AMOK: A Dox Thriller, page 23
He cut back and forth for the dozenth time. He saw Goodman and Nairn interviewing people but didn’t spot Stahl. Still no sign of Isobel. She had said that she would look for him in front of the church, and that she would be there early. Now he realized in front of the church was too imprecise a plan. When he agreed to it, he had envisioned a few dozen people, which in fairness was how things had started out. But now . . . even if he’d knocked a few onlookers off the statue pedestal and climbed it himself—which would have been an extremely bad idea for one of the few obvious foreigners in the area—it would have taken a lot of luck to spot her. There were just too many shifting people.
He kept moving back and forth and the crowd kept growing. He fought the temptation to go to the clinic, afraid that if he did, Isobel would show up while he was gone and they’d miss each other entirely.
After another hour, there were thousands of chanting protesters jamming the street as far as he could see, the din so loud he wouldn’t have objected to earplugs. He was close to the water now, and too far back to hear what the latest speaker was saying from the church portico, but whatever it was, it must have been a stemwinder because it got the crowd roaring Timor-Leste! Timor-Leste! in unison. And then suddenly, as though some unspoken command had reached everyone all at once, the crowd began moving southeast. Dox had already reconnoitered and knew this was the route to the cemetery. But where the hell was Isobel?
He let the masses carry him along, the seawall to their left, doing what he could to drift back and forth, like a swimmer caught in a strong river current, looking for her. Some of the protesters eyed him with curiosity. A few, probably hoping he was a foreign reporter, even tried to explain in limited English what the procession was about. To these he held up his hands palms forward and said, “Sorry, not a reporter, just here to do what I can,” all of which was true, and all of which could be read however anyone might want to read it. There was an ebullience in the air, a feeling dramatically different from what he’d sensed on that first walk through the city.
As the crowd proceeded along the water, its pace accelerated from a walk to a trot. A helicopter passed overhead, and the marchers chanted more loudly over the roar of its rotors. Banners began to appear: images of Xanana Gusmão, who Dox knew from the briefing papers he’d read was a resistance leader; slogans in Tetum; the yellows, blacks, and reds of the Timorese flag. People were holding up their fingers in peace signs, or maybe V for victory, but there were a lot of clenched fists pumping up and down as well. Some of the marchers pulled off sweatshirts, revealing Falintil tee-shirts beneath, and started running ahead, the crowd increasing its pace to follow. He began to see masks, and knew nothing good would come of it. It would be bad enough if it was just ordinary people covering their faces, because anonymous marchers could turn into a mob fast. But there was a worse possibility—false flags and agents provocateurs. The chanting grew to a roar, some in Tetum, but always returning to a refrain of Viva Timor-Leste! Viva Timor-Leste!
People jostled him left and right. He looked for escape routes and didn’t see anything promising. To his right was a concrete wall. To his left stood a high steel fence, naval ships docked in the waters on the other side of it, Indonesian sailors watching sullenly from their decks as the protesters raced by. Dox and the marchers might as well have been running through a cattle chute for all the options they had. And none of the Indonesian soldiers he saw had anything resembling riot gear, just rifles. That was bad. For one thing, it meant the soldiers would feel vulnerable, which would make them scared. On top of which, to deal with any problems, they’d have only two options: retreat on the one hand, start shooting on the other. The bad feeling he had about where this was going was getting worse. And still no sign of Isobel.
Nor of Joko, for that matter. Another disquieting sign. Dox doubted the man would miss a shindig like this one, and if he was keeping himself unseen, it was likely because he was up to something nefarious. Maybe looking for new hearts to eat or whatever else he did to while away the hours.
They reached the walls of the cemetery and the crowd began to flow through the gates. Dox knew from his earlier reconnaissance that the grounds wouldn’t easily hold so many, so he hung back. He saw Max Stahl standing along the entry path, holding a video camera and interviewing people as they passed him. Some of the protesters made sure to get handmade English signs in front of him: Why the Indonesian Army Shoot Our Church? Independent Is What We Inspire! Check All the Prison and Liberate the Prisoners! The spelling was off in a few, but whatever they lacked in English skills, they made up for in understanding who their audience was, and it sure wasn’t Indonesia.
