Chapter 17

Night fell.

The rain stopped.

Manila’s nightlife began heating up. Downtown certainly, but most especially in the War Zone. The neighborhood of iniquity was crowded early, strange for a weeknight. But there was a buzz all over the city, like something big was about to happen. Those who knew how to recognize such things could smell it in the air.

The Impatient Parrot was busy early, too. The bar out front was three deep at the rail. The poon-tang rooms upstairs had a three-hour wait. The mud fights out back were already playing to overflowing crowds.

The brothel’s owner, the man named Marcos, had woken at his usual time: 4:00 P.M. He’d finished dinner by five and was walking the floor by six. He spoke quietly with a handful of underworld associates, discussing various deals that would be going down in and around his establishment this night. Business done, he was about to enjoy his first drink of the evening when he was informed that he had a long-distance phone call, which he took in his private office.

It was Palm Tree.

The conversation was stern and one-sided. Marcos did all the listening. The Stingers were being assembled, packed, and moved tonight, Palm Tree told him. But a crucial component was suddenly missing: Kazeel’s shuka hadn’t been seen since that morning. Moving the missiles was one thing; activating the sharfa was another. That could not be done without the dim-witted Uni, as only he held the last secret of the dearly departed Kazeel. The plan all along was to move Uni around like a chess piece, attracting attention in his mobster suit, so anyone on their trail would sniff him out first—and buy them the time they needed. But completely losing track of the shuka was never in the cards, and now his disappearance had the entire operation in jeopardy.

Like Ramosa, Marcos was being handsomely paid by Palm Tree’s government, he was reminded. If this mission was not completed, then not only would the whole affair be an expensive, embarrassing failure, but anyone connected with it would have to be eliminated, Marcos and Ramosa included. If things did not change for the better quickly, they would both find themselves on a hit list to be carried out by the well-known and ruthless intelligence service of Palm Tree’s home government.

Marcos was highly troubled hearing all this. He knew Palm Tree did not issue threats lightly. But as they were conversing, Marcos was scanning his crowded establishment on a bank of video monitoring screens next to his desk. And like a gift from God he saw someone sitting deep in the shadows of the mud fight room. Bald, with many cuts and abrasions on his head and neck, trying to stay in the background, but watching the mud fight with a certain amount of glee. It was Uni, the shuka.

And he appeared to be very drunk.

 

The change came for Uni after he woke up in the ditch.

Bleeding, battered, chilled again to the bone, he’d looked up the hill, back toward Ghost Town. The last rays of the sunset were creating weird patterns of shadows and light in the graveyards, especially streaming through the crucifixes. The silhouette of a huge cross fell upon him as he raised himself from the stream. It would have been too poetic for this to be a conversion, but the vision, plus his nap, definitely gave him a different perspective on things.

He no longer wanted anything to do with Stingers, or Ramosa, or yachts or minibars. He wanted to remove himself from history, from any involvement in the Second Time of Falling Sparrows, from the ways of Allah. He wanted himself rid of Kazeel’s ghost. In fact, Uni was interested in doing just one thing: resuming his search for the Impatient Parrot.

And this time he found it, just after the evening’s shower drenched him again, washing his clothes in the process. Clearheaded or with a clear conscience, he found the War Zone, turned this corner, then that corner, and boom! there it was, that psychedelic neon sign that to Uni meant “the place where girls fought in the mud.” Why here? Because it was here that he’d last felt really safe—before the Crazy Americans broke in and started all this new trouble.

Getting into the brothel wet was no problem. Everyone was wet in Manila tonight. He’d made his way through the crowd, using money stolen from the Buddha man to buy a glass not of champagne but of whiskey—the taste he’d acquired in the limo the night before. He found a seat in the rear of the back room and settled down to forget everything else.

He watched many mud fights, staring over the smaller people in front, laughing as they leered, drinking whiskey like it was milk. He could live here, he decided. Just drink whiskey, sit in the back, and watch girls wrestle in the mud.

That was his Paradise. He would have to eat, though, eventually—that might be a problem. Did this place even serve food? he wondered.

It was as if the devil himself had heard Uni, for at that moment he saw two more girls making their way across the back room. One of them was holding a huge frying pan with something smoking and crackling inside.

The girls stepped over and around the businessmen who were close to the mud pit, eyeing Uni while trying to keep the huge pan level. He was hungry—back when things were normal he used to eat as many as six meals a day. The girls indicated that they were indeed heading his way—they were moving in a dreamlike fashion, almost as if they were in slow motion. Maybe as a newcomer he was entitled to a free dinner here? Uni didn’t know, but the combination of the whiskey and his long ordeal in the past 24 hours had his stomach aching for food.

The two girls finally reached him. They were even prettier than the two rolling around in the mud—and that was a milestone for Uni, brought on, he was sure, by the alcohol, because he’d never graded women before in his life, simply because they’d never interested him. But these two girls were raven-haired beauties, wearing short white dresses and smiles a mile wide, almost like angels. And the frying pan was not only hot; it was absolutely sizzling. He sat up straight, hoping this might be lamb curry and cabbage, his favorite dish. The two girls never stopped smiling.

Uni drunkenly pointed to himself with both thumbs, as if to ask: “For me?”

Both girls nodded. “It sure is,” one replied. “Big-time, Joe.”

With that, she lifted the large red-hot skillet and with a form rivaling a MLB player gave it a mighty swing and hit Uni square in the face.

