Blackmail Earth

Chapter 13





Adnan and the other jihadists slept in the fisherman’s house in Malé. Maybe their last night on Earth. Paradise beckoned.

The fisherman told his wife to feed them breakfast. The attractive, dark-haired woman never smiled, and seemed nervous, as she had when he returned early from his trip—even before she’d seen the heavily armed men. She certainly never questioned that he’d brought home no fish.

Her name remained unspoken until they started packing their weapons into the trunk of an old Renault, whose backseat had been ripped out to make room for rifles, ammunition belts, and the RPG with the rockets shaped like minarets.

The fisherman told his wife sharply, “You will stay and speak to no one, Senada.”

As he turned to leave, a cell phone rang, filling the immediate silence with a silly pop tune from the West, where godless men made videos of their wives having naked sex with strangers and showed them on the Internet.

Everyone stared at everyone else. None of the jihadists carried a phone, not on a mission where electronic records could destroy many others joined in the holy war against infidels. The fisherman’s cell was in his pocket, silent. He looked down, shaking his head.

The ring tone played over and over: “I love you baby, in every way. I love you baby, let’s go play…”

The fisherman followed the trail of pop love to a shelf above the single-burner stove.

“I love you baby, in every way…”

He smacked aside three brightly painted tin canisters, revealing the device. They crashed to the floor, spilling salt, sugar, flour. A silty fog whitened the fisherman’s feet as he grabbed the pretty purple cell phone. He shook it in rage and reared back to throw it at the wall where it had nestled and sung. A hollow-cheeked jihadist pulled the phone from the fisherman’s hand. Flipped it open. Handed it back to him.

The fisherman put it to his ear and shouted, “Who is this?” turning his furious gaze on his wife. His enraged voice drew no response.

Senada backed into the arms of one of the strangers. Her husband rushed over, shouting, “Who was that? Who?” When she shouted back, “I don’t know,” he punched her in the stomach. She doubled over, spittle hanging from her lips. He grabbed her long black hair, yanked up her head, and waved the phone in her face, demanding, “Who gave you this?” He shook her head, yelling, “Tell me!” When she glared at him, he backhanded her face, bloodying her lips. “This is why I have no sons,” he screamed.

The Waziristanis didn’t speak his language, but they understood a husband’s fury and what had been exposed in the syrupy strains of an infidel’s song.

They pushed Senada to the floor and stared at her husband expectantly. He kicked her once, then again, waving the phone above his head. He began to stomp her.

Adnan stared. He had never seen such violence. He thought of his mother. No woman should be beaten like this. No matter what. But he didn’t dare try to stop her husband. These men scared him.

Senada curled into a ball but could not escape her husband’s kicks. She cried out at each hammering blow from his bare heels.

The gaunt jihadist who’d ordered the fisherman to answer the phone now threw out his arms and stopped the beating. He shouted at his men and one of them dragged Senada to her knees. When she started to collapse, the minion jerked her upright by her thick hair. He leaned over her shoulder, his long black beard pressing against her back, and spoke rapidly. Adnan didn’t understand what the jihadist was saying, and from her lack of response, neither did Senada. The jihadist who was holding her hair forced her to face the man who’d barked the commands.

The leader snapped out more foreign words and his other two men shoved the fisherman to his knees beside his wife. The man’s head hung to his chest, moving slightly side to side. He still held the phone. The head jihadist took it from him.

The Waziristani leader grabbed the Mauser pistol from under Adnan’s shirt and thrust it into the seaman’s hand. He dragged Adnan over to the kneeling couple and forced the barrel of the gun to the back of Senada’s head. The jihadist shouted again and pantomimed shooting. Adnan did not move. The other man shouted three more times, spittle landing on Adnan’s face.

Adnan shook his head: He was a martyr, not a murderer.

The jihadist jammed the gun into the base of the fisherman’s skull, squeezing Adnan’s hand painfully. His commands grew piercing.

“No,” Adnan said, so softly that he might have been whispering. He slipped his finger from the trigger. The others’ eyes grew large. He snatched the gun away and stuck the barrel into Adnan’s face, bruising his cheekbone.

Suddenly the room was so quiet that Adnan could hear Senada’s quick gasps.

Adnan closed his eyes and accepted his fate, knowing that his regrets would span eternity. What would Parvez think—that his friend had been a coward? That he’d lost his nerve and been shot like a dog?

The fisherman yelled “whore” at his wife. She shouted that she’d never loved him. “Do you understand? Never.” Blood dripped down her chin and spilled to the floor. “You’re a pig. My father forced me to marry you.”

