Strike Force Bravo (18 page)

Kazeel obeyed. The gunfire became more intense, the explosions closer and more frequent. But in among it all, he heard another sound. Mechanical. Whirring, blades turning. A helicopter! Its noise soon drowned out everything else. A great downwash splattered him with more crud in his face. Once again, he couldn't see. He could hardly breathe. Suddenly a metal ladder was in front of him. Unseen hands hoisted him to it. He was sternly ordered to hang on.

Kazeel could feel himself being lifted up, bullets passing so close to him they singed his beard as they went by.

He was quickly hauled into the open bay of the helicopter. The remaining Dragos piled in after him. The aircraft began moving away even as tracer fire was bouncing off it. Kazeel was simply astounded. He was close to going into shock again, but the exhilaration of still being alive was overwhelming. He just couldn't believe what was happening. The ferocity displayed by the Dragos in protecting him was astonishing. But to have the foresight to have a helicopter near the site of the ambush? That went so above and beyond…The Chechyans had saved his life so many times over the past 24 hours, he'd lost count.

But there
was
something strange here, at least to Kazeel's battered mind. It was the helicopter itself. It wasn't really a military aircraft. It was roomy inside, but he saw no weapons. And to his amazement, the Dragos knew how to fly it. Two of his sterling bodyguards were behind the controls. Or at least men that looked like them.

But the really odd thing was the helicopter's color. It didn't seem appropriate somehow for a battle zone. Not green or black or a camouflage combination of both.

Instead, it was painted very bright yellow.

And on its tail were the words: Sing-One TV.

Manila
Three days later

Her name was Tiffany, and she was quite possibly the only Tiffany in all of Manila.

She was the assistant day manager of the Xagat Pacific Hotel, by far the most expensive place to stay in the Philippine capital. Tiffany was an American, but on duty she spoke English with a vague European accent. She was just 22, attractive, and stranded in the Philippines by a failed romance. She hated her job. Hated her boss. Hated the hotel's well-heeled customers. She was also in charge of the Xagat's public relations.

She arrived at her office this Saturday morning, 20 minutes late to begin her shift. No sooner had she sat down with her first coffee of the day than she got a call from the front desk. There was a strange man in the lobby. He was claiming he had to pick up a very important message from his boss, yet no message had come in for anyone under his name. He was causing a bit of a ruckus and would not leave.

“Is his boss a guest here?” Tiffany asked the front desk. “He was about a couple weeks ago,” came the reply, or at least that's what the strange man was saying. But he refused to give his boss's name, so there was no way to check. Hotel security had the man under surveillance, but no one working the floor knew what to do. Tiffany gulped the rest of her coffee and charged down to the lobby. This was not the way to start her day.

Her elevator arrived, and she marched past the front desk to a cluster of couches near the main door. The disruptive individual was now sitting here quietly. Tiffany approached the lobby matron, the person who'd first flagged the problem. She was standing about ten feet away from the strange man, giving him his space.

He wasn't really being difficult, the matron explained to Tiffany in a whisper. He was just slow on the uptake. If the message from his boss hadn't arrived yet, he would just wait here until it did. That sort of thing.

Tiffany walked around the couch and finally got a look at him. Bald head. Big muscles. Gold hoop ring in left earlobe. He
was
odd-looking. And his scowl was frightening. But Tiffany noticed he had the eyes, and the eyelashes, of a woman. Six security men were watching him from afar, but Tiffany could tell the guy was making them nervous. She couldn't blame them; he looked like he ate children for breakfast.

He reeked, though, and was dirty and was wearing filthy Middle Eastern–type clothes. He would have to go.

It took all the security people, two bellhops, plus the concierge to finally get the man out. He was half-dragged, half-pushed through the huge revolving door and deposited, butt-first, on the sidewalk outside. Yet no sooner was he on his feet than he was up against the plate-glass window looking back in. He was crying.

Tiffany went over to shoo him away. He pressed an index card up against the window for her to read. It contained just one sentence, written in several different languages. She recognized only two of them: Arabic, which she couldn't read, and English, which she could.

The card said:
My name is Abdul Abu Uni. Can you direct me to the nearest bathroom or airport?

 

He was lost.

In a strange country, filled with strange people, with no money, no luggage. Nowhere to go. Uni, the
shuka,
was lost.

