Brotherhood and Others Read online

  “It won’t,” the pilot promised. “We are at thirty-five thousand feet. ETA twenty hundred hours and fifteen.”

  Monarch shook his head, coming more awake, feeling colder still. He got to wobbly feet, breathed the oxygen deeply, then eased over, hanging on to the rack until he got to the food sack. He sat with the food and water and forced himself to eat half of the ration they’d given him.

  Two hours later his feet were turning numb and he was fighting chills. He ate the rest of his food and drank half a gallon of water. Ten minutes later, he strapped the smallest oxygen tank to his chest.

  At twenty hundred hours and ten, the pilot said, “You ready, Rogue?”

  “Affirmative,” Monarch replied, checking the oxygen mask once more. Trying to minimize the effect the squirrel suit’s wings would have as he exited the bomb bay at better than four hundred miles an hour, he took a narrow stance, parallel to and above the seam of the doors, almost like a diver out on a high board.

  “Once the doors open, you have ten seconds to be away,” the pilot said. “I’ve got targets that will be right out in front of you. Copy?”

  “Understood,” Monarch said, and went down inside himself, breathing and pushing away all thoughts until there was only the seam of the bomb bay reflected in his mind.

  * * *

  Robin lay belly-down on the branch and grabbed leaves, his heart beating wildly at the memory of the shotgun blasts that killed his parents. Gasping for air, furious yet again, he noticed that the deep male voice that upset him so much had died back into the good-natured din of the party. In the next few moments, the anger in the teen chilled and iced until he believed he could hang from it, rely on it, use it to do whatever he wanted.

  And in that process, in that icing, something transformative happened to Robin. All those things his mother and father had taught him, all those things Claudio had been teaching him, they all came together and gelled, and quite suddenly the idea of cat-burgling a multimillionaire’s house during a party became the normal, the expected, the longed-for.

  I am my father’s son, I am my mother’s son, Robin thought fiercely. I will be a member of the Brotherhood. I’m going to take these things right from under their noses.

  He imagined that the bracelet and the painting belonged to the Perón supporter with the booming voice, and that set him in motion again, scrambling among, over, and along the branches of the live oak with the nimbleness and light touch of a monkey. He stopped, belly-down again on the largest of the upper limbs. About eight feet below him he could see the top of the wall.

  Robin looked down into a narrow spot between the wall and the side of the mansion, which was covered in thick leafy vines. Waitresses in gray uniforms exited and entered through a door about forty feet to his left, carrying dishes that smelled indescribably delicious and made him realize he hadn’t eaten at all since the morning.

  The tree limb ahead twisted and stretched toward the mansion, coming closest to a small arched dormer up on the third floor. He judged the space that separated the tree from the roof of the dormer at four feet to the wall and about a six-foot drop. The shutters on the window had been thrown open and the sash lifted to catch the night air. Inside he spotted gray dresses hung in a row. A closet for the domestic help, Claudio had said

  Robin studied the branch and the dormer for another minute until he saw how to cross that gap and snag the lip of the arch above the window. From there it was a cinch.

  However, if he missed, if he didn’t snag the lip of the dormer, it was at least thirty feet to the ground. He’d break bones. Lots of them. He never wavered. He was going to get in that window or he was going to bust up, maybe die trying.

  The latest round of waitresses exited through what he assumed was the kitchen door. They passed around the corner and out onto the terrace where the party was in full swing, the air full of music, bravado, and the self-satisfied laughter of the moneyed and the privileged.

  The laughter rang in his ears as he locked his ankles and hands around the tree limb and then rolled intentionally to his left. The teen’s body swung like a pendulum and now hung below the branch like a sloth. Robin slid and reached, grasping, covering distance, focused completely on his hands and ankles, which screamed at him to let go. He didn’t until very near to the end of the branch, and then only with his legs.

