Whiplash

8

Danny Freah pulled his yellow baseball cap lower as the boat approached the pier. He stepped up toward the bow, holding his bag tightly against his leg as someone jostled against his side. The small ferry had set out hours earlier from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. When it left the dock there, the sun was about at eye level over the water; now it was long gone, sunk into the gray mass of Africa.

The passengers crowding Danny were mostly poor Sudanese returning from work. There were a few pilgrims mixed in, devout Muslims who had performed the hajj, or holy trek, to Mecca. The rest were operators, thieves, and pretenders.

Danny fell firmly into the last camp. His passport and papers declared that he was a doctor of paleontology, a claim backed up with several official letters from the Sudanese and Egyptian governments. Each seal had been bought for five thousand dollars cash, a price high enough for him to consider turning them over to a legitimate paleontologist when his job here was done.

Except few legitimate paleontologists would dare travel to the Sudan.

“How’s the dock look?” Danny muttered.

“Rephrase question,” answered the Voice.

He pushed the earphone in his right ear a little deeper. Though designed specifically for his ears, the plugs didn’t feel very comfortable.

“Are there armed men on the dock?” he asked.

“Affirmative. Six guards within customs area. Additional men beyond the gate. One armored car.”

“Why do they need the armored car?”

“Rephrase question.”

Danny didn’t bother. He had been using the MY-PID “appliance” for several days, but it still felt uncomfortable. Nor had it been particularly useful. He knew where he was going and what to do. The Voice’s contribution to his mission so far had been to tell him how warm it was and how unlikely it was to rain.

He squeezed his eyes together, fighting off fatigue. He’d flown from Cairo via Rome with barely an hour stopover, and from there to Saudi Arabia. Immediately on landing he’d rented a car and driven halfway across the country to the ferry. All told, he’d spent roughly eighteen hours traveling. He’d napped for a little less than four hours during the first flight. Those were the most he’d had in a row since starting his new assignment.

Searchlights flashed on above the pier as the ferry closed in. Through the glare, Danny saw men armed with automatic rifles waiting for the ship to dock. Behind them was the armored car the Voice had mentioned.

Danny gripped his bag as the ferry bumped against the dock. A deckhand sprung across, tying the ship to the wharf. Another removed the spar from the rail and stepped back. People began jumping across. Danny waited until it was clear that the boat wasn’t getting any closer, then leapt as well, crossing over to the worn wooden planks.

The rickety dock was bisected by a metal fence that enclosed the customs and passport control areas. To get into Sudan, a visitor or resident had to queue in the single line that started at the center of the fence and spread willy-nilly in front of it. Occasionally, a customs officer or one of the soldiers guarding them attempted to form the wedge-shaped mass into order, but it was hardly worth the effort; as soon as one person moved forward, the order collapsed, and the crowd once more jockeyed for position.

Like nearly everyone who’d gotten off the ferry, Danny was black. But his fresh, Western-style clothes and confident manner stood out from the others as sharply as if his skin had been green. One of the customs officers waved at him, calling him around the press of the line. He had Danny walk to a chained gate at the far end of the pier. One of the soldiers accompanied him, glancing backward every few seconds to make sure none of the other passengers followed.

They didn’t. While a few were jealous that a foreigner would be allowed to cut in line, they also knew the reason. The foreigner represented money, to both the customs agent who would expect a “fee” for the convenience, and to the country, which collected for an instant visa whether he had one already or not.

The natives watching, on the other hand, were merely a nuisance.

“Papers,” said the customs officer.

Danny reached into his pocket for his passport. He’d been well-schooled on the procedure; inside the passport was a crisp hundred dollar bill.

The bill disappeared into the agent’s palm so quickly Danny thought it had been vacuumed up his sleeve.

“What is your purpose here?” asked the man in English.

“I am on a dig,” said Danny. “We’re looking for dinosaurs.”

“Hmph.” The customs agent could not have been less interested. “That bag is all you have?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Open it, please.”

He gestured toward a table nearby. Danny had been told that once he gave the official the bribe, he would be waved through. Now he started to feel apprehensive. He had no money for a second bribe.

