Kingdom Come

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?”