Warlord Of The Pit

Chapter 1

Malaysia, the island of Pandakar

The sky rolled with thunderclaps and flashed with bolts of lightning.

So this is the way it’ll end, Kane thought wearily. With a bang so big you couldn’t even hear a whimper.

Lifting his head, he squinted against the glare of a lightning flash. In the white-blue electric blaze, the night shadows crawling over Pandakar’s waterfront looked like caricatures of black animals prowling for prey. Although the men creeping through the rain weren’t animals, they were most definitely on the prowl for prey. He figured at this point the odds were ten to two.

Wind-driven sheets of rain fell in a torrential downpour. Gusts of wind tore at the distant tree line. Another stroke of lightning split the indigo tapestry of the sky, turning the hulking ships docked at the piers into ghostly apparitions. Their rain-slick hulls glistened as if as they were painted with quicksilver.

Kane crouched beside the gaping rectangular hole that had been a window and a fair-size portion of stone wall before the warhead of an RPG had blown it inward in a hailstorm of rubble.

The rain suddenly increased in volume and tempo, sluicing down the sloping roof and through a hole in it. Kane wiped at the warm fluid seeping down the left side of his face and glanced ruefully at the diluted blood shining on his fingertips. He hadn’t even been aware of the superficial cut, inflicted during the brief but fierce firefight that had raged all along the docks until ten minutes ago.

He wasn’t surprised that the mission had gone sour so quickly, but he raged at the concept that his life and Grant’s might end in such a stinking place for such a foolish cause.

“Shit,” muttered Grant, who knelt on the floor across from him. He glared at the leak in the ceiling, then out through the gaping hole in the wall. “How much longer do you think this storm will last?”

Kane shook his head. “It’s monsoon season in this part of the world. It might last all night or it could stop in five minutes.”

Knee joints popping, Grant heaved himself to his feet and peered out at the rain-buffeted darkness. He could see little of the Pacific island called Pandakar beyond the immediate waterfront area.

Grant loomed six feet four inches tall in his stocking feet. He wore a Kevlar vest over a black T-shirt, tricolor camo pants and thick-soled jump boots, which added almost an inch to his impressive height. The spread of his shoulders on either side of his thickly corded neck was very broad. Because his body was all knotted sinew and muscle covered by deep brown flesh, he did not look his weight of 250 pounds.

His short-cropped hair was touched with gray at the temples, but it didn’t show in the gunfighter’s mustache that swept out fiercely around both sides of his tightlipped mouth. Behind his lantern jaw and broken nose lay a mind of keen intelligence that possessed a number of technical skills, from field-stripping and reassembling an SAR 80 blindfolded to expertly piloting every kind of flying craft, from helicopters to the Annunaki-built transatmospheric vehicles known as Mantas.

A Colt Government Model .45 pistol hung from his right hip in a paddle holster, and he held a Copperhead in his right hand. The abbreviated subgun was slightly less than two feet long, with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire, and the extended magazines held thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bull pup design, allowing for one-handed use.

An optical image intensifier scope and a laser autotargeter were mounted atop the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperhead to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts.

“I don’t know who is who out there,” Grant murmured, “but I don’t care to be caught in a cross fire again.”

“Me either,” Kane agreed. His blue-gray eyes took in the details of the slithering shadows in the rain while his mind kept the raw worry about Brigid Baptiste from preoccupying him.

Dressed similarly to Grant in a black T-shirt, Kevlar vest and camo pants tucked into high-laced combat boots, Kane was a tall man, lean and rangy. He resembled a wolf in the way he carried most of his muscle mass in his upper body. His thick dark hair, showing just enough chestnut highlights to keep it from being a true black, hung in damp strands. A faint hairline scar stretched like a piece of white thread against the sun-bronzed, clean-shaved skin of his left cheek.

A pair of Bren Ten autopistols were snugged in shoulder holsters, and he cradled a Copperhead subgun identical to Grant’s. A canvas rucksack at his feet held spare ammunition clips and other equipment.

Reaching up behind his right ear, Kane made an adjustment on the Commtact’s volume control. The little comm unit fit tightly against the mastoid bone, attached to implanted steel pintels. The unit slid through the flesh and made contact with tiny input ports. Its sensor circuitry incorporated an analog-to-digital voice encoder subcutaneously embedded in the bone.

