Blackmail Earth

Chapter 16





A gentle hand shook Jenna’s shoulder. A voice spoke, distant as a dream. “Jenna? We’ll be landing in about forty minutes, and I want to bring you up to speed so we can hit the ground running.”

Nicci? Jenna wondered groggily. She slipped off a black sleep mask and squinted at her producer in the bright tropical sunlight that was spilling into the spacious charter jet. She checked her watch: zonked out for almost nine hours. Great. She usually didn’t sleep well on planes, but she usually didn’t zap herself with zopiclone. Neither did she generally fly on a luxurious Gulfstream with a buttery leather seat that, at the push of a button, converted into one of the plushest beds that Jenna had ever nestled in. Yes, she felt guilty about the outsized carbon footprint of a private jet, but she could not deny, much as she would have liked to, the pleasure of having this kind of transport in a pinch. Now she understood what network old-timers were waxing nostalgic about when they talked about “back in the day.” Old-timers like Rick Birk.

Jenna groaned, though she recognized that Birk was the reason that she and the rest of the network team weren’t flying commercial. If they had been, they would have been refueling back in Dubai about now, instead of arriving at their destination, halfway around the world from their starting point at LaGuardia.

“Want some coffee?” Nicci asked.

Jenna nodded, set aside a soft cotton blanket, and turned her “bed” back into a seat. “Back in a sec,” she said.

Returning from the bathroom, she joined Nicci on a full-size couch that was braced against the left side of the jet. The flight attendant, a young man named Anders from the Netherlands, handed Jenna a cup of coffee.

Behind them, Chris Randall, the network’s special terrorism correspondent, was waking. In a neighboring seat, his producer, Alicia Gant, was pecking peevishly at her laptop. She was about ten years his senior, and not nearly as warm toward Jenna and Nicci as the former Army Ranger turned correspondent.

“That woman worries me,” Nicci said, sotto voce. Randall walked past them toward the front of the plane.

Jenna nodded. Who needed air-conditioning with icy Alicia around? After takeoff, they’d all shared a couple of bottles of Australian Riesling. Jenna had found the two-person camera crew and Chris friendly enough, but Alicia had said very little. Despite her few words, Jenna had sensed the news producer’s disapproval of her. She’d thought that maybe Alicia was feeling territorial, so she’d made a point of saying that she and Nicci weren’t going to report, only analyze. This had not raised the friendliness quotient one point.

Nicci opened her MacBook. Jenna, after several sips of coffee, was awake enough to notice that her producer had changed into khaki shorts and top.

“You look like a total safari girl,” Jenna said.

“I know,” Nicci enthused. “I bought this outfit at F. M. Allen two years ago, and I was worried that I’d never get a chance to wear it. I hope I haven’t overdone it. I don’t want to look silly.”

“No, not at all. You look great.” Nicci was one of those rare wonders who thrived on five hours of sleep and always looked spritely and freshly scrubbed. But much as the pixyish producer could pass for an ingénue, she preferred her lovers to have long hair, long legs, ruby-red lips, and towering heels. Jenna had often thought the Barbie Master would have been perfect for her—if only he weren’t a guy.

“Before we land, you should use a mirror,” Nicci said kindly. Part of her role was making sure the “talent”—Jenna—looked her best.

Jenna tugged at her hair, hardly believing that she’d failed to look closely at herself in the bathroom. I must have really been groggy back there.

“You want the news about GreenSpirit’s murder first, or the Maldives?” Nicci asked. “We’ve got enough time for both.”

“Let’s do New York first.” A killer might be stalking Dafoe’s environs, and that worried her. Jenna realized, uneasily, that her personal and professional lives had become focused not on clouds, rain, or sunshine, but on violence, whose hard hand felt increasingly close. She felt like she’d become the sharp point of an acute triangle—the connection between terrorism in the Maldives and a monstrous murder two hours from home. She wanted to be armed with information on all counts, even if it made her as wary as a Sunday hiker in a forest teeming with dark shadows and the tracks of large carnivores.

“This is a press conference I downloaded a couple of hours ago,” Nicci said. She paused the video on a shot of a young man tugging at his shirt collar, evidently uncomfortable in his jacket and tie. “That’s the ‘person of interest,’ a high school senior and football player named Jason Robb. The one next to him in the gray suit is his lawyer. The other two are his parents. They don’t say anything the whole time.”

