Brotherhood and Others (20 page)

He'd no sooner had that thought than in the distance to his west he heard a bird call that didn't sound quite right. And then another from due east. And a third that was directly behind them, not far north, maybe two hundred yards.

Gahji was on their trail. And he had other experienced hunters with him.

Fasi seemed to realize it as well, and started pushing himself, slashing forward, and then turning and grinning. “It's ahead here fifty yards,” he whispered. “The main trail. We'll move much faster now.”

“Give me the machete,” Monarch said in a low, urgent voice.

*   *   *

The slash to Robin's upper right arm was deeper than he'd thought at first. It burned now as well as bled. There was no doubt about it. The arm was weakening. Julio must have seen that, because he started to strut and broke into a big grin.

“You feeling it now, my brother,” Julio boasted. “That's just the beginning. You gonna die from thousand little cuts like that, my little thieving idiot. The last one's gonna be your throat. Ear to ear. Brand-new smile.”

Whether it was from the blood loss or the beers he'd drunk so fast or the rush of adrenaline, Robin's vision started to tunnel. He no longer saw Claudio on the floor in the corner, or any of other gang members. There was just blood-lusting Julio standing between him and life.

The gang leader feinted and then slashed upward and diagonally, just missing Robin's belly, but the tip caught his right bicep high near his shoulder, the second cut there. The pain was white-hot, and Robin started to fear that death was staring him in the face.

*   *   *

To confuse Gahji and the other boys hunting them, Monarch cut out the suggestion of multiple side trails with the machete. Then he and Fasi took care to leave no trace as they worked their way to the trail to the lower lake. They ran the entire way, almost two hours, stopping only to drink in streams they crossed, hearing no evidence of anyone still following them.

At each stream crossing, however, Monarch dunked the mud-coated AK-47 until the banana clip released and the bolt opened. He got the live shell out of the chamber, and let water flow through the barrel, the action, and the clip after emptying it of the last five rounds. Wasn't the best way to clean a gun, but it would work. Or at least it should.

About an hour and a half into the journey, Monarch thought he heard the thump of a helicopter somewhere far behind them to the north. That had to have been the chopper Lieutenant Zed had called in to ferry the diamond experts out. Monarch expected his own rescue to come from the southeast.

But what if Lieutenant Zed commandeered the helicopter?

That seemed the rebel leader's most likely course of action. He called softly to Fasi, “How far to that lake?”

“Not far,” the pygmy called back. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes. No more.”

*   *   *

Robin almost succumbed to fear, almost let it make him believe that he had no hope of survival. Then he almost gave in to blind anger, almost went crazy, and on the offense.

But something held him back.

Robin had trained with a knife, but had never fought with one. Julio, to Robin's knowledge, had never killed a man before this evening. But he had seen Julio in many knife fights where the object was to cut your opponent, but not kill him. The leader of La Fraternidad was an expert, and he looked ready to take his game to a whole other level, feinting, looking for another opportunity to strike.

Then Robin heard the voice of his dead mother saying,
“Sometimes the greatest strength is acting weak.”

His tunnel vision faded. Robin was suddenly aware of everything, the smell of his blood, the smell of sweat, the other brothers roaring their approval at Julio, and Claudio watching him like he was his last best hope.

Sometimes the greatest strength is acting weak
.

*   *   *

Thunder rumbled close and the air was filled with the scent of approaching rain when Monarch hit the narrow shoreline of the lower lake, hard on the heels of Fasi, who was gasping and dripping with sweat. The pygmy waded out into the water and sat in it, splashing his face, ignoring the lightning in the distance.

Monarch wanted to go in there with him, wanted to get all the grime and sweat off him, but his training would not let him. Instead he found a good position where he could watch the pygmy, the southeastern horizon, and their back trail.

Less than five minutes later, he saw a wall of rain coming from the south, and was surprised when a helicopter burst out of that wall. He checked his watch. Ten minutes early.

Fasi started to wade back toward shore. Monarch looked around, saw no logical place for the helicopter to land. The shoreline was too narrow and the jungle up against it too thick.

