War Lord (32 page)

I checked his pockets and found a few US dollars and two Somali thousand-shilling notes in the bottom of a thigh pocket, which was probably as much in the way of identification as I could hope for. Next I opened the bag. It stank of sweat, tobacco, grass and something my nose couldn’t identify. I dug around. Two empty AK-47 mags; standard terrorist ski mask, black; a cheap plastic spray or rain jacket with hood; a pair of pants, dirty; a ratty blue t-shirt with holes; a red scarf. The source of the unusual smell lay in the bottom, a bundle of damp leaves bound tightly together inside a banana leaf. I pulled out the bundle and took a sniff. Christ, this smelled foul, like old meat soused in vinegar. I’d seen pictures of the stuff before in DEA handouts, but never come across it.
Khat
, drug of choice in Somalia, Yemen and Kenya. From what I remembered reading, the stuff produced an effect similar to speed when chewed or brewed up like tea. I threw it back in the bag and pulled the zip shut. The spray jacket told me the dead guy spent time at sea, the ski mask and AK mags said bandit, the Somali shillings and the
khat
suggested his nationality. In short: Somali pirate. His vessel had to be the
African Spirit.
Maybe the NVG-wearing bandits I’d seen aboard had captured it along with the men bivouacking in the bunker. I wondered why the port authorities hadn’t challenged the vessel. Maybe they’d just been bribed to look the other way.

Moving on, the music I’d heard had come from an antiquated cassette/compact disc/radio player. It was on the floor, covered in trash. The battery levels on the player’s face hovered in the red. The floors in the other rooms were thin concrete slabs but here the floor was wood. I noticed an empty foil fruit-juice container sticking up between the boards and brushed it aside with my foot but it refused to budge. It appeared to be jammed in the seat of a trapdoor. Further investigation revealed a knot in a rope recessed into one of the boards and a hole in the floor beside the trapdoor. I pulled on the rope and a section of floor came with it. I lifted it completely out, revealing a dark square of nothingness beneath. The rungs of a ladder disappeared into the jet-black void.

I holstered the Desert Eagle in the small of my back, and shifted the .38 to my left hand. A hand free, I carried the battery to the hole in the floor, set it down and dangled the globe into the basement. The bulb flickered off and on several times until it stopped swinging, the connections dodgy.

Lowering my head into the hole, I saw . . . Jesus Christ, it was a man hanging by his wrists from a chain bolted to the ceiling. I gagged. The air smelled putrid in there – of blood, shit and death. I had no choice but to climb down into that stinking hellhole to get a better look. The man, a white man, was stripped to his undershorts and covered in dirt and human feces, festering machete cuts, burns, bruises and welts. The animals had been shitting on this guy through the hole in the floor above. He had to be dead, but then I saw a bubble of mucus grow out of his nostril and pop. The guy was alive. I checked the chains to see if I could get him down quick. They were covered in thickly clotted blood. And then I saw why. The manacles attached to those chains were secured with bolts that went clean through the poor bastard’s wrists.

‘Can you hear me?’ I said. ‘I’m gonna get you down.’

I spun around, looking for something that might help get the job done. There were more auto batteries here – three of them wired together. Other wires were attached to the terminals with alligator clips. The ends were wrapped in sponges, one of which dangled over a bucket of filthy black water.

The man hanging by his wrists started to whisper, a dry exhausted rasp. His lips and tongue were cracked and I couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. This guy needed water bad. I climbed back up the ladder to get the two full bottles I’d noticed upstairs, returned and poured some water into his mouth. Most of it he coughed straight back up. His lips were moving. He was saying something. I went up close.

‘I toe there noth . . .’ he whispered.

‘You told them nothing?’ I said, taking a guess.

He nodded.

‘Attaboy,’ I said, wondering what information the guy had that the fucks holding him wanted.

‘I toe there nothi, nothi . . .’

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him. I kicked a pile of trash to one side and saw a hammer and an old wrench, probably what had been used to bolt the guy in.

‘I toe there noth . . .’

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

He swallowed, coughed up a blood clot that ran down his chin and made his Adam’s apple jerk up and down. ‘Weewarah. Ran Weewarah. Ran Weewarah . . .’

Randy Sweetwater.
My heart backfired. ‘Fuck! Randy! That’s you?’

Tears streamed from his eyes. ‘Waity, waity, waity?’