Her defiance needed no translation. The jihadist smacked her head sharply with the steel butt of the gun. The blow made her weep, but she directed her outrage at her husband, spitting in his face and screaming, “I love Rafan. Do you hear me? Only Rafan. Not you.”

The fisherman lunged for her. She pulled back. A short jihadist stopped him.

A gunshot made Adnan’s ears ring. Senada’s body crumpled to the floor, eyes open, empty. The fisherman looked at his wife’s body, then at her killer, who met his gaze with a flat stare. The jihadist placed the barrel of the gun between the fisherman’s eyes and mumbled something. Adnan thought it might be a prayer, since the man raised his eyes to the ceiling as he spoke. Then the Waziristani fired again.

The fisherman’s head jerked like a line when the bait has been struck, and his body lay beside that of his slain wife.

Adnan and the four jihadists left the house and squeezed into the Renault. As they neared the harbor, the leader handed the Mauser to Adnan, who stuck it in his pants and carefully arranged his shirt to conceal it.

Adnan felt dizzy and sick to his stomach, but relieved: Martyrdom would still be his.

He prayed to Muhammad … peace be upon Him.

* * *

Crack, crack, crack …

Goddamn AK-47s. Rick Birk knew he would never outlive his fear of that rifle. He hadn’t heard one since Vietnam, yet he’d identified the weapon the instant the first shot had sounded. The North Vietnamese Army had loved them; back in the day the Russkies gave them away like stuffed cabbages.

Birk ducked behind a pallet of crates stamped with inky Chinese characters, moving so fast that his media laminates, hanging from his neck on a beaded chain, swung up and smacked him in the face. Least of his worries. There were brown buggers in headscarves down the dock to his left, and brown buggers in uniforms down the dock to his right; the ones in uniform were guarding the gangplank to Senator Gayle Higgens’s supertanker, the Dick f*cking Cheney.

All the brown buggers had Kalashnikovs. The guys in headscarves looked like Al Qaeda wannabes and were trying to shoot their way onto the tanker. The soldier boys had been searching bags by the gangplank. Duffels had been left open and unattended; Birk assumed their owners had fled. The uniforms had behaved like smart soldiers everywhere and taken cover. Who wants to die for iron oxide? Helluva legacy. But why would anyone kill for it? This has got to be a first.

Birk figured this skirmish—they were still firing at one another, mostly blindly—would last about two more minutes, until army reinforcements arrived and picked off the headscarves from behind. The wannabes had no plan, apparently, beyond playing shoot ’em up. Amateurs. They should take some lessons from their brothers-in-arms in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those guys were ferocious kick-ass fighters. Birk hated their guts but they knew war. Not this piddly shit. He could take on these bozos.

One of them had an RPG, and Birk wondered why. If they used rockets, they risked blowing up the gangplank and damaging the boat, which they appeared to want to hijack. Bring it on, Birk thought. Rockets made for terrific bang-bang, and show producers adored them. Where’s my cameraman?

Birk and his photographer had come to the docks to catch the water taxi to Dhiggaru, where Birk intended to flush out Jenna Withers’s old boyfriend. Then the shooting had started and the cameraman had bolted. Birk hoped that the chickenshit had holed up somewhere to shoot the entire scene, especially since he was in the middle of it. The “veteran correspondent,” the anchors at all the networks would call him. A dashing figure, a stalwart observer caught between opposing forces of evil. Might even save him from the next round of layoffs.

Come on, come on, Birk mumbled impatiently, sweating through his fine Egyptian cotton shirt. Can we have some sirens? The cavalry? Give me “bang-bang” for the viewers at home. Something, for God’s sake.

He took out his cell and grabbed video of the five jihadists, assuming they had the shortest lease on life. Once the reinforcements arrived, he’d have to try to capture the bloodletting with the phone’s crappy little lens. No telling what chickenshit was doing.

He’d no sooner settled back behind the pallet when a fusillade riddled the sweltering air. Birk peeked out in time to see a headscarf rise up dramatically from behind the covering fire and lob a grenade.

Holy f*cking shit.

The grenade exploded. Shrapnel tore into soldiers, the gangplank, and the shipping crates. Birk glanced out and saw all five jihadists racing toward the ramp, which appeared intact. The same could not be said for three bodies that, until seconds earlier, had worn the unshredded uniform of this beleaguered nation. The surviving soldiers, seeing themselves about to be overrun, fled right toward Birk, who registered this development with dismay and more profanity. He also noticed that one of the jihadists heading toward the gangplank was armed with only a pistol.

Christ, he’s fat.

