Brown, Dale - Independent 04 (27 page)

 
          
It
was the opportunity the Americans had been waiting for to vent their own
frustrations at being away in a foreign land among foreign peoples ...

 
          
For
the next forty-eight hours, Henri Cazaux had been passed back and forth between
the security police teams so they could practice their “interrogation
techniques.” Cazaux was stuffed into fifty-five-gallon barrels, hosed down
naked with icy cold water from fire hoses, questioned by teams of interrogators
for hours at a time, made to kneel naked on bricks while chained to concrete
pillars, and ordered to dig his own grave and then buried alive in mock
firing-squad executions. He was never beaten, never physically harmed ...

 
          
...
until the nights, the long, awful nights, when Cazaux was alone with just one
or two guards in an isolated part of the brig where no one could hear him
scream. Then they took turns with him, tying the strong, lean, handsome young
man up to a table and performing the ultimate degradation on him again and
again, sometimes with a nightstick, sometimes with a broken broom handle and,
ultimately, the engorged penises of the men themselves. If they were afraid of
the shift commander hearing the prisoner’s screams or cries for help, they
would order the prisoner to suck on the end of a Colt M1911 pistol while they
ravaged him—soon, Cazaux was praying they’d just pull the trigger and put him
out of his misery.

 
          
Of
course, Jo Ann Vega invented most of the more lurid details of the ordeal in
her own fertile, twisted mind. Henri Cazaux had been imprisoned and abused for
two days in the hands of the American Air Force, that much was known—exactly
what had happened to him, Cazaux never said beyond only the vaguest hints. It
certainly explained his bloodthirsty attitude toward the Americans, his intense
fear and revulsion to the thought of capture, and his intense desire for
revenge.

 
          
In
her own way, Vega relished the idea of some big black soldier treating Henri
like a ten-dollar whore ... It was a fantasy that got her wet just thinking
about it.

 
          
In
any case, the
Antwerp
incarceration was for Cazaux’s third felony crime. He had a choice—ten
years in the Auxiliaries (the virtual slave-labor arm of the Belgian Army), or
ten years in prison. Cazaux willingly, even happily, joined the Auxiliaries. He
reformed himself enough to join the regular army, then the First Para, the
special-operations quick-strike brigade known as the Red Berets, flight school,
and even received a commission. He stayed on an extra two years after his now
long-forgotten sentence, then, as with most soldiers, he was given a Reserve
assignment. He left the regular army a finely tuned, well-trained, precision
killing machine—and as mentally twisted as a Swiss mountain road.

 
          
“I
need to know if my plans of destruction will be successful, Madame Vega,”
Cazaux said. “I need your advice. I cannot issue commands to my staff without
some assurances that my plans will be successful.”

 
          
“I
saw much blood, much destruction,” Vega said. “I saw death, Henri, lots of
death—but I did not see yours, although death is all around you. I saw the
wings of the angel of death, the dark master, sweeping across the skies in a
fiery chariot, driven by you.”

           
“Your visions are not helping me, Jo
Ann,” Cazaux said irritably. “All I need to know is, will my campaign be
successful?”

 
          
She
soaked a clean gauze pad with hydrogen peroxide and, without warning or
fanfare, scrubbed the exposed wound to loosen the blood and dirt. Fresh water
was necessary to clear away the bubbling flesh, but Cazaux did not cry out or
even flinch from what had to be incredible pain. “I can see exposed muscle,
Henri,” Jo Ann said. “You’ll need stitches and antibiotics.”

 
          
“Runyan,”
Cazaux replied. She nodded. Lewis Runyan was a decertified physician who had
tried to set her up as a drug dealer until Cazaux caught up with him. Rather
than kill him, he convinced him to become the Cazaux operation’s medical
officer, and now lived in
Newark
,
New Jersey
, under the watchful eyes of Cazaux’s
lieutenants. “Continue to clean the wound, and pack it tightly. I need to
travel within the hour.”

 
          
“All
right.” She made no attempt to be gentle, but used her weight to scrub the
wound until it bled. She knew she was working harder than necessary—was she
trying to cause him pain? Why?

 
          
“Tell
me what you are thinking, Jo Ann,” Cazaux ordered. “You have not answered my
question, and you are bound as my spiritual adviser to do so.”

 
          
She
looked up at him, her eyes pausing for a moment on his naked crotch before
affixing on his stone-hard face. “I see more blood in your chart, Henri,” she
said. “I see much more blood, by your hands.”

 
          
“Yes,
yes,” he responded impatiently. “My campaign?” .

 
          
“Have
you taken any drugs, any painkillers, any cocaine?” She knew the answer to that
even before his flaming eyes rested on hers. Henri Cazaux never did drugs
except for antibiotics and aspirin. She touched the leg wound again, with her
fingernail. The touch did not register in even one muscle in his angular face.
“You have transcended pain, Henri,” she said. She wrapped her hand around his
calf, stroking his leg., “I see other human traits that are now missing in your
soul. You have been touched by Death, Henri, and for some reason, the dark
master has released you—for now.”

 
          
“Yes,”
he said, his eyes widening as he accepted her words as truth. He couldn’t
rationalize it before, but her words confirmed what he was thinking: the
mission he had just completed, escaping the jaws of death so narrowly as he
did, had changed him.

