Manila
Two days later
Sheik Kazeel had never laughed so hard in his life. Tears were rolling down his face. His sides ached. He could barely catch his breath. He was usually as joyless as a man could be, an occupational hazard of being the world’s first “superterrorist.” But at the moment, he could hardly contain himself.
He was sitting in the back room of the Impatient Parrot brothel in downtown Manila. This part of the Philippine capital was known as the Combat Zone. A throwback to the days of the Vietnam War, it was a six-block area heavily populated with strip clubs, saloons, dance halls, and whorehouses. These days the streets were crowded not with US soldiers on R and R but sex tourists, from Europe and Japan, who were looking for a little bit of the strange. They’d come to the right place. It was a Saturday night and the Zone was rocking. There was plenty of strange going around.
The Impatient Parrot would have seemed an unlikely place to find the shadowy Kazeel. He was a devout Muslim. He prayed the required five times a day and never went anywhere without his copy of the Koran. Alcohol, drugs, slatternly women, young girls? Just about everything the Prophet Muhammad had warned all Islam to avoid was on display at the Parrot. Kazeel was then sitting in a defiled place, and to do so was considered unholy. He was also a senior member of Al Qaeda. Being spotted in a whorehouse might not please the Saudi fundamentalist mullahs who were still the backbone of Al Qaeda’s financial network.
So why was he here then?
And why was he laughing?
That Kazeel planned the attack on the USS Abraham Lincoln was known around the world. That he also helped plan the attacks of 9/11 was also common knowledge. It was for these reasons that the Department of Homeland Security, imprudently, as it turned out, proclaimed him the world’s first superterrorist. That’s how Kazeel’s blurred photo wound up on the cover of Time.
That the plan to sink the Lincoln had failed miserably was also known to the world, of course. But in the twin Byzantine cultures of jihad terrorism and international notoriety, Kazeel’s standing had not diminished a bit, despite handing the Americans a huge victory that day. That he even attempted the attack was enough to please his fans in the Saudi palaces, the casbah, and the Islamic religious schools through the Middle East where hatred of all things American made for most of the curriculum.
Kazeel’s street rep aside, though, the failure of the Lincoln attack, as well as the events at the Tonka Tower, were hardly good news for worldwide Islamic terrorism. Both had succeeded only in draining away much of the momentum Al Qaeda had generated after the attacks of September 11th and since. And this holy war against the United States was all about momentum. Al Qaeda’s aim was to put fear into the hearts of all Americans and keep it there, permanently. They did this by being brutal, unrelenting, and evasive. But in less than 40 days the terrorist network had been thrown on the defensive, not once but twice. It had been made to look inept. Funds flowing into Islamic charities, Al Qaeda’s lifeblood, were slowing. Huge chunks of money from the House of Saud or Syria or Iran were not so forthcoming as they had been. Many of Al Qaeda’s members were still on the run, trying to stay one step ahead of the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. Many were in jail. Many more had been killed. Despite Kazeel’s newfound celebrity, the Al Qaeda movement itself seemed in danger of running out of gas.
For these reasons, the next attack against America had to be big and it had to be a success.
That’s why Kazeel was in Manila.
In his own toothless, pop-eyed way, Kazeel loved irony.
The United States was now sitting in Iraq. The oil was finally beginning to flow and at least some of the Iraqi people were beginning to get happy. In many ways, the American dream was coming true half a world away. Plus, the military victory against Baghdad, for all its faults, had made the United States more respected in the Arab world, whether through fear or admiration.
But while Gulf War II had turned some old adversaries into friends, it had also produced the reverse effect. It had created some new, unexpected enemies for America. Friends who were now foes. One of them, the most powerful, had decided it was in their country’s interests to take the United States down a peg or two.
To say this new enemy was well-placed in the global community was a huge understatement. Indeed, they were entrenched in both world history and current affairs, in diplomatic parlance, a “real player.”
And now, for reasons that were beyond Kazeel’s reckoning, they were willing to help Al Qaeda in operations against the United States. Very secretly, of course.
War made strange bedfellows; politics did too. And, frankly, Kazeel’s new ashaab judus, his “newfound friends,” were only a little less repugnant than the Americans themselves. But he was in no position to be choosy. After the events at Hormuz and in Singapore, he would take all the help he could get. And he was already getting a lot of it.
