where he lay. He could hear voices, and after a while he became aware that the shapes were asking him questions. He squinted through the fever-sweat to make them out in the emerald twilight, but one of them covered his eyes with a blindfold. Not that it was needed. When they lifted him off the bed of leaves and detritus he had made for himself, he passed out. Waking two days later, he found himself inside a Khmer Rouge encampment. As soon as he was deemed fit by a cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and one watery eye, the interrogation began. They had thrown him into a pit with writhing creatures which to this day he could not identify. He was cast into a darkness more complete, more profound than any he had ever known before. And it was this darkness, enveloping, constricting, pressing against his temples like a weight growing in baleful proportion to the hours that passed, that terrified him the most.

A darkness not unlike this one, in the belly of Rush Service Flight 113.

...
Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly. And said, I cried by
reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I,
and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas;
and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me . ..
He still remembered that section from the frayed and stained copy of the Bible the missionary had made him memorize. Horrible! Horrible! Because Khan, in the midst of the hostile and murderous Khmer Rouge, had been cast quite literally into the belly of hell, and he had prayed—or what passed for prayer in his still unformed mind—for deliverance. This was before the Bible had been pushed on him, before he had understood the teachings of the Buddha, for he had descended into formless chaos at a very early age. The Lord had heard Jonah cry out from the belly of the whale, but no one had heard Khan. He had been utterly alone in the darkness and then, when they felt that they had softened him up sufficiently, they pulled him out and slowly, expertly, with a cold passion it would take him years to acquire began to bleed him.

Khan snapped on the flashlight he carried with him, sat immobile, staring at Bourne. Unfolding his legs, he kicked out violently, the sole of his shoe catching Bourne on the shoulder so that he rolled over on his side facing Khan. Bourne groaned, and his eyes fluttered open. He gasped, took another shuddering breath, inhaling the fumes from the aviation fuel, and convulsed, vomiting in the space between where he lay in burning pain and misery and where Khan sat serene as Buddha himself.

"I've been down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever; yet have I brought up my life from the darkness," Khan said, paraphrasing Jonah. He continued to stare fixedly into Bourne's reddened swollen face. "You look like shit." Bourne struggled to rise onto one elbow. Khan calmly kicked it out from under him. Again Bourne tried to sit up and again Khan thwarted him. The third time, however, Khan did not make a move and Bourne sat up, facing him.

The faint and maddeningly enigmatic smile played across Khan's lips, but there was a sudden spark of flames in his eyes.

"Hello, Father," he said. "It's been such a long time I was beginning to think we'd never have this moment."

Bourne shook his head slightly. "What the hell are you talking about?" "I'm your son."

"My son is ten years old."

Khan's eyes were glittery. "Not that one. I'm the one you left behind in Phnom Penh." All at once, Bourne felt violated. A red rage rose up inside him. "How dare you? I don't know who you are, but my son Joshua is dead." The effort cost him, for he had inhaled more of the fumes, and he bent over suddenly, retching again, but there was nothing left inside him to vomit up.

"I'm not dead." Khan's voice was almost tender as he leaned forward, pulled Bourne back up to face him. In so doing, the small carved stone Buddha fell away from his hairless chest, swinging a little with his efforts to keep Bourne upright. "As you can see."

"No, Joshua is dead! I put the coffin in the ground myself, along with Dao and Alyssa!

They were wrapped in American flags."

"Lies, lies and more lies!" Khan held the carved stone Buddha in the palm of his hand, held it toward Bourne. "Look at this, and remember, Bourne." Reality seemed to slip away from Bourne. He heard his rapid pulse thundering in his inner ears, a tidal wave that threatened to pick him up and carry him off. It couldn't be! It couldn't! "Where—where did you get that?"

"You know what this is, don't you?" The Buddha disappeared behind the curl of his fingers. "Have you finally recognized your long-lost son Joshua?"

"You're not Joshua!" Bourne was enraged now, his face dark, his lips pulled back from his teeth in an animal snarl. "Which Southeast Asia diplomat did you kill to get it?" He laughed grimly. "Yes, I know more about you than you think."

"Then you're sadly mistaken. This is mine, Bourne. Do you understand?" He opened his hand, revealed the Buddha again, the stone dark with the imprint of his sweat. "The Buddha is mine!"

"Liar!" Bourne leaped at him, his arms coming around from behind his back. He had flexed his muscles—the cords expanding as Khan had wound the wire around him—then using the slack had worked his way out of the bonds while Khan had been gloating. Khan was caught out, unprepared for his headlong bull-rush. He tumbled backward, Bourne on top of him. The flashlight struck the deck, rolling back and forth, its potent beam flashing on them, then off, illuminating an expression here, a bulging muscle there. In this eerily striped and stippled darkness and light, so like the dense jungle they had left behind, they fought like beasts, breathing in each other's enmity, struggling for supremacy.

Bourne, his teeth gritted, struck Khan again and again in a maddened attack. Khan managed to gain a grip on Bourne's thigh, pressed in on the nerve bundle there. Bourne lurched, his temporarily paralyzed leg buckling beneath him. Khan struck him hard on the point of the chin, and Bourne staggered further, shaking his head. He grabbed hold of his switchblade just as Khan delivered another massive blow. Bourne dropped the knife and Khan picked it up, flipped open the blade.

