Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death Read online

  Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

  John Case

  Photojournalist Mike Burke carried his camera into every war zone and hellhole on earth – and came back with the pictures (and battle scars) to prove it. He was flying high until, quite suddenly, he wasn’t. When Burke’s helicopter crashed and burned in Africa, he came away with his life but lost his heart to the beautiful woman who saved him. That’s when he decided it was time to stop dancing with the devil. But a wicked twist of fate puts an end to Burke’s dreams, leaving him adrift in Dublin with bittersweet memories… and no appetite for danger. But the devil isn’t done with him yet.

  An ocean away, Jack Wilson leaves prison burning for revenge. Like Burke, Wilson has had something taken from him. And he, too, dreams of starting over. Only Wilson ’s dream is the rest of the world’s nightmare. Driven by his obsession with a Native American visionary, and guided by the secret notebooks of Nikola Tesla, the man who is said to have “invented the twentieth century,” Wilson dreams of the Apocalypse – and plans to make it happen.

  As a terrifying worldwide chain reaction is set in motion, Burke alone grasps the impending horror of Wilson ’s malevolent plan. With nothing left to lose, Burke pursues an American terrorist – a twisted genius who journeys from a lawless weapons arsenal in the Transdneister to the diamond fields of the Congo… to an isolated Nevada ranch. It is here, in a climactic showdown, that a determined Mike Burke faces a nemesis who knows no fear.

  John Case

  Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

  Copyright © 2006 by John Case

  For Paco Ignacio Taibo, Justo Vasco,

  and the Semana Negra crew

  PROLOGUE

  LIBERIA | SEPTEMBER 2003

  There was this… ping.

  A single, solitary noise that announced itself in the key of C-ping! – and that was that. The noise came from somewhere in the back, at the rear of the fuselage, and for a moment it reminded Mike Burke of his brother’s wedding. It was the sound his father made at the rehearsal dinner, announcing a toast by tapping his glass with a spoon.

  Ping !

  It was funny, if you thought about it.

  But that wasn’t it. Though the helicopter was French (in fact, a single-rotor Ecureuil B2), it was not equipped with champagne flutes. The sound signaled something else, like the noise a tail rotor makes when one of its blades is struck with a 9mm round – and snaps in half and flies away. Or so Burke imagined. Ping !

  Frowning, he turned to the pilot, a Kiwi named Rubini. “Did you-?”

  The handsome New Zealander grinned. “No worries, bugalugs!” Suddenly, the chopper yawed violently to starboard, roaring into a slide and twisting down. Rubini’s face went white and he lunged at the controls. Burke gasped, grabbing the armrests on his seat.

  In an instant, his life – his whole life – passed before his eyes against a veering background of forest and sky. One by one, a thousand scenes played out as the helicopter tobogganed down an invisible staircase toward a wall of trees.

  In the few seconds it took to fall five hundred feet, Burke remembered every pet he’d ever had, every girl he’d kissed, every house apartment teacher friend and landscape he’d ever seen. Candyland and Monopoly. Christmas lights and incense, Chet Baker and the stalls along the Seine. His past washed over him in a wave, and kept on coming. As the helicopter sawed through the air, he remembered the dawn coming up behind Adam’s Peak, and the three-point shot he’d taken against Park High, the way it rattled the rim with two seconds left on the clock – and the celebration that followed. A shit-shot, yes, but… thank you, Jesus!

  His mother’s face appeared like a curtain of rain between his seat and the altimeter, while lines of long-forgotten poetry ran through his head and the smell of gardenias – gardenias? – filled the cockpit.

  The pilot yelling. Or not quite yelling… screaming. The pilot is screaming, Burke thought.

  Not that there was anything Burke could do about it. They were going down fast – plummeting really – and only a miracle could save them. Burke didn’t believe in miracles, so he sat where he was, listening spellbound as a voice in the back of his head recited notes for an obituary:

  Michael Lee Burke…

  27-year-old Virginia native…

  award-winning photographer…

  crashed and burned…

  50 miles from the border of Sierra Leone…

  will be much missed…

  As the helicopter’s undercarriage scraped the tops of the trees, Burke saw his future telescope from fifty years to five seconds. Still, the memories came – only now, he was almost up to date.