The customs agent stood over him as he unzipped the small black case. He was not looking for additional money, but rather, doing his job. In his mind, the hundred dollar bill was a tip from a beneficent westerner, accepted custom rather than corruption. It would not influence him one way or another. If he found any contraband — literature against the regime, a gun, drugs of any sort, including prescription medicine — he would arrest the American.

The bag contained a change of clothes, extra socks, and two pairs of sunglasses. Nothing illegal.

“You are listening to an iPod?” asked the official, pointing to the headphone.

“It’s off.” Danny showed him the control unit. He worried for a second that the officer would take it, but he merely frowned at the device.

“Go,” the man said, dismissing him with a wave.

Danny made his way off the pier, ducking his eyes from the glare of the lights. The rotten fish smell of the seaside gave way to the scent of rotting meat. Crates of goats were stacked along the path that ran from the pier into the start of the city. The animals bleated and moaned, hoping they might convince someone to let them roam the port. Peddlers huddled near the end of the fence, selling various wares. Anything that wasn’t on display, said a crude sign in Arabic, could be obtained.

A stocky black man in a long Arab robe approached Danny from the cluster of people milling near the entrance. Danny saw him from the corner of his eye and tensed.

“Welcome to the hell-hole capital of the world,” said Ben “Boston” Rockland as he took Danny’s elbow. “Our ride’s this way.”

“How you doing, Boston?”

“Good. I was beginning to think you’d never get here.”

“Me, too.”

“Don’t use too much English around here. The natives are pretty restless as it is.”

Boston had been in Port Sudan for several hours, more than enough time to form an impression of the place. He had seen two muggings in that time, one by a police officer. There surely would have been more, but most of the people in the city were too poor to bother robbing.

“The thing is, this is the good part of the Sudan,” he told Danny, leading him toward the bus they had leased.

Danny and Boston had first met at Dreamland some fifteen years ago, when Boston replaced one of the original members of Whiplash who’d been killed during an operation. Though the sergeant had an impressive record, he also had what some of his superiors politely termed “issues with authority.” He’d seen action in the first Iraq war, where he served as a pararescuer. He’d also done time as a combat air controller and was “loaned” to the Marines under a special program that put combat veterans on the front lines with other services. But Boston had also nearly come to blows with at least two officers in the past three years, one of whom pressed but then dropped formal charges against him.

“A misunderstanding,” said the captain on the record. Off the record, the captain called Boston a hothead but said he’d also saved three men in combat the day after the incident, and so the captain decided to forget the matter out of gratitude.

Serving with Danny and Colonel Bastian had changed Boston’s perspective considerably. He still thought most officers were jerks. But he also knew that there was an important minority who weren’t. That knowledge had helped Boston advance after Whiplash was disbanded. He was now a chief master sergeant, a veritable capo di capo in the military’s chain of command.

It hadn’t been easy wresting Boston away from his assignment, a cushy job as senior Air Force enlisted man in Germany. Not because he didn’t want to go — he started packing as soon as Danny gave him the outlines of what he was up to. Boston’s commanding officer, however, put a premium on his chiefs, especially those whose extensive combat experience made them instant father figures for the “kids” in the unit. Danny had to get General Magnus involved; fortunately, Magnus had been responsible for one of the CO’s early promotions, and eased Boston’s transfer as a personal favor.

After the briefest introduction possible to the new Whiplash concept, Boston had shipped out to the Sudan to scout out locations for a base. Danny remained in the States, recruiting more members and arranging for their gear.

“You’re going to love this bus,” said Boston. “Got a port-a-john and everything.”

“As long as it runs.”

“Walks more than runs. But it’ll get us there. When’s the rest of the team showing up?”

“Couple of days.”

“Nuri’s waiting for us. Interesting fellow.”

“Why’s that?” asked Danny.

“Just interesting. Knows a bunch of stuff. Pretty good cook.”

“Yeah?”

“You should taste what he does with goat and garlic.”

“Can’t wait,” said Danny.