‘Waity?’ I asked him.

‘Waity,’ he said, over and over.

Waity?
And then it hit me. ‘You mean W80? The nuke?’

Apparently it did because with the burden of this knowledge passed along, Randy slumped to his knees, unconscious, pulling the chains taut and jerking his arms violently in their sockets.

*

Being out cold did Randy a favor. It wasn’t easy getting the manacles off those bolts with a slippery, rusty wrench. It wasn’t easy getting him up through the hole in the floor. And it wasn’t easy carrying him to the waiting cab across the river of mud and shit. Most difficult of all was convincing the cab driver to let me put the bleeding feces-covered agent on his rear seat.

The promise of another ten bucks overcame the problem. But where to take him? There was a hospital up the road from the Southern Sun offering a nice view over the water. But Sweetwater was in a bad way and a nice view wasn’t going to be enough. Some of the deep machete cuts on his legs and back had gone septic. He was also badly dehydrated and who knew what the fuck else. I’d given him more sips of water from those scavenged bottles, but he hadn’t been able to keep much of it down. His captors believed he was as good as dead, which was probably why they’d left him breathing. Maybe they just wanted to make his death as ugly as possible – torture the guy a few hours more before he died alone, from blood loss and septicemia.

‘We take him to hospital?’ the driver wanted to know.

‘How far is the US Embassy from here?’

‘Twenty minute.’

‘Go there. Hurry.’

The driver stepped on it while I sat in the back with Randy to stop him sliding onto the floor. I wanted to ask him where that nuke was, who had it, what they intended to use it for, and when they intended to use it. None of which was possible, the guy being unconscious. So instead I kept brushing the persistent flies off him and counted the machete strikes on his legs and back. I counted more than a hundred before giving up. Some of the cuts were over a quarter of an inch deep. His wrists were a mess. I’d chosen to leave the bolts where they were in case I severed vital blood vessels pulling them out. God knows how the arteries hadn’t been destroyed when they were hammered through.

‘How much farther?’ I shouted forward.

‘Ten minute, a little more perhaps.’

Randy stirred briefly, distracting me, then returned to his previous limp state. Alabama had been right about him being alive, and with odds I believed were overwhelmingly against it. I wanted the opportunity to ring her to give her the news, but someone from the embassy would eventually have the pleasure of doing that, though maybe they shouldn’t be too hasty about placing the call. I’d seen enough battleground casualties to know that while some people recovered from devastating wounds, others died from injuries that seemed little more than a scratch. Just because Randy had made it this far didn’t mean his prospects were good. As far as I could tell he had no broken bones or major punctures in his chest cavity or back, which was reassuring, but he’d lost a lot of blood from those cuts and some of them wept yellow and green pus. I took his pulse. His heart rate was completely off the scale, windmilling like a fan in a storm. The guy could blow a gasket any moment.

‘How long now?’ I shouted.

‘Ten minute! Ten minute!’

You said that last time, pal. A pre-dawn tropical downpour was now drenching the scenery out the window. We were well out of the bad end of town, this area resembling the one around my hotel, with plenty of gardens and so forth, though nothing appeared particularly familiar in the darkness.

The cab ride was giving me time to consider whether taking Randy to the embassy was such a smart move, given what Petinski said about the situation there with the station chief taking bribes. I had no idea who he’d been taking bribes from, or if the bribery related to this case. For all I knew it was von Weiss or one of the White brothers doing the paying off. And were there others besides the chief still dug in at the embassy, selling their country out the back door? Or was the cancer entirely cut out with his removal? Too many questions with no answers. All I knew was that the medical aid at the embassy would be first world.

Besides, indecision was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I had to get back to Petinski and Ken, convince them to drop their stakeout and form a boarding party. And, of course, I could give Petinski the news about her former partner. Speak of the devil, he groaned.

I leaned in close. ‘Randy? Randy . . .’

‘Eye dee,’ he whispered. ‘Eye dee.’

‘What? Eye what? Idea?’ I asked him. He was drifting in and out.

‘Eyee dee, eyee dee,’ he repeated before his mouth went slack and he slipped back into unconsciousness.

‘Sir, we are here!’ the driver said. ‘US Embassy.’