You didn’t see many fatties in the Maldives. But then a suspicion seized Birk and sent waves of fear washing through him: that the fat guy was wearing a suicide belt, or vest. Birk wanted to run, too, but didn’t risk any exposure, not with armed men racing toward the crates that he hoped would hide him.

* * *

In seconds, Adnan was glad he was lagging behind the other four Islamists: The one with the long beard was mowed down by automatic weapons fire and went sprawling on the pier. Adnan, thirty feet behind him, froze and watched the wiry leader of the Waziristanis open fire on the enemy, who was trying to take cover behind the leg of a massive red crane. The jihadist cut him down, leaving his dead eyes fixed on the steel structure that towered above him.

Adnan ran to the jihadist with the long beard, shaking him. No life. He stuffed the Mauser into his pants and grabbed the other man’s Kalashnikov. He’d never shot one of these rifles, but the trigger worked as he imagined. Too well: He shot up one of the jihadists before he realized what he was doing, ripping open his back and head, spraying blood, brains, and headscarf into the air. The man collapsed, facedown. Adnan felt nothing.

Four soldiers ran away, chased by a lone Waziristani.

Adnan sprinted as hard as he could for the ramp. “Nothing else matters,” Parvez had told him. “You must get on board.”

The short jihadist who’d tackled the fisherman raced into view, shooting at the soldiers who’d already been hit by the grenade. The attack appeared unnecessary; the bodies looked barely intact.

Adnan slipped on the blood seeping across the dock. When he dragged himself to his feet, shirt and pants smeared red, he saw the short jihadist stumble; a bullet had ripped through his neck, fired by a wounded soldier who had seemed dead a moment earlier. Blood arced from the jihadist’s neck, like water from a garden hose. He clutched his wound, staring wildly at Adnan; then he fell, dropping his rifle.

Adnan turned to shoot the soldier; but his head had fallen to the dock, and his dead eyes saw nothing.

“You must get on board.”

Alone, Adnan started up the long ramp.

* * *

The sounds of the soldiers racing toward Birk grew louder. The jihadist couldn’t be far behind. One raggedy-ass headscarf, four soldiers. Why the f*ck were they running? But Birk knew the answer: The perverse ratio of religious nutbars to political psychos generally favored the former, even when handily outnumbered. Hey, the afterlife promised gardens full of low-hanging fruit and bubbling streams, fine food and drink, and dozens of virgins—good lookers!—swarming over your loins. Even the most rigorous military training couldn’t compete with that.

Birk abandoned the idea of trying to race twenty-year-old soldiers being chased by a rabid Islamist. Be worse than Pamplona, where a bull almost gored him in the behind in ’73, after Birk had drunk a wee too much courage in his favorite cantina.

The memory had him sucking on his flask, savoring the gin, but he wasn’t drinking courage now—just settling his nerves: He decided against trying to run away from the jihadist and the soldiers—all the brown buggers—after remembering that you never made sudden moves in a firefight that could catch the eyes of jumpy gunmen. For better or worse, the pallet, piled high with heavy-looking crates, provided the only protection, however minimal, on the whole goddamn dock.

All Birk could do was peek out long enough to see the soldiers drawing closer with Mr. Raggedy Ass right on their heels. But the worst part, the fright that made Birk wince and groan and want to stomp his poor fallen arches, was that Raggedy Ass caught his eye.

Oh, f*ck a duck.

Birk hadn’t prayed in decades, not since the Tet Offensive when the Vietcong pinned him down near the embassy in Saigon. But he prayed now, if profanities interlaced with “Jesus” and “God”—as in “Jesus f*cking God”—could be considered, if but for a second only, as a means of petitioning a higher power. (Not a lot of spiritual belief animated Birk, not after all he’d seen of earthly miseries, but self-interest came into play, and he wasn’t about to bet against the big bully in the sky, not if he could eke out any kind of edge on the theological constructs that turned other men insanely murderous.)

And there they go. The pounding boots of the soldiers. He watched them pass without ever looking over at him. Their backs quickly grew smaller.

And here comes Mr. Raggedy Ass. Birk saw him rear up and start shooting. Oh, Christ alf*ckingmighty. All four soldiers fell.

The best Birk could hope for was that the jihadist, having slaughtered the only outright resistance left on the dock, wanted nothing more than to hustle back to whatever nasty business he had planned for the tanker. Or that in the excitement of gunning down four men with a single burst of his dearly beloved Kalashnikov, he’d forgotten about the geezer huddling behind the pallet.

