Without Warning Part 47

She came fully awake with a start, and slid from the chair like a cat. Rolland stood by the window, narrowing his eyes, peering through the lace curtain.

"Those men, do you recognize any of them?"

She peered out. At least four young men, all civilians, all Arabic or African in appearance, were gathered outside the target address across and down the street a little ways. It was dark outside, but some of them smoked, and as they pa.s.sed around a lighter she was pretty sure she recognized a couple of faces.

One in particular stood out.

Short. Round-shouldered, with a potbelly. Gray stringy beard with no mustache. His skin was dark brown, as though stained by tobacco juice. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and in her imagination she could smell the fragrant blend. Some acne pits blemished the left side of his face, and melted skin from a homemade bomb gone wrong marred his other profile. The permanent squint to his right eye was a result of the same disfiguration. She couldn't see from here, but she knew he would have yellowed, crooked teeth, with two of the lower incisors missing, thanks to a beating from the Malaysian Special Branch five years ago. Powerful forearms and thighs from years of silat and karate training.

"The chunky-looking groover in the nasty gray acid-wash jeans and cheap vinyl jacket, his name's Noordim ul Haq. He's an Indonesian. Javanese. We call him Dr. Noo. He's a Jemaah Islamiyah commander. A bomb maker, too, but not a great one, as you can see from his pretty face."

"He is part of Baumer's network? I have not heard of him."

Caitlin frowned.

"Nope. But they have met, twice that we knew of. Once in Singapore, August 1998, and later that year in Surabaya. We're not sure to what ends or if they ever met again under the radar. But the Doc there is a heavy hitter in Mantiki 3, the Jemaah Islamiyah franchise with responsibility for the Philippines and Central Indonesia."

Rolland looked lost.

"Sorry," said Caitlin. "I can be a bit of a f.u.c.king trainspotter, can't I? His CV doesn't matter. The fact that he's here does. He should be about ten thousand miles away, blowing up noodle shops in Jakarta for the glory of G.o.d."

"Well, we don't have many noodle shops in Paris anymore."

"You never did, Marcel. Not worth a pinch of s.h.i.t anyway."

"So, this Noordim," said Rolland softly, peeking out into the dark again. "If he is here, there must be something important going on."

"Dude, if he's here, it's the end of the f.u.c.king world ... Oh, wait. Sorry, we already did that, didn't we? Okay, look, it's not just delicious noodles and opportunities for ma.s.s murder that kept him in Mantiki 3. This guy, he doesn't like whitey. His father was a midlevel official in Golkar, the guys who put the party into Indonesia's one-party state under Suharto. His mother was a singer, but more important a second cousin to Tuk Tuk Suharto, the big guy's daughter. The family controlled the distribution of kretek cigarettes in East Timor and lost it all in the Australian takeover of '99. Dr. Noo was already into the whole jihad thing by then. His family may well have been funding him. But Timor pushed him right over. Ruined the family and put the zap on his head. So he really hates whitey."

She paused and Rolland took the hint.

"But?" he said.

"But," she continued. "He really f.u.c.king hates Arabs and resents their control of international jihad. To his way of thinking the Arabs never recovered from the crusader attacks after 9/11. All the best jihadi since then have since been Asian or African, but in the mythology of the jihad, it is the Arabs who matter. And they make sure their little rice-eating cousins know about it, too. Our understanding was Noordim got a.s.sf.u.c.ked three ways from Sunday while he was in the Northwest Territories and Afghanistan. The camel humpers really broke his b.a.l.l.s. His raison d'etre ever after was to be acknowledged as a player of equal importance to the likes of bin Laden and Zawahiri."

"So he blew up noodle shops?"

"Yeah. Lots and lots of noodle shops. Apparently Allah really f.u.c.kin' hates noodles."

Rolland smiled, an exhausted, washed-out smile. Caitlin watched the men in the street as they moved into the building.

"Tell your guys they need to be on the stick now," said Caitlin. "They need to ..."

She trailed off as a car appeared.

Gasoline was so scarce that any moving vehicle was invested with significance. This one, a blue Pa.s.sat with a cracked windshield, appeared to be full of pa.s.sengers. She motioned Rolland over to the gap in the curtains.