  Last night, he’d gone out drinking with Rubini. And they’d ended up singing karaoke at the Mamba Point Hotel. Burke sang “California Stars” to the hoots of some UNMIL types, but he must have done all right because he went home with a Slav agronomist named Ursula who was reliably said to be the last natural blonde in Monrovia. She was probably still asleep in his room, just as he’d left her, arm crooked above her head on the pillow, like a movie star swooning for the cameras.

  As a blizzard of vegetation slammed into the windshield, Burke had an epiphany. A 9mm round wasn’t going to kill him. What was going to kill him was a tidal wave of bad karma brought on by years of photographing people in extremis. Whatever his intentions, however benign they might have been – to expose, to explain – the simple reality was that he’d made his living on other people’s despair.

  The more painful the images in the photographs he took, the better they sold. That fact did something to a person. The favelas in Rio, the orphanage in Bucharest, the red-light district in Calcutta – he thought he’d been doing a public service when in reality it had all been a kind of well-intended voyeurism.

  And now today, barely a week before his twenty-eighth birthday, he was on his way to take pictures at a refugee camp for children who’d suffered amputations in the diamond wars.

  Except… he wasn’t going to make it. He wasn’t going anywhere but down.

  The helicopter dug deeper into the canopy of the forest and Burke wordlessly realized he’d never again take another photograph. One way or another, he was done with that.

  Jesus!

  Something came through the windshield with a crash and Rubini’s forehead exploded, sending a spray of blood and brains through the cockpit. Burke caught a mouthful as the chopper meteored through the trees, bucking, plunging, falling like a box of tools, slamming finally into the waterlogged earth of a swamp.

  So this, Burke thought, is what it’s like to be dead… But that didn’t make much sense. If you were dead, you didn’t feel dead. So maybe he was dying. That made more sense because he felt as if every bone in his body was broken. He tasted blood in his mouth. He was shaking. And the world was turning, slowly, round and round.

  His eyes flew open and he realized what was happening. The helicopter was revolving on its axis like a bluebottle fly in its death throes. The overhead rotor slashed at the water, the earth, and the trees, then flew apart like a grenade, sending shrapnel in every direction.

  The engine coughed, spluttered, and whined, showering sparks through the cockpit.

  With great difficulty, Burke fumbled with his seat belt. Even the smallest movement was painful. His body was a bag of broken glass and thorns. And he was covered with blood. It ran down the side of his face, and his shoulders were soaked.

  But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t just blood. He took a deep breath, and choked on it.

  Aviation fuel!

  His fingers tore at the seat belt, but even as it popped open, he realized it was too late. A soft whump announced the fuel’s ignition and, in an instant, the cockpit w
as engulfed. His shirt went off like a flare and, for a moment, it seemed as if the side of his head was on fire. Stumbling and falling, he erupted out of the cockpit, tearing the shirt off his chest, staggering blindly until a fallen log caught his foot and spilled him into a pool of shallow water.

  Where he lay for hours or days, delirious and suppurating. Incredibly, his burns attracted the attention of bees, who fed on the clear liquid oozing from his skin. Occasionally, he rose to consciousness, only to faint dead away. It was the pain, of course. That and the sight of the apiary embedded in his chest.

  Bad karma? Oh, yeah…

  CHAPTER 1

  WEST BEIRUT | TWO YEARS LATER

  They sat on revolving stools at a small plastic table under the proprietary gaze of Colonel Sanders. Sunlight poured through the oversized windows. Behind the Corniche, the beach curled away like a ribbon of gold, and the Mediterranean sparkled.

  Hakim, the older man, sat with his hands folded in front of him, like a schoolchild waiting for class to begin. They were beautiful hands, with long and elegant fingers, and they were carefully manicured. “Too much!” he said, nodding toward the windows.