“You’re also going to need this.”

Boston held out a pistol. It was a large Dessert Eagle, more than twenty years old.

“Got it in town,” he said. “Everything else I saw was just peashooters, 22s and revolvers, pretty useless to stop anyone. I figured it would do until we’re settled. No spare ammo, though.”

Danny took the weapon in his hand. The pistol had a heft to it that made it a clearly serious weapon. Chambered for.44 Magnum, it held eight rounds and could stop anything lighter than an elephant in its tracks.

He slid the gun under his belt, tucking it beneath his jacket.

The bus was an old French municipal bus, converted to private service. It came with a driver, Amid Abul, an Arab who had lived in Derudeb for ten years, occasionally hiring himself out to the CIA as a driver and local “consultant.” Nuri had hired him to provide transportation to their base in the hills to the south, and to help in whatever capacity seemed practical.

Nuri had dealt with Abul before, but even he didn’t fully trust him; it would have been foolish to do so. Though as the owner of a bus, he was relatively well off, the inhabitants of the war-torn country were so poor that most would gladly give up a relative to a sworn enemy for a year’s supply of food and water. Nuri had given Abul a cover story, telling him that his friends were paleontologists. Abul, who knew Nuri was CIA, was smart enough not to ask any questions.

Danny kept up pretenses by asking whether he had ever seen any bones in the sands nearby.

“Plenty of bones, Doctor,” answered Abul. “But all of men.”

The buildings and houses they passed were mostly black shapes barely discernible in the darkness of the night. They faded as the bus wound its way beyond the city, illusions conjured by a stage manager designed to convince an audience that Port Sudan was a real place.

The landscape, harsh and mostly barren during the day, looked surreal at night, the endless darkness punctuated by black stalks and hulking mounds, silhouettes of gray hills and mountains.

After about an hour and a half, Danny began to relax. There was almost no traffic on the road, though it was the only highway to the south from the coast. It was easy to believe they were the only people left on earth.

The area was warm, but not as warm as he’d thought it would be; the night became more pleasant as they left the moist air of the coast. The mountains and foothills of the eastern part of the country received much more rain than the desert to the west. While the fields and hillsides were hardly lush at this time of year, grass, shrubs, and trees grew in the thin but well-drained soil. Here and there farms made a stab at civilizing the land.

Danny felt his eyes start to close. He shifted often, shaking himself, trying to stay as alert as possible.

Boston had no trouble staying awake. He’d been drinking coffee practically nonstop since arriving in Africa, but it wasn’t the caffeine that made his muscles buzz. The idea of being back in action after so many years thrilled him.

As far as he was concerned, he’d spent the last few years as a mascot for the Air Force brass. He’d had plenty of responsibility, but responsibility and action were two different things. His job really didn’t call for him to do all that much. The men and women he directly supervised were mostly chiefs or senior NCOs themselves.

It had been years since he’d really done anything. The elite nature of the units he’d served in meant that even the lowest person on the totem pole not only knew his job, but did it in textbook fashion. Boston had sometimes perversely hoped that a screw-up would find his or her way to the unit; it would give him a project.

All of this might have been a tribute to his organizational and leadership skills — or maybe just colossal good luck — but in truth Boston was not comfortable with the role that had settled on him: that of father figure. He had always looked up to the chief master sergeants he’d known; even in the few cases where he didn’t respect the men, he always admired the rank. But becoming chief made him feel not so much honored and respected as simply old. He didn’t mind the kids at all, and having people jump when you said boo was easy to get used to. But there was also a kind of distance between him and the others that made him uncomfortable. He felt as if he was always on stage, a plastic role model who could not deviate from what preconceived notion the audience had. Inside, he knew he was just good old Ben “Boston” Rockland, tough kid from the streets, snake eater ready for action…not the rocking chair.

Being with Colonel Freah — several times he’d come close to calling him captain, as he’d been in the old days — made him a snake eater again. Just being called Boston felt good.

