Pirate Page 2

  To complete his laundry list of physical complaints, he had such a cocktail of drugs pumping through his system, he was humming like a goddamn high-tension line. Some kind of meth they'd injected him with, a mix of truth serum and speed, and he couldn't get it out of his system.

  Time to hit the pool.

  Brock had spent the preceding few nights in far humbler circumstances. He had lain on bare ground under the stars, freezing his balls off and listening to his camel fart. Having skirted the two walled towns of Tisnet and Goulemain, he'd reached a desert plateau cradled in the foothills of the snow-capped Atlas Mountains.

  Exhausted, he tied his foul-smelling beast to a handy scrub bush and collapsed on the rocky ground. Below his mountain, he could see the hazy lights and minarets of Marrakech in the near distance and the coast of Morocco in the far. He slept hard, woke up with the sun, and started down.

  At eight the previous morning, having given his noxious camel away to the first reasonable facsimile of a decent-looking kid he saw, he'd presented himself and his remaining cash at the reception desk. The dark-eyed beauty behind the computer flashed a winning smile. He'd cleaned up a little first, in the Gents' off the lobby, washing a couple of continents' worth of dirt out of his long brown hair. Couldn't do much about the beard or the clothes, but he'd flirted his way into a room with a big marble bathtub and a balcony overlooking the gardens. A bowl of rose petals by the tub: paradise, just like he said.

  He was so close, now, so close and yet so goddamn far.

  He heard a noise above him and looked skyward. A jumbo was on final, Air France, bringing in another boatload of tourists for le weekend. Down from Paris to hit ye olde Kasbah. Drop a few thousand Euros at the rug and hookah shops in the Medina. Two hours on the ground and the big Frogliner would load 'em up again and fly away home.

  Au re-fuckin'-voir, mes amis. French bastards. When General Moore's JCS munchkins and the seventh-floor suits at Langley heard Harry's epic tale of harrowing adventure, they would not effing believe what their erstwhile "allies" were up to now.

  Brock had a plane to catch, too, but his was an unscheduled departure at an airport short on amenities. Like runways. And, in order to catch that little crop duster, first he had to get on that train to Casablanca.

  Brock International, as he'd dubbed it, lay about thirty-five miles out in the open desert, due north of Casablanca. It was a dried-up oasis called Dasght-al Dar. This garden spot was where an underground spring used to form a wadi, nothing more than a forgotten pinprick on a few old maps; even parched-brain camel-drivers hadn't bothered to visit the site for a century or more.

  At eighteen hundred hours today, just at dusk, a two-seater biplane with no markings would touch down and taxi across the hard sand, stop, and turn.

  The pilot would wait exactly ten minutes. If no one instantly recognizable to the pilot ran out of the clump of palms by the oasis in that time, the pilot would take off solo. Harry had one shot. One shot only. Going once.

  They had a name for CIA guys like Brock. He was a NOC. That seldom-heard acronym stood for Not on Consular. It meant if you got caught, like he had been five days ago, you were dead and gone. Forgotten. Your name did not appear on any consular lists. In fact, your name did not appear anywhere. If you ever called your actual boss, in his case, Sweet-Talking Charlie Moore, the head of the Joint Chiefs, and said, hey, somebody has a gun stuck in my ear, Charlie would say, "Harry who?" and hang up. A NOC, operating behind enemy lines, was the deepest of the deep, and the deadest of the dead should he or she be captured.

  No NOC funerals in Arlington, no-sir-ee bobtail.

  Brock had been captured all right, three fucking times. Once in Tianjin on the Gulf of Chihli, that was the second time, trying to get the hell out of the Chinese prison system. He figured he could survive the beatings and other shit maybe one more day, so he'd gone over the wall. They caught him, tried to kill him again, and he escaped again. Made it to the waterfront. An old guy, a longshoreman with a scow, was supposed to ferry him to a French freighter anchored out in the crowded harbor.

  The longshoreman geezer turned out to be a PLA, People's Liberation Army, informant, like every other rat in that godforsaken cesspool port town, and Brock had to kill him, too, just like he'd wasted all the other rodents. He slit the bastard's throat with his well-honed assault knife and held him under the stinking water until the thirty bloody pieces of silver lining his pockets made him sink out of sight.