 

Airplanes…

Buzzing around inside Uni’s head, like a swarm of bees. They were so noisy. And painful. And they were stinging him all over….

He woke with a scream only he could hear. His mouth was full of mucus; blood was dripping from his ears. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids would barely move. Everything from his toes to his collarbone felt broken. But most especially, his head was immersed in pain. His face, shattered….

He was lying nose-down on a very oily floor. Through those bleary eyes he could see tiny pools of blood, his blood, mixing with a rainbow of gasoline and hydraulic fluid. His ears never stopping buzzing—but these weren’t bees in his head. These were the sounds of real airplanes, taking off nearby.

Where am I? he thought. Certainly not the back room of the Impatient Parrot. There was no mud.

No…it was…Manila Airport. The two words just popped into his head. The noise. The smell. He recognized them.

He managed to open his eyes just a little more. His vision was still blurry—but considering all the whiskey he’d consumed, and the mighty whack to his head from the frying pan, he was lucky he could see at all.

He was in an aircraft hangar, big, old, and dreary. Four ceiling-mounted halogen lamps provided the only illumination. Two huge letters that meant nothing to Uni adorned one wall: UN. The place reeked of cigarette smoke and spilled coffee.

Twenty feet from where he lay Uni saw three packing crates. He knew right away they were the work of the graveyard carpenter. They looked like three monstrous caskets. The stack of Stinger missile tubes was just behind the crates; the launchers were piled next to them. Two huge cardboard boxes containing the red and yellow Buddhas were close by, too, along with an enormous plastic bag filled with foam packing peanuts, four big rolls of bubble wrap, and a spool of duct tape the size of a truck tire.

He heard footsteps now. Two boots appeared next to his bloody nose. Uni moved his head a little and saw Marcos, the brothel owner, standing over him.

He’d been waiting for Uni to wake up. Now Marcos snapped his fingers and two armed Filipino men arrived. They were wearing blue jumpsuits with those two letters—UN—on the sleeves. They were among the thirteen gunmen in the hangar dressed this way. These two roughly lifted Uni to his feet, dragged him across the floor, and threw him against the far wall, hurling an overflowing trash barrel at him for good measure.

Facedown again, Uni found himself lying in a pile of smelly rags and discarded Styrofoam coffee cups. He managed to lift his fingers to his face and wipe the crap from his eyes. The next thing he saw was the razor blade.

Marcos was leaning over him, holding an old-fashioned straight razor just an inch from his throat.

“Why did you think you could run away from us, my friend?” he asked the shuka cruelly. “I thought we were all in this together?”

Uni could barely hear his words. But the message the razor was sending was very clear.

“I’ll make it easy on you,” Marcos went on. “We only want one thing—the sharfa. Tell it to me now and I will kill you quickly. If not, I’ll cut your throat out, one piece at a time. I assure you, that is a very painful way to go.”

To prove his point, Marcos slid the blade across the soft skin just below Uni’s right ear and began to slice into it slowly. Uni was horrified—and very confused. He thought the brothel owner was his friend.

Another guy in a blue UN jumpsuit suddenly appeared. He was holding a Nokia cell phone.

“It’s him,” was all the man said to Marcos.

Even Uni knew what that meant. Palm Tree was on the phone. Marcos withdrew his blade and grabbed the cell. Uni gasped for breath as even more blood flowed down his neck

What followed was an intense conversation between Marcos and Palm Tree on how the weapons were to be packed and shipped. Marcos did all the talking at first. He explained to Palm Tree that he had followed his previous instructions to the letter. The crates had been clearly marked 1, 2, and 3 on their inside panels. The missiles and launchers were about to be packed in all three, using layers of Buddhas to surround them. This way, the crates could pass, at least by a cursory inspection, as nothing more than a shipment of chintzy religious statues heading for the United States.

But then Palm Tree started talking, and clearly there had been a change in plans. Marcos’s men were now to pack all the Buddhas into Crate 1, and all of the weapons into Crate 2. Crate 3 would be left empty. Furthermore, Crates 1 and 2 would be the only ones shipped. Crate 3 was to be dumped on a beach nearby.

Uni could tell Marcos was hearing all this for the first time. The Filipino hoodlum actually questioned Palm Tree as to why they went through all the trouble of getting the 2,000 Buddhas if they weren’t going to be used as camouflage for the weapons during shipment. “I thought the whole idea was to move the weapons disguised as a load of statues,” Uni heard Marcos say. It was impossible to hear Palm Tree’s reply, but it was short, curt, and Marcos got the point right away. Things had changed.

Palm Tree hung up and Marcos began shouting out the new orders. Just as mystified as their boss, the men in the blue UN jumpsuits got to work nevertheless. A flurry of activity ensued as the Buddhas were taken from their cardboard boxes and put into one crate, with the missiles and launchers put into another. The bubble wrap was unfurled, the bag of packing peanuts cut open. The sound of duct tape being torn and applied fill the air. The entire packing operation took less than five minutes.

Then Marcos turned back to Uni. Slamming him against the wall once more, Marcos began screaming at the shuka, telling him how stupid he was, how he’d been manipulated, how everyone from Palm Tree to Kazeel had used him as a dupe. Marcos even held the phone to Uni’s ear and let him hear a saved message from Palm Tree ordering Marcos to eliminate Uni whether he came across with the sharfa or not. Either way, the shuka had to go.

