Dark Watch

The name always caught Max off guard. Vietnam’s largest city would always be Saigon to him. But that was from another time and another war. Every so often when a chopper approached the Oregon, a flood of memories would leave Hanley shaken for days.

Actually, the memories were never that far from the surface. It wasn’t the sound of the Vietcong’s RPGs exploding or the chatter of their AK-47s that stuck with him. And the screams as his patrol boat was raked from stem to stern were just a background noise. What remained sharpest in his mind was the sound of the Huey’s blades pulsating over the black jungle, homing on the stream of flares Max launched into the night with one hand as he used his other to keep his newbie bow gunner’s intestines inside his body. God, the blood was hot, even in that stinking hell. The Huey’s door-mounted minigun sounded like a buzz saw, and the jungle flanking the estuary peeled back under its three-thousand-round-per-minute onslaught. And when that RPG arced up at the Huey —

Max yanked himself from the past he’d never stop reliving. The newspaper was balled in his fist. “Ah, any course change?” he finally asked.

“No, she’s still on one hundred and eighty-five. Projected either she’s headed for Singapore, which isn’t likely since they’ve got the most incorruptible harbor workers in this region, or she’ll turn due south soon and make for Indonesia.”

“Seems a better bet,” Max agreed. With several thousand islands to patrol, the Indonesian Coast Guard was stretched thin. The pirates would have an easy time eluding them and finding a secluded spot to unload the ship they’d hijacked off Japan. The ship-wide betting pool had been evenly split between the Philippines and Indonesia as a final destination since before they’d reached Taiwan.

“Okay, then,” Max said, “call me if the Maus turns or you get anything from Eddie or Juan.”

“Roger.”

Max straightened out the rumpled pages of his newspaper and set them aside. He relit his pipe and let smoke dribble past his lips until his cabin was perfumed with the aromatic blend. As yet he couldn’t figure out why the pirates hadn’t found a quiet spot of ocean to disgorge their stolen ship. They’d had enough time to give her a new name and make enough cosmetic changes that no one would recognize her, especially if they ran her in different waters, say, off the coast of South America. So why risk keeping her in the drydock this long? Unless they had a specific destination in mind. Someplace close to shore where they felt safe. Max hoped the Maus was leading them to the pirates’ lair, but it couldn’t be that easy.

There was another level to this operation, another peel to the onion they hadn’t seen. He knew he wouldn’t find it by merely shadowing the Maus, but he was confident that either the chairman or Eddie Seng would. Confidentially, he was betting on Eddie finding the key. There was no real reason, just a strong feeling of confidence in the tough, independent ex-CIA operator.

Had Eddie Seng known at that moment that Max was placing a mental wager on him, he would have told the Corporation’s president to put his money on Cabrillo and his team in Switzerland.

During his training for the CIA, Eddie had undergone a grueling program to teach agents how to deal with imprisonment and torture. It had been run by army specialists at a corner of Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Before he left for Bragg, his training instructor at the Farm had given him a random code word: aardvark. It was his job to keep it a secret and the soldiers’ to get it out of him.

For a month they owned Eddie body and soul. They used hoses to beat him on a regular basis, confined him in an iron box in the sun for hours without water, and often poisoned his meager food rations so he couldn’t keep them down. They tried to break his will by keeping him awake for six straight days and screaming every racial slur they could come up with. They once dumped him naked onto a fire ant nest, and one night they poured half a bottle of Scotch down his throat and questioned him for an hour before he passed out. They pulled out all the stops in their interrogation, but Eddie never gave up his code word. He was able to keep a small part of his mind focused that no matter what they did to him, it was only an exercise, and he wouldn’t die.

Eddie held no such illusions now, and as the truck lurched, the throng of illegals packed in with him swayed so that those closest to the rear doors were almost crushed. He whispered, “Aardvark.”

Six days in the hands of the snakeheads made that month at Fort Bragg feel like a Club Med vacation.

There were about a hundred men packed into the sweltering box truck. They hadn’t been fed or been given water in at least two days, and the only reason many were still on their feet was that there was no room for them to fall. The stench of sweat and body waste was overwhelming, a cloying film that coated Eddie’s mouth and seared his lungs.