Kingdom Come

But the leader, Krivi, had no heart that anyone knew of so he just touched the girl on the shoulder, with a little more pressure this time. Enough that she looked up.

“Alina, listen to me. Will you listen to me?”

She nodded, her eyes streaming anyway.

“Stop crying. Can you do that?”

“I … I …”

“Brave girls don’t cry. They are heroines who get out of terrible situations and tell their grandkids about their youthful adventures,” he said, in a quieter, reassuring tone. That just set the girl off again. He considered his options and looked back at recon one who’d just come into the room.

“Detonation cord,” he said, nodding at the girl’s feet.

“Shit.”

“I’ll look into it. You get the girl out. Now.”

“Roger that.”

Krivi moved away from the girl but she screamed and he turned back and said, “I am here, Alina. This is my friend, John. He’s going to untie your hands. If you stay still, it won’t hurt at all. Can you do that?”

“Kri … Krivi,” she whispered, a small whisper of a terrified girl.

Krivi smiled, even though it felt like stretching taffy. “Yes?”

“There’s a lock. On my neck. There’s a lock.”

His smile faded and he looked at recon one, who had already removed a small wire cutter that could run through steel nylon rope if it needed to. And it had on three separate occasions.

“I am going to unlock it and you’re going to be out of here right now.”

Her lips trembled as she looked at the calm, rock-like face of the man kneeling before her, but she refused to cry again. And Krivi gave her points for that. It took a lot of cojones to not give in when the situation went FUBAR.

“Promise?” she asked.

He nodded and held out his hand. She took it with trembling fingers and just held on. Krivi squeezed once and then barked, “Scoot her forward. Give me specs. I am going to look at that.”

He turned to the gunnysack-covered contraption where the wire that had tied Alina’s legs disappeared under. He removed the gunnysack carefully knowing any movement could be fatal, trickily fatal.

Bombs were like that.

It wasn’t a very smartly made IED (improvised explosive device). There was a black cylinder with three different wires protruding out of it, and a small pin held the mouth of the cylinder shut. A few sticks of C4 were strapped to the outer body of the cylinder, as if to underline the point of an explosion and the three wires, all yellow, ran to a point under the wall and then disappeared.

“Now we know why they left no guards,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“Yeah,” Recon one, John, agreed.

He smiled reassuringly at the girl and said something too low for Krivi to hear. But Alina smiled and let him reach for a clean piece of cloth and wipe her face with it.

Krivi focused all his attention on the IED. It was a pretty standard bomb, with a decent-sized blast radius given the amount of C4 wrapped around the cylinder and det cord that were designed to confuse and fluster and a trigger mechanism that was probably pressure-controlled, rather than remote-controlled.

Hence, the lock on the girl.

He unsnapped a pair of pliers and carefully removed the main firing pin from the mouth of the cylinder and laid it on the floor. He looked at the wire that disappeared into the wall and knew there was no way they could remove it all out without setting off the pressure mechanism on the trigger, even though he hadn’t even seen the trigger yet.

There was no other way to it.

Krivi unsnapped his throwing knife, a tiny thing with a blade so sharp it could slice the hide of an elephant, and started severing the C4 from the cylinder. It took moments, because they’d just tied the packets to the outside with cords. That done, he carefully wrapped the explosive in tarp and placed it in his backpack that recon two took away immediately.

Half the firepower was gone right there.

Now he turned his attention to the girl, who was somehow miraculously calm.

“Alina.”

She looked at him with a small smile and he froze infinitesimally. A girl in her position should not have been smiling. It was why he couldn’t understand humans at all, any more.

“Will you let me look at the lock now?”

She nodded and John, recon one, carefully pushed all her hair to the front while she presented him with her nape.

It was taped to her neck. The three wires came out of the wall and ended in a tiny device that was locked together with a padlock. The reading on the device read forty-five kgs. The girl’s weight. Any more and she would blow them all up. He couldn’t touch the thing without setting it off. And he couldn’t touch the wires without setting it off.

“The lock,” recon one said.