  That sudden change in his position caused the branch to dip and quiver. Robin kicked his feet up and down as a frog might, encouraging the branch to rise and fall, rise and fall, and …

  On the way up that third time, Robin let go, felt momentum toss him up, forward and then into a fall. He stared at the lip of the dormer as if it were his own dead mother, hands outstretched, and willed himself to grab it. But the edge of the roofing tiles scraped the tips of his middle fingers, three inches short, and Robin knew he was done for.

  * * *

  “Bomb door opening, Rogue. Go with God.”

  Monarch did not reply. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God. He did, or at least in a power much greater than his own. But in that moment he thought of the older woman with the long gray braid, asked her to watch over him, and then focused his entire being on that seam in the bomb bay as it separated, giving him a view of a broad swath of lights miles below in a sea of inky blackness.

  The wind howled, threatened to throw him off his feet.

  “Five seconds,” the pilot said.

  Monarch wrapped his arms across his chest and somersaulted forward out of the bay above Baghdad much in the same way he had into the darkened compound in Buenos Aires when he was a boy.

  He hurtled past the underbelly of the B-2, blasted by the jet wash of the bomber, and was sent cartwheeling out into space with such force that it was ten, maybe fifteen seconds before he’d slowed enough to risk opening his arms and legs.

  Monarch had an uncanny sense of direction, even when falling. Like a cat instinctively turning to the floor, he rolled over until he saw the lights of Baghdad below him and then spread his arms and legs.

  The wind caught the wings, slowing Monarch’s descent dramatically. Indeed, for several seconds, he felt as if he were hovering and not dropping inexorably toward what was about to become the mother of all war zones. Even with the helmet on, he heard the whistling of bombs dropping somewhere in front of him.

  Then, below and ahead of him tens of thousands of feet, he saw the flaming arrow of the first cruise missile heading across the Tigris River toward central Baghdad. The explosion was bright as magnesium igniting and louder than thunder. It threw a rolling plume of fire, smoke, and debris that he could see from five miles up. Air raid sirens began to wail. Lights began to die everywhere, and Monarch hurtled toward hell on earth in a gathering darkness.

  The bombs from the B-2 struck beyond the cruise missile’s target, blowing like a string of firecrackers attached to balloons filled with gasoline. Monarch aimed the headlamp at his altimeter. Sixteen thousand feet and dropping. On his other wrist, the GPS indicated he was 2.4 miles southeast of his target.

  Monarch dipped his left wing and soared northwest toward central Baghdad, right at the bombardment as more planes began to drop their payloads. He’d fallen below eight thousand feet and was less than a mile and a half from his target when the antiaircraft guns opened up below, sending up rounds that began to explode in the sky above and around him.

  * * *

  Robin’s hands slapped the ivy leaves before his fingers found a vine and grabbed, halting his fall but slamming his lower body into the wall of the mansion. He clung there, shocked that he wasn’t lying broken on the ground below. Another dose of adrenaline surged through him, took over his every impulse, and drove him to claw his way up through the vines until he’d reached the bottom of the windowsill.

  Desperate, he let go with his left hand and stabbed it up over the sill and snagged the back edge of it. His left followed. Robin hung there, panting, and then with what seemed like his last ounce of strength, he hauled himself up over th
e sill and dropped onto the closet floor.

  He lay there, grunting, soaked with sweat, and wanting to laugh himself sick. He was in and Claudio had to have seen how he’d pulled it off. He looked at his scraped and bleeding hands and forearms, already imagining a tattoo there.

  * * *

  More antiaircraft rounds blew above Monarch, throwing shrapnel. A hot piece of it glanced off his left cheek, flaying open skin. He reacted by slapping his arms to his side, holding his legs together, and going into a nosedive. As he hurtled toward the ground, a symphony of bombs erupted to the east inside Baghdad’s administrative district, the heart of Saddam Hussein’s political regime.

  General Barrens had explained the “Shock and Awe” concept to Monarch on Diego Garcia. The intense barrage was intended to throw Hussein’s forces into disarray, especially the top command, while U.S. infantry, tanks, and helicopters invaded Iraq from the north and the south.

  The barrage would also cover Monarch’s entry. At least that was the plan.