Within ten minutes, protesters of all ages were standing along every inch of the white concrete retaining walls, holding aloft banners in Tetum and English. There were schoolgirls in blue-and-white uniforms; bare-chested teen boys probably hoping to impress them; even some spry-looking gray-haired oldsters. People were climbing into the surrounding banyan trees for a better view, and the chanting was getting cacophonous. Someone started shouting in Tetum through a bullhorn. Dox wiped sweat from his eyes and looked around wildly, wondering if Isobel might have been inside the cemetery already, his head pounding and his bad feeling growing steadily worse.
And just like that, he saw her, pressed in the center of the approaching crowd that was still flowing into the cemetery. “Isobel!” he shouted, waving. “Hey!”
She broke into a smile at the sight of him and returned the wave. He fought his way against the current of people until he reached her.
“Where’ve you been?” he said. “I was worried.” The crowd jostled them as it moved toward the cemetery gates, but he barely noticed.
“I had to wait for Rosa’s family,” she said. “I couldn’t leave her.”
“I’m sorry, I should have realized. Are they all right?”
“No. They’re devastated. But . . . I don’t want to talk about that now. I want to focus on this. Because it’s wonderful. And I need that.” She looked around. “See? There’s even a Western cameraman. The whole world will see.”
She must have been referring to Stahl. Dox started to answer, but someone bumped Isobel’s shoulder on the way past, hard enough to knock her back a step. Dox gave the guy an angry look, but he was already gone, with twenty protesters flowing behind him. Immediately the crowd started pouring through the gap that had opened between Dox and Isobel. He struggled forward and stood close to make sure no one could come between them again.
“Don’t look so worried,” she said. “I was feeling resentful about coming. Because of Santiago. But now . . . look at all the people! Can’t you feel it? This is a great day.”
Dox was feeling something, all right, but a great day wasn’t it. He looked around. “This is a bad place to stand,” he said. “We’re like a couple of leaves in a damn river.”
She nodded to the cemetery gates. “Let’s go in. There will be speakers at Gomes’s grave. Maybe we can get close.”
“I doubt it. See how the crowd is moving more slowly at the gates? They’re congealing there because the entrance is a chokepoint. Not likely to be a lot of room to maneuver inside.”
“Why would we need to maneuver?”
“I don’t know, the soldiers I’ve seen feel twitchy to me. And that’s just the ones in uniform. There could be others around, in street clothes, even masks.”
“What can they do? There are thousands of people here! Come on. Let’s go in.”
He wanted to argue, but he could see she was caught up in the excitement and knew she wouldn’t listen. “All right,” he said. “You win. But listen, let everyone else get carried away by what a great day it is, all right? You keep your eyes and ears open.”
“For what?”
“For anything that doesn’t seem right. And stay close to me. If we get separated, let’s try to meet back here again.”
For a moment, she didn’t respond. Then she surprised him by reaching out and taking his hands. “Are you asking me to trust you?” she said.
It made him happy, but somehow it hurt, too. “You shouldn’t. You’re not supposed to.”
She gave him one of her beautiful smiles. “Then you shouldn’t be trustworthy. Come on.”
Going in was easy enough—all they had to do was stop resisting the crowd. Dox saw Stahl enter ahead of them and figured the man had decided it was time to go to the gravesite.
They walked along a wide dirt road toward the center. The air was thick with dust the procession was kicking up. As they passed a cluster of trees to their left, Isobel pointed ahead. “It’s just up there,” she said. “Let’s try to get close.”
Dox would have preferred far to close, but before he could respond, a tall man just ahead of them and to their left tripped or got pushed—it happened too fast to be clear on which, but the man stumbled toward Isobel, and just as they were about to collide, the man’s head erupted and blood and brains sprayed onto Isobel and Dox. Isobel froze in shock. An instant later, Dox heard the crack of the shot. A single word blared Klaxon-loud in his head:
Sniper!
