It was time to plan their next move.
“Did he ever say anything about the twelve grand?” Batman asked Crash when he returned.
Crash shook his head no. “Not unless he’s talking about it in his sleep,” he said.
The money the team used to help Twitch make his bones had come from the stash Kilos had given them as payment for their first job. They’d looked on it as a reasonable investment or an acceptable loss, depending on the eventual outcome of the mission. But it was still their money, and they had to assume most of it was blown to the four winds by now. But as Batman kept reminding them, it would be nice to somehow recoup the loss. No matter what the situation, he was always the team’s “money man.”
They knew some of what Twitch told them sounded more like Alice in Wonderland than solid intelligence. The drugs he’d ingested in order to maintain his cover had been some kick-ass stuff and the team was amazed he’d held it together long enough to get away.
The problem now was finding the pirates again. The team knew some of the locations of Twitch’s recon mission, because every time he took a picture with his wristwatch, the time stamp also contained his transponder location. But just about the only place he
didn’t
take a picture was the most important place of all: the pirates’ hidden camp. So the team would have to look for it.
Problem number two was the size of Zeek’s gang. From what Twitch told them, and what they’d seen in the photographs, the ruthless pirate controlled what amounted to a small army of at least eighty men, many more than the couple dozen the team had been expecting. Even worse, as the recruitment of Twitch had shown, Zeek was looking for even more thugs to join his murderous crew. The numbers were definitely in Zeek’s favor.
“But we got the air asset, and that’s a plus,” Nolan said, addressing the issue. “And we got some firepower at the bottom of this ship. Plus, up until a few hours ago, Zeek had no idea that someone was in the area looking to fry his ass. When he finds his two boyfriends out on that island full of pinholes, he’ll know something is up. His MO is to create fear—and
then milk it. But still, he might freak out a little, which will be good for us.”
“And there’s something else we can key in on,” Batman said. He pulled a small stapled booklet from his pocket, titled
Super stitions of Indonesia.
“I downloaded this earlier,” he said. “And there’s some interesting reading here. I quote: While it might be called culture, tradition, religion or superstition, a lot of Indonesian customs add up to the same thing: an attempt by Indonesians to influence future events by small, seemingly unrelated actions.”
He passed the book around for the others to peruse.
“Translation: They’re superstitious as hell,” Batman went on. “We already know they believe in magic. And we know Zeek thinks of himself as lucky, or blessed by God, the fucking egomaniac. But if we can get him thinking that things
aren’t
so overall rosy for him and his gang, that might have a detrimental effect on him, too.”
“Well, we have to find him first,” Crash said.
THEY SPENT THE
next hour trying to plot Twitch’s stops on their map. It took some doing, but eventually they were able to match most of the photos with most of the locations their colleague had visited during those last few hellish hours.
From there, they developed their war plan. In the old days, they would have had all the resources of the CIA, NSA, the FBI, spy planes, spy satellites, listening stations—you name it—at their disposal. But now it was just them and their wits. Which meant they had to go with their intuition and gut instincts, just the sort of thing that got them in trouble back at Tora Bora. But they didn’t know any other way.
At the end of it, Nolan said: “I know we figured the way to beat these guys was either quickly or quietly. I think this time, we do it quickly rather than quietly.”
Batman was nodding. “You read my mind. One, two, three. A kick in the nuts. A punch in the face.”
He slammed his fist on the table.
“Then . . . a knife in the heart.”
The others grunted their approval.
“And that way,” Batman added, “maybe we can still get some of our money back.”
Skull Island
THE MONKEY AT
the Red Skull had been sick all day.
The night before, while lapping up spilled beer from the bar as he always did, he’d ingested a substantial amount of methamphetamine, which had been spilled by an intoxicated patron, along with a half of Rohypnol pill, also known as the date-rape drug.
The monkey spent the rest of the night and most of the next day hanging by his tail above the rickety piano, urinating on himself.