Not that Danny hadn’t changed. There was a hint of gray in the hair that curled at his temples. He’d also mellowed, slightly at least, over the years. Danny had always run him particularly hard, trying to prove that just because they were both black, he wasn’t cutting him any slack. Now they were more like old friends.

The bus’s headlamps caught a black shadow in the road as they came out of a sharp curve. There was a truck in the road.

“Shit,” muttered Boston.

Danny, who’d been dozing, jerked awake.

“Can you get around it?” Boston asked the driver.

“I don’t know,” said Abul, downshifting. He left his right foot hovering over the gas and used his left foot to slow and work the clutch.

“Somebody behind us, too,” said Boston. “This ain’t no coincidence.”

The truck’s lights came on ahead of them. It was a military vehicle. Two men with berets stepped in front of the lights, arms raised to stop them. They had M-16 rifles.

“This is the army?” said Danny.

Abul shrugged. It was impossible to know who was stopping them. The reason, though, was easy to predict — they wanted money.

“I see six,” said Boston, who was looking behind them. “I think we can make it past them.”

Danny leaned forward, trying to see beyond the truck in the road. It was blocking most but not all of the highway. There was a deep ditch to the left. They might make it past, he thought, but they might also fall into the ditch and tumble over. The road curved to the right a short distance beyond the army truck, and there was no way to see what might be there.

“What are these guys going to ask for?” Danny asked Abul.

“Money.”

“What if we shoot them?” said Boston.

“Bad, bad. They have many guns. Plus, the army will not be happy.”

“Stop the bus,” said Danny.

The driver hit the brake.

“Keep the engine running. Be ready to leave. You think you can get around the truck?”

Abul looked at the space. It might be possible, but it would be very tight. “A chance,” he said.

“If I say go, you go,” said Danny. “No argument.”

“What are we doin’, Cap?” asked Boston.

“Playing it by ear,” said Danny.

Outside, the soldiers surrounded the bus. The two men who’d held up their hands pounded on the door, yelling.

“He wants us to come out,” said Abul.

“That, we’re not doing.”

Danny slipped across the aisle and sat in the first row. Removing his pistol from his belt, he flicked off the safety and held it behind his back.

“Open the door and tell him we’re scientists,” he told Abul. “Poor scientists. We don’t have any money.”

Abul glanced at his passenger nervously. “They will just take some money and leave,” he said.

“If we let them do that, they’ll see us as easy marks,” said Danny. “They’ll hit us again and again.”

Abul disagreed. But rather than telling Danny that directly, he told him he didn’t understand what he said. “My English not good.”

“They’ll rob us again and again,” said Boston. “And then probably kill us.”

“You can’t get away from them,” said Abul. “If tonight you escape, tomorrow they will come.”

“Tomorrow will take care of itself,” said Danny.

The soldiers pounded on the door again.

“Go ahead and open it,” said Danny.

Abul put his hand on the handle and pulled it toward him. Robbery was a simple cost of business here; resisting was foolish.

“Out!” shouted the leader of the small band of soldiers. He’d been in the Sudanese army for five years. He was nineteen.

“Tell him,” said Danny.

“My passengers are scientists,” said Abul in Arabic. “Poor men.”

“We will see their papers!” yelled the leader. He pointed his M-16 at the driver. “And they will pay for our troubles.”

“They only want to see your papers,” Abul told Danny. “And a small bribe will make things right.”

“How small?” asked Danny.

Abul asked the gunman how much the inspection might cost. The soldier replied that it was impossible to say beforehand.

“There are only two men, and they are very poor,” said Abul.

The number displeased the soldier. Ordinarily a bus like this would carry at least a dozen foreigners and yield a good amount of loot. Ten U.S. dollars would feed his men for a month; a hundred would give them a new store of ammunition, which was starting to run low.

“Tell them to come out,” he told the driver.

“He wants you to come out,” Abul told Danny.

“We’re not coming out. If he wants his money, he’s coming in,” said Danny.

Abul turned back toward the door, not sure what to tell the soldier. But the man saved him the trouble, bounding up the steps angrily. In the Sudan, the gun was law, and best obeyed quickly.