He stood over Bourne now, pulled him up by the front of his shirt. A brief tremor passed through him, as a current sizzles through a wire when the switch is thrown. "I'm your son. Khan is a name I took, just as David Webb took the name Jason Bourne."

"No!" Bourne fairly shouted this over the rising noise and vibration of the engines.

"My son died with the rest of my family in Phnom Penh!"

"I
am
Joshua Webb," Khan said. "You abandoned me. You left me to the jungle, to my death."

The point of the knife hovered over Bourne's throat. "How many times I almost died. I would have, I'm sure of it, if I didn't have your memory to hold on to."

"How dare you use his name! Joshua is dead!" Bourne's face was livid, his teeth bared in animal rage. His vision was clouded with blood-lust.

"Maybe he is." The knife-blade lay against Bourne's skin. A millimeter more and it would draw blood. "I'm Khan now. Joshua—the Joshua you knew—is dead. I've come back for revenge, to deliver your punishment for abandoning me. I could've killed you so many times in the last few days, but I stayed my hand because before I killed you I wanted you to know what you had done to me." Khan's lips opened and a bubble of spittle grew at the corner of his mouth. "Why did you abandon me? How could you have run away!"

The plane gave a terrific lurch as it began to taxi out onto the runway. The blade sprayed blood as it sliced into Bourne's skin, then it was lifted away as Khan lost his balance. Bourne took the advantage, drove his balled fist into Khan's side. Khan swept his foot back, hooking it behind Bourne's ankle, and Bourne went down. The plane slowed, turning onto the head of the runway.

"I didn't run away!" Bourne shouted. "Joshua was taken from me!" Khan pounced on him, the knife flashing down. Bourne twisted and the blade drove past his right ear. He was aware of the ceramic gun secreted at his right hip, but try as he might he wouldn't be able to get to it without leaving himself open to a fatal attack. They struggled, their muscles bulging, their faces engorged with effort and rage. Their breath sawed from between half-open mouths, their eyes and minds searching for the most minute opening as they attacked and defended, counterattacked only to be rebuffed. They were well matched, if not in age, then in speed, strength, skill and cunning. It was as if they knew each other's minds, as if they could anticipate each other's moves a split second beforehand, thus neutralizing whatever advantage had been sought. They did not fight with dispassion and, therefore, they did not fight at peak level. All their emotion had been flushed out of the depths, lay stranded and squirming in the conscious mind, like an oil slick clouding water.

The plane lurched, the fuselage trembling as the plane began its race down the runway. Bourne slipped and Khan used his free hand as a cudgel to draw Bourne's attention away from the knife. Bourne countered, striking the inside of Khan's left wrist. But now the blade-point flashed in on him. He stepped back and to the side, inadvertently unlatching the bay door. The rising motion of the plane caused the unlocked door to swing open. As the runway blurred by below, Bourne splayed himself out like a starfish to keep himself inside the plane, gripping the doorframe tightly with both hands. Grinning maniacally, Khan leaned in toward Bourne, the knife-blade describing a wicked shallow arc that would cut across the entire width of Bourne's abdomen.

Khan lunged just as the plane was about to lift off the runway. At the last possible instant, Bourne let go with his right hand. His body, driven out and back by gravity, swung so violently away that his shoulder was nearly dislocated. Where his body had been was now a gaping space through which Khan fell, tumbling to the tarmac below. Bourne had one final glimpse of him, nothing more than a gray ball against the black of the runway.

Then the plane was airborne and Bourne was swinging up, farther from the open doorway. He struggled; rain whipped against him like chain-mail. The wind threatened to take his breath away, but it scrubbed the last of the jet fuel from his face, the rain rinsing his stinging red-rimmed eyes, flushing the poison from his skin and tissue. The plane banked to the right and Khan's flashlight rolled across the cargo bay deck, tumbled out after him. Bourne knew that if he did not get himself inside within seconds, he would be lost. The terrible strain on his arm was far too intense for him to hold on much beyond that.

Swinging his leg around, he managed to hook the back of his left ankle into the doorway. Then, with a mighty effort, he heaved himself forward, the back of his knee clamped against the raised frame, giving himself both purchase and leverage enough to turn so that he was facing the fuselage. He got his right hand on the lip of the seal and in this fashion was able to work his way into the interior. His last act was to slam the door shut.

Bourne, bruised, bleeding and in a great deal of pain, collapsed into an exhausted heap. In the frightful, turbulent darkness of the shuddering interior, he saw again the small carved stone Buddha that he and his first wife had given Joshua for his fourth birthday. Dao had wanted the spirit of Buddha to be with their son from the earliest age. Joshua, who had died along with Dao and his little sister when the enemy plane had strafed the river they had been playing in.

Joshua was dead. Dao, Alyssa, Joshua—they were all dead, their bodies ripped asunder by the hail of bullets from the dive-bombing plane. His son could not be alive, he
could
not.
To think otherwise would be to invite insanity. Then who was Khan really, and why was he playing this hideously cruel game?