Behind them came the sudden report of dozens of rifle shots. The crowd started screaming and stampeding. Dox realized all at once what was happening:
—Supposed to take her out just before the shooting started, maybe me, too. The guy who tripped saved her—
Sirens started wailing. Dox threw an arm around Isobel and dove behind a raised concrete tomb. They crashed into the dirt. He looked back to see a dust cloud kicked up by a round that had hit just beyond where they’d been standing, heard the crack of the shot an instant later.
While reconnoitering that morning, he’d passed a small construction site—a store or a school or such. It was framed for two stories but only the first had been built, and there was an aluminum scaffold alongside it, the same type Dox had perched on while doing summer construction work as a teenager back home. He’d seen nothing else in the area that was both deserted enough for discretion and high enough to cover the necessary parts of the cemetery, and had noted the scaffolding as a good sniping position. Of course at the time, it was merely hypothetical, the kind of thing he noticed everywhere he went, an occupational hazard of being a Hunter of Gunmen. But now he knew someone else had seen that scaffolding, and decided to actually use it. He was furious with himself for not having treated the possibility seriously. Absent the dumbest of luck, right now Isobel would be dead, and it would have been his fault.
Isobel groaned, the wind knocked out of her. She tried to come to her knees, but Dox kept his arm around her back and pushed her down.
“There’s a sniper!” he shouted. “On our left!”
He looked back and saw soldiers entering through the gates, shooting into the crowd. Panicked people stampeded past them. A young girl got hit in the neck, corkscrewed, and went down in a spray of blood. Isobel saw and struggled as though to go to her. Dox held her tight.
“We’re pinned down!” he shouted. “They’re shooting at us!”
“They’re shooting at everyone!”
“No, you and me specifically! The shooting is random, the sniper is about us! Understand? You move from behind this crypt, he’ll take you out!”
“But that girl—”
“You can’t help her! That guy is good, he was going for your head and he would have had it, too, if someone hadn’t stumbled!”
“Why? Why would they—”
“I don’t know. We’ll worry about why later.”
He glanced around. They’d been lucky—the guy stumbling, of course, but also being right next to a tomb that offered reasonable cover. There were headstones in the area, and other tombs, too, but a lot of exposure involved in reaching them. A bizarre thought zigzagged through his brain: If anyone ever asks me to define irony, I swear I’ll tell them my life was saved by a damn tomb.
Over the wail of sirens, he heard more rifle shots from the cemetery entrance. He looked over and saw additional soldiers racing through, firing as they moved. But not panic firing—it was deliberate. They were chasing marchers into the cemetery and mowing them down. All around, people were screaming, hiding, running, coughing from all the dust getting kicked up from the road. Here and there were bodies and pools of blood. One man tried to drag one of the fallen to safety, then he himself fell back from a shot through the chest.
Dox didn’t like being downrange from the soldiers, but he’d take his chances with random fire over a sniper any day. And anyway, it wasn’t like he had a choice.
He looked at Isobel. “You can’t move from here. Not to save someone, not for anything. You can’t even raise your head above the top edge of the tomb. You don’t understand what a sniper sees through his scope. One inch of scalp and you’ll lose your head, do you understand me?”
Her eyes were wide with fear. “What are we going to do?”
Dox glanced around. It looked like half the procession was running, and the other half was sheltering behind whatever cover they could find. The guy the sniper had hit was sprawled facedown just a few feet away. Dox checked the angle of the tomb and thought he could make it. But only if he was flat, and from that position he wouldn’t be able to drag the dead guy back.
“I’m gonna stretch out,” he said. “You stay close to the tomb and pull me back.”
“Why?”
“No time to explain. Just pull me. I’ll push with my free arm, and between the two of us, I think we can manage.”