Uni’s eyes went wide. His jaw dropped open. Marcos saw this and started to laugh. But Uni was not reacting to what he’d just heard the judus say. The reason for his sudden amazement was that he saw something apparently no one else in the hangar could see. Straight up, past the suspended ceiling, on the dirty skylight directly above his head, a heavily armed masked man was looking right down at him.

The man had his finger to his lips, telling Uni, Don’t make a sound.

Uni’s mind began to move—albeit slowly. What should he do? Palm Tree had all but ordered him killed. The sadistic Marcos had his razor blade back out to do the job. Yet Uni was more fearful of the ghost looking down at him than what his former friends had in store for him.

Several things happened in the next two seconds. Marcos began to draw the blade across Uni’s throat again. But at the precise moment the razor touched the shuka’s skin, there was a mighty crash! above them. It startled Marcos so, he dropped the straight razor, grazing Uni’s ear and opening yet another cut. Suddenly four heavily armed people were rappelling from the ceiling, firing their guns wildly. All four were wearing masks and, incredibly, had American flags tied around their necks as capes.

The hangar was instantly ablaze in gunfire. More figures crashed through the skylight. Some were dressed like the first four—in black combat suits. But others were wearing sailors’ uniforms, and still others were in very tattered Hawaiian shirts. All of them were firing M16s. The zing and sizzle of bullets became deafening. The electrical system was hit and all the lights went out. But the sudden darkness was quickly relit by the illuminating rounds of tracer fire. People were screaming, grunting, crying out in pain. There were 15 people inside the warehouse, including Uni and Marcos. Within 10 seconds, 13 of them were dead, riddled with bullets by the crazy men dropping from the night sky.

Uni was petrified, absolutely frozen with fear. So was Marcos, who was now standing straight up, his hands raised over his head, pleading with the masked soldiers not to kill him. One of the soldiers came out of the dark, pushed Marcos aside, and grabbed Uni around his throat. He slammed the shuka up against the wall again and jammed a small American flag in his mouth. Then he took off his mask.

It was Dave Hunn.

He growled at Uni: “Hey, Mr. Clean…remember me?”

 

Ozzi had lost his helmet on the way down into the hangar. His wrist felt broken on landing and the sudden descent had turned his stomach inside out.

He was the 5-Guy, as in the fifth guy down the rope. Hunn, Curry, Puglisi, and McMahon had been the Crashers. Ozzi and Bingo and two Spooks were the second team down. After that, Bingo’s guys just started jumping into the place. Though Ozzi had been with the rogue American team for what seemed like forever now, he was still trying to get the hang of this superhero stuff. He knew losing one’s helmet during a crash-and-smash was not considered good form.

It had all been a whirl for him these past few days. First the trip from Manila to the mysterious Ocean Voyager, by way of a stolen high-speed drug-running junk. Then the long flight to Pakistan (stealing aviation fuel along the way), getting on the trail of the real Dragos (an adventure in itself), icing them, fooling Kazeel with fake ambushes and bombing attacks until they knew every step he’d made, and then icing him. Bahzi, the Paki intelligence men, and Kazeel’s seven dwarves came next, all leading to the team finally picking up the shuka’s scent. The bright yellow Sing One TV chopper nearly crashed on its way back to Ocean Voyager. (They’d used too much fuel diverting to a suburb of Rangoon to mail the videotapes to the shuka.) The spy ship set sail just before the Vietnamese government finally got wise that it had been hiding in their waters for weeks. It met the copter at sea.

From there, the American team had been able to keep track of the shuka the same way they’d first got on Kazeel’s tail—because he’d stupidly kept using his cell phone. By remotely accessing his DSA computer back in Washington, Ozzi had tapped into the NSA’s top-secret ECHELON eavesdropping system and marked Uni’s phone for movement updates once every hour or so. All they had to do after that was follow the electronic footprints. At the same time, they’d dissected the phone used by Kazeel, and from this became privy to at least the basics of the supermook’s Big Plan. They knew Kazeel had somehow come upon the Stinger launchers and had paid Bahzi handsomely for the accompanying missiles. They knew the weapons were to be assembled somewhere in the Philippines and then shipped to the United States. They also knew once the missiles were en route, the shuka, having survived his boyfriend Kazeel, was supposed to activate the so-called sharfa, signaling the Al Qaeda sleeper cells inside the United States to spring into action. Just about the only piece of information the team hadn’t uncovered yet was the sharfa itself. Kazeel died because they couldn’t beat it out of him. It was only after they busted into Kazeel’s phone did they discover the shuka held the secret key too. That’s why they had to get back to the ’Peens chop-chop—and that’s why they were here, crashing through the ceiling.

The hangar was nearly pitch-black by the time Ozzi came flying in. He could see only gun flashes during his short ride down the Zorro rope. He’d hit the floor hard, hurting his wrist and separating himself from his helmet, which also contained his night-vision goggles. While reaching around for his flashlight, he unwittingly squeezed the trigger on his M16, unleashing a stream of tracers that further lit up the hangar with an intense blinding flash.

The glow from his bullets helped him spot the waylaid helmet though. He dived for it, shoving it back over his head as if it were an oxygen mask and he needed the air. He cranked the night goggles to full power and everything slowly coalesced into the reassuring green underworld of night vision.

Of course, by that time, the battle was over.

Someone got the lights back on and Ozzi thought he’d died and gone to special ops heaven. Everything they’d worked for in the last few hectic days was now before them: the Stingers, the launchers, the shuka, and a key bad guy who was already trying to plea bargain with Bingham and Curry. The only thing missing was a big bow to wrap it all up.

