30

SUBIC BAY, PHILIPPINES

MID-AUGUST

“How’s the calamari?” Havok asked as he stared at his margarita.

“Could use some more seasoning.” Stone stopped chewing long enough to answer Havok and sip his margarita, placing the glass back on the table. A salt crystal clung to his upper lip. “You seem to be thinking a lot lately. About Pilar?”

BB, relaxing with his own margarita, quietly watched the two men.

Havok tasted his margarita and shifted cautiously in his seat. Though they’d had time for their wounds to heal, some were still tender. He looked down at his wrists and saw the jagged white scars against his tanned skin. He also felt the cool northerly breeze on his cheek and heard the soft country lyrics of a Kenny Chesney country song hitch a ride on the waft. They were sitting at Kilgore’s bar, waiting for him to arrive. “A bit of everything, and she says hi.”

“She’s fine then?” Stone asked.

“HSU told her to take a semester off and gave her a research project to work on instead,” Havok said, removing a grain of salt from his lips and licking it off. “Sort of a recuperation process, I guess.”

“She’ll be fine. It’s us we have to worry about,” Stone said. “Junior said the modifications to our new boat are coming along nicely. It’s a sorry replacement for the Outfit, but it’ll be in the water in two weeks. However, I haven’t given up finding something sexier.”

“Good,” Havok said. “I’m getting bored stiff.”

“Well,” BB said, “don’t forget that you promised to help us on that Caribbean project.”

Havok sat a bit straighter in his chair. “No problem there. Have you firmed up things with corporate?”

Before BB could answer, Kilgore bounded up the steps to his bar, holding a yellow envelope in his hand. As he passed the bar, he made a circular motion to Mercedes, who stood at the bar. He walked up to the table, threw down the envelope, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

“Still pissed?” Stone asked.

Kilgore grunted before answering, “It still galls me. When I asked for help to rescue you thugs, the brass told me they couldn’t get involved. The White House has their own way of dealing with the Chinese government, and an overt American military intervention in the South China Sea wouldn’t be good for business just now. So it was all me. I ended up using precious favors. But once everything came out into the open, the president’s press secretary went to the podium claiming that the president had authorized a covert special ops to recover American personnel and property, and a half-billion dollars in treasure, which was kept out of the hands of terrorists.”

Mercedes swung by the table, carrying a tray with another round of margaritas. She stood next to Stone, who looked up at her with a twinkle in his eye. After collecting the empty glasses, she nudged Stone’s shoulder with her hip as she moved on.

Havok noticed the sentiment between the two of them and thought back. Stone had always treated Mercedes with respect. Havok then thought about Apple. He told himself he needed to make up for years of disrespect.

“But forget about our gutless leaders,” Kilgore said dismissively, and grabbed his margarita. He quaffed the drink and then placed the glass back on the table. “Nothing like the first drink of the day.” Now, with a cheery smile on his face, he looked at the three men. “I got some bizarre good news and some great good news. Which do want to hear first?”

“I’ve always been a bizarre-good-news-first man myself,” Stone responded.

“Good,” Kilgore said. “It seems that when Kang escaped Terumbu he headed straight for Hong Kong. However, his government wasn’t too keen on the hornet’s nest he stirred up. It interfered with their future plans concerning the South China Sea.” He paused pensively. “So they wanted to have a word with him. Kang knew he was in a serious jam, so he left his yacht in Hong Kong, where he and Xian caught a flight to Canada. He was going to hide out on a property he owned outside of Vancouver and run his business from there until things settled down. The problem was that the top bidder for his sarin was Kim Jung Un, and, as we all know, he is bat-shit crazy and paranoid as hell. So he sent a covert grab-and-snatch team to Vancouver, drugged Kang, and flew him back to North Korea. Once there, he was taken to Un’s palace and strapped to a medical gurney in a special room.”

Havok sipped his margarita. “Let me guess. Un’s getting bored by executing his victims the old standard way: death by forty-millimeter antiaircraft cannon at twenty paces.”

