The Red Menace #4 Read online

  A Red-Letter Day

  The Red Menace #4

  James Mullaney

  James Mullaney Books

  Copyright / Credits

  Red Menace 4: A Red-Letter Day

  By James Mullaney

  Copyright © 2022 James Mullaney. All Rights Reserved.

  “THE RED MENACE” TM & © James Mullaney. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover by Mark Maddox

  Editor: Donna Courtois

  James Mullaney Books, May 2022

  Available in paperback from Bold Venture Press

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior express written consent of the publisher and the copyright holder.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Red-Letter Day

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  A Note From Jim

  About the author

  To Rich Harvey,

  who got the ball rolling.

  A Red-Letter Day

  Chapter 1

  For more than twenty-four hours the brutal sandstorm had continued its merciless attack on the capital with no end in sight, but it was not the shaking walls or the relentless howl of wind outside that frightened him. It was that which had arrived with the storm that churned the acid in Hassan Abuda’s belly and caused sweat to drip down his broad, dark forehead even in the air-conditioned coolness of the grand old building.

  Despite the persistent noise of the storm outside, his footfalls still clicked sharply on the cold floors and echoed off the high walls.

  The building was like a palace with its grand marble staircase, gleaming buffed marble floors, frescoed ceiling and huge ionic columns. It had actually been built as a bank in 1903, just over seventy years before. The First British Bank was headquartered in London, but it had many branches in the most remote corners of His Royal Highness King Edward’s empire. This was not one of the remote branches. The branch in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, was a major local office in its time, built to reflect the enduring, eternal nature of the British Empire. The building sank through sand and so deep into bedrock that the Earth would go to the devil and Heaven’s trumpets would herald the second coming before the walls of the First British Bank, Tripoli, fell.

  The very first manager of the Tripoli branch had been a Sir Garold Smythe-Pivney. Sir Garold was a squat, no-nonsense hero of the First Boer War who frequently boasted that he had personally killed fourteen Zulus in hand-to-hand combat at Rorke’s Drift. His youthful bravery had not been of very much assistance to him when, on his third evening strolling home from work, he was kidnapped and held for ransom.

  At that time the region was still part of the dying Ottoman Empire, and the pasha who managed the Vilayet of Tripolitania had assured the British Foreign Office that all was well and the bandits would best be dealt with simply by paying them the ransom they were demanding; five hundred pounds sterling.

  “Preposterous,” the Foreign Secretary’s representative in Tripolitania had told the pasha. “The crown will not bargain with these barbarians.”

  “Ah, you misunderstand,” replied the pasha, the governor of the region. “There is no, as you say, bargaining. There is payment, or there is death.”

  “There is no payment,” the man from the Foreign Office insisted.

  The pasha had offered a little helpless shrug while the Foreign Office representative struck a defiantly British pose in the pasha’s office. The raised chin, the pursed lips and the backwards thrust of his shoulders were meant to convey the British government’s resoluteness in this matter. His Majesty’s government would simply not accept the kidnapping of its citizens, nor would it ever consent to the ransom demands of godless hooligans who were the responsibility of local government. As a game of high-stakes poker between rival governments, the standoff garnered mixed results.

  Within the week, Sir Garold Smythe-Pivney had, in fact, been returned to His Majesty’s government, as the crown had demanded. However, to the disappointment of His Majesty’s representatives in Tripolitania, he did not come back all at once but, rather, was returned over the course of several days in boxes small enough to fit a hand and large enough to nestle a torso. The head was last to arrive in the afternoon post with a rolled-up note stuffed in Sir Garold’s mouth with a simple three-word suggestion, written in perfect English script: next time pay.

  And when the next time came around, this time a demand for a thousand pounds for the kidnapped son of the ambassador, His Majesty’s government reconsidered its previous resoluteness. In the end payment was made, albeit quietly. After all, one could not let the riffraff in all of the many non-British (and, therefore, barbarian) regions of the world think that His Majesty’s government would dip into the treasury for any old subject of the crown. Fortunately, these particular kidnappers never got so greedy that they plucked British citizens willy-nilly off the streets of Tripolitania every other week. In fact, it became quite orderly and largely bloodless. Dealing with such trivial matters as kidnappers and ransom was simply the price of doing business in a backwards part of the world that was not yet part of the British Empire.

  That was seventy years ago, and in an interesting historical twist Hassan Abuda’s grandfather had been one of the original band of enterprising kidnappers.

  The ransom money earned was less than paid out, since the pasha demanded his cut. After all, it was the pasha’s police who turned a blind eye to the activities of the kidnappers. But it was still a handsome salary for Hassan Abuda’s grandfather, and that seed money grew into a fortune that eventually became large enough to send first Hassan Abuda’s father and, when it was his turn, Hassan Abuda and his three brothers to school abroad. The children and grandchildren of the kidnapper all attended Oxford University which was, ironically, Sir Garold’s alma mater as well. And so it was that Hassan Abuda received a business degree from one of the most prestigious schools in Great Britain paid for by the Abuda family fortune which had started way back seven decades before with the kidnapping and dissection of Sir Garold Smythe-Pivney.