What went wrong? The plan had been so simple up to this point. By Kazeel's wishes, he'd accompanied Bahzi and his men down from Sat Put to see the stash of missiles, which turned out to be stored in the basement of Bahzi's house in Karachi. Uni counted them, which was all Kazeel ever wanted him to do. Eventually reaching the correct number of 36, he okayed the missiles' shipping to their next destination, somewhere in the Philippines. They would make the trip, by cargo air, in crates marked:
U
NITED
N
ATIONS
—D
ECONTAMINATED
H
AZARDOUS
W
ASTE
.

This done, Bahzi's men put Uni himself on an airplane and essentially pointed him east. He was in Manila just a few hours later, again all according to plan. But stepping off the plane at Manila Airport this time was like stepping into another world. Although it was his second trip here in little more than a week, he'd never traveled this far alone before. Through the eyes of someone no brighter than an eight-year-old child, the airport and its chaotic environs were frightening for him.

From there, the plan called for Uni to go to the Xagat Pacific, the same place Kazeel had stayed earlier that month. Here a message from Kazeel would be waiting for him. It would tell Uni what to do next, most probably to wait in place until Kazeel himself returned to Manila, something he'd intended to do all along. But even though it should have arrived more than 48 hours before, Kazeel's message was not there.

Something was not right, and even a half-wit like Uni knew it. He wasn't totally cut off. He did have a cell phone with him. It was a clean Nokia, given to him by Kazeel at Sat Put, to be used only if something went wrong once the two had parted. But only one number was programmed into it: that of Kazeel's cell phone. Uni had been pushing that button madly since discovering there was no message for him at the hotel. But his boss never picked up. Instead, the
shuka
kept getting Kazeel's answering service, a French-speaking woman who was so cold and emotionless, she could even infuriate a dolt like him.

Once tossed from the Xagat, Uni was at a loss as to what to do. Although he'd stayed in a very seedy hostel around the corner from the grand hotel during his first trip here, he'd accompanied Kazeel everywhere he went in those few days. They'd toured the Bangtang Channel together on a private yacht. They'd met the
judus
's contact. They'd seen the mud fight in the brothel.

Desperate, Uni began searching for familiar places now, just as a child would do. He wandered the streets of Manila, a big ugly stranger in a strange and frequently ugly land. The slums were horrific; they overwhelmed Uni, who'd grown up in the isolated high desert of northwest Pakistan. Somehow he found the waterfront and from there the marina from which they'd embarked on their yacht trip. The yacht itself would be easy to find, even for him. It was painted in blue, white, and red, and it was so clean, so smooth, so sleek, it seemed to glisten. But though he searched the marina several times, all he saw were fishing boats and junks. The yacht, which in his mind was the size of a battleship, was no longer there. He was crushed. He'd loved riding on the expensive vessel. It was big and fast and protected him from falling into the water. He'd actually dreamed of riding on it again someday.

He drifted for several more hours, going back through the shantytowns, stumbling his way through the crowds, pushing away the beggars who seemed to be everywhere. By dumb luck he found the fancy restaurant where Kazeel and Marcos had had lunch. It was called the Luzon Cricket Club. Uni stationed himself outside its front door, closely examining anyone going in or out, hoping to see a familiar face, but scaring many. A small army of security men showed up, and just like at the Xagat, he was told to move on.

More hours of confused meandering followed. Night fell, and it began to rain. By the glow alone Uni found the section of downtown Manila called the War Zone, the neighborhood where young girls fought in the mud. He stumbled from saloon to dance hall to strip club, looking for the one sign he thought he would recognize in the neon watercolors of the night.

But though he searched for it until way past midnight, he couldn't find the place called the Impatient Parrot.

 

Cold, wet, tired, and not knowing what else to do, Uni returned to the Xagat.

It was now two in the morning and the rain had turned into a monsoon. The streets around the hotel were empty. Uni avoided passing directly in the front of the place; instead, he crawled up under a low-hanging palm tree next to the hotel's entrance.

He lay there crying, pounding his head on the ground, wondering why Allah was doing this to him. He prayed for forgiveness, prayed for advice. Prayed for good luck. Eyes closed tight, he asked God to send him a sign. When he opened them again, he saw a woman's face staring in at him under the palm fronds. It was Tiffany, the nasty woman who'd ejected him from the hotel earlier. She was leaving work after a long day and had spotted his huge bare feet sticking out from under the branches.

