Blackmail Earth

Chapter 11





The presidential palace gleamed white as sugar under the glaring sun, a promise of shade and drink amid marble and silk. A mere block away, Rick Birk, seventy-four-year-old investigative reporter, fanned himself furiously as his rickshaw driver made his way through the crowded streets. Despite his discomfort, Birk loved breaking out his tropical-weight safari suits—custom tailored with high collars to hide his sagging neck—for equatorial forays that reminded viewers he was still a dashing, war-torn foreign correspondent.

Decades ago he’d draped his fit young frame in khaki every morning, and he could still wax nostalgic for the years when he wore his bwana garb to cover the Vietnam War for the Associated Press. Especially alluring were his deeply cherished memories of dropping his soft cotton drawers for nights soaked with gin and tonic and sex with a staggering array of Saigonese women. That’s if they were women. They were so goddamned teensy that it had been hard to tell in his nightly stupor, so Birk made a point of preserving his upright sense of self by never asking their age. Just grab two, three, four of them and go. Break out opium, hash, and Thai sticks, and share the smoke with his newest nubile friends. And then cavort for hours in petite fields of firm flesh. Ah, those were the days. Don’t let anybody kid you. Christ, he was glad to have been alive when you could wet your wick and not get sick. At least not with anything truly ghastly.

His Vietnam reporting earned him a Pulitzer before he jumped the Good Ship Print for the greater fame of television, where he was lauded for possessing the pluck of Morley Safer, the unmitigated gall of Mike Wallace, and the sangfroid of Peter Jennings—all names that meant less and less with the passage of every hour in the fiercely burgeoning multimedia universe of the twenty-first century.

Birk’s highest accolades had come decades ago. These days, he was even scorned in his own newsroom. No less than Jenna Withers could hang up on him with outrageous impunity. It helped to know that there had once been a much sweeter time when she would have done penance on her knees for that impropriety—or been out on her ass.

Intimations of his glory days often crept up on Birk when he found himself, as he did this afternoon, on his way for drinks. Or as he preferred to call it, a “briefing from a high government official.” In this case, the Maldivian minister of defense.

That these randomly cast, largely forgotten islands should even need a minister of defense would have struck the world as ludicrous, until the second terrorist bombing in a year tore apart a street no more than three blocks from where Birk ambled along … so slowly that he had to actively resist an urge to slip off his fine alligator belt and flog the little brown bugger hauling him along.

No one but idiots was impressed with his television appearances these days. He ascribed this to the decline of “traditional media,” rather than his ravaged looks—the pits and craters from the removal of numerous precancerous skin growths. The relentless sun, not his withered organ, had humbled him most visibly. In bad light, Birk looked pocked with shrapnel, and when he appeared on camera, he layered on more pancake than a drag queen with a five o’clock shadow.

What with the toll of alcohol and the faulty scribes of memory, he honestly couldn’t recall the last time he’d been laid; and self-pleasuring—a miserable tonic for the palsied and lame—had been but a limp handshake for as long as he could remember.

In the end, drink became his favorite friend, and the tang not of flesh but of Schweppes and Bombay gin all but came alive on his tongue a half block before he arrived at the palace gate.

Amazing what anticipating a stiff one can do for you, how it can tease with a single imaginary scent. After all, look what poured out of Proust after tasting a simple madeleine. Birk figured the juniper flourish of gin might serve him equally well, if he ever picked up the pen again. He supposed he could give the world of letters a real boost, if he were of such a mind; they were in need of his reserves.

Meanwhile, his driver, sweat spilling off his back in disgustingly swollen streams, brought the rickshaw to Birk’s destination. But the man had the ill grace to pant like a cart dog. A tip, a tip, that’s what he wants. Well, f*ck me.

Birk groaned loudly as he lifted his calcium-sapped bones from the thinly padded seat. He paid and even tipped handsomely, leaving the little native smiling. But then all those rickshaw drivers in Saigon had flashed rows of betel-stained teeth before blowing you straight to hell.

“Rick Birk,” he announced dramatically in his sonorous voice at the palace gate, giving an imperious flick of his hand to the guard. His name ought to have guaranteed admission. But this slack-skinned brown man wasn’t impressed. Almost as bad, he wore what could plausibly have been a bunny suit. The one-piece design seemed more appropriate for toddler wear; it was the color of cheap Easter eggs and had epaulets as large and floppy as rabbit ears. The man raised his hand to keep Birk at bay. Then he entered a gaudily decorated guardhouse with a pink roof, turquoise door, and glass so old and heat-stricken it looked like it would shatter if you sneezed. Birk watched him place a call on a landline. After a few moments he nodded and hung up before returning to send Birk, without escort, to the towering porte cochere where another bunny-suited brown bugger opened the door to the palace’s impressively large reception room.

