Impact (14 page)

“
Tu parles français
?” he finally said, his voice unexpectedly smooth, buttery, his French elegant.

“
Oui, mais je préfère
to speak English.”

A smile. “You not carry identification.” His English was much cruder, with a nasal Khmer accent.

Ford said nothing. In the door of the house, the stooped figure appeared, the advisor that Ford had earlier noted. He was dressed in loose khakis, his thinning gray hair hanging limply over his forehead, dark circles under his eyes, perhaps fifty years old.

Six spoke to the arrival in standard Khmer. “We found an American, Tuk.”

Tuk peered at Ford with his drooping, sleepy eyes.

“Your name?” Six asked.

“Wyman Ford.”

“What you doing here, Wyman Ford?”

“Looking for you.”

“Why?”

“To have a conversation.”

Six slid a knife out of his pocket and said quietly, “I cut your testicle off. Then we have conversation.”

Tuk held up a restraining hand and turned to Ford, speaking in a much more practiced, British-accented English. “You are from where, exactly, in America?” The lidded eyes closed, remained closed for a moment, then opened.

“Washington, D.C.”

Six gestured lightly with the knife toward Tuk and spoke in Khmer. “You’re wasting time. Let me work on him with the knife.”

Tuk ignored him and turned to Ford. “You are in the government, then?”

“Excellent guess.”

“Who did you come here to have a conversation with?”

“Him. Brother Number Six.”

There was a sudden, freezing silence. After a moment, Six waved the knife in his face. “Why you want meet me?”

“To accept your terms of surrender.”

“Surrender?” Six pushed his face in close. “To who?”

Ford looked up into the sky. “Them.”

Both men looked into the empty sky.

“You have . . .” Ford smiled and glanced at his watch, “. . . about a hundred and twenty minutes before the Predator drones and cruise missiles arrive.”

Six stared.

“Do you want to hear the terms?” Ford asked.

Six pressed the flat of the knife blade into Ford’s throat, giving it just a slight turn. He could feel it begin to bite into his flesh. “I cut your throat!”

Tuk laid a light hand on Six’s arm. “Yes,” he said easily. “We want to hear the terms.”

The knife blade relaxed and Six stepped back.

“You have two options. Option A: you don’t surrender. In two hours, your mine will be flattened by cruise missiles and Predator drones. Then the CIA will come in to clean up—to clean
you
up. Maybe you die, maybe you escape. Either way, you’ll be hunted to the end of your days by the CIA. You will have no rest in your old age.”

A pause.

“Option B: you surrender to me, abandon the mine, and walk away. In two hours it is flattened by American bombs. The CIA pays you one million dollars for your cooperation. You live the rest of your life in peace, a friend of the CIA. Your old age is calm, restful, and financially secure.”

“Why CIA not like this mine?” Six asked. “All legal here.”

“You don’t know who’s buying your gemstones?”

“I sell gemstone to Thailand, all legal.”

Tuk nodded slowly, as if in agreement, his eyes half-closed.

“Right. All legal. You’re selling honey stones to wholesalers like Piyamanee Limited.”

“All legal!” Six said.

“Do you know who the wholesalers in Bangkok are selling to?”

“Why I care? I not break law.”

“Just because you’re not breaking the law doesn’t mean you aren’t pissing us off.”

Six fell silent.

“Let me explain something,” Ford went on. “The Bangkok wholesalers are selling to gemstone brokers in various countries in the Middle East, who are fronting for a Saudi dealer who sells in bulk to buyers in Quetta, Pakistan, who are hiring mules to transport the gems to Al Qaeda in South Waziristan. Do you know what Al Qaeda is doing with the gemstones?”

Six stared. This was clearly a new thought to him.

“Al Qaeda is grinding up the gems, concentrating the radioactivity in them, and is using them to make dirty bombs.”

“I know nothing. Nothing!” shrilled Six angrily.

Ford smiled. “Yeah, you and Sergeant Schultz.”

“Who is Sergeant Schultz?”

Ford waited, letting the silence build. “So: option A, or option B?”

“You are man who walk in here with stupid story, no more.” Six spat.

“Ask yourself, Brother Number Six: would I walk in here without backup?”

“You bring no evidence, no proof, not even ID!”

