The escort had whipped his head around in surprise upon Cooper’s entry; the witch doctor had not.
“Allez-y!” Cooper said to the escort. “Vas!”
The guy got up and headed for the door, spouting off at the mouth as he did it. Cooper ignored him, knowing he was the kind who would leave. The witch doctor remained on the floor in the lotus position, eyes closed, Cooper thinking he probably still has a lungful of that weed in there.
“You been warned,” the witch doctor said, eyes still closed. “Now you going to die.”
“Your death squad already struck out, big boy.”
The guy opened his eyes and looked up at him. Given the circumstances, Cooper didn’t like how leisurely the look was.
“You be dead soon enough,” the witch doctor said.
“Here’s a message from Marcel S.,” Cooper said, and plugged the witch doctor with the first four shells of the fresh clip he’d popped into the Browning on the walk over.
Barry toppled over backward onto the floor. Cooper came over and checked his robes, but there was nothing on him. It made Cooper think a little more about the bastard’s last words, the bokor sounding all too confident as he’d said them.
You be dead soon enough.
He came around behind the desk and rifled through everything he could find-the cell phone, the charger, some trinkets, papers, a short stack of money in the metal box under the desk. He took out the money and threw it on the floor. Under the money, there were some other things. Coins, what looked like a car key, a couple of blank business cards with phone numbers written on them. Cooper recognized the main area code for Puerto Rico on one of the cards. The other he didn’t know for sure but figured it for Jamaica. He snatched the business cards and kicked the money, scattering it across the floor, and left.
Graveside, he took the loose end of the strap he’d used to tie off Alphonse’s arm and knotted it around a pair of belt loops on his shorts. He let go of the severed arm, and it dangled from his waist-the flexed fingers of the kid’s lost hand reaching almost to his shoelaces, but not quite. He retrieved the last of his candy supply, feeding Alphonse a few bites before polishing off the rest himself. He gulped a bottle of water and, deciding to do without the rest, left the backpack beside the empty grave. He positioned himself alongside Alphonse’s long, limp body, the kid looking like a snake in the dirt, and then, bending at the knees, he reached backward and stretched his arms out behind his legs to loop them underneath Alphonse.
Cooper got the kid a foot off the ground, crouched deeper, leaned forward, and pulled the boy’s skinny body up over his ass. He positioned Alphonse’s waist so that he could bend the kid’s body around the contour of his hips, and with Alphonse bent around him like a noodle-float in a suburban swimming pool, he was able to clasp his hands underneath the noodle, in front of his body-just above his own nuts, as it turned out. Bobbing once to check the seal of his hand clasp, he shook his head, reasonably satisfied that this was the best he was going to do, and stood up straight.
“Not too bad, Kareem,” he said. The kid felt light as a feather, though he’d have to see how long that would last.
He set out and felt the grade wearing on his hamstrings before he’d taken a dozen steps. The blisters on his feet squeezed against the boots and his arms ached. He looked up at the hill, which it did not appear to him he had even reached.
“Christ.”
It was going to be a long walk up that fucking mountain.
16
In 1974, at the tail end of the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese strategists, fearing a possible last-ditch invasion by the U.S. Navy, ordered a series of mines planted outside a harbor near Haiphong. By the time local intel overrode the paranoia of the strategists and the order came to sweep the mines, local vessels had been safely navigating the harbor for almost two years. All of the local captains knew exactly where the mines were.
Unfortunately, the new rotation of military personnel supervising the minesweeping operation did not. Operating from a combination of the original specifications and hearsay from local fishermen, the man in charge of the mission did his best, but found that once the harbor and its adjoining channel were ostensibly cleared, the count of recovered or detonated mines came up two devices short. After a cursory second sweep, the commander wrote off the discrepancy, stating in his report that the two missing mines must have previously detonated without incident.
In actuality the missing mines had broken from their moorings almost two years before the sweep.
A typhoon in the fall of 1976 had caused the cables anchoring the two mines to scrape against a marine escarpment for sixteen straight hours; both cables were sheared, one near its mine, the other almost where it had been affixed to the ocean floor. The mine with the shorter length of cable floated to the surface and drifted off in the night, washing ashore thirty miles up the coast along with some driftwood and other debris. It was never discovered except as a sort of jungle gym used unwittingly by local kids.
Trailing its longer, and therefore heavier cable, the second mine remained well below the surface and drifted at a much slower cruising speed into the open waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.
Over the course of the next year, out of reach of even the deepest keel by some hundred feet, the mine made its way through the South China Sea, along the Malay Peninsula, and past the Riau Islands near Singapore. Toward the end of 1977, a storm washed the mine up against an oceanic shelf in the Strait of Malacca, where it lurked for fourteen months, too deep to disturb any passing vessels, and too heavy to be moved more than an inch or two at a time by the lackluster current. Another storm, this time a violent one, carried the mine into the Andaman Sea, where it caught a slow but consistent current, riding the floe through the Bay of Bengal in a looping semicircle down past Sri Lanka into the Indian Ocean.
The mine migrated south through the next winter, passing Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope before working its way up the western coastline of Africa in the spring, again traveling deep enough to avoid surface traffic. In June of 1980, the mine started across the Atlantic near the equator, and by September of 1981, had reached the coast of Brazil.
Prevailing currents brought the mine slowly up the east coast of South America until, in 1983, it lodged in a stubborn bed of seaweed that appeared to have seized the mine permanently in its morass of brown tentacles. Then a hurricane tore the kelp from its bed, bestowing upon the mine another shot at freedom. With a northbound momentum generated by 1984’s particularly harsh storm season, the mine rose past Trinidad and Tobago, up the Antilles chain, and was approaching the eastern seaboard of the United States, due north of Puerto Rico near the Tropic of Cancer, by the end of that year-so that, in the early months of Ronald Reagan’s fourth year in office, the mine was floating harmlessly in the warm, clear waters of what was widely referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, about forty fathoms beneath the ocean’s surface.
This had been an ambitious journey for the mine, and it showed: with an aquatic forest of barnacles, mussels, algae, and other oceanic vegetation, the mine had grown its own ecosystem that went as high up the food chain as the occasional Atlantic salmon and blackfin tuna. By the time the mine had reached the Bermuda Triangle, in fact, there wasn’t a single square inch of steel visible on either the floating orb of the mine itself or the one hundred feet of steel cable dangling beneath.
Between 1981 and 1985, the U.S. Navy launched four Ohio-class nuclear attack submarines which it overlooked the obligation to declare under the then-current nuclear disarmament treaties-and which the navy also managed to hide from the KGB. For as long as the navy maintained this ruse-which, for three of the four subs, meant all the way to the end of the cold war-America was able to position ballistic missiles in places that members of the Politburo would have found appalling.