  He pulled out of the dive at five thousand feet and threw the wings wide again. Shedding the oxygen tank and mask, he swooped at a hard angle toward the target. He could make it out now. Streetlights still glowed on the absurdly wide avenues inside Saddam Hussein’s vast presidential compound, making it look some ultra-affluent neighborhood in the desert southwest.

  The blast and rumble of the aerial bombardment continued unabated as Monarch soared toward the compound, close enough now to the explosions that he felt their shockwaves as he passed under fifteen hundred feet, spotting people on the roofs of houses that surrounded the palace compound.

  No one shot at him. No one shouted. No one even seemed to notice. All eyes were turned to the east and the flash and loud rumor of the bombardment.

  Monarch waited until he’d passed over the palace wall at eight hundred feet, waited until he’d cleared Saddam Hussein’s personal palace, and headed toward the deep back corner of the compound before he pulled the chute.

  It popped open but deployed oddly, with only three of the four panels splayed against the wind. The lines that controlled the sail’s front right corner were knotted up.

  Less than four hundred feet above the ground, Monarch was thrown into a fast spiral that he was able to control only marginally as it bore him toward a second compound wall and a dimly lit multistory palace inside. As he crossed over the wall at one hundred feet, Monarch saw several other buildings and then a pond. The grounds were thick with irrigated pine and eucalyptus. He wanted to land in a shadowed area well to the right of the target.

  But the wind picked up, and shifted the angle and speed of his final spiral descent, taking him over the pond and deep into the darkest part of the compound. He thought he caught sight of steel fencing right under his boots before he plunged into a pit of some sort. His heels slammed into the ground and he fell, crashed, and rolled across gritty, sandy soil before thudding to a stop.

  Monarch lay there, the wind knocked out of him, listening for voices, for alarms raised, but he heard none. He fought for air, forced it through his nose, and smelled cat urine as strong as smelling salts, as if he’d landed inside the yard of some crazy old woman and not the sadistic oldest son of a dictator.

  Monarch rolled up to his knees and got free of the parachute harness. He felt the blood dripping down his face and knew he was going to need to patch it. He rolled up the chute first, removed the helmet, took off the jacket part of the squirrel suit, and unzipped the bib. He got out the satellite radio and turned it on.

  “Barren Wolf this is Rogue,” he said.

  “We’ve got you, Rogue.” Barrens’s voice came back immediately. “GPS signal’s strong. Well done. You have forty minutes until the next sortie arrives. They are targeting that palace. Repeat, they are targeting Uday’s palace.”

  “Roger that,” Monarch said. “I came in spinning and screwed up. Having trouble getting oriented.”

  There was a pause, and then the general’s voice came back. “It appears you landed inside Uday’s personal zoo.”

  It was then that the bombardment stilled. In that pause, over the faint ringing in his ears, Monarch heard the hollow, wet rattle of breath exiting the throat of something very large and very close. He holstered the radio and grabbed a pistol and a flashlight, all the while backing away from the sound. He did not want to use the light, but felt compelled to flip the switch.

  In the Maglite’s powerful thin beam, a black-mane African lion sniffed at the line of blood drops that separated them.

  * * *

  In the closet on the third floor of the mansion in Buenos Aires, Robin recovered enough to stand and inspect his surroundings. The row of gray dresses proved to be maids’ uniforms; on the other side of the closet were a row of dark pants and white shirts. Butler? Waiter? Certainly help of some sort.

  He remembered one of the rules Claudio had taught him. He could never remember the exact number of the rule, but he distinctly recalled the advice: “Fit in.” Pausing only for a beat, Robin tore off his filthy t-shirt, ripped jeans, and sandals, then climbed quickly into a pair of pants that were only slightly large and a white collared shirt that fit him perfectly. He didn’t see socks, but found a pair of shoes that fit.

  He remembered from the drawing Claudio had showed him that the closet was off a landing at the top of a staircase along with two bedrooms and a bathroom irregularly used by servants. He squeezed the door handle, opened the door, and peered out into the hallway, hearing the muted sounds from the party coming up the staircase and even louder through the closet window behind him.