Danny coiled his body as the bus rocked.

“First one is mine,” he muttered to Boston as the Sudanese leader came onto the bus.

The soldier raised his rifle and shouted angrily. Then he fired a three-shot burst through the roof of the vehicle to show he meant business.

As he started to lower the rifle, something hit him in the side of the head, sharp and hard — Danny’s fist.

Danny pounded the soldier’s temple so hard that he cracked the skull. With his left hand he grabbed the soldier by the scruff of the neck and threw him face first to the floor, scrambling on top of him as his rifle flew down.

“Go! Go! Go!” yelled Boston. “Past the truck! Past the truck!”

Abul needed no urging. He stomped on the gas as the soldier’s companion raised his gun. The bus leapt forward. The right fender scraped against the side of the troop truck as Abul fought to keep it on the road.

One of the soldiers leapt onto the back of the bus. Boston turned and fired, pumping three bullets into the door. The man fell off, dead.

Abul jerked the bus onto the road behind the truck, barely keeping it upright as the shoulder gave way on the left. He let off the gas and cranked the wheel desperately, staying with the curve. A man ran at the bus from the side, and Abul lowered his head, hunching over the wheel and praying to Allah to deliver them.

Behind him, Danny quickly frisked the soldier, tossing away a pistol and a grenade, along with two magazines for the M-16. Now that he was on the floor, the man looked small and almost frail. His rib bones poked through his uniform shirt.

“Up,” Danny ordered.

The soldier didn’t understand. Danny grabbed his shirt and threw him into a seat. Fear gave way to resignation on his face. The man prepared himself to die.

“You’re a lieutenant?” said Danny incredulously, noticing the metal pins on the man’s brown fatigue collar.

The soldier didn’t understand.

“Ask him his name,” Danny told the bus driver.

Abul was too busy driving to translate.

“Hey, Abul, who is this guy?” Danny said.

The soldier turned and spat blood to the floor. He worked his tongue around his teeth, trying to see if any had been broken. He’d been shot once when he was seventeen; the punch in the face felt worse.

“Stop the bus,” said Danny after they’d gone almost a mile from the other soldiers.

Abul did so, his foot heavy on the brake. His hands were shaking.

“Ask him his name and his unit,” Danny told the driver.

“What is your name?” said Abul from his seat.

The soldier didn’t answer the question, merely staring at Danny. Never in his life would he have expected a robbery victim to act this way, especially a westerner. It was impossible; the man, he decided, must be a devil.

“Open the back door, Boston,” said Danny.

“What are you going to do, Colonel?”

“Get rid of him. He’s of no use to us.”

“You must kill him,” said Abul. He jumped up from his seat. “Shoot him. Shoot him.”

“I don’t think so,” said Danny.

“You will kill him or he will kill you. He will kill me,” said Abul.

“You come this way a lot?” said Danny.

Abul had already resolved that he would never drive this way again, but that was irrelevant. The soldiers were fierce and predatory; they would certainly want revenge for this sort of embarrassment.

“Kill him,” said Abul.

“I don’t know, Colonel,” said Boston. “Abul may be right. They aren’t going to interpret mercy as a good thing here.”

Danny looked into the soldier’s face. He fully expected to die.

“How old are you?” he asked.

The soldier had no idea what he was saying.

“Abul?”

Abul translated. The man simply shrugged. He wasn’t able to answer the question accurately, and would not talk to a devil for anything. It was one thing to lose his life — everyone did, some more quickly than others — and a much different thing to lose his soul, which he knew would last forever.

“Get the door, Boston,” said Danny.

“Mr. Rock,” said Abul, appealing to Boston. “To let him go now — foolish.”

“So was not paying him,” said Danny. He hauled the kid to his feet and pointed the gun toward his groin.

“You remember me. My name is Kirk,” he told him, using one of his aliases. “Kirk. You screw with me, next time I blow these off.”

He jammed the gun hard enough to make the kid suck wind.

Boston opened the door at the back. Danny pushed him out.

“Go,” Danny told the driver. “Get us the hell out of here.”