“Stay here for now,” Monarch yelled at Fasi. “They'll lower a rope or a basket.”

“Basket or rope?” the pygmy said, looking worried.

By this time, Monarch could clearly see the helicopter, a big construction chopper. Gloria Barnett sat in the copilot's seat, a tall, redheaded woman. The bay door was open behind her. John “Tats” Tatupu, the huge Samoan-American who'd become an integral part of his team, was leaning out, looking for him.

Monarch stepped out into the water, signaled to Tats that they'd need an active pickup. Just as the rain caught up with them, the pilot hovered the chopper forward and Tats threw two harnesses at Monarch. They landed in the water about six feet offshore.

Fasi retrieved them. Monarch kept the gun under his armpit while working to adjust the harness for such a little man, but got it done and his own harness on quickly. The rain had turned torrential. The helicopter wash was throwing water when Tatupu snaked out the door a heavy rope with loops hanging at intervals off the side.

The pygmy looked more agitated than he had confronting the crocodiles. “I've never been up in the air before,” he said.

Monarch reached out and showed Fasi the carabineer attached to his harness, said, “We'll link that to the rope. You'll be fine. Let's go.”

But the pygmy was no longer looking at the carabineer, the rope, or the helicopter. He was staring in disbelief past Monarch toward the trail that had led them to their rescue.

*   *   *

Robin acted dull, glanced at the two wounds and the blood running down his right arm and along his ribcage. He tried to flex the arm, and grimaced as if dealing with a racking pain.

“Please, Julio,” Robin gasped. “I can't. My arm, it's…”

His right arm was trembling now, quivering in spasm as if Julio's second cut had severed a nerve. Robin struggled to keep his knife pointed at the gang leader. But with every second that passed, his right arm and the knife drooped lower. Robin finally grabbed the knife with his left hand, and heard Julio laugh.

“You gonna fight Julio left-handed?”

Robin made an awkward feint toward the gang leader, who laughed again before going stone cold, the way he'd looked shooting the cleaner at the factory.

Julio jabbed at Robin low, toward his stomach. Robin tried to block it, and took a slice to his forearm. He had been so slow to react that Julio became emboldened. The gang leader made a series of quick feints as he advanced, trying to close the ground, trying for the kill.

Robin backed up, clearly on the defensive, right arm useless. Julio tried to slash diagonally at Robin's torso, left shoulder to right hip.

But this time Robin was quicker.

Much quicker.

His left hand shot out, knuckles and the hasp of his knife hitting the inside of the gang leader's right elbow. Julio gritted his teeth, pushed against Robin's left hand, and then stepped in to punch Robin with his free hand.

As Julio swung, Robin released the pressure he had on the gang leader's left elbow, and flicked his knife to his bloody right hand.

Robin took the punch to his stomach. He saw Julio's knife coming to stab him even as he plunged his own blade deep into the neck of the founding
jefe
of La Fraternidad de Ladrones
.

*   *   *

The instant Monarch saw the pygmy's expression change there was no thought, only action. He kicked his own feet out, and twisted hard left as he fell toward the water, pulling the trigger the second his mind registered bodies aiming at him through the pouring rain.

The five-shot burst hit all three of the boy soldiers before Monarch landed on his elbows in the shallow lake water. Two of the boys dropped and floated lifeless, pelted by rain. Gahji lay half in, half out of the water, forty yards down the bank, staring up at the rain, his seventeen-year-old mouth working as if he'd had every bit of wind in the world knocked out of him.

Monarch flashed on an image of Robin on the floor in the basement of La Fraternidad, stabbed in the lung, watching Julio bleed out and his eyes lose light.

Feeling like he was going to be sick, Monarch got up, and splashed through the shallows to Gahji, wanting to help him, hating that he'd had to shoot him. Gahji's eyes found him. Along with hatred in them, Monarch saw a piteous boy who'd been cast adrift, parentless, sucked into a warped life where you could end up like this, bleeding and confused and dying long, long before your time.

“Diamond,” Gahji rasped. “Not yours.”