As they watched, saying nothing, the car came to a halt and all four doors opened like insect wings. Heavily armed, unshaven young men stepped out and scanned the street. Neither Caitlin nor Rolland moved. n.o.body pointed them out or paid anything but scant attention to the ruined building in which they stood. As a jet screamed overhead somewhere nearby the last of the pa.s.sengers exited the rear of the Pa.s.sat.

Baumer and Lacan.

Melton was lying in a child's bed, his head pillowed by a mildewed stuffed elephant. The room was dark and the multileveled house empty. Abandoned.

Or at least it had been.

As he came awake he heard voices on the lower floors. Men talking in a ghetto mixture of Arabic and French. He was jolted awake as all of his body's remaining adrenaline reserves sluiced into his nervous system. A cool ball of ice seemed to form in his stomach, making his b.a.l.l.s contract and loosening his bowels.

He wondered if friends of the man he'd killed earlier had come looking for him, but the few s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation he heard clearly seemed to be about the civil war.

A quick scan of the room where he'd hidden out, far above the street, told him there were no obvious hiding places. He slowly, carefully eased himself up, fearful of a creaking bedspring that might give his presence away. For the same reason he dare not put his feet on the floor, as the boards would surely creak. Instead, he lay in darkness, straining to hear whatever he could pick up. He stroked his pistol for rea.s.surance and checked that he still had the spare mags in his vest pocket. Not that a d.i.n.ky little handgun would be much help if he'd woken up in a house full of jihadi street fighters. And really, who the h.e.l.l else was left in this part of Paris?

As the minutes ticked by with infuriating slowness his heart rate began to slow down a little and he even managed to relax. n.o.body had come up to check on his room. He hadn't been discovered. Indeed, there didn't appear to be anybody in this attic level of the house. But he found that hard to accept. It commanded a good view of the street below and some of the approaching roads. He would have put a lookout up here, even if he was just running a small gang of looters. Then again, his instructors at ranger school had probably drilled the basics into him with more alacrity than the towel-headed loser who'd trained these guys downstairs. If trained they had ever been. Judo rolls and paintball in the forest didn't really count.

Slowly, and as quietly as he possibly could, Melton eased himself off the bed and slid across to the door. He placed his ear against the cool wood for two minutes, straining to hear anything that might indicate he wasn't alone up here. After that, he gripped the old-fashioned bra.s.s k.n.o.b and turned it gently but firmly until the door clunked open. It sounded as loud as a grenade to him, but there was no discernible change in the flow of conversation from downstairs. He was able to make out a lot more of what was being said, however, not that it did him much good. The men's French was heavily accented and their Arabic so guttural and fast-spoken that his very basic understanding of the language was all but useless.

Then someone spoke whom he could understand. A Frenchman, with a polished, well-educated voice. Again, Melton's French wasn't great, but he was certain this guy was giving them a pep talk. Something about how well the fight had gone in the suburbs and how they had to delay the fascist Sarkozy forces long enough to get their leaders out of this area. Or at least, that was what Melton thought he said. He simply couldn't be sure, and it made no sense. He had no context in which to frame the conversation.

It was infuriating, but there was nothing he could do about it.

"They will be here in fifteen minutes," said Rolland. "They are coming through the storm water drains. There is a ... what do you call it... a man's hole in the rear courtyard of the tenement two down."

Caitlin snickered despite the seriousness of the situation.

"Okay. You got any floor plans?"

Rolland removed a set of drawings from a plastic tube.

"There has been some remodeling of the property in the last five years," he said. "These were lodged with the city archives. I had a devil's job getting them."

"Yeah, but G.o.d bless continental bureaucracy," said Caitlin. "Now, what've we got here?"

They scoped out the plans of the house across the street on a fold-up card table in a windowless room on the second floor of their own building. It looked like it might have been a storeroom until recently. A few cardboard packing boxes, folded flat, remained.

The target property was not so different from the one in which they stood. Same number of floors, similar layout of rooms, save for the ground floor, which had been opened up into one vast living s.p.a.ce. It was not bomb-damaged either, as far as they could tell.

