Along with the pistols, Clark carried a Benchmade AFCK folding knife, a small roll of Gorilla tape, and a pocket Streamlight flashlight. It wasn’t much, but he’d done more with less. His rules of engagement made the job a little easier.
If anyone fought back, he intended to kill them.
From the looks of the waist-high Johnson grass and dry stalks of grain sorghum, little else but mourning doves and rattlesnakes had spent much time in the fields behind Matarife’s house in years.
Clark stayed low as he moved, crawling when the stalks were short, stooping in a fast duckwalk when the plants gave him better cover. Earth-tone 5.11 slacks and a black sweatshirt helped him blend well into the long morning shadows. The field was damp from recent rains, but the day promised to be a hot one for September and the ground was already beginning to steam. The humidity and muggy odor of wet earth, not to mention the fire ants and the high probability of coming nose-to-nose with a pit viper, brought back so many memories that Clark found it nostalgic… almost.
Ding Chavez hadn’t exactly been wrong in his earlier assessment. John knew full well he risked becoming far too focused on the human-trafficking aspects of this op. The sight of the girls at Naldo Cantu’s, covered with track marks and surrounded by used condoms, brought back memories he’d suppressed for decades, memories that made him who — and what — he’d become. Just looking at the poor drugged kids made him feel like his teeth might shatter. He was nearing seventy years old. Still a tough old bird, no doubt, but old was fast eclipsing tough as the operative word.
For as long as he could remember, something inside Clark had pushed him to check out danger, to go and see, to help. Some accused him of being addicted to violence. If he was honest with himself, there had been a time when he relished a good fight. When there was going to be violence on his watch, he certainly didn’t want to miss it. But the fight wasn’t the main thing. His wife, Sandy, had summed up his sentiment best when she caught him coming back in from his private range early one morning on their Emmetsburg, Virginia, farm.
“John,” she’d said, sipping her morning coffee and looking even more beautiful than she had the day he’d met her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ll still be relevant.”
It was at once the kindest and most pitiful thing anyone had ever said to him.
Maybe that was it. Relevance.
His workouts were less intense now, his runs slower. His hair was thinning… no, it was just plain thin. Even worse, each passing year saw him get a little more emotional. Hell, he got choked up when his grandson caught a pop fly at a baseball game. And all that blubbering just served to piss him off. He abhorred the idea of going soft.
But a guy past his use-by date wouldn’t be inching through a dry sorghum field behind a murderous bastard’s house. Pound for pound and year for year, he could still hold his own against most threats. He was the personification of the sentiment “Never underestimate an old man in a dangerous profession.” Like Jack London, he wanted to go out on his own terms, “as ashes instead of dust.”
And so Clark fought the clock by fighting bad men, whenever and wherever he found them.
The sorghum was thick enough now that he had to drop back down and belly-crawl. The tops of the plants rattled and hissed when they brushed together, brittle and heavy with grain. He moved as quickly as possible, taking care not to disturb the stalks any more than necessary. Only a trained observer would be able to see the ripple of his approach by watching the tops of the plants.
Clark heard the distant splash of someone taking a morning swim in a pool. He estimated the house to be less than a hundred meters away now. Crawling, he tapped the Wilson Combat with his elbow, habitually making sure it was still in the holster where he’d left it. Ahead, the plants began to thin and Clark found himself entering a small clearing. A mound of fresh earth, roughly two feet high and at least eight feet wide, blocked his path. Beyond the dirt pile, at the far edge of the clearing, rutted tracks ran between the grain rows toward the house.
Clark dropped flat, his chest to the damp earth, scanning the edge of the clearing. He turned his head as he looked, knowing from experience he could miss important elements of danger if he moved only his eyes. Searching inch by inch, foot by foot, he searched for anything out of the ordinary — game cameras, tripwires, fishhooks strung at eye level.
Just inches from his nose, half an earthworm hung from a ball of roots and sod, exposed to the air, cut in two by whatever tool had been used to turn the clods. The worm was still moist, telling Clark the dig was recent, probably during the hours of darkness. Small piles of tiny white pellets were visible here and there among the clods of rich black soil. At first glance he took the white stuff for fertilizer, but he inched forward, getting a closer look. He rolled one of the gray BBs between a thumb and forefinger — he moved forward immediately, scuttling around the edge of the piled dirt, dreading but knowing what he would find. He fought the urge to vomit as he came to the lip of a hole dug in the middle of the clearing, eight by eight feet square and four or five feet deep. At the bottom of the pit, from beneath a layer of dirt and pellets of kitty litter, the pale fingers of a delicate hand reached toward the sky.
26
Mamat bin Ahmad sat on an overturned wooden crate with his back to the trunk of a tall coconut palm, gazing out to sea, when the satellite phone in his lap gave a startling chirp. He and his men were on the southern shores of the Indonesian island of Buru, within easy pouncing distance of any passing pleasure craft — if one would only pass. The window for their operation was small. He’d already received an earlier call informing him that the USS Rogue had passed Timor-Leste hours before. The American Cyclone-class patrol ship was steaming north from a recent stop at HMAS Coonawarra, the Australian naval base in Darwin, where it would join the Philippine and Malaysian military vessels in a joint antipiracy patrol of the Sulu Sea.
Mamat had been expecting the second call and kept the satellite phone’s plastic antenna extended and oriented toward the sky. Even so, the sudden noise made him jump and he very nearly dropped the device in the sand. All his men were jumpy — it was understandable, considering their mission — but they needed leadership and, mercifully, did not seem to notice his fumbling.
Mamat was a young man, not yet twenty-five years old. Had he been a happier sort, his intensely white teeth would have shone through a broad smile. But since his father had died, his family had known nothing but poverty. His older sister had run off with a Dirty Joe — one of the older American or European men who came to Southeast Asia looking for a wife. His mother cleaned hotel rooms for wealthy tourists in the Indonesian city of Manado — but she was perpetually sick. Mamat’s father had fully expected his son to follow his path. Men in his family had fished for generations. Mamat learned about boats and became a better-than-average sailor, but the tenets of Jemaah Islamiyah lured him away while he was in his teens. JI provided stability — and, even more important, a cause higher than living hand-to-mouth as a simple fisherman. Mamat’s parents were both devout Muslims, observing a strict Ramadan or meticulously making up missed days when illness made fasting impossible. But even they saw things in moderation.