Once the device made full cranial contact, the auditory canal picked up the transmissions. The dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even if someone went deaf, a Commtact would still provide a form of hearing, but if the volume was not properly adjusted, the radio signals caused vibrations in the skull bones that resulted in vicious headaches.

Touching a tiny stud, he opened the channel to Brigid, but only a crackling hash of static filled his head. Scowling, he reached inside the rucksack and brought out a compact set of night-vision binoculars. Kane switched on the IR illuminator and squinted through the eyepieces. Viewed through the specially coated lenses, which optimized the low light values, the riverbank seemed to be illuminated by a lambent, ghostly haze. Where only black had been before, his vision was lit by various shifting shades of gray and green.

Craning his neck, Kane looked toward Captain Saragayn’s treasure ship, the Juabal Hadiah, the Mountain of Wealth. Even at over a mile away, the ship looked monstrous. The vessel was less of a less of a seagoing vehicle than a huge anchored pavilion, sprawling across several acres of harbor water.

The Juabal Hadiah rose to exaggerated heights at stern and bow. The stern was built up in several housed decks, one atop the other. The hull crawled with intricate designs carved everywhere above the waterline, from Asian ideograms to representations of fish and dragons. The prow carried a huge figurehead painted, like the balance of the ship, in gaudy hues of red, yellow and gold. The effigy was of a naked red-haired woman, at least fifteen feet long, with an eighty-eight-inch bust.

Cupping his hands around the lenses of the binoculars to shield them from the rain, Kane tried to find movement on the decks. He saw nothing, whether due to the distance or the rain, he wasn’t sure. However, he could make out the huge flag emblazoned with the image of a blazing skull superimposed over a crossed sword and a rifle.

“Pirates,” he muttered.

“What?” Grant asked, raising his voice a trifle to be heard over the drumming of the rain.

“Pirates of the goddamn South China Sea,” Kane said loudly. “Who would have figured?”

A gust of wind blew streamers of water into his face. Swallowing a curse, Kane rose and went to stand beside the big man.

“We should’ve figured,” Grant commented sourly. “Who better?”

Kane assumed the query was rhetorical and so didn’t respond. In the world he and Grant shared, the impossible happened often enough to seem commonplace. They had encountered pirates before, like those who prowled the waters off the Western Isles and controlled the island of Autarkic. That term was a catchall to describe a region in the Pacific Ocean of old and new landmasses.

Back during the nuclear holocaust, bombs known as earthshakers had been triggered, seeded months before by submarines along the fault and fracture lines of the Pacific Ocean. ICBM missiles had pounded the Cascades and the region from western Canada down to California. The concentrated destructive force had ripped that part of the Earth to pieces.

The tectonic shifts and undersea quakes triggered by the atomic megacull raised new volcanic islands. Because the soil was scraped up from the seabed, most the islands became fertile very quickly, except for those in the Blight Belt—islands that were still dangerously irradiated. Pandakar wasn’t one of those.

Arriving on a small island in the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia and finding Pandakar to be a stronghold of twenty-third-century pirates was one thing, but landing barely two hours before a bloody insurrection staged by a rival faction was something neither Grant nor Kane could have anticipated. They had been running and hiding along the sprawling waterfront for the past thirty minutes.

Pandakar’s population was a surprisingly mixed lot of Malays, Dyaks, Filipinos and quite a few Chinese. Unsurprisingly, the little island stunk of dead fish, mud and the eternal heat of the tropics. Mud-filled holes pitted the narrow streets. Still, Brigid, Kane and Grant had been entranced by the people of all colors with monkeys and parrots for sale. There were vendors of magical charms for the healing of wounds and curing of scurvy. There were sellers of maps who offered charts of submerged predark cities and their treasures.

But at night, the waterfront looked quite different, particularly during a rainstorm, than it had during the daytime. When the Cerberus warriors arrived on Pandakar, they had only caught a glimpse of its stilt-legged huts, plank walkways and piers crammed with sampans and brightly painted outrigger fishing boats. In the rainy darkness, the flickering glow of yellow lanterns cast an unearthly aurora over its byways.