Because of this strange new alliance, Kazeel now owned the contents of the downed B-2F’s cargo bay—and it was hardly a shipment of American Tourister luggage. The thirty-six cases contained launchers for Stinger missiles, the ubiquitous shoulder-fired, American-made antiaircraft weapon favored by armies and insurgents alike.
Stingers were one of Al Qaeda’s most cherished weapons, almost custom-made for their needs. When matched with their missiles, they were light to carry, just 22 pounds, and compact, at five feet and change. They were simple to operate: just aim, fire, and forget. The heat-seeking missile carried a two-pound fused warhead designed to explode on contact. It could fly as high as 2 miles, and had a range of five. It also hit its target going 1,500 miles per hour. Put it all together and it was more than powerful enough to bring down a helicopter. Or a jet fighter.
Or even an airliner.
Just how his judus was able to get the launchers into the belly of the B-2F, and then arrange for the spy bomber to crash-land on Fuggu Island, Kazeel had no idea. In many ways, he didn’t want to know. When he and the judus agreed, quoting an old Arabic phrase, “to get their hands dirty together,” it was also understood that for security reasons, both sides would only know what they had to know, and nothing more. The Aboos were involved, as was an almost-antique Soviet-made SAM—but beyond that, Kazeel was blissful in his ignorance of how his new friends came by the precious launchers.
“High-level connections,” was how he reasoned it out.
There really was no other explanation.
Kazeel was a dark-skinned Arab. He was thin and perpetually dirty. However, if he dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a Hawaiian shirt, he became indistinguishable from the thousands of Filipino men walking around Manila. Not that it made any difference. He’d been assured by his new patrons that he could also move around the city with virtual impunity, that the local authorities had been paid off to leave him alone. Another indication how powerful the judus could be.
Kazeel had flown in three nights before, using a fake Egyptian passport again supplied by the judus. He was met at the airport by the judus’ Manila contact, a balding, rotund, 50-ish Filipino hoodlum named Marcos. They left the airport in a limousine; they even did lunch. On the third day, Kazeel was taken to see the launchers; they were hidden in a bunker on a small island outside Manila Bay. Kazeel had been whisked there in a multimillion-dollar yacht. The bunker was in a deep chamber bored into the side of a small mountain. It was guarded by uniformed members of the Philippine national police. The launchers, still sealed in their carrying cases, were piled in three stacks inside. The cases were muddied and some were dented, but all had survived the impact of the B-2F’s crash landing, as they had been made of a material similar to that used in commerical aircraft crash-proof black boxes.
Marcos told him the cache of missile launchers was still “very hot” though, and could not stay in the bunker for very long. The plan would be to move them around continuously until they could be shipped to their final destination.
Visiting the bunker was like walking into a bank vault for Kazeel. In the past, Al Qaeda had been hard-pressed to find even a handful of Stinger launchers at any one time. Now that he was working with the judus, these kinds of weapons could be had almost readily.
All Kazeel had to do now was get three dozen missiles to mate with the launchers and the next big assault on America would be one step closer to reality.
The viewing in the bunker had been complete by early afternoon. When the yacht docked back in Manila, Marcos asked if he could join Kazeel for dinner. Normally Kazeel would have told him a flat no. But in this new world of his, he surmised the contact wasn’t doing this because he longed for Kazeel’s company, but rather that his judus wanted someone to keep an eye on him while he was in town. And Kazeel was learning to become flexible. So he accepted Marcos’ request.
Kazeel spent the rest of the day holed up in his five-star hotel. Around 6 P.M., Kazeel received a message from Marcos. He was on his way up. Dinner was eaten in Kazeel’s suite, during which Kazeel lectured the hoodlum on the fruits of Islam, his one condition for agreeing to meet. The conversation after that was trite. Marcos quickly grew bored. It was so obvious he was here just to keep tabs on Kazeel, it was almost painful.
But then room service arrived and a bottle of post meal wine was offered, courtesy of the house. Kazeel rarely drank alcohol, as it ran counter to Muhammad’s laws. But for whatever reason, he didn’t feel very Muslim tonight. He’d had a very stressful past couple months, trying to get the world to stand on its head for Allah. He deserved a little respite. So he agreed to just one.