  The younger man, whose name was Bobojon Simoni, screwed his face into a squint, and nodded. “I know. It’s too bright.”

  The older man shook his head. “I meant the glass. If there was a car bomb…”

  Bobojon nibbled on a chunk of popcorn chicken, then wiped his hands with a paper napkin. “That was a long time ago. No one’s fighting now. It’s different.” He balled up the napkin and dropped it on the tray.

  His uncle grunted. “It’s always different,” he said, “until something goes off.”

  Bo chuckled. He would like to have said something clever, but that wasn’t his way and, besides, there was too much noise. A baby wailed in the center of the restaurant. Behind the counter, the manager berated a teary-eyed cashier, while a mix tape of Tony Bennett and Oum Kalthoum floated above the tables.

  The older man lifted his chin toward a poster of the KFC colonel, plastered against the window. “You think he’s a Jew?”

  Bo glanced around. “Who?”

  His uncle nodded at the poster. “The owner. He has the lips of a Jew.”

  Bo shrugged. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and a pair of carefully ironed Lucky Brand jeans. Mephisto loafers and a Patek-Philippe watch completed the ensemble, all of which had been bought the week before at a shopping mall a few blocks from his new apartment in Berlin.

  “If he’s a Jew,” his uncle continued, “the meat’s probably halal.”

  Like he cares, Bo thought. But what he said was: “Right.” In fact, Bo didn’t know a whole lot about Jews. He’d heard there were a couple in Allenwood, but…

  “Let’s walk,” his uncle said, suddenly disgusted.

  Outside, Zero and Khalid sat in the BMW, smoking cigarettes. Seeing Aamm Hakim leave the restaurant with his nephew, they scrambled out of the car to fall in step behind. Nineteen years old, they dressed alike in short-sleeved shirts, running shoes, and jeans. Zero carried a brown paper bag with a grease stain on its side. Khalid swaggered beside him, a Diadora gym bag hanging from a strap over his shoulder. Since they’d already eaten and weren’t going to a soccer match, Bo was pretty sure that the bags held something heavier than sandwiches and a jockstrap.

  It was a beautiful day. But then, it was always a beautiful day in Beirut. Just down the coast, near the Summerland resort, he could see windsurfers zipping back and forth under a cloudless sky.

  He and his uncle walked arm in arm, heads bent in conversation, moving toward the city’s improbable Ferris wheel, past vendors of coconuts and corn on the cob. It was Sunday, and the Corniche was mobbed. There were kids on Rollerblades, lovers and joggers. Girls in abbayas, girls in miniskirts. Syrian commandos lounged against the seawall, preening in their tiger stripes.

  “ Berlin, it’s okay for you?”

  Bo nodded. “Yeah.”

  His uncle smiled. “What do you like best about it?”

  “The work.”

  “Of course you like the work,” his uncle said. “I mean, besides the work.”

  Bo shrugged. Finally, he said: “The architecture.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I like it. It’s new.”

  His uncle walked with his eyes on the ground, his brow furrowed in thought. “And the pussy?”

  Bo nearly choked.

  His uncle smiled. “In Berlin,” he said, “it’s crazy pussy!” He took Bo by the arm. “I am told this.”

  Bo couldn’t believe it. The color rose in his cheeks. He looked away, mumbling something that even he didn’t understand.

  His uncle laughed and pulled him closer. Suddenly, he was serious. “Find a girlfriend,” he ordered. “German, Dutch – whatever. Take her out. Be seen with her. And get rid of the beard.”

  Bo was astonished. “But… it’s haram!”

  His uncle shook his head. “Do what I tell you. And stay away from the mosques. They’re filled with informants.”

  It took him a second, but then he understood. And smiled. “Okay,” he said.

  “Your friend – Wilson – he’s a kaffir?”

  “Well…” Bo let the sentence die. There were nicer ways to say that Wilson wasn’t a Muslim.

  His uncle threw him an impatient look. “You trust him?”

  “Yes.”

  Hakim looked skeptical. “A Christian?”

  “He’s not a Christian. He’s not anything at all.”