Krivi looked up, nodded approval. The lock could be reached from the top. If he was careful enough and steady enough, he could then, maybe, gain the three seconds required to sever the connection from the girl.

Big maybe.

“All right. Get out,” he said.

Recon one shook his head.

“That’s an order.”

“Not following it, Boss.”

“Bastard.” But it was said without any heat and made Alina smile. Krivi smiled at her too, a flash of white on a betel-brown face and said, “That’s a bad word. Don’t use that in front of your dad, OK? And don’t tell him I used it either.”

“OK.” She smiled again.

“I need you to hold absolutely still, Alina. Totally still.”

“Like the statue, right?”

He nodded.

Krivi unfolded to a kneeling position and crawled right beside Alina. Recon one stood back and watched as his leader inspected the tiny device and the lock over it.

It was going to be delicate as a surgery, getting to the lock without touching the trigger mechanism or the wires. But John also knew if there was any man alive who could do it, it was Krivi. The man had ice water for blood and a brain that was blade-sharp and just as deadly under pressure.

Krivi removed a cigarette from his pocket and looked at it for a second. He smiled, a strange, weird smile and put it back in his pocket.

John watched as Krivi stooped over Alina’s head, his breathing rock-steady and his hands steadier as he used a pair of picks and went to work on the lock. He twisted one, and it stuck in the place of the key, then he used the other one, without moving the position of the lock which wasn’t easy at all, to snick the lock open.

It worked after three seconds of quiet breathing and absolute, deafening silence.

The lock opened with an audible snick and the pressure mechanism moved. Alina breathed deeply, her shoulders shaking and Krivi snapped the lock back, but not all the way back to lock it.

Recon one breathed easy and shared a grim look with Krivi.

“Alina?” Krivi said.

“Yes, Krivi?”

“I am going to remove the lock now, all the way out and I want you to leap into John’s strong arms and just hold on, OK? He’s going to run really, really fast and take you out of here. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“John, you ready to take my girl out?”

John’s lips tightened but he said easily, “Alina’s my girl, Krivi. Don’t poach.”

“We’ll see, Johnny Boy. We’ll let Alina decide. Right, Alina?”

She giggled, but didn’t nod her head. She was aware of the lock on the back of her head.

“On the count of three,” he said quietly, looking at recon one. Recon one nodded slightly, because he got it. There was a growing chance that Krivi was not going to make it out in time, but there was not a damn thing he could do about it right now.

“Boss,” was all he said.

“One.” Krivi’s steady hand went to the lock. “Two.” He flicked it open, sliding it out and pushing Alina away in one motion.

“Three.”

John snatched the girl and ran straight and true, without a backward glance.

Krivi didn’t spare them a glance either, he held the pressure mechanism gingerly as a timer started counting down the seconds. He had twenty seconds before he cut the wrong wire and blew himself to kingdom come.

“Five,” he murmured, measuring the position of the wires from the detonator. All three yellow wires ended in a tangle, so he wasn’t sure anyway that he wasn’t going to be blown up.

“Eight.”

He picked one out and held his pliers over it.

“Twelve.” He picked the next one out and his fingers trembled in a fine reaction. He steadied his hand and cut the wire. The timer stopped its deathly countdown. And he placed the pressure mechanism detonator down as carefully as if it was still alive.

He pushed the earbud on once.

“Hot load is cold. I repeat, hot load is cold. Coming out now. How’s the girl? She all right?”

There was no answer from the other end for a minute. And he waited, while sweat poured off his face in rivulets, even though the temperature inside the cave was close to five degrees. The black paint he’d worn had run off, washed by his perspiration and his hand was steady again as he pushed the pliers back into his Army knife kit and shoved it into his pocket.

“Boss?”

“Yeah?”

“Get the fuck out of there. Now.”

Krivi chuckled, a strange ghostly sound in a tomb.

“Yeah. Roger that.”

Then he slung his weapon on again and walked out, as calmly as he had come in. In the five minutes that he had told his teammates he would.

The team was lodged in Holiday Inn, paid for by a very grateful Mr. Gujjar who was probably placing an armored tank around his kid round about now. The whiskey was flowing freely in John’s room, which was Party Central. And the sounds of raucous male laughter could be heard two floors down. John walked out of his room and rapped on a door two doors down. The door opened a crack. Krivi still in his fatigues, with the shirt off, stood at the entrance.