That one glass quickly led to another however; Marcos fancied himself a wine connoisseur and he was also a lush. Soon the first bottle of wine was gone, and room service brought two more. They were drained as well. Then Marcos ordered some liquor Kazeel had never heard of. They drank it in little glasses poured right from the bottle. Kazeel was soon very drunk. That’s when Marcos revealed that in addition to working for the judus, he was also the owner of a brothel, downtown. In the Combat Zone.
That was how Kazeel found himself here now, in the back room of the Impatient Parrot, cackling hysterically, not unlike a jackal.
What was making Kazeel laugh so hard was the two girls sloshing around in the mud pit in front of him.
They were young and topless and they were wrestling each other ferociously. A dozen well-heeled Filipino businessmen were sitting around the pit. They’d made a corral of metal folding chairs and were occasionally flipping U.S. half-dollar coins into the mud as tips for the two young combatants. Kazeel and the Parrot’s owner sat in padded seats at either end of the squared ring. The back room was small and grimy. A giant plate glass window, covered in thick black paint and pictures of some rather sick pornography, made up one of its walls. Brick and perforated bamboo sticks made up the other three. The room was filled with tobacco, marijuana, and opium smoke. The floor was a half-inch deep with spilled beer. The stink of sweat was almost overwhelming.
For the most part, the other men sitting around the pit were silent, intense. Not unlike a pride of lions getting ready for the kill. The two girls would be made available to all after this slop match. If the crude pictures on the black wall were any indication, a rough outing was guaranteed for both.
But Kazeel’s delight was not coming from anticipation of sex. Having been taught from an early age to hate women, he was virtually sexless. Yet he was finding it highly amusing to watch the two girls roll around in mud, slapping each other, pulling hair, ripping off what was left of their clothes, groping at their privates.
The others in the room saw the mud fight as a prelude to nocturnal depravity. Kazeel saw it as slapstick.
There were four security men watching over him; they’d been supplied by Marcos. Kazeel’s shuka—Arabic slang for assistant or companion—was standing close by as well. He was Abdul Abu Uni, a nickname, of course, and a cruel one. Abdul was a eunuch, mutilated by an uncle at the age of two. Keeping such a thing hidden in an Arab community was impossible. People had been calling him Uni most of his life.
A dead ringer for the American ad icon Mr. Clean, right down to the huge gold ring in his left earlobe, Uni was six-foot-two, wide and strong, with a powerful face and gigantic hands. He was fanatically loyal to Kazeel. He was also a functional idiot, with an IQ of less than 75. They’d been a couple for nearly 10 years. While the superterrorist had traveled alone in the weeks before the Lincoln attack, back when he was less well known, these days Uni went everywhere with him. He could usually be found standing at Kazeel’s left shoulder, arms folded, a perpetual scowl in place.
But even Uni was laughing now. The two girls rolling around in the mud, the hair pulling, the ripped clothes. He shared the same humor as his boss. He thought the whole thing was hilarious.
Until the bullets started flying.
The brothel’s four security men had been arrayed around the room in a protective box, one for each corner. Standing back in the shadows, they couldn’t see anything but the back of a lot of heads.
Kazeel had just downed another glass of Stoli when he noticed one of these guards suddenly disappear behind the row of Filipino businessmen. One second the man was there; the next he was gone.
As this was registering in Kazeel’s woozy brain, another of the bodyguards went down, the one directly off to his left. But this time, before he fell forward, Kazeel saw a button of blood appear on the man’s forehead. A bullet, shot through a silencer and passing through the bamboo, had cracked the man’s skull in two.
Kazeel’s mind began racing. Then a third guard, the one right in front of him, got a bullet between the eyes. His head, too, split open like an egg. Everyone noticed it this time. Someone killed the music. One of the mud girls screamed. Then came another loud pop! and the fourth guard went down, another bullet to the brain.
Kazeel froze with drunken fear. Each of the bodyguards had been killed by a tap shot, a single round to the skull. This was a favorite means of dispatch by many of the world’s more notorious special ops teams.
“Praise Allah!” Kazeel screamed.
An instant later, Sergeant Dave Hunn came crashing through the window.