Ozzi fell to the seat of his pants, burning his hands on the muzzle of his still-hot M16. He was both exhausted and exuberant. Curry came up to him and delivered a low five so powerful, it almost broke Ozzi’s other wrist. There was much hooting and hollering among the Americans as they checked the bodies of the dead. None of the gunmen had ID or any kind of anything that might tell them who they were or who was paying them. No matter. The Americans were already using their switchblades to cut the letters UN out of the girly-blue uniforms. Every battle gives birth to trophies. This one was no different.

Both Puglisi and McMahon slid down next to Ozzi now and delivered simultaneous bear hugs to him, so glad were they that their long ordeal was finally over. He just laughed and pushed them away. They’re endured so much over the past week and a half: brutal heat, biting cold, long rides over water, and low-altitude dashes through perilous skies. Slippery mountain roads, raging Afghan blizzards, narrow escapes, gunfights, fistfights, bombings, stabbings—all on little food, no sleep, and lots of stress. Yet, in the end, they’d won somehow. They’d stopped Kazeel for good and had captured his weapons cache intact. Hundreds if not thousands of American lives had been saved. And Ozzi had been a small part of it.

All kinds of images began flashing through his head now. The triumphant trip home. A good meal. A few drinks. Maybe meet some girls…Maybe they’ll give me a bigger office, he thought. With a TV this time.

And then, strangely, a name popped into his head: Yogi Berra.

Why?

An instant later came a great crash—another one. Suddenly armed men were pouring through just about every orifice in the hangar. Ozzi’s first thought was: Hey, it’s the 82nd Airborne!

But he couldn’t have been more wrong. It was Ramosa’s secret police instead. Lots of them.

And Yogi Berra?

Of course…déjà vu all over again.

But this wasn’t an exact re-creation of the bust-up in the Impatient Parrot the week before. This time there was a gunfight. A big one.

The lights went out in the hangar a second time—a moment later everyone in the room who had a weapon opened up. The pyrotechnics when the American team first crashed in on Marcos were a sparkler compared to these fireworks. Stretched out flat on the floor now, Ozzi started firing wildly in the direction of the doors the secret police were streaming through. They all did. Ozzi was astonished that he could actually see the armed men, never mind hit some of them. That’s when he realized this time he was looking through his night goggles.

It got very weird, very quickly, from there. The big hangar was again awash in fluorescent gunfire, a single round of which could obliterate a heart or explode a skull. In the sudden murk of gunsmoke Ozzi could only see faces—just faces amid the bullet streaks—eyes wild, heading right for him, firing their weapons in his direction.

Then, just a few seconds into this thing, someone grabbed hold of Ozzi’s feet and started pulling him backward. He was dragged across the floor for 20 feet or more. He never stopped firing, though—he couldn’t. Not with a tidal wave of bad guys who wanted to kill him just a few meters away. His finger was melded to his trigger.

It was Puglisi who was pulling him along the oily floor. As soon as the first shot was fired, the American team had assembled into a defensive formation known as “Zulu 2.” Everyone but Ozzi, that is. Puglisi had yanked him back into the fold. Finally Ozzi took a half-second to look around him. The team was set up three deep. Some were lying on the floor next to him; some were on bent knee; the rest were standing up. Their weapons raised, they formed three ranks of continuous fire. It was a brilliant tactic, quick and ballsy, but it reminded Ozzi too much of Custer’s Last Stand.

The attackers were advancing with fanatical drive. The Americans were dropping them like flies, but they kept on coming anyway. The bad guys didn’t have night goggles, and for the first 30 seconds that made all the difference in the world. The Americans were mowing them down, like a grisly shooting gallery.

The fusillade coming from the three-deep formation was frightening—but it was also costly in ammunition, which is why the battle lasted barely a minute. The Americans had crashed the place with only enough ammo to take the hangar—not fight a small war. The team ran out of bullets all at once. Suddenly the firing stopped. The floor was littered with dead mooks and empty shell casings. Incredibly, no one on the American side had been killed or even wounded.

But surely, they were dead ducks now.

A surreal moment passed. More than half of Ramosa’s guys had been popped. But those that had survived quickly disarmed the Americans. Ramosa appeared from nowhere and made sure every prisoner was aggressively frisked.

When it came to Hunn’s turn, he just looked at Ramosa and said: “How?”

The police captain displayed his sinister 24K grin.

“Same way as last time,” he said. “We’ve had this place surrounded for hours, just waiting for you.” Ramosa was speaking in a surprisingly sophisticated manner.

“You would have known that had you chosen to come in through the front door this time,” he went on, looking up at the smashed skylights overhead. “And not by the roof. I’m afraid you’ve destroyed a lot of UN property, my friends. Too bad you won’t be around the pay the bill.”

Hunn tried to spit at him. “What do you think—you’re in a James Bond movie?”

Ramosa was clearly embarrassed. He knew his last comment had been a little too melodramatic.

“No matter,” he snapped right back again. “One way or the other, you’re all about to die.”

He directed his men to line up the Americans in a row. Each was made to kneel, facing the wall, hands behind his head. The classic position for a gangland execution….

Ozzi was on the end of this sad line. I’ll be either the first to go or the last, he thought grimly, knees starting to shake. Ramosa handed his pistol and extra ammunition to Marcos; the Filipino thug, saved in the nick of time, was practically drooling with anticipation now. There were 16 American team members in all, including the sailors and the Spooks. Marcos took Ramosa’s pistol but said to him: “I will use my razor on some of them, too. If you don’t mind?”