  Harry then made his way through the heavy fog to the freighter, poling the scow by himself. It was not a skill they taught at Quantico or the Farm, two places where he'd attended classes on his way to becoming a case officer. Put scow-poling in heavy fog in the training manual. Yep. He'd have to drop that one in the seventh-floor suggestion box if he ever made it home.

  But he found the right boat at least, without the Chinaman's navigational help. He held on to the anchor rode, kicked the scow away, and did a hand-over-hand up a slimy ratline. It was two in the morning. He knew by that time the captain, a rummy from Marseilles named Laurent with whom he had a passing acquaintance, would be passed out dead drunk in his bunk. Brock hauled himself over the rail and dropped silently onto the deck at the stern. He made his way un-challenged to the bridge deck and slipped into the Frenchman's darkened cabin. Laurent had covered the single porthole with his blanket, probably hoping to sleep it off in the morning.

  Sorry, mon ami. Je m'fucking 'scuse, pal.

  It was pitch black in there.

  It stank to high heaven, too. But Brock didn't differentiate the bad smells in the captain's boudoir, which was his first mistake. No, he simply dumped a half-full pitcher of water from the nightstand in Laurent's face and simultaneously put the point of his blade up under his stubbly chin. The man positively reeked of fish and sweat and gin and needed a bath anyway.

  "Who got to you?" Brock asked the captain, one hand clamped down on his shoulder, the other twisting the blade tip in the soft folds of grey skin hanging loosely around his grimy neck. "You gave me up, you sonafabitch! Why? Tell me!"

  "Piss off, mate! I'm already dead," Laurent hissed through clenched yellowed teeth.

  "Correct," Brock said, and made all of the captain's well-founded assumptions come true. He had barely finished wiping the blood off his blade and sticking it in its nylon ankle holster when he realized just how badly he'd just this minute fucked up.

  "Mr. Brock?" a voice said in the darkness, and Brock figured it might be over for him, too. Game, set, and match. The head. He hadn't checked the goddamn toilet. The door to the fricking head had been closed. It was open now. He could see a lighter shade of grey in there, and the guy standing by the toilet. Christ. Two guys.

  Harry instinctively turned sideways to present a smaller target. He had his small Browning Buck Mark already out. His handgun skills were modest, but, luckily, the Browning shot a whole lot better than he did. He raised his arm to fire. He got one round off in the general direction of the silhouetted guy's mouth when the flat of a hand came down on his wrist and broke it. Shit. The gun clattered to the steel deck and whoever had hit him danced back into his corner. He still had his knife, of course, but he'd stowed it inconveniently in his ankle holster.

  "Pick the gun up, Mr. Brock, and put the barrel in your mouth. Then put your hands above your head."

  Gun in his mouth? These guys were endlessly inventive.

  "If I put my gun in my mouth, I'll use it." He would, too, put his brains on the bulkhead. Had no intention of going back to the "Potsticker," the guy who liked to duck Harry's head in a pot of boiling water, or worse. He always carried an "L" pill on him, a Lethal for little emergencies just like this one, but he hated to swallow the damn thing until he saw exactly how this was all going to turn out.

  "Let me get a look at you, Trigon."

  Trigon was his cryptonym in all the agency dossiers. Everybody in the agency had three names: the one on their birth certificates, the one on their files, and a dumb codename lik
e Trigon. Damn. He'd been in China for six months, two of which he'd spent in prison. He was finally on his way out. And he'd been stupid enough to think he was clean. And trust a Frenchman.

  Will we never learn?

  He heard the soft click of a switch and an overhead light came on. Buzzing fluorescent. There were two of them in the cabin with him. A tall, elegant Chinese gentleman in a neatly pressed white mandarin jacket was seated in the hard wooden desk chair. His long khaki legs were encased in old-fashioned leather boots laced up to his knees, polished to a mirrorlike finish.

