The Secret Soldier Page 5

  The lead cop pulled the man into an alley. The other cops stood in the street around the woman. “You know, it’s the first time I ever smoked pot,” she mumbled. “I don’t even feel anything. Just thirsty.”

  Wells watched from a shop across the street, riffling through T-shirts that read “Life’s a Beach in Jamaica” and “No Shirt. No Shoes. No Problem.” A couple minutes later, the guy emerged from the alley, an unhappy smile plastered on his face.

  The cop in charge seemed satisfied. He patted the husband. “Enjoy your trip, mon. And be careful.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll do that.” The cops disappeared. The husband pulled out his wallet, cheap black Velcro, and opened it wide. Empty. “Two hundred dollars. Assholes,” he said.

  “You said it would be okay,” his wife said.

  “It could have been worse.”

  A philosophy of sorts, Wells figured. Then the couple disappeared, poorer and wiser. The shakedown had happened the second day, when Wells still hoped to find Robinson on the street. But Robinson was no doubt working carefully, popping up for a few days and then retreating. And the sheer volume of the drug trade meant that Wells and Gaffan couldn’t simply hope to bump into him. They would have to search him out, a more dangerous proposition.

  NOW WELLS TUCKED HIS wallet, thick with twenties, into his shorts and followed Gaffan out of their hotel room. “Where do we start tonight?”

  “Margaritaville.” Part of Jimmy Buffett’s empire, which stretched over Florida and the Caribbean like an oversized beach umbrella. The Montego Bay outpost featured water trampolines and a one-hundredtwenty-foot waterslide that dropped riders into the Caribbean. Each night it filled with tourists who would prefer to visit another country without seeing anything outside their comfort zone, exactly the type of unimaginative dopers who wanted to score from white dealers.

  The night before at Margaritaville, Wells had watched a guy in a tropical shirt work the room. He sat with a table of frat boys for ten minutes before he and one of the guys got up. They came back five minutes later, the frat boy rubbing his nose, his face flushed. The coke must have been pretty good. An hour or so later, the dealer pulled the same trick with another table. But the dealer couldn’t have been Robinson. He had blond hair and was a decade too young.

  Margaritaville was on the southern end of Gloucester Avenue, separated from the street by high walls. Wells and Gaffan paid their cover and walked past three bouncers, each bigger than the next. They gave Wells a not-very-friendly look, letting him know that his shorts and especially his boots barely passed muster.

  “Welcome to the islands,” Gaffan said. “Nicest people on earth. Want a beer?”

  “Red Stripe.”

  The inside of the bar was empty. The drinkers had migrated to the decks over the bay, getting ready for another subtropical sunset. The sun had turned the sky a perfect Crayola red, and a satisfied hum ran though the crowd, as though the world had been created solely for its amusement. The dealer stood in the corner, in a different tropical shirt today, his hair pulled into a neat ponytail. Wells edged next to him.

  “Nice day,” Wells said.

  “They all are this time of year.”

  “Peak season. Business must be good.”

  The dealer shook his head.

  “I saw you last night.”

  “Looking for something?”

  “I might be.”

  “I’m not a mind reader. Ask away.”

  “It’s more a someone than a something.”

  “That’s gonna be impossible. Something, difficult. Someone, impossible.”

  “You don’t even know who.”

  The dealer pulled away from the rail, turned to face Wells. He looked like a surfer, tall and lanky, with a craggy, suntanned face. He lifted his sunglasses to reveal striking blue eyes.

  “What I know is that you and your bud, you couldn’t look more like cops if you tried. Him especially.”

  Gaffan walked toward them, holding two Red Stripes. Wells raised a hand to stop him. “We’re not cops.”

  “You don’t fit, see. There’s several kinds of doper tourists. The frat boys, bachelor-party types, they just wanna buy some weed, coke, not get ripped off too badly. You’re too old to be frat boys. The old heads, retired hippie dippers, they were in Jamaica back in the day, man, back in the day. Probably once for about a week, but they still talk about it. Now they have kids and they came on a cruise, but they want to get high for old times’ sake. That definitely is not you.”

  “True.”

