The Pirate Hunters (15 page)

The place was enormous. Nearly five square miles in area, it was an immense field of craggy trees, overgrown grass, weeds, boulders, and of course, graves and gravestones—hundreds of thousands of them.

Batman studied the cemetery from the air. “Maybe this is where
we
start to get lucky,” he yelled to his teammates.

He landed the copter in the darkest part of the sprawling graveyard and the three men climbed out.

“Fucking hey . . . look at this place,” Gunner said. “Is this where every person who drops dead in Indonesia gets planted? There’s like a million graves here.”

“It’s already giving me the creeps,” Crash said. “Are we sure this is the right thing to do?”

Batman looked around, making certain no one was nearby. “It’s part of the plan because of what it says in the superstitions book,” he told them. “You want to reread the book now? After we’re already here?”

They began walking among the graves. They were here not to steal a body, but to steal funeral flowers. Trouble was, they’d landed in an area of older graves, and they could see only patches of covered-over ground and grave markers.

“Damn—no flowers anywhere?” Batman asked.

“I think the book said some Indonesians bury the funeral flowers with the body,” Crash said.

“Well, we don’t want to roam too far away from the copter,” Batman said. “So, I guess we start digging here.”

Retrieving some entrenching tools from the aircraft, they selected what looked to be a relatively fresh grave and commenced digging. But after five minutes of hard work, they still hadn’t found any flowers or plants. They kept at it, until they heard a bone-chilling
clunk!
Crash’s entrenching tool had hit the top of a coffin.

“Oh God,” he cried. “Is that what I think it was?”

Before anyone could answer, Gunner’s boot went through the top of the flimsy casket and he found himself implanted in a corpse.

“Jesuszz fuck!” he screamed. “Jesuszz!”

Crash pulled him out and they quickly threw dirt back onto the broken coffin and grave.

“I’m telling you,” Gunner said, trying to calm down, “we shouldn’t have smacked that monkey or spilled the salt or whistled during all that. This bad-luck shit must work
both
ways here.”

“Let’s just try somewhere else,” Batman told them.

They found a second relatively new grave and started digging again. But no sooner had their shovels hit this ground than they heard a dog start howling in the distance. It unnerved Gunner so much, he dropped his digging tool and unslung his M4.

“Goddamn,” Batman scolded him in an urgent whisper. “Can you calm down, please?”

“Do you remember what the book said about hearing a dog howl in a graveyard after midnight?” Gunner asked him, looking around nervously. “It says, ‘if a dog howls past midnight, it signifies a wandering earthbound spirit on the premises.’ Like in a ghost?”

“You memorized
that
?” Batman asked him.

“Hey, it was your book—you said to read it,” Gunner shot back at him.

And now Crash was getting caught up in it. “Well, what the fuck time is it?” he asked as the dog began wailing again.

“It’s five minutes to midnight,” Batman said. “Not that it
makes a piss hole of difference. The Indonesians are the superstitious ones, guys, remember? Not us.
Them
.”

The dog howled again. It seemed closer this time.

“What did it say about howling
before
midnight?” Crash asked Gunner seriously.

Gunner tapped his forehead in an effort to remember. “I think if a dog howls at the stroke of midnight, it signifies death in the family,” he said. “What happens before, I don’t know.”

The two men began digging furiously. Batman didn’t know whether to laugh or chew them out. “You guys are unbelievable,” he said.

They finally found some dead flowers beneath the dirt and quickly did what they came here to do: rub them all over their hands and faces and battle suits.

“These are lilies, right?” Gunner kept asking. “And orchids? They’re the kind to use.”

“Two minutes to midnight,” Crash said, hearing the dog howl again.

They both turned to Batman. “Enough?” Gunner asked him.

Batman just shook his head. He grabbed some loose flowers. “Yeah—let’s go.”

With that, both men sprinted to the copter. Batman climbed in after them.

“One minute to go,” Crash said.

Batman again just shook his head. He hit the throttles and pulled up on the collective.

“I really made the right choice hooking up with you two.”