Ramosa wasn’t listening, though. He was bent over the shuka who’d collapsed back into a heap against the wall. Marcos joined him.

Ramosa said: “I’m here not so much to save your ass as I am to get the sharfa. It might very well be the most valuable thing in the world right now.”

Marcos lifted Uni’s bloody chin. He was a distant cousin of the people who used to run the Philippines. As such, he’d inherited their penchant for violence and violation.

“But how do we get it, my friend?” Marcos asked Ramosa. “This one’s too stupid to bleed it out of him. I was about to try—and so would have they, if you hadn’t arrived.”

Ramosa studied the bloody pulp of Uni’s face. The shuka appeared to be clinging to life by the barest of threads, his eyes teary with confusion, horror.

“Yes, it seems strange that Kazeel would entrust something so important to such an imbecile,” Ramosa said. “But the sheikh wasn’t stupid. He must have imparted the sharfa to him in such a way that this clown could not take it with him to the grave. That means something about him should give us a clue to its whereabouts. But what could it be?”

Suddenly it was as if a lightbulb went off over Marcos’s head. He turned to Ramosa.

“Have you ever heard this dimwit speak?” Marcos asked him. “Beyond a few grunts, I mean?”

Ramosa had to think a moment. “No,” he answered. “I don’t think I have. Not really. Has anyone?”

Marcos smiled demonically. His razor was back in Uni’s face in a flash. He forced the shuka’s mouth open and pulled out his tongue.

“Well, look at this!” Marcos cried.

He turned Uni’s tongue upside down to reveal that a set of tiny numbers, 14 in all, had been tattooed there. Ramosa bent down and studied them. They seemed distorted and unreadable.

“But they are backward,” he said. “Why?”

Marcos thought another moment. Then, another lightbulb.

“So this idiot can see them in a mirror,” he declared. To make his point, he held his very shiny razor blade against Uni’s tongue. Sure enough, only in its reflection did the numbers make sense.

“Yes, I see it now,” Ramosa said. “It’s a phone number. Country code, area code, and the rest. That’s the sharfa. Call this number and let it ring—no one will ever pick it up probably. They won’t have to. The sleepers will know to go into action simply upon hearing it.”

Marcos laughed like a girl. “And the sheikh must have told this moron to keep his mouth shut—and he has. Until now.”

Ramosa looked at the numbers again and winced. “But the pain of putting them there must have been incredible.”

“Nothing like he is about to feel,” Marcos replied. In one swift motion, he lifted his razor and lopped off the end of Uni’s tongue, the part containing the numbers. Uni howled. The spurt of blood was sickening. But Marcos simply smiled.

“Now at last, we have the unholy grail,” he said to Ramosa, dropping Uni back to the floor. “And the idiot is an idiot once more.”

There came a commotion at the hangar’s main door. One of Ramosa’s men peeked outside, then gave a hand signal. Ramosa nodded in reply. The doors opened, and a bizarre-looking airplane taxied its way into the hangar, followed by two nondescript freight trucks.

The noise inside was suddenly overpowering. Ramosa and Marcos had a shouted conversation, most of which only they could hear. It had to do with the crates, what was supposed to be in which crate, and where each crate was supposed to go after being repacked.

“It’s another switch in plans!” some of the Americans heard Ramosa yell over the plane’s whining engine.

“Are you sure?” Marcos was heard shouting back. “Another switch?”

“Absolutely!” Ramosa yelled in reply. “I got it straight from Palm Tree….”

Now it was Ramosa’s small army of men who went into action, repacking the crates according to the latest orders. The crates themselves were actually moved around the hangar floor to the extent that it would have been just about impossible for a casual observer to know which was crate 1, 2, or 3. Finally, though, Ramosa ordered them sealed and loaded onto their predetermined modes of transport.

This done, Ramosa turned to Marcos and started yelling at him again, still straining to be heard over the racket.

“After you take care of them,” some heard Ramosa tell Marcos, indicating the captured Americans, “meet me at the you-know-where.”

With that, Ramosa took the piece of tongue, put it in his pocket, and left.

 

Ozzi was surprised. The bubble of fear from just minutes before had dissipated. He wasn’t scared anymore, just the opposite in fact.

“I’m dying for my country,” he kept whispering over and over. “I’m dying…for my country.”

A strange peace had come over the rest of the team, too, even though a grisly death was just seconds away. Sure the tables had suddenly turned on them. But they were still Patriots all, still Ozzi’s heroes. He’d been privileged to know them. And that’s why he was so suddenly calm.

Even still, Ozzi was doing his job, trying to remember everything he had heard. As he was one of the closest to the crates, he’d kept track of the packing process as best he could, taking mental notes as it proceeded at a fast and furious pace. Others along the line of captured Americans were doing the same thing. Even above the racket of the airplane and the trucks’ engines, they could hear the sound of more packing peanuts being dumped, more bubble wrap being snapped, more duct tape being torn and applied. They each caught fleeting glimpses of the crates being loaded, being sealed, and finally put on their means of transport. But still, because of all the movement and confusion, Ozzi and the others could not quite tell which crate held what and which crate was going where.

In any case, the two vehicles and the airplane soon departed. One last glance over Ozzi’s shoulder confirmed only a few strands of duct tape and some packing peanuts remained.