Nicci tapped the keyboard, resuming the video. The lawyer was clearing his throat.

“We’re here today because Jason is making himself available for questioning in the investigation of GreenSpirit’s murder. As soon as we leave here, he’ll be talking to police and FBI investigators, but first he wanted to talk to his friends and neighbors through all of you.

“There have been rumors flying around about Jason,” the lawyer continued. “Some of them, in our view, have resulted from leaks from law enforcement officials. Today, we’ll be asking those agencies to make these leaks stop. A responsible young man like Jason should not be tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. I think that after you hear what he has to say, you’ll agree that he’s not linked to this heinous crime in any way.”

“There’s more boilerplate,” Nicci said as she moved the time bar button on the bottom of the screen, “but this is where it gets good. The kid’s just been asked if he threatened GreenSpirit.”

“I didn’t threaten her. I did threaten a girl who dumped my brother before he got killed in Baghdad,” Robb said. “But I only said that I’d get even with her because she accused me, in front of a whole bunch of people, of taking money from guys to lead them to their naked parties, and that wasn’t true.”

“What Jason just said can be confirmed with the CBS News crew that was present during the initiation,” the attorney interjected. “Of course, no harm has come to the young woman in question, and Jason regrets his outburst.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry I said it, but imagine if someone accused you of being a pervert in front of a famous news guy.”

“Did CBS pay you to lead them to the ceremony?” asked a woman.

“Yeah, a fat hundred bucks. I wished I’d never run into them.”

“It was a consultant’s fee,” the attorney jumped back in. “That’s what CBS News called it when I contacted them to confirm the details.”

“So you’re a consultant to CBS News,” the woman followed up archly.

“I guess so,” Robb replied.

“Cronkite must be turning over in his grave,” Nicci said.

“The larger issue here is that my client was not involved in any threat against GreenSpirit, and absolutely denies any role in her killing.”

“Where have you been, then?” another reporter called out.

“He was scared,” the attorney said. “He went to a cabin with his girlfriend. He got in touch with his parents yesterday, and they contacted me.” Jason’s middle-aged parents nodded. They sat right next to him, dressed in what could have been their Sunday best. “Together, we made immediate arrangements to meet with the FBI and New York State Police. There’s no mystery. That’s the story. It’s no more complicated than that.”

“So the girlfriend’s the alibi?” a man bellowed.

“That’s correct,” the attorney said. “I’ve questioned her, and I believe—”

“Will Jason take a polygraph?” two reporters interrupted to ask the same question.

“Sure.” The young man shrugged, like Why the heck not?

“We’ve told law enforcement that Jason will make himself available for a polygraph exam.”

Nicci hit the pause icon. “That’s pretty much it.”

“I believe that kid,” Jenna said. “He’s too rough around the edges; his attorney would never have let him take questions if there was any doubt about his innocence.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Nicci said. “Sounds like you’re still catching lots of Court TV,” she joked. Jenna’s favorite channel after the Weather Channel.

“Not as much as I used to,” Jenna responded with a smile.

“Yup, sharing your bed cuts down on all that quality TV time,” Nicci said playfully.

“I didn’t say anything about anyone in my bed.”

“Didn’t have to. Last few days you’ve been lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Jenna laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

“As a naked man in Times Square.”

Jenna furrowed her brow, returning to the subject at hand. “So who murdered GreenSpirit?”

“No one knows, or if they do, they’re not saying,” Nicci said. “There have been all kinds of leaks saying the crime scene isn’t producing anything useful, which is bizarre because there was blood all over the place. All the attention is back on Lilton or someone associated with him.”

“I don’t find that credible,” Jenna said. “Lilton wouldn’t get involved with a freakin’ murder. The speculation alone will probably sink his campaign.”

Chris Randall came back from the front of the plane and spoke to the TV crew. The rotund cameraman and blue-jeaned soundwoman sprang up and grabbed their gear, which was near at hand. They moved over to the jet’s windows as Chris sat next to Jenna.

“I asked if we could get a look at the supertanker before we begin our—”

“If you look out the left side of the plane,” the pilot’s voice cut off Chris, “you’ll see the hijacked tanker, about three miles away.”