A wonderfully lithe Indian woman in a red sari led the reporter up a winding staircase to the minister’s office. The rear view was enticing as the rounded cheeks of her bottom glanced temptingly against the shiny fabric. Never had Birk felt so strongly that youth was wasted on the young. What he wouldn’t give to be thirty-five again, with a broad, brilliant smile. Back in the long ago, women like Miss Sari had led him on just such a meandering path to their bedrooms in just such a flirty manner. Just once more, for God’s sake.

At least she was eye candy. The minister’s office lacked all appeal. The walls were white and stark, no more encumbered with style or flourish than the sapped religion they believed in. Wait, he spotted a crescent and a star, and some mumbo-jumbo lettering that might have been Maldivian in origin—or from the moon, for all Birk knew or cared. These Muslims were a boorish lot, positively thirteenth century.

Another look around was a cause for real grief: not a drop of gin. No tonic. Not even a single lonely lime in the minister’s office. Water? She offered him water? Whales shit in water.

“The new austerity?” he asked Sari archly, who might have been a secular holdover in her sleek red dress. But she didn’t favor him with so much as a smile as she left.

Birk was old school enough to carry a silver flask neatly curved to fit an aging gent’s not-so-nimble frame. And as soon as the door shut behind his comely escort, he nipped the elixir that he loved so much.

He’d no sooner felt the gin’s first soothing effects when Minister of Defense Hassan Darby entered, a short man with a long beard and the faltering steps of a rickets-stricken midget. His excessively large brown suit didn’t help, cuffs overrunning his wrists like starving tribesmen laying siege to the gates of a refugee camp.

“Mr. Birk. So sorry to keep you waiting. It seems we have so many luminaries today that I have only ten minutes for you.”

“Luminaries?” It didn’t pass Birk unnoticed that he hadn’t been included in that breath, but mostly he was gobsmacked that the little brown f*cker had the temerity to cut short the forty-five minutes that he’d been promised. Bad enough that he hadn’t permitted Birk to bring along a cameraman. “What other luminaries are you expecting today?”

Birk’s question appeared to flummox the minister, but briefly: “Surely, you must know about the arrival of the Dick Cheney.”

The former vice president? “No, I didn’t know. When’s he coming?”

“He? No, no.” Ho-ho-ho.

What an annoying laugh.

“It is the ship the Dick Cheney. A giant tanker ship. It is in our Maldivian territorial waters even while we waste Mr. Birk’s precious time. Goodness, we are down to six minutes.”

The tanker, right. He knew about that. Didn’t know it was named the Dick f*cking Cheney. And if the Dick f*cking Cheney was plodding along in local waters, then Senator Gayle Higgens couldn’t be far behind. Birk would have to act fast.

“Tell me, Mr. Minister, how serious is your problem with homegrown terrorists?”

“No, Mr. Birk, you must not say … what is that word? ‘Homegrown’? They all come from far away. No proud Maldivian would ever take the life of his brother or sister. You must get that right in your reports. We insist.”

“What about your homegrown jihadists? They’re not so proud, are they?”

“Ah, look at this, Mr. Birk.” He pointed to his gold Rolie. “Time for you to go. Me, too. A luminary is coming.”

* * *

Adnan sat in the small fishing boat, squeezed below the gunwale with four jihadists from Waziristan. They’d arrived on his island at dusk last night, minds laden with the schemata of the tanker they planned to hijack, eyes gleaming with paradise. All of them knew death was imminent, either from seizing the vessel or from the detonation of the bomb that Adnan had become.

Last night Parvez had strung a large black Islamic flag between two trees. Then he’d brought out a video camera.

“Adnan, you are a martyr…”

Recording Adnan’s final statement had always been part of the plan. Even so, when Parvez said those words, Adnan’s spirits soared as surely as if he’d been praised by Allah Himself. Martyr. The highest honor—and it had been bestowed upon him. How great to have lived to hear such praise. The supreme leaders of Islam would know of him, and of Parvez, too, for he was the orchestrator of a martyrdom so great that billions of people would bear witness.

His friend went on: “Do you wish to say anything before you start on your path to martyrdom?”

“I wish to say that I’m doing this, inshallah, to make retribution for the Christian and Jewish pigs who are killing my country…”

Parvez nodded approval of every word. Then, on cue, the jihadists rushed up from the beach and flanked Adnan for the camera with their guns and heavy cartridge belts and RPGs. Their shoulder-mounted weapons pointed straight to the heavens, and Adnan had been startled to notice for the first time that the rockets were shaped like the minarets of Malé. Surely chance alone could not explain such a blessed coincidence: The unholy who dared to ban the most sacred towers would be answered with minarets of steel and explosives that would claim them in storms of fire and death.

Those weapons now lay hidden beneath layers of netting thick with the rotting smells of the sea. The fisherman who had sailed them past dozens of the country’s tiny islands now trailed the Dick Cheney and the five Maldivian Coast Guard boats that were escorting it.