He turned his head slightly to the right now and could see Marcos out of the corner of his eye. The hoodlum had a huge .357 Magnum in hand and was fiddling with the safety button. He began walking down the line of prisoners, pressing the gun barrel against the neck of each American, sometimes yelling, “Boom!” to frighten one into thinking he would be the first to die.

It didn’t work. The Americans weren’t scared. In fact, Curry was laughing at him, daring Marcos to shoot him first. Puglisi and McMahon began taunting him as well. Soon most of the others were, too. Hunn alone stayed in his private place. He’d come up with another American flag and was quietly holding it in his hands as someone might hold a rosary.

Ramosa had left 10 men behind to cover Marcos while he performed the executions. They were gathered around the prisoners now, like lions waiting for the kill. Marcos went back down the line, muttering angrily, “I decide who will go first!” This as the Americans continued to mock him. Strangely, though, he ended not on one of the raiders but on Uni, the shuka. He’d been made to kneel up against the wall with the rest of them.

“I shall do the world a favor, I think,” Marcos declared. “Getting rid of a stupid freak first makes us all a little bit better, don’t you think?”

Ramosa’s men laughed on cue. “Do him good!” one of them called out.

“And you are a fucking imbecile, you know,” Marcos hissed at the eunuch in broken English. “What ever gave you the idea that you would wind up making the headlines with this thing? That you of all people would come out on top? I guess idiots have no choice but to dream idiots’ dreams.”

Marcos then took a step back. Ozzi tensed himself for the gunshot. He could see everything now: Uni, Marcos, the ravenous secret police—it was all happening just a few feet away from him. This was going to be nasty, he thought. But he could not turn away.

Marcos smiled at the cops around him, pointed the gun at the back of Uni’s shiny bald head…and pulled the trigger.

The sound of a gunshot exploded throughout the hangar. Ozzi saw the fire and smoke spew from Marcos’s weapon. And it really did seem like the round hit Uni’s skull. But whether the gun misfired or it was divine intervention or because Uni’s head really was made of concrete, incredibly, the bullet ricocheted backward…and hit Marcos right between the eyes.

Silence…cold and eerie. Marcos stood there for the longest time, absolute bewilderment on his face. He even reached up and felt the hole in his skull. Hunn was the closest American to him. Marcos turned to him and said one word: “How?”

Hunn was so shocked by what he’d just seen, he couldn’t speak. He could only shrug.

Marcos went over in a heap a second later.

Ramosa’s men panicked. This was a little too freaky for them. Half began to run; the other half knew it would be wise to finish off the Americans first before they fled—Captain Ramosa did not forgive unfulfilled orders lightly.

But just as these men raised their weapons to fire, one of them was shot through the left eye. He, too, went over with a thump! His comrades were aghast. Now what was happening? Did this man somehow shoot himself, too? But then the guy beside him got a bullet through the throat and another to the forehead. The cop beside him instinctively ducked, but not before he caught a round right between the eyes.

All of the policemen panicked now. This was strange on top of strange, their comrades being shot down by ghosts. But the American prisoners knew what was going on. Ramosa’s evil policemen were getting tap-shot.

And that could only mean one thing….

The top of the hangar disappeared a moment later. Suddenly it was just gone, in a blinding explosion, cheap aluminum reduced to metallic cinders. A second after that, a huge airplane roared over the top of the building. Huge…and noisy. With a fuselage that looked like the bottom of a boat.

A second after that, six men in barely opened parachutes dropped down through the gigantic hole in the roof, guns blazing. They all hit the floor at the same time.

“We’re Americans!” one of them screamed. “Team Ninety-Nine—U.S. Navy. Get down on the floor…now!”

Ozzi was stunned. They all were.

Team Ninety-Nine? he thought. The SEAL assassins? What the fuck were they doing here?

The American prisoners hit the deck as told and the hangar saw its third gunfight in less than 10 minutes. This one was as one-sided as the last one, though. Ramosa’s men weren’t combat troops; they were barely cops. They were no match for the SEALs.

As soon as the first six intruders hit the floor, another handful of armed men descended through the roof. These guys weren’t SEALs. Just the opposite, they were dressed like they’d just walked out of a J. Crew catalog. Following them were more huge soldiers—as big as Hunn and his guys—wearing the same jet-black combat suits with the infamous 9/11 patch. They came down on ropes, leaving no doubt they were the ethereal tap-shooters.

The invaders dispersed expertly throughout the warehouse, hunting down and brutally eliminating the last of Ramosa’s men. It took less than a minute. Then the shooting died down again.

Meanwhile the SEALs came along the row of the suddenly liberated Americans and by procedure frisked each one. By the time they got to Hunn, the SEALs were gloating mightily.

“Got in a bit of a jam, Delta?” one SEAL asked Hunn sarcastically. “Glad we could be of service.”

Hunn just moaned. Happy to be alive, he knew the special ops community would never let him forget the day that SEALs had to rescue Delta.

Ozzi was equally relieved but felt even more embarrassed than Hunn. The Gitmo team were his heroes, yet he’d led them into not one but two very dangerous situations, this and the screw-up in the mud room. He was not one of them; just the opposite in fact. But he had one more surprise coming. One last guy came through the roof and landed right in front of him. He took off his helmet and mask and just stood there, smiling.

Ozzi couldn’t believe it. It was his boss, Major Fox.

“Sir? What are you doing here?” he cried.