“I'm a thief,” Monarch explained, moved to tears.

Gahji blinked at the rain, said, “I hope some hell finds…”

The boy soldier's words died in his throat and he stopped blinking at the rain. Monarch was overcome for a moment and he sobbed for Gahji and for Robin, the boy who'd died that night in the basement in Buenos Aires.

“Rogue!”

Tat's voice boomed to him over the pounding of the rain.

For a moment, Monarch was unable to respond. Then he tore his attention away from the dead boy, looking through the storm to see the big Samoan holding a bullhorn.

“We have fuel issues,” Tats said. “It's now or you wait six hours.”

Monarch's attention fell to Fasi, who stood knee-deep in the water, back to the chopper, looking as miserable as a wet terrier.

Ever since Monarch was a young boy, he'd developed the ability to compartmentalize, to shove events and thoughts away and lock them. It was the only way he had been able to stay sane.

So he shut off the image of Gahji dying and of Robin dying, and he set off through the water toward the pygmy. He held the little man by the back of the harness as he waded out deeper toward the rope dangling from the helicopter. A solid twelve feet of it writhed on the lake surface.

Monarch snagged the rope, snapped Fasi's carabineer to one of the loops closest to the helicopter, and his own to one of the very last before giving a thumbs-up to Tatupu and the pilot.

The chopper rose slowly. Tats set the winch in motion. The pygmy rose out of the water, riding up into the sky with Monarch lifting below him. Ten feet above the water, he heard Fasi laughing over the noise of the chopper.

The pygmy looked down at Monarch, grinning like a madman.

“Flying!” he yelled. “I'm fly—!”

The flat crack of a rifle reached Monarch at the same time Fasi took the bullet through the throat and slumped and hung from the harness and rope like a marionette without a master.

Monarch's head swung around. Another helicopter hovered in the fog right at the jungle's edge. Lieutenant Zed sat in the open bay door, grinning, lowering the gun to admire his marksmanship before swinging his weapon Monarch's way.

Tatupu fired twice at the rebel leader, driving him deeper inside the helicopter, which banked away into the fog and disappeared as quickly as it had come. Monarch stared after it as he began to rise and fly away into the storm because he could not bear to look at the little body dangling above him.

Two days later …

Nairobi, Kenya

4:00
P.M.

Monarch sat on a terrace by the pool at the Serena Hotel, trying to numb himself with another rum and tonic. Three had not worked, so he'd ordered a fourth and fifth, which the waiter placed on the table in front of him.

As he started in on the fourth cocktail, Monarch's thoughts gathered darkly on the image of Fasi's corpse hanging above him, and then on the image of himself as Robin, lying on the floor of the basement, and then on an older woman with long iron-gray hair and a kindly face.

Why had the miracle of that woman happened to him, and not to a boy like Gahji? Why had she saved him? So he could shoot three boys and cause the death of an innocent man trying to do the right thing?

He thought about the gray-haired woman and wished she could be here to listen to him, to help him see how he should handle this. But though he kept in contact with her regularly, she knew little of his current life.

Would she even understand? What? That his life was out of balance again? That his wrongs once again outweighed the good things he'd done?

Before he could come up with answers to any of those questions, Gloria Barnett walked up wearing a floppy hat, a long-sleeved blouse, and cotton pants that protected her fair skin and gangly body from the scorching African sun.

She took in the three spent cocktails, the full one on the table, and the one he was drinking.

“Never knew you to do a lot of boozing,” she observed, taking a seat beside him

“First time for everything,” Monarch said, and drained the drink, signaled to the waiter for another. “You want something?”

“A Tusker,” she said. “Cold, please.”

The waiter walked away, leaving an awkward silence.

Finally, Barnett said, “They have people at the agency who help with this kind of thing.”

“You mean being a kid-killer?” he asked sardonically. “Or someone who sacrifices pygmies for the United States of America?”

“Those boys were going to kill you,” Barnett shot back. “I had a bird's-eye view, remember? You had no choice. And Fasi made a choice to help you. His people and those boys will be better off because of his sacrifice.”