“Come on out to the land of the living,” he invited.

“No,” Krivi said. “Thank you.”

“You did a good thing there today, Boss.”

Krivi’s face remained impassive. “We all did our jobs, John. Now go. Have some fun.” His lips twitched but his eyes remained the same. Black and flat, with not much to read in them. In fact, nothing at all to read in them. “Go on out to the land of the living.”

John smiled and tipping his head once, went back the way he’d come. It was a futile hope to think the boss would come and join in the revelry when he hadn’t done so once in all the years that John had known him. John understood death, the awful pressure of it and the horror of it. But every time he saw Krivi Iyer, he was reminded of something worse than seeing death firsthand. He was reminded of war victims who couldn’t understand life or death because neither made sense to them. Then, he stopped thinking about his boss and tossed a shot back and partied because he’d escaped his fate again.

Back in his room, Krivi stripped down to his skivvies and roamed the hotel room like a caged animal. He gave a fleeting thought to joining his men, but dismissed the thought immediately. He didn’t know how to laugh and horse around and pretend that everything was A-OK just because they had cheated death tonight. This time. This party would go on for hours, because they were all getting a hefty bonus for getting the girl out and recovering the money too.

All in a day’s work for K&R experts.

But he wasn’t a kidnapping and ransom specialist. He wasn’t even team leader because he wanted to lead a bunch of decent, strong men down dark tunnels or into dangerous situations, being responsible for their lives. Most of these men had families, wives and children: the whole enchilada. They carried around pictures in their wallets and had emails and scheduled phone calls when they were in rotation for missions. He didn’t know how to relate to them. He had no one. No pictures in wallets or emails from loved ones or scheduled phone calls.

He only had an awful, empty blackness that sometimes got filled when he stared sure death in the eye and understood today was the day he would die. Today was the day he would die. When Gemma had died along with Joe and the unborn baby, he might as well have died with them.

He didn’t know how to live anymore, because he literally had nothing to live for. His family, the ones still surviving, had long since lost hope on the brooding, dark man he had become. And it had been months since he had even spoken to his parents. For all intents and purposes, he was all alone. Just the way he liked it.

He was here in India, his birthplace, and he knew there were relatives scattered in various cities who would love for him to visit. Aunts, uncles and second cousins who his parents were regularly in touch with through the wonders of modern technology, back in their little farm in Surrey. But he didn’t feel the need to reconnect with family or his birthplace, even though he was home. He was alone and that was best.

Alone meant safety.

He stopped at the window and looked out over the white-tipped mountain ranges which were particularly beautiful in twilight. At that moment before day changed into night and everything was just slightly out of focus. Krivi smiled. It was weird. He was noticing the sunset and the beauty. Maybe coming home had not been the worst idea of all. And India, no matter how long ago he’d left it, was still home. His motherland, even though his passport was British.

He placed his hands on the sill and leaned out, deeply breathing in the unadulterated, mountainous air. Breathed in life. Sometimes, it was the only thing that mattered.

Life.

And tonight, there was a little girl who was sleeping safe in her own bed with her parents around her, standing guard over her dreams. Safe from all the monsters who roamed this world, looking for easy, pluckable prey. She probably had years of therapy ahead of her to recover from this ordeal, but she was alive and she was unharmed and that was the only thing that mattered.

He closed his eyes and reached for the cigarette he’d placed in his shirt pocket. He used a match and lit it, blowing smoke deep in his lungs and letting it out into the pure mountain air. Watched the gray smoke pass on, ethereal and wispy, getting lost in the little flurry of snow that began to fall on the Holiday Inn. He’d smoked half his cigarette when there was a peculiar beeping from his bag.

Krivi straightened instantly, on animal alert. He crossed to the bag he’d placed on the dressing table and extracted a bulky instrument that vaguely resembled a cellular phone. A satellite phone with the latest scrambler codes that bounced between at least three satellites, if he wasn’t wrong. This phone was the only way he could call his family and be completely untraceable.