 
          
“You
have completed a deal with the Devil,” she continued as she stroked his right
leg, then kissed his left leg, then stroked his rock-hard buttocks. “You have
traded what was left of your humanity for a few extra days of life. Show me
your right hand.” She opened his right hand when he extended it to her. A fresh
three-inch-long bum, caused by his grip on the nylon webbing of his parachute
risers during his low-altitude bailout over San Francisco International, was
etched across his palm, perfectly perpendicular to his already very short lifeline.
“Here is the signed contract, Henri. You didn’t know this wound was here, did
you?” Obviously he did not, because he stared at the cut. “I don’t know how
long you have—maybe hours, maybe days. Perhaps only . .. minutes.”

 
          
His
eyes flared, knowing she had added that last warning selfishly, that she wanted
the next few minutes with him. “No—longer,” she admitted. “I see blood, too, a
lot of blood. Not all of it is yours.”

 
          
“It
won’t be. I can guarantee
that. ”

 
          
“This
is a serious contract, Henri, a contract with the dark master,” Jo Ann said
angrily, returning to her nursing. “The contract is irrevocable. The dark
master offers you incredible strength, a life without pain, with a tireless
body, with sharp eyes. He demands a price for these gifts.”

 
          
“A
price? From
me?”

 
          
“Yes,
damn you, the ultimate price—your very life, your
future,
” she said. “Your soul is already his—now he wants control
of your mind. He gave you these gifts because he wants to turn you loose on the
mortal world, taking your revenge.”

 
          
“That’s
exactly what I intend to do.”

 
          
Her
eyes flared, and she took a deep breath as the excitement welled in her chest.
He could do it,
she thought. “Then do
it, Henri,” Vega said. “I’m telling you, Henri, you’ve been chosen by the dark
master to carry out a baptism of fire on planet Earth. He has given you the
gift of freedom from mortal pain. You will not feel hunger, or pain, or
weariness. You will defy the laws of nature. You will see with the eyes of a
hawk, hear with the ears of a wolf, move with the speed of a cheetah. You will
think like no other general has ever done before. It is time to set it all into
motion, Henri.”

 
          
“I
have already set it in motion, Jo Ann,” Cazaux said, his voice as deep and
hollow as if from the bottom of a grave. “Death from the skies, from nowhere,
from everywhere. Men think they have conquered the sky; I say they will fear
the skies, fear the machines and the physics that carry them aloft. My lack of
pain is the sign that I have been given this assignment and that I must carry
it out.”

 
          
“Turn
your hatred into blood-lust, Henri,” Vega pleaded with him. “You’re not just a
soldier, not a machine—you’re the sword of Satan. Be all that he has commanded
you to be. Do it.
Do it!”

 
          
She
saw the smile creep to his lips, and it was then that she noticed his erection,
and she knew he had indeed changed. Henri Cazaux was not interested in aides,
or soulmates, or advisers—he was interested in conquest. The dark master had
told him that anything he desired was within his grasp. She had confirmed the
voice. Now he was going to act upon that advice.

 
          
Her
blouse and brassiere ripped off her body in his grasp as easily as if they were
of paper. The creature inside Henri Cazaux was free once again, and this time
there was no restraining it.

 
          
An
hour later, Jo Ann Vega wondered with the darkest sense of doom if the country
would survive what Henri Cazaux had in mind for it. If the pain and the blood
she had just experienced was going to be multiplied by even a fraction of this
country’s three hundred million inhabitants, she knew that it could very well
not survive his onslaught.

 
          
Near
Bedminster
,
New Jersey
That Evening

           
“That is what I desire,” Cazaux told
the men assembled around him. The staff meeting was in an isolated house in
rural
New
Jersey
,
owned by
Harold
Lake
through several layers of
U.S.
and offshore corporations, as safe from
government scrutiny as possible. The night was warm and humid, but Cazaux’s
security forces kept all of the windows and doors tightly closed. Human and
canine patrols roamed the thirty-acre walled and gated estate, and electronic
trip wires and sensors ringed the compound. Every room of the seven-bedroom
home was occupied by an armed guard who constantly checked in with a security monitor.

 
          
The
men present were members of Cazaux’s “senior staff,” organized much like an
army battalion headquarters with operations and plans, intelligence, logistics,
transportation, maintenance, security, and munitions staff officer. Of all of
them,
Harold
Lake
—who did not consider himself a staff
officer but was generally in charge of procurement, purchasing, and finances
for Cazaux’s organization—had been with the organization the longest.
Surrounded by some of the world’s most wanted terrorists, smugglers, murderers,
and mercenaries,
Lake
was definitely the most out-of-place person
there.

 
          
The
“security officer,” Tomas Ysidro, was probably the most notorious officer
besides Cazaux himself, and
Lake
had to
be careful at all times to not do or say anything to piss the bastard off. Bom
and raised in Mexico, Ysidro had been one of the Colombian drug cartel’s
deadliest enforcers before joining Cazaux’s small army, and he was quickly
elevated to a status very nearly equal to Cazaux himself simply because no one
else dared challenge him. Ysidro was in charge of recruitment and training, and
his tactics and forms of discipline were a lot harsher than anything the
Colombian drug lords used. Only Henri Cazaux’s strength and sheer force of
superior will could keep Ysidro’s psychopathic tendencies in check. They were
like two peas in a pod.