A flash of lightning showed only the faint outlines of two figures creeping between a pair of thick wooden pilings draped with fishnets. With the long streamers of rain falling onto them, they resembled life-size mannequins attached to puppet strings.

“Looking for us?” Kane whispered.

“I don’t think it matters much,” Grant replied lowly. “Both sides will probably shoot us on sight.”

Kane sighed heavily. “Why does this shit always happen when we’re making diplomatic overtures?”

Grant uttered a derisive snort. “You’re asking me?”

Diplomacy, turning potential enemies into allies against the spreading reign of the Overlords, had become the paramount tactic of Cerberus over the past two years. Lessons in how to deal with foreign cultures and religions took the place of weapons instruction and other training.

Over the past several years, Brigid Baptiste and former Cobaltville Magistrates Grant and Kane had tramped through jungles, ruined cities, over mountains, across deserts and they found strange cultures everywhere, often bizarre re-creations of societies that had vanished long before the nukecaust.

Another crash of thunder exploded overhead, blasting a shock wave ahead of it, concussing with great force against the roof of the structure. A split roof timber shifted with a creak, and wood splinters mixed with dirty water pattered down.

Grant eyed it apprehensively. “We’re going to have to get out of here pretty soon, no matter what.”

A staccato drumroll wove its way around and through the roar of the storm. Kane and Grant knew the noise wasn’t thunder. They ducked, falling almost prone on either side of the cavity in the wall, and peered into the night.

Illuminated by a lightning stroke arcing overhead, they saw a man lying on the ground near one of the pilings, rain slamming into him. Dark liquid ribbons inched away from his body.

A figure slid away from the shadows, and a stab of orange flame spit from between a stack of wooden crates. Shot after shot cracked in the darkness as the subgun sprayed the gloom with bullets. The muzzle flashes strobed.

A crooked spear of lightning spread a curtain of blue-white radiance across the sky. The figures moved swiftly, bent over in crouches. Kane’s eyes flitted back and forth, trying to fix the men’s position in his mind. Then Grant sucked in his breath and whispered, “They’re behind us.”

Kane wheeled, unholstering a pistol and leveling it at the doorway in the rear of the hut. The plank door hung askew on crooked hinges. Grant threw himself against the wall, putting his Copperhead against his right shoulder. In almost the same shaved fraction of a second, the door crashed open and three men staggered into the hut.

Chapter 2

They were small, fierce Malaysians, all of them adorned in little more than rags. They carried a variety of pistols and carbines. The tallest man, who stood five foot eight, stared at Grant and Kane in astonishment.

A purple silk scarf enwrapped the Malaysian’s forehead, and gold earrings glittered in the lobes of both ears. His face and hands were covered by a network of old scar tracings. A scraggly mustache twisted down around the sides of his mouth, which was open in surprise.

For a long moment no one moved or spoke. Then the man in the purple scarf demanded in passably good English, “Where the fuck did you two come from?”

“Montana,” Kane replied, striving to sound nonchalant. “What about you?”

The man ignored Kane’s question. “You’re not part of Captain Saragayn’s crew. I know all of them.”

“Are you one of his crew?” Grant asked.

The man’s face convulsed with anger. “You don’t know who I am?”

“Should we?” Kane inquired.

The man tapped his chest with a thumb. “I’m Mersano.” The little Malaysian said the name as if it would explain everything.

Kane pointed to himself and Grant. “I’m Kane. This is Grant. We’re trying to find a friend of ours. We got separated when the fighting broke out.”

Mersano’s eyebrows rose. “A friend? A woman?”

Before Kane could reply, a grenade exploded with a muffled crump, blowing a blast of muck and rock fragments in through the hole in the wall. A brief burst of gunfire followed the detonation, and a bullet chipped stone out of the wall beside Grant’s right shoulder. Everyone dropped flat to the floor as three more rounds struck the wall and keened away.

“Their grenade fell short but they’ll try again,” Mersano said angrily.

“Who will?” Grant demanded. “What the hell is going on here?”

Mersano gestured toward the gap in the front of the building. “Captain Saragayn’s crew is trying to kill me and my men.”

“Why?” Kane asked.