He pressed a button and said, very quietly, “Iyer.”

“Hello, Krivi, my boy. You’ve been a hard man to track.”

Krivi sat down on the bed abruptly.

“Harold,” he said, shortly. “How did you find me?”

Harold Wozniacki, Assistant Director of Operations, MI5, laughed gregariously, a jarring sound that echoed in the hotel room. Krivi winced and listened to his blast from the past laugh as if he hadn’t laughed in years. All his pleasure in the moment, the evening, was gone.

The cigarette in his hand had burned down to more than three-quarters and he flicked it out the window with an accurate throw. It wasn’t the decent thing to do but he couldn’t care about butt disposal right now.

“What do you want, Harold?” he asked, when there was a break in the laughter.

“Should I answer the first question, my boy?”

Krivi shook his head. “No. What do you want, Harold? Whatever it is, the answer’s no. You know that.”

“Hey, maybe my kid has been kidnapped and I need you to rescue her. Defuse a bomb or two along the way,” Harold rejoined, full of joie de vivre.

“You have a son, Harold. And he is in the Army. If someone has taken him, they would have already lost a limb or two. Or their head.”

Harold must have spread his tentacles wide to get this much current intel on him. Probably even called in a few favors.

“I thought you would have forgotten all about me by now, Krivi.”

“I never forget, Harold. You know that.”

There was a beat of silence and then Harold exhaled. “What do you know about The Woodpecker?”

“The bird? Not much.” But he sat up straighter. “Why do you ask, Harold?”

“A series of bombings in Benghazi,” Harold answered instantly. “Car bombs. IEDs, with circuitry fucked up so badly it would have taken a rat to clear it. Remote detonation on start-up. Semtex and plastique as primary explosives, with marble shrapnel. Recognize it?”

Krivi felt cold, colder than he’d felt in four years. His vision sharpened, his breath slowed, his heart slowed. He gripped the phone so tight, his knuckles showed veins.

“What are you saying, Harold?”

“You know what I am saying, Krivi. Come back, and you can find the son of a bitch who took out Joe and Gemma.”

“No.”

The word was short and cold.

“Come back, Krivi. The Woodpecker is a dangerous entity. No fear, no consequences. But no one can catch him because there are rumors about identity, no one can confirm. Gun for hire type and with no moral compass to guide him, from the looks of things. People are getting hurt, Krivi. You can help stop that.”

His other hand clenched in a fist. His short nails dug into the skin of his palms.

“No, Harold. Goodbye.”

“Krivi, there’s a face and features match, eyes, skin color, mom’s date of death and DOB with a civilian. Ninety percent chance of siblings. That’s a huge chance for someone we haven’t ever seen. We need confirmation and you can get it for us. The female is in India, in Kashmir. Transport wouldn’t be a problem for you. You can nail The Woodpecker.”

“It’s a fucking awful codename for a terrorist.”

Harold chuckled weakly. The sound seemed wrong in the conversation they were having.

Krivi loosened his grip on the phone. Looked at the blinking red light that indicated call active on the satellite phone. He thought about the last four years and the six months before that. He thought about all those days and nights when he had sat and thought about nothing else but finding the person responsible for killing his soul.

“I pull the trigger,” he said.

“Now, Krivi—”

“I come back, I do your ID, I catch the bastard and I pull the trigger and watch the life bleed out of him. Do we have a deal?”

“Krivi, I don’t think—”

“Goodbye, Harold.” He made to press the end call button.

“Goddammit. Wait.”

Krivi waited.

“Fine. You come back, run the op and we will see where we end up. Deal?”

“I come back, run the op, ID the female, find out her connection to him and when we get the bastard; I put a bullet between his eyes. Deal.”

Harold Wozniacki was a smart man. He knew when to weigh his options and he knew when to hedge his bets. He also knew that Krivi Iyer was the best man for the job because there was no one else with his unique skill set. And that skill set included, cold, purposeful, lethal vengeance.

Harold sighed.

“You always were a stubborn bull, my boy. Fine. Come back and we have a deal.”