“You want proof?”

Six narrowed his eyes.

Ford nodded toward the hills. “I’ll show you proof. I’ll order a Predator drone to fire a missile into the top of one of those hills over there. That good enough for you?”

Six swallowed, his big ugly Adam’s apple bobbing. He said nothing. Tuk’s eyes remained lidded.

“Untie my hands,” said Ford.

Six muttered an order, and Ford’s hands were untied.

“Put the knife away.”

The Cambodian put the knife back into its sheath.

Ford pointed west. “See that far hill, the one with the double top? We’ll hit that one with a small missile.”

“How you give order?”

Ford smiled. He knew that most older Cambodians had an almost supernatural dread of the CIA and he was hoping to capitalize on that fear. “We have our ways.”

Six was now sweating.

“Within half an hour, you will have your proof. In the meantime, I wish to be treated as an honored guest, not like a criminal.” He gestured to the men with the guns.

Six said something and the guns lowered.

“There’s a lot of hardware above your heads that you can’t see. You do anything to me and it’ll rain death and destruction down on you so fast you won’t even have time to take a piss.”

Six’s face remained impassive. He leaned over and spat on the verandah. “You have half-hour. Then you die.” He shuffled back over to his rocking chair, sat down, and began rocking.

25

Egg Rock was just about the most desolate island Abbey had ever seen, little more than a pile of sea-battered boulders in the Atlantic Ocean. It took less than five minutes to determine that the island had no crater. After wandering about disconsolately, they rested on the highest boulder at the top of the island. Seagulls wheeled overhead, crying out. The ocean thundered on the encircling rocks.

“Well?” said Jackie, sitting beside her. “That was a bust.”

Abbey swallowed. “We still have Shark.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Fog’s coming in,” said Abbey. The fog bank was rolling in from the south, a low, gray line on the horizon. Even as she watched, the bank began swallowing Monhegan Island, which grayed out and disappeared, and a moment later it ate up the smaller island, Manana, next to it. She could hear the lonely moan of the Manana Island foghorn every few seconds.

Her eyes moved across the water to Shark Island, a speck of land about eight miles offshore, no more than two acres in extent, treeless and desolate. It was the last island on their list. If the meteorite wasn’t there . . . she tossed a pebble, musing gloomily about their odds of finding a crater on Shark. The clouds above began to roll in and a shadow fell across them, the light leaving the air, enveloping them in a cold seaweed smell.

“Gonna rain,” said Jackie. “Let’s go back to the boat.”

Abbey nodded. They picked their way down through the rocks and the sea wrack to the dinghy and launched it into the light swell. The ocean was calm and it seemed to be settling down, as it often did in a fog. Abbey rowed back to the
Marea
, pulling hard, and in a moment they climbed over the stern. Back in the pilothouse, Abbey ran through a mental list, checking the fuel level, batteries, and bilge. She started the engine, the Yanmar rumbling to life. As she was switching on the electronics, Jackie came in.

“Let’s find a nice gunkhole somewhere, drop anchor, and get stoned.”

“We’re going to Shark Island.”

Jackie groaned. “Not in the fog, please. My head aches from that wine last night.”

“Fresh air will do you good.” Abbey hunched over the chart. Shark Island was exposed to the wild Atlantic, surrounded by sunken ledges and reefs, and swept by dangerous currents. It was going to be a bitch to get on it. She tuned the VHF to the weather channel and the strangely flat computer voice began reciting the report.

“Let’s just park here for a while, wait for the fog to blow over,” Jackie said.

“This is our chance. The sea’s relatively calm.”

“But the
fog
.”

“We’ve got radar and a chartplotter.”

As the fog bank rolled toward them, an eerie half-light fell on the sea.

Jackie flopped into the seat next to the helm. “Come on, Abbey, can’t we just chill for a while? I’ve got a hangover.”

“Weather’s coming in. If we don’t take advantage of the calm sea now, we may be waiting for days. Look—once we land, it’ll take us five minutes to explore that rock.”

“No, please.”

Abbey laid a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Jackie, the meteorite is waiting.”

Jackie snorted sarcastically.

“Haul anchor, first mate.”

As Jackie stumbled forward, the fog bank swallowed the boat, shrinking the world into a few yards of gray twilight.