He was 20 pounds heavier since the last time he’d done something like this. His forty days at Guantánomo Bay as both a prisoner and someone recovering from wounds received above Hormuz had done a job on his waistline. If anything he and his three associates had been fed too well in captivity. But if he was just a bit older and fatter, he was also a bit wiser. And as fired up as ever to grease some mooks.
He’d come through the room’s plate-glass window, feetfirst. The crash alone was deafening. This was Hunn’s specialty back in Delta Force—he was a door kicker, the guy who went in first. He was armed with a shotgun, two pistols, and butcher’s cleaver. Landing in a crouch, he fired his 12-gauge at one of the room’s two lightbulbs. It exploded in a storm of sparks. Two more men came crashing through the window. These were Puglisi and McMahon, the other two Delta Force guys who’d shared Hunn’s prison down in Gitmo. Unlike Hunn, they came in headfirst, like two guided missiles, taking down the line of Filipino businessmen and firing into the ceiling as well, adding to the confusion.
A fourth and fifth quickly followed behind. One was Red Curry, the heroic special ops helicopter pilot who’d also taken the unexpected vacation in Gitmo.
The other was Lieutenant Mikael Ozzi, he of the DSA.
Paper cuts. Falling on a slippery floor. Bad coffee in the cafeteria. These were the most dangerous things Ozzi had faced flying a desk back at the Pentagon. This? He’d never done anything like this. But he was different man these days. He was pumped to the point of feeling stoned. The excitement and terror were exhilarating.
The epiphany he’d experienced after meeting the strange prisoners down in Gitmo had not faded a bit. In fact, it had grown. Why was he so enamored? He’d been able to boil it down to one simple fact: the Gitmo guys were different. Certainly Ozzi had known many fine soldiers in his career. Men who’d served their country with both intellect and brawn and who would lay down their lives for America in a heartbeat. But that was their job. They were professional warriors. Combat was a vocation, what they got paid to do.
The Gitmo Four were different. None of the mysterious special ops unit had ever received a paycheck. Ozzi knew this because he asked them. Neither had they been given a promise of promotions or stellar duty in the future. What they’d done in the Persian Gulf and at Hormuz had come from the gut. And from the heart. Ozzi’s theology professor back at Yale would have said they were following their souls. After sitting in the Pentagon basement for most of the past three years, Ozzi wanted nothing more than to be like them.
He got his chance when a secret communiqué forwarded to the NSC from the CIA crossed his desk by mistake. It had been intended for Fox, a follow-up to a previous report. It had been marked for his eyes only, but Ozzi read it anyway. The agency report said that Abdul Kazeel, the mastermind of the Lincoln attack and an architect of 9/11, was in Manila. The CIA even knew the five-star hotel he was staying in. This was the good news. The bad news was the Philippines Intelligence Service had forbidden the CIA to do anything about it. Not a big surprise. That higher-ups in the PIS were in the pay of the Aboo guerrillas was an open secret around the Pacific Rim. Diplomatic niceties prevented the United States from publicly accusing them of such. The ’Peens were still considered a strategic asset to the United States, a dictate larger than the lust for intelligence gathering. Because of this, the CIA had to live with Manila’s ban on anything but surveillance of Kazeel.
But this didn’t mean the DSA had to. It seemed to fit right into their “Go Anywhere, Do Anything, Just Don’t Get Caught,” dictum. And being that they ran a very small shop, and with his boss, Major Fox, away, that left Ozzi the top DSA officer in Washington. And of course he knew all about Kazeel and what he had done and how much the guys in Bobby Murphy’s supersecret special ops team hated him. Yet here he was, right out in the open, walking the streets of a country the United States considered, on paper at least, to be a friend.
But could Ozzi go after the superterrorist without running it by Higher Authority? He took a long walk along the Potomac that day, trying to figure out a way he could capitalize on this piece of information. He thought of every trick in the book, but nothing applied. The memo had been meant for Fox and as a follow-up; this meant Ozzi’s boss already knew that Kazeel was in Manila—and he’d certainly not left any orders for Ozzi to do something about it. Plus, it would be very out of character for Ozzi to do anything without running it by his boss. To do so was probably a court-martial offense as well.