"This will be very hard," said Rolland. "Getting them alive."

Caitlin nodded. "Like a hostage situation, where the hostage doesn't want to come with. And he's armed."

"We would normally train in a mock-up facility first. But there is no time."

"You could let me go in on my own," she offered. "I am renowned as a sneaky b.i.t.c.h, you know."

"You are renowned as an a.s.sa.s.sin, Miss Monroe. I have no doubt you could make it inside. But perhaps only you would come out, non?"

"Perhaps," she conceded. "But I could make it easier for you."

"How so?"

She explained what she would need, and although the plan was crazy, to his credit, Rolland heard her out.

When she was finished she folded her arms and shrugged.

"It is the only way I can think of to kick down the doors, kill everyone who needs killing, and maybe, just maybe keep Baumer and Lacan in one piece."

Rolland pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, a gesture she recognized.

He was thinking of betting the pot.

MV Aussie Rules, southern ocean

"Oh, for f.u.c.k's sake."

"I am sorry, Captain, but the storm, it put much stress on the engines, yes, much stress on everything, and this can be repaired but it will take time."

Julianne examined the length of black steel mesh tubing that was going to kill them all. It was less than an inch thick and a foot long, and it carried coolant to one of the Aussie Rules's twin 1,492-horsepower Caterpillar engines. Or rather, it would have were it not disconnected and dangling uselessly, having blown from running at maximum pressure for way too long. Her chief engineer, Pankesh the Sri Lankan, shook his head sadly, as though betrayed by his wife.

"How much time do you need to fix this?" asked Jules. "The truth. Don't underestimate the difficulty."

"It is a very specialized fitting, ma'am," said Pankesh as his two Dutch off-siders crowded in behind him, both of them looking equally despondent. "Three hours, minimum. Possibly up to five. You can run the other engine at half power but that is all."

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her temples were throbbing. They had a lead of twenty nautical miles on the Viarsa, but she would eat that distance up in two hours. They were going to have to fight.

"Okay," she said, standing up and turning away from the mess of spilled coolant. The engine room gleamed as white as ever, but it was eerily still with the power plant shut down. "All three of you will work on this as fast as you have ever worked on anything in your f.u.c.king lives. Got me? Maybe you'll perform miracles. First, though, get to the armory and draw yourself a weapon. If they board we will need every hand we have, except for you, Pankesh. You keep working here. You don't stop until one of them comes through the door, understood?"

The Sri Lankan's white, frightened eyes were comically wide as he bobbed his head up and down.

"Rohan, Urvan, when I give the call to repel boarders you'll have to put down your tools here and come help out on deck. You understand that?"

The Dutchmen, both in their thirties, were veterans of the North Sea oil rig tenders, who'd been stranded in Ecuador by the collapse of the airline carrying them home from a s.e.x tour of Bangkok. They nodded and tried to look resolute, but she could tell neither of them wanted to leave the relative security of the engine room.

"All right then. Get your weapons, then get back to work. If you can pull a miracle out of your a.r.s.e we won't have to fight."

She moved from one hand hold to the next, negotiating an exit with the engineers on her tail. They'd left the storm behind twelve hours ago, but the sea was still a vista of churning, mountainous waves. At least it would make any boarding difficult. When the Dutchmen headed aft to the gym-turned-armory, she hurried as best she could up to the main lounge, where she found Shah and Birendra engaged in the interminable process of teaching her pa.s.sengers how to kill. She held on to the doorway to steady herself and beckoned Shah over when she caught his eye. He moved with fluid grace across the pitching deck, barely needing to check himself against the movement of the ship.

"Yes, miss. The engines, they are down?"

"Yeah, and I don't think we're getting them back any time soon. How're your pupils doing?'

"They do well, miss. Some of the Americans have guns at home. Moor-house the banker hunts with a shotgun. I think we should arm him with one. The others should take the M16s. They are A2 models, quite reliable. We have seventeen of them and three thousand rounds of ammunition. I would suggest creating three fire teams. Pieraro can watch over one. Two of my men will take the others. Volume of fire, Miss Julianne. That will be crucial."