“You…” she was saying, an odd inflection in her voice.

Uni stayed frozen. He was sure the woman would call her friends and have him removed again.

But she had a surprise for him. “You…your message,” she began stuttering. “It came. I mean, it didn't come. But
something
came for you.”

Uni didn't understand her. But she motioned for him to come out from under the tree. The rain had stopped and the sky above was filled with stars. She led him back into the hotel, not through the front door but via the service entrance. They walked through the empty kitchen, where she passed him some dish towels to help dry off. She brought him to a small employee break room near the food storage bin. The tiny room had vending machines, a coffeemaker, a pot of tea on a warmer, some couches, a TV, and a VCR. She left Uni here, sniffing around the teapot, but returned shortly with a small package.

“I saw your name on your card,” she tried to tell him. “And it looked very much like the one on this address. It was delivered here today. In fact, it arrived right after you left.”

Again Uni didn't understand, but he recognized his name on the package and took it from her. He was confused, though. He'd been expecting a simple letter from Kazeel, a love letter in fact, with coded messages within containing his instructions. Why then would Kazeel send him a package?

He opened it with the woman's help; his hands were still stiff from being so wet and cold. She finally tore away the thick paper envelope to find not a letter, but a videotape inside.

Uni was even more baffled now. He equated videotapes with movies, American movies, of which Kazeel had dozens back home in Ubusk. Why would the boss send him a movie?

And was this package even from Kazeel? There was no return address, no paperwork for its delivery. But then again, who else but Kazeel would know he was here?

The woman turned on the TV for him and pushed the tape into the VCR. Then she smiled, briefly, muttered her apologies, and left, her PR work done for the day.

“Show yourself out when you're done,” she told him. “And please, use the back door.”

Uni took off his soaking wet robe and dried off.

He placed his Nokia phone atop the TV set, hoping the water in his pockets had not damaged it. It took him a while to find the VCR's play button. In between, he nearly scalded himself while stealing a cup of tea.

Finally the tape began. At first it showed a bare piece of snowy ground, the camera work very shaky. Then Uni heard a voice. A man said, in Arabic: “Recognize your friends?”

The camera panned over to three dead bodies lying next to a mound of bloody snow. Uni almost dropped his cup of tea. This wasn't a Hollywood movie. This was real. Even he could tell…

The bodies were lying faceup; one of them was huge. The camera zoomed in on the face. It was Bahzi. Shot twice in the head. Next to him, his two oily bodyguards. Their throats had been slashed.

Uni stared unblinking at the screen, not quite sure what was going on. There was a burst of static and an edit to another piece of video. “How about these guys,
shuka?
” the voice asked again. “They were friends of yours, too, weren't they?”

The video focused now on a room full of bodies, the floor beneath them splattered with blood. Uni's stomach turned inside out. He recognized the bloody rug as the one in the main room of Kazeel's mountain home. The bodies were those of the council of seven, Kazeel's closest advisors, the men who lived in the caves around the Pushi. All of them had been shot in the head, right in Kazeel's living room.

Another burst of static, another edit. Uni remained numb. He saw six more men, all bound to chairs in a filthy house somewhere. They, too, were all dead, garrotes around their necks. Uni recognized them as well: they were the Pakistani intelligence agents, the men who'd served as Kazeel's temporary bodyguards.

Still, none of this was making any sense to Uni. But then more static came and went and suddenly he was staring into the face of Kazeel himself….

Uni did drop the hot tea this time, right in his lap, but he didn't feel a thing. He was stunned, reality slowly sinking in. Here was Kazeel, in the middle of the high desert somewhere, clothes torn away, hands bloody, on his knees, begging for his life.

Four masked men appeared behind him; each was carrying a small hand ax. It was early morning, and the sun was coming up. Kazeel saw the men, saw the axes, and commenced wailing even louder. He began pleading with the man operating the camera, begging him to spare his life, that he was sorry, that he would make restitution. It did him no good. The men with the axes converged on him and began chopping him up. His screams were hellish. It took a long time for Kazeel to die. Uni threw up on himself.