There was now a wall beside the road. I couldn’t see the end of it. It was high, too, and blast resistant, featuring anti-truck bollards disguised as potted trees placed at regular intervals a distance out from the base. With a wall this long, the compound behind it had to be
massive
. That massiveness felt reassuring. And so was the sight of the Stars and Stripes hanging from a towering flagpole behind the wall, transfixed in the crossfire of floodlight beams.

A roadway opened up on our right, leading to a parking lot. The driver turned into it. A gatehouse lay ahead. The lights were out. Heavy steel anti-collision gates prevented access to the compound beyond.

‘Wait here,’ I told the driver as I got out and ran to the gate. Shit, no buzzer to press, but there’d be cameras on this entrance and, in this part of the world, someone somewhere would be watching monitors. I ran back to the cab.

‘You got a pen or pencil?’

He shook his head. ‘No, sir.’

‘A cell phone? Let me make a call? You can add it to the bill.’

He handed it over reluctantly, an ancient Nokia with a cracked screen and the battery held in place with a bit of old electrical tape. There was a notice on the wall with an emergency number to call. I dialed the number. Nothing. I examined the phone’s screen. Signal strength one bar out of five. I tried it again with the same result.

‘Sometime it work. Sometime not.’ The driver shrugged.

Shit. I gave him back his phone, went to the gutter, found a piece of rock and used it to scrawl on the asphalt. The rain instantly washed it away. Double shit. Four twenty-five a.m.: time was getting away from me. I went back to the cab and opened the rear door wide.

‘Sorry, buddy,’ I said as I put my arms under Randy and lifted him out. Last time I saw him he was maybe a hundred and ninety pounds, but not anymore. On top of everything else, his captors had starved the poor bastard. The good news was that he was easy to carry when the ground underfoot wasn’t a river of poo. Taking extra care of his wrists, I set him down on the asphalt in a puddle of light in front of a surveillance camera, then ran back to the cab, grabbed the dead Somali’s overnight bag and stripped the cover off the back seat.

‘Hey!’ the driver snapped.

He didn’t know what to say when I pulled the headrest out of the front seat. ‘The bill – add another twenty,’ I told him and rushed back to Randy. The rain was still coming down hard. The guy wasn’t moving, but he was breathing. I repositioned him on his side, put the headrest under his ear and spread the seat cover over him. I took the clothes from the bag, laid them on the cover and then put the rain jacket over the top. That’d have to do. Randy wouldn’t be lying there long. But to make sure of that, I took the .38 from my sock and fired it into the air once, twice, sharp cracks ringing around the wall and bouncing off the gatehouse.

‘What are you doing? You will make them angry!’ the driver wailed as I jumped in the back seat. He wrenched the wheel to one side and stood on the gas pedal.

‘I couldn’t find the doorbell,’ I said, as we snaked out of the lot. Whoever was watching those security screens would see a body placed outside the gate by a guy firing a gun. An alarm would be raised and folks would rush out to see if the body was alive or dead. That was my plan, at any rate. I just had to hope that Randy would regain consciousness long enough to tell someone who he was and what was going down, because I’d run out of options for the moment on that score. ‘Okay. You know the Holiday Inn? That’s where we’re going.’

‘No! I want money! You pay
now
!’

I was tempted to remind him that I was the only one in the car with a gun, but chose the next best option and lied in the most soothing voice I could muster. ‘The Holiday Inn is where all my cash is. I’ve got nothing on me.’

‘
What?!
’ he squealed like someone was squeezing his nuts. ‘Two hundred dollar you owe me!’

Did I? I’d lost count. That seemed a lot.

‘You have no money?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got money, but like I said, it’s at the Inn. And if you don’t get me there pronto, I’ll take ten off.’

The driver swore at me in Swahili, downshifted and hauled ass.

‘How long till we get there?’ I asked. ‘Lemme guess, ten minutes?’

‘Yes, ten minute,’ the driver snapped, giving me the evil eye in his rear-view mirror.

In fact it was eight.

Up ahead on the left, just before the hotel, was a vehicle with its hazard lights flashing and its alarm honking. Parked in front of it was Ken’s light-green Ford. On the other side of the street was a prefab concrete block of around ten stories lit up like a bad party in a variety of colors the hotel probably described as ‘fun’. The Holiday Inn ‘H’ was displayed in a concrete frame just off the sidewalk and the forecourt was clearly visible. Petinski and Ken had chosen a good vantage point from which to keep the place under surveillance.