He got on his stomach, squirmed forward, extended an arm, and managed to snag one of the guy’s pant legs without moving from behind the cover of the tomb. He pulled, but it didn’t work—the guy’s pants just started coming down. The guy was wearing a belt, too, obviously not cinched very tight. Worse, a second after Dox’s hand had been exposed, a round tore into the guy’s leg right where Dox had been gripping it.
Gonna get you for that, Mr. Sniper. You’ll see.
He hooked his fingers inside one of the guy’s sneakers, hoping the laces were snugger than the belt had been, and jerked hard just to get his hand out of danger. Then he glanced back, his eyes watering from all the dust. “Okay, pull me!”
Isobel grabbed his pant leg and did as he said. Luckily, Dox’s belt was a little tighter than the unfortunate dead guy’s, and between Isobel’s efforts and his own pushing with his free hand, he was able to belly back to the edge of the tomb, dragging the dead guy along with him.
Isobel must have thought he’d been trying to help the guy, because she immediately turned him onto his back. But you didn’t have to be a doctor to see there was nothing to be done. Half the guy’s head was gone, and the remaining half was a mess of blood and brains and bone. Dox undid the guy’s belt, then cinched it as tightly as he could.
More people ran past, screaming. “What are you doing?” Isobel said.
He didn’t want to waste time explaining, but if she didn’t understand, she might not listen.
“They didn’t know where we’d be,” he said. “Or when we’d get here. And maybe they didn’t want anyone to witness anything done up close. Whatever it was, they decided to place a man in an elevated position with a clear view of the cemetery entrance, Gomes’s grave, and everything in between. They knew we’d show up. All this shooting . . . it was planned. And the Go sign was the initial shot. No one would be able to distinguish that from all the random shooting right after.”
“Why didn’t he shoot us when we were outside the gates?”
“Where he’s hiding, he’s got a better view of the cemetery itself.”
“How do you know where he’s hiding?”
“I might be the world’s worst spy, but I know a thing or two about sniping. I know where he is, and I’m going to take him out.”
“How?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet. But you gotta promise me you’ll stay here. Keep still and it’ll be less likely those soldiers will key on you, there are hundreds of other people doing the same. The sniper’s not in contact with the soldiers—if he were, they’d already be here shooting us at close range. Dumbasses didn’t have a plan B.”
It sounded encouraging. But the truth was, it wasn’t clear that the “dumbasses” needed a plan B. The sniper had missed, but he still had them pinned down.
“I don’t—”
“Promise me!”
“All right, I promise.”
He took her hand. “You trust me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then trust me to come back. And don’t move ’til I do.”
Without thinking, he leaned forward and kissed her hard on the mouth. She kissed him back with equal ardor.
It couldn’t have lasted for more than a couple of seconds, but it seemed like longer, maybe because it felt so good and he didn’t want it to end. But somehow he managed to break away. “That was better than the first one,” he said. Which was only a half truth, because in fact it was better than any he’d ever had.
She looked at him—her mouth half-open, her brow furrowed as though in consternation or shock. “That was the first one,” she said.
He grinned. “Well, I can’t wait for the second. Okay, I gotta go. Remember. Don’t move.”
What he had to do sucked, and the only reason he was going to do it was because everything else sucked even more. Going west back to the gate would have him running against the crowd and into the soldiers. Going north would have him running straight at the sniper. Any other direction would be equally exposed, and take too long besides. His only chance was northwest to the banyan trees lining the west side of the cemetery. But that was thirty yards of dirt with only headstones and low tombs for cover. His legs would be protected, but it wasn’t his legs he was worried about.
He managed to push the dead guy into a sitting position with the guy’s back against the tomb. Then he got on his knees in front of him, let the guy collapse onto his shoulder, and hoisted him by the belt and sleeve up into a fireman’s carry. The good news was the guy was light enough to probably not slow him down too much. The bad news was a slightly thicker specimen might have been better suited to stopping rifle rounds. Well, any port in a storm.