The glare of light on water was almost blinding, but Jenna could make out the dark shape of the Dick Cheney. Beside her, the camera’s lens was almost touching the window.

“We can’t go any closer because they’ve got a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher,” Chris said.

“Ouch.” Jenna smiled.

“Ouch is right,” Nicci agreed. “No flybys today.”

Chris Randall had a classic, deeply resonant broadcaster’s voice and a head full of closely cropped black curls. Jenna thought he bore a resemblance to Barack Obama—a bulked-up younger version with darker skin. Chris looked like kind of a tough guy who’d been tamed, which, given his background as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan and Iraq, probably wasn’t far off the mark.

“So I guess we’re safe,” Chris said, “even if we can’t see squat.”

“What’s that?” Jenna blurted out, pointing to a thin, gray-blue streak bursting out of the glare and rocketing toward the Gulfstream.

“Holy shit,” Chris yelled. “That’s a—”

Chris was cut off once again as the Gulfstream went into a screaming dive. The correspondent, Jenna, and Nicci tumbled wildly off the couch, rolling toward the closed door of the cockpit. Behind them, the camera crew careered into the wall as gear scattered everywhere. Jenna smashed into Chris’s back as the aircraft gained speed and banked hard to the right. The g-forces grew so intense as they plummeted toward the vast Indian Ocean that Jenna couldn’t have pried herself off Chris if she’d tried.

Heart-pounding seconds later the plane shuddered like it was about to rip apart, then leveled. The pilot’s voice filled the cabin again, so calmly that it was as if nothing of note had taken place: “We were just targeted by a rocket fired from the tanker. We were out of range, but I took evasive action anyway.

“Anders, would you please check on the passengers and come up front,” the pilot asked.

Jenna saw the blond flight attendant uncurling from the gold-colored carpet next to her seat, where the sudden maneuver had left him scrunched up like a crumpled ball of paper. The young man got to his feet and asked in a shaky voice if everyone was okay.

“Fine,” said Alicia airily, already back to typing. She’d been belted into her seat.

Jenna stood on rubbery legs. “I’m okay,” she said. The cameraman grunted that he was all right while he checked his camera. The soundwoman forced a smile. Nicci and Chris appeared to have weathered the tumble, too. The producer dusted herself off, swearing when she saw a big coffee splotch on her khaki shorts.

“Sorry,” Jenna said. Her empty cup lay on the gold carpet, which was now marred by a brown splatter pattern.

The weather producer shook her head. “What am I complaining about? Christ, I’m alive.”

Chris smiled. “I haven’t been fired on like that since Fallujah.”

“I’ve never been fired on,” Jenna replied.

Alicia spoke without looking up from her laptop. “Try West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Chechnya, Gaza…”—peck-peck-peck—“… Afghanistan, Yemen, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.”

Queen of the bang-bang, thought Jenna.

“That rocket couldn’t have hit us,” the producer continued. “It fell into the ocean at least two miles away. The pilot overreacted.”

Maybe, Jenna thought, but she knew that if she’d been in his seat, she would have taken “evasive action,” too.

Nicci nudged her. “That tanker looks like it’s just sitting there. I don’t think it’s moving at all.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Jenna asked. “Aren’t they more stable when they’re in motion?”

“Only in bad weather,” Alicia chimed in, then unsnapped her safety belt and stretched out like a diva on the couch across from Jenna and Nicci. Long dark slacks, long dark hair, and dark wraparound glasses. “The forecast is for calm seas,” she added.

Jenna bristled inwardly; forecasting was her specialty. “Any more demands from the hijackers?”

“It’s been pretty quiet,” Nicci answered. “Apparently, there are just two of them on board, plus the captain and Birk. All twenty-four crewmembers were killed and tossed overboard.”

“One of the jihadists has an AK-47 and the RPG that ‘almost killed us,’” Alicia said, as if she were quoting Jenna. But I never said that, the meteorologist wanted to protest. “The other one’s decked out in a suicide vest,” Alicia added. “They came to play.” The news producer raised an eyebrow. Jenna had always wished that she could do that. Hers rose together or not at all.

“And they’ve got Birk,” Nicci said.

“I hope he dies,” Alicia said blandly, which made her sound icier than ever. Even Jenna, no fan of Rick Birk, thought wishing him dead was over the top: You don’t speak ill of the deceased or the soon-to-be-slaughtered. She must have frowned.