Silence descended, sudden and uneasy. No more bullets, boots, or Raggedy Ass’s bare soles. Birk peered out to see if the jihadist had taken to creeping around. No sign of him. Birk looked behind him. No sign there, either. Then Birk heard him—no question—moving along the far side of the pallet.

He clocked the man’s every step, and tiptoed away. Oh, sweet Jesus. Cat and mouse time.

He had no illusions about which tail-twitching role belonged to him.

* * *

Adnan pulled himself up the gangplank to the tanker’s main deck, panting heavily and sweating profusely. The deck was deserted. If any seamen or soldiers were on board, they’d retreated.

Following Parvez’s instructions, Adnan immediately stripped off his shirt to bare the powerful bomb that circled his torso—bulky packages of C-4 plastic explosives strung together with wires.

“It’s important,” Parvez had told him, “to show them the bomb right away. Don’t worry about them shooting you; they’ll never risk setting off anything this powerful.”

Adnan hoped Parvez could see him. The first step toward martyrdom had been achieved. If everything else was also going according to plan, his old friend could see him on a computer screen or television, and so could millions of others.

Imagining himself before their eyes, Adnan raised his arms high above his head. A fighter for Muhammad.

A champion.

* * *

Birk eased around the pallet, hoping that when Raggedy Ass turned the first corner, he’d see nothing and go on about his homicidal chores like a good jihadist. Maybe he wasn’t thinking of the geezer at all. Maybe he’d only slowed down to catch his breath by the only cover on the dock. All that chasing and murdering had to be exhausting.

What was that? Footsteps. But they were getting softer and sounded farther away. Go, Raggedy Ass. Go-go-go.

Birk could have howled with joy. Instead, he took a nip from his flask. You are one savvy son of a bitch, Birk said to himself. Pulled another rabbit out of the old hat.

Birk put away his flask and fished out his phone. He dialed the direct line to the network desk, which was run by a good-looking Brit named Sheila. A little old for his taste—at least fifty, by now—but not too old for a little friendly phone flirtation. And slim, like Miss Sari.

The septuagenarian correspondent cleared his throat and said, “Sheila, dear, you are not going to believe this, but I’m right smack dab in the middle of a gun battle in Malé.” He thought he sounded debonair as ever. “Put me on live.”

Oh, baby, it felt great to say those four words again: “Put me on live.” And to deliver them with such well-earned authority. Sounded so good that he repeated them to himself one more time during an odd stretch of dead air; Sheila was generally so perky. That’s why it was so easy to imagine spanking her.

“Listen, love…” Getting a little flirty herself with that “love” business. Might have to give her a chance, after all. “… you are on live, and if you’re really, really smart you’ll stop drinking and you won’t move when the guy behind you sticks his gun up your arse.”

“What?” Birk felt an adrenaline rush that became a tsunami as a gun barrel pressed against his head. Hot f*cking steel burned so bad Birk thought he could smell his skin cooking, but he didn’t dare move.

“You there, love?” Sheila said. “We’re watching you and your friend. Everybody sends their best, I’m sure. Hang in there. No time to panic, old man.”

A hand reached over Birk’s shoulder, groped for his laminates. Then he was jerked around to face Mr. Raggedy Ass himself, who shouted the universal language of “Run, a*shole, run” with uncommon force and fluency.

Birk ran, viciously poked and prodded to the gangplank by Raggedy Ass’s weapon. He looked around and saw that there was no one to save him; only one barrel poked out from the crack of a metal door, and it was the lens of chickenshit’s camera.

Raggedy Ass grabbed the RPG from a dead jihadist and screamed at Birk all the way up to the deck of the Dick Cheney. The correspondent had no idea what the jihadist was saying now, but the porker whom Birk had suspected of carrying a suicide bomb was speaking all too clearly of blood and bedlam with his half-naked show-and-tell. Birk took no comfort in seeing that his deductive powers had remained as sharp as ever. The vest looked like it held enough C-4 to take out the tanker, dock, and anything and anyone else within a half-mile radius.

Raggedy Ass cracked Birk on the shoulder with his rifle stock, collapsing his legs and forcing him to lie down, probably to be executed—and this really hurt—off camera.

Birk stretched out facedown on the filthy deck. The metal was so goddamn hot he felt like a boneless breast of chicken slapped on a grill.

Raggedy Ass cuffed his hands behind his back with plastic restraints, tightening them way too much. Birk took this as a good sign: Who cuffs you and then shoots you?

Idiots the world over, he answered himself.