  He was tall for a Chinese, something over six feet. His hair was dead straight and blue-black. A thick comma of it lay on his forehead, the skin of which was the familiar shade of flat light yellow. His eyes, a shade of pewter grey, were hooded and thickly lashed. A northern type, Brock thought. Tibetan, perhaps, or Manchurian. He'd seen this face somewhere. Yeah. He'd seen the guy's picture in a dossier at Langley. Hell, the guy was practically famous in certain international terrorist circles.

  Say hello to General Moon. A charter member, at least as far as Harry was concerned, of the World Hall of Fame of Flaming Ass-holes.

  This would be the dashing General Sun-yat Moon, all right. He was a man Harry had managed to learn something about in the last six months. Like any good case officer, especially one assigned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Brock had done his homework. Before his insertion into China, he'd committed every line on the man's face and every filling in his mouth to memory. Even knew his favorite movie: Bridge on the River Kwai.

  It was starting to come back to him now.

  General Moon, fifty-six years old, was born in Jilin, Manchuria. He was a widower with two grown daughters, twins, both of whom had been trained in the shadow arts since childhood. Rumor had it, they were both high-ranking Te-Wu officers. That's secret police in Chinese. Their current whereabouts were unknown, but both were believed to be on assignment in the field.

  Moon was a seasoned battlefield commander. He'd come up through the ranks. But more important, Sun-yat Moon was deputy chief of the much-feared Special Activities Committee, People's Liberation Army. A vicious, hard-line Communist, known even in Beijing for his extremist ideological stands, Moon was now in operational command of more than a million Red Chinese, for want of a better description, storm troops.

  And, he was second in command of the Te-Wu. Tough outfit, to put it mildly. Harry couldn't even imagine what a badass the number-one guy must be.

  The gentleman now getting ready to kill him was also the officer who had commanded the Thirty-eighth Home Brigade, responsible for the slaughter of thousands of demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square in 1986.

  Busy boy.

  Moon's mission was to suppress dissidents on mainland China. Which Brock figured was about as tough as being on the California Raisin Board like his step-dad had been before he retired to a sun-kissed casita in Santa Rosa. There just aren't that many bad raisins, Pop. And there just weren't that many fucking dissidents period, end of report, in Red China, either. They'd all learned to keep their mouths shut at Tiananmen. It didn't hurt to cover your eyes and plug your ears, either.

  Moon's sidekick, a nasty little horror-show featuring a bald head ringed with greasy black locks, leaned casually against the sweaty bulkhead, whistling a pretty ditty. This bullyboy was semifamous, too, an assassin from the sewers of Hong Kong named Hu Xu. Couldn't forget that name. When Brock had repeated the name on hearing it in a Foggy Bottom briefing room, he had tried a number of different inflections but it had always come out sounding like a question Abbott might ask Costello. Who's who?

  The four-stars and the Pentagon suits just looked at him and said, "It's not funny, Agent Brock."

  It isn't?

  Hu Xu was, according to his resume, the assistant consultant of interrogations, and looked like an Oriental Peter Lorre starring in a bad sideshow gig with the Ringling Brothers. This was the little chipmunk who'd just broken Harry's wrist. Both of these Commie agitators had ugly snub-nosed Sansei .45 automatics aimed at his gut. Brock knew at that precise moment that he was dicked, double-dicked, and redicked. Made him slightly sick to his stomach.

  "We've been waiting patiently for your arrival, Mr. Brock," General Moon said in clipped Oxbridge English. He lit a cigarette and stuck it between his thin lips. He kept talking, just letting it burn down without taking a puff. It was kind of cool, actually. "This is my associate, Hu Xu. He will help me find out what I need to know from you. He is a doctor of sorts. A semiretired mortician, actually, who works on both the living and the dead. You seem uninterested, Mr. Brock. Bored. Distracted. Are you?"

  "I'm pretty busy figuring out how to kill you two shitheads and get off this fucking boat. That tune your little pal is whistling. Catchy. What is it?"

  "Beethoven."

  "I like it."

  Moon laughed. "I'm curious about you, Mr. Brock. You've been difficult to arrest and you have caused my Te-Wu officers some embarrassment in Beijing. Let's talk for a moment before Hu Xu dissects you, shall we? Have you learned very many of our secrets? You'll tell me everything under Hu Xu's injections and expert scalpel anyway. What exactly do you know, Mr. Brock?"