  Sir Garold’s successor had fared better in his post at the First British Bank. That man had lived to see the end of the Ottoman Empire and the takeover by the Italians in 1912. The First British Bank had survived while Libya was still known as Italian North Africa, and closed its doors only during World War Two. The grand old building was reopened during the British postwar occupation and remained a sturdy bastion of Western civilization in the increasingly unstable region until the revolution four years before.

  In 1969, King Idris I was overthrown in a coup led by army officer Muammar Qaddaf
i. The self-proclaimed Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution was no friend of stability, civility or the West. Within days of the coup, the First British Bank officially shuttered its teller windows and closed its great oak doors for the final time and its staff were quietly and hastily flown from Libya in the dead of night, never to return.

  The formerly British-owned building became the property of the Revolution.

  At first the military wanted to turn the bank into a barracks. An order quickly came from the top that the building was off limits to anyone not personally approved by the Brother Leader. One general objected. Libya was fresh from the revolution, and this one man truly believed the flowery words of the man whom he had helped to overthrow King Idris. The general was dragged by his own soldiers into Revolutionary Square where he was beheaded in front of the same frothing mob he had led into the palace of the king four months before. His body with its decapitated head tucked up under the right arm of his smart military uniform was left to bake out in the North African sun and, by order of the Brother Leader, his former troops were made to relieve themselves on the corpse as part of their daily ritual just after calisthenics and just before breakfast.

  After that, none in the military dared question a single command of the lunatic they had installed as their de facto king.

  For the first four years Qaddafi’s reign had been a sort of legal lawlessness. Enemies of the Brother Leader were declared enemies of the state and given public executions, which were broadcast throughout Libya. Up to one-fifth of the population was enlisted in setting up the surveillance necessary to run an autocracy. The hand of Libya’s leader stretched beyond his own borders, where dissidents living abroad were murdered and where the growing shadow of global terrorism could be traced back to the looming madman at the edge of the world’s stage dressed in high military hat and midnight black Foster Grant sunglasses. Even among his most loyal supporters, Muammar Qaddafi had for the past four terrifying years been the most feared man in the North African nation. Until one day before.

  The stranger had come in darkness at the leading edge of the worst sandstorm in many years. Hot wind off the Sahara blew the cloud across Tripoli, savaging homes, cars and people unlucky enough to be caught in the storm. Yet the fear inspired by nature’s fury was as nothing compared to the dread caused by the man in the mask.

  “You are Hassan Mohammed Abuda, hero of the Libyan Revolutionary Command Council. You do not fear the night,” Abuda insisted to himself in a voice that echoed like the squeak of a mouse in the corners of the wide hallway.

  Abuda had been a captain in the military under King Idris, and had been part of the Free Officers Movement that had overthrown Libya’s monarch. Since the coup, the defense of Tripoli had been Abuda’s primary responsibility, a job that had not caused him very many sleepless nights. Until now. On this dark midnight he was not only failing in his duty to protect Libya’s capital, he was coming dangerously close to failure in his one overriding mission: safeguarding the life of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.

  Something caught Hassan Abuda’s eye as he hustled along the third-floor corridor of what had until only recently been the First British Bank in Tripoli.

  Abuda had been passing the spacious office of the former bank manager. It was in that room that Sir Garold Smythe-Pivney, hero of the First Boer War, had ruled the pencil-pushers on the floors below for less than a week seventy years before.

  Through the thick windows, Abuda saw a faint orange glow.

  He stepped into the dark office, past the massive desk used by all the former British bank managers, and stopped at the window.

  Sand struck the pane an inch from his face, like fistfuls of rice hurled by angry wedding attendees. The window rattled against the gusts of fierce wind. It was like the whiteout in a snowstorm, where it was impossible to see even a few feet distant.

  And then the gust of wind changed direction and the dab of distant orange reappeared. Abuda was not surprised the fire was still burning. The fire brigades were on the scene last he had heard, but he had been informed it would be a total loss. The men who led Tripoli’s fire brigades continued to fight the blaze even though there was no hope of stopping it, for to stop trying was an admission that they had failed in their mission and failure in such an important task assuredly meant death.

  Abuda saw what he thought was a stream of water blasting from the top of a modern Western hook-and-ladder truck. He was not certain, for the wind abruptly shifted direction once more and the image of Colonel Qaddafi’s home, the palace of deposed King Idris, vanished behind a sheet of sand. Briefly, the orange glow fought the storm, and then even that was gone as swirling sand swallowed whole both palace and flames.