“Let me ask you the same thing,” Fox replied. “I thought I left you back at the office.”

Ozzi fell to the seat of his pants—again. “It’s a long story,” he muttered. “You must know some of it already. But how did you find me?”

Fox reached inside the young officer’s breast pocket and took out his cell phone. He held it up to his eyes. “Don’t you ever turn this thing off?” Fox asked him.

Ozzi slapped himself upside the head. He couldn’t believe it. He’d committed the same stupid mistake the shuka had! In this Spook-versus-mook business, only an idiot left his cell phone on these days, that is, if he used the same one more than once. Powered-up cells were how the United States tracked terrorists—after all, that’s how the Gitmo team had tracked first Kazeel and then the eunuch. Only a real amateur would have done this. But at least this time, Ozzie’s mistake turned out to be a good thing.

Finally the two halves of the rogue American team came together in the center of the hangar. It was the first time the original team members had seen one another since the events at Hormuz. Inside 60 seconds they’d exchanged stories on exactly how they all came to be here. They rejoiced at the news of Kazeel’s demise. The Kai team highly commended the Gitmo Four (or Five) for their cunning, initiative—and just plain balls in whacking the superterrorist. The Kais adventure had been of a different sort but just as down and dirty. Though mysteriously cut off from Washington after finding the B-2 spy bomber—no one ever did return Fox’s phone calls—they felt they had no other choice but to continue the search for the people responsible for what happened on Fuggu Island. They did this by scouring every island, atoll, lagoon, shoal, and sandbar from the Bangtang Channel down to Manila Bay. They killed many Aboo terrorists along the way, as these places were infested with them. But they uncovered nothing connected to the events which occurred over the northern Philippines that night.

But how then did they get on Ozzi’s phone trail or even know enough to start looking for him? the Gitmos asked the Kai team. What’s more, how did they know about the Stingers, and the hangar and Ramosa and the sharfa? Did they have help—as in “inside help”? Just by body language alone, the Kai team seemed to indicate this was the case, and that it went beyond simply tapping into the NSA’s ECHELON system, as the Gitmo group had done. But then the Kais warily eyed the SEALs, the SDS guys, even the DSA officers, anyone not part of the original 9/11 group and buttoned up. “We’ll tell you later,” was all they said.

The reunion celebration was brief; everyone knew they had to get moving. It was imperative they get out of the hangar before someone else crashed in on them—that seemed to be the pattern these days. Plus the Stingers were gone, on their way to the United States, and the puke Ramosa had the sharfa. They had to try and catch up to them.

But how were the weapons being moved? That was the big question. The combined Gitmo/Spook/Navy crash team told the Kais everything they could recall hearing during the final packing and shipping process. Again, not just Ozzi had been paying attention; others had, too. But to everyone’s dismay, these reports turned out to have a severe case of rashamons—many different versions of the same story. Some of the Americans were convinced they saw Buddhas being repacked around the missiles. Others said the bad guys had discarded the Buddhas and just packed the weapons cold. Some insisted the missiles and the Buddhas were put in a crate that went on one of the trucks. Others swore the Buddhas only went on the truck and the weapons crate was put onto the weird-looking airplane. Just about the only thing everyone agreed on was that one of the crates had been carried away empty, to be dumped on a beach nearby. But if that was the case, then why have three crates in the first place? Having an empty one didn’t make sense.

“Thirty-six missiles, thirty-six launchers, two thousand Buddhas, and three crates,” Fox moaned. “Who knows what it all means?”

“None of us do,” Curry replied. “Because none of us could see the whole thing.”

“Wait a minute,” Ozzi said suddenly. “He knows….”

He was pointing at Uni.

 

Ryder needed a cigarette. Actually, he needed a carton of them. Along with a couple bottles of Jack Daniel’s, a pool, some sunblock, and a slew of babes.

He was getting too old for this. Schlepping all over Fuggu Island was one thing. But he’d trooped across so many other islands in the past week, he’d lost count. All of them darker, scarier, and with more prehistoric animals than Kong Island. Until they got the lead on the young DSA officer’s cell phone, it had been a long, dirty, bloody trip. He was just happy that his feet were back on concrete again—and not stuck in the jungle muck.

But now what? They’d saved their colleagues—but the Stingers had slipped away and were heading for States, and the only guy who knew how was a certified block-head.

But if there was one thing all of the American team members were good at, it was extricating information from people who would rather keep their mouths shut. And they were all convinced that the shuka knew something. The trouble was the shuka looked like he’d already had the shit kicked out of him—twice. He was battered and bleeding in many places; half his tongue had been cut out. His clothes were soiled and covered with many unidentifiable substances. Though he was somehow able to pull himself up to his knees, he didn’t seem to be in any shape to be “persuaded” about anything.

That’s why they were all so surprised when the shuka indicated he wanted to make a deal.

 

It took Uni a while to make this understandable to the Americans, for he was now a simpleton without a tongue. He first tried waving a rag as a white flag. Then he kissed Hunn’s American flag, the same one the Delta soldier had stuffed into his mouth just minutes before. Only when he pantomimed pledging allegiance to it did he get his point across. Yes, he wanted to “talk.”

He had a simple proposition for them. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, he indicated. Just don’t kill me. It was only because Uni looked half-dead already that the Americans agreed.

But then began 10 long minutes of excruciating confusion. The translation gap was not just wide; it was a chasm. No one could really understand what the hell the tongue-less, beaten Uni was trying to tell them. He was gesturing weakly, trying to use crude sign language to get his point across. He even wrote down some things in fractured, unreadable Arabic. But it was sheer torture trying to follow along.