  “Then you have the true potheads, the guys who subscribe to High Times and argue on message boards about Purple Skunk versus Northern Lights. Amateur scientists. At least they would be if they weren’t so damned high all the time. They come down here two or three at a time. Mostly they don’t look like you, they’re fatter and their eyes are half closed. But let’s say you two have kept yourself up better than most. Except they don’t hang out here. They go straight to Orange Hill, like wine connoisseurs in Napa doing taste tests. And believe me, they’re equally annoying. So what are you, then? You look like cops. Or DEA, but why the hell would the DEA be buying ounces on the Hip Strip?”

  “We’re not DEA. We’re not cops. We’re looking for someone. Nobody fancy. Nobody like Dudus”—Christopher Coke, a dealer who had run an infamous gang with the unlikely name of the Shower Posse.

  “That’s good. Seeing as he’s in Kingston”—the Jamaican capital. “And seeing as you wouldn’t get within a mile of him. Let me tell you about Jamaica. Seventeen hundred murders reported last year, not counting a couple hundred bodies that never turn up. Dumped in de sea to feed de fishees, mon. Four times as many murders as New York City, and New York has three times as many people as Jamaica.”

  The dealer stopped talking as a woman splashed down the waterslide and into the bay with a pleased scream. “Watch this. Her top’s going to come off. Yep.”

  Shouts of “Tits!” erupted from the deck. “Tits! Tits! Tits!” The woman happily raised her polka-dotted bikini in the air as the crowd cheered.

  “The whole country is a warehouse for coke and pot. From here you go west to New Orleans, east to the Bahamas and Florida. The politicians are owned by the gangs lock, stock, and barrel. They don’t even try to hide it. The cops just play along. Don’t let the dreads and the Marley songs fool you. This place is Haiti with better beaches.”

  “So how do you get by?” Wells found himself intrigued.

  “These frat boys? They’d pay by credit card if they could. They like a friendly face. And by friendly I mean white.”

  “And you keep the locals happy.”

  “I take care of the people who take care of me. In and out of this bar. I understand my place in the ecosystem. I don’t have aspirations. And understand, please, that whether it’s white or green, it’s so pure that I can step on it two, three times and still make my customers happy. In fact, I have to, or they’d wind up OD’ing. And trust me, you don’t want to see the inside of a Jamaican hospital, any more than a Jamaican jail.”

  Around them the deck was filling up.

  “It’s getting busy,” the dealer said. “I appreciate the chance to chat, but I gotta go.”

  “How do we prove we’re not cops? Get high with you?”

  “I believe you. You’re not cops. But you’re trouble. Whatever you want, it’s trouble.”

  The sun touched the edge of the horizon. A long collective sigh went up from the crowd beside them.

  “Gonna be a beautiful night,” the dealer said. “Do me a favor. Get lost. I see you and your boy hanging around, I’m gonna talk to my friends. You don’t want that. These dudes, they won’t care even if you do have a badge. They do sick stuff when they’re stoned. Most people get relaxed when they smoke, but these guys, they just dissociate. They won’t even hear you screaming.”

  “We’ll be going, then.”

  The dealer nodded. Two minutes later, Wells and Gaffan were on the street.

  “So? He know where Robinson is?”

  “He didn’t say, but I have a feeling he might.”

  “And he’ll help us?”

  “He doesn’t think so. But we’re gonna change his mind.”

  CHAPTER 2

  MANAMA

  THE SIRENS FROM THE STREET COULDN’T HIDE THE WOMEN SCREAMing from inside the bar, their high voices begging in a language Omar couldn’t understand. What had he done? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was in a tunnel with death on both ends, and the only way out was the rifle in his hand.

  Fakir peeked through the front door, stepped inside, fired a blind burst to keep the troublemakers down. He hefted a grenade, pulled its pin, flipped the handle. “Wahid, ithnain—” he said. One, two—

  He tossed the grenade high and deep, aiming at the back edge of the bar. It spun end over end and disappeared. The explosion came a half-second later, and the screams a half-second after that, not even words, pure animal keening. Another wave of shooting began outside, the quick snap of pistols against the rattle of AKs. Amir and Hamoud defending their posts. “Time to go in,” Fakir said. “Finish this.”

