“What do they want?”
The small brunette squared her shoulders and sighed. A tear rolled down her stricken face. “Ransom, I imagine,” she said.
Out on the deck a young Jemaah Islamiyah recruit stood to the side of the hatch, a battered AK-47 held to his chest. This was his first operation, and he chewed on chapped lips, a bundle of frayed nerves.
“What if they have another firearm down there?”
Mamat gave a slow shake of his head. Dusk was falling rapidly, but he welcomed the darkness. It would only make their job easier. “They would have shot by now.”
“Shall I bring the women back on deck?”
Mamat closed his eyes and listened, the dead man at his feet, his back to the cabin. “In time,” he said. “For now, they are doing exactly what we need them to do.”
Stooping slightly and craning his neck, he was just able to hear a shaky female voice below as she whispered on the cabin radio.
“Mayday! Mayday! This is sailing vessel Lucky Strike. We are under attack from pirates! I say again, we are under attack from pirates…”
The woman repeated her call for help. Her shattered voice grew more shrill with every word.
At length, the words Mamat had hoped for crackled over the radio in a barrage of static.
“Lucky Strike, this is United States Naval Vessel Rogue…”
27
Clark had a vague idea of what Magdalena Rojas looked like from Caruso’s description, but he’d never seen a photograph of the child. Some girl was dead at the bottom of this grave, and he suddenly needed to know if it was Magdalena. Belly down, he slid feet-first over the edge, bringing a small trickle of dirt sliding after him into the pit. Dropping to his knees, he used a flat rock the size of his hand to scoop away the loose dirt around the raised arm. It did not take him long to work his way down the arm to expose the pale gray flesh of a female shoulder. Her neck lay at an odd angle, encircled with a thin line of blood from some ligature that had been used to strangle her. Long purple bruises crisscrossed the portions of ashen skin exposed by the dirt. The dead did not bruise. This one had been beaten, and beaten badly, before she died.
Clark closed his eyes, remembering another girl, similarly murdered so long ago. Pam Madden’s death had come during a brutal rape — and, if Biery’s suspicions about Matarife’s snuff videos were true, this girl had suffered the same fate before she was dumped unceremoniously into a pit in the middle of a grain field.
Clark took a deep breath, bracing himself lest the memories overwhelm him, allowing the anger just enough of a foothold to focus his actions into a white-hot beam of fury. A lock of dirty-blond hair clung to the dead girl’s broken neck. Clark touched it to make sure it wasn’t a wig, then, out of pity, brushed away the loose soil and smoothed it into place. He blinked away a tear, then rolled onto his back, looking skyward, barely able to see the surrounding sorghum stalks from the bottom of the grave.
Knowing what he did about technology, he was sure some Keyhole satellite was up there, watching him, tough-as-nails John Clark, as he grew weepy beside a dead girl he’d never met. He shook it off and looked at the body again. He had never met Magdalena — and she certainly had no more value than the one lying dead in this shallow grave — but he found himself relieved to find out the body wasn’t hers. It was always possible that the Rojas girl was buried beneath this one, but Clark pushed that thought from his mind, chiding himself even as he did so for clinging to hope rather than cold, hard facts.
A telephone rang in the distance. A female voice muttered something Clark took for a curse but could not quite make out. Moments later, there was another splash. The call had ended and the woman was back in the pool. A tractor fired up and the female voice yelled something in Spanish. Then the tone of the engine changed as the tractor was shifted into gear and the putt-chug sound began to grow louder.
Someone was making another run to the grave.
Clark scrambled to his feet, peeking over the lip of dirt to see the top of a man’s head as the tractor rolled steadily toward him. The higher angle of the driver’s vantage point would put him in full view if he tried to climb out now. He dropped immediately, rolling onto his back, staying tight against the dirt wall nearest the house and pulling a layer of clods on top of him to help him stay hidden as long as possible.
With the tractor getting closer by the second, he drew the Glock 19 and hastily screwed the Gemtech suppressor onto its threaded barrel. “Press checks are free,” he muttered under his breath as he slid the slide back a scant quarter-inch to assure himself that there was a round in the chamber. He hadn’t lived to be an old man by taking things for granted.
The suppressed Glock wouldn’t exactly be silent, but Clark had taken steps to close the gap between kaboom and a mouse fart. A slightly-heavier-than-stock recoil spring would slow down the action just enough to channel most of the escaping gasses down the suppressor instead of out the chamber. Subsonic ammunition would go a long way toward dampening the noise.
Stalks of grain rustled against the side of the chugging tractor as it broke into the clearing. The thought occurred to Clark that it might be a backhoe or some other kind of small ’dozer that could simply cover him up with dirt before he could crawl out. But the engine sounded smaller, like the little tractor he kept on his own farm. The tractor stopped. Above, and out of the line of sight, the driver switched it off. Clark could hear the man groan, as if overweight, when he climbed down from the tractor. Plastic sheeting rustled. Clark tensed as dirt rained over the edge. He was close. Very close. Any moment he would look over the edge, as people did when they neared a deep hole. Clark heard another sound that he couldn’t quite make out. He’d just decided it was probably a shovel blade being driven into the dirt, followed by the scrape and subsequent ignition of a match.
The smell of cigarette smoke drifted down into the pit. Clark listened as the man unzipped his trousers and — smoking and singing a narcocorrido, or narco ballad, called “Cuerno de Chivo”—relieved himself less than ten feet away. The song’s title literally meant “horn of the goat,” but that was a euphemism for an AK-47 rifle. Singing around the cigarette clenched in his lips, the man did up his zipper while he droned on about blowing the heads off his enemies with the horn of a goat.
Clark took a deep, relaxing breath. Pissing beside the grave of a dead girl, happily singing about bloody murder — two strikes against this guy being an innocent bystander.
More grunting and groans came from above, and then a heavy thud as the man dragged something into the dirt from the back of a trailer or cart. He sang with gusto about the joys of killing and then dumped another young woman into the hole. Clark ignored the falling body, focusing on the edge, waiting.
Clark fired twice when the man looked over to admire his handiwork. The nine-millimeter rounds took the man low, angling up through a distended belly to tear through his diaphragm, blow out a lung, and then bisect his heart from bottom to top before lodging in the back fat near his left shoulder blade. Blinking stupidly, he tried to swallow but could muster only a ragged cough. The cigarette dropped from his lips, followed by a stream of frothy blood that cascaded down his chin like something from a Quentin Tarantino movie. A half-second later his knees buckled and he toppled over the edge, landing on top of the other bodies with a heavy thud.
The dirt walls of the grave had absorbed much of the noise the Gemtech didn’t suppress. Clark doubted anyone at the house had heard a thing. Even so, he stayed focused on the lip of the hole above for a full minute, just in case the fat Mexican had any friends he hadn’t heard.