THE FLIGHT TO
the other end of the island took just two minutes.

They easily relocated the white beach that “went on forever.” Batman put the copter down behind a jetty that was partially hidden by jungle. Gazing over the jetty with their night-vision goggles, the three men spotted a building washed in green neon among the many bars and dance clubs along the waterfront. But this place was not some wooden box on stilts. It was a huge, ornate old building of mixed Asian and Western
design, with many floors and windows. It looked more like some groovy apartment building than a whorehouse. The sign above the front door read Kucing Jantan Rumah—Home of the Tomcat.

“Gentlemen,” Batman said. “Behold the brothel at Brothel Beach.”

THE HOOKERS SMELLED
them coming.

Even before Gunner kicked in the back door, some of the prostitutes inside the brothel had detected the scent of dead lilies and overripe orchids blowing in the hot night air. That’s why the six women taking a tea break in the back room were already freaking out when Team Whiskey burst in.

The sight of their M4s, their black camos or their otherworldly night-vision-equipped helmets didn’t faze the hookers one bit. It was scent of the dead flowers on them, and even worse, the mud on their boots.

“Is that dirt from a graveyard?” one girl asked frantically after the trio exploded through the door.

Batman was stumped for a moment; they all were.

He finally replied: “Yes, it is.”

The hookers lost it at that point. “God help us!” one screamed.

They started to push past them, trying to get to the back door.

“Wait—how many people are here?” Batman shouted at them. “Where’s the madam? Where are all the radios?”

But the six prostitutes, all scantily clad, gorgeous and Asian, weren’t listening to him. They were manhandling him out of the way now. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” one told him, rushing by.

With that, the hookers fled out the back door.

Batman slammed the already-splintered door behind them in frustration. Then he signaled Crash and Gunner to check out the hallway leading into the main part of the cathouse.

What an odd beginning
, he thought.

According to Twitch’s debriefing, the brothel doubled as Zeek’s intelligence-gathering center, so Whiskey was here to destroy it. Their
moyens d’entrée
was the smell of funeral flowers because, according to the superstitions book, any
house in Indonesia that smelled of flowers placed on a grave would be considered unlucky forever and would have to be abandoned by those who lived there. Having dirt from a cemetery on one’s shoes apparently brought even more bad luck.

But as it turned out, the team had arrived bearing
too much
misfortune. As word quickly spread throughout the brothel about the sudden appearance of the flower-scented, muddy-booted visitors, the result was a virtual stampede of call girls going out the front door of the cathouse, with an equally frantic mad dash of clients going out the back. The problem was, Twitch hadn’t been able to remember exactly where the spy center was located within the huge whorehouse, and that’s something Whiskey had to know if they were going to grease it. But weapons cocked or not, no one would stop long enough to talk to them.

It was total chaos by the time the team members found their way to the front parlor, the center of the whorehouse’s universe. It was as if someone had planted a bomb in the place. Call girls were practically knocking the team members to the floor in their rush to escape.

Batman caught an elderly, extremely made-up woman rushing by. He correctly identified her as the house madam.

He held her by the arm. “Zeek is running out of money,” he told her, hurriedly reciting his prepared lines. “And we’re here to collect what he owes us.”

“He owes us money, too!” she barked back at him. “But I’m not staying around to collect. Not in this place.”

“So, where’s all his radio equipment?” he asked her. “His spy gear?”

But she had already broken away from him and was halfway out the door. She called over her shoulder: “I don’t know who you are, but I wouldn’t stay around too long. When more people find out about the bad luck in this place, it won’t be pretty.”

With that, she and the remaining call girls were out the door. Just like that, the place was empty.

Batman, Crash and Gunner just stood there and looked at each other.

“Jesuszz, now what?” Gunner asked.

Batman shrugged. “We gotta toss the joint, I guess.”

Crash and Gunner shrank back. The whorehouse was enormous; just judging by the number of call girls taking flight, there had to be more than a hundred rooms in the place.

“Can I go on record as saying: ‘Ee www?’ ” Crash asked.