* * *

Adnan felt sorry for the old man lying on the deck, captured by the surviving Waziristani. The seaman had been hoping that the jihadist would be killed along with the other three, or so seriously wounded that he wouldn’t make it aboard. Then Adnan wouldn’t have had to worry about the crazy, murderous Waziristanis. He would have ordered the captain to take them out to sea, and after three or four days of world attention, the great martyr would have blown up the tanker so he could have paradise and pomegranates and virgins who would make him want their ridiculous bodies with those silly breasts that shook like rice pudding.

Instead, Adnan eyed the jihadist, who pointed to himself and the ship’s bridge. Adnan nodded, and the man ran toward a metal stairway, holding his rifle ready, so he could shoot anyone who got in his way.

That means you, too, Adnan reminded himself.

* * *

Birk figured that the laminates had saved his butt. Raggedy Ass must have been smart enough to know the value of his prize.

So they’d use him, and that was fine with Birk. This could resurrect his career, win him a George Polk Award for foreign reporting. Not much competition for it these days because there wasn’t much overseas reporting anymore; Americans just didn’t give a fig about the rest of the world—focus groups didn’t lie—and network executives didn’t cram foreign coverage down viewers’ throats anymore, not with their corporate overlords constantly carping about the costs of running a global news operation.

So this escapade could turn out to be the pièce de résistance of Birk’s career. Go out in a blaze of glory. He might win everything—Polk, Emmy, duPont-Columbia, Peabody. And why not? He deserved every one of them, a whole goddamn panoply of prizes. And with any luck at all, he might get to accept them in person, rather than posthumously.

The a*shole in the vest had plans, but they weren’t imminent or they’d all be dead by now. Birk figured the suicide bomber wanted airtime, and he, Rick Birk, would do everything possible to make that happen. It would keep him alive and on camera.

Birk held hostage, day one, he mused. Look what those Americans in Iran did for Ted Koppel’s career, and that poor shmuck looked like Alfred E. Neuman.

Birk laughed, then stifled his mirth with a mighty effort—mistake; don’t show them you’re amused—but he could feel his whole body shaking. Maybe that’s what an earthquake is, he thought. The whole planet trying not to laugh out loud at mankind’s latest folly.

* * *

The deck shuddered and Adnan looked up. Moments later he heard automatic weapons fire. Everything according to plan: The jihadist had forced the captain and crew to the bridge. Then the Waziristani had killed them, except for the captain himself.

Parvez had told them to leave the captain alive only till they got out to sea. “He can sail the ship by himself, if he has to.”

How did Parvez know all this? Adnan wondered. And in the same moment he realized that Parvez had studied far more than the Koran in Waziristan. He’d studied jihad.

* * *

Parvez sat blocks away in an Internet café, watching a computer screen that showed the tanker heading away from Malé. Live video of the hijacking. Parvez had arranged for a jihadist who’d studied with him in Waziristan to set up a camera and provide a feed to an Islamic Web site, which was making this historic event available to the whole world.

The authorities would track down the camera soon enough, but every minute of video would draw more viewers. Even more important, it would attract the attention of world media.

Parvez clicked on the major news Web sites, including Al Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC. All of them were streaming video of the tanker leaving port, noting the decimated bodies in the foreground, and commenting on the “terrorist attack” in barely restrained voices. It was already a huge story. Hundreds of journalists would race to the Maldives, much like the rescuers who’d run to the bombing last week, to try to save the ruined survivors.

And then what happened? Parvez thought with a smile. The second bomb exploded.

He lifted his heavy-lidded eyes to the luxurious Golden Crescent Hotel across the street, where every room would soon become home to a foreign journalist.

Kill them all. The most famous faces.

Parvez knew that with each bomb, the story would get bigger, almost as huge as the orange stain that would soon spread across the sea.

* * *

Jenna stared stonily at her television, scarcely believing what she was witnessing: Maldivian soldiers blown up and gunned down by jihadists taking over Senator Gayle Higgens’s supertanker. That brazen moron. What was she thinking, making that kind of move on her own? And now, thanks to the hijacking, the task force was really in a state of suspended animation. Everything was on hold—except the phone starting to ring beside her. She looked at the digital readout: Marv, the executive producer of The Morning Show.

“What’s up?” She didn’t bother with niceties. Why pretend?

“You watching your old stomping grounds?”

“I am.”

“You see Birk getting taken hostage?”

“I did.” Birk was unmistakable both in appearance—shock of white unruly hair—and personality, which she declined to consider at any length.

“Elfren wants to see you in the morning. Soon as we’re off air.”

As in James Elfren, the vice president in charge of correspondents and producers. Smart guy. He didn’t waste anyone’s time. If he wanted to see her, she was about to take off for the Maldives.