Thomas Prescott Superpack (96 page)

“Pry his fingers off it,” Gina yelled.

She had the guy in a bear hug and his left hand was dangling off the cot. I took a deep breath, darted in, and tried peeling back two of his fingers, which both snapped in half.

Gina screamed, “I didn’t say
break
his fingers.”

Whoops.

The beacon fell to the ground and rolled under the cot. I ducked under the table and pulled it out.

Gina was staring at something wide-eyed.

It was a photograph.

I asked, “You okay?”

“Oh yeah,” she stammered. She folded the photograph and shoved it in her pocket, then yelled, “LET’S GO!”

PTUTSI

11:50 a.m.

When Gina and I were twenty yards from the bus, I screamed, “What time is it?”

Lacy, Rikki, Bheka, and J.J. were all standing just outside the bus. Rikki looked down at the phone and said, “11:50.”

Gina and I joined them, sucking for breath.

“Was it where you thought it was?” asked Lacy, taking the flashing beacon from my hand and surveying it.

Gina and I looked at each other and she said with a smirk, “More or less.”

Lacy handed the beacon back to me and I said, “All right, here goes nothing.” I reached my hand up to smash it down on the metal bumper of the bus.

“STOP,” screamed Rikki.

I stopped. Everyone stared at her. “What?”

“You can’t break it.”

“Why?”

“If it’s anything like a transponder on an airplane, than it will have a fail-safe built in. If you break that thing, the missile is still going to hit its last known coordinates.”

Lacy chimed, “She’s probably right.”

I nodded. “How long do we have?”

“Nine minutes.”

“All right.” I looked up the hill where we’d come down. The path we’d taken was still open, as if the people were expecting more buses any second. I started up the bus steps. “I can get this thing a mile away in nine minutes.

“No,” Lacy yelled, grabbing my shoulder.

I shrugged her arm off and said, “Lace, it’s our only shot.”

Her eyes grew moist. “But what about you?”

I hadn’t thought of this little nugget. “I’ll be fine. I’ll duck and cover.”

She wrapped her arms around me and began weeping. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

I was probably down to eight minutes. But in eight minutes, I could get this thing over a mile away, then some. I threw Lacy off and climbed into the bus.

I placed the beacon in the cup holder and turned the ignition. I had this uncanny feeling the engine wouldn’t turn over. But it did. The engine roared to life. Louder than I’d ever heard it. Too loud. Then it hit me. The noise wasn’t coming from the bus. It was coming from above.

Through the windshield I saw the helicopter. On the side, it read, “SA NAVY.”

I let out an exhale. Someone had listened.

The helicopter could get the beacon ten miles away in seven minutes. Take it and drop it in the middle of nowhere then zoom off.

Thank God.

The air whipped around us as the helicopter put down thirty feet to our left. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the door opened and I was left staring at a familiar face.

Shit.

I screamed, “Everyone in.”

The five of them jumped into the bus. I threw it into gear and slammed down the gas. The bus lurched forward.

Machine gunfire erupted from the helicopter. The bullets ripping into the bus, cutting through the engine. The bus stopped dead in her tracks. We’d gone eight feet.

“EVERYBODY OUT HERE!” yelled the Professor.

The six of us looked at one another in a daze. It was over. We were all going to die. I looked at the dash.

Seven minutes.

The six of us clamored down the bus steps and into the dirt.

“You again,” I said.

The Professor was out of the helicopter and striding towards the smoking bus. He looked like shit. His face and arms were covered in bandages. He’d been burned in the explosion. Maybe he should have waited another minute before he’d blown the remote detonation switch.

“I told you about the village in confidence,” he said. “And now you come and try to sabotage my perfect plan. Don’t you see what you are doing? You are getting in the way of God’s plan. God needs these people to die, so others can live.”

“Save me the soapbox?”

“The what?”

“You can rationalize this however the fuck you want. But it’s murder. You are murdering these people.”

I noticed a blur out of the corner of my ear. It was Bheka. He had darted towards the village. Maybe he wanted to be with his mother when the bomb came. The Professor watched him go. I could tell he’d thought about putting a couple bullets into the child’s back, but it would have been a waste of energy. The child would be dead soon enough.

The Professor turned his attention back to me and said, “I will tell you what
is murder. Having the means to help a country in dire need and not sending help. That is murder. Watching as millions upon millions of people die each year and doing nothing. That is murder. No, this is the only way. Believe me. I have tried.” He waved his arms at the village and said, “In fifty years, long after I’m gone, long after you’re gone—which will be any minute now—a new village will rise from the ashes of the old. A village that is healthy and pure. A village where the word AIDS does not exist.”

The Professor looked down at his watch and said, “Well, I’d say this is cutting it a bit close.” He started back towards the helicopter. Over his shoulder he yelled, “Oh, and don’t bother trying to break the beacon, it won’t do you any good.”

He climbed into the helicopter.

“You never knew my mother.”

The Professor turned. “What gave it away?”

“She doesn’t drink vodka,” shouted Rikki. “And she wouldn’t have settled for a million dollars.”

He nodded.

“So then Track was behind this whole thing?”

He smiled wide.

“What’s he get out of this?” Rikki asked immune to the blow. I guess she’d already known her father was behind the ransom.

“You’ll have to ask him. However, you may never have the chance.”

“Well, seven hundred and fifty million of his dollars will die with me.”

“What do you mean?” the Professor’s voice wavered.

She held up the phone and smiled. “You’re not the only one who banks in Monaco you know.”

“No. You couldn’t.” He grasped at his neck. He must have been in such agony when Ganju had ripped it off that he hadn’t noticed.

Rikki held up the Random Generating Password capsule that Ganju had ripped from the Professor’s neck and said, “Looking for this.”