“Yes,” replied Kilgore. “In this case I think he outdid himself. In the special room, he had a starved dog held in a cage, and every morning at eight, for about two weeks, he had doctors medically amputate one of Kang’s body parts and feed it to the dog in front of him while he was conscious. They started out with the fingers and then the toes, then moved on to the lower, then upper, limbs. The last parts to go were the genitals and tongue. All that was left was a torso and head.”

“Ouch,” Stone responded.

“But this is when it gets really weird,” Kilgore continued. “Every night at six, he had Kang wheeled into his television room, where he was forced to watch the old Brady Bunch shows with Un. It seems Un gets fixated on certain American TV shows and movies. The worst part, though, is that Un would also dress up like Hillary Clinton‍—wig, pantsuit, and all—while watching the shows.”

Stone coughed slightly and pushed the basket of calamari away.

Kilgore looked at Stone and smirked. “Un got bored, so he ordered his men to toss a living and breathing Kang into the dog’s cage and had the meal video recorded.”

Stone looked at Havok. “Let’s make sure we never take a job in that part of the world.”

“No worries,” Havok said, and then turned to Kilgore. “And what about Xian?”

“I don’t think she has anything to worry about.” Kilgore sipped his drink. “She wasn’t a key player in that mess, and she is now the proud wife of an aged and wheelchair-bound Canadian oil tycoon.”

Havok had nothing against Xian and even wished her luck in some way. He looked back at Kilgore. “So what’s the good news?”

“I’ve been made privy about a deeply buried paramilitary group,” Kilgore stated.

“How deep?” Havok asked.

“So deep that anybody who knows about the group has to look up to see down,” Kilgore explained. “They call themselves the Pagan Raiders, but are officially called the Special Component Recovery Unit, or SCRU.”

“Mercenaries?” Havok suggested.

“Better. They do what the DEA, FBI, NSA, or the CIA can’t do legally or get away with. Besides, no self-respecting government employee looking to the future and a job in management wants to risk being asked embarrassing questions about any knowledge of the group at any congressional nomination hearings. Anyway, they are about to visit a drug lord’s villa in Vietnam. They plan on extraditing him back to the US.”

“Why should that concern us?” Havok said as he sat even straighter in his chair. “We don’t have a dog in their fight.”

“You should,” Kilgore responded with a smirk on his face. “Here’s your chance to play Frank Buck and ‘bring ’em back alive.’”

“Do you mean the drug lord and a certain house guest who may be hiding out in Vietnam, meaning Anisimova?” Havok asked as he remembered holding a grieving and shaking Catalina in his arms when he told her about her husband’s death.

Kilgore looked into the eyes of his friends. “You know him. You could be a big help in capturing him and his sponsor, and bringing them back to the States for trial: a kind of two-for-one sale.”

“If we go through the trouble of dragging his ass back to the States,” Stone said, “he’d better not end up being let loose on a technicality or getting locked up in Club Fed.”

“No chance of that,” Kilgore affirmed. “He’s being charged with the murder of those students, international drug-trafficking, and kidnapping. If for some reason he doesn’t end up in an electric chair, there are some Eastern Europeans who would love to save us the juice.” Kilgore looked hard at his two friends. “This little operation is not for the fainthearted and is not supported by the Vietnamese government. They won’t be very receptive to the American agents invading their country. This is voluntary and unofficial. What do you say?” Kilgore looked over at BB. “I know you showed up late for the party, but you’re more than welcome to join in.”

BB looked at Kilgore and lifted his glass in a salute. “I would, but I’ve already committed myself to getting our Caribbean thing finalized.” He turned to Havok and Stone. “You two have your fling, and I’ll see you in Pensacola.”

Havok retuned the salute with his own glass and looked at Kilgore. “How do we get inside Vietnam?”

Kilgore pushed the yellow envelope across the table to Havok and looked at him with a beaming smile. “When was the last time you guys jumped?”