Jackie slotted the anchor into its stay and smacked in the anchor pin. “You’re a Captain Bligh—you know that?”

With her eye on the chartplotter, Abbey eased the boat into forward, and swung the bow of the
Marea
toward Shark Island. “EBay, here we come.”

26

Ford waited on the verandah as the minutes passed. The soldiers stood around, weapons at the ready. Six sat in the rocking chair, gazing down the valley, the chair making a faint creaking sound as it rocked back and forth, back and forth. Brutally hot even in the shade of the verandah, the air was dead. A cacophony of sounds reverberated from the mine, where ragged lines of workers labored in an endless loop of horror, an occasional gunshot marking the unceremonious end of another life. Children swarmed over the rock pile and the smoke from cooking fires rose into the white-hot sky. Tuk stood unmoving, his eyes closed as if in sleep. The soldiers shifted nervously, their eyes darting into the sky or over at the double-topped hill.

The slow rocking creaked to a halt. Six checked the fat Rolex watch on his wrist, and lifted his binoculars to examine the hill. “Forty minute. Nothing. I give you ten minute free.”

Ford shrugged.

“We go in house,” Six said to Ford, rising from the chair. “Cooler in there.”

The gunmen pushed Ford through the house to the back. A shedlike extension had been built out behind the kitchen, next to a pigpen. The room, made of raw lumber, was empty except for a wooden table and chair. As soon as they entered the room, the pigs outside began squealing and snorting with anticipation.

Ford noted dried blood on the chair and in several large smears on the floor that had been halfheartedly mopped up. Flies roared in the stinking heat. A streak of blood led to a door in the back, which opened directly into the pigpen.

The soldiers pushed Ford into the chair and tied his hands behind his back and to the chair rails. They duct-taped his ankles to the chair legs and wound an old chainsaw chain around his waist and the chair, padlocking it behind, the teeth biting into his skin.

The soldiers worked with an efficiency borne of practice. Tuk entered the room and stood in one corner, long arms folded in front.

Outside, the pigs began to scream.

“Well, well,” said Six, positioning himself in front of Ford. He slid an old Ka-Bar knife out from under his shirt, and smiled. Standing in front of Ford, he hooked the knife under the top button of his shirt, and gave it a little flick. The button popped off. He positioned it under the next button, popped it off, and the next, until the shirt was open.

“You a big liar,” he said.

The knife flicked off the last button, and then he hooked it under Ford’s tank top, blade out, and made a neat slice upward, cutting it open. He raised the tip of the blade to Ford’s chin, paused, and gave it a little flick. Ford felt a stinging sensation and the gathering of blood on his chin, dripping down to his lap.

“Oops,” said Six.

The knife flashed, making a little cut across Ford’s chest, flashed back, making another. Ford stiffened as he felt the warm blood running down. The knife was extremely sharp and so far he felt very little pain.

“X mark spot,” said Six.

“You really enjoy this sort of thing, don’t you?” said Ford.

Tuk watched from the doorway.

The point of the knife gently traced a line down his chest toward his abdomen. The point hooked in his trouser button.

A deep
boom
rumbled across the valley and echoed among the hills. Six and Tuk seemed to freeze.

“Oops,” said Ford.

Six sheathed the knife and exchanged a rapid glance with Tuk. The tall man, with no sense of hurry, strolled out of the room toward the front of the house. A moment later he returned and nodded to Six. The Cambodian barked an order at the soldiers, who untied Ford from the chair, gave him a rag to mop his cuts, and led him back through the house and onto the verandah. A crooked, snakelike cloud of smoke and dust was just dissipating over the summit of a nearby hill.

“Wrong hill,” said Six, parsing the cloud and sky with his binoculars.

Ford shrugged. “Those hills all look alike.”

“I not see drone.”

“Of course you don’t see it.”

Ford noted that Six, who up until now had appeared impervious to the heat, was badly sweating.

Ford said, “You now have sixty minutes before this camp is destroyed and all of you hunted down and shot like dogs. You better make up your mind soon.”

Six stared at him, his small black eyes tight and hard. “How I get this million dollar money?”

“Get my backpack.”

Six yelled an order and a soldier disappeared, returning with Ford’s pack, which had been taken from him on his capture.