“Because me and some others tried to boot him out of office,” Mersano answered, raising his head and gazing at the darkness beyond the hole. “I think you two ought to throw in with us.”

“Good call,” Kane commented dryly, turning and aiming his pistol through the gap. He squeezed off a single shot, the Bren Ten slamming like a door.

Immediately a volley of bullets stormed in, ricocheting and chipping out fragments of stone. Kane counted at least four separate muzzle-flashes.

“They’ve got us pinned down,” Grant said. “They’ll chuck in more grens once they can get closer.”

Mersano chuckled, a harsh, bitter sound. He heaved himself to one knee. “Then it’s best not to linger.”

Kane cast him a questioning glance. “Do you know of a way out of here?”

Mersano thumbed back the hammer of the big Casull revolver he carried and spoke to his two men in a dialect that neither Grant nor Kane understood. His men nodded in understanding and readied their carbines. Thunder rolled and lightning flared.

“What’s the escape route?” Grant asked impatiently.

Mersano sprang to his feet. “Through the hole.”

He leaped through the cavity, landing in the mud outside. He crouched, eyes and gun barrel questing for targets. No one shot at him. Over his shoulder, he said quietly, “The captain’s men are circling around behind us. No one is paying much attention to the front.”

“Define ‘much attention,’” Kane demanded.

Mersano’s men jumped through the hole in the wall, joining their chief outside. Kane and Grant exchanged glances of weary resignation and then followed the men. They swept the perimeter with watchful gazes. The rain slackened as the heart of the storm moved farther inland.

Their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and Mersano gestured for everyone to follow him. “Move! Bergerak! Move!”

As the group of men sprinted across an open expanse of ground, a barrage of gunfire blazed from the interior of the hut. Voices rose in cries of outrage. Geysers of mud spewed up around them as bullets plowed into the ground.

Kane half turned to return the fire. Then he glimpsed a small projectile lancing overhead, seemingly propelled by a ribbon of spark-shot smoke. It arrowed through the gap in the wall of the hut. The interior instantly lit up with an orange nova of flame, surrounded by a dark mushroom of muck. The explosion slammed against his eardrums. The roof lifted up and one wall collapsed outward.

Kane returned his focus to running through the rain over uncertain ground.

“Don’t shoot! It’s me!” Mersano shouted.

The group ran into a narrow alley formed by several stacks of shipping crates. A tall figure in a hooded rain cape cradling a short-barreled, big-bored LAW rocket launcher stepped out of the shadows to meet them.

“Clarise!” Mersano shouted, showing his discolored teeth in a grin. “I was getting worried about you.”

“I was delayed,” said a soft female voice touched by a French accent. “A thousand pardons.”

Clarise pulled back the hood, revealing a face of surprisingly exotic beauty. She was a tall woman with skin the color of ivory, deep blue eyes and an athletic body with full, proud breasts and strong hips. Her long blond hair glittered with a patina of raindrops.

Clarise cast her suspicious gaze toward Kane and Grant. They met it with neutral expressions. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said.

Mersano nodded toward the two men. “Grant and Kane. From Montana.”

Clarise’s eyebrows rose. “Ah. The Americans from Cerberus who’ve been trying to unite Roamer, robber, Farer and freebooter against a common foe.”

“Yeah, that sounds like us,” Grant said blandly. “How did you know that?”

“I have my sources,” Clarise replied. “How’s that job working out for you?”

“Not so bad in some places, terrible in others,” Kane answered. “Like Pandakar, for example.”

Clarise laughed, but it sounded forced. “If you’d only delayed your arrival by a day or two, your reception would have been quite different. As it is, your timing for a diplomatic effort could not have been worse if you had planned it that way.”

Grant scowled. “Yeah, we figured that out after it was too late.”

Kane gestured in the direction of the huge treasure ship. “One of our party is aboard the Juabal Hadiah.”

The humor in Clarise’s eyes faded. “Yes, I know. A woman named Baptiste.”

Suspicion raised Kane’s nape hairs and his hand tightened around the grip of his pistol. “How do you know her name?”

“I was introduced to her,” Clarise said curtly. “Until a couple of hours ago, I was Captain Saragayn’s executive officer…and his wife.”