The owner of the bar, Miss Aloo, took this as a very bad sign. The monkey never got sick. But business had been slow the whole day as word of the macaque’s malady spread. Neighboring businesses up and down the street even burned incense to keep the monkey’s bad spirits away. The whole island felt uneasy.
But as soon as the sun went down and the small navy of boats belonging to the smugglers and the drug dealers and the pirates and happy girls began tying up at the Skull’s docks, the bar filled up as usual, reassuring Miss Aloo that the danger had passed and it would be just another typical Friday night. The monkey, though, stayed in his perch, angrily gnawing on the paper napkin that served as an ill-fitting diaper.
By 11
P.M.
, the bar was as smoky and crowded and rowdy and dangerous as always. Besides the pissing monkey, the talk was about the murder of two of Zeek’s bodyguards the night
before on the small island off Sumhai. That thirty villagers had also been killed wasn’t as much on the patrons’ minds as Zeek’s men getting cut up. Everyone
knew
who slaughtered the villagers and why—no one crossed the most powerful pirate in Indonesia and got away with it. But who had the balls to kill two of his right-hand men?
The words on everyone’s lips were:
Ku-sang do-tang.
Roughly translated: “Wait for the next shoe to drop.”
THAT CAME AT
precisely eleven-thirty.
Every Friday night, Zeek had three Chinese money-counters go to the Red Skull and tally his week’s take. They had an electric-powered bill counter, carried a set of books, and prepared payments for people in Zeek’s employ, including his army of pirates.
But Zeek’s money-counters were having an off night as well. They had all of the pirate’s operating cash out of the hidden vault and laid out on one of the kitchen’s cutting tables as always. But their bill-counting machine had been breaking down ever since they’d arrived. The island’s notoriously unreliable electricity had been working intermittently, stopping the machine cold and losing the totals, meaning the counters had to start all over again.
Zeek’s bagmen were also late getting to the Skull. These were the people who actually distributed money to Zeek’s gang members and other people who worked for him. Heavy showers sweeping through the area were slowing travel by water in some parts. Where usually the paymasters would do their secret knock on the Skull’s back door sometime just after sundown, tonight they were actually arriving past 10
P.M.
and later.
So when the money-counters heard a secret knock on the back door around eleven-thirty, they routinely hit the open buzzer to let the visitor in. But instead of the typical pair of scruffy pirates walking in to pick up their packs of money, three huge men in ski masks and carrying assault rifles burst in instead.
The money-counters thought it was a joke until the first
gunman through the door hit the nearest counter with the butt of his rifle, sending him flying over the table of money and knocking him unconscious.
This was enough to wake up the two armed men who were supposed to be serving as guards for the money-counters, but who were usually the most inebriated patrons in the Skull. Both received the same treatment, the butt of an M4 assault rifle right on the temple, collapsing each to the floor. Oddly, the three masked gunmen were whistling throughout most of this, terrifying the bar’s innocent kitchen workers, as Indonesians consider it highly unlucky to whistle around food. When the gunmen intentionally started spilling boxes of salt on the floor, the kitchen staff fled to the walk-in freezer, locking the door behind them and leaving the two remaining money-counters to deal with the invaders alone.
One of the masked gunmen checked the door leading into the bar itself. But there was so much noise coming from the front of the Red Skull that none of the patrons realized anything unusual was going on in back.
“What do you want?” one of the money-counters finally asked in horror, reaching for a piece of hollowed-out wood he always kept nearby.
“What the fuck do you think we want?” one of the gunmen snarled back, knocking the lucky piece of wood out of his hand and crushing it with his boot. “We want the money. All of it.”
The gunman threw a box of garbage bags at them, but the two money-counters hesitated, even though they were looking down the barrels of three assault rifles.
“We can’t,” one blurted out. “Zeek will kill us . . .”
“Don’t worry about Zeek,” another masked man told them. “Zeek’s broke. He’s out of money. We’re only here because he can’t pay us what he owes us. Now start stuffing those fucking bags!”
That was it—that was all it took.
The money-counters quickly filled the bags with packets of cash and handed them over to the gunmen. Then they hit the floor and covered their heads with their hands.