Krivi smiled. And it was a terrible thing to see. “Good. Send me the details at the—”

“Holiday Inn, Ladakh. Yeah, I know.”

Krivi shook his head, the call ended. And every muscle in his body loosened just as his brain sharpened.

The Woodpecker. It was an awful name for a cold-blooded murderer. But there was no name suitable enough for a monster like that. And he was going to kill this monster and pay his blood debt once and for all. Maybe, he could even die in the process. Maybe, God would be that kind.

If ever there was a God.

Krivi took out his cellphone, the one provided by his employers and punched in speed dial two.

When his boss picked up he said, very briefly, very clearly, “Jim. Krivi Iyer. Yeah, everything went down OK. The girl’s OK. I am calling to let you know I am done. I quit.”

Jim asked something and Krivi answered, “Why? Just something I have to take care of. No, not a woman. I quit, Jim. You can wire the rest of my funds to Ladakh. Thanks.”

two

Srinagar

India

May 2012

Ziya Maarten had never looked forward to early mornings, till she came to Srinagar, the heartland of some of the most beautiful country she had ever seen. She’d done the Euro backpacking trip, fresh out of school, saving up for her grand adventure when other girls her age had been trying out graduation day dresses and making out with their boyfriends in shady corners.

Ziya had worked two jobs, as a library helper and a waitress at a trendy Soho café, in order to see the Eiffel Tower, Pisa, the Coliseum and the sandy beaches of Corfu. Kids who bounced from foster home to foster home, learnt the value of being grounded to places rather than people early on in life. Places that you had been to, places that you dreamed about, were something else altogether. They were permanent. They were forever.

People, on the other hand were so much more inconvenient to love. People came and went. More often than not, they left you. And she’d experienced more loss in her twenty-nine years than she’d wanted. Ergo, she’d traveled extensively and wide, as a troubleshooter for an organic chemical fertilizer company that operated out of England and had ties in China.

Ziya had worked hard after high school too, getting into Trinity, which was no mean feat and then getting her business admin degree from the London School of Economics. All on scholarship. Because foster kids were really on their own after age eighteen. And, it had been a stroke of luck that she had become roommates with the most interesting creature in Trinity, who was waiting for the love of her life to finish his Army training.

Noor Saiyed, a Kashmiri princess who had only spent the summers in India till her twenty-seventh birthday which fell this year, had simply refused to let Ziya be alone. She had cajoled and laughed and giggled and drunk her way into Ziya’s life, until they really were Best Friends Forever. Last year she’d given those goofy, tacky, matching BFF bracelets to Ziya as a gag gift. And this, from a woman with an IQ in the triple digits, and who had made the Dean’s List all four years of her undergrad as a literature major at Trinity. Ziya couldn’t hold out against someone with so much love and sunniness and eternal optimism, even though Noor was as impulsive as Ziya was methodical and pragmatic.

And, when Noor, had told Ziya that one of her distant relatives had an interesting job opening back in Kashmir, managing a fairly large estate and the various business concerns that made up Goonj Enterprises, one of which was manufacturing cricket bats, the most popular sport in the sub-continent, Ziya had been hard-pressed to not at least give the interview a fair shot. And she had flown into Srinagar Airport, after a connecting journey filled with innumerable delays.

Ziya had been fully prepared to turn down the job, because she didn’t think she was suited to just settle down in one place, no matter how interesting and challenging the running of it was.

She had not counted on Kashmir. Her first view of the mountains that ringed the hilly terrain of Srinagar had made her catch her breath. Her second view of the Dal Lake, totally frozen in winter, with the houseboats moored in for the duration like soldiers hunkering down for the long haul, had clutched at her heart. And she’d wanted this job, the managing of an estate she knew almost nothing about, with a desperation that still worried her.

Kashmir was a place, you could love a place.

But, she loved Goonj too. The house of wood and stone, set high up in the hills, overlooking the lake, which flickered like a bright jewel on a clear spring night that she could see down her bedroom window. The challenging job of overseeing the different business interests of the Akhtar family, all of whom were settled in other parts of the world and wanted nothing to do with the house and the business.