The first 10 minutes of Ozzi’s walk, then, were fairly glum. The banks of the Potomac were crowded with tourists and government workers, tens of thousands of them, as it was such a pleasant day. That’s when Ozzi finally felt something in his gut. A guy who would just love to drop a dirty bomb on these people was running around Manila, untouchable by the big boys of America’s intelligence agencies. If Ozzi did nothing and disaster struck, two months or two years from now, how could he live with himself knowing he could have saved all of these fellow Americans? How could he sleep? Eat? Breathe? It would have been impossible.
So he returned to his subterranean office and simply wrote a bunch of orders to himself. Again, it was something he would never have done just a few weeks before. But now it came to him as easily as signing his name. It took him nearly an hour to fill out the correct paperwork. But when it was over, Ozzi had essentially authorized himself to go after the superterrorist.
But Ozzi knew he still had to be careful. Anything he did would be beyond classified. Causing a rift between the United States and the Philippines would not be good for job advancement. In fact, going against State Department orders was career suicide. This meant he had to be superquiet. He needed some muscle, but using regular special ops troops would not make it the seamless mission he knew it had to be. It was a Catch-22. How could he pull off a top-secret operation without anyone knowing it?
Then, a brilliant idea. A simple one, too. Ozzi knew Major Fox was tracking down the larger group of the mysterious special ops team to help in the emergency up near Fuggu Island. Why couldn’t Ozzi take a page from the same book? Work another supersecret operation with guys from a special ops team that didn’t exist. Incredibly, with one terse fax forged in Fox’s name, he got the Gitmo Four released to his custody. They were immediately flown to Mexico City, where in a cheap hotel room Ozzi told them what he knew of Abdul Kazeel’s whereabouts and the diplomatic impasse that allowed him to roam free. Ozzi wanted to go get the bastard. Could the Gitmo Four help him out?
The reply was unanimous. “Superterrorist? Supermook is more like it. Screw the PIS. Screw the Philippines. We’ll go in and get Kazeel before he knows what hit him.” They would do their thing and be out of the country before anyone—the PIS, the CIA, anyone—knew better. It was exactly what Ozzi wanted to hear.
They flew coach to Manila and bought four shotguns in a back alley behind a police station. Then a hunting rifle was found at an open-air market nearby. Puglisi fashioned a silencer out of a stolen motorbike muffler. They took a room across from Kazeel’s hotel and settled in to wait. It didn’t take long for the snake to show his tail. They saw him leave with Marcos and followed both to the Impatient Parrot. After that, the crash and smash had been routine.
At least, so far.
The Filipino businessmen dived for the floor at first sight of the Americans. The mud girls went down, too. Only one lightbulb had been spared in the barrage. It was swinging wildly back and forth, casting strange shadows across the crowded, smelly room.
The businessmen were quickly frisked; each had been carrying a pistol. The two girls were obviously clean, but Puglisi frisked them anyway. Red Curry frisked Marcos and found a list of all the underage girls who worked in his establishment. Curry hit the guy on the jaw with the butt of his shotgun. The man went over with a thud.
All this happened in just seconds. With the room secured, Hunn walked over to Kazeel sitting petrified in his fancy padded chair and put the muzzle of his shotgun against the terrorist’s substantial nose. Meanwhile, McMahon’s gun was resting on the back of Uni’s neck. Hunn got up in Kazeel’s face. Hunn’s young sister had been in the World Trade Center the day the towers were hit. At 18 years old, she was among the youngest victims. That’s what gave Hunn the bones to be in the secret unit, and now here was a dream come true. His sister’s murderer just the length of a gun barrel away. One pull of the trigger, sweet vengeance would be at hand—and lights out for the world’s first superterrorist.
There was no mistaking that now. Executing Kazeel was why the American team was here. There was no other reason. There would be no need for impossible sacrifice on Hunn’s part. He would not have to reel in his emotions and spare this puke for some trial at the World Court or somewhere. The Americans were executioners. Hit men. That’s what made them so scary, so off the reservation. Their target was anyone connected with the 9/11 attacks.
And now, they had the top guy himself. Hunn looked to Ozzi. The DSA officer steeled himself, ready to see Kazeel’s skull blown apart. The room tensed. Kazeel had turned absolutely white. Hunn moved the double-barreled gun muzzle off Kazeel’s nose and put it square against his forehead.