  He sniffed, smelled meat frying, felt hungry again. But he pushed his appetite aside and strode lightly out into the hallway, hand along the banister, peeking over into the well and seeing no one. He danced down the hall, spotted laundry and trash chutes low on the near wall, and reached the bathroom in three seconds. He shut the door behind him, locked it, turned on the light, and looked in the mirror over the sink.

  Robin looked like the street urchin he’d become in the months since his parents’ murder, face streaked with grime, hair matted to his head, skin scratched and cut, the last purple hues of a black eye he’d gotten trying to outbox Claudio.

  The clothes aside, Robin didn’t fit in at all. He turned on the water, ducked his head under the spray, ran a bar of soap through his hair and all over his face, took off the shirt, and washed under his armpits too. He rinsed as best he could, then found a towel, wetted it, and turned it near black cleaning his torso.

  His dusky skin now had a reddish glow to it and he’d managed to comb his hair into something resembling neat. He smiled, bowed his head as if to a powerful employer, then summoned up his courage once more.

  He shut off the light in the washroom and eased open the door. The hall was empty. So was the stairwell.

  Robin stalked down the stairs, found himself within two doors of the master suite, where Claudio said the woman of the house kept her jewelry. The sounds of the party were louder here, coming up another stairway from below. He could hear the slap of shoes on tile and odd snatches of conversation and the building chords of a piano solo. The aroma of coffee brewing drifted up to him.

  The double doors to the master suite were right there at the head of the lower staircase. The floor seemed deserted at the moment, but he was going to need sheer luck not to be seen by someone on the first floor, which sounded increasingly crowded and raucous.

  Then he heard that man’s deep voice from before, yelling that he wanted everyone out on the terrace to sing to his wife on her birthday. Robin waited, listening until the last footsteps were fading before bolting toward the master suite. He grabbed the door handles. Locked.

  Trying not to panic, the boy fished out the three picks, dropped to his knees, and began to toy with the lock, all the while praying to his mother and father to watch over him, to bless him in his …

  He heard people start singing “Que los cumplas feliz,” but over it came the quick slap of someon
e running and then a creak directly behind Robin. Someone was coming up the stairs.

  * * *

  Monarch thought for a moment that the shrapnel had hit him harder than he thought, that he was wounded and hallucinating in shock. But then the lion lifted its head and looked straight into the flashlight beam, so close Monarch could see the cat’s yellow eyes dilate.

  He had never stopped moving, however, rolling backward, toes to heels, gun aimed at the lion. He could and would kill the animal if it attacked, but he didn’t want to shoot for any number of reasons, not the least of which was noise. Though the lion began to pant, it did not move as he backed up. Indeed, it acted as if mesmerized by the light, expecting something.

  Monarch flicked the beam off the cat and around and saw that he was indeed in a pit with sheer walls and a steel fence above. The top of the wall had to be seven feet, the top of the fence another six.

  He swung the light back at the cat and perhaps twenty feet behind the lion saw a steel door set in the wall under an overhang. Monarch heard the sound of a gate clanging. He flipped off the light, listening to the cat’s breath come in deeper pants that swelled into a low, salivating roar.

  Monarch heard someone walking above him, the strike of a stick and then shuffle, stick, shuffle, followed by the nervous bleating of a lamb. Over it, he heard a man muttering and shouting gibberish in Arabic. Monarch pressed tight into the wall, heard the padding of the big cat coming closer, stalking him now.

  When he picked up the shadow of the lion less than five yards away, he felt certain he was going to have to shoot it and then kill whoever was walking above him, and …

  Light played into the pit, cutting back and forth.

  “Here, kitty,” called a drunken man in Arabic. “Come here, my love. Daddy has a present for his vicious kitty love.”

  * * *

  Robin felt the lock to the master suite give, squirted inside the door, and heard a woman’s voice behind him say, “Is the powder room up here, Estella?”

  Another woman’s voice said no, it was around the corner and to hurry because cake was about to be served.