The Americans managed to get some of it. Uni’s two trips to Manila. Palm Tree. Ramosa. Marcos. The frightening ride in the yacht. The weapons themselves and the three different sets of orders on how to pack them. Of course, half the rogue team knew some of this already. But it was a road they all had to take, for the shuka didn’t know any other way to tell a story except from the beginning, and whenever he felt stymied in his rendition, he went right back to square one and started all over again.

Finally, though, he approached some sort of climax: Why were three crates built instead of just two? they asked him. Or even just one? Had they and the Buddhas been part of a diversion all along?

Uni seemed to confirm this deflating possibility. The Gitmo contingent hadn’t been subtle in announcing their impending arrival in Manila, nor had they laid low once their boots were on the ground. If Palm Tree knew the Crazy Americans were coming all along, just as Uni, Ramosa, et al., had, that meant time was of the essence. While the American team was off killing the Buddha man and the coffin maker, the bad guys were sewing up loose ends. By the time the Americans finally zeroed in on Uni, the bad guys had bought just enough time to send the missiles on their way, making the narrowest of escapes.

This news didn’t sit well with the Americans; shooting first and asking questions later was almost an occupational hazard of the 9/11 team, most especially Hunn’s men. They’d blown opportunities in the past simply by being too trigger-happy while moving about as gracefully as a herd of elephants. It had happened right before Hormuz and now it had apparently happened again.

Finally Curry spoke up: “OK—so we were duped. Misdirected, outright fooled, or whatever. And we still don’t know what went where or how. But why in God’s name were they pulling all those switcheroos with the crates?”

They besieged Uni to spill this one last piece of information—and it was something that he knew, something he wanted to tell them. But there was just no way he could communicate it to them. Words failed him, as always, and he could not speak with his hands to any satisfaction or write it out in any legible way.

Desperate, as he was sure the Crazy Americans would indeed kill him if he didn’t please them, he scrambled around the floor gathering up the remnants from the overturned trash can. Locating three Styrofoam coffee cups, he set them upside down on the dirty floor. Then he painfully rifled through his pockets, finally coming out with an American half dollar—a favorite in the Impatient Parrot—and two Pepsi bottle caps he’d saved from his days at the Xagat.

As the Americans watched, totally mystified, Uni put the coin underneath one cup and the bottle caps underneath the other two—then began moving the cups around crazily. After a few seconds he stopped and lifted one cup to reveal a bottle cap. He moved the cups again, then stopped again, lifting a cup to reveal another bottle cap. He did all this a third time—but this time he lifted the third cup to reveal the coin.

Gathered tightly around him, the Americans were convinced he’d gone completely mad.

But then Ryder got it.

“It’s a shell game,” he said, out of the blue. “That’s what he’s trying to tell us.”

The shuka jumped back to his feet and staggered toward Ryder, arms outstretched as if to kiss him. Two dozen raised weapons prevented such a thing. But the meaning now was clear for all to see.

“A freaking shell game?” Puglisi cried. “That’s what they’re playing here?”

“Changing the rules right up to the last minute?” Bingo said. “Not that bad an idea, especially if you think people are looking in on you—or hot on your trail. They knew we were just hours, then minutes behind them. They knew if they kept switching the crates around, the chances were good we’d pick the wrong one to chase once we—or someone else—finally got this close to them.”

“The bastards,” Curry swore. He was a native New Yorker. He’d seen hustlers on 42nd Street play shell games hundreds of times while growing up. They were the ultimate suckers’ bet.

“So how will we ever figure out which shell is the prize, then?” Hunn asked. “Which crate has the weapons? Which ones have the duds?”

They went over the many different versions of the packing episode again, trying to track the logic. If the crucial crate was being shipped by air, were the two trucks on hand then just to carry the “empty” shells? Or, if the weapons crate was being sent by sea and one of the trucks was just a way to get it to a ship, was the airplane just another diversion?

Ryder tried to noodle it out. “If Curly here is right and it’s a shell game, then there has to be a diversion of some kind,” he said. “So, maybe they put the weapons crate on the airplane and put a dud crate on one truck to be driven to a ship. Then the third crate was put on the second truck, to be dumped on the beach.”

“Or, they could have put two crates on the airplane,” Curry said. “One a fake, one that was real. Then they used one truck to dump the bogus crate on the beach. And the second truck was a backup.”

“Or maybe the airplane is the diversion,” Bingham offered. “They put the weapons crate on a slow boat, while making it seem the real delivery is going airborne.”

“Well, however they did it,” Fox said, with no little frustration, “the question remains, how in hell are we ever going to track them from here?”

Ozzi stepped up again. He was on fire now, angry that the bad guys were winning again.

“How about we go to the airport manager here and find out if any unusual flights took off in the past twenty minutes,” he said. “He must know something weird has been going on. And if he doesn’t want to cooperate, we beat his ass until he does. Same thing goes for the Manila harbormaster. Let’s haul his ass out of bed and see if any suspicious ships were due to leave in the same time frame. They surely ain’t driving the missiles to the states. So air and sea are the only ways to go.”

Everyone was paying attention to him now. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Lieutenant?” Fox asked.

Ozzi was checking the clip in his M16 magazine.

“Yes, sir, I am,” he replied. “It means we’ve got to split up. Again.”