Adnan had been approved for duty on the supertanker. Given his experience, training, and seaman’s papers, his employment had never been in question. He would be welcomed when he walked onto the wharf, his fully packed vest covered by a layer of clothes.

But disguising his true intentions would get him only as far as the gate to the gangplank. To board would require his fellow jihadists to shoot their way past the Maldivian security forces who would search each sailor. In the past, the security detail often lazed in the sun and performed cursory baggage checks, but Parvez had warned that they would be more alert tomorrow, and that the jihadists must take the ship. Adnan’s assignment would be to get on board, not to engage in battle. Even so, a Mauser pistol lay under the netting for him. Once on deck, he could hold everyone at bay with the threat of the bomb. He had to buy time, Parvez said, and make them sail the tanker into the ocean. Time to get the attention of Satan’s media, east and west and north and south. The unclean everywhere.

The fisherman let his boat drift farther astern of the tanker, and then headed for a beach only three miles from the outskirts of Malé. From there, the greatest journey would begin: to paradise, with the whole world watching.

* * *

Rick Birk walked out of the minister’s office with as much dignity as he could muster. Ten minutes. And to think he’d also been admonished to not even suggest that the Maldives had its own native-born killers. The minister himself had taken a sudden detour to a lavatory, though Birk suspected the man wanted to free himself from the incisive questions of a brilliant veteran correspondent.

Of course, the denial about homegrown jihad was hardly surprising. In his entire career, which now spanned a half century, Birk had run across no more than a handful of leaders in the developing world who had readily accepted that their country’s problems lay within their own borders—from a sorry lack of resources and the pervasive futility that poverty inevitably spawned. The rest of the riffraff spewed blame on “outsiders” until, of course, the rude reality exploded with bombs and bloodshed. Then they “got” it—but only in the moments before they fled to Switzerland with their national treasury.

These little brown buggers, however, had a case for finger-pointing: The looming disasters throughout much of Oceania could be laid at the feet of the smokestacked, tailpiped West.

As Birk took the last three steps to the main floor, he spotted Senator Gayle Higgens and her entourage bustling through the main entrance. Argh, the sight of her spurred a memory painful as a lesion, a real standout in his fat catalog of sexual misadventures.

She’d been a freshman Texas legislator when they’d met, as foulmouthed and shameless in private as she was sanctimonious and born-again in public. He’d been young, too, sent to the Oil Patch to cover some long-forgotten hurricane, whose force, even then, couldn’t have stood up to Gayle Higgens. She’d rounded Birk up like one of her stray steers and herded him right into her bed. She’d tied him down as if she were a real buckaroo, then laughed bitterly when he couldn’t perform.

He’d sworn never to go near Higgens again, and there she was. Christ almighty, aging was pitiless: Look at her pastry-crust skin; bloated, mashed-potato body; and swollen ankles, shapeless as bread dough.

She pointed the sharp tip of her pink umbrella at him and bellowed, “Get your rascal self over here, Birk.”

He looked around, finding no reprieve.

“What are you doing here?” the senator demanded.

“Scoping out the restless natives,” he responded as suavely as he could, wondering why in God’s name he was even bothering. But he couldn’t help himself: She’d humiliated him almost fifty f*cking years ago, yet the moment he saw her he was filled with an unruly desire to reclaim his dignity.

“But you must come for the launch of our pilot project. Surely you know about it, you old crow.”

Old crow? That’s some cheap goddamn booze.

Yeah, surely he did know about her pet project, but the seeding of the ocean with iron oxide held no more interest for him than all the bizarrely shaped sea critters whose names escaped him and whose culinary appeal lay chiefly in their most crushed, pounded, and fully processed, deep-fried forms.

“I’m on the hard news beat, Senator.”

She looked at him, openly askance. “Hard news?” she laughed. “You?” With those few words, and with that sharp inflection, she brought back the single biggest humiliation of his sex life. “We’re here to change the world. If you’re smart, Ricky, you’ll come along.”

“I’ll be busy.”

“Sorry to hear that you’ll be tied up. I’m at the Four Seasons. Come by for a backgrounder, if you’d like a good one.”

Why was everything a double entendre with her? And was that a wink? Had that old sack of nickels actually winked at him?

She turned away in the next instant. “Ten o’clock. Down at the port,” she said in parting.

He harrumphed. At ten he’d be at the port, all right, but it would be to catch a water taxi to the island of Dhiggaru. He’d found out the name of weather girl’s old flame—Rafan Yoosuf—and now knew exactly where he could be found. Wasn’t hard. Malé was a small city, and memories were long for beautiful blond girls who scandalized the locals by stealing the heart of one of their sons.

And if Rick Birk understood anything, it was how to trade on resentment to get information. Safe to say that if this Rafan Yoosuf was taking dirt from one island and larding it on another, there would be resentment afloat, never more so than when land meant life.