That’s when the cops arrived.
Or more precisely, the Philippine national police.
This was how things worked in Asia—and maybe America needed a few more lessons in it. The double cross was not enough in this part of the world, not when a triple cross was much more fashionable. What happened? It was hard to say. Word of Ozzi’s plan must have leaked back to the PIS. But how, when no one even knew he was here?
Whatever happened, he and the others were now reaping the price. More than two dozen heavily armed Filipino cops were suddenly in the room. They were all holding their weapons up, a bad sign. The American team immediately took a defensive posture, their weapons raised, too, poised for a fatal shoot-out.
That’s when Ozzi just laughed out loud. He couldn’t help it.
“We drop in on them, they drop in on us…” he said, looking at the small army of policemen. “Wait till my boss hears about this. He won’t believe it….”
But not everyone was listening, and especially not Hunn. He still had his 12-gauge on Kazeel’s brow, fighting an almost impossible urge to just pull the trigger and kill the monster anyway. The only reason Hunn hesitated was because otherwise his comrades would all get killed in the process. If it had just been him, he would have done it in a second. But he couldn’t die with the murder of his buddies on his soul. So while he kept his gun on the terrorist’s head, he eased his finger off the trigger.
A man in the crowd of green faces stepped forward. His name tag IDed him as Captain Ramosa, a chief of the National District Police. He looked like he’d walked right out of Central Casting: oily hair, oily skin, a bad complexion, and very beady eyes. Oddly, he was wearing a cheap paper armband with the letters UN printed on it in blue ink.
“What the fuck is this?” Hunn screamed. “The UN has no jurisdiction here!”
“Well, they do now,” the officer, Ramosa, told them as another dozen or so policemen squeezed into the room, making it almost comically crowded. “This is an action taken on behalf of the UN Subcommittee on Refugees. I am here at their request. This man is a foreign national. We are here to protect him.”
Hunn was furious. “You’re a fucking cop!” he screamed at Ramosa. “Don’t you recognize this guy? He’s the mook of mooks. The top guy….”
Ramosa just laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said with a fake bow. “I am not so up on current events as you.”
Hunn looked to Ozzi, who was just as perplexed. It was like they were suddenly in a bad kung fu movie.
“How could you possibly know we were here?” Ozzi railed at Ramosa. “This thing was tighter than a drum.”
“Apparently not tight enough,” the police chief replied. He nudged Hunn’s weapon away from Kazeel’s head, much to the relief of the Arab terrorist. “Better luck next time.”
“You bastard,” Hunn said to Ramosa. “Whose side are you on?”
The Filipino officer just smiled. He had a mouthful of gold teeth. “On the side of peace, of course,” he said.
Hunn scanned the room. His comrades would never know just how close he came to pulling the trigger and greasing the supermook—and getting them all killed.
But if the situation was now impossible, that didn’t mean Hunn was going quietly. He got right back in Kazeel’s face. He screamed at him: “Look at me, asshole! I’m from Queens, New York! My name is Dave Hunn! Remember me. Next time you see me, I’ll be chopping you to pieces!”
At that point, the mighty Kazeel, superterrorist, wet his pants.
On a curt nod from Ramosa, two of the policemen lifted Kazeel to his feet and quickly carried him out of the room. Uni followed close behind. Ramosa turned back to the five Americans. “I assume everyone here has a valid passport?”
Hunn spit in his face. Ramosa wiped it off with a neatly folded handkerchief. He never lost his snide grin.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” he said.
He gave a quick “hup-to!” to the rest of his men. They began filing out, but with their weapons still up, still ready for anything.
Ramosa went out last, walking backward, protecting his tail.
“My condolences on Nine-Eleven, gentlemen,” he said, flashing his seedy gold smile again. “My prayers were with you that day….”
Manila International Airport was a typical Third World mess.
Dirty, dark, chaotic, dangerous. It was all breakdowns and plastic baggage and noise, filthy windows, and broken doors. Tens of thousands of people, running, walking, staggering, sleeping, many wearing SARS masks, many carrying knives. It was Saturday morning, an insanely busy time. The line of passengers waiting to depart stretched through the main terminal, out the main doors, and all the way to the curb. Nearly every scheduled flight coming in was at least an hour late. Those going out were even further behind.