“What? That bothers you?” Alicia challenged her. “That a*shole once groped me and then threw up on me.”

“That would put a damper on things,” Chris laughed. His producer, notably, did not.

“Christmas 2003,” Alicia said. “Party at Williamson’s penthouse.” Williamson was the president of the news division. “Then, when I went to try to clean up, the bastard barged in on me, wanting to know if I’d like to ‘make it all better’ by taking a bath—with him.” Alicia stared at Nicci. “He’s lucky I didn’t cut off his dick and mount it on my wall.”

“Big ouch,” Chris said.

“I doubt it.” Alicia let slip her first smile. It looked like daylight seeping through a cracked ceiling.

Jenna noticed that Nicci was staring at the other woman and suddenly realized that her producer’s adoring gaze was the cause of Alicia’s pleasure. Jenna looked from one to the other. Oh, no, not her, was all she could think.

But it made sense: Alicia had long legs, long hair, and brilliantly red lips. Nicci’s perfect lover. I should have seen it coming.

Jenna looked out the widow. The glare had lessened, and she spotted the tanker’s white bridge as easily as she’d seen the gray-blue burst of the rocket. Somewhere, hidden in the length of that enormous vessel, Rick Birk awaited rescue. Or death. And wherever he was, five hundred thousand tons of liquid iron oxide was stored below him.

* * *

Get over here, you worthless raghead.

Birk tried to draw Suicide Sam’s attention to his laminates by pointing his chin down at his chest. The beaded chain on which they hung was painfully reminiscent of a bright blue noose that he’d seen around the neck of a prominent dissident at a public hanging in Tehran. Bastards let the poor son of a bitch swing for half an hour.

The correspondent’s liver-spotted hands were bound behind him in plastic cuffs to a three-inch metal pipe that ran along the lower section of a wall in the engine room. He’d been marched there by Raggedy Ass himself. Birk had spent two horrendous hours trying to nap in a seated position, only to be awakened at excruciating intervals by a herniated disc in his lower back. He’d been putting off surgery for years, but at the moment he would have thrown himself on a gurney for the first flight to the body butchers, if only he could.

What he needed far more than surgeons—and what he appeared even less likely to get—was a drink. His mood was as foul and festering as a Superfund site.

Suicide Sam shook his head as if he, a f*cking killer, was disgusted by one Rick Birk, one of television’s greatest chroniclers of human events of the past half century.

“TV, pee,” Birk muttered, thrusting his chin toward his chest for the thousandth time, finding the juxtaposition of words strangely easy on his ears. He hoped the prestige of television would buy him a bathroom break. Maybe even that drink, he found himself thinking once more, yet another delusionary result of his ever-sobering state. But he couldn’t just sit here in agony. “T … V. Pee,” he stressed.

He presumed that Raggedy Ass knew that he worked in television, but Suicide Sam hadn’t paid any attention to Birk’s laminates, so the correspondent was doing all he could to draw the man’s attention to them. He wished he could actually point to the goddamn things—I look like a f*cking bobblehead doll—but this was not possible. And what’s with the plastic cuffs anyway? he wondered. Not what he would have expected from jihadists. Bailing wire, maybe. Rope, for sure. But plastic cuffs? Weird. Too Western for these troglodytes, although for all he knew, everything, including plastic handcuffs, had gone global. Al Qaeda probably buys them by the gross on the Net. Address? Third cave past the bombed Humvee. Christ, he hated terrorists. Not worth the lice in their straggly-ass beards.

The metal door of the engine room clanged open. Raggedy Ass glanced at him, then eyed Suicide Sam. With a single move of Raggedy Ass’s head, Suicide Sam left. Birk figured he was off to keep watch on the captain, who was probably hogtied in the wheelhouse.

Higgens would be right at home here.

Keeping to his soft-spoken strategy, still equal parts desperation and near delirium, Birk looked pleadingly at the top banana jihadist: “Please Mr. Scum-f*ck Terrorist, could you rub your two brain cells together just long enough to realize that I’m your greatest asset?”

Hopeless. Raggedy Ass stared at him like he was from Mars. Birk nodded with what he thought was an idiotic grin, trying his damnedest to conform to the jihadist stereotype of a typical American: “CNN. BBC. Pee.”