Jules had to agree. Even the Yanks who may have had pistol club or hunting experience would never have shot at another human being and, crucially, would never have been shot at. The decks were still heaving all over the place, and she knew from personal experience that firing from one unstable platform at another usually meant missing your target. Shah was right. Best just to throw up a wall of lead.

"Okay," she agreed. "Your guys and Miguel will need to run those teams, otherwise we'll fire off all our ammo and hit nothing but waves and sky. What about the crew and your chaps? What's happening with them?"

Shah looked behind him, where Birendra was instructing the village children how to reload an M16 magazine. He was making a game of it, laughing and clapping along as they pushed the rounds in. Jules shook her head sadly. What a sight.

"We have spent much time on this, Miss Julianne. I will lead the reaction force. We will have the heavy weapons, including the rocket launchers. Three RPG7s and eight warheads, deployed from the upper decks. Depending on how the enemy attempts to board we shall use them to interrupt the a.s.sault or interdict any heavy weapon crews on the Viarsa."

"Fifi's gonna be p.i.s.sed." Jules smiled. "She loves rocket launchers."

"Miss Fifi will lead the fire team composed of crew members," said Shah. "She will also suppress any heavy weapon fire from the Viarsa with her machine gun. The crew I have divided up according to their levels of competence. She will take the best of them as a reserve, holding the pool deck and providing cover over the aft sections. If needed they have been trained to split into two sections, one to hold the pool level and the other to deploy as needed."

"Okay. Sounds like a plan. What about those kids, though? I'm really not comfortable having children in the thick of it."

Shah shook his head, frowning gravely.

"It is a bad business, miss. But unavoidable. They cannot run away, not in this sea state. And they are very useful. Birendra has trained them well to load and to clear blockages. They know to keep their heads down. And miss, remember, too, they are not spoiled little brats. They are village children, from the edge of the desert. They have all worked from their earliest days. Their lives have been hard, and sometimes violent. They will be scared but I think they will endure the battle more calmly than some of the others."

She rolled her eyes.

"I know what you're talking about, Sergeant. I'm really worried about some of my bigger dilettantes just going to pieces."

The deck dipped sharply as they slid over another crest. One of the kids Birendra was teaching rolled himself into a ball and tumbled across the thick woolen carpet in the empty lounge, squealing with laughter.

"Now roll back, roll back, little yeti," called out Birendra.

Jules had to admire his patience. She found the children a challenge, and was more than happy to have as little to do with them as possible.

"How long until we are intercepted?" asked Shah.

"Two to three hours, depending on how hard we can push the second engine. I don't want to blow it, too, though. If we get stuck without any propulsion at all, we're royally b.u.g.g.e.red."

"Then I shall take all of the civilians outside for a live fire exercise," said Shah. "It would be best if they hear the guns before the real shooting starts."

"Yes," agreed Jules. "It would be. Who knows? It might even put off our chasers."

It didn't, but the live fire did give Jules some hope and, she supposed, her charges, too. Shah gathered everyone on the boat deck at the stern and had them fire off three rounds, one individually, one in their fire teams, and one en ma.s.se. It was the latter that gave everyone some heart. Shah had a.s.sembled quite an armory for the yacht, and the roar of so many guns firing all at once was more than impressive. It was actually frightening. The youngest children, who had nothing to do with the fight, were all herded inside for the exercise, but it was still loud enough to upset them. Quite a few of the adults, too, Julianne thought.

But when the single crack of thunder had dissipated on the strong ocean breeze what remained were forty-one people, most of whom were grinning like fools.

"Bring it on," yelled Fifi, leaping onto a diving locker and waving her a.r.s.e at the small dot of the pursuing vessel. "You want some of this? Come and get it, baby."

The younger members of the crew laughed and grinned, and some of the Mexican village boys began smacking their own a.r.s.es and crying out, "Bringing on, si. Bringing on."

"Maybe we should be the pirates," said the Rhino, who stood beside Jules on the pool deck above the display. He was wearing a sidearm for the first time, and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark aviator gla.s.ses. His face was flushed but Jules couldn't smell any rum on his breath.

"How long, Rhino?"

"Less than an hour."