He snarled.

I said, “Your friend Ganju was really good with numbers.”

“Well, the money was just icing on the cake,” he said, fighting back a grimace. “That you and everyone within a square mile will soon be compost is satisfaction in itself.”

“But the money would have been nice.”

He cut his eyes at me, then pulled the door closed. The helicopter’s propeller started up, kicking up the village floor, then slowly began to rise off the ground.

I looked at Rikki and said, “Were you really able to transfer the money?”

She nodded.

But even with this small victory, we still had the problem of being blown to pieces in the coming minute.

The helicopter continued to rise. When it was twenty feet off the ground, it banked slightly. Then abruptly, it stopped. It banked once more and headed towards the bus. It stopped directly overhead, hovering. I stared upward. The door to the helicopter slid open. The Professor leaned out. He was holding something black in his hands. It weighed about fifty pounds. Bheka.

“I believe this belongs to you.”

He released Bheka and he fell into Gina’s and my outstretched arms. The door to the chopper slid closed. The chopper banked to the left, quickly rose, and slowly disappeared from view.

I looked down at Bheka. I couldn’t blame him. Trying to sneak onto the helicopter. I wished I’d thought to do the same. I rubbed his head and said, “Nice try.”

He threw a shy smile.

“One minute,” Rikki chimed, looking at the phone.

I let out a deep breath.

“Well, we might as well go ahead and break the thing,” quipped Gina.

She was right. It couldn’t hurt.

I jumped on the bus and checked the cup holder. It wasn’t there. I sat on my haunches and peered into the side of the seats where it could have fallen.

“Don’t tell me you lost it,” Lacy shouted, joining the search.

“It was in the cup holder,” said J.J. “I saw it.”

Gina and Rikki hopped aboard and began searching frantically for the beacon. I thought if we could just find it and shatter it, then maybe the bomb would misfire. That there would be some sort of complication. It had become our last hope. Our last gasp.

“It’s 12:00.”

I stopped my search and looked at Lacy. She was pointing at the clock on the bus’s dash. She was right. And yes, the clock could have been off by a couple minutes like most clocks were, but this one was accurate. How did I know? Through the windshield a streaking plume of smoke was approaching from the horizon.

Lacy reached out her hand. I took it.

Lacy stared at me. Her beautiful blue eyes slowly leaked a single tear that ran down the side of her nose. I pulled her into my chest and closed my eyes.

The explosion was cataclysmic. A million times greater than the blast that had destroyed the
Afrikaans
.

But the explosion was not in the village. It was miles away, high up in the sky.

Lacy and I held each other and watched the orange mushroom cloud bellow high in the atmosphere. At the center of the mushroom, I was certain was a helicopter.

I looked at Bheka standing on the bottom step of the bus. His eyebrows were raised. He looked like he’d just got caught cheating on a test. I started laughing. Gina, Rikki, J.J., and Lacy still appeared to be putting the events together.

Lacy pointed to Bheka and said, “You? The beacon?”

Bheka smiled and said, “I thought he should have it back.”

≈

Rikki smiled wide and gave me a big hug. That’s when it clicked. I pushed her away.

She cut her eyes at me and said, “What?”

“The diamond in your tooth?” I said, holding onto her shoulders. “Where did you get it?”

“It came in the mail on my twenty-first birthday.”

“Who do you think gave it to you?”

She paused a moment and then said, “Track probably.”

“And what did we see two signs for when we were driving here?”

It took her a second, but she got there. “Diamond mines.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You asked what your father would be getting out of it.”

The air was sucked from her lungs. She still had the satellite phone and started flipping through it. She hit the screen several times and I knew she was searching, “Track Bowe and diamonds.”

After several more seconds, she turned the phone to me and said, “Oh my God.”

ELEVEN DAYS LATER

LONDON

4:40 p.m.

“Are you ready for this?”

Rikki tilted her head to the side and gazed upward through the window of the cab. She appraised the skyscraper her father owned and said, “Yep.”

After the explosion, the six of us had climbed the hill from the Zulu village, then hitched a ride in the back of a truck to the town of Ladysmith. There we hitched another ride and by the time the sun was setting we’d found our way to King Edward VIII hospital in Durban. (Gina accompanied us as both Timon and the little girl from the village were being treated there.) When we arrived, Gilroy had just gotten out of surgery and was in critical condition. Susie and Frank had made the most of the hospital cafeteria and listened closely as Lacy, J.J., and I recounted the events at the village. We’d tried to get a hotel, but the media swell had made this utterly impossible and we slept in hospital chairs. At noon the following day, Gilroy was upgraded to stable condition and we were able to visit him. Trinity hadn’t left his side and was still wearing her bikini. Lots of happy doctors. Gilroy was groggy, but was still able to flip me off. What a guy.

Later that day, Susie and Frank said that they needed to get back to the States. There were tears (not from me), promises to stay in touch (from everyone), and threats made if Snuggies weren’t waiting for us we got back home (from me.) J.J. departed as well. His agent had him booked on all sorts of talk shows and he needed to get back if he was going to cash in on the hostage “bonanza.” There were tears (from him), promises to stay in touch (from him), and threats if we didn’t stay in touch (from him.) That same day, Bheka’s mother showed up. She was a beautiful black woman and I recalled seeing her about the ship. She didn’t look the least bit sick and picked Bheka up in her arms and twirled him around when the two reunited. Gina took Llandee’s information and promised to get her help with her disease as soon as she could. Lacy left as well. She could tell I was in detective mode, and she desperately missed her fiancée back in France. I would see her in three months at her wedding, but it didn’t make the goodbye any easier (lots of tears from me.)