  His uncle scowled. “Everyone is something.”

  Bo shook his head a second time. “With him, it’s different. He’s not religious.”

  “Which makes Mr. Wilson… what?”

  Bo thought about it. Finally, he said, “A bomb.”

  Hakim smiled. He liked melodrama. “What kind of bomb?”

  “A ‘smart’ bomb.”

  The answer seemed to please his uncle, because he stopped at an ice-cream cart to buy each of them a Dove Bar. When they resumed walking, Hakim asked, “But this bomb of yours, why does he want to help us?”

  “Because he’s angry.”

  Hakim scoffed. “Everyone’s angry.”

  “I know, but… Wilson is angry in the right way. We want the same thing.”

  A dismissive puff of air fell from his uncle’s lips, as he looked down and shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d trust an American.”

  “He’s not an American. I mean, he is, but he isn’t. Wilson ’s people, they’re like us.”

  “You mean they’re poor.”

  Bo shook his head. “Not just poor…” They paused to watch an Israeli jet slide across the sky, beyond the reach of the antiaircraft guns hidden in the slums. Nearby, a cloud of pigeons fell upon an old woman with a small bag of corn. “They’re like we used to be. Desert people.”

  His uncle scoffed.

  “They lived in tents!” Bo insisted.

  “You see too many films.”

  His nephew shrugged. “It was a long time ago. But they remember. Just as we do.” Bo was not a man with a large vocabulary, or he might have added “figuratively speaking.” Because, of course, no one in his family had ever lived in a tent, unless you counted refugee tents set up by the Red Cross. Bo’s father was a Cairene laborer who’d emigrated to Albania after the Sixty-seven War. He’d grown up in a two-room flat in a slum on the outskirts of Cairo. So he was an Arab, yes, but not the kind who rode horses or hunted with falcons. As for his mother, well… she was the fifth daughter of an Albanian farmer. Muslim, yes. Arab, no.

  Still, he remembered.

  Aamm Hakim sunk his teeth into the Dove Bar’s chocolate plating, and resumed walking. “This Wilson – tell me again how long you’ve known him.”

  There was no hesitation: “Four years, eight months, three days.”

  “Not so long, then.”

  Bo chuckled. Bitterly. “It seemed like a long time. Anyway, it was 24/7. We might as well have been married.”
>
  It was his uncle’s turn to shrug. “He’ll have to be tested. I won’t work with a crazy man!”

  “He’s not crazy.”

  Hakim gave his nephew a skeptical look. “Not even a little?”

  Bo grinned. “Well, maybe a little.”

  His uncle grunted an I-told-you-so. “In what way?”

  “It’s just a small thing,” Bo explained, “but-”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes, he thinks he’s a character in a novel.”

  Hakim stared at him, nonplussed. He wasn’t quite sure just what it was that his nephew was saying. “A novel?” he asked.

  Bo nodded.

  “You mean, like this man, Mahfouz? A novel like one of his?”

  Bo bit into his Dove Bar, savoring the interplay of chocolate on vanilla. “No, Uncle. Nothing as good as that.”

  CHAPTER 2

  WASHINGTON, D.C. | DECEMBER 17, 2004

  The first thing Jack Wilson did when he got to Washington was take a bath. Which was strange. Because baths had never been his thing, not at all. But after nine years of showering under surveillance, the prospect of a long hot soak by himself was irresistible.

  So he lay in the water with his eyes half-closed, listening to the faucet drip, transfixed by the silence, mesmerized by the steam. Slowly, the days and nights in prison began to fall away, like blocks of ice calving from a glacier.

  One of these days, he thought, I’ll go to a hot spring. Like the ones they have in Wyoming. Just me and the rocks and the water, the trees and the stream. Pine needles. They say it’s a whole other world. A world like… Then.

  The day replayed itself at its own speed. First, the fingerprinting at the prison in Pennsylvania, then the paperwork, then the dressing out. This last, a joke. Because nothing fit. Just his shoes and his watch. And the watch was dead.