They climbed the stairs and began their search. They found just empty bedrooms on the first and second floors, but the higher they got in the building, the stranger things became. On the third floor, many of the rooms had chains and restraining equipment attached to the walls. Whips—and whipped cream—seemed to be the most prominent features on the fourth floor. On the fifth floor, they found rooms filled with large rolls of plastic and bubble wrap. On the sixth floor, many rooms had adult-size diapers scattered about, some used, some not.

“There’s not enough booze in the world to get that image out of my head,” Crash had said on this discovery.

But still, they could find no communications equipment or anything connected to what they’d envisioned Zeek’s spy center to look like.

And yet Twitch had said he’d momentarily glimpsed the inside of the place. “What did we miss?” Gunner wondered.

Batman thought a moment, then asked: “Where’s the last place you’d want to go in a place like this?”

Crash and Gunner answered almost simultaneously: “The kitchen.”

They raced back downstairs, made their way to the rear of the building and went through a door next to the lounge where they’d first come in. Here they found a stove, a refrigerator and a dining table—but nothing to indicate a spy station.

“It’s here though,” Crash said, adding with unintended irony, “I can
smell
it.”

He took out his combat knife and started jabbing the walls. The first three thrusts hit solid wood. On the fourth try, the blade went through a thin piece of plastic veneer. One well-placed kick knocked half the wall down. On the other side, they found a room full of shortwave radios and computers,
bracketed by two hidden doors that ran flush to the wall. This was Zeek’s version of an intelligence-gathering center, right down to the secret entrances.

They searched the place, but nothing surprised them very much at first. The shortwave radios were made on Taiwan; the knock-off computers in South Africa.

“Not exactly MI-6 headquarters, is it?” Crash observed.

But in the bottom drawer of the computer table, Gunner found a notebook containing dozens of e-mail addresses. One of the entries was clearly marked
Indonesian Naval Intelligence Center
. Another
The Malaysian Secret Service
.

“Interesting cybersex partners these chicks had,” Gunner said, reading through the notebook.

He turned it over to Batman, who flipped randomly through it until he came to a page of names and e-mail addresses printed entirely in red ink. He started reading the names, written in a sort of pigeon English, when he realized some of them were familiar. Jiang Zemin. Wang Zhen. Hu Jintao. Zeng Qinghong.

“Do those guys own restaurants or laundries?” Crash asked, reading over his shoulder.

Batman laughed darkly. “They own half the fucking world,” he replied. “These are top guys in the Communist Chinese government.”

Beside each name was an indication—things such as
Likes 5th Flr
or
Owes $$$ for 6th Flr
—plus a calendar date, some recent, some from years past.

“If this means what I think it does,” Batman said, “I predict Pampers will be opening a factory in China soon.”

They heard a noise outside. Crash looked out a nearby window and cried, “Holy crap!”

Gunner and Batman joined him and saw a crowd of people coming up the street, carrying torches and, yes, some of them, pitchforks.

“Christ, is this because of us?” Batman asked.

His answer arrived a moment later when a Molotov cocktail came crashing through the kitchen window behind them.

Before they could react, another firebomb came through the front door. Then another through the battered rear door.

“These people don’t fuck around!” Gunner said. “A few dead flowers and they want to burn the place down . . .”

Within seconds, three large fires were spreading on the bottom floor of the building.

“What should we do?” Crash asked Batman anxiously.

Batman started firing his M4, tearing up the banks of radios and computers inside the spy room. “Just in case!” he yelled over the gunfire.

The other two did the same thing—for about five seconds.

Then Batman stuffed the phone book in his back pocket, along with some DVDs he’d found along the way, and said: “Ladies? After you.”

They left the way they came—punching through the flames and out the rear door. A minute later, they were back out on the beach and running toward their copter, avoiding the huge crowd that by now had surrounded the building. By the time they were airborne again, this crowd had grown to several hundred people, including a police car and a fire truck.

As the team watched silently above, the mob continued throwing firebombs into the brothel, this while the firefighters hosed down nearby buildings to keep the blaze from spreading.