  "Enough."

  "Tempelhof?"

  "What about Tempelhof?"

  "The Happy Dragon?"

  "Never heard of him."

  "Leviathan?"

  "Leviathan? What Leviathan?" Brock said. Moon just looked at him, reading his eyes for a minute. You could tell he'd spent most of his career doing this stuff and was really, really good at it.

  "Given China's explosive growth, you can hardly blame us for our current political actions, Agent Brock. China is the second-largest consumer of petroleum on earth. You know that. The CIA tracks our consumption numbers on a daily basis."

  "You're hooked on oil, pal. Welcome to the club."

  "China has only an eighteen-day strategic petroleum reserve. Whereas you Americans have 180 days. We find this inequity unacceptable. You have the Saudis. You have Iraq. And, soon, you'll occupy Iran, or Sudan, and our new oil contracts with those countries will be null and void."

  "Life sucks when you're a junkie, doesn't it, Comrade?"

  "China intends, as you have no doubt learned during your recent travels, to redress this gross injustice in the Gulf."

  "May I sit on the bed with the deceased?"

  "Please. It's your deathbed, too, Harry Brock."

  "Thanks. Hey, here's one for you. What is the significance of the numerical sequence one-seven-eight-nine? I keep seeing that in the middle of a code break. That one has got me stumped."

  Moon ignored him. Time for a new tactic. Brock sat on the edge of the bunk and let his hands fall between his legs, a man who knew he'd been bested. After a few long seconds, he looked up at Moon with tired, bloodshot eyes.

  "America will never allow you into the Gulf, General," he said. "Never. Trust me on that one."

  "Really? Are you quite sure of that, Mr. Brock?"

  In reality, Harry knew, China was already headed to the Gulf to get her fix. Yeah, China had the oil monkey on her back now, big time. Harry had recently glommed on to the fact that the Reds had moved more than half a million troops into the Sudan. More were arriving every day. This "secret army," disguised as "guest" workers, millions of them, was slipping into Africa serving as cheap labor. Here was the thing about the Sudan: It was just three hundred miles across the water from the Saudi oilfields.

  But Brock didn't want to go there. He had to concentrate on more important stuff, like survival. Somehow, he had to live long enough to bring home the bacon. The Chinese weren't stupid. They knew an American spy satellite couldn't distinguish between a soldier and a Sudanese migrant worker. The bastards had it all figured out. Only Harry could spoil this Chinese tea party. But first he had to disembark with his head intact.

  Right now, the only thing standing between the world's shaky status quo and a total collapse of the global economy was the Saudi ro
yal family. If the Chinese rolled from Sudan and into Saudi Arabia--or into any Gulf state--well, you don't want to even think about that. Where Brock came from, counting on the Saudis was what was called leaning on a slender reed.

  Harry thought about all the things he could say at this point, and then he decided on, "Forget the Gulf, General. How about Mother Russia? Or Sister Canada? They've got a lot of sweet crude."

  Moon had chuckled at "Sister Canada." He had a sense of humor, you had to give him that. A lot of these Commie four-stars did not.

  Moon said, "We know that America will never allow China into the Gulf. But they will allow our ally to do it, Mr. Brock."

  "Really? What ally is that? You don't mean France?"

  Okay, this was the part that really pissed him off. The French. Their behavior toward America in the last decade or so had been despicable. First, their UN votes were bought and paid for by Saddam's billions. Then, during the early going of the Iraq war, French diplomats were selling details of meetings with U.S. diplomats to the Iraqis! American boys were dying because of French duplicity. It made his blood boil. And he wasn't the only one in Washington who was hot and bothered.

  General Moon laughed again. "That cowboy in the White House is capable of many things, Mr. Brock. But nuking Paris is not one of them."

  He had a point. Wolf Blitzer broadcasting CNN images of the Eiffel Tower leaning at a severe angle would not be well received back home.

  Brock said, "Don't be so sure about that, General. The prez is kind of pissed off at your little French pals right now. That whole 'oil for food' scandal, you know. Bugs some people in Washington. How many billions did it cost Saddam to buy French votes at the UN?"

  "Enough, Brock."