“Now stay down there and count to five hundred slowly,” one gunman warned them. “Or we’ll blow your fucking heads off.”
The robbery complete, the gunmen turned to leave when they heard an ungodly screech behind them. They spun around to see the bar’s brass-colored monkey flying through the air, fangs bared, diaper in place, coming right at them.
There was no time to shoot it; instead, one of the gunmen swung his rifle like a baseball bat, hitting the creature dead on and sending it spinning into the kitchen wall.
Then the robbers went out the door.
THEY MADE A
clean getaway.
Or at least it seemed that way at first. The three masked gunmen—Batman, Gunner and Crash—had left the work copter, engine running, in the weeds behind the Red Skull while they robbed Zeek’s bank. It took them not ten seconds to get back to the aircraft after the theft—but that’s when the problems began.
Batman jumped in behind the controls; he was the most accomplished flier of the team, having joined Delta right out of the Air Force. But Gunner and Crash had trouble stuffing the bags of money into the copter’s tiny open cockpit. There were six bags in all, containing nearly $60,000. But they were mostly filled with packets of small bills, and some of the bags were packed so tight the sides were ripping. They also had no way to tie off the tops of the bags once they had twisted them closed. The result was a comedy of errors trying to get all the loot on board.
In the mad rush, Gunner tried sitting on the moneybags to keep them from blowing out of the cabin during takeoff. But as soon as Batman lifted off, some packets burst and streams of stray bills found their way out of the bags and out of the helicopter altogether, raining down on lucky drunks stumbling the muddy roads of Skull Island below.
Batman was pissed. He’d planned this operation down to the last detail—or so he thought. He knew, like every enterprise, Zeek’s business ran not so much on his total worth but
on cash flow. Take away the operating funds, people stop getting paid, and trouble usually results. Thus the idea to rob Zeek’s depository. But Batman was also intent on replacing the $12,000 the team had invested in Twitch’s undercover operation; Anything beyond that would be a happy profit. But now that profit was going out the window—literally—all because Batman didn’t bring any twist ties.
The trail of falling bills continued as they climbed out over the water and headed east. Finally, Gunner and Crash managed to hand-tie the bags and stow most of them under the seats. But by that time, more than half the loot had blown away.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have smacked that fucking monkey!” Crash yelled above the racket of the rotor, still trying to catch some stray bills swirling around them. “What’s it say in the book about that?”
“Screw the monkey!” Batman yelled back to him. “Just try to keep at least twelve grand of that for us!”
Then Batman forced himself to stop thinking about the money and concentrate on their next destination. He checked his watch.
Somehow, they were still on schedule.
FINDING SKULL ISLAND
hadn’t been a problem. Twitch had remembered its name from his night of involuntary debauchery, and it was on most of the maps they’d downloaded of the area.
Determining that Mirang Island was their next destination had been a little more difficult. Twitch had recalled lots of color, lots of activity, and a long white beach that “seemed to go on forever.” He’d estimated that it had taken a speedboat ride of about twenty minutes to get there from Skull Island—that is, if he had his sequence right.
The team was able to cop some color satellite maps from the Internet and found a long, thin, finger-shaped atoll off the northwest edge of Batam. From space it looked like a miniature version of downtown Las Vegas: one of those places that needed no streetlights because the honky-tonk provided all the illumination anyone would ever need. When some quick
calculations told them it was conceivable that a sekoci fast boat could get from Skull Island to Mirang in twenty minutes or so, they felt they had their place.
The flight over from Skull to Mirang took just five minutes in the work copter. Batman was rated in fighters, big planes and helos; for him, flying the copter was like driving a small, slow economy car. He had to constantly remind himself not to exceed the chopper’s maximum speed, as this was rough on the hardware and hell on fuel consumption. Still, they made it to Mirang in record time.
They flew over the downtown first, confirmed it was an orgy of neon lights and waterfront saloons, then headed for the southern end of the island. Here was another well-known feature of Mirang: the vast, isolated, Piniti-Hatan graveyard.