“His wife?” Grant echoed incredulously.

“One of five,” Clarise explained smoothly. “I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn the captain has intentions of trying your friend Baptiste out for the sixth.”

Kane’s shoulders stiffened. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Perhaps we should get out of the rain,” Mersano suggested. “This is only good weather for sitting ducks.”

He laughed shortly at his own joke although no else did.

“Follow me.” Clarise led the men farther down the passageway between the wooden crates. It was extremely dark in the narrow aisle, almost pitch-black.

Far too late, Kane sensed the rush of bodies. He tried to acquire a target for his Bren Ten, but a hard foot whipped out of the gloom and slammed into the pit of his stomach, just above his groin. The air exploded from his lungs, and he folded in the direction of the sickening pain. He staggered, trying to force himself erect, only to feel his shoulders gripped by hands that should have belonged to a great ape.

Kane shook himself violently to break free of the agonizing grasp. In the murk, he heard Grant’s voice blurt a curse, then Clarise shouting in French. A series of smacking, thudding impacts filled the damp, the sound of savage struggle at close quarters.

A man cried out in pain and a white shaft of gunfire blazed in the darkness. A body fell heavily almost at Kane’s feet. His assailant shifted his grip from his upper arms to a bear hug, catching him up in a crushing embrace, pinning his arms against his sides. He thought he heard a rib break, but then realized it was the sound of a bladed weapon chopping into a wooden crate.

Sagging forward, Kane shifted his center of gravity into a dead, unresisting mass. His attacker loosened his grip ever so slightly, trying to pull him upright. Planting his feet firmly on the ground, Kane kicked himself backward, smashing the rear of his skull into the nose and mouth of the man standing behind him. He stumbled backward and crashed into a crate. Kane broke free and turned, gasping for air. He glimpsed a shadowy shape rushing toward him, arms outspread, and he squeezed off two shots. He heard a ghastly gurgle and a heavy body toppled nearly at his feet.

Kane leaned against a crate, breathing hard, heart trip-hammering. He heard Grant’s voice, “Kane! Where the hell are you?”

He coughed and replied, “Here. Where the hell are you?”

“Getting the hell out of here. Follow my voice.”

Kane did so, tripping over two bodies before he found his companions clustered at the far end of the aisle formed by the shipping crates. They emerged at the edge of the jungle. The green wall of foliage looked thick enough to be nearly impenetrable, but Clarise found a small path. Everyone fell into step behind her, walking single file. Kane’s mind toyed with images of poisonous snakes coiled to strike, of scorpions clinging to low-hanging branches and worse forms of wildlife. He knew from prior experience that all jungles held nasty surprises.

Clarise led the way with quick confidence despite the dark. The wind died down to no more than an intermittent breeze. The rain ebbed to a drizzle, then only a spritzing. Lightning still arced across the sky, but the heart of the storm was a couple of miles away. Humidity rose, and streamers of mist curled up from the ground. The world was a primeval, menacing green with night-blooming epiphytes and flowering creepers stretching down from the branches overhead.

They roused a family of langurs, monkeys with white eye rings. There was a brief, outraged chittering as they jumped in great arcs between the trees. No one spoke as they marched. There was the constant pelt and drip of water from the canopy of leaves above them. Kane kept checking his bare arms for the giant gray leeches that dropped from the branches and attached themselves to the flesh.

In the darkness, the danger of straying off the path, and becoming lost was a greater hazard than leeches. Even in daylight, enveloped within the suffocating heat and humidity and thick foliage it would have been difficult to find the trail.

Then the overgrowth opened up in a small clearing. In the center rose a mat hut built on rickety, leaning stilts. The tips of the thatched roof dripped incessantly with rainwater.

The people quickly climbed up a bamboo ladder into the interior of the hut. The reed walls exuded a cloying, pungent aroma, and the floor was damp. Neither Kane nor Grant relaxed, keeping their weapons close to hand. Mersano produced a candle from a small box and lit the wick with a wooden match.

In the flickering, yellow illumination, everyone stared at the outlanders with a mixture of bemusement and distrust, but no one spoke. Irritably, Kane asked, “Is anybody going to tell us what’s going on here?”