  Tripoli was burning. The fearsome Muammar Qaddafi was in hiding. Colonel Hassan Abuda, who had stood so close at the executions of former friends that he could no longer count the number of times he had been spattered with their blood, felt a primal fear he had never before experienced even at the worst of Qaddafi’s manic reign.

  All because of one faceless man in a bright red mask.

  Abuda turned from the window and hustled through the gloom of Sir Garold’s office and back into the dimly lit corridor. Even though doom was coming for them all, Abuda had his orders to put up the best defense possible when it at last arrived. And with luck, he would be the one to put a bullet in the head of the murderous masked madman.

  * * *

  Thirty hours before Hassan Abuda stood at the third-floor window of the First British Bank and faced the storm while awaiting death, a nondescript black sedan drove without incident under the pale blue sky toward the low buildings on the outskirts of Tripoli. The car struggled over the rocky debris that spilled across the dry ground between a pair of ancient columns which centuries before had flanked a major route into the city. The Ptolemaic Kingdom that had given rise to the columns had long disappeared from the region and the stone posts that marked the old route had struggled for a thousand years to join the ancient empire in dust and ruin. The old road over which they had towered had long ago deteriorated into a weed-lined goat trail.

  An elderly Bedouin herding a trio of stubborn goats grabbed the neck fur of one of the animals that was venturing into the road and drew it hastily from the path. Sunlight and a few thin white clouds were reflected on the windshield, yet the old man did not see the mirror image. He averted his eyes and allowed the car to pass as if it were invisible.

  The locals were practiced at ignoring the comings and goings of any vehicles in that particular part of town. The occupants as a general rule were smugglers, thieves, killers or, worse, officials of the government of the Brother Leader, who were also very likely to be smugglers and thieves and were almost certainly killers. No good came from peering into the windows of those rare cars that passed by, and so the sedan was virtually unnoticed as it left the rubble of the collapsing columns in its wake and sped along the road, kicking up clouds of dust along the rutted, lonely path to Tripoli.

  Inside the car, the air conditioning was turned up to its maximum, but it was not enough to fight back the oppressive desert heat. There were two men on the long front seat and while the younger one steered along the old road, the older man with the steel-gray hair who sat in the passenger seat pursed annoyed lips at the heat and watched the wrinkled goatherd shrink to a withered speck in the side view mirror.

  “I think I met him once before. Was it twenty years ago or a thousand? He had four goats back then. I imagine he ate the fourth one in the intervening millennium. Or married it. That’s legal in this godforsaken part of the world, Patrick. Perhaps he did both. That’s legal too. God help us, we need a substitute for oil.”

  Patrick “Podge” Becket’s hands held fast at ten and two on the steering wheel.

  “You’re the one who insisted you were coming along, doc,” Podge said. “I’m pretty sure there were a few people in Marrakech you hadn’t gotten around to offending yet. You could have sat by the pool and sharpened your tongue un
til I got back.”

  Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright shook his head. “I didn’t want to hear about your death on the news. The bugger is I don’t want to witness it firsthand either, yet I have to be somewhere when it happens, so here I am.”

  “I’m not going to die, doc. I’m just here to teach crater-face a lesson. In and out in one day. Two, tops.”

  “Everyone dies, Patrick,” Wainwright insisted.

  “You’re doing a pretty good job avoiding it,” Podge pointed out.

  Wainwright released an impatient sigh and turned his attention once more to the side mirror. The old goatherd was gone, as were the dilapidated pillars. The buildings were growing more numerous, huddled in a densely packed, bleached slum that might have been the festering suburbs of Cairo, Damascus or Tehran.

  “It is an amazing thing that one can drop down on this road once every decade for three thousand years and watch the time-lapse deterioration of civilization amongst buildings, walls and roads, yet the men themselves stumble through the swelling rubble utterly unchanged. I missed my calling, Patrick. I should have opened a tailor shop in this part of the world. The same paper dress pattern would have suited them and their ancestors back thirty generations, male and female. I’d have been set for life. Even a life as long as mine.”

  Podge knew that the older man’s mildly scathing tone masked a deeper disgust. Thaddeus Wainwright was a great supporter of modernity. The doctor was a man always looking towards the horizon, eager to welcome the next leaps forward in technology, medicine, civilization. Therefore a trip to certain parts of the world was a journey back into the Stone Age for Dr. Wainwright, and for a forward-looking man like Wainwright it was an ugly reminder of where man had been not very long ago and where mankind might wind up yet again if the advancing human culture of a negligible few hundred years relaxed its vigilance and mistakenly took as inevitable the forward march of civilization. The world would suffer if the West were to lapse into lazy complacency. The Greeks who had once ruled this region were gone, as were the Italians, the Ottomans and a dozen more. Barbarians wore many faces throughout human history, and they were always eager to destroy that which they were incapable of creating.