“Mind the piranhas,” Hawke said cheerfully.
The fellow pulled a crumpled package of black market smokes from his torn khaki shirt and shook one loose.
“Thanks.” Hawke bent forward so that he could accept a light. “I am eternally grateful. What’s your name?”
“Wellington Hassan,” the man said, lighting another.
“Wellington Hassan. Quite a name.”
“Saladin’s good enough. My middle name.”
“Saladin it is, then. Sal-a’ha-Din. Slave of God. You Talib, Saladin? Taliban?”
Saladin Hassan laughed deeply. “Me? Taliban? Hardly. Afghan, though. I bled for your side, Mr. Hawke.”
“Where’d you get your English?” Hawke asked, withholding smoke until it burned.
“My mother. An English rose from Devon. Her family name was Wellington. She met my father when she was working as a nurse in Kabul. We always used English in the house. When the shooting started in Afghanistan, I was recruited as a translator for a British regiment advising the Northern Alliance. I had a military engineering background and some experience of artillery and explosives.”
“Really? Which regiment, may I ask?”
“Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire Light Infantry.”
Hawke nodded and said, “What theatre?”
“Up in the north. Near Mazar-e-Sharif. Helping the Afghan government develop democratic institutions and disarming militias.”
“Good work.”
“Until an unfortunate incident, yes, it was.”
“What happened, Saladin?”
“We came under fire between bases. I’d told my commander the road had been cleared of IEDs. I checked it three times. I thought it had been. It hadn’t. We lost three.”
Hawke looked away, inhaled the harsh smoke deeply and felt almost human. Nicotine brought a great clarity to things, so fresh it was startling. This was, he realized, his first real human conversation in over six months.
“Pretty rough,” Hawke said, “I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing here, Mr. Hawke?”
“I was with a scientific expedition before your friends in there captured me. These people are your employers? Las Medianoches?”
“Perhaps. But only temporarily. I’m an independent contractor. Since I retired from the military, I work for anybody. Recently, I’ve been doing odd jobs for El Salvador del Mundo.”
“The savior of the world? Big job, saving the world. Is your current employer up to it?”
“My employer believes world salvation starts here in the jungle. This is where it all begins. At any rate, my life story is of no consequence. You, on the other hand, are quite a celebrity in this part of the jungle. You’re going to the highest bidder.”
“Really? Who’s bidding?”
“A man named Muhammad Top and an American who calls himself Harry Brock.”
“Harry Brock?” Hawke knew the name well. Harry was a bit of a piss artist, but also a tough, hard-bitten intelligence operative with a particularly American sense of humor.
“Yes. He came down here looking for you. Top found him first, sentenced him to death for spying. He said he had information for you.”
“So Harry’s dead.”
“Not yet. He’s a very smart man, Brock. He played to Papa Top’s ego, gave him a ton of information, most of it probably false. They sent him to die in the camps. Somehow, he got away. Top hired me to find Brock and dispose of him.”
“Ah. You’re an assassin. You kill him?”
“Got a better offer.”
“Doing what?”
“Harry’s paying me to keep an eye on Muhammad Top. And, look for you. So, now that I’ve found you, there is a small seaplane moored upriver. We can steal it, fly to the town of Madre de Dios. From there, I can get you somehow to Manaus. And, from Manaus, well, there are many flights to Rio. You look like you could use a good doctor.”
“Let’s fly. Now.”
“We will fly, m’lord. Give me a few seconds to straighten things out in the office.”
Saladin got to his feet, picked up his carbine, and went inside.
A loud staccato roar of automatic gunfire erupted inside the small office. The lights were instantly extinguished and glass exploded outward, showering fragments on Hawke in his bamboo prison. There were loud screams and curses. Then another burst silenced the cries from inside.
Saladin Hassan stood in the doorway with a smoking carbine in his hand. He pulled a blade from a sheath on his belt and started working on the cage.
“What was that all about?” Hawke asked.
“I had to shred your paperwork.”
7
PRAIRIE, TEXAS
C ome on in, why don’t you, it’s open.”
Daisy hadn’t even heard the cruiser pull up in the drive out front. Now she could see the good-looking boy from the kitchen table. Standing out on the front porch, plain as day.
“It’s Homer, honey,” she said.
“I can see who it is.”
Homer Prudhomme was right outside the screen door under the yellow bug light. Reason he wasn’t in any big hurry to come inside, Daisy guessed, was the bad news writ all over his face.
“Homer,” her husband said to the boy, swallowing his macaroni and scootching his chair back from the table a few inches. “Come on inside the house, son. You are not interrupting anything special in here. We eat supper every night.”
Homer pulled open the flimsy door and stepped inside the parlor, taking off his hat and riffling the dusty brim through his fingers. His big dark eyes were a little puffy and red. He had waves of dark hair and a cowlick that just wouldn’t pay any mind to Brylcreem.
“Sheriff,” he said, nodding to Franklin. “Evenin’, Miz Dixon.”
“Hey, Homer,” Daisy said to the boy, “You got something in your eye, baby?” It was true she wanted to mother this child. Nothing wrong in that.
Homer wiped the back of his hand across his face. “No, ma’am. Had the windows down driving out here, that’s all. Just a gnat or something flew in my eye.”
They waited for the boy to say something else, but he didn’t. He had been crying, that much was plain to see.
“What brings you out here this time of night, son?” Franklin said.
“Bad news, Sheriff.”
Homer was a tall, good-looking kid with the uniform hanging off of his bones. The Tuesday Girls down at the Bon Jour beauty parlor all had a crush on him. Hell, every churchgoing one of them, every lady in Prairie had a sneaker for that boy. The general consensus was he looked like Elvis right before he got famous, when he was still living at home with Gladys and Vernon.
Homer was older than that, shoot, he was almost twenty now and a high school graduate. But he had those same sleepy eyes and those long silky eyelashes. Behind his back, all the gals called him La Hilacha. The threadbare one. Homer had grown up semi-Anglo in the barrio part of town.