He spoke slowly and loudly, consciously reinforcing the caricature of an American trying to make a foreigner understand him, but this asswipe seemed incapable of even the most basic civilized discourse.

Raggedy Ass walked over to him, shaking his head just like Suicide Sam had.

“Oh, of course, the poor terrorist is all befuddled,” Birk baby talked to him.

Raggedy Ass must have picked up on Birk’s poorly hidden hostility, because he abruptly kicked apart Birk’s legs. The old man became immediately uneasy, having his privates so wantonly vulnerable. Raggedy Ass placed the muzzle of his fifth appendage—the AK-47—right on Birk’s balls.

The reporter’s spineless smile morphed immediately into a wince, and he rued having alluded to his privates. Then Raggedy Ass exerted serious downward pressure, and Birk was overwhelmed by sickening pain. Turned into a writhing mass of wrinkled, tormented flesh. Even so, Birk managed to keep his gaze pinned to the man’s trigger finger.

Oh, God.

“Now you listen to me,” Raggedy Ass said in shockingly clear English. Not just English, but English with a thick Southern drawl. What the f*ck? “You think you’re real funny, Rick Birk, but you want to know something?”

That I’m in the deepest shit ever? But outwardly, all Birk could manage—and only barely—was a nod.

“I’d have killed you back in Malé along with the other infidels, if I didn’t think you could help us, so stop your blasphemous swearing or I’ll send you straight to hell.”

“You … speak … English?” Birk gasped out.

“You’re a regular Einstein.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m someone who grew up in the Great Satan. I found my true faith nine years ago on a pilgrimage to Mecca.” Raggedy Ass’s eyes rose briefly to the stained ceiling. “English is my first language. Heard enough? I know I’ve heard all I want to from you. I’ve heard every foul word and insult you’ve spoken.” He grabbed a fistful of Birk’s white hair, forcing the codger to look up at him at a painful angle. “You’re everything I hate. You’re everything Allah hates. But I’m going to spare you the horrors of eternal hell for a few more days, as long as you do exactly what I tell you to do.”

He pulled out a menacing combat knife, and Birk thought, despite the man’s words, that the jihadist was about to slice off his head. Instead, Raggedy Ass cut off the plastic cuffs and dragged the newsman to his feet. Birk’s legs almost buckled from a seizure of pain in his lower back, but he ground his teeth and confined evidence of his agony to a single moan.

The jihadist shoved him toward the door. “Out. Walk in front of me. Try to run and I’ll shoot you in the spine.”

“Where are we going?” Birk couldn’t forget what had happened to every member of the crew after Raggedy Ass dragged them to the railing.

“You’re going to go ‘live.’ That’s what you want, right?”

Birk staggered from the engine room like he was drunk. Never had he misjudged a man so severely. Mr. Scum-f*ck Terrorist? Is that what you called him? Ai-yi-yi.

He’d found his own Omar Hammami, whose Syrian immigrant father had married an Alabama belle. They’d given little Omar a small-town upbringing in the heart of Dixie—Bible camp, high school class president, blond girlfriend, drunken Friday night fights—but despite all the advantages that American life could offer, Omar had turned to Islam. And not just any old Islam-in-a-mini-mall-mosque, but Islam in Somalia, where sweet, baby-faced Omar became a leader and spokesman of the Al Shabaab, one of the most brutal Islamist insurgencies.

What’s with the South? Birk asked himself in his newborn panic. Could growing up around crackers actually be worse than he’d imagined?

He looked back over his shoulder. “I can help you with your message.”

The hometown boy from hell shoved the barrel of the Kalashnikov into Birk’s wattled neck. “Shut up. When I tell you to talk, talk. Otherwise, don’t say a thing.”

Birk had heard those very words before—from an executive producer of Nightly News, back when he was still being invited to the set for live tête-à-têtes with the anchor. He’d love to obey, but his rampant and torturous thirst could not be denied.

“Could you spare me a drink, you suppose, from the captain’s private reserve? I don’t expect he’s making much use of it at the moment, and I, for one, work much better when I can wet my whistle.”

Raggedy Ass whacked Birk upside the head with his rifle barrel. The correspondent yowled.

“I should kill you now and, inshallah, I will when you’re no longer needed.”

I guess that means no.