It was even worse out on the runways. Air traffic control at Manila International was more rumor than fact. Planes were taxiing everywhere with no reason to their movements. A major accident seemed likely at any moment. A bottleneck of airliners was jammed up at the end of the airport’s main runway; all were waiting for some kind of signal to take off and get out of this place. Some of these planes had been waiting here since before sunrise—and that was three hours ago.
A dirty white cargo plane suddenly appeared in the middle of all this. It rolled onto the tarmac from a part of the airport off-limits to commercial aircraft. It was an Airbus A321, the smallest version of the cookie-cutter European airliner. Two large letters, UN, had been hastily applied to its fuselage behind the wing; streaks of blue paint were already running off them. A small drama played out on the field. The airplane suddenly stopped. A police Jeep drove up to it. The plane’s cockpit door opened and a boarding ramp appeared. Two men were led out of the Jeep and sent up the steps. They were both draped in long, hooded robes. Once they were inside, the door was quickly closed, the ramp was pulled away, and the plane started moving again.
The Airbus rolled right past the traffic jam of commercial airliners, taking a place at the head of the line. This infuriated passengers and pilots alike on the waiting airplanes. But no measure of outrage directed toward the airport’s control tower would change anything. The top three people at Manila International—the airport chief administrator, the traffic captain, the security chief—had all been paid off. The UN airplane had priority over every other aircraft.
It waited at the head of the line for just a half-minute. Then it revved up its engines, covering the rest of the planes in dirty exhaust, and went screaming down the runway.
Past the airport’s fences, over the highway, over the dump, over the shantytowns, the shacks, and up on a hill overlooking the southern end of Manila International a battered rented Ford Taurus was parked, engine running, AC blowing, all four doors wide open.
Ozzi was sitting on the hood, shoulders drooped, ball cap pulled low. He watched the UN plane a half-mile away pull up its gear and start to climb.
In the backseat of the Ford were Puglisi and McMahon. Both were trying to sleep. Red Curry was sitting behind the wheel, chain-smoking. They were all exhausted, except Hunn. He was stalking around the car like a madman, talking to himself and swearing mightily.
“Jesus Christmas!” he screamed, shaking his fist as the airplane carrying Kazeel went right over their heads. The noise was tremendous. “I just can’t believe these Zips let that asshole go! Didn’t we free these people from the Japs a while back?”
“Gratitude isn’t in much supply these days,” Curry said over the roar of the departing jet’s engines. “Not for guys like us.”
“Then how about we just nuke this shitty little place?” Puglisi asked with a yawn from the backseat, eyes still closed. “You can get a nuke, can’t you, Lieutenant?”
Ozzi took the question half-seriously. “It might take a few weeks. But…”
He looked out on the mountainside slums. They stretched for miles. “I’m not sure it would make much of a difference here,” he added.
A brutal, smelly wind blew by them. They were quiet for a long time.
Then Ozzi let out a moan. “Well, this is just great,” he said. “We’re at the end of the world here—and damn it, now we’ve got to fly back. I’m not looking forward to the ride home, boys. I don’t even know if I still have a job.”
Suddenly Hunn stopped pacing. He looked at Ozzi strangely. Hunn was a huge individual, perpetually unnerved and like a time bomb ready to go off at any moment. But for a few seconds he turned pro.
“Wait a minute,” he said to Ozzi. “Why are you getting us all bummed out?”
Ozzi just looked up at him. “Did you just say ‘bummed out’?”
“Yes…sir. You’re bumming us out.”
Ozzi was confused. “Don’t I have a good reason to?” he asked sincerely. “We just went through a major-league Chinese fire drill, and I’m sure, with the UN involved, we lit up every phone between here and D.C. I’ll be lucky if they let me sweep my office when I get back.”
“Get back?” Hunn asked him. “You keep saying that. Get back where?”
“To the states. To Washington. And for you guys, probably back to Gitmo.”
All four men started laughing and couldn’t stop. Hunn was almost in tears.
“Oh man, Lieutenant,” he told Ozzi, “I understand you’re the new guy around here. But, sir…you got to get a four-one-one on this. We ain’t going back.” He turned toward the spot where the “UN” plane was now just disappearing into the west. “And believe me, that guy ain’t getting away this easy….”