  Omar’s watch read 12:16. They’d walked into the corridor at 12:13. All this had taken just three minutes.

  ROBBY PEEKED DOWN FROM the balcony. He could hear again, a little. Outside, an amplified voice shouted in Arabic. The police telling the jihadis to surrender, Robby figured. Good luck with that. The AKs outside were still firing, three-shot bursts, the SOBs conserving their ammo while the ones in here killed everyone who was left. In London the police wouldn’t have wasted any time; they would have mounted up and attacked. But these Bahraini cops would take ten or fifteen minutes. Too long.

  Two men stepped into the bar, holding AKs. They were young, as young as he had been when he joined the squaddies. But old enough to step in here and kill. The one who’d come in first was bigger and seemed to be in charge. He stepped behind the bar, fired a burst.

  Robby squirmed back, pushed himself to his knees. The two men who’d helped him in sat with their backs to the wall, their feet pressed against the table that was barricading the stairs. “They’re going to kill everyone down there,” Robby said.

  “The police are here,” the man closer to Robby said. He had a faint French accent. “We should wait. The ones down there don’t notice us.”

  Shouts came from downstairs as the jihadis herded people toward the bar’s back corner, almost directly below the balcony. Robby didn’t know why no one downstairs was fighting back. He supposed people would do anything for a few extra seconds.

  “They’re going to put them in the corner, shoot them all,” Robby said. “Then come up here. We’re gonna die, let’s die fighting.”

  “You have an idea?” the Frenchman said.

  Robby explained.

  “Merde. Not much of a plan.”

  “It’s a start.”

  BODIES WERE SLUMPED UNDER chairs, against walls, huddled together behind the bar. At least thirty people were dead. The others couldn’t possibly think Fakir had something different in store for them. Still, they obeyed.

  Fakir grabbed a wounded woman by the leg, pulled her from under a table. “Move!” he yelled. She crawled for the corner. Omar could almost smell his bloodlust. Fakir was an animal now, not even an animal. And what am I, then?

  “Enough, brother. It’s enough.”

  “No. All of them.”

  Outside, an amplified voice shouted: “Drop your weapons. You are surrounded by the Bahrain Civil Defence Force. Drop your weapons. This is your final warning.”

  A few AK shots stuttered from the street outside. Then a single rifle shot, close and loud, cracked the night. The AK stopped.

  “Let us out,” a man in the corner shouted. “It’s over.”

  “Quiet—” Fakir yelled.

  THE TABLE SMASHED HIS skull wide open.

  Omar saw it a quarter-second before it hit, a blocky blur of heavy, round wood, its legs facing up. It caught Fakir’s head with a sick crunch. His neck snapped forward and he collapsed, his bulky body falling sideways like a curtain.

  For a moment, the people huddled in the corner didn’t move, as though they, like Omar, did not believe their own eyes. Then a man shouted something in English and ran for the door. And somehow despite his doubts, Omar didn’t hesitate. He turned toward the men and women in the corner and tugged at the AK’s trigger—

  Just as Robby Duke, all two hundred pounds of him, landed on him, Robby jumping from the balcony with his arms spread wide, berserk from shrapnel and blood loss and everything he’d seen. He crashed into Omar, smashing him onto the bar’s wooden floor. The AK came loose from Omar’s hand and bounced sideways, firing two shots into the ceiling before the trigger came loose. Omar frothed at the mouth, concussed and barely conscious.

  Robby pushed himself to all fours and then his feet and looked over at what was left of Josephine the flight attendant. He very carefully put his boot on Omar’s neck, feeling the bones of Omar’s larynx under his heel. “We’re not all the same,” Josephine had said, and sure as death she’d been right. Omar mumbled something Robby didn’t understand and wrapped a weak hand around Robby’s ankle, and a woman yelled “Don’t,” and Robby smiled and put all his weight into his heel. Omar kicked against the floor and a terrible wet half-gasp slipped out of his mouth as he tried to breathe through the useless blocked straw of his crushed windpipe, until he finally gave up and died.

  Then Robby found a chair and sat and wiped the spit off the side of his boot. Most of the televisions had been destroyed in the attack, but a couple still played, and Robby tilted his head to watch Man City and the Spurs until the cops finally showed. He knew he shouldn’t have killed the Arab, but he didn’t have the strength to care. He wondered vaguely if he’d go to jail.

  But of course the world didn’t see it that way. He was a hero, Robby Duke. He’d saved at least twenty lives and killed a terrorist. In the days to come, the BBC and The Sun and everyone else would call him a hero. And as soon as the doctors let him out of the hospital, he said no to all the interview requests and the free trips to London and went straight back to work. Robby didn’t thank God for much anymore, but he was grateful to be able to work with kids who had no idea who he was or what he’d done.

  YET EVEN WITH ROBBY’S last-minute valor, Omar and his team did terrible damage. The Bahraini police found the bar so covered in blood and brains that they asked the Fifth Fleet to send a hazardousmaterials response team to sterilize it. Forty-one people were killed that night, not counting the four attackers. Six more died over the next two weeks. And the attack on JJ’s wasn’t even the deadliest terrorist attack on the Arabian peninsula that night. In Riyadh, the Saudi capital, a car bomb tore off the front of the Hotel Al Khozama, killing forty-nine people. And just off Qatar, fifty miles east of Bahrain, a speedboat filled with explosives blew itself up beside a supertanker loaded with millions of barrels of Saudi crude. Fortunately, the attack failed to ignite the oil. But it killed four sailors, breached the tanker’s double hull, and spilled one hundred fifty thousand barrels of crude into the Gulf.

  Even before the sun rose on Saudi Arabia the next morning, a claim of responsibility arrived at Al Jazeera and CNN from a previously unknown group—the Ansar al-Islam, the Army of Islam. The group’s spokesman wore a mask and gloves, and stood before a black flag painted with the Islamic creed.

  “Our warriors protest the endless corruption of King Abdullah,” he said in Arabic. “He and his supporters live as infidels. They steal the treasure that Allah has given all Muslims. They desecrate the Holy Kaaba”—the cube-shaped building inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca that served as the center for Muslim prayer. “We reject them. And make no mistake. We will never stop fighting until we drive them from these sacred lands.”

  CHAPTER 3

  MONTEGO BAY

  WELLS AND GAFFAN SPENT TWO DAYS TRAILING THE DEALER FROM Margaritaville. They didn’t know his name, so they were calling him Marley. He drove a black Audi A4 with tinted windows and a roof rack for surfboards. He lived in a gated community in the hills east of Montego, near the Ritz-Carlton and other four-hundred-dollar-a-night resorts. The development, called Paradise East, was still under construction, half its lots empty. An eight-foot brick wall, landscaped with ivy and topped with razor wire, surrounded the property. Two security guards patrolled around the clock with German shepherds.

  Given his line of work, Marley had a remarkably stable life. He followed the same routine both days. He surfed in the mornings, had lunch at home. At around three p.m., he drove to Margaritaville and disappeared into the club, emerging at about two a.m. Going home, he headed east on the A1. After about twenty miles, he turned right onto an unmarked road that led up a hill to the gatehouse for Paradise East.

  Like the development, the road was unfinished. The first quarter and the last quarter were graded and paved. But the middle stretch was a mix of gravel and red clay. Trees hemmed it in on both sides, leaving it barely wide enough for two cars to pass. It was a carjacker’s dream.

  Wells intended to take advantage.

  WELLS HAD OUTLINED HIS plan in their hotel room that afternoon. When he finished, Gaffan shook his head. “What if somebody else comes up the road?”

  “Hasn’t been a problem the last two nights.” The fancy neighborhoods outside Montego shut down after midnight. “And it won’t get loud if we do it right.”

  “We don’t know if this guy knows Robinson.”

  “He does. He’s smart, and he’s been around awhile.”

  “We don’t even know his real name.”

  “Obviously you’re not sold. It’s all right. I can do it myself.”

  “I’m thinking out loud, is all.”

  “We can’t touch him in Margaritaville. His house